This talk presents findings from Dr. Zou’s recent work that investigates the production of soft propaganda campaigns on China’s social media, where ideological persuasion is entwined with various forms of digital play, such as hip-hop music videos, memes/hashtags, and interactive mini-games. China’s state-run media play a crucial role in producing and distributing soft propaganda campaigns. This talk offers a glimpse of such campaigns and presents a nuanced mezzo-level analysis on the inter- and intra-organizational dynamics within the Party press system that contribute to the increasing output of soft propaganda. It shifts the emphasis from the effect of propaganda as a political instrument to the design of propaganda, which fashions an aesthetic and affective experience and opens up an ambient process of subject formation.

Sheng Zou is a postdoctoral research fellow at Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies of the University of Michigan. He received his PhD in Communication from Stanford University. His research interests include global media industries, digital politics and popular culture, platform economy and labor, and emergent technologies. His dissertation and book project: "The Engineering of Sentiment and Desire: Unraveling the Aestheticized Politics of Ideotainment in China" examines the shifting paradigm of propaganda and emotional governance in China, with emphasis on the entanglement of ideological persuasion and online entertainment.

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Zoom webinar; attendance requires registration: https://umich.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_y_v9cJkeQM2fyVFZQlH3ZA