Communist Control: Propaganda, Censorship and the Cult of Mao
A State That Reached Into Every Mind
By the mid-1950s the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) ruled c.600 million people, most of them illiterate peasants spread across vast countryside. Direct rule by police alone was impossible. Instead Mao Zedong built a system of propaganda, censorship and surveillance that aimed to reach every village square, every factory and every dinner table. The aim was not just to silence opposition but to produce loyal citizens who would internalise the party line and police themselves. By the late 1960s, posters of Mao hung in railway stations, classrooms and family homes; loudspeakers piped political broadcasts into village streets; and a billion copies of the Little Red Book had been printed.
Defence Minister Lin Biao first issued the Little Red Book to the People’s Liberation Army in 1964. By the early 1970s over a billion copies had been printed — one of the largest print runs of any book in history.
Mass Propaganda
CCP propaganda worked at every level. Posters in bright colours showed Mao surrounded by smiling peasants and soldiers; radio broadcasts and street loudspeakers piped revolutionary songs and party slogans into daily life; films and revolutionary operas dramatised model citizens. The 1963 ‘Learn from Comrade Lei Feng’ campaign turned a young soldier — said to have died selflessly serving the people — into the model of communist virtue. Children copied passages from his diary; classrooms held ‘Lei Feng study days’. Other ‘model citizens’ followed: the Dazhai brigade for agriculture, the Daqing oilfield workers for industry. Critics later argued that the Lei Feng diary was largely fabricated, but the campaign worked because it gave ordinary people a clear ideal to aspire to.
Mass rallies were the spectacle that pulled propaganda together. The eight Tiananmen rallies of August 1966 to November 1966 brought around 12 million Red Guards to Beijing, each clutching a Little Red Book and chanting ‘long live Chairman Mao’. For most participants this was the most exciting moment of their lives. Photographs of these rallies became propaganda in their own right, circulated to villages where peasants who would never travel to Beijing could see their leader surrounded by adoring youth.
The Cult of Mao
From 1964 onwards, the propaganda message narrowed onto Mao himself. Lin Biao, who replaced Peng Dehuai as Defence Minister in 1959, built the cult of Mao as a political weapon. He compiled the Little Red Book from Mao’s speeches, made it required reading inside the People’s Liberation Army, then expanded it nationwide. Soldiers held morning study sessions before duty; factory workers paused production for ‘asking instructions’ rituals before Mao’s portrait. Every public space displayed his image; statues went up in town squares.
A common student misconception is that the cult of Mao was endured cynically. Most Chinese, especially the young, genuinely believed. The cult worked because much of the propaganda was internalised — particularly during 1966–69, when Red Guards smashed temples and denounced teachers in the name of the Chairman they had been taught to revere from primary school. Strong answers acknowledge both the manufactured nature of the cult and the sincere belief it inspired.
Students often imagine that Chinese citizens went through propaganda rituals while privately rolling their eyes. Memoir evidence (Jung Chang’s Wild Swans, Mobo Gao’s village interviews, recent oral histories) shows that genuine veneration was widespread, especially among teenagers and young workers. Internalisation was the point: a loyal citizen polices themselves more cheaply than one watched by the police. Top-band answers distinguish between sincere belief in the early Cultural Revolution, ritual conformity by older intellectuals, and disillusionment among ‘sent-down’ youth after 1968.
Censorship
If propaganda was the loudspeaker, censorship was the muffler. The Ministry of Culture vetted every book, film, opera and newspaper. Foreign works deemed ‘bourgeois’ were banned; classical Chinese literature was attacked as feudal; private printing presses were closed. During the Cultural Revolution, Jiang Qing tightened the screws further, allowing only her ‘eight model operas’ on the public stage. Newspapers ran party-approved stories alone; the People’s Daily was the authoritative voice. Authors who fell out of favour — including the celebrated novelist Lao She, who drowned himself in 1966 after Red Guard struggle sessions — faced denunciation, beatings or worse.
Censorship worked alongside the propaganda machine: by removing alternative narratives, the regime made its own message the only one in circulation. Schools used party-written textbooks; libraries purged their shelves; family photographs of relatives in ‘bad class backgrounds’ were burned by their owners to avoid trouble. The 1957 Anti-Rightist Campaign, which had silenced the urban intelligentsia after the Hundred Flowers, made later censorship easier — the people most likely to resist had already been removed.
Laogai: Reform Through Labour
For those who could not be persuaded, there was the camp. The laogai system — literally ‘Reform Through Labour’ — was formalised in 1951. Hundreds of camps were built across China, particularly in the western provinces of Qinghai and Xinjiang. They held political prisoners (former GMD officials, denounced ‘rightists’, religious clergy, ‘capitalist roaders’) alongside ordinary criminals; the regime treated both as people whose thinking needed correcting through hard work. Inmates mined coal, farmed reclaimed land, built roads and produced manufactured goods. Estimates of the total detained vary widely; revisionist historians like Frank Dikötter put the figure in the millions during the Mao era.
A common misconception is that laogai was a wartime measure. It was not. It was a permanent Maoist institution, run continuously from 1951 to Mao’s death and beyond. The camps were also economic units, contributing to provincial production targets, which gave local cadres an incentive to keep them full. Inmates’ families were often informed only that a relative had been ‘sent away to study’.
Beyond camps and propaganda, surveillance ran through daily life. Every urban Chinese citizen belonged to a danwei (work unit) that controlled their job, housing, ration coupons and permission to marry. Neighbourhood committees, often headed by older women, watched comings and goings on every street. Each citizen had a dossier (dang’an) recording their class background, family history and political reliability — followed them through their career, decided promotions and informed denunciations. In the countryside, the production brigade played a similar role. Top-band students name these structures rather than describing ‘people watching each other’ in general.
Communist control rested on four pillars: propaganda (posters, loudspeakers, model citizens like Lei Feng), the cult of Mao (built by Lin Biao through the Little Red Book), censorship (Ministry of Culture, banned books, eight model operas) and forced labour (laogai, formalised in 1951). Surveillance through the danwei work unit and the personal dossier reached every citizen.
Historians Disagree
Western revisionist historians such as Frank Dikötter (The Cultural Revolution, 2016) and Roderick MacFarquhar treat the propaganda machine as an instrument of personal command, the laogai as systematic terror, and the cult of Mao as a deliberate political construction by Lin Biao and Jiang Qing’s Cultural Revolution Group. Sympathetic historians such as Mobo Gao (The Battle for China’s Past, 2008) argue the cult had genuine roots in popular feeling, that propaganda raised literacy and self-confidence in poor villages, and that the laogai numbers have been exaggerated in Cold War-era Western writing. Both views can be tested against the evidence; top-band answers acknowledge both rather than dismissing one as bias.