Running a mainstream revolutionary newspaper: Guangdong Qunbao and socialist propaganda in 1920s South China

ABSTRACT

Revolutionary newspapers and periodicals have generally taken a confrontational stance towards the established power and the dominant ideology. In this sense, Guangdong Qunbao (The Social), the first daily newspaper run by the Chinese Communist Party in the early 1920s, was an interesting exception. From the beginning, its founders strove to strike a balance between becoming an influential mainstream newspaper and committing to revolutionary propaganda. This article examines its cultural strategies for the cultivation of socialist culture and explores how Qunbao engaged with the existing local cultures and developed a nuanced approach to socialist propaganda. It argues that, although the Qunbao’s editors hoped to promote a new ideology that was at odds with the prevailing ones, they did not rebel against the mainstream media; instead, they followed the model of modern print capitalism and creatively exploited indigenous cultural forms for the sake of socialist propaganda.

KEYWORDS:

• Socialist propaganda
• guangdong qunbao
• cultural strategy
• cultural hybridity
• print capitalism

Acknowledgments

The author thanks the two reviewers for their constructive suggestions on revising this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Xuduo Zhao

Xuduo Zhao is an Associate Professor of History at Sun Yat-sen University, China. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, specializing in twentieth-century Chinese radicalism and revolutions.