The CCP Information Order in the Early People's Republic of China, 1949-1966

• Applicant: Professor Daniel Leese, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 509736107

With the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) faced a major dilemma. As the area formally governed by the CCP expanded, long-term control crucially hinged on the party organization’s capacity to process reliable intelligence about developments on the ground. Since the new leadership did not allow free public exchange of opinions, it faced a massive information problem: How to obtain useful information, when public debates are massively restricted and loyalty counts for more than competence? To deal with the problem of information distortion, the CCP developed a two-pronged approach. Besides public news items that catered towards mobilization, it established distinct systems of feedback loops, which were strictly tasked to separate facts from opinion in order to provide the party leadership with an objective account of developments in China and abroad. This approach was extended and repeatedly updated as the party reorganized into a nationwide administration after 1949. Over time, a distinct system for controlled circulation of intelligence, an “information order”, took shape. This remained in place until the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution in 1966. Yet the system’s basic structures remained intact even throughout these tumultuous years and continue to shape the CCP’s information politics until the present. This project seeks to understand how and according to what criteria the CCP top leadership collected information on domestic and international affairs prior to the Cultural Revolution. While the party-state sought to project unity in external communication, the controlled circulation of information within its sprawling bureaucracy was diverse and took place in separate bureaucratic circuits, each with its own logic and fields of interest. The project will focus on three of the most crucial channels through which information reached the state and party leadership: the Central Propaganda Department, the CCP General Office, and Xinhua News Agency Headquarters. These institutions compiled top-secret internal reference bulletins, so-called neican materials for the country’s top leaders. The three bulletins selected for this project: Xuanjiao dongtai, Qingkuang jianbao, and Neibu cankao, constitute the three most important neican sources in the early PRC. Despite their importance for CCP governance, there has been nearly no research on these bulletins. The proposed research project will thus break important new ground and shed light on core aspects of CCP rule. The project has three expected outcomes. First, it will build a nuanced theoretical framework by which to understand information flows in the early PRC. Second, it will provide detailed case studies of the three most important neican bulletins in the years after the founding of the PRC, drawing from an empirical basis exceeding anything prior. Finally, it will create open data sets for further scientific research.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants