Where Did the CCP's Brainwashing Techniques Come From?

Where Did the CCP's Brainwashing Techniques Come From?

The term "brainwashing" was coined by the KGB, the intelligence agency of the former Soviet Union, based on the conditioned-reflex experiments of the Soviet biologist Pavlov. In these experiments, the experimenter rang a bell every time the dog was given food; after several repetitions, the dog would salivate at the sound of the bell alone, even with no food present. Later, when a young boy was rewarded with his favorite cake for saying the number 4 out loud, or even merely thinking of the number 4, after a few repetitions, when he was later asked what 8 divided by 2 equals, he began salivating before he could even get the answer out.

These conditioned-reflex experiments demonstrate that repeated, cyclical stimulation of the human brain can bring about a fundamental change in a person's thinking, turning them into an uncontrollable machine and a puppet of the experimenter. Pavlov was hailed by the Soviet Communist Party as a great scientist; the more than four hundred pages of research he produced were never published, and were instead handed over in full to the Soviet Communist Party for internal use. Using Pavlov's conditioned-reflex experiments for brainwashing under communist totalitarianism is, in essence, nothing but a method of turning human beings into animals.

In the 1950s, the CCP convened a special international symposium on Pavlovian psychology in Beijing, to explore how to apply his theories to propaganda. In the political campaigns that followed, the CCP used violence to force this conditioned-reflex style of brainwashing onto the entire population, and "fabrication, hatred, and struggle" thereby became the entire nation's habitual mode of thought and behavior.

Beyond this, the CCP is also skilled in another, more covert and gentler form of brainwashing, in which the person being brainwashed sees only the specially framed picture the CCP has prepared for them, and hears only the preset lies, so that their perception of reality becomes divorced from the actual facts. Violence serves only as a means of retaliation once a lie has been exposed, so that the person being brainwashed dares not reveal the truth — indeed, dares not even accept the truth. Edgar Snow and his wife were brainwashed in precisely this way.

"Informer 001" and the Little Heroes of the Cultural Revolution

In the 1930s, the Soviet Russian government implemented its collective farm program, confiscating the people's grain. A farmer named Morozov, trying to keep his family from starving, secretly hid several hundred jin of grain — only to be denounced by his own 12-year-old son, Pavlik Morozov, a member of the Young Pioneers. The father and other farmers who had hidden grain were all arrested. A few months later, the young Morozov's body was found dumped in the woods; the Soviet Communist Party then had his parents and neighbors all put to death, held a state funeral for him, and ordered that every town and village across the country name a street "Morozov Street." Afterward, children joining the Young Pioneers were required to swear their oath before a statue of the young Morozov.

Brainwashing children into becoming informers who spy on their own parents, and then turning those informers into heroes — this is the myth manufactured by communist totalitarianism's brainwashing techniques. The Soviet dissident writer Yuri Druzhnikov, after interviewing eyewitnesses to the events at the time, wrote the truth-revealing work Informer 001: The Myth of Pavlik Morozov.

In February 1970, in Guzhen County, Bengbu, Anhui Province, a woman named Fang Zhongmou criticized Mao Zedong's personality cult at home, and was reported by her husband, Zhang Yuesheng, and her eldest son, 16-year-old Zhang Hongbing. Two months later, Fang Zhongmou was executed by firing squad as an "active counterrevolutionary." At the end of his written denunciation, 16-year-old Zhang Hongbing had shockingly written: "Execute Fang Zhongmou by firing squad!" After the Cultural Revolution, a grief-stricken Zhang Hongbing said: "From childhood on, we were taught that not even our own father and mother were as dear to us as Chairman Mao — that whoever opposed him was our enemy. I told her, if you dare spread your poison again, I'll smash your dog's head in!"

Farces and tragedies like this were countless during the Cultural Revolution. In 1967, 18-year-old Kong Fanlu of Jiangquan County wanted to go join the revolution; his mother urged him not to go, warning that he might lose his life. But Kong Fanlu, a young man of "pure red revolutionary stock," would not listen to a word of it. In desperation, his mother threw his shoes into the outhouse pit to stop him from leaving; in a fit of rage, Kong Fanlu pressed a gun to his mother's stomach, and a revolutionary bullet pierced her body. Kong Fanlu, for killing his own mother, was himself sentenced to death with a two-year reprieve, and remained in prison until 1992.

