Two media systems at once
In 1967 China had two kinds of media operating side by side. One was the official system: the Party’s newspapers, Xinhua news agency and national radio, which carried instructions from the top. The other was a loose, noisy and short-lived world of wall posters, handbills, mimeographed newsletters and Red Guard tabloids, produced by rival groups that each claimed to speak for Mao Zedong. The tension between the two was one of the defining features of the year.
The Little Red Book
The most widely distributed text of the period was Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong, known abroad as the Little Red Book. A compilation of short extracts, it had been prepared in the early 1960s for the People’s Liberation Army, and was printed in small, pocket-size editions. From 1966 it was produced on a vast scale and became compulsory reading in many places. Figures of hundreds of millions of copies are often cited, though exact totals are uncertain.
In 1967 people carried it at rallies, held it up while chanting slogans, and were expected to quote from it in daily life. Study sessions in factories, schools and army units involved reading passages aloud. Recitation could become a kind of loyalty test: a person who stumbled over a quotation might be criticised, and rival groups used identical quotations against each other. The book’s authority was real, but so was its use as a social and political device.
The People’s Daily and the official line
The People’s Daily, the Party’s main newspaper, was the clearest signal of official policy. Control of the paper had been taken over by radicals in 1966, and its editorials and front pages told readers which groups and individuals were acceptable. Joint editorials with Red Flag, the Party journal, were treated as authoritative statements. In January 1967 an editorial encouraging revolutionary rebels to seize power was understood as support for the new wave of takeovers, including those described in accounts of the Shanghai January Storm.
Policy statements were often couched in coded phrases: a person might be described as “a handful” or as taking “the capitalist road”. Readers learned to interpret changes in vocabulary as signs that a leader had fallen from favour. This did not prevent confusion, since local newspapers and local army commanders sometimes interpreted the line differently, and groups could claim that their reading was the correct one.
Red Guard newspapers
One of the most distinctive features of the period was the explosion of unofficial Red Guard papers. Students and rebel workers set up hundreds of small publications, printed on cheap paper, often with bold headlines and cartoons. They reported on rallies, published speeches by leaders in Beijing, exposed alleged “traitors” and attacked rival factions. Because they were cheap to produce and quickly out of date, they often disappeared within weeks or months.
These papers were not independent journalism in the usual sense. Most were committed to a faction, and many reprinted rumours or unverified accusations. Yet they also carried information that official outlets did not, including internal speeches and leaked documents. Western and Hong Kong observers later used them as a main source on events in China, with the necessary caution. In 1967 rebels also seized control of established local papers, as happened in Shanghai in January, meaning that some previously official organs became voices for one group.
Big-character posters
The big-character poster, written in large characters on paper and pasted on walls, was the cheapest and most visible form of communication. Their use as a political weapon is usually traced to a poster put up at Peking University by Nie Yuanzi and colleagues at the end of May 1966, which Mao praised. In August 1966 Mao himself wrote a short poster titled “Bombard the Headquarters”, widely understood as an attack on senior colleagues.
By 1967 posters covered walls, gates, buses and factory buildings. They were used to accuse, defend, announce meetings and demand confessions. They were also dangerous: being named on a poster could lead to humiliation or violence, and anyone who wished to reply had to put up a poster of their own. Later, under the 1975 constitution, writing big-character posters was included among citizens’ rights, though that provision was removed after Mao’s death.
Loudspeakers and the spoken word
Not everyone could read easily, and so loudspeakers were as important as print. Public-address systems in streets, factories, schools and villages broadcast news bulletins, editorials, revolutionary songs and quotations. Rival groups sometimes used loudspeakers in a form of sound warfare, blasting slogans across a campus or a factory yard to drown each other out. In some cities, groups seized radio stations in an attempt to control the airwaves.
Radio mattered in the countryside as well, where wired speakers carried the day’s programme into villages. Combined with study meetings, these formed a dense network through which central messages travelled.
The press abroad and at the border
China’s media conflicts also spilled into foreign relations. Foreign journalists in Beijing had difficulty working, and some were harassed. The detention of the Reuters correspondent Anthony Grey in Beijing from July 1967 was widely seen as retaliation for the arrest of left-wing journalists in Hong Kong, where the Hong Kong riots were at their height. In Hong Kong, pro-Beijing newspapers were among the main voices of the unrest, while commercial radio became a target of violence.
What it meant
The late 1960s were a time of media change elsewhere too: Marshall McLuhan’s book The Medium Is the Massage came out in 1967, and the underground press was growing in the United States and Europe. In China the situation was different. During the Cultural Revolution the media had a political function, and what looked like open competition among posters and tabloids was really a contest over who could claim Mao’s authority. Once the leadership decided to restore order in 1968, the Red Guard papers closed and the official press regained control. The experience left many Chinese readers sceptical of printed claims for years afterwards.