The Routledge Handbook of Language and Mind Engineering [1 ed.] 1032267496, 9781032267494

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THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF LANGUAGE AND MIND ENGINEERING

The Routledge Handbook of Language and Mind Engineering is a comprehensive work that delves into the complex interplay between language, culture, politics, and media in shaping the human mind. The book is divided into five main sections, each exploring different aspects of mind engineering: I. Political Mind Engineering; II. Commercial Mind Engineering; III. Media, Culture, and Mind Engineering; IV. Linguistic and Semiotic Analysis of Mind Engineering; V. Mind Engineering in Educational Settings. The book provides a multi‑dimensional perspective on how language, media, culture, and politics intersect to shape individuals’ thoughts and beliefs. It highlights the diverse methods and contexts in which mind engineering occurs, making it a valuable resource for scholars, researchers, and policymakers interested in understanding the complexities of contemporary discourse and manipulation of human thought. The contents of this cutting‑edge handbook will engage all undergraduate, postgraduate, PhD students and scholars, and researchers at all levels, in fields such as languages, linguistics, politics, communication studies, media studies, and psychology. Chris Shei, originally from Taiwan, pursued MPhil and PhD degrees in the UK at Cambridge and Edinburgh, respectively. Since 2003, Chris has taught and researched in applied linguistics and translation studies at Swansea University, UK, with a particular interest in authoritarian discourse. Highly experienced in overseeing large‑scale book projects such as handbooks, encyclopedias, and thematic book series, Chris invites proposals to publish monographs, edited volumes, or book chapters in the fields of linguistics, rhetoric, political discourse, language learning, Chinese stud‑ ies, or translation studies, at [email protected]. James Schnell, Ph.D. (Ohio University, 1982), presently works in administration at Ohio State University after spending three years as a cultural advisor in the Defense Critical Languages & Culture Program at the University of Montana, USA. He retired from the U.S. Air Force at the rank of Colonel with his final 14 years serving as an Assistant Air Force Attache at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, China. Schnell is a three‑time Fulbright Scholar to Cambodia, Myanmar, and Kosovo; has completed three visiting fellowships at the East‑West Center (Honolulu); and has taught at universities in the United States and throughout Southeast Asia.

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF LANGUAGE AND MIND ENGINEERING

Edited by Chris Shei and James Schnell

LONDON AND NEW YORK

Designed cover image: YQW First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 selection and editorial matter, Chris Shei and James Schnell; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Chris Shei and James Schnell to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. With the exception of Chapters 15, 17, and 18 no part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Chapter 15 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) International license. We acknowledge support by the Open Access Publication Fund of the Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg. Chapter 17 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution‑Non Commercial‑No Derivatives (CC‑BY‑NC‑ND) 4.0 license. Chapter 18 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing‑in‑Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978‑1‑032‑26749‑4 (hbk) ISBN: 978‑1‑032‑26750‑0 (pbk) ISBN: 978‑1‑003‑28974‑6 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003289746 Typeset in Times New Roman by codeMantra

CONTENTS

Editorial Board List of Figures List of Tables List of Contributors

ix x xii xiii

Introduction Chris Shei

1

PART I

Political Mind Engineering

9

1 Nostalgia as False Commemoration: How US Conservatives and White Supremacists Mind Engineer through Dog Whistle Politics Laila S. Dahan 2 “Trump”‑ing to the Capitol: Brainwashing through Social Media Rimi Nandy and Jhilli Tewary 3 The Chinese Communist Party’s Historical Resolutions as Mind‑Engineering Projects Heike Holbig 4 Identifying Partisan Efforts to Generate Authoritarian Legitimacy Joanna Rak

v

11 25

39 58

Contents

5 Political Legitimization of Hybrid Regimes: Chinese State Discourses on the Democratization of Post‑Handover Hong Kong Chi Kit Chan PART II

74

Commercial Mind Engineering

89

6 The Benefit of the Doubt: How Big Oil Makes Us Think William F. Schnell

91

7 Chain‑Effect Mind Engineering: The Multilayered Manipulation of Advertising Brian L. Schnell

105

8 On the Commodification of Sexual Wellness: Race, Gender, and the Engineering of Consent Kwasu D. Tembo

121

9 Manipulative Practices of Programming and Controlling Employee Behaviour in the Activities of Chinese Managers Pavel Deriugin, Liubov Lebedintseva, and Evgeny Kremnyov

137

10 Humor as a Mind‑Engineering Tool in the Digital Age: The Case of Stand‑Up Comedy Joanna Ut‑Seong Sio and Luis Morgado da Costa

153

PART III

Media, Culture, and Mind Engineering

167

11 Corporate Colonization, Geopolitical Power Struggles, and Hypernudge – How Social Media Engineers Minds Till Neuhaus and Lee J. Curley

169

12 Red Tourism: Spirituality, Modernity, and Patriotism in China’s Tibet Kamila Hladíková

183

13 The Truth Lies In‑between: Mind Engineering in the 2020–2021 Indian Farmers’ Protest Sony Jalarajan Raj and Adith K. Suresh

197

14 Patriotism and Nationalism in Chinese Fansubbing Pin‑ling Chang vi

212

Contents

15 Pop Cultural Media as a Resource for Fostering Responsible World Citizens Valentin Werner and Theresa Summer PART IV

224

Linguistic and Semiotic Analysis of Mind Engineering

243

16 Newspeak and Cyberspeak: The Haunting Ghosts of the Russian Past Kristina Šekrst and Sandro Skansi

245

17 Understanding the Roles of Violent Extremist Dream Accounts in Radicalization and Recruitment Noor Aqsa Nabila Mat Isa, Nurul Miza Mohd Rashid, and Ahmad El‑Muhammady

259

18 Framing and Metaphor in Media Discourse: Multi‑Layered Metaphorical Framings of the COVID‑19 Pandemic in Newspaper Articles Tetsuta Komatsubara

274

19 Uncovering the Linguistic Agenda of ‘Hindi’stan: The Political Implications of Language Imposition in India Raisun Mathew

293

20 Language Corruption in Chinese: A Cognitive Linguistic Perspective Haidan Wang and Albert H. W. Jiang

310

21 Visual Language and Mind Engineering: The Case of Multicultural Emojis Amin Heidari

329

22 Brainwashing at Home and Abroad in Cold War Fiction and Film David Seed

352

PART V

Mind Engineering in Educational Setting

367

23 Engineering the Mind of a Child: The Potency of Japanese Language Lessons in Colonized Korea Catherine Ryu

369

24 Creating ‘Ignorance of Ignorance’ through School Education: A Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Victimhood Nationalism and Educational Ignorance in Japan Mitsuhiro Tada vii

386

Contents

25 Language, Ideologies, Discrimination, and Afrocentric‑Focused, Critical Language Awareness Writing Curricula for African American Language and Akan Language Speakers Shenika Hankerson and Monica A. Obiri‑Yeboah

404

26 Navajo Students’ Perspectives of Their Heritage Language and Translingual Identity Yi‑Wen Huang

418

27 Linguistically Responsive Instruction and Ideologies in Preservice Teacher Preparation Laura Mahalingappa, Jessica B. Crawford, and Astrid Sierra

431

Index

447

viii

EDITORIAL BOARD

Said Faiq, Nadia Hamrouni, Pascal Hohaus, Amy Leshinsky, Ekaterina Lesnikovskaya, Sarah MacDonald, Mariam Orkodashvili, Cringuta Irina Pelea, Tiyasha Sengupta, Darcy Sperlich, Vio‑ leta Stojičić, Vivienne Tailor, Verena Zipperer, Karin Zotzmnn

ix

FIGURES

2.1 Word cloud for Donald Trump’s tweets 36 7.1 Graphical representation of crosstab data from weighted (000) 115 sections of Table 7.1 7.2 Hypothetical sales pitch using crosstab data from index sections in Table 7.1 116 15.1 Basic requirements for critical literacies pedagogies focusing on language ideologies 234 17.1 Analytical model used in exploring the dream accounts in Daesh propaganda materials262 18.1 Changes in the number of examples and new infections 286 18.2 Change in framings of authorial texts 286 18.3 Change in framings of quoted texts 287 288 18.4 Change in frequency of the war framing in authorial texts 288 18.5 Change in frequency of the war framing in quoted texts 289 18.6 Change in frequency of the journey framing in authorial texts 289 18.7 Change in frequency of the journey framing in quoted texts 313 20.1 A post in Jinri Toutiao titled with 灵活居住者 ‘flexible dweller’ 20.2 The Qingdao sub‑district announcement issuing a warning to those who 316 恶意不买房 ‘­spitefully refuse to buy real estate’ 20.3 Conceptual blending of Example 6: Weifang and Lei Feng 319 20.4 The mental spaces of 失业(者) ‘laid‑off’ and its related phrases 320 20.5 The blended space for 维修性拆除 ‘dismantled for the purposes of maintenance’ 321 20.6 The mental spaces of ‘lockdown’ and its related Chinese terms that are used 322 20.7 The mental spaces of 恶意+ 攻击 ‘spitefully attack’ 323 20.8 The mental spaces of 恶意+ 看病 ‘see a doctor with malice’ 324 21.1 Exhibition of Humanæ project in Valencia, Spain 337 21.2 Leonardo da Vinci’s The Vitruvian Man 340 21.3 The Vitruvian Man by Cesare Cesariano 341 21.4 Geoffroy Tory’s The Vitruvian Man 342

x

List of Figures

21.5 Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa’s The Vitruvian Man 21.6 An AR Emoji laid over Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man 21.7 A Bitmoji laid over Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa’s Vitruvian Man 21.8 An emoji laid over Geoffroy Tory’s Vitruvian Man 21.9 A Meta avatar laid over Cesare Cesariano’s Vitruvian Man 24.1 Map titled ‘Air Strikes in Mainland Japan: Number of Victims by Aerial Bombing’ in the Y ­ amakawa Illustrated Catalogue of Japan History 24.2 Table titled ‘Pacific War Damage: Number of Victims’ in the Yamakawa Illustrated Catalogue of Japan History 24.3 Map titled ‘① The Japanese islands (Ⅱ)’ in the New Detailed Atlas for Upper Secondary School Students

xi

342 343 344 344 345 393 396 398

TABLES

2.1 LIWC cognition category and subcategories score 4.1 A regime’s legitimacy claims in the Polish state media during the 2020–2021 mobilization for women’s reproductive rights 7.1 Example of standard crosstab report layout using syndicated data from market research firms (for the purposes of this example, all numbers are fictional) 15.1 Common racial stereotypes 15.2 Sociolinguistic studies on animated telecinematic artifacts for children 15.3 Octonauts main characters overview 17.1 Discursive analysis of dream accounts in Daesh magazines 18.1 Metaphorical sources of the coronavirus 19.1 Total (first, second, and third Language) speakers of selected languages in India (Census 2011) 23.1 Education ordinances issued during the Colonial Era 23.2 Line distributions of the 20 My Precious Granddaughter Cards 23.3 The quantitative narrative structure of ‘The Song of Clementine’ 25.1 The curriculum’s session topics and goals

xii

34 66 114 226 231 233 265 283 295 370 374 381 409

CONTRIBUTORS

Chi Kit Chan is Associate Professor at the School of Communication at the Hang Seng University of Hong Kong. His research interest covers journalism, mass communication, media sociology, and cultural identities. Chi Kit’s articles are seen in various peer‑reviewed journals – Journalism, Media, Culture and Society, Journal of Contemporary China, Chinese Journal of Communication, and China Perspectives, for example. He is the leading author of Hong Kong Media: Interaction Between Media, State and Civil Society (Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 288 pages, published in 2022). Chi Kit is the guest editor of a special issue of the Chinese Journal of Communication –  ‘Anti‑extradition law and beyond: the role of media and communication in the crisis of Hong Kong’ (Vol. 15, Issue 3, 2022). He also received the Emerald Awards Literati – Outstanding Re‑ viewer from Emerald Publishing in 2022.  Pin‑ling Chang is Professor at the Department of Applied Linguistics and Language Studies, Chung Yuan Christian University (CYCU), Taiwan. She earned her PhD degree in Translation Studies from Newcastle University, UK. Her research interests focus on identity and ideology in translation and interpreting history and practice in the Chinese language world. Her publi‑ cations have appeared in journals, such as The Translator and Linguistica Antverpiensia, New Series – Themes in Translation Studies (LANS–TTS). She has also contributed to two other Rout‑ ledge Handbooks and another three edited volumes published by Routledge, Palgrave Macmillan, and Cambridge Scholars. Jessica B. Crawford is a Ph.D. student in Applied Linguistics and Language Education at the University of Maryland, College Park, USA. Her research interests include TESOL teacher edu‑ cation, the literacy and biliteracy development of multilingual youth, and asset‑based, culturally sustaining pedagogies. Lee J. Curley submitted his PhD in January 2018 and graduated with his PhD in June of the same year. Lee is currently a lecturer in applied Psychology in the School of Life and Health Sciences

xiii

List of Contributors

at Glasgow Caledonian University, UK. His research interests include forensic cognition, legal psychology, and decision science. Lee has published over 20 articles in highly respected journals and has engaged with the media extensively, being written about in the UK press (the Telegraph, the Times, and The Guardian) and being interviewed on BBC radio. Laila S. Dahan is Adjunct Professor of writing and ESL specialist in the Professional Writing Department at Woodbury University in Burbank, California, USA. She taught writing for 14 years in the UAE at the American University of Sharjah. She holds MAs in political science and TESOL and a PhD in applied linguistics from the University of Exeter. Her research interests are multidis‑ ciplinary including global English, language and identity, women and Islam, politics of the Middle East, and social justice. Pavel Deriugin has been working at St. Petersburg State University since 2010. In 2022, he be‑ came Head of the Russian‑Chinese Center for Interdisciplinary Research at the Sociological In‑ stitute of the Russian Academy of Sciences. His areas of teaching and research interests include modern Chinese sociology and the sociology of organizations. He is particularly interested in the study of human capital in modern societies, especially in Russia and China. He has over 200 papers published. Ahmad El‑Muhammady is Assistant Professor and Head of Responsible Research and Innovation at the International Institute of Islamic Thought and Civilisation (ISTAC‑IIUM). Besides that, he holds various external positions such as Associate Fellow at the International Centre for Counter‑ Terrorism (ICCT), The Hague, Netherlands; International Advisory Committee Member at the Global Peace Institute (GPI), United Kingdom; and Associate Research Fellow at the Accounting Research Institute (ARI), Universiti Teknologi MARA (UiTM), Malaysia. Dr. Ahmad also testi‑ fied as an expert witness in the Malaysian High Court in various terrorism cases involving former members of Jama’ah Islamiyyah (JI), al‑Qaeda Malaysia, and ISIS‑affiliated groups. Additionally, he is a panel member in the prison rehabilitation program for individuals detained under terrorism laws and a consultant to develop Malaysia’s National Action Plan on Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism (NAPPCVE). Shenika Hankerson is Assistant Professor of Applied Linguistics and Language Education in the Department of Teaching and Learning, Policy and Leadership at the University of Maryland‑ College Park. Her research explores the intersection of race, language, and equity, with a focus on African American Language (AAL) and college writing. Dr.  Hankerson’s research has two strands: (1) examining how critical and Afrocentric college writing practices and policies shape the writing experiences and outcomes of AAL speakers, and (2) examining how college writing instructors develop dispositions about teaching and learning that foster equitable and just writ‑ ing environments for AAL speakers. Her published and forthcoming scholarship can be found in peer‑reviewed journals such as the Journal of Second Language Writing, Written Communi‑ cation, and Language Arts Journal of Michigan and edited collections published by Routledge, Oxford University Press, and Utah State University Press. Amin Heidari shifted his focus to the world of art and theater after obtaining his law degree from the University of Kashan. He pursued a master’s degree in Theatre Directing at the Tehran Univer‑ sity of Art. He is now a PhD candidate at Macquarie University, analyzing the performativity of

xiv

List of Contributors

emojis in digital communications. Specifically, he is exploring how emojis, in their aesthetic en‑ gagement within everyday digital interactions, contribute to the propagation of macro ideologies like neoliberalism and principles of the capitalist market. His other field of interest is film studies, and his article on the anti‑Nietzschean nature of the cinema of Abel Ferrara is under review. Kamila Hladíková graduated from sinology at Charles University in Prague and completed her PhD in 2011. Since 2007, she has been teaching Chinese literature and film at the Palacky Univer‑ sity Olomouc. In her research, she focused primarily on the representation of Tibet in the PRC and contemporary Chinese popular culture. She published articles on Tibet‑related literature and film in the PRC and translated works of modern Chinese and Sinophone Tibetan fiction. She is also the author of the first Czech language teaching material on modern Chinese literature and co‑author of the first Czech lexicon of the Sinophone cinema. Heike Holbig has been trained in Modern and Classical Chinese Studies, macroeconomics, and social sciences in Erlangen, Beijing, and Heidelberg, where she obtained her PhD in 1997. Since then, she has worked as a researcher on Chinese politics at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies in Hamburg and as a professor of political science with a focus on Chinese and East Asian area studies at Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main. Her research interests include, among others, the role of language and ideology in the legitimation of party rule in the People’s Republic of China, Chinese domestic politics, state‑society relations, comparative authoritarian‑ ism, and growing efforts by the Xi Jinping leadership to shape global norms and global governance standards. Yi‑Wen Huang is a Professor of English and Linguistics at the University of New Mexico‑Gallup, USA. Her research interests include language anxiety, writing apprehension, second language ac‑ quisition, psycholinguistics, and Native American literacies. Albert H. W. Jiang received a Bachelor of Science and a Master of Engineering in Chemical and Biological Engineering from Princeton University. He is currently working as a biomedical scien‑ tist in New York City. Previously, Jiang was a senior news writer and associate editor at The Daily Princetonian, specializing in coverage of research, science, education, health, and health policy. Tetsuta Komatsubara is a lecturer at Kobe University, Japan. He received his PhD in linguistics from Kyoto University in 2015. His main fields of research are rhetoric, pragmatics, and cognitive linguistics with foci on communicative effects of metaphor and metonymy, conceptual motiva‑ tions for figurative understanding, and grammatical constructions of figurative language. He is the author of Retorikku to Imi no Sozosei: Kotoba no Itsudatsu to Ninchi Gengogaku (Rhetoric and Creativity in Meaning: Linguistic Deviation and Cognitive Linguistics, Kyoto University Press, 2016) and has published articles in Cognitive Linguistic Studies (John Benjamins), Journal of Cognitive Linguistics (The Japanese Cognitive Linguistics Association), Studies in Pragmatics (Pragmatics Society of Japan), and others. Evgeny Kremnyov graduated from Transbaikal State University in 2002 and worked at Irkutsk State Linguistic University. Since 2016 he has been working at Irkutsk State University. In 2022, he joined the work of the Russian‑Chinese Center for Interdisciplinary Studies of the Sociological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences as an associate researcher. He carries out teaching

xv

List of Contributors

and research in the following areas: sociology of management in China and transdisciplinary re‑ gionology in Asia Pacific. Much of his research focuses on China’s socio‑political system. To date, he has published more than 100 research papers. Liubov Lebedintseva graduated from St. Petersburg State University and has been working there since 2002. Since 2022 she has been an associate researcher at the Russian‑Chinese Center for Interdisciplinary Studies of the Sociological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences. She teaches and researches in the field of modern Chinese sociology and economic sociology and is particularly interested in the study of indigenization processes in Eastern societies’ social knowl‑ edge, especially in China. In total, more than 150 works have been published. Laura Mahalingappa is Associate Professor in the Applied Linguistics and Language Education program at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her research focuses broadly on the lan‑ guage and education of marginalized learners, incorporating sociolinguistic and critical linguistic and pedagogical perspectives into issues related to teacher preparation to support linguistically and culturally diverse learners and first and multilingual language acquisition. Noor Aqsa Nabila Mat Isa is Senior Lecturer based in the Department of English Language, Faculty of Languages and Linguistics, Universiti Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. She is also a Research Fellow at Rabdan Academy, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Her teaching and schol‑ arly interests are focused on the areas of Critical Discourse Studies, Social Semiotics, and Multi‑ modality. She is interested in multidisciplinary work and research involving (violent) extremism, (de)radicalization, religion, and politics, specifically on social media platforms. She is actively involved in various Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism initiatives in Malaysia, and she hopes to educate the general public about the dangers of (violent) extremism, equipping them with knowledge to resist extremist ideologies. Raisun Mathew is Assistant Professor of English at Chinmaya Vishwa Vidyapeeth (Deemed to be University) in India. He teaches and researches in English literature and language and has con‑ ducted his doctoral research in liminality and transition studies. He is the author of Zephyr: The Breeze of Love (2021) and In‑Between: Liminal Stories (2022), and the editor of Literature, Media, and Society: Scholarly Perspectives (2021), The Post‑Truth Era: Literature and Media (2021), Identity: Quest and Questions (2022), and Power, Politics, and People (2023). He has presented many research papers and guest lectures at hybrid international conferences held in Spain, Poland, the Philippines, Turkey, and different states in India. His research interests include identity studies, liminality, post‑truth, power politics, and religious studies. Nurul Miza Mohd Rashid is Assistant Professor at the International Islamic University of Malay‑ sia (IIUM). She has recently completed her PhD in Psychology at IIUM. Her thesis uncovered the risk factors of the radicalization process using Malaysian ex‑detainees and citizens as her research samples. Her main research interests include violent extremism and the radicalization process from a psychological point of view. Her other interests include exploring various psychological processes in media use and social issues permeating Malaysian society, including the intergroup tensions between Malaysians and migrants in Malaysia. Her most recent publication, ‘Examining the Effects of News Frames as a Risk Factor of Radicalisation’, is available in the Journal of Intel‑ lectual Discourse.

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List of Contributors

Luis Morgado da Costa received his PhD from the Nanyang Technological University, in Singa‑ pore. He is currently an Assistant Professor in Computational Linguistics at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands. His main research interests are Computational Lexical Semantics, Syntactic and Semantic Parsing, Educational Technology, and Digital Humanities. His work often employs multi‑ and cross‑lingual methodologies. He works mainly with English and Mandarin Chinese but has also worked with other languages such as Japanese, Portuguese, Kristang, Can‑ tonese, Coptic, Indonesian, and Abui. Rimi Nandy is a PhD Research Scholar at the School of Media, Communication and Culture, Jadavpur University, India. She has been teaching English Language and Literature at various institutions since  2011. Her research interests include Digital Humanities, Narratology, Media Studies, Postmodernism, Posthumanism, and Japanese Cultural Studies. She has published journal articles and book chapters in the field of digital humanities. Till Neuhaus works and researches at Bielefeld University, Germany. In his PhD project, he in‑ vestigates decision processes in the field of educational assessment. His research interests include the history of decision‑making sciences and the socio‑political negotiation of Nudging. Prior to his current occupation, he earned three separate master’s degrees – Political Communication, In‑ teramerican Studies, and Education – all from Bielefeld University. Monica A. Obiri‑Yeboah is a PhD student of Applied Linguistics and Language Education at the University of Maryland College Park. She seeks to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion in education through her research and teaching. Specifically, her research focuses on language policy in education (especially in multilingual settings), black language, and language use in specific contexts. She has published with the Nordic Journal of African Studies and Current Issues in Language Planning. Sony Jalarajan Raj is Assistant Professor at the Department of Communication, MacEwan Uni‑ versity, Edmonton, Canada. Dr. Raj is a professional journalist turned academic who has worked in different demanding positions as a reporter, special correspondent, and producer in several news media channels. Joanna Rak is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Political Science and Journalism of Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan. From 2016 to 2023, she was a visiting researcher at CEU San Pablo University in Madrid, Universidad de Navarra, Charles III University of Madrid, and Val‑ ladolid University. She is the principal investigator of the research projects ‘The Culture of Po‑ litical Violence Dynamics of Anti‑austerity Movements in Europe’, ‘Contentious Politics and Neo‑Militant Democracy’, and ‘Civil Disorder in Pandemic‑ridden European Union’ financed by the National Science Centre, Poland. The laureate of Scholarship by the Minister of Science and Higher Education for outstanding young scientists, the Barbara Skarga Scholarship, the START Scholarship by the Foundation for Polish Science, and the POLITYKA Scientific Award. The author of the book Theorizing Cultures of Political Violence in Times of Austerity: Studying Social Movements in Comparative Perspective (Routledge, New York 2018) and co‑editor of Neo‑­ militant Democracies in Post‑communist Member States of the European Union (Routledge, New York 2022). Her research interests include political violence, militant democracy, democratic and nondemocratic regimes, contentious politics, and protest movements.

xvii

List of Contributors

Catherine Ryu is Associate Professor at Michigan State University. Her teaching and research interests encompass classical Japanese poetry, second language studies, game studies, digital hu‑ manities, global studies, translation studies, children’s literature, and diaspora studies. Recently, her research scope has broadened to include data visualization and human–machine collaborative writing. She is one of the co‑editors for Passing, Persuasion, Propaganda: Cultural Production and Coloniality in Japan’s East Asian Empire, published by the University of Hawaii Press in 2023. A key aspect of her ongoing research is the transnational and translingual translation of writ‑ ings by ethnic Koreans in China. Brian L. Schnell studied Cognitive Science, Psychology, and Marketing at Case Western Reserve University. Prior to his current role in consumer research, Brian worked in market research at Au‑ dacy – one of the nation’s largest radio companies – in support of its media sales team. His current research focuses on the exploration of trends in consumer sentiment during times of crisis. William F. Schnell (Bill) retired as a pastor after a 37‑year tenure serving three congregations in succession, including a term as President of the Ohio Council of Churches. He earned a Mas‑ ter of Arts degree from Central Michigan University and both Master of Divinity and Doctor of Ministry degrees from the Methodist Theological School in Ohio, USA. Since retirement Bill has completed a Graduate Certificate in Social Justice from Harvard University, where continuing coursework supports his independent research. In 2022 he published Migration and the Metaprob‑ lem of Climate Change based upon research that had previously informed a presentation at the 2021 Annual Symposium of the Harvard Extension Alumni Association and a TEDx Talk at Case Western Reserve University. Bill is a trained activist with the Climate Reality Project. He is mar‑ ried to Nancy, and they have two grown children and three grandchildren. David Seed was educated at Cambridge, Leicester, and Hull universities and has taught in the Eng‑ lish Department of Liverpool University since 1977. He helped secure the transfer of the Science Fiction Foundation Archive to that university, one of the largest such collections in Europe. His published work includes editing scholarly editions (Edward Bulwer‑Lytton’s The Coming Race, for example) and critical collections on nuclear war, science fiction, and nineteenth‑century travel writing. His monographs include studies of Thomas Pynchon, Joseph Heller, and Ray Bradbury; an analysis of Science Fiction and the Cold War; a study of the interaction between the cinema and U.S. fiction up to the Second World War; and Brainwashing: The Fictions of Mind Control (2004). His main current projects are an edited collection of nineteenth‑century science fiction and a study of John Wyndham’s fiction. Kristina Šekrst has earned a PhD in Logic at the University of Zagreb. She holds master’s degrees in Philosophy, Comparative Linguistics, Cognitive Linguistics, and Croatian Language and Lit‑ erature. She is an author of an Ancient Egyptian grammar and a contributor to various papers and talks regarding philosophy, linguistics, logic, computer science, and film studies. She is currently teaching linguistic and philosophical courses at the University of Zagreb, along with volunteer‑ ing as a mentor in Caltech’s and University of Illinois at Urbana‑Champaign online courses. Her research interests comprise logic, comparative and historical linguistics, philosophy of science, ar‑ tificial intelligence and cognitive science, cosmology, film studies, and computational complexity. Astrid Sierra is a PhD student in Applied Linguistics and Language Education in the Department of Teaching and Learning Policy and Leadership at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her xviii

List of Contributors

research focuses on equitable spaces for bi/multilingual learners and teachers, teacher education, bilingual education, transnational bilingual teachers, TESOL, and language ideologies. Joanna Ut‑Seong Sio received her PhD from Leiden University, The Netherlands. She has worked in Hong Kong (Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong Baptist University) and Singapore (Nanyang Technological University) and is currently Associate Professor of Chinese linguistics at Palacký University Olomouc, The Czech Republic. Her main research focus is on the syntax and semantics of languages spoken in China (Mandarin, Cantonese, Min, Zhuang), especially in the area of noun phrase structure. She is also an improviser and a stand‑up comedian and is interested in the use of verbal arts in the training of communication skills. Sandro Skansi is Associate Professor in Logic at the University of Zagreb. He is the author of Introduction to Deep Learning (Springer, 2018) and Logic and Proofs (Element, Zagreb, 2016), serving also as the editor of Guide to Deep Learning Basics: Logical, Historical and Philosophi‑ cal Perspectives (Springer, 2020). He is a member of the Association for Symbolic Logic, the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, the SAT Association, and the Croatian Philosophical Society. His main research interests include artificial intelligence, philosophy and history of cybernetics and artificial intelligence, deep learning, reasoning, complexity, and logical satisfiability. Theresa Summer is Associate Professor of Teaching English as a Foreign Language at the Uni‑ versity of Bamberg, Germany. She completed her PhD at the University of Würzburg and worked as an English and Music teacher at secondary schools for several years. Her research interests comprise learner perspectives, critical language pedagogy and taboos, pop culture, global educa‑ tion, and grammar teaching and learning. She is co‑editor of the volume Taboos and Controversial Issues in Foreign Language Education (Routledge, 2023, with Christian Ludwig), co‑editor of the practitioners’ journal Englisch 5–10, and has been active as a developer of teaching materials. Adith K. Suresh is currently associating as a research assistant at the Department of Communica‑ tion, MacEwan University. Adith holds a master’s degree in English Language and Literature from Mahatma Gandhi University. His research interest includes Film Studies, Literary Criticism, and South Asian Cultural Studies. Mitsuhiro Tada, Professor of Sociology at Kumamoto University in Japan, works on sociological theory, history of sociology, and sociology of nationalism. He received the Young Investigator’s Award for The Temporal Construction of the Social World: Theory of Social Systems as Socio‑ logical Phenomenology (English title) from the Japan Association for the Study on the History of Sociology. He is presently researching the relationship between nationalism and language in sociological theory. His latest English publication, ‘Alfred Schutz on Race, Language, and Subjec‑ tivity: A Viennese Jewish Sociologist’s Lifeworld and Phenomenological Sociology within Transi‑ tion from Multinational Empire to Nation‑State’, appears in Kumamoto Journal of Humanities 4 (2023), 103–158. Kwasu D. Tembo’s eclectic and wide‑ranging research interests include – but are not limited to – comics studies, literary theory and criticism, and philosophy, particularly the so‑called ‘proph‑ ets of extremity’  –  Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida. He has published in Christo‑ pher Nolan’s The Prestige, in The Cinema of Christopher Nolan: Imagining the Impossible, eds. xix

List of Contributors

Jacqueline Furby and Stuart Joy (Columbia UP, 2015), and in Superman, in Postscriptum: An In‑ terdisciplinary Journal of Literary Studies (2017). He also has essays in Porn Studies; American, British, and Canadian Journal and Messengers from the Stars, as well as a monograph on the life and work of Genndy Tartakovsky for Bloomsbury titled Genndy Tartakovsky: Sincerity in Anima‑ tion. He is currently a full time lecturer at Lancaster University, UK. Jhilli Tewary is Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology, School of Arts and So‑ cial Studies, St. Xavier’s University. She has been teaching Psychology at various institutions since 2000. Her research interests encompass the fields of positive psychology, personality studies, and aggression. Dr.  Tewary’s scholarly contributions have been featured in numerous peer‑re‑ viewed journals, where she has shared valuable insights and findings related to these areas of study. Haidan Wang is Associate Professor at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. She is interested in cognitive linguistics, pragmatics, and many perspectives of Chinese as a second language (CSL), ranging from proficiency assessment to multimodal interactions at workplaces. Wang’s publica‑ tions cover CSL curriculum design, program evaluation, pedagogy, and technology‑assisted Chi‑ nese learning for specific purposes. She co‑authored the Intermediate to Advanced Level textbook, Chinese for Working Professionals, and co‑edited a volume, Chinese for Business and Profession‑ als in the Workplace: Reaching across Disciplines. Wang’s articles have also appeared in interna‑ tional journals and as chapters of books published by Springer and Routledge. Valentin Werner is Associate Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Bamberg, Germany. He studied at the universities of Bamberg, Limerick, and Cambridge and held previ‑ ous positions at Leipzig and Marburg. His research interests comprise stylistics, sociolinguistics, the study of variation and change, media linguistics, applied linguistics (including learner corpus research), and how linguistic insights can inform EFL education. He has co‑edited the award‑ winning volume Pop Culture in Language Education: Theory, Research, Practice (Routledge, 2021, with Friederike Tegge) and has published several articles on the language of TV series and song lyrics and their use in language education. He is the founding editor of the Journal of ­Language and Pop Culture.

xx

INTRODUCTION Chris Shei

At the time of this publication, ‘mind engineering’ is not a well‑defined or widely accepted concept within the scientific community, and its meaning can vary widely depending on the context. It can refer to the field of neuroengineering, which combines principles from neuroscience, engineer‑ ing, and computer science to develop technologies for understanding and manipulating the brain, often with a focus on enhancing cognitive functions or creating brain–computer interfaces. Some self‑help and personal development circles use the term to describe techniques and strategies for optimizing one’s cognitive and emotional processes. However, ‘mind engineering’ can also pertain to efforts to control or manipulate the human mind, including ideas related to brainwashing, mind control, or the use of advanced technologies to influence or alter people’s thoughts and behaviors. In this handbook, our primary focus is on the aspect of mind engineering related to mind control and manipulation. The Chinese internet, in stark contrast to global condemnation of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, has exhibited strong pro‑Russia, pro‑war, and pro‑Putin sentiments. Chinese social media users have hailed President Vladimir V. Putin as ‘Putin the Great’ and have criticized Russian anti‑war protesters as being influenced by the United States. They have resonated with Putin’s portrayal of Russia as a victim of Western aggression, which aligns with China’s narrative of being targeted by the West. Although the Chinese government has not explicitly endorsed Russia’s actions, its foreign policy has taken a more confrontational stance in recent years, shaping a generation of online nationalists (Li 2022). Wang (2020) calls attention to the profound transformation occur‑ ring within China’s digital landscape, particularly among its younger, tech‑savvy generation. She observes how the once‑vibrant online environment for open discourse, criticism, and debate has shifted toward a more nationalistic and state‑influenced platform. The impact of strict internet cen‑ sorship, government control, and the propagation of nationalistic narratives, according to Wang, have effectively stifled alternative perspectives and made it increasingly difficult for critical voices to be heard. Ric and Chen (2022) examine the alignment between Chinese state rhetoric and public opinion. It focuses on several recent socio‑political/geopolitical disputes involving the Chinese govern‑ ment, assessing the extent to which state rhetoric, often citing public opinion and citizens’ ‘hurt feelings’, genuinely reflects domestic public sentiment. The study involves a public opinion sur‑ vey in China, exploring citizens’ awareness, knowledge, and concern regarding these issues, such

1

DOI: 10.4324/9781003289746-1

Chris Shei

as criticisms against Mercedes‑Benz for quoting the Dalai Lama, the NBA boycott over a Hong Kong‑related tweet, pressure on Marriott for recognizing Taiwan as a country, and the govern‑ ment’s retaliation against Prague for meeting Taiwanese leaders. Their findings reveal that the Chinese government accurately represented the displeasure of domestic audiences, with citizens being well‑informed and advocating more forceful measures than those adopted. This suggests the impact of rising nationalism in China and challenges conventional assumptions about undemo‑ cratic governments’ actions being inconsistent with public opinion. The ‘hurt’ emotions of citizens are predominantly driven by nationalistic sentiment rather than personal experiences, emphasizing the effectiveness of state propaganda in shaping public opinion. Mattingly and Yao (2022) investigate the influence of emotionally resonant ‘soft’ propaganda, such as television dramas and viral social media content, by conducting experiments involving over 6,800 Chinese respondents exposed to actual propaganda videos. These videos, featuring nationalist messages endorsed by the Chinese Communist Party, were drawn from television dra‑ mas, state‑backed social media accounts, and state‑run newscasts. Contrary to prevailing theories suggesting propaganda’s lack of persuasiveness, their findings demonstrate that propaganda ef‑ fectively triggers emotions like anger, anti‑foreign sentiment, and behavioral changes, with the heightened anti‑foreign attitudes persisting for up to a week. Liu and Shao (2023) explore how autocratic leaders can influence public backing for war through the use of nationalist propaganda. By conducting two online survey experiments involving textual and musical propaganda content in mainland China, their findings indicate that nationalist propaganda effectively enhances public support for potential military conflicts related to the Taiwan Strait. The research reveals that propa‑ ganda contributes to an increase in respondents’ expectations of the benefits of winning wars, stirs up feelings of national pride, and decreases the sensitivity of respondents to the costs associated with warfare. Fortuin (2022) delves into Russia’s assertion that the war with Ukraine, initiated on Febru‑ ary 24, 2022, is a response to alleged genocide by the Ukrainian government led by Volodymyr Zelenskyy. It reveals that these claims are part of a broader rhetorical narrative painting Ukraine as a Russophobic Nazi regime conducting genocide against Russians, rooted in Russia’s propa‑ ganda tactics, drawing on historical World War II themes. Fortuin examines the evolution of this narrative across five stages, beginning in post‑Soviet Russia and Ukraine and further developing after Ukraine’s Orange and Maidan revolutions. Russia substantiates this narrative by referenc‑ ing established facts concerning the Donbas situation, Ukraine’s language laws, and right‑wing extremists in Ukraine, selectively highlighting certain ideas while downplaying others. However, the article exposes Russia’s arguments as invalid, relying on exaggeration, hyperbolic language, and falsehoods. The primary objective of this narrative is to garner support for Russia’s policies toward Ukraine and deflect potential criticism. Geissler et al. (2023) collected messages from Twitter expressing pro‑Russian sentiment, which garnered approximately 251,000 retweets reaching an audience of around 14.4 million users. They found that bots played a significant role in disseminating these pro‑Russian messages, particularly from countries like India, South Africa, and Pakistan, which abstained from voting on the United Nations Resolution ES‑11/1. About one‑fifth of the accounts responsible for spreading these mes‑ sages were identified as bots, which indicates the existence of a large‑scale Russian propaganda campaign on social media, underscoring the new societal threats it poses. Valcore et al. (2023) discuss the use of hostile rhetoric in politics, specifically focusing on the speeches and commu‑ nication tactics employed by former President Donald Trump. They emphasize how Trump’s use of denigration and deprecation was a prominent feature of his campaign and that these speech acts are part of a trifecta of violence that includes violent ideology, policy, and actions aimed at 2

Introduction

undermining political opponents. According to them, hate speech in political discourse can be problematic and, when contextualized within a broader environment of hostility, can serve as a precursor to more violent speech. Contemporary mind engineering is widespread, encompassing government propaganda for opinion manipulation and the impact of social media bots on shaping public perceptions. The once‑fictional notion of ‘brainwashing’ is now a tangible concern, transcending science fiction and conspiracy theories. By introducing the term ‘mind engineering’, our objective is to pave the way for a fresh academic discipline dedicated to investigating how modern society experiences ma‑ nipulation by authoritarian governments, charismatic leaders, commercial entities, and individuals who exploit advanced technology and extensive surveillance to influence human minds. Studying mind engineering scientifically necessitates a multidisciplinary approach, drawing from psychol‑ ogy to delve into cognitive, emotional, and clinical aspects, sociology to analyze group dynamics, and neuroscience to explore neural mechanisms. Communication and rhetorical studies are crucial for understanding propaganda and persuasive communication strategies, while political science investigates authoritarian regimes’ use of mind control tactics in political contexts. Philosophy and ethics provide insights into the ethical and moral dimensions of brainwashing, and legal scholars examine its legality and human rights implications. Historical analysis offers lessons from past cases, and AI and computational studies explore technology’s role in mind manipulation. A more comprehensive approach, encompassing the cognitive, social, ethical, and legal facets of mind engineering, is essential for achieving a holistic understanding of this intricate phenomenon. The Routledge Handbook of Language and Mind Engineering carries out a comprehensive exploration of the multifaceted ways in which language, media, and education are used to shape and influence human cognition and behavior. The book is organized into five sections, each delv‑ ing into a distinct aspect of mind engineering. The first section, Political Mind Engineering, in‑ vestigates how political ideologies are promoted and manipulated through language, including the use of dog whistles and Twitter. The second section, Commercial Mind Engineering, focuses on the role of advertising and corporate influence in shaping our perceptions and desires. Media, Culture, and Mind Engineering, the third section, delves into the ways in which platforms like social media can engineer thoughts and opinions on a global scale. The fourth section, Linguistic and Semiotic Analysis of Mind Engineering, explores the language and symbolism employed to engineer minds, touching on issues like extremism, media framing, and language corruption. Finally, the fifth section, Mind Engineering in Educational Setting, examines how language and education are employed to influence students’ beliefs and identities, in both historical and con‑ temporary contexts. Chapter 1, titled Nostalgia as False Commemoration, uncovers how US conservatives and white supremacists utilize dog whistle politics to influence and manipulate their followers, ap‑ pealing to deep‑seated fears and desires. Laila Suleiman Dahan examines the role of nostalgia in crafting inaccurate visions of the past, shedding light on the tactics used by these political actors in the current political landscape. Chapter 2, ‘Trump’‑ing to the Capitol, delves into the impact of social media on brainwashing and the spread of right‑wing populism, with a focus on the case of Donald Trump’s tweets and the ‘Save America’ Rally speech. Rimi Nandy and Jhilli Tewary dissect the use of social media platforms to create ‘epistemic bubbles’ and manipulate truth, leading to the polarization of beliefs in a post‑truth era. Chapter 3, ‘The Chinese Communist Party’s Historical Resolutions as Mind‑Engineering Projects’, explores how the Chinese Communist Party utilizes linguistic strategies to engineer minds. Heike Holbig investigates the genre of Party literature represented by historical resolutions 3

Chris Shei

and reveals their mind‑engineering functions, which reshape historical reality, instill ideological ­orthodoxy, and prime audiences for a particular interpretation of history and leadership. Chapter 4, Identifying Partisan Efforts to Generate Authoritarian Legitimacy, offers a theoreti‑ cal tool for measuring partisan efforts to generate a regime’s legitimacy, with a focus on Polish state‑led mind engineering. Joanna Rak presents a methodological approach to differentiate be‑ tween democratic and authoritarian frames, shedding light on cognitive and behavioral aspects of public involvement in supporting political systems. Chapter 5, Political Legitimization of Hybrid Regimes, takes a closer look at the political legiti‑ mization of hybrid regimes through the case of post‑handover Hong Kong. Chi Kit Chan explores the reconstruction of nationalism and democracy in Chinese state discourses, illustrating how hybrid regimes respond to democratic aspirations and international values. Chapter 6, The Benefit of the Doubt, takes a close look at how the fossil fuel industry has con‑ sistently sowed doubt regarding climate change, effectively casting a shadow over the scientific consensus. William F. Schnell examines the tactics employed by the industry and sheds light on the psychology behind the muted public response to this existential threat. Chapter 7, Chain‑Effect Mind Engineering, broadens the scope of advertising manipulation by exploring the interplay between advertisers and media firms. Brian L. Schnell unveils the concept of chain‑effect mind engineering, wherein both advertisers and consumers are manipulated through advertising processes, offering a fresh perspective on how advertisements reach the public. Chapter 8, On the Commodification of Sexual Wellness, delves into the exploitation of gender and race in the marketing of sexual wellness products. Kwasu D. Tembo scrutinizes the case of a sex‑toy company and reveals how it employs strategies of engineered consent from traditional marketing, shedding light on the consequences for both consumers and contemporary identity politics. Chapter 9, Manipulative Practices of Programming and Controlling Employee Behavior in the Activities of Chinese Managers, explores the world of managerial practices in Chinese organiza‑ tions. Pavel Deriugin, Liubov Lebedintseva, and Evgeny Kremnyov dissect the manipulative strat‑ egies used by managers, highlighting their adaptability and effectiveness in achieving behavioral control. Chapter 10, Humor as a Mind‑Engineering Tool in the Digital Age, takes a lighter but equally significant perspective, focusing on stand‑up comedy as a tool for challenging mainstream ide‑ ologies. Joanna Ut‑Seong Sio and Luis Morgado da Costa investigate the intentions of stand‑up comedians, advantages and drawbacks of disseminating comedy on digital platforms, and the limi‑ tations of topics used for mental manipulation. Chapter 11, Corporate Colonization, Geopolitical Power Struggles, and Hypernudge, authored by Till Neuhaus and Lee J. Curley, delves into the intriguing realm of social media as a mind engineering platform. It explores the use of nudging and the emerging concept of hypernudging to understand how social media induces behavioral changes. By dissecting case studies involving Facebook and TikTok, the authors reveal the underlying motivations, linking economic interests for Facebook and geopolitical factors for TikTok. In Chapter 12, Red Tourism: Spirituality, Modernity, and Patriotism in China’s Tibet, Kamila Hladíková takes us on a journey into the enigmatic perceptions of Tibet. This chapter examines the portrayal of Tibet on Western social media platforms during the COVID‑19 pandemic, as shared by Tibetan influencers. Hladíková scrutinizes the role these vlogs play in promoting Tibet as a modern and spiritually significant destination, deeply intertwined with Chinese identity and political narratives.

4

Introduction

Chapter 13, The Truth Lies In‑between: Mind Engineering in the 2020–2021 Indian Farmers’ Protest, authored by Sony Jalarajan Raj and Adith K. Suresh, offers an illuminating perspective on the role of social media in shaping narratives during the 2020–2021 Indian Farmers’ Protest. It uncovers the interplay of identity, nationalism, and communication technologies, exploring how they led to the polarization of public opinion and a realm of misinformation. In Chapter 14, Patriotism and Nationalism in Chinese Fansubbing, Pin‑ling Chang takes us into the world of Chinese fansubbing. Exploring the ideologically charged realm of subtitles in foreign films and TV shows, Chang examines the manipulation of content to convey Chinese nationalism and patriotism. The chapter unveils how social media, especially platforms like Facebook, has become a canvas for shaping national image and identity. Chapter 15, Pop Cultural Media as a Resource for Fostering Responsible World Citizens, au‑ thored by Valentin Werner and Theresa Summer, embarks on a journey through language educa‑ tion and pop cultural media. It sheds light on the role of media in molding language learners, underlining the need for an anti‑discriminatory approach. The authors argue that language educa‑ tion plays a pivotal role in creating responsible global citizens who value freedom of expression and independent thought. Chapter 16, Newspeak and Cyberspeak: The Haunting Ghosts of the Russian Past, steps into the fascinating realm of cyberspeak and newspeak with Kristina Šekrst and Sandro Skansi. This chapter explores the lingering traces of cyberspeak’s cybernetic origins in modern science and its subtle influence on our thoughts. Drawing a parallel with newspeak, the authors dissect the theory of speech acts to analyze how words shape our perceptions. They also examine contemporary Russian public communication, specifically Putin’s speeches, to uncover the performative aspects of newspeak. Chapter 17, Understanding the Roles of Violent Extremist Dream Accounts in Radicalization and Recruitment, authored by Noor Aqsa Nabila Mat Isa, Nurul Miza Mohd Rashid, and Ahmad El‑Muhammady, delves into the uncharted territory of dream accounts in the discourse of vio‑ lent extremism. They explore how dream accounts serve as a potent tool in Daesh’s recruitment strategy. By integrating approaches from critical discourse studies, psychology, and ideology, the chapter aims to shed light on the role of dream accounts in radicalization and recruitment. In Chapter 18, Framing and Metaphor in Media Discourse: Multi‑Layered Metaphorical Framings of the COVID‑19 Pandemic in Newspaper Articles, Tetsuta Komatsubara takes us on a journey through the multi‑layered world of metaphorical framings in media discourse. This chapter reveals how journalists wield metaphors to shape public perceptions and beliefs regard‑ ing the COVID‑19 pandemic. By analyzing the evolving frames in Japanese newspaper articles from 2020 to 2021, the author highlights the influence of media discourse on public opinion and social issues. Chapter 19, Uncovering the Linguistic Agenda of ‘Hindi’stan: The Political Implications of Language Imposition in India, authored by Raisun Mathew, delves into the intricate relationship between politics and language in India. By dissecting recent language policies, Mathew seeks to unveil the historical, political, and linguistic motives behind the imposition of Hindi over regional languages. The chapter scrutinizes how language can be a tool of dominance and division, as well as a means of cultural preservation and unification. In Chapter 20, Language Corruption in Chinese: A Cognitive Linguistic Perspective, Haidan Wang and Albert H. W. Jiang embark on a linguistic exploration of language corruption in China. They redefine linguistic putrefaction as a cognitive phenomenon that distorts language for po‑ litical, ideological, or economic purposes. Using cognitive linguistic concepts, they unveil how

5

Chris Shei

corrupted language manipulates mental spaces and reshapes perceptions, ultimately distorting ­ordinary language within societal discourses. Chapter 21, Visual Language and Mind Engineering: The Case of Multicultural Emojis, au‑ thored by Amin Heidari, examines multicultural emojis as a form of visual language and their role in neoliberal mind engineering. Heidari delves into how multicultural emojis, which often conform to Euro‑centric standards, reinforce notions of diversity while upholding traditional West‑ ern ideals. The chapter investigates the use of color categorization and the Vitruvian Man body template in these emojis, revealing their impact on contemporary discourses of diversity and white supremacy. In Chapter 22, Brainwashing at Home and Abroad in Cold War Fiction and Film, David Seed takes us on a journey through the portrayal of brainwashing in American and British fiction and film since the 1950s. Seed delves into the origins of ‘brainwashing’, first introduced through trans‑ lation from Chinese and its subsequent portrayal as a menacing technique of mind control. By ana‑ lyzing works like Richard Condon’s The Manchurian Candidate and science fiction classics such as The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Seed explores how the concept of brainwashing infiltrated popular culture and its impact on American and British societies. In Chapter 23, Engineering the Mind of a Child, Catherine Ryu unravels the strategic use of language education in colonized Korea during Imperial Japan’s rule (1910–1945). Ryu’s explora‑ tion focuses on the establishment of the Japanese language as ‘the national language’ in Korea and the psychological effects of this imperialization policy on colonized individuals. Through cultural representations like My Precious Granddaughter and ‘The Song of Clementine’, Ryu uncovers the potent mind engineering methods employed to assimilate Korean subjects into Japanese identity. The chapter centers on the experiences of children in this mind‑altering process, highlighting the emotional and psychological consequences. In Chapter 24, Creating ‘Ignorance of Ignorance’ Through School Education, Mitsuhiro Tada explores the intricate link between school education and nationalism from a sociological perspec‑ tive. Tada investigates how school education creates ‘ignorance of ignorance’ by promoting a spe‑ cific viewpoint, particularly regarding matters critical to nationalism. Focusing on Japan’s school materials related to the Asia‑Pacific War, the chapter examines how educational ignorance, espe‑ cially victimhood nationalism, is cultivated. Tada argues that this process of educational ignorance contributes to nation‑building and the perpetuation of nationalism, highlighting its implications for memory wars. In Chapter 25, Language, Ideologies, Discrimination, and Afrocentric‑Focused, Critical Lan‑ guage Awareness Writing Curricula for African American Language and Akan Language Speak‑ ers, Shenika Hankerson and Monica A. Obiri‑Yeboah delve into the world of Afrocentric‑focused, critical language awareness (CLA) curricula and their impact on African American Language (AAL)‑speaking students’ writing skills. The authors emphasize the need for college writing in‑ structors to adopt such curricula and provide guidance on designing Afrocentric‑focused, CLA curricula tailored to AAL speakers. The chapter also explores the potential of these curricula for broader K–12 writing contexts and the Ghanaian Akan language‑speaking population, offering a blueprint for dismantling discrimination against AAL in educational settings. In Chapter 26, Navajo Students’ Perspectives of Their Heritage Language and Translingual Identity, Yi‑Wen Huang delves into the experiences of Navajo students near the Navajo reser‑ vation who grapple with the loss of their heritage language. By analyzing their reflections and stories, Huang highlights the impact of language loss, emphasizing the desire to reconnect with their cultural roots. The chapter explores the complexities of translingual identities among Navajo students, shedding light on the role of language in shaping their identity. 6

Introduction

In Chapter 27, Linguistically Responsive Instruction and Ideologies in Preservice Teacher Preparation, authors Laura Mahalingappa, Jessica B. Crawford, and Astrid Sierra delve into criti‑ cal approaches to teacher preparation with a focus on developing positive language ideologies. They emphasize the importance of addressing language biases held by teachers who may view minoritized languages and dialects negatively. By promoting linguistically responsive instruc‑ tion (LRI), this chapter aims to equip teachers with the knowledge and consciousness needed to support the linguistic diversity that students bring into the classroom. The authors advocate for asset‑based approaches to teaching and provide insights on how to prepare teachers for linguisti‑ cally diverse classrooms. The Routledge Handbook of Language and Mind Engineering offers a comprehensive explora‑ tion of the intricate interplay between language, cognition, and societal influence across diverse domains. By delving into various chapters, readers are exposed to a multifaceted analysis of how language serves as a tool for molding minds and engineering cultural and ideological constructs. The handbook provides an in‑depth examination of linguistic strategies used in shaping public opinion, the impacts of historical events on language, and the complex relationships between lan‑ guage and nationalism, identity, and social justice. These chapters, informed by a wealth of ex‑ pertise, offer profound insights into the role of language in controlling and manipulating human thought, making it an indispensable resource for scholars, educators, and anyone interested in understanding the dynamics of language and its influence on the human mind.

Acknowledgments I wish to express my sincere gratitude to Andrea Hartill and Iola Ashby from Routledge for their unwavering support and exceptional professionalism during this project. Special thanks are owed to Violeta Stojičić and Verena Zipperer, whose invaluable contributions as members of the Edito‑ rial Board went above and beyond. My heartfelt appreciation goes to Jim Schnell not only for his warm friendship but also for his constant supply of wisdom, wit, and professional guidance. I am also deeply thankful to Professor Sian Rees, Professor Tess Fitzpatrick, and Dr. Alexia Bowler at Swansea University for their remarkable administrative efficiency and consistent moral support, which proved instrumental in navigating numerous challenges.

References Fortuin, E. (2022). ‘Ukraine commits genocide on Russians’: the term ‘genocide’ in Russian propaganda. Russian Linguistics, 46(3), 313–347. Geissler, D., Bär, D., Pröllochs, N., & Feuerriegel, S. (2023). Russian propaganda on social media during the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. EPJ Data Science, 12(1), 35. https://doi.org/10.1140/epjds/s13688‑023‑00414‑5. Li, Yuan. (2022). Why the Chinese Internet Is Cheering Russia’s Invasion. The New York Times. https://www. nytimes.com/2022/02/27/business/china‑russia‑ukraine‑invasion.html. Liu, D., & Shao, L. (2023). Nationalist propaganda and support for war in an authoritarian context: Evidence from China. Journal of Peace Research. https://doi.org/10.1177/00223433231178849. Mattingly, D. C., & Yao, E. (2022). How soft propaganda persuades. Comparative Political Studies, 55(9), 1569–1594. https://doi.org/10.1177/00104140211047403. Neo, Ric, & Chen, Xiang (2022). State rhetoric, nationalism and public opinion in China. International Af‑ fairs, 98(4), 1327–1346. https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiac105. Valcore, J., Asquith, N. L., & Rodgers, J. (2023). ‘We’re led by stupid people’: Exploring Trump’s use of denigrating and deprecating speech to promote hatred and violence. Crime, Law, and Social Change, 80(3), 237–256. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10611‑023‑10085‑y. Wang, Yaqiu (2020). In China, the ‘Great Firewall’ Is Changing a Generation. Politico. https://www.politico. com/news/magazine/2020/09/01/china‑great‑firewall‑generation‑405385.

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PART I

Political Mind Engineering

1 NOSTALGIA AS FALSE COMMEMORATION How US Conservatives and White Supremacists Mind Engineer through Dog Whistle Politics Laila S. Dahan Introduction Dog whistle politics describes how words and implied meanings reach those for whom they are intended through speeches and the media according to Haney López (2014) (see also Khoo 2017; Mendelberg 2001; Saul 2018; Stanley 2015). Dog whistles, sometimes referred to as coded lan‑ guage or code words, are messages that are elusive in nature and can be heard and understood only by those ears trained to capture their subtle meaning (Åkerlund 2021; Khoo 2017). The term “dog whistle” is a metaphor that is a “reference to high‑pitched dog‑training whistles that use frequencies inaudible to humans” (Bonikowski and Zhang 2020: 2). These dog whistles have the additional effect of mind engineering or brainwashing their listeners as the propaganda effects of the dog whistles pull on the subconscious fears and longings of people. Additionally, many of the dog whistles harken to a time in the past, when life was “simpler” and white men were in charge. This nostalgia is not based on facts about the historical past of America or other western nations, but it draws in those who are offended and fearful that the present is being ruined by globalization, immigration, and civil rights for all. The dog whistles function as a tool to help politicians and white supremacists emphasize the divide between “us” – the ingroup – and “them” – the outgroup. Using a conceptual frame of nostalgia, this chapter will elucidate how conservative lawmakers, worldwide, utilize dog whistles in an effort to expand support for personal gain, while US white supremacists use them to increase their numbers, attain more power, and become mainstream. Nostalgia studies, as a conceptual structure, fused with dog whistles politics, offer insight into peo‑ ple’s attitudes about the past, their perceptions of history, and bygone traditions, while effectively being mind engineered. The chapter uses a simplified version of critical discourse analysis as a research tool to carry out qualitative content analysis. This type of analytical research predomi‑ nantly looks at how “social power abuse, dominance, and inequality are enacted and reproduced” in the social and political context (Van Dijk 1998: 164). This research assessed speeches, Tweets, media records, and manuscripts. It employed an interpretive methodology since the focus was on understanding the occurrences in a comprehensive way.



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DOI: 10.4324/9781003289746-3

Laila S. Dahan

Contextual Framework I: The Psychology of Nostalgia Nostalgia, generally, is a look back at the past with fond remembrance. According to extensive research, nostalgia can be social and satisfying, while offering cultural and psychological benefits (Menke 2017). Generally, nostalgia is viewed as a positive emotion that can improve people’s views on life and may even diminish feelings of human peril (see Behler et al. 2021; Routledge et al. 2008). Part of the longing for the past is that the time before is depicted as a world where all the people lived with the same belief systems and traditions (Duyvendak 2011; Steenvoordena and Harteveld 2018). However, there is a false assumption that diversity was not part of that past ­(Parrillo 1994). The US began on land that belonged to Native Americans, and it was further diver‑ sified by the African slaves imported by white Americans. The truth about America’s multicultural past is hidden because, as Appleby (1992: 425) argues, those “exotic cultures of Africans and Native Americans could not be incorporated” into US history, because that would have ­undermined the tale of American evolution and exceptionalism. Nostalgia, although not obviously political, can turn “darker” when an ingroup determines the “vision for society” while disregarding or threatening those “declared members of outgroups” (Menke and Wulf 2021: 239). There tend to be negative consequences when the nostalgia is group based and that group refuses to accept those seen as the outgroup or “other” (Behler et al. 2021). While individual nostalgia can be positive, there is a very different psychological profile among group‑based nostalgia. In recent years, the sentimental longing for the past has been exploited for emotional manipula‑ tion. We are currently living in a time when many “white Americans feel free to speak openly of their nostalgia for an age when their cultural, political, and economic dominance” was the norm (Alexander 2020: xi). According to Bonikowski and Stuhler (2022: 1), these “nostalgic appeals to an idealized past are commonly associated with radical‑right discourse” and are used as a method of persuasion (Lammers and Baldwin 2020). Research has found that populist and conservative parties often use nostalgia to compare the present negatively to the past (Steenvoordena and Harteveld 2018). In the US, for example, the use of “nostalgia to frame exclusionary nationalist and authoritarian appeals, is limited to the ­radical‑right” (Bonikowski and Stuhler 2022: 1). They are successful because they latch on to the negative attitudes of white Americans toward the increasing numbers of people of color in the US population (Hooghe and Dassonneville 2018; Major et al. 2018; Mutz 2018). Slogans used by right‑wing populists call for a return to the past. Former president Trump used nostalgia as an appeal to his supporters; he tugged on their anxieties as an ingroup – white ­Americans – that outgroups – including immigrants, Asian Americans, African Americans, and people of color – should be feared as they are a threat (Behler et al. 2021) to their “safety and stability” (Menke and Wulf 2021: 246).

Contextual Framework II: Dog Whistles Dog whistle politics have the distinction of being “inaudible” to those they might “alienate” ­(Goodin and Saward 2005: 471). Dog whistles are coded words with sometimes hidden or implicit meanings – essentially, they operate as strategies to communicate secretly with those able to decode their significance (Haney López 2014; Khoo 2017). Haney López (2016) describes dog whistling as “speaking in code to a target audience.” In addition, using dog whistles allows speakers to step away from “politically correct” speech but still maintain that they are not saying anything untoward (Mendelberg 2001) allowing for plausible deniability (HoSang and Lowndes 2019; Saul 2017). 12

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These coded words are all a part of a larger approach wherein “power is the game” (Haney López 2016: 11). Coded racism, according to Haney López (2016: 15), operates by offering up ste‑ reotypes that suggest that “white people are innocent, hardworking, endangered, and ‘real’ Ameri‑ cans; while people of color are predatory, lazy, dangerous, and perpetual foreigners.” Republican politicians have been using dog whistles that emphasize the superiority of white Americans over all other minorities, especially African Americans, for years as a way to appeal to their white supporters (Phillips 2017: 1867). The purpose of these dog whistles is to inspire negativity and hostility toward those who are not white (Haney López 2014: ix). Furthermore, this racial type of discourse tends to increase concerns about a racial threat to whites, leading to intensified racial hostility (Hurwitz and Peffley 2005; White 2007). Today, coded language is utilized by the far‑right to convey hidden meanings to fellow far‑right sympathizers (Åkerlund 2021; Kien 2019). These dog whistles are not new and have been used to stir up resentment among white voters because they subtly entice racial animosity through manip‑ ulation. Some examples of this are seen in the “southern strategy” and “silent majority” outlined by Nixon, in addition to the 1990s rhetoric that promoted “tough on crime” and “law and order” (see Bonikowski and Zhang 2020). Without even mentioning race, coded language sends racial messages through allusions to “culture, behavior, and class”; in fact, America’s “political milieu is saturated with ugly racial innuendo” (Haney López 2014: 129). There are multitudes of examples offering glimpses into the world of racist dog whistles. Space limitations prohibit discussing them all in depth; therefore, an overview of the most common will be included here. Nixon started the “law and order” and “tough on crime” dog whistles, which resonated with white voters who were unhappy about the civil rights movement (Bolden 2015). Reagan continued this trend by using the terms “welfare queens” and “strapping young buck” to prop up the stereotype that African Americans were using welfare at the expense of white people’s needs (Ericksen 2019). Other terms used as dog whistles over the years have included “inner city,” “welfare,” “ghetto queen,” “thug,” “hoodlums,” “looters,” “illegal alien,” “anchor baby,” “hardworking Americans,” “decent folks,” and “heartland.” Trump expanded on the notion of im‑ migration and its “illegality” by harping on “intruders,” “illegals,” and how they were attempting to enter “our” country (Nacos et al. 2020). The US media further entrenches these dog whistle ste‑ reotypes leading to “ideological conditioning,” especially through the “black thug” who represents a “pimp, drug dealer, etc.” (Bolden 2015: 181), which are all associated with black criminals in America (Joseph 2020). It is not just words that are dog whistles but “images and visual symbols also express significance and ideology” (Moshin 2018: 32). There are obvious white supremacy symbols and images that most people are familiar with such as the Ku Klux Klan hoods and robes, cross burnings, the confederate flag, and Nazi symbols and salutes. Other racist images use implicit racial appeals that are understood to be racist but can be denied as such, for example, images that contain “apes, witch doctors, fried chicken, watermel‑ ons, etc.” (Hughey and Parks 2014, as cited in Rosino and Hughey 2016: 328). However, some racist images may not be as apparent to a general audience and those not versed in white supremacist dog whistles such as the use of the “OK” sign, Pepe the Frog, and “echoes.” The “OK” sign has been used by many right‑wing supremacists; however, they claim it is just a “joke” and they enjoy using it to mock those who get upset when they see it. According to Neiwert (2018), it becomes difficult to tell if it is a signal to other white supremacists or just an innocent symbol. This offers those using it the ability to deny they are doing anything racist. Pepe the Frog started in a cartoon in 2005 but was conscripted by the far‑right in memes that alluded to concentration camps and other anti‑Semitic images and tropes (Moshin 2018) (see Nuzzi 2016 for details). As a symbol, Pepe offers reasonable refutation because users can claim they had no idea 13

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he was associated with anti‑Semitism (Moshin 2018). Another symbol is the triple parentheses ((())) also known as “echoes,” positioned “around the names of those who are or might be Jew‑ ish, often these people are journalists,” and once identified as being Jewish they face “abuse and threats” (Moshin 2018: 32). Churchwell (2018) argues that the slogan “America first” is simply a dog whistle. Its mean‑ ing is part of the long dark history of slavery in America combined with the white supremacists’ hatred of immigrants and other races. Although conventional history has lost the meaning behind this “terrible tale,” its meaning has been “kept alive by underground fascist movements” (Church‑ well 2018: 2). Other words ascribed to belonging to the white race of Anglo‑Saxons included “Nordic,” which was used in a similar way that Nazis used “Aryan,” and “100% American” were all used interchangeably (Churchwell 2018: 3). Trump’s “Make America Great Again” is another example of a dog whistle entreating those white supremacists, who feel they are losing their power, culture, and identity, to take their country back to a time when it was “great” – but categorically suggesting “white.” White supremacists hold racist beliefs that somehow their skin tone and melanin content make them “superior to other races, characterized as outgroups, and therefore should be dominant over them” (Ong 2020: 2). Regardless of the names they give themselves or those that are attached to them by outsiders, the ideologies of these groups represent a span of opinions regarding race and dominance, anti‑Semitism, Islamophobia, homophobia, misogyny, xenophobia, and more (Godin et al. 2013; Simi and Windisch 2020).

Background: History of Racism To understand how dog whistles continue to work in the US in 2024, it is important to offer a brief historical background about racism generally and in the US specifically. Racism has a deep historical grounding in the Enlightenment where white supremacist writings were observed in the work of Charles Montesquieu, Voltaire, Hume, Kant, and America’s Thomas Jefferson (Bobo 2017: S89). Racism is abundantly clear in the US in the enslavement of black people from Africa, who were first brought to Virginia in 1619 (Allcorn 2021). This establishes how “deeply woven” white supremacy and racism are in the “fabric of American society” (Allcorn 2021: 284). Since the basic institutions of the US were premised on racism, it is ingrained in the minds of most Americans’ worldviews and how they determine what is beautiful or unattractive and what is untainted or contaminated (Bobo 2017; Hacking 2006). Those dispossessed slaves had their black bodies placed outside the possibility of citizenship by the Founding Fathers, who supposedly were creating a constitutional democracy (Bong Cook 2017). The disrespect and dehumanization of African Americans is found in the US Constitution, wherein slaves “were considered three‑fifths a person” (Taylor et al. 2019: 216). It is this historical precedent of slavery, white supremacy, and Jim Crow that has consigned the US to its current situation wherein white power is institutional‑ ized (Allcorn 2021). Up until the mid‑ to late 1930s many white Americans accepted the idea of whites being su‑ perior, as racism was blamed on ignorance. Kendi (2017: 9) however contends it is actually the institutions and their policies that have made white Americans think there is “something wrong with Black people” and this is what has “produced racist ideas of Black people as being best suited for slavery, segregation, or jail.” The European Americans handed down those beliefs be‑ cause their self‑deception let them imagine themselves to be superior Christians, while perceiv‑ ing African Americans and Native Americans as dangerous brutes and infidels who needed to be constrained (Freese 2018). Despite the length of time that has passed since slavery was condoned, 14

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much remains to be done in America to come to terms with its racist past and its troubling p­ resent. Despite the supposed “freedoms” offered by emancipation, African Americans continued to suf‑ fer from Jim Crow. The civil rights movement met with the “school‑to‑prison pipeline,” and the Obama presidency elicited the Tea Party and then Trump (Bong Cook 2017: 15). In the midst of the continued racism encountered by black Americans, other peoples of color such as Asian Americans, Latinx, and Arab Americans have faced and continue to face intolerance. The structure of racism in America is based on an absolute border between black and white people due to the fear of miscegenation (Myrdal 1944). This made‑up word from the 1860s led to rulings outlawing marriages between black and white people. Although one might think this type of unscientific nonsense is in the past that would be incorrect. While being president in the fall of 2020, Trump appealed to the “pseudo‑scientific eugenics saga of white genetic superiority” when he said to his predominantly white listeners: “You have good genes. A lot of it is about the genes, isn’t it, don’t you believe? The racehorse theory. You think we’re so different? You have good genes in Minnesota” (Nacos et al. 2020: 4). This is further evidence of using language to separate his ingroup, who fancy themselves having the “good genes,” from the outgroup which they look upon as “other.” Using this type of language gives Trump a tool that aids him in maintaining au‑ thority over his followers.

US Conservatives and Trump’s Dog Whistles Nativism is at the heart of Trump’s policies, many conservatives, and white supremacists. Nativ‑ ists are guided by the principle that only those who are native to the country should be favored, while any person or idea that is outside the local group is a threat (Koski and Bantley 2020). Despite sustaining continual immigration into the country, nativism was discernable early on and plainly intimated that “Anglo‑Saxon and Protestantism would be protected” (Steinberg 1981: 13). This situation remains today wherein nativist ideologies advocate power and authority over those residing in America (Borunda et al. 2020: 38). Trump used dog whistles associated with nativist arguments at the Naval Academy graduation in 2018, when he asserted “our ancestors tamed a continent,” followed by “we are not going to apologize for America” (Borunda et al. 2020). This type of rhetoric only serves to worsen the rift in the “nation’s political, social, and moral fiber” while advocating for white supremacist ideologies (Borunda et al. 2020: 38). In addition, nativism and an intense bond to the nation correlate with xenophobia (Ariely 2012; Bonikowski et al. 2021). This rhetoric allows Trump’s supporters to focus on the nostalgic aspect of his words and credit themselves as the “tamers” of wild uninhabited land, which is a false narrative. Nativist and racist speech have been part of America since its inception. However, according to Nacos et al. (2020), this most recent spate of white nationalism and hate speech are a direct reaction to Obama’s vic‑ tory in 2008. It is an unfortunate truth that when America finally got a president who represented the diversity of most Americans, the white people who harbored hatred and fear arose to ensure it may never happen again. As a candidate for president, Trump offered an opening to white identity that had been unspo‑ ken for the past half century. He accomplished this through “racist, xenophobic, and Islamophobic rhetoric” (Banahene Adjei 2018: 58). Some examples include: in 2016 Trump said, “Islam hates us”; in an October 2016 Tweet he wrote, “If elected POTUS – I will stop RADICAL ISLAMIC TERRORISM in this country!” In August 2017 he tweeted, “Radical Islamic Terrorism must be stopped by whatever means necessary!” and these are just a few instances of the continuous Islamophobic rhetoric that emerged from Trump, before and after his election (see Khan et al. 2016). Trump used his rhetoric to ensure that those with a white identity in the US could connect 15

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with him and their “perceived collective identity of the movement” (Simi and Windisch 2020: 4). This is further proof of using dog whistle politics to link to his ingroup while asserting their ­differences from the outgroup. Trump’s speeches and authoritarian behaviors maintained a focus on “othering” those his followers feared. He consistently pointed out how their differences made them incapable of being “real” Americans while stimulating hate and anger toward outgroups (Åkerlund 2021; Betz 1994; Thompson 2021). Political leaders in the US are being strategic when they engage in “othering,” as they are aware that they can convince their supporters to a­ ccept poli‑ cies that demean the outgroup. Trump sees American identity in a very particular way. His rhetoric is exclusionary and has been since he led the Birther movement. It culminated with attacking Mexican immigrants and banning Muslims. His MAGA slogan implies the need to take back the country (Railton 2019), while all his words offer his supporters a false society that excludes out‑ groups (Nacos et al. 2020). It is for this reason that it is relevant to review some of Trump’s language, as a candidate and then president. Due to the use of dog whistles, it is difficult to pin a charge of invoking violence on Trump. However, his words definitely focused on power and strength, which could be (mis) understood as calls to act out violently by his supporters. His preferential words projected might, rigidity, and victory according to Nacos et al. (2020). Trump’s expressions celebrated and inspired violence, and a brief review of his most often used words in his tweets included: “win” and “won” (1,136 times); “strong” (551 times); and “fight” and “attack” (over 200 times each) (Nacos et al. 2020: 16). In view of the influence of language, it is very possible that Trump’s constant criticisms of minorities, such as Mexican Americans, Muslims, Asian Americans, and immigrants, com‑ bined with his implied and sometimes obvious appeals to hostility “against singled‑out groups and individuals did result in political violence” (Nacos et al. 2020: 17). Negative political rheto‑ ric, especially when it comes from the highest office, can be dangerous and lead to objection‑ able consequences. Those in positions of power use “linguistic aggression” to “confuse and tempt their supporters” (Apressyan 1998: 589). It is through speech that extremists are able to assemble and collaborate on their collective identity, which entails “violent and aggressive worldviews” ­(Windisch et al. 2020: 72). By using coded language, politicians and their supporters can deny racism by pointing out that their words are harmless (Haney López 2014). Most Americans disagree with any signs of obvious racism (Horowitz et al. 2019); however, dog whistles use oblique language that usually conceals the bigotry from those “being racially manipulated” (Haney López 2016: 12). An example of this is Trump’s blunt comments about banning Muslims and calling Mexicans rapists (Korte and Gomez 2018; Simon 2018; Wilson 2020). Although many felt Trump had been racist, by never using “racial epithets or mentioning skin color” (Haney López 2016: 12), he was able to feign in‑ nocence. When white supremacists are called out for their dog whistles, they immediately turn on those criticizing them, claiming those people are racist for bringing up race (Haney López 2016). Some politicians have become so adept at this maneuver that it is often difficult to get around them. Many white supremacists felt that Trump agreed with their ideologies and during his tenure “white supremacist attitudes toward African Americans remerged” in a more noticeable man‑ ner (Railton 2019: 139). They looked to the president as the man who not only wanted to make America great again but perhaps more importantly wanted to make America white again (Allcorn 2021). Trump and his beliefs act as a “cultural force that creates a dark, dystopian worldview” (Kusz 2017: 237). He fuels the underlying fears of white men regarding their status in society by launching racist attacks at immigrants and others whom white people perceive as dangerous to their livelihoods or white American civilization (Kusz 2017). Since the ascension of Trump, the white supremacist movements have operated more openly online, and, according to Alexander 16

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(2020: xii), they are using this platform to “celebrate mass killings and recruit thousands into their ranks.” Currently, alt‑right beliefs are an integral part of today’s political arena in the US, with several conspiracy proponents working in elected positions. Their ability to organize online and evade detection allows them to expand their membership and become more influential and threat‑ ening, while their newly minted roles in the federal government are a dangerous step toward an unpredictable future America.

Findings: White Supremacist Functions and Strategies There are several aims of American dog whistle politics. Mainly they are applied to persuade their listeners that there is a tangible and valid division between those of “us” who are white and those others, who are “them.” Trump supporters and white supremacists utilize dog whis‑ tles in a carefully scripted way to emotionally manipulate their followers into believing that all their anxieties about the declining social status of white people are factual and should be ad‑ dressed. Furthermore, the dog whistles are often able to activate stereotypes, sometimes even unconsciously, by using terms such as “welfare queen,” which encourages their followers to categorize what they are hearing in a specific way. In addition, dog whistles are adjusted to influence negativity and hostility toward people of color, who are painted as the “other” who cannot ever fit into white people’s America, which in their minds is a white and Christian nation. Finally, by using dog whistles, white supremacists and others, including politicians, are always able to have plausible deniability, because nothing in their dog whistle speech is overtly racist. The findings of this research discovered that dog whistles have a multitude of ways to achieve their aims of mind engineering their followers. The three most relevant include the push for the belief in the ingroup versus the outgroup or “us” and “them,” the dangers of immigration to “real” Americans, and the notion of colorblindness, which absolves them of any burden of guilt for their racist actions.

Ingroup versus the Outgroup (Us versus Them) In the US, the “white supremacist movement embodies one of the most enduring political sub‑­ cultures in American history” but remains largely misunderstood (Simi et al. 2017: 1). One of the clearest definitions of white supremacy is offered by Frederickson (1981) as the “attitudes, ideolo‑ gies, and politics associated with blatant forms of white dominance over ‘non‑white’ populations” (as cited in Almaguer 1994: 7). The Southern Poverty Law Center (n.d.) defines supremacists as those who spread and accept far‑right ideologies whose goals are to safeguard and advance white‑ ness and white supremacy. At the heart of what white supremacists believe is that “We are not them, and they are not us” (Tenold 2018: xiii). They spend an inordinate amount of time character‑ izing and classifying what it means to be white, which is accomplished by identifying who is not white or more specifically who is not black. White supremacy maintains its control by relying on “historical economic, social, political, and judicial power” (Allcorn 2021: 280) and counts on the “willingness of whites to recognize white superiority over racial outgroups and maintain oppres‑ sion” (Phillips 2017: 1873). Through regular attention toward the past, white supremacists remind themselves of a nostalgic time when they reigned, and they can pretend that life was better for everyone. These beliefs allow them to assure other whites that being “superior” is not a problem and should be the norm. Fundamentally, white supremacists are a powerful culture of “paranoia and conspiracy that ferments in American society” (Simi and Futrell 2015: 1). Despite doctrinal variations, they all 17

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share the notion that “white racial genocide” is a real threat (Simi et al. 2017: 2). Despite the horrors of Hitler’s actions based on his assumed genetic superiority, many white supremacists look upon Hitler and his rule as something to be revered – a nostalgic time in history where being white meant something. The majority of them want to maintain their racial “purity” and many idolize Hitler and his gruesome actions. The veneration they offer to Hitler is visible today in the use of the swastika and Nazi salutes. They have various names and designations, some given to them and others they have chosen. Some of the monikers they and others label them with include white supremacists, white nationalists, separatists, Aryans, the radical right, and racists. Additionally, there are more well‑known groups such as the alt‑right and those long‑established factions such as the “Ku Klux Klan, neo‑Nazis, racist religious sects, prison gangs, football hoo‑ ligans as well as skinheads” (Ong 2020: 2). In the US, Canada, and Europe, there are a variety of white supremacy groups whose objectives and positions differ. Some of them hope for a world that has geographically separated areas where whites and non‑whites could live in segregation and avoid any mixing or marrying, while others want to completely eliminate all people of color (see Ferber 1998; Simi 2010). Their overall objectives are the same: subjugation and exploitation (Bong Cook 2017). Although violence is not at the heart of all white supremacist culture, according to Windisch et al. (2020: 66), they do tend to endorse and foster violence. Their world depends on all members being supportive of violence on behalf of the group and unreservedly defending all of their radi‑ cal adherents. In recent years, these groups have been stockpiling weapons in “anticipation of a second civil war” (Ong 2020: 3). Despite the violent talk and increase in arms purchases, very few go on to coordinate and put into practice “shooting sprees, bombings, or assassinations” (Windisch et al. 2020: 72). Although at this juncture there have been no overwhelming amounts of dangerous attacks, as many have been thwarted by law enforcement – during the Trump administration white supremacists were invigorated and indoctrinated by his dog whistles and conspiracy theories. Na‑ cos et al. (2020: 2) found that Trump’s hate speech led to “aggressive rhetoric, threats of violence, and actual violence” from his followers, who targeted Trump’s “enemies” mainly his political op‑ ponents, the media, and minorities.

Immigration Immigration maintains a major role in the worldwide rise of the far right. By insisting they are supporting their nation, white supremacists can more easily oppose immigration because they can claim it is not racism. It is more socially acceptable to be anti‑immigrant because it is viewed as being patriotic and therefore commendable (Saul 2019). However, it is important to understand that “cultural racism” remains discriminatory and it has been extremely notable in “British rac‑ ism” (Modood 2001, as cited in Saul 2019: 17). Many conservatives and white supremacists are convinced that immigrants and refugees are taking away the rights of the majority – that is whites. They pine for a false time when the US and the UK belonged to white Christians who dominated every aspect of society (Gorski and Perry 2022; Whitehead and Perry 2020), while turning to a false nostalgic past that allows politicians to control their beliefs. The “good” versus “bad” scenario is often used in far‑right populist discourse where they ­ensure that outgroups are viewed as “evil them” while the ingroup is seen as “good, white, and devout” (Åkerlund 2021; Hameleers and Schmuck 2017). The ingroup is easily threatened by perceived dangers, leading to heightened bitterness toward the outgroup (Bonikowski and Zhang 2020), like what occurred after 9/11. These opportunities allow dog whistles to heighten ­differences and prompt the ingroup to be alert. 18

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Colorblindness One way that white supremacists profess that there is no racism emanating from them is the no‑ tion of colorblindness. The fundamental conception of colorblind racism is that racism does not exist anymore because there are no officially recognized blockades holding back people of color. Therefore, all Americans have the same chances to prosper (Bonilla‑Silva 2021). Fundamentally, colorblindness disregards all visible suggestions of racial injustice and the “socio‑historical mean‑ ings of racial markers,” thereby effectively keeping racism alive (Edgar and Johnson 2018: 72). An example would be Justice Antonin Scalia, while still a law professor, arguing against affirmative action, stating that people do not owe each other anything “because of the blood that flows in our veins” (cited in Haney López 2014: 90). This reference to blood is a technique to “disjoint race from social context” (Haney López 2014). Colorblindness is a ploy that offers critical concealment according to Haney López (2014). It promotes conservatives’ declarations that racism is only real when a “person actually uses an epithet or confesses to malice”; effectively “coded speech is never racism so long as it remains in code” (Haney López 2014: 132). Ultimately, however, according to Alexander (2020: xi), the “colorblind veneer of the early 21st century American democracy was just that: a veneer.” There are some political leaders who only want Americans to understand one thing about rac‑ ism: that it involves hatred and can be recognized through cross burnings and physical assaults. Conservatives strongly condemn that behavior but so do most people in society. However, only condemning “malicious racism, with its hooded robes, tattooed swastikas, and apartheid flags” while insisting that this is the only form of racism is a political strategy (Haney López 2014: 5). This permits the right to claim that racism is mostly a thing of the past and ergo they cannot be racists because they do not use racist language or carry nooses (Haney López 2016). Conserva‑ tives are able to defend their coded racism because it obviously does not look like the types of overt racist imagery that they claim is true racism. As conservatives routinely assure people that racism must be seen to be actual racism, they “prevent individuals from recognizing how dog whistling – rooted in code, routine, and strategy – constitutes racial manipulation” (Haney López 2016: 17). The language of the Republican Party “reconstructs whiteness” as being infused with dominance, integrity, “citizenship, and victimhood” (Rosino and Hughey 2016: 328). They are skilled at applying their rhetoric to provoke racial animosity, while denying any accusations of racial discrimination (Bolden 2015: 175). Republicans and the conservative media presented ra‑ cially prejudiced, anti‑immigrant, and anti‑Muslim configurations long before Trump applied the same to his campaign and presidency (Anderson 2016; Bail 2014; Bonikowski et al. 2021; Parker and Barreto 2014). Their “socially exclusionary rhetoric” reveals progressively more prejudice, intolerance, xenophobia, Islamophobia, and anti‑Semitism (Bonikowski et al. 2021: 494).

