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intellectuals are also acutely aware that the propaganda model must adapt to the Internet age, with some of them aggressively touting the benefits of a more proactive ideological approach to the Internet. As Huang Tianhan and Hui Shugang, two young Chinese academics, argue: “We must ... realize that there is a huge gap between the traditional forms of propaganda and education and the ways of modern mass media. This forces us to implement creative changes in traditional forms of propaganda, and to use modern high technology to fine-tune, enrich, and perfect the content and forms of our culture—in order to make it easier for young people to accept and be influenced by education.” (The language of propaganda is subject to such “creative changes” as well. At a 2010 gathering of nine hundred officials and students at the Central Committee’s Party School, China’s vice president, Xi Jingping, urged Chinese officials to purge their speeches of any “unhealthy” writing that may undermine efficiency by ridding them of “empty words” and political jargon.)

The emergence of Fifty-Cent Party commentators on the Chinese Internet is an important stage in the country’s constantly evolving propaganda strategy; in its latest reiteration, it is characterized by greater decentralization, increased reliance on the private sector, and a radical internationalization. In her 2009 book Marketing Dictatorship: Propaganda and Thought Work in Contemporary China, Anne-Marie Brady, one of the world’s foremost experts on the evolution of China’s propaganda, notes a shift toward more scientific ways of producing and thinking about propaganda among Chinese officials. Since the Tiananmen crackdown, they have been paying more attention to public relations, mass communications, and social psychology. According to Brady, after the Tiananmen tragedy, which was arguably the direct result of temporarily slowing down the propaganda machine and allowing freer discussions to take hold in the 1980s, the Party turned to the old slogan “seize with both hands; both hands must be strong,” which meant that both economic development and propaganda should serve as sources of political legitimacy.

Luckily for the CCP, plenty of Western intellectuals, especially in the first half of the twentieth century, also saw propaganda as essential to the functioning of a modern capitalist state. Not surprisingly, the works of American propaganda theorists like Harold Lasswell (signature quote: “we must not succumb to democratic dogmatisms about men being the best judges of their own interests”) and Walter Lippmann (“the public must be put in its place ... so that each of us may live free of the trampling and the roar of a bewildered herd”) have been translated into Chinese and, according to Brady, are quite popular with China’s own propaganda officers.

The Chinese propaganda leaders, in other words, look to the West and imbibe its vast intellectual resources, using them for their own antidemocratic purposes. (Something similar is happening in Russia, where Kremlin-affiliated young intellectuals use their blogs to share download links to pirated editions of key Western academic texts in economics, psychology, philosophy, and political science.) Brady notes that “the re-invention of the British Labour party under Tony Blair became a model for the CCP’s own repackaging in the 1990s.” Peter Mandelson, who played a key role in reshaping the Labour Party, was invited to give a talk at the Central Party School in 2001 and share his insights. Brady believes that Chinese propaganda officials used Blair’s spin doctors as a model for managing the media during political crises in the wake of the SARS crisis of 2002 and 2003. Chinese officials also paid visits to left-wing parties in Germany to study their transformation in the last few decades. Given that most propaganda tricks used by the Chinese regime today come from Western textbooks, it won’t be shocking if one day we’ll discover that the Fifty-Cent Party was inspired by the widely spread corporate practice of “astroturfing,” or faking support