Sarah Paine: evaluation

Transcript context

…f vocational schools. He tried being a, what was it? A merchant, a lawyer, I'm missing something else, a soap maker. Imagine Mao, three stages of personal hygiene, whatever. 00:15:39 It was not to be. But he eventually gets an Ed degree, so he can go off and be a primary school principal. Okay, imagine setting your child off to the psychopath doing show and tell. And then he joins the Communist Party. And it's during the First United Front so he also joins the Nationalist Party. And he has very important positions. If you look at, he's in the National Party, he's at their central headquarters, and he's the minute taker. So he's the fly on the wall listening to everything. 00:16:10 And then he's a stand in for the head of the propaganda department, which is probably where he learned a great deal about the importance of propaganda. And here's what he says early on, “the Communist Party can overthrow the enemy only by holding propaganda pamphlets in one hand and bullets in the other”. And if you look at the original organization chart of the shadow Communist government, you'll see there are only what, six departments there? One of them is a propaganda department. If you have no power, words are, is, your initial way into gaining power. I'm now going to use a framework from my wonderful colleagues, Mark Genest and Andrea Dew, this is theirs, about analyzing strategic communication in terms of messenger, message and medium. And I'll go through each three, all three. 00:16:59 What you see here is a propaganda poster. It's a woodblock print. That's the medium. And it's a very easy way to reproduce pictures back in the day. The message is about a model laborer, this “always emulate Wu Man Yo”, lucky us. And to do all the nice things he does with whatever is going on there. So that's what that is. Now, messengers were the delivery system, the broadcasting system for the Communist Party. So you've got the Communist Party, but you've got to reach an audience. And that's what these messengers are doing. And so they go into local areas and they identify local grievances for attention by the Communist Party, which when it fixes them or fixes somebody, that will generate loyalties and allegiance. So these propaganda personnel would be identifying local bullies to come in and deal with them, organize mass rallies. During battles they're going to double as medics, after battles, they're going to propagandize POWs, between battles, they are helping on troop morale. But what they're really doing is reporting back to Communist Central exactly what's going on. 00:18:10 And civil and military messengers differ. For civil messengers, they would be activists, maybe in the local government, labor unions, peasant organizations, women organizations, any number of these things. And it's there, it's your broadcasting system to reach a population and mobilize it. Military messengers are a little different. Every single military unit had about a 20-member propaganda team. That's a lot of people. According to Mao, the propaganda work of the Red Army is therefore first-priority work of the Red Army. This is very different from soldiering in the West. ber propaganda team. That's a lot of people. According to Mao, the propaganda work of the Red Army is therefore first-priority work of the Red Army. This is very different from soldiering in the West. This is not how it would work. Also, Mao had his international broadcasting system. These would be foreign journalists. While Mao was holding court up in Yenan, he invited many of these journalists up there. Edgar Snow was by far the most famous. Why? Because he was the first one in and the last one out. He had really long interviews with Mao, and Edgar Snow, this is when he was an old man, but when he was a young man he never asked, "Why does this A-list political leader spending so much time with me?" That never occurred to Edgar. But it's hours. 00:19:24 And he was a very fine writer, Edgar Snow. What Edgar Snow writes, Red Star Over China, you can probably go to Barnes and Noble and pick up a copy there. It's been in print ever since, and it's the original footnote in Chinese history because no one knew anything about Mao. And so then everybody starts citing Edgar Snow, and then we cite everybody and everybody and everybody. But actually, it only goes back to Edgar Snow. So, Mao got his word out. Mao thought, "You want to keep the message simple. You want to make it epigrammatic so that people can understand it rapidly." In his day, this meant having matching slogans, the equivalent of newspaper headlines, to provide a lens for people to understand events, rather like tweets in our own day. So, when the White Terror occurred, when Chiang Kai-shek is turning on the Communists in the first United Front, the slogan was, "Arm the peasants. " 00:20:16 And then, when the Japanese invaded Manchuria in 1931, the new slogan is, "Down with imperialism and the Nationalist Party too," because you want to smear your enemy in the civil war while you're at it there. But there are a whole series of these slogans. And here, Mao is one of the most popular poets in China, certainly, of the 20th century. He could write really simple couplets. If you look here, I think it's a total of eight characters so that someone who's semiliterate can make their way through this poem. 00:20:46 On the other hand, he wrote really complicated things because he needed to garner the support of intellectuals initially before he'd educated enough peasants and workers to take over. Intellectuals prize poetry, and they also prize what's called grass writing, which is that unintelligible Chinese stuff that’s under there. But if Mao set these poems to tunes that everybody knew, people could sing them on the Long March and elsewhere and learn them that way. So, he's an incredibly accomplished man. He also understood you have to manage the message, and the way he did that is through political mobilization. Part of that is you've got to tell people what the policy objective is, which for him was abolishing imperialism, feudalism, and the landlord class, and then presenting a strategy for how to get there. 00:21:36 And here are the media that he used: not only the written and spoken word but also the dramatic arts in order to get the message out. ass, and then presenting a strategy for how to get there. 00:21:36 And here are the media that he used: not only the written and spoken word but also the dramatic arts in order to get the message out. He also used an institutional medium of education. And here is Mao, the primary school teacher, in his element. Most of the people in his armies were illiterate, but Mao knew all about how to reach them. And if you can see in this slide, there are a lot of political commissars. What are they? Political and military commissars come in a pair. Military commissar is the military professional who actually knows about the fighting. The political commissar is the one with the direct line to the secret police who will cap the military commissar if there are any problems whatsoever. 00:22:21 So, Mao's got an elaborate network to get the message out, offering all kinds of social services to people, not only medical but also education for peasant children. And he also educated their parents. This is for the first time in Chinese history. He did it during the winter slack season. Now, the Nationalists had also tried to improve education, but once the Japanese invaded full bore, they had to drop it because the Nationalist conventional armies are the ones that are fighting off the Japanese conventional armies. The Communists are a guerilla movement, and they're operating behind enemy lines. So, as the Nationalists are dragooning people into their armies, the Communists are busy offering social services, and I'll get to land reform. And so for the peasants, before too long, it becomes a no-brainer whom they're going to support. Mao also emphasized professional military education because he needs to turn peasants to cadres, to guerillas, to conventional soldiers. And there's got to be an educational pipeline to do this. And if you look at this Northwest Counter-Japan Red Army University, of the first original departments, political work is one of them. This is not professional military education the way it's done in the West, it's a separate thing. 00:23:48 Okay, part one over: Mao the propagandist, I've covered that. Now I'm going to go about Mao the social scientist. And here, he says, "The peasant problem is the central problem of the national revolution. If the peasants do not rise up and join and support the national revolution, the national revolution cannot succeed." And if you look at his, further along in his biography, while the first United Front was still operative, he's heading the Nationalist Party's Peasant Institute in Guangzhou and also their Central Commission on the Peasant Movement, learning a great deal about it. But once the White Terror hits, he needs to get out of Dodge fast, or they'll kill him. And that's where he flees to Jiangxi Province, to the Jiangxi Soviet, where he is going to become the political commissar of the 4th Army. He's also going to be in charge of land reform as he figures out how to calibrate that to make it work. 00:24:46 All right, for Mao, he's doing data-driven survey after data-driven survey, does a whole series of them between 1926 and 1933.…

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