Conclusion The fact that some politicians are able to exploit stereotypes without ever mentioning race is the remarkable part of dog whistles. Large numbers of Americans are mind engineered by “coded rac‑ ism because racism is endemic in our society,” and at its heart dog whistle politics are designed to manipulate white people’s anxiety about their “eroding social status” (Haney López 2016: 15). Long‑term, dog whistle politics succeed due to the indecisive and contradictory attitudes of white Americans toward racial matters – specifically with regard to African Americans (see Hutchings and Jardina 2009; Mendelberg 2001). Even though most white Americans no longer accept the biological assertions of racism, many have negative feelings about African Americans that are 19

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based on stereotypes and a view that “racial inequality is attributable to the individual failings of black people” (Wetts and Willer 2019: 2). Essentially, dog whistle politics used by right‑wing populists may work as indirect hints that mind engineer in such a way as to “activate people’s antipathy toward ethno‑racial minorities and immigrants” (Bonikowski and Zhang 2020: 12). This is relatively easily managed as many white people think that minorities are the foundation of so‑ ciety’s problems, and the dog whistles “resonate with their unconscious racial anxieties” (Haney López 2014: 178). Ultimately, in the US and some European countries, white supremacists are seeking ways to return to “white nations” dominated and ruled by white people. These groups strive to cause ten‑ sion by appearing authoritative and skilled enough to save the white race. They are convinced that they should rightfully be the leaders of society, and they believe they are losing resources and stature due to other groups, such as black people and immigrants. What white supremacists fail to understand and accept is that the US and much of Europe are made up of many cultures, languages, and religions. However, they still want to focus on a historical past that promotes the status of white people, all of which is “antithetical” to the democracy that supposedly undergirds the nations (Borunda et al. 2020: 40). The repeated use of nostalgia especially that which focuses on the nation and nationality is a part of the conservative and populist parties. The goal of nostalgic thinking is to “preserve cultural hegemony” while “stigmatizing outgroups” (Behler et al. 2021: 1). By offering praise to the na‑ tion’s past, the ingroup develops positive emotions and is very receptive. At the same time, the call to the past aggravates the group because they believe they have lost their power and prestige – this anger is then “channeled towards xenophobia” (Menke and Wulf 2021: 239). Trump’s MAGA slogan uses a nostalgic position that appeals to many but especially to older white men. The slogan reminds them of America when the US was the most powerful nation in the world, where diversity was not so obvious, and patrimonial power was the norm (Steenvoordena and Harteveld 2018: 31). Although to the many diverse people residing in the US, the past is not something to celebrate; for white supremacists and many white males, it was a time when they boasted all the authority and respect. Many white Americans, of European descent, fear annihila‑ tion and want their life of “comfort and privilege” to remain – and that depends on the “unchal‑ lenged, continuing exploitation, and oppression of people of color” (Freese 2018: 345). According to Bonikowski and Stuhler (2022: 22), Trump’s speeches used nostalgia to emphasize “populism, exclusionary nationalism, and authoritarianism.” His discourse ties in closely with the prevailing theories of “radical‑right politics in the literature,” while his practice of reaching back for nostalgia offered his campaign roots in radical‑right foundations (Bonikowski and Stuhler 2022). Trump’s racial dog whistles encouraged the festering resentments found among many white people during the Obama presidency. In addition, he pushed their internal beliefs that to be a “real” American, one must have a white identity, and this was done through “scapegoating and stigma‑ tizing” all those perceived as “others” or outgroups, because of their religion, ethnicity, or race (Kusz 2017: 238). Since most Trump supporters were only interested in rescuing “their” America from African Americans, Asian Americans, Muslims, Mexicans, and multiculturalism, they were not concerned about truth or facts. Therefore, Trump’s lies, “xenophobia, racism, sexism, and Islamophobia” did not affect their opinions of him; rather, those behaviors probably created more adoration for him (Banahene Adjei 2018: 50). White privilege is based on the supposition that whites are superior (Mitchell‑Yellin 2018). Conservative ideology in the US argues that any inequality between races should be blamed on the culture of those underprivileged factions or individual choices (HoSang and Lowndes 2019). By criminalizing black people and those viewed as “other,” this offers the “justification 20

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for exploitation” and suppression (Bong Cook 2017: 12). Through dog whistles, many Ameri‑ cans have been brainwashed/mind engineered to believe a certain story when it is repeated in a variety of subtle and not so subtle ways. They are no longer willing to engage critically with what they are hearing but instead accept it at face value, especially when it supports their own racial proclivities.

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2 “TRUMP”‑ING TO THE CAPITOL Brainwashing through Social Media Rimi Nandy and Jhilli Tewary

Introduction Politics and rhetoric have been intertwined within political discourse. In America specifically, authority figures have linked the physical territory to signify freedom and liberty. The American dream warrants a freedom of choice beyond any hierarchical constrictions. Nineteenth‑century “expansionism” in America defined the significance of expanding the American territory to fa‑ cilitate the progress represented by the idea of the liberating American dream (Azria 2018). The right‑wing populism prominent during the tenure of Ronald Reagan has evolved further in the contemporary age, spreading its effect quickly with the help of the internet. The rapid evolution of information communication technology has profoundly impacted how humans interact with information and each other. The internet has become an essential tool for con‑ necting people in the contemporary age. The social media platforms have been transformed into discussion spaces based on shared content. With the increased networked population, social media platforms have become effective tools for manipulating public opinion. The term “brainwashing” became prominent in the context of spreading propaganda using advanced forms of information communication technology. The space afforded by social media platforms, coupled with the al‑ gorithms behind the platforms, transforms social media into an effective tool for brainwashing. Negative news stories dominate the news because we are hard‑wired to respond more to them. It’s simple brain science, really, and harkens back to our days of needing every bit of news we could find in order to guarantee our survival. (Jones and Flaxman 2015: 346) This can be connected to “broaden and build” theory, which states that negative news leads to the narrowing down of “the field of attention”. According to recent neuroimaging studies, “positive and negative states had opposing influences over perceptual encoding in early visual cortices with positive states broadening and negative states narrowing the field of attention” (Schmitz et  al. 2009). The emergence of the internet transformed computers into a persuasive technology. With the rise of the network society, information is available in abundance. Most often, contradictory

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DOI: 10.4324/9781003289746-4

Rimi Nandy and Jhilli Tewary

news could be seen floating across social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Insta‑ gram. The significance of the information available in the internet space is not connected to the truth value but the affective value. Concepts such as spectacle, pleasure maximizing algorithm, and illusory truth effect have to be understood in the context of the role of social media in gen‑ eral and, in particular, Twitter’s role in disseminating information and constructing a political discourse. For this chapter, the tweets shared by Donald Trump during the first week of 2021 will be closely analyzed. The extracted tweets using #MarchforTrump and #StoptheSteal will also be critically evaluated. Apart from the aforementioned tweets, Trump’s speech at the rally preceding the protest at the Capitol on January 6, 2021 will also be evaluated. Social media has enabled the acceleration of the spreading of information/misinformation. With the increasing relevance of post‑truth in the contemporary age, the brainwashing trend has been enhanced with the help of cyberspace at the disposal of human society. Dissemination of information has become a collective and persuasive venture caused by the sheer volume of data created and shared every second. The ideas connected to truth and false are no longer seen as dy‑ namic opposites. Instead, the words have become part of manipulating public discourse. Creating doubt and confusion in the audience’s minds forms the base for the post‑truth era. The construction of social bias is no longer just restricted to humans alone. The presence of bots and trolls com‑ bined with a human presence online creates a persuasive environment of what appears to be truth (Foster 2022). For a piece of information to be considered as truth, the manner of its dissemination is also essential. How and by whom the data is shared goes a long way in its perception as true or false. Foster refers to several pieces of research proving that “fake news is spontaneously shared as much as six times more than evidence‑based news and is thus specifically about ‘circulation’” (Foster 2022). Truth value is no longer significant. Instead, the virality of a piece of information/ misinformation caters to constructing a manipulated belief system. This chapter focuses on the es‑ sence of post‑truth and the process of manipulation enabled by the digital communication system in the form of social media interaction. Politicians like Donald Trump have popularized the term “fake news” by using Twitter to polarize political viewpoints. To investigate the importance of the term fake news within “convergence culture”, the algorithmic patterns of social networking sites have to be critically analyzed. This chapter will analyze various posts to connect the irrelevance of truth in the contemporary age with mind manipulation through social media platforms. Fogg elaborates on the idea of computing technologies being used as persuasive tools. He refers to the persuasive role enacted through human–computer interaction (Fogg 2003). The persuasive ability is fashioned by the network of human and material elements. This is depicted through Latour’s ­actor–network theory, which is used to study the connection between human society and new me‑ dia technologies. The ubiquitous nature of computing technologies has constructed a constant con‑ nection between humans and technological devices such as laptops and mobile phones. According to Latour, technology and sociology cannot exist in siloes but are already connected (Sovacool et al. 2020). Following the introduction, the chapter is subdivided into five sections. The first section dis‑ cusses the architecture of social media platforms, its significance in social media, and the resulting prominence of post‑truth phenomena. The second section concentrates on Twitter’s popularity and its role in creating the political brand of Donald Trump. Further, it discusses various theoretical aspects connected to media studies and psychology to assess Twitter’s significance as a tool for brainwashing. The third section elaborates on the methodology used for data extracting and analy‑ sis of tweets and Trump’s speeches. The fourth section discusses the implications of the collected data in forming a political discourse efficient in persuading Trump’s followers. The final section concludes with a brief reflection on the study’s implications and this chapter’s hypothesis. 26

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Theoretical Implications of Post‑Truth and Politics on Social Media Social media platforms have created a space for prosumers. Every user is a potential broadcaster. This has led to the circulation of misinformation and fake news (Moravec et al. 2018). Since the users have the liberty to publish anything connected to their pre‑existing ideas and ideology, the data is not always verified. With the development of feminist criticism and post‑colonial criti‑ cism, the need for counter‑narratives has become essential in public narratives. The move from truth to affective narrative has made the value of truth redundant, thereby influencing the birth of the post‑truth era. The rise of ubiquitous computing, that is, the easy access to mobile devices enabled with internet connection, has made it easier to share opinions disguised as information around the clock. The role played by social media in the political sphere is embedded in the con‑ cept of participatory democracy. However, since the emotional effect of a message has become more ­important to rational information, anyone can participate in creating opinions and biases. The importance of new media rests in its ability to mobilize groups based on partisan politics (Olaniran and ­Williams 2020). Social media algorithms aim to create echo chambers catering to users’ accepted viewpoints. This has resulted in users being surrounded by information validating his/her ideas and ideologies. The users are never exposed to alternate viewpoints. This creates “filter bubbles”, further reinforcing existing beliefs and preferences (Wanless and Berk 2021). For an in‑depth understanding of public discourse on social media, psychological analysis is essential in comprehending how such a practice influences the creation of ideological homophily, favoring the reduction of cognitive dissonance. When these filter bubbles are combined with the naturally occurring homophily among human social networks with an affinity for gathering like‑minded people, a powerful homogenous network is born. This homogenous network functions like an echo chamber that regularly reflects similar opinions, creating the impression of an imagined commu‑ nity where every individual becomes a single homogenous voice (Currarini et al. 2016). Social media’s viral nature and affective capability make it an essential tool for persuasion. With the emergence of new media and the deepening of political polarization, a binary political approach has surfaced, aiming to boost political engagement and voter turnout among individu‑ als who perceive themselves as marginalized or lacking influence within the democratic system (Olaniran and Williams 2020). As Baggini puts it, “[o]ur current predicament is that authorities of expertise are routinely dismissed, with the authority of the gut, intuition, the people and/or God taking its place” (Baggini 2017: 30). The appeal of alternative authorities like popular opinion or intuitive beliefs often lies in their alignment with the sentiments and desires of the general public. However, such sources of authority may not always align with factual accuracy or the complexity of the issues at hand. Relying solely on populist appeal can oversimplify nuanced problems and hinder the implementation of evidence‑based solutions. The “echo chambers” enhance the effect of confirmation bias, seeking and interpreting information that confirms one’s preconceived no‑ tions. This may become more prevalent in a context where authoritative expertise is dismissed, leading to a polarized and fragmented society, with individuals selectively accepting information that supports their existing views. While the freedom to believe in a particular reality from within the plethora of alternative realities and truths might appear to be democratic, it also makes manipu‑ lating the consumers, even more, easier than in the preceding ages (Castillo and Egginton 2017). The access to uninterrupted information on social media platforms has affected the habits of the audience in relation to gathering news. However, the characteristics of the news in the form of information and knowledge available on social media are dynamically different from the in‑ formation made available by mass media tools such as radio, newspaper, and television. Data refers to information pertaining to various events occurring in society, whereas knowledge refers 27

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to the reasons behind a particular event. With the proliferation of the “attention economy”, the intention behind an act is less important than the act itself. However, in the post‑truth era, where misinformation and subjective narratives can easily gain traction, credibility verification remains essential for ensuring informed decision‑making, combating falsehoods, and preserving the integ‑ rity of information. However, it becomes challenging as the users function as content creators and reviewers. The cognitive reaction of the audience while processing a piece of information can be con‑ nected to “source credibility”, “repetition” and “pictures” supporting information. Human beings tend to believe information which is perceived to be credible. Since perception is based on a sub‑ jective reaction, the perceived credibility of the source might change from one person to the other. The idea of repetition is essential in social media, as the algorithms in each social media platform work toward creating “echo chambers” which reiterate one’s apperceptive mass, which refers to the previous experiences used to understand a new percept and idea. The significance of echo chambers in legitimizing information can be better grasped through the lens of referential theory (Korteling et al. 2018). This theory states that the experience of fluency depends on a statement’s fit with a recipient’s semantic network. The more references the statement shares with the network and the more coherently it fits into the network, the more fluently it is processed at re‑exposure and the more likely it will be judged as true. Hence, the referential theory highlights the role of conceptual rather than perceptual fluency. (Nadarevic et al. 2020) A discussion on the same will be undertaken in the latter half of the chapter. The multimodal affor‑ dance of social media platforms brings texts and images together in meaning‑making. The verbal component of social media posts depicts the human perception and reaction to public discourse. As mentioned previously, the algorithmic structure of social media enhances the creation of “echo chambers”. These “echo chambers” are created due to the principle of homophily char‑ acterizing social networks. The term “homophily” with reference to social networks represents the tendency of human beings to create natural bonds between people with similar attitudes and viewpoints. The presence of homophily enables the transfer of information within a homogeneous demography (Currarini et al. 2016). The “filter bubbles” are created through social media’s ability to constantly surveil consumers’ personal data. Deibert discusses three major perceptions based around social media, which he refers to as the “three painful truths” of social media: 1) That the social‑media business model is based on deep and relentless surveillance of consumers’ personal data in order to target advertisements; 2) that we permit this stagger‑ ing level of surveillance willingly, if not altogether wittingly; and 3) that social media are far from incompatible with authoritarianism, and indeed are proving to be among its most effective enablers. (Deibert 2019) He further refers to social media as “addiction machines”, which influence the human brain and the secretion of the hormone oxytocin, creating a longing for social media interactions. With the high level of influencing capability, social media inevitably becomes an effective tool for manipula‑ tion. Deibert also discusses how social media, instead of being a democratic space, has become a 28

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platform that helps spread authoritarianism. The constant production of information in the form of data affects the quality of public discourse. The cognitive aspect of information processing can be overwhelmed by information overload, leading the public to gravitate toward accepting informa‑ tion that aligns with their pre‑existing opinions and belief systems (Deibert 2019). In light of the earlier discussion in this chapter, post‑truths have increased the value of pathos compared to logos. Pathos, a mode of audience persuasion to connect with the speaker/writer’s point of view, has become an essential element in post‑truth rhetoric. It successfully transforms logic into a concrete object that can be quantitatively and qualitatively analyzed simultaneously. To understand the integration of pathos within the network culture, one needs to look back to Guy Debord’s idea of the Society of Spectacles (Briziarelli and Armano 2017). He talks about the image‑saturated consumer culture based on the objects’ representation rather than the object itself. The same idea of spectacles can be found in the contemporary age, though the spectacle and the spectator’s characteristics have undergone a massive change. Debord talks about a spectator who is a passive receiver of spectacle. In contrast, the spectacle and spectator of Web 2.0 is entwined in an interactive relationship. Baudrillard focuses on how “simulation” through images has replaced reality. He furthers the idea of the political economy of signs “according to which a world of commodified objects then turned into a world of signs without material referent, thus a post‑modern hyper‑reality” (Briziarelli and Armano 2017: 32). The digital space embodies spectacle, which is entirely immaterial, and it increases the value of pathos. This, in turn, makes “affect” more relevant for fulfilling the consum‑ ers’ desire for popularity. Therefore, the role of information in the digital age is connected to its ability to attract attention, which denotes affective capacity. Affect is a comprehensive term en‑ compassing personal reactions, feelings, evaluations, moods, and emotions. It influences our lives, including perception, social interactions, behaviors, decision‑making, and information processing. By understanding the role of affect, we can gain insights into how our emotional states shape our experiences and behaviors (Kalpokas 2019). As discussed earlier, affect has become the driving force behind constructing an audience con‑ trolled by affective truth. According to Van Dijk, in a networked society, “Direct experience is replaced by mediated and technically supported or affected perception” (Dijk 1999: 189). This shows how human–machine interaction is characterized in the context of social media. The social media platforms, such as Twitter, transcend the bounds of geographical space and time while bringing together an interactive expanse catering to the representation of an individu‑ al’s perception. Massumi refers to affect as transversal in the sense that it cuts through realms that are usually seen as separate—such as subjective/objective, desire/what is given, freedom/constraints. Affect happens in the mid‑ dle, the in‑between; the two realms are like two facets of the same event. (Hipfl 2018: 7) In this context, Deleuze and Guattari’s idea about society being a complex interconnection system is extremely relevant. According to them, this network is like a rhizome with multiple nodes, mak‑ ing the system fluid and dynamic. An individual exists within this system of networks in a con‑ stant flux of a state of “becoming” and “actualization”. Since the state of becoming is never fixed, it focuses more on potentiality and multiplicity. Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of assemblages refers to a continuous process of connecting, disconnecting, and reconnecting. Social network‑ ing site such as Twitter is entirely based on a system of networks that brings together opinions to create a social discourse. An integral part of the post‑truth era is passing opinion as truth. 29

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The data created and produced is always targeted toward creating a sense of pleasure among the users. Contemporary consumer culture works toward maximizing the sense of pleasure charac‑ terized by “emotional enrichment from commercial goods and experiences”—a utopia of easily ­accessible pleasure (Kalpokas 2019). The emotional responses to social media updates cater to the construction of “electronic elsewhere”, that is, “social spaces sustained through digitally enabled affective structures” (Papacharissi 2015: 24). Such affective publics can be defined as “public formations that are mobilized and connected or disconnected through expressions of sentiment” (Papacharissi 2015: 125). This drive toward instant gratification and agglomeration through shared affects (i.e., shared gratification) also means that competition over audience attention effectively turns into competi‑ tion over the maximization of pleasure and consumer satisfaction: in other words, politics‑as‑a‑­ service becomes a satisfaction‑maximizing service. The newer version of politics is embedded in the proliferation of post‑truth. Politicians now manipulate “facts” as per the requirement of their narratives. Ignas Kalpokas comments on the formation of contemporary political culture by quot‑ ing Horsthemke “in which political debate characteristically assumes the form of appeals to per‑ sonal feelings detached from policy details, and of frequent repetition of bold assertions to which factual counterevidence is disregarded” (Kalpokas 2019). This implies that algorithmic politics potentially undermine political agency, as individuals may perceive themselves as making choices based on their own will and agency. Still, the choice environment is manipulated through algorith‑ mically determined triggers. Instead of consciously addressing matters of concern, personalized satisfaction is induced through these triggers, which individuals may not consciously recognize. Consequently, political agency becomes compromised, with the choice environment predispos‑ ing individuals toward specific choices, thereby limiting their autonomy. As a result, the commu‑ nication specialists working for world leaders such as Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, among others, use social media to propagate alternative truth, strengthening the preconceived notions of popular public discourse. This section enumerated the characteristics and principal features of social media platforms and their affordances, encouraging the transformation of such platforms into tools for brainwashing and spreading fake news. The following section will delve deeper into the politics of language and Trump’s rhetorical lies.

Trump and Post‑Truth in Twittersphere The use of media to achieve political ends is not a new practice. This process has existed since time immemorial. Manufacturing news has always been a tool in the hands of the dominant sphere of society, namely, the leaders in power. The Red Scare, during the reign of Senator McCarthy, is symbolic of the prevalence of manufactured truth which was used to brainwash the citizens of America to George W. Bush’s claim that Saddam Hussain hid weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. This is another example of how media was used to spread information that did not necessarily have any basis for existence (Leffler 2023). Ronald Reagan’s promise to the voters to take them back to the more liberating past of America, using political vocabulary, is another instance of the persua‑ sive value of language and media. Reagan’s abolition of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting paved the way for “affective” media. As mentioned earlier, post‑truth phenomena became increasingly important. This reached its culmination in the form of social media communication. Within the sphere of social networking, “Microblogging services provide a simple, easy form of communica‑ tion that enables users to broadcast and share information about their day‑to‑day activities, opin‑ ions, news stories, current status, and other interests” (Bae and Lee 2012). Twitter’s format of 140 30

“Trump”-ing to the Capitol: Brainwashing through Social Media

characters makes it more appealing to users. The shortened and restricted length is in keeping with the decreasing attention span of the public and increases the pace of information dissemination. Twitter, a social media tool, provides a different information‑sharing approach. It combines the features of a social networking site and microblogging, which helps spread information in real time. Unlike other social networking sites, Twitter allows sharing of information with users. It is mainly used to share information and opinions about different aspects of society. As a plat‑ form, it works as a collaborative public space. Twitter uses a particular model termed “following”, which does not require prior connection to any user. Networking occurs when a user “ follows” another user, which refers to real‑time updates from the profiles being followed. A “follower” is another Twitter user who has followed you. Some elements specific to Twitter are the format for responding to a tweet (@username) and #(hashtag) to define different categories. Because of its influential capacity, Twitter is used as a branding and marketing platform for products and politics (Cripps et al. 2020). Since signs, images, and spectacles have become more important in society, image‑making has become integral to politics. This chapter mainly focuses on understanding Twit‑ ter’s role in spreading fake news. To understand this, it is essential first to discern the reason for the belief that fake news is genuine. The social media platform acts as a breeding ground for opinions and information that may be reliable and untrue. Unlike traditional news media, social media content generally does not run through a thorough filtering process, such as fact‑checking or editorial judgment (Allcott and ­Gentzkow 2017). Unlike traditional news, news circulated in social media is not chosen by the user but is determined by algorithms. In the absence of fact‑checking, the information obtained from unreliable sources cannot be distinguished from information circulated by reliable sources. Silverman stated, “More fake news articles are shared on social media than real news” (Moravec et al. 2018). The reason behind the higher circulation of fake news is the presence of bots and trolls, which are used to manipulate and manufacture consent. The pleasure‑seeking attitude of ­users leads them to avoid existential concerns that arise out of the possibility of the negative ­impact of climate change. This approach causes users to become uncritical of the source ­information, ­causing them to process information superficially without in‑depth cognitive processing. The combination of various psychological aspects creates an increasing acceptability of fake news. These aspects can be defined with reference to the dual‑process theory, heuristics, partisan bias, illusory truth effect, and cognitive biases (Korteling et al. 2018). In relation to this, the dual‑process theory can be accurately used to analyze the impact of fake news on the audience’s mind. The dual‑process theory states that there are two modes of information processing called System 1 and System 2. System 1 operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control, whereas System 2 allocates attention to the difficult mental activities that demand it, including complex calculations. The operations of this system are often associated with the subjective experience of agency, choice, and concentration (Evans and Stanovich 2013). Analytical reasoning, associated with System 2, is more effective in detecting fake news. However, based on the pleasure‑seeking principle, the human mind mostly avoids using System 2 as it requires more effort. A further discussion of this theoretical aspect will be undertaken later in the chapter with reference to the results of linguistic analysis of extracted tweets. Being “cognitive misers”, we will likely process information based on heuristics. A study con‑ ducted by Allcott and Gentzkow (2017) reported that those who claimed they had seen and agreed with fake news stories were more likely to react to the coherence of the fake‑news story headlines with their predisposition and consumed information consistent with their support or opposition to the main party presidential candidates. This leads to a conformity bias. Confirmation bias refers to 31

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a bias created against any form of information challenging one’s accepted belief system and there‑ fore refusing to believe any information proclaiming to the contrary (Nickerson 1998). Exposure to similar ideas and ideologies repeatedly enables the process of brainwashing in the absence of any contrary opinions (Tabet 2021). When judging news headlines, people are likely to use heuristics, lowering their resistance to false information. Heuristics  are mental shortcuts that allow people to solve problems and make judgments quickly and efficiently. These rule‑of‑thumb strategies shorten decision‑making time and allow people to function without constantly thinking about their next course of action ­(Schirrmeister et al. 2020). This study used the Linguistic Analysis Word Count (more commonly known by the acronym LIWC) tool to derive an analytic score of the tweets, which in turn is used to understand the heuristic aspects. The significance of LIWC analytic count lies in its ability to provide insights into individuals’ psychological and emotional states based on their language usage. By examining the frequency of words associated with different categories, LIWC can help researchers or analysts understand pat‑ terns of communication and gain a deeper understanding in various fields, including psychology, linguistics, and social sciences. The LIWC analytic count is significant as it allows researchers to quantitatively measure and analyze linguistic and psychological dimensions in texts, providing valuable insights into the emotional and cognitive aspects of communication (Tausczik and Pen‑ nebaker 2010). The following section will focus on the methodology used and the interpretation and discussion of the results.

Methodology and Results The hypothesis being examined in this study points to the fact that the Twitter platform is a sig‑ nificant tool for manipulating public opinion through brainwashing techniques. To prove the hy‑ pothesis, Donald Trump’s tweets and speeches connected to the attack on the U.S. Capitol building have been used as a case study. A mixed‑method approach was employed to investigate this, ana‑ lyzing relevant tweets obtained through data scraping. The study also analyzes Trump’s “Save America” Rally speech. The data collection for this study utilized a Twitter developer account. Twitter provided an Academic Research Access for the same. Twitter application programming interface (API) was used to scrape tweets through Python programming. A total of 27 tweets were extracted from Donald Trump’s Twitter account dated January 1, 2021, to January 8, 2021. The case study will also refer to relevant comments on the same. The extracted data was then analyzed using the licensed version of LIWC. The collected data was analyzed to show how the sentiments reflected in the tweets were used to manipulate public opinion. Trump’s tweets from the first week of January 2021 were analyzed to connect the quantitative values to the qualitative analysis of the statements. The storming of the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters on January 6, 2021, makes the study of Trump’s tweets during this period extremely significant. The quantitative values of the cognition process depict how Trump’s tweets are used to brainwash his supporters into believing that the presidential election was rigged. There are also instances of Trump supporters speaking about being brainwashed and persuaded through his “cha‑ risma” and “lies”. For example, in a comment dated August 26, 2023, the erstwhile support talks about how he realized that Trump “duped” him into believing in his falsehoods under the influence of his “charisma, bravado” and lies. He comments: I also turned a blind eye to the lack of accountability, the erosion of democratic values, and the blatant disregard for justice and diversity. I was so caught up in the “us vs. them” 32

“Trump”-ing to the Capitol: Brainwashing through Social Media

mentality that I failed to see the bigger picture: that democracy thrives on diversity of thought, that justice is for everyone, and that climate change is a real and present danger that we need to address now. (P a u l ◉ [@ybarrap] 2023)

In opposition, supporters are tweeting “Thank you for coming back” alongside a reiteration of the phrase “Make America Great Again”. Mirroring the words of Ronald Reagan “Let’s Make America Great Again”, Trump strengthens right‑wing populism, through mind manipulation and persuasion. The later part of this chapter engages in the qualitative analysis of various tweets pertaining to the promise of a greater America of an imaginative past under extreme right‑wing policies (Hassan 2019). The LIWC analysis (Table 2.1) shows a cognition value of 10, suggesting that only 10% of the tweets contain words related to cognitive processes, thinking, understanding, and perceiving. As a result, the audience readily accepts the information shared through the tweets. The category of cog‑ proc (cognitive process) represents words related to thinking, analyzing, and processing informa‑ tion. A value of 8.75 suggests that very few of the tweets initiate critical and analytical processing of the shared information. Insight, which is a subcategory of cognition, includes words related to gaining insight or understanding. A value of 1.54 suggests a very low percentage of words providing an understanding of the comments made by Trump. Similarly, a value of 1.25 in the cause category can be considered to signify the prominence of a form of language not explaining the reasons behind Trump’s political proclamation. Discrep, another subcategory of cognition, denotes words depicting discrepancy. With reference to Trump’s tweets, the value suggests that 2.12% of the words show the presence of discrepancy. Since Trump does not cite the sources for the statements he makes, it becomes impossible to verify his claims. A total of 1.35% of the words represent a cautious note, whereas the value of certainty is much lesser at 0.77. Since Trump neglects to cite the sources for the information he shares, the rate of discrepancy is higher than the words helping to understand the reasons or causes behind the statements he makes. Dr. Jonathan Schroeder refers to the right‑wing media machine’s strategy of lying and skewing information by using the vocabulary of statistics and science which makes his statements appear truthful. In his words, the right‑wing media uses cite a statistic, or they’ll cite a finding. But they won’t really tell you where it’s from. They won’t tell you much about the study. They won’t tell you who’s compiling that statistic. They just cite it out of thin air. Who put this statistic out? Is this scientifically proven? Was it peer reviewed? Who paid for it? (Senko 2021: 103) This is clearly evident in Trump’s tweets and speeches, also posted and reposted on Twitter. For example, in his tweet “Georgia election data, just revealed, shows that over 17,000 votes illegally flipped from Trump to Biden”, Trump does not indicate the source of this data. This is a strategy very commonly used by Donald Trump. Another important psychological element working in favor of the sharing and acceptance of fake news is partisan bias. Ideological beliefs construct every social identity. Information congru‑ ent with one’s beliefs is accepted, and those incongruent are dismissed. Regardless of their ac‑ curacy, social networks efficiently spread information clustered together and disconnected from other parts of society. If the source of information disseminated is from within the recognizable social circle, then it is evaluated more favorably. Within this network, an echo chamber is created, making one an easy target for conscious and unconscious manipulation. 33

Rimi Nandy and Jhilli Tewary

Table 2.1  LIWC cognition category and subcategories score S. no.

LIWC_Measure

Value

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Cognition Cogproc Insight Cause Discrep Tentat Certitude

10 8.75 1.54 1.25 2.12 1.35 0.77

Partisan bias causes one to reject or accept the information based on whether the preferred politician is being portrayed in a negative or positive light. Critics with a negative attitude toward a politician willingly accept fake news which highlights the negative aspect of the politician and reject positive news in favor of the politician, even if it is real. The construction of cognitive bias is closely related to the framework of the neural networks. Neural networks are considered to be the basic biological component responsible for the percep‑ tion and motor function of the human body. These networks are characterized by four neural mechanisms which give rise to cognitive bias. The four neural mechanisms are categorized as association, compatibility, retainment, and focus principles. All four principles create the basis for the human brain to form associations and connections between unrelated information which are in sync with preconceived notions and beliefs. Further, the exposure to irrelevant information tends to be integrated into the brain permanently, which in turn gets concretized by exposure to “known knowns’ or repeated information (Korteling et al. 2018). Since Twitter as a platform creates filter bubbles through algorithmic processes, alternative viewpoints are often completely missing in the discourse built around understanding a particular phenomenon. Repetition of news within the Twitter circle creates a familiarity that primes the mind to process similar stimuli quickly. For example, the repeated use and circulation of the phrases “Make America Great Again”, “Our Country”, and “Rigged Election”, along with “#StoptheSteal” and “#MarchforTrump”, success‑ fully establishes a stronghold of blind supporters, almost forming a cult. In his book The Cult of Trump, Steven Hassan states: Trump uses all kinds of cult tactics—lying, insulting opponents, projecting his weaknesses onto others, deflecting, distracting, presenting alternative facts and competing versions of reality—to confuse, disorient, and ultimately coerce his followers. Repetition programs the beliefs into the unconscious. (Hassan 2019: 11) The following tweets can be read in the context of cognitive bias and neural network mechanisms. The linguistic category of pronouns is critical in constructing the context and meaning of the tweets. The tweets repeatedly use the term “we” to refer to Trump and his supporters, and the per‑ sonal pronoun “they” is used more commonly to refer to Trump’s opposition, mainly the Demo‑ crats and the Liberals. For example, the tweet “Just didn’t want to announce quite yet. They’ve got as many ballots as are necessary. Rigged Election!”, is such an instance. The tweets on Donald Trump’s Twitter account1 show a similar pattern of opinion building in support of Trump. Continuous tweets referring to fraudulent elections create an impression of 34

“Trump”-ing to the Capitol: Brainwashing through Social Media

truth. The repetition of these opinions successfully creates “filter bubbles” exposing the users to similar viewpoints repeatedly, creating a cognitive bias. The biological functions of neural net‑ works therefore play an essential role in brainwashing through the interaction of Twitter.

Discussion LIWC is used to infer a speaker’s psychological state based on the categorization of the spoken or written words. A previous study has shown that language elements associated with deception are “(a) fewer self‑references, (b) more negative emotion words, and (c) fewer markers of cognitive complexity” (Newman et al. 2003). This is clearly visible in the collected datasets. The analysis of individual tweets revealed that the use of the term “we” is much higher than other personal pronouns, with a total value of 1.73 and for the Save America Rally speech a total value of 3.24. This indicates the desire to create a community feeling among Trump supporters. The category of authenticity reflects a value of 1 in both cases. Authenticity deals with the content words acting as the markers of honesty, clarity, transparency, and authenticity markers. The low value indicates that the number of words projecting authenticity is much lesser in number. In spite of this, Trump’s followers readily believe his words due to their affective capability. James Moir refers to Peter Bull’s work on Atkinson’s theory of rhetorical devices and the idea of “claptrap” to discuss the role of performance in a political speech. According to this discussion, certain words invoke instant ap‑ plauses. Bull further categorizes Atkinson’s idea of “claptrap” into invited and uninvited applause (Moir 2013). Though this theoretical approach is used to denote political speeches, the comments on tweets could also be analyzed using this approach. An analysis of the comments on the tweets clearly shows the presence of both kinds of applauses. For example, in his speech, Trump’s words “We will not let them silence your voices. We’re not going to let it happen, I’m not going to let it happen” led the audience to chant “Fight for Trump”. LIWC analysis of the separate datasets shows a higher rate of use of the term “we” in the year 2021 in comparison to the use of “I” and “they”. A calamity or impending danger brings people together as a group. This is very clear from the fact that “we” is used more often in tweets. Using the homophylic tendency of communication on social media platforms such as Twitter creates a space for the increasing use of pronouns like “we” and “you”. The word cloud (refer to Figure  2.1) shows the ten most frequently used words in Trump’s tweets. The words “great” and “states” are used to associate with the greatness of America and the need to protect it. Trump’s use of the words “election” and “fraud” evoked a sense of anger among his followers, which finally led to the attack on the U.S. Capitol. This is clearly reflected in the tweets referred to earlier. The word cloud image shown in Figure 2.1 was made using a licensed version of LIWC. LIWC contextualizer analysis under the affect category also shows the placement of words in context to manipulate the followers’ allegiance. For example, the word “great” is categorized as an affect word in the context of the text. In this context, it appears to be describing the “American patriots” who number 75,000,000. The use of the word “great” here suggests a positive sentiment or evaluation of these individuals. The term “American patriots” implies that these people are highly regarded as devoted and loyal citizens of the United States. Therefore, the text appears to be expressing a positive opinion about a large group of American patriots, characterizing them as “great”. The word “great” is associated with an America of the past and a prosperous future for the country. The inclusion of “will have” at the end of the phrase indicates a future action or outcome related to making America great again. In another instance, the word “illegally” is being associated with electoral misconduct and irregularities. The tweet suggests that there were over 17,000 votes 35

Rimi Nandy and Jhilli Tewary

Figure 2.1  Word cloud for Donald Trump’s tweets

that were changed or “flipped” from Donald Trump in a manner considered illegal. This statement implies an accusation of electoral misconduct or irregularities. The word “illegally” indicates that these actions were not per the law or regulations, and it raises concerns about the integrity of the election process. The analysis of the dataset2 depicts various aspects of Donald Trump’s use of words to ma‑ nipulate and “brainwash” his followers to believe in the narrative of election fraud that he paints through Twitter. The structure and linguistic and cognitive markers, along with rhetorical devices, validate the presence and ready acceptance of Donald Trump’s political discourse.

Conclusion Social media has transformed the practice of public discourse. Real‑time communicative ex‑ changes and the ubiquity of social media platforms enable an easier way of undertaking mass brainwashing. The current age of “inflationary media” based on the fragmented nature of society has created a “crisis of reality”. Eli Parser’s use of the term “filter bubble” deftly explains the consumer‑driven culture of the digital age. This study has focused on understanding the process of brainwashing American citizens into following Trump’s instigation to storm the U.S. Capitol. An analysis of extracted tweets by Trump shows that the algorithmic structure of social media, coupled with the prevalence of post‑truth, enables the manipulation of the citizens to create a large number of supporters for Trump. His supporters in turn through the repetition of Trump’s use of political vocabulary continue the process of manipulation. The Twitter platform essentially becomes a tool efficiently wielded by Donald Trump in molding his followers to believe in the conspiracy related to the rigging of the 2020 U.S. presidential elections. 36

“Trump”-ing to the Capitol: Brainwashing through Social Media

Notes 1 A table containing the tweets referred to can be found at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ZgvFM7 t34PQSgWqk9IEa1R20Jg60ZRFA/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=108689591193300984010&rtpof=true&sd= true 2 The Result of the LIWC contextualizer can be found at https://docs.google.com/document/d/17FWc5BY GpEtvIFjcqPDZxB8QLDeVTFYt/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=108689591193300984010&rtpof=true&sd= true

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Rimi Nandy and Jhilli Tewary Newman, M., Pennebaker, J., Berry, D., & Richards, J. (2003). ‘Lying Words: Predicting Deception from Linguistic Styles’. Personality & Social Psychology Bulletin. 29: 665–675. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 0146167203029005010 Nickerson, R. S. (1998). ‘Confirmation Bias: A Ubiquitous Phenomenon in Many Guises’. E Educational Publishing Foundation. 2(2): 175–220. Olaniran, B. and Williams, I. (2020). ‘Social Media Effects: Hijacking Democracy and Civility’. In J. Jones and M. Trice (Eds.), Platforms, Protests, and the Challenge of Networked Democracy (pp. 77–94). https:// doi.org/10.1007/978‑3‑030‑36525‑7_5 P a u l ◉ [@ybarrap]. (2023, August 26). @realDonaldTrump My DMs are filled with folks like Sylvia. MAGA, you can do better. “I can’t believe I’m writing this, but I have to get it off my chest. For years, I was a die‑hard Trump supporter. I believed in the man and his message—Or at least, what I thought was his message. I wore the… [Tweet]. Twitter. https://twitter.com/ybarrap/status/1695312367016382789 Schirrmeister, E., Göhring, A.‑L., and Warnke, P. (2020). ‘Psychological Biases and Heuristics in the Context of Foresight and Scenario Processes’. Futures & Foresight Science. 2(2): e31. https://doi.org/10.1002/ ffo2.31 Schmitz, T. W., De Rosa, E., and Anderson, A. K. (2009). ‘Opposing Influences of Affective State Valence on Visual Cortical Encoding’. The Journal of Neuroscience. 29(22): 7199–7207. https://doi.org/10.1523/ JNEUROSCI.5387‑08.2009 Senko, J. (2021). The Brainwashing of My Dad: How the Rise of the Right‑Wing Media Changed a Father and Divided Our Nation—And How We Can Fight Back. Sourcebooks. Sovacool, B. K., Hess, D. J., Amir, S., Geels, F. W., Hirsh, R., Rodriguez Medina, L., Miller, C., Alvial Palavicino, C., Phadke, R., Ryghaug, M., Schot, J., Silvast, A., Stephens, J., Stirling, A., Turnheim, B., van der Vleuten, E., van Lente, H., and Yearley, S. (2020). ‘Sociotechnical Agendas: Reviewing Future Directions for Energy and Climate Research’. Energy Research & Social Science, 70, 101617. https://doi. org/10.1016/j.erss.2020.101617 Tabet, R. (2021, May 24). ‘Brainwashing Capabilities of Social Media’. Gritnova. https://gritnova.com/ brainwashing‑capabilities‑of‑social‑media/ Tausczik, Y. R. and Pennebaker, J. W. (2010). ‘The Psychological Meaning of Words: LIWC and Com‑ puterized Text Analysis Methods’. Journal of Language and Social Psychology. 29(1). https://doi. org/10.1177/0261927X09351676 Trump, D. (2023, August 25). Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) / X. X (Formerly Twitter). https://twit‑ ter.com/realDonaldTrump Wanless, A. and Berk, M. (2021). ‘Participatory Propaganda: The Engagement of Audiences in the Spread of Persuasive Communications’. In D. Herbert and S. F. Hoyrem (Eds.), Social Media and Social Order (pp. 111–132). De Gruyter.

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3 THE CHINESE COMMUNIST PARTY’S HISTORICAL RESOLUTIONS AS MIND‑ENGINEERING PROJECTS Heike Holbig Introduction In November 2021, the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) approved the Resolution on the Major Achievements and Historical Experience of the Party over the Past Cen‑ tury (henceforth 2021 Resolution), the third resolution of its kind. Together with the Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of our Party published in 1945 under Mao Zedong (henceforth 1945 Resolution)1 and the Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of our Party since the Founding of the People’s Republic of China passed in 1981 under Deng Xiaoping (henceforth 1981 Resolution), it forms a string of watershed documents, each of them inaugurating and legiti‑ mating a new ‘dynasty’ of Party rule. The purpose of the CCP’s historical resolutions can be captured most aptly from the perspective of mind‑engineering as conceptualized in this handbook. As this chapter shows, each resolution is designed to (re‑)shape the perception of historical reality with a view to creating historical narra‑ tives that justify and transfer authority to the incumbent Party leadership. To do so, first, the perio‑ dization of Party history is repeatedly recalibrated, historical protagonists and events are enlarged or downplayed, and ‘history’ itself is ascribed agency to bestow rightful authority to the Party leadership. Second, the resolutions are written in a rhetoric that strives to inculcate beliefs in the Party’s evolving ideological orthodoxy. As pedagogical texts, they call for instilling Party mem‑ bers with the core tenets of the Party canon which they help to reproduce under incumbent CCP leaders. Last but not least, they prime for action in the sense of invoking audiences’ consent to the ‘correct’ interpretation of historical reality and thus to the current leadership’s right to rule, while sanctioning other ‘incorrect’ accounts of Party history – recently labeled ‘historical nihilism’. This chapter elaborates on the evolution of these three functions of mind‑engineering from 1945 to 2021. To do so, the three resolutions published under Mao, Deng, and Xi are analyzed from a linguistic perspective, thereby offering an original contribution to the existing literature. Each of the three resolutions has been studied by Party historians and political science scholars in its respective contemporary context, mostly from a perspective of power politics. To name just a few seminal works, Schwartz (1968), Apter and Saich (1994), Saich (1995), and Li (2002) have discussed the political background and implications of the 1945 Resolution; Goodman (1981), Weigelin‑Schwiedrzik (1987), and Leese (2020: 434–448) have investigated the machinations of 39

DOI: 10.4324/9781003289746-5

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elite politics and the forging of a consensus on the post‑Mao Party leadership in the making of the 1981 Resolution, while Engman (2021) focuses on its role in Party propaganda efforts to reconcile personal experience and Party historiography. The third resolution, published in November 2021, has been covered mainly in online media commentary (Leese 2022; Introvigne 2022), still await‑ ing a more systematic analysis. So far, there is almost no overarching research on the CCP’s history resolutions as a generic form of text evolving over the course of time (Weigelin‑Schwiedrzik 2006 being an exception, see below). This chapter aims to fill this research gap by treating the resolutions on Party history as a genre of its own. The concept of genre denotes a specific type of communication recognized via social conventions that shape discursive interaction (Fairclough 2003: 26) and characterized by specific linguistic functions, formal traits, and patterns of textual organization as well as specific communicative relations implied in a text’s genre (Charaudeau et al. 2002: 278–280). Building on the existing literature dealing with the power politics and propaganda rationales behind the three consecutive resolutions, the linguistic perspective chosen in this chapter allows us to focus on the discursive modus operandi behind the evolving mind‑engineering functions as outlined earlier – the (re)shaping of historical ‘truth’, the inculcation and molding of beliefs, and the justification of incoming leadership generations vis‑à‑vis a wider public. This approach bears some similarity to Apter’s and Saich’s (1994) notion of ‘exegetical bonding’,2 which he used in his analysis of the 1945 Resolution – in a nutshell, the process of bestowing symbolic capital and political authority to incumbent leaders via a collective process of textual exegesis orchestrated top‑down by the Party leadership. In line with the conceptualization of the historical resolutions as a genre of its own, however, this chapter attaches more weight to the upstream process of the discursive con‑ struction of the texts than to the downstream process of emotional ‘bonding’ facilitated by their collective exegesis. The chapter is structured according to the three functions of mind‑engineering; each of them is analyzed diachronically. While the first section elaborates on how perceptions of the CCP’s historical reality have been shaped by Soviet historiography and reshaped under Mao, Deng, and Xi, the second section investigates how the three resolutions have contributed to the indoctrination of beliefs in the evolving Party canon. The third section illustrates how the genre is designed to prime its target audiences for action by incentivizing certain forms of behavior and disincentivizing other forms of behavior, followed by a conclusion on the genre’s evolving mind‑engineering role. The linguistic analysis is based on primary sources, including the original Chinese‑language versions of the 1945, 1981, and 2021 Resolutions, as well as the official English‑language transla‑ tions offered by foreign language outlets of the CCP’s propaganda apparatus. For purposes of cita‑ tion, citations will refer to document sections instead of pagings in the three resolutions to allow for cross‑references between Chinese and English versions.

(Re‑)Shaping Perceptions of Historical Reality Stalin’s Short Course and Mao’s 1945 Resolution The first resolution on CCP history was adopted by an enlarged plenary session of the Party’s central committee in April 1945, marking the end of Mao Zedong’s rectification campaign in the Yan’an revolutionary base area (Apter 1994; Saich 1995; Gao 2019). It was closely mod‑ eled on the 1938 version of the Short Course of the History of the All‑Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) (henceforth Short Course), the constitutive text of the would‑be genre. The Russian blueprint, which had been commissioned in the early 1930s and heavily edited by Stalin himself,

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served as one of the most widely used textbooks on Party history and as an encyclopedia of Marx‑ ism–Leninism well into the 1950s not only in the Soviet Union but also in other communist coun‑ tries around the world (Brandenberger and Zelenov 2019). Mao Zedong was one of the most fervent readers of a 1939 Chinese translation of the Short Course, particularly of the concluding parts of each section. Allegedly, he took pride in not having read the entire book – instead of get‑ ting lost in the details of Soviet history, he aspired to apply the book’s main ideas to conditions in China (Li 2002: 364). The main formal trait of the new genre is a master‑narrative copied by Mao Zedong from Sta‑ lin’s Short Course. This master‑narrative is based on a formula that can be traced all the way to the 2021 Resolution: the ‘integration’ of theory and practice, or, as the 1945 Resolution has it, the ‘integration of the universal truth of Marxism–Leninism with the concrete practice of the Chinese revolution’ (马克思列宁主义的普遍真理和中国革命的具体实践相结合). Epistemologically, the idea of ‘integration’ is different from a mere application of theoretical knowledge to empirical practice. Rather, it is described as a continuous Sinification of Marxism, a process driven forward by respective communist vanguard leaderships whose historical mission is to update and develop Marxist–Leninist theory by organically adapting its basic tenets to the changing reality of society (Schurmann 1968: 18–33). For the CCP under Mao Zedong, the appropriation of this master‑nar‑ rative allowed to tap into the authoritative legacy of world communism while emancipating itself from a dominant Soviet model and creating its own identity in line with the Chinese experience. A second basic feature of the genre copied by Mao from Stalin’s Short Course is a specific pat‑ tern of textual organization – a plot structure of continuous ‘struggle’ (Li 2002: 359). Each stage of Party history and each significant development was conceived of as resulting from political ‘struggles’ (斗争) between the ‘correct’ (正确) line of the vanguard and various ‘incorrect’ (不正 确), ‘erroneous’ (错误), and ‘distorted’ (偏向) positions inside or outside the Party. In the 1945 Resolution, this plot structure shapes the perception of historical reality to a large extent. While covering the full period from the founding of the CCP in 1921 to 1945, the narrative focuses on the period 1927 to 1937, that is, between the end of the first and the beginning of the second united front with the ruling Guomindang (GMD). While the Party is depicted as having primarily strug‑ gled against GMD ‘reactionary cliques’ during 1921–1927 (‘First Great Revolution’) and against the enemy of Japanese imperialism during 1937–1945 (‘War of Resistance against Japan’), the ‘Agrarian Revolution’ period from 1927 to 1937 is narrated as dominated by intra‑Party struggles. Section III identifies the various ‘“Left” and Right deviations’ (‘左’、右倾的偏向)3 threaten‑ ing the Party’s unity during 1927–1937 in chronological order, with a focus on three ‘“Left” lines’ (‘左’倾路线) challenging Mao Zedong’s ascent as Party leader between 1927 and 1935 (Sections III–V). A six‑month ‘First “Left” Line of putschism’ in 1927/28 was followed by a ‘Second “Left” Line’ led by Moscow‑trained Li Lisan over a course of ‘less than four months’ during the summer and fall of 1930. A ‘Third “Left” Line’, led by Wang Ming, Stalin’s devoted disciple, spans the full four years (1931–1934) of Party history, before culminating in the famous Zunyi Conference of January 1935, which marks Mao’s breakthrough as the uncontested leader of the CCP (Section III). Taken together, the duration of the three ‘“Left” lines’ amounts to almost five years, that is, close to but less than half of the ten‑year period that is in the resolution’s focus. This plot structure allows to streamline the historical narrative in a way that portrays Mao Ze‑ dong’s ascent to the Party’s apex not as a personal political power struggle but as an ideological contest between the Party’s ‘correct’ line and various ‘erroneous’ lines. Section IV of the 1945 Resolution, which covers almost half of the text, offers a trenchant analysis of the main errors committed during 1927–1935 ‘politically, militarily, organizationally and ideologically’, only to

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juxtapose them with the ‘correct’ lines across the four domains as developed by Mao Zedong in the course of struggle. Summarily, the resolution states: The correctness or incorrectness of any political, military or organizational line has ideo‑ logical roots – it depends on whether or not the line starts from Marxist‑Leninist dialectical materialism and historical materialism and whether or not the line starts from the objective realities of the Chinese revolution and the objective needs of the Chinese people. (Section IV/4) In this way, the resolution transforms the historical contingency of political power struggles inside the CCP to a strict consequentiality of Mao Zedong’s rise that results from his acting out of an arduous and heroic ideological struggle between ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ positions. Zooming in on the seven and a half years leading to his ascent to uncontested leadership in 1935, the previous six years and the following ten years of Party history are relegated to a mere prelude and coda, respectively. Thereby, the resolution normatively justifies the rightful authority of Party leadership under Mao Zedong, elevating him to the pantheon of communist ideology to sit eye to eye with Marx, Lenin, and, Stalin thanks to his efforts in integrating Marxist theory with China’s practical experience. With the help of this master‑narrative and a plot structure of continuous struggle between ‘cor‑ rect’ and ‘incorrect’ lines copied from Stalin’s Short Course, the 1945 Resolution not only rewrites CCP history based on Maoist discourse and interpretation, as Saich (1995) has argued. It goes much further, claiming to offer ‘historical proof’ (历史证明) of the rightful authority of Party leadership to complete the revolution and rule the country. As the last section summarizes, The practice of the Chinese Revolution […] has proved, and continues to prove, that the line represented by Comrade Mao Zedong, the line of struggle of our Party and the people of the whole country, is entirely correct. […] The great success achieved by our Party […] and the decisive role our Party has played testify most vividly to the correctness of this line. (Section VII) The underlying argument is a tautological one: As a revolutionary vanguard, the Party is mandated with the ‘historical task’ (历史任务) (Section IV/1) to complete the revolution – fulfilling this task then ‘proves’ the correctness of the Party’s line, which again is testified by the Party’s success. As the following analysis of the 1981 and 2021 Resolutions demonstrates, this tautology of a Party living up to its self‑proclaimed ‘historical mission’ has come to form another core trait of the genre.

The 1981 Resolution and the Transfer of Leadership Authority from Mao to Deng Thirty‑seven years after the 1945 Resolution, the second resolution on CCP history was passed by the Party’s central committee in June 1981 on the occasion of the CCP’s 60th anniversary. In the meantime, the Party had declared victory in the ‘War of Resistance’ against Japan in 1945 and in the ‘War of Liberation’ against its domestic competitor, the GMD, in 1949. With the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in October of that year, the CCP under Mao Zedong be‑ came China’s ruling party for decades to come. Mao not only had ‘liberated’ the Chinese people and initiated the country’s socialist transformation but had also launched increasingly devastating

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political campaigns and purges, among them the ‘Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution’, which swept across the country from 1966 to 1969 and triggered protracted strife between various elite factions and among the people’s ‘masses’. Mao’s death in September 1976 left the Party in disar‑ ray and created a vacuum of leadership authority. After successfully discrediting and removing Hua Guofeng from his two‑year stint as Party chief, a new leadership collective formed around Deng Xiaoping, Mao’s brother‑in‑arms, since the late 1920s (Leese 2020: 441–443). As Goodman (1981: 520/1) observed, the Party elite then consisted of leading members of the ‘revolutionary generation’ who had first come to power in 1949 and made their careers during the 1950s and 1960s. For many of them, including Deng, the ‘Cultural Revolution’ was a traumatic watershed during which they faced massive criticism, humiliation, and persecution, often with fatal results. Those who had survived the purges faced an unprecedented dilemma: while Mao Zedong was clearly the main culprit behind two decades of political purges, the Party’s authority rested on his ideological legacy. His revolutionary merits could not be denied without cutting off CCP legiti‑ macy from its Marxist–Leninist sources. To solve this dilemma and justify a transfer of leadership authority from Mao Zedong to Deng Xiaoping, the new leadership collective around Deng devised a linguistic operation that allowed to separate Mao Zedong’s personal role in Party history from ‘Mao‑Zedong‑Thought’ – the quintes‑ sential collection of ideological tenets distilled under Mao’s leadership but detached from his per‑ son. The CCP’s central committee mandated a drafting group – among them Party historiographer Hu Qiaomu who had already helped to draft the 1945 Resolution (Weigelin‑Schwiedrzik 1987: 80–83) – to enshrine this separation in an updated version of Party history. In line with the genre’s master‑narrative appropriated from Stalin’s Short Course and elaborated in the 1945 Resolution, ‘Mao‑Zedong‑Thought’ (毛泽东思想) was defined in the penultimate section (the longest out of eight sections) as: the product of the integration of the universal principles of Marxism‑Leninism with the concrete practice of the Chinese revolution (马克思列宁主义普遍原理和中国革命具体实 践相结合的产物) […]. Mao‑Zedong‑Thought is Marxism‑Leninism applied and developed in China […], a crystallization of the collective wisdom of the Chinese Communist Party. Many outstanding leaders of our Party made important contributions to the formation and development of Mao‑Zedong‑Thought, and they are synthesized in the scientific works of Comrade Mao Zedong. (Section 7/28) While this abstract definition of Mao‑Zedong‑Thought as ‘crystallization of collective wisdom’ was the easy task, the corresponding rewriting of the Party history was more challenging. The 1981 Resolution had to serve as a consensus paper, weighing the merits and demerits of Mao, but also ‘legitimizing the balance of power between different factions inside the CCP and defining the hierarchy of its leading members according to their contributions and mistakes […] made in the course of Party history’ (Weigelin‑Schwiedrzik 1987: 86). To do so, the drafting group recalibrated the plot structure of continuous struggles between correct and incorrect positions, the other defining trait of the genre. The 1981 Resolution started with a review of the 28 years before the founding of the PRC. While the 1945 Resolution’s valid‑ ity and the ‘correct’ summing up of historical experience were explicitly confirmed, the abridged narrative of those years included subtle and not‑so‑subtle revisions of protagonists, periods, and political struggles. Instead of the Comintern and Stalin, who had figured prominently in the 1945

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Resolution as the CCP’s godfathers, the updated version focuses on Lenin’s and Sun Yatsen’s revolutionary contributions. By cutting out the first three years after the Party’s founding, the ‘First Great Revolution’ (1921–1927) is downgraded as the ‘Northern Expedition’ (1924–1927). While the 1945 version had gone to length to include China’s peasants as part of the proletariat, the 1981 version praises the historical role of the ‘Chinese workers’ movement’. Mao Zedong is not portrayed as struggling on his own but side‑by‑side with other Party veterans. The previous narrative of Mao’s struggle against three ‘“Left” lines’ is condensed to only one, namely the strug‑ gle against Wang Ming’s ‘Left’ errors, which are blamed for causing ‘enormous losses’ before and during the Long March. By straightening out the trajectory of line struggles, the establish‑ ment of Mao’s leading position in the Party and the Red Army at the 1935 Zunyi Conference is highlighted as a first ‘vital turning point (生死攸关的转折点) in the history of the Party’ (Section 1/3). As another defining trait of the genre, we again find a tautological ‘proof’ of the correctness of Mao‑Zedong‑Thought irrespective of Mao Zedong’s personal role: Just as the [CCP] is recognized as the central force leading the entire people forward, so Comrade Mao Zedong is recognized as the great leader (伟大领袖) of the [CCP] and the whole Chinese people, and Mao Zedong Thought, which came into being through the collec‑ tive struggle of the Party and the people, is recognized as the guiding ideology (指导思想) of the Party. This is the inevitable outcome (必然结果) of the 28 years. (Section 1/5) The following five sections offer a ‘basic appraisal’ of the 32 years of Party history since 1949, divided into four periods: seven years of ‘socialist transformation’; ten years of ‘initially build‑ ing socialism’; and ten years of ‘Cultural Revolution’, followed by a short transition period after Mao’s death in 1976 that culminates in another ‘great turning point in history’ (历史的伟大转折) in December 1978 – the Party session that confirmed Deng as the CCP’s new leading figure. To make a long (hi‑)story short, the first period of socialist transformation, officially declared complete in September 1956, is unequivocally praised as highly successful across the board. The resolution hails the achievements made in the development of productive forces and in the ideo‑ logical sphere. In particular, it emphasizes the Party’s collective insight into the post‑1949 era’s ‘principal contradiction’ (主要矛盾), a key term of dialectial materialism. In 1956, the new con‑ tradiction was ‘correctly’ identified to be no longer between the working class and the bourgeoisie but between the ‘demand of the people for rapid economic and cultural development’ and the rela‑ tively backward state of China’s economy and culture. Starting from this ‘golden age’, Party his‑ tory is narrated as cascading downward decade by decade. For the period 1956 to 1966, the 1981 Resolution registers ‘very big successes despite serious setbacks’. For example, the Anti‑Rightist Movement of 1956/57 is interpreted as a ‘correct and necessary’ rectification, except for admitting that ‘the scope of struggle was made far too broad’, with too many unjust verdicts against Party members. Similarly, the momentous episode of the ‘Great Leap Forward’ of the late 1950s, which resulted in a dramatic three‑year famine, is portrayed very briefly as a well‑intentioned but hastily implemented campaign caused by ‘excessive targets, arbitrary directions, boastfulness, and the stirring up of a “communist wind”’. While Mao is said to have tried to correct these ‘Left’ errors, he failed to do so in a sufficient way; instead he mistakenly ‘widened and absolutized class strug‑ gle’, which actually no longer was the principal contradiction of the times. Nevertheless, the 1981 Resolution makes it clear that the responsibility for those ‘Left’ er‑ rors (Section 4) is carried by the Party’s leadership collective by Mao Zedong, not by him as

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a person (Section 4/16–18). Given the fact that the Great Leap Forward has caused the death toll of dozens of millions of peasants, this assessment as a mere ‘collateral damage’ of social‑ ist policies (Leese 2020: 432) appears highly apologetical. It might be explained as an act of self‑exoneration: Deng Xiaoping and other members of the incumbent leadership generation had been involved in the Anti‑Rightist Movement on the side of Mao and had made their po‑ litical careers during the years following the Great Leap (Holbig 1999: 1031–1032; Engman 2021: 198). Compared to this moderate rhetoric, the 1981 Resolution portrays the following ten years from 1966 to 1976, labeled as ‘The Decade of the Cultural Revolution’, as the darkest period in PRC history. Notably, the period is homogenized as a decade of ‘chaos’ (混乱) by stretching the ‘Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution’, launched by Mao in May 1966 and declared as completed by April 1969, to also cover the years until his death and the demise of the ‘Gang of Four’ in late 1976. This semantic extension of the ‘Cultural Revolution’, on the one hand, allows to criticize Mao Zedong for its initiation, said to be motivated by erroneous ‘Left’ assumptions, which caused him to ‘confuse right and wrong, people and enemy (混淆了是非和敌我)’, while, on the other hand, to shift the ultimate blame for the ‘ten years of chaos’ away from Mao and to the ‘coun‑ ter‑revolutionary cliques’ around Lin Biao, Jiang Qing, and other ‘criminals’. History has shown that the ‘Cultural Revolution’, initiated by a leader laboring under a mis‑ apprehension and capitalized on by counter‑revolutionary cliques, led to domestic turmoil and brought catastrophe to the Party, the state and the whole people. […] Chief responsibil‑ ity for the grave ‘Left’ error of the ‘Cultural Revolution’ […] does indeed lie with Comrade Mao Zedong. But after all it was the error of a great proletarian revolutionary (终究是一 个伟大的无产阶级革命家所犯的错误). […] Herein lies his tragedy (是他的悲剧所在). (Section 5/20–22) Besides saving Mao’s overall reputation as a ‘beloved great leader and teacher’ (Section 5/22), blaming a small minority of counter‑revolutionary criminals for the ‘decade of chaos’ allows to portray the overwhelming majority of Party members and the people as misled but innocent vic‑ tims. By rehabilitating those who had suffered ‘unjust verdicts’ during the Anti‑Rightist Movement and the ‘Cultural Revolution’, the reassessment of Party history is translated into political real‑ ity, a step which provides the incumbent Party leadership with a broad support base (Section 6). By attributing the key role in cleaning up the chaos to the new leadership collective under Deng Xiaoping, the 1981 Resolution massively bolsters his authority, as a phoenix rising from the ashes. The penultimate section brings home the resolution’s main message in an unmistakable fash‑ ion: Mao remains a great revolutionary leader whose ‘merits are primary and [whose] errors are secondary’ (Section 7/27). It is entirely wrong to try to negate the scientific value of Mao‑Zedong‑Thought and its guid‑ ing role […] just because Comrade Mao Zedong made mistakes in his later years. […] And it is likewise entirely wrong to adopt a dogmatic attitude towards the sayings of Comrade Mao Zedong […]. Both these attitudes (两种态度) fail to make a distinction between Mao Zedong Thought – a scientific theory formed and tested over a long period of time – and the mistakes Comrade Mao Zedong made in his later years. And it is absolutely necessary that this distinction should be made. (Section 7/31)

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Based on the same dialectics, the last section completes the transfer of authority from Mao to Deng. Armed with Marxism–Leninism and Mao‑Zedong‑Thought, the CCP’s ultimate ‘historical mission’ (历史使命) is to realize communism. The Party leadership cannot be exempt from mistakes, but there is no doubt that it can cor‑ rect them […] So long as we earnestly uphold and constantly improve Party leadership, our Party will definitely be better able to undertake the tremendous tasks entrusted to it by his‑ tory (担负起历史所赋予的巨大的责任). (Section 8/34) With this conclusion, the 1981 Resolution builds on the same tautological argument as the 1945 Resolution, thereby confirming this key trait of the genre. By entrusting the Party’s leadership with a ‘mission’ and with ‘tremendous tasks’, ‘history’ takes on an agency of itself: the Party is not free from mistakes, but by knowing and fulfilling history’s tasks, the Party will always be able to correct its mistakes and, as history proves, remain victorious. Overall, the perception of historical reality has been remolded to fit this tautology. Mao‑Zedong‑Thought, as the Party’s constant guid‑ ing ideology, is the vehicle for a smooth transition of CCP leadership authority from Mao to Deng.

The 2021 Resolution and the Making of Xi Jinping’s Supremacy The genre of CCP history resolutions has been developed further in 2021, the Party’s centennial. In November, less than a year before the 20th Party Congress in October 2022, which would con‑ firm Xi Jinping for an unprecedented third term as CCP general secretary, the last plenary session of the 19th Central Committee adopted the ‘Resolution on the Major Achievements and Histori‑ cal Experience of the Party over the Past Century’. Slightly longer than the 1981 Resolution, it features a similar pattern of textual organization. Starting with an opening section (‘Preamble’) that puts the document in a long historical context and confirms the validity of the previous two resolutions, the first four sections (I‑IV) chronologically outline the Party’s history from 1921 to the present, divided into four periods (1921–1949, 1949–1978, 1978–2012, 2012– ). Among them, the last section on ‘A New Era of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics’ (IV), dedicated to the most recent period under Xi Jinping, covers more than half of the entire text. It is followed by two reflective sections that systematically elaborate on the Party’s ‘historical significance (历史意义)’ (V) and the ‘historical experience (历史经验)’ (VI), followed by a concluding section (VII) which projects the CCP’s ‘great glories and victories’ well into the future. As before, the chronological narrative is bracketed by pedagogical reflections about the evolving significance of Party ideology. The 2021 Resolution builds on the same master‑narrative of integrating Marxist theory and Chi‑ nese practice found in the previous resolutions. However, the narrative is now unfolding in distinct steps across various leadership generations. The establishment of Mao‑Zedong‑Thought is praised as the ‘first historic step (第一次历史性跃, lit. “the first historical leap”) in adapting Marxism to the Chinese context’ (Section II). The ‘theory of socialism with Chinese Characteristics’ as devel‑ oped by Deng Xiaoping and his successors since 1978 is then summarized in the Chinese version as ‘a new breakthrough (新的飞跃, lit. “a new leap”) in the Sinification of Marxism’ (Section III). Yet, when it comes to Xi Jinping’s contribution to the Sinification of Marxism, described as another ‘new breakthrough’ (‘new leap’), the master‑narrative of ‘integration’, besides repeating the well‑known ‘practical’ element of China’s reality, is enlarged to include a second ‘practical’ element. The formula now reads ‘adapting the basic tenets of Marxism to China’s specific realities

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and its fine traditional culture (把马克思主义基本原理同中国具体实际相结合、同中华优秀 传统文化相结合4)’, thereby elevating the country’s ‘traditional culture’ to the highest level of Marxism’s ongoing authentication. Accordingly, the 2021 Resolution celebrates on the contribu‑ tion of Xi Jinping, eulogized as the ‘principal founder (主要创立者)’ of ‘Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era’ (hereafter as ‘Xi‑Jinping‑Thought’) with various new superlatives: Xi‑Jinping‑Thought is trumpeted as ‘Marxism of contemporary China and of the 21st century’ (是当代中国马克思主义、二十一世纪马克思主义), embodying ‘the best of the Chinese culture and ethos in our times’ (中华文化和中国精神的时代精华) (Section IV). In Chinese, the condensed version of Xi’s unique contribution is a hard‑to‑translate 中国化时 代化, literally the ‘Sinification and Era‑ification of Marxism’. This careful extension and elaboration of the genre’s master‑narrative attributes an authority of Xi Jinping (Thought) that is clearly superior to that of Deng Xiaoping (Theory), not to speak of Jiang Zemin’s and Hu Jintao’s impersonal contributions covered only by few lines of text each. Compared to Mao Zedong (Thought), Xi Jinping (Thought) is situated at eye level if not even more elevated. Other features of the 2021 Resolution appear to confirm Xi’s superior authority. While Mao is labeled as the ‘core’ (核心) of the CCP’s ‘first generation of the central leadership collective’ (Section I), Xi is ascribed a double ‘core position on the Party Central Committee and in the Party as a whole’ (Section 4). Thanks to Xi’s theoretical innovations, Marxism has take[n] on a fresh face in the eyes of the world (以崭新形象展现在世界上) and signifi‑ cantly shifted the worldwide historical evolution of and contest between the two different ideologies and social systems of socialism and capitalism in a way that favors socialism (有利于社会主义的重大转变). (Section V/3) Thanks to Xi, the Party is ‘certain to see Marxism emanate mightier and more compelling power of truth (更强大、更有说服力的真理力量) across the land of China’ (Section VI/3). Moreover, in an international context, while Mao is praised for having liberated the country from foreign imperialism and restored its lawful rights in the United Nations, the sections about Xi Jinping (Thought) stress the global emanations of his rule throughout. In the Resolution’s chrono‑ logical sequence, the Chinese nation has ‘stood up (站起来)’ under Mao, ‘become rich (富起来)’ under Deng and his successors, but is ‘getting strong’ (强起来) on the international stage only under Xi’s rule. His global ambitions are framed in lofty Sino‑centric rhetoric, for example, ‘[w] hen the path is just, the common good will reign over all under Heaven (大道之行，天下为公)’. In a modernist variant, the text invokes a ‘global vision for the future [destiny] of mankind (以世 界眼光关注人类前途命运)’, which will allow the Party ‘to stand on the right side of history and the side of human progress (站在历史正确的一边，站在人类进步的一边)’ and to bring about ‘more miraculous achievements that amaze the world (更多令人刮目相看的人间奇迹)’ (Section IV/6–7). By conjuring Xi’s global charisma, the 2021 Resolution appears to signal that his leader‑ ship authority has the potential to outshine that of Mao. The genre’s second basic feature, the plot structure of continuous struggle, is also discernible in the 2021 Resolution, though slightly modified. The vocabulary of conflictive ‘struggle’ (斗争) be‑ tween ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ positions inside the Party is mainly reserved for the Mao era and the early post‑Mao period. In stark contrast to the increasingly dark and erratic narration of the PRC’s first three decades in the 1981 Resolution, the account is now streamlined into a compact narra‑ tive of regrettable mistakes not rectified in good time. While the 1981 Resolution’s basic appraisal

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of the ‘Cultural Revolution’ is maintained, the language is much less dramatic and emotionally charged (Section II). In line with the 1981 Resolution, the post‑1978 period is defined by aban‑ doning ‘class struggle as key link’ (以阶级斗争为纲) and ‘completely renouncing (彻底否定) the “Cultural Revolution’’’ (Section III) – but, conspicuously, not any longer by abandoning the Mao‑style ‘personality cult’, as the 1981 Resolution had done. From 1978 onwards, the Party’s ‘struggle’ is limited to the fight against corruption, for the realization of developmental goals and for gaining international status. Taking a bird’s‑eye view, by toning down the language of conflic‑ tive struggle, the plot structure of the 2021 Resolution levels out the extreme low of the ‘Decade of Chaos’ under Mao and the phoenix‑like rise of Deng. What results is a substantially smoothened trajectory of Party history that allows projecting the CCP leadership far into the 21st century. In the sections dedicated to Xi Jinping’s ‘New Era’ (新时代), the realm of conflictive ‘strug‑ gle’ is limited to the realm of national security and military combat. At the same time, another type of ‘struggle’ in a more constructive sense as 奋斗 (‘fighting for’, ‘making endeavors for sth’) gains in importance. Prominently, it also features as ‘a century’s struggle’ (百年奋斗) in the Chinese version of the resolution’s title (not appearing in the English translation. In line with dialectical materialism, the Party’s contemporary ‘struggle’ is portrayed as being about identify‑ ing the ‘principal contradiction’ of each period and striving for its gradual solution. Accordingly, the 2021 Resolution defines the ‘New Era’ under Xi Jinping as characterized by a new principal contradiction, which Xi is praised to have identified as the contradiction ‘between unbalanced and inadequate development and the people’s ever‑growing needs for a better life’ (Section IV). In this logic, what is ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ is no longer the outcome of (violent) political line struggles (斗争) but depends on whether the Party’s struggles and endeavors (奋斗) help to resolve the cor‑ rectly identified principal contradiction. Thanks to Xi Jinping’s merits in the ‘Sinification and ‘Era‑ification’ of Marxism, the Party knows what for and how to struggle into the future. While China is said to have ‘caught up with the times in great strides (大踏步赶上了时代)’ by the end of the Reform‑and‑Opening period (Sec‑ tion III), the ‘century’s struggle’ has made the Party ‘a forerunner of the times’ (走在时代前列)’ by 2021. This historiographical choreography of leap‑frogging across ‘the times’ (时代) – from catching up to overtaking – will not escape the attention of the resolution’s more diligent readers. To complete the tautological argument typical of the genre, ‘history’ itself is instrumentalized once more to ‘prove’ the CCP’s correct path, glories, and victories. While the two previous resolu‑ tions had already emphasized the Party’s ‘historical mission’ and ‘responsibility’, the 2021 Reso‑ lution goes one step further in assigning ‘history’ an agency of its own. It even claims that ‘it has been proven through practice that history and the people have chosen (历史和人民选择了) the Communist Party of China’ (Section I), thereby suggesting a proto‑democratic role of ‘history’. A similarly torn version of a combined agency of history and the people can be found in the Chinese version of the resolution’s concluding section. It is not included as such in the official English version, obviously due to translators’ concerns – that the metaphoric language might appear too parochial to foreign readers. Here is a literal translation: Over the past century, the Party has handed to the people and to history an excellently an‑ swered examination paper (党向人民、向历史交出了以份优异的答卷). […] The times are the ones who provide the paper (时代是出卷人), we are the ones who answer the paper (我们是答卷人), and the people are the ones who score the paper (人民是阅卷人). We must continue to achieve good test results (一定要继续考出好成绩) and to develop a new impos‑ ing manner and new accomplishments (新气象新作为) on our new journey in the new era. (Section VII) 48

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To interpret this impressively naturalistic passage of the 2021 Resolution’s Chinese version, in‑ stead of democratic accountability, it appears to claim a kind of meritocratic accountability based on the Party’s performance in perpetual examinations handed out by ‘the times’. It is hard to tell whether this metaphor is meant to reminisce about China’s imperial examination system or to forebode the coming realization of Marxism’s soteriological promises. Regardless, ‘history’ – in collaboration with the ‘people’ – is refunctioned as an agency testifying to the Party’s rightful source of authority, a linguistic device that aptly demonstrates the genre’s function to shape and reshape perceptions of historical reality. As this linguistic analysis has shown, the purpose clearly is not to reconstruct the past but to reproduce the authority of new leadership generations in the present and to project it into the future.

Inculcating Beliefs in the Party Canon For the purpose of mind‑engineering, (re‑)shaping perceptions is not enough though. To be effec‑ tive, resolutions on Party history also have to inculcate their audiences with beliefs in the CCP’s ideological orthodoxy. In fact, this function has evolved over time with the change of the genre’s target audiences. As this section shows, the genre has become an important site for the construc‑ tion and reconstruction of the Party’s evolving ideological canon, a process designed to instill enduring beliefs in a malleable corpus of texts. As described earlier, the genre’s basic pattern of textual organization combines a more or less compressed narration of Party history with analytical reflections that serve a pedagogical purpose.5 The 1945 Resolution is divided into various chronologically organized sections, followed by a long analytical section (covering half of the text) dissecting the errors of the various ‘Left’ lines in the realm of politics, military, organization, and ideology. Each of the four subsections starts from outlining the respective erroneous positions, only to juxtapose them with the ‘correct’ positions, which are then elaborated on in much detail. Similar to Stalin’s Short Course, the resolution thus offers a kind of encyclopedic knowledge of Maoist tenets. The subsection on organizational is‑ sues even mentions a ‘Mao Zedong Model’ (毛泽东模范) of how to conduct inner‑Party struggle while maintaining inner‑Party unity (Section IV/3). Here, it is important to remember that the 1945 Resolution was drafted at the end of the Yan’an rectification campaign. Its target audience con‑ sisted of the survivors of the Long March and a growing group of educated urban youth who were sympathetic to the revolutionary cause but had no revolutionary experience of their own. By offer‑ ing a summary of the orthodox version of Party history (Saich 1995), the resolution’s proto‑canon served both as an ex‑post justification of the rectification of comrades who had been ‘misled by erroneous positions’ and as a pedagogical tool to mold the revolutionary identity of younger Party members. The tautological rhetoric of historical mission, embellished by eulogies of revolutionary martyrs who ‘heroically sacrificed their lives’ and who will be ‘forever revered’ (Section IV/4), creates a transcendental realm of belief in the ‘sacred’ cause of the Party. According to Apter, the collective act of textual exegesis has been highly effective in inculcating Party members with quasi‑religious convictions, suggesting a ‘transcendence of ordinary understanding’ and helping them to internalize ‘Mao’s correct understanding of party history’ (Apter 1994: 264, 269). The 1981 Resolution features a similar basic organization of sections, consisting of six sec‑ tions featuring a period‑by‑period chronological setup, followed by two reflective sections with a pedagogical purpose. Among them, the penultimate section (Section 7), covering almost a quarter of the text, outlines the quintessential wisdom of Party ideology. After distinguishing between the historical person of Mao and Mao‑Zedong‑Thought, the latter’s ‘wide‑ranging con‑ tent’ is developed systematically in six subsections, reaching from key insights into the new 49

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democratic revolution and socialist construction to military strategy, policy, and tactics, to ideo‑ logical work and Party‑building. Each of the subsections summarizes the main convictions and offers a list of Mao’s main publications on the respective elements of the canon (Section 7/29), thereby offering a ‘must‑read’ selection of the Selected Works of Mao Zedong that had been published since the 1960s. This list of canonical elements is then followed by an equally detailed elaboration of ‘the stand, viewpoint and method embodied in the component parts’ of what is hailed here as ‘the living soul (活的灵魂) of Mao Zedong Thought’ (Section 7/30). As the formal structure and the rhetoric suggest, it is this section which is designed not only to inculcate basic knowledge of the Party orthodoxy but also to keep up the collective faith in the Party’s cause despite the Mao era’s traumatic experience. It is important to note that the audience of the 1981 Resolution was much larger and more di‑ verse than in 1945. It included a large part of people ‘either too young to know or politically not active inside the Communist Party’ (Weigelin‑Schwiedrzik 1987: 82) who needed to be trained in Party history and familiarized with its ideological belief system. The 1981 Resolution contrib‑ uted to these efforts by offering a crash course on the existing Party canon while warning against overtly ‘dogmatic’ (教条化) (Sections 6 and 7) interpretations and prohibiting any kind of ‘per‑ sonality cult’ (个人崇拜) (Sections 5 and 8). The pleas for an ‘undogmatic’, ‘seeking truth from facts’ attitude, however, should not be misread as expressions of pure pragmatism, as is often done with regard to the reform period under Deng. Rather, the expectation that CCP members ‘believe’ in Party ideology is obvious, for example, from the ‘Four Fundamental Principles (四项基本原 则)’.6 Mentioned seven times in the 1981 Resolution, the formula clearly serves as an ideological rail‑guard to prevent overtly ‘undogmatic’ and liberal interpretations. Compared to its predecessors, the 2021 Resolution reflects the most systematic efforts in craft‑ ing a contemporary canon designed to indoctrinate beliefs in the Party’s ideology. To understand the rationale behind these efforts, we have to bear in mind the political context in the run‑up to Xi Jinping’s contested third term as Party leader, which had to be justified vis‑à‑vis an unprecedent‑ edly large audience of more than 95 million Party members as of 2021. Noticeably, in a ­section on Party‑building, the 2021 Resolution brings home the urgency of instilling Party members with unwavering beliefs in the Party’s ideology. It deplores a ‘serious lack of political conviction’ (政治信仰出现严重危机; literally, ‘a serious crisis of political belief’) among the rank and file of Party members, followed by a long typology of misconduct resulting from the decay of ideological beliefs (Section IV/2). Reading the resolution in line with this diagnosis as a pedagogical text, it also provides the necessary means to tackle this endemic ‘crisis of belief’. Noticeably, a personal ‘explanation’ (说明) of the 2021 Resolution offered by Xi Jinping himself mentions Zhao Leji, the leading figure of the Central Committee’s Discipline Inspection Commission (CCDIC), as one of the chief politburo members in charge of the drafting process (Xi 2021). This fact might explain the heavy emphasis on Party‑building throughout the text and indicates the resolution’s potential impact on the weal and woe of Party members under the purview of the powerful CCDIC which scrutinizes, and if necessary disciplines, individual beliefs, and behaviors. In the challenging process of circumscribing a unified system of thought ascribed to a living leader who produces new texts all the time, the 2021 Resolution serves as an apt opportunity to dis‑ till its most essential elements. In fact, Section IV, which follows three chronologically structured sections and covers almost half of the entire text, presents the locus canonicus for important seg‑ ments of ‘Xi‑Jinping‑Thought’, which has been in the making since 2017 (Holbig 2022). Official online encyclopedias such as Baidu Baike or the Chinese version of Wikipedia, for example, cite the 2021 Resolution as the authoritative source for the main contents of Xi‑Jinping‑Thought. Most

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prominently, the reader finds a list of ‘Ten Clarifications’ (十个明确), ranging from Party leader‑ ship, the overarching tasks of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics, the New Era’s Principal Contradiction, to a series of ‘magic‑number’ formulas summarizing the state of the art of domes‑ tic governance (such as the ‘Five‑Sphere‑Integration’ (五位一体) or the ‘Four Comprehensives’ (四个全面), too long to be detailed here), to external domains such as security, military develop‑ ment and diplomacy, and ending with Party‑building (Section IV). The same long section also lists the ‘Historical Achievements in Thirteen Fields’ (十三个方面历史性成就), again starting with the Party’s overall leadership, followed by its ‘full and rigorous self‑governance’, achievements made in economic, political, legal, cultural, social and ecological fields as well as national defense, security, ‘One Country Two Systems’ and international diplomacy (Section IV:1–13). A third inte‑ gral segment of Xi‑Jinping‑Thought, the ‘Fourteen Upholds’ (十四个坚持), likewise starting with Party leadership and ending with Party‑building, are not numerically listed in the 2021 Resolution but are elaborated across the text. To grapple with the complex canonical structure, propaganda de‑ partments at lower levels have transcribed the resolution by using the mnemonic code ‘4135101’, referring to ‘4 periods, 13 achievements, 5 significances, 10 experiences, and 1 appeal’ (Leese 2022). Equipped with this canonized system of thought, the resolution expounds its pedagogical mis‑ sion in the most explicit ways. To tackle the serious ‘crisis of belief’ diagnosed in Section IV/2, the final section calls for ‘educat[ing] our people with Xi‑Jinping‑Thought’ and ‘enhanc[ing] cohesion by instilling in them the Party’s ideals and convictions (用党的理想信念凝聚人)’. Party members and cadres in particular should be educated to become ‘firm believers and faithful practitioners’ (坚定信仰者和忠实实践者) of Xi‑Jinping‑Thought. The concluding ‘appeal’ (号召) call[s] upon the entire Party, the military, and all Chinese people to rally more closely around the Central Committee with Comrade Xi Jinping at its core, to fully implement Xi‑Jin‑ ping‑Thought […] and to champion the great founding spirit of the Party (大力弘扬伟大 建党精神). (Section VII) Again, the rhetoric insinuates a sacred aura reminiscent of the personality cult of the Mao era – which, in contrast to the 1981 Resolution, the 2021 Resolution fails to renounce explicitly. The genre’s second function of mind‑engineering, the cultivation of ‘true believers’, is illustrated most aptly by this evocative language of the 2021 Resolution. Of course, we cannot look into the private recesses of Party members’ minds to know to which extent they ‘truly believe’ in the Party canon and to which extent they simply pretend to do so to conform with official expectations. While the production of belief and the mobilization of emotions in the Mao era have been investigated in depth (aptly summarized and developed, for example, in Perry 2002; Liu 2010; Cheek 2016b), there is little research on the psycho‑affective dimensions of political discourse in post‑Mao China. The few extant publications such as Davies (2008) on the legacy of ‘moral emotions’ in political discourse in the 21st century, Sorace (2018) on the ‘affective sovereignty’ claimed by the Party over people’s emotional life in televised confessions of allegedly corrupt cadres in the Xi era, Sorace (2021) on the ongoing adaptation of the CCP’s ‘affective governance’ from the Mao to the Xi era, or Shue (2022) on ‘regimes of resonance’ Xi Jinping’s Party‑state rule suggest, however, that the Party’s ongoing efforts of psychological and emotional engineering have not been ineffective, at least with regard to Party‑state cadres – who, after all, are the target audience of the genre under study here.

