When Propaganda Had to “Melt into the Body”: Labor and the Limits of CCP’s Propaganda Network, 1950–53

In 1951, a 52-year-old farmer, Li Xiwen, was celebrated as a model propagandist at a provincial conference promoting the Chinese Communist Party’s campaign to build a nationwide “propaganda network.” Party newspapers praised Li for studying newspapers while walking to the fields, reading until his eyes turned bloodshot, and staying up late to rewrite policy directives into rhythmic local storytelling forms. Li explained that propaganda had to “melt into his body” before it could move others. His story was presented as evidence of the campaign’s success. However, Li’s experience reveals a basic but often overlooked reality, namely that CCP propaganda was not only about messages or persuasion but also demanded strenuous bodily labor.

This paper takes such everyday practices as a starting point to reexamine the CCP’s propaganda network campaign in 1950-1953, an ambitious effort to build a hierarchical system of propagandists, instructional stations, and newspaper-reading groups reaching down to the village level. Drawing on local newspapers and archives from Shanxi Province, I argue that this project frequently faltered because it underestimated the bodily and material conditions of propaganda work. Logistical breakdowns, uneven literacy, and the competing demands of agricultural life repeatedly disrupted the Party’s planned chains of political communication. As a result, the propaganda network did not represent the rise of a powerful propaganda state; instead, it revealed the limits of Party command. By attending to the bodily labor and material constraints involved, this paper reframes Mao-era propaganda as a social practice negotiated in everyday life rather than a system engineered from above.