Jason

Second Paper: Chinese Modernity

Modernity in China, as in any other nation, is a constantly expanding, changing, and fluid process that is hard to pinpoint in any specific way. To these ends, I think that ‘modernity’ as a definition is nearly as fluid as what it describes, directly related to when you’re trying to define it and from what angle you’re trying to analyze it from. But despite this movement through time, there’s always a thread tying all these significant historical items together, providing us a path to follow through history that has led to the China that’s still evolving today.

For these reasons, I want to explore China and her movement through modernity in the light of social values, and the way that society is monitored and controlled through the PRC’s elaborate propaganda measures. As politics, leaders, economies, and times change, so do the values that they push upon the people, and the types of things they try to keep them from learning about. Starting first with the massive campaign of propaganda art prior and through the cultural revolution, I’m going to explore how a similar system has been implemented through the internet as it’s becoming a more mainstream method of communication and information exchange in China proper.

The introduction of propaganda artwork wasn’t unique at all to the 20^th century or to China, but its impact has been felt most significantly through this period and has brought China to where it is today. Introduced as a significant force during the May Fourth movement, it was used to get the attention of people at large and to help sway more and more popular support for their cause. As time went by and it came under more governmental pressures—at this time, propaganda art was the exclusive use of the counter-pressures, not yet the government—the propaganda art took on a distinct feeling of economic issues (economic freedom, consumerism, and the like). Never once had this been an issue for China, the concept of considering what it is that you’re purchasing and what brought it into your hands. This was an initial and important shifting point in Chinese society, the effects of which are still easily noticeable today.

During the civil war between the GMD and PLA, propaganda posters were taken in two distinct, but still connected, directions: the economic, and the social. The economic posters were more akin to the ones that occurred earlier, about the cultural humiliations China suffered and Western imperialism, in that they tried to inspire people to economically support their own government through their actions by suggesting that people are intimately tied with the success of their government, and that every bit of money they could spare for the government assured their own future. Akin to telling people to support China by buying Chinese goods, these posters told the masses to support China by directly buying bonds or even donating money to the PLA or GMD. These posters were made to alter the behavior of the masses by inspiring them to support their government, but outside of economics made little to no effort to change their behavior (while they said you should buy less and save more, they never dictated how you should live).

The social-posters, however, were a mutation of the period and marks another first for the time and another important movement for China’s modernity, a type of media that’s still very much in use in the China of today. It was adopted first by the PLA and later followed by the GMD (through their “New Life Movement”). These posters generally served one of several purposes: to teach, to change, or to garner support. All of them, however, were propaganda whose main purpose (despite what the goal of the poster was said to be, or what it may be doing on the surface) was to affect the minds of the populace and to influence them to do something, most generally to support them in their efforts to win the civil war. While it could be said to be just conjecture, it appears that the PLA managed to use these posters to much greater effectiveness than the GMD, judging by the amount of support they maintained throughout the prolonged war.

The GMD started these, and their “New Life Movement”, as a reaction to the PLA’s policies on attempting to make the lives of the peasants better. While the GMD had concerned themselves with providing a governmental style, the PLA was worried about a lifestyle change, and in providing a better form of life for the lowest of citizens, eventually prompting the GMD’s reactionary policy. While the GMD fought to play catch-up, the PLA actively inspired artists and writers to create more propaganda, to help the people to “realize” the superiority of life with them.

Upon their ultimate victory over the GMD and change into the PRC (from a military force to a government), the types and methods of propaganda remained about the same, with both the economic and social posters still running frequently, trying at the same time to foster support for whatever the government was doing while also trying to convince the people to save more and spend less, to empower the fledgling government with more money. This was to be the norm for the propaganda art for some time.

The most recent mutation took place during the Cultural Revolution, where life became so uncertain that what was fact one day was a jailable offense the next. As an interesting change, economic propaganda was nearly entirely phased out during this period, to be replaced by the newer generation of social propaganda posters. This seemingly insignificant disappearance of the artform is, I feel, a rather important note and another step towards the modernity that would later take hold of China. Not only was it less necessary for the PRC to ask for money from the population due to being a more stable and set government at this point, but there was also a more significant power to the propaganda poster: just as you can slowly guide the flow of a river through the use of dikes, you can control the masses at large through the use of art and literature.

Through this period, propaganda art separated again and can be split up between one of two forms: those that were created with the current political tide (and reflected the issues that the government and masses currently supported) and those that essentially said nothing at all (posters that had simple truisms on it, such as calling on people to be “red” for China, or to praise Chairman Mao). The former posters were meant to bring about a more immediate reaction in the populace and to control the motions of society and culture, but when the political winds changed, they were taken down as fast as they had been put up. The latter, however, while not serving as much a purpose in directly influencing the population, it did keep up a general “white noise”, a background murmur of political sentiments that always remained true regardless of what was to happen in the political sphere.