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Priming for (Non‑)Action By shaping perceptions of historical reality and instilling beliefs in the malleable Party canon, the three resolutions have also provided the conditions to prime the audiences for action, both at a collective and an individual level. To understand the genre’s behavioral implications, we need to look at incentives that shape certain forms of active consent as well as at disincentives that help to preempt dissent. At the collective level, the three resolutions uniformly call for learning the lessons from past experiences to rally allegiance for the Party’s future mission. Illustrated in a most paradigmatic fashion in the concluding appeal of the 2021 Resolution just quoted, the key is to educate Party members to enhance cohesion, achieve unity within the Party, and have the whole nation ‘rally more closely’ around the Party’s leadership core. The formulaic rhetoric of ‘educating’ (教育), ‘uniting’ (统一), and ‘rallying’ (团结), which can be found in all three resolutions, constitutes a clear imperative to actively acknowledge the historically ‘proven’ rightful authority of the Party’s leadership. The 2021 Resolution goes one step further by emphasizing the ‘great historical initia‑ tive (伟大的历史主动精神), tremendous political courage (巨大的政治勇气), and a powerful sense of mission (前列的责任担当)’ demonstrated by Xi Jinping (Section IV), and by repeatedly admonishing readers not to forget their ‘original aspiration and mission’ (初心使命) (Preamble, Sections V and VII). The slogan ‘Do not forget the original aspiration, keep the mission firmly in mind (不忘初心，牢记使命)’ in particular has been propagated widely to the Chinese public via gala festivals, propaganda songs, and films since 2016. Starting in May 2019, a formal education campaign on the same theme focused on leading cadres, followed in February 2021 by a related campaign for ‘Party history study and education’ (党史学习教育) that targeted Party members at large, thus providing fertile ground for the 2021 Resolution’s mind‑engineering efforts later in the year (Zheng and Hu 2022). As these education campaigns suggest, the genre’s action‑priming function is not limited to the collective level but has direct implications for individual behaviors. By complying with the resolu‑ tions’ mantra to ‘study’ (学习) Party history and the Party canon, CCP members actively demon‑ strate their loyalty vis‑à‑vis Party leaders. While this behavioral dimension of performing loyalty is inherent, of course, in all official ‘study’ activities, the genre’s characteristic plot structure of ‘struggles’ between ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ positions gives a more existential meaning to the per‑ formance of studying. In the 1945 Resolution, individual failure to attend intensive courses for the study of Party history implied a lack of loyalty and a higher risk of relentless ‘rectification’, particu‑ larly for educated urban Party members with ‘petty‑bourgeois’ class background (Saich 1995). The 1981 Resolution toned down class struggle and renounced the Maoist rituals of personality cult as proof of loyalty. Instead, loyalty was redefined in terms of Party members’ past and current conduct (Doyon and Yang 2022). Those who distanced themselves from ‘factionalism’, ‘anarchism’, ‘ul‑ tra‑invidualism’, and other ‘unhealthy tendencies’ (不正之风) would be rehabilitated; those who failed to do so would be ‘weed[ed] out [as] degenerate elements (清除腐化变质分子)’ (Section 8/35(10)). According to Goodman (1981: 526), the approval of the 1981 Resolution can be seen as ‘festival of vindication’ for the generation that had been active on the eve of the ‘Cultural Revolu‑ tion’ and from which the incumbent leadership was recruited. And as Engman (2021: 199) argues, ‘each person who was rehabilitated […] became a stakeholder in the official story of the past’. Under the leadership of Xi Jinping, the call for acting out one’s political loyalty has been stepped up once more as a key element of ideological governance through rectification (Cheek 2021). In language reminiscent of the Mao era, the Chinese version of the 2021 Resolution calls

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for all Party members to undergo ‘self‑revolution’ (自我革命, toned down as ‘self‑reform’ in the English version), ‘criticism and self‑criticism’ and lauds the Party’s continuous efforts in ‘self‑pu‑ rification, self‑perfection, self‑renovation and self‑improvement’ (自我净化、自我完善、自我 革新、自我提高; not translated literally in the English version) (Section IV/2). Presaging a vague but wide‑ranging social impact of Party members personal conduct, the resolution’s Chinese ver‑ sion even promises that the Party, ‘by engaging in a great self‑revolution, will steer a great social revolution (以伟大自我革命引领伟大社会革命)’ (Section IV). This topos of ‘steering a great social revolution with a great self‑revolution’ – included as the last of ‘Ten clarifications’ expounded in the 2021 Resolution as part of the new Party canon (Sec‑ tion IV) – is elaborated in a People’s Daily article authored by CCDIC head Zhao Leji. Published a week after the resolution, the article praises Xi‑Jinping‑Thought as ‘action guide (行动指南) to lead the Party’s great self‑revolution and promote the great social revolution’ and calls for ‘arming the Party’s innovative theory as the basis for casting the soul’ (把党的创新理论武装作为铸魂之本). According to Zhao Leji, the 2021 Resolution ‘profoundly reveals the dialectical relationship of self‑revolution and social revolution accompanying and promoting each other (自我革命和社 会革命相伴相随、互促共进的辩证关系) and fully reflects the historical initiative of Chinese Communists who, while transforming the objective world consciously transform their own sub‑ jective world, to transform the objective world even better (充分体现中国共产党人在改造客 观世界的同时自觉改造主观世界，从而更好改造客观世界的历史主动) (Zhao 2021: 3). In a rare expression of dialectical materialism, this explanation appears to draw a direct connection between the CCP’s great historical mission of ‘social revolution’ and individual Party members’ equally great mission to constantly probe into their souls and steel and prove themselves in the daily practice of social life. Whoever fails to do so, the article makes clear, too, will be ‘eliminated from the Party’s body like a malignant tumor through self‑purification’ (以自我净化革除自身毒 瘤) (Zhao 2021: 3). Embedded in the genre’s characteristic plot structure of an ongoing struggle between ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ positions, this vocabulary bears clear reminiscences of Maoist‑style rectification. If we agree with Cheek (2021: 10) that ‘rectification politics depends on the power of correct thought […] and on the impact of it through a mobilized, faithful cadre of leaders’, the 2021 Resolution embodies this power of correct thought in a most trenchant way. While the previous two resolu‑ tions employed the Maoist term of ‘political attitude’ (态度) to categorize the supposed unity of (in‑)correct political conviction and conduct, belief, and behavior, the 2021 Resolution does with‑ out the term. However, the pedagogical impetus based on the assumption of an integral relation‑ ship between cognition, emotion, and conscious action, aptly coined by Cheek (2016b: 80–87) as ‘cognio‑affective disposition’, is clearly still there. In this pedagogical context, the benchmark for measuring correct political attitude at the indi‑ vidual level – manifest in the congruence of proper conviction and proper conduct – is the political orthodoxy of Xi‑Jinping‑Thought, which Party members are obliged to study on a daily basis. A propaganda app for smartphones called ‘Study to Make the Country Great’ (学习强国, readable also as ‘Study Xi to Strengthen the Country’) launched in 2019 assists these efforts. The app of‑ fers textual and visual material expounding Xi‑Jinping‑Thought in theory but also trains and tests the user’s knowledge with interactive tools, quizzes, and points to earn. The app is mandatory for Party members – scores achieved are documented by the system and visible via publicly available leaderboards (Spence 2019). With this kind of competitive training device, individual dedication to the study of the Party canon becomes a measurable criterion of loyal conduct under the purview of the CCP’s disciplining agencies. By putting its members’ devotion to study on display, the Party

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sends a strong signal that personal loyalty, integrity, and ‘true beliefs’ in Party ideology are obliga‑ tory for Party members not only in their official but also in their private capacities. Incentives for individual dedication to the study of Party history in particular are complemented by strong disincentives to cast doubt on the official narratives. Since 2013, ‘historical nihilism’ (历 史虚无主义) has been framed as an element of the offense – and as another manifestation of the continuous power of correct thought in political discourse under Xi Jinping (Cheek 2021). The no‑ tion was listed as one of seven ‘false ideological trends, positions and activities’ that were banned from public discourse by an internal Party directive in April 2013 (the famous ‘Document No. 9’). The danger of ‘historical nihilism, in the guise of “reassessing history”’, was seen in ‘fundamen‑ tally undermin[ing] the CCP’s historical purpose, which is tantamount to denying the legitimacy of the CCP’s long‑term political dominance’. Denying the ‘historical inevitability in China’s choice of the Socialist road’ [or] ‘the scientific and guiding value of Mao Zedong Thought’ was marked as intolerable behavior (ChinaFile 2013). Five years later, after various individuals had been publicly accused of ‘distorting’ history and tarnishing the image of revolutionary martyrs, the National People’s Congress approved a new ‘PRC Law on the Protection of Heroes and Martyrs’ in March 2018. Ideological disputes over the correct interpretation of Party history could now be turned into lawsuits (China Law Translate 2018; Wu 2023: 160–164). In tandem with this criminalization of ‘historical nihilism’ under Xi Jinping, the orthodox ver‑ sion of Party history as canonized in the 2021 Resolution must be regarded as an effective tool of the Party‑state’s ideological governance to prevent dissenting views on CCP history and related claims for legitimacy. Priming Party members for active displays of consent and loyalty go hand in hand with preempting any form of contestation over Party history, which would have to be inter‑ preted as active disloyalty vis‑à‑vis the CCP and its core leader. Whether the ultimate goal of the genre’s pedagogical impetus is to rectify and transform individual Party members into faithful be‑ lievers and agents of the Party’s cause or rather to scrape off the malignant tumors from the Party’s bones and repair its tarnished image remains open to debate. What is at stake in both scenarios is the legitimation of the Party’s present and future right to rule based on the incumbent leadership’s claim to provide an irrefutable version of the Party’s past and to test Party cadres’ willingness to succumb to its version of CCP history with their hearts and minds.

Conclusion As this chapter’s analysis has demonstrated, the CCP’s historical resolutions can be conceived of as a distinct genre of Party literature with powerful mind‑engineering functions. Modeled on Sta‑ lin’s Short Course, the genre’s main formal traits include a master‑narrative of integrating Marxist theory with Chinese practice and a plot structure of ‘struggle’ between correct and incorrect ideo‑ logical positions. The precise form of ‘struggle’ has changed over time from a partly antagonistic class struggle to a non‑antagonistic struggle for the realization of an evolving ‘historical mission’ as ascribed to the CCP in successive resolutions. The texts, however, are organized according to a common scheme as a chronological narration of the Party’s ongoing ‘struggle’ bracketed by lengthy pedagogical sections. The latter offer authoritative reflections about the ongoing Sinifi‑ cation of Marxism presented as crystallization of the evolving collective wisdom of the Party’s central committee, with the incumbent core leader as the primary creator but not as the sole author of the guiding ideology. By separating the historically contingent role of core leaders, described as learning individuals not free from errors and misperceptions, from the abstract ‘thought’ distilled

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from the Party’s collective struggle, leadership authority can be transferred from one generation to the next while tapping into a constant stream of ideological resources of Party legitimacy. In this way, the genre reproduces CCP legitimacy by tautologically ‘proving’ that the Party has always lived up to the ‘historical mission’ correctly analyzed and ascribed to it by successive resolutions. The genre’s implicit social convention is not to offer a credible reconstruction of Party history but to reshape historical reality in ways that justify the rightful authority of its incumbent leadership. The mind‑engineering role of the Party’s historical resolutions, however, goes beyond reshap‑ ing reality. To validate the genre’s legitimacy claims, Party members are addressed as individuals expected to cultivate unwavering beliefs in the CCP’s malleable guiding ideology. As this chapter has shown, the resolutions themselves serve as key texts in the ongoing canonization of Party ide‑ ology by providing systematic outlines of the evolving Party orthodoxy and pedagogical manuals to instill Party members with ‘true beliefs’. Last but not least, the resolutions urge their audiences to rally their allegiance to the Party’s cause by learning the lessons of the past, thereby priming Party members for action at an individual level. Measured obligations to devote themselves to the study of the ‘correct’ updates of Party history are combined with threatening consequences for those who harbor incorrect views or even cast doubt on the orthodox version of Party history, be it rectification, non‑rehabilitation or the criminalization of ‘historical nihilism’. Incentives for ac‑ tive demonstrations of Party loyalty through dedicated study of Party history and disincentives to question its orthodoxy thus complete the genre’s mind‑engineering role.

Notes 1 The official version of the 1945 Resolution, on which our analysis is based, was officially published only in 1953. For the drafting and publishing process, see Saich (1995). 2 Apter and Saich define the notion as ‘an engagement with words and ideas in a context of immediated social learning [which] results in an emotional and symbolic intensity that includes the consciousness of self in terms of others, [… an] act of realizing transcendental understanding [that] results in a kind of bonding’ (Apter and Saich 1994: 264). They developed the concept in their analysis of the CCP’s Yan’an period and of Mao’s Rectification Cam‑ paign (1942–1945), which culminated, among others, in the adoption of the Third Resolution in 1945. In Apter’s words, ‘[r]ectification presented what might be called the hermeneutical transformation of texts as social facts into things in themselves embodying the party line. Exegetical bonding was the way to internalize this line and reshape interpretative capacities. […] opportunities for conflicts in interpretation were reduced at the same time that people were called on to take an active part in interpretation’ (Apter and Saich 1994: 266). The author is grateful to Daniel Leese for drawing her attention to this similarity. 3 Note that in case of ‘Left’ deviations, the term ‘Left’ always appears in quotation marks, while ‘Right’ deviations appear without in the Chinese as well as the English version. This seems to indicate that while ‘Right’ deviations are regarded as truly founded in rightist (bourgeois, capitalist) ideas and beliefs, ‘Left’ errors often appear in disguise, cloaking themselves in correct Marxist–Leninist, socialist, progressive form but being reactionary in substance. Accordingly, “Left” errors’ are described as more challenging to deal with than ‘Right’ ones. 4 Note the difference between 中国 referring to China as a country and 中华 referring to an imagined Chi‑ nese cultural entity. 5 For an analysis of a ‘pedagogical party‑state’ emerging during the Yan’an period, see Cheek (2016a); see also Cheek (2021) for a discussion of a perpetuation of the pedagogical party‑state under Xi Jinping. 6 The ‘Four Fundamental Principles’, also translated as ‘Four Cardinal Principles’, refer to ‘upholding the socialist road, the people’s democratic dictatorship, the leadership of the Communist Party, and Marxism‑Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought’. They had first been introduced by Deng Xiaoping on Theory Meeting of the CCP’s Central Committee in March 1979 and were included in the PRC’s 1982 Constitution.

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References English References Apter, D. E., and Saich, T. (1994) Revolutionary Discourse in Mao’s Republic, Cambridge: Harvard Univer‑ sity Press. Brandenberger, D., and Zelenov, M. (eds.) (2019) Stalin’s Master Narrative: A Critical Edition of the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks): Short Course, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Charaudeau, P., Maingueneau, D., and Adam, J. (2002) Dictionnaire d’analyse du discours, Paris: Seuil. Cheek, T. (2016a) ‘Making Maoism: Ideology and Organization in the Yan’an Rectification Movement, 1942–1944’, in R. Culp et al. (eds.), Knowledge Acts in Modern China: Ideas, Institutions, and Identities, Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, pp. 304–327. Cheek, T. (2016b) ‘Attitudes of Action. Maoism as Emotional Political Theory’, in L. Jenco (ed.) Chinese Thought as Global Theory. Diversifying Knowledge Production in the Social Sciences and Humanities, Albany: Suny Press, pp. 75–100. Cheek, T. (2021) ‘Xi Jinping’s Counter‑Reformation: The Reassertion of Ideological Governance in Histori‑ cal Perspective’, Journal of Contemporary China, https://doi.org/10.1080/10670564.2021.1893554. ChinaFile (2013) ‘Document 9: A ChinaFile Translation’, 8 November, https://www.chinafile.com/ document‑9‑chinafile‑translation. China Law Translate (2018) ‘People’s Republic of China Law on Protection of Heroes and Martyrs’, Promulgation date: 27 April, https://www.chinalawtranslate.com/en/peoples‑republic‑of‑china‑law‑ on‑protection‑of‑heroes‑and‑martyrs/. Davies, G. (2008), ‘Moral Emotions and Chinese Thought’, Michigan Quarterly Review 47(2) (Spring), http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0047.212. Doyon, J., and Yang, L. (2022) ‘Shades of Red: Changing Understanding of Political Loyalty in the Chinese Communist Party, 1921–2021’, Journal of Current Chinese Affairs 51(3): 386–410. Engman, P. (2021) ‘Breaking with the Past. Party Propaganda and State Crimes’, in J. Farley and M.D. Johnson (eds.), Redefining Propaganda in Modern China. The Mao Era and Its Legacies, London & New York: Routledge, pp. 183–204. Fairclough, N. (2003) Analysing Discourse: Textual Analysis for Social Research, London and New York: Routledge. Gao, H. (2019) How the Red Sun Rose. The Origin and Development of the Yan’an Rectification Movement, 1930–1945, translated from Chinese by S. Mosher and J. Guo. Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong Press. Goodman, D. (1981) ‘The Sixth Plenum of the 11th Central Committee of the CCP: Looking Back in Anger?’, China Quarterly 87(September): 518–527. Holbig, H. (1999) ‘Fifty Years of PRC Politics in China’s Official Historiography’ (Fünfzig Jahre Politik der VR China in der offiziellen chinesischen Geschichtsschreibung), CHINA Aktuell, October: 1030–1034. Holbig, H. (2022) ‘Canonising Xi Jinping Thought – Ideological Engineering and Its Real‑World Relevance’, in F. N. Pieke and B. Hofman (eds.), CPC Futures. The New Era of Socialism with Chinese Characteris‑ tics, Singapore: NUS Press, pp. 41–46. Introvigne, M. (2022) ‘The Resolution on CCP History’, Bitter Winter, 15 March, https://bitterwinter.org/ the‑resolution‑on‑ccp‑history/. Leese, D. (2020) Maos Langer Schatten. Chinas Umgang mit der Vergangenheit (Mao’s long shadow. China’s dealing with the past). Munich: C.H.Beck. Leese, D. (2022) ‘Auf dem Sprung’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 31 January, p. 6. Li, H‑Y. (2002) ‘Stalin’s Short Course and Mao’s Socialist Economic Transformation of China in the Early 1950’, Russian History 29(4): 357–376. Liu, Y. (2010) ‘Maoist Discourse and the Mobilization of Emotions in Revolutionary China’, Modern China 36(3): 329–362. Perry, E. (2002) ‘Moving the Masses: Emotion Work in the Chinese Revolution’, Mobilization 7(2): 111–128. Saich, T. (1995) ‘Writing or Rewriting History? The Construction of the Maoist Resolution on Party History’, in T. Saich and H.J. Van den Ven (eds.) New Perspectives on the Chinese Communist Revolution, Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, pp. 299–338.

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The CCP’s Historical Resolutions as Mind-Engineering Projects Schurmann, F. (1968) Ideology and Organization in Communist China, Berkeley: University of California Press. Schwartz, B.I. (1968) Communism and China: Ideology in Flux, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Shue, V. (2022) ‘Regimes of Resonance: Cosmos, Empire, and Changing Technologies of CCP Rule’, Mod‑ ern China 48(4): 679–720. Sorace, C. (2018) ‘Extracting Affect: Televised Cadre Confessions in China’, Public Culture 31(3): 145–170. Sorace, C. (2021) ‘The Chinese Communist Party’s Nervous System: Affective Governance from Mao to Xi’, The China Quarterly 248(November): 29–51. Spence, P. (2019) ‘How to Cheat at Xi Jinping Thought’, Foreign Policy, 6 March, https://foreignpolicy. com/2019/03/06/how‑to‑cheat‑at‑xi‑jinping‑thought/. Weigelin‑Schwiedrzik, S. (1987) ‘Party Historiography in the People’s Republic of China’, The Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs 17(January): 77–94. Weigelin‑Schwiedrzik, S. (2006) ‘In Search of a Master Narrative for 20th‑Century Chinese History,’ The China Quarterly 188(December): 1070–1091. Wu, G. (2023) Chinese Revolution in Practice. From Movement to the State, London and New York: Routledge. Zheng, Y., and Hu, J. (2022) ‘Political Discourse in Chinese Urban Community: Pragmatic Utility and Ideo‑ logical Fatigue’, Journal of Contemporary China, Online First: 20 September, https://doi.org/10.1080/10 670564.2022.2124355.

Chinese References CCP Central Committee 党中央委员会 (1945) ‘关于若干历史问题的决议’ (Resolution on Certain Ques‑ tions in the History of our Party’), Adopted on April 20, 1945 by the Enlarged Seventh Plenary Session of the Sixth Central Committee of the CCP. In: 毛泽东 (Mao Zedong) (1953) 选集 (Selected Works), Vol. III, pp. 975ff. A digital version is available at https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/關於若干歷史問題的決議. The official English translation appeared as an appendix to the chapter ‘Our Study and the Current Situation’ in the 1965 ‘First Edition’ of Volume III of the Selected Works of Mao Tse‑tung (Peking: Foreign Language Press), pp. 177–225. A digital version is available at http://www.marx2mao.com/PDFs/MaoSW3.pdf. CCP Central Committee 党中央委员会 (1981) ‘关于建国以来党的若干历史问题的决议’ (Reso‑ lution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party since the Founding of the People’s Re‑ public of China), Adopted on June 27, 1981 by the Sixth Plenary Session of the Eleventh Central Committee of the CCP. 人民日报 (People’s Daily), 1 July 1981, pp. 1ff. A digital version is available at https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/中国共产党中央委员会关于建国以来党的若干历史问题的决议. The official English translation was published Beijing Review 24, no. 27 (6 July 1981), pp. 10–39. A digi‑ tal version is available from the History and Public Policy Program Digital Archive, http://digitalarchive. wilsoncenter.org/document/121344. CCP Central Committee 党中央委员会 (2021) ‘关于党的百年奋斗重大成就和历史经验的决议’ (Res‑ olution of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China on the Major Achievements and Historical Experience of the Party over the Past Century), Adopted on November 11, 2021 at the Sixth Plenary Session of the Nineteenth Central Committee of the CCP, 新华社 (Xinhua News Agency), 16 November 2021, http://www.gov.cn/zhengce/2021‑11/16/content_5651269.htm. A digital version of the official English translation is available at https://english.www.gov.cn/policies/latestreleases/202111/16/ content_WS6193a935c6d0df57f98e50b0.html. Xi, Jinping 习近平 (2021) ‘关于“中共中央关于党的百年奋斗重大成就和历史经验的决议”的说明’ (Ex‑ planation of the Resolution of the Central Committee of the CCP on the Major Achievements and His‑ torical Experience of the Party of the Past Century), 新华社 (Xinhua News Agency), 16 November 2021, http://www.gov.cn/xinwen/2021‑11/16/content_5651271.htm. Official English translation available at www.news.cn/english/2021‑11/16/c_1310314613.htm. Zhao, Leji 赵乐际 (2021) 以伟大自我革命引领伟大社会革命 (Steering the Great Social Revolution with a Great Self‑Revolution), 人民日报 (People’s Daily), 18 November 2021: 3, http://cpc.people.com.cn/ n1/2021/1118/c64094‑32285471.html.

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4 IDENTIFYING PARTISAN EFFORTS TO GENERATE AUTHORITARIAN LEGITIMACY Joanna Rak

Introduction The crises of democratic legitimacy reveal that democracies in various stages of their institu‑ tions’ erosion are vulnerable to threats from anti‑democratic actors (Schmidt 2020: 139). Partisan institutions that are subordinate to the ruling parties use their resources to generate authoritarian legitimacy under the guise of protecting democracy, translating into a rise in social support for authoritarianism (Rak and Bäcker 2022). Legitimacy allows authoritarian rulers to stabilize politi‑ cal regimes (Gerschewski 2013; Grauvogel and Von Soest 2014). Simultaneously, an increase in authoritarian legitimacy uncovers the effectiveness of using mind engineering through discursive frames to embed ideology in government propaganda (Bray, Shriver and Adams 2019). Johannes Gerschewski (2013: 14) formulated a classic theory of authoritarian stability to ex‑ plain why some autocracies collapse while others remain stable. It draws on the assumption that the longevity of autocracies depends on legitimacy, repression, and co‑optation. However, the study of legitimacy in non‑democratic regimes raises methodological difficulties. It requires conducting surveys to explore political consciousness, whereas fear of the consequences of disclosing op‑ position to rulers may result in hiding genuine attitudes. Accordingly, the declared attitudes may differ from the actual ones. Thus, such studies may be biased and lead to erroneous conclusions. Constantine Boussalis, Alexander Dukalskis, and Johannes Gerschewski (2023: 2) developed the theory to overcome the difficulties. The modification consists in redirecting the scholarly attention from legitimacy as the belief in regime legitimacy toward claims to legitimacy. As they assume, the state‑controlled and pro‑government distribution of information keeps authoritarian rulers in power. The remaining factors include elite cohesion enforced by co‑optation and selective repression. Embedded in the body of works on claims to legitimacy as a pillar of stability, recent studies present how authoritarian regimes and other anti‑democratic actors use media to shape their power position (Gerschewski 2018). They deliver empirical evidence to confirm that the strategic use of state‑controlled information allows authoritarian rulers to avert threats to a political regime. On the one hand, the focus is on targeting the opposition and ordinary people who engage in anti‑­ government protests (e.g., Thyen and Gerschewski 2018). It takes a form of delegitimization, con‑ sidered soft repression (Rak 2021). On the other hand, researchers address self‑legitimacy to reveal how authoritarian rulers claim and justify the right to rule (e.g., Dukalskis and Gerschewski 2017).

DOI: 10.4324/9781003289746-6

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Authoritarian rulers socially construct meaning when they produce and distribute ‘elite frames’, also called ‘state official frames’ (Bray, Shriver and Adams 2019: 685). When directed internally, frames serve to influence other elites’ perceptions of challengers, i.e., protesters and opposition. Externally directed frames facilitate the mobilization of mass support (Bray, Shriver and Adams 2019: 685). Both democratic and autocratic rulers claim the right to rule, and the stability of the political system depends on their effectiveness. Nevertheless, not all claims by non‑democratic actors are overtly anti‑democratic. Some calls for autocratic legitimacy rely on references to respect for democratic values and institutions (San‑ filippo 2022). Others rest on similarities to militant democracy (Malkopoulou and Kirshner 2019), which is the principle of limiting the rights and freedoms of the enemies of democracy to prevent the latter from using them to change their political roles and become rulers (Loewenstein 1937a; 1937b). This practice is quasi‑militant democracy, which means that a non‑democratic actor re‑ stricts civil rights and freedoms under the guise of protecting the values of a higher order, such as democracy, public order, or health. However, the actor limits the sovereignty of a political na‑ tion (Rezmer‑Płotka 2022). Identifying and distinguishing between democratic and authoritarian claims to legitimacy remains challenging for students of political system stability (Bäcker 2021). At the same time, these are essential civic competencies for those who consciously strive to par‑ ticipate in politics. Informed by the puzzle of differentiating between democratic and authoritarian legitimacy‑­ generating actions, the chapter aims to propose and test a theoretical tool for measuring partisan efforts to generate a regime’s legitimacy. The tool also applies to unpacking legitimacy‑generating actions independently, and, as such, it is of practical use for non‑specialists. Based on a qualitative news frame analysis, the tool undergoes an empirical test through an illustrative case study of Pol‑ ish state‑led mind engineering. The test covers state media efforts to generate legitimacy during the largest wave of social mobilization in democratic Poland that expressed opposition to restricting women’s reproductive rights combined with anti‑government views. In a non‑democratic setting, protest activities, taking a form of civil disorder, undermine the stability of political regimes since they put state legitimacy at risk (Bray, Shriver, and Adams 2019: 682). Moreover, anti‑government protests as communication situations offer rich material for understanding discursive efforts to maintain and rebuild the rulers’ endangered legitimacy and limit political pluralism and participa‑ tion. The main argument is that the Polish state media, as partisan institutions, used interpretative frames typical of authoritarian mind engineering to generate authoritarian legitimacy during the 2020–2021 mobilization for women’s reproductive rights in Poland. The study contributes theoretically to our understanding of generating a regime’s legitimacy by modifying and combining the theories of mind engineering and ideology‑based education. The modification departs from normative significance‑based evaluation of mind engineering conse‑ quences. This feature of mind engineering is replaced with a type of political system to capture what ideology it instills. Also, the study proposes sensitive criteria for differentiating between democratic and authoritarian frames. A methodological contribution lies in offering and testing a theory‑based tool useful to unpack cognition‑ and behavior‑oriented claims to democratic and authoritarian legitimacy. The new empirical approach uncovers the mechanisms of mind engineer‑ ing aimed at influencing cognitive and behavioral aspects of the public’s involvement in support‑ ing political systems. What is new is the broadening of the perspective to generate legitimacy expressed through views and controlled behavior. Besides, the test demonstrates how to apply the tool to analyze media news. It helps develop civic competencies in understanding the language used by partisan institutions, and, as such, it can be incorporated into language and civic education.

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The remainder of the chapter consists of four parts. The first introduces a critical literature review on mind engineering as a means of generating democratic and authoritarian legitimacy. It offers a discussion on applying the theory of mind engineering in studies on political systems. The discussion uncovers the theory’s strengths and possible difficulties in its application. Simultane‑ ously, it gives grounds for developing a theoretical tool for measuring partisan efforts to generate democratic and authoritarian legitimacy. The tool’s presentation concludes the discussion. Then, the chapter sheds light on a research design. Apart from justifying methodological choices related to the source corpus and methods, it shows how to apply the tool step by step to analyze news. The two final sections deliver research findings and conclusions. They locate Polish state‑led mind engineering between the Weberian ideal types of democratic and authoritarian legitimacy claim‑making efforts.

Overview of Research on Mind Engineering Mind engineering is crucial in stabilizing political systems since it underlies the processes of gen‑ erating legitimacy. In studies on political regimes, the category of ‘mind engineering’ is usually associated with ‘brainwashing’, ‘propaganda’, ‘mind control’, ‘manipulation’, and ‘coercive per‑ suasion’ (cf., e.g., Donskis 2003: 81; Ivančić 1994: 101). Andrii Leonov (2022: 191) argues that it results from treating mind engineering as a tool to instill political agendas and ideologies into sup‑ porters and opponents. Based on David Chalmers’s and Charles Peirce’s theories, Leonov (2022: 191) defined mind engineering as the ‘design, implementation, and evaluation of minds’. Minds are sets of beliefs, whereas beliefs are pragmatically hermeneutically interpreted as habits. What is more, the latter is a ‘“fixed” functional interpretation of the world, and one’s place in it that either works or does not work’ (Leonov 2022: 192). As a result, in Leonov’s (2022: 192) approach, mind engineering is ‘the process of design/redesign, implementation/reimplementation, and evaluation/ re‑evaluation of the “fixed” functional interpretations of the world, and one’s place in it that either work or do not work’. The process can be deliberate or forceful. While the former means educa‑ tion, the latter signifies driving somebody to do something against one’s will and desire. Finally, mind engineering can differ in terms of its normative significance. As such, it can be positive when it signifies the acquisition of good habits or negative when it results in the acquisition of bad habits (Leonov 2022: 192). Leonov’s (2022) theoretical approach may cause two application difficulties. First, although the differentiation between deliberate and forceful mind engineering reveals two distinctive influence aspects, their measurement poses several challenges. Education may lead people to act against their will and desire. The criteria for when deliberate mind engineering becomes a forceful action are underdetermined. Still, Leonov revealed a hitherto marginalized, in mind engineering stud‑ ies, aspect of the impact on cognitive and behavioral spheres. Notably, this distinction is present in public engagement studies that account for the mechanism of generating the involvement of various communities in public affairs. According to the current studies, building cognitive public engagement is about shaping beliefs. In turn, generating behavioral public engagement boils down to stimulating people to take actions in the public sphere that go beyond passive acceptance or lack thereof (e.g., Dubovi and Tabak 2021; Kucuk and Richardson 2019). Considering the influence on cognition and behavior through legitimacy claims allows for a more in‑depth understanding of legitimacy claim‑making efforts. Leonov’s theoretical approach (2022) directs scholarly attention to generating a regime’s legitimacy through attitudes and ac‑ tions. While the former includes calls to internalize a particular vision of a political reality, the

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latter involves calls to act expectedly in this reality. For instance, mind engineering oriented on cognition can draw upon a call to interpret unjust, partisan, and partial policing of anti‑government protest as a necessary and adequate means of establishing relationships between the government and its opponents or the only means to restore public order. Mind engineering focused on behav‑ ior can rest on a call to join a pro‑government meeting or vote. Regardless of orientation, mind engineering develops interpretations and justifications to spark cognitive or behavioral reactions. These different calls can coexist, complement, and reinforce or weaken each other. Second, applying Leonov’s theoretical approach requires intersubjective identification from whose perspective habits are good or bad. Additionally, it tells little about whether the motivations or consequences of habits undergo normative evaluation. However, in studies on political systems, the type of generated legitimacy, either democratic or authoritarian, is much more important than normative significance because it uncovers a political regime under construction (Burnell 2006). Legitimacy claim‑making efforts aim at justifying and gaining support for democratic or auto‑ cratic institutions, values, and norms, respectively. Studies on ideology‑based education provide tools for research inscribed in mind engineering. They treat education as a means of instilling in recipients the values and norms that underpin po‑ litical regimes. Simultaneously, they allow for systematic differentiation between democratic and authoritarian values and norms characteristic of the regimes (Österman and Robinson 2023: 1). It is an essential step toward an intersubjective comparison of mind engineering in diverse political settings. Accordingly, less normative approaches and comparative research begin replacing the current distinction between pro‑democratic civic education and authoritarian propaganda (cf. Şanlı and Altun 2015). However, it is still problematic to classify such elements of education that, under the guise of praising and promoting democratic values and norms, are anti‑democratic. Based on William A. Galston’s (2004) model of civic education, Joanna Rak and Kamila Rezmer‑Płotka (2022) formulated a tool for measuring media engagement in civic education. It rests on the assumption that ideology‑based and state‑orchestrated education shapes an ideal citizen’s civic attitudes and behavior. The ideal of citizenship varies according to the type of political system that education serves. Rak and Rezmer‑Płotka’s tool is a dyad of antinomic ideal types of democratic and autocratic civic knowledge. The democratic variant’s essential features include (1) promoting support for democratic values, (2) promoting political participation, (3) helping citizens learn about civic affairs, (4) assisting citizens in reducing mistrust and fear of public life, and (5) preventing po‑ litical divisions based on hostility (Rak and Rezmer‑Płotka 2022: 85). In turn, the characteristics of the autocratic variant are (1) devaluating democratic values, (2) discouraging political participation, (3) convincing citizens of the rightness of the ruling’s policy, (4) spreading mistrust and fear of pub‑ lic life, and (5) forging political divisions based on hostility (Rak and Rezmer‑Płotka 2022: 85–86). Rak and Rezmer‑Płotka’s (2022: 85–86) contribution to studies on knowledge distributed under democratic and authoritarian education lies beyond evaluating orientation on democratic values. Still, it includes ‘promoting support for democratic values’ and ‘devaluating democratic values’. Nevertheless, they are not indicative of democratic and authoritarian discursive frames since autocratic and anti‑democratic actors discursively recognize the protection of democratic values and norms as their objective (e.g., Sharafutdinova 2014). Removing this indicator from the model might optimize its use in comparative studies. In sum, the theory of mind engineering offers a theoretical framework that enables a researcher to make sense of legitimacy claims. It applies to unpack frames that shape attitudes and actions relevant to the political regime’s stability. Moreover, after expansion, it allows for a differentiation between democratic and authoritarian frames used to stabilize different systems.

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Joanna Rak

Drawing on the theoretical developments in mind engineering and ideology‑based education studies, the chapter proposes a theoretical tool for measuring partisan efforts to generate democratic and authoritarian legitimacy. It rests on Leonov’s (2022: 192) definition of mind engineering as the ‘process of design/redesign, implementation/reimplementation, and evaluation/re‑evaluation of the “fixed” functional interpretations of the world, and one’s place in it that either work or do not work’. Mind engineering draws on democratic and authoritarian frames embedded in ‘interpretations of the world’. It is a means of making a regime’s legitimacy claims understood as pressurizing the popula‑ tion to accept a political and social order proposed by the rulers (von Soest and Grauvogel 2015: 5). Following Rak and Rezmer‑Płotka’s (2022: 85–86) differentiation between democratic and authoritarian knowledge, the chapter proposes cognition‑ and behavior‑based democratic and au‑ thoritarian claims. The cognition‑based ones are interpretative schemas imposing a peculiar in‑ terpretation of political and social order. Behavior‑based democratic and authoritarian claims are requests for action that manifests legitimacy. At a cognition‑based level, democratic claims include (CD1) helping citizens learn about re‑ solving civic affairs, (CD2) assisting citizens in reducing mistrust and fear of public life, and (CD3) preventing political divisions based on hostility. In turn, authoritarian claims are (CA1) convincing citizens of the rightness of the ruling’s policy, (CA2) spreading mistrust and fear of public life, and (CA3) forging political divisions based on hostility. At a behavior‑based level, while democratic claims include (BD1) encouraging independent political participation, authoritarian ones involve (BA1) discouraging independent political participation (Rak and Rezmer‑Płotka 2022: 85–86). In contrast to the original framework, the modified model specifies the orientation toward independ‑ ent political participation to avoid misinterpretation of managed behaviors. The antinomic features constitute dyads, the antinomic ideal types in Max Weber’s meaning. Each thematic claim distrib‑ uted by a state actor can be located on one of four continua.

Research Design A case study approach was applied to develop an in‑depth understanding of the mechanisms involved in state‑led mind engineering through claims to legitimacy. It facilitated delving into the claims ho‑ mogenous regarding claimants and their recipients and embedded in the same political, social, and cultural context. Simultaneously, a case study approach effectively elaborates and tests theoretical tools (Dooley 2002: 351). It facilitates finding significant features of phenomena under scrutiny, developing their comprehension, and conceptualizing for further studies (Punch 2014: 124). The study is theoretically embedded in mind engineering and ideology‑based education studies. It rests on qualitative news frame analysis to answer the question: what types of mind engineering did the Polish state media use to generate a regime’s legitimacy during the 2020–2021 mobiliza‑ tion for women’s reproductive rights in Poland? The types of mind engineering were analyzed through discursive frames in Michelle D. Bonner and Lucia Dammert’s (2022: 632) meaning. The frames are interpretative schemas that show situ‑ ations by simplifying and accounting for them to make sense to the targeted audience. Delving into discursive frames employed to generate a regime’s legitimacy, the analysis captures two variants of mind engineering. While cognition‑based claims address knowledge spread to claim legitimacy, behavior‑based claims focus on action expressing legitimacy. It uncovers how different frames or narratives used in communication can influence how people interpret information and subse‑ quently guide their thoughts and actions. This theory is relevant to understanding cognition‑ and behavior‑based strategies of mind engineering by unpacking the attempts to influence individuals’ thinking about politics and political actions. 62

Identifying Partisan Efforts to Generate Authoritarian Legitimacy

Cognition‑based and behavior‑based strategies of mind engineering are two distinct approaches used to influence individuals’ attitudes and actions. They differ in their focus and methods of per‑ suasion. Cognition‑based strategies center on shaping individuals’ cognitive processes, including their thoughts, beliefs, perceptions, and understanding of the world. The primary goal of cogni‑ tion‑based strategies is to impact how people interpret information and make sense of the environ‑ ment around them. These strategies aim to change or reinforce existing mental frameworks and schemas, which, in turn, influence decision‑making and behavior. Behavior‑based strategies, on the contrary, concentrate on directly influencing individuals’ actions and behaviors. These strate‑ gies are focused on encouraging or discouraging specific actions without necessarily changing the underlying cognitive processes. Behavior‑based approaches often leverage rewards, punish‑ ments, incentives, and social norms to shape behavior. The distinction between cognition‑based and behavior‑based strategies is crucial as they represent different paths of mind engineering. Cognition‑based strategies aim for deeper, more lasting changes in individuals’ cognitive frame‑ works, which can have broader and long‑term effects on behavior. In turn, behavior‑based strate‑ gies may achieve more immediate and observable changes in actions but might not necessarily result in long‑term shifts in attitudes or beliefs. The study covers frames used by state media to claim the right to rule to the incumbent rulers during a period critical to their legitimacy and, thus, the political regime’s stability. It was the 2020–2021 All‑Poland Women’s Strike (Ogólnopolski Strajk Kobiet) protests, the largest wave of social mobilization in democratic Poland that lasted from October 22, 2020, to January 29, 2021. The movement won the support of 70% of Poles (Kiełczykowska 2021). The analysis is limited to the period of mass mobilization. With the emergence of a powerful challenger, there was a threat of  the political system’s collapse and the replacement of the ruling elites (Polynczuk‑Alenius 2022). The threat came from ordinary citizens who protested against restricting women’s repro‑ ductive rights and the ongoing erosion of democracy in Poland. It is worth mentioning that the protests continued during the coronavirus pandemic, lockdown, and other restrictions. The rulers struggled with a public health crisis, winning legitimacy for their crisis management policies and extending executive power competencies (Kustra‑Rogatka 2023). The source corpus contains 1,481 news articles and videos archived on the TVP Info portal, the Polish state media’s (TVP – Telewizja Polska S.A., Polish Television) comprehensive digital archive. It consists of original news articles and video materials spread on all nationwide public sta‑ tions during Wiadomości (a major news release on TVP1), Teleexpress (an afternoon news release on TVP1 and TVP Info), and Panorama (a major news release on TVP2). The subject scope of ma‑ terials determines the theme of mobilization for women’s reproductive rights. Therefore, the source corpus includes only the materials that contain at least one of the following searching phrases ‘wom‑ en’s strike’, ‘women’s protest’, ‘women’s demonstration’, ‘women’s manifestation’, and ‘abortion’. TVP is a Polish state media corporation. After the 2015 parliamentary election, PiS passed a new media law, thus providing the government with complete control over public broadcasting. As a result, TVP became a tool for disseminating pro‑government news and pursuing the rulers’ political agenda. Compared to other Polish media, it has one of the lowest brand trust scores. Nevertheless, the Institute for Media Monitoring Report (2020) informed that TVP Info was the most opinion‑forming state media during the 2020 world crisis of public health. Also, during the mobilization for women’s reproductive rights, TVP news had more viewers than other stations. From the perspective of the research objectives, the state media must aim to regain, win, and main‑ tain support for the rulers. Utterly dependent on and subordinated to the ruling party, they loyally created the regime’s legitimacy in times of crisis. Also, their unique role resulted from nationwide mass coverage (cf. Otwinowski 2022). 63

Joanna Rak

Qualitative news frame analysis followed Margaret Linström and Willemien Marais’s (2012) methodology. First, data was collected from the source corpus by determining excerpts related to women’s protests and their participants. News excerpts from articles and transcribed videos were treated as units of analysis. In one excerpt, more than one legitimacy claim may occur. Moreover, legitimacy claims were counted to determine the configuration and number of democratic and au‑ thoritarian frames in the news. It was assumed that regardless of the number of sentences, words, or signs used to make a claim, one excerpt introducing a whole idea of a regime’s legitimacy claim was counted as a single employment of a democratic or authoritarian frame. An idea repeatedly emerging in one piece of news was counted as one excerpt. The next step involved a pilot study aimed at elaborating a codebook. Frames that occurred when scrutinizing excerpts were inductively chosen. Drawing upon the investigation of 40 ran‑ domly selected excerpts, news frames (codes) for eight democratic and authoritarian cognition‑ and behavior‑based legitimacy claims were formulated and their operational definition was developed. While the first three dyads concentrate on cognition‑based claims, the last one addresses a behavioral sphere. The first set of antinomic ideal types consists of (CD1) helping citizens learn about resolving civic affairs and (CA1) convincing citizens of the rightness of the ruling’s policy. CD1 frames are (1) ‘pluralization of information sources’ by encouraging to search, compare, and verify information from different sources; (2) ‘tackling problematic issues’ by informing about the whole complexity of a situation without concealing inconvenient facts; and (3) ‘giving a voice to conflicting positions’ by providing the opportunity to people representing various environ‑ ments, having different political interests, and conflicting opinions to present their positions. CA1 frames are (1) ‘monopolization of information sources’ by recommending only state‑controlled information sources and warning against obtaining information from other sources as unreliable and misleading; (2) ‘political tabooing’ by depicting anti‑government contentious performances, related situations, or their participants without referring to the social movement; and (3) ‘block‑ ing a voice’ by not giving a voice to contentious performance participants when discussing their actions and ideas. The second dyad covers (CD2) assisting citizens in reducing mistrust and fear of public life and (CA2) spreading mistrust and fear of public life. CD2 frames are (1) ‘preventing prejudice’ by ex‑ plaining emerging views and beliefs and (2) ‘introducing contentious performances’ by depicting them as a component of political life rather than disruption. CA2 frames are (1) ‘making people threats’ by convincing the audience that those who oppose the government put their health, lives, interests, and public goods at risk and (2) ‘making anti‑government contentious performances a dangerous experience’ by presenting harmful consequences of anti‑government contentious per‑ formances and engagement in them. The third dyad involves (CD3) preventing political divisions based on hostility. In turn, au‑ thoritarian frames are (CA3) forging political divisions based on hostility. CD3 frames are (1) ‘including in a political community’ by encouraging social unity and solidarity beyond possible divisions and (2) ‘respecting variety’ by showing that everyone, regardless of their views and be‑ havior, deserves to be heard and respected as a part of a political community. CA3 frames are (1) ‘excluding from a political community’ by pointing to ‘them’ and arguing that ‘they’ do not belong to ‘our’ community due to their characteristics or deeds and (2) ‘normalizing’ by setting standards of normality and stimulating hostility and non‑acceptance of those who fail to meet the set criteria. Finally, the fourth dyad includes (BD1) encouraging independent political participation and (BA1) discouraging independent political participation. BD1 frames are (1) ‘assisting free con‑ tentious performance participants in need’ by calling for providing help to those making public

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claims independently, if needed, and informing them about what help is expected and (2) ‘facili‑ tating voluntary activities to influence public policy’ by encouraging and supporting organization and participation in contentious performances, regardless of the political side the media favor. BA1 frames are (1) ‘establishing counter‑movements’ by encouraging to oppose anti‑government contentious performances by taking to the streets or organizing vigilante action and (2) ‘staying home’ by discouraging from engaging in contentious performances and assuring that the state ac‑ tors solve all problems on their own. In line with Linström and Marais’s (2012) methodology, the study used a comparative tech‑ nique for manual qualitative analysis to classify news frames. The analysis commenced with the comparative assignment of excerpts to categories (CD13, CA13, BD1, BD2) and then to frames, which resulted in grouping the excerpts. The following steps involved refining and counting data, which were crucial to locating the clusters of a regime’s legitimacy claims on the four continua and evaluating the mind engineering variants. The last analysis stage involved simplifying, gen‑ eralizing findings, and integrating them into a coherent theoretical framework. It finished with a conclusion on the type of state‑led mind engineering during the Polish mobilization for reproduc‑ tive rights, which was shaped to generate a particular regime’s legitimacy.

Research Findings The characteristics of cognition‑based claims locate the state‑led mind engineering very close to the ideal type of authoritarian regime’s legitimacy claims (Table 4.1). However, a few democratic claims emerged (0.5% of all claims). The latter helped citizens learn about resolving civic affairs and boiled down to giving a voice to conflicting positions (64 excerpts). These few attempts ap‑ peared only in journalistic articles published on the TVP Info portal but not on television, which limited their reach. Giving the floor to conflicting positions consisted of presenting various opin‑ ions to demonstrate that the decisions taken by PiS were correct and just (Gąbka 2020a). They were selective, often put PiS opponents in a negative light, and ridiculed them. Still, no attempts to pluralize information sources or tackle problematic issues occurred. Among the authoritarian frames of convincing citizens of the rightness of the ruling party’s policy, the most important strategy was blocking a voice (372 excerpts). The state media presented public gatherings as collective actions supporting abortion. By selective presentation of claims and ignoring the movement’s voice, the state media avoided discussing the complex demands, includ‑ ing protecting women’s reproductive rights, legally protecting LGBTQI+ minorities, limiting the Catholic Church’s meddling in politics, and stopping democratic backsliding. Despite different political views, journalists from the state and PiS‑favoring media, PiS politicians, and experts supporting them explained the anti‑government movement’s motivations, goals, and demands. Opponents of ideas presented their interpretations, not ideas. At the same time, the media aimed to conceal that the anti‑government social movement had a collective identity (JMK 2020). They replaced it with the image of scattered individuals whose hazardous behavior was representative of the protests. Imposing a political taboo was a less popular strategy (163 excerpts). The state media avoided referring to the massiveness of the movement’s support. Journalists highlighted that few protested, and they failed to mobilize others. Second, TVP silenced claims unrelated to abortion to limit the discussion and trigger unequivocal condemnation of activists. The third taboo was avoiding nam‑ ing the movement by its name and presenting its members or supporters. Accordingly, protests were ‘few’, attended by a ‘handful of people’ or ‘only by their organizers’. The movement was a

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Joanna Rak Table 4.1 A regime’s legitimacy claims in the Polish state media during the 2020–2021  mobilization for women’s reproductive rights Categories of a regime’s legitimacy claims

Discursive frames

(CD1) helping citizens learn about resolving civic affairs

1 ‘pluralization of information sources’ 2 ‘tackling problematic issues’ 3 ‘giving a voice to conflicting positions’ 1 ‘monopolization of information sources’ 2 ‘political tabooing’ 3 ‘blocking a voice’ 1 ‘preventing prejudice’ 2 ‘introducing contentious performances’ 1 ‘making people threats’ 2 ‘making anti‑government contentious performances a dangerous experience’ 1 ‘including in a political community’ 2 ‘respecting variety’ 1 ‘excluding from a political community’ 2 ‘normalizing’ 1 ‘assisting contentious performance participants in need’ 2 ‘facilitating voluntary activities to influence public policy’ 1 ‘establishing counter‑movements’ 2 ‘staying home’

(CA1) convincing citizens of the rightness of the ruling’s policy (CD2) assisting citizens in reducing mistrust and fear of public life (CA2) spreading mistrust and fear of public life (CD3) preventing political divisions based on hostility (CA3) forging political divisions based on hostility (BD1) encouraging independent political participation

(BA1) discouraging independent political participation

The number of a regime’s legitimacy claims across excerpts 0 0 64 12 163 372 0 0 4,731 3,626 0 0 2,678 1,989 0 0 312 904

Source: Own study.

‘so‑called women’s strike’ (SJ and KF 2020), and its leaders often remained unnamed or called ‘pro‑abortionists’, ‘abortion advocates’, and ‘those women’, e.g., God, save us from such women – I thought deeply, listening to the two leaders of the Women’s Strike. The first name begins with L, and the second with S. I will not write their names in full, not to save them, but so as not to make them popular. Presence in the media, regardless of the context, satisfies their psychological needs to the greatest extent. They represent two crude, vulgar people, resembling horror movie characters living on the margins of society. (Jachowicz 2020)

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The monopolization of information sources was unimportant due to the TVP’s targeting of the PiS‑supporting viewers and readers, which constituted the state media’s audience. The few refer‑ ences (12 excerpts) were the warnings against using non‑governmental information sources as un‑ reliable and likely to spread disinformation typical during election campaigns and crises. It means the state media were not afraid of their position in national broadcasting as opinion‑making actors. The second type of cognition‑based claims referred to attitudes toward mistrust and fear of pub‑ lic life. The state media did not prevent prejudice regarding protesters, including the LGBTQI+ community, and avoided introducing contentious performances. Instead, they fueled it by present‑ ing the protests as unjust violence. Any democratic challenge to prejudice‑based frames could weaken the basis for authoritarian behavior‑based claims. The latter were coherent with the most numerous authoritarian frames of making people threats (4,731 excerpts) and depicting anti‑gov‑ ernment contentious performances as a dangerous experience (3,626 excerpts). They provided the grounds for and strengthened arguments against joining the movement. Protesters were threats due to being offenders (multiple criminals, convicted before the protests by final court judgments, committing crimes during the women’s protests, and breaking pandemic‑induced restrictions), vandals, and prone to risky and unpredictable behavior. Their involvement in contentious perfor‑ mances turned the latter into dangerous experiences. Peaceful demonstrations transformed into vi‑ olent clashes with the police, and public order transformed into civil disorder. State media incited and sustained fear of protest participants instead of facilitating comprehension of their claims. The final cognition‑based category of a regime’s legitimacy claims is an attitude toward po‑ litical divisions based on hostility. No democratic attempts to eliminate divisions between PiS’s supporters and opponents occurred. The state media avoided shaping Poles’ image as an inclusive nation and did not appeal for respect for the diversity of political views. Instead, they used authori‑ tarian frames to determine relationships between those who opposed the ruling party and those who did not. A criterion for excluding from the community of Poles (2,678 excerpts) was political and related to the PiS’s political agenda. The participants of the anti‑government protests and the op‑ position supporting the protesters were excluded. According to TVP, their views and behavior devi‑ ated from the norms of Poles that should have been united and shown solidarity in times of crisis. Normalizing (1,989 excerpts) justified exclusion from the community and drew upon the three standards. The first assumed that it is normal for people to be Pole‑Catholic and defend human life from conception, regardless of the costs, such as the mother’s life and health. Thus, whoever sup‑ ported abortion was an ‘abortion advocate’ (SJ and SC 2020) not up to the standard. The second benchmark was heteronormativity. Any deviation from the state‑established norm was treated as a deviation (e.g., creating ‘LGBT‑free zones’ as an acceptable political practice (Gąbka 2020c)). The third standard was belonging to a group of polite Poles. It appeared in response to the vulgariza‑ tion of the movement’s slogans, which were supposed to express the extreme stage of resistance to government policies that did not respect the rights of women and LGBTQI+ minorities. Anyone who used profanity deviated from the norm (e.g., ‘this is the language used by women (…) As if they had left a hard prison for hardened criminals a few hours ago after a long sentence for using violence against loved ones’ (Jachowicz 2020)). Normalizing was at the ideological and political levels and in opposition to the movement’s beliefs and collective behavior. Behavior‑based claims for action manifesting the regime’s legitimacy also locate the state‑led mind engineering on the side of securing support for the authoritarian regime (Table 4.1). They unequivocally aimed to discourage independent political participation. The unambiguity resulted from diagnosing the real threat to the PiS government. The dominant frames were calls for keep‑ ing from action and staying home (904 excerpts). Noteworthy, mass protests continued during the

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coronavirus pandemic. The need to stop the lethal virus spread provided additional justification for staying home. Calls to refrain from taking to the streets and joining ongoing public gatherings re‑ ferred to a public duty to protect the health and life of oneself and other citizens. They determined the relationship between participation in protests and respect for health and life: The Civic Platform and the Left are pulling Poles onto the street to take power. If the protests do not work, they may take power thanks to many more infections. Taking power with blood on their hands is unacceptable. (Gąbka 2020b) The media shifted the responsibility for the increase in coronavirus infections to the participants of anti‑government protests, ignoring, for example, pro‑government gatherings or meetings of PiS politicians with their supporters. The news reported that people who participated in the protests were infected with the coronavirus and assumed that it was there that the infection took place. Contagion was shown as a deliberate and conscious act against Poles (AB and MNIE 2021; FA and MNIE 2020). At the same time, calls to keep from action aimed to prevent contention and to stop activists from engaging in protests. They were also supposed to decrease the number and turnout of mass protests considered a threat to the political system. Moreover, the media discouraged participation in the protests due to the perceived physical danger posed by their participants. First, the protesters allegedly attacked other participants, wit‑ nesses of contentious performances, and police officers, including policewomen (MK and MNIE 2020). Noteworthy, in Polish culture, there is an image of a woman’s bodily inviolability, and breaking it is widely condemned. Second, the protests were to be attended by dangerous criminals convicted by final court judgments. During public gatherings, they were to commit further crimes because they viewed the protests as an opportunity to do so. Simultaneously, the media showed the irrationality of the protesters. For example, women’s protests were attended by men convicted of mistreating women (PO, KF, and SC 2020) or who did not know what they had come for (SJ and SC 2020). Arguing that the protests were few, unattended, and internet‑based calls for action went unanswered (PO 2020) supported the interpretation that risking life and health through political participation was pointless. The protests were depicted as insignificant, supported by those from the margins of society, and without a clearly defined goal. Based on the ruling party’s leader Jarosław Kaczyński’s call for vigilantism on October 27, 2020, the state media encouraged Poles to establish counter‑movements (312 excerpts). They re‑ peatedly cited the following excerpts from the call: In particular, we must defend Polish churches; we must defend them at any cost. I call on all PiS members and all those who support us to take part in defense of the Church, in defense of what is being attacked today, not by chance (…) the judgment of the Constitutional Tribunal cannot be changed during the validity of the current constitution. All the more, it is impossible to pass a law that would allow abortion on demand, and this is the demand of the extreme left. (SJ and KF 2020) Kaczyński created a community of interests to protect the Catholic Church, its buildings, and the fetus’s life. The leader asked PiS members and its supporters to stand up for shared values. He considered the behavior of the ‘extreme left’ represented by the protesters and the opposition to be a threat to these values. It began a state‑led counter‑movement established to oppose political

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actors threatening the political system’s stability. The media portrayed the call as the founding act of vigilante activism, supporting the police and allowing the use of physical force. Additionally, the news referred to Kaczyński’s call and illustrated the acts of vandalism by the movement’s participants against churches, other public buildings, and people defending them. TVP regularly reported the counter‑movement’s successes. Thereby, it delivered and maintained motivation for the action that confirmed the regime’s legitimacy. At the same time, the state media avoided encouraging the independent political participation characteristic of democracy. They neither encouraged Poles to support contentious performance par‑ ticipants in need nor facilitated voluntary activities to impact public policy. Protests for women’s re‑ productive rights emerged during a particular communication situation. The tightening of the abortion law took place, bypassing the legislative route by the Constitutional Tribunal, which is subordinated to the ruling party. Therefore, the protests were also against violating the rule of law and manifested anti‑government stances. Especially during mass mobilization, the widely supported protesters posed a severe threat to the stability of the political system created by PiS. Moreover, PiS faced a public health crisis and accusations of ineffective crisis management. Deepening economic and social dif‑ ficulties gave rise to further protests by new groups. It was essential to stop large social groups with different interests from publicly expressing opposition and to limit independent political participation against the government. The state media diagnosed the critical moment for the political system and the threat of its collapse due to the protests and the emerging opportunities for the opposition.

Conclusion The state‑led mind engineering was oriented toward creating absolute subordination to PiS, gen‑ erating the regime’s legitimacy, and depriving its opponents of the legitimacy to perform political roles. Claim‑making drew upon (re)designing, (re)implementing, and (re)evaluating attitudes and behaviors considered significant to the political system stability. Using systematic means, TVP pressurized its readers and viewers into adopting beliefs radically different from those held by 70% of Polish society supporting the movement for women’s rights (Kiełczykowska 2021). Also, the instilled beliefs radically differed from those typical of democratic discourse shaped before 2015, i.e., until PiS started changing the political system. Unpacking legitimacy claims, the study reveals that Polish state‑owned media proved loyalty to PiS and acted as a partisan institution. It sought authoritarian legitimacy at the cognitive and behavioral levels, and the former was dominant. The state‑controlled message gave coherent and consistent interpretations of current politics. Frames on various aspects of authoritarian power relations strengthened and complemented each other. Among 13,635 excerpts containing cognition‑based claims, as many as 13,571 aimed at gen‑ erating authoritarian legitimacy (99.5%). At the cognitive level, it was crucial to undermine the protests’ image created by the independent media or to limit its impact on the TVP audience’s awareness. The movement’s representatives did not receive the opportunity to explain their de‑ mands, and the media’s viewers and readers were not given information to understand the com‑ plexity of the contention. The main type of authoritarian claims drew upon spreading mistrust and fear of public life (8,357 excerpts). Fear, anxiety, and doubts about what was true were supposed to make it difficult to assess the situation rationally. They also weakened the will to create or demand social and po‑ litical change. Distrust facilitated confusion. TVP questioned the seriousness of the movement’s demands and did not recognize their common collective identity.

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The second‑most crucial authoritarian category was the forging of hostility‑based political divi‑ sions (4,667 excerpts). The state media made anti‑democratic efforts to exclude some Poles from the national community due to their worldviews and political views. Instead of democratic assur‑ ances of respect for diversity and tolerance, hostility‑based divisions emerged. The movement was not an opponent with whom PiS could negotiate but a dangerous and unpredictable enemy to be fought. The latter was unworthy of trust and respect because it endangered Poles’ health and lives and introduced civil disorder on the streets. Information about resolving current affairs and the changing political situation was less fre‑ quent than perpetuating divisions and spreading distrust. TVP rarely referred to the positions of the opposition and protesters (64 excerpts). The democratic juxtaposition of opinions created the illu‑ sion of pluralism and diverse political views. Still, their selectiveness favored PiS and discredited opponents. A more frequent strategy was convincing citizens of the rightness of the ruling’s policy (547 excerpts). It left no room for misinterpretation. TVP achieved this by blocking informative statements, disallowing people presented by the media, i.e., those directly interested, to speak. Se‑ lected activists, especially the movement leaders, were openly excluded from the state discourse. These strategies of divesting media attention and directing it to selected actors and positions were more potent than strident self‑promotion. Finally, there were only a few recommendations to limit information sources to state‑owned ones. TVP used 1,216 excerpts to make behavior‑based authoritarian claims without references to pro‑democratic behavior. Calls to action and to prove support to PiS by deeds resulted from a criti‑ cal situation for the political system stability. The most desirable social behavior was to keep from independent political participation. Weakening the protests and depriving the protesters of support was supposed to eliminate the threat to the political system. At the same time, institutions subordinated to the ruling party sought allies in averting the threat of political system collapse. In response to Kaczyński’s call recurring in TVP, the counter‑move‑ ment emerged. The state‑managed vigilantes supported the state police in escalated force protest policing. However, stabilizing the political system through repression was impossible in the long run without at least the passive consent of the Poles. Distrust and hostility to protesters considered enemies served to legitimize months of their repression. The study confirms the mind engineering measurement tool’s analytical usefulness in explor‑ ing cognition‑ and behavior‑based legitimacy claims. It allows researchers to distinguish which frames serve to shape views, which can justify action, and which are a call to action. The research findings proved the exploratory power of distinguishing these aspects of claims and considering action claims. Furthermore, the tool effectively differentiates and classifies claims to legitimacy based on the type of regime they support. Non‑specialists can use it to analyze selected political texts without any specialist software independently. However, its application to broadly based comparative research can be time consuming. Thus, the challenge for state‑led mind engineering researchers is to develop IT tools to automate and accelerate the analysis. Automation also could help reduce the likelihood of researchers’ possible mistakes at the data coding and counting stages. More research is still needed to understand changes in political systems, not only their effects but also their mechanisms.

Funding This work was supported by the National Science Centre, Poland (grant number 2021/43/B/ HS5/00290).

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5 POLITICAL LEGITIMIZATION OF HYBRID REGIMES Chinese State Discourses on the Democratization of Post‑Handover Hong Kong Chi Kit Chan Introduction This chapter discusses a political aspect of mind‑engineering: political legitimization of hybrid regimes. Hybrid regimes are polities that feature a mixture of democratic and non‑democratic ­political systems. Notable examples are general elections that are subject to domineering the po‑ litical influence of incumbents or other means of power inequalities. Democratic states solicit their political legitimacy by the people’s mandate indicated in general elections. While regime stability of hybrid states largely comes from political, military, and socio‑economic powers, they also pursue political legitimacy for their existence, claim the representation of general will, and campaign for the heart and mind of the people. Some hybrid states argue for the “merits” of their political systems vis‑à‑vis those of “western” democracies, some resort to the nationalistic senti‑ ment for unity in view of “foreign threats” when suppressing domestic opposition, and some fab‑ ricate political discourses that reproduce the existing power hierarchy. Political legitimization of hybrid states therefore is a prominent topic for scholarly dialogue surrounding mind‑engineering in a political aspect: how do regimes that are characterized by non‑democratic features rationalize their political systems and practices? The political legitimization of hybrid states is vividly illustrated by Chinese state discourses— the political discourses issued by Chinese officials and Chinese state media—on the democra‑ tization of post‑handover Hong Kong. After its handover from Britain to China in 1997, Hong Kong politics has been wrestling with the democratization promised in the Basic Law (the mini‑­ constitution of post‑handover Hong Kong), which stipulates that the Chief Executive (equivalent to the mayor) of the city and all members of its legislature shall be ultimately elected by univer‑ sal suffrages. Throughout post‑handover decades, China has been (re)defining such constitutional promises of universal suffrage by its political discourses in response to local demands for de‑ mocratization. This chapter illustrates that the notion of nationalism is reconstructed by Chinese state discourses as a political legitimacy for refuting the popular demand for universal suffrages in Hong Kong. Equally important is how the notion of democracy, which has been widely under‑ stood as a participatory political system with fair and open elections, is re‑narrated by political discourses of Chinese officials and state media as justification for limited political franchises and

DOI: 10.4324/9781003289746-7

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non‑direct election methods. Democratization of post‑handover Hong Kong shows how a hybrid regime reacts to the democratic aspiration of a highly westernized local civil society. It also in‑ dicates how China reacts to the universal values among international communities—democracy, freedom, human rights, for example—by redefining them in a non‑western way (Leonard 2008; Thornton 2021; Steiner 1950). This chapter begins with a brief literature review of how hybrid regimes legitimize their po‑ litical systems and practices. Their political discourses are a useful reference to our understand‑ ing of Chinese state discourses that address the democratization of post‑handover Hong Kong. Specifically, this chapter will systematically unfold how Chinese officials and state media justify the constitutional power and political patronage of China over Hong Kong’s democratization and refute the application of western democracy to Hong Kong’s constitutional system. The chapter ends by evaluating the social outcomes of the abovementioned political legitimization of Chinese state discourses.

Political Legitimization of Hybrid Regimes All polities and authorities pursue becoming legitimated governances that gain the people’s popu‑ lar will. Legitimacy comes from the Latin word “legitimus”, which refers to a lawful and legal agreement and justification (Reyes 2011: 782). In the political sense, public governance and policy decision entails political legitimacy which sufficiently represents people’s mandate and general will. Scholarly dialogue surrounding political legitimacy is primarily manifested in two ways: public opinion studies and political discourse. The former focuses on the social meaning and constructs of public opinion, and how polities and authorities react to and manage various forms of people’s voices. Riding on the Latin words vox populi, vox dei (voice of the people, voice of GOD), support of public opinion is largely perceived as the political legitimacy for public govern‑ ance and policy decisions. However, political and communication scholars have long questioned the representation and quality of people’s voices. Renowned American writer, Walter Lippmann, once famously depicted public opinion as “pictures in our heads” which were portrayed by the orchestra between political elites, journalists, and a handful of influential experts (Lippmann 1922, p.1). Lippmann’s cynical remarks on the political legitimacy of public opinion were concurred by political scientist, Philip E. Converse, who refuted the rationality and political consistency of American voters through empirical survey data (Converse 1964). Converse’s conclusion on American public opinion was criticized by scholars who argued that by no means we should de‑ mand a politically knowledgeable public, but a public sphere that can show reasonable responses in critical moments such as elections (Lupia and McCubbins 2000; Popkin 1991), and news media which can perform a monitorial citizenship when social problems arise (Zaller 2003). Norma‑ tively speaking, the essence of public opinion on politics may not be indicated by whether the people are politically prolific enough but by how open, plural, and deliberative the public is in the decision‑making process (Herbst 1999; Jaggar 2000). Scholarly dialogue on public opinion pinpoints the significance of political discourses on the po‑ litical legitimacy of public governance and policy decisions. Anthony Giddens (1984) highlighted that political interaction entails linguistic structures and behaviors for social domination and le‑ gitimation. Political discourses are thus comprised of a variety of linguistic, rhetorical, and social dimensions for mind‑engineering, agenda‑setting, and social manipulation (Gastil 1992; Teun and Van Dijk 2006). The academic debates over public opinion in the previous paragraph could be conceived as political discourses that argue over the meaning of people’s voices. Lippmann and

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Converse’s cynical views on public opinion are in line with the calls for deliberative democracy, which questions the representative democracy, elections, and parliamentary politics. Studies of po‑ litical discourses periodically post inquiries regarding social manipulation and mind‑engineering within well‑known democracies all over the world. Citing former British prime minister, Tony Blair’s, public speeches in support of the United States‑led war against Iraq in 2003, Teun and Van Dijk (2006) unfolded the social, cognitive, and discursive dimension of political manipulation us‑ ing critical discourse analysis, and demonstrated how political power could be abused by semiotic choices that reproduce social inequalities in symbolic power. In the same token, Reyes (2011) il‑ lustrated how social fear, social trust to expertise, past critical events, and even altruism could be manipulated as mind‑engineering political discourses in his in‑depth textual analysis of the public speeches made by former American president, George W. Bush. Political legitimacy thus is largely an art of mind‑engineering via political discourses. To non‑democratic regimes, political discourses for their governing legitimacy are equally a pressing issue. The distinction between democratic and autocratic polities often exhibits a contin‑ uum of the grey zone between the two ends rather than a clear boundary (Carothers 2002; Levitsky and Way 2010; Mazepus et al. 2016). Instead of depicting all polities that have non‑democratic features (such as plausible manipulated elections, limited franchise of voting rights, and suspected opaque and abuse of constitutional power) as autocracies, this chapter employs the term “hybrid regime” to describe polities that combine both democratic and autocratic elements (Hale 2011), and displays visible political features that are not in line with open and fair political and human rights. Samuel Paul Huntington (1991) conceptualized two major approaches for regime survival: the input and output sides. Input refers to the representativeness of the people’s mandate, citizens’ interest, and the general will, which are usually manifested in the general elections of democratic polities (Easton 1975). Huntington asserted that non‑democratic regimes usually focus on the output side—especially economic prosperity—as the social output to justify their regime survival. Further studies explicate that hybrid regimes attempt striking both the input and output sides when formulating political discourses for their power incumbency (Levitsky and Way 2010; Mazepus et al. 2016). To justify their governing status in view of questionable democratic elections and so‑ cial freedom, political discourses of hybrid regimes are often characterized by clientele patronage, populist appeal, and xenophobic nationalism. Clientele patronage echoes the output side of regime survival as Huntington (1991) pinpointed. It refers to the parental safeguard of people’s interests, social welfare, and the common benefit of the majority. Different hybrid regimes have varying political discourses of clientele patron‑ age. For example, President Vladimir Putin’s popularity in Russia since 2000 is characterized by a glorified brinksmanship defending for Russian national interest against western sanctions, while the late President Hugo Chávez in Venezuela positioned himself as a Socialist liberator who brought patriotism, liberation, and independence to the people who suffered from social inequali‑ ties and poverty (Mazepus et al. 2016). In mainland China, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been practicing the party‑state structure of which the governmental and partisan organiza‑ tions are connected with each other under the doctrine of democratic centralism (民主集中制) since the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 (Steiner 1950; Thornton 2021). China has started its socio‑economic liberalization since 1978 when former Chinese leader, Deng Xiaoping, launched the reform and open (改革開放) policy. From the 2000s to the early 2010s, China seemed to be relatively tolerant towards the growth of civil society associations and a vo‑ cal public while keeping their edge in public governance. This was indicated by the academic discussion pertaining to whether China was becoming a progressive hybrid regime via contentious

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authoritarianism (Chen 2011), consultative authoritarianism (Teets 2013), and responsive authori‑ tarianism (Heurlin 2016). While trying to incorporate and represent the interests of the Chinese people, China could hardly accept institutional challenges against the partisan leadership of the CCP (Leonard 2008; Thornton 2021). The abovementioned examples indicate the working of cli‑ entele patronage, which aims to secure regime legitimacy and survival from the output side in terms of socio‑economic stability, improved livelihood, and ruling benevolence. However, there are good and bad days for all polities. When political discourses of clientele patronage look pale in times of socio‑economic adversities or political crises, hybrid regimes may resort to populist appeal to suppress domestic opposition via an “us and them” dichotomic rhetoric. Linguistic and discourse studies have shown that populism is largely an empty signifier or cultural artifact with little political value (Freeden 1998; Laclau 2005). It is an us and them so‑ cial imaginary which fosters distrust of and frustration with political elites, social institutions, and systems, and positions them as the enemy of the people—the majority in the societies (Comroff 2011; Mudde 2004; Taggart 2000). Political discourses of populism are commonly seen in media representation that construct a sense of “in‑groups” and hostility toward elites and institutions of representative democracy (Krämer 2014). In fact, populism is also seen in western democracies (Rooduijn 2014). However, such political discourses are mobilized by hybrid regimes in order to impose institutional sanctions against domestic opposition and dissents (Mazepus et al. 2016). Lastly, xenophobic nationalism is also commonly seen in the political discourses of us and them fabricated by hybrid regimes (Mazepus et al. 2016). Nationalism refers to empathy, passion, and a sense of belonging to nationhood. Scholarly dialogues explicate the formation of nationalism from various historical and socio‑cultural contexts: national reunification, breaking up colonial and multi‑national empires, restoring the ancient state, and mind‑engineering projects which echo ­national greatness and related political discourses (Gellner 1983; Naire 1977, 1997). Political dis‑ courses of nationalism are manifested in various forms of “common sense” in politics (such as the quest for national values), social imaginary (visions about what a good society means), collective identities (stories and folklore about who “we” are and the cultural origins of “our nation”), and so‑ cio‑cultural practices (habitual tributes to national anthem, national flag, and totems alike, and usage of languages in everyday life) (Anderson 1983; Billig 1995; Gellner 1983; Naire 1997). Such com‑ mon political discourses in both democratic and non‑democratic states, however, could be narrated as an us and them dichotomy by questing for domestic unity in front of credible foreign threats when hybrid regimes attempt to secure regime legitimacy (Mazepus et al. 2016; Tang 2016; Zhao 2013). This chapter does not aim to exhaust all mind‑engineering means of hybrid regimes. The above‑ mentioned scholarly dialogue exhibits common political discourses which hybrid regimes employ for their political legitimacy and policy justification. A point to note here is that these political discourses—clientele patronage, populist appeal, and xenophobic nationalism—are not exclusively seen in non‑democratic societies. In fact, they are also well‑documented in academic journals that select democratic polities as case studies (for example, Gastil 1992; Teun and Van Dijk 2006; Reyes 2011; Rooduijn 2014). Nonetheless, they are the political discourses that are utilized by hybrid re‑ gimes to justify their incumbency, governance, and policy decisions in comparative political studies.

Case Study and Methodological Note This chapter discusses the political legitimization of hybrid regimes by using the case study of Chinese state discourses on Hong Kong’s democratization. Democratization of Hong Kong re‑ fers to constitutional reforms of this city, aiming to elect the Chief Executive (political head of

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Hong Kong) and all members of the Legislative Council (the legislature of this city) by universal suffrage. Hong Kong was under British colonial governance from 1842 to 1997. The handover of Hong Kong from Britain to China in 1997 has been celebrated by the Chinese government as a nationalistic triumph over western colonialism (Lee et al. 2002). The handover, however, was also coupled with the solemn promise of democratization stipulated in the Basic Law, the mini­ ‑constitution of post‑handover Hong Kong: the Chief Executive and all lawmakers of Hong Kong shall be ultimately returned by universal suffrages (Articles 45 and 68 of the Basic Law of Hong Kong). However, China has largely been perceived by political scientists as being a hybrid regime with a party‑state structure. The party‑state framework upholds the partisan leadership of the CCP and denounces the western democracy of parliamentary politics and direct elections (Leonard 2008; Thornton 2021). How does China react to the constitutional promise of democratization in post‑handover Hong Kong? This question echoes the general scholarly question of how a hybrid regime formulates political discourses that justify its top‑down governance in view of the calls for democratization from below. To investigate Chinese political discourses on Hong Kong’s democratization, this chapter ex‑ amines the official statements and important documents issued by the Chinese government and their key officials and policy advisors on Hong Kong’s constitutional framework and reforms. Ad‑ ditionally, significant commentaries made by Chinese state media or pro‑China media outlets are also scrutinized. Further to the literature review on how hybrid regimes legitimize their govern‑ ance and political decisions, this chapter focuses on the political discourses expressed by Chinese officials, policy advisors (such as constitutional and legal scholars who drafted the Basic Law of Hong Kong or served in key positions that were in charge of Hong Kong affairs), and pro‑China media outlets. Further to the literature review in the previous section, I will employ the intellec‑ tual lens of clientele patronage, populist appeal, and xenophobic nationalism to examine China’s discourses on Hong Kong’s democratization. We explore how and to what extent the political discourses of China on Hong Kong’s democratization exhibited the abovementioned patterns amid unremitting local demand and outcry for materializing the constitutional promise stated in the Basic Law: holding universal suffrages for the Chief Executive and all members of the Legislative Council. Lastly, scholarly analyses of post‑handover Hong Kong’s politics, public opinion, and formation of cultural identities will be illustrated as evidence that evaluates the mind‑engineering effectiveness and outcome of Chinese state discourses on Hong Kong’s democratization.

Chinese Patronage of Post‑Handover Hong Kong Chinese political discourses on Hong Kong’s democratization have been featured with China’s clientele patronage of Hong Kong under the constitutional framework of “One Country, Two Sys‑ tems” (OCTS). OCTS is the constitutional framework that attempts to guarantee Hong Kong’s capitalist system under Socialist China in the Joint Sino‑British Declaration in 1984. It is mani‑ fested in the Basic Law (Tsang 1997). In brief, China’s political discourses have been highlighting how post‑handover Hong Kong’s political stability and socio‑economic prosperity are the output of China’s successful implementation of OCTS, and successful output could only be guaranteed when the party‑state leadership of China is fully respected in Hong Kong. Such discursive rationale is in line with the political discourses of clientele patronage, which is commonly seen when hybrid regimes attempt to justify their incumbency and legitimacy without fully implementing popular and direct elections. Chinese officials and state media continue reiterating the political patronage of China over Hong Kong in the name of Chinese nationalism. Based on media content analysis of Chinese 78

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state media’s coverage of Hong Kong’s handover in 1997, media scholars concluded that China perceived the resumption of sovereignty over this former Crown colony as a triumph over western colonial history on Chinese soil (Lee et al. 2002). In addition, Chinese state media made an explicit interpretation of OCTS in early 2004 when there were white‑heat social debates surrounding how to make sure that those who governed Hong Kong must be “patriots” to China, and what “patriots” meant politically and culturally to the governance of this city. The background was the massive rallies against enacting national security law in July 2003, a critical social movement event that triggered vibrant momentum from local civil society in Hong Kong to press for holding universal suffrages for the Chief Executive and all lawmakers in 2007 and 2008, respectively (Lee and Chan 2011). Blooming political demands for democratization, however, resulted in vocal rebuttals from Chinese officials, mainland Chinese legal scholars, and Chinese partisan media outlets in early 2004 (Chan and Chan 2014). By reprinting a speech made by the late Chinese leader, Deng Xiaoping, in June 1984, Chinese state media Xinhua News Agency stated that Hong Kong must be governed by Hong Kong people who are mainly “patriots”, whereas loving the [Chinese] na‑ tion and loving Hong Kong are inseparable (Editorial office of Ming Pao 2004: 76–77). People’s Daily—another Chinese partisan media outlet—issued a commentary echoing Deng’s words on patriots and stating that a Socialist China under the CCP’s leadership is the precondition to OCTS and Hong Kong’s prosperity (Editorial office of Ming Pao 2004: 82–83). Despite the conceptual similarities and differences between patriotism and nationalism (for example, see the discussion of Chan and Chan 2014: 954–957), the political discourses of the Chinese state media made clear political patronage of China over Hong Kong: the sovereignty of a Socialist China under the leadership of the CCP is the precondition for the existence of a capi‑ talist Hong Kong. This rationale was comprehensively explicated by Xia Yung (夏勇), director of the Legal Studies Institute of the Chinese Social Sciences Academy on 22nd February 2004 (Editorial office of Ming Pao 2004: 95–99). Xia specified that one country is the precondition to two systems, and the special arrangement of the latter for Hong Kong premises on the respect to Chinese sovereignty. According to Xia, the power relationship between China and Hong Kong is unliterary—the appointment of the Chief Executive and principal officials of Hong Kong, as well as the election methods for the Chief Executive and the Legislative Council must be subject to the Chinese central government’s approval. In addition to the political patronage of Hong Kong, China’s political discourses of OCTS also consist of socio‑economic patronage which specifies that the support of China is indispen‑ sable to Hong Kong’s prosperity and stability. Such socio‑economic patronage under OCTS was vividly illustrated in a significant position paper issued by the Chinese government on 31 August 2014 (The State Council of Chinese government 2014). This position paper was entitled, “The practice of the ‘One Country, Two Systems’ policy in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Re‑ gion”, which was self‑explanatory enough to stand for how the Chinese government implemented OCTS in post‑handover decades. The second paragraph of the paper’s Foreword specified that, under OCTS, “[t]he previous capitalist system and way of life remain unchanged, and most laws continue to apply. Hong Kong continues to prosper, its society remains stable, and full develop‑ ment is being witnessed in all undertakings” (The State Council of Chinese government 2014: 1). Such socio‑economic patronage of prosperity and stability was further explicated in part IV of the document, which reviewed the supporting economic and trading policies from the central govern‑ ment of China to Hong Kong, notably the Closer Economic Partnership Agreement (similar to a free trade agreement at the international level) between mainland China and Hong Kong. Moreo‑ ver, the Appendix of the same document spent 27 and 15 paragraphs, respectively, on various indicators showing the post‑handover socio‑economic development and cross‑border economic 79

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activities between Hong Kong and mainland China. The indicators ranged from economic output, the city’s fiscal and foreign reserves, trading volumes of securities and foreign currencies, eco‑ nomic and trading data released by international organizations such as the International Monetary Fund, international agreements signed by Hong Kong and other territories, and the significance of economic, trading, and merchandizing relations between mainland China and the city. The political and socio‑economic patronage of Hong Kong in China’s political discourses is cited as the justification for rejecting the universal suffrages for electing the city head and all law‑ makers. An example is how the Chinese state media and legal experts interpreted Deng Xiaoping’s comment on Hong Kong. Deng’s original words on patriots addressed the general appeal for sup‑ porting Hong Kong’s handover to China: Respect for the Chinese nation, sincere support for the motherland’s resumption of sov‑ ereignty over Hong Kong and a desire not to impair Hong Kong’s prosperity and stabil‑ ity. Those who meet these requirements are patriots, regardless of whether they believe in capitalism or feudalism or even slavery. We don’t demand that they are in favour of China’s socialist system; we only ask them to love the motherland and Hong Kong. (Editorial office of Ming Pao 2004: 81) On 29 February 2004, the Xinhua News Agency issued a commentary written by Xu Chongde (許 崇德), a professor from Remin University of China who served on the Basic Law Drafting Com‑ mittee in the 1980s (Editorial office of Ming Pao 2004). Xu rode on Deng’s words and argued that universal suffrages could not guarantee that Hong Kong would be governed by patriots. He said that some elected lawmakers in Hong Kong “badmouthed” the city at the international level and expressed supportive rhetoric for the independence of Taiwan (Editorial office of Ming Pao 2004: 111–112). Disregarding the validity of such political accusations, what we note here is how Deng’s remarks on patriots in the 1980s were narrated on as the discursive weapon to criticize the democrats and political dissidents in the city and disapprove electing the Chief Executive and all members of the Legislative Council by universal suffrages. Equally important is how Chinese political discourses narrate Hong Kong’s prosperity and stability as rationales for not holding universal suffrages for the city’s head and lawmakers. As mentioned in previous paragraphs, Chinese state media initiated the public discussion on patriots in early 2004 (Chan and Chan 2014). In early February 2004, the Chief Secretary for Administration of Hong Kong, Donald Tsang, reported to the city’s Legislative Council about his trip to Beijing to discuss constitutional affairs with Chinese officials and concerned legal experts (Editorial office of Ming Pao 2004). Tsang reported that the Chinese central government highlighted the significance of considering “the interest of different social classes” and the goal of “safeguarding the prosperity and stability of Hong Kong” when developing a democratic system that “suits the practical situation in Hong Kong” (Editorial office of Ming Pao 2004: 70). Political scientists argued that Hong Kong’s democratization, which began in the 1980s when the colonial Hong Kong government introduced direct elections to the city, has been encountering resistance from local business sectors and conservatives who worried that democratization would bring welfarism and populist politics to Hong Kong (Fong 2014; So 2000). The abovementioned political rhetoric echoed the concern of local conservative business sectors, and their skepticism to democratization was mobilized as political legitimization for rejecting calls for universal suf‑ frages in early 2004.

