Chinese Propaganda Seducing the World offers a fascinating analysis of the Chinese Communist Party's use of propaganda to legitimize its position and strengthen its power in China and the world. The author presents a unique insider’s view of how political propaganda infiltrates private life in China. Propaganda is also the Party’s strongest tool for building China’s global power. Thanks to both Chinese and non-Chinese spreading China’s national myth, the Communist Party of China is fast seducing people all around the world. Jeanne Boden holds a PhD in Oriental Languages and Cultures (Sinology). In her 30 years of engagement with China, she has assembled an impressive archive of photographs depicting propaganda slogans in places across China, from Jilin in the Northeast to Tibet and Xinjiang in the West, from Beijing in the North to Guangdong in the South. This book presents exclusive photographs, revealing China’s extensive use of propaganda, and its deep impact domestically and internationally.

This classic in the annals of village studies will be widely read and debated for what it reveals about China's rural dynamics as well as the nature of state power, markets, the military, social relations, and religion. Built on extraordinarily intimate and detailed research in a Sichuan village that Isabel Crook began in 1940, the book provides an unprecedented history of Chinese rural life during the war with Japan. It is an essential resource for all scholars of contemporary China.

The first book-length English-language study focusing on the early modern export of Chinese silk to New Spain from the sixteenth to the seventeenth century, An Object of Seduction compares and contrasts the two regions from perspectives of the sericulture development, the widespread circulation of silk fashion, and the government attempts at regulating the use of silk. Xiaolin Duan argues that the increasing demand for silk on the worldwide market on the one hand contributed to the parallel development of silk fashion and sericulture in China and New Spain, and on the other hand created conflicts on imperial regulations about foreign trade and hierarchical systems. Incorporating evidence from local gazetteers, correspondence, manual books, illustrated treatises, and miscellanies, this book explores how the growing desire for and production of raw silk and silk textiles empowered individuals and societies to claim and redefine their positions in changing time and space, thus breaking away from the traditional state control.

Most current research on the evolution of China’s propaganda discourse only touches upon recent variations of official propaganda rhetoric grounded in popular media. Here, the research is extended by tapping into the most recently released popular cultural media narratives such as online documentaries, films, TV drama serials and education programs, all of which are enlisted and co-opted by the state for propaganda goals. This book maps out the cutting-edge expansions of official propaganda that are embedded in the entertainment industry of contemporary China. Its case studies bring to light the progression of the mainstream propaganda discourse in terms of its merging, cooperation and compromise with the commercial features of both the traditional and newly-emerging entertainment media. In particular, it examines a group of mass entertainment products which include two best-selling mainstream blockbusters, two on-line commercial web documentaries, the China Central Television Moon Festival Gala series, socialist revolutionary TV drama serials, and a prime time science and education program. In so doing, it forefronts the up-to-date developments and novelties of state propaganda: its motives, reasoning and approaches within the mediasphere of today’s China. Illustrating how the CCP propaganda apparatus and tactics evolve and become embedded in popular media products, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of Chinese studies, Media Studies and Popular Cultural Studies.

"This edited volume takes a distinct approach to the study of soft power in history, moving beyond the framework of the nation-state. The editors of this volume use "soft power" as a broad label to refer to the processes through which persuasion, the search for influence and power, and public opinion as an actor in foreign affairs, converge in the international arena. The book has been organized around three central themes: the circulation of knowledge and strategies across borders; collaboration of intermediary actors who have their own agencies and interests; and non-national identities, such as gender and race. The book also broadens the typical temporal and geographic understanding of soft power, starting in the nineteenth century and including cases from the Global South. It argues that the pursuit of soft power has been a global phenomenon, including regions that have been neglected in the general debates on the subject, such as Africa, Asia, and Latin America. These arguments and themes are explored through ten chapters that offer a powerful new interdisciplinary perspective on soft power for scholars and students of history and international relations"--

The leader's portrait, produced in a variety of media (statues, coins, billboards, posters, stamps), is a key instrument of propaganda in totalitarian regimes, but increasingly also dominates political communication in democratic countries as a result of the personalization and spectacularization of campaigning. Written by an international group of contributors, this volume focuses on the last one hundred years, covering a wide range of countries around the globe, and dealing with dictatorial regimes and democratic systems alike. As well as discussing the effigies that are produced by the powers that be for propaganda purposes, it looks at the uses of portraiture by antagonistic groups or movements as forms of resistance, derision, denunciation and demonization. This volume will be of interest to researchers in visual studies, art history, media studies, cultural studies, politics and contemporary history.

In this provocative and illuminating account, Richard McGregor offers a captivating portrait of China’s Communist Party, its grip on power and control over China, and its future. China’s political and economic growth in the past three decades has been one of astonishing, epochal dimensions. The most remarkable part of this transformation, however, has been left largely untold—the central role of the Chinese Communist Party. In The Party, Richard McGregor delves deeply into China’s inner sanctum for the first time, showing how the Communist Party controls the government, courts, media, and military and keeps all corruption accusations against its members in-house. The Party’s decisions have a global impact, yet the CCP remains a deeply secretive body, hostile to the law and unaccountable to anyone or anything other than its own internal tribunals. It is the world’s only geopolitical rival of the United States, and is primed to think the worst of the West.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP), with nearly 90 million members, is the largest ruling political party in the world. Its power and influence reach into every corner of state, society and economy in China. Given the CCP’s omnipresence, in-depth knowledge of how the CCP is organised and managed and how it will likely evolve is of paramount importance and is a basic prerequisite for understanding China’s rise. By bringing together the best scholarship on the CCP, covering areas such as organisation, cadre management, recruitment and training, ideology and propaganda, factions and elites, reform and adaptation, corruption and law, this collection provides a key to open the black box of Chinese politics.

"As a twenty-two-year-old exchange student at Nanjing University in 1981, John Pomfret was one of the first American students to be admitted to China after the Communist Revolution of 1949. Living in a cramped dorm room, Pomfret was exposed to a country few outsiders had ever experienced, one fresh from the twin tragedies of Mao's rule - the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution." "Twenty years after first leaving China, Pomfret returned to the university for a class reunion. Once again, he immersed himself in the lives of his classmates, especially the one woman and four men whose stories make up Chinese Lessons, an intimate and revealing portrait of the Chinese people." "Beginning with Pomfret's first day in China, Chinese Lessons takes us back to the often torturous paths that brought together the Nanjing University History Class of 1982. We learn that Old Wu's father was killed during the Cultural Revolution for the crime of being an intellectual; Book Idiot Zhou labored in the fields for years rather than agree to a Party-arranged marriage; Little Guan was forced to publicly denounce and humiliate her father." "As we follow Pomfret's classmates from childhood to university and on to adulthood, we see the effect that the country's transition from near-feudal communism to First World capitalism has had on his classmates. This riveting portrait of the Chinese people will not only change your understanding of China but also challenge your perception of the way fate can shape the course of nations as surely as it has the extraordinary lives of these five classmates."--BOOK JACKET.

The current trade war between the US and China looks like a small piece in a much larger puzzle over world leadership in which China plays the part of the ascending challenger seeking to upset the existing balance of power. Technology and innovation seem to be Beijing's weapons of choice in its frontal assault on Washington in sectors traditionally led by the US. China is not only acquiring technology. Its ambitions include the regulation of international trade and global governance. Just what a China-led global order would look like is still unclear, but the inherent side-effects of technology need to be meticulously assessed, as they have the potential to alter the core values of modern societies. To what extent will technology facilitate China's rise?