It moves through you – early Chinese Communist radio and the culture of technology

In December 1940, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) launched its first radio station from Yan’an, Shaanxi. Through the practice of the announcers who gave voice to political texts, this article explores the formative years of CCP radio, and through this the relationship between technology and culture. While radio has been depicted as a technology that transformed China, put to use by first the Nationalists (KMT) and then the CCP, the practice of CCP announcers reveals two important diversions from this model. First, the CCP put radio to use not to replace but to enhance extant socio-political practices of community building. Second, this resulted in a distinct CCP broadcast culture during the 1940s, with unique conceptions and deployments of the new technology. The development of early CCP radio announcing practices reveals a mutual interaction between the promises of the new media, extant socio-political practices, and limiting factors that forced broadcasters to improvise with the new technology. Far from eroding cultural or national barriers, CCP adoption of the new media of radio would create a distinct Chinese media culture after 1949 and into the current era.