HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_020539.jpg

80 and comprehensive China to the world, and raise the country’s soft power and the influence of Chinese culture.”° External propaganda work has long been an important foreign policy instrument for the Chinese Communist Party and the People’s Republic of China, but under Xi it has become a top priority of China’s party-state. State Media China’s Communist Party and government have a long history of trying to influence international opinion. Over the years, the themes of its external propaganda have varied substantially—usually in parallel with dramatic fluctuations in its own domestic political campaigns (G&s) and related slogans (O45), shifts in ideology GBiR#A), meta propaganda narratives (#234), and substantive elements in China’s diplomacy (J43). The shifts in Beijing’s propaganda lines (Bf##4z) throughout PRC history have been dizzyingly consistent, but they are always important to follow as indicators of the country’s direction. During the 1950s, Communist China used organizations such as the China News Service, a successor to the Party’s International News Agency (founded in 1938), to appeal to overseas Chinese for support of the new revolution. The Party placed this news service under the State Council’s Office for Overseas Chinese Affairs. Other propaganda campaigns targeted allies in the Western world, such as black nationalist figures from the United States like Robert Williams, who were given airtime on shortwave broadcasts from Beijing, and a few Western writers and journalists, like Edgar Snow, Felix Greene, and William Hinton, who were offered rare, and sometimes lucrative, peeks behind the Bamboo Curtain. During the Cultural Revolution, from 1966 to 1976, Beijing’s propaganda outreach to overseas Chinese slowed, as the Party persecuted those in China with foreign ties. But following the arrest of the Gang of Four in 1976 and the economic reform program led by Deng Xiaoping in the early 1980s, the Party once again directly engaged with the overseas Chinese community as well as with mainstream Western society and media, appealing to all comers to help China modernize. In 1980, the Party formed the External Propaganda Group (8842448) and placed it under the Propaganda Department of the CCP Central Committee. Zhu Muzhi, the former chief of the Xinhua News Agency and a vice minister of propaganda, was its first head. In 1991, the group was transferred to the State Council, where it was still internally referred to as the External Propaganda Group. For foreign consumption, however, it was called the State Council Information Office. Media HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_020539