Brainwashing Starts With the Children

In recent years, as more and more people have come to see through the CCP's evil nature, the Party has sought to extend its life through brainwashing. It has begun targeting children from the earliest possible age. In 2020, the CCP's top leader personally ordered that the "red gene be passed down from generation to generation." At the start of the spring semester in 2021, under the banner of the Party's 100th founding anniversary, the CCP went so far as to introduce Party-indoctrination classes into kindergartens.

Even more appalling, the CCP's brainwashing of children places special emphasis on the CCP's history of armed struggle, encouraging children to dress in Red Army uniforms and reenact scenes of "beating down the local tyrants" and "dividing up the land" with toy sabers. According to the Shaanxi Youth Service Network, at the memorial hall of the former Shaanxi-Gansu-Ningxia revolutionary base area, students dressed in Red Army uniforms and eight-cornered military caps pushed wheelbarrows to simulate seizing land and grain, and reenacted mock battle scenes involving throwing grenades. Shanghai's Wen Wei Po reported that the city's "gold-standard" course in ideological and political education draws on Red landmarks such as the site of the CCP's First National Congress, revisiting the creed that "political power grows out of the barrel of a gun."

On this point, a senior teacher in Beijing surnamed Du said: "This is essentially killing children at the level of their very humanity — killing off the next several generations." Mr. Wei from Zhejiang said: "In truth, this is extremely harmful to our nation's future; if things continue this way, I'm not very optimistic about what lies ahead." Ms. Lin from Guizhou went further, saying that this kind of red education damages children both physically and mentally: "My son used to be lively and adorable when he was in kindergarten. Now I feel he's becoming uglier by the day — he doesn't seem nearly as lively or bright as he used to be."

Since September 2017, the CCP has incorporated a large number of "red culture" selections into the unified national primary and secondary school Chinese-language textbooks — some thirty or forty classic red-themed pieces, including "Never Forget the Well-Digger When Drinking the Water," "The Five Heroes of Langya Mountain," "How the Steel Was Tempered," and "In Memory of Norman Bethune." Beyond this, the CCP's brainwashing methods proceed on every front simultaneously, in a comprehensive, dragnet-style push — indoctrination delivered through flag-raising ceremonies, parent-child activities, traveling film screenings, study-trip excursions, "big hands holding small hands" mentorship programs, essay and speech competitions, the "Study Xi, Strengthen the Nation" app, and more.

Brainwashing Strips University Students of Their Capacity for Critical Thought

Li Datong, former editor-in-chief of China Youth Daily's Freezing Point supplement, told the media: "Kindergartners are out there play-acting 'beating down the local tyrants and dividing up the land,' dressed in Red Army uniforms, being indoctrinated with violence from the earliest possible age — this whole approach is already beyond redemption. It is anti-human, anti-intellect, and anti-civilization through and through."

The CCP's brainwashing within the education system operates as one integrated pipeline, running from kindergarten through primary and secondary school all the way up to higher education. In October 2020, the CCP issued its "Overall Plan for Deepening the Reform of Education Evaluation in the New Era," emphasizing that by 2035 it aims to have basically established an education evaluation system that "demonstrates Chinese characteristics while reflecting world-class standards." In February of this year, Tsinghua University unveiled its own education reform plan, in which the school motto — "Self-Discipline and Social Commitment" (from the Book of Changes) and "Independent spirit, free thought" — has vanished, replaced instead by phrases like "serve the Party and the nation" and "both red and expert," now prominently featured.

What kind of talent can an education system like this possibly produce? On March 1, 2021, Nature Human Behaviour, a sister journal of Nature, published a study on the academic performance of engineering undergraduates in Russia, China, India, and the United States, finding that Chinese students showed declines in both critical thinking ability and academic skill levels after completing their university education.