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Xenophobic Nationalism and Populism While upholding China’s political and socio‑economic patronage of Hong Kong, Chinese political discourses of Hong Kong’s democratization also exhibit a certain extent of xenophobic national‑ ism. As the literature review for this chapter suggests, some hybrid regimes attempt to anchor an us vs. them dichotomy by arousing domestic nationalism against foreign threats. Such discursive strategy was also present in Chinese official discourses on Hong Kong’s democratization. The most apparent instance is the fact that China’s political rhetoric often criticized foreign nations and their alleged arrogance and disturbance to China. Deng Xiaoping explicitly stated that the “foreigners” “looked down” and “insulted” the Chinese when he urged that the Chinese in Hong Kong could manage the city well (Editorial Office of Ming Pao 2004: 80). Such xenophobic senti‑ ment was also seen in the political spats surrounding the debates on patriots in early 2004. On 20 February 2004, China Daily, an official English media outlet of China, published an editorial that stated that people who “begged” foreign forces to intervene in Hong Kong’s affairs and openly supported the “self‑determination” movement of Taiwan was not comprised of patriots, according to Deng’s words in 1984 (Editorial office of Ming Pao 2004: 85–87). This editorial aimed to react to local democrats who called for Hong Kong’s democratization. In a position paper on OCTS that the Chinese government issued in June 2014, China reiterated that Hong Kong’s affairs are its internal affairs which have no room for “foreign forces” to intervene (The State Council of Chinese government 2014). Chinese political discourse also depicted foreign forces are the culprit making trouble for Hong Kong. In June 2019, the Anti‑Extradition Law Amendment Bill protests (Anti‑ELAB protests) stormed nearly all territories within Hong Kong, expressing the general discontent toward the unpopular bill that allowed fugitives in the city to be transferred to mainland China (Lee et al. 2019). The protests became the critical event that triggered China to remap the city’s political order (Chan 2022). On 29 June 2022, days before the 25th anniversary of Hong Kong’s handover to China, Chinese state media, People’s Daily, issued a long article that narrated the leadership of Chinese president Xi Jinping in the steadfast implementation of OCTS in Hong Kong (Wong 2022). It depicted the Anti‑ELAB protests as disturbances to Hong Kong’s social order under the guidance and deep intervention of some foreign and overseas forces. The deep intervention of Hong Kong by foreign and overseas forces, according to the article, was effectively suspended by China’s introduction of the National Security Law (NSL) to the city in 2020 and China’s reform of Hong Kong’s election system in 2021. This reform largely reduced the weigh‑ ing of directly‑elected lawmakers in the composition of the Legislative Council, and enhanced the censoring mechanism to make sure only patriots could be the head and lawmakers of the city (NPSCS 2021a, 2021b). While some hybrid regimes resorted to populism—soliciting direct support from the people by attacking and circumventing existing political and social systems—Chinese political discourses on Hong Kong’s democratization exhibit very little populism. Instead of demonstrating an anti‑elitist and anti‑system appeal, Chinese political discourses underscore the institutionalization of China’s authority in the constitutional affairs and democratization of Hong Kong. Such institutionalization was manifested in twofold. Firstly, Chinese political discourses keep reiterating the superior and unchallengeable role of the National People’s Congress Standing Committee (NPCSC) in Hong Kong’s constitutional affairs. The NPCSC is the core decision‑making body of China’s legislature at the national level. Its authority and power over Hong Kong’s constitutional affairs—­interpreting the Basic Law—were repeatedly explicated by Chinese legal scholars such as Xia Yung and Xu Chongde during the debates on patriots in early 2004 (Editorial office of Ming Pao 2004). The

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NPCSC’s role in Hong Kong’s constitutional affairs was further substantiated and institutionalized in its decision in 2007, which specified a five‑step legal procedure to amend the selection and for‑ mation methods for the Chief Executive and Legislative Council: (1) the Chief Executive makes a report to the NPCSC, (2) the NPCSC makes a corresponding decision, (3) the Legislative Council endorses the decision, (4) the Chief Executive gives consent, and (5) the NPCSC approves or puts it on the record (The State Council of Chinese government 2014). In addition to the authority of the NPCSC in Hong Kong’s constitutional affairs, China has also institutionalized the constitutional status of patriots by reforming the election systems in Hong Kong after the Anti‑ELAB protests and the enactment of the NSL in 2019–2020. The Anti‑ELAB protests became a total mobilization from below—millions of citizens packed the streets to rally, owing to acute anxiety as the result of the unpopular bill that allowed fugitives’ transfer to Main‑ land China (Cheng et  al. 2021). The Anti‑ELAB movement was radicalized by a social outcry against suspending the extradition law to public demands for democratization and political re‑ forms after rounds of violent interactions between protesters and the police (Lee et al. 2022). It triggered a series of chain reactions from China’s state power, reforming Hong Kong’s election system by the NPCSC in early 2021 and introducing political censorship of the candidates for the city’s head, lawmakers, and members of an election committee that would select the city’s head and a substantial portion of lawmakers in the local legislature in Hong Kong (NPSCS 2021a, 2021b). When narrating the Chinese president’s vision for Hong Kong, the People’s Daily ap‑ praised such electoral reform as safeguarding the city in the hands of the patriots (Wong 2022). Instead of resorting to populist support and both anti‑elitist and anti‑system sentiment, Chinese political discourses appear to be an institutionalizing force that remaps and establishes a sort of political order in the city, especially after its tumultuous experiences in 2019–2020 (Chan, Tang, and Lee 2022). This discursive strategy could be attributed to the waves of the post‑handover social movement that triggered political tension between China and Hong Kong through the mas‑ sive rallies against enacting the NSL in 2003 (Lee and Chan 2011), the Occupying Movement (a 79‑day sit‑in in the central business districts of Hong Kong which called for uncensored democ‑ ratization) (Lee 2015), and the Anti‑ELAB protests that rocked the whole territory of Hong Kong through street fights between protesters and the police (Chan 2022; Lee et al. 2019). China and pro‑China forces in Hong Kong attempted to counter‑mobilize public support for their political stance and undermined the momentum of social protests (Yuen and Cheng 2017). However, such counter‑mobilization by the state power could hardly be a long‑term means to restore social order in Hong Kong. Responding to the abovementioned protests in the name of the people’s power, China could hardly resort to populism, but assumed the role of social stabilizer who safeguards the status quo. Its political discourses on Hong Kong’s democratization thus are different from those for mainland Chinese societies, which have exhibited populist appeal of massive support for the CCP’s partisan ruling (Tang 2016).

Interim Evaluation of the Post‑Handover Political Mind‑Engineering To evaluate the mind‑engineering effect of Chinese political discourses drawing from patronage and nationalism on Hong Kong’s democratization, this chapter reviews two sets of scholarly dia‑ logues surrounding the political and social developments of post‑handover Hong Kong. Firstly, literature on post‑handover Hong Kong identities could inform us regarding the extent to which the local and national cultural identities of Hong Kong people and Chinese could be compatible with each other. If Chinese political discourses could win the hearts of Hong Kong people, the lat‑ ter should exhibit a positive stance on the Chinese national identity or at least a less dichotomous 82

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perception of Chinese and Hong Kong identities. Equally important is how China has been por‑ trayed in Hong Kong’s key political discourses and the extent to which China is perceived as a counterforce against the city’s democratization and the wider local interest. The above questions show whether Chinese political discourses could stand for a moral leadership that legitimizes China’s stance on Hong Kong’s constitutional affairs and democratization. Hong Kong’s identity has been perceived as a distinctive entity vis‑à‑vis the Chinese identity thanks to the socio‑economic uptakes of colonial Hong Kong since the 1970s, which helped the modern city enjoy a cosmopolitan lifestyle that was substantially different from those of mainland China (Mathews, Ma, and Lui 2008). While residents in Hong Kong shared a kind of pan‑Chinese ethnicity and Chinese nationalistic sentiment owing to traditional ethnic and cultural ties (Vickers and Kan 2003), they have been reluctant to fully embrace political allegiance to the governing regime of mainland China thanks to the popular social values of civil liberties, individual freedom, and democracy during the decades of modernization since the late colonial period of Hong Kong (Fung 2001; Ma and Fung 1999). Post‑handover Hong Kong identity surveys exhibited that the majority of residents picked up a mix of Hong Kong and Chinese identities (Fung and Chan 2017). Chinese and Hong Kong identities exhibited a blending trend throughout the early decades in the post‑handover period, which was manifested in the growing socio‑economic integration and trans‑ border living experiences of Hong Kong residents in mainland China (Ma 2006) and the rise of instrumentalism in identity politics which strongly embraced China’s market opportunities while brushing aside the embarrassing questions on its political freedom (Ma and Fung 2007). However, cultural tensions between Chinese and Hong Kong identities became seething in the 2010s amid multiple unexpected social developments: cross‑border consumption demands and outnumbered visitors from mainland China resulted in local discontent in Hong Kong (Chan 2014), a widening gap between local aspirations for democratization and China’s decision on Hong Kong’s constitu‑ tional framework (Kaeding 2017), and the falling social trust in the Chinese central government in Beijing in the eyes of local Hong Kong people (Steinhardt, Li, and Jiang 2018). While the identity politics of Chinese and Hong Kong identities consist of multiple dimensions, related literature highlights two observations that substantially matter to Chinese political discourses on Hong Kong’s democratization. Firstly, growing tension between Chinese and Hong Kong identi‑ ties during the 2010s was explicated by a sort of cultural othering process that was seldom conceived in the past decades. Despite varying social values and modernizing pace, Hong Kong’s identity did not exclude its mixture with Chinese identity (Brewer 1999; Mathews 1997). However, such cultural hybridization between Chinese and Hong Kong identities went pale in the 2010s when the Chinese identity was culturally positioned as the cultural other (Chan 2014) and innate enemies (Ip 2015) by some local political and online discourses in Hong Kong. Such cultural antagonism against China spread to general elections whereas the voting contests were mobilized as a political tug‑of‑war between pro‑China and anti‑China camps (Ma 2015). Widespread local skepticism and political discourses against China in the 2010s explicated the limited mind‑engineering effect of Chinese political discourses on promoting China’s patronage of this city. Secondly, the positive correlation between Chinese and Hong Kong identities weakened during the 2010s (Fung and Chan 2017). Further regression modeling of identity surveys showed that the entrenched social values of Hong Kong—notably, the general belief in democracy, civil liberties, and social freedom—became incom‑ patible with the Chinese identity and its nationalistic narration (Chan and Fung 2018; Chow, Fu, and Ng 2020). Such statistical evidence illuminates how upholding Chinese nationalism and blaming foreign forces could hardly address local aspirations for democratization and social freedom. The decade of the 2010s also witnessed the rise of localism in Hong Kong—a set of radical‑ ized ideologies stemming from local resentment against China’s role in democratization and the 83

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city’s social development (Kaeding 2017; Veg 2017). The term localism was once employed by progressive activists to put forward the leftist social movement for community networking against unregulated capitalist hegemony (Chan 2017). However, it began to signify radicalized right‑wing discourses that called for keeping the status quo of Hong Kong by rejecting the Chinese influence in the city, whereas China was essentialized as a cultural other to Hong Kong society (Ip 2020; Veg 2017). The prominence of localism in the 2010s was a cultural defiance against China’s patron‑ age of the city and Chinese political discourses, which attempted to legitimize China’s stance on Hong Kong’s democratization and social development. These findings demonstrated the limits of Chinese political discourses to justify China’s patronage of the city, and they were not able to gain the hearts and minds of the locals by resorting to Chinese nationalism and the constitutional and legal frameworks established by China’s top legislative body.

Concluding Discussion As pinpointed at the beginning of this chapter, political legitimization is a significant aspect of mind‑engineering. All polities, whether democracies or hybrid regimes, must justify their exist‑ ence, governance, and policies before the public. Political legitimization has been widely attributed to direct and popular elections, which are perceived as being the core representation of the people’s mandate on governing bodies or decisive policies. However, hybrid regimes show inadequate or problematic features in direct and popular elections, which pose an intriguing question about their political legitimization of governance and policies. Studies on hybrid regimes show that they usually focus on the output of their governance—clientele patronage of desirable political and socio‑economic outcomes, nationalism that calls for domestic unity by highlighting foreign threats, and populist appeal that exhibits stances of anti‑elites and the anti‑system when soliciting direct support from the people. This chapter’s case study—Chinese political discourses of Hong Kong’s democratization—is illustrated to scrutinize how a hybrid regime attempts to legitimize its rebuttal against holding universal suffrages and direct elections for the city’s administrative head and legislature amid local demand for democratic reforms. By examining the key Chinese official statements, reportage and editorials of Chinese state media, and important official documents, this chapter unfolds the Chinese political discourses on Hong Kong’s democratization and provides hindsight regarding how a hybrid regime attempted to legitimize its political stance in a cosmopolitan city that featured a social system that contrasted its own. While Hong Kong has been under Chinese sovereignty since its handover in 1997, it already had a vocal civil society that consisted of political parties calling for democratization, civic organi‑ zations that got used to liberties and human rights protection, and residents who highly treasured the social freedom that was remarkably different from mainland China. The ways that Chinese political discourses legitimized China’s political and socio‑economic patronage of Hong Kong and justified the former’s unchallengeable final say on the democratization of this global capitalist city deserve scholarly attention as pertains to those political legitimizing rationales and their similari‑ ties and differences to the political discourses of other hybrid regimes alike. The first and foremost observation is that the political discourses taken by hybrid regimes for legiti‑ mizing their policy options could vary. In this chapter, Chinese political discourses on Hong Kong’s democratization focused mainly on establishing China’s political and socio‑economic patronage of this global city. According to Chinese political discourses, China’s party‑state leadership and its poli‑ cies to Hong Kong have safeguarded the political stability and socio‑economic prosperity of this city.

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Additionally, Chinese political discourses framed the social protests and movement activists of Hong Kong as being disturbances caused by foreign forces. Such narrations were largely in line with the political discourses commonly seen in other hybrid regimes, justifying the regime’s legitimacy via the positive output brought on by the incumbent political leadership and a sort of xenophobic depiction of foreign countries when calling for national unity and internal loyalty. However, populism seemed to be unfit to China for its discourses on Hong Kong’s democrati‑ zation. Post‑handover Hong Kong witnessed several massive rallies and social movement events that called for democratization in the name of the people’s power. In the anti‑NSL protests in 2003, the Occupying Movement in 2014, and the Anti‑ELAB protests in 2019, China was largely de‑ picted by local public discourses as a regime vis‑à‑vis the democratic call by Hong Kong publics. As pro‑China forces could hardly secure majority votes in post‑handover general elections (Ma 2015), populist discourses might induce political embarrassment under Hong Kong’s political context. Hybrid regimes therefore exhibit different political discourses when legitimizing their governance and policies based on the social context and possible political challenges they face. A further noteworthy observation is the momentum for Chinese political discourses on Hong Kong’s democratization at the national level. The key narrations of Chinese political discourses, in addition to China’s patronage of Hong Kong’s well‑being and Chinese nationalism, are the constitutional status and legal authority of China over Hong Kong’s democratization. This is in line with China’s own understanding of democracy under the doctrine of democratic centralism (Leonard 2008; Thornton 2021). Democracy, to China, has been interpreted as an “intra‑party democracy”, which facilitates the partisan governance of the CCP rather than the direct election and representative democracy of parliamentary politics (Thornton 2021). To the CCP’s partisan ideologies, the calls for implementing such a western democratic system in mainland China are a prelude for “peaceful evolution”, undermining the CCP’s leadership and promoting a regime shift in China without explicit violence, military presence, and foreign pressure (Johnston 2017). Such partisan ideologies of the CCP echo China’s key political discourses on Hong Kong’s democrati‑ zation: direct elections could not guarantee electing patriots loyal to China, and the power of the CCP must be safeguarded in Hong Kong’s constitutional reforms. Attribution to foreign forces in view of Hong Kong’s protests and rallies was also reminiscent of China’s vigilance for peaceful evolution by the West. China is remapping the political and social orders of Hong Kong after the tumultuous years of the Anti‑ELAB protests (which mainly occurred in 2019) and the swift enactment of the NSL in Hong Kong in June 2020 (Chan, Tang, and Lee 2022). While the literature of post‑handover Hong Kong identities informed us of the local resistance to Chinese identity and public defi‑ ance against Chinese political discourses in the 2010s, it is expected that China will continue legitimizing the political decisions and policies of Hong Kong’s democracy and constitutional structures. China’s political discourses on Hong Kong’s democratization indicated its considera‑ tion for national security and international relations. They also demonstrated the discursive tactics for a hybrid regime to legitimize its political and policy choices. China’s determination to remap Hong Kong’s political and social orders after the tumultuous years of 2019–2020  must not be underestimated. Its political discourses on Hong Kong’s democratization and other political‑socio reforms are noteworthy case studies to researchers who consider the political legitimization of a hybrid regime and its mind‑engineering effect in the long run amid recent scholarly dialogue and debates surrounding democratic backsliding and shifting geo‑political dynamics between China and other world powers.

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PART II

Commercial Mind Engineering

6 THE BENEFIT OF THE DOUBT How Big Oil Makes Us Think William F. Schnell

Introduction Anthropogenic (human‑caused) climate change poses an existential threat to human civilization and, more immediately, to the fossil fuel industry. As the latter is responsible for meeting most of the world’s energy needs, its constituent businesses are among the world’s most profitable. There‑ fore, the industry has the motive (business survival) and the means (business profits) to counter the threat coming from a scientific consensus about the connection between greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels and a dangerously warming climate. The fossil fuel industry is one of many to face a threat from a scientific consensus, including the tobacco industry. Indeed, a whole new consulting specialty has emerged from the public rela‑ tions (PR) field to cast doubt in the public mind about a given scientific consensus. Engineering the public mind to doubt sound science can stall legislation and other attempts to curtail profits made at the expense of the public good—hence, the benefit of the doubt for any lucrative industry seeking to buy time to continue business as usual. This chapter details how Big Oil makes us think. Big Oil is a moniker for the fossil fuel in‑ dustry, which includes gas and coal companies. Who are the players in the countercampaigns that challenge the scientific consensus about climate change? What tactics do they employ, and how have they proven so successful over the past 35 years? Engineering the mind to think in a particular way requires knowledge of how the mind operates. It will become clear that the field of psychology has informed successful tactics used by countercampaigns. However, before this study considers those issues, it begins with some historical context to sketch the development of a scientific consensus that became a grave threat to the robust fossil fuel industry and those depend‑ ent upon its extracted resources.

A Scientific Consensus Starts a Movement Only in the late 1980s did anthropogenic climate change illicit controversy beyond scientific cir‑ cles. Before then, it was an academic affair. ‘In the 1820s, French mathematician and physicist Joseph Fourier proposed … that Earth’s thin covering of air—its atmosphere—acts the way a glass greenhouse would. Energy enters through the glass walls, but is then trapped inside’ (Editors 2017).

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In 1856 American scientist Eunice Foote was the first to highlight the importance of carbon ­dioxide (CO2) as a greenhouse gas (Jackson 2019: 105). As the 19th century drew to a close, Svante ­Arrhenius, a Swedish chemist, modeled the surface Earth temperature decrease expected by ­reducing the atmospheric concentration of CO2 by half. He then calculated the corollary— the ­temperature increase from doubling CO2 concentrations. Despite the limited resources at his ­disposal, ‘Arrhenius’ laborious analysis gave thermal results close to those later obtained by hun‑ dreds of hours of calculations carried out with powerful digital computers’ (Arrhenius et al. 2008: 36). Fast forward to 1938 when Guy Stewart Callendar, a British engineer, calculated a 19th‑­century point of reference for CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere at 290 parts per million (ppm). He then demonstrated how much CO2 levels had risen since the human burning of fossil fuels began in earnest and how much the Earth’s surface temperature had warmed as a result (Anon 2006: 1756). The need for collecting more evidence was building and led to the construction of the Mauna Loa Observatory, remotely located near the middle of the Pacific Ocean. It was tasked with moni‑ toring atmospheric CO2 levels and has done so continuously since 1958 (Lindsey 2006). As years of measurements were collected at the observatory, a graphic representation of rising CO2 levels became known as the Keeling Curve, named after the first scientist called to manage the facil‑ ity and maintain its records, Charles David Keeling (Ostrowski 2017: 34). After accounting for seasonal variations, the Keeling Curve revealed ‘an increase of ~2 ppmv (parts per million vol‑ ume) carbon dioxide per year’ (36). Further, ‘the year‑to‑year increase in carbon dioxide roughly matched the amount emitted by the burning of fossil fuels each year’ (35). As early as 1965, the science about the connection between burning fossil fuels and increasing atmospheric CO2 was reaching the White House. On February 8 of that year, President Lyndon Johnson delivered a Special Message to the Congress on Conservation and Restoration of Natural Beauty, where he said, ‘this generation has altered the composition of the atmosphere on a global scale through … a steady increase in carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels’ (Johnson 2007). That was a mere seven years after atmospheric CO2 measurements began at the Mauna Loa Observatory and the Keeling Curve was becoming apparent. ‘By 1976, it was well established that the rising carbon dioxide in the curve was due to anthropogenic emissions’ (Ostrowski 2017: 35). The evidence was becoming clear, the scientific consensus was building, and by 1988 the risks were becoming apparent. ‘The summer of 1988 was the hottest on record (although many since then have been hotter). 1988 also saw widespread drought and wildfires within the United States’ (Editors 2017). The time was arriving for the issue to proceed from scientific circles to the public square. On June 23, 1988, Dr. James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Stud‑ ies, testified before the U.S. Senate about a documented rise in Earth temperatures while noting ‘that it was 99 percent certain that the warming trend was not a natural variation but was caused by a buildup of carbon dioxide and other artificial gases in the atmosphere’ (Mulvey and Shulman 2015: 4). The next day the frontpage headlines of the New York Times read: ‘Global Warming Has Begun, Expert Tells Senate,’ followed by the subheading: ‘Sharp Cut in Burning of Fossil Fuels Is Urged to Battle Shift in Climate’ (4). Coinciding with these developments, 1988 was also the year that the United Nations created the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) with the stated objective ‘To provide governments at all levels with scientific information that they can use to de‑ velop climate policies’ (IPCC 2022). On the national level, it took only one month after Hansen’s testimony for the National Energy Policy Act of 1988 to be introduced in the U.S. Senate to ensure ‘a national energy policy to reduce global warming’ (National Energy Policy Act of 1988). The scientific consensus regarding anthropogenic climate change was initially accepted on national and international levels as the mobilization to address it began.

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A Fossil Fuel Industry Starts a Countermovement However, something else occurred during that eventful year. ‘The Denialosphere began spinning around 1988, in response to an increasingly outspoken scientific community, led by James Hansen’ (Pooley 2010: 39). Profitable fossil fuel companies quietly funded a countermovement of climate change denial and skepticism (McCright and Dunlap 2000: 504–505). In 1985 the largest corpora‑ tion in America was Exxon Mobile, and 10 of the 20 wealthiest corporations in America were pe‑ troleum companies (Fortune 500). Because climate change policies ‘greatly threatened the profits of the most powerful industry in the world’ (Brown 2017: 126), the fossil fuel industry had a vested interest in countering any public policies that would diminish or eliminate the burning of fossil fuels. Further, petroleum, coal, and gas executives had a legal and fiduciary responsibility to their stakeholders to maximize profits in nearly every way possible short of breaking the law. Indeed, ‘shareholders can and have sued companies for being overly socially responsible, and not paying enough attention to the bottom line’ (Masters 2009). Hence, the industry’s denial and skepticism even though its scientists had long before high‑ lighted the connection between greenhouse gas emissions and global warming. As far back as 1977, this was the message of one of Exxon’s senior scientists, James F. Black, in a meeting at company headquarters (Banerjee et al. 2015: 1). A year later, he was more specific. He warned Exxon scientists and managers that independent researchers estimated that a doubling of the carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration in the atmosphere would increase aver‑ age global temperatures by 2 to 3 degrees Celsius (4 to 5 degrees Fahrenheit), and as much as 10 degrees Celsius (18 degrees Fahrenheit) at the poles. (1–2) However, what Exxon reported to its petroleum executives was kept from the general public. The message for the latter was to be carefully crafted by experts with a proven track record in disinfor‑ mation campaigns and mind engineering. Big Oil would borrow a page from the playbook of Big Tobacco—the profitable tobacco industry which had also felt threatened by a scientific consen‑ sus (Goldberg and Vandenberg 2021: 2). The results since that pivotal year of 1988 have proven spectacularly successful for the fossil fuel industry. ‘Although the Industrial Revolution began more than 250 years ago, more than half of all industrial carbon emissions have been released since 1988—after major fossil fuel companies knew about the harm their products were causing’ ­(Mulvey and Shulman 2015: 3). That was as of 2014. Since then, record amounts of fossil fuel burning demonstrate that the battle for the American mind on anthropogenic climate change con‑ tinues to be won by the fossil fuel industry against an opposing scientific consensus. Any industry has a PR problem whenever scientific advances uncover harm in their products. When the public embraces the scientific consensus, governmental action follows, restricting or eliminating the product and the industry from which it emanates. However, if doubt arises in pub‑ lic thoughts regarding the scientific consensus, the affected industry can buy the necessary time to continue profitable business as usual. That is how industries with such a PR problem benefit from the doubt. A PR problem calls for a PR solution. Hence, when Big Tobacco’s product was deemed significantly unhealthy for human consumption, ‘Big Tobacco turned to one the world’s five larg‑ est PR firms, Hill and Knowlton, to help out’ (Masters 2009). The help received gave Big Tobacco decades to continue business as usual at the expense of public health (Biello 2015). In 1979, the former chairman of R.J. Reynolds could correctly boast, ‘No plaintiff has ever collected a penny

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from any tobacco company in lawsuits claiming that smoking causes lung cancer or cardiovas‑ cular illness—even though one hundred and seventeen such cases have been brought since 1954’ (Oreskes and Conway 2019: 13). In the meantime, ‘Hill and Knowlton, on behalf of the tobacco industry, had founded the “Manufactured Doubt” industry’ (Masters 2009). Other industries have since sought the benefit of the doubt from PR firms like Hill and Knowl‑ ton. Among them have been corporate interests associated with sugar‑sweetened beverages (Maani et al. 2022); vinyl chloride, lead paint, herbicides, asbestos (Oreskes 2015: 2), and, most recently, pharmaceutical opioids (Elsasser 2021). When the scientific consensus about anthropogenic cli‑ mate change reached the public in 1988, lucrative fossil fuel interests were well aware of the ex‑ istential threat to their industries. They knew where to turn for help in creating doubt in the public mind regarding the science. They turned to many of the same PR firms that had served Big To‑ bacco so well, and they drew upon the expertise of some of the very same individuals. The prow‑ ess they sought had as little to do with climate science as it had with the adverse health effects of smoking. What they sought had to do with casting doubt upon a scientific consensus (Biello 2015). One scientist skilled in creating The Benefit of the Doubt for Big Tobacco was Fred Seitz, who lacked expertise in both climate science and the health sciences. He was a physicist who helped to build the first atomic bombs (Oreskes 2019: 10). Having learned how to interface with gener‑ als, he rose in the ranks of science administration to work with politicians, including presidents and, notably, the media (7). In the process, he would build upon his governmental experience by becoming the President of the National Academy of Sciences, a member of the U.S. President’s Science Advisory Committee, and a recipient of the National Medal of Science (25). Seitz was a notable example of ‘Cold War physicists eager to maintain their proximity to government’ (Gold‑ berg and Vandenberg 2021: 2). Nevertheless, just at the height of his career as a physicist and science statesman, Fred Seitz made a professional move that was as uncharacteristic as it was lucrative. ‘Fred Seitz directed a program for R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company that distributed $45 million to scientists around the country for biomedical research that could generate evidence and cultivate experts to be used in court to defend the “product”’ (Oreskes 2019: 5). Just as a scientific consensus emerged regard‑ ing the harmful effects of smoking tobacco, Seitz began developing a countermovement to create doubt in the public’s mind concerning the consensus. Furthermore, he did not lend his scientific reputation to Big Tobacco alone. ‘In case after case, Fred Seitz and a handful of other scientists joined forces with think tanks and private corporations to challenge scientific evidence on a host of contemporary issues [including] … the fossil fuel industry’ (5–6). In short, a whole new PR specialty emerged. Big Oil looked to the same PR specialty firms like Hill and Knowlton, and even the same ‘experts’ like Fred Seitz, that Big Tobacco had used. That is because the aim of both industries was the same: to protect against an emerging scientific consensus that posed a grave threat to future profitability. In each case, these countermovements were spectacularly successful in creating doubt in the public’s mind regarding a scientific consen‑ sus, thereby securing many decades of business as usual at the expense of the public’s well‑being.

How They Did It A PR firm owned and operated by E. Bruce Harrison had, like Hill and Knowlton, become a merchant of doubt by organizing Big Tobacco campaigns. Harrison’s subsequent involvement with the fossil fuel industry illustrates the engineering of public thinking to ignore a scientific consensus regarding anthropomorphic climate change. Following the congressional hearings of

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1988, various fossil fuel industries, such as coal and oil, created a front group called the Global Climate Coalition (GCC) to ‘lobby policymakers against action to limit fossil fuel emissions’ (McMullen 2022). As those policymakers were just awakening to the connection between burning fossil fuels and climate change, the GCC realized it needed ‘a communications partner to change the narrative on climate change’ (McMullen 2022). They found that partner in E. Bruce Harrison, whose success would result in the moniker ‘The Dean of Green PR’ (McMullen 2022). His PR campaign for the GCC would be two‑pronged. ‘They would persuade people that the scientific facts weren’t settled, and that alongside the environment, policymakers needed to consider how action on climate change would ‑ in the GCC’s view ‑ negatively affect American jobs, trade and prices’ (McMullen 2022). The strategy for creating doubt in the scientific consensus ‘would be implemented through an extensive media campaign, everything from placing quotes and pitching opinion pieces (so‑called op‑eds), to direct contacts with journalists,’ resulting in ‘more than 500 specific mentions in the media’ (McMullen 2022)—all in the campaign’s first year. Further, While most climate scientists agreed that human‑caused climate change was a real issue that would require action, a small group argued there was no cause for alarm. The plan was to pay these skeptics to give speeches or write op‑eds ‑ about $1,500 (£1,250) per article ‑ and to arrange media tours so they could appear on local T.V. and radio stations. (McMullen 2022) The second prong of the campaign was to enlist economists to emphasize the cost of decarboni‑ zation as being too costly. Benjamin Franta, a Stanford Ph.D. candidate, writing in The Other Merchants of Doubt, reveals that ‘Oil companies used their economic power to delay action, even hiring economists to produce reports saying climate action would be too expensive and using these reports to block and delay climate policies’ (Franta, The other Merchants of Doubt 2021). In a separate peer‑reviewed article, Franta also testifies that, beyond funding these economists, ‘the fossil fuel industry has made substantial investments in influential climate economics programs across the U.S.’ (Franta, Weaponizing Economics 2021: 570). Three years into the campaign, Harrison reported that the ‘GCC has successfully turned the tide on press coverage of global climate change science, effectively countering the eco‑­catastrophe message and asserting the lack of scientific consensus on global warming’ (­McMullen 2022). Harrison’s campaign success was representative of many PR firms and campaigns targeting ­climate science. It is illustrative in that it involves a bevy of customary players such as a lucra‑ tive fossil fuel industry, a front group, a PR firm, policymakers, lobbyists, contrarian scientists, paid economists, and journalists eager to give them a voice with the public. However, it is in no way an exhaustive example of players. Other campaigns have included conservative‑supported trade associations, foundations, think tanks, and nonprofit advocacy groups (Dunlap & McCright 2017). Neither is the Harrison illustration exhaustive in terms of the tactics employed by the manu‑ factured doubt industry. Two researchers identified 28 tactics used to create doubt in a scientific consensus, 17 of which were associated with contrarian climate campaigns. An example of a tactic not found in the Harrison campaign is to ‘conduct targeted attacks on opponents by undermin‑ ing their professional or personal reputations’ (Goldberg and Vandenberg 2021: 4). When deep pockets are involved, legal harassment and smear campaigns become options for discrediting or silencing legitimate scientific authors of peer‑reviewed literature.

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Other tactics include greenwashing, where ‘P.R. firms falsely portray oil and gas companies as environmentally friendly, often by overemphasizing renewable energy initiatives, which only make up a fraction of the companies’ activities, or presenting fossil fuels as a safe partner to renewable energy’ (Werthman and Rockwell 2021: 2). In the public’s mind, such companies are portrayed as part of the solution and not the problem. A further aptly named tactic is astroturfing, where ‘P.R. firms manufacture the appearance of grassroots support for their client through groups which appear to be led by community members but are run entirely by the firm and its client’ (2). To the extent people follow the crowd with a herd mentality, public opinion can be swayed by depicting paid fossil fuel industry supporters as concerned citizens and using closeup camera techniques to magnify small groups posing as big crowds. Just as Astroturf, the product, gives the appearance of a real grass lawn, astroturfing creates the appearance of a real grassroots effort. With so many contrarian climate players having so many tactics at their disposal, the public becomes bombarded with the same messages through various media until they become mutually reinforcing. A newly emerging media only compounds the effect. ‘As a result of the internet com‑ munication between participants in this campaign, charges by one … have been quickly transmit‑ ted to others creating an echo chamber of counter‑claims made in opposition to the mainstream scientific view of climate change’ (Brown 2017: 127). This is no small feat, given that mainstream scientific consensus has been overwhelmingly quantified by a survey of peer‑reviewed literature on anthropogenic global warming (AGW). ‘Among abstracts expressing a position on AGW, 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming’ (Cook et al. 2013: 1). Yet, despite this overwhelming scientific consensus, the issue remains unsettled in the public mind so long as contrarian climate voices speak in a well‑funded countercampaign. Even when the scientific consensus eventually prevails over a professionally coordinated cam‑ paign, the latter knows how and when to pivot. For example, There has been a noticeable moderation of views from those previously involved in ques‑ tioning the science of climate change. Several now acknowledge global heating resulting from human activity but have shifted focus to arguing that markets and technological in‑ novation rather than government action or international treaties curbing emissions are the best ways to tackle it. (Lawrence et al. 2019) So, when a flat‑out denial of global warming no longer gains traction in the public mind, contrar‑ ians pivot to stating that the cause of warming is naturally occurring and not from burning fossil fuels. Or, even if it is human‑caused, the harm is far off into the future when new technologies will solve the problem. For now, a present fix will be too costly. There is always a contrarian point of view. Far from needing to be widely subscribed to in peer‑reviewed scientific literature, it requires only a few self‑proclaimed authorities to create con‑ fusion, controversy, and, most importantly, doubt in the public mind. ‘When people see two sides arguing a complicated scientific issue, they come away with the impression of an ongoing equally split scientific debate’ (Lewandowsky 2021: 7). Cristine Russell vents in the Columbia Journalism Review: The era of ‘equal time’ for skeptics who argue that global warming is just a result of natural variation and not human intervention seems to be largely over—except on talk radio, cable, and local television. Last year, a meteorologist at CBS’s Chicago station did a special re‑ port entitled ‘The Truth about Global Warming.’ It featured local scientists discussing the 96

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hazards of global warming in one segment, well‑known national skeptics in another, and ended with a cop‑out: ‘What is the truth about global warming? It depends on who you talk to.’ Not helpful, and not good reporting. (Russell 2008) The funding required to support all the players and tactics of the doubt manufacturing industry is immense. As previously noted, the fossil fuel industry has both the means and the motive to underwrite this expense of doing business. In the second quarter of 2009 alone, ‘the fossil fuel industry outspent the environmental groups by $36.8 million to $2.6 million’ (Masters 2009). This expenditure was for lobbying alone. In 2009 there were ‘2,663 climate change lobbyists working on Capitol Hill. That’s five lobbyists for every member of Congress’ (2009). One peer‑reviewed study by Robert Brulle ‘found that between 2003 and 2010 more than $500m had been donated by private conservative philanthropic foundations to organizations whose output included material disputing the consensus’ (Lawrence et al. 2019). But these amounts pale in comparison to others Brulle also uncovered. In another peer‑reviewed study, he estimated that 91 groups involved in the climate change countermovement (CCCM) received between $900 million and a billion dollars each year from 2003 to 2010. All this was to further their work in manufacturing doubt about the scientific consensus regarding anthropogenic climate change (Brulle 2013: 681). The billions paid for manufacturing doubt proved a small price to pay in light of the trillions earned by the fossil fuel companies from the pivotal year of 1988 until the present (Taylor & Ambrose 2020). Nearly every year during the same period record amounts of fossil fuels were burned releasing corresponding amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

Why It Worked In 2021, the President of the United States opened a U.N. Climate Summit noting that climate change ‘is an existential threat to human existence as we know it’ (Macaya et al. 2021). One of the most influential human beings on the planet states that the existence of human civilization is at risk because of anthropogenic climate change. What could be a more compelling issue? However, as a subject of casual conversation, it is often avoided in favor of less disturbing topics—hence the title of the book by George Marshall: Don’t Even Think About It, followed by the telling subtitle Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change (Marshall 2015). Human brains are the product of a long evolutionary process. In their development, not all primitive aspects were left behind. ‘Inside our skulls are fish, reptile, and shrew brains’ (Tattersall 2013: 273). Those neurological remnants help explain how the human brain operates or fails to op‑ erate in given circumstances. For example, humans have evolved two systems for processing risk. ‘One is analytical, logical, and encodes reality in abstract symbols, words, and numbers. The other is driven by emotions (especially fear and anxiety)’ (Marshall 2015: 48). Both the rational brain and the emotional brain typically work together. ‘In cases where the outputs from the two process‑ ing systems disagree, however, the affective, association‑based system usually prevails, as in the case of phobic reactions’ (Weber 2006: 105). For example, an otherwise astute person may strug‑ gle with claustrophobia. The individual may cognitively grasp that the struggle is with irrational fear but that analytical understanding does not keep the person from panicking when jammed next to a window in a commercial airliner beside a hefty traveler in the aisle seat. If need be, the emo‑ tional brain overrides the rational brain in assessing risk and responding to it. Such a method of assessment is helpful when the risk is immediate, such as when the sound of nearby gunfire causes those in crime‑ridden neighborhoods to instinctively duck without requiring time to think about it. 97

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Nevertheless, ‘the emotional brain is poorly suited to dealing with uncertain long‑term threats of the kind that constitute climate change’ (Marshall 2015: 49–50). Further, in concert with the evolved architecture of the brain, are deep‑seated issues of self‑­ identity and worth. Notions of human‑caused climate change can negatively affect one’s self‑­ esteem as one feels part of a problem of epic proportions. One feels guilt over the impact on future generations. One feels anxiety about a situation inexorably digressing from bad to worse. One feels helpless to stop personal behaviors contributing to the crisis. ‘People want to protect themselves from disturbing information to (1) avoid emotions of fear, guilt, and helplessness, (2) follow cultural norms, and (3) maintain positive conceptions of individual and national iden‑ tity’ (Norgaard 2009: 26–27). The denial offered by the CCCM offers a way out of unpleasant feelings people would typically rather avoid. Hence, ‘psychologists consider denial—the refusal to accept facts in order to protect us from uncomfortable truths—to be a primitive defense mecha‑ nism’ (Gorman & Gorman 2019). Unfortunately, ‘these defense mechanisms do their job in the moment, yet prove to be unhealthy or disruptive in the long run’ (Grohol & Russell 2022). For example, a person may ignore a new noise made by an automobile in the hope that it will somehow resolve itself. In the end, what would have been a minor problem to repair is allowed by neglect to grow into a significant, expensive overhaul. Even when outright denial becomes untenable with a personal and progressive experience of a changing climate, an informed countermovement can shift the narrative to its continuing ad‑ vantage, thanks to the insights of psychology that have long informed the field of PR. George Marshall and others identify the psychology undergirding the campaigns to counter the scientific consensus on climate change. While detailed accounting is beyond the scope of this study, several psychological principles can help to explain the reasoning behind various campaign tactics and to help account for their success.

Salience The first has to do with the issue of salience in the public mind. Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel prize‑ winning psychologist, states that ‘Climate change lacks salience. Salience belongs to threats that are concrete, immediate and indisputable. By contrast, climate change is, he says, abstract, dis‑ tant, invisible, and disputed’ (Marshall 2015: 56–57). Countermovement campaigns promote the disputed impression of the issue by depicting the science behind it as ‘junk science’ and ‘tabloid science’ (McCright and Dunlap 2000: 511) even while it besmirches legitimate climate scientists and their motives for research (Brown 2017: 128). The lack of issue salience also permits the countermovement to employ pseudo‑climate research (128), and false notions of journalistic bal‑ ance to attack the idea of a scientific consensus (131). The portrayal of climate change models being imprecise and the effects they forecast being far off in the distant future similarly diminish the issue’s salience.

Bystander Effect Marshall also alludes to a ‘bystander effect,’ which reflects the human tendency to follow the crowd. This tendency evolved over hundreds of thousands of years when humans lived in small tribal groups where individuals deferred to group decision‑making in assessing and responding to risk. According to Marshall, ‘This is a solid behavioral instinct that is built into our core psychol‑ ogy, and most of the time we are not even aware that it is operating’ (Marshall 2015: 27).

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However, designers of contrarian climate campaigns are aware of its operation, which is why they are keen to create the illusion of great grassroots efforts through astroturf campaigns. It also helps to explain the development of the echo chamber, where the same messages bounce to and from think tanks, media outlets, foundations, scientific researchers, trade groups, online sites, poli‑ ticians, and the like. All that countercampaigns need to do is create the appearance of an unsettled issue, and most individuals will take a wait‑and‑see approach. That buys time for the fossil fuel industry to continue reaping profits with business as usual.

Biases Biases are also a feature of human psychology that agents of climate change disinformation suc‑ cessfully manipulate toward the end of attacking climate science. ‘Theoretical and modeling work has shown that even fairly subtle biases and even just a few evidence‑resistant agents are sufficient to prevent a network of rational agents from accepting the best available scientific knowledge in the presence of disinformation’ (Lewandowsky 2021: 7). For example, a single‑action bias oper‑ ates when a person responds to a threat with a single action even though it is inadequate or pre‑ cludes a more complete or appropriate response (Shome and Marx 2009: 21). Illustrating this bias is the fellow who ‘boasted that he recycled everything’ while adding that it ‘makes me feel less guilty about flying as much as I do’ (Marshall 2015: 197). Less guilt translates into less motivation for further action. Fossil fuel interests seek to inhibit further action for addressing climate change by appealing to single‑action bias. Where single actions might have been sufficient for risks en‑ countered in earlier and simpler human environments, the complexity of the modern era poses risks requiring more involving responses (Weber 2006: 116). Unfortunately, single‑action bias persists in human risk assessment and response. One way fossil fuel companies appeal to this bias is when greenwashing. ‘While ExxonMobil says it supports the Paris Agreement, the vast majority of its operations remain focused on fossil fuels. But its ads tell a different story’ (ClientEarth & DeSmog 2021). That different story is compelling for those with a single‑action bias who believe that if Big Oil joins in the fight against climate change, victory must be at hand. Another bias that the counter‑climate campaigns have exploited in enlisting large groups to their cause is confirmation bias. Here the tendency is to seek out information that confirms what a person already thinks and to ignore conflicting information—especially when it demands a change in outlook or behavior (Shome and Marx 2009: 40). Think tanks that have opposed climate change, such as the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and many others, are uniformly conservative in political outlook, if not libertarian. These outlooks oppose government regulation, restrictions upon individual freedom, and similar impediments to free markets. The climate crisis is an expansive global challenge demanding international regula‑ tion and significant financial sacrifices. ‘It is unsurprising, therefore, that countless surveys have shown a strong association between right‑wing or libertarian worldviews and the rejection of cli‑ mate science’ (Lewandowsky 2021: 3). Campaigns countering climate change capitalize quickly on the confirmation bias of some of its most ardent supporters who go on to ‘spread disinformation among family, friends, and relevant parties’ (Goldberg & Vandenberg 2021: 7). Some human biases develop in concert with shared human experiences such as parenthood. ‘Presuming that we wish the best for our children … this inclines us to an optimism bias concern‑ ing climate change and certainly concerning the prospects for our own children’ (Marshall 2015: 189). Otherwise, the current century’s dismal climate projections might incline potential parents to refrain from bearing children. Indeed, 17% of researchers for the IPCC signified in a 2021 survey

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that they have reconsidered the decision to have children because of global warming (Tollefson 2021). However, most people of childbearing age are not climate scientists. ‘So the choice to have children compels us to write a narrative around climate change in which the overall prognosis becomes more optimistic’ (Marshall 2015: 189–190). While the countermovement may not have actively targeted parents with an optimism bias, the former’s more optimistic prognosis would have resonated well with the latter for the following reasons: People with children were consistently less likely to believe that climate change was a seri‑ ous threat, less likely to talk about it, and significantly less likely to have an opinion on how to deal with it. People with children were 60% more likely to say that climate change was not really happening than people without children. (2015: 189) CCCMs offer a narrative that parents with an optimism bias are psychologically inclined to em‑ brace. Even through such indirect means, countermovements make people think by offering ‘food for thought’ to those who already hunger for it. An availability bias leads people to make decisions based on information that is most immedi‑ ately available, as opposed to projections further removed from the present. Because the current weather is not as bad as that which climate models portend for the future, it is easy to disregard the latter as a distant issue for future generations to solve with new technologies not presently avail‑ able. Climate countermovement campaigns portray present fixes as resulting in more economic harm than the problems they seek to resolve (McCright and Dunlap 2000: 515). In other words, they ‘make it just current enough to accept that we need to do something about it but put it just too far in the future to require immediate action’ (Marshall 2015: 64). That buys time for the fossil fuel industry to continue profiting from business as usual. One bias relates specifically to the media and has already been alluded to in this chapter. It is called ‘balance as bias’ and refers to when the ‘press’ adherence to balance actually leads to biased coverage of both anthropogenic contributions to global warming and resultant action’ (Boykoff and Boykoff 2004: 125). If journalistic balance means articulating all sides of an issue, it should also mean a fair weighting of each side. Proper balance in a debate on climate change would need to feature a panel of 97 climate scientists debating three climate contrarians to accurately reflect studies quantifying the consensus among climate scientists. Otherwise, an unwitting public is left to conclude that the issue is unresolved. People tend to ignore issues until little or no doubt re‑ mains. The climate countermovement is adept at creating the appearance of scholarly research that is not peer‑reviewed, producing so‑called experts who are not climate scientists, and fabricating grassroots campaigns that are elaborate productions funded by fossil fuel interests (Brown 2017: 128). Nevertheless, the right‑wing media eagerly covers them under the guise of fair and balanced reporting. ‘Instead of providing balance, this norm magnifies the perception of uncertainty in the public mind, leading to a false appearance of uncertainty and debate’ (Norgaard 2016: 40). If a balance as bias contributes to doubt and uncertainty about the scientific consensus on cli‑ mate change, scientists are not helping the situation because of ‘scientific reticence’ (Spratt and Dunlop 2018: 8). Scientists use language with great precision where ‘uncertainty’ has a particu‑ lar meaning. They may pronounce something with 90% certainty or a high degree of certainty but never with complete certainty. ‘When scientists say uncertain, the public hears unsure, and considers them less reliable or trustworthy’ (Marshall 2015: 73). The climate countermovement capitalizes on this disconnect, portraying the work of climate scientists as junk science while aligning themselves with sound climate science (McCright and Dunlap  2000: 512). Scientists 100

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want to avoid having their work so labeled, just as they want to avoid themselves being labeled greenhouse alarmists or prophets of doom (2000: 512). Hence, their tendency to duck and cover under scientific reticence. Unfortunately, according to the same Dr. James Hansen who first testi‑ fied to Congress about global warming while incurring much vilification for his efforts, ‘scientific reticence hinders communication with the public about the dangers of global warming’ (Spratt and Dunlop 2018: 8). Beyond the psychological processes previously mentioned are others, such as emotional numb‑ ing or the finite pool of worry, that also work against effectively dealing with an existential threat such as climate change. Climate change communication researcher Tony Leiserowitz says, ‘You almost couldn’t design a problem that is a worse fit with our underlying psychology’ (Marshall 2015: 91). Social psychologist Daniel Guilbert agrees. ‘It really has everything going against it. A psychologist could barely dream up a better scenario for paralysis’ (91). The countermovement against the scientific consensus on climate change understands the psychology well and plans ac‑ cordingly, achieving remarkable success on behalf of its fossil fuel clients.

Conclusion It is common to recognize mind engineering when it occurs in others subjected to propaganda in authoritarian regimes. It is equally common to marvel at how vulnerable to manipulation others can be. However, it is rare for individuals to recognize when and how their own thinking is being engineered, especially in first‑world democratic countries like America where individualism is highly prized. This chapter has shown that mind engineering is taking place in America where a very lucrative industry exists to undermine knowledge gleaned by the best and brightest among its citizenry. This industry aims to protect company profits, even at the expense of the public good. Those who make up this industry are merchants of doubt because they are adept at creating doubt in the public’s mind about a given scientific consensus. In this chapter, the focus has been on the scientific consensus regarding anthropogenic climate change. However, over the years, the merchants of doubt have attacked the scientific consensus about numerous things, such as smoking tobacco or taking prescription opioid painkillers. There is often an addictive quality to what is putting Americans at risk. In the 2006 State of the Union Address, President George W. Bush stated, ‘America is addicted to oil’ (Bumiller & Nagourney 2006). America is smitten with a controlling dependency upon the burning of fossil fuels to meet its energy needs more than any other country on a per capita basis. A scientific consensus has been sounding the alarm about the destructive consequences of this dependency for decades. However, an enabler countermovement has been so successful in creating doubt in the public mind that re‑ cord amounts of fossil fuels have been burned in succession nearly every year over that timeframe. History has shown that these countermovements eventually lose their hold over public think‑ ing. Since 1998, laws have required tobacco companies to make multibillion‑dollar payouts to the states annually and in perpetuity where their products are sold (U.S. Government Accountability Office 2001). However, those laws were passed long after the scientific consensus about smok‑ ing’s harm was first made known to the public, allowing decades of very profitable business as usual at the expense of public health. Even now, and at long last, references to climate change are increasingly common in the U.S. media. There may even come a time when the fossil fuel industry must make compensatory payments to those suffering the ill effects of climate change. However, unless legally proscribed, the merchants of doubt industry will abide as a resource for others who, in the future, would engineer public thinking to protect profitability at risk from a scientific consensus. 101

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So while this study begins by looking at past instances of mind engineering on the part of Big Tobacco and proceeds to present instances on the part of Big Oil, it concludes with a warning about future attempts by Big Money to oppose a scientific consensus (particularly where big profits come at the expense of the public good). Indeed, the first question to be asked at any given time is (1) Where is Big Money at present? Then follows other such questions as (2) Who is accessing PR spe‑ cialty firms with a history as merchants of doubt? (3) What scientific consensus is under challenge? (4) When did a countermovement arise to oppose that scientific consensus? (5) How might public dependency be a contributing factor to countercampaign success? The answers to these questions should help expose mass mind engineering attempts at any given time. Praemonitus, praemunitus. For now, the benefit of the doubt accrues to the fossil fuel industry. How Big Oil makes us think is a contemporary study of engineering doubt in the mind of the American public.

Acknowledgment Gratitude to Nancy J. Schnell, without whose hard work and attention to detail this research would not be possible.

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William F. Schnell Norgaard, K.M. (2009) Cognitive and behavioral challenges in responding to climate change, SSRN. World Bank Policy Research Working Paper No. 4940. Available at: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers. cfm?abstract_id=1407958 (Accessed: December 26, 2022). Oreskes, N. (2015) ‘The fact of uncertainty, the uncertainty of facts and the cultural resonance of doubt,’ Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences, 373(2055). Available at: https://doi.org/10.1098/rsta.2014.0455. Oreskes, N. and Conway, E.M. (2019) Merchants of doubt: How a handful of scientists obscured the truth on issues from tobacco smoke to global warming. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing. Ostrowski, A. (2017) ‘Keeling curve: Result, interpretation & global monitoring,’ International Jour‑ nal for Empirical Education and Research, pp.  34–38. Available at: https://www.researchgate.net/ publication/335445675_Keeling_Curve_Result_Interpretation_Global_Monitoring Pooley, E. (2010) The climate war: True believers, power brokers, and the fight to save the Earth. New York: Hyperion. Russell, C. (2008) Climate change: Now what?, Columbia Journalism Review. Columbia University Gradu‑ ate School of Journalism. Available at: https://archives.cjr.org/feature/climate_change_now_what.php (Accessed: December 27, 2022). Shome, D. and Marx, S. (2009) Cred guide | the psychology of climate change communication, Cred.columbia. edu. Cener for Research on Environmental Decisions. Available at: https://doi.org/10.7916/d8‑byzb‑0s23. Spratt, D. and Dunlop, I. (2017) What lies beneath, Breakthrough. National Centre for Climate Restoration. Available at: https://www.breakthroughonline.org.au/whatliesbeneath (Accessed: December 27, 2022). Tattersall, I. (2013) Masters of the planet the search for our human origins. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin. Taylor, M. and Ambrose, J. (2020, February 12). Revealed: Big oil’s profits since 1990 total nearly $2tn. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/feb/12/revealed‑big‑oil‑profits‑since‑1990‑total‑n early‑2tn‑bp‑shell‑chevron‑exxon Tollefson, J. (2021) Top climate scientists are sceptical that nations will rein in global warming, Nature News. Nature Publishing Group. Available at: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586‑021‑02990‑w (Accessed: December 27, 2022). U.S. Government Accountability Office (2001) Tobacco settlement: States’ use of master settlement agree‑ ment payments. U.S. GAO. Available at: https://www.gao.gov/products/gao‑01‑851 (Accessed: December 27, 2022). Weber, E.U. (2006) ‘Experience‑based and description‑based perceptions of long‑term risk: Why global warming does not scare us (yet),’ Climatic Change, 77(1–2), pp.  103–120. Available at: https://doi. org/10.1007/s10584‑006‑9060‑3. Werthman, C. and Rockwell, E. (2021) Beyond climate denial, Climate & Development Lab. Brown Univer‑ sity. Available at: http://www.climatedevlab.brown.edu/uploads/2/8/4/0/28401609/beyond_climate_de‑ nial_‑_cdl_2021_report.pdf (Last Accessed: December 27, 2022).

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7 CHAIN‑EFFECT MIND ENGINEERING The Multilayered Manipulation of Advertising Brian L. Schnell

Introduction Consumers are subjected to mind engineering when viewing advertisements, yet they are not the only ones falling prey to manipulation. It is the advertisers themselves whose mental models must be primed first before they can prime the minds of others. Advertising is the product of chain‑effect mind engineering; this chapter aims to explore its sequential nature by synthesizing criticisms of persuasive advertising and its mind engineering tactics with empirical data gathered from working in the radio advertising industry. Radio, television, and social media provide powerful mediums to advertise on. To gain clients, such media platforms must convince businesses that they can reach their target audiences. In the realm of audio advertising, massive amounts of quantitative consumer data are leveraged through market research tools, enabling audio platforms – such as radio – to craft data‑driven realities where they reach large segments of every target audience imaginable. If maternity clothing companies consider radio as a potential media platform to advertise on, radio companies can utilize market research data to paint a story where its listener base seemingly provides a desirable pool of maternity clothing consumers. In reality, if only a small pool of rel‑ evant consumers actually listens to the radio, such unfavorable data can be concealed so that only favorable data is presented, thus creating positive perceptions without lying. Mooi et al. (2018) highlight the importance of repackaging data based on the context of audience interests, stating that ‘when providing reports (and presentations), you should keep the audience’s characteristics and needs in mind and should tailor the report to their objectives’ (p. 368). Motivation for radio companies to create enticing narratives stems from the need for revenue generation; successful persuasion of prospective advertisers to purchase ad space on their stations yields income (Hack‑ ley 2005). Media platforms generally do not report falsified information to prospective clients. Rather, they capitalize on data as a mind engineering tool by deliberately categorizing data to be shared and data to be concealed. Through this process, the truth is always reported. Whether or not it is reported holistically is left to the discretion of the engineer. Critics of advertising call attention to the ways in which advertisers engineer the minds of consumers (Crisp  1987), yet ignore the complexities of the advertising process that allow

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advertisements to reach consumers in the first place (Turow 2013). In examining such a process holistically, mind engineering follows a chain‑effect sequence where both consumers and advertis‑ ers fall prey to mental model manipulation.

Criticisms of Advertising Crisp (1987) highlights persuasive advertising’s inherent moral issues, proposing that ‘all forms of a certain common type of advertising are morally wrong, on the ground that they override the au‑ tonomy of consumers’ (p. 413). Such a stance casts advertisers in the role of perpetrators, with con‑ sumers starring as victims. Through this narrative, the premise of advertising becomes synonymous with malicious manipulation, prompting the rise of unnatural inclinations for the sake of profit. Rubin (2022) supports this, stating that ‘in an effort to promote products and brands to consumers, advertisers, in effect, become skillful rhetoricians, without a moral compass. Their true north is perpetually commercial profit’ (p. 166). Evidently, the role of advertisers is not a favored one. Their behavior, strategies, and rhetoric are weaponized, and all sympathy is directed toward consumers. In noting that Crisp’s arguments are specifically geared toward persuasive advertising, Moses and Baldwin (2005) define persuasive intent in advertising as a situation in which ‘the advertiser intends to persuade consumers by inducing a change in their mental states’ (p. 191). As discussed by Rozendaal et al. (2009), such mental states comprise beliefs, attitudes, and desires toward the product being advertised. Because the goal of an advertiser is to induce change in consumers’ beliefs, the advertiser is incentivized to enter the mind of the consumer to create such change, thus paving the way for mind engineering to occur. Crisp (1987) differentiates between first‑order desires and second‑order desires, defining the former as desires for objects, and the latter as desires for the initial object‑centric desire to be ful‑ filled. While such orders in Crisp’s contexts are focused on desires, they are applicable to mental states. The ability to identify persuasive intent in advertising – in other words, recognizing when an advertiser is trying to influence one’s thoughts – requires an understanding of second‑order mental states (Moses and Baldwin 2005). Ciolino et  al. (2021) define the role of second‑order mental states as the ability to conceptualize one’s beliefs about another person’s feelings or thoughts. Crisp’s criticisms of persuasive advertising therefore rely on the ability to conceptualize consumers’ beliefs about advertisers’ beliefs, enabling him to conclude that consumers’ beliefs are manipulated and violated by advertisers. The participation of second‑order mental states in this equation illustrates the presence of two minds at work; the advertiser’s mind produces beliefs about the products they are selling, and, in return, the consumer’s mind adopts such beliefs and reacts accordingly. Despite such a duo, Crisp narrowly focuses on the mind of the consumer, thus resulting in a lack of consideration for how an advertiser’s mind is manipulated in the process of advertising.

Chain‑Effect Mind Engineering Turow (2013) addresses Crisp’s oversight by introducing the process of media buying, explaining that: Most people likely think of advertising in terms of its most visible manifestation, the persua‑ sive message. Often lost in discussion of the ads is the advertising industry’s major role as a media support system. That is, advertising involves payment of a media firm (a particular

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magazine, TV network, or website) in return for the right to reach the medium’s audience members with persuasive messages. (p. 99) In acknowledging the over‑emphasis of advertisers’ persuasive tactics, Turow uncovers the under‑ lying dynamics of advertising whereby advertisers become consumers to media firms. Crisp’s flow of manipulation starts with the advertiser, who then manipulates the consumer. While I agree that advertisers manipulate consumers, I propose that such sequencing paints an incomplete picture. Rather than the advertiser being the initial source of manipulation, I suggest that media firms prime the mental models of advertisers to convince them (and their media buyers) to purchase ad space on their platforms, which then allows for the manipulation of consumers. Chain‑effect mind engineering serves to broaden Crisp’s narrow scope of manipulation in advertising, presenting a more holistic view of the series of events where both advertisers and consumers are manipulated. Following this theory, the order in which minds are manipulated follows a chain‑effect fashion, where the sequence of mind engineering does not start with the advertiser. Before advertisers can even manipulate consumers, they must work with media buyers to ensure their advertising content is placed on relevant media platforms provided by media firms (Bala and Verma 2018: p. 332). The need for media buyers introduces another layer of complexity, thus requiring an expanded narra‑ tive. Chain‑effect mind engineering serves to fulfill this need. Amazon (n.d.) highlights the necessity of media buying in the process of advertising, express‑ ing that it’s not enough to have compelling copy and visuals – ads must be placed in the right loca‑ tions and at the right times and frequencies, so that the right audiences see the ad. Media buyers can purchase ads across a mix of media, with traditional and digital media working together – such as radio and digital advertising. Crafting persuasive messages is merely a component in the process of advertising – a component Crisp does not consider. To account for such intricacies, the flow of chain‑effect mind engineering follows an inte‑ grative, sequential fashion that starts with media firms, who then manipulate media buyers and advertisers into placing advertisements on their platform, allowing for the subsequent manipula‑ tion of consumers upon viewing advertisements on such platforms. Given the close collaboration between advertisers and media buyers in this process, I will use the term ‘advertising party’ to refer to both groups. In later sections of this chapter, I utilize empirical data gathered from professional experience working in the radio advertising industry to explore applications of chain‑effect mind engineering in the dynamics between media firms and advertising parties.

Value of Mental Models in Advertising and Mind Engineering Advertising’s goal is to embed favorable perceptions of brands and products into the minds of consumers (Hackley 2005). Thus, the ability to occupy headspace in a consumer’s mind is of great value to advertisers. Hackley (2005) explains that ‘advertising is an important part of the creation and maintenance of the contrived brand values that make particular brands distinctive, memora‑ ble and, above all, desirable’ (p. 66). One such method for making impressions in one’s mind is through the manipulation of mental models.

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Mental models, much like mental states, are rooted in beliefs and perceptions (Furlough and Gillan 2018). Such models are foundational for one’s ability to reason, as well as the ability to construct expectations when navigating one’s environment (Westbrook 2006). Moreover, humans’ reliance on mental models to inform decisions and actions enables mental models to serve as building blocks for navigating one’s reality (Furlough and Gillan 2018). Westbrook (2006) highlights the power of mental models in shaping reality, stating that ‘[men‑ tal] models have a value and reality all their own. Individuals believe in them, often without direct reference to their accuracy or to their level of completeness’ (p. 564). In other words, people con‑ struct personal versions of truth using mental models, regardless of whether such versions of truth contain inaccuracies. Mental models are also sticky; upon their formation, people tend to hold onto such models and are reluctant to deviate from their narratives (Westbrook 2006). Consequentially, the ability to influence mental models affords advertisers opportunities to convince consumers to adopt beliefs and perceptions about products that may not always be entirely accurate and to ensure such beliefs and perceptions persist in the consumer’s mind long after the advertisement is viewed. Language provides a channel through which mental models can be influenced (Brown and Yule 1983). Carley and Palmquist (1992) highlight the interconnectedness between language and mental models, stating ‘language is key to understanding mental models, that is, mental models can be represented linguistically’ (p. 602). Johnson‑Laird (2001) builds upon the manifestation of mental models through linguistic constructs, expressing that ‘mental models can represent dis‑ course about real, hypothetical, or imaginary situations. They can reside in long‑term memory as a representation of knowledge’ (p. 435). Such a stance demonstrates the power of language to trans‑ form information from mental models into perceived knowledge, ultimately establishing language as a gateway into the mind. Van Dijk (2006) further expands upon the critical role of language and discourse when manipu‑ lating the formation of mental models: If manipulators are aiming for recipients to understand a discourse as they see it, it is crucial that the recipients form the mental models the manipulators want them to form, thus restrict‑ ing their freedom of interpretation or at least the probability that they will understand the discourse against the best interests of the manipulators. (p. 367) Thus, the employment of strategic wording in advertising is critical when influencing the develop‑ ment of consumers’ mental models. By leveraging language tactically, advertisers can penetrate the minds of consumers and embed mental models (engineered by the advertisers) that lead to favorable perceptions of the product being sold. Because mental models serve as the foundation for people’s understandings of reality and truth, they are a powerful asset for advertisers in creating realities whereby their products are ideal. In a later section of this chapter, I examine how calculated language alters mental models, enabling inferior products and services to appear superior in the marketplace.

Mind Engineering of Advertisers During the rise of consumerism in the United States during the mid‑1960s, Kotler (1971) identi‑ fied the movement as an inevitable and enduring force, and, through its evolution, the relevance of consumerism would further embed itself into the country’s culture. With the prominence of

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consumerist habits, nearly everyone – including advertisers – can be classified as a consumer, be it of information, products, or services. To explore their susceptibility to mind engineering, Brown imposes psychological manipula‑ tion tactics on advertisers (Brown 2021). To accomplish this, Brown tasks two advertisers with creating an advertising pitch for a chain of taxidermy stores; to prevent the development of pre‑ conceived ideas, the advertisers are unaware of what they are creating a pitch for before the start of the exercise. Upon completion, the advertisers showcase proposed company names, logos, and slogans. Brown reveals his own advertising content that he created before the start of the exercise. When comparing Brown’s sketches to the advertisers’ sketches, it becomes apparent that their creative concepts share numerous similarities. Both Brown and the advertisers utilize images of a bear playing a harp, angel wings, and zoo gates sitting in clouds. Moreover, the advertisers’ pro‑ posed company name is Animal Heaven, while Brown’s proposed name is Creature Heaven; the advertisers’ slogan is The Best Place for Dead Animals, while Brown’s slogan is Where the Best Dead Animals Go. It is revealed that, during the advertisers’ car ride over to meet him, various elements of Brown’s pitch were exhibited to them. A prominently displayed harp along with posters of bears playing harps and large signs saying ‘Where the Best Dead Animals Go’ and ‘Creature Heaven’ with angel wings were showcased in windows of buildings they passed. Additionally, pedestrians walked in front of them wearing shirts showcasing images of zoo gates. Upon tasking the advertisers with creating a pitch for taxidermy stores, a number of taxidermied animals were also unveiled, of which one was a bear. Brown suggests that the deliberate, strategic placement of such items influ‑ enced the advertisers’ creative choices as they developed their pitches (Brown 2021). Trappey (1996) defines subliminal priming in the context of advertising as ‘a technique of exposing consumers to product pictures, brand names, or other marketing stimuli without the con‑ sumers having conscious awareness’ (p. 517). Given that it involves the manipulation of consumer perceptions without their knowledge, such a definition aligns subliminal messaging with criticisms of persuasive advertising regarding violations of consumer autonomy. Verwijmeren et al. (2013) acknowledge this notion of a helpless consumer, stating that subliminal messaging ‘fuels the idea that people may not be able to protect themselves against this type of persuasion’ (p. 1124). The predatory notions surrounding subliminal messaging uphold perceptions of sneaky, immoral mind engineering tactics, thus further segregating advertisers from consumers and ignoring the con‑ sumer status of advertisers. Although the efficacy of subliminal messaging faced years of doubt and controversy, research studies conducted throughout the past two decades demonstrate that subliminal advertising, under certain circumstances, does indeed influence consumer behavior (Verwijmeren et al. 2011). One such study conducted by Karremans et al. (2006) concluded that ‘exposing individuals sublimi‑ nally to the brand name of a drink increases the probability that they will choose this drink, pro‑ vided that they are thirsty’ (p. 797). In other words, if a thirsty consumer is motivated to quench their thirst, then subliminally primed beverage advertising content will have a greater influence on their purchasing decision as they seek to satisfy their thirst‑suppressing goals. Such findings illustrate that subliminal priming tactics are effective under the condition that the primed object is relevant to the consumer’s goals. In Brown’s exercise, the assignment of creating advertising content for taxidermy stores estab‑ lishes a goal for the advertisers. As indicated by Karremans et al. (2006), ‘priming is especially likely to affect a person’s actions if the prime is relevant or applicable to the person’s current motivation’ (p. 797). Although the taxidermized bear is the only primed object of relevance that

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is shown subsequent to goal establishment, it can be argued that the primed objects displayed be‑ fore the task reveal are still goal‑relevant. Given that the advertisers’ participation in the exercise is sought out due to their profession, they are aware that their task is advertising related, despite not knowing the specific details. Thus, the goal of carrying out some advertising‑related tasks is established before the theme of taxidermy stores is revealed. Advertising is therefore relevant to the advertisers’ motivations before the start of the exercise, enabling the priming of logos, slogans, and clothing designs to be considered goal‑relevant. Although Brown’s exercise was not conducted in an academic setting, such a setup reinforces the humanity of advertisers by offering an alternative view of the dynamics between consumers and advertisers, suggesting that advertisers are not immune to manipulative mind engineering tactics. Chain‑effect mind engineering builds upon such a notion, proposing that advertisers and consumers are not so dissimilar given they are both capable of falling prey to mind engineering manipulations. Aylsworth (2020) further removes barriers between advertisers and consumers, arguing that an advertiser’s manipulation is not the fundamental moral issue in the context of persuasive adver‑ tising; rather, ‘the problem with advertising is that it produces desires without being sufficiently attentive to preferences that consumers would effectively endorse’ (p. 690). In other words, he suggests that advertising is only problematic when the audience’s desires are manipulated in ways they do not welcome. Aylsworth (2020) cites instances where manipulation of one’s desires is deemed acceptable; those who visit hypnotists to quit smoking are subjected to having their desires manipulated to suppress their cravings, yet such manipulations are embraced. Aylsworth proposes that if consumers consent to have their mental models manipulated just as hypnotist patients do, then the weight of criticisms surrounding advertising’s manipulative practices ought to be relieved. In the context of second‑order mental states, Crisp’s conceptualization of consumers’ beliefs about advertisers’ beliefs rests on the assumption that the consumers’ beliefs are being violated. However, Aylsworth’s stance offers an alternative conceptualization where, rather than advertisers imprinting unwanted thoughts onto consumers’ minds, they interact with and rearrange existing thoughts to produce desirable, sought‑after outcomes. Such a stance consequently eases preda‑ tory attitudes surrounding advertisers by placing them on the same playing field as consumers. Aylsworth’s argument regarding acceptable manipulation in advertising redefines the predator– prey relationship between advertisers and consumers. Rather than upholding a predatory narrative whereby advertisers prey on consumers through unfair mind games, Aylsworth instead treats ad‑ vertisers as beneficial aids of consumers’ cognitive processes when consent is given, thus balanc‑ ing a previously unequal power dynamic between consumers and advertisers.

Market Research Data in Radio Advertising Market research’s ability to provide quick and effective reporting of consumer sentiment has con‑ sequentially boosted its popularity among marketers in the United States for nearly a century; since the Great Depression, usage of market research practices has grown rapidly across numerous industries as businesses strove to target relevant consumer markets (Samuel 2013). Radio’s wide‑ spread listenership in the 1930s offered advertisers an attractive pool of consumers in which they could survey regarding their purchasing behavior, which positioned radio companies to become some of the earlier adopters of market research techniques (Samuel 2013). For advertisers, utilizing appropriate platforms to reach relevant consumer markets is a top priority. Advertising mediums – such as radio, television, and social media – provide opportuni‑ ties to reach such markets. Findings from a study conducted by Allan (2007) demonstrate that 110

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advertisements played on the radio result in greater brand recall when compared to other forms of electronic media advertising methods. As a result of its ability to make impressions in listeners’ minds, ‘radio commercials play a significant role in influencing listeners on products and services’ (Rajagopal 2011). Such influence on consumer beliefs reflects the effectiveness of advertising through radio mediums. Moreover, radio’s advertising strategy often involves stoking emotional arousal in its listeners using music, playful banter, and familiar anchor voices (Backstrom 2006). Consumers who listen to radio shows regularly tend to develop personal connections to the program and its hosts, thus creating the potential for radio to play a more intimate role in the lives of various consumer seg‑ ments (Hackley 2005). In appealing to listeners’ emotions, radio advertisements enable advertising content to effectively manipulate consumer behavior through the influence of attitudes and percep‑ tions regarding the advertised product (Mustafa and Al‑Abdallah 2020). Consequentially, radio offers potential high value to advertisers in regard to disseminating advertising content. However, for radio platforms to convince advertising parties (i.e., both advertisers and media buyers) to place advertisements on their stations, they must convince them that their platforms are capable of reaching and making impressions on their target audiences. Market research data enables various media platforms to demonstrate their value to prospective advertising clients by offering insight into their audience reach metrics (Mooi et al. 2018). Providers of market research data, such as The Nielsen Company, equip advertisers with massive amounts of syndicated data spanning numerous purchasing behavior categories. Mooi et al. (2018) explain: Syndicated data are data collected in a standard format and not specifically collected for a single client. These data, or analyses based on the data, are then sold to multiple clients. Large marketing research firms mostly collect syndicated data, as they have the resources to collect large amounts of data and can spread the costs of doing so over a number of clients. (p. 6) Because the information is already collected, syndicated data provided by The Nielsen Company are categorized as external secondary data. By utilizing such external secondary data, radio plat‑ forms are spared from spending time and resources on conducting primary research themselves, which ultimately enables them to dive deep into consumer behavior quickly and efficiently. Niels‑ en’s data is gathered from survey responses through their consumer panel, which includes 250,000 households across 27 countries (Mooi et al. 2018). Given its ability to reach large segments of consumers, Nielsen has positioned itself as a leading provider of market research data in the United States since the 1930s (Samuel 2013). Its relevance to the radio advertising industry remains strong, as radio companies continue to rely on its data to demonstrate their abilities to reach relevant consumer markets for prospective advertising cli‑ ents. In having access to external secondary data from market research firms, radio platforms are equipped with the ability to employ mind engineering tools to manipulate the mental models of the advertising party. Consider a hypothetical maternity clothing company looking to gain more customers. Given the radio’s effectiveness in establishing higher brand recall, it considers placing its advertisement on the radio. Just as any company does when creating advertisements, the maternity clothing company has its own agenda for brand communications (Hackley 2005). In creating a successful advertisement that influences consumer perception and behavior, it is necessary for the maternity clothing company to appeal to the needs of their target consumers and communicate their product’s value in a manner that convinces consumers to make a purchase (Glowa 2002). To do so, mind 111

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engineering tactics are necessary to influence consumers’ perception of how such a product will address their needs. By creating persuasive advertising content, the maternity clothing company establishes the groundwork for manipulating consumers. However, for their advertising content to manipulate consumers, they must first consult with media buyers to help secure ad placement on the radio (Bala and Verma 2018; Turow 2013). While the maternity clothing company is a seller, it must also assume the role of a buyer it is a prospective customer of the radio company’s services. In turn, the radio company assumes the role of the advertiser, as it must persuade the maternity clothing and its media buyer to purchase ad space on its platform. The maternity clothing company’s intentions to act as an advertiser do not exempt them from its consumer status; everyone is a consumer, including advertisers themselves. Revenue generation is among the top priorities for businesses that sell services to other busi‑ nesses (Hackley 2005). Therefore, the actual number of people who buy maternity clothes and listen to the radio company’s stations is irrelevant; regardless of whether they have 100 or 100,000 relevant consumers tuning in, the main objective for the radio company is to win over the mater‑ nity clothing company as a client for the sake of revenue generation. If the radio company’s reach numbers for maternity clothing customers are unfavorable, syndicated market research data from external secondary sources can be repackaged so that it favors the desired narrative. Even if an‑ other advertising medium reaches more target consumers, the radio company can present compel‑ ling data‑supported sales pitches that seemingly offer up a more desirable listener base. Capitalizing on data as a means of mind engineering involves deliberate categorization of data to be shared and data to be concealed. Understanding an audience’s objectives enables presenters to determine what details to include and what details to leave out in a report (Mooi et al. 2018), thus allowing for truth to always be reported, even if the entire picture is not showcased. Regard‑ less of how well the radio company reaches a certain target audience, they are motivated to ma‑ nipulate prospective customers into adapting their desired mental models to win business. Mind engineering is therefore necessary for radio companies to attract clients, as it enables the construc‑ tion of realities in which every target audience appears to be reachable through their stations. The following section expands upon mind engineering methods utilized by radio companies to influence the mental models of advertisers and their partnered media buyers.

Syndicated Data and Crosstabs As discussed, radio companies rely on syndicated data from external secondary databases – such as ones provided by The Nielsen Company – to demonstrate the value of their platform to prospective advertisers and media buyers. Nielsen’s subsidiaries include Scarborough Research, which equips users with market research data collected from over 300,000 consumer surveys that cover an ex‑ tensive list of categories spanning various lifestyle activities, demographic information, shopping habits, and purchasing behaviors (Nielsen 2022). Scarborough’s survey methodology – ranging from phone interviews, survey booklets, and internet surveys – asks consumers granular ques‑ tions regarding their attitudes, habits, future plans, and product usage across numerous industries including automotive, dining, financial services, grocery, healthcare, home improvement, internet, media, retail, sports, technology, travel, and voting (Nielsen 2022). Scarborough’s inclusion of cross‑platform consumption data allows users to identify mediums that consumers engage with most, such as radio, television, social media, and streaming plat‑ forms. Insights into cross‑platform consumption are particularly useful for media firms, as they enable comparative analysis with competitors. In the context of audio advertising, radio compa‑ nies can utilize Scarborough’s database to compare their radio stations’ performance metrics with 112

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competing radio companies. To analyze massive amounts of data, Scarborough offers data analysis software that allows for the creation of crosstab reports. Crosstabs – short for crosstabulation – are beneficial for identifying compelling sales stories embedded within datasets, as they allow for the analysis of relationships between multiple variables (Mooi et al. 2018). The ability to identify and construct favorable narratives when analyzing crosstab reports is crucial when influencing target consumers to adopt desired mental models. When harnessed ef‑ fectively, mind engineering techniques can manipulate data to create the appearance of appealing consumer engagement capabilities. Standard crosstab reports using external secondary data from market research firms typically present the following information (Bentley University 2022; Radio Advertising Bureau 2015): • Unweighted: The number of survey respondents who meet the specified criteria (in the case of the maternity clothing company, criteria include the condition that respondents must be in the market for maternity clothes). • Weighted (000): The projected number of people in the specified geographical region that fit the criteria, expressed in thousands. • Vertical %: The percentage of those with a given characteristic as defined by the column head‑ ing. Generally, the target audience (in this case, people looking to buy maternity clothes) is placed in the column section of a crosstab report. • Horizontal %: The percentage of those with a given characteristic as defined by the row heading. Generally, what the user wants to know about the target audience (in this case, what radio stations maternity clothing consumers are listening to) is placed in the row section of a crosstab report. • Index: The likelihood of targeted respondents meeting a specified criterion. Indices are ex‑ pressed in relation to the base of 100, which represents the average. The numerical difference from the average (100) is expressed as a percentage of being more likely (numbers higher than 100) or less likely (numbers lower than 100). If the index is 136, this indicates that target respondents are 36% more likely to meet the specified criterion (136 − 100 = 36). If the index is 85, this means the target respondents are 15% less likely to meet the specified criterion (100 − 85 = 15).

