Propaganda with a Human Face: How Personal Relatable News Affects in China

• In Event: China's Propaganda Apparatus

Abstract

Authoritarian regimes rely on various forms propaganda for fortifying rule. What remains controversial, however, is what propaganda they are resorting to and how effective the propaganda is in helping the autocrats achieve anticipated goals. Critical to the existing literature dwells on a debate over two opposite accounts of political propaganda, “hard propaganda” and “soft propaganda”. The former centers on heavy-handed, dogmatic propaganda, arguing that dictators employ such propaganda mostly as a signal of the regime’s power over its citizens in the pursuit of eliciting public fear and political compliance while the latter emphasizes political messages which are aesthetically appealing and credible in claims, hoping to manipulate public opinion through persuasion. Yet, such two accounts of propaganda, hard or soft, examine merely “hard” messages in nature, that is, conceiving stories at state, aggregated level within the political domain and highlighting national interest while overlooking the alternatives which bring in the “human face” into propaganda information through undergirding individuals’ personal experience and interest in mundane life, or briefly, personal relatable news, let alone the effectiveness of such propaganda.

This article, by examining the real-world political messages employed by China’s propaganda apparatus, argues that the Chinese authoritarians have often resorted to much propaganda with content and package relatable to personal immediate interest, and the employment of such sophisticated strategy adapted to meet individuals’ increasing demands for personal rights allows the state to shape public perception and activate actions in favor of the government. Concentrating on nationalist propaganda regarding South Korea and Taiwan during China’s diplomatic confrontations with respective region in recent years, this research employs an original online survey experiment conducted among 1,600 respondents from mainland China. It finds that personal relatable news——mostly in association with disruptive personal experience and humanistic interest of traveling to above destinations——packaged in negative tones not only stirs up the respondents’ enmity to target regions (proxied by their assessment of the government and the region as a whole) but more importantly, foments their nationalist actions——that is, decreased likelihood of making outbound trips. More interestingly, such antagonist behavior engaging the tourism industry can even translate into the respondents’ hatred towards all products and services provided by rivalry states and even citizens there. Considering that the Chinese government has increasingly relied on state-led nationalism for resolving international conflicts recently and exploited consumer nationalism (mostly in the form of consumer boycotts) to pressure foreign governments, the personal relatable news effectively and successfully helps the state realize public sentiment and behavior manipulation.

Moreover, inconsistent with what current literature holds that the hard propaganda is less to persuade than to signal overwhelming power, the findings suggest, in comparison to personal relatable news, the nationalistic indoctrination, often treated as a form of “hard propaganda”, can also stoke antiforeign emotions while less effective in translating them into specific actions.

Through a systematic investigation of the effectiveness of personal relatable news and its comparison with indoctrinated propaganda messages, this article contributes to the increasingly salient scholarly enterprises such as propaganda and authoritarian resilience. It first provides a window into how the sophisticated authoritarian propaganda is inclined to immerse recipients into state-backed messages in a more covert, unnoticeable but relatable fashion. In doing so, it explains whether and how the authoritarians can ultimately achieve political or diplomatic goals through non-political but more banal, relatable propaganda. Findings also suggest the necessity of academic attention shifted to the influence of factors in more association with personal immediate interest over opinion maneuvers. Given such propaganda has essential “softness” in nature, it thus, bears implications for the scholarship of “soft propaganda” by offering the possibility of inviting further research on more sophisticated propaganda strategies underscoring human interest. Second, it, although not aiming to invalidate the “signaling” theory of hard propaganda, questions the mechanism of how heavy-handed propaganda can influence its recipients. Lastly, through the use of various propaganda strategies, it showcases the dynamics of the party-state to garner domestic support to compete in international relations and eventually to strengthen its authoritarian rule.

Author

• Yuan Wang