What Can Americans Learn from Chinese Government Propaganda?

Under the relentless thrust of accelerating over-population and increasing over-organization, and by means of ever more effective methods of mind-manipulation, the democracies will change their nature; the quaint old forms—elections, parliaments, Supreme Courts and all the rest—will remain. The underlying substance will be a new kind of non-violent totalitarianism. All the traditional names, all the hallowed slogans will remain exactly what they were in the good old days. Democracy and freedom will be the theme of every broadcast and editorial—but Democracy and freedom in a strictly Pickwickian sense. Meanwhile the ruling oligarchy and its highly trained elite of soldiers, policemen, thought-manufacturers and mind-manipulators will quietly run the show as they see fit.

– From Aldous Huxley’s, Brave New World Revisited, published 1958

We live in a world like no other in human history. We’re mercilessly bombarded by intense and sophisticated propaganda virtually 24/7, whether it be from government officials, media outlets or multi-national corporations with endless budgets. The barrage is relentless, and unless you feel like ditching it all and moving into a cave, pretty much inescapable. For those of us dedicated to living on the outside, the only offense is a good defense, and a good defense requires understanding.

Most of us assume that for propaganda to be most effective it must remain undetected by its intended victims. While this is true on some level, it’s also an unsophisticated understanding of how this stuff really works here in the U.S. on a far more clever and pernicious level.

To get a deeper understanding, I want to highlight a few passages from an excellent article published at CounterPunch titled, Why Ridiculous Official Propaganda Still Works:

Chief among the common misconceptions about the way official propaganda works is the notion that its goal is to deceive the public into believing things that are not “the truth” (that Trump is a Russian agent, for example, or that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, or that the terrorists hate us for our freedom, et cetera). However, while official propagandists are definitely pleased if anyone actually believes whatever lies they are selling, deception is not their primary aim.

The primary aim of official propaganda is to generate an “official narrative” that can be mindlessly repeated by the ruling classes and those who support and identify with them. This official narrative does not have to make sense, or to stand up to any sort of serious scrutiny. Its factualness is not the point. The point is to draw a Maginot line, a defensive ideological boundary, between “the truth” as defined by the ruling classes and any other “truth” that contradicts their narrative.

Imagine this Maginot line as a circular wall surrounded by inhospitable territory. Inside the wall is “normal” society, gainful employment, career advancement, and all the other considerable benefits of cooperating with the ruling classes. Outside the wall is poverty, anxiety, social and professional stigmatization, and various other forms of suffering. Which side of the wall do you want to be on? Every day, in countless ways, each of us are asked and have to answer this question. Conform, and there’s a place for you inside. Refuse, and … well, good luck out there.

In openly despotic societies, the stakes involved in making this choice (to conform or dissent) are often life and death. In our relatively liberal Western societies (for those of us who are not militant guerillas), the consequences of not conforming to the official narrative are usually subtler. Despite that, the pressure is still intense. Conforming to the consensus “reality” generated by these official narratives is price of admission to the inner sanctum, where the jobs, money, professional prestige, and the other rewards of Capitalism are. Conforming does not require belief. It requires allegiance and rote obedience. What one actually believes is completely irrelevant, as long as one parrots the official narrative.

In short, official propaganda is not designed to deceive the public (no more than the speeches in an actor’s script are intended to deceive the actor who speaks them). It is designed to be absorbed and repeated, no matter how implausible or preposterous it might be. Actually, it is often most effective when those who are forced to robotically repeat it know that it is utter nonsense, as the humiliation of having to do so cements their allegiance to the ruling classes (this phenomenon being a standard feature of the classic Stockholm Syndrome model, and authoritarian conditioning generally).

The point of all this propaganda is to delegitimize Donald Trump, and to prophylactically reassert the neoliberal ruling classes’ monopoly on power, “reality,” and “truth.” In case this wasn’t already abundantly clear, the neoliberal ruling classes have no intention of giving up control of the global capitalist pseudo-empire they’ve been working to establish these last sixty years. They’re going to delegitimize and stigmatize Trump (and any other symbol of nationalist backlash or resistance to transnational Capitalism), bide their time for the next four years, and then install another of their loyal servants … after which life will go back to “normal,” and liberals will do their best to forget this unfortunate period where they pretended to believe this insipid neo-McCarthyite nonsense.

