Mar 1, 2025
My dissertation examines how the seemingly rigid and archaic official discourse of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)—often called “hard propaganda”—serves as an intra-elite communication system, with political catchphrases (tifa, 提法) as its fundamental units. Using a corpus of 2.5 million ideological texts (1921–2019), I developed a method to extract over 25,000 catchphrases. My findings show that subtle wording changes in these catchphrases can send important political and policy signals, significantly shifting their ideological and policy positions, as quantified by word embedding-based methods. Survey evidence further indicates that these nuances are primarily recognized by political elites while remaining obscure to the general public. This enables elites to communicate sensitive political information “in plain sight” while ensuring a gradual and controlled release of ongoing elite conflicts to broader circles of political power.
Jun 1, 2024