It’s my Party, I can cry if I want to

Noting and building on this awareness of the constitutional importance of individual subjectivity in Maoist emotion work, this article expands the field in three ways. First, it begins with the observation that while ‘the Party’ was indeed a key agent of emotion work and ‘the masses’ were its target, the divide between mobilizer and mobilized is not so clear. The Party was itself made up of a large and growing contingent of people who, before they began their ‘emotion work’, had to be emotionally moved.Footnote ¹⁵ The ‘intense group pressure’Footnote ¹⁶ of Rectification at Yan’an and its descendent campaigns may indeed have browbeat forth emotional performances, but what held that group together in the first place? Perry, in noting the mass nature of the CCP’s emotion work, suggests a continuity with earlier Chinese political thought that emphasized the group over the individual—that ‘[t]he Confucian stress upon social bonds and obligations made group ostracism a particularly potent form of emotional discipline’.Footnote ¹⁷ Such a stress on the collective, however, took serious work by both individuals and the Party to bring about and cannot be explained by the catch-all and essentializing descriptor ‘Confucian’.Footnote ¹⁸ How were emotional communities built and maintained within Party ranks? As we enter those ranks, the question arises as to the genesis of collective emotions. That is, where exactly were any normative or predominant emotions created, and how did they travel through the growing Party organization? Were they prescribed from above? Modelled? Theorized? Where Perry, Liu, Lee, and others have suggested that emotional norms or models were first created and then conveyed, this article explores the role of individual subjectivity in the creation of such norms. How did an individual, already in principle committed to the revolution, find their way to emotional cohesion both with the collective and with its guiding ideology? Was it possible to be ideologically in tune but emotionally off-key?

Love and hate, with reason

A further important question is the role of individual reason in the emotional transformation of revolutionary recruits. Studies of East Asian communist regimes have been resistant to the idea of voluntarily and rationally held, rather than coerced or performed, emotions.Footnote ¹⁹ Previous emphasis on theatricality, on fabrication, and on what Perry calls the ‘plasticity and ambivalence of human emotions’ have played down the role of reason in emotion work.Footnote ²⁰ Examples of emotional incontinence during struggle sessions drawn from the work of Chen Yung-fa and William Hinton, in which theatrics stir up a crowd until they are ‘unable to restrain their indignation’Footnote ²¹ and in which violence acts at a somatic level on an audience ‘as if an electric spark had tensed every muscle’,Footnote ²² further minimize the role of reason. As Huang Daoxuan has shown, however, emotion work during Rectification in Yan’an involved a great deal of rational introspection. Group pressure, certainly a major factor, was coercive in intent and in cases veered towards the violence of the struggle session. Such external pressure, however, worked only in tandem with rational processes of self-reflection and careful study of key texts. Huang suggests that during what we could see as the formative emotional moment of the CCP, many Party members took an ‘inner journey’ (心路歷程) that, while not entirely of their own choosing, involved a crucial element of self-aware voluntarism (自覺自願).Footnote ²³ In short, even when CCP ‘emotion work’ was in full swing, its targets were not simply overcome by emotional or affective charge. For most Party members, emotional commitment and expression was the result of, and intertwined with, intellectual engagement.

This reinjection of individual subjectivity into emotion work and reason into emotional practice reflects recent developments in the history of emotions. Historians working in this field are divided as to whether normative emotions were propagated through enforced emotional ‘regimes’,Footnote ²⁴ plural and interlocking ‘communities’,Footnote ²⁵ or ‘styles’ formed through social practice.Footnote ²⁶ They align, however, in their emphasis on emotions as not simply reflexive, but rather formed in interactions between agential subjects and external impulse. William Reddy expresses this through the idea of ‘emotives’, by which one both ‘manages’ and ‘explores’ a feeling through its expression.Footnote ²⁷ Barbara Rosenwein suggests a similar return to the subject with her critique of the ‘hydraulic model’, in which emotions, detached from reason, ‘well-up’ or ‘over power’ subjects. Rosenwein instead promotes a ‘cognitive model’ of emotions as informing and informed by internal cognitive processes.Footnote ²⁸ Monique Scheer elaborates further with four categories of emotional practice: ‘mobilization’, in which emotions are evoked or charged through various external stimuli; ‘naming’, in which emotions are organized through language; ‘communicating’, in which feelings are publicly expressed’; and ‘regulating’, in which embodied emotional norms are acquired through a habitus.Footnote ²⁹ The major advance in the history of emotions in the two decades since the publication of Perry’s foundational work, then, has been the importance placed on the subject and subjective in any emotional regime, community, or style, and on the process whereby such normative feelings are created, inculcated, maintained, and transformed. This implies that any study of revolution and emotions must focus not only on the actions of a prescriptive regime, but on the formation of emotions within that regime and processes by which they are normalized and diffused.

Third, we have little research on the impact of mass media on emotion work in authoritarian regimes, let alone in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Wherever scholars locate agency within the Maoist emotional, predominant throughout existing research on Maoist emotions and emotion work is a focus on physical gatherings of people in immediate proximity to one another. These were struggle sessions, forums for bitterness speaking, or other genres of that key media of the CCP revolution and Maoism—the meeting (會). Didactic texts offered theoretical support but the coalface of ‘emotion work’, and greatest corrective for any errant emotional expression or behaviour, was direct contact with classmates, Party members, co-workers, peers, or friends. Here the theoretical contributions of Reddy, as well as Barbara Rosenwein whose ‘emotional communities’ were based on face-to-face contact, work rather well.Footnote ³⁰ However, as Jan Plamper has suggested, and Brenton J. Malin has explored, modern mass media and real-time communication over long distances have fundamentally changed both the size and nature of such emotional communities.Footnote ³¹ Recent work has presented broadcast sound in China as variously a vital medium of informationFootnote ³² and ideology.Footnote ³³ What of its emotional conductivity? How did CCP emotion work change through the application of new media? What did Party and Xinhua leadership expect of this new medium that was already playing so important a role in how their Soviet role models spoke to the state?Footnote ³⁴ How did they understand its possibilities and threats? As Jonathan Sterne has argued, while new media technology makes possible new cultural and social forms, the way such technology is put to use is in turn shaped by pre-existing social and cultural forces.Footnote ³⁵ What, in the case of CCP radio, were those forces?

