UC San Diego

This dissertation answers the question: How do material and human constraints shape political communication? Historians of China and other societies have studied the discourses of political propaganda, their efficacy, and how people subvert them. Much less is known, however, about the material basis of political communication and the material limits of state autonomy. Within the scope of communications employed by modern states, books and other print publications offer fertile ground for analyzing these processes. In this, the first full-length study of book publishing in the People’s Republic of China, I combine archival research, book history and bibliography to understand how the Chinese Communist Party communicated with ordinary people during the 1970s.

Through discussion of book production during a 1970s political campaign, I demonstrate how material factors both bolstered and limited the state’s communicative power and, by extension, influenced the course of political movements in China. By harnessing technologies of industrial production and cheap paperback publishing, state publishers and printers could saturate society with printed material. A sophisticated network of bookstores, distribution points and libraries brought books to the masses and extended the Party’s influence, while the expertise of book designers and editors in manipulating technological capabilities welded established genres onto revolutionary political programs. Yet, at the same time, propaganda activities ran up against quotidian practical limitations. Paper shortages, fluctuating book supplies, conflicting workloads and political instability numbered among the many factors that mediated the reach of the state. Furthermore, material considerations overlapped with geographic, ethnic and class differences across the country to ensure that propaganda publications retained the book’s historical value as an index of status. Finally, regime change after the death of the Party’s paramount leader revealed the risks associated with tying publishing, printing and politics so closely together.

Overall, I paint an in-depth picture of a powerful Cold War state committing huge quantities of resources – technological, manual, mental and physical – to political communication and yet finding that these investments were sometimes still insufficient or paradoxically counter-productive. On one level, this conclusion has the potential to transform the way historians think about state power by refuting latent assumptions about the state’s unbridled ability to produce large amounts of propaganda material. More fundamentally, it reminds us that technology and material resources occupy a central place in the political economy of information distribution.

While transforming the way historians think about propaganda and information, I also demonstrate the contributions methodologies from book history and bibliography can make to such studies. This dissertation deploys a range of material techniques – such as typeface and paper analysis, comparison of multiple copies of the same book, and reconstruction of a book’s printing process from evidence left in copies – to provide quotidian information unrecorded in standard publisher and printer archives. For instance, I identify when books printed in different parts of the country used the same parent set of printing plates, thereby finding new evidence for publishers coordinating with each other to accelerate propaganda production.

Where Chinese studies and propaganda studies can learn from the (mostly Euro-centric) fields of book history and bibliography, so the reverse is also true. My study challenges the European and American biases of modern book history. Quantitatively, the scope of China’s publishing sector eclipsed most other countries, yet book historians are far more familiar with the likes of Penguin Books than with Beijing People’s Press. Therefore, this dissertation is an early call to recast the history of the book in the twentieth century as dominated by the ever closer union of politics and print.