Mind Engineering in Crosstab Interpretation In the example of the maternity clothing company, let us say the radio company generates a cross‑ tab report to identify what stations relevant consumers are listening to. Table 7.1 presents a stand‑ ard example of a crosstab report using syndicated data collected by market research firms such as Nielsen. Using the hypothetical crosstab report in Table 7.1, let us say Radio Company B represents all radio stations belonging to the radio company that is persuading the advertising party (i.e., the maternity clothing company and its media buyer) to advertise on their platform. Radio Company A and Radio Company C represent all radio stations belonging to Radio Company B’s competitors. Limitations in the ability of syndicated market research data to cater to all situations must be acknowledged, as it is unfeasible for market research firms to capture data on every niche consumer market. Such limitations manifest themselves in Table 7.1’s crosstab report, as the target audience is listed as people planning for the birth of a child in the next 12 months, rather than people looking to buy maternity clothes. The maternity clothing company evidently wants to reach consumers who are in the market for maternity clothes; Radio Company B needs to demonstrate its ability to reach 113

Brian L. Schnell Table 7.1 Example of standard crosstab report layout using syndicated data from market research firms (for the purposes of this example, all numbers are fictional) All

All

Music Or Audio Services – Listened to Or Used in the Last 30 Days: Radio Company A

Radio Company B

Radio Company C

Lifestyle changes/ events personally plan to do next 12 months: Birth of a child

Unwgtd Weighted (000) Horz % Vert % Index

104,448 62,481 100.00 100.00 100

2,180 1,433 2.29 100.00 100

Unwgtd Weighted (000) Horz % Vert % Index

10,752 6,333 100.00 10.14 100

248 119 1.87 8.28 82

Unwgtd Weighted (000) Horz % Vert % Index

1,216 879 100.00 1.41 100

39 39 4.44 2.72 193

Unwgtd Weighted (000) Horz % Vert % Index

25,715 16,769 100.00 26.84 100

402 214 1.28 14.95 56

such a demographic. Although Scarborough’s collection of consumer survey responses span across numerous categories, its repertoire does not include data on purchasing habits for maternity clothes. Consequently, data on maternity clothing consumers do not exist within Scarborough. While building compelling sales narratives from non‑existent information seems impractical, Radio Company B must make use of other relevant data, even if it does not perfectly match the topic of interest. Accomplishing this requires the identification of relevant response substitutes. In sifting through Scarborough’s survey categories, the next best option falls under the lifestyle category, which asks ‘lifestyle changes/events planning to do in the next 12 months’, of which ‘birth of a child’ is a response option as displayed in Table 7.1 (Nielsen 2022). As a result, data on people planning for the birth of a child serves as a proxy for data on people looking to buy maternity clothes. A later section of this chapter will discuss how language and inference serve as mind en‑ gineering tools when constructing desired narratives using substitute data. According to the weighted (000) sections of Table  7.1’s crosstab report, Radio Company C has the highest projected number of listeners who are planning for the birth of a child in the next 12  months at 214,000 people, followed by Radio Company A with 119,000 people, and Radio Company B having the lowest number of listeners meeting this criterion at an estimated 39,000 people. Figure 7.1 visually ranks reach numbers from the weighted (000) sections of Table 7.1, 114

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214,000

119,000

39,000 Projected number of listeners who are planning for the birth of a child in the next 12 months Radio Company C

Radio Company A

Radio Company B

Figure 7.1  Graphical representation of crosstab data from weighted (000) sections of Table 7.1

reflecting Radio Company B’s undeniably low reach of listeners in comparison to Radio Compa‑ nies A and C. If Radio Company B presented this data to the maternity clothing company and its media buyer, it would likely lose business given that its competitors’ stations provide greater op‑ portunities to reach significantly more potential customers. Moreover, the low percentages reflected in the horizontal % and vertical % sections of ­Table 7.1 do very little to support Radio Company B’s ability to engage with the maternity cloth‑ ing company’s target audience. The horizontal % section reports that 4.44% of people who listen to ­Radio Company B are planning for the birth of a child in the next 12 months, and the vertical % ­section reports that a measly 2.72% of people who are planning for the birth of a child in the next 12 months listen to Radio Company B. Such percentages are hardly boastworthy. Evidently, a majority of data presented in Table 7.1 do not position Radio Company B favora‑ bly among its competitors. Given the unimpressive nature of Radio Company B’s data points in Table 7.1, there appears to be a lack of compelling sales stories embedded within the numbers. However, the index section of the crosstab report offers redemption. Table 7.1 demonstrates the power of index numbers as tools of perception–manipulation. With indices, 100 represents the baseline average of the population being examined (Bentley University 2022). An index of 125 is 25 percentages above the average of 100, meaning the target consumer is 25% more likely to meet the specified criterion in comparison to the rest of the population, whereas an index of 75 is 25 percentages below the average of 100, indicating the target consumer is 25% less likely to meet the specified criterion than the rest of the population. Indices are calcu‑ lated by dividing the vertical percentage of the target column by the vertical percentage of the base column and multiplying the result by 100 (Radio Advertising Bureau 2015). In the crosstab report of Table 7.1, the target column is titled ‘Lifestyle changes/events person‑ ally plan to do next 12 months: Birth of a child’, while the base column (neighboring the target column on the left) is titled ‘All’. For Radio Company B, the vertical percentage listed under the 115

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target column is 2.72% (the percentage of people who are expecting a child and also listen to Radio Company B), and the vertical percentage listed under the base column is 1.41% (the percentage of the total population within the specified geographical region that listens to Radio Company B), resulting in an index of 193 (2.72/1.41 = 1.929 × 100 = 192.9, rounded up to 193). An index of 193 indicates that Radio Company B listeners are 93% more likely to be planning for the birth of a child in the next 12 months (193 − 100 = 93). The remainder of Table 7.1’s in‑ dex sections report that Radio Company A’s listeners are 18% less likely (100 − 82 = 18) to meet such criterion, with Radio Company C’s listeners being 44% less likely (100 − 56 = 44). Thus, the favorable nature of Radio Company B’s high index in comparison to Radio Companies A and C’s low indices provides the opportunity to use data‑based evidence to create a reality in which Radio Company B dominates its competitors. By deliberately not showing data to the advertising party from the weighted (000), horizontal %, and vertical % sections of Table 7.1, Radio Company B can engineer perceptions of a desirable listener base – without lying – by showcasing data only from the index section. Figure 7.2 presents a hypothetical sales pitch using data reported in Table 7.1’s index sections, demonstrating potential frameworks for persuasion. Figure 7.2 presents an entirely opposite storyline from that of Figure 7.1. Where Radio Com‑ panies C and A outshine Radio Company B for reach numbers in Figure  7.1, Radio Company B dominates Radio Companies A and C for indices in Figure 7.2, consequentially reversing the hierarchy. Although the data originate from the same crosstab report, Figures 7.1 and 7.2 create drastically different narratives while both being rooted in factual information. As discussed in Van Dijk (2006), manipulators must restrict the interpretation of information to effectively implant desired mental models into their target’s minds. Radio Company B has the power to choose what information to present and what language to use when presenting to the ma‑ ternity clothing company, thus gaining influence over which mental model they adopt. Given Fig‑ ure 7.2’s favorable version of reality, it makes sense for Radio Company B to present its narrative

Radio Company B’s Listeners Are More Likely to be in the Market for Maternity Clothes Than Radio Company A and C’s Listeners

193

US Adult Average (100)

Radio Company B’s listeners are 93% more likely than the average US adult to plan for the birth of a child in the next year

82 56 Planning for the birth of a child in the next 12 months Radio Company B

Radio Company A

Radio Company C

Figure 7.2  Hypothetical sales pitch using crosstab data from index sections in Table 7.1

116

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to shepherd the maternity clothing company and its media buyers into thinking that its station provides the best value. Figure 7.2 capitalizes on Radio Company B’s high index by utilizing a dotted line to represent the baseline average of 100, establishing a symbolic threshold of quality. Because Radio Company B’s index is 193, it well surpasses 100, thus assigning it a sense of superiority in comparison to Radio Companies A and C, whose indices dwindle beneath the threshold’s surface. The callout box directs immediate attention toward Radio Company B’s 93% points above the average, reinforcing its distinction from competitors. Moreover, the visual hierarchy of Radio Company B towering over its competitors conjures an image of abundance, thus prompting the idea that Radio Company B has more offerings than its competitors. In reality, the only thing abundant about Radio Company B is its index number, not its listenership. The index number – high as it may be – represents a percentage, not the number of listeners. For this reason, the index is a valuable tool of mind engineering, as it positions Radio Company B above its competitors, despite the fact that its stations reach over five times less the amount of relevant listeners than Radio Company C, and over three times less the amount than that of Radio Company A. Figure 7.2 demonstrates how partnership between indices and strategic visuals enshroud unfavorable data, ultimately manipulating mental models by influencing percep‑ tions of quality regarding Radio Company B’s listenership.

Inference as Mind Engineering Aid As discussed previously, the absence of data on maternity clothing consumers requires mind en‑ gineering tactics to fill its void. Table 7.1 uses a relevant substitute from the lifestyle category of Scarborough’s survey, which asks ‘lifestyle changes/events planning to do in the next 12 months’, of which ‘birth of a child’ is a response option (Nielsen 2022). Evidently, survey respondents who indicate they are planning for the birth of a child may very well be shopping for maternity cloth‑ ing. However, this is not guaranteed. Perhaps respondents are helping their pregnant partner, rela‑ tive, or close friend plan for birth, in which case they themselves do not need maternity clothes. Or perhaps respondents are using surrogacy methods. In instances where survey responses have broad meanings, there is no way to verify if respondents precisely fit the desired criteria; therefore, Figure 7.2’s claim that ‘Radio Company B’s Listeners Are More Likely to Be in the Market for Maternity Clothes Than Radio Company A and C’s Listeners’ is technically true. Inference plays a critical role in utilizing proxy data to foster desired narratives, as it enables manipulators to shepherd their audiences toward specific assumptions. Ultimately, inference com‑ pensates for limitations in the data’s ability to apply neatly to every situation. Collins et al. (1977) explain: Inference is thought of as filling in the missing connections between the surface structure fragments of the text by recourse to context and knowledge about the world. This text‑based view of inference stresses the notion that the inference process looks for meaningful rela‑ tions between different propositions in the text. (p. 2) Figure 7.2’s text presents two propositions: 1 Radio Company B’s listeners are more likely to be buying maternity clothes. 2 Radio Company B’s listeners are more likely to be planning for the birth of a child. 117

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The first proposition capitalizes on the logical postulation that if a person buys maternity clothes, they are pregnant. The second proposition exploits common knowledge that, if someone is preg‑ nant, they are planning for the birth of a child. Figure 7.2’s textual propositions work in tandem to guide audiences toward forming connections between the provided information and common knowledge, thus fostering inferences that, because Radio Company B’s listeners are planning for the birth of a child, they are pregnant and, therefore, need maternity clothes. The unspecified nature of survey responses affords leeway in interpretation, enabling inference to influence audiences’ comprehension of proxy data. In using inference, Radio Company B is able to overcome the absence of maternity clothing consumer data and impose desirable perceptions of reality upon the maternity clothing company and its media buyer.

Conclusion Advertising critics commonly condemn advertisers’ use of mind engineering tactics for the sake of profit (Rubin 2022). Crisp (1987) proposes that persuasive advertising is immoral, given that it robs consumers of their autonomy to formulate their own desires. Such criticisms perpetuate the notion of an imbalanced power dynamic, whereby advertisers reign over consumers with ma‑ nipulative potency. Consequently, discussions surrounding manipulation in advertising are often one‑sided, focusing solely on the consumer. The process of media buying prompts consideration of the ways in which advertisers are sub‑ jected to manipulation. Media firms are motivated to sell access to their platform’s audiences to yield revenue generation; to attract prospective advertisers and media buyers, media firms utilize mind engineering tactics to enhance the appeal of their audiences. Advertising critics are correct to call out advertisers for manipulating consumers for the sake of profit. However, such condemnation does not consider manipulative dynamics in its entirety, as advertisers too are manipulated by media firms for profit. Thus, media buying suggests that advertisers face manipulation in their roles as customers to media firms. Media buying is, in essence, a necessary condition for chain‑effect mind engineering. It must be acknowledged that chain‑effect mind engineering does not occur in all instances of advertising. Consider a small local bakery that uses free social media platforms – such as In‑ stagram and Facebook – to share promotional deals with their small pool of local customers. In this case, there is no need to broadcast advertisements on large‑scale media platforms. Therefore, partnership with media buyers is irrelevant, as there is no need to pay media firms for ad space. Additionally, some advertisers are long‑term customers of certain media firms and form close business partnerships. Businesses that experience repeated success when placing ads on certain radio stations will likely continue purchasing ad space on those stations. In instances of long‑term loyalty, manipulation is not always necessary. It is important to consider limitations in understanding chain‑effect mind engineering as it ap‑ plies to advertising. Turow (2013) acknowledges the lack of discussion surrounding media buying in the advertising process, stating that ‘academics who study advertising typically overlook media buying’ (p. 99). The lack of focus on media buying results in a limited understanding of chain‑­ effect mind engineering in advertising, given that the former is foundational to the latter. Further study of media buying dynamics will benefit the understanding of chain‑effect mind engineering in the advertising space. However, it is important to note that processes of marketing, advertising, and media buying are in constant states of flux as a result of changing social, economic, cultural, and technological dynamics (Bala and Verma 2018; Turow 2013). Forthcoming advancements in data collection and media buying systems suggest that processes of chain‑effect mind engineering will evolve as well. Regardless of how such changes manifest themselves in the media landscape, 118

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maintaining a holistic perspective on mind engineering in advertising will be critical to the future discourse of advertising criticisms. Principles of chain‑effect mind engineering also apply beyond the realm of advertising. While chain‑effect mind engineering in the context of advertising involves three parties (media firms, advertisers, and consumers), certain phenomena – such as the transmission of political ideologies from parents to children – involve numerous links in the chain spanning across multiple genera‑ tions. Jennings et al. (2009) discuss the effects of parental behavior on shaping children’s ideolo‑ gies later in life, stating that ‘parents can have an enormous degree of influence on the political learning that takes place in pre‑adulthood. If parents are politically engaged and frequently discuss politics with the child, transmission rates rise substantially’ (p.  795). Parents who consistently express their political views expose their children to political predispositions early in life; such dis‑ positions stick with the child as they grow up, enabling the reproduction of such political ideolo‑ gies to occur more frequently across generations (Jennings et al. 2009). Consequentially, parents’ political influences live vicariously through their children and subsequent generations. Chain‑effect mind engineering is at play in the case of politicized families, where generational political ideology transmission is more likely to occur. Parents (for the sake of this example, I will call them Generation A) engineer the minds of their children (Generation B) by molding their political mental models. Generation B then carries such models into their adulthood and engineer the minds of their children (Generation C) through imprinting political mental models originally developed under the influence of Generation A. Generation C then engineers the minds of the following generation (Generation D) based on influences made on their political mental models from Generations B and A. The cycle of mind engineering in this instance follows a chain‑effect fashion, whereby the manipulation of one generation’s mental models relies on manipulations of previous generations’ mental models. While this chapter utilizes the domain of advertising to explore the underlying workings of chain‑effect mind engineering, it is likely that such chain‑effect manipulation of mental models occurs in numerous societal facets, thus fostering the formation of many types of biases and prob‑ lems spanning a myriad of domains. Researchers looking to understand surreptitious influences on human minds may benefit from approaching the issue with a chain‑effect framework. Tracing the root of mind engineering as far back as possible uncovers what first went wrong in the chain link, providing greater perspective on the scale of the chain, as well as deeper insights into course correcting such cyclical mind manipulations.

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8 ON THE COMMODIFICATION OF SEXUAL WELLNESS Race, Gender, and the Engineering of Consent Kwasu D. Tembo

Introduction: The Mind Engineering of Consent The past decade has seen an adrenalization of various commercial networks of sexual wellness. These networks have become global cultural, sociopolitical, and economic lodestars of interest, la‑ bor, and general activity. These same networks have also emerged as key aspects of contemporary on‑ and offline identity politics. As a result, they simultaneously intersect with numerous issues and debates related to contemporary lifestyles in digital late capitalism. It isn’t therefore unrea‑ sonable to assert that, within the framework of the ostensibly progressive ideology promulgated and predominating in the liberal democratic regimes in the Global North, sex still sells. A key aspect of this nexus is the concept of sexual wellness. It gestures to and appropriates the lexicon and practices of self‑care, self‑management, and/or self‑work – all of which are characterized as either antidotes or analgesics to the various experiences of psycho‑emotional and physical malady in the contemporary world. Included here is the idea of sexual dissatisfaction due to hook‑up culture and dating apps, as just one example. Here, sexual satisfaction is, through this network and its tributaries, often characterized as a site of potential reclamation and resistance to broader oppressions one endures as a subject of a capitalist regime. This collection of terms and practices has obvious importance within such a regime because, for example, it describes a broader $3.7 tril‑ lion global wellness industrial complex. In view of these resonances and associations, an obvious question emerges: is so‑called wellness nothing but an obfuscatory use of rhetoric and presentation designed to make the exploitation and consumption of commodified sexualities more palatable? This, in turn, begs additional questions. These include, but are not limited to, the following two: is the contemporary commodification of sexual wellness, and its appeal to identity politics’ concern for inclusivity and representation, particularly exploitative of various subject positions, including racialized ones? Do the praxes and effects of contemporary sexual wellness cleave to or cleave apart from traditional mid‑20th century marketing and business methods elaborated most clearly, if not controversially, by Edward Bernays in “The Engineering of Consent” (1947)? This chapter seeks to provide an analysis of how online brands, spaces, and cultures self‑­ identify as allies of progressive interests in the reality market against not only gender but also race. Focusing on Bernays’ essay, it will first offer a critique of Bernaysean strategies of engineered

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consent. It will posit some theoretical grounding concerning sexuality and commodification, mind and market engineering, and some of their racialized lines of flight. Here, it will aim to raise concerns about ostensibly progressive and inclusive brand images and how they can, and often are, essentially predicated on the aforementioned techniques of profit‑oriented psycho‑emotional methods of manipulation. Central to the argumentation of the thesis of this chapter is a disagreement between the online sex‑toy company Wildflowersex, and the public exposure of the company’s exploitative dealings with specifically Black Femmes in 2019, as well as in times preceding. The conflict between Wild‑ flower and Black Femmes arose when the latter began communicating with one another about their negative experiences in business and social relationships with the former. This included, among other things, evidence of tokenistic exploitation and profiteering from Black Femme sex educators and sex‑toy sellers’ identities as queer and black. Moreover, the discourse precipitated between Black Femmes led to a collective investigation into the broader business dealings of Wildflower‑ sex. What resulted was the discovery and exposure of monetary connections and fiscal activity that starkly countermanded the company’s carefully curated public image as an inclusive, progressive, and morally adroit sex company, as well as an accepting and egalitarian space for sex positivity and wellness. With this brief sketch in place, this chapter will explore the following consequences of the company’s exposure and the contentions – public and private – that resulted: (1) the com‑ pany’s manipulation of sexual wellness through Bernaysean mind/consent engineering techniques, (2) its cozening of an entire online space and community of consumers, (3) its influence on their ostensibly progressive ethical understandings of contemporary identity politics, sex and sexuality, and their commodification and consumption. Lastly, this chapter will conclude by emphasizing how Wildflowersex’s engineering of self‑care, self‑management, and work in the frame of sexual wellness has led to, perhaps even required, the clandestine economic, sociopolitical, and cultural exploitation of Black Femmes to achieve its underlying goal of profit.

Capital Sexuality: The Engineering of Wellness Wellness, in its myriad interpretations, forms, modes, and commodity networks (markets), refers to a holistic approach to healthy living. It is characterized by physical, mental, and social well‑being. In view of the fact that the global wellness industrial complex is estimated at $3.7 trillion, contem‑ porary wellness should be more accurately referred to as a “wellness industrial complex” (Global Wellness Institute 2018). Amanda Hess (2019) gives a helpful summation of some of the contours of this complex as it relates to various features of contemporary American and global materialism: shopping, decorating, grooming and sculpting are now jumping with meaning. And a pur‑ chase need not have any explicit social byproduct – the materials Eco friendly, or the pro‑ ceeds donated to charity – to be weighted with significance. Pampering itself has taken on a spiritual urgency. (Hess 2019) Those seeking to provide some intellectual underpinnings for this type of contemporary wellness life‑ style and its underlying pseudo‑spiritualism typically refer to Audre Lorde’s 1988 essay “A Burst of Light” in which she states “caring for myself is not self‑indulgence, it is self‑preservation, and that is an act of political warfare” (Lorde quoted in Hess 2019). Lorde was, however, addressing an exigent concern, namely, managing and treating her liver cancer. As a black lesbian in the United States at the time, Lorde’s invocations of the spiritual dimensions of self‑care and health were a political act of 122

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resistance. For Lorde, what makes health and well‑being revolutionary is the fact that the health and well‑being of people in her subject position was, and arguably still is not, prioritized in America (Hess 2019). Even a cursory comparison of Lorde’s usage of these terms and their signification and contem‑ porary uses and significations of the same reveals an important cleave which separates them. Unlike Lorde, contemporary proponents and producers of narratives and products of wellness like Gwyneth Paltrow equate wellness with luxury more so than they do wellness with health. As Hess notes, the logic of GOOP, Gwyneth Paltrow’s luxury brand that sells skin serums infused with the branding of intuition, karma and healing, is being reproduced on an enormous scale. Women’s shoes, bras, razors, tampons and [sex toys] are stamped with the language of empowerment. (Hess 2019) This contemporary elision of wellness, wealth (luxury), and moral rectitude is key.

Be Well, Buy Well(ness): Bernays, Wellness, and the Engineering of Consent The ideas and practices associated with wellness are now so globally meaningful (or, indeed meaningless) because sociopolitical and cultural issues and debates concerning identity and sex‑ ual politics have been so effectively reverse‑engineered by businesses. The goal of this process of re‑association is, ultimately, converting users into customers. These techniques of engineered consent aren’t new and have been a seemingly inextricable part of global late capitalism’s raison d’etre for nearly a century primarily because of one man: Edward L. Bernays. The phrase “engineered consent” is taken from the title of Bernays’ 1947 essay “The Engineer‑ ing of Consent” (hereon EoC). The phrase refers to the application of psychoanalytic techniques to engineer, manufacture, produce, and reproduce ideal consumers; that is, consumers who cannot disassociate their desires, ideas, beliefs, and sense of selves from products (Bernays 1947; Curtis 2002). As a sort of herald of late capitalism, Bernays came bearing a message to American and subsequently global corporations, and his message was both deceptively and devastatingly simple: as a human being in late capital, “you bought things not just for need but to express your inner sense of self to others” (Curtis 2002). In the Bernaysean model of mind engineering, EoC is inextricable from another concord‑ ant process: the manufacturing of demand. In his pioneering 1928 book Propaganda, Bernays ­unequivocally states that “if we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, it is now possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without them knowing it” ­(Bernays 1928). In this way, the consent engineer must direct their efforts toward the reproduction of demand that is itself reproducible. Bernays notes that this is on account of the precariousness of a business’s profitability if it rests on the whims of the consumer’s desire. To manage this stochas‑ ticity, EoC aims to guarantee demand by, in a way, transcendentalizing the desire for products they can sell. By making the desire that can only be partially satisfied in and through consumption, EoC ensures that there will always be a demand for its products and, therefore, always a dependable stream of revenue to exploit. As Bernays puts it, a single factory, potentially capable of supplying a whole continent with its particular prod‑ uct, cannot afford to wait until the public asks for its product; it must maintain constant touch, through advertising and propaganda, with the vast public in order to assure itself the continuous demand which alone will make its costly plant profitable. (Bernays 1928) 123

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What results, inevitably, is a highly malleable, highly influential, and highly connected network of engineered consent and manufactured need – both of which form the basis, access, and desire for a sense of belonging and community. Just as potently as language or biology, a consumerist ideology becomes a metastatic, omnipotent force or continuum acting on and ultimately binding global capitalist society. As van Dijck (2012) notes, a tremendously powerful tributary or layer of the “constant touch” of this “continuous demand” is social media platforms “where agents of different nature (human and non‑human, material and immaterial) and varied size (individuals, groups, collectives, societies) are building a connective space for communication and informa‑ tion” (Dijck 2012: 142). It is upon or through this layer that acts as a type of caul or membrane that simultaneously connects and disconnects consumers, wellness, health, products, and desire that ordinary people are “trained to desire, to want new things, even before the old have been entirely consumed” so that people’s “desires must [necessarily] overshadow [their] needs” (Mazur quoted in Häring and Douglas 2012). In important and far‑reaching ways, Bernays’ methods laid out the rudiments for the emergence of a modern consumer culture in which consumption is undifferentiated from its various socioeco‑ nomic, political, and cultural networks, for example, the digital Commons of global mass media. In other words, as a reflection of Bernays’ techniques, to exist in contemporary global culture is to desire to satisfy desire through consumption. The triad of Bernaysean propaganda, advertising, and “public relations” has instantiated an intentional shift from a “needs to a desires culture”, which ultimately “weakens and disconnects [sic] us”, alienates us from our true needs and desires, and, according to many, “encourages our self‑absorption” (Levine 2011). The resulting illusion of a (in)finitude of controlled and curated desires by EoC successfully annuls the belief in the possible occurrence or existence of anything outside of what EoC offers. Being enmeshed in this network is like “playing a repeated game”, where the reproducibility of commodification and the processes that engineer and manufacture our real consent and imaginary need, form the crux of contemporary global life (Witold 2013: 354–355). The contemporary manifestation of EoC is also an unavoidable fixture of digital life. EoC has, among myriad other things, interpolated algorithmic sociopolitical and economic processes in contemporary life by exploiting data mining and social media as key new tools of manipula‑ tion (Kassam 2017). The mind engineers of today operating in fields like captology, such as the so‑called modern‑day‑Bernays B. J. Fogg, avail themselves of these technological constituents primarily as persuasive technology that can be leveraged to influence the attitudes and behaviors of users (Kassam 2017). It is important to note that these digital spaces are combinatory in nature that bring together various facets of contemporary digital life: those computational, social, politi‑ cal, and cultural. On account of this influence alone, any critique of the mind engineering potential and use of these platforms needs to recognize that these spaces are ostensibly and covertly spaces governed and sustained by various types of interest, capital, and activity. In and through social media, wellness, inclusivity, and profit can be performed, as well as governmentally, communally, and corporately (dis)regulated. Therefore, while it may appear that the determinations of these aspects of usership are ultimately the result of their interfacing with users or user communities, any and all users are simultaneously interfacing – influencing and being influenced in turn – by a network engineered for control and consent (van Dijck 2012: 145). Being a user in late capitalism is therefore never neutral. The end result of the combination of platforms, protocols, and interfaces is that not only are identities and their commodification necessary to imbue products with a care‑ fully engineered sense of “personality”, but socioeconomic practices and interactions are also as much steered as they are mediated (van Dijck 2012: 145).

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The overarching narratives espoused by the contemporary wellness industrial complex have subsequently come to follow this model. In a Bernaysean sense, the narratives of this complex appeal to customers’ desires to be seen as progressive, informed, and tolerant. The goal of the consent engineer, then and now, is to develop a narrative that simultaneously exacerbates and ame‑ liorates consumers’ deepest desires and personally resonant fears. Included among these are racial guilt and sexual dissatisfaction. The consent engineer then uses these aspects of their potential consumer’s lives to develop narrative templates in the development of products under particular auspices; specifically, ones that posit that the recursive and ever more intensive acts of consump‑ tion are necessary for them to engage with and participate within on and offline cultural content in a timely way and ethical way. The overall effect is the belief and practice of ostensibly conscious consumption as being not only possible but necessary to engender the overcoming of these op‑ pressive forces. What results is the engineering, sale, and most importantly purchase of a sense of psycho‑emotional well‑being. One might speculate that Bernays would be ecstatic were he alive now to witness the reach, immersion, and proliferation of communication technology in late capital through even a sin‑ gle social media platform, let alone the entirety of the communicative aptitude of the Internet. In the 1940s, Bernays and his confederates in the then‑burgeoning enterprise of Public Rela‑ tions were still thinking in terms of syndication, broadcast, and print (newspapers, radios, early cinema, and books). The acceleration of commodifying power that Bernays recognizes communications media to latently possess has now exploded, altered, augmented, and created entirely different experiences of disparate realities. Therefore, what contemporary communica‑ tions technologies can communicate is far more than information. They are capable of dispers‑ ing fractalized realities that sprawl out like viral envelopes shuttled across a capsid of global on and offline content. As the membranes separating lives and markets grow so porous as to disappear, the distinctions between communication and commerce also grow even more indis‑ tinct. This is also true of the lines separating relationships and transactions. This fact and any resultant anxiety resulting from the part of the user can be reverse‑engineered into a product that, upon purchase, promises to annul it. As a result, the “highly mechanical web” of social media is, above all else, concerned with engineering consent to convert users into consumers and, therefore, derive a profit (Bernays 1947: 114). Another key aspect of EoC outlined by Bernays is its relationship with education. So much of what passes for wellness and self‑awareness is framed as a didactic process. Oftentimes, a user purchases a product, learns and uses the terminology of a specific ideology directly or tangentially related to that product, and, as a result of the combination, is inevitably interpellated into wellness, as if wellness were a degree that can be attained through hard work and smart spending. Therefore if, as Bernays claims, “the engineering of consent often does supplement the educational process”, then the engendered consent must be taught in some way (Bernays 1947: 114). In contemporary social media networks, this didactic power coalesces around a singular figure, a social media ar‑ chetype whose semblance is measured in likes, followers, and subscriptions. This is the purview of the influencer who is, among other things, an engineer of attention. They can take many forms: the expert, the guru, the leader, the designer, the caster, the streamer, and/or the (life) coach. Dis‑ seminated, sponsored, and contextualized by this figure, wellness ultimately becomes a series of lessons, products, and practices that are within the power and preserve (mediation) of an expert who then teaches a user‑follower how to consent to be well. This wellness, however, is always also associated with a range of interconnected products, regimes, and praxes, including those pursuant to transaction and consumption.

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One of the most telling moments in the essay is when Bernays professes his belief that knowl‑ edge of the techniques of EoC will make the knower thereof benevolent, democratic, and perhaps even altruistic in trying to achieve what sounds like an oxymoron: good‑natured EoC. However, whatever gains EoC accrues in terms of “efficient functioning of modern society”, the democratic pursuit of “socially desirable ends”, and/or “out‑maneuvering […] opponents in the public in‑ terest”, its underlying goal remains unchanged: “engineering consent” (Bernays 1947: 115). Its view of Bernays’s simultaneous, tacit acknowledgment that EoC can be used for unsurpassable malevolence in the same selection from which the above quote is pulled makes one think that the inescapably manipulative substrate of EoC disqualifies this appraisal on the grounds that to curtail an individual’s ability to, as freely as possible, choose for themselves is antithetical to democracy. The diction of the above quote places EoC firmly and resolutely within the grasp of the bivalent goals of mastery and control.

Mass and Manipulation Many pieces of literature have substantiated the influence of mass media on the behavior of the public.1 According to Tiwari (2021), the informational role media plays in engendering trust in its narratives lies more or less solely on the numinous albeit potent factor of authenticity. Authenticity in media‑mediated information can be engendered through classic appeals to ethos, pathos, and logos. Opining experts, industry insiders, leaders of communities, sector influencers, and agents of authority and techne can elicit a semblance of authenticity which predisposes users and consumers to consent to their attempts to leverage influence over their lives as described by their consumptive habits (Tiwari 2021: 1668). Similarly, Spasova (2022) notes that, in view of the dispersive and networked tributaries of information and opinion, persuasion and influence are both concordant and are each exacerbated exponentially. The idea here is that persuasion is, ultimately, a long con in the sense that it seeks to establish and maintain long‑term lines of influence on users and groups of consumers. A part of this influence concerns itself with the control of notions and narratives of socially approved behaviors. Not only is the desire for this approval but its interpersonal media‑ tion is, in a concrete way, mimetic. A desire to be regarded as “good”, broadly speaking, acting, a desire which exerts itself, through mediated information, upon individuals in and through the collection of individuals such as that found in an online community, for example, “leads to bound‑ less imitative behavior and perception of other people’s beliefs” (Spasova 2022: 31). Spasova evokes notions of pathology that gesture to Marxist notions of commodity fetishism by using the term “contagion” to describe this phenomenon. This is fitting as the relationship between well‑ ness and its contagious consumerist concern itself describes a perhaps extremely revelatory, albeit anamorphic, truth. What makes this particularly relevant to any discussion or analysis of online communities is the fact that, through telecommunications dispersal, far exceeding the vectors of transmission employed and delineated by Bernays, this “contagion does not require the simultane‑ ous presence of users in a single place. It can act ‘from a distance’” (Spasova 2022: 31–31). When it comes to mind engineering as theorized here, the influence on the subconscious and covert tools of persuasion used in mass media and, particularly in social media, need to be men‑ tioned. I propose that the conflict between Wildflowersex and Black Femmes gestures toward the idea that subconscious attachments to sexuality, liberation, quality of life, and the idea of sex‑as‑revolutionary all accrue interest in being framed in particular discourses – not only in gen‑ dered but also in racialized discourses and intersectional struggles. In other words, what we have is what I think of as a “trend‑war”, by which I mean a conflict between influencers concerning

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investment and sale of stock in a product (emancipatory sexuality) framed as simultaneously both a right and part of revolutionary ethics in a digital economy of affects whose credit subsists on influence. The confluences of these areas are a key concern of brand engineering. As Keller (2003) notes, branding is a network of praxes that attempts to simultaneously reify and synthesize numinous psycho‑emotional experiences and concrete physical aspects of a product or service. In so doing, branding is a process “that builds knowledge about a brand leading to brand loyalty or equity” (Keller 2003). Ultimately, branding relies heavily on EoC to disseminate mediated information about the various attributes, the ethics or philosophy, and the bargain of products and their com‑ munities. In buying stock in both through purchase, user‑consumers experience far more than the product‑in‑itself. Instead, along with a product or service purchased, individuals simultaneously purchase images, thoughts, feelings, attitudes, and experiences that have both microscopic (indi‑ vidual) and macroscopic (social) values. There are numerous techniques of influence on the subconscious and covert tools of persua‑ sion used in mass media and particularly in social media that engender this effect, that is, imbuing products with character and personality. As such, a tangible product or service becomes a value. In keeping with the Bernaysian idea that the consumer seeks identitarian and psycho‑emotional affects which they can only directly access in and through their purchasing power, Wee and Ming (2003) suggest that brands exploit this concatenation of emotional appeal and symbolic value in prod‑ ucts through careful curation of semiological signs (Wee and Ming 2003). For example, Dominiak (2004) notes that “words such as trustworthy, feminine, helping, and nurturing convey an entirely different image or brand personality, and, therefore, a different customer expectation of the product, than words such as professional, clinical, intelligent, and scientific” (Dominiak 2004: 296). If we are to take Bernays as a point of departure for modern commercial mind engineering, then we can also say that the effort to transcendentalize products has been a part of 20th‑century capitalism for three‑quarters of a century. While not necessarily new, in this sense, its latent impact on capitalist ethos can be noted in vivid ways. Gobe (2001), for example, at the turn of the mil‑ lennium, offers what he refers to as the “Ten Commandments of Emotional Branding”. The goal thereof is straightforward as it is grandiose: to shift branding and commercial language to empha‑ size the “personality” of brands, as well as the consumer–product interface as a “relationship” as opposed to a service (Gobe 2001). Doing so ensures that the consumer does not, cannot, or will not view the process of capital exchange for goods as a purely economic phenomenon but a cultural and social event which not only affirms but also reinforces the customer’s self‑image, reified and reflected in the product itself. As such, buying things is not only about the meeting of needs but the satisfaction, expression, and affirmation of self through purchase. Such techniques are intended to be durable, to make incumbent on the customer the fulfill‑ ment of tacit and explicit psycho‑emotional responsibilities and expectations with regard to their relationship with their own status as consumers. This includes determining the contours of pro‑ spective customers’ purchasing power. At stake here is the meaning of personal capital as a means of not only accessing but (re)creating and (re)affirming their self‑image through products. In late capital, where trends and microtrends emerge and disappear with heightening acceleration, this connection between customer and product may be seen as a means to endure the undulations of consumer trends and the idiosyncrasies of the market; what we could think of as the stochasticity of global finance. Here, the product becomes an identitarian anchor that, when accessed through the exchange of capital, allows the consumer to remind themselves of who they are. In this way, platforms, manufacturers, distributors, and sellers are not simply a chain of supply feeding linked

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demands. Instead, this entire network and its epiphenomena become a community of individuals whose individual affirmation of self and mutual recognition as individuals is mediated by a com‑ munity of buyers, sellers, and products. In this way, the socioeconomic and socio‑cultural network of customers and products becomes a history and a narrative. Fanning (1999) noted, on the other side of the turn of the millennium, that “successful brands continuously update their stories to adapt to societal changes, while at the same time retaining their core values. In responding to changing market needs while maintaining core values, brands effectively maintain their continu‑ ing relevance” (Fanning 1999, quoted in Dominiak 2004: 296; emphasis mine). In the case of Wildflower vs Black Femmes, some techniques of mass media persuasion are on clear display. One such technique is described in Burgoon and Jones’ (1976) discussion of the Expectancy Violations Theory, which refers to nonverbal behavior involving breaking proximal expectations (Burgoon and Jones 1976). Applying Expectancy Violations Theory to Wildflower vs Black Femmes explains the source of shock and indignation in and by the community both sellers subtended. On the one hand, there was a perception of a normal pattern – one ostensibly marked by non‑exploitative diversity and inclusivity. On the other hand, this was followed by a violation of that very same perception (Meyer 1997). The irony here is that in adopting the image of inclusiv‑ ity, in conjunction with enacting and evoking behaviors that made Wildflower unique in the eyes of potential customers and their community, the company spun a narrative about themselves that they ultimately violated in being unable to live up to. But what of Black Femme’s responses to this failure? Is their collective critique of Wildflower’s failure, which I will discuss in more detail below, indicative of a potential “sleeper effect”? As Nabi, Moyer‑Gusé, and Byrne (2007) note, the sleeper effect refers to an audience discounting the credibility of a message source. However, this incredulity does not entirely negate the persuasive effects of mass manipulation and engineered consent (Nabi, Moyer‑Gusé, & Byrne 2007). This is evident in the fact that, while the Black Femme response to Wildflower’s dealings was indeed controversial for the latter, it did not alter, destroy, or disqualify their message, their appeal, their community, or the popularity enjoyed by their products. In terms of techniques of engineered content and mass media manipulation, we have two types of bias in conflict. If “mass media can be considered as the main manipulator by the consciousness of the masses to form a required attitude to an event, a phenomenon or a person”, then the narrative one tells of actions and their resultant feelings has the potential to heavily influence an onlooker’s conscious processing and understanding of an event (Lippmann 1965). This is why both the public and private attempts to control the narrative of the dispute between Wildflower and Black Femmes were so important. On social media, narratives that avail themselves of a sense of greater or lesser authenticity, identity, capital, and community emerge in virtual spaces as not merely a way of substituting order for the great blooming, buzzing confusion of reality. It is not merely a short cut. It is all these things and something more. It is the guarantee of our self‑respect; it is the projection upon the world of our own sense of our own value, our own position and our own rights. (Lippmann 1965) On the one hand, we have herding bias. Herding is the result of individuals in a particular com‑ munity whose identity is fixed and maintained by their continual and up‑to‑date participation in the said community (Tiwari 2021). The fear of missing out can elicit herding behavior in this way, where conformity and alignment take on increased value of psychological and social intensity. Moreover, herding can be engendered by trust placed in the authority and accuracy of a model, an 128

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influencer’s perception and perspective more so than their own mores and misgivings. In response to the allegations and proofs brought to bear against Wildflower by Black Femmes, the company gestured (since deleting any trace from their Instagram page) to their carefully cultivated and cu‑ rated narrative of non‑exploitative inclusivity and diversity as proof against the potentially ruinous critiques leveled against them. Many users – virtual passers‑by, loyal customers, those against, and those unsure – commented profusely on Wildflower’s official response post that the entire history of their brand is based on a narrative of community support, racial and gender progressiveness, and sexual positivity. Others expressed reservations about wanting to herd around the “right” nar‑ rative, while others were yet torn between their brand loyalty and their commitment or desire for commitment to the “right side of history”. Those expressing contrary views herded around their distrust, vitriol, and envy for and against Wildflower’s ostensible hypocrisy, ruthless and exploitative capitalism, appropriative performa‑ tivity, and status (success) as leaders in the online sex‑positive sex‑toy market. Here, authenticity again becomes important. What gave the Black Femme critique weight was their open, direct, and consistent appeal to the racial and gender dimensions of their dealings with Wildflower. The impli‑ cation of this is that their racial and gender statuses garner them critical authority in, at least, pre‑ cipitating, at most, demanding trust in their suite from those across the spectrum of credulity in it.

On Authenticity In many ways, the term “authenticity” is often a shorthand for a particular kind of coding. This coding can take as its share identitarian categories – as well as combinations thereof – that pertain to socioeconomic status, racial and ethnic appellations, sexual orientation, and geographical locat‑ edness. The term, therefore, is or can be crucial in disputes and disagreements regarding the mis‑ use, misappropriation, and exploitation of any of the aforesaid, singularly or collectively. In terms of Wildflower vs Black Femmes, the idea that Black Femmes are oppressed in numerous ways and that sexuality is a recursive site of oppression, warrants even a brief comment here. In view of the fact that stereotypes acting against Black Femmes, such as the mammy, jezebel, and sapphire, Black Femmes have their sexuality and haptic potential for pleasure circumscribed in historically exploitative, caricatural, and exaggerated functions of WASP2 centrality in global sociopolitical spheres of influence. As a direct result, one might assume that these areas also form the most effective counter‑site of emancipation and reclamation of joy and pleasure. As I will dis‑ cuss later, Wildflower vs Black Femmes achieves a double effect in being a dispute that reflects the reduplication and intensification of these very same stereotypes and oppressions. Some might argue that the dispute between Black Femmes and Wildflower is that the latter treated the former as a type of pool of “magical negresses”, a racialized stereotype of Western visual and lit‑ erary cultures whose purpose is to unflinchingly serve and support the aspirations and goals of white protagonists. As Tembo notes (2019), like the ostensibly progressive representation of black female mainstream comic book characters he analyzes, the Black Femmes in dispute with Wildflower are also seemingly caught in a similar position. Tembo describes this position as an ostensibly beneficent allyship with white producers and sellers who, perhaps surreptitiously, exploit the aura of authenticity garnered from stereotyping their subject positions as angry, black, sexual, and femme (Tembo 2019). Angry, black, sexual, and femme form a network of tensions that relate to three harmful ra‑ cialized and gendered stereotypes that oppress black women. The first two are the mammy and the jezebel. The former emerged from the era of North American slavery whose design was to influence and maintain the dominant sociopolitical perception of black women and the roles they could occupy in a society subject to white centrality. This stereotype propounded the notion that 129

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black women should be as much faithful, as they must be obedient and subservient (Glenn and Cunningham 2009: 139). The mammy is, in an essential way, self‑effacing. She “loves her White ‘family’ more than her own. Even though this family may care for her, she never forgets her role as the obedient servant and has accepted her subordination to white male elite power” (Glenn and Cunningham 2009: 139). Kimberly Wallace‑Sanders (2008) also notes that the term “mammy” reflects a caricatural misunderstanding and misrepresentation in terms of servility and maternalism (Wallace‑Sanders 2008: 2; 6). In contrast, the jezebel inverts the sexlessness of the mammy by representing her as sexually perverse, promiscuous, aggressive, yet  also submissive in her fundamental desire to please. She is forward and brash, albeit acquiescing in her embodied representation of profligate and wanton sexuality. Thus, while the mammy relegates black womanhood to the role of nurturer, the jezebel se‑ questers black womanhood to the role of reproduction. Both subject positions were employed as an oppressive shorthand during the era of slavery in America in this way (Glenn and Cunningham 2009: 139). It would seem that the Black Femmes’ critique of Wildflower entails an acknowledgment and rebuke of the company’s use of their images and lives in the exploitation of a “stereotyped authentic‑ ity” in which libidinal liberation and racial inclusivity accrue interest, value, and subsequently profit. The sapphire refers to a negative stereotype directed toward black women that originated later in the 1940s and 1950s in North America. Like the namesake character from which the stereotype emerged, the sapphire is depicted as nagging and emasculating when it comes to her constant re‑ monstrations of her African American husband. Here, the excess of the mammy’s nurturing takes the form of over‑aggressiveness (Celeste Walley‑Jean 2009: 70). In taking these three negative stereo‑ types black women battle against, holding them up to the case of Wildflower vs Black Femmes, one can see that the vitriol and anger of the latter risks being disregarded and invalidated as an affective force of a legitimate dispute and recklessly stereotyped as the excessive emanations of the sapphire.

Wildflower vs Black Femmes: Race, Gender, Profit, Influence, and Authenticity In July 2019, Wildflowersex (a popular sex‑toy company) and Ev’yan Whitney’s page (a Black Femme sexuality professional, sexual health educator, and promoter) came to a public clash in the Instagram sexual wellness community. The crux of their contention was captured and corroborated by a collective report subsequently produced and ratified by a group of Black Femmes, whose joint statements revealed a troubling pattern of behavior defining their dealings with Wildflower. The core of this pattern was ultimately based on the exploitative use of Black Femmes to undermine their rivals, while simultaneously appearing progressive for having used Black Femmes as tokens of inclusivity within the spaces of social media that comprise a broader “wellness industrial com‑ plex” in which they participate and influence. In looking at the case of Black Femmes vs Wildflowersex, it is easy enough to describe the con‑ flict as a contention between two leaders of a community developed and experienced by users of so‑ cial media, leaders who communicate ideologies, selfhood, grievances, personal communications, as well as products to their overlapping follower‑consumer bases. Through Instagram, Whitney and Wildflower have, in a court of public opinion, in an arena of user‑follower review, prosecuted de‑ fenses; provided proofs to corroborate and substantiate counter‑proofs; and engaged, condemned, and allied with members of their intersecting market bases. All of this was, in some way, an attempt to engineer consent to their point of view. One might contend that such conflagrations are, at this point in the history of social media, so de rigueur as to be banal and not worthy of comment. A counter might assert that such a conclusion is a direct manifestation of the success of the techniques 130

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of mind engineering outlined by Bernays above and those systems of mind engineering influenced by him. While it is true that online conflict in some form is a seeming default of usership, we should be careful to not overlook the techniques of EoC that are often employed in such contentions. With Whitney and Wildflower, one can easily deduce the presence of EoC. Their narratives and counter‑narratives concerning race, gender, sexuality, authenticity, and profit, like some of the most potent forms of propaganda, both rely on “the aspirations, fears and loyalties” of their respective audiences (Kimble 2005: 212). This seems an obvious observation. However, what is interesting is how much the technique and underlying ethos of this contemporary example mirror the initial techniques of public manipulation and coercion refined and put forward by Bernays himself. Whitney’s “Dildon’t Disrespect Black Femmes: Our Personal Experiences with Wild Flower Sex Shop” (2019) details several personal accounts from Black Femmes who felt maligned, ex‑ ploited, and harmed by the owners of Wildflower – Nick and Amy, “two able‑bodied, femme‑ and masculine‑presenting white individuals” (Whitney 2019). To Whitney and other Black Femmes, Wildflower presented itself as a widely influential “non‑binary digital sex shop that centered pleas‑ ure, inclusivity, and education”. After an initially tepid reception, Wildflower and Whitney began what ostensibly appeared to be a collaborative relationship in May 2018. Whitney reveals that early into their relationship, Wildflower’s founders divulged a narrative of ideological and ethi‑ cal concerns against their rivals Unbound Babes, another progressive sex‑toy company run and founded entirely by multi‑ethnic women with strong Instagram influence. In view of those in‑ volved, their image, and their self‑professed ethic of progress and inclusivity, these recriminations were not minor. For example Unbound received $2 million in funding from Peter Thiels, a right‑wing conservative, and do‑ nor who supported Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Peter Thiels was anti‑woman, anti‑choice, homophobic, and the sole reason behind the bank‑ ruptcy of Gawker, the former online media company and blog network. Unbound has willingly kept this information from the public and has evaded Amy’s attempts to hold them accountable, and the one potential reason Polly (the CEO and co‑founder of Unbound) was able to evade that accountability was by allegedly using her previous cancer diagnosis as deflective sympathy against critique. As Amy was being vocal about Unbound on their Instagram and Facebook, Amy received a cease and desist letter from Unbound, telling them that if they continued to speak about what they knew, Amy would be sued. Amy was frustrated that they had been silenced and wished Unbound would be exposed for who they really were. (Whitney 2019) In view of the list of allegations, one might ask what role does Whitney play in Wildflower’s ri‑ valry with Unbound Babes. She notes While it was never explicitly stated or requested by Amy or Nick that [she] take on the re‑ sponsibility of sharing [the narrative about Unbound she’d received] with [her] own friends and peers, hearing Amy and Nick complain about how hard it was for them, a relatively new indie sex toy business, to make it on their own without the mass support of venture capital‑ ists and to hear them express how much integrity and intentionality they were bringing into their business […], [she] chose to take up the fight. (Whitney 2019) 131

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Amid the palpable sense of personal drama and a litany of grievances, the underlying question is whether Wildflower used Whitney, her ideals, praxis, race, orientation, and maybe even naiveté, to engineer her consent in becoming a tool against its rivals. It is a concern Whitney herself notes as she questioned whether Nick and Amy had any interest in supporting her and her work beyond the dividends good optics in the form of a collaboration with her could afford. Worse, in terms of the concept and praxes of mind engineering, is the possibility Whiney grapples with: that Wild‑ flower maintained a relationship only with her to leverage the authenticity of her subject position to undermine their competitors. As Whitney notes, the concern here is whether or not Wildflower reduced her to not only a corporate bludgeon but also “a black face/body they could put on their Instagram to prove their intersectionality, diversity, and inclusiveness” (Whitney 2019). At the bottom, for Whitney and the other Black Femme complainants, Wildflowersex used her to tap into their customer’s desire for feelings and displays of inclusivity in its products by simply adding the image of equitable collaboration with a popular Black femme. The implication of Whitney’s critique is as important as it is timely. This is because, among other things, EoC, in all its myriad manifolds of power and ideology, is also a matter of privilege. The issue of privilege, in this case, to exploit Black Femme sexuality professionals, specifically as superficial totems of inclusivity and pawns of corporate rivalry, re‑affirms itself alongside the pejorative and exploitative notion that black female labor is, by its very nature, exploitable. Here, the subtext of the role black women are sequestered to, encapsulated in a triad of longstanding stereotypes that sideline black women and caricature any attempts at revolt against that sidelin‑ ing, re‑emerge albeit anamorphically, compared to the explicitness of the mammy, jezebel, and sapphire. Could it be that white privilege here acted as a refracting lens through and by which exploitative praxes against black women could be sublimated and re‑narrativized into what os‑ tensibly looked like its opposite, namely, inclusivity, allyship, and active progressiveness? Ash‑ leighchubbybunny, another well‑known Black Femme sexuality professional who had negative dealings with Wildflower, offers an astute observation of how authenticity became simultaneously a type of capital, as well as a grammar, of mind engineering. Noting the importance of white privi‑ lege within the spaces that comprise online sex‑positive activities, Ashleighchubbybunny states I feel that people inherently think that because talking about sex is such a “freeing” thing, that these conversations and spaces that they occur in are inclusive by default – which is not true. They are still headed by and representative of varying degrees of proximity to ­whiteness – and more times than not led by white women. Which is why what I’m doing as a fat, queer black woman is still seen as “revolutionary” and “inspiring” because the common narrative of my sexual experiences as it pertains to other people is one of settling, trauma, hypersexualization and fetishization. (Ashleigh quoted in Whitney 2019) I call this observation astute because it recognizes the hypocritical dissonance between the narrative(s) of sexual, racial, and bodily inclusivity and representation and the still racist and classist undercurrents determining the flows of sociopolitical, economic, and cultural power that influence every aspect of the contemporary narrative and sale of sex/sexuality. Therefore, when taken in the guise of doses of self‑care, healing, and decolonization, there is often a risk of repeat‑ ing narratives of contemporary sex and sexuality that offer nothing but newer, perhaps even more insidious avenues, for capitalist exploitations to manifest themselves. It is this narrative that brings physical acts of pleasure, the products used therein, the ideology of inclusivity, wellness, progress,

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and the digital act of purchasing together to form a taut kernel of trauma and exclusion that still underpins much of the spaces of the broader wellness industrial complex. To date, Wildflower has offered a stilted and latently defensive non‑dialogical explanation of the situation before it was hastily taken down from their official Instagram page. Much of the critique I recall took Wildflower to task for overlooking, almost entirely, the psycho‑emotional consequences of their exploitative business praxes. Whitney notes how she felt manipulated by Wildflower into turning on herself by turning on similar figures in the sexual wellness community, allowing Wildflower to let its competition destroy itself without getting its hands dirty (Whitney 2019). The underlying manipulative dimensions of this contestation were further reinforced by Whitney’s subsequent conversations with the owner of Unbound Babes, who revealed to Whitney that the allegations leveled against them by Wildflower were categorically false (Whitney 2019). The question then becomes: why did Wildflower bring Whitney into their confidence with a false and defamatory narrative? Whitney herself gives a succinct answer: “I feel that they used me as an object [,] as a Black queer femme to give themselves clout and validate themselves as intersec‑ tional and inclusive” (Whitney 2019). She continues For a platform that claims to be so inclusive, Amy and Nick (two white, cis passing people) take up a lot of space within their own social media. I have yet to see any posts from them highlighting other sexuality educators of color and their expertise on their platform – unless it’s to use their image on WF’s Instagram feed as objects to prove their diversity. As a Black femme who was once featured on WF’s Instagram feed, it has felt more so connected to their brand and company and not my own personhood or humanity. (Whitney 2019) Here, we see a flattening of sexuality, gender, and race into tokens of authenticity used to purchase the attention and brand loyalty of user‑followers in the sexual wellness community. The narrativi‑ zation and symbolization of this process, in a variety of intersectional forms and formats, is the very definition of EoC.

Conclusion: Never Forget the Schematics Perhaps the conflict described above may garner no surprise in any contemporary reader famil‑ iar with social media and the current digital landscape. Perhaps the advent of stronger artificial intelligence (AI), specifically image‑centric recognition software, and image‑generation AI like Midjourney and Stable Diffusion and their potential lines of exploitation are of more immediate interest and concern.3 However, I would be cautious in thinking about the situation above, cer‑ tainly one of myriad; it should be dismissed as a relic of a bygone error of social media capitalism and engineered consent. This chapter has tried to argue that what the conflict between Wildflower and Whitney and other Black Femmes reveals are digitized echoes of Bernaysean mind engineer‑ ing in both overt and subtle ways. The tokenistic exploitation of individuals’ subject positions, in this case as black and queer, to help in the engineering of a cohesive public image of inclusivity and progressive ethics elicits a multidimensional effect. One could conclude that a dimension of this effect is certainly overt because the success of this kind of tactical tokenism relies precisely on narrativized assumptions of authenticity based on the visibility of those exploited. It is the imagis‑ tic or textual visibility of the queerness and blackness of these exploited individuals that engenders

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a feeling of authenticity associated with a brand that ostensibly enacts the ethics it extols. Here, the surfaces of textual and imagistic content of the brand and its products cohere around a per‑ ceived core of authenticity and ethical rectitude. As a result, this engineered feeling of authenticity becomes an attribute of both the products of the company and the company itself. Therefore, pur‑ chasing what appears authentic and progressive allows the purchaser to participate in an activity that potentially feels revolutionary and progressive. Through purchase, the user‑customer can also feel a sense of psycho‑emotional well‑being accessed through the image of an authentically pro‑ gressive product sold by an authentically progressive company. The interiority of this dimension of the above effect makes it easier for one to describe as subtle. However, in the last instance, one could be left asking whether any aspect of contemporary digital culture, capital, and their collec‑ tive effects on the minds and feelings of user‑customers is in any way subtle at all. The conflict between ostensibly inclusive sex‑positive businesses operating on Instagram and their interpolation not only of the issues and debates of wellness broadly speaking but the bodies, specifically the visibility, of black female bodies engineered two narratives. One concerns the os‑ tensible adroitness of sex‑positive ideology, products, and lifestyles. The other is a narrative of the bankruptcy of the same in their chief rivals. In each instance, the ostensible and subtle narratives, the conscious and unconscious narratives, redound to the same goal: to safeguard Wildflower’s position as a, if not the, most profitable and lauded white‑owned brand of its kind. While both narratives engineered by Wildflower sought to enrich themselves, neither can function without the exploitative and paradoxical inclusion/exclusion of Black Femmes. As Karmenife, another Black Femme negatively impacted by WF, notes, the issue here is black women and femmes being dehumanized and viewed as mouthpieces, not human beings with autonomy […] As painful as this is, it comes as no surprise to me […] This is white feminist violence, something that black women and femmes constantly have to deal with and fight against. I was treated like an object, something to be used so that I do all the work while Wildflowersex collects all the profit without speaking on it themselves […] This behavior is violent, anti black. (Karmenife quoted in Whitney 2019) In this sense, the narratives of Wildflower wellness reveal how a Bernaysean kind of mind engi‑ neering can endure because the narratives engineered by Wildflower have no intention of altering the objective conditions that necessitated its countermanding. It is far more profitable to rather commercialize and sell the feeling of progress behind the idea of sexual wellness and inclusiv‑ ity, exploiting Black Femmes to achieve this end. What the Black Femme critique of Wildflower and the sexuality professional/sexual wellness industries and communities more broadly reveals is that the “diversity quota” narratives subtending them are, in the last instance, concerned with securing several key things. These include, but are not limited to, profit and privilege, specifically white privilege, the privilege to command, determine, engineer, and influence. The potency of authenticity as a mind engineering vector is also among them. But, and it is important to note this, the conflict between these companies and individuals also affirms progress in other ways. This is because the case of Wildflower and Black Femmes marks an instance wherein the engineering of these narratives, in part and only briefly, failed. It seems that Wildflower did not anticipate the soli‑ darity, tenacity, and courage of Black Femme sexuality professionals who, aside from constituting a part of the wellness industrial complex at large, also importantly act as ideologues, influencers, and community leaders within the spaces and debates of sex positivity. It is for this reason that Black Femmes speaking out is so important. It is only through their testimonials, critiques, and 134

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willingness for open dialogue/debate, despite the depredations and disadvantages they’ve expe‑ rienced and overcome, that the truth of the engineering of sex‑positive wellness can be exposed, redressed, and/or debunked.

Notes 1 See particularly, S. Bogatyriova, R. R. Garifullin, O. A. Dotsenko. A. A. Diakov, S. G. Kara‑Murza, O. Yu. Balezina, A. S. Tkhostov and A. S. Neliubina who have studied the problem of information manipulation. The research by V. P. Sediakin and I. V. Solovyov provides elaboration on the information needs theory by the information consumers. P. H. Gasanova, O. M. Lozova, and V. F. Petrenko investigate the psychose‑ mantic aspects of ordinary consciousness. The research is based on various theories and approaches: psy‑ chosemantic approach to the human consciousness (O. F. Bondarenko, V. F. Petrenko, O. A. Lapshova), ordinary consciousness theory (Ye. Kant, S. B. Krymskii, N. L. Muskheleshvili), social consciousness theory (L. S. Vygotsky and A. N. Leontiev, O. M. Lozova), mess media influence theory (J. Klapper, L. A. Naidionova, V. O. Popova, J. Baudrillard, M. McLuhan), theory of combination of the real and elusive in ordinary consciousness (F. Garyfillin, V. F. Kazibekova, O. Ulybina), theory of ethnic stereotypes (O. M. Lozova, V. F. Petrenko, O. V. Ulybina), theory of social stereotypes (W.Lippman, L. P. Mardyieva, S. G. Osmachko), theory of manipulation by mass consciousness (S. G. Kara‑Murza). 2 WASP stands for White, Anglo‑Saxon, Protestant. 3 “Levi’s to Test Diverse AI Models to Be More Inclusive”, and “Racial Discrimination in Face Recognition Technology” Harvard University.

References Bernays, E. (1928). Propaganda. New York: Ig Publishing. ——— (1947). ‘The Engineering of Consent’, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 250(1), 113–120. Burgoon, J. K., & Jones, S. B. (1976). ‘Toward a Theory of Personal Space Expectations and Their Viola‑ tions’, Human Communication Research, 2, 131–146. Celeste Walley‑Jean, J. (2009). ‘Debunking the Myth of the “Angry Black Woman”: An Exploration of Anger in Young African American Women’, Black Women, Gender + Families, 3(2), 68–86. https://www.jstor. org/stable/10.5406/blacwomegendfami.3.2.0068. Curtis, A. (2002). The Century of the Self. Wyandotte, MI: BigD Productions, BBC. Dominiak, M. C. (2004). ‘The Concept of Branding: Is It Relevant to Nursing?’, Nursing Science Quarterly, 17(4), 295–300. Glenn, C. L., & Cunningham, L. J. (2009). ‘The Power of Black Magic: The Magical Negro and White Salva‑ tion in Film’, Journal of Black Studies, 40(2), 135–152. Global Wellness Institute. (2018). ‘2018 Global Wellness Economy Monitor’, Globalwellnessinstitute.org. https://globalwellnessinstitute.org/industry‑research/2018‑global‑wellness‑economy‑monitor/. Gobe, M. (2001). Emotional Branding: The New Paradigm for Connecting Brands to People. New York: Allworth Press. Häring, N., & Douglas, N. (2012). Economists and the Powerful: Convenient Theories, Distorted Facts, Ample Rewards. London: Anthem Press. Hess, A. (2019, August 19). ‘The New Spiritual Consumerism’, The New York Times. https://www.nytimes. com/2019/08/19/arts/queer‑eye‑kondo‑makeover.html. Kassam, L. (2017). ‘“Mmm bacon”: The Engineering Of Consent’, Medium. https://medium.com/@laila. kassam/mmm‑bacon‑the‑engineering‑of‑consent‑872e4476efd2. Keller, K. (2003). ‘Understanding Brands, Branding and Brand Equity’, Interactive Marketing, 5, 7–20. https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.im.4340213. Kimble, K. K. (2005). ‘Whither Propaganda? Agonism and “The Engineering of Consent”’, Quarterly Jour‑ nal of Speech, 91(2), 201–218. https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630500291521. Levine, B. E. (2011). Get Up, Stand Up: Uniting Populists, Energizing the Defeated, and Battling the Corpo‑ rate Elite. Vermont: Chelsea Green Publishing. Lippmann, W. (1965). Public Opinion. New York: Free Press.

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9 MANIPULATIVE PRACTICES OF PROGRAMMING AND CONTROLLING EMPLOYEE BEHAVIOUR IN THE ACTIVITIES OF CHINESE MANAGERS Pavel Deriugin, Liubov Lebedintseva, and Evgeny Kremnyov Introduction In the sociology of mainland China, the practices of manipulative programming and behavioural control of employees in organisations are considered through the traditional concept of “Jiao hua” (literally “training and nurturing”), which is expressed in the acceptance of an attitude towards managers, which implies a high degree of trust in them and a willingness to follow their instruc‑ tions. (Zhao 2005: 85–88). This is natural, because it is generally accepted that any managerial activity can be seen as a set of manipulative practices that shape the appropriate behaviour of em‑ ployees in organisations to achieve the goals of the activity (Babiuk 2004: 128). In general, Chinese management theory recognises such practices as legitimate, although they are not very common as a topic of sociological research. It can also be said that ethical problems in this regard are perceived quite tolerantly by the Chinese, without fear or demands for legal restrictions ­(Molchanov et al. 2019: 58 and 67). In particular, Berman’s studies show that it is impossible to completely exclude elements of neuroeconomic and neurolinguistic studies of programming practices or manipulative control over the behaviour of personnel from the practical work of organisations (Berman 2015: 497–546). However, it should always be remembered that, in the Chinese tradition, the recognition of the primacy of morality, reputation and a sharp condemnation of any kind of dishonesty in doing business is an important part of the study of managerial activity (Tong 2022). Manipulation is based on one of the basic properties of consciousness (Stepanenko 2012: 166), namely, involuntary and one‑sided perception of information (Kilmashkina et al. 2021: 442), since any management in a certain sense is always coercive and is aimed at covert programming and verification of the volitional, intellectual and emotional efforts of the object of control and the implementation of the will and power of leaders. Manipulative practices can be considered a reflection of the manager’s internal attitudes and external forms of their manifestation (Lobanova and Tersakova 2019: 450). In essence, manipula‑ tion externally manifests itself as a set of methods and techniques used by the manager to pro‑ gramme the behaviour of subordinates.

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DOI: 10.4324/9781003289746-12

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The subject of this study was to identify the manipulative practices of Chinese executives and attitudes towards the manipulation of different social groups. The research questions included iden‑ tifying the manipulative practices of Chinese organisational leaders and studying the attitudes of several Chinese social groups towards manipulative practices, i.e. answering the questions: (1) What are the scientific approaches to the analysis of the manipulative practices of Chinese managers from a ­sociological–historical perspective? (2) What are the manipulative practices of modern Chinese leaders? (3) How do respondents working in different fields, of different ages and experiences relate to manipulation: managers, civil servants, military personnel, intellectuals, engineers and medical workers; employees of large and small commercial organisations and young entrepreneurs; represent‑ atives of the older generation and youth; respondents with managerial experience and without it. In the following sections of the chapter, the results of our study will be presented and discussed in detail.

Historical and Sociological Overview of Manipulation as an Element of Management Manipulation has always accompanied managing people since the earliest human communities and in a sense is an immanent attribute of management in any society (Knyazeva 2010: 220–221). It is known that Shen Dao, long before Machiavelli, suggested that a ruler should combine strength and charm to govern more effectively. In his view, “being dignified” is not enough to subdue the people. For these purposes it is necessary to possess the power of authority to “subdue the dignified” (Udaltsov 2007: 664). Under conditions of market relations, manipulation becomes a mass and common practice of social interaction: manipulation creates the modern world (Yuren‑ kov 2013: 21–23). It should be noted that, although a considerable number of socio‑humanitarian scholars have studied manipulation, little attention has been paid to the genesis of the phenomenon (Bernays 2012: 149–159). We have identified several approaches to the consideration of the his‑ torical evolution of this phenomenon. According to the first approach, manipulation has existed “forever” (Makarovsky 2009: 164– 172). Magical forces, rituals and rites, and gods and sacrifices were the basis of influencing peo‑ ple, a way of social programming and control and reproduction of actual forms of behaviour and patterns of activity. The Olympian gods, as is known, had a clear hierarchy – some gods were subordinate to others. It was this, according to some authors, that gave rise to man’s conscious perception of hierarchical relationships and the recognition of a system in which one member of society controls another. Makarovsky argues that the function of social control emerged together with the birth of human society, and manipulation appeared during the transition from a family community to a neighbourhood community, when the first inter‑group conflicts arose. Further, with regard to the period of slavery, manipulation is studied as an open and perverted nature of the relationship between leadership and slavery, where the master–slave relations were built at the local level of direct influence – interpersonal open manipulation (Crachov 2003: 450). For similar reasons, manipulation is later seen as a factor in ethical problems. The question of how relevant these problems are remains open. In 2014, the Presidential Commission on the Study of Bioethi‑ cal Issues was established in the United States to investigate the bioethical issues associated with the use of neurotechnological manipulation technologies that affect the problems of stratification, the emergence of special groups and the disclosure of personal data (Jones et al. 2014: 224–236). However, the commission did not reach any unequivocal conclusions. The second approach we identify was applied by Crachov and Melnik (2004), who describe the transformation and expansion of manipulative practices starting from the ancient Chinese era, when in the early stages, manipulation was reflected only in certain areas of interaction and 138

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eventually spread to all spheres of human life. Chinese scholars began to comprehend ancient ­Chinese conceptions of ruling by “implanting” ideas convenient for rulers into human conscious‑ ness quite early: in 1906, the Chinese philosopher and populariser of sociology Zhang Binlin wrote that Confucianism was used by rulers to cultivate passivity among the masses, to eradicate the desire to participate in the affairs of governing the country (Taiyan 1906). The early 20th‑century debate in China exposed considerable social contradictions (Kremnyov 2019: 116–142) caused by the centuries‑old manipulation of the public mind through traditional values (Zhang 1960), philosophy and the educational system, religious cults (Changing 1903), etc. Conversely, the rep‑ resentatives of another approach, point out that manipulation acquired its status only during the formation of industrial society (Limnatis 2000: 31). The division of labour and stratification of society played an important role there (Babiuk 2004: 128). The third approach links the emergence of manipulation not so much with the development of social forms of life as with domination and subjugation. For instance, Ortega y Gasset writes about the need for a spiritual dictatorship. Most people have no opinion. People have only value judgments … But without opinions, human society would be chaos, even more so, “historical nothingness”, so opinions “must be squeezed into people under pressure from the outside, like lubricating oil into a machine”. (Knyazeva 2010: 220–221) Such pressure is a manipulative influence, which becomes a forced practice of interaction. This role of management as a tool for “overcoming irrationality” through the actualisation of “correct” and “rational” behaviour as conceived by leaders is noted by many Chinese sociologists, in particular Zhao Lili and Qiu Xihua (Zhao 2005: 85–88). In some cases, the obligatory manipulative function is attributed not only to the management process as such but also to the sciences that study it. For example, Yuan Shaoqing and Tao Wenjun point out that a Marxist sociology of governance should, based on human needs and motives, through the coordination and control of social groups and interpersonal relations in governance, stimulate and induce human behaviour, prevent and correct irrational modes of action, and eliminate factors that hinder the implementation of governance goals. (Yuan 1987: 58–61) In addition to the three approaches mentioned above, one more concept should be highlighted, according to which manipulation in the activities of leaders is spread through the media in the information society (Chernikova 2015: 141–144). Sociologists from different countries and ori‑ entations associate a new stage in the development of manipulative practices with the widespread use of the media as a means of control by those in power: “Radio programmes and advertising are replacing intimidation and violence” (Kara‑Murza 2005: 35). The aim of manipulation through the mass media can be described as the introduction of certain attitudes into the subconscious of people and the formation of behaviour patterns. If we consider the practices of manipulative interaction at the micro level, then at the organisa‑ tional level they arose from the earliest forms of interaction between managers and subordinates. With the transformation of forms of ownership and the emergence of new types of interaction of labour relations, the nature of the manipulative influence of organisational leaders has also changed. Manipulative practices in the activities of managers are especially widespread in modern information (digital) societies. 139

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Manipulative Practices of Managers as an Object of Sociological Analysis The concept of manipulation is used both in everyday and scientific sense. The word “manipula‑ tion” has Latin roots “manus”, which originally meant “hand, handful” (Shanskiy and Bobrova 2004); i.e. originally, manipulation meant a certain action with the hands, as a trick or fraud. So today the term “manipulation” is mostly also perceived negatively at the everyday level. The ety‑ mology of another word – management – is also associated with the concept of a hand. As sources indicate, the Italian “maneggiare” (“to manage; to touch with hands”) also goes back to the Latin manus “hand” (Etymology 2023). Thus, manipulation and management, both conceptually and substantively, are connected with the activities of leading people. The Chinese terms are similarly comparable, only in a different, ideographic key: thus, the sign of “hand” (扌) is present as a semantic sign both in the first hieroglyph of the lexical unit with the meaning of “manipulation” (操纵) and in the first hieroglyph of the word “management” (控制). In the sociological encyclopaedia, manipulation is understood as a way of social influence on people through various economic, political, social media and mass media. At the same time, the purpose of such influence is considered to be the imposition of certain ideas, values, forms of behaviour, etc. (Manipulation 2009). The main areas of study of manipulation in sociology include the following: (1) manipulation of public opinion and public consciousness (Dotsenko 2003; Kara‑Murza 2005; Sheynov 2006; Chaldini 2012; Gorin 2013: 120–126); (2) manipulation in mass media (Malyukova 2011: 105–109; Chernikova 2015: 141–144; Lisova 2015: 52); (3) ma‑ nipulation technologies in the political sphere (Gorin 2013: 120–126); (4) manipulation practices in pedagogy (Gudina 2011: 14–21); manipulation in organisations (Nuridzhanov 2013).

Distinctive Social Features of Managers’ Manipulative Practices as an Object of Sociological Research As an object of sociological research, manipulative practices have a number of distinctive char‑ acteristics which lie in the special relationship between the subject and the object of manipulation and are conditioned by the regularities of the social order. They can be combined into several groups. Firstly, the manipulative practices of managers take place in an environment of direct contact, and therefore in sociology they should be considered as a special form of interpersonal interac‑ tion (Kuptsov 2004: 91–106). This distinguishes the sociological interpretation of the concept from pedagogical, managerial and other definitions which traditionally emphasise the one‑sided nature of manipulation: as “impact” (management, pedagogy), “influence” (psychology, political science) or “use” (economics). Society is a unified holistic system of connections and interactions (Weber 1990), and management, according to Chinese principles, becomes more effective if the manager allows the organisation’s employees to “maintain morale and a sense of success in their work” (Hu 1995: 14–21). Secondly, the study of theoretical sources in sociology shows that manipulation involves the exclusion (circumvention) of consciousness and disregard for the interests and values of others, which is defined as its essential characteristic. On the contrary, we believe that the sociological understanding of manipulation cannot ignore the interests and values of people. It is obvious that at least in all manipulative interactions there are always two facets of social consequences that can be characterised as “functional” and “dysfunctional”, depending on the value bases of the partici‑ pants’ actions. In Chinese sociology, for example, the value bases of management are one of the

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key issues studied by researchers (Gong 2014). All this requires an interdisciplinary approach in the study of the value base of managers’ manipulative practices. Thirdly, the sociological understanding of manipulation should orient the definition of this category in relation to the goals that the manager‑manipulator invents for the addressee and seeks to embed them in the addressee’s psyche (Dotsenko 2003). Relying on the concepts of interpretive sociology, we classify the manipulative practices of leaders as an ideal type of social action – purposive action (Coleman 2004: 35–44). According to the main provisions of Weber, purposive‑­ rational action is an individual’s action oriented on the expectation of certain behaviour of other people and the state of objects of the external world, as well as rational regulation of goals, means and side effects of one’s own behaviour designed to achieve success (Weber 1990). In other words, in purposive‑rational action, the subject of social action realises his goal, rationally determines the means to achieve it (Kultygin 2004: 27–36) and correlates his own behaviour with the desired and possible reactions of other people. The criterion of the effectiveness of such action is the achieve‑ ment of success, which fully applies to the activity of a manager as well (Zhang 1987). Finally, the manipulative practices of managers in sociology should be seen as practices of cov‑ ert and overt interaction. Modern researchers predominantly consider the covert nature of manipu‑ lation, while the object acts as a “victim” of such control. Many authors dealing with the topic of manipulation refer to the works of Sheynov (Sheynov 2006; 2007; 2009) and equate the concepts of “manipulation” and “covert management”. Covert control is such an influence of the initiator on the addressee, when the addressee makes decisions and performs the actions conceived by the initiator without feeling the impact (Sheynov 2006). Thus, manipulative practices of managers should be understood in sociology as socially condi‑ tioned interactions between the initiator (manager) and the object of organisational relations (sub‑ ordinates), in which various means are explicitly or implicitly used to achieve the organisational goals of the initiator, while the goals and values of the object of interaction may not be taken into account. This can effect changes in the structure of relations, potentially with both positive and negative consequences.

Manipulative Practices of Managers in Chinese Organisations Using the concept of “practices”, we emphasise the habitual, i.e. more or less common forms of manipulation in the activities of managers, which combine specific techniques, methods and tac‑ tics. This is important to note, because in the literature, there is often a synonymisation of the types of manipulative influence of managers, i.e. its techniques, methods and tactics. In our opinion, ma‑ nipulation techniques should be interpreted as specific actions or methods of manipulation (there are many such specific actions). For example, it can be the use of terms and concepts unfamiliar to the subordinate; influencing the emotions of others; creating the impression of short deadlines for faster achievement of the organisation’s goals; emphasising the uniqueness and unexpectedness of the upcoming work; regular exposure to significant areas of the organisation’s activity; break‑ ing the task into parts (when only part of the necessary information is presented to employees); taking out of context‑specific information about the content of the upcoming work; modifying the information in accordance with one’s own opinion (mixing facts and the leader’s opinion); referring to authority when setting goals for activities; and highlighting stereotypes and generally accepted patterns of behaviour in similar situations (Kara‑Murza 2005). The specific manipulation techniques described below allow managers to unobtrusively programme the minds of the organi‑ sation’s employees in the desired direction.

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Manipulation techniques and methodologies can include a combination of the specific manipu‑ lation techniques described earlier and manipulation steps arranged in a specific sequence. Such techniques can effectively programme or control the behaviour of an organisation’s personnel over a period of time. For example, a set of manipulations that make it less painful to build relationships when changing the management structure of an organisation or reducing staff. Rather, manipulation tactics can be represented as a line or trajectory of using manipulation techniques and methods. Tactics can, for example, be characterised as harder or, conversely, softer manipulation. Manipulative practices are the most generalised concept and in this case are understood as a set of sustained manipulative techniques, methods and tactics that are most often used by managers and develop into a manipulative experience that is established and based on the positive results of management and in conscious goal‑setting aimed at programming and controlling the activities and behaviour of employees. Based on our review of works on managers’ manipulative practices (Smith 1999, 2011), we will try to systematise the main characteristics of these practices (Pavlova 2013, 16–45). To summa‑ rise, we can say that manipulative practices of managers are most consistently implemented in the process of various negotiations (Statsevich et al. 2007), both with employees of the organisation and with external agents, stakeholders, customers, suppliers and competitors: “The negotiation process is implemented in all those situations of interpersonal interaction in which interests are coordinated or clarified (mutually or unilaterally)” (Grachov and Melnik 2004). Alternatively, we can say that manipulation is primarily relevant in typical managerial situations and communica‑ tions. There is a certain stereotypical feature of such manipulations, irrespective of the specific situation in which the interaction takes place. Specific manipulative techniques (to be described below) vary only slightly in standard situations. In particular, the manager’s manipulative prac‑ tices may not change in situations of hiring personnel or exercising current control, regulating the work process, dealing with crises, dismissal, etc. In such different situations, the manager has to act traditionally, diagnosing the position of the subordinate, and then determining the “targets” of influence and using manipulation tactics to achieve the goals: asserting the authority of the leader, negotiating in crises, striving for loyalty and establishing a hierarchy of relations, achieving discipline and obedience of subordinates and constitutionalising the boundaries of authority and responsibility (Grachov 2003). There are some consistent characteristics in the manipulative practices of Chinese managers, which are based on the following manipulation techniques – stratagems of programming and con‑ trol over subordinates, which adequately reflect the general management system in China. It is the stratagem thinking of the Chinese, as well as Confucianism and the peculiarities of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as a state, which form the Chinese national style of conducting any ex‑ ecutive negotiations (Lewis 2013). Generalisations, i.e. the unification of certain phenomena into a general category, in most cases has a positive connotation (Odintsova 2010). In the case of Chinese managerial engineering of the mind, the supervisor tries to treat the object of his influence in a benevolent manner, e.g. by saying “my friends”, as it is important for the Chinese to maintain and develop a “spirit of friendship” and to establish informal relationships with partners (Papulova 2015). Reference group. Consider the following examples in combination with compliments: empha‑ sising the importance of the employee’s actions in the eyes of the team (“Everyone in the company sees how well you perform the task”), indicating a high assessment of the employee’s actions in the eyes of the manager (“I personally appreciate the fact that you completed the assigned tasks

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so well”). Here, in addition to compliments, we see a referral to different reference groups. The effectiveness of such practices in China is largely due to the collectivist social orientation of the Chinese in general and management in particular: the average Chinese seeks to create strong social ties – guanxi (关系) and seeks social approval (Song 2009). Labelling. This practice refers to abusive language and metaphorical expressions (Hovland et al. 1957) such as “insiders”/“outsiders” (自己人/圈外人) in combination with other manipu‑ lation techniques and is aimed not at humiliation but at receiving feedback after manipulation ­(Nikitina 2019). The boss would offend the subordinate only if the technique is used incorrectly, which is why the manager must be very skilful in combining it with other techniques. For example, if a Chinese employee is directly or indirectly labelled as an “outsider”, he feels outside the group, loses a sense of security and self‑confidence and will try to get into the circle of “insiders”. Appeal to authority, implying an urgent need to listen to the opinions of leaders, authorities and superstars. By referring to them, the leader reinforces his arguments, thereby giving them more credibility in the eyes of the object of manipulation (Hogan 2007). In Chinese society, which tends to be ethatist dominated (Dou 2014), it is preferable to refer to past and present political leaders. “Your guy”. Employees in Chinese organisations identifying with the group carry a positive charge (Arsenieva 2013). Thus, it is important for Chinese managers to present themselves as one of them. Sun Tzu advises: “Be like an innocent girl first – and the adversary will open the door for you” (Sun 2020); this is one way to gain favour. One of the common ways in which a Chinese leader interacts with subordinates is that the director, for all his undeniable power and authority, must maintain a patronisingly gentle and cordial attitude towards his subordinates, constantly apologising and thanking them for their labours (Zeng 1981). “The common carriage”. This technique emphasises belonging to the same group, community and social class. Here there is a connection between oneself and the group, for example, using the pronoun “us”: “You and I want us to have more visitors, so that our institution brings people only pleasant experiences” (Nuridzhanov 2013). In Chinese, the use of “inclusive we” (咱们, “you and I”) to reinforce the connection with the object of influence instead of the “exclusive we” (我们, “we”) may serve as a marker of this manipulation practice. This practice can be applied in China primarily because the spirit of harmony and shared success is the first priority in Chinese organisa‑ tions (Gao 1993). Multiplicity. In this case, information from the leader comes quickly and in multiple directions, he presents information in a large stream and/or abruptly changes the direction of his decisions (Sheynov 2006). In an excessive flow of information from the manager, the employee does not have time to notice when the manager’s arguments become weak or inappropriate and therefore can agree with them and start to act as the manager wants. It is also called the “Siege of Wei to save Zhao” (Senger 2004) (according to one of the traditional stratagems), i.e. to change the direction of the offensive in a direction unexpected for the opponent. Some researchers also attribute this strategy to the features of the Chinese worldview, which gravitates towards a holistic perception of reality (Malyavin 2013). Taunting. The Chinese do not like to be the object of taunting when it threatens them to “lose face”. Thus, the employee will avoid possible ridicule and try to please the manager. The effec‑ tiveness of this technique lies in the fact that it affects the internal mental processes and acts on the subconscious (Mordachev 2007). Becoming an object of taunting, the worker also becomes vulnerable to external psychological influences. Unlike the techniques where harsh and rude ex‑ pressions are used openly, a playful form of ridicule is not accepted with hostility by the object of manipulation due to its milder form of influence. In addition, in the practice of communication

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between the leaders and employees of a Chinese organisation, it is not allowed to ridicule (1) the politics, the political system of the PRC; (2) parents; (3) mentors (teachers); (4) food; (5) intimate relationships; (6) drug addiction; (7) law enforcement officials, etc. (Kosinova 2013: 675–676). Compliment. Praise produces a pleasant effect at any stage of human interaction. A subtle and skilful compliment is a typical example of manipulative influence. Such manipulative techniques are less commonly used in managerial practice, since the Chinese are generally more cautious about the use of compliments. In Chinese culture, compliments could also have a negative con‑ notation (could be seen as a kind of bribery, which is condemned). Therefore, managers are more likely to pay compliments to those who are older or have a higher social status (Ren 2019). Small concessions, favours. This manipulative technique has a positive effect if used systemati‑ cally (Grachev 2003). The condition for manipulation is the dismissal of employees from work a little earlier, the absence of financial punishment for breaking dishes, forgiveness tardiness and other “favours” that the Chinese leader gives to his subordinates instead of the harsh direct punish‑ ment that may follow. By accepting such benevolent favours, the employee is put in the position of a “debtor”. Reciprocity in relationships, the mutual exchange of “favours”, including within the framework of hierarchical relations, is one of the main features of relationships in organisa‑ tions (Malyavin 2007). Thus, Chinese sociologist Jia Yuijiao believes that a manager’s benevolent behaviour carries a significant resource due to the traditional significance of the concept of “Ren”, “humanity” (仁, the researcher points out that the character is a compound of two simple signs: “person” and “two”, i.e. “two people”, “people together”, “connection between people”) (Jia 2010). In doing so, the strictly hierarchical Chinese who develop tacit obedience tend to become dependent on a “kind”, “understanding” leader. Template phrases. The use of such phrases in the manipulative practice of Chinese leaders is due to the fact that the object of influence does not think about the exact meaning of the phrase, does not perform logical operations to analyse it, but perceives it as confirmation and reinforce‑ ment of the manipulator’s statement (Albertych 2018). In Chinese practice, pattern phrases are not only slogans, proverbs and signs, and set expressions but also lists of status characteristics of a person: Mr., Madam, Engineer, Director, etc. (Shardakov 2010). Implied choice. This technique is used in a situation where the leader expects a subordinate to make a decision or take an action for the sake of manipulation (Pustovoitova 2016). For example, the supervisor offers the target “non‑alternative” options: “Either you clean the kitchen now, or you stay at work for the night” (Senger 2004). Dosage of background information. In this case, the background information is presented, first, in parts, e.g. when hiring, the manager verbally describes all the job responsibilities of his subor‑ dinates, indicating that they are all recorded in writing, but, coincidentally, the list could not be printed before the start of negotiations (Grachov and Melnik 2004). In general, dosed communica‑ tion is highlighted as an essential feature of interaction with Chinese managers (Galeeva 2013). This practice comes from the symbolic communication inherent in the ritual, which requires “looking at the signs to guess the essence”. This approach allows the manager to hide information about which the employee should guess and speculate and not ask directly (Malyavin 2013). Chi‑ nese businessmen explain this concept as follows: the art of managing people the Chinese way is to make workers guess what the manager has in mind: this puts them in a position where they are forced to please the boss (Redding 1996). Management of the discussion process. Discussion process management refers to the meth‑ ods of organisational manipulation (Parshukov 2020). The choice of the place and time of any dialogue between the manager and subordinates in the Chinese organisation is used as a kind of manipulation, in which the leader of the organisation wins (Leichenko 2007). When and under what 144

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circumstances the communication process will be structured has a direct impact on its success. In addition to choosing the time and place, researchers identify some other ways to manage the discus‑ sion process “with Chinese characteristics”: taking the initiative in determining the principles of ne‑ gotiations, exploiting the weaknesses of partners, imposing a sense of shame, etc. (Malyavin 2007). Referencing. The manipulative practice of “Referencing” involves the repetition by the man‑ ager of the position of the employee, which can be modified and transformed in the process of such retelling (Ksheminsky 2016). As numerous sources show, in Chinese culture, only the boss can make decisions, so abstracting the positions of subordinates by their immediate supervisor is con‑ sidered a stable norm (Palkin 2019). The “summary” technique can also be applied to “Referenc‑ ing” where the supervisor summarises the overall message, which also undergoes some changes and puts the right emphasis. Annoying the interlocutor. Annoyance is based on identifying weaknesses in a person (­Manipulation 2021). The principle of “management without action” (achieving maximum results with minimum effort (Anikina 2016)) implies restraint, which often leads to emotional irritation of the subordinate. One of the most common practices is delaying the resolution of important issues when it is unprofitable for the manager. In such situations, the patient wins, while time is more often on the side of the one who is higher in status. Impatience, irritability and excessive demands are perceived as weakness and inability to succeed in negotiations (Malyavin 2007). Self‑glorification. Self‑glorification is used as the opposite of taunting and labelling (Semi‑ zdralova 2012). The examples are “take my word for it”, “I have been in the field for years”, “ become a leader first, and then you can reason”, etc. In real management practice in China, this technique is not uncommon, despite the desire for modesty declared by Chinese culture. This practice is stimulated by another characteristic of the Chinese – the tendency towards hierarchical relationships (Laaksonen 1988) which leads to the automatic recognition that the leader is smarter and more talented than the subordinate. The use of unfamiliar words and terms. For China, the success of this practice is determined primarily by the “cult of an educated person”: such a person, by definition, has a higher status in society – when communicating with him, people with a lower level of education experience a depressing effect, aided by the use of terms and unfamiliar words. Unfamiliar words always put people in an awkward position; some clarify their meaning, while others do not want to seem ignorant or pretend that they know the meaning and nod their heads meaningfully (Malyukova 2011: 105–109). It is only clear that the technique has a psychological effect on the object of manipulation, and the feelings of shame, guilt, incompetence, and innocence make the object of manipulation more vulnerable. Avoiding unwanted discussions, breakdowns. This manipulative technique of manoeuvring dur‑ ing conversations with subordinates allows the leader to control the situation, steer it in the right direction and prevent it from developing in a way that the leader did not expect (Levin 2009). The supervisor can use this technique to resolve a conflict situation and prevent it from developing further. The phrase “That’s it, close the topic and get back to work” demonstrates mastery of the situation, authority and power. From the perspective of Chinese ethnoconsciousness, this also dem‑ onstrates the ability to prevent emerging conflicts – one of the most important qualities of a leader, which is highly valued by the Chinese who generally tend to avoid open conflicts (Yu 2011: 121). Question manipulation. Interrogative sentences are typical for any discussion (Lyubimov 2013). Among the manipulative questions, the following types can be distinguished: (1) Question‑­ repetition: Did you understand the task? Is there something you don’t understand about what I’m saying? (2) Use of counter questions: Tell me, will we have 13 salaries? – What do you think? (3) Questions that cannot be answered: Don’t you learn from your mistakes? (4) Non‑alternative 145

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question: You don’t want to leave tomorrow, do you? As the researchers note, interrogative forms of sentences in the practice of boss–subordinate relations in Chinese organisations have significant distinguishing features – limiting the topics of discussion, for example, uncomfortable questions from the manager about the employee’s personal life (Wang 2021). Comparison is used in different spheres of life (Brusenskaya and Belyaeva 2022). People are constantly being compared to others, some are set as an example and others are criticised as a re‑ sult of the comparison. However, in Chinese society, this is a largely more stable form of upbring‑ ing than in Western culture. Chinese people are compared from childhood to playground kids, classmates and older siblings, reflecting the importance of social ties and social status described above (Chu 2004). Comparison is an effective practice, because through it the Chinese identify themselves: from birth, the Chinese are involved in a network of interpersonal relationships that determines and organises their existence and controls their consciousness (Sun 2015). Negative comparisons with another more successful employee are a hint of “losing face” (丢脸, i.e. a de‑ crease in trust among colleagues and a decrease in opportunities to create useful social connec‑ tions). “Losing face” is one of the most frightening prospects in a Chinese person’s life, so an employee will do everything possible to avoid negative comparisons at work.