The announcer, often referred to as the ‘mouthpiece’ (喉舌)Footnote ³⁶ of the Party, was, from the first CCP vocal broadcasts in 1940, charged with giving voice to Party directives, ideologically charged news, and the words of leaders, including Mao Zedong. This process necessarily involved the encoding of text, often somewhat abstract to the announcer and their audience, with emotional shape. How did they go about finding and performing this shape? Were normative emotions spelled out and enforced by propaganda heads? Did they mimic others? What part did reason and introspection play in their emotional practice? And how was the personal practice of the announcer replicated or enforced across a growing community of CCP-controlled areas through the medium of radio? I open with a discussion of the advent of CCP vocal broadcasting, turn to the problem of emotion for announcers, and then discuss the process by which announcers injected emotion into ideological texts. I then discuss the proximal roots of this emotional practice found in Rectification at Yan’an. Finally, I turn from the emotional practice of individual broadcasters to the role of the broadcaster as a node in an expanding network for the diffusion of emotion.

Drawing on internal broadcast and propaganda circulars, instructional guides for broadcasters, and diary and memoir, I make three claims. First, the emotional practice of announcers involved, by design and in practice, the subjective and reasoning agency of individual announcers in tandem with the normative forces of peers and the guiding voices of other announcers. Second, this practice, rooted in the small group (小组) of Rectification in Yan’an, and continuing after 1949, reveals a lineage of CCP emotion building that relies on, rather than erases, individual subjectivity and reason. Third, that the potential and limitations of CCP radio both empowered and necessitated CCP expansion of its modular emotional practice to the regional and, eventually, the national scale, in the process creating a distinct broadcasting culture that would shape CCP radio throughout the Mao era.

In the person of the announcer we find a model for the individual in Maoism—fully cognizant, reasoning, but embedded as a node in the normative forces of a network for the diffusion of emotion. This moves our understanding of the Maoist emotional beyond the mechanics of the masses mobilized by the CCP, without seesawing towards the idea of a liberal individual pitted against the Party-state. In doing so it brings the history of emotions in twentieth-century China into conversation with a global history of emotions and with developments in major works by Reddy, Rosenwein, Scheer, and others.Footnote ³⁷ CCP emotional practice and community building was not reliant on the media of either mass agitation, nor on radio as an empty channel by which thoughts and feelings are transparently relayed. Instead, CCP emotion work over mass media was shaped both by the medium of radio, and by the subjectivity of the individuals who gave it their voice. As with the wavelets in Huygens’ principle of wave motion that opened this article, the individuals who lived and made the Chinese Revolution were both receptors and propagators of emotions, each at once on the perimeter and at the centre of an expanding and deepening revolutionary wave.

Wireless first steps: From signals intelligence to an emotive voice

In 1958, the Soviet broadcaster Comrade Ilynsky, working in Beijing at the Central Broadcasting Station, commented that the difference between newspapers and radio was that ‘newspapers act upon people’s intellect. Radio not only does this, but also acts upon people’s emotions.’Footnote ³⁸ CCP awareness of radio as a tool and medium for the transmission of feeling as well as ideas, however, has its own history, building on the Party’s early forays into wireless communication. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, CCP radio communication was largely limited to signals intelligence (SIGINT) between various Party bases in Shanghai, Hong Kong, as well as Jiangxi, Ruijin, and other rural areas. In Shanghai, for example, commercial and Kuomintang (KMT) broadcast and reception developed rapidly throughout this period. The CCP, however, was restricted to gleaning whatever equipment and technical knowledge it could from the Soviets, infiltrating KMT radio training programmes, and scouring the burgeoning commercial market for radio parts. It then put this technology to use almost entirely in intra-Party communication and predominantly through telegraphic code rather than broadcast voice.Footnote ³⁹ This SIGINT development was vital in CCP-KMT skirmishes, perhaps most notably during the KMT encirclement campaigns, in which SIGINT provided key information as well as a means for obfuscation.Footnote ⁴⁰

When, in Yan’an, the CCP did begin to develop the capacity to broadcast voice, it naturally inherited the SIGINT focus of the previous decade. In 1940, Zhou Enlai returned from Moscow with the components (broken down into separate parts in his luggage to avoid detection and confiscation) needed to broadcast voice rather than code. This provided the technical basis for what is now held as the People’s first radio station—Xinhua Guangbo Diantai (新华广播电台), with the callsign XNCR, launched in Yan’an on 30 December 1940. With the launch of XNCR, based in a cave at Wangpi Wan (王皮灣), about 40 li from Yan’an, the CCP began its experiments with vocal broadcasting. It did so, however, within the very particular context of war, at first with the Japanese, and then, from 1945, with the KMT. Building on the previous decade’s experience in SIGINT, Xinhua’s Broadcasting Department (广播科) (with a staff of three) continued to broadcast, letter by letter, texts sent through code (文字廣播) to other communist bases and military excursions. The content included domestic news (including news about the liberated areas, guerrilla areas, and Chiang Kai-shek areas), and international news (mainly military, political, and commentary on diplomatic developments).

