---
title: Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party, thought work and the mass line (1942-present)
url: https://propagandaarchive.org/about/maoist-thought-work/
description: The CCP set up its Central Propaganda Department (中共中央宣传部, Zhongxuanbu) in May 1924, during the First United Front with the Kuomintang, on the Comintern…
section: About and doctrine
---

![Illustration: a dossier collage of generic campaign-era posters, loudspeaker trucks and rally crowds.](https://propagandaarchive.org/static/generated/hero-campaigns.jpg)

[About](https://propagandaarchive.org/about/)

# Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party, thought work and the mass line (1942-present)

In brief

Mao's 1942 Yan'an Talks and 1943 statement of the mass line set the Chinese Communist Party's doctrine that art and information serve politics and that ideas are gathered from and returned to "the masses", and the Party's propaganda apparatus has applied and adapted that doctrine from the Cultural Revolution to the reform era.

On this page

- [The source](https://propagandaarchive.org/about/maoist-thought-work/#the-source)
- [Context](https://propagandaarchive.org/about/maoist-thought-work/#context)
- [What it says](https://propagandaarchive.org/about/maoist-thought-work/#what-it-says)
- [How it worked in practice](https://propagandaarchive.org/about/maoist-thought-work/#how-it-worked-in-practice)
- [Techniques in this archive's taxonomy](https://propagandaarchive.org/about/maoist-thought-work/#techniques-in-this-archive-s-taxonomy)
- [Reception and criticism](https://propagandaarchive.org/about/maoist-thought-work/#reception-and-criticism)
- [Same-standard note](https://propagandaarchive.org/about/maoist-thought-work/#same-standard-note)
- [Sources](https://propagandaarchive.org/about/maoist-thought-work/#sources)

On this page

**In one line:** Mao's 1942 Yan'an Talks and 1943 statement of the mass line set the Chinese Communist Party's doctrine that art and information serve politics and that ideas are gathered from and returned to "the masses", and the Party's propaganda apparatus has applied and adapted that doctrine from the Cultural Revolution to the reform era.

## The source

- **Mao Zedong, "Talks at the Yan'an Forum on Literature and Art",** speeches of 2 May and 23 May 1942; English text in *Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung*, vol. 3 (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1965).
- **Mao Zedong, "Some Questions Concerning Methods of Leadership",** 1 June 1943, adopted as a Central Committee resolution; *Selected Works*, vol. 3.
- **Mao Zedong, "Bombard the Headquarters: My First Big-Character Poster",** 5 August 1966.
- **Central Committee of the CCP, "Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party since the Founding of the People's Republic of China",** 27 June 1981.
- **Anne-Marie Brady, *Marketing Dictatorship: Propaganda and Thought Work in Contemporary China*** (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008).
- **Language:** Chinese originals; official English translations by the Foreign Languages Press.
- **Rights on this archive:** all are post-1930 works, in copyright or of uncertain status, and are summarised with short quotations.

## Context

The CCP set up its Central Propaganda Department (中共中央宣传部, *Zhongxuanbu*) in May 1924, during the First United Front with the Kuomintang, on the Comintern model described in [Lenin and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the agitprop model (1902-1991)](https://propagandaarchive.org/about/soviet-agitprop/). In 1925-1926 Mao himself served as acting head of the Kuomintang's own Propaganda Department.

The Yan'an Talks came in the Party's wartime base area during the war with Japan, at the start of the Rectification Movement (1942-1944). Writers who had come to Yan'an had published criticism of life in the base area. The best known, Wang Shiwei's essay "Wild Lily" (1942), criticised inequality and privilege among Party members. Wang was denounced, charged with being a Trotskyite and a Kuomintang spy, imprisoned, and killed by his guards in 1947 during the retreat from Yan'an. The Talks set the line for writers and artists that the Rectification enforced.

![Mao Zedong addressing a crowd from a raised platform beside a banner, Yan'an, 1944](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/images/yrm-mao-addresses-followers-yanan-1944.jpg)

*Mao Zedong addressing a crowd beside a banner, 1944 (NARA record 196235, dated 6 December 1944; the record names no photographer and no place). Franklin D. Roosevelt Library collection, U.S. National Archives, via Wikimedia Commons; U.S. federal government work, public domain. The banner's text is not legible in this scan.*

## What it says

**Art serves politics.** Mao says: "There is in fact no such thing as art for art's sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics." Literature and art are to be parts of the revolutionary cause as a whole.