Non‑Verbal Manipulative Techniques In addition to verbal and organisational manipulative techniques (choice of the place and timing of the conversation), the non‑verbal sphere should be singled out (Pease and Pease 2006). The distinctive features of non‑verbal manipulation are described by a number of Russian and foreign researchers (Stepanenko 2012). Some consider the classification of techniques; others study ma‑ nipulation in a particular field of activity (Pavlova 2013: 359–383). The similarity of judgements lies in the high degree of significance of non‑verbal communication and manipulation techniques. The authors of The Definitive Book of Body Language (Pease and Pease 2006) note that 7% of any information is verbal (words and the meaning they convey), 38% is vocal (timbre of voice, pronunciation of words, articulation and loudness) and 55% is non‑verbal. This study shows that the first impression of a person is formed in four minutes and the interlocutors may not even have time to utter a sentence or two during this time. During this time, body language conveys from 60% to 80% of all information. It is noted that non‑verbal behaviour can be divided into several systems: acoustic, optical, tactile‑kinesthetic (touch) and olfactory (smells) (Larina 2013: 26–30). Each of these systems uses various manipulative techniques which are divided into sections such as kinesics (gestures, gesture movements), proxemics (distance between interlocutors), haptics (touch as a manipulative effect), optics and acoustic effects.

An Empirical Study of the Manipulative Practices of Chinese Leaders The empirical study was conducted in April–May 2022 to identify the attitudes of respondents from different social groups towards managerial manipulative practices. The random probability sample of the study was n = 1,472 respondents – representatives of different socio‑professional groups. The respondents – people aged 18 to 66 from different provinces of China – were asked to fill out an online questionnaire. The key indicators of the study were the characteristics of the respondents’ interaction with managers and the assessment of the socio‑psychological profile of managers. Statistical methods were used for data processing – calculation of the arithmetic mean on a five‑point ordinal scale. Ethical considerations were taken into account, and all participants gave informed consent. 146

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The respondents had to rate a total of 24 qualities, one of which was the ability to manipulate others. According to the data obtained, the role model of a positive Chinese leader should not have manipulative qualities compared to the other personality traits. Thus, of the 24 qualities of an exemplary leader, modesty (“should be modest”), authority (“the role model should not be overbearing”) and altruism (“the leader should be collectivist”) have a higher mean value than manipulative skills. This distribution indicates that, for the respondents, manipulative abilities are not a characteristic feature typical of a Chinese leader in an organisation (mean = 3.42). Recognition of the importance of manipulative qualities was significantly related to the re‑ spondents’ level of education: the higher the level of education of the respondents, the more this quality was inherent in the role model of the ideal manager. The self‑reporting of such qualities as important also increases with the level of education (average value: they have only a secondary education – 2.3; they are currently studying at a university – 2.5; they already have a university degree – 2.9). Moreover, in different professions, one can see some significant differences in the assessment of the role model for manipulation skills. Managers, economists and the military rate the quality of manipulation as a positive master role model higher than specialists in the humanities, engineering and medicine. The level of ability to manipulate is one of the characteristics that help to compare the positive and negative behavioural patterns of leaders (military –4.0/2.7; economists –3.5/2.7; managers –3.5/2.7). For representatives of the three professions under consideration, the ability to manage people, including the use of manipulative techniques, was the basis of their activities, which testified to the connection between manipulation and management. In contrast, those whom respondents considered to be poor managers were characterised as not being proficient in manipu‑ lation techniques. Employees of large companies attach more importance to a manager’s ability to manipulate others compared to employees of small companies or people with no work experience. In large companies, manipulation is more obvious than in small organisations. Also, those who work/have worked in large companies are more likely to consider their own ability to manipulate as an impor‑ tant quality than employees of small companies or individuals with no work experience. The ability to manipulate others is rated as an important quality depending on the presence of managerial experience: if it is available, manipulation is rated at 3.1 points out of 5; in the absence of managerial experience, manipulation is estimated at 2.3. In another pilot study conducted in July 2021 among young Chinese entrepreneurs (ages 21– 30, university degree, total n = 50 young entrepreneurs), the majority of respondents identified ma‑ nipulation as a negative quality. However, 42 respondents indicated that manipulation techniques can be used to achieve the overall good of the organisation, with 39 noting that manipulation negatively affects the nature of interactions in the workplace. We would like to emphasise that a negative attitude towards manipulative practices is expressed by young people who are going to work in a business environment in the future (Deriugin et al. 2020: 108).

Conclusion The results of the study showed that the scientific and everyday understanding of the role of ma‑ nipulative practices in the activities of managers of Chinese organisations differs significantly. In particular, our analysis of scientific publications suggests that, as Chinese society developed, the understanding of the role of manipulation in management has transformed from complete non‑recognition to the recognition of the importance of such technologies as well as numerous special studies and developments of manipulative practices. We have seen that the understanding 147

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of the manipulative practices of the manager of Chinese organisations is considered in academic research as an advantage and a virtue of his/her managerial activity. In particular, the researchers emphasise that such practices make management more flexible, adaptive and responsive to the characteristics of performers, carriers of a special Chinese culture. The main advantage of using manipulative practices in the managerial activities of the lead‑ ers of Chinese organisations is their unique property of bypassing consciousness – the use of manipulation as a “soft power” that has a corresponding effect on employees. The main problem associated with manipulation was and remains the moral side of the question: in what interests and purposes is this force used? In the conditions of post‑industrial (digital) society, manipula‑ tion is becoming more active, and its capabilities and means are becoming more sophisticated. The manipulative practices of Chinese managers are able to increase the motivational component in the activities of performers and form a special type of social relations, taking into account the personal characteristics of the head and employee of the organisation. There is an idea that a com‑ petent manager should be able to manipulate his wards, use certain manipulation strategies and practice them in everyday communication, relying on the knowledge of the specifics of Chinese morality and communication features. Books, articles, masterclasses and webinars teach how to master the tactics of such influence, focusing on positive management results. On the contrary, at the everyday level, among Chinese employees, a manager‑manipulator is often perceived as a deceiver, a liar who uses the best human qualities to his advantage. There is an increasing num‑ ber of publications about how to avoid influence, how to deal with manipulation and how not to “get hooked”. For the object of influence – the “victim” – recommendations and techniques are developed on how to resist such manipulative influence from the opposite sex, power structures, leadership, etc. The manipulative practices of Chinese managers from the point of view of sociology should be analysed as a special form of social interaction organised by managers as initiators of corpo‑ rate relations, in combination with economic, psychological, technological and other means in the interests of promoting corporate culture, certain ideas, values, etc., sometimes in opposition to the interests, goals and values of employees. Often these are technologies of hidden influence on people. The study presents the manipulative techniques of Chinese managers, which are of a habitual nature and have received their coverage (confirmation) not only massively in the practice of managerial work of Chinese managers but have also been analysed and described in articles, publications and other materials. The conducted empirical sociological research has confirmed a number of positions expressed in relation to the manipulative practices of managers. In general, the ability of Chinese leaders to manipulate is assessed by respondents as a negative quality. At the same time, the role of ma‑ nipulative abilities is recognised as important by respondents with a higher level of education: the higher the level of education, the more loyal attitude is expressed towards the manipulative practices of managers. More loyal to manipulation are those respondents who are themselves in‑ volved in the practice of private and public administration and have such experience (managers, economists, former military personnel). Respondents with humanitarian, medical and technical education are more critical of manipulative technologies. Those respondents who work in large companies are more likely to positively perceive the role of the manipulative practices of Chinese managers. As it becomes clear, the manipulative practices of the leaders of Chinese organisations are to a large extent a specific social engineering – a tool for implementing the leaders’ value worldviews, which largely determines the moral climate of Chinese organisations.

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Acknowledgment This research is funded by the Russian Science Foundation under grant no 24‑28‑01448.

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10 HUMOR AS A MIND‑ENGINEERING TOOL IN THE DIGITAL AGE The Case of Stand‑Up Comedy Joanna Ut‑Seong Sio and Luis Morgado da Costa

Introduction Humor is an effective discourse weapon against mainstream ideologies and has always been relied on to counter mainstream propaganda. Under the veil of playfulness, it introduces marginal and new angles in viewing the status quo. The New York stand‑up comedian Ted Alexandro has the following joke1 J.K. Rowling announced that the character Dumbledore is gay. Some people were outraged – couldn’t believe it. Really? You can’t believe he’s gay, but you can believe he’s a wizard? By contrasting an imaginary fantasy world entity with the existence of gay people in the real world, Ted Alexandro revealed the unconscious bias in mainstream media. Humor is good packaging for ideas because it arouses attention (Bryant and Zillmann 1989), stimulates engage‑ ment (Yeo et al. 2020), creates a bonding experience (via laughter) (Provine 2005, Terrion and Ashforth 2002), and can manipulate people’s perceptions/opinions (Quirk 2015). Dagnes (2012) cites a piece the late Christopher Hitchens wrote in October 2009 for The Atlantic, which states that Tina Fey’s merciless impression of Sarah Palin undid the possibility in people’s minds that Governor Palin could ever be a candidate as Vice President, showing that there is true swaying power behind humor: the laughter is real, and so is the damage. Quirk (2015) argues particularly that stand‑up comedy (SUC), being an accessible and popular art form, helps comedians to bring in non‑­mainstream views, challenging and re‑negotiating social norms. Quirk (2015:15) writes that joking is a ‘veil’ which allows an ever‑present counterculture to express its ‘deviant’ ideas (­citing Wertheim 1964:26); joking is like a weapon, ‘an important means of non‑violent resist‑ ance’ (­Zijderveld 1968:311). Comic license allows stand‑up comedians to speak their minds more freely, allowing them to persuade the audience to agree with ideas (which the audience might not agree with otherwise) temporarily to facilitate the smooth running of the performance and create a reference group (the audience) with the shared experience of being exposed to a certain view. The art form allows a more relaxed approach to truth and the everyday standard of decency, thus af‑ fording something akin to an ‘ideological playground’ for different ideas to be entertained (Quirk 2015). From the audience’s side, there is also strong motivation to pay close attention to what the comedians have to say. The audience wants to laugh and be entertained, and they must listen at‑ tentively to enjoy the punchlines. This provides an ‘in’ for the comedians to get people’s attention: 153

DOI: 10.4324/9781003289746-13

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the audience wants to listen carefully for their own benefits. The promise of laughter is the bait. Regarding the palatability of the more controversial comedy content, it has been suggested that the audience is less likely to scrutinize and counter‑argue against the information embedded in comedy, especially if it is delivered by a likable messenger (the comedian) (Nabi et al. 2007). It is within these favorable conditions that we believe SUC can function as a mind‑engineering tool. There is no clear definition of the term ‘mind‑engineering’ in the literature. A closely related term is ‘brainwashing’, which has a very forceful, politically inclined, and negative connotation. The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘brainwashing’ as [t]he systematic and often forceful elimination from a person’s mind of more established ideas, especially political ones, so that another set of ideas might take their place; this pro‑ cess regarded as the coersive conversion practiced by certain totalitarian states on political dissidents. (Taylor 2006:3) ‘Mind‑engineering’ is understood generally as a more neutral, not domain‑specific, and less force‑ ful term. To be precise, we define ‘mind‑engineering’ as a sophisticated attempt, drawing on knowledge, skills, or expertise, to manipulate the subjects’ perceptions/opinions/beliefs. SUC is a mind‑engineering tool in that the art form provides an excellent set‑up for mind‑engineering to take place. As a tool, SUC can also backfire, especially in the digital age. There have been cases where humor creates offense. A more recent case is Dave Chappelle’s Netflix Special The Closer (2021), in which he explores his own transphobia and has received backlash from the LGBTQ commu‑ nity. He commented that the people who are most angry at him are the ones who only hear his soundbites as opposed to the whole set.2 Jimmy Carr, a UK comedian with dark humor, recently mentioned that he probably has already told the joke that would end his career.3 It is on YouTube somewhere waiting to explode, like a landmine. Undoubtedly, the style and appreciation of humor change over time. What was considered acceptable decades ago might not be considered so nowa‑ days, but the change in the format of SUC in the digital age is also relevant. SUC is about mental manipulation. The stand‑up comedian manipulates the train of thoughts (e.g., sequence, content) of the audience to make them laugh at specific moments determined by the stand‑up comedian. SUC was traditionally a live performance, where the performer can manipulate a live and finite audience in a controlled environment with mostly prepared material and the performer can adjust the performance content along the way if necessary. It is now also a recorded entertainment piece where the clip can reach a much bigger audience by being listed on streaming platforms (e.g., Net‑ flix, Amazon Prime) or posted on social media platforms (e.g., YouTube, Instagram, TikTok). Such a shift of platforms is both a blessing and a curse: it has boosted the impact of SUC (its availability is no longer restricted by the time and space of the show, and its audience is no longer restricted to physical attendance); it has however also created possibilities where jokes/humorous content could be interpreted out of context by people who had no established rapport with the comedian. As such, the nature of stand‑up as a mind‑engineering tool is altered in the digital age: it has be‑ come more powerful as the audience size expands, and yet some of the properties that make it such a good tool are missing in these bite‑size clips. As a mind‑engineering tool, we are also interested in the question of whether there are topics that are too ‘much’ for the tool, whether stand‑up comedians think there is a limit in terms of the content matter of the art form when the offense would invariably outweigh the funniness.

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Against this background, this chapter focuses on SUC and explores the following three ques‑ tions: (i) Do stand‑up comedians consciously use the stand‑up platform to promote their own agendas (i.e., actively use SUC as a tool for mind‑engineering)? (ii) What are the advantages and drawbacks of disseminating SUC on digital platforms from the perspective of mind‑engineering? (iii) Are there topics that are off‑limit for such mental manipulation in SUC? We conducted an online survey. The survey was sent to 36 comedians based in 12 different countries (Australia:1, Austria:2, Germany:2, USA:1, Czech Republic:6, England:8, Hong Kong China:7, Poland:1, Malaysia:2, Scotland:1, Singapore:4, Canada:1). These are SUC practitioners of various levels who have access to a platform (to speak to the public in the setting of a comedy show) regularly. Among the group, there are stand‑up comedians who are professionals (20 of them do SUC for a living) and semi‑professionals (15 of them perform regularly for financial gain while keeping regular jobs). One of them does SUC as a hobby. Twenty‑four of them have performed SUC for more than seven years, and sixteen of them perform more than ten times a month. Twenty‑seven of them have their own one‑hour show, which is often used as a yardstick to distinguish the more experienced comedians from the beginners. In addition to questions related to the background of the comedians, the survey contains ten open‑ended questions, where comedians were asked about their opinions/practices on SUC. Stand‑up comedians who answered the survey were given the choice as to whether they wanted to remain anonymous or not. All of them have given their consent to use their comments for this chapter. In addition, we have conducted interviews with three profes‑ sional stand‑up comedians: Vivek Mahbubani (Hong Kong), Steve Lee (Hong Kong), and Sam See (Singapore). Our discussions will be structured around insights from the surveys and interviews. The chapter is structured as follows. The section ‘Stand‑Up Comedy’ provides background discussion on SUC as an art form, including its history, format, and the role of the audience. The section ‘Do Comics Consciously Use Stand‑Up as a Platform to Influence Others’ Opinions?’ dis‑ cusses comedians’ opinions on using SUC as a platform for mind‑engineering. The section ‘Online Clips vs. Live Performances’ discusses the advantages and drawbacks of disseminating SUC on digital platforms. The section ‘Off‑Limit Topics in SUC’ discusses whether comedians think there are limits to topics in SUC. We conclude the chapter in the section ‘Conclusion’.

Stand‑Up Comedy Stand‑up comedy (SUC) is a prominent form of entertainment nowadays. In addition to live SUC in physical venues, SUC is also streamed on major online platforms (Netflix, Amazon Prime, You‑ Tube, Instagram, TikTok, etc.). The expansion into the online sphere has increased the impact and reach of SUC but has also led to unexpected consequences as live SUC is interpreted outside the time, space, and context of the performance. These are issues we will discuss in this chapter, but before that, we will first provide some background information on this performance art, including its history, format, and the role of the audience.

What Is SUC? SUC includes the following main components (Double 2013) Personality: It puts a person on display in front of an audience, that person can be an exagger‑ ated comic character or a version of the performer’s own self. Direct communication: It involves direct communication between the performer and the audi‑ ence (a two‑way communication).

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In the present: It acknowledges the performance situation. The stand‑up comedian is duty‑bound to incorporate events in the venue into the act (e.g., the ringing of a mobile phone or someone laughing or clapping at an unexpected time). The inability to do so will result in the audi‑ ence losing faith in the performer. The ‘personality’ component is an important one. It sets apart a stand‑up joke from an ­internet joke: a stand‑up joke has a personality behind it. Becoming a stand‑up comedian in‑ volves ­building and shaping/fine‑tuning this personality (his/her stage persona) – which can include adopting certain political views, stances on important societal issues, and many others. Of course, this stage persona needs not to be aligned with the comedian’s actual views and beliefs (although it often is). This brings great importance to the matter of mind‑engineering: when a comedian (especially famous ones) has earned the trust of a large following of fans with whom rapport is built and accumulated through many performances, this large following of fans let themselves be open to new views and ideas expressed by the comedian, the fans also often expect the comedian’s views to be consistent across performances. Several well‑established stand‑up comedians have also become hosts for comedic news shows (e.g., John Oliver, Stephen Colbert, Trevor Noah, or Samantha Bee), where comedy, news, and political commentaries are merged (what Baym 2005 called ‘discursive integration’). In these programs, the persona of the host comedian is usually politically aligned, and comedy (e.g., satire and parody) is used to undermine certain beliefs or political views. More people are learning about news and politics via comedic talk shows (Baym 2005). This again suggests that ingesting humor into the dissemi‑ nation of news and political matters makes them more palatable/consumable and shows the po‑ tential of comedians in shaping political discourse. One should note, however, that even though these hosts began their careers as stand‑up comedians, comedy news shows are not typical SUC. Regular stand‑up performances are different from comedy news shows/entertainment political commentaries in several ways. In addition to a more elaborate set‑up (e.g., live bands, light‑ ing, staging), limited direct interaction with the audience, and inclusion of different segments (e.g., interviews), a major feature of comedy news shows/entertainment political commentaries (e.g., The Daily Show, The Colbert Report) is political satires. They frame political and social issues in ways that resemble how the public discusses these issues in their daily lives, with jokes and humorous remarks (Faina 2013). While the goal of SUC is to make people laugh (content not limited to social and political issues), these shows (although written by many writers) aim to present a political stand by using humor, a form of public journalism, ‘the humorous content of both Stewart and Colbert enables a characterization of their shows as an extension of public journalism anchored in political satire’ (Faina 2013:546).

Basic Structure of Stand‑Up Performances Stand‑up performances can be of various lengths. It can range from an open‑mic performance of a sheer three min to an hour special, or anything in between. Comedians accumulate material as they progress in the art form. A single performance (of various lengths) can be referred to as a set. A bit is a unit of discourse containing several jokes around a certain theme, e.g., relationship. A joke is a unit of discourse containing the set‑up and the punchline(s). A punchline is an utterance after which the comedian would expect a laugh. It is possible that there can be multiple punchlines after the set‑up. A set can be thought of as a sequence of bits:

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(1) [SET [BIT.A [jokeA1, jokeA2…]], [BIT.B [jokeB1, jokeB2…]], [BIT.C…], …] There are many ways a comedian can arrange the bits in his or her set in a performance. Many comedians adhere to the rule ‘open strong, end strong’: placing your best jokes at the beginning and the end of the set. One of the motivations to ‘open strong’ is to earn the audience’s trust in your ability to make them laugh; once the comedian has won the audience over with a few laughs, the audience will be willing to be led and be open to other ideas of the comedian. Ending strong creates a high at the end of the performance, making the performance more memorable and creat‑ ing the moment in which the comedian can exit in laughter and claps. Bits can also be connected thematically and arranged purposefully with variations in lengths to avoid being monotonous. In addition to pre‑scripted bits, a set often contains ‘improvised’ content, which is used when the performance deviates from the scripted content for various reasons, e.g., when responding to the audience’s heckling. Improvisation is also needed when stand‑up comedians do ‘crowd work’, which is talking directly to the audience for various purposes, e.g., to act as a transition between bits and to engage the audience to heighten the mood and get their attention. Comedians might also adjust their material on the spot if they sense that the audience is not receptive to the material they have prepared. The audience appreciates stand‑up comedians’ ability to think and generate funny remarks on the spot. These non‑scripted interactions, if they go well, can establish rapport between the comedian and the audience.

The Role of the Audience SUC is neither a monologue nor a theater play. There is no fourth wall. It is a two‑way commu‑ nication. The comedian tells a joke; the audience responds, mostly by laughing. There are also times when the comedian elicits verbal answers or contributions from the audience (e.g., to cheer or to clap), but audience responses are always cued by the comedian. The positive response of the audience informs the comedian that the set is going well; the lack of laughter/responses indicates something is amiss; e.g., the jokes are not funny, the jokes are too offensive/considered bad taste, the audience is tired because the show has been going on for too long, etc. During the pandemic when physical shows were not possible (mainly from 2020 to 2022), some comedians resorted to doing online shows. Even though all three components (personality, direct communication, in the present) are technically present, several features that are in live shows are missing. First, there is often a longer lapse of time between the delivery of the punchline and the triggered laughter, and that unexpected gap of silence often throws comedians off, as they expect the laughter to come faster (as in live shows). Second, the laughs from the audience members might be slightly mis‑ aligned due to unstable internet connections, which lessens the effects of the laughing audience, not to mention some people will have both their cameras and microphones turned off. Further‑ more, the comedian cannot catch the eyes of the audience. There is a lack of direct eye contact. It is hard for the comedian to manipulate responses and timing, and the audience doesn’t feel like they are being talked to directly (even if technically they are). In addition, the online setting makes it easier for the audience to disengage because there is less of a feeling of being in a group that laughs together. There is no bonding experience. The lesser degree of engagement in these online shows makes it much less satisfying for both the comedian and the audience. Going back to physical shows, in addition to regular performances, comedians test their jokes in events called open‑mic nights. Audiences of open‑mic nights are aware that jokes performed on

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these occasions are not polished and might not be kept further for future shows and are generally even more open and forgiving regarding the content/funniness of the jokes. Even though an SUC performance is a testing ground for non‑mainstream ideas/opinions, the audience must permit its content. The permission is granted by laughter. The laughter indicates to the comedian that it is safe to proceed further. When there is none, this is also a cue, a cue for the comedian to adjust, if possible; if the situation is not rectified, it can turn into a disaster. One extreme example can be found during a performance by Michael Richards (who played Cosmo Kramer on the hit TV show ‘Seinfeld’) in 2006 at the Laugh Factory in West Hollywood. When being heckled, Richards verbally bullied the heckler with racial slurs. The situation esca‑ lated. Richards went into a rage. Ultimately some audience members walked out of the show.4 It was mentioned in the Guardian post that ‘the audience became confused, uncertain whether the extreme language was part of Richards’ act. Some laughed at the comments, but, as the attacks from the stage continued, there were gasps and some voices could be heard expressing disbelief’. The incident is interesting in two different ways. The most obvious take is that, even in a comedy setting, where social norms are less strictly upheld, not everything is passable. It is also interest‑ ing to see that some audience members were laughing at the racial slurs in the beginning, thinking they were part of the performance, but once it was clear that these outbursts were not part of the show, the atmosphere became tense. This shows that, at least for some audience members, the line of acceptability shifts depending on whether a certain comment is embedded in a ‘comedy performance’ setting or not.

Do Comics Consciously Use Stand‑Up as a Platform to Influence Others’ Opinions? In the 2015 Atlantic article ‘How Comedians Became Public Intellectuals’, Megan Garber men‑ tioned that, for some performers (she focuses specifically on Amy Schumer), their jokes do not treat humor as an end in itself but as a vehicle for making a point.5 In our survey, when asked the question of whether SUC can be used as a tool to influence others’ opinions, 30 (out of 36) comedians think it can. When asked whether they make conscious use of SUC to influence other people’s views on issues that are important to them, however, only 14 of them replied yes. A fe‑ male comedian from Malaysia replied that she uses her comedy to promote the image of a happy single woman and normalize healthy sex talks, something that is taboo in the region. Radu Isaac (a Romanian comedian living in the UK) mentioned that ‘I think it is used in that direction. It’s probably mainstream enough now that most stand‑up is just piling on to whatever the mainstream direction might be’, suggesting that some comedians are simply riding the tide rather than present‑ ing new views. Others replied, e.g., ‘No. It’s not a TED talk.’; ‘No. I just want people to have fun at the shows!’, and interestingly, Jack Holmes (a British comedian living in Austria) replied, ‘Not really, I’ve tried doing opinion pieces in the past and they have never really landed the way I want them to, so I tend to stick to real life stories’. This echoes the point made in Chattoo (2019:18), ‘[Comedy’s] influential muscle comes from its ability to entertain and absorb us into the humor itself – it won’t work for audiences who know they are being “messaged to” through only mildly funny material’. This suggests that, where mind‑engineering is concerned, if the audience believes it is being manipulated, the trust could be broken. Vivek Mahbubani is a stand‑up comedian from Hong Kong. As an Indian growing up in Hong Kong, he is fluent in Cantonese but ‘was’ often treated as an outsider despite being 100% local. He insisted on using ‘was’, as he thinks, due to his comedy work and increased publicity, most people

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now recognize him and treat him as a local. When asked whether he used SUC as a platform to raise awareness of minorities or on diversity issues in Hong Kong, he said his materials are based on his life experience and he doesn’t try to ‘preach’. His job is a comedian, and he focuses on being funny. Mahbubani has a joke which depicts an encounter between him, and a Hong Kong police officer. In the story, the policeman read his Hong Kong identity card, saw his beard and his brown skin, and misaddressed him as ‘Mohammad’ (instead of Mahbubani), with a stress on the [‑d] at the end of the word, making it sound like the past tense of a verb. It is possible that his audience would interpret his joke as promoting different opinions (e.g., stereotyping of Middle Eastern–looking people, low English proficiency of the Hong Kong Police force), but that would not be his intention. All he did was recount a single experience that he found funny. However, he added that even though he didn’t do it consciously to spread and promote certain opinions, he does reflect on his content very often and realizes there are certain mindsets that he embraces which are often present in his SUC routine. Similarly, many comedians have jokes that touch on social issues, but they might not always have the conscious intention to ‘preach’. Jim Jefferies has a bit on ‘gun control’ in his 2014 show Bare, where he said (transcription taken from his interview for the Malaysian magazine, The Vibe): There is one argument and one argument alone for having a gun, and this is the argument … ‘F**k off. I like guns’. It’s not the best argument, but it’s all you’ve got. And there’s nothing wrong with it. There’s nothing wrong with saying, ‘I like something. Don’t take it away from me’. But don’t give me this other bulls**t. The main one is, ‘I need it for protection. I need to protect me. I need to protect my family’. Really? Is that why they’re called assault rifles? Is it? I’ve never heard of these ‘protection rifles’ you speak of. In a recent interview with the Malaysian magazine The Vibes, Jim Jefferies was asked about this particular joke. After the success of the ‘gun control’ joke, some people accused Jefferies of turn‑ ing into the kind of comedian who aims to get social justice messages across in their performances. In the interview, Jim Jefferies dismissed the claim and emphasized his view that ‘a comedian’s job is, ultimately, to entertain’.6 Australian Hannah Gadsby released her comedy special ‘Nanette’ in 2018, where she shares personal stories about being a lesbian. She also discusses how she thinks using deprecating humor to present important issues would ultimately trivialize these issues. She mentions that comedy relies on building up tension and then releases such tension by ending with a punchline. In the second half of her show, she tells the true version of one of her stories presented earlier, but she doesn’t release the tension by ending it with a punchline, to illustrate the tension that the LGBTQ community faces every day. The show was wildly successful, but it has also drawn discussion as to whether the show was indeed a comedy show (given that there are quite a few uncomfortable moments in the show which are not funny at all and are meant to invite the audience to reflect on the seriousness of different social issues), or it should have been billed as performance art or a lecture.7 Steve Lee is a stand‑up comedian currently based in Hong Kong (having previously performed in the US). His SUC is centered on his experiences on both continents dealing with racism and liv‑ ing with disabilities (he suffers from amyoplasia congenita). He thinks that joking about disability is a way to exert control over the way people think about disability. It is a way of empowerment for him, which he didn’t expect in the beginning, a form of healing for himself. He thinks the bot‑ tom line is still that he is a joker; he needs to be funny. Whether he can change people’s minds is

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beyond his control. He also mentions that trying too hard is not funny. This is echoed in Cline and Kellaris (1999), who wrote that, for comedy to be a successful vehicle for persuasion in service of a serious social issue, it can’t be seen as trying too hard to explicitly persuade. Sam See is a stand‑up comedian from Singapore. He is the only openly gay comedian in Sin‑ gapore. Homosexuality for males and females had only been officially legalized in 2022. Prior to that, same‑sex sexual activities between males were de jure illegal. See admits that, in his comedy, albeit only occasionally, he tries to promote equality for the LGBTQ community. When he is do‑ ing his LGBTQ material, he tries to keep it light‑hearted, genuine, and not immune to criticism (in the sense that he would also make fun of LGBTQ people. For example, he has a bit on how gay people are not nice to trans people). He thinks that, by talking about LGBTQ issues, he is bring‑ ing the public more understanding of the LGBTQ community. It has been shown that exposure to positive, humorous entertainment portrayals of minority groups can decrease individuals’ levels of prejudice toward those groups (Schiappa et al. 2005). See also believes that, to be successful in SUC, it is important not just to be funny but also to have opinions on important social issues, so as to stay ‘relevant’. He thinks it has the consequence that some comedians are holding strong opinions for the sake of having strong opinions, as a mar‑ keting strategy rather than a genuine interest and it is not easy to tell the difference. In our survey, when asked about Jimmy Carr commenting that he probably has already told the joke that would end his career, six of the comedians had the opinion that it is all just very clever marketing. When asked whether SUC may trivialize social issues, Mahbubanhi, Lee and See all think that even though using humor to present social issues might lose some of the nuance, the payoff is more exposure/accessibility of such issues and new perspectives. People who normally aren’t interested in/aware of these issues will be lured to the show by the promise of laughter. Vivek further com‑ mented, concerning his joke about being stopped by the police that ‘in a way it opens people up to discuss the issue of racial profiling’. He also mentioned another joke that he has: I joke about how it’s ‘illegal’ to use the terms ‘Ah Cha’ [a Cantonese derogatory term to describe an Indian person] and even ‘Gwailo’ [a Cantonese derogatory term to describe a Caucasian] because of the racial discrimination ordinance … and how it’s a shame because so many expats may have spent a long time perfecting the tone of ‘Gwailo’ and now they can’t say it anymore. He was not inviting people to trivialize the issues. He was just presenting his point of view and what he found interesting. He only opens the box; the audience is welcome to dig deeper if they wish. To sum up, the nature/format of SUC has made it an excellent mind‑engineering tool. Humor has a normalizing effect, reducing taboos, shaping new narratives, and opening conversations. The intimate setting in a stand‑up environment (live shows) where the comedians talk directly to the audience creates an illusion of authenticity. Stand‑up comedians from minority groups (be it racial, physical, or sexual) use the platform to articulate their identities and (re‑)shape narratives that are either unavailable or different from mainstream media (Gilbert 2017). On the contrary, in addition to that, not all stand‑up comedians might have an agenda to pursue, many comedians think the goal of SUC is to entertain and the content (be it on social issues/slapstick/pun, etc.) is simply the tool. On the other end of the spectrum, there are comedians like Hannah Gadsby who have messages to pass. Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette (on being a woman, on being gay, on homophobia, and on mi‑ sogyny) and the subsequent Douglas (on autism, on chauvinism) are considered by some as a com‑ edy game changer. Similar to entertainment news shows, humor is used as a means to an end: the message is the key. To complicate the issue, some stand‑up comedians might also have alternative 160

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reasons (e.g., establishing an intellectual/edgy persona, virtue signaling, staying ‘relevant’ by adopt‑ ing mainstream views, or doing the exact opposite for marketing) for expressing strong opinions in their set. Changing people’s minds, if it is successful, is for some simply a by‑product.

Online Clips vs. Live Performances In our survey, 32 of the 36 comedians admit that they have put their own stand‑up clips on online platforms. With physical shows, SUC is limited to a physical audience at a particular time and space; with online presence, all time/space restrictions are off. Comedians often post online old material that they consider good, and they no longer use in shows, material that they are ready to ‘burn’. One comedian mentions that ‘I think we live in an age where we have no choice but to build an online presence if we are hoping to work as comedians’. Singapore stand‑up comedian Sam See thinks it is just the nature of the games. In addition to live shows, there have always been other ways to expand the audience bases via recordings, from audio comedy albums, clips on You‑ Tube, shows on Netflix/Amazon Prime, short clips on TikTok videos/Instagram videos/YouTube shorts, etc. It is the call of the era. One anonymous comedian commented that ‘unfortunately it seems like it’s the only way to get noticed these days, which leads to a lot of bad comedy being uploaded’. It is important to get publicity via these online channels and the exposure can attract the attention of bookers, who rely on the number of views, among other things, when deciding which comedians to book. If the video garners a large number of views, it will also garner comments. Some comedians also put clips where they discussed controversial issues online, because the more comments a video gets (be it positive or negative), the more likely it would be recommended by the platforms’ algorithm to other users. All online stand‑up clips are recordings from live stand‑up shows, rather than just recordings of a comedian telling jokes in front of the camera. This is because SUC requires audience participa‑ tion (as discussed in the section ‘The Role of the Audience’). On platforms like Netflix or Amazon Prime, whole comedy shows are commercially filmed/produced. Short clips from these shows are also available either as promotional material or by fans posting online. Comedians also upload short clips themselves to various online platforms (e.g., YouTube, TikTok, Instagram). We will focus mainly on shorter stand‑up clips (up to a few minutes in length). A major difference between live shows and online video clips is the lack of ‘context’ within which the clip was performed, and that might lead to misunderstanding of the clip. First, how receptive an audience is toward a joke depends substantially on how much the audience likes the comedian. Comedians cultivate that liking right from the beginning of the show; the leeway/trust they have gotten from the live audience would be missing in the online audience from the online clip. During a live show, the comedian is talking to the audience; when it’s online, the online audi‑ ence watches the comedian talking to the live audience. In a full comedy set, the bits are arranged in such a way that there can be a gradual build‑up from the milder to the more edgy in terms of material. The live audience has time to adjust and shift their boundaries. Furthermore, a specific joke can refer to previous content that was not included in the clip (a call‑back), which would also affect the full understanding of the joke. Two anonymous comedians made the following com‑ ments in our survey: Well‑crafted long sets developed a language of common understanding with the audience, which empowers jokes later in the set. Additionally, the comedian’s character and values become more and more established and breaking with that continuity can make powerful jokes in long sets that are lost when reduced to clips. 161

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You can very easily lose the context of the persona of a comedian. Irony or sarcasm can be built up over a longer set, to the point where a comedian could almost be talking exclu‑ sively in the opposites of what they really mean, and the crowd gets it, but take a 15 second clip of that and put it on TikTok, and all the context is gone. The build‑up of rapport between the audience and the comic can mean the audience’s baseline (on what is acceptable and what is not) can shift. In addition to not being able to access what happens prior, online audiences can’t access what happens later. It is possible that a comedian would say something outrageous, and then explain/justify the point later in the set, which is outside the clip. The comedy audience in a live performance is an ad‑hoc group. Whether a certain joke works or not also depends on the composition of the audience. Below is a quote from the stand‑up come‑ dian Dwayne Perkins (taken from Scarpetta and Spagnolli 2009): Some jokes don’t work for mixed crowds, you know? Say … I used to have a joke like when I talked about the slavery world: it works with black people, it works with all‑white people, but when they are together it’s uncomfortable ‘cause black people think you don’t say that before whites and white people are like, can you laugh at that? You know what I mean. So, sometimes some jokes will work all‑Black/all‑White but not all together. A Canadian comedian shared the following experience with us in the survey: Many times I have related personal experiences with trauma or my partner’s experiences and used them for illustrative benefits to coping, but the challenge can be that they need a long setup, and the positive message will be revealed in the surprise. […] I often joke about suicide, something very close to me and something I am passionate about reducing, particu‑ larly in groups with very high incidences. I have had a majority of positive shows with this, however once I had a show where someone brought to the show a 14‑year‑old girl whose dad killed himself, and when I talked about my own experiences I was cut off by shouts and interruptions. While I fully understand their reaction, it stopped me from getting to the positive revelation. And wrecked the show. I don’t blame myself for this, or them. It’s just an unfortunate event. And had I seen the child I wouldn’t have used such complex material, but I don’t ever expect children in a comedy room. The above shows that, even with the same joke, it might elicit different results depending on the composition of the audience. In online platforms, it is inevitable that some jokes will be interpreted in a way that is not intended, as the jokes are now open to all. Stand‑up comedians can adjust their content in live shows depending on the audience’s reaction and composition. In a line‑up show (where there are multiple performers), there is a compere. The compere has multiple functions such as warming up the audience, so they are ready for the show, talking to the audience and gathering information about the audience (which is for the benefit of the comedians in the line‑up), and doing jokes to see what preferences of the audience has (which is also for the benefit of the comedians in the line‑up): the compere’s interaction with the audience can inform the comedians of the preference and limit of the ‘crowd’. Compared to live performances, online clips are subject to a lot more scrutiny. In addition to the possibility of multiple viewing of the clips, depending on the platform, there is the possibility of

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discussion among online audiences in the comment section. In a live show, things move on and get forgotten. Online clips could be analyzed and criticized in ways that would not happen in live shows. Online clips provide exposure to a much bigger audience that transcends time and space. This is good news for comedians who use SUC to propagate certain views with respect to the scope of reach. However, the lack of context, opportunities for subsequent justification, and the exposure of the clips to the audience outside the show setting (who have not interacted with the comedian, thus the lack of rapport) might lead to misinterpretation of the intended messages of the comedians. Comedians, especially those who hope to use SUC as a tool for mind‑engineering, would need to pay attention to these differences and select their clips carefully to avoid misunderstanding.

Off‑Limit Topics in SUC Since there is the possibility of jokes being misconstrued in the online context, and nowadays most comedians post their clips online for promotion purposes (or posted by their audience members), individual comedians’ stance toward a certain social‑political issue can, by extension, also be mis‑ construed. In view of this, can comedians still approach any topic freely? Should there be a limit as to what one can joke about? In a live show, we need to worry whether the audience is receptive to the content; as an online clip, one needs to worry whether it is offensive to the public and has repercussions. In some cases, it might also be a legal offense or a diplomatic issue. In July 2022, at Crack House Comedy Club in Malaysia Kuala Lumpur, an open‑mic per‑ former, Siti Nuramira Abdullah, 26, claimed that she had memorized 15 chapters of the Quran and proceeded to unwrap her headscarf and baju kurung (a traditional costume of Malays) to reveal a low‑cut top and a mini skirt underneath. She continued to use profanity in her set. The set was filmed and was later posted (by the performer and her boyfriend) online. Kuala Lumpur City Hall subsequently suspended the operation of the club because the video was considered an insult to Is‑ lam. In stand‑up open‑mic nights, anyone who is interested in performing can ask for a spot. There is no pre‑screening of material. Thus, until the point the act is performed, no one knows what the content would be like. The open‑mic live performance of Siti Nuramira Abdullah didn’t cause any problems on the spot; it is the posting of the clip online that caused problems. Jocelyn Chia, a comedian in New York City (with Singaporean parents), joked about the safety of Malaysian planes in June 2023 at Manhattan’s Comedy Cellar, commenting that, since the sepa‑ ration in 1965, Singapore had become a first‑world country while Malaysia allegedly remained a ‘developing’ one. She also made reference to the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370. Con‑ troversy erupted (in both Singapore and Malaysia) after she posted the short clip online, includ‑ ing a protest at the US embassy in Kuala Lumpur. Singapore’s High Commissioner to Malaysia commented in a tweet, ‘Chia certainly does not speak for Singaporeans’ and he was ‘appalled by her horrendous statements’. The Minister of Foreign Affairs of Malaysia also commented on the comedian’s lack of sensitivity and empathy toward Malaysians and the families of the victims. Chia told CNN that she had done the routine many times, and there were no problems. Malaysian audience members often told her how much they loved her performance, showing that they didn’t take offense. When posted online, the clip was interpreted by online viewers as offensive.8 These two instances reflect the danger of doing sensitive material in SUC and posting it online. When asked, as a principle, whether SUC has a limit and if there are topics that should not be joked about (regardless of whether they will put the material online), 7 (out of 36) comedians said yes, while most comedians stated that they believe there shouldn’t be any limit regarding topics. However, when asked if they personally avoid certain topics in their performances, 25 of them said

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yes. Some of the topics they avoid include LGBTQ issues, politics, and religion. Some comedians are not interested in such issues, and some find them difficult to make funny. A few comedians mentioned the general guideline they uphold, which is to punch up and never punch down: to make fun of the rich and powerful but never of the less fortunate. Some comedians adopt a more flexible approach; instead of avoiding topics/groups, they think one can joke about anything as long as it is funny and done in a thoughtful way and with positive intent.

Conclusion In many previous studies, it has been established that humor, in particular, SUC, is a good tool for introducing new/marginal views and influencing people’s opinion, and such is within our broad definition of ‘mind‑engineering’ (a sophisticated attempt, drawing on knowledge, skills, or ex‑ pertise, to manipulate the subjects’ perceptions/opinions/beliefs). This chapter looks at SUC as a mind‑engineering tool from the perspective of practicing comedians with different levels of experience and in different places. Our results from the survey suggested that, even though most comedians agree that SUC is a good tool, only some comedians in our survey use it actively to push ideas. It is also not always easy to make social issues funny, and it shouldn’t be seen as trying too hard to persuade. For comedians who do not use SUC as a mind‑engineering tool, they believe that the goal of SUC is to make people laugh. We interviewed three comedians who belong to a certain minority group (racial minority, dis‑ ability, LGBTQ). They talk about social issues in their comedy and agree that SUC provides a way for them to steer the narratives of minority groups and provide exposure to such issues, but their goal, as comedians, is ultimately to entertain. It is up to the audience to dig deeper into the new narrative. As entertainment news programs continue their dominance as media agenda‑setters and sources of viral commentary on social issues in the news (Chattoo 2019), and with the success of comedy shows like Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette and Douglas, more comedians might incorporate social issues in their performances, be it a genuine interest, or to remain ‘relevant’, or for publicity/ marketing purposes. In the digital era, SUC as a tool (or as a weapon) can be even more powerful due to the expo‑ nential increase in viewership, but it also increases the chance of misfiring, where the intended message embedded in humor is misinterpreted. In a live show, the live audience forms a group together with the comedian in one physical space. Watching stand‑up clips online, one remains an outsider watching a conversation, rather than being part of it. Furthermore, online audiences are only privy to part of the conversation, missing the part where the live audience was charmed to like the comedians/persuaded to be open to new ideas/shift their boundaries and information conveyed earlier, which could affect the interpretation of the clip. They are also missing the subsequent part where more justification for a certain view might be given. The chance of misunderstanding increases with online bite‑size SUC clips. The same joke might work for one audience and might not work for others. Online clips are also subject to a higher level of scrutiny with the possibility of repeated viewing and exchanges in the comment section. Messages that were more palatable in live shows might become unpalatable in online clips. Given that SUC is such a great tool, can comedians make fun of anything? The general conclu‑ sion from the survey is that, in principle, there shouldn’t be a firm limit – it depends on the skills of the comedian. Even for professionals, there are many sensitive topics that might be offensive

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to some, especially when it is subjected to all when posted online. In general, the unwritten rule is that comedians should punch up but not punch down. When done skillfully (punching up), it can swing opinions.

Acknowledgments We would like to thank all the comedians who have volunteered their time by either filling out our survey or talking to us. The research described here is supported by the European Regional Development Fund – Project ‘Sinophone Borderlands – Interaction at the Edges’ CZ.02.1.01/0.0/ 0.0/16_019/0000791.

Notes 1 https://www.timeout.com/newyork/comedy/joke‑of‑the‑week‑ted‑alexandro 2 https://time.com/6105951/dave‑chappelle‑netflix‑controversy/ 3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiHWGW6a5cQ 4 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/nov/22/usa.danglaister 5 https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/05/how‑comedians‑became‑public‑intellectu‑ als/394277/ 6 https://www.thevibes.com/articles/culture/79138/jim‑jefferies‑on‑Crackhouse‑Comedy‑Club‑free‑ dom‑of‑speech‑and‑comedy‑today 7 https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2020/may/31/hannah‑gadsby‑you‑dont‑do‑a‑show‑like‑nanette‑ without‑a‑tough‑shell 8 https://edition.cnn.com/2023/06/11/asia/jocelyn‑chia‑mh370‑joke‑singapore‑apologizes‑intl‑hnk/index. html

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Joanna Ut-Seong Sio and Luis Morgado da Costa Schiappa, E., Gregg, P.B. and Hewes, D.E. (2005). The parasocial contact hypothesis, Communication Mono‑ graphs 72(1): 92–115. Taylor, K. (2006). Brainwashing: The science of thought control, Oxford University Press. Terrion, J.L. and Ashforth, B.E.. (2002). From ‘I’ to ‘we’: The role of putdown humor and identity in the development of a temporary group, Human Relations 55(1): 55–88. Wertheim, W.F. (1964). East‑west parallels: Sociological approaches to modern Asia, W. Van Hoeve. Yeo, S.K., Su, L.Y.F., Cacciatore, M.A., McKasy, M. and Qian, S. (2020). Predicting intentions to engage with scientific messages on Twitter: The roles of mirth and need for humor, Science Communication 42(4): 481–507. Zijderveld, A.C. (1968). Jokes and their relation to social reality, Social Research 35(2): 286–311.

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PART III

Media, Culture, and Mind Engineering

11 CORPORATE COLONIZATION, GEOPOLITICAL POWER STRUGGLES, AND HYPERNUDGE – HOW SOCIAL MEDIA ENGINEERS MINDS Till Neuhaus and Lee J. Curley Introduction Emerging media technology has often, at times, been suspected to have a corrosive effect on ­society and especially the youth. While such concerns could, at least historically speaking, be pushed aside as hysteria or unreasonable fears, new technologies and (social media) networks – powered by artificial intelligence (AI) and almost omni‑available via smartphones – may actually be a game changer in that regard. While these technological novelties and the associated platforms have been suspected to be the root cause for a range of undesirable dynamics, one commonly articulated concern is that, through exposure to the minds of specific applications, human behav‑ ior1 may be altered in predictable ways – a process which could be labeled as mind engineering. Such mind engineering is suspected to be conducted by extremist groups in attempts to recruit new followers (cf. Weimann and Masri 2020), by the platforms themselves to prolong usage time or, as the Cambridge Analytica scandal (cf. Berghel 2018) and the suspected election meddling in the 2016 presidential election (cf. Gavra and Slutskiy 2021) has shown, by domestic and foreign po‑ litical actors. Such a perspective is supported by the fact that India has banned the Chinese‑based application TikTok and then‑president Trump threatened to do the same for the USA (cf. Kuhn 2020) – a threat which is, as of 2023, negotiated at the federal and state‑level judicial realms, however, without a conclusive result yet. Tentatively summarizing, it can be argued that there is something angst‑inducing in the way social media and the employed technologies are suspected to change user behavior and thought, such as in overconsumption of certain apps (cf. Fasoli 2021), addictive potential, and the personal and societal side effects2 thereof (cf. Worsley et al. 2018). Due to the fact that the algorithms employed by Facebook, TikTok, and others can be considered black boxes (cf. Rahwan et al. 2019) and due to the novelty of the phenomena as such, this field is not just underregulated legally but also underinvestigated scientifically. This chapter wants to address the topic of mind engineering via social media applications by presenting two cases in which applications employed techniques which could qualify as mind en‑ gineering (section “The Application of Hypernudges – The Cases of Facebook and TikTok”), yet



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with alternative motifs. The first one is Facebook and its attempts to prolong screen time for eco‑ nomically motivated reasons (section “The Attentional Merchants at Facebook”), and the other is TikTok which operates with similar mechanisms, yet also with a potentially geopolitical notion (section “TikTok and the Educational Cold War, Revisited”). Taken together, these cases provide a relatively clear picture of what social media applications are able to do regarding minds and behav‑ iors. Yet, before discussing these cases in‑depth, this chapter will lay out its theoretical presupposi‑ tions (section “From Nudge to Hypernudge”) by illustrating the school of thought known as nudge (Thaler and Sunstein 2017) (section “A Very Short Introduction to Nudging”). Nudges can be considered consciously made changes in decision architectures – all aspects relevant in a decision context – which contribute to a predictable change in behavior (cf. ibid.: 15), a fact which makes nudging potentially compatible with the field of mind engineering. These psychologically informed interventions have already been employed by governments globally (cf. Neuhaus and Curley 2022) to nudge citizens into the “right” direction and, as Brodmerkel (2019) showed, are also regularly employed by the private sector. This chapter aims at systemically connecting insights from the field of nudging with the decision architectures set up by social media companies. Therefore, the proposed nudge lens needs to be expanded by the concept of hypernudge (Yeung 2017), which combines nudging’s psychological insights with big data and AI3 (section “Big Data, Psychologi‑ cal Insights, and Hypernudging”). The chapter ends with a summary and reflection of key insights.

From Nudge to Hypernudge In the following, the theoretical assumptions and axiomatic presuppositions of nudging will be outlined. Also, certain branches of criticism and suspected abuse of these psychological insights will exemplarily be illustrated. In a second step, the concept of nudging will then be expanded by the possibilities of big data, algorithmic analysis of data, AI, and tailor‑made responses in the digital realm – all of these aspects will be subsumed under the label of hypernudging.

A Very Short Introduction to Nudging Based on the insights of the cognitive‑psychological school of thought4 known as Prospect Theory (cf. Tversky and Kahneman 1974; Kahneman 2012), nudging primarily focuses on the surround‑ ing factors – conceptualized as the “decision architecture” (Thaler, Sunstein and Balz 2014: 429) – of decision scenarios. Further, nudging assumes that human beings can consult two decision sys‑ tems, namely the fast, intuitive, and highly associative system 1 and the slower, more analytical, and reflective system 2 (Kahneman 2011). Thaler and Sunstein (2017) re‑labeled system 1 and 2 as Human (system 1) and Econ (system 2) (cf.: 34). While Prospect Theory was and still is primar‑ ily interested in identifying predictable errors regarding judgment under uncertainty – ­questions requiring a system 2 decision but, due to the presentational circumstances and the cognitive ca‑ pacity of the decision maker, being decided upon by system 1, -nudging utilizes these insights and attempts to create decision architectures which alter people’s behavior in predictable ways. Thaler and Sunstein (2017: 15) suggest that nudging is centered on providing appropriate deci‑ sion architectures to prompt the “correct” choice, while not removing or limiting the options of the decision maker. Such interventions mostly operate by providing selected comparison groups (Cialdini and Schultz 2004), framing information in specific ways (cf. McNeil et al. 1982; Tversky and Kahneman 1979: 3/4), setting strategic defaults (cf. Johnson and Goldstein 2003), or exploit‑ ing the tendency of humans to orient themselves in relationship to the majority (Sunstein and Vermeule 2008). To separate nudging from its alternatives – laissez‑faire economics or strict state 170

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interventions – and to promote nudging as the third way, Thaler and Sunstein (2017: 15) broke the concept down into two very simple sentences: “Draping the fruit in the canteen at eye level counts as a nudge. Removing junk food from the menu, on the other hand, does not”. As such nudging, as well as its supplementary philosophy, adhering to the name of “liberal paternalism” (Sunstein and Thaler 2003) promises foreseeable and controllable results while keeping freedom of choice intact; however, a significant degree of ambiguity regarding nudging’s utilization can be observed in practice (cf. Neuhaus 2022). This ambiguity can in part be explained by the fact that nudges appear to be undefined (cf. Selinger and Whyte 2011: 926–928) and thereby invite abuse of the concept (cf. Farrell and Shalizi 2011). Nudge advocates often cite the enhancement of public welfare as the key incentive to alter given decision architectures, yet welfare appears to be a difficult concept at times (cf. Neuhaus 2022) depending on the applied level of analysis. For example tilting decision architectures against the consumption of sweets may result in a healthier population and decreasing insurance costs but also creates a negative economic outlook for the manufacturers of candy which, in turn, could result in fewer jobs in specific areas. Quoting an overall welfare gain is misleading in such in‑ stances as partial problems have been addressed at the expense of other societal areas. However, the endeavor to position nudging as a cheap yet effective policy tool (cf. Doherty and Hallsworth 2017: 560) has been, also due to massive lobbying efforts (cf. Neuhaus and Curley 2022), incred‑ ibly successful as governments all around the world currently rely on behavioral public policy (cf. Lourenço et al. 2016). Taking this observation seriously, it can be argued that nudging implicitly promises to be the savior of the modern world, saving “us” from obesity to global warming (van der Linden 2018: 208). To make nudging an appealing concept to governments, Sunstein and Thaler (2003) developed a, at times, highly contradictory (cf. Neuhaus and Großjohann 2022), supplementary philosophy which should guide the altercation of decision architectures. Simulta‑ neously, this supplementary philosophy, coined “liberal paternalism” (Sunstein and Thaler 2003), also rendered the concept of actual preferences ineffective as o]ur emphasis is on the fact that in many domains, people lack clear, stable, or well‑ordered preferences. What they choose is strongly influenced by details of the context in which they make their choice, for example default rules, framing effects (that is, the wording of pos‑ sible options), and starting points. These contextual influences render the very meaning of the term “preferences” unclear. (ibid.: 1161) Additionally, to the premises of liberal paternalism, nudges should also be passive, positive, avoid‑ able, and voluntary5 (cf. French 2011: 157). Often being reduced to putting fruit at eye level in the canteen statement while being simultaneously highly successful regarding global roll‑out, nudg‑ ing is not only an ambiguous term but its key principles are simplistic, thus meaning non‑benign actors could utilize its principles for non‑positive outcomes (Neuhaus 2022: 6). Furthermore, nudging has been criticized on multiple grounds and many scholars suspect subtle, yet potent, governmental overreach (cf. Rebonato 2012; Mitchell 2004).

Big Data, Psychological Insights, and Hypernudging As it could be shown, classic nudges or, more formalized, behavioral public policy can be consid‑ ered a one‑size‑fits‑all model (cf. Mills 2020: 1) as the fruit in the canteen is put at eye level, yet it is the same arrangement for all customers in the canteen. Experience has shown that nudges can 171

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also produce unintended consequences. For example, nudges which encourage weight loss may have a negative effect on those who undereat, while having little effect on those who overconsume calories (cf. Mills 2019: 4). Further, individual differences exist in the population across a wide range of variables (personality, intelligence, risk taking), to assume that a one‑size‑fits‑all tool works the same on everyone is, potentially, reductionist (Mills 2020: 1). This problem has also been identified by nudge founding father, Sunstein, who suggests that the rather general princi‑ ples of nudging could and should be combined with more specific, demographic insights into the nudged group and/or individual (cf. Sunstein 2013: 1871). Referring back to the canteen exam‑ ple, a combination of psychological insights and an emerging degree of personalization has been sketched out by Risdon (2017: n.p.): But there’s a lot of data to collect and analyze in order to improve the cafeteria architecture. Now imagine that Amazon’s prototype of a check-out free convenience store has become a widespread reality. We can apply this combination of computer vision, data collection, and machine learning to our cafeteria. Our “choice architecture machine” can then make and update its own predictions about what is effective. It could even alter the arrangement of the cafeteria – change labels and placement of choices – and optimize itself, all under the aegis of increasing the probability of the desired outcome: healthier choices. What is described here by Risdon is a combination of individual data, big data,6 and psychological insights. By comparing current individual behavior with patterns derived from large numbers of prior users or customers, such a system can predict the likeliest response of a given individual to a variety of potential stimuli and can thereby statistically predict – and potentially influence – future behavior (cf. Pasquale 2015). Such designs have been branded as a hypernudge environment by Yeung (2017: 119) who defines the concept and its potential as following: By configuring and thereby personalising the user’s informational choice context, typically through algorithmic analysis of data streams from multiple sources claiming to offer predic‑ tive insights concerning the habits, preferences and interests of targeted individuals (such as those used by online consumer product recommendation engines), these nudges channel user choices in directions preferred by the choice architect through processes that are subtle, unobtrusive, yet extraordinarily powerful. And, while standard regulation differentiates between the three phases of information gather‑ ing, standard setting, and behavior modification (cf. Hood, Rothstein & Baldwin 2001), such “­design‑based regulation” combines the three phases in its architecture, thereby allowing instant and highly personalized intervention at the most basic level (Yeung 2017: 120). As sketched out by Yeung (2017), hypernudging combines the potency of big data with psycho‑ logical insights to create algorithms that scaffold the decision maker to make decisions deemed as optimal by the decision architect (i.e. the producer of content) (Selinger and Seager 2012). What remains unclear and underspecified in such settings is the knowledge on the basis of which the choice architect operates, also the intentions of the choice architect remain unknown (cf. Bröck‑ ling 2017: 195); in fact, the very notion of the choice architect – who, by definition, has a specific aim in mind – is questionable as the algorithms underlying large digital settings may be a product of a human craft, yet these algorithms also develop a life on their own. Due to the scope and complexity of the code, even the programmers, may not fully grasp the workings of a specific site (cf. Fasoli 2021). As argued earlier, algorithms and the underlying code remain a black box, 172

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thereby the intentions of a given digital decision architecture cannot ultimately be proven but only, as circumstantial evidence, observed and argued for. Generally speaking, digitally enhanced nudging or, adopting Yeung’s lingua, hypernudging suffers similar problems as traditional nudging as the choice architect’s intentions are not com‑ municated transparently, a (hyper)nudge remains underdefined, and altered decision architectures often have a touch of a coercive setting. Mills (cf. 2022: 1) suggests a specification of hypernudges by introducing them as a collection of nudges which change, adapt and reconfigure to individual decision makers based on live data and feedback. While a traditional nudge consists of a single intervention in a given setting, hypernudges can and should be understood as eco‑systems of dif‑ ferent psychological interventions which dynamically change according to the prior and current choices of the addressed individual (or group) and, over time, improve in their predictive accuracy (cf. Schreyer 2022: 133). The ecosystem trait of hypernudges has also been described by Lanz‑ ing (2019: 55) who notes that hypernudging cannot be opted out of unless the entire service (i.e. website or social media package) is quit. Summarizing, Morozovaite (2021: 117) concludes that hypernudging is the most complex and sophisticated method of digital nudging, as it allows for personalized decision architectures based on the individual differences of the consumer. Here, the decision architect hopes to use the correct nudge for the right decision maker at the right time (cf. Morozovaite 2021: 117). And, while traditional nudging has been suspected to be a “bag of tricks” (Gigerenzer 2015: 362) employed by coercive decision architects (cf. Waldron 2014) to influence decision makers to choose outcomes which society deems optimal (Basham 2010), such concerns multiply regarding hypernudging as only a limited amount of companies have the capital and expertise to set up such processes to manipulate decision makers (Leander and Burriss 2020: 1263), meaning the optimal outcome is no longer chosen by state actors, who at least theoretically should adhere to ethical standards, but rather by tech companies and their stakeholders. Thus, the “correct” outcome may be what increases profits or stock value for said companies.

The Application of Hypernudges – The Cases of Facebook and TikTok In the following section, two examples of (hyper)nudge settings will be provided, namely on the social media applications Facebook and TikTok. As illustrated earlier, hypernudging combines data, analysis, and psychological insights, yet certain scholars define it as a complex and entangled ecosystem of different nudges. Following this definition, a hypernudge could be discussed only when fully analyzing a certain digital decision architecture. Such an analysis will not be conducted in the following section; instead exemplary nudges, which employ patterns derived from big data analyses, will be presented and discussed regarding their workings. Ultimately, the employed al‑ gorithms remain black boxes, thereby intentions regarding a given (digital) decision architecture can be derived only from its outcomes – in other words, the provided analysis will try to system‑ atically connect psychological insights with their (suspected) realization in the digital realm and, on the basis of this, infer the platform’s intentions. Lastly, the presented cases – Facebook and TikTok – have been selected due to their prominence; yet this should not hide the fact that many other platforms and applications operate with similar tactics.

The Attentional Merchants at Facebook Facebook is arguably the largest social media website in the world and – together with further applications owned by the parent company Meta – a powerful player in the realm of social me‑ dia as the company reaches roughly 3.74 billion users on a monthly basis (cf. Statista 2023). 173

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While usage of the platform does not require monetary payments from its users, Facebook’s busi‑ ness model strongly focuses on user‑generated data and thus, may hope to incentivize users for their continued usage (Fasoli 2021: 1418). As shown by Eyal (2014), a plethora of companies exploit insights generated by behavioral sciences, neuroscience, cognitive psychology, social psy‑ chology, and individual differences research to create designs/decision architectures that maxi‑ mize the time which users spend on their platform. The user’s attention – and thereby also the generated data – can be commodified in two ways: “consumers give new media developers their literal attention in exchange for a service (such as a news feed or access to pictures of friends), […] [or] developers auction off consumer attention to advertisers” (Castro and Pham 2020: 2; cf. Neuhaus, Jacobsen and Vogt 2021: 246). Generally speaking, Facebook and other companies oper‑ ate under a neoliberal paradigm which primarily focuses on monetary gain. One notable difference between classic companies and social media services is that their monetary gain can primarily be generated by user data, which can be analyzed, systematized, and ultimately sold off to advertisers. In short, social media services collect data about their users’ interests, habits, traits, attitudes, and desires; synthesize these; and then sell them in the form of highly individualized advertisement opportunities. As such, attention and behavior – in the form of personality profiles – become trad‑ able products (cf. Schreyer 2022: 133) as these pieces of information can be considered real‑time market analyses combined with highly personalized and direct sales‑pitches (cf. Seele and Zapf 2017: 119) – a textbook hypernudge. As already hinted at, such a business model is based on the extensive “datafication” (van Dijck 2014) of the individual and, in accumulated form, society; such a data‑driven permeation of personal and societal structures has the potential to dissolute the borders between the individual/personal, public, and economic spheres. The observations made above have led some scholars to label platforms, such as Facebook, as “attentional merchants” (Wu 2016; Brodmerkel 2018: 3). This section explores the psychological processes Facebook exploits to prolong the time users spend on the platform – as it has been illustrated, longer dura‑ tion on the page results in more data, which, in turn, enhances the corporation’s monetary profit. As argued earlier, hypernudging can be conceptualized as the interplay or ecosystem of dif‑ ferent nudges which, on the basis of data‑driven and algorithmically powered processes, are con‑ sciously presented to alter behavior in predictive ways – in this case, more time being spent on the website. One nudge which may be– among many other mechanisms – exploited on Facebook, as well as other services, is the setting of strategic defaults, which is also known as the status quo bias. The default effect/status quo bias can best be conceptualized as a preselected option which becomes active when the decision maker refuses to make an actual decision. This can be exemplified by Choi et al. (2004: 81) in the case of a pension scheme. Choi et al. (2004) found that when enrolled automatically in their company’s 401(k) scheme, employees were much more likely to engage in the scheme than when they had to opt‑in to the scheme. Following rational choice theory, such changes should not affect the outcome of a given decision, yet empirical data suggests a status quo bias does exist (Jachimowicz et al. 2019: 174); again, providing evidence for the previously discussed Prospect Theory. Another example comes from a study by Johnson and Goldstein (2003; 2004) who showed that defaults – in this case, the change from an opt‑in to an opt‑out scheme – can influence the frequency of people being enlisted as a potential organ donor. Given the lack of organ donors, many countries have changed their default options accordingly (cf. Jachimowicz et al. 2019: 175). The literature on defaults suggests three reasons which speak in favor of default’s potency: The first is effort: choosing the default option requires no physical action and can free one from laborious calculation. The second is implied endorsement: decision‑makers may infer 174

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a default has been preselected due to its merit or the desires of those presenting the choice. Finally, defaults may result from reference dependence: the default option may represent a reference point which colors the evaluation of other options as gains or losses. (Dinner et al. 2011: 332) Given the potency of the default effect, it comes as no surprise that social media companies – in this case Facebook – may also be exploiting the status quo bias and modifying their existing decision architectures accordingly. As shown by Fasoli (2021: 1418/1419), the specific default adjustments which have been made reflect Facebook’s goals, namely prolonging user time and engagement. For example, in the past, Facebook and other platforms have used fixed‑length pages meaning that the most recent content is shown on the current page and users can scroll back to past posts (Fasoli 2021: 1418/1419). As such, a user can reach the point where s/he has covered all new content in a given time span. However, more recently, as the user moves down the page to the end of the visible information, more information is added to the view of the user. During this, the navigation bar is moved to the top of the page again, signaling to the user that they can scroll indefinitely (Fasoli 2021: 1418/1419). Furthermore, this change to the default webpage signals to the user that the content is infinite, thereby attempting to increase usage by said user (Fasoli 2021: 1418/1419). While the classic behavior of most users appears to be to scroll the page to the end, this insight has consciously been used by Facebook to prolong the time spent on the platform. However, just making Facebook appear infinite or bottomless does not qualify as a hypernudge but rather as a traditional one‑size‑fits‑all arrangement. Yet, Facebook was also able to enhance this change in decision architecture by not just making its timeline appear infinite but also by positioning the right posts for the right people to appear in this endless timeline. Based on the al‑ gorithmic processes described above, namely measuring user behavior and responses, comparing this data to prior patterns, and predicting the likeliest content which will result in the continuation of the desired behavior (cf. Luckerson 2015). And, while the general, in this case bottomless, web‑ site structure is a conscious decision by the company and implemented by its programmers, the specific contents being presented are selected by AI, which, in turn, raises the question of who or what is the actual choice architect in such a case. Mills and Sætra (2022) suggest that the AI can be considered the autonomous choice architect as the hypernudge would not have the same power without the tailor‑made impulses selected by the AI. As it could hopefully be shown, Facebook – as an exemplary case for social media sites in ­general – employs cognitive‑psychological insights and embeds these into their website’s ­(decision) architecture. The specific case of the default effect/status quo bias could highlight the interplay between traditional nudges and their data‑driven amplification which turns them into personalized hypernudges. Just like traditional nudges, these interventions primarily work through directing attention to certain, in this case attractive, aspects. As it could be shown earlier, Facebook’s main concern is the enhancement of its revenue which, based on the mechanisms and processes outlined above, is tightly correlated with its ability to bind and direct attention. Referencing Stanley Deetz (1992), such an approach could be labeled the “corporate colonization of attention” as most deci‑ sions as well as the associated architectures in these virtual surroundings have been created with an economic motif in mind.

TikTok and the Educational Cold War, Revisited As suggested by Eyal (2014: 9), websites employ decision architectures and AI‑generated content to address human emotion, which is produced by psychobiological processes (Stein 2006: 766). 175

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These psychobiological processes are suspected to create what human beings generally perceive as meaning (Carr 2002: 478; Neuhaus and Vogt 2022). As such, the mechanisms which are sub‑ sumed under the label hypernudging can be suspected to address significantly deep, underlying processes of the human brain pertaining to emotion. Likely, it is this entanglement of cognition, decision architectures, and the dopaminergic system which led some scholars to the conclusion to label social media platforms, which use hypernudging, as “habit forming” products (cf. Eyal 2014). This habit formation quality stems from the fact that, through positive feedback loops, ex‑ ternal impulses can initiate learning processes of behaviors which, through repetition, can become habitual (cf. Osseiran 2019). Due to the inversive nature of such products – in the end, they address the physio‑chemical processes of the human brain-, Smith and de Villiers‑Botha (2021) argue that children and teenagers should not be exposed to hypernudging environments as their cognitive, emotional, and regulatory systems are still developing. Despite the articulated concerns, TikTok has consciously targeted a teenage audience (Mohsin 2022), as it is suspected that the largest share of TikTok users (estimated at 41%) are aged between 16 and 24 (Kennedy 2020). The prevalence of younger users on TikTok may be ascribed to the AI‑powered design and the employed decision architecture of the company (cf. Herrman 2019). Tentative analyses of the app (cf. Kaye, Chen and Zeng 2021) have shown that TikTok employs similar mechanisms as Facebook as consumers can scroll infinitely to content tailored to them due to their personal data. Besides the already‑known status quo bias, this section would like to highlight a second change in the decision architecture, which utilizes the randomization of rewards as first described by Fer‑ ster and Skinner (1957). In their study, pigeons were rewarded with seeds when they showed a cer‑ tain behavior (i.e. pecking a button) and could only receive a second seed once a certain amount of time had passed – behavior and time had to be synchronized. Ferster and Skinner discovered, over trials, that pigeons began to memorize how long it would take for a second seed to be given (say 1 minute) and would peck at the window for the seed after the time they had memorized. How‑ ever, if the time interval was not consistent (always 1 minute) but instead varied in a randomized way (1 minute one time, 30 seconds another, 10 seconds the time after that, etc.), the birds would consistently and compulsively peck at the window (cf. Ferster and Skinner 1957, cited in Fasoli 2021: 1419). While this effect is employed by a plethora of websites, services, and apps, it is also an instance in which an algorithmically powered app addresses the dopaminergic system by pro‑ viding, in a randomized manner, rewarding content. The latter has been identified algorithmically by assessing the user and comparing behaviors to already existing data patterns. Thereby, the ap‑ plication elicits habit formation processes which reflect the inscribed aims, goals, and values of the app. As such, the randomization of rewards qualifies as a hypernudge as behavioral–psychological insights have been employed and amplified by the abilities and scope of AI; the combination of these insights and means manifests itself in the created decision architecture, namely the app itself. As research from alternative settings – i.e. casino gambling – could show (cf. Schüll 2014), human beings appear to be sensitive to such randomization patterns. For example, variability in relation to reward can create excitement regarding the anticipation of the said reward (i.e. “Will I win this time?!”) (Osseiran 2019). As Bucknell, Bossen, and Kottasz (2020) suggested, TikTok appears to employ these insights as it provides gratification7 based on the AI algorithms, which reward certain behaviors and indirectly punish – or, more precisely, refuse to reward – others. Thereby, users of the platform are animated to modify their behavior according to the inscribed reward patterns (Borelli 2021: 298). Apart from the rather obvious neoliberal agenda which aims at profit maximization, it should also be mentioned that the collection, analysis, and usage of large data sets may also help companies and governments alike to not just discipline individuals but also 176

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preemptively predict and control their behavior (cf. Schreyer 2022: 139) – the very definition of a hypernudge. As it could be shown, TikTok can be considered an attention‑binding platform which has the potency to actively alter behavior. While this observation may be valuable in and of itself, the underlying motifs of TikTok have not yet been discussed extensively. In contrast to other plat‑ forms, TikTok has a track record of censoring voices criticizing China, i.e. regarding the Uighur detention camps, as well as protests in Taiwan (cf. Mattheis 2019). Reuter and Köver (2019) even go so far as to claim that TikTok is an essential part of Peking’s media strategy and that China tries to realize its (geo)political aims through TikTok’s supervision and management. Therefore, a (geo)political lens may provide a valuable perspective on the issue. The application of such a lens is further legitimized by the fact that TikTok and Douyin – the Chinese equivalent of TikTok – operate on similar technology, yet the companies remain separated and utilize different networks, allegedly to comply with Chinese censorship restrictions (cf. Mohsin 2022). However, the strict division between the domestic (Chinese) product and the application for international audiences (cf. Abidin 2020: 77) may also suggest that the originators of the application have diverging inten‑ tions for the two audiences. Taken together with the fact that Facebook and multiple other services are actively blocked by China, it could be argued that a struggle for the hearts, minds, behaviors, and attention of the younger generation is currently fought between the competing superpowers of the time, namely China and the USA. Arguably, such a view has its epistemic roots in human capital theory,8 according to which children and young adults should primarily be considered re‑ sources for the economies – the main dimension in which the struggle between China and the USA manifests itself. A well‑educated, qualified, motivated, and capable workforce can be considered a prerequisite for economic growth and supports the associated political system. Vice versa, the workforce of another country is a resource for the rival country and its underlying political system. Following this line of thought, being in control over an application which is not only potentially habit forming but also highly attractive to younger audiences is not just an economically valuable asset but further allows for certain (geo)politically motivated adjustments, which should manifest themselves in the diverging designs of the two apps (TikTok and Douyin), an endeavor which will be discussed in the coming paragraph. When comparing the two versions of the application, one crucial difference becomes obvious, as Douyin (i.e. the Chinese version of TikTok) has an additional second trending tab called “posi‑ tive energy” (Kaye, Chen and Zeng 2021). “Positive energy (zheng nengliang)” is representa‑ tive of Chinese patriotism, closely aligned with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and used to represent the value systems, ideologies, and ethos of the party (Kaye, Chen & Zeng 2021). Since the National Propaganda and Ideological Work Conference in 2013, “positive energy” has been utilized by Chinese mainstream media and the propaganda wing of the CCP to attenuate critique and exaggerate praise (Chen 2021: 4); thereby, it can be argued that the concept as well as its dis‑ semination through TikTok serves domestic motifs and supports China’s mainstream ideology. In‑ formation that trends on the positive energy tab has been shown to display patriotism for the CCP (Kaye, Chen and Zeng 2021). Alongside these political motifs as well as the censorship of diverg‑ ing opinions as “negative” (cf. Zhang 2022: 224), TikTok also serves to inspire the younger Chi‑ nese generation by providing (state‑approved) role models as well as positive endeavors, mostly related to self‑improvement, learning, scientifically minded activities, personal development, and physical capabilities (cf. Hizi 2021: 25), arguably aiming at empowering “society to unite and forge ahead” (Chen 2021: 4). These aims are realized by algorithmically providing reward to those users who follow the state doctrine, thereby creating a positive feedback loop as new users pri‑ marily see the positive content and, in the strive for gratification, copy, emulate, and reproduce it. 177

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When looking at the Western version of TikTok, which runs on the same mechanisms, it strikes the eye that there is no equivalent to the positive energy tab (Kaye, Chen and Zeng 2021). ­Instead – again arguing from the observable outcomes as the specific algorithms remain black ­boxes – ­TikTok has been criticized multiple times as it may have, allegedly, promoted ­dysfunctional ­behaviors, such as eating disorders (cf. Redaktionsnetzwerk Deutschland 2019), dangerous ­challenges (cf. Kriegel et al. 2021), and mindless activities (Kennedy 2020). Arguably, these ­potentially habit‑forming activities could have an impact on the users’ future lifepath, educational/vocational activities, and physical and mental well‑being. In accumulated form, these tendencies could manifest themselves as a future advantage for the Chinese state in comparison to Western states. This advantage stems from the fact that TikTok can, through the underlying processes described above, install reward patterns addressed at children and young adults and provide this target group with role models and model behaviors which, in turn, make certain outcomes more likely in comparison to others. Through extensive exposure, these patterns and role models elicit habit formation processes which can, in the long run, manifest themselves in diverging levels of qualification, motivation, and general capability – all of them being factors of future economic stability and growth. If a country (in this case, China) can negatively influence children and young adults abroad while exposing its own youth to more productive content, an economic – and arguably with it, (geo)political – advantage can be generated. Summarizing, it can be argued that TikTok addresses younger audiences by design; is attempt‑ ing to promote different activities, behaviors, and values in diverging regions; and is (by design) highly stimulating which explains the expansive usage time and engagement rate. All of these in‑ dividual observations can be synchronized with a geopolitical motif and, at least in part, explained by the inner workings of a hypernudging environment.

Summary and Outlook This chapter aims to demonstrate the potential of the nudge framework and its digitally enhanced counterpart, hypernudge, as valuable lenses for analyzing and understanding the operations of social media services. We hope to illustrate how these services – powered by psychological in‑ sight, big data, and algorithmically driven analysis of data – can be employed in processes which could be understood as mind engineering as they affect and influence the way users perceive the world, what they deem desirable and valuable and how they modify their behavior accordingly. By having taken a closer look at Facebook and TikTok, it could be shown that the motifs of so‑ cial media companies can vary – ranging from corporate considerations to more political and geopolitical interests – even if the exploited processes and employed mechanisms are similar in nature. This chapter has primarily focused on the decision architecture level as platforms have been looked at and discussed. Therefore, future research should focus on user engagement – i.e. through eye‑tracking studies – and should clarify how users react in response to these decision architectures. More specifically, it could be of interest to compare user behavior depending on whether users have received information on the underlying mechanisms guiding these platforms and whether this alters their responses to the platform and decision architecture.

Notes 1 Generally, it is assumed that perception is organized by value hierarchies which help human beings to differentiate between objects (cf. Peterson and Flanders 2002). Thereby, value hierarchies not just organ‑ ize perception but, as a precursor, also enable human beings to set themselves goals and then act out cor‑ responding behaviors (cf. Peterson 2013). Framing social media as mind engineering tools assumes that

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Corporate Colonization, Geopolitical Power Struggles, Hypernudge the relationship between value hierarchies, perception, and act/behavior is not just unilateral but works in multiple ways, namely here the change of values/value hierarchies and behavior through exposure to (pre)selected information. This process – and this is the key argument of this chapter – can be facilitated through social media applications and their underlying workings, namely the interplay of algorithms and cognitive‑psychological insights which are here referred to as Hypernudge (cf. Yeung 2017). 2 One commonly expressed concern is that the information space is no longer under control by a given nation state (cf. Müller 2011). While this may appear unproblematic at first sight, foreign powers could employ this newly emerging opportunity to erode trust in existing governments. The results of such ef‑ forts often manifest themselves much later, i.e. in times of crisis when citizens suspect malevolent actions perpetuated by their governments, do not follow given arrangements (i.e. evacuation orders) and thereby amplify the scope and impact of a given crisis (cf. Neuhaus and Großjohann 2022). 3 It could be argued that the general dynamics of collecting data and improving given impulses are not new. In fact, they are not as advertisers have employed similar strategies to enhance their commercials ever since. However, the precision, accuracy, potency, and degree of personalization have increased tremen‑ dously with the opportunities of collecting and analyzing larger data sets and using the newly generated insights almost instantaneously. 4 For an historical account on the developments within the disciplines of psychology, economics, and – the newly emerging field of – behavioral economics see Neuhaus (2023) and Heukelom (2014). 5 In this context, positive means that the nudge, if working accordingly, should generate a positive outcome for the nudged person. Passive describes the fact that the realization of the nudge should be minimal inversive in existing structures, avoidable describes the idea that the nudged person can avoid the nudge, and voluntary means that alternative decision option remain intact (cf. French 2011, Neuhaus 2022). 6 boyd and Crawford (2012: 662) define big data and locate its value as following:  Big Data’s value comes from patterns that can be derived from making connections about pieces of data, about an individual, about individuals in relation to others, about groups of people, or simply about the structure of information itself. Big Data is important because it refers to an analytic phenomenon playing out in academia and industry. 7 In the TikTok app, users can upload short video snippets (15 seconds to a minute) in which they film themselves and underscore their movements with music and/or verbal quotations (i.e. from a movie or song). These videos are then circulated inside the community as other users have the possibility to follow appreciated video creators or express their appreciation – both can and should be considered reward. Via the in‑built algorithm, TikTok controls which videos receive more attention from the community and are thereby more likely to be rewarded. Through this connection, TikTok can motivate users to realize certain behaviors (i.e. through rewarded challenges) while neglecting others. 8 Such a view on the younger generation(s) stems from human capital theory, the branch of thinking which has historically as well as currently been carried out by the OECD and manifests itself in multiple edu‑ cational endeavors (cf. Ydesen 2019). Such a perspective is supported by the USA’s response to different PISA rankings, which the USA only started to take seriously once China has advanced to the realms com‑ parable to the USA’s (cf. Martens and Niemann 2013).

