Methods of Communication within the Chinese Bureaucracy

Abstract

Not until the Tenth Party Congress in August 1973 did the Chinese mass media openly refer to the “Lin Piao affair.” Yet, almost all Chinese - including Kwangtung commune members - had been given an explanation for his demise sometime previously, so the revelations of the Tenth Congress came as no surprise. Without help from the mass media, but with guidance from the network of political study groups, the Chinese had been taught how to decode such esoteric phrases as “Liu Shao-ch'i type swindlers” which appeared in the media. The dissemination of information about Lin Piao was the most dramatic but not the first indication of China's dual communication network: the open, mass media and the closed system contained within the bureaucracy (except for the final link to the populace). To cite other prominent examples, a recorded tape of Mao's important 27 February 1957 speech “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions among the People” was played for select audiences long before the revised version was published in June 1957. The series of edicts on agriculture and the socialist education campaign in the early 1960s were widely disseminated; yet the open press only reflected the spirit of the documents. Mao's interview with Edgar Snow that explained and sanctified Nixon's visit went unrecorded in the open media, but circulated widely among cadres.