That’s the first point about the complexities of propaganda I want to highlight today, but it’s not the only one. The second example comes from the Chinese government, as outlined in a post published at Marginal Revolution titled, Authoritarians Distract Rather than Debate. Here’s what we learned:

It’s long been known that the Chinese government hires people to support the government with fabricated posts on social media. In China these people are known as the “50c party”, so called because the posters were rumored to be paid 50 cents (5 jiao or about $.08) to write the posts. The precise nature and extent of the 50c party has heretofore been unknown. But in an amazing new paper, Gary King, Jennifer Pan and Margaret Roberts (KPR) uncover a lot of new information using statistical sleuthing and some unusual and controversial real world sleuthing.

KPR’s data-lever is an archive of leaked emails from the Propaganda Office of Zhanggong. The archive included many 50c posters who were sending links and screenshots of their posts to the central office as evidence of their good work. Using these posts, KPR are able to trace the posters though many social media accounts and discover who the posters are and what they are posting about. Both pieces of information reveal surprises.

First, the posters are government workers paid on salary not, as the 50c phrase suggests, piece-rate workers. Second, and more importantly, it has long been assumed that propaganda posts would support the government with praise or criticize critics of the government. Not so. In fact, propaganda posts actively steer away from controversial issues. Instead, the effort appears to be to distract (especially to distract the people from organizing collective action; thus distraction campaigns peak around times and places where collective action like marches and protests might become focal). KPR write:

Distraction is a clever and useful strategy in information control in that an argument in almost any human discussion is rarely an effective way to put an end to an opposing argument. Letting an argument die, or changing the subject, usually works much better than picking an argument and getting someone’s back up…

Debate is about appealing to an individual’s reason; debate is thus implicitly individualistic, respectful of rights and epistemically egalitarian. (As I argued earlier, respect for the truth is tied to individualism because any person may have truth and reason on their side.) Authoritarians don’t care about these things and so they lie and distract with impunity and without shame. In this case, the distraction is done subtly.

If you come away from the above with the conclusion “good thing we aren’t China,” you aren’t thinking hard enough. We live in a world in which eight men own as much wealth as the bottom 50%. This is clearly not a stable world, so how is it kept in place by those in power against the best interests of so many? Distraction is certainly a huge part of it.

Distraction can take many forms of course. A particularly noxious way to distract people is to make sure you work them to death. People who work two jobs and still need foodstamps to survive will be so demoralized and exhausted, staying informed about the world around them becomes nearly impossible, let alone being part of any sort of organized popular movement. For those who do have free time to be productive members of society there’s an overabundance of sports, video games, TMZ, and reality tv. Distraction is an essential part of keeping this destructive, predatory society intact, and in order to break free, it’s essential we understand this and adjust our behavior wherever and whenever possible.

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In Liberty,
Michael Krieger

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13 thoughts on “What Can Americans Learn from Chinese Government Propaganda?”

  1. Fascinating observations and certainly borne out by the avalanche of sheer idiotic banality that washes over the average American/Brit every day. Titillation, gore, hero worship, vapid celebrity, feeding the senses…a non-stop cornucopia of crap.

    They have done a fine job, as most of the people I meet are too busy putting their team flags all over their cars or talking about the cutest baby clothes to care that we are being (not Candy) crushed.

    I get a lot done in my life because I threw my TV out over a decade ago, avoid it and popular papers/magazines and spend my time enriching myself with the incredible wealth of useful information at our fingertips on the Net.

    It is amazing how we are enslaved by our own acceptance of this Bizarro World. Just like an elephant trained young that it couldn’t break its chains, we come to the point where we don’t even try…and are just grateful for the occasional banana from the master’s hand.

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  2. “Symbolism is more important than substance”

    Along the same lines as this article, a quote from Charles Hugh-Smith:

    “For Progressives, symbolism is more important than substance. Never mind that the incomes, wealth and opportunities of the bottom 95% have steadily eroded in the eight years of the Obama presidency, or that an American neocon-neoliberal foreign policy was running amok globally. To Progressives steeped in the mythology of political correctness, the symbolism of the speech acts being uttered mattered far more than the substance or the consequences.”