Across the cave in Yan’an, however, the Oral Broadcast Group (口播組) created its own oral broadcast scripts (口語廣播稿).Footnote ⁴¹ The textual-oral categories divided broadcast scripts in multiple ways and had a lasting impact on both CCP broadcast culture and on who heard what in early broadcasts.Footnote ⁴² Post-1949, this division into two (or more) audiences was to be an important one, with text-broadcast scripts to be transmitted for publication in urban newspapers, and oral-scripts to be relayed to rural radio stations for re-broadcast, both reflecting and enhancing the urban–rural divide that characterized the Mao era. But in 1940 at Yan’an, the distinction was even more meaningful, because at that time the two modes of broadcast were not only pitched at audiences with different educational or literacy levels, but were broadcast through different wireless technology. Text-scripts followed the early CCP SIGINT pattern of relay in code, directly from Yan’an, and (once decoded back to text) were for the eyes of Party leadership and for publication in local Party newspapers. Oral-scripts, however, were rewritten at a separate desk for a general audience that included those living in KMT-controlled areas, then sent by courier to Wangpiwan, where they were given voice by an announcer.Footnote ⁴³ Thus, in oral-broadcasts, we see the very beginnings of CCP concern with a wider audience that listens rather than reads, something called the ‘listening masses’ (聽眾); the consideration of choice of spoken language for a diverse audience; of tone; and of something referred to repeatedly throughout the documents of the era—emotion (感情).

The announcer’s voice as emotional medium

Paulina Hartono has given us an excellent introduction into the creation of what she calls the ‘ideal Communist voice’. This was a prescriptive vocalization that, she argues, was inspired by Stanislavsky’s proto-method acting and that stressed the emotional commitment of the announcer. One could not simply deliver information through the microphone and over the airwaves, but had to let one’s true feelings be heard in every syllable, and thus at once ‘communicate party loyalty and serve as a sonic representation of political authority’.Footnote ⁴⁴ Certainly, even a brief survey of the available sources confirms the emphasis placed on emotion and emoting in CCP broadcasting culture. Announcers were instructed to, praised for, and even hired on the basis of a full expression of emotion. On 3 April 1947, we see the instruction from Handan Broadcast Station (邯鄲廣播電台) that broadcasts should always be ‘fluent, natural, and full of emotion’ (流利、自然、充滿感情).Footnote ⁴⁵ The announcer Qian Jiamei (錢家楣) recalls broadcasting from Shahe Village, in She County at the foot of Mt Dahang in March 1946, and receiving praise for an announcing style that was, ‘emotionally rich (感情充沛)’.Footnote ⁴⁶ In the summer of 1948, Liu Xia(劉峽), aged 15 and just graduated from middle school (where he studied politics and recitation), was recruited as an announcer for Northeast Xinhua radio station (東北新華廣播電台). Both his age and education were below the advertised requirements for announcers, but, as Liu Xia later learned, he was hired ‘because my voice was mellow and sonorous and my recitation full of emotion’ (聲音圓潤洪亮,朗誦富於感情).Footnote ⁴⁷

The dilemma for the first generation of CCP broadcasters, then, was not whether to express emotions, but which emotions to express and how. For while early broadcasting directives as well as praise and criticism from leaders all stressed the importance of this thing called ganqing, they also stressed that such emotion had little to do with personal or individual feelings. Rather, they laid out a rather narrow emotional range for broadcasters to follow. The April 1947 ‘A Few Lessons on Broadcast Technique From Handan Station’ called for:

Despite advice to be ‘fluent, natural, and full of emotion’, it would be wrong to assume that announcers simply ‘let go’ in front of the microphone. Indeed, we only need to attend to the numerous accounts of broadcasters suppressing certain emotions in order to perform others to realize that whatever feelings were conveyed through the wireless and then wired broadcast networks were not simply ‘released’ or ‘vented’.Footnote ⁴⁹ Rather, broadcasters expended considerable effort overcoming what they felt were inappropriate emotional or somatic states.

Wang Ou (王謳), for example, was given the role of narrator and director for a 30 October 1947 live broadcast of the ‘Yellow River Cantata’ to mark the first anniversary of the death of the poet Xing Hai. Wang remembers the makeshift orchestra and recording studio that he managed to cobble together in Shanbei, and particularly his own nervousness prior to the performance: ‘Everyone was nervous, and no one more than me, but I had to pretend to be steady.’Footnote ⁵⁰ Or take Meng Qiyu, who describes her first broadcast in summer, 1946, and her embarrassment and anxiety over her Southern accent, so acute that…

Also stressed was the importance of suppressing any fear felt, given the proximity of the frontline. Such suppression was doubly important as there was widespread understanding that early CCP broadcasts were a way of allaying such fears among its audiences.Footnote ⁵²

What these recollections show is not that the broadcasters ‘faked’ emotion at the behest of the Party or Xinhua leadership, but rather that they struggled to reconcile their internal or somatic state at any given moment with an appropriate emotive form. Here we get a clear example of what Reddy refers to as ‘emotional effort’ as individuals endured personal physical discomfort while attempting to align themselves with an accepted emotional performance.Footnote ⁵³ That is, to reconcile what were referred to as ‘personal feelings’ (個人的感情) with an ideal emotion that, while repeatedly stressed, remained only vaguely delineated. As with the Handan ‘Lessons’, it was not specific emotions that were being mandated or enforced, but rather certain styles that were to be avoided. To be ‘full of emotion’ was a repeated refrain, but it lacked a clear description of what kind of emotion, or how an announcer might find such emotional fullness.

