Abstract
Propaganda used to be a dirty word, particularly in the English-speaking world and especially after World War I. Propaganda was something your enemy created and you countered with facts and accuracy. The legitimate persuasion of the honest advocate and broker involved “public relations” and “publicity.” More recently, however, scholars have begun to blur these lines, reexamining propaganda as a key tool in modern party- and state-building processes across Eurasia. In China's Republican era, for instance, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and its founder Sun Yat-sen organized a party propaganda department in 1921 prior to the KMT claiming the reins of government in late 1927. Borrowing from the Soviet “propaganda state” via the Comintern, Sun and the KMT laid the foundation for China's own Republican “propaganda state.” From 1927/28, with Sun dead, conflict with the Communists out in the open, and Nanjing proclaimed the new national capital, the KMT's party propaganda department then started to substitute for the one-party state's propaganda ministry, supporting the KMT's more general effort to take over state functions and replace state institutions. Drawing on internal documents from the KMT archives as well as on published but restricted contemporary sources, this chapter addresses issues of party-state organization, jurisdiction, inner-party dynamics, message control, and mobilization in the late 1920s and 1930s. The social history of official print culture as revealed in Republican China's propaganda dynamics, along with the early stages of the KMT's propaganda establishment in creating what has recently been called “the pedagogical state,” will shed light on nation-building through the party via its political publishing program.
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