**The audience is workers, peasants and soldiers.** The Talks direct writers to learn the language and life of these groups, to take their class stand, and to praise and expose according to that stand rather than from outside it.

**The mass line.** The 1943 text states that correct leadership goes "from the masses, to the masses": the Party takes the scattered ideas of the masses, concentrates them through study into systematic ideas, then returns to the masses to propagate and explain them until the masses embrace them as their own, and repeats the cycle. Here persuasion and policy-making are one loop.

**Thought work.** *Sixiang gongzuo*, "thought work", is the Party's term for the whole field of ideological education and persuasion, from propaganda and study sessions to individual talks by a Party cadre. Brady's book pairs it with propaganda as the two named parts of the Party's persuasion work.

![Museum display case of Cultural Revolution-era textbooks and notebooks, including a reader whose cover bears a slogan about Mao Zedong Thought](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/images/maoist-school-curriculum-control-textbooks-hohhot-2015.jpg)

*Cultural Revolution-era school textbooks and notebooks in a display case at the Inner Mongolia Museum, Hohhot; the cover of one reader carries the slogan "Use Mao Zedong Thought to unify everything". Photograph by Gary Todd, 14 July 2015, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.*

**Mass criticism as a mobilising form.** In "Bombard the Headquarters" Mao endorses the first Peking University big-character poster and accuses unnamed leaders in the Party centre of enforcing a bourgeois dictatorship, inviting the public to attack them directly.

**Persuasion over repression in the reform era.** Brady argues that after 1989 the Party turned from ruling by claim of revolutionary ideology to ruling as a party in power, and put more weight on persuasion than on coercion, using methods adapted from public relations and marketing.

## How it worked in practice

- **The Propaganda Department.** The Central Committee department supervised the press, publishing, and ideological education through a hierarchy of propaganda departments at each Party level. In 1998 the Party changed the department's official English name to "Publicity Department"; the Chinese name, 宣传部, did not change.
- **Rectification (1942-1944).** Cadres studied set documents, wrote self-criticisms and took part in group criticism. Dai Qing's book on Wang Shiwei documents how his case was used as an example.
- **Big-character posters (*dazibao*).** On 25 May 1966 Nie Yuanzi was the lead signatory of a poster at Peking University attacking the university's leaders. About a week later Mao ordered it broadcast by the Central People's Broadcasting Station and published in the *People's Daily*. The *People's Daily* editorial of 1 June 1966, "Sweep Away All Cow Demons and Snake Spirits", applied that label to a range of people declared enemies. Mao's own poster of 5 August 1966 was circulated at the Eleventh Plenum of the Eighth Central Committee and published in the *People's Daily* on 5 August 1967. The Sixteen Points adopted on 8 August 1966 named the target as persons in authority taking the capitalist road. The right to write big-character posters was written into the 1975 state constitution and removed in 1980.
- **Reform-era apparatus.** Brady describes how, after 1989, the Party renewed and expanded its propaganda system, drew lessons from the propaganda mistakes of the Soviet Union, and adopted methods from public relations, marketing and mass communication to shape public opinion. At the national conference on propaganda and ideology on 19 August 2013, Xi Jinping said that "ideological work is an extremely important task of the Party" and introduced the concept of "public opinion struggle" (*yulun douzheng*).

![A wall covered with handwritten big-character posters in Beijing, August 1976, with passers-by on bicycles](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/images/crbcp-dazibao-wall-beijing-1976.jpg)

*Big-character posters in Beijing, 22 August 1976. Photo by Heinz Bunse, CC BY-SA 2.0, cropped to the poster wall. The posters date from 1976, not 1966; the picture shows the form, a public wall of handwritten sheets.*

## Techniques in this archive's taxonomy

- [Name-calling](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/name-calling/): the 1966 labels "cow demons and snake spirits" and "capitalist roaders" were applied to categories of people as a verdict in advance of any charge.
- [Scapegoating](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/scapegoating/): the 1966 campaign assigned problems in the Party and society to bounded categories (landlords, rich peasants, "bad elements", "reactionary academic authorities", capitalist roaders), including the children of the denounced.
- [Identity fusion](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/identity-fusion/): the Yan'an Talks tie a writer's judgement to class stand, so that criticism from outside that stand is treated as a class position; Wang Shiwei's criticism was answered with charges of being a Trotskyite and a spy rather than with a reply to its content.

