Brainwashing in China, Then and Now
April 20th, 2008 at 6:28 am (Uncategorized)
A word that seems to be cropping quite a bit lately from both Chinese and non-Chinese quarters has been “brainwashing”. The Merriam Webster and American Heritage dictionaries give the etymology xi nao (洗脑), the English word first appearing in 1950.
In the book Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of “Brainwashing”, Robert Jay Lifton cites the writings of the American journalist Edward Hunter first used it “as a translation of the colloquialism “hsi nao” (literally, “wash brain”), which he quoted from Chinese informants who described its use following the Chinese takeover.” The term was later applied to indoctrination techniques in other parts of the world. Hunter was a propaganda specialist for the OSS during World War II, and collected a great deal of Chinese propaganda material, which is now available in the Chinese Pamphlets e-collection at the Center for Research Libraries. The Oxford English Dictionary says the first appearance of the word was in an article by Hunter for The New Leader in 1950, while Wikipedia cites an article by Hunter in the Miami Daily News the same year titled “‘Brain-Washing’ Tactics Force Chinese into Ranks of Communist Party”.
In the years that followed, “brainwashing” got alot of play to explain defection among American POWs in the Korean War, and that in turn later became part of the premise of “The Manchurian Candidate”.
There doesn’t seem to be any evidence that xinao was an official phrase in the Chinese government, but referred to what is typical translated as “thought reform”, or 思想改造 (sixiang gaizao), which referred to the re-education of the intelligentsia and educated after 1949. Official history says that thought reform started in 1951, but according to one Chinese blogger, the roots can be traced back to 1950 (when Hunter first heard the term xinao referring to political re-education) in Mao Zedong’s speeches at the Second Meeting of the 1st CPPCC National Committee, when he exhorted intellectuals to use their free time to study Marx-Leninism, educate the masses and engage in self-criticism. An English version of the speech, “Be A True Revolutionary”, does not appear to mention intellectuals or holidays, but does quote Mao Zedong saying “Towards the people, on the contrary, it uses the method of democracy and not of compulsion, that is, it must necessarily let them take part in political activity and does not compel them to do this or that but uses the method of democracy to educate and persuade. Such education is self-education for the people, and its basic method is criticism and self-criticism. I hope that this method will be used by all the nationalities, democratic classes, democratic parties, people’s organizations and patriotic democrats in the country.”
The blogger quotes Mao Zedong speaking at the 3rd Plenary of the 7th Central Committee of the CCP, which can also be found on Xinhua, “对知识分子要办各种训练班，办军政大学、革命大学。要使用他们，同时对他们进行改造.” “Intellectuals need to do every kind of training, military education, revolutionary education. They need to be utilized, and at the same time reformed.” Most likely these campaigns, which the following year would solidify as “thought reform”, were the ones Hunter’s informant was referring to when he used the term “brainwash”.
In contemporary China, “xinao” is a bit of a curious word. It is often used precisely as we would use it in the West, right now across the Internet in reference to CNN, or more loosely when author Wang Shuo called the 80s generation brainwashed by Hong Kong and Taiwan pop culture. Numerous stories appear talking about pyramid schemes “brainwashing” people into scams. But then there are the political campaigns mentioned online, such as “City and Rural Party Branches Hand in Hand”, which says that in tackling rural poverty, material donations are not enough but city and rural party members must go to each others areas to “brainwash” and “liberate their thinking”. [突出抓好思想共建。共建不能只是停留在给钱给物的层面上，更要抓好党的建设，解放思想，要组织城市党员进村入户，组织结对村党员进城洗脑，按“一加一模式”结对帮扶贫困党员和贫困户。]
Other instances often use the term brainwash positively (and in quotation marks suggesting its sorta slang) when referring to educating cadres, human resources (no quotation marks), public anti-corruption campaigns and to describe (again, positively) the controversial remarks of Professor Zheng Qiang (郑强), who railed against defects in the Chinese education in a speech in Jiangsu, saying “the higher your test scores, the more disabled you are”, early education overloads students, English education at a university level leads to students who only understands “English with a Sichuan accent”, and other thought provoking stuff.
The term xinao then, seems to have two lives in China. One is the sort of contemporary usage familiar to English speakers, as a negative term for indoctrination and people in China, where the word and concept originated, is now applying it to others, while the other xinao continues to be a term for a kind of “thought reform”, though now applied positively as a buzzword to things like Six Sigma training. Heh. I’ve lost count of the levels of irony at play here.