How to know how to feel—emotions as practice

What is clear is that throughout the 1940s, while a definitive programmatic statement on emotion in broadcasting remained unforthcoming, announcers gradually began to establish, if not an emotional template, a process by which to arrive at an appropriate emotional performance of key texts. The memoir of Chen Hongsheng (陈鸿声) gives us a detailed example. In early January 1949, Chen, then announcing for Qiqihar Xinhua Radio Station (齊齊哈爾新華廣播電台) in Heilongjiang, received a broadcast script via encrypted telegram. The text to be broadcast, ‘Comment on War Criminals Suing for Peace’, was signed off by his supervisor Lin Qing (林青) along with the request for Comrade Hongsheng to broadcast it. As Chen recalls, the process began with a collective appreciation of the text:

Chen then describes his personal engagement with the text:

After Chen’s streetside reverie, he returned to the station. His fellow broadcasters were looking for him and Lin Qing was worried. Chen told them he was now ready to broadcast the text, but Lin would allow this only after one more vital step:

Chen’s recollection of the process, from receiving a script to delivering a voice with an appropriate tone and expression, lays out the stages involved in triangulating and shaping the emotional contours of a text for broadcast. First, came an engagement, along with his peers and leaders, with the text itself, an awareness of its importance, of its ‘tone and language’, as well as a summoning of the voice of his broadcasting model Qi Yue, who had given voice to the same text a few hours earlier. Second, a retreat inwards (or street-wards) during which Chen ruminated alone on the document, imagining the ‘mental state’ and the ‘logic’ of the KMT and the stance, opinion, and feelings of the author of the text. Third, he returned to his peers to practise his reading and test it against the ears of his leader, comrades, and other announcers. It was this three-stage process that enabled Chen to deliver a vocalization that appropriately expressed what he referred to as the ‘spirit of the document’.

Text as a spirit medium

Chen Hongsheng’s three stage process reveals the mingling of reason and emotion and the balancing of subjective discovery with social discipline. Diary, memoir, and Party documents from the period reveal that the introspective path to emotional performance as well as a focus on the ‘spirit’ of political texts were not unique to Chen but a constant component of CCP broadcasting practice in the 1940s. Xiao Yan肖岩, who announced for Yan’an’s Xinhua Broadcasting Station from the early 1940s, describes the formative stages of CCP broadcast culture. After a manuscript had arrived to Wangpiwan, announcers would read a script many times, both silently and aloud. As she writes, strict adherence to the original script was demanded: ‘you could not mispronounce a word’. You ‘read the script silently several times to carefully understand the central idea of the text so as to accurately convey the spirit you felt to the audience’.Footnote ⁵⁷ We also find this ‘spirit’ in the writing of Chen Hongsheng’s vocal model. In Qi Yue’s ‘Broadcast Diary’ for 31 May 1948, he notes his own struggle to find the correct tone for the 1948 ‘CCP CC Instruction on the Work of Land Reform and Party Consolidation’. Wen Jize (温济泽, 1914–1999), director of Xinhua’s Oral Broadcasting Department, nominated Qi Yue to broadcast this key document, writing at the top of the script ‘Chairman Mao instructs that no mistakes be made when broadcasting this text’. To not misread any characters was, for Qi Yue, a clear enough instruction to follow, but to find the correct emotional tone for the manuscript Qi Yue followed the same stages as Chen Hongsheng had:

Qi Yue was himself following the advice of Meng Qiyu (孟启予, 1920–?), his group leader (组长), broadcasting for Xinhua since August 1945, who had stressed the necessity of deeply understanding the content of the manuscript and grasping its ‘spirit’ (精神). The more you concentrate on these elements, according to Meng, the better the emotion and tone of the broadcast.Footnote ⁵⁹

The idea that the correct emotional expression was to be derived through a personal communing with the ‘spirit’ of the text to be broadcast would find even fuller expression in the 1950s, particularly with Mei Yi’s (梅益 1913–2003) speech at the National Conference for Announcers on 2 April 1955:

We are seeing here the gradual elaboration and exposition of the relationship between the feelings and voices of individual announcers and those of key Party texts, finding ever more nuanced and theoretically coherent statements on this relationship. Indeed, these discussions, centred around the ‘spirit of a text’ continue in Party broadcast circulars and directives throughout the Mao era.Footnote ⁶¹ From the 1940s onwards, then, entrenched in CCP broadcast culture was a practice of encouraging announcers to engage subjectively and rationally with a text in order to discover and voice their own emotional response.

The emotional practice of announcers such as Chen Hongsheng, then, reveals both the centrality of subjective engagement and the co-dependence of emotion and reason in the creation of revolutionary sentiment. This process could be understood as what Reddy calls the ‘explorative’ aspect of emotions, in which their expression necessitates a testing of that expression through introspection.Footnote ⁶² It also brings Rosenwein’s ‘cognitive theory’ of emotion into relief, as we must accept that announcers reasoned as well as felt their way to an emotional commitment and voice.Footnote ⁶³ Of course, waiting for them at the end of this process were their comrades and supervisors—not disinterested, but with a keen ear for emotional commitment to the CCP’s Revolution. Announcers thus modulated their expression in response to social cues and direction from their supervisors, embedded as they were in the regulating forces of CCP work style, bringing Scheer’s Bordieuan ‘social practice’ into play. The other side of Reddy’s ‘emotives’ equation, in which emotions are both explored and managed, suggests that as announcers modulated their emotional expression, they in turn managed their own feelings towards the text—mingling and smoothing the edges between subjectively held and socially reinforced feelings until they were indistinguishable. Such monitoring and testing of emotional performances, however, departs from both the prescription of particular emotions, and the attempt to mobilize emotion directly as per Perry’s ‘emotion work’ model. Rather, we see a back-and-forth between individual introspection and collective management of emotions, focused on the ‘spirit’ of a text. The announcer was neither a ‘mouthpiece’ of the Party, nor a wilful individual set against or suppressed by it. Rather, the emotional practice of the announcer was created through the interplay between reasoning introspection and the socializing forces of Party organization and discipline.