This same sort of fluid modernity, constantly spawning and mutating from one form to the next, is also apparently in China’s acceptance of the internet and it’s spreading like wildfire as an increasingly popular medium amongst the masses. Ironically enough, the internet was not first censored by the PRC, but by international forces, namely the US in its bid to keep China from using the internet for military applications or to research newer, more powerful weapons. This kept the internet mostly restricted purely to governmental offices or to universities, places that had strong government control already, so it made most controls unnecessary.

Until the Chinese masses started to get online, it seems premature to say that China had undergone any significant change with the internet in regards to modernity, a noticeable and definite transition from one period to the next. But once this did occur, in the mid-1990s, the change was highly noticeable and extreme, marking the beginning of a drastically new period of information for the Chinese people and the PRC in its control over the thoughts of the people as a whole.

Prior, and even after, Nixon’s visit to China and the slow opening of the country to the international community, the PRC had always had de facto control over what the people could read, watch, and listen to. Mail—especially international—was subject to censorship, and what was written in a supposedly private medium easily could be used against a person. The reading of foreign news was explicitly forbidden, and the newspapers and television stations were direct extensions of the government, repeating the party line and what they wanted people to hear over actual information.

This is why the significance of the implementation of the internet can’t be underestimated, and has played a huge part in China’s ever-evolving move through modernity. With more and more people discovering the internet and getting online regularly in droves, the information present is creating new dangers for the government and their stranglehold on the minds of the population and providing a new outlet for people to finally have a say in what they want to hear about and how they choose to express themselves.

What this has brought to China, and has never really been around before, is a certain accountability of the government to the people. Never before has the PRC felt obligated to explain itself to the populace or that their acts could be judged, as they controlled the media and what people would hear about any incident, letting them put their own spin. However, now, this is not always the case. With international news available through the internet and—even more significant—the local media becoming more brazen, the PRC is having a harder time holding an “anything goes” line and maintaining popular support amongst the people. This change is inspiring the people of China to be even more forward and to push their government through the various message boards offered up for conversation, for the first time in history allowing people to be at least somewhat openly critical without facing immediate death or prosecution. It’s still not yet wise for people to openly confront the government, it’s slowly getting there and people are, day by day, getting closer to being able to air their true feelings.

These two themes, of the political propaganda art and the internet, are linked intimately, both of which having brought China into a new and unique era. The same values and feelings of change and cultural modernity, the goal of the Cultural Revolution, have been maintained from the spirit of the propaganda posters and are still widely in use today as the PRC tries to confront the new issues that they face in the internet and its unique ‘culture’.

The over-arching goal of the propaganda through the Cultural Revolution was to cut away the bourgeois Western influences that were making in-roads into the population as China became more self-sustaining and intellectuals became interested in Western concepts, along with curbing the still-strong teachings of traditional Confucian values. In the same way, the PRC is now intended to cut back on yet another burgeoning culture: that of the internet culture, a new sort of society that is much harder to confine and that is built up on information and communication.

Even the methods employed are much the same, facing the same difficulties that they did back during the Cultural Revolution. Like before, the types of controls they implement can be defined under the same familiar categories: those that apply to current social/political tensions (Wikipedia, Livejournal, or other sites that cause issues at the time), and those that are always out of favor (pornography, sites related to PRC abuses, etc).

In this way, history comes both full circle, while at the same time leading to progression into a new form of modernity. Using methods that proved successful in the past, they are applied to the future to try to stop progression. However, this application is, in its own way, a new form of progression, creating something new. The attempts to bar the Chinese population from changing and finding new sources of information lead to the PRC being forced to change and adapt in order to stop it. Though they may fight to deny it and hope to maintain a status quo, ultimately the PRC and people of China are ushering in a new era that will contain both artifacts from the past (the use of propaganda material), but being implemented in new ways that before wouldn’t have been envisioned, or even would’ve been considered bourgeois in its own right (allowing forum-style discussion of politics online, but still pushing propaganda messages through it by way of censorship).

Judging by history, China is still in a state of change and has yet to “feel” the full impact of the internet. Like all prior major modern changes from one era to the next, they all tend to involve the government and population coming at odds with each other and coming into a conflict before a drastic resolution has occurred is almost forced as a by product, as has occurred in the May Fourth Movement and Cultural Revolution. From this historical perspective, I think it’s fair to say that the internet still has awhile to go until its full impact is obvious throughout China, most likely after more people are online and internet access becomes harder to monitor. When this happens, the two parties will come into conflict and strike, ultimately strengthening the bond of what comes out at the end, ideally a stronger China and a society that’s discovered a new definition of what it is to be modern.

Bibliography:

Evans, Harriet and Stephanie Donald. Picturing Power in the People’s Republic of China.

Maryland: Rowmand and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1999.

Kang, Liu. Globalization and Cultural Trends in China. Hawaii: University of Hawaii

Press, 2004.

Zhou, Yongming. Historicizing Online Politics. California: Stanford University Press,

2006.