## Reception and criticism

- **The Party's own account.** The 1981 Resolution says the Cultural Revolution "was responsible for the most severe setback and the heaviest losses suffered by the Party, the state, and the people since the founding of the People's Republic", and places chief responsibility on Mao. It keeps Mao Zedong Thought, including the mass line, as Party doctrine. The Party continues to mark the anniversary of the Yan'an Talks, and in 2013 Xi Jinping restated that propaganda and ideological work are central Party tasks.
- **Anne-Marie Brady** argues that propaganda and thought work became the life blood of the party-state after 1989 and that the Party learned from both the Soviet collapse and Western political communication. Ashley Esarey, reviewing the book in *The China Journal*, calls it a useful source for students of Chinese politics and an invaluable resource for scholars of Chinese media.
- **Dai Qing,** a Chinese journalist, reconstructs the Wang Shiwei case and the Rectification purges of 1942-1944.
- **Supporters of the mass line outside China,** such as the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, present the Yan'an Talks as a model of culture joined to national liberation and popular participation.

## Same-standard note

The same terms apply to every party that runs a propaganda department or labels opponents as a class. The Kuomintang ran its own Propaganda Department in the same years on the same Soviet model, with Mao briefly at its head, and the CCP apparatus descends directly from Soviet agitprop. The 1998 English renaming has a parallel in US commercial usage, where "public relations" largely replaced "propaganda" after the First World War (see [Edward Bernays, Propaganda (1928)](https://propagandaarchive.org/about/bernays-propaganda/)); differences in scale and in the institutions are large, since the CCP department sits inside a one-party state with authority over all media. For later Chinese military doctrine see [People's Liberation Army, the Three Warfares (2003)](https://propagandaarchive.org/about/pla-three-warfares/).

## Sources

1. Mao Zedong, "Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art" (May 1942), in *Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung*, vol. 3 (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1965).
2. Mao Zedong, "Some Questions Concerning Methods of Leadership" (1 June 1943), in *Selected Works*, vol. 3. [marxists.org](https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-3/mswv3_13.htm)
3. Mao Zedong, "Bombard the Headquarters: My First Big-Character Poster" (5 August 1966). [Wilson Center Digital Archive](https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/bombard-headquarters-my-big-character-poster)
4. CCP Central Committee, "Decision Concerning the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution" (Sixteen Points), 8 August 1966. [Columbia University, Asia for Educators](https://afe.easia.columbia.edu/ps/cup/sixteen_points.pdf)
5. *People's Daily*, "Sweep Away All Cow Demons and Snake Spirits", editorial, 1 June 1966; English in *Peking Review* 1966, no. 23. [marxists.org](https://www.marxists.org/subject/china/peking-review/1966/PR1966-23c.htm)
6. CCP Central Committee, "Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party since the Founding of the People's Republic of China", 27 June 1981. [USC US-China Institute](https://china.usc.edu/node/20941)
7. Anne-Marie Brady, *Marketing Dictatorship: Propaganda and Thought Work in Contemporary China* (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008).
8. Ashley Esarey, review of *Marketing Dictatorship*, *The China Journal* no. 61 (2009).
9. Dai Qing, *Wang Shiwei and "Wild Lilies": Rectification and Purges in the Chinese Communist Party, 1942-1944* (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1994).
10. Xi Jinping, speech at the National Conference on Propaganda and Ideological Work, 19 August 2013; summary translation in China Copyright and Media. [chinacopyrightandmedia.wordpress.com](https://chinacopyrightandmedia.wordpress.com/2013/08/20/xi-jinping-keep-the-larger-picture-in-mind-grasp-general-trends-look-towards-great-matters-do-propaganda-and-ideological-work-even-better/)
11. Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, "Go to Yan'an: Culture and National Liberation" (dossier). [thetricontinental.org](https://thetricontinental.org/dossier-yanan-forum/)