Hollow words : Guomindang propaganda and the formation of popular attitudes toward the National Revolution in Guangdong Province, 1919 to 1926

Abstract

The idea that political education can alert people to some common good is by no means unique to early twentieth century China, but events there around the time of the New Culture and May Fourth Movements did conspire to give it a particular prominence. The success of publicity campaigns and popular protests in 1919 seems to have confirmed for radical intellectuals a long-held assumption that political education, or propaganda, could, if conducted on a sufficiently massive scale, influence the entire people's thinking and behaviour and perhaps even prompt a popular national revolution. It appeared to these activists that the indifference and ignorance of the common people were partly responsible for the continued presence of foreign gunboats and local despots, and hence that only when popular ignorance had been dispelled could there by any hope of a reprieve. Yet by 1926, after an interval of only seven years, this idea had lost much of its earlier credibility: experience had shown that peoples' attitudes were linked very closely to their regional interests and social and economic status, and were all but impervious to change through political education. In this thesis, I have tried to explain how one contemporary political party, the Guomindang, came to think of itself as capable of launching a popular national revolution with the assistance of mass political education, and why it failed in the actual attempt. In the first chapter, I have examined the premise from which the party derived its optimistic view of propaganda, viz. that ,the people could be 'awoken' to their plight by political education. This examination follows two lines of inquiry, the first outlining the premise itself and tracing the source of its appea1, and the second contrasting the party's pronouncements on propaganda against its behaviour. From this base, I have, in the second and third chapters, attempted to measure the gap between the party's professed commitment to 'awakening' the people and its preference in fact for political negotiation and mercenary military activity. The fourth and fifth chapters take the form of an inquiry into the organization and nature of Guomindang propaganda in the period following the party's First National Congress of 1924. Two major developments are identified between 1924 and 1926: the centralization and coordination of propaganda, and the transformation of propaganda from a medium of instruction by outsiders to a medium for articulating local concerns and so bringing them to the attention of those outsiders. This section concludes with a discussion of an emerging materialist view of popular consciousness among party propagandists, and an assessment of the place of Mao Zedong in Guomindang history. In the sixth and seventh chapters, the party's expansion throughout Guangdong is traced along the trail of the Eastern and Southern Expeditions, and an assessment of civilian responses to the national revolution is made in terms of regional and class differences, with particular reference to the party's taxation policies at the time of the Northern Expedition. Show more