Reasoning subjects and CCP emotion work

Where then did the emotional practice of announcers such as Chen Hongsheng come from? Was it peculiar to Xinhua broadcasters, or does it reflect a significant and enduring vein of CCP emotionality? While the ‘spirit’ (jingshen) of a text could point us to either Hegelian or Confucian readings, the more proximate roots of the concept take us to Yan’an and the seminal movement in which CCP culture and work style were forged—Rectification of 1942–1945. In this campaign, as Party members were urged to render themselves as one with the documents they were studying, it was the ‘spirit’ of each text that had to be grasped in order to go beyond a surface (看来看去) reading of the document, and to enter deeply into its inner essence.Footnote ⁶⁴ The goal here was not simply to intellectually understand a text, but to reconcile that text with one’s subjectivity and personal history. As Kang Sheng spelled out:

And as instructions to cadres carrying out Rectification made clear, this personal engagement was to enable each cadre to ‘grasp the central thread of their thoughts, and to meld together the act of self-reflection and the spirit of the documents so that they become inseparable’.Footnote ⁶⁶ The spirit of a text, then, implied something more than the ‘gist’ or basic idea of a document that one should learn to repeat and moved beyond both the Hegelian geist and the Confucian jingshen. Rather, it was a reading of a political text specifically oriented towards the reader and their own internal transformation. We can think of it as the interface between Party text and personal experience, or between ideology and subjectivity.Footnote ⁶⁷ It was this ‘spirit’, inaugurated at Yan’an, that broadcasters such as Chen Hongsheng sought to locate, commune with, and express through the discovery of an appropriate emotional tone and voice. Through the location and performance of this spirit, a theoretical or political text from the Party centre was rendered both particular and subjective in the person and voice of the announcer.

At Yan’an also we find a precursor for Chen Hongsheng’s emotional practice, with its back-and-forth between introspective engagement with, and collective expression of, Party texts. During Rectification, Party members were pushed to engage with Party texts through a similarly stadial process. This began with collective reading in ‘small groups’ (小組) of three to five individuals. It then progressed to a stage of introspection, during which the Party member was to reconcile, as Kang Sheng called for, the ‘spirit of the text’ with their own subjectivity. Finally, a third stage returned the individual to the collective to both reveal and test the results of their ‘inner journey’ (心路歷程) through the all-important stage of criticism and self-criticism.Footnote ⁶⁸ This process, deeply embedded in Party work style during Rectification, stressed ‘self-awareness’ (自覺) as the correct path to subjective engagement with revolutionary ideology.Footnote ⁶⁹ As Huang Daoxuan writes, the process was ‘quasi-coercive’.Footnote ⁷⁰ While clearly programmatic, it relied for the most part upon the agency of the individual and a continued alternation and mutual reinforcement between personal discovery and collective management of subjective and emotional experience.

The omnipresence of a subject-oriented ‘spirit’ in Party documents, diary, and memoir, reveals the Party’s sustained interest in active subjective engagement with political texts, not only for announcers but for all Party members.Footnote ⁷¹ In turn, the process of giving voice to ideological texts by announcers such Chen Hongshen illustrates that such interest was indeed put into practice beyond Yan’an. Post-1949, manuals for announcers reveal that both collective and introspective practices and a focus on the spirit of a text were propagated after the founding of the Republic.Footnote ⁷² This suggests that, in both Party theory and personal experience, how an announcer should feel in relation to given ideas, and how they should communicate those feelings, were not prescribed through an explicated set of normative emotions by which Reddy defines his ‘emotional regime’.Footnote ⁷³ Indeed, such an enforcement, in which emotions were externalized from the self, would be unlikely to have the capacity to expand any emotional norms or bonds beyond the quasi-military discipline of Yan’an, let alone to a national community. What was scalable, however, was the practice of subjective, reasoned, emotional, and vocalized engagement with political texts through collective reading, personal introspection, and the simultaneous expression, testing, and management of emotional styles for the ears of others. In the emotional practice of the announcer, we see a means of creating and maintaining subjective and emotional engagement with revolutionary ideology, not through the external stimulation of emotionally reactive subjects and potential revolutionary recruits (as Perry described the struggle session),Footnote ⁷⁴ but through the active participation of those within the choir of Party ranks. In Cheng Hongshen and other announcers then, we see a lineage of CCP emotional practice that complicates binaries between Party and individual, between organizational discipline and subjective experience, and between emotion and reason. Revolutionary feelings were generated in constant interplay across such fictive borders.