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12 RED TOURISM Spirituality, Modernity, and Patriotism in China’s Tibet1 Kamila Hladíková

Introduction For the past hundred years, Tibet has been by many Westerners imagined as a utopian spiritual abode, ‘a peaceful land devoted only to ethereal pursuits’ that has later been invaded by ‘an un‑ differentiated mass of godless Communists’ (Lopez 1998: 7). It has been represented through its unique religion, tantric form of Buddhism, but also through an idyllic peaceful lifestyle character‑ ized by nomadic pastoralism and magnificent landscapes with pristine nature. Starting with the era of reforms and opening (改革开放) in the 1980s, this image of Tibet as a myth‑like ‘Shangri‑la’, influenced by Western and Han Chinese imaginations and stereotypes, has been adopted within the People’s Republic of China (PRC) – often for commercial purposes – through various forms of cultural production, including literature (Hladíková 2013), music, and with rising prominence also tourism. With a significant boom in global tourism development in the 21st century, many Asian countries, including mainland China, witnessed a surge in domestic tourism that has been enabled by the rapid emergence of the middle class (Chang et al. 2009, King and Ploysri 2014). Sharply increasing numbers of Han Chinese tourists visiting Tibet turned tourism into an important source of income for the region, contributing to local employment and infrastructure development, but also a powerful tool for new forms of propaganda aiming to shape the public perception and dis‑ courses on Tibet. Building on the notion of ‘politics of tourism’, first introduced in the Asian context by Richter (1989), this chapter examines the role of tourism as an effective tool of mind engineering promot‑ ing official ideology, narratives of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and common identity of the big Chinese nation (中华民族共同体意识), both within the PRC and internationally. Rowen, in his recently published study of Chinese tourism in Taiwan, identified tourism as ‘a mode of territorial socialization and a political technology of state territorialization’ (2023: 10) and recog‑ nized the PRC’s efforts to use tourism ‘to incorporate Taiwan into an undivided “One China”’ (2). Tourism in the PRC’s minority regions works toward a similar, ultimately political, goal – to incite patriotism and strengthen national unity by introduction and re‑confirmation of ideologically cor‑ rect authoritative interpretations of history and social development. Through analyzing personal vlogs focused on tourism promotion in Tibet published on YouTube during the COVID lockdowns



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DOI: 10.4324/9781003289746-16

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between spring 2020 and autumn 2022, this study examines connections between forms of official tourism promotion in Tibet, the PRC’s ethnic policies and ideological narratives used by authori‑ ties to legitimize Chinese rule in Tibet.

Methodology The official Chinese discourse legitimizing the CCP’s rule in Tibet on a strongly ideological basis has its roots in the 1950s and after the 1959 Tibetan uprising was decisively formulated in the ­English‑language volume Concerning the Question of Tibet published by the Foreign Language Press in Beijing (Anonymous 1959). It reframes the military invasion of Tibetan territory as ‘peace‑ ful liberation’ (和平解放) in the name of ‘emancipation of serfs’ (农奴解放) by the abolishment of the old feudal regime through enforcing social changes labeled as ‘democratic reforms’ (民主改革). Since the 1980s, derived ideologically based narratives have evolved into a systematic ­counter‑discourse against the criticism voiced repeatedly by the Tibetan exile government – the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA) in Dharamsala, Tibet support groups, and international ­organizations including the United Nations, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and others. The critics raised the questions of occupation and colonization of Tibetan territory, ­constant human rights infringement, and ‘cultural genocide’ (CTA 2018: 107), pointing out that, since 2009, over 150 Tibetans self‑immolated inside the PRC in an act of ‘counter‑securitization’ (Topgyal 2016: 166), after the Chinese government implemented heavy securitization measures in the ­region following the 2008 protests (Zenz and Leibold 2017). The presented study examines the role of tourism within the complex government propaganda network promoting social stability (社会稳定) and national unity (民族团结) in Tibet as a means to fully integrate Tibetans into the Chinese state after the last large‑scale protests. The aim of this research is to show that, in the case of Tibet, the government tourism development strategies and tourism promotion are designed to help spread official Chinese narratives on Tibet’s past and pre‑ sent. The main research objective of the presented qualitative content analysis of the PRC‑based Tibet‑related personal vlogs on one of the most influential global social media platforms, YouTube, is to show how this kind of media targeting international audience reflects the described official narratives and strategies, thus potentially serving as new external propaganda tools of the Chinese government. Following the analysis, the official strategies implemented during the past decade in tourism promotion in the Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR) will be examined to identify key narratives and related mass manipulation techniques employed in Tibetan tourism development. The first part provides a qualitative media analysis of the representation of Tibet by PRC‑based ethnic Tibetan YouTubers active during the COVID lockdowns between 2020 and 2022 with an aim to define their role in the state‑run mind engineering project shaping global public opinions about Tibet. During the research period from May 2020 to November 2022, several channels on YouTube, newly created or repurposed, started to regularly publish personal vlogs specifically fo‑ cusing on Tibet. Among dozens of Tibet‑related videos that appeared on YouTube during this time, some were published by either Han Chinese or foreigners (American or European), but, notably, many of them were made by ethnic Tibetans. The channels publishing these videos either claimed to be run by local tour operators or individual vloggers introducing themselves as ‘ordinary Ti‑ betans’. The research covered several hundreds of short‑ to medium‑length vlogs in English or Chinese, introducing Tibetan culture, customs, and style of living, as well as officially promoting new travel destinations. The collected data clearly show that the number of Tibet‑related travel vlogs uploaded to YouTube sharply increased starting around mid‑2020 up until the end of 2022, which marked a notable slowdown in the second half. As this chapter argues, these videos share 184

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some features indicating that they might be a part of a government‑orchestrated mind‑engineering campaign aimed to shape public perceptions and opinions on Tibet. Recent research by scholars focusing on Xinjiang and Uighurs (Ryan et al. 2022, Steenberg 2022) described a new type of ‘personalized propaganda’ by Uighur influencers that started to ap‑ pear after the international backlash against the CCP’s policy toward Uighurs and other Muslim minorities in Xinjiang. Steenberg coined the term ‘personalized propaganda’ in reference to the Chinese notion of ‘personal media’ (自媒体) to stress the individualized and subjective character of media content serving as propaganda, but presented through a personal channel, in the form of a personal output, as opposed to institutional channels and output. Uighur influencers’ videos published on Chinese social media and for a certain period of time also on YouTube were identi‑ fied as a part of ‘war of information and representation’ over the ‘state violence [against Muslim populations in the region]’ (Steenberg 2022: 178). Such personalized propaganda, defined as ‘a synthesis of state propaganda, social media, the gig economy, and the commercialization of per‑ sonal space’ and including ‘explicit political content and close alignment with CCP narratives’, has been observed in other minority regions in the PRC as well, including Inner Mongolia and Tibet (Ryan et al. 2022). The Tibet‑related vlogs analyzed in this chapter started to appear slightly later than the Xinjiang influencers’ videos but serve a similar purpose in a different context. In comparison to Xinjiang videos, Tibetan influencers present a more subtle form of mind engineering that aims to gradu‑ ally shift global public opinion on Tibet in favor of the official Chinese narratives of ‘peaceful liberation’, socialist development, and national unity, helping to reconstruct the image of Tibet according to the needs of the state ideological apparatus. On the surface, they serve primarily to promote tourism. Nevertheless, the fact that they started to appear with increased intensity during the COVID‑19 pandemic and on a global platform blocked in the PRC, poses justifiable questions about the influence aspect of these videos that sometimes overtly support government agendas. Therefore, the second part examines this social media content in the context of local development campaigns and newly promoted tourism development strategies, which highlight three topics: ‘red tourism’ (红色旅游), ‘ecological tourism’ (生态旅游), and ‘Tibetans travel [in] Tibet’ (西藏人游 西藏) (Xizang 2021).

The Power of Eyewitness Even before the start of the COVID‑19 pandemic, the TAR was a place with strictly limited acces‑ sibility. Foreign passport holders needed a special travel permit and could visit only on organized trips accompanied by a local tour guide, and since 2015 by a local police supervisor. Access for foreign journalists and diplomats was restricted and impossible after the last major protests in 2008.2 The whole region was regularly closed for foreign tourists around the March anniversary of the Lhasa uprising in 1959 as well as around other important anniversaries or Party meetings. After the COVID‑19 outbreak, Tibet remained closed to visitors from outside of the PRC until January 2023. During the three years, when Tibet, as well as the rest of the PRC, remained virtu‑ ally inaccessible, numerous channels on YouTube, a platform blocked by the PRC government, started to upload videos about Tibet, including travel vlogs and various content about Tibetan culture and life. Under such paradoxical circumstances, some of the influencers repeatedly pro‑ claimed their intention to show ‘the real Tibet’ (真实的西藏) to those who are not able to see it for themselves. In summer 2020, a well‑known PRC‑based and CCP‑supportive entrepreneur and influencer, Daniel Dumbrill, visited Tibet, accompanied by the female journalist Li Jingjing (李菁菁), a 185

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reporter for the state China Global Television Network (CGTN). In the videos she explains official CCP narratives of Tibetan history and presents a Sinicized perspective interpreting Tibetan culture and religion to her ‘foreign friend’, while communicating in Mandarin with locals. The propa‑ ganda function is not always obvious to viewers not familiar with the terminology of ideologically based narratives that underline the content of Dumbrill’s videos. It is explained more clearly in a vlog documenting their visit to one of the recently opened small museums of Tibet’s feudal past, the Pala Manor (帕拉庄园). The former feudal estate of Phalha Tashi Wangchug (pha lha bkra shis dbang phyug, 1912–1982) who escaped to India with the Dalai Lama after the 1959 uprising hosts an exhibition of the ‘decadent’ lifestyle of old Tibetan nobility juxtaposed with the miserable conditions of the family’s serfs (Dumbrill 2020). Such videos highlighting evils of the ‘old Tibet’, published either through official channels of the PRC state media or pro‑China propagandists like Dumbrill, clearly promote the CCP narratives and government policy on Tibet and are quite eas‑ ily identified as propaganda. This content is produced to directly address criticism of the Chinese regime and its policies and aims at ‘debunking the lies’ (CGTN 2021) of Western ‘anti‑China media’ and scholars, presenting the ‘Chinese perspective’ in an effort to indoctrinate recipients and change their opinion. The openly propagandist content presenting official narratives like ‘liberation of serfs’ and promoting the CCP’s standpoints and policies toward Tibet is different from the ‘personalized propaganda’ videos analyzed later. These take up the form of personal vlogs with only subtle links connecting them to government agendas and narratives. Such links, for example, emphasizing the benefit of government‑led development projects, poverty alleviation, or harmony among nationali‑ ties, can be identified also in travel vlogs of other Chinese‑speaking foreigners with long‑term resi‑ dence in the PRC who visited Tibet or Xinjiang (often both) during the research period. Some of them document obviously organized excursions to non‑tourist places, for example, visiting newly built hospitals or local schools, featuring minority children speaking fluent Chinese and singing patriotic songs. One example is The China Traveller, a channel operated by the PRC‑based British influencer Stuart Wiggin, who uploaded several Tibet travel vlogs promoting massive government investments in the region within the poverty‑alleviation program (The China Traveller 2022a). These vlogs often present strongly Sinicized perspectives of Tibet manifested in the language us‑ ing Chinese names and terms for Tibetan realia and the CCP rhetoric to describe current develop‑ ment in Tibet (The China Traveller 2022b). Before 2020, there were several active Tibet travel channels on YouTube acting like local tour operators. Because the platform is blocked in the PRC, while operating from within Tibet, they were registered abroad using a VPN, either unnoticed or with some kind of consent of the au‑ thorities. In the beginning, these channels featured professional, commercial, non‑personalized tourism promotions with beautiful shots and practical advice (in either English or Chinese) to travelers, including how to obtain a Tibet travel permit or how to deal with altitude sickness (e.g., 卓玛 Zhuoma, registered in 2018). However, in 2020, a new kind of personalized videos started to appear, featuring individual hosts/influencers who gradually built close relationships with sub‑ scribers, adapting to the general trend of commercial social media. The content is presented as an ‘authentic personal account’ of someone who actually lives in Tibet to increase the influence and credibility of the videos. The emergence of Tibetan influencers from within the PRC is sympto‑ matic. Tibet has always been a highly sensitive topic in the PRC’s international relations, and it would involve certain personal risk to publish any individual Tibet‑related content on Western platforms at one’s will.3 The boom of personalized Tibet vlogs on YouTube started with videos uploaded on a channel of one of the local tour operators providing services to foreign visitors, Tibet Vista. The channel 186

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Tibet Travel (Tibet Vista) was registered on YouTube in 2011 with the United States as its indicated location. Initially, only one or two short videos were uploaded per year, all of them related to usual travel procedures and itineraries. The channel started to show more activity in 2019, but the real breakthrough came after June 2020. By October 2022, the channel has been updated regularly, usu‑ ally once a week, and has reached over 170,000 subscribers and over 24 million cumulative views. This new activity surged with a new host who introduced himself as a tour guide, going by the name Jamyang. In his vlogs, he addresses the audience in fluent English, occasionally switching to Ti‑ betan or Chinese when communicating with locals, and most of the videos include English subtitles. Between June 2020 and October 2022, more than 100 professionally edited videos with Jamyang as host were uploaded on various topics. The vlogs combine beautiful shots of Tibetan scenery, including aerial footage from drones, with Jamyang’s monological interactions with the audience taken by a front‑facing or hand‑held camera. He often engages in simple conversations in Tibetan with local people and introduces interesting figures, like a monk or a nun, hardworking nomads, an old man whose job is posing for tourists with his Tibetan mastiff by the Yamdrok Lake, and even a ‘Himalayan Gay’.4 Topics are carefully selected to draw the attention of international audiences and show Tibet as a modern, ecological, open, and at the same time spiritual and mysterious land. The professional quality of videos, the beauty of Tibetan nature and cultural relics, and Jamyang’s friendly smile and respectful behavior combine to raise the popularity of the channel, with several videos gaining well over one million views.5 Not surprisingly, the comments section is full of praise. Closer to the government agenda, several videos highlight recent developments in the ­region – most notably the vlog from a trip on the new bullet train from Lhasa to Nyingthi (林芝) in south‑eastern Tibet (Tibet 2021b). Many such videos include a short commentary on the develop‑ ment of the region or the government’s poverty alleviation campaign. In some vlogs, Jamyang praises new roads and cheap petrol or government‑built houses, in others he highlights that Tibet is ‘safe, developed, and modern’. He never fails to mention the help from the government and the leaders whose portraits he encounters in many households, often imitating the traditional Buddhist images of deities and revered lamas known as thangka. In a video uploaded in May 2022, Jamyang finds a random washing machine standing outside by a well in a remote mountain settlement near Yangpachen and comments that ‘last year the government provided washing machines to every household in Tibet’ (Tibet 2022b). More recent vlog (Tibet 2022c) about a visit to Tibet’s oldest Buddhist monastery Samye includes a similarly absurd scene proving the development in Tibet when Jamyang invites the viewers ‘to enjoy the toilets of the monastery’.6 Other videos praise the Chinese health care system and COVID‑19 management. In one of them a senior villager enjoys the benefits of the government vaccination program at the local Party Members’ and Mass Service and Activity Center and expresses (in Tibetan) his thanks to the authorities who ‘arranged it for us’ (Tibet 2021a). This occurred just as other countries were struggling to get enough vaccines for the massive outbreak of the Delta variant. Almost one year later, a smiling Jamyang after an exhaust‑ ing trek in the snowy mountains shares his happiness, claiming that Tibet is one of the safiest place (sic) on this earth, it thanks to the government and the strong religions that we have (…) both of them protecting this place since the beginning Covid‑19, no one has infected by this disease, so we believe here is one of the holiest and happiest place (sic), come to enjoy all this beautiful view of Tibet. (Tibet 2022a)7 In comparison, another channel run by a Tibetan tour operator is Explore Tibet, which was also registered in 2011. It has just 1,600 subscribers, and videos rarely surpassed 1,000 views. More 187

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personalized videos featuring several male guides started to appear during 2021; between January and May 2022, when the last video was posted, 12 longer vlogs featuring the same host were up‑ loaded introducing less visited Tibetan pilgrimage sites. Tibetan language is much more prominent here than in Tibet travel vlogs, with English explanations or subtitles. The host does not introduce himself by his name, but in one video he mentions he comes from Yushu in Qinghai Province, the southern part of the Tibetan Amdo region. Yet, he never uses Chinese to communicate with Tibetans from different parts of Tibet, always speaking in Lhasa Tibetan. These vlogs put a lot of emphasis on the explanation of religious meanings, often interviewing local lamas or hermits to introduce the history of these places (e.g., Explore 2022). The videos, obviously made with non‑professional equipment, record more natural interactions with Tibetans than sometimes awk‑ wardly staged excursions in Tibetan homes with Jamyang. These videos, reaching only hundreds of views, do not exoticize Tibet as it often happens in mass tourism and do not openly promote the government agendas as described earlier. It can be assumed they were made without government incentives that seem to be at play in videos identified through their content analysis as personal‑ ized propaganda. Direct evidence of government funding is lacking, but the recently published research on Xin‑ jiang influencers argues that Chinese minority vloggers are only able to work on banned West‑ ern platforms thanks to ‘state‑sponsored programs that subsequently help facilitate commercial success’ (Steenberg 2022: 175). The vlogs are not published by individual influencers but are produced ‘with the help of special influencer‑management agencies known as multi‑channel net‑ works (MCNs)’ (Ryan et al. 2022). These agencies enable monetization on platforms not legally accessible from the PRC and work closely with authorities to provide strictly controlled content. Some Tibetan influencers on YouTube appear to be a part of this network. For example, a young Tibetan girl hosting the channel 那曲拉姆 (Lhamo from Nagchu) in one of her videos, which was uploaded on the eve of the Chinese National Holiday (国庆节) on October 1, 2022, praises the recent developments and thanks the government and her motherland for the opportunity to become an influencer. As she explains in the vlog, her career started after she participated in an ‘excursion with leaders from the Tibetan Cyberspace Administration Office (西藏网信办)’ one year earlier (Naqu 2022). It might be assumed that this was one of the ‘state‑sponsored programs’ mentioned by Steenberg that facilitate the ‘personal media’ business as government‑endorsed influencers. Dozens of videos by individual Tibetan vloggers appeared on YouTube during the year 2021, reminiscent of those by Xinjiang minority influencers described by Steenberg and Ryan et al. In contrast to the English‑language Tibet travel channel, these new influencers are young, mostly fe‑ male, Chinese‑speaking Tibetans. Their videos are less focused on the representation of exotic and spiritual elements of life in Tibet, with more emphasis on modernity and development. Specific topics often directly address Han Chinese stereotypes about Tibet, refuting its perceived ‘back‑ wardness’. The above‑mentioned vlogger Naqu Lamu started a Weibo account on May 13, 2021, indicating a location in Xizang and accumulating 1.1 million followers within the first year. The content is regularly uploaded to several Chinese social media platforms and YouTube, where the channel, registered on May 31, 2021, through Hong Kong, quickly reached close to 100,000 fol‑ lowers. At the time of this research, the videos were only in Chinese with no English subtitles and the number of views reached lower than thousands for most videos except for YouTube shorts. The content is mainly commercial, allowing direct monetization on Chinese social media platforms, but not on YouTube, where any kind of remuneration must be processed through an agency. Com‑ pared to the Xinjiang influencers’ videos, there is rarely an obvious government agenda present in Naqu Lamu’s vlogs. They cover attractive topics, like the daily life of Tibetan pastoralists, beauty tips based on natural Tibetan cosmetics, Tibetan cuisine, and Tibetan medicine. Many videos are 188

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related to caterpillar fungus,8 a highly sought‑after supplement in traditional Chinese medicine and an important part of the Tibetan local economy in herding areas, where it grows. The commercial content, which naturally attracts followers, is occasionally interlaced with promotions of specific government projects. For example, one vlog introduces a new high‑tech neighborhood in Lhasa that provides living for senior Tibetans with free social and medical care. During a clearly arranged visit to a newly built medical center, Lhamo conducts short interviews in Tibetan with the staff and an elderly client (Naqu 2021). A brief scan of the comments section shows many positive comments, some of them in traditional Chinese characters, appearing to show support from Taiwan, Hong Kong, or the Chinese diaspora with words appreciating the gov‑ ernment’s efforts to develop and modernize Tibet, the social benefits, and health care, etc. Along with informative vlogs explaining Tibetan rituals, rites, and etiquette (like ‘how to relieve yourself in the pasture’), there are several videos openly inviting Han Chinese to Tibet and encouraging interethnic marriages, indicating either increased interest for Tibetan wives among Chinese men or government’s support for mixed relationships. Other vlogger’s videos even specifically mention the government’s incentives to attract workers from inland China to come to Tibet for employment (Baima 2021b). With these topics, young female Tibetan influencers help to present the govern‑ ment’s agenda of rich, modern, and developed ‘Chinese Tibet’. Another notable Tibetan influencer channel on YouTube is 白玛卓玛, which is a Chinese trans‑ literation of a Tibetan female name, Pema Dolma. Videos under the same name were also uploaded on Bilibili, mostly through a channel called ‘Pema Dolma in Tibet’ (白玛卓玛在西藏), but the same person under this name figured in other social media as well. The protagonist is a ‘real‑life Tibetan girl Dolma’ in reference to the broadly known and very popular Chinese language song by Tibetan singer Yadong (亚东). Interestingly, the YouTube channel with more than 13,000 sub‑ scribers went through a series of changes during the research period. The original channel with this name stopped posting with the last video uploaded on August 9, 2022. After that date it changed its name several times and uploaded other unrelated content (later deleted), but some of Dolma’s videos remained searchable on this channel. However, another channel (as of January 2023 with only 3,700 followers) started to publish under this name since November 2022. Both channels, the original and the new one, were registered in April 2021, just one day apart. It is not known whether the new channel was used with another name and uploaded other content before changing to 白玛卓玛, but as of January 2023 there are no older videos predating November 19, 2022. The use of one personal name for several channels on various media and the changes of users on YouTube may indicate that these channels are managed through a PRC‑based agency as discussed earlier. Dolma’s first video was uploaded on April 13, 2021, and during the next 17 months the original channel published around 215 short videos and accumulated almost 1.8 million views. ‘Tibetan girl Dolma’ in her videos provides explanations for various questions that a Han Chinese viewer might have about Tibet, reacting to people’s curiosity and stereotypes about Tibet and Tibetans. Some vlogs explicitly mention incentives for Han people to come to Tibet, as tourists or even to live and work there, and possibly marry a Tibetan girl like herself. Other videos promote Tibet as a modern and developed region, fully integrated into the PRC society, either promoting Tibet as an attrac‑ tive tourist destination and a place to settle or showing the aspirations of young Tibetans within the PRC’s economy. For example, Dolma answers questions about the high plateau climate or the level of development in Tibet (Baima 2021a) and provides advice for those (Han Chinese) who are considering moving there (2021b). The last video uploaded on the original channel in August 2022 was later deleted from YouTube but remained accessible on Bilibili (Baima 2022). The video titled ‘Why we say that Han and Tibetans have the same origin? Tibetan girl Dolma explains Tibetan culture and thousand‑years 189

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strong blood relationship’ is one of the examples of more overt personalized propaganda. It is based on government narratives providing ‘historical evidence’ that Tibet has been a part of China since ancient times and Tibetans are part of the big Chinese nation (Xizang 2017). There is a clear message emphasizing the common identity of Tibetans and Han as ‘Chinese’ (中国人) and enthu‑ siastic aspirations of young Tibetans to integrate into the Chinese society. The agenda behind such videos clearly reflects the shift in the PRC’s ethnic policy during the past decade, from the notion of ‘autonomy of minority nationalities’ toward the inclusive state identity and ‘mingling’ (Hu & Hu 2011) of ethnic minorities with Han to build the big Chinese nation.

Between Shangri‑la, Red History, and Glorious Modernity As convincingly argued by scholars focusing on Xinjiang, the ‘frontier influencers’ recruiting from among ethnic minorities can be seen as ‘the new face of Chinese propaganda’ (Ryan et al. 2022). Considering the sharply increased presence of Tibet influencers on YouTube starting around the year 2020, some two years later than the Xinjiang influencers appeared, it can be assumed that these videos were created with a certain form of official support or incentive. Being posted on YouTube, a platform legally inaccessible from the PRC, they aim primarily at overseas audi‑ ences, including Westerners and exiled Tibetans, but also people from Taiwan and Chinese living abroad or using VPN to ‘climb the [fire]wall’ (翻墙) blocking forbidden platforms. The situation is more complicated in the case of influencers predominantly active on Chinese social media, es‑ pecially youth‑oriented apps like Douyin or Xiaohongshu, therefore this study has focused only on PRC‑based Tibetan influencers on YouTube. Because many of these channels are travel‑oriented, it is important to see them in the context of tourism development in Tibet and the conditions under which foreign passport holders can visit Tibet. As far back as 1989, Richter argued that ‘tourism is a highly political phenomenon’ (2) and that ‘[socialist and other authoritarian regimes] see in tourism a means of improving their international press notices’ (6). In a chapter, which is the first English‑language study on Chinese tourism, she describes the tourism policy in the PRC in the 1980s as ‘essentially modeled on the assumptions that Chinese governments from the time of Confucious (sic) to the era of Mao Zedong have had about foreigners in general, namely that foreign access to Chinese society should be delimited’ (27). Richter saw the opening of the PRC for (primarily Western) tourists as an important milestone for China’s foreign relations in the post‑Mao era. However, Western inbound tourism was only one part of the evolution of the tourism industry in Asia, including the PRC, as cross‑Asian and domestic tourism started to flourish from the 1990s on. Richter did envision this growing trend, noting that ‘in 1986 there were some 27 million domestic travelers [in the PRC], and that number [was] expected to double in the 1990s’ (41), but in general, English‑language scholarship on Asian tourism only started to address this phenomenon after the year 2000 (Winter 2007, Chang et al. 2009, King and Ploysri 2014). The rapid emergence and growth of ‘domestic’ (i.e., Han Chinese) tourism in Tibet clearly shows that we need to abandon what Winter called ‘outmoded conceptions of globalization as a process of Westernization’ (2007: 29) and rethink the ‘politics of tourism’ from a non‑Western perspective. In the process of ‘decolonization’ of tourism studies, the uneven power relations ‘based upon conceptual binaries between traditional/modern, authentic/inauthentic, hegemony/ resistance, and local/global’ (28) can be observed on multiple layers within Asia. This is evident not only in ‘the encounter[s] between Western, northern‑hemisphere tourists and their Eastern, southern‑hemisphere hosts’, but also on local levels as it is evident from many aspects of Chinese domestic tourism as well, namely in politically contested regions like Tibet, Xinjiang, or Taiwan. 190

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The development of tourism in the TAR differed from the Chinese inland, even though it mostly shadowed the general trends. The TAR opened for foreign visitors during the 1980s for the first time after the political turmoil following the Tibetan resistance in 1958–1959 and the Cultural Revolution in 1966–1976. However, a special permit (入藏函) with a detailed itinerary was still required for entry of foreign passport holders; this policy did not apply to the Tibetan‑inhabited areas outside of the TAR. The number of incoming tourists in the TAR started to rise dramatically after the opening of the Qinghai‑Tibet railway in summer 2006. From the 2.5 million tourist vis‑ its (both domestic and foreign, including Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macao) that year the number multiplied annually and reached 20 million in 2015, when tourism had already made up 25% of the TAR’s GDP. The sharp growth continued and surpassed 40 million in 2019 (Zhonghua 2020) with only a short pause in the first half of 2020, when the region was closed due to COVID‑19. Nevertheless, despite the ongoing pandemic, in 2021 official sources announced a new high reach‑ ing over 41.5 million tourist visits (Zhonghua 2022). There are no public data quantifying the ratio of foreign visitors to the TAR in the past; however, since the PRC effectively closed its borders after the outbreak of COVID‑19 in Wuhan, only domestic tourists (and a small number of foreign residents) have been able to visit between spring 2020 and autumn 2022. Richter in 1989 remarked laconically that at that time domestic tourism was ‘not seen as a particularly important means of integrating the PRC’s minority groups into the dominant Han culture’ (52). In fact, according to her observation, ‘foreign tourists [had] the greatest likelihood of visiting minority areas’ (53). In other words, tourism in minority areas originally developed with primarily foreign tourists in mind. However, unceasing resistance and recurrent waves of protest, namely in Tibet and Xinjiang, from the late 1980s to the 2000s have radically changed the picture. In the process of securitization of these two regions, the authorities focused on controlling various ‘foreign forces’, including foreign tourists and researchers, but also members of overseas diasporas whose contact with local people was seen as potentially subversive or even erosive from the perspective of the state/regime. Under such circumstances, tourism started to be used as one of the integration strategies aimed at the PRC’s minority groups and a means of achieving state control over minority‑related narratives. Hand in hand with the ‘second generation ethnic policies’ (Hu & Hu 2011) promoting ‘ethnic blending’ (交融) instead of former ‘regional ethnic autonomy and minority preferential policies’ (Leibold 2012), the rapid growth of domestic tourism found a favorable response in both Tibet and Xinjiang. Local authorities started to incentivize Han Chi‑ nese inbound tourism to the TAR, emphasizing the role of ‘Tibetan red culture resources’ included in officially promoted travel itineraries (Xizang 2021) for ‘strengthening of ‘five identifications (五个认同)’9 of all nationalities in Tibet and affirmation of the collective identity of the big Chi‑ nese nation’ (Niu 2020). Western studies (e.g., Schein 2000, Blum 2001) have shown how ethnic minority identities and cultures in the PRC are commercialized and commodified within the mass tourism industry, which is an important source of income for many local communities and whole minority regions. At the same time, tourism, during the past decade namely Han Chinese tourism, contributes to the further incorporation of ethnic minorities into the larger frame of inclusive Zhonghua wenhua (中华文化; Chinese national culture) or ‘collective civic culture and identity’ (Leibold 2012) of the Chinese nation (中华民族). As in other parts of the world, exotic local cultures and customs with colorful ethnic costumes, dancing and singing, became a signature feature of ethnic tour‑ ism in the PRC, appropriating various stereotypes stemming from the uneven power relations between the Han majority and ethnic minorities, the Chinese state and indigenous elites. On the surface, ethnic tourism appears to contribute to the preservation of local minority cultures, but it often changes them according to the taste of the incoming tourists, while fixating on the perceived 191

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inferiority of their culture, which is viewed as primitive and backward compared to the culture of the dominant ethnic group. One of the new trends in Tibetan tourism that started to be officially promoted in 2021 is ‘red tourism’, whose aim is to promote patriotism and can thus be described as ‘patriotic tourism’ (爱国旅游). In 2021, the TAR Tourism Development Office (自治区旅游发展厅) promoted a series of red tourism events under the motto ‘Hundred years of great historical course, seventy glorious leaps’ (百年伟业历程·七十辉煌跨越). This campaign encouraged the regional travel authorities to ‘make good use of red resources, tell red stories, promote red education, and pass on red genes [in order to] develop red tourism’ (Xizang 2021). This kind of tourism either takes tourists on ­‘development‑tours’, showcasing newly built modern living quarters, hospitals, schools, railroads, and train stations, or highlights sites of historical significance that are somehow connected to the ­revolutionary history and heroic endeavors of the CCP in Tibetan areas. Such sites serve as ­Tibet’s ‘pa‑ triotic education bases’, combining the ‘unique natural and cultural resources of Tibet’ (Xizang 2021). The analyzed Tibet travel vlogs often build on those aspects of Tibetan culture and life that are perceived as exotic by many outsiders (e.g., pastoralism, polyandry, monastic life, religious practices), arousing the curiosity of viewers by stressing elements of otherness. Using this basis of popular stereotypes that people interested in Tibet or in general traveling expect from Tibet‑related content, they incorporate elements, aspects, and narratives desired by the authorities, from the ‘lib‑ eration of serfs’ from the oppressive feudal ‘old Tibet’ to clean cities with modern infrastructure and free high‑quality health care. Various strategies are used to link the positive images of Tibet directly with the CCP’s rule as ‘red tourism’ does. The open propaganda narratives of official me‑ dia channels juxtaposing ‘dark old Tibet’ with the ‘bright new Tibet’ are in the influencers’ videos substituted by more subtle forms, ranging from explicit expressions of gratefulness to the govern‑ ment and omnipresence of leaders’ portraits in restaurants and ordinary households to presenting a Sinicized perspective of Tibet, emphasizing the inclusive state identity with strong bonds and ‘natural ethnic mingling’ (Leibold 2012) between Tibetans and Han, etc. This combination of spir‑ ituality, modernity, and patriotism in analyzed videos helps to construct an image of the familiar ‘Shangri‑la’, newly recontextualized between its ‘red past’ and high‑tech future represented by super‑modern infrastructure and ecological ways of life.

Conclusion By the beginning of the 21st century, tourism has become an important part of the economy of many countries and regions. Hand in hand with rising numbers of tourists, the political aspect of tourism becomes more prominent, turning it into an effective tool for shaping the image of a coun‑ try/region with the potential to strengthen national pride and a sense of common identity through emphasizing traditions that are often re‑invented for tourism. In the case of Tibet, tourism has be‑ come one of the main sources of income for the TAR and other Tibetan‑inhabited areas in the PRC. At the same time, as shown in this study, the authorities aim to use Tibetan tourism as an influential means of asserting the common Chinese identity, ‘blended’ together from various local and ethnic minority cultures in a process of ‘natural ethnic mingling and a shared sense of civic belonging’ (Leibold 2012). The actual and virtual tourists learn about Tibet, its culture, and history through official interpretations building upon the ideological representations of the old Tibet as a backward region, stuck in a middle‑age‑like feudal serf system from which ‘millions of serfs’ needed to be ‘liberated’ by the People’s Liberation Army in the 1950s. In the 21st century, development, wealth, and social benefits including allegedly accessible and affordable health care have become the key arguments legitimizing CCP’s rule in Tibet. 192

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This study outlines the Chinese politics of Tibetan tourism, based on an examination of official narratives used in local tourism promotion since 2020 and supported by a qualitative analysis of travel vlogs posted on YouTube by ethnic Tibetan travel agents or individual influencers during the researched period. The analysis confirmed that different forms of promotion of tourism in Tibet are shaped to serve as means of soft mind engineering through which Chinese authorities aim to convince both domestic and foreign audiences, consumers, and visitors to accept the historically based narratives justifying Tibet’s ‘liberation’ that has led to today’s ‘flourishing Tibet’. The recent effort to incorporate ‘red’ tourist sites and related ‘red stories’ into tourist itineraries makes clear that it was the ‘red past’ that enabled the present prosperity of Tibet and Tibetan culture rather than destroying it. Tibetan tourism authorities and private actors, as well as the cyberspace administration offices and young Tibetan influencers, are parts of a broad propagandist and information network, whose main agenda is to legitimize the Chinese rule over Tibet and to subvert the narratives of the Tibetan exile government (CTA 2018) and criticism coming from the Western human rights organizations and governments. The new mind‑engineering strategies used in tourism promotion range from patriotic education through red history to young influencers promoting Tibetan culture as modern and ecological rather than mysteriously spiritual and backward. Compared to traditional propa‑ ganda, mind engineering often goes unnoticed by uninformed audiences and consumers, whose main interest is seeking leisure and enjoyment in both their video‑watching and physical traveling experiences. Even though the long‑term effects of Tibet‑related mind engineering disguised as online leisure and tourism promotion are yet to be assessed by future research, examined vlogs on YouTube, potentially reaching millions of views, demonstrably aim to influence global public perceptions of Tibet through subtle manipulations of opinions, demystifying Tibet by showing its modern, Sinicized face. By recontextualizing Tibet within Chinese ideological narrative frameworks for international audiences, the analyzed vlogs reflecting key government agendas strive to shift nega‑ tive and China‑critical attitudes about the CCP’s rule in Tibet to acceptance and appreciation of the government’s achievements in the region, showcasing that – despite the heavy securitization and restrictions on personal freedom – thanks to the Chinese state, modern Tibetans are living in a present‑day Shangri‑la.

Notes 1 The research was supported by Czech Science Foundation (GAČR) within the project Representation and Role of Tibetan Buddhism in Narratives about Tibet from 1950s to present (reg. no 23‑06406S). 2 There are no publicly available official directives specifying the access of foreigners to Tibet, but, accord‑ ing to one of the tour operator’s promotional videos on YouTube, foreign journalists and diplomats are among the ‘three kinds of people prohibited from traveling to China’s Tibet’ (Zhuoma 2019). 3 For example, in January 2023, a Tibetan language channel was started by Kardol, a female Tibetan influ‑ encer living in Lhasa. She posted regular vlogs on various topics, reflecting the life of young people in contemporary Lhasa. By June 2023, all personal vlogs were taken down from the channel. 4 The video titled ‘The Himalayan Gay: How Is His Daily Life? How He Deal (sic) with Conflict of Being Gay in Buddhist Society?’ was published on July 9, 2021, and until January 2023 has accumulated almost 500,000 views. The protagonist with a feminine Tibetan name Metok (‘flower’; Ch. 苏鲁梅朵) form Ny‑ ingthi is a successful entrepreneur and internet celebrity (网红) on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, where he has currently 56,000 followers. In the vlog, he is introduced as ‘the first gay in Himalayan re‑ gion, who has found the balance between the society and the religion’ by donating 40% of his earnings on charity. This image of Tibetan society as tolerant and open toward the LGBTQ+ community, connecting this attitude with Buddhist notions of compassion and forgiveness, is one of the topics that help to portray Tibet as a harmonious and modern place with personal freedoms comparable to democratic societies.

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Kamila Hladíková 5 As of January 2023, Polyandry family 3.7  million; Kailash inner kora 2.4  million; Tibetan arranged ­marriage 2 million; Tibetan yak man 1.5 million; Life of Tibetan Buddhist monk 1.2 million. 6 According to Tibetan writer Tsering Woeser Chinese leader Xi Jinping started a ‘toilet revolution’ (厕所革命) in 2015, proposing improvement of public toilets as a means to promote tourism development (Ciren 2020: 162). 7 A wave of COVID hit Tibet in August 2022, and the region was closed for more than 90 days during the writing of this chapter. Traveling was restricted, and many vloggers stopped updating during the lockdown. 8 Ophiocordyceps sinensis, in English also known as cordyceps, in Tibetan yartsa gunbu (དབྱར་རྩྭ་དགུན་འབུ་), in Chinese 冬虫春草is an entonompathogenic fungus parasitizing larvae of moths found on the Tibetan plateau above 3,500 meters. It is considered an aphrodisiac in Tibetan and Chinese folk medicine. As such, it might be considered one of the positive associations connected to Tibet for many people in the PRC, increasing the searchability of the videos and its visibility through algorithms. 9 Five identifications (五个认同) is a campaign launched in 2015 by the United Front Department to ‘ad‑ vance in building of national unity and actively nurture common identity of the big Chinese nation’. It includes identification with ‘the great motherland, big Chinese nation, Chinese culture, Communist Party of China, and socialism with Chinese characteristic’ (Tong zhan bu 2015).

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Red Tourism ——— (2022b). ‘TIBET VLOG6: The streets of LHASA/英国小哥逛拉萨八廓街 误食了牛粪?’ YouTube, undated; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j‑71poOimBo&t=266s Tibet Travel (Tibet Vista) (2021a). ‘Himalayan man with the most expensive dog in the world: How is their daily life?’ YouTube, May 15; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzXyZPC0oCE&t=974s ——— (2021b). ‘Fastest train in Tibet: My awesome Lhasa Nyingchi bullet train experience’. YouTube, Au‑ gust 20; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWnmUbsO1C8&t=338s ——— (2022a). ‘Most difficult Himalayan snowy road I ever walked; What is it to live here? How is people’s life?’ YouTube, February 13; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22pQO‑Lwwc4 ——— (2022b). ‘I finally finished the trekking and back to my home Lhasa’. YouTube, May 18; https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=4Ehn8X__Peg ——— (2022c). ‘Take you to visit the first and oldest Tibetan Buddhist monastery – Samye monastery’. YouTube, July 19; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXYV5U0d03M Topgyal, T. (2016). ‘Tibetan self‑immolations as counter‑securitzation: Interdiscoursivity, identity, and emer‑ gency’. Asian Security 12(3): 166–187. Winter, T. (2007). ‘Rethinking tourism in Asia’. Annals of Tourism Research 34(1): 27–44. Zenz, A. and Leibold, J. (2017). ‘Chen Quanguo: The strongman behind Beijing’s securitization strategy in Tibet and Xinjiang’. China Brief 17(12); https://jamestown.org/program/chen‑quanguo‑the‑strongman‑ behind‑beijings‑securitization‑strategy‑in‑tibet‑and‑xinjiang/ Zhuoma卓玛 (2019). ‘Why not allow foreign guests to travel to Tibet in March each year?’. YouTube, January 13; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zOyshy9o‑g

Chinese References Baima Zhuoma 白玛卓玛 (2021a). ‘From one street developed into a town, how much Tibetan small towns flourish?’ 从一条马路发展为城市，西藏的小城有多繁华? YouTube, September 15, 2021; https://www. bilibili.com/video/BV1Tf4y1E7JF/ ——— (2021b). ‘Handsome guy wants to get married and establish family in Tibet, how can Tibetans and Han marry?’ 帅气小伙想在西藏结婚安家，藏族和汉族如何通婚. YouTube, September 12, 2021; https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1JM4y1g7Yu/ Baima Zhuoma zai Xizang 白玛卓玛在西藏 (2022). ‘Why we say that Han and Tibetans have the same origin? Tibetan girl Dolma explains Tibetan culture and thousand‑years strong blood relationship’ 为啥说 汉藏同源?藏族姑娘卓玛介绍西藏文化，血浓于水千年传承. Bilibili, August 10; https://www.bilibili. com/video/BV1qG41187NG/?from=search Ciren Weise 次仁唯色 (2020). Amnye Machen, Amnye Machen 阿尼玛卿，阿尼玛卿. Taipei: Xueyu chu‑ banshe 台北:雪域出版. Hu Angang; Hu Lianhe 胡鞍钢;胡联合 (2011). ‘Second generation of ethnic policy: Promoting ethnic blend‑ ing into one flourishing whole’ 第二代民族政策:促进民族交融一体和繁荣一体. Xinhua wenzhai 新华 文摘24; https://www.sinoss.net/uploadfile/2011/1229/20111229100022433.pdf Naqu Lamu 那曲拉姆 (2021). ‘How good are Tibetan social benefits? Herders have 90% of their medical costs covered, Tibetan girl wants to bring her grandfather to live in the city too’ 西藏福利待遇多好? 牧民就医报销90%多，藏族姑娘也想带爷爷进城. YouTube, November 6; https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=JDcZhy3buEY&t=1s ——— (2022). ‘Tibetan girl doing personal media to buy apartment? Not really, but in the new era life brings more and more benefits’ 234. 藏族姑娘做自媒体买房子?其实并没有，但新时代生活越过越慈润! YouTube, September 29; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJVwXdLrwzg&t=133s Niu Yanjun 牛燕军 (2020). ‘Using Tibetan red culture resources to develop advanced education toward na‑ tional unity’ 运用西藏红色文化资源开展民族团结进步教育. Xizang minzu daxue xuebao 西藏民族大 学学报 3; https://www.fx361.cc/page/2020/1210/12737597.shtml Tong zhan bu 统战部 (2015). ‘Regulations on the Chinese Communist Party’s United Font work‘ 中国共产 党统一战线工作条例. China University of Political Science and Law 中国政法大学, May 18; https:// tzb.cupl.edu.cn/info/1007/1415.htm Xizang zizhiqu renmin zhengfu 西藏自治区人民政府 (2017). ‘From ancient times, Tibet is a part of the Chi‑ nese territory’ 西藏自古以来就是中国领土的一部分, May 23; http://www.xizang.gov.cn/xwzx_406/ ztzl_416/gdzt/66zn/dsj/201901/t20190117_51816.html

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13 THE TRUTH LIES IN‑BETWEEN Mind Engineering in the 2020–2021 Indian Farmers’ Protest Sony Jalarajan Raj and Adith K. Suresh

Introduction In the 21st century, popular narratives about public issues are strengthened by new forms of ­communication enhanced by the integration of technology and media. Online media platforms are important sites of public engagement where individuals use communicative features such as memes and hashtags to express their political bias (Bennett et al. 2012; DeCook 2018). ­Narratives of propaganda, which appear in multiple modes such as fake news, social media campaigns, and virtue signaling, manipulate the minds of populations by often reinforcing group identities ­(Marwick 2018; Gerbaudo 2022). Political protests in India, the largest democracy in the world, are often influenced by narra‑ tives that are created through the manipulation of public opinion and attitudes through media, propaganda, and other psychological techniques. Tactics of mind engineering are employed by different stakeholders, including the government, political parties, corporate groups, and other external forces and interest groups, to sway public sentiments and mobilize support for specific causes. The underlying grievances and demands of the people often play a significant role in the construction of these narratives. Stories that cater to the group identity of the masses are important in India as the country is highly sensitive to cultural sentiments and traditional social values. India has witnessed a series of protests where mind engineering through technologically assisted media platforms redefined the language of political communication in different ways. The 2020–2021 farmers’ protest is a recent example of this. The 2020–2021 farmers’ protest was started as a response to the central government’s passage of three farm bills that claimed to create a new ecosystem for doing business between farmers and traders by eliminating middlemen participation. Although the government claimed that the bills would empower farmers and reduce external intervention and exploitation, they were met with im‑ mediate public backlash, with many labeling them as ‘anti‑farmer’ and ‘corporate‑friendly’. Con‑ sequently, farmers gathered in the streets of the Indian capital to show their opposition to the ruling government, triggering nationwide debates. These discussions often adopted a divisive ‘support or protest’ narrative, leading to the characterization of individuals with differing opinions as either ‘nationalist’ or ‘anti‑nationalist’. The objective authenticity of such a dichotomy and its impact on the larger population were reflected in social media where the dissemination of misinformation

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DOI: 10.4324/9781003289746-17

Sony Jalarajan Raj and Adith K. Suresh

and biased viewpoints transformed the public platforms into hostile spaces of hate‑mongering. Authoritative power that wields state propaganda as a tool to control the masses frequently uses media as a reliable weapon (Kellner 1992; Boyd‑Barrett 2004). The weaponization of social me‑ dia in political crises involves the use of internet bots to spread fake news and propaganda (Jones 2019). According to Oliver Boyd‑Barrett, creating hostile situations are a strategy of governments where they use ‘media to whip up patriotic fervor, boost support for the authorities, and marginal‑ ize and/or ridicule dissent and dissenters’ (Boyd‑Barrett 2016: 30). He argues that such ‘pretexts’ are ‘frequently wrong, provoked, and even fabricated’ for authorities to choose ‘independent’ (but colluding) mainstream media for the widespread dissemination of their inaccuracies and decep‑ tions’ (2016: 30). The chapter argues that group identity‑inspired political activism only obfuscates fact‑based reality politics and leads to collective action under emotionally activated contexts. In the farmer’s protest, objective debates on the farm laws were minimal because the thought process was shaped by political populism. The international recognition of the protests through slogans and newspaper reports made global icons like Rihanna and Greta Thunberg respond to the event, which the gov‑ ernment declared as an ‘external intervention’, and many Indian celebrities used counter‑hashtags to rebut it in social media. This chapter investigates how such narrative constructions help shape a culture of dichotomized opinion‑making in the public sphere where the truth(s) gets sidelined by collective brainwashing and groupthink.

The 2020 Farm Bills The agriculture sector plays a vital role in shaping India’s socio‑economic structure and cultural life. As one of the world’s largest producers of many agricultural products, it contributes sig‑ nificantly to the country’s gross domestic product (Jethwani et al. 2021). Since the populations in the rural areas largely depend on farming and related activities to sustain their livelihoods, agri‑ cultural development is central to the overall development of the nation (Bhatnagar and Poonia 2019). The farmers as a group constitute a large workforce among India’s massive population. After independence, the issues related to farmers’ quality of life became part of political and so‑ cial debates and political parties have been using these issues to create narratives that favor their agendas. However, the socio‑economic status of the Indian farmer has not improved in a way that grants economic stability and assurance to make agriculture a profitable endeavor. Since India’s economic policies are regulated by a centralized government that plans, invests, and produces in a socialist model, everything is decided in a politically collective manner which is strictly based on strategies and policies that appeal to the sentiments of the farmer’s group whenever they put pressure on governments. This ubiquitous role of the government was reformed after the 1991  liberalization policies, which paved the way for new economic activities operated through major corporate interventions. A competition‑based economic system that emerged out of this globalized scenario was enhanced and integrated by innovations in technology and media, where business models strive to increase their profit margins to the maximum. When the government, political leaders, and administrators worked with corporations to make arrangements that were mutually beneficial to each other, a cor‑ rupt political and economic order started to engulf the public sphere, stripping ordinary people of their free will and preventing them from engaging with the market. The resulting economic crisis was mainly reflected in the agricultural sector in the form of failed small‑scale business endeavors, lack of production, price hikes, scarcity of agricultural products, and farmers’ suicides all over the country. Esha Shah (2012) observes that the farmers’ suicides created an ‘agrarian crisis’ which 198

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resulted from the social and structural transformations that ‘contribute[d] to the hegemonic repro‑ duction of rural–urban and agriculture–industry inequality’ (1160). Farmers’ suicides have been one of the most used topics in election campaigns in India. Politi‑ cians cite them to create an emotional appeal in the public sphere; a strategy of political populism that includes the brainwashing of the masses. The identity of the Indian farmer is often used as a cultural symbol that emphasizes the notion that farmers are essential to the country’s food secu‑ rity. Issues of nutrition deficiency and hunger affect the country’s attempts to achieve self‑reliance as a major development goal (Singh 2016), and farmers’ suicide and low income amplify these problems. Individuals whose livelihoods depend on agriculture often face inadequate support from prevailing economic conditions, leaving ordinary farmers reliant on bank loans, which, in turn, can lead to an accumulation of overwhelming debts. Major political parties like the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Indian National Congress have included solutions to farmers’ conditions in the form of new ‘farm laws’ in their election manifestos (Mukherjee 2019; Verma 2022). In June 2020, the BJP‑led Indian government im‑ plemented three agricultural laws through ordinances. The three farm laws, officially called the Essential Commodities (Amendment) Act, Farmers (Empowerment and Protection) Agreement on Price Assurance and Farm Services Act, and Farmers’ Produce Trade and Commerce (Promotion and Facilitation) Act, attempt to limit the government’s control over the marketing of agricul‑ tural produce in India. The following are the main provisions of the laws according to the Indian government. The new legislation aims to establish an ecosystem that fosters freedom of choice for farmers and traders in the sale and purchase of agricultural produce. This will be achieved by promoting barrier‑free trade within and across state borders, extending beyond the physical premises of mar‑ kets governed by State Agricultural Produce Marketing legislation. Notably, farmers will not incur any cess or levy charges for selling their produce, and their transportation costs will be eliminated. To facilitate seamless trade, the bill proposes the establishment of an electronic trading platform. Moreover, in addition to the traditional mandis (marketplace), farmers will have the freedom to engage in trading at various other locations like farm gates, cold storage facilities, warehouses, and processing units. This move will enable direct marketing and eliminate intermediaries, ensur‑ ing that farmers receive the full value of their produce. By empowering farmers to engage with processors, wholesalers, aggregators, large retailers, and exporters on a level playing field, the legislation provides them with price assurance even before sowing their crops. In cases where the market price exceeds the minimum price, farmers will be entitled to receive the higher price. This shift transfers the risk of market unpredictability from the farmer to the sponsor, providing them with stability and protection from market price fluctuations. Furthermore, the legislation opens doors for farmers to access modern technology, better seeds, and other essential inputs. This move is expected to reduce marketing costs and ultimately improve farmers’ income. To ensure effec‑ tive dispute resolution, the legislation introduces a mechanism with clear timelines for redressal. Additionally, the bill encourages research and the adoption of new technologies in the agriculture sector, promoting its growth and development. Overall, this comprehensive legislation is aimed at empowering farmers, enhancing their income, and fostering a more efficient and dynamic agricul‑ tural trading system (Press Information Bureau 2020). Politicians from the opposition parties argued that the farmer’s laws make the farmers suscep‑ tible to corporate demands while the government assured that these rules will make it easier for farmers to sell their produce directly to large private traders without the involvement of middle‑ men. Critics and protestors argued that the government’s failure to engage in meaningful consulta‑ tions with farmers prior to implementing the laws left them feeling excluded from decisions that 199

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directly impacted their livelihoods. A central worry was the potential erosion of the minimum sup‑ port price (MSP) system, which provides farmers with price guarantees, as the new laws aimed to open up agricultural markets to private sector involvement. Concerns also surrounded the potential loss of traditional mandis, the influence of large corporations, and the inadequacy of legal protec‑ tions for farmers in their dealings with private buyers. Some feared that small farmers might strug‑ gle to compete in a more liberalized market, raising questions about economic viability and access to credit. Moreover, protestors voiced environmental and procedural concerns, emphasizing the need for a broader discussion on the future of agriculture in India. This difference in opinion cre‑ ated a divided space in the public sphere where narratives created two groups of people–those who support the farm laws and those who refuse to accept them. It became evident that building con‑ sensus and addressing these concerns was essential to bridge the gap between the government’s intent to modernize the agricultural sector and the deep‑rooted worries of the farming community. Agricultural unions and organizations played a pivotal role in mobilizing and organizing the protests. Farmers from Punjab and Haryana, in particular, took a lead role in the movement, draw‑ ing on their historical significance in India’s agricultural sector. Labor unions across the country also expressed solidarity with the farmers’ cause, viewing the reforms as a threat to workers’ rights and labor protections in the agricultural domain. The prevailing sentiment was that the reforms could shift power dynamics, potentially disadvantaging both farmers and agricultural laborers. These intensified fears of job insecurity, wage reductions, and the erosion of long‑established labor rights and protections in the agricultural sector. Their participation further bolstered the movement and added to the collective strength of the protests. The opposition political parties, including the Indian National Congress, Aam Aadmi Party, and various regional parties, lent their support to the farmers’ demands. They criticized the government’s handling of the protests and demanded a repeal of the controversial laws. The involvement of opposition parties added a political dimension to the protests and fueled debates in India’s political landscape. In addition to formal political and labor groups, civil society and human rights organizations rallied behind the farmers’ movement. Activists and concerned citizens raised their voices in support of the farmers’ demands, highlight‑ ing the potential ambiguity of the reforms on rural livelihoods and the need to protect the interests of the farming community. It reflected a broader concern for rural development, social justice, and economic stability, emphasizing the need to strike a balance between modernizing the agricultural sector and safeguarding the interests of the farming community. On the other side, the primary pro‑ ponent of the agricultural reforms was the Indian government, led by the BJP and Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The government maintained that the reforms aimed to modernize the agricultural sector, enhance farmers’ income, and attract private investments to the agrarian economy. While the majority of farmers and agricultural unions opposed the reforms, there were some farmers and smaller agricultural organizations that supported the new laws. They saw potential benefits in mar‑ ket liberalization and contract farming and believed that the reforms could bring positive changes to the agricultural landscape.

Narratives of Protest The three agricultural laws immediately became part of the public discourse as the ‘farm laws’ and opinions and discussions were based on this particular popular reference. Mekhala Krishnamurthy (2021) observes that referring to the ‘agricultural produce marketing and trade laws’ as the ‘farm laws’ was ‘strategic’ as it reflected the union government’s intention of creating a ‘pro‑farmer legislation that granted the nation’s small and marginal farmers a long denied ‘freedom’: the free‑ dom to sell their produce wherever, whenever and to whomsoever they chose’ (original emphasis, 200

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2021: 1409–1410). Both the government and the protestors have expressed differing viewpoints regarding the farm laws, with each side presenting their perspectives and raising concerns about the other’s communication strategies (Arora 2020; NDTV 2020). The rhetoric of the ruling gov‑ ernment was that the farm laws were supposed to bring a free market agricultural space for farmers to negotiate product prices on their own terms without the help of middlemen. The government’s narratives emphasized the freedom of choice and liberty these laws assure the farmers, allow‑ ing them to participate in the new and globalized market economy. They claimed that these new reformations will modify the agricultural sector of India in favor of the farmers and increase the farmers’ incomes which will eventually improve their lives. The issues and concerns raised by various stakeholders were rooted in the potential unintended consequences and implementation challenges of these reforms. This is where mind engineering comes into play through the construction of popular narratives that manipulate the collective con‑ sciousness of society. The government’s narrative was widely criticized by the opposition parties and the public for its pro‑capitalist provisions that attempted to reduce state regulation over the agriculture sector. They argued that these provisions heavily favored large corporations at the ex‑ pense of small and marginal farmers, potentially leading to exploitation, reduced income, and loss of traditional market structures. They believed that the laws tilted the balance of power away from the agricultural community and were overly focused on market‑driven outcomes, which raised concerns about the economic viability of smaller farmers and the vulnerability of the sector to mar‑ ket fluctuations. The agitated farmers from northern Indian states like Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan, and Uttar Pradesh gathered and marched to New Delhi, the national capital of India, to protest (Gettelman, Singh, and Kumar 2020; Trivedi 2020). The large mobilization of farmers in Delhi created political and social unrest that produced tremors throughout the country. The farmers’ model of protest was noted for its sheer will and resilience. For example, the farmers–including ailing old men and women–arrived at the protest site on their tractors and stayed there for months. The government failed to convince the farmers of the benefits of the laws as the discussions be‑ tween the state and the farmers’ union members were not constructive. Both the government and the farmers’ union were unflinching from their respective stands—either the implementation of the laws or its complete withdrawal. These discussions, carried out in a dichotomous manner, there‑ fore, could not find a middle ground for constructive criticisms and dialogues. The popular narrative construction behind the farmer’s protest painted it as a national revolu‑ tionary movement of the marginalized Indian farmer. Many farmers’ unions have termed these measures as ‘anti‑farmer laws’ (Palnitkar 2021). It gained global recognition through media cov‑ erage and social media interactions that centralized the ‘poor farmer’ image to gain emotional support. Although the farmers’ protest was initially started as an independent strike involving the regional mobilization of the farmers, more outside participation was explicitly visible during the course of time. For instance, in the name of supporting the farmers, the left‑wing political parties joined the protest and tried to project it as their own. Campaigns and discussions were conducted across the country to help frame the local protest as a global phenomenon and gained more vis‑ ibility through mass media exposure. Politicians and Parliament members from South Indian states marched in the streets to show solidarity with the farmers. In order to give a global perspective to the strikes, more diasporic protests were conducted internationally in different countries and global celebrities like Rihanna and Greta Thunberg came forward to give their support (Hindustan Times 2021a). The Indian government tried to stop the farmers’ movement using the police and law enforce‑ ment. They used water cannons, tear gas, and batons to suppress the agitations which were in the form of demonstrations, road blocking, gherao (encirclement), and picketing. The altercations 201

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between the farmers and the police resulted in many casualties and infrastructural damage. The farmers’ Republic Day protest on 26 January 2021 turned violent after a group of protestors tried to storm the Red Fort, resulting in the death of a protestor, and the arrest of hundreds of others. Many police officers were injured while stopping the rampage created by the protestors. The protestors hoisted Sikh religious flags from the top of the Red Fort’s domes. The act of flag hoisting was criti‑ cized in the public sphere as a violent anti‑national activity that challenged the sovereignty of the nation‑state. The president of India condemned these acts of dissent and civil unrest as an ‘insult to the national flag and Republic Day’ (Hindustan Times 2021b). Although the government promised some amendments to the rules, the organizations were not ready for anything other than the complete repealing of the acts. From December 12, 2022, farmers’ organizations took over the highway toll plazas in Haryana and allowed vehicles to pass for free. In mid‑December, the Supreme Court received a batch of petitions seeking the removal of blockades created by protestors around Delhi. The court also expressed its interest in holding discussions with various officials of the protesting farmers’ organizations. During this period, the court asked the government to suspend the laws, but the government refused. The farmers col‑ lectively demanded the government repeal the three agricultural laws. The farmers’ opposition reflects the fear that such liberalization may expose them to market forces and corporate exploita‑ tion. They also demanded MSP of 50% above the average cost of production, abolishing the Air Quality Commission (2020) in National Capital Region (NCR) and surrounding areas, implement‑ ing the recommendations of the National Commission for Farmers,1 withdrawing all cases filed against farm union leaders, reducing diesel price by 50% for agricultural activities, and repealing the Electricity (Amendment) Ordinance (2020) (ANI 2020; Ellis‑Petersen 2020; Gaon Connection 2020; Sehgal 2020; The Times of India 2020). The call for legally ensuring the MSP highlights the absence of a guaranteed MSP mechanism in the new laws, raising concerns about market fluctuations and lower income. The demand for set‑ ting the MSP at a rate 50% above the average cost of production underscores the apprehension that the laws may not ensure fair and remunerative prices for their produce. Additionally, the request to abolish the Air Quality Commission in the NCR and surrounding areas points to the opposition against the penalization for stubble‑burning activities of farmers. The demand to withdraw cases against farm union leaders highlights the government’s confrontational approach toward the pro‑ tests. Furthermore, the request to reduce diesel prices by 50% for agricultural activities addresses rising production costs, particularly concerning the market‑driven practices emphasized by the new laws. Lastly, the demand to repeal the Electricity (Amendment) Ordinance (2020) reflects concerns about potential changes in electricity regulations and underscores farmers’ anxieties about essential support systems. These demands collectively embody the farmers’ fears about the perceived inadequacies and risks associated with the new agricultural laws, as they strive to secure legal protections, pricing mechanisms, and safeguards to protect their livelihoods and traditional agricultural structures. The farmers’ protests were characterized by a form of group thinking that revolved around propagating and countering narratives, which tended to oversimplify complex issues into binary extremes, thereby fostering tensions among the public. This means branding the protestor with political labels to degrade the authenticity of the protest with suggestive remarks that associate the protest with hidden agendas. During the Farmer’s protests, supporters of the ruling government called protestors anti‑nationals, proponents of Western conspiracy, and agents of Islamic terrorism. The clash between the pro‑Hindu hyper‑nationalistic ideology of the right‑wing ruling government and the liberal and secularist ideals of India transformed the public sphere into a space where the perpetual exchange of arguments and counter‑arguments regarding the fixation of identities that 202

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fit into the respective narrative agenda of each side occurred. The pro‑farmer and anti‑farmer narratives soon turned into a nationalist and anti‑nationalist angle where both parties (those who support the government and the farm laws and those who oppose it) simultaneously accused each other of being unpatriotic or against the nation’s interests. This marked a significant turning point in the discourse, where the focus shifted from the original debates surrounding the agricultural reforms to accusations of loyalty and intentions. The accusations and counter‑accusations further exacerbated the polarization, making it increasingly challenging to engage in a productive and fact‑based discussion about the existing agricultural issues and their potential solutions (Kaur and Singh 2021).

Digital Media and Mass Protests: Hashtagging and News Making Pavlik (2013) argues that technological development has positively affected the news business. He opines that the innovation strategies in the news media are proving successful in at least three areas. These are (1) creating, delivering, and presenting quality news content; (2) engaging the public in news dissemination and discussion process, both through citizen reporters and social me‑ dia; and (3) employing new methods of reporting optimized for the digital, networked age (Pavlik 2013). It is evident that such technological changes became new vessels for users and ordinary citizens to come up with their own stories. It should also be noted that it allowed people without a professional background in journalism to be involved in the news‑making process, where the only requirement is a smartphone or a computer with internet connectivity. From a global perspective, as Deuze (2009) notes, one can witness the shift from citizen to victim reporting. Saleem Kassim (2012) suggests that ‘social networks have broken the psychological barrier of fear by helping many to connect and share information’ and that ‘the social networks for the first time provided activists with an opportunity to quickly disseminate information while bypassing government re‑ strictions’. This saw the emergence of hashtags as a tool for information mobilization and news dissemination. The social networking websites serving as a platform for hashtags to consolidate collective ideological and personal opinions created a new wave of news reporting. These are short pieces of information (often phrases) meant to be shared among their followers/friends on Twitter, Facebook, and similar social media sites in an attempt to make it viral (Lasorsa, Lewis, and Holton 2012). The hashtags (#) becoming one of the essential tools in recognizing and influencing news is therefore understood in this new context of the modern digital age of news making. Academic research and discourses show that global newsrooms have made various attempts to implement practices inviting audience participation (Paulussen et al. 2007; Domingo et al. 2008; Hermida and Thurman 2008; Lewis, Kaufhold and Lasorsa 2010; Chung and Nah 2013). Further‑ more, studies on social media and new media journalism show an exponential increase, mainly due to the adoption of social media platforms by the journalist as an individual and the organization as a whole. The news travels much faster and reaches a wide audience with social media intervention. Hashtag facilitates a new stage of collaboration where users contribute to a shared virtual space centered around a particular issue through the dissemination of their tweets or postings accom‑ panied by hashtagged phrases. In this process, individuals come together to collectively engage and express their perspectives, fostering a diverse and inclusive online environment. Hashtags like #PeopleAgainstCorruption, and #AntiCorruptionMoment became viral when people began to opine on these issues after following their corresponding hashtags. Here, the spreading of informa‑ tion or misinformation can be in the form of photographs, videos, Geo‑tags, animations, or short written forms. These act as information sources for the public through which particular opinions and perceptions about events, ideas, and people are constructed as the norm. 203

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Social media intensified the voices of regular citizens. The power and rights enjoyed by the press in news dissemination have shifted to laymen. Since this has led to the emergence of citizen journalism, in which the public plays the role of journalists, the grand examples and frameworks for understanding citizen and social journalism will become less relevant in understanding the structure of mass movement and its social media support. The social media response to various In‑ dian mass protests can be observed as support or shared solidarity toward the movement. It can be found in three forms: (1) sharing the news from official social media and web desk pages of main‑ stream media with stressing on the keywords (not only with the hashtags), (2) updating the events, and (3) criticizing or supporting the content of news by sharing the same from other sources. The emergence of new transnational spaces of digital activism influenced the creation of a politically active young population who often exercise their activism, which is often called ‘slacktivism’ for its low‑effort actions, through the process of ‘trending hashtags’ on Twitter and Facebook, or ‘going viral’ on YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram. The Indian digital activism associated with the 2012 Nirbhaya protests, Article 370 abrogation, the 2019 anti‑ Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) protests, and the 2020–2021 farmers’ protests are important examples of how contemporary pro‑ tests in India are being recognized globally and controlled by the hashtag revolution. The newly emerged digital public sphere in India has provided a platform for hashtag activism, allowing so‑ cially invisible issues in India to gain the political voice and attention (Dey 2020). The student‑led Hok Kolorob Movement in 2014, for example, used the hashtag #hokkolorob (meaning ‘let there be clamour’) to seek justice for a student who survived on‑campus sexual violence at Jadavpur University, Kolkata. The movement drew support from students, faculty, and various sections of society and led to discussions on larger societal problems related to gender‑based violence and the safety of women on college campuses (Chaudhuri 2019). For understanding hashtags as a means of news making, it is important to analyze them be‑ yond the notion of a ‘catchy word’. A hashtag serves as the symbol of a community (Noon and Ulmer 2009; Ebner and Muhlburger 2010; Golovchinsky and Efron 2010; Starbird and Palen 2011). When a hashtag enables users to identify and participate in online chats designated by the tag (Starbird and Palen 2011), it symbolizes a virtual image common to all the participants. The image‑making effect of the hashtag is supported by the use of emojis and gifs giving a visual ef‑ fect in performing its communicative function (Highfield 2018) as narrative resources (Giaxoglou 2018). Yang et al. (2012) call hashtags a ‘virtual community’ of users with the same background. The same background needs to be understood in terms of social behavior. For example, a massive response echoed throughout India when the leader of AAP (Aam Aadmi Party), Arvind Kejri‑ wal, orchestrated a protest against corruption. Twitter and Facebook users extended their support by using hashtags #AAP and by #IStandWithKejriwal when he was arrested (DNA India 2014). Hashtags serve dual purposes, acting as both organizational tools and social catalysts. When these tags go viral on online platforms due to widespread sharing, mainstream media pick them up as lead stories. In the context of mass protests, studying the genesis of a hashtag becomes essential. Typically, it is initiated by new media groups that consistently provide event updates and create official accounts for the event or cause. The responsibility of creating relevant hashtags usually falls on individuals closely associated with the cause. Wolfson (2014) gives a clear historical, empirical, and theoretical framework for the digital revolution. He put forward the argument of the ‘left’ space of digital new media, which is used to resist the right‑wing hegemony. He termed the space as ‘cyber left’ or ‘indymedia’ and noted down its key three features as follows: ‘strategy: utilization of new technologies and other strategies to bind distinctive, diversified transnational social movements; structure: decentralized, multiscalar (local, national, global) network formation; governance: local, national and global application of 204

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direct, participatory democracy’ (Wolfson 2014: 17). The strategy, structure, and governance of digital participatory media can be viewed in every cyber movement. The farmers’ protests, which spanned over 15 months, received global attention and became associated with slogans like ‘No Farmers, No Food’, ‘India Is Killing Its Farmers’, ‘Murderer of Democracy in India’, ‘Recall the Farm Bills’, ‘Dharti Mata Ki Jai (transl. Hail Mother Earth)’, and ‘Narendra Modi Kisan Virodhi (transl. Narendra Modi farmer enemy)’ (Firstpost 2020; DNA India 2021; Lau 2021). Additionally, hashtags like #FarmersProtest, #standwithfarmerschallenge, #SpeakUpForFarmers, #iamwith‑ farmers, #kisanektazindabaad, #tractor2twitter, and #isupportfarmers (The Tribune 2020) became synonymous with the mass protest. When the hashtag becomes viral, it signifies a collaborative effort by users contributing to a mass event virtually, as the hashtags become keywords for protes‑ tors to identify each other and share information on a common platform. Poell et al. (2015) argue that leadership plays a crucial role in guiding popular contention on major social platforms. Social media administrators serve as connective leaders, utilizing market‑ ing strategies and leveraging technological features to mobilize and steer online activism during impactful socio‑political events (Poell et al. 2015). The conventional way of fashioning political protest narratives traditionally relies on mainstream media outlets, rallies, and physical demonstra‑ tions to spread messages to a broad audience. Political activists and leaders often use speeches and press releases to convey their narratives, which may have limited interactivity and real‑time en‑ gagement. In contrast, the digital way of fashioning political protest narratives uses social media, online platforms, and digital tools to mobilize and connect with a diverse and global audience. It allows for instantaneous dissemination of information, encourages two‑way communication, fa‑ cilitates the organization of virtual protests, and enables grassroots movements to gain momentum rapidly. The digital approach empowers individuals to create, share, and amplify protest narratives in a decentralized manner, challenging the centralized control of information prevalent in the con‑ ventional approach.

Conclusion: Agenda‑Setting and Constructed Media Realities The Indian Farmers’ protest was a complex and multifaceted movement that brought together diverse stakeholders with differing perspectives and interests. The protests continued for several months, and rounds of negotiations between the government and farmers took place. Eventually, in January 2021, the government agreed to suspend the implementation of the laws. The move‑ ment demonstrated the power of narrative construction in contexts of collective action and showed how manipulating public perception influences policy decisions. The protest movement and the narratives developed through mind engineering techniques shaped public opinion and put pressure on politicians. Media coverage and international attention also played a role. In response to these influences, the government decided to repeal the laws, reflecting the changing political landscape driven by the protest movement and its carefully crafted narratives. Narrative constructions played a significant role in shaping public perceptions and opinions about the farmer’s protest. For example, social media platforms saw instances of hate speech targeting specific communities as some posts vilified farmers from certain states, using deroga‑ tory language to incite animosity and division among different regional and religious groups. Pro‑farmer groups used emotional stories and videos to highlight the hardships faced by farm‑ ers, evoking sympathy and support for their demands. On the contrary, anti‑protest narratives depicted the movement as being hijacked by extremist elements, portraying the farmers as disrup‑ tive and violent. False images and videos circulated on social media, depicting unrelated incidents as evidence of violence during the protests. Automated bots and coordinated troll accounts were 205

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deployed to amplify certain hashtags and messages in an attempt to manipulate public opinion. This tactic artificially increased the visibility of specific narratives and created the impression of widespread support or opposition to the protests. Some media outlets and individuals presented biased and one‑sided reporting of events. They focused on isolated instances of violence by a small minority of protestors while downplaying the overall peaceful nature of the protests. Social media algorithms tended to show content that reinforced users’ existing beliefs. As a result, supporters and opponents of the protests were exposed to content that reaffirmed their own views, contribut‑ ing to the echo chamber effect and deepening the divisions. For the government’s narrative, mind engineering was used to present the agricultural reforms as essential for modernizing the sector, boosting farmers’ income, and attracting private invest‑ ments. Initiators crafted messaging that emphasized these objectives, often framing the laws as pro‑farmer and pro‑growth. They strategically utilized social media algorithms, content curation, and targeted messaging to amplify these narratives. This engineered narrative aimed to garner support for the government’s stance and create a positive perception of the reforms. On the other side, initiators supporting the protestors utilized mind engineering to frame the laws as detrimental to farmers’ interests. They highlighted concerns related to MSPs, corporate dominance, and the potential loss of traditional agricultural markets. These initiators worked to mobilize public senti‑ ment against the government’s actions. Social media, grassroots campaigns, and protest move‑ ments were leveraged to build a narrative that portrayed the protestors as the defenders of farmers’ rights and traditional agriculture. In both cases, mind engineering techniques involved content curation, selective exposure to information, and targeted messaging to reinforce the desired nar‑ ratives. These efforts were designed to not only shape public opinion but also to deepen the divi‑ sions between supporters and opponents of the protests. The use of these techniques contributed to the creation of echo chambers, where individuals were continually exposed to information that affirmed their pre‑existing beliefs, further polarizing the discourse. The agenda‑setting theory came to journalistic parlance after Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw (1972) revisited Lippmann (1922)’s classical idea about the construction of public opinion through the news. They studied the 1968 presidential election in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and found positive effect evidence of agenda‑setting of media over public opinion. Social media algorithms, surveillance tools, and political bots contribute to the formation of echo chambers, po‑ tentially manipulating public opinion and undermining authentic grassroots movements (Woolley and Howard 2019). Social media platforms, governments, political parties, special interest groups, individuals, technology companies, media outlets, hacker groups, online communities, influen‑ tial individuals, regulatory bodies, and academic researchers can use or manipulate these tools to shape public opinion and create echo chambers. All such characteristics of online activism encap‑ sulate ‘computational propaganda’, a term that refers to ‘digital misinformation and manipulation’ (Woolley and Howard 2019: 4). The process of social media news construction is very crucial to modern democratic discourses, especially when tools like hashtags are effective in causing a mass effect in a less time period. Examples of social media responses on popular topics show that a mass can create a huge upheaval through the internet. Netizens, unrestricted by affiliations with news organizations, play a crucial role in overcoming threats of gatekeeping and censorship, thereby fostering a more open and diverse landscape in professional journalism. When a mass media or‑ ganization tries to neglect the user content or dominate ideas, it becomes more powerful as a form of resistance (Wolfson 2014). Such efforts to dismiss or control user‑generated content often back‑ fire, ultimately bolstering resistance movements. This phenomenon occurs because these actions tend to amplify discontent, foster solidarity among dissatisfied individuals, promote the emergence of alternative platforms, erode the legitimacy of traditional media, raise public awareness, and 206

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encourage legal and ethical challenges. In the digital age, resistance can leverage social media effectively to mobilize against media control, making it increasingly challenging for mass media to maintain its dominant position. The resistance and reaction to particular events are achieved through acts of agenda‑setting and counter‑agenda‑setting. This re‑enactment of agenda‑setting is now carried by hashtags that consolidate information from all parts of the internet to a single platform to reach a single point of consensus. It is no wonder that agenda‑setting is often conflated with propaganda formation because it violates the opposing party’s picturization of a context. Digital media interventions often take online solidarities and traditions out of their borders. For example, in support of the farmers’ protests, pop star Rihanna tweeted a CNN article about the protest with the caption and hashtag: ‘Why aren’t we talking about this?! #FarmersProtest’, which sparked a national controversy after the tweet went viral and supported by more global celebrities like Greta Thunberg (BBC 2021; Times of India 2021). After accusing Rihanna of intervening in India’s internal political affairs, many started a campaign against her. This includes Indian celebrities like film stars and sports icons using hashtags such as #IndiaTogether and #IndiaAgain‑ stPropaganda to show their dissent. The cause and effect of this particular situation showed how agenda‑setting and its counter‑agenda‑setting are processes that become synonymous with modern democratic practices. The sudden outbursts of masses in the news‑making process make this new mass communication significant and spontaneous. To destabilize the farmers’ protests, counter‑protestors in Delhi burned effigies of Greta Thun‑ berg and Rihanna, among other international celebrities, after they tweeted support for India’s protesting farmers. The tweets prompted an investigation by Indian police. The crowds in Delhi expressed anger at what they perceived as ‘international interference’ in Indian affairs and warned against such actions (Ellis‑Petersen 2021). Greta Thunberg got entangled in allegations of an in‑ ternational criminal conspiracy against India when she shared a ‘toolkit’ on Twitter, providing guidance for supporting the farmers’ protests. The document included campaigning tips and sug‑ gestions for hashtags and petitions. While Thunberg was not directly named in the police case, her tweet drew the Delhi police’s attention to the toolkit. Leaders from the ruling BJP party claimed that the toolkit served as ‘evidence of international plans for attacks against India’ (Ellis‑Petersen 2021). As a consequence, the Indian government requested Twitter to block hundreds of accounts related to the farmers’ protests (Iyengar 2021). Twitter initially complied but faced public backlash and later reinstated the accounts. However, the government’s non‑compliance notice and threats of legal consequences have raised concerns about the company’s ability to protect free speech while respecting local laws. Twitter has taken action against some accounts but maintained its stance on defending protected speech and engaging in dialogue with the government. This situa‑ tion underscores the challenges faced by social media companies in navigating content regulation in complex political environments. The international recognition of the farmer’s protests revealed the way social issues are used as a tool to control public perception. The protests and their narrative differences divided Indian soci‑ ety into two groups—those who supported the farmers and those who opposed the farmers, and all other opinions regarding the same were discarded. This psychological division in opinion‑making was further emphasized through accusations of propaganda and agenda‑setting. Reports alleged that the farmers were often represented by powerful union members, rich individuals, and busi‑ nessmen acting as ‘farmers’ to frame their opinion as that of the marginalized farmers (De and Pohit 2020; Singh 2020; Babones 2021). The pro‑government opinions stated that the farm laws were made to support the farmers, and the protestors’ demands did not seek change but rather aimed to preserve the status quo (Mehra 2021). They assert that certain groups exploited the situ‑ ation and acted as information dissemination channels to convince economically disadvantaged 207

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farmers, including those with limited access to education, that the farm acts were detrimental to their interests. The reality as media‑constructed reality (agenda‑setting) and the public perception of the real‑ ity (public agenda) are difficult to classify on the verge of a social media‑led news revolution. The opinion of the user is carried by the news media, and, in turn, the users also depend upon the news media for the conception of reality. In the current context of hashtag revolution and social media activism, the public and its mass movements are the new realities of society, which the media need to be projected, thus itself becoming a part of the same reality. Since the media report it to themselves, it is difficult for the media to construct reality over public opinion. This difficulty is handled by social media through a collective collaboration between the public and the journalists. The opinions emerging from public‑led hashtags and social media are often reflected directly or collaboratively in the mainstream media.

Note 1 The National Commission on Farmers, led by Prof. M. S. Swaminathan, delivered a total of five reports between December 2004 and October 2006. The last of these reports concentrated on identifying the factors contributing to agricultural distress and the increase in farmer suicides. It proposed the imple‑ mentation of a comprehensive national policy for farmers as a solution. The conclusions and suggestions covered matters related to farmers’ access to resources and their entitlements to social security. See Swa‑ minathan (2016).

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14 PATRIOTISM AND NATIONALISM IN CHINESE FANSUBBING Pin‑ling Chang

Introduction Fansubbing, or known as non‑professional subtitling, refers to subtitle translation activity ­conducted voluntarily by fans. Initiated by fans of Japanese anime films in the US in the 1980s, who subtitled and shared Japanese anime films themselves in pursuit of an authentic encounter with ‘otherness’ (Leonard 2005), fansubbing has expanded into various formats of audiovisual content and become one of the most noteworthy grassroots translation practices in recent dec‑ ades. Working on a non‑profit, voluntary, and spontaneous basis, fansubbers around the world are usually not subject to subtitling conventions, prior official censorship, commercial pressure, or translator‑agency/patron relationships, thus making fansubbing a channel of various ideologies. Specifically, in the West, the ideologies behind fansubbing practices may involve resistance to sub‑ titling conventions through aesthetic presentation or performativity of subtitles (Pérez‑González 2014: 258–262), retainment of authentic otherness or foreignness (Leonard 2005), engagement in counter‑institutional activism, or fight against official censorship and manipulation of subtitling (Massidda 2015), in addition to sharpening one’s foreign language skills or seeking belongingness within fansub communities (Barra 2009). In contrast, although fansubbing has been thriving in China since the early 2000s due to ex‑ tremely limited legal access to foreign films and shows and fully censored, often lackluster official subtitling (French 2006), Chinese fansubbers tend to produce more domesticated or manipulated subtitling than their Western counterparts (Chang 2017). The key to the prosperity of Chinese fansubbing lies in its over‑domesticating feature that contributes to the embeddedness of Chi‑ nese elements and ideologies in Chinese fansubs, which is socially accepted and academically acclaimed as a creative way of catering to Chinese audiences (e.g. Tian 2011: 73–74) or of resist‑ ing imperial cultural hegemony while spreading Chinese culture and values (e.g. Shen and Luo 2017). More specifically, Chinese fansubbers have been found to show Chinese nationalism and patriotism, both of which are essential to legitimating and consolidating the ruling of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), in their fansubs and in their interactions within their fansub groups or with their audience (Tian 2011: 114–118; Chang 2017: 250–252). In this chapter, the significance and prevalence of Chinese nationalism and patriotism will first be briefly explained, followed by a review of previous studies on Chinese fansubbing from ideological perspectives. Then, examples DOI: 10.4324/9781003289746-18

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of how Chinese nationalism and patriotism are practiced or presented in Chinese fansubbing with pseudotranslation or pseudointerpreting will be provided and discussed to indicate the possibility that Chinese fansubbing may have become an arena for demonstrating and reinforcing Chinese nationalism and patriotism in line with the ideology of Chinese authorities.

Chinese Patriotism and Nationalism in Communist China In the wake of the Tiananmen incident in 1989, where pro‑democracy demonstrators claimed to have taken to the streets out of patriotism to demand reform for a better future for the nation, the CCP was keenly aware that patriotism was the key to its survival and prosperity. Soon a well‑­ engineered nationwide patriotic education campaign, dominated by such two themes as ‘Chinese tradition and history’ and ‘national unity and territorial integrity’ (Zhao 1998: 296), was targeted at younger generations to bundle together one’s love for the nation and one’s love for the CCP so that the legitimacy of the CCP’s rule could be maintained or boosted (Zhao 1998). Since then, the CCP has made a great effort to develop a strong sense of patriotic responsibility among students at all levels of education, and patriotism education has been intertwined with almost every school subject, including English (e.g. Liu 2000). Patriotism, in a positive sense, means ‘love for one’s home country or own people’, but it may also negatively involve ‘see[ing] other countries and people as inferior, and one’s own country as most important or superior’ (Blank 2010: 535). For the CCP, both the positive and negative conno‑ tations of patriotism meet its political needs. The CCP advocates that patriotism is a ‘fine tradition of the Chinese nation’ and compares itself to numerous patriotic heroes in (ancient) China’s his‑ tory, justifying the CCP’s ruling of modern China with its heroic and patriotic deeds for securing China’s national independence and prosperity (Zhao 2004: 227). In essence, the CCP’s patriotic education is aimed at cultivating a politically motivated and exclusive form of nationalism that strategically aligns with the interests of the governing power (Zhao 2004: 230). Chinese nationalism under the CCP rule is different from that of the 19th century in the West, the latter seeking the formation of a nation‑state and self‑strengthening. Instead, the implications of Chinese nationalism may involve a more extreme ‘positive‑negative dialectic’ than that of pat‑ riotism: on the one hand promoting people’s loyalty to the nation and people’s unification within the nation and on the other hand cultivating ‘a monocentric, narcissistic concept of the nation’s life‑world, creating a perception of the nation’s history that identifies the “good” with one’s own nation and the “bad” with that of “the other,” particularly of “the enemy other”’ (Anastasiou and Broome 2010: 499; original emphasis). Patriotism is the wrapper of the CCP’s emotive national‑ ism, and patriotism education for China’s younger generations has shown great effects. For exam‑ ple, they display a diminished inclination to criticize the CCP so as not to be perceived as being unpatriotic, and they tend to defend their country and the CCP against criticisms made by foreign‑ ers (Zhao 2004: 243–244). China’s ‘Century of Humiliation’ between the mid‑19th century and the mid‑20th century that fuels public resentment against Western and Japanese imperialism is also an integral part of Chinese nationalism (Gries 2004: 43–53). Contempt for or animosity toward foreigners or foreign countries, particularly those against which China holds a grudge or vendetta, may be easily aroused among the Chinese public if there is a conflict of national interest or if Chinese people’s feelings are hurt. Yet, whether to evoke or contain nationalist sentiments among Chinese people is up to the CCP’s ideology and policy (e.g. Zhao 2004: 273–274). The CCP’s construction and development of Chinese nationalism and patriotism among Chi‑ nese younger generations also evolve with the advancement of technology. In addition to patriot‑ ism education at all levels of educational institutions, the CCP has been keenly aware that the 213

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Internet has become a very important battleground for ideological work. For instance, Chinese authorities have invested heavily in the online gaming industry, promoting games, such as Resist‑ ance War Online, which can remind young Chinese generations of China’s suffering during its resistance to Japan’s invasion in WWII and arouse their nationalist sentiments in fighting against Japan (Nie 2013). The growing trend of cyber nationalism in China is also found to be developing among Chinese fansub communities, and Chinese fansubbers tend to show nationalism or patriot‑ ism in their subtitling and in their community interactions (Tian 2011: 114–118), indicating that Chinese fansubbing may be used as a channel of patriotism and nationalism.