    I think this insight speaks to how people easily fool themselves that something beneficial is happening when they are told a story. They only need to hear about it, they don’t actually need to see it and evaluate it to confirm that it is true. I suppose it is too much work for people to do their own investigations. I think such people are like children in their naivety. They are also lazy and perhaps don’t trust their intelligence to be able to decipher what is really going on.

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  3. The Chinese should take a lesson from the masters. Why pay for distractions when you can profit from them? Professional Sports and Day Time programs are far more inoculating. They also provide just the right time gaps to order fast food.

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  4. Do remember that the alternate media dishes out their own propaganda so it’s not just the MSM presstitutes and the government doing it.

    Also, what’s the deal with the comment on distractions? Are you saying people shouldn’t ever do anything fun in their free time? Are you saying anyone who does play video games or watches sports or entertainment on TV is some brainwashed zombie? I play games and watch sports and watch tv shows (not reality) and I can assure you I am not a brainwashed zombie and realize the majority of the crap the government spews forth is propaganda. I also realize a lot of what I read on alt media sites is propaganda too, designed in a way to make one think everything in the world is a disaster and push a complete doom and gloom view.

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    • Don’t take the article so personally. I have complete confidence regarding your ability to stay informed while also participating in a variety of other activities from video games to sports. This isn’t about you, but about a wider point about how distraction functions as a form of intentional state propaganda in China, and how various distractions keep people from resisting in America as well. If I had intended to say “anyone who does play video games or watches sports or entertainment on TV is some brainwashed zombie,” then I would have said that, but I did’t.

      From my personal life experience, there has been an imbalance with people I have been friends with or interacted with when it comes to the relative time they spend engaging with the real world around them and understanding how things work, versus the time spent on let’s say sports and reality tv/gossip. The good news is that this is changing, which is partly why you see increased populist political movements on both the right and the left. Things are changing, and the gross imbalance is being smoothed out in a healthy way toward more of an equilibrium, which is probably how you lead your life. Just because you maintain balance, doesn’t mean society at large does, and I think it’s clear from our culture that there has not been a healthy equilibrium at play for a long, long time.

      Finally, of course I agree with your commentary on alternative media. There’s an incredible amount of crap out there everywhere on the internet, but don’t think for a second there isn’t a difference between a site like this where one person is giving his honest opinion on stuff without regard to funders and major advertisers and what you see on corporate oligarch-owned media. I may be wrong from time to time, but I’m always honest and straightforward, and that’s all too often a limited resource.

  5. Nice article that includes a perfect example of how propaganda works, even on MIke Krieger. The 8 rich guys that are wealthier than the bottom 50% of society is simply not accurate. This canard has been debunked. The methodology is bad.

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    • I couldn’t read the article without “subscribing” so I still don’t know specifically where the data is wrong. Can you copy/paste excerpts or provide a link to a free article.

      Ultimately, the fact that the wealthy and powerful created a rigged, crony capitalist, rent-seeking economy in which they have systemically funneled most of the gains from this fake recovery is clearly one of the biggest issues of our time, even if you can prove the specific Oxfam report is wrong.

      I lived and worked in that world, and believe me, they take care of themselves on Wall Street using the U.S. government and by hurting the less fortunate to do it, and this must be seriously addressed.

    • Free to subscribe to one free article per month. Your concerns are systemic to the state and are not new. They cannot be addressed within the state as they are in its nature. You will find the same in Rome, Imperial France, or Chile today. Lest you think I am only a critic, I am not. I have enjoyed your articles and interviews many times. Cheers.

    • Yes…but….
      No metric can measure the influence that such incredibly concentrated and distilled wealth buys. That, at least to me, is the scary scene in the horror show. And the corporate media has been allowed to amalgamate to such an extent that they control not just information but context (which is absolutely vital). Western media now resembles an old Cuban factory where someone reads the Party newspaper to all of the other workers.

    • Content control comes with the territory. Those who control states and the wealthy/powerful have always done this. Easy examples are the Spanish American War & WWI. A danger for independent media is accepting useful narratives without checking first. It’s useful to discredit competition by offering bad data or stories so reputations are damaged. It’s also useful to get enemies to chase the wrong stories so there is less time for the real issues.

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