Feeling, mediated: The announcer as emotional node

How that practice travelled from Rectification at Yan’an to Chen Hongshen out in Qiqihar in 1949 and beyond is also complicated. It involved two intertwined processes: the revolutionary organization of the CCP and the revolution of radio. First, Rectification was not limited to Yan’an but held across CCP bases in North China, becoming a formative movement for the Party organization. More crucially, Rectification also took place at all Xinhua radio stations in the years 1947 to 1949. With Rectification came the distribution of key texts (including Kang Sheng’s, above) and the twin-pronged method of small-group expression and individual study. The practices of Rectification noted above were thus organizationally enforced throughout the CCP’s broadcasting infrastructure, and further reinforced through the constant transfer of personnel from Yan’an to outlying stations in the network. Added to this were campaigns such as the anti-keli-kong (反客里空) drive in 1947 (named after a long-winded character in the Soviet play Front), in which pretentious airs and sophistry were attacked, and announcers encouraged to embody, rather than preach, the communist spirit.Footnote ⁷⁵ Second, however, was the communications revolution unfolding in tandem with its communist counterpart, and the role of the announcer as both receptor and transmitter of an emotional voice.

As it had around the globe, radio offered the CCP the promise of expanding terrestrially bound interpersonal communities to the national scale.Footnote ⁷⁶ The single and controlled voice of the announcer had the potential to both unite and educate geographically and culturally diverse audiences.Footnote ⁷⁷ Such potential, however, was in constant tension with the technical limitations of the medium, a tension that would shape Xinhua broadcasting not only during but after the 1940s. We can see these limitations reflected in the manner in which Xinhua incrementally established its broadcasting network, centred initially about Yan’an, with outlying stations including those in Qiqihar, Jiamusi, Harbin, Andong, Mudanjiang, Yanji, Linjiang, and Jinan. As noted in the introduction, CCP broadcast infrastructure before 1940 was limited to telegraphic code. Even after the December 1940 launch of XNCR at Yan’an, Xinhua often relied on telegraphic code transmitters (发报台) that had been converted to oral broadcast devices.Footnote ⁷⁸ These converted devices could transmit text at an output of 500 watts, but voice at only 2–300 watts.Footnote ⁷⁹ This meant that, despite the theoretical promise of radio, in practice the CCP could still relay text further, and with greater reliability, than voice. To expand the range of vocal broadcasts, as the broadcast network grew through captured territory and broadcast facilities, Xinhua workers at outlying stations attempted to retransmit central broadcasts. But again, technical limitations hampered this effort as retreating KMT or Japanese troops often destroyed or sabotaged expensive retransmission equipment. Additionally, the improved broadcast conditions at night-time, when reduced solar radiation levels meant a higher ionosphere (300km rather than 100km during the day) and thus greater broadcast range, limited XNCR to three hours of broadcast each evening. Finally, the position of Xinhua’s central station close to the front line meant repeated forced relocation and outages of the central node of the CCP’s broadcast network.Footnote ⁸⁰ Throughout this period, the exigencies of war and associated technical limitations and failures meant that even when XNCR could send out a voice, it could only be heard, and not always retransmitted, by outlying stations in the network, like Chen Hongsheng’s, some 1,300km away in Qiqihar. Even when retransmission was possible, the three hours of night-time broadcast from XNCR left the majority of the day and evening to be filled with the voices of on-site announcers. In this diffuse centralized model, there was substantial room, and indeed necessity, for branch stations to improvise, both in content and broadcast style.

Such centrifugal forces were enhanced by the fact that as each new outlying station was established, its operators and announcers relied on both equipment and broadcasting practices that had been inherited from either Nationalist or Japanese broadcasters. Challenging any unification across CCP broadcasting practices, those sent to establish new stations often had limited, even zero, broadcasting experience, coming instead from newspaper or theatrical backgrounds but called upon to master the technical and operational challenges of radio within a matter of days. Thus, as announcers filled the hours of programming outside the attempted nightly retransmission of central Xinhua broadcasts, they both catered to local audiences and drew on the broadcasting model of their ostensible enemies. Lin Ming (林明 n.d.), for example, was charged with taking over a station in Zhangjiakou (張家口) on 23 August 1945. His recollection of the takeover noted not only that technical knowledge, equipment, and even record collections were sourced from the previous Japanese operators, but that he drew inspiration for the broadcast schedule and programming from what he had heard of KMT broadcasts.Footnote ⁸¹ Finally, in areas, such as Dalian, where the audience was constituted of a mix of CCP supporters and the general public, attention needed to be paid not only to political message, but also to attracting listeners through entertainment.Footnote ⁸²

My own limitations of space and time prohibit a station-by-station account of early CCP local broadcasting culture, but what we can see from the Zhangjiakou example is that throughout the 1940s, the CCP centre and its drifting broadcasting headquarters dictated content, form, and style in only a limited sense. This scattered network made any goals of a unified Xinhua broadcast style and singular Party voice difficult to maintain. Needless to say, it presented an even more formidable obstacle to a unified emotional reception of Party broadcasts. Ol’ga Kuptsova has described the challenge for eighteenth-century Russian theatre practitioners of divergent emotional reactions across multiple performances of the same theatrical play. At one performance the audience would sob, in another laugh, or have no visible or audible reaction at all. Kuptsova notes that it took the broad dissemination of the prescriptive writings of Nikolai Gogol and Vissarion Belinskii to unify the emotional response of audiences on a normative plane.Footnote ⁸³ It was not until the 1950s that the CCP would begin to circulate texts, couched in the genre of reportage, that would delineate the appropriate emotional response to key political broadcasts.Footnote ⁸⁴ Through the 1940s, any unified emotional response to radio broadcasting across diverse cultural and linguistic territory presented a major challenge for a Party so intent on the mobilization of emotions.

