Propaganda in Chinese Domestic Politics

Propaganda practices involve the Party-state exercising power in order to affect how discourses are publicly articulated. The Party-state uses propaganda practices to reproduce its official narrative about key political concepts and issues as well as to suppress any rival narratives that threaten to undermine the shared meanings that legitimize CCP rule. This is intended to prevent the emergence of a coherent alternative political project that could challenge the existing political order. Although these attempts to control public discourse cannot guarantee that people will always accept the assumptions embedded in the official narrative, they are designed to increase the likelihood that the Party-state’s official narrative will prevail in its ideological struggles with alternative interpretations of Chinese politics and society. This chapter focuses on the propaganda practices the Party-state uses to exercise power in the domestic political context and begins by identifying the official institutions that are responsible for carrying out the Party-state’s propaganda practices. This shows the extent to which such institutions are embedded in the structure of the Chinese political system and highlights the fact that all areas of public discourse to some degree fall under the purview of the Party-state.