China’s Victory Parade and Propaganda
Everybody was running. A portly little man sprinted past me. His blue jeans were hiked up to his bellybutton. His rear-end struggled to keep up. I forgot I’d left my apartment for water — I started running. The first thing I saw when I left the compound was a tank rolling down the street, a soldier standing at attention on top.
Today, September 3rd, China is celebrating the anniversary of the end of World War II with a parade to beat all parades. Tanks, drones, and soldier hordes are parading through Beijing, representing countries like Russia, the “stans,” and Syria. Bashar al-Assad is in attendance alongside some central Asian heads-of-state, as well as Vladimir Putin. The U.S. sent only their ambassador to China, Max Baucus. Besides the curious arrangement of political dignitaries positioned high in the stands, there was a healthy dose of 老百姓 (“the people,” as it were) in attendance. Of course, only those “people” with official invitations were welcome.
With all the military flexing and particular international participation, the event feels more threatening than reconciliatory. There’s a statement being made about national alliances and China’s military capacity, but that was expected. What I didn’t expect was to see the parade roll past my university’s campus.
The last tanks were rolling away as I approached the white steel barriers (most of the streets and sidewalks near the center of the city are completely blocked off for the whole day, meaning many people are stuck within their block until the parade is over). Among the crowd, I felt suddenly small. Camera phones towered over me, children beamed down from their father’s shoulders, the elderly perched on ledges — but they’re no strangers to nationalist hotdoggery.
I don’t know what I expected to happen after the last tank drifted out of sight, but the first thing I heard was “没了可以过马路吗?” (“if it’s over, can we cross the street?”). No applause or cheer, only a few guys who’ve been wanting to cross the street for the past eight hours. While it’s easy to compare the parade to those ultra-nationalist displays of force used in Fascist Germany and Italy, Stalin’s Soviet Union etc., a view from my street corner tells a more nuanced story.
In a matter of minutes, everyone who did not need to cross the street had retreated — quietly, for the most part — into their compounds. Chinese are sometimes stereotyped as politically apathetic by necessity and by preference. But of course, this characterization doesn’t do justice to the many who speak out and take action against the government, not to mention those who keep their political opinions to themselves, of which there are many. And since comparisons are being drawn between today’s parade and nationalist parades of the previous century, I couldn’t help but remember the writings of Hannah Arendt on Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia as I looked out over the sea of people lining the streets. One could almost mistake them for the “masses.”
In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt gives a fascinating psychological and political characterization to what she calls “the mass man”: “the chief characteristic of the mass man is not brutality and backwardness, but his isolation and lack of normal social relationships.” He was not a blind follower; rather, he was the individual leftover after political parties had assembled their respective followings. In fact, he was fed-up with the hypocrisy of all politicians and party members. He was attracted to the totalitarian mass movements because its leaders and its propaganda were honest.
Chinese today, however, do not resemble Arendt’s “mass man.” They have the advantage of hindsight, and are therefore more wary of strategies meant to win their unconditional support. In a 2014 study, Haifeng Huang at the University of California, Merced, set out to answer the question: “Why do authoritarian governments engage in propaganda when citizens often know that their governments are propagandizing and therefore resist or ignore the messages?” Indeed, propaganda is only effective if the target audience does not know that it is propaganda.
Huang found that “propaganda is often not used for indoctrination of pro-regime values and attitudes as is traditionally understood, but rather to signal the government’s strength in maintaining social control and political order.” He observed that Chinese college students exposed to state propaganda through the Chinese education system are “not more satisfied with China’s government system, but are more likely to believe that the regime is strong in maintaining social control.”
The propaganda function of today’s parade makes a lot more sense in this light. Yufan Huang watched the TV broadcast of the parade alongside Tsinghua University students. He wrote in a New York Times article about the experience: “Sentiment about the parade was mixed. There was nationalistic fervor, but also criticism of the Communist Party’s decision to make the march an anti-Japanese event.” Haifeng Huang could have been writing about today’s parade when he observed last year that “such propaganda is not meant to ‘brainwash’ people with its specific content about how good the government is, but to forewarn the society about how strong it is via the act of the propaganda itself.”
Whereas the masses of a bygone era might have greeted their nation’s pageantry with cheers and a sense of renewed political integrity, the people on my street corner betrayed a jaded, even docile, attitude. But the Chinese Communist Party did not expect a passionate crowd, just like they don’t expect all Chinese people to love their policies. The CCP is happy, I imagine, leaving “the people” feeling both safe and compliant, and the international community a bit uncomfortable.
As I was swept away from the scene by a sea of people returning home, a twenty-something Chinese man yelled “中国万岁!” (“Long live China!”). No one made a sound; in fact, many people stopped speaking. The same man started to skip down the street, a grin spreading across his face. He yelled again, “中国万岁!” A few people chuckled…under their breath.
