The Effects of Propaganda in the Chinese Authoritarian Regime - The Case of Chinese University Students

While scholars have emphasized the ongoing importance of propaganda in the Chinese authoritarian regime (Brady, 2009), its efficiency has been more assumed than empirically observed from the standpoint of the individuals. The objective of this paper is twofold. First, it intends to examine the effects of propaganda on university students. Second, it thereby intends to propose a re-conceptualization of propaganda, combining a macro-level approach with micro-sociological analysis. Defining propaganda as “the attempt to transmit social and political values in the hope of affecting people''s thinking, emotions, and thereby, behavior” (Kenez, 1985), I hypothesize that its efficiency do not consist in persuasion and positive inculcation of values it seems to convey. Instead, the influence of propaganda is rather negative, resulting in de-politicization and disempowerment. Data is provided by a two months fieldwork I conducted in Beijing in 2009-2010, consisting of participant observation and semi-structured interviews with Chinese students. The paper is organized as follows: First, it focuses on the effects of political education, a form of propaganda directly imposed to university students. Through an interpretation of respondents'' perceptions, I demonstrate that while political education fails as a means of inculcation, students'' skeptical attitudes paradoxically lead to indifference towards the relation of domination. Second, I argue that propaganda is therefore not reducible to a tool of persuasion and inculcation. Beyond political education or other tangible and external forms, propaganda should be regarded as an order of discourse in which omissions and silences matter as much as messages. Such discursive order establishes norms which are internalized and reproduced by individuals through socialization process and social interactions.