This diffuse network forecloses on the idea of the CCP radio as a transparent system for the replication of revolutionary emotion from the Party centre outwards. In the 1940s the CCP simply did not have the human or technological resources to install such a system. What the Party did have, however, was an emotional practice developed at Yan’an, the organizational capacity to expand that practice to outlying stations, and a jerry-rigged radio network capable of transmitting a model voice, if not reliably to all radio listeners, then to the expanding circle of announcers who populated the network. In this manner, throughout the 1940s, the CCP developed a broadcast network of emotional propagation in which a central but migratory node emitted signals that were quasi-regularly received, and less reliably retransmitted by an unevenly expanding wave of outlying stations stretching from Jinan in Shandong to Jiamusi in Heilongjaing. Each of these stations in turn also created its own local content through the voices of its own announcers. In doing so, the CCP relied on the discovery, management, and performance of emotion by individual announcers at each outlying node, in productive tension with the small group practices developed at Yan’an and relayed throughout the CCP organization. As at Yan’an, it was the emphasis on the individual subjective rather than its erasure that powered the expansion of emotional commitment to the Revolutionary cause and to the CCP regime. And as at Yan’an, a cellular approach centred around the subjective and the voluntary as well as the socially normative proved remarkably effective. Indeed, while technical limitations necessitated this broadcasting model, and Xinhua broadcast leaders such as Mei Yi would no doubt have preferred to have a single voice relayed at maximum clarity, power, and uniformity out of Yan’an, it nonetheless ensured that in each locality, listeners would hear local voices, intoning and engaging with the texts of the Chinese Revolution.

Do as I sound. The announcer as model and guide

Of course, absolute regionalization, whatever its advantages for local appeal, was not coherent with CCP goals for national unity. So how did the emergent Xinhua broadcast network avoid a diffusion into divergent emotional expression of the same Party texts? As Chen Hongsheng recalls, not only did Xinhua’s central station broadcast valuable information (domestic and foreign news, CCP Central Committee decisions, updates from the frontline of the war), it also broadcast the art of broadcast—a style to learn and follow and a model voice that offered audible clues for how ideology from above could meet subjectivity within. As Chen noted, his process of finding voice for ‘Comment on War Criminals Suing for Peace’ was not only influenced by his peers at the station in Qiqihar, but by the disembodied voice of Qi Yue. With his voice, Qi Yue modelled this sentiment for Chen, and Chen in turn modelled it for other broadcasters, and finally for the broader radio audience. Vocal modelling and mimicry were in evidence across the early Xinhua broadcasting network. Xiao Feng (萧风), who was charged with establishing the Handan Xinhua Radio Station (XGHT), from March 1947, recalls attempts to create a ‘nationwide colloquial broadcast’ by ‘not only receiving the broadcast effect of the original Shaanxi station, but also to resemble the original announcer’s emotion, accent, and tone’.Footnote ⁸⁵ Such modelling was of course already present at Yan’an in the person of the informal small group leader and in activists who spoke at enlarged meetings, but radio allowed the Party to take this model, disembodied, and relay it through the skies of KMT-controlled areas, across the vast regions of geographically volatile but ever expanding CCP control. Such modelling, then, created a consistent emotional fingerprint to early Xinhua broadcasts, ensuring that the Yan’an model of individual and collective engagement with the ‘spirit of the document’ would not, once applied across disparate stations and through a diverse range of accents and educational backgrounds of its announcers, devolve into widely divergent emotional readings of key texts.

Waves of feeling

The emotional practice of announcers such as Chen Hongsheng has shown us that Xinhua announcers found emotional commitment and expression through a co-mingling of reasoned introspection and social discipline. For announcers such as Chen Hongsheng, reason played a major role in their emotional response to, and expression of, revolutionary texts. This brings the emotional world of the Chinese revolution into closer relation with recent research on the history of emotions in which individual subjectivity and agency are seen as essential in the creation of shared emotions. It also brings the Chinese case into conversation with its Soviet counterpart, in which, according to Jochen Hellbeck:

The announcer, as we have seen, makes precisely such engagement with CCP ideology. They represent a model of emotional engagement not as a corporal part of the reactive masses, but as a reasoning and introspective individual embedded within a social context that both constrains them and which they simultaneously help to create. It is a model of individual-Party emotional relations that remains operative in the all-important periods and spaces between and away from the mass campaign. Individual introspection and social discipline were omnipresent sparring partners throughout the Mao era, as indeed they are, in various states of balance, in any society. This aligns with William Reddy’s observation that ‘emotional suffering’ and emotional freedom’ are not by necessity in opposition,Footnote ⁸⁷ and that emotional freedom under authoritarian regimes could in fact be greater than for certain groups in contemporaneous liberal democratic societies.Footnote ⁸⁸

Tracing this emotional practice, along with its emphasis on the ‘spirit’ of a text, back to Rectification at Yan’an and then onwards beyond 1949, reveals that it was not unique to Xinhua announcers, but represents a consistent mode of emotional engagement by those within CCP ranks. This mode was not one in which old emotional bonds were broken, or in which emotions were ‘stirred up’ by external impulse in order to disrupt or overturn extant social orders. Rather, it served to maintain, deepen, and propagate emotional connection within the rapidly growing community that was the CCP. While it had its origins in the often-coercive Rectification campaign, the emphasis on introspection and reason in tension with social reinforcement exhibited milder iterations both in the person of the broadcaster and throughout the Mao era. We can see examples such as the artist Liu Chunhua, who painted the now famous Chairman Mao Goes to Anyuan (毛主席去安源), and described in an interview the subjective, reasoned, and socially tested process by which he imagined, planned, and executed what would become a central image of Maoist propaganda.Footnote ⁸⁹ This mode of emotional practice, constructive rather than disruptive, would be increasingly important for the CCP as it left behind the mass campaign as its key medium for the engagement of emotion.

