Central Propaganda Department

Created in May 1924, the Central Propaganda Department is one of only two Party organizations from the earliest years of the CCP to have survived into the twenty-first century, the other being the Central Organization Department. It peaked in power and importance at the start of the Cultural Revolution. With the beginning of the reform era in 1979, it entered a period of slow and steady decline as the core of the correct ideology, which it was meant to propagate, became increasingly hollow.

In the 1980s, the department launched a succession of largely ineffective propaganda campaigns to neutralize the impact of heretic ideology and ‘spiritual pollution’. In the 1990s, its futile attempts to promote the sanctity of the ‘eternal truths of Marxism—Leninism’ have lost out to an explosive growth of consumerism as a competing discourse that is easily winning the hearts and minds of increasing numbers of PRC citizens.

Today, as the CCP attempts to redefine its relationship to the revolutionary praxis of the past, the Central Propaganda Department is regarded by more and more Party members as an archaic institution ill-suited to the needs of a political force operating in a world of open borders, the increasingly free flow of information, and sophisticated techniques of mass persuasion that make George Orwell’s 1984 look like the picture of an age of innocence by comparison (see Party advertising and self-promotion).

See also: Campaign against Bourgeois Liberalization; cultural purges; socialist spiritual civilization

Further reading

Schoenhals, M. (ed.) (1992). Selections from ‘Propaganda Trends’, Organ of the CCP Central Propaganda Department. Published as Chinese Law and Government 24.4. Armonk: M.E.Sharpe.

MICHAEL SCHOENHALS