Thought Reform and Press Nationalization in Shanghai: The Wenhui Newspaper in the Early 1950s

In the early years of the People's Republic of China (PRC), new policies from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) instigated a thorough remake of mass media in Shanghai. Creating infrastructure and establishing a sense of nationhood were the two dominant goals of this era. One key step in realizing these goals was to absorb the majority of freelance media industry workers into work units that complied with the new policies. The work units then recast the employees as "anchor-screws (luosi ding)" in the state's new nationalist infrastructure.¹

This paper uses the reform of Shanghai's newspapers, specifically the Wenhui bao (), to describe a complex historical process: the reform of both the media infrastructure and the individuals working within it. By examining the conflicts between popular media and state planning, I show how the state, the CCP, and urban society contended with and adjusted to one another, thus revealing the ways in which post-1949 state infrastructure developed and diverged from the targets and aims set during the pre-1949 revolutionary-war era.

Recent scholarship has addressed this topic in three ways. The first focused on historical continuity, discussing the consequences of the Communist Revolution, its relationship to Guomindang ( GMD) state infrastructure, and the revolution's impact on state-society relations at the level of China's social elites.² The second provided a series of case studies that illustrated the historical process of the state's efforts to reform and control urban society and popular culture in the early 1950s.³ The third concerned the CCP's early relationship with intellectuals (in recent years, this field has turned increasingly towards the study of thought reform movements).⁴

Generally speaking, this scholarship showed that 1949 can no longer be seen primarily as a disjuncture in Chinese history, emphasizing that historical breaks and continuities are parallel processes. The 1950s is shown to be "an important moment for interactions between the state, urban society, and family relations."⁵ Some note that the early PRC era marks the beginning of a long process toward the one-party state: as William Kirby states, "[T]he better part of China's twentieth century, particularly under the rule of first the Guomindang and then the Communist Party-States, would witness an ever-increasing state control, culminating after 1949 in a despotism that was felt more widely and deeply than any in Chinese history."⁶ Although these scholars recognized that during the latter half of the twentieth century China showed a "slow, steady, but unmistakable re-assertion of realms of personal and communal autonomy,"⁷ referring to the so-called "adaptive authoritarianism,"⁸ they still maintain that despotism characterized the PRC's early years.

This paper does not disagree with the scholarship regarding the CCP's despotism during the 1950s, but seeks to examine the complexities and pluralities of that process. The despotism that links 1949 with the present day was not pre-determined. New archival materials show that many factors shaped the road from independently managed to party administered during PRC-state formation: like the GMD, the CCP wanted to control the mass media, but also opposed the GMD's monopolistic management of the media industry. The CCP wanted to realize the new people's democracy, but also use the strategies of class struggle to create an anti-capitalist media industry; it wanted the new policy makers and Shanghai's progressive newspaper men to remain comrades-in-arms, but also reform them with the party's new rules and standards. On the one hand, these goals allowed Shanghai's newspapers to survive, and extended the honeymoon period that the revolution's immediate success created.⁹ On the other hand, it created "the zero-sum game between state and society."¹⁰ Between 1949 and 1953, the state successfully regulated Shanghai's mass media market. However, the state was not as successful in gaining full control over Shanghai's intellectuals as it was during the Yan'an era, when Shanghai's petty intellectuals flocked to support the revolution. Although thought reform for...