Cute Propaganda: A Blessing or a Curse?

• In Event: The Soft Sell: Alternate Propaganda Strategies

Abstract

Scholars have extensively studied two major types of propaganda: overt, pompous, and “hard” propaganda that is not persuasive but can signal regime power, and more sophisticated, sleek, and “soft” propaganda that is aimed at persuasion. In China, a new variant of propaganda has emerged in recent years that either embeds political messages in informal, “cute,” and conversational discourses or attempts to lessen social tension with nonpolitical, “chicken soup for the soul” style stories. While such “cute” propaganda is apparently aimed at persuading citizens using lively or down-to-earth narratives and can potentially be regarded as a particular type of soft propaganda, its effectiveness is not yet known. Its informal and subtle style may resonate with people, who will then develop more positive perceptions of the official media and the state, but its overuse may also reduce the officiality of government messages and even make them trivial, thus hampering propaganda’s persuasiveness and engendering public antipathy.

In this study, we have collected an original corpus of over 800,000 Weibo posts by Chinese state-affiliated media outlets, and our topic modeling shows a large proportion of these posts can be classified as cute propaganda. To further investigate whether such propaganda can effectively shape attitudes toward official media and the state, we will field an online survey experiment in China to compare the effects of cute propaganda with more traditional and serious official propaganda, both in terms of the degree to which they improve positive perceptions of the state and whether they signal state power. This research will contribute to our understanding of an emerging type of propaganda and how it may affect authoritarian resilience in the face of an increasingly competitive information environment.

Authors

• Rex Weiye Deng, Washington University in St. Louis

• Haifeng Huang, The Ohio State University