Cultivating, Cleansing, and Performing the American Germ Invasion: The Anatomy of a Chinese Korean War Propaganda Campaign

Abstract

Amid a lull in the Korean conflict of early 1952, Chinese officials launched a sensationalized propaganda campaign against purported American germ attacks in Korea and China. To boost enthusiasm for the war, the Chinese government sought to foment popular anxieties about the strange specter of American insects and diseases raining down from the skies. Officials quickly capitalized upon public outcries and mobilized them toward the aims of the state. Using dramatized fears of an American germ war, propagandists combined the government’s aims of increasing popular anti-Americanism, developing the Patriotic Hygiene Campaign, and rallying the country for total war. As this article argues, Chinese leaders honed imagery of a microbial American invasion to teach the public about science and educate them about the threats of germs and diseases. In this fusion of state propaganda and pedagogy, the citizenry was mobilized to performatively confront fictional American germ attacks in ways that entrenched a dogmatic anti-Americanism into the banal constructions of everyday life.