To win the west : China's propaganda in the English-language press, 1928-1941

Abstract

This dissertation focuses on China's propaganda in the English-language press from 1928-the establishment of the Nanjing government-to 1941-the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour. Without a proper news infrastructure, the Guomindang government had to rely on the English-language treaty-port press, a credible source of information for foreign audiences, to present its case abroad. Yet extraterritoriality and the transnational media environment, as well as the underlying tensions among news groups representing different interests made it difficult for the government to regulate the treaty-port press. To harness this medium, the government attempted to limit the extraterritorial privileges of foreign journalists through the postal service and the threat of deportation. Chiang Kai-shek also approached the bilingual Chinese elite, particularly the US-trained Chinese journalist Hollington Tong, to tighten his connections with the foreign journalists. With Chiang's support, Tong built a centralized propaganda system after 1937 and used his treaty-port news networks to strengthen the government's propaganda efforts during the Sino-Japanese war. This study argues that propaganda was an important means for the Guomindang government to resist Japan's threat to its territorial integrity and to restore its legal sovereignty in the absence of a strong military and economic capacity. The development of China's propaganda system was a transnational and trans-social process, shaped in part by the treaty-port English-language press in China and facilitated by the cooperation between bilingual elites and propaganda officials. This project combines examination of the government's news policies and personal networks with analysis of reports in key English-language papers. It traces the interaction between news policy and newspapers and reveals the intricate power struggles among empires in China. It also provides an alternative interpretation to the perceived passivity of China's propaganda apparatus during the conflict with Japan. Show more