Photo courtesy of BCostin, under Creative Commons (Flickr)
James said,
April 20, 2008 at 3:54 pm
Brilliant and Intriguing; and yes relevant.
BOB said,
April 20, 2008 at 5:12 pm
According to Naomi Klein’s book “The Shock Doctrine”, the CIA’s interest in brain washing began in the 1950s after observing behavioral changes in US POWS returning from the Korean War.
What’s interesting about the Chinese students is their apparent “regression”, i.e., the immaturity. Many observers have commented on this phenomenon, which is not reflected in Chinese from other regions, countries. Apparently, one objective of brain washing is to regress the subject to a childlike state to make the subject more easily influenced and controllable. It may also have the effect of heightening childlike feelings towards parental authority. If the parent can meet the child’s basic material and psychic needs (for food, “face”, etc.) then the child would have a strong emotional, irrational, unquestioning bond towards the parental authority.
The CIA’s experiments often ended in failure. The CIA attempted to induce regression by electro-shocks to the brain and harsh chemicals, like LSD. In some cases, the subjects were reduced to vegetables. The Chinese, it seems, have had much greater success.
Alphast said,
April 21, 2008 at 4:35 am
They have more success, because they don’t use electricity of chemicals but this perfect combination:
- deprivation of any freely available uncontrolled news source (remember that if you are not actively hacking it, you don’t access any critical news behind the Great Firewall)
- school, university, family, Party, media and business indoctrination
- low/high level fear (depending on the circumstances and the needs), thanks to the omnipresent goons of the government (local or national).
- incentives for the ones who comply more zealously.
BOB said,
April 21, 2008 at 6:28 am
How does one brainwash a foreigner in China?
samuel said,
April 21, 2008 at 6:56 am
I think that some foreigners in China often say that Chinese are brainwashed just because they don’t have the same vision of the world as them. It’s possible to love the Communist party and believe that Tibet is a part o China without having been brain-washed. Chinese culture, ,much like American culture is a very strong and all encompassing thing it sort of drives itself and is thinly aware of the outside world, it’s normal that a lot of the stuff that people think here will be totally foreign to outsiders and seem like brainwashing…. I’m not denying that there is some indoctrination and stuff, just saying you can’t apply it too broadly.
matteo said,
April 21, 2008 at 7:45 am
hello dave,
brief OT:i’m sure you know that but, just in case, u’ve been linked by bbc,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7347821.stm
Charles Liu said,
April 21, 2008 at 1:17 pm
And of course, us Americans are “influenced” by our military-industria-media-complex.
Amy Goodman of Democracy Now asked “Had our media been state-sponsored, would our pre-Iraq-invasion reporting be any different?”
Her answer was no. Now, would our reporting of Tibet/Olympic torch be any different if our media was state-sponsored? I don’t think so.
BOB said,
April 21, 2008 at 6:49 pm
I agree that most peoples’ minds are dominated to various degrees. For example, the person who believes that there’s a number 1 university, a number 2 university, 3 number 3 univesity, etc, etc, or the person who believes in brandnames—the minds of such people are clearly dominated.
It’s important that mankind does not lose its ability to think, to be human.
Zictor said,
April 22, 2008 at 2:39 am
Samuel has a very good point. Being patriotic does not necessarily mean that a Chinese person is brainwashed. Maybe this whole mindset is just so entrenched in the Chinese psyche that it would take centuries to take it away. The other day, I was talking to some guy who said that the idea of on Han nation was a construction of Sun Yat Sen to unite the Chinese against the Japanese (I don’t know if the Japanese were already in China by then). So he re-interpreted history to create this coherent narrative that is a fiction. Come on, the Yuan and Qing ” Dynasties” were actually foreign occupations.
Some foreigners just buy into the story that China cannot be judged by foreign standards, so everything is excusable from a Chinese point of view. I don’t know if anyone out there agrees with me, but for me this is bullshit. If China wants to be a respectet international player, it has to adapt to the world a little bit too.
Charles Liu said,
April 22, 2008 at 2:49 pm
Okay, Victor, let’s judge China by our standards - compare our “official narrative” about why we own the Native Americans with China’s “official narrative” that Tibet is part of China.
QED
BOB said,
April 22, 2008 at 8:00 pm
Here’s another one of those articles about how stupid Americans are generally:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/22/opinion/22herbert.html?em&ex=1209009600&en=06fa0cda22fca02a&ei=5087%0A
The author writes:
“Ignorance in the United States is not just bliss, it’s widespread. A recent survey of teenagers by the education advocacy group Common Core found that a quarter could not identify Adolf Hitler, a third did not know that the Bill of Rights guaranteed freedom of speech and religion, and fewer than half knew that the Civil War took place between 1850 and 1900.”
