Waves of feeling: Emotions, media, and the Chinese Communist Revolution

How did the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) foster emotional engagement with its revolution? How did the advent of new media transform this engagement? Building on research that has noted the importance of emotions in the CCP’s revolution, this article explores these questions through a study of CCP radio and the person of the announcer. Using broadcast circulars and directives, memoirs, and diaries, it explores how broadcasters found an appropriate emotional tone for political texts, and how individual broadcasters functioned as nodes in the diffusion of emotions over an expanding network of radio stations. I make three arguments: first, that along with the well-documented normative forces of Party organization, announcers relied on reason and introspection to find their own emotional expression of a text and, with that, an emotional engagement with the revolution; second, that announcers were not anomalous in their reasoned engagement, but represent a consistent strain of community-building emotional practice within the ranks of the CCP; and third, that the advent of radio empowered the CCP to scale up its subject-oriented emotion work, developed at Yan’an but locally bound, to the regional and, eventually, the national scale. In this scaling up, extant CCP work-practice interacted with the promises and limits of the new media to create a distinct broadcasting culture that would shape the use of radio throughout the Mao era.