The import of the emotional practice of the announcer, however, lies not only in representing an important alternative strain of CCP emotional practice, but in revealing the interaction between the advent of a new media and extant CCP emotion work. Announcers such as Chen Hongsheng not only inherited the emotional practices of Yan’an, they rendered them expandable to a potentially unlimited and eventually national scale. The scaling-up of a subjective and emotional commitment to the Revolution was, of course, an aspiration and a practice already in full swing at Yan’an. Prior to and through Rectification, the CCP developed a work-style built upon the expansion and reinforcement of subjective and emotional engagement through gatherings that gradually escalated in size from the ‘small-group’ (小組), to the Party branch (支部), to the enlarged meeting (大會).Footnote ⁹⁰ It was in these expanded meetings that the emotional alchemy described by Elizabeth Perry took place as emotions were charged, released, and the affective power of a mass of people in tight proximity catalysed. But at the enlarged meeting of Yan’an lay too the terrestrial limits of CCP emotion work, as the reliance on the intimacy of physical gatherings, powerful as they were, could not be expanded beyond the perimeter of a single room or courtyard, let alone traverse great distance. Its expansion to the regional or national scale would require either the physical penetration of CCP forces in sufficient density (not achieved until after 1949), or the technological means by which the emotional practice of Yan’an could be transmitted across space. Similar meetings could and did occur at other base areas, but prior to widespread social penetration, such meetings remained atomized rather than regional or national events.

Radio, however, allowed the emotional practice of Yan’an, through the announcer’s engagement and personal expression of revolutionary texts, to be relayed outside the walls of the expanded meeting, across and even beyond CCP territory. In this, both the potential and the technical limitations of radio were factors. The CCP adapted to the new media with the instruction throughout the expanding Xinhua broadcast network that announcers deliver performances that were ‘full of emotion’, coupled with the establishment, at every station, of the small-group practices of introspective and collective engagement with a text. These adaptations of extant Party practice enabled the CCP to radically enlarge its modular method of creating subjective and emotional commitment to the revolutionary cause. Rather than a top-down regime in which prescribed sets of emotions were relayed from the Party centre downwards or outwards, the Xinhua broadcasting network of the 1940s expanded a reasoning, subjective, and focused model of emotional management developed at Yan’an in which the injection of voluntary and agentful emotional commitment in each cellular unit, in constructive tension with the discipline of that unit, served as the generative source for an emergent emotional style. The CCP announcer provided not simply the ‘mouthpiece’ (喉舌)of the Party, but acted as the embodied and vocalized representation of the act of Revolutionary commitment. Through the expanding network of Xinhua stations, the announcer could carry out the combination of introspective and collective practice developed at Yan’an, exploring and testing their own way to an emotional connection and expression of a key text while listening to vocal models such as Qi Yue. Then, leaning into the microphone, they relayed the results of this process to other announcers and potentially unlimited listeners, while preserving the tight vocal intimacy of the small group at Yan’an.Footnote ⁹¹ The potential of radio, then, freed the CCP to expand from proximal to distant emotional engagement, a challenge that faced all burgeoning national states.

Post-1949, the tension and balance between local modulation and a centrally projected model voice enabled the CCP to expand both its broadcasting network and its emotion work to the national scale, despite the ongoing limitations of broadcasting equipment and personnel. From December 1950, internal broadcast circulars such as Guangbo Tongbao institutionalized the three-stage system deployed by Chen Hongshen and others and circulated it nationally.Footnote ⁹² With the expansion of the national broadcast network from 1951, further outer nodes were added through the establishment of provincial and local radio stations, and the deployment of in-situ ‘radio operators’, who tuned into Xinhua broadcasts, grasped their ‘spirit’, and relayed this spirit in their own voices to villagers who lacked access to radio receivers.Footnote ⁹³ Ostensibly outer nodes in the propagation of revolutionary ideology, such radio operators, like announcers, functioned also to inject and relay their own emotional commitment to the revolution.Footnote ⁹⁴ As the network expanded to a national scale, this broadcast culture ensured that far from attenuating the expansion of emotional engagement with the Party’s cause, the technical limitations of CCP radio, as they had in the 1940s, forged a radial network of broadcasters who injected and recharged political texts with personal emotion at every node, no matter how far from Beijing. To maintain consistency, however, we see indications in internal circulars such as Broadcast Trends (广播动态) that local stations should follow provincial stations, including the directive to emulate their vocal performances that were ‘full of emotion’.Footnote ⁹⁵ The announcer, therefore, like all nodes in CCP propaganda and mobilization, exhibits what Liu Yajuan calls the ‘double role of receiving as well as exerting influence’,Footnote ⁹⁶ both subject to and active in the creation of any collective emotional style or community. And as they had in the 1940s, central models created a consistent emotional fingerprint for Xinhua broadcasts, ensuring that the Yan’an model of individual and collective engagement with the ‘spirit of the document’ would not, once applied across disparate stations and through a diverse range of accents and educational backgrounds of its announcers, create wildly divergent emotional readings of political texts. Such a network, mimicking Huygens’ expanding wavefronts and wavelets and combining centrifugal and centripetal forces, meant both a base tone of model voices like Qi Yue’s and regional variations on that tone like Chen Hongsheng’s. To listeners across the PRC the voice of Xinhua was heard as both centrally conceived and locally borne—at once at the centre and the periphery of the revolutionary wave.