I suspect that there’s a strong corralation between consumerism, conformity and other manifestations of mind-domination, and levels of education, including how people are educated.
Jack said,
April 23, 2008 at 12:35 pm
@Charles
Um, our official narrative is that we boned the Native Americans with disease, religion, guns, inept government, and cultural misunderstanding. That even when we were trying to fix things we made them worse.
Making a comparison between the Tibetans and the Native Americans is more of a senseless knee-jerk. It would be like if China turned Taiwan into the unsinkable crater tomorrow and the only defense would be, “Well the West atom bombed Japan, so everything’s cool.”
Ed said,
April 24, 2008 at 1:48 pm
Jack, the comparison is more “Well the West atom bombed Japan - we’d probably do likewise in the same situation.”
…which pertains to the Tibet/Native American analogy.
Bringing up a hypothetical Taiwan situation with an extreme outcome is a bit bizarre.
nanheyangrouchuan said,
April 24, 2008 at 11:09 pm
Why are there no protests outside of Bausch & Lomb, Areva, Total, Renault and Suez?
Because those companies are associated with high technology, advanced manufacturing and modern management methods and so are necessary for China’s development. So they stay protected, Carrefour is just a department store.
And here is more of “bad China”!
It’s time for “Shark awareness week”!
http://tinyurl.com/4zt6j4
Jack said,
April 25, 2008 at 2:22 am
@Ed
Okay, so it was a totally weird and bad analogyI brought up. But to me, the Chinese argument is to say that China is not colonizing Tibet, but at the same time it compares the West’s effort to colonize with China’s efforts in making these sorts of comparisons between Tibetans and Native Americans.
Ed said,
April 25, 2008 at 1:53 pm
Jack, I’m not really sure I’ve heard much from the Chinese government about Native Americans. That seems to be a thing ordinary folks have come up with. Is it a knee-jerk reaction? Most certainly.
But as you have yourself pointed out, the West went *much further* than China has gone with Tibet, which is the real reason why the analogy seems strange. We are only about 100 or so years since the completion of the colonisation of places like Oz and N.America, and it is nigh on impossible to imagine the situation being reversed in those places.
China followed the Soviet model and enacted a nationalities policy. Ultra-nationalists probably think that this was a fundamental mistake now and really wish they’d followed the Western model to a tee (which, thankfully, they didn’t).
Ed said,
April 25, 2008 at 2:05 pm
nanheyangrouchuan - how would you boycott Areva? Turn off your lights?
Charles Liu said,
April 28, 2008 at 4:28 pm
Jack, I am an American. The point is we should be introspective.
There’s no doubt China colonized Tibet - 700 years ago according to the Chinese. Matter of fact there’s a lot of “liberated fudual Tibet” stuff in Chinese blogsphere. That doesn’t sound like denial at all.
Also what’s true is Tibet is overrun with Han people. Compare the % of han population in Tibet with % of non-native Americans in North America.
Charles Liu said,
April 28, 2008 at 4:30 pm
Tibet is NOT overrun with Han people. Just compare the %.
tessa said,
July 21, 2008 at 7:55 am
any useful sites for the role of the education system in supporting Mao’s propaganda? Studying it for school… a major work requirement…!
Mikey said,
March 5, 2009 at 2:15 pm
Of course they are brainwashed, do you ever see Australian or American kids throwing bricks at embassies. They live in abject fear and dropped that professor in it for having “an opinion”…. if that isn’t robotized, what is?
hlbb said,
June 11, 2009 at 10:30 pm
Australian or American kids throwing bricks at embassies
~~~~~~~~~~~ You must be kidding, almost half American high school student use drug and about 40% of high school student are functional illiterate, they probably be busing shooting eachother robbing each other and take illegal drugs or simply watching carton.
BTW, there are still few kids that is not so busing doing all kids of illegal issue, like the one throw his shoes to china’s prime minister.
Just a reminder, all barbarian civilization cannot last for more than 100 years, just look at Mongols, Britain, this time is American, sorry, china would again gain its position back and rule the world for another 2000 years, too bad for “democracy”.
Longlife said,
July 8, 2009 at 3:06 am
In Tibet I remember that the Chinese actually used the term similar to brainwashing, the Tibetans were called “green brain” and the objective of the “liberation” was turn our brains white.