Previous Studies on Ideology of Chinese Fansubbing – a Review Since its inception in 2001, Chinese fansubbing has grown in popularity with Chinese‑speaking audiences and academics (Chang 2017). Most Chinese fansubbing researchers focus on the sub‑ jectivity and creativity of Chinese fansubbers in embedding Chinese elements and culture in their translation and consider this to have improved the quality of the original foreign language subtitles, connected China with the West, entertained Chinese audience or helped defend China from imperial cultural hegemony (e.g. Dong 2009; Shen and Luo 2017). Some others investigate fansub group identity and dynamics through longitudinal participant observation or through netnography (i.e. ethnography employed on the Internet) (e.g. Tian 2011; Li 2017). Specifically, Tian finds that fansub group members tend to be like‑minded and loyal to their own group, and she also discovers that patriotism or nationalism has become ‘one of the dominant values’ within Chinese fansub groups (2011: 97–117). In Tian’s study, despite their affinity for foreign cultures, Chinese fansubbers do not accept situations where China is being disparaged, and practicing pat‑ riotism is ‘politically correct’ within the fansub groups. Therefore, when it comes to the foreign audiovisual content that Chinese fansubbers think attacks, humiliates, or jeopardizes China, they may not translate it or they may make disapproving statements or announcements (Tian 2011: 114–117). A few other ideology studies of Chinese fansubbing provide an analysis of fansubs and link ideology with translation. It is found that, when foreign content concerns China’s territorial in‑ tegrity, Chinese fansubbers may practice patriotism, exert self‑censorship, and manipulate the original, for instance, by adding ‘China’ to ‘Hong Kong’, which becomes ‘zhōng guó xiāng gǎng’ (meaning Hong Kong, China, or China’s Hong Kong) or by deleting a scene that shows Taiwan’s national flag, to ‘filter out’ the idea that Taiwan and Hong Kong are sovereign countries (He 2017: 275–277). Another study of Chinese fansubs of the first eight seasons of the US TV series The Big Bang Theory suggests the over‑domesticating, manipulative, and patriotic tendency of Chinese fansubbing (Chang 2017). Specifically, in the fansub version of episode 7, season 2 of The Big Bang Theory by YYeTs, the largest fansub group in China, the original line ‘No shoes, no shirt, no Sheldon’ was translated into ‘日本人与谢尔顿不准进入’ [back translation: Japanese and Sheldon are forbidden to enter] (Chang 2017: 252). This fansub example, acclaimed in China as a superb translation (Fanyoumaoyu 2011), is deviant from the original, which bears no political sensitivity, to such a great extent that it can be regarded as pseudotranslation. The term ‘pseudotranslation’, first used in 1823 by an anonymous reviewer of a British literary magazine, originally meant ‘a synonym of free translation’ (Rambelli 2020: 442). Having been defined variously with time, pseudotranslations nowadays may refer to (1) texts falsely claimed to be translations which draw inspirations from certain foreign texts and mix translation with original content, (2) translations of nonexistent source texts, or (3) translations that greatly deviate from their existent source texts (Radó 1979: 193; Toury 2005: 5–6; Rizzi 2008). 214

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Based on the findings of the ideology studies in question, the patriotic or nationalist actions taken in the fansub community are voluntary and may not be necessarily reactive to something politically sensitive. Nevertheless, these previous studies provide only a limited number of Chi‑ nese fansub examples that show signs of nationalism or patriotism, and thus this chapter presents more relevant examples to give a clearer picture of how Chinese fansubbers may have shown their nationalism or patriotism in various ways.

Nationalism and Patriotism Shown in Chinese Fansubbing of Full‑Length Foreign Films and Shows The examples demonstrated in this section have been collected over several years by the author’s watching more than a hundred Chinese fansubbed foreign films and more than 60 fansubbed for‑ eign TV series, each with varying numbers of seasons and episodes and diverse topics, or by garnering relevant information from news reports, personal blogs, or online forums. It is found that Chinese fansub groups have shown strong patriotic or nationalistic tendencies by mixing translations with pseudotranslations, adding translator’s notes, or intensifying/mitigating the origi‑ nal tone. Most of the deviant cases occur when the fansubbed foreign content conflicts with the ideologies and policies of Chinese authorities, jeopardizes China’s supposed national unity and territorial integrity, or undermines Chinese national dignity and pride carefully engineered by the ruling party, but a few others where the foreign content bears no political sensitivity indicate Chinese fansubbing is used as a channel or medium for nationalistic statements or propaganda. Chinese fansubs may be manipulated to mitigate the negative portrayal of China or the CCP in a foreign film or show. In episodes 12 and 13, season 5 (the last season) of the US TV show Boston Legal (2004–2008), China, as well as the CCP, is severely criticized for its violation of human rights. Chinese fansub group FRM (风软) first rejected fansubbing these two episodes and then one week later produced a special fansubbed version in which China is referred to as ‘Country C’ and politically sensitive terms are manipulated in an unusual way (Wang 2008). Specifically, in this FRM’s first fansubbed version, the original reference to the tanks in Tiananmen Square becomes ‘比如像是 Tian’an Door 广场上的  tank’ [back translation: like the tank in the square of Tian’an Door] (Tiananmen literally means Sky Peace Door in Chinese) and another one to the monks in Tibet is turned into ‘xi zang 的喇嘛’ [back translation: the monks of Xi Zang] (Tibet pronounced xī záng in Chinese) (MeiJuTT.com 2023). For the audience who know only Mandarin Chinese, the English words mixed into Chinese subtitles are unintelligible. Another more recent example that also involves the 1989 Tiananmen incident is found in the Chinese fansub of episode 5 of the US miniseries Devs (2020). In addition to obscuring which country is referred to, such as ‘mainland China’ translated into ‘一个国家 (a country)’, ‘the Chinese government’ into ‘这个国家的政府 (The government of this country)’, ‘Beijing’ into ‘首都 (the capital)’, and ‘Tiananmen Square’ into ‘the city hall square’, the Chinese fansub group YYeTs chooses to omit politically sensitive source texts (YYeTs 2020). Note that Chinese fansubs are usually presented bilingually on the screen, particularly when the source text is in English, to facilitate English learning purposes (Liu and de Seta 2015: 127), but bilingual subtitling also facilitates the detection of deviant translations, hence probably the omissions of some source texts in this example. Chinese fansubbers may also manipulate their fansubs to show their support for the CCP’s One China policy. For instance, the Fenghuang Tianshi TSKS Korean Fansub group (凤凰天使 TSKS 韩剧社) adds ‘zhōng guó (meaning China)’ to the original term ‘Hong Kong’ in one of their fansub versions of the South Korean variety show Running Man. In response to one Hong 215

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Kong viewer’s online protest, the fansub group explicitly states that the addition is justified and proper and that being patriotic is more important than watching foreign shows, and this statement has been warmly welcomed by many Chinese audiences (hket.com 2015). Another comparable instance is found in the Chinese fansub versions of Japanese YouTuber and competitive eater Yuka Kinoshita’s videos in which she tastes and comments on the food of Taiwan, but the Chinese fansubbers spontaneously add the term ‘China’ to the name of Taiwan, causing an online fight between Taiwanese and Chinese fans (ETtoday 2017). Another even more unusual case concerns a map of China appearing in a foreign video about food around the world. An image of Taiwan is added to the map through post‑production, with a translator’s note on the top of the screen that reads ‘注释: 此中国地图原图缺失台湾地区 字幕组通过后期以补全’’ [Literal translation: Note: Taiwan area was missing in this original map of China; the Chinese fansub group made up for it through post‑production] (ETtoday 2017). In some other cases, Chinese fansubbers may faithfully translate what is against the One China policy but express their disagreement through the translator’s notes. One example is found in Chinese fansub group PPX’s (琵琶行) translation of the Japanese anime A Spirit of the Sun (太陽の黙示録), in which when Taiwan is referred to as a ‘country’, PPX translates the original as it is but provides a translator’s note on the top of the screen to alert the audience to adhere to the One China policy (Youku 2022). In a similar vein, responsive to the 2008 Tibet Unrest, Chinese fansub group FRM inserts a nationalist statement in English in its fansubs of episodes 15 to 22, season 6 of The Simpsons that reads ‘Tibet WAS, IS and ALWAYS WILL BE a part of China’ and another in Chinese in its fansub of episode 16 of the same season that reads ‘小辛一家和中国人 民一起维护国家主权, 反对任何分裂行为’ (literally The Simpsons and Chinese people together safeguard the national sovereignty and oppose any secessionist action), which unilaterally makes the Simpsons stand with Chinese people in opposition to whatever undermines China’s territorial integrity (Xianzheyeshixianzhe 2010; Chang 2017: 241). This example, which involves no deviant translations, clearly shows how Chinese fansubbing serves as a channel or platform for demon‑ strating Chinese nationalistic or patriotic thinking. Another way to demonstrate Chinese patriotic or nationalistic thinking through Chinese fan‑ subs is to adopt the over‑domesticating strategy. Chinese fansubbers are found to have shown a strong preference to replace the original that is not necessarily politically sensitive with something they deem as ‘pride and joy’ in Chinese contexts, such as a ‘smartphone’ replaced by ‘Baidu’ (a Chinese version of Google) (Chang 2017: 243–253). Such cases, which may be seen as pseu‑ dotranslations that mix translation with renditions of nonexistent source texts, seem to echo the Chinese mainstream viewpoint on teaching English in China that Chinese culture needs to be ‘introduced’ and ‘infiltrated’ into English teaching materials to boost Chinese national dignity and pride (e.g. Yang 2008). Whereas praising China is one way to show one’s patriotism, demeaning or debasing other countries that may have feuds or conflicts with China is another way to demonstrate Chinese nationalism. For instance, the US is often derogatorily referred to as ‘美帝 měi dì’ (literally American Imperialism or American Empire) by Chinese people (Baidu Baike 2023). This deroga‑ tory reference is also commonly seen in Chinese fansubs. For instance, in the fansubbed version by Chinese fansub group SCG (圣城家园) of episode 3, season 7 of The Big Bang Theory, when the characters are singing one Neil Diamond’s song, the repeated term ‘America’ is translated into ‘美帝 měi dì’ (SCG 2013). There may be doubts as to whether some deviant fansub examples presented in this chapter might simply be a show of Chinese fansubbers’ fear of government crackdowns (Yao 2021: 498). However, to avoid official punishment, the fansubbers might have just omitted politically sensitive 216

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texts or produced vague or simplified translations, which is legal and more commonly seen in the official subtitling practice in China. The ‘creativeness’ of these deviant fansubs, along with the nationalistic and patriotic statements issued by Chinese fansub communities, also rules out the possibility of using automatic subtitling (machine translation) as the latter is often criticized for its too literal translation tendency to properly deal with the flexible meaning and register in film texts (Varga 2021). Therefore, the deviant fansubs and pseudotranslations in Chinese fansubbing of full‑length foreign films and shows may be largely produced by Chinese fansub groups on a voluntary basis, echoing the findings of previous relevant studies (e.g. Tian 2011) and suggesting that Chinese fansubbing may not be just a fun‑driven and de‑politicized activity (Li 2015) but may serve as a channel for Chinese nationalism and patriotism.

Nationalism and Patriotism Shown in Chinese Fansubbing of Short, Edited Foreign Films and Shows It is observed by the author that, over the past five years, a large number of short, edited foreign films and shows or edited documentaries that introduce foreign cultures, all of which are targeted at Chinese‑speaking audiences, have been uploaded onto social networking media, such as Fa‑ cebook, with embedded Chinese nationalistic thinking that is aimed at boosting China’s status and image by praising China or by debasing other countries. Simply exploring Facebook Watch on mobile smart devices with such Chinese keywords as ‘diàn yǐng jiè shào 電影介紹’ (movie introduction or recommendation), ‘wài guó jiè shào 外國介紹’ (foreign country introduction or recommendation), or ‘shuāng yǔ zì mù 雙語字幕’ (bilingual subtitling) results in an endless list of individually uploaded fast movies and short edited video clips that come with Chinese voice‑overs and/or bilingual subtitling. In this research, nearly 1,000 fast movies or short edited video clips of foreign content have been watched, and at least more than 50% of them are found to show signs of Chinese nationalistic or patriotic ideologies. In fact, the more such ideological clips one watches on his/her smart devices, the more clips of similar genres and content automatically appear for the same user because the built‑in recommendation systems or algorithms predict the preference of the user, causing the percentage of Chinese nationalism or patriotism‑involved fast foreign movies and edited clips of foreign content to get higher and higher. This chapter presents only those fast movies and edited clips that show Chinese nationalism or patriotism and come with voice‑over narration, categorized as Chinese fansubbing with pseudoin‑ terpreting by the author. Here, pseudointerpreting is defined similarly to pseudotranslation since both interpreting and translation involve converting a source text from one language to another, except that interpreting is to ‘orally’ translate messages that may be in speaking or in writing (the latter is known as sight translation or sight interpreting). The system of benshi (also known as the ‘lecturer’ or ‘narrator’ of films) that emerged in countries such as Japan in the early 20th century (Baron and Carnicke 2008: 140) may serve as a very representative example of pseudointerpreting and is strikingly similar to what has been found in this research. At the turn of the 19th century and the 20th century, when silent films were shown to audiences, the benshi would explain the plot and interpret or create dialogue for such films while standing or sitting next to the screen on the stage, giving the audience a better understanding of the presented foreign cultures. The benshi could be said to provide pseudointerpreting, as no original soundtrack or dialogue could be heard, thus giving the benshi much more leeway than expected to produce whatever renditions in the name of bridging the gap between the target audience and silent films. Japanese labor activist Toyojiro Takamatsu (1872–1952) took advantage of this opportunity and acted as a benshi to spread his radical ideas on the pretext of explaining the films to Japanese audiences (Lee 2017: 132–133). 217

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Soon with Japan’s colonization of Korea and Taiwan, the benshi system was introduced to those colonies. The Japanese colonizers wished to promote Japanese national identity in the colonies by showing films to the general public, only to find some of the colonized local benshi spread‑ ing an ideology of resistance against the Japanese colonizers through pseudointerpreting (Hong 2011: 21–23). Now edited and condensed versions of films or documentaries with foreign content allow view‑ ers to take in the main plot points through edited scenes, with Chinese narration in the background and without original sounds or subtitling. This means viewers rely solely on what is being narrated to understand the scenes and plots. It can be said that the Chinese narrators function as interpreters between the video edits and the viewers, just like what the benshi did in the silent film era, hence the deviant edits in this research referred to as Chinese fansubbing with pseudointerpreting. The following selected examples show that the edited content has been infused with nationalistic ideas that promote China’s status and image by praising China or by denigrating other countries, particu‑ larly those that have vendetta or conflict with China, such as Japan and India. Example 1 is extracted from a Chinese fansub edit of the 2015 Italian superhero film They Call Me Jeeg. It seems that the Japanese anime Koutetsushin Jeeg is a source of inspiration for this Italian film, hence the mention of the Japanese anime in the film. Note that the bad blood between China and Japan for centuries has made it prevalent to see Chinese referring to Japan and its people in a derogatory manner as ‘little Japan’ and ‘little Japanese’ (Baidu Baike 2021). In Mandarin Chi‑ nese, ‘little Japan’ is written and pronounced as 小日本 xiǎo rì běn. In Example 1, the underlined term 小日子 xiǎo rì zǐ (literally little days) functions as 小日本 xiǎo rì běn since both terms are very similar in writing and pronunciation. The former derived from a TV news interview with a Chinese rowing athlete, in which he was just about to say his next opponent was xiǎo rì běn but stopped short with a sudden realization that it was not appropriate to say the derogatory term on TV. As he had already uttered the first two Chinese characters xiǎo rì, he paused very briefly and then said ‘xiǎo rì zǐ guò dé bù cuò de rì běn xuǎn shǒu’ (literally a Japanese player who lives good little days). Since then, xiǎo rì zǐ and xiǎo rì běn have been used interchangeably in China (www.111com.net 2021). Example 1 (Cinema Sharing Area [电影分享区] 2022) 2.35–2.42 Chinese narration: 虽然救Sara断了一根脚趾头，但他却不图回报，反而在得知 Sara喜欢小日子动画《钢铁吉客》后，他买来投影仪和光盘和她一起看。 (Literal translation: Although saving Sara broke one of his toes, he asked for nothing in return. Instead, after he learned that Sara liked little days’ anime Koutetsushin Jeeg, he bought a projector and a DVD and watched it with her.) Example 2 is taken from the Chinese fansub of one episode of 世にも奇妙な物語 (literally strange stories in the world), one of the longest‑running TV series in Japan. This episode de‑ scribes how a female Japanese student bumps into a strange Shinto shrine (a place of gods) and obtains magic power to turn her fabricated answers on exam papers into reality. As shown in the underlined parts of Example 2, Japan is derogatorily referred to as xiǎo guǐ zǐ (literally little devil), an offensive term for a Japanese person in Chinese, which is similar to the word ‘Jap’ in English (Baidu Baike 2021). Example 2 (Viral Town 2022) 0.51–1.11 218

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Chinese narration: 从这一刻开始, 金莲仿佛有了魔力! 请问小鬼子的现任首相是谁？ 金莲绞尽脑汁想了半天，始终没想到!抬头看到男友正在打哈欠，她瞬间有了主意， 于是，金莲把三郎的名字填了上去，万万没想到啊，匪夷所思的事情发生了!新闻播 报，小鬼子的首相换人了，而新任总统竟然是他的男友三郎! (Literal translation: From this moment, Jinlian seems to have magic power! Question: Who is the incumbent prime minister of xiǎo guǐ zǐ? Jinlian racks her brains in vain! She raises her head and sees her boyfriend yawning. She suddenly gets an idea. Then, Jinlian fills in the blank with Saburo’s name. Unexpectedly, an unbelievable thing happens! The news reports that the prime minister of xiǎo guǐ zǐ has changed and the new president is her boyfriend Saburo!) Example 3 is extracted from a Chinese fansub video clip entitled ‘How do Japanese tell who is a Chinese; Japanese Internet users point out this and everyone suddenly realizes it’, which contains scenic scenes and street views of Japan and two women separately interviewed in front of the camera without any original soundtrack heard. The video is presented as a documentary in which the Chinese narrator says the Japanese admit the superiority of the Chinese over the Japanese in built, temperament, and dressing. The false claims in the clip evidently meant to boost the image of Chinese people while belittling the Japanese. Example 3 (Travel 旅行的意义 2022) 0.23–0.34 Chinese narration: 日本人是如何区分谁是中国人的呢，后来经过了解后，终于知 道了，绝大多数的日本人认为两者之间还是有很大的不同中国人的身高普遍比日本 人都要高，周身气质也比较端正 (Literal translation: How do Japanese people tell who is a Chinese? Finally know [how] after reaching an understanding. The great majority of Japanese consider the two to be very different. Chinese people are generally taller than Japanese people and have a better temperament.) In addition to Japan, other countries, such as India, are found to have been targeted in Chinese fansubbing with nationalistic pseudointerpreting. The relations between China and India have for decades experienced ups and downs due to border disputes and economic competition (Bha‑ dauriya 2023). This is probably why India is negatively portrayed in many Chinese fansubbed documentaries that involve Indian food, culture, and products. Example 4 is extracted from one Chinese fansubbed documentary that shows how Indian food is processed in unhygienic condi‑ tions. Judging from the comments left by the viewers, the ironic tone and negative descriptions in the Chinese narration, such as using tetanus and cholera as adjectives to modify the cooking utensils, have made viewers extremely uncomfortable and dampened their enthusiasm for In‑ dian food. Example 5 is observed in a short Chinese fansubbed foreign video, in which a man, claimed to be an Indian by the Chinese narrator, conducts a test to compare the durability of helmets made in India and China. The voice‑over is vivid, with some created dialogue between the man and the narrator. The initially proud Indian man becomes embarrassed when he discov‑ ers that the helmets made in China exhibit much greater durability than those made in India. No original sound track can be heard to verify the authenticity of the Chinese narration, but what is narrated does not seem to be a very likely scenario where an Indian person concedes China’s victory over India. In fact, a search of Facebook Watch with the keyword ‘印度 yìn dù (India)’ in addition to ‘wài guó jiè shào 外國介紹’ (foreign country introduction/recommendation) reveals 219

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hundreds of such clips that either negatively portray India or exaggeratedly favor China over India. Example 4 (Li Da Pu 梨大影视剧 2022) 1.06–1.38 Chinese narration: 他们的烹饪方式也很特别，一个破伤风井字架，一个霍乱漏勺， 加上老板的无情铁手，光看这个组合就知道不简单了，漏勺往热腾腾的油锅上一 架，老板用自带咸味的右手，掏出一坨鹰嘴豆糊糊，接着用无情铁手直接摁进锅 里，这操作，还真是有够勇的，不仅如此，老板更是连鞋都不穿，直接把脚放在油 锅前，要我说老板肯定有金刚不坏之身 (Literal translation: Their cooking way is also very special. One tetanus cross bar, one cholera flat plate strainer, and the vendor’s ruthless iron hands. Simply looking at this com‑ bination, one knows it’s not simple. [The vendor] places the strainer on the top of the hot oil pot. He uses his right hand that comes with a flavour of salt to scoop out one scoop of smashed chickpeas, places it on the strainer and presses it into the pot with his ruthless iron hand. This operation is brave enough. Moreover, the vendor wears no shoes and puts his feet in front of the oil pot. I would say that the vendor must have an indestructible body.) Example 5 (Wolfgangd 2022) 01:10–01:45 Chinese narration: 他大言不惭地说，印度头盔都不能承受拖拉机的重压，那中国制 造的头盔只会表现更差，大猛赶紧将中国头盔放在了轮胎下，随后如猴一般，跳上 了拖拉机。下一秒。漂亮，中国头盔特别坚硬，车轮碾上去时，头盔只是发生了轻 微的变形，三秒不到就复原了。看见这一幕后，大猛有些不淡定了，红着小脸蛋， 尴尬的说，头盔的作用是抗摔打，而不是在拖拉机下辗压的。既然你想测试抗摔打 的性能，那就来吧，我们奉陪到底。 (Literal translation: He brags shamelessly that since the made‑in‑India helmet cannot bear the rolling of the tractor, then the made‑in‑China helmet can only perform worse. Da‑ meng hurriedly puts the made‑in‑China helmet under the tire and then jumps onto the tractor like a monkey. Next second. Wonderful, the China helmet is particularly hard. When the tire rolls onto it, the helmet only changes its shape slightly and recovers within three seconds. Seeing this scene, Dameng is a little restless, and his face turns red. He says with embar‑ rassment that the purpose of a helmet is to withstand a fall or a hit instead of being rolled by a tractor. Since you want to test [the helmet] for withstanding a fall or a hit, then come. We will see [the experiment] through.) There are too many clips on Facebook Watch like these to list here, but the examples presented in this section shall give a general picture of how Chinese nationalistic or patriotic thinking is being embedded in Chinese fansubs or edited foreign content.

Conclusion Chinese fansubs have enjoyed their popularity in the Chinese language world for the past two decades, and with the advancement of information and communication technologies, Chinese fansubs could reach as many viewers as possible. As Chinese fansubbing is generally not subject to prior official censorship or commercial pressure, this research that reveals how Chinese fan‑ subbers, who are mostly China’s young intellectuals or talent, have their Chinese nationalism and 220

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patriotism embedded or represented in their fansubs or in their edited foreign videos may help give us a clear idea of the effectiveness of the CCP’s patriotism education that has been given to the younger generations since the Tiananmen incident in 1989. The fast‑growing number of Chinese fansubbed or edited foreign content with pseudointerpreting on Facebook Watch aimed at boosting China’s image while demeaning or debasing foreign countries may be attributed to the Chinese Tankie, or known as Chinese Little Pink, a term for young Chinese nationalists that are mind engineered by the CCP’s nationalism and patriotism and notorious for their rampant brag‑ ging, distortion, or hostility of varying degrees in the cyberworld. Yet, the sheer quantity of such exquisitely made Chinese fansubbed and edited foreign content appearing mostly over the past few years on Facebook, which is banned within China, makes it hard not to connect those Chi‑ nese nationalistic clips with Xi Jinping’s emphasis on innovating the CCP’s external propaganda work through new media (People’s Daily 2016). Cleverly disguised as a form of entertainment, Chinese fansubbing could be a tool of not only demonstrating and spreading Chinese nationalism and patriotism but also, judging from the level of contempt and maliciousness toward specific foreign countries carried through Chinese fansubbing, engaging in cyberwarfare, and extending Chinese hegemony.

Acknowledgments This research is partially funded by Taiwan’s National Science and Technology Council under grant no. NSTC 112‑2914‑I‑033‑020‑A1.

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Pin‑ling Chang Li, D. (2017). ‘A Netnographic Approach to Amateur Subtitling Networks’. In D. Orrego‑Carmona and Y. Lee (Eds.), Non‑Professional Subtitling (pp. 37–62). Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars. Li, W. (2015). ‘Crowdsourcing Translation in China: Features and Implications’. In Y. Sun (Ed.), Translation and Academic Journals: The Evolving Landscape of Scholarly Publishing (pp. 149–164). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Liu, X. and de Seta, G. (2015). ‘Chinese Fansub Groups as Communities of Practice: An Ethnography of On‑ line Language Learning’. In P. Marolt and D. K. Herold (Eds.), China Online: Locating Society in Online Spaces (pp. 125–140). London: Routledge. Massidda, S. (2015). Audiovisual Translation in the Digital Age: The Italian Fansubbing Phenomenon. Bas‑ ingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Nie, H. A. (2013). ‘Gaming, nationalism, and ideological work in contemporary China: online games based on the War of Resistance against Japan’. Journal of Contemporary China. 22(81): 499–517. Pérez‑González, L. (2014). Audiovisual Translation: Theories, Methods and Issues. London: Routledge. Radó, G. (1979). ‘Outline of a systematic translatology’. Babel. 25(4): 187–196. Rambelli, P. (2020). ‘Pseudotranslation’. In M. Baker and G. Saldanha (Eds.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies (pp. 441–445), 3rd ed. London: Routledge. Rizzi, A. (2008). ‘When a Text Is Both a Pseudotranslation and a Translation’. In A. Pym, M. Shlesinger and D. Simeoni (Eds.), Beyond Descriptive Translation Studies: Investigations in Homage to Gideon Toury (pp. 153–162). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Tian, Y. (2011). Fansub Cyber Culture in China. Master Thesis. Georgetown University. Toury, G. (2005). ‘Enhancing Cultural Changes by Means of Fictitious Translations’. In E. Hung (Ed.), Trans‑ lation and Cultural Change: Studies in History, Norms, and Image Projection (pp. 3–17). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Varga, C. (2021). ‘Online automatic subtitling platforms and machine translation. An analysis of quality in AVT’. Scientific Bulletin of the Politehnica University of Timişoara: Transactions on Modern Languages. 20(1): 37–49. Yao, S. (2021). ‘Love my House, love my bird: an intercultural communication perspective on Chinese fansub practices’. Journal of Intercultural Communication Research. 50(5): 481–505. Zhao, S. (1998). ‘A State‑led nationalism: the patriotic education campaign in post‑Tiananmen China’. Com‑ munist and Post‑Communist Studies. 31(3): 287–302. Zhao, S. (2004). A Nation‑State by Construction: Dynamics of Modern Chinese Nationalism. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Chinese References Baidu Baike 百度百科 (2021, July 8). ‘Little Japan’ 小日本. Retrieved May 31, 2023 from https://baike. baidu.com/item/%E5%B0%8F%E6%97%A5%E6%9C%AC/111599. Baidu Baike百度百科 (2023, February 10). ‘American Empire’ 美利坚帝国. Retrieved June 1, 2023 from https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E7%BE%8E%E5%88%A9%E5%9D%9A%E5%B8%9D%E5%9B %BD/1310323. Cinema Sharing Area 电影分享区 (2022, April 17). ‘Young man drank nuclear wastewater; The body had terrible changes’ 小伙喝了核废水，身体产生恐怖变化. [Facebook Video]. Retrieved December 30, 2022 from https://www.facebook.com/watch/?ref=saved&v=676969263573111. Dong, Shujing 董淑静 (2009). ‘On translator’s subjectivity embodied in Chinese fansubbing of US TV shows’ 论译者主体性在美剧字幕非官方中译中的体现. The Science Education Article Collects 科教 文汇(下旬刊). 2009(3): 231. ETtoday (2017). ‘Yuka Kinoshita ate Taiwanese instant noodles; Chinese fansubs used ‘Taiwan, China’ and caused fight!’ 木下佑香大嚐台灣泡麵　陸字幕組改「中國台灣」引戰!. ETtoday. Retrieved Decem‑ ber 22, 2022 from https://www.ettoday.net/news/20170531/935127.htm. Fanyoumaoyu 反游猫鱼 (2011). ‘Those divine translations in The Big Bang Theory’ 生活大爆炸里那些神 乎其神的翻译. Retrieved January 22, 2024 from https://site.douban.com/120100/widget/notes/3671907/ note/174853313/ hket.com (2015). ‘HK netizens urged no ‘China Hong Kong’ in Running Man fansubs, causing fight between China and Hong Kong’ 港網民籲 RM 字幕勿用「中國香港」 掀中港罵戰. Hong Kong Economic Times. Retrieved December 12, 2022 from https://reurl.cc/yMRGXD.

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Patriotism and Nationalism in Chinese Fansubbing Li Da Pu 梨大影视剧 (2022, April 15). ‘Indian‑style deep‑fried dough sticks; Owner must have an in‑ destructible body, or he wouldn’t stand it’ 印度版油条，老板必须有金刚不坏之身，不然扛不住. [Facebook Video]. Retrieved December 30, 2022 from https://www.facebook.com/watch/?ref=save d&v=1143981736415332. Liu, Yanlin 刘艳林 (2000). ‘Brief discussion on education of loving our motherland through English course’ 浅论英语教学中的爱国主义教育. Journal of Shijiazhuang University 石家庄职业技术学院学报. 12(4): 54–55. MeiJuTT.com 美剧天堂 (2023). ‘US TV series: Boston Legal season 5 (2008)’【美国剧】波士顿法律第 五季(2008). Retrieved July 2, 2023 from https://www.meijutt.cc/meijutt/7909.html. People’s Daily 人民日报 (2016). ‘Xi Jinping emphasized in the meeting of the Party work on news and pub‑ lic opinion: insisting on right directions and innovating ways and means; increasing the communication and leading power of news and public opinion’ 习近平在党的新闻舆论工作座谈会上强调：坚持正确 方向创新方法手段 提高新闻舆论传播力引导力. Retrieved July 31, 2023 from http://jhsjk.people.cn/ article/28136289. SCG 圣城家园字幕组 (2013). ‘The Big Bang Theory, episode 3, season 7, SCG bilingual subtitles’ 生活大 爆炸/The Big Bang Theory S07E03/第七季第 3 集/圣城家园双语字幕. Retrieved July 14, 2023 from https://assrt.net/xml/sub/243/243668.xml. Shen, Chen 沈忱 and Zhenglin Luo 骆正林 (2017). ‘Participatory text creation: Chinese fansubbing’s “di‑ vine translations”’ 参与式文本创作: 字幕组 “神翻译”. Journal of Zhejiang University of Media & Com‑ munications 浙江传媒学院学报. 24(3): 63–69. Travel 旅行的意义 (Travel’s Meaning) (2022, April 30). ‘How do Japanese tell who is a Chinese; Japanese internet users point out this and everyone suddenly realizes it’ 日本人如何分辨谁是中国人，日本网友 说出这一点，众人恍然大悟. [Facebook Video]. Retrieved July 10, 2022 from https://www.facebook. com/watch/?ref=saved&v=1052456622043830. Viral Town (2022, June 5). ‘Female student takes exams; She makes blind guesses but gets a mark of 100!’ 女学生考试，闭上眼睛瞎蒙，竟然也能得 100 分！《世界奇妙物语》. [Facebook Video]. Retrieved July 10, 2022 from https://www.facebook.com/watch/?ref=saved&v=365177052158484. Wang, Xiaoxiao 王潇潇 (2008). ‘Newly broadcast US TV show said to have distorted China’s image; In‑ ternet fansub group protested against it’ 新播美剧被指扭曲中国形象 网络字幕组提抗议. Legal Evening News 法制晚报. Retrieved January 26, 2023 from https://www.chinanews.com.cn/yl/kong/ news/2008/12‑25/1503081.shtml. Wolfgangd (2022, April 19). ‘Indian young man challenged Chinese helmets by rolling them with a trac‑ tor. The results are so embarrassing!’ 印度小伙挑战中国头盔，用拖拉机碾压测试，结果好尴尬呀!. [Facebook Video]. Retrieved December 30, 2022 from https://www.facebook.com/watch/?ref=save d&v=362413915844656. www.111com.net (2021). ‘What’s the punchline of saying Japanese people live good little days; What does it mean by saying Japanese people who live good little days’ 小日子过得不错的日本人是什么梗 小日子过得不错的日本人是什么意思. Retrieved December 30, 2022 from https://www.111com.net/ xinxianshi/201682.htm. Xianzheyeshixianzhe 闲着也是闲着 (2010). ‘Being moved: “FRM” fansub group’s patriotic subtitles’ 一种感 动: “风软” 字幕组的爱国字幕. Retrieved June 15, 2016 from http://i.mtime.com/751199/blog/4662766/. Yang, Hongying 杨红英 (2008). ‘Emphasizing the introduction and infiltration of Chinese culture; enhancing students’ cross‑cultural communication competence’ 注重中国文化导入与渗透 提升学生跨文化交际 能力. Forum on Contemporary Education当代教育论坛(学科教育研究). 2008(5): 117–119. Youku 优酷 (2022). ‘A Spirit of the Sun 01’ 太阳默示录 01. Retrieved September 22, 2022 from v.youku.com/ v_show/id_XMTlxMtM4MTY0.html?spm=a2hbt.13141534.1_2.d_1_3&f=3774136&scm=20140719. apircmd.46307.video_XMTlxMTM4MTY0. YYeTS 人人影视字幕组 (2020). ‘Devs Episode 5, Season 1’ 开拓者 第一季第五集/Devs.S01E05’. ­Retrieved June 2, 2023 from https://assrt.net/xml/sub/675/675339.xml.

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15 POP CULTURAL MEDIA AS A RESOURCE FOR FOSTERING RESPONSIBLE WORLD CITIZENS Valentin Werner and Theresa Summer Introduction ‘How much TV is educational?’ – ‘All of it! It just depends on what it’s teaching’1 As we live in a media‑saturated world, language learners are constantly exposed to2 and strongly influenced by pop cultural media such as songs, video games, memes, podcasts, films, and TV/ streaming series, among others. While relevant artifacts have been usefully employed in language education for various purposes (see, e.g., Werner and Tegge 2021), this form of media influence has alternatively been associated with ‘cultural pedagogy’, defined as ‘process[es] of teaching and learn‑ ing through social sites, often outside of sanctioned educational institutions’ (Tavin and ­Anderson 2003: 23). In this context, it has been found that pop cultural media as sites of (normative) ­social evaluation are not merely ‘benign forms of entertainment’ (Duff and Zappa‑Hollman 2012: 3). Rather, they act as power instruments (Currie and Kelly 2022). This means that their visual ele‑ ments and content, such as the under‑ and misrepresentation of ethnic minority groups (see, e.g., Klein and Shiffman 2006; Greenberg and Mastro 2011),3 but particularly the language varieties used, can transport certain identities, power structures, stereotypes, and ideologies that perpetuate discriminatory practices (Joyce et al. 2020). Thus, pertinent artifacts and their cultural pedagogy can be viewed as a form of mind engineering by scriptwriters and media producers. Accordingly, pop media artifacts and the characters represented therein are one of the main ways language learners encounter ‘a version of the world regarding ─ among other things ─ how dif‑ ferent groups of people speak’ (Stamou et al. 2015: 216). Language education thus plays a crucial role in multiple respects. While promoting communicative competence as an overarching goal, it can also initiate critical reflection on media artifacts encountered inside and outside the classroom by examining ‘how characters and contexts are discursively constructed, marginalized, commodi‑ fied, or mocked, based on their social or linguistic characteristics’ (Duff and Zappa‑­Hollman 2012: 2). This encompasses, especially on the part of educators, an understanding of language teach‑ ing as a political activity that can tackle social injustices, based on theoretical concepts such as critical language education (Crookes 2021) and intercultural citizenship education (Byram 2008). Against this background, the present chapter aims to illustrate the potential of analyzing linguistic DOI: 10.4324/9781003289746-19 This chapter has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license.

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usage and concurrent social attributions in pop cultural media for advocating critical consumers and eventually responsible world citizens who value freedom of speech and independent thinking while countering any form of discrimination. By focusing specifically on cultural and linguistic stereotyping (i.e., bias in the form of an association of a particular, often non‑standard language use with unfavorable social traits of a character) in narrative telecinematic children’s media,4 it discusses their relevance for language learning.

Theoretical Foundations The following passages summarize insights from several disciplines considered relevant for broader contextualization at the intersection of media studies, psychology, sociolinguistics, and language education.

Social Psychology, Media Effects, and Socialization The issue of media effects on the socialization of children and adolescents has been a long‑­ standing concern in social psychology. Research from this domain converges in viewing broadcast media, and especially animated films and series, as an important socializing agent, given that even children at an early age ‘form their expectations for a variety of behaviors and social roles by watching animated films’ (Bloomquist 2015: 751; see also Klein and Shiffman 2006: 167; Barrett et al. 2022: 259). This has been related to social essentialism as ‘the propensity to see social differ‑ ences as being real, immutable, and highly predictive of people’s attributes and behaviors’ (Kinzler 2021: 252) and resulting social categorization (i.e., the tendency to categorize all kinds of input one receives) as general psychological processes. While such mechanisms may foster cognitive efficiency, it has also been observed that there is a risk of emerging social biases when ‘stereotypes about groups of people [are] erroneously applied to specific individuals’ (Kinzler 2021: 242). Such cultural or cognitive stereotypes, formally defined as ‘set of beliefs, mental models, or schemas relating to a specific social group or category’ (Joyce et al. 2020: 59), can be reinforced through the media and are especially salient when linguistic traits of people (particularly accent features) are essentialized and related to their social identity, leading to negative evaluation of the social group affected (known as prejudice) and eventually to stigmatization and discriminating behavior (Kinzler 2021; Ward and Bridgewater 2023). In this context, it has been found that media artifacts in general are prone to represent stereo‑ types relating to gender (e.g., González Vera 2012) and race/ethnicity (e.g., Mastro 2009: 377), as selectively illustrated in Table 15.1 for racial stereotypes in the US‑American context, pertaining to random characteristics and roles from various domains. It emerges that while not all stereotypes are necessarily negative, non‑white groups are generally represented less favorably (Klein and Shiffman 2006: 167). Notably, however, linguistic features are rarely discussed in relevant publi‑ cations (see sections ‘Indexicality and Language Ideologies’ and ‘Language Ideologies in Narra‑ tive Pop Media: Insights from Sociolinguistics’). The central importance of media in establishing and reinforcing stereotypes is underlined by the fact that, while they may be an important channel for encountering a wider range of people than would be possible through personal contact alone, they are often the only channel through which people receive formative information about other social groups (Sanborn and Harris 2022: 113; Ward and Bridgewater 2023: 87),5 and thus also about linguistic variation (Stamou et al. 2015: 217). Such observations (with an explicit reference to telecinematic content) are grounded in

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Traits/roles

Table 15.1  Common racial stereotypes African American

Asian American

Latinx

Native American

Athletic Criminal Poor Rhythmical and musical Unintelligent Aggressive

Compliant Humble Model minority Smart

Drug dealer Illegal immigrant Low‑status jobs Uneducated

Alcoholic Brave Lazy Spiritual

Wealthy Sidekick (martial artist, nerd)

Very religious Hypersexual

Wild

American with Middle Eastern/North African background Muslim Terrorist

Source: Synthesized from Kirsh 2010: 105; Ward and Bridgewater 2023: 83

approaches such as cultivation theory, whose central claim is that ‘exposure to the themes in televi‑ sion content shifts viewers’ social perceptions toward the television version of reality, regardless of the accuracy or precision of that content’ (Gerbner et al. 2002; cited in Greenberg and Mastro 2011: 76). Empirical research in this area (including the analysis of animated shows) has further shown that consumers with repeated and long‑standing media exposure are indeed susceptible to adapting to conceptions of telecinematic reality, including mediatized stereotypes (Mastro 2009: 379; Dragojevic et al. 2016: 63). Proponents of Bandurian social cognitive theory (which recog‑ nizes interaction between environment, behavior, and individual factors, such as affect, cognition, and biological factors) claim that even irregular consumers are susceptible to media effects, po‑ tentially building on the enactment of already learned models (Pila et al. 2018: 40). In any case, there is strong evidence that media, as outlined above, act as socializing agent, influencing values and attitudes of the audience in the ‘realm of pleasure’ (Tavin and Anderson 2003: 23), that is, in an environment in which affect may be raised through mediatized emotions.6 On a positive note, studies have shown a longitudinal trend of increased diversity. This applies to the sets of characters in animated TV and movies and the disappearance of overt racism since the late 1990s (Klein and Shiffman 2006: 173; Pila et  al. 2018: 35). Furthermore, exposure to counterstereotypical content with pro‑social and pro‑diversity messages can have positive effects, especially on non‑minority adolescents (Mastro 2009: 380; Ward and Bridgewater 2023: 85). In this regard, it has been argued that media are not merely a mirror of society but may also serve as a catalyst for change with substantial positive effects on social attitudes and ultimately behavior (Kearney and Levine 2020: 83; Sanborn and Harris 2022: 402).7 In other words, media should be viewed not only as a risk factor but also as potentially beneficial (Kirsh 2010: 239), since stereo‑ typing is learned and can therefore be changed. Relating to the use of language specifically, it has been argued that the presence of media characters with non‑native and non‑standard accents por‑ trayed as competent and devoid of stereotypical traits (see Table 15.1) tentatively leads to a reduc‑ tion in negative affect toward speakers of such varieties and more openness to linguistic variation (Griva et al. 2018: 34; Roessel et al. 2020: 99). To consider the role language plays in purporting stereotypes and ideologies, the sociolinguistic concepts of language ideology and indexicality will be introduced in the section ‘Language Variation in Current Animated Series for Children’. This is done with a focus on their relevance in media contexts before assessing the representation of varieties of English in an animated children’s series to gauge current media practice. 226

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Indexicality and Language Ideologies As already mentioned in the section ‘Social Psychology, Media Effects, and Socialization’, lan‑ guage usage as an overtly audible feature is an important carrier of social information, enabling people to categorize others through it. A general tendency observed in this regard in both psycho‑ linguistic and sociolinguistic language attitude studies is that non‑native or non‑standard language varieties are commonly stigmatized (Kinzler 2021: 243). This bias has been termed ‘standard lan‑ guage ideology’ (SLI), loosely defined as any kind of hegemonic effort to highlight the supremacy of a language variety and to systematically devalue linguistic diversity (Stamou et al. 2015: 216; see also Woolard 1998). SLIs have been found to be prevalent in narrative media, and particularly in telecinematic me‑ dia directed at children, through the portrayal of linguistic stereotypes (Barrett et al. 2022: 259). Concretely, there are persistently strong correlations between likable main protagonists and speak‑ ing a standard variety (most probably standard American English), while minor or evil characters, as well as those portrayed with low education, from lower classes, or belonging to an ethnic minority, are much more likely to use non‑standard varieties (Stamou 2014; see further section ‘Language Ideologies in Narrative Pop Media: Insights from Sociolinguistics’). Sometimes, such non‑standard varieties are ignored altogether (Degener 2017: 2). Importantly, linguistic stereotyp‑ ing (i) varies according to concrete sociohistorical and political circumstances (e.g., with Russian accents prevailing for evil characters during the Cold War, while Middle Eastern accents have fea‑ tured more prominently for them since the 1990s; Barrett et al. 2022: 266), and (ii) has also been traced for non‑human (yet anthropomorphic) characters in telecinematic representations (see, e.g., Tavin and Anderson 2003: 24; Bloomquist 2015). Given the abovementioned function of language as a key carrier of social meaning, the socio‑ linguistic notion of ‘second order indexicality’ (see, e.g., Silverstein 2003), relating to the connec‑ tion between linguistic variables and social and character traits of the speaker (rather than the mere association of a speaker with a stereotyped group alone, which would be related to first‑order in‑ dexicality), appears relevant. Scriptwriters may therefore deliberately exploit language varieties as a shortcut to characterization (i.e., individual distinctiveness of a character; see Queen 2015: 155) through styling language use of characters after (stereotypical) social traits associated with them (Hodson 2014: 66–67). This has been criticized as a ‘particularly easy trick […] to play into the stereotypes and prejudices that exist in the society within which the story is to be told’ (Barrett et al. 2022: 258; see also Dragojevic et al. 2016: 67). Therefore, it is argued here that usage of varieties in media should not be viewed as given reality or even a reflection of actual use but rather as strategic (or, at best, unconscious) choices made by producers that potentially foster SLIs and both form and maintain linguistic stereotypes (Dragojevic et al. 2016: 64). This is particularly important from a language education perspec‑ tive, as learners should be made aware that their knowledge of languages and varieties is largely ‘socially constructed and culturally mediated’ (Abe and Shapiro 2021: 359; see also the section ‘Critical Language Education and Awareness’). Further, a critical assessment of language usage in media artifacts among learners may help overturn SLIs (Coupland 2014: 78).

Critical Language Education and Awareness Given the potential of pop cultural media to spread biases through SLIs, the field of critical lan‑ guage education with its aim to develop learners’ critical literacies is highly relevant. Rooted in Paolo Freire’s work, critical language education seeks to eliminate oppression and promote

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transformation through a problem‑posing approach that focuses on critical thinking, learner‑driven content, and active participation (Crawford 1978: 112–113). This perspective has also entered linguistic research within the field of critical language awareness (CLA), in which Fairclough (1992) posits that language awareness does not only include descriptive linguistic knowledge but also a critical awareness of how language practices relate to social and political power dimen‑ sions. He notes that CLA is ‘coming to be a prerequisite for effective democratic citizenship and should therefore be seen as an entitlement for citizens, especially children developing toward citizenship in the educational system’ (Fairclough 1992: 3). CLA approaches should therefore be incorporated into teacher education courses for future teachers to gain insights into the relationship between language and culture (Abe and Shapiro 2021: 356). A crucial argument is that ‘awareness of implicit bias (linguistic or otherwise) is the starting point for resistance and change’ (Abe and Shapiro 2021: 363). As concerns the visibility of stereotyped varieties in telecinematic artifacts, ‘[r]epresenting real varieties that do not emerge solely as part of stereotyped character‑building shortcuts can offer visibility and increase linguistic knowledge’ (Darder 2022: 3). In more general terms, CLA pedagogy encourages learners to think about the following question: ‘Who gains and how from the production of particular texts, genres and their accompanying discourses?’ (Wallace 2017: 132). The pedagogy of multiliteracies (Kalantzis et al. 2016), which accounts for the increasing mul‑ timodality of texts, also emphasizes critical literacy, a term defined as ‘[a]pproaches to literacy that focus on texts that communicate student interests and experiences and address challenging social issues, such as discrimination and disadvantage’ (Kalantzis et al. 2016: 176). Crucially, therefore, discrimination affects social justice because those affected may internalize stigmata, leading to poor health and low self‑esteem. A central aim of critical language education is to foster social justice (Crookes 2021: 249). Problematic, however, is the fact that the concept of social justice is highly complex and lacks an objective definition. While classrooms are described as ‘sites of social justice work’ (Randolph and Johnson 2017: 102), social justice is considered to be a journey and the equitable sharing of social power and benefits in a society (Osborn 2006). Randolph and Johnson (2017: 102) have suggested a framework consisting of three components that impact social justice learning outcomes in world language education: (1) standards (cultures and communities); (2) student‑oriented processes (transformative learning, intercultural communicative competence); and (3) teacher‑oriented processes (critical pedagogy, community‑based instructional design). Student‑oriented processes highlight the importance of learning becoming transformative. This happens when learners de‑ center their own experience and take the perspective of the interlocutor (Randolph and Johnson 2017: 106). Regarding the consumption of pop cultural media, this means uncovering stereotypi‑ cal depictions of certain characters and language varieties and finding ways to promote their di‑ verse and inclusive representation. This understanding of learning complies with Byram’s (1997) model of intercultural communi‑ cative competence and the goal of developing critical cultural awareness (Randolph and Johnson 2017: 104). More specifically, it is the field of intercultural citizenship education that provides another important theoretical base for considering a critical literacies pedagogy that aims to coun‑ teract mind engineering and promote critical engagement with language.

Intercultural Citizenship Education Education is increasingly regarded as a means of combating racism, extremism, and discrimina‑ tion. This is reflected in the Charter on Education for Democratic Citizenship and Human Rights 228

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Education (Council of Europe 2010), advocating the promotion of core values including human rights, democracy, and the rule of law. Represented in the Charter for All (Council of Europe 2012), the points raised provide an important reference point for language education, which plays a key role in valuing diversity and promoting human rights. This understanding of education is the foundation of intercultural citizenship education, which is a major goal of foreign language education today (Byram 2008; Porto et al. 2018). Defined as ‘the ability of individuals and groups to live and dialogue with individuals and groups of other identifications’ (Porto and Byram 2015: 23), citizenship education promotes the integration of pluralism including ethnic and linguistic complexity without promoting division in society (Por‑ tera 2021). Intercultural citizenship education therefore offers an important basis for a critical engagement with pop cultural media that, through their culture‑specific representation of certain characters and language varieties, may implicitly promote a division of society by displaying cer‑ tain characters (and thus social groups) in a negative light (see the section ‘Language Ideologies in Narrative Pop Media: Insights from Sociolinguistics’). In a similar vein, global citizenship ‘acknowledges global interconnectedness and the responsi‑ bility every individual has in preserving planet Earth and in contributing to a fair, just and peaceful world’ (Lütge et al. 2022: 3). In connecting global citizenship with social justice education, Banks (2003: 18) emphasizes that the biggest problem worldwide is not that people cannot read and write but rather their inability to get along and work together to solve problems such as global warm‑ ing, racism, and war. Consequently, he considers it imperative to foster ‘thoughtful and active citizens’ to make the world ‘more just and humane’ (Banks 2003: 19). This highlights the necessity to engage with ‘reflective processes [that] can help us to understand the nature of privilege and inequality and to engage with the world more equitably’ (Abe and Shapiro 2021: 355). Extremist/ stereotypical views, fostered by, for example, inadequate representation of language varieties in pop cultural media must be uncovered so that learners can become intercultural and global citizens committed to a more humane world. Through mediation, defined as ‘a class of intervention strategies that attempt to disrupt the effects of consuming media’ (Kirsh 2010: 241), telecinematic representations can build a bridge to critical literacy. More specifically, this requires active mediation that involves, for example, discussions about media content with learners to help them understand the intent and realism of media products to change their affective responses to them and reduce potentially negative media effects (Kirsh 2010: 244). Such effects related to SLIs and linguistic stereotyping are outlined in the subsequent passages.

Language Ideologies in Narrative Pop Media: Insights from Sociolinguistics While the study of pop cultural media had long been sidelined in sociolinguistics due to the alleged ‘inauthenticity’ of the data (see Werner 2022: section 3), there has been an increasing acceptance of the importance of mediatization as a ‘historical process through which more and more aspects of social lives and socio‑cultural understandings are achieved through technologically‑mediated sys‑ tems’ (Coupland 2014: 78). Consequently, there has been considerable engagement with scripted narrative forms, and specifically language use in telecinematic artifacts, and this work has usefully employed the notions of indexicality and language ideology (see the section ‘Indexicality and Language Ideologies’), as a selective review of relevant studies that focus on animated children’s series and movies shows.8 The choice of animated (and specifically fantasy) telecinematic artifacts is deliberate, as they provide an ‘ontological rupture that allows some distance between voice and image [and] allows non‑mainstream varieties to be decontextualized and recontextualized in 229

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mediated relocations of speech communities’ (Darder 2022: 3). Further, previous work has found that animated productions may lag in the more diverse representation of ethnic groups increasingly found in traditional, non‑animated movies and series (Bloomquist 2015: 751; cf. Clouse 2022). A landmark effort in this respect is Dobrow and Gidney (1998), who manually coded 323 characters from 12 animated US TV series to determine whether ethnicity and gender are used to convey stereotypes and how linguistic variation is employed in the series studied. While they fail to find evidence of a specific ‘genderlect’,9 their overall results imply that standard American English (AmE) is the default variety for heroes and that linguistic variation is used to stereotype characters, especially in the role of villains, who are found to use German‑ and Slavic‑accented, but interestingly also standard British English (BrE), which alternatively features as a variety associated with refined characters. The representation of these varieties indeed relies on several indexical phonological features, such as final devoicing for German‑accented English. The study identifies additional noteworthy tendencies, among them the use of a stylized New York/‘Italian’ accent for criminals, regional AmE accents for comic characters, and only rare use of African American English (AAE), working‑class speech, or foreign‑accented English for hero characters. The results of several related studies are summarized in Table 15.2. In sum, the aforementioned findings indicate a general potential of telecinematic artifacts di‑ rected at younger audiences to use varieties to deliberately conceptualize ‘good and evil in ways that strongly correlate to race and ethnicity’ (Barrett et al. 2022: 273) and therefore to establish a rigid ‘status hierarchy’ (Dragojevic et al. 2016: 75) of varieties. Thus, they may foster SLIs (and residual racism) by way of stereotyping speakers of different varieties as either desirable or infe‑ rior through processes of second‑order indexicalities. Such insights are highly relevant from a language‑educational perspective, as, due to the pro‑ duction circumstances of animated telecinematic artifacts, it can be assumed that scriptwriters and producers deliberately select varieties and their use for various purposes of characterization. Observers have called such practices an implicit political choice and have criticized producers of animated formats in particular for associating language varieties that may in fact be part of a person’s identity with stereotypical character representations (especially in anthropomorphic char‑ acters such as animals, robots, cars, etc.), ascertaining an institutionalized status hierarchy in the mediasphere (see, e.g., Degener 2017: 13 on AAE and African American identity). This is particularly relevant as studies have found that an awareness of varieties is already ob‑ servable among children (Maroniti et al. 2013: 60–61; Griva et al. 2018: 42), who may internalize the attitudes purported in such media representations, which may be the first and only encounter with a particular variety (see the section ‘Social Psychology, Media Effects, and Socialization’). To unearth language ideologies and to put such representations into perspective, there have been repeated calls for active engagement with telecinematic artifacts and their language representation in connection with stilted roles (Degener 2017: 13; Abe and Shapiro 2021: 363). That is why we address the potential of pop cultural media for mind engineering in a critical literacies’ pedagogy (see the section ‘Building a Bridge to Language Education’). At the same time, we highlight that such media can also be characterized by inclusive practices fostering tolerance. While most of the studies presented considered commercially successful movies, children and adolescents have even greater exposure to the media through streaming and video‑on‑demand services (see the section ‘Introduction’). The ensuing case study (the section ‘Language Variation in Current Animated Series for Children’) therefore complements extant work in two ways: First, it provides an updated picture of animated series vs. movies, and, second, it gauges whether media practice as to the use and representation of language varieties has been subject to change in recent productions, reflecting an increased awareness of the role that language may play as a carrier of 230

Pop Cultural Media for Fostering Responsible World Citizens Table 15.2  Sociolinguistic studies on animated telecinematic artifacts for children Study

Film/series

Non‑standard variety/varieties

Main results

Meek (2006)

Peter Pan

‘Hollywood Injun English’ (stylized non‑standard variety of English to depict the speech of Native Americans)

Bloomquist (2015)

Various

AAE

Degener (2017)

The Secret Life of Pets

AAE

Valleriani (2020)

Zootopia

AAE, Southern AmE

Darder (2022)

Various

AAE, Southern AmE, Jamaican English/Creole

Barrett et al. (2022)

Various

AAE, Spanish‑accented English, non‑native accents

Indexical markers (e.g., lack of tense and aspect and usage of specific lexical items) that work in collaboration with the representation of negative character traits to signify the ‘otherness’ of Native Americans • Both older and contemporary animated children’s movies following ‘Black stock characters’ stereotypes emerging from minstrel shows (e.g., Baloo the Bear in the Jungle Book as an ‘Uncle Tom’ or Marty in the Madagascar franchise as ‘Coon’) • Indexicality: AAE associated with minor and comical roles and unfavorable traits (laziness, superstition, childlikeness, cowardice, stupidity, being thuggish) • Distorted depiction of African American realities • Lack of positive Black characters • AAE as ‘deviant’ variety • Indexicality: AAE associated with (male) streetwiseness and low socio‑economic status Indexicality: selected phonological, grammatical, and lexical features index characters as rural, low‑class, unintelligent, or criminal Indexicality: selected grammatical and lexical features index characters as low‑class, uneducated, or thuggish • Negative portrayal of non‑native accents • Indexicality: AAE and Spanish‑accented English for dangerous or mentally insane characters

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social information. This increased awareness may, in turn, result in positive media effects on the audience (see the section ‘Social Psychology, Media Effects, and Socialization’).

Language Variation in Current Animated Series for Children While the view of stereotyped language use in telecinematic media for children as an ‘inescapable trait’ (Darder 2022: 3) seems justified given the review of previous work (see the section ‘Lan‑ guage Ideologies in Narrative Pop Media: Insights from Sociolinguistics’), and there is persistent skepticism about whether growing social diversity is also represented medially (Kirsh 2010: 123; Degener 2017: 3); there has also been some recognition of positive messages that can be conveyed through children’s media in general (e.g., Sanborn and Harris 2022: 372) and animated films in particular (e.g., Bloomquist 2015: 751). Regarding the latter, it has been suggested that animated fantasy is, in principle, a site of creativity and almost endless possibilities to conjure up an ‘equita‑ ble universe’ (Pila et al. 2018: 35). The looming question that remains is whether and to which ex‑ tent current scriptwriters and producers make use of these opportunities (in the sense of practices that foster tolerance and inclusivity), especially in series with an educational and/or pro‑social concern.10 To address this issue, patterns in a commercially highly successful,11 award‑winning, and critically acclaimed12 educational series distributed via the BBC13 in the UK, and, globally via Netflix, the Octonauts (www.theoctonauts.com; 2010–2021; UK/Ireland – US version available) is qualitatively explored with a view to the representation of language varieties. The cast of Octonauts is a team of eight anthropomorphic animals that embark on undersea ad‑ ventures using various vehicles (‘gups’) during which they encounter real marine ecosystems and animals. The role of the speech used by the characters has been highlighted before in the context of the formation of national identity in children by means of ‘accents imagined to belong to people’s [sic] of differing nations’ and an inherent potential for the audience in ‘developing knowledge of and attitudes toward nations’ (Barraclough‑Brady 2023: 3–4). The connection to the function of animated media as agents of socialization (see the section ‘Social Psychology, Media Effects, and Socialization’) is evident. Table 15.3 presents an overview of the main protagonists, featuring six male and two female characters. As shown in Table 15.3, the Octonauts’ main cast represents a mixture of characters using both standard and non‑standard varieties. This in itself is a noteworthy finding because traditionally non‑standard varieties were sometimes ignored in animated telecinematic representations for (pos‑ itive) main characters (see the section ‘Language Ideologies in Narrative Pop Media: Insights from Sociolinguistics’). Remarkably, the protagonists using non‑standard accents (including non‑AmE/ BrE) are represented as equally competent in the story world and fulfill important specialist and/ or leader functions that require high professional qualifications. Noteworthy in this context is the fact that some main characters use varieties that are widely stigmatized, such as Cockney, South‑ ern AmE, and AmE with a Spanish accent. These generic observations are striking in light of the results of other sociolinguistic analyses (see the section ‘Language Ideologies in Narrative Pop Media: Insights from Sociolinguistics’) and show an alternative practice of how the diversity of varieties/accents can be represented medially. At the same time, it has to be acknowledged that, despite the wide range of varieties in Octo‑ nauts, the focus on the main protagonists is a limitation of the present analysis because, as other work has shown, the use of varieties by minor characters may still at times be associated with ste‑ reotyped behavior and traits (Barraclough‑Brady 2023: 11). Further, given the large amount of re‑ search on the role of AAE (see the section ‘Language Ideologies in Narrative Pop Media: Insights

232

Pop Cultural Media for Fostering Responsible World Citizens Table 15.3  Octonauts main characters overview Character name (and species, gender)

Variety

Roles/traits

Barnacles (polar bear, male)

Standard BrE

Kwazii (cat, male)

Cockney/Estuary English

Peso (penguin, male)

Standard BrE/AmE with Spanish accent (US version)

Shellington (otter, male)

Standard BrE with Scottish accent Standard BrE with hyper‑RP accent Australian/AmE (US version)

Group leader/captain, operating vehicles, physically strong, brave, claustrophobic Second in command (lieutenant), (crypto)zoologist, operating vehicles, daring, arachnophobic Medical officer, sometimes easily scared, brave in the face of danger Biologist, researcher

Inkling (octopus, male) Dashi (dog, female) Tweak (rabbit, female) Tunip (‘vegimal’ = hybrid between plant and animal)

Southern AmE N/A

Oceanographer, professor, founder of the Octonauts IT specialist, technician, photographer, surfer Engineer, inventor Chef, gardener, leader of the vegimals

from Sociolinguistics’), it could be argued that Octonauts misses the chance to present this widely stigmatized variety in a positive light. Furthermore, we have focused solely on linguistic diversity in general and have omitted gender or class, for instance. Overall, however, the – necessarily brief – analysis of the series’ protagonists shows that, un‑ like the practices traced in most telecinematic artifacts (see the section ‘Language Ideologies in Narrative Pop Media: Insights from Sociolinguistics’), it is by no means ‘inescapable’ to employ non‑standard and less widely used varieties to index positive character traits. Rather, Octonauts could be viewed as an example challenging stereotypical associations between social attributions and linguistic usage, illustrating paradigmatic ‘new ways of embedding and disembedding voices into/from social contexts, and new normativities for self‑presentation and for social relations’ (Coupland 2014: 78) fostered by mediatized representation. Thus, animated telecinematic artifacts might, in fact, epitomize desirable practice in the sense of showing the value of linguistic diversity or at least presenting linguistic diversity as a given and natural state of societies.

Building a Bridge to Language Education Over the past six decades, critical language education (see the section ‘Critical Language Educa‑ tion and Awareness’) has recognized the fact that language is neither a neutral object of study nor a neutral medium of communication. Rather, it is an instrument for maintaining power hierar‑ chies and promoting certain values (see the section ‘Introduction’) so that ‘language teaching and learning are not ideologically neutral practices; they are located within complex webs of political and historical contexts and sociolinguistic practices’ (Curdt‑Christiansen and Weninger 2015: 1). Importantly, the use of pop cultural media in language education as a mere cultural resource that

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promotes media literacy is insufficient and rather requires ‘[an analysis of] its production within historically specific social relations’ (Currie and Kelly 2022: 415). Fostering responsible world citizens capable of critiquing pop cultural media and promoting social justice requires practice‑oriented suggestions, which are discussed in the following sections. Since critical foreign language pedagogies, including intercultural citizenship education (see the section ‘Intercultural Citizenship Education’), are generally compatible with curricula based on a democratic understanding of education, no new method is required but rather the creation of spaces for discourses that advance social justice (Osborn 2006). This complies with Randolph and Johnson’s (2017: 109) argument that social justice themes can enhance the communication goals of curricular guidelines. Hence, we will discuss practical implications in two parts: A sketch of some basic requirements for engaging with critical literacy practices is presented, followed by an outline of some more specific ways to integrate pop cultural media into the classroom with the aim of developing responsible world citizens.

Basic Requirements Critical literacy practices aim to uncover language (and other) ideologies. The assumed context in this section is a foreign language classroom, although the requirements equally apply to language learning in general. We argue that three basic requirements (see Figure 15.1) provide the founda‑ tion for potentially fruitful critical literacy practices and pave the way for more specific sugges‑ tions related to the variety of texts in the subsequent section. The first requirement is the creation of a safe learning environment. This safe space includes the establishment of a trustworthy atmosphere in the classroom that allows learners to raise their voices, ask questions, and possibly share their stories – yet without encouraging or even forcing

Safe space

Hello!

¡Hola!

㟮޹

Use of L1s

Variety of texts

Figure 15.1  Basic requirements for critical literacies pedagogies focusing on language ideologies

234

Pop Cultural Media for Fostering Responsible World Citizens

them to share any potentially traumatizing experiences (Ludwig and Summer 2023: 14). Freedom of speech, democracy, pluralism, and fairness set the basis for this safe space in which basic hu‑ man rights provide the foundation for educational practices. Importantly, a critical investigation of pop cultural media by learners in a safe environment can empower them and enhance their agency (Yol and Yoon 2020: 12). A second requirement for critical literacy practices is openness toward learners’ language re‑ sources and their individual cultural experiences. This means that the use of learners’ first and other languages (L1s) is not tabooed but included in foreign language teaching – albeit not as a medium of instruction but rather as a ‘teaching aid’ (Akbari 2008: 280). Engaging learners’ lin‑ guistic diversity aims to make them aware that educators appreciate diversity in all its forms, for instance by raising language awareness through a comparison of linguistic features across differ‑ ent languages or by increasing awareness of their own unique linguistic variety. A third aspect central to critical literacy practices is the use of a variety of thought‑provoking and valuable texts (i.e., in a broad sense, including songs, films, etc.) that showcase voices be‑ yond the classroom and invite multicultural perspectives. According to Yol and Yoon, ‘instruction should challenge the ideologies praising norms and encouraging cultural assimilation’ (2020: 12). As such, language educators play a key role in raising learners’ awareness of stereotypical, poten‑ tially problematic, and racist representations of linguistic varieties through telecinematic media by initiating classroom discourse that counters stigmatization and promotes critical literacy. The movies and series explored in sociolinguistic work (the section ‘Language Ideologies in Narra‑ tive Pop Media: Insights from Sociolinguistics’) and the series analyzed above (see the section ‘Language Variation in Current Animated Series for Children’) offer examples illustrating how linguistic varieties in series can be critically investigated while showcasing some positive develop‑ ments and fostering learners’ CLA.

Specific Ways Specific ways through which critical literacies with a focus on pop cultural media can be imple‑ mented at different levels of language proficiency emerge from our theoretical groundwork see (the section ‘Theoretical Foundation’). At a general level, a distinction between a simple and a more complex way of putting critical language pedagogies into practice can be drawn: A sim‑ ple approach would be to include supplementary content that is more diverse; a more complex way would be to negotiate the syllabus with learners (Crookes 2021: 252). This could include a comparison of animated films and series with different degrees of linguistic diversity or a critical inspection of text suggestions in syllabuses or textbooks by investigating how (non‑dominant) linguistic varieties are perceived and valued. According to Chang (2018: 4–5), three broad themes are effective in promoting social justice in English language education: (1) recognition, (2) collaboration, and (3) solidarity. These themes are described by highlighting the importance of (1) recognizing different types of linguistic and cultural practices while also recognizing learners’ own identities. Collaboration (2) refers to all forms of collaborative learning among learners, parents, administrators, and stakeholders, for in‑ stance through action research projects. Solidarity (3) involves striving toward collective goals to develop a sense of community among learners. As such, integrating social justice perspectives into foreign language education by recognizing learners’ own (linguistic, among other) identities, en‑ couraging them to work together with others, and envisioning collective goals provides important impulses for the journey toward social justice (Osborn 2006).

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Critically reflecting on the representation of linguistic diversity in telecinematic representa‑ tions can provide an ideal starting point for social justice work in the classroom, as our case study has shown. In addition, a great variety of text formats offers relevant materials for a critical en‑ gagement with language. Another interesting way of approaching the representation of language ideology is, for instance, to examine Disney films. As analyses like Barrett et  al. (2022) and Currie and Kelly (2022) reveal and criticize, certain portrayals of characters (and their language) perpetuate specific racial, cultural, and gender stereotypes, thus contributing to the formation of social injustice. These include characters like princesses (often white and symbolizing good‑ ness and beauty) and voices of primates in Tarzan (with Black voices encouraging associations with apes). Indeed, these sexist and racist representations call for a thorough critical engage‑ ment with such texts, especially when we consider their worldwide popularity. In addition, lyrical texts such as poems (e.g., ‘All American Girl’ by Julia Alvarez) offer opportunities to examine resistance toward dominant language ideologies, as suggested by Abe and Shapiro (2021: 363). They also recommend the TED talk ‘3 Ways to Speak English’ by Jamila Lyiscott as it includes code‑switching and thus offers opportunities for analyzing linguistic codes and creative writing. The idea behind using such texts is that ‘[t]hrough media engagement, students can exercise their power to resist, challenge and transform media culture promoting exclusion and marginalization of social groups, while also recognizing extra‑textual processes that sustain this culture’ (Currie and Kelly 2022: 406). Importantly, however, in line with Crawford’s recommendations (1978), language educators are well advised to include texts from learners’ lives, which might be popular series offered by streaming services or videos by influencers on social media platforms. In that way, learners may learn to critically reflect on processes of mind engineering in texts with which they personally engage. As criticality has shown to play a key role in all of the theoretical frameworks discussed in this chapter, it should take center stage in pedagogical endeavors. Based on Barnett’s (1997) work, critical language education can be approached by focusing on three domains of criticality: (1) knowledge, (2) self, and (3) world (Porto and Byram 2015: 18; in reference to Barnett 1997: 103). Referring to a project for lower proficiency learners (Porto and Byram 2015: 20–21), we suggest the following steps when working with pop cultural media and focusing on the representation of language ideologies: 1 Knowledge: Students learn about different linguistic varieties of English in pop cultural me‑ dia and stereotypes associated with these as well as the SLI and how this relates to social justice. 2 Self: Students reflect on their own beliefs and biases with regard to linguistic varieties, gaining conscious awareness of and relating them to their perception of pop cultural media. 3 World: Beyond critical thinking and reflexivity, learners take critical action by evaluating the representation of linguistic varieties in pop cultural media (e.g., through digital posters dis‑ played in the school or podcasts shared with a (local) community). Overall, a variety of pop cultural media, possibly suggested by learners, can provide a basis for these three domains of criticality. In line with Currie and Kelly (2022: 412), we reject treating seemingly authentic cultural resources such as pop cultural media ‘as “natural resources” for meaning making […] rather than the product of human activities orchestrated by social relations and vested interests’ (see the section ‘Introduction’). We advocate a differentiated discussion of the concept of text authenticity and a consideration of critical literacy in language education that accounts for the potential effects of mind engineering through pop cultural media. This is crucial 236

Pop Cultural Media for Fostering Responsible World Citizens

in today’s world as mediatized ‘global flows of language and culture’ (Pennycook 2010: 65) of internationally distributed pop culture have an impact on learners, which needs to be considered by language education.

Conclusion Learning languages in the 21st century requires the development of critical literacies. This can pave the way for a tolerant society and eliminate impacts of mind engineering (aka ‘brainwash‑ ing’) through pop cultural media, which are an important factor in the socialization of youth. That is why Fairclough’s statement that ‘a language education focused upon training in language skills, without a critical component, would seem to be failing in its responsibility to learners’ (1992: 6) holds true today more than ever. As children and adolescents face potentially biased representa‑ tions through linguistic stereotypes in animated telecinematic content, for instance, language edu‑ cation plays a key role in uncovering such representations and fostering responsible world citizens. This can be achieved by integrating critical literacy practices into today’s language classrooms, and, more specifically, by taking the dangers involved in the creation of stigmata through the me‑ diatized representation of certain language varieties seriously. The present chapter related critical language pedagogies/awareness and intercultural citizenship education to the concept of mind engineering and discussed findings from sociolinguistics. This discipline has found evidence for mind engineering in the sense of a long‑standing tradition of stereo‑ typical depictions of characters (and thus social groups, often minorities) in pop cultural media with the help of linguistic processes related to second‑order indexicality. To gauge whether such represen‑ tations are inevitable in media practice, this chapter developed a case study on the current (educa‑ tional and pro‑social) animated children’s series Octonauts, focusing on the usage of varieties. It was found that Octonauts represents, to some degree, a positive example of a diverse representation of standard and non‑standard varieties and avoids falling into the trap of using linguistic stereotyping as a means for characterization conveying SLIs. While the series in the case study exemplified desirable practice in the sense of avoiding linguistic stereotyping, it concentrated on linguistic variation as one domain of diversity, so that additional broader domains such as class, race/ethnicity, gender, ableism, and age, among others, were not considered explicitly and are issues open to further exploration. On a general note, pedagogical endeavors that take the dangers of mind engineering seriously, as postulated in this chapter, should aim to make injustices and inclusive practices across different domains evident to learners. This is important because typically subconscious thinking processes need to be made visible to learners (Currie and Kelly 2022: 408). Basic requirements, such as cre‑ ating a safe space, using L1s as teaching aids, and integrating a variety of texts, provide a founda‑ tion for reflexive educational practices. Crucially, a critical engagement with the effects of mind engineering through pop cultural me‑ dia (but also with how they employ practices that emphasize tolerance and inclusivity) can be beneficial for both formal (in the classroom) and informal language learning (outside the class‑ room). As Degener highlights, ‘[c]hildren’s media can serve to help educators guide students to view media critically, understand stereotyped representations to be a (conscious or subconscious) political decision, and work to dismantle linguistic supremacy inside and outside of the classroom’ (2017: 14). Such endeavors require a fundamental ‘stance of tolerance and generosity toward dif‑ ference and nuance [as regards] the messy, complex realities of language use’ (Abe and Shapiro 2021: 365). We therefore suggest that relevant media should be exploited in language education to promote the development of responsible world citizens in which human rights and democratic values set the basis for independent thinking and anti‑discriminatory practices. 237

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Acknowledgments We acknowledge support by the Open Access Publication Fund of the University of Bamberg. We further would like to thank Berit Ellies, Claudia Schnellbögl, Verena Zipperer, and the editors for constructive criticism on the manuscript.

Notes 1 Attributed to Nicholas Johnson, member of the US Federal Communications Commission; quoted in Sanborn and Harris 2022: 370. 2 While over time the amount of media contact has grown and direct interaction with peers and family has diminished (Kearney and Levine 2020: 83), current surveys estimate that youth use media between 3.5 and 6.5 hours daily, with telecinematic content covering two to three hours (Ward and Bridgewater 2023: 86; see also European Commission 2023). 3 See also https://sites.tufts.edu/ctvresearch/. 4 While the focus in the present chapter is on telecinematic media, it is evident that (linguistic) stereotyping may occur in other media, such as books for children and adolescents, comics and cartoons, computer software and video games, and TV commercials (see Kirsh 2010: 105–120 and Adukia et al. 2023 for an in‑depth study of race and gender stereotyping in children’s books). 5 In terms of additional social factors, children from low‑income families are more likely to spend time with media input and thus to receive their role models from it (Kearney and Levine 2020: 83). 6 These attitudes may not only emerge towards other groups, but media may also have an effect on the self‑perception of one’s own (often minority) group in terms of what is called social identity threat if this group is stereotypically displayed (for a case study, see Schmader et al. 2015). 7 The cultural context plays a large part, as Moland’s (2020) study on the ineffectiveness of Sesame Street, a se‑ ries widely acclaimed for its diversity and pro‑social messages, as an educational program in Nigeria shows. 8 See also https://shrekthelinguistics.wordpress.com/2017/12/01/the-protagonists-language/ for an analy‑ sis of language varieties used in Shrek or https://latinasandmedia.wordpress.com/term-projects/latinoacharacters-in-childrens-television/ for exemplification of the portrayal of Latina characters in animated TV series. 9 For lack of space, linguistic gender stereotyping is ignored in the present chapter. For relevant work, see González Vera (2012), Pila et al. (2018), or Fought and Eisenhauer (2022). 10 An issue outside of the scope of the present chapter is whether such programs are educationally success‑ ful in terms of content delivery and realism, for instance as regards factual accuracy (see Chlebuch et al. 2023). 11 See https://tv.parrotanalytics.com/US/the-octonauts-cbeebies and https://tv.parrotanalytics.com/UK/theoctonauts-cbeebies. 12 See www.commonsensemedia.org/tv‑reviews/octonauts and www.commonsensemedia.org/tv‑reviews/ ask‑the‑storybots. 13 www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/b00xhyjf/octonauts.

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PART IV

Linguistic and Semiotic Analysis of Mind Engineering

16 NEWSPEAK AND CYBERSPEAK The Haunting Ghosts of the Russian Past Kristina Šekrst and Sandro Skansi

Introduction to Cyberspeak and Newspeak Cybernetics, as a wide field encompassing the study of circular causal systems, had its first wave in the 1940s, led by American scientists such as Norbert Wiener, Arturo Rosenblueth, and Julian Bigelow, and in the United Kingdom by the so‑called Ratio Club, which included young psychia‑ trists, mathematicians, engineers, physiologists, psychologists, and other scientists who discussed issues in cybernetics. In the Soviet Union, cybernetics was at first scrutinized and seen as an American reactionary pseudo‑science but was soon rehabilitated to serve as an umbrella term for various scientific disciplines such as structural linguistics, control theory, or genetics. The second wave became notable from the 1960s onward, grounded in biology and works on self‑organizing systems, especially in the works of Chilean biologists Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana, while the third wave is a modern one connected with machine learning and, as we can see, with mind engineering as well. One of the best‑known definitions of cybernetics comes from the classic work of Norbert ­Wiener (1961 [1948]), who defines its scope as “control and communication in the animal and the machine.” That is, human behavior and communication are seen as analogous to machine behavior and communication: your mind could be seen as software and your brain as hardware, and there is a constant flux of information being sent. For cyberneticists, control is a form of communica‑ tion and communication is a form of control: there is a purposeful action based on information exchange (Gerovitch 2002a: 2). So, what is cybernetics then? It is a way to study any system in a general way, and that system can be a machine or a biological organism. However, to do that, we need a general language to describe both machines and organisms in the same way. It is no wonder that cyberspeak, the language of cybernetics, or its metalanguage to be more precise, consists of words that both explain and describe human/animal and machine forms of control and communication. By metalanguage, we consider a language that describes another language. Since cybernetics studies control and communication, its terminology and vocabu‑ lary are diverse. Even though different terms are borrowed from different sciences, that does not mean they will retain the same meaning in cybernetics. To illustrate, consider the word or term frame outside cybernetics (denoting a reference frame in cybernetics). The term frame will denote



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DOI: 10.4324/9781003289746-21

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different objects or concepts in different disciplines. In artificial intelligence, it is a formalization of ­concepts; in aircraft engineering, it refers to structural rings, while, in film, it refers to a photo‑ graphic image in a motion picture. Cyberspeak has acquired a set of ideological connotations in the Soviet Union. Echoing ­Orwell, Gerovitch (2002a: 12) has named the ideologically colored language of Soviet scientists newspeak. Newspeak was the “value‑laden ideological language of official Soviet discourse” ­(Gerovitch 2002a: 13). Coined by George Orwell in his dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty‑Four (1949), the term designates a controlled fictional language of a totalitarian superstate, in which both the ­grammar and the lexicon were limiting the ability of an individual to talk about possibly ­“dangerous” con‑ cepts such as free will. Any similar language might be dubbed Orwellian since it mirrors the use of newspeak in Orwell’s novel. However, in Soviet Russia, the skillful use of newspeak allowed a person to manipulate ideology and define what was permitted in a Soviet context at that time: it provided mechanisms for negotiating the truth (Gerovitch 2002a: 12). So, if cyberspeak was aiming to be a universal language to describe both man and machine, what is actually this newspeak? In such a language, words were value‑laden, which means they had strong positive or negative connotations connected to their use. For example, Marxism and Leninism always carried positive connotations, while idealism, metaphysics, or formalism were always labeled negatively (Gerovitch 2002a: 21). The outline of this chapter is as follows. First, it will show how there are still remnants of cyber‑ speak in modern science, pinpointing its cybernetic background and shaping our thoughts without us realizing they had any cybernetic origin whatsoever. The background description for cyber‑ speak and newspeak will be provided with Gerovitch (2002a) as the basis since there is little to no other research on this matter. Second, it will investigate how newspeak, as its counterpart, can be analyzed from the theory of speech acts. Namely, it will be stated that their use is a performa‑ tive one: by using the term, one is also doing something. Third, and a surprising outcome of this chapter not originally planned, the current war in Ukraine allowed us a brief analysis of newspeak present in Russian public communication today (instead of historical examples), which will again be connected to their performative aspect.

Cyberspeak vs. Newspeak This chapter will first rely on Gerovitch’s (2002a) differentiation between cyberspeak and new‑ speak, to then observe their remnants or application in modern science. Regarding a general lan‑ guage to describe different systems in cybernetics, various sources of scientific terminology were taken from different disciplines. Such a language has been named cyberspeak since it combines “diverse mathematical models, explanatory frameworks, and appealing metaphors from various disciplines by means of a common language” (Gerovitch 2002a: 2). For example, a cyberneticist will talk about homeostasis and reflex, borrowing terms from physiology but also about control and feedback, or entropy and order, using terminology from control engineering and thermody‑ namics. Of course, there are also behavior and goal and similar terms from psychology, along with information, signal, and noise from communication engineering. In newspeak, every term carried a philosophical and ideological load. A spy (шпион) is only an American or a foreign secret agent, while a Russian one is, of course, a “patriot” (патриот). The word spy is automatically devoid of positive connotations, and an American person could never be a “patriot” – such a word was reserved for true patriotism in their own lines. So, newspeak in this sense alters the meaning of a word itself by adding connotations. The process of addition is a social one: a connotation gets added to the meaning of a word by associating the word exclusively 246

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in positive or negative social situations, and the added connotations tend to spread like a disease among meanings of the words which are frequently found together. According to Gerovitch (2002a: 155), scientists wanted to deal with “precisely described con‑ cepts and with notions defined through rigorously described operations” and not with vague terms and so‑called ideologemes, words referring to not just ideas but ideas in an ideological sense. Newspeak reduced the explicit assertions such as “striving for peace in this situation is wrong” to the simple term conciliatoriness, which already had negative judgments associated with it (Gero‑ vitch 2002a: 22). That is, such usage can be connected to Orwell’s ideas of “words which had been deliberately constructed for political purposes” or “a sort of verbal shorthand, often packing whole ranges of ideas into a few syllables, and at the same time more accurate and forcible than ordinary language” (Orwell 2003 [1949]: 212). Science in Soviet Russia was full of newspeak before the advent of cyberspeak. For example, Hilbert’s mathematical thought was known as formalism which was at first an objective scientific term that acquired a more ominous meaning during the debate over the interpretation of Marx‑ ist philosophy in 1930: the accusers were talking about “formalistic deviations” or “formalistic perversion.” This was a widespread phenomenon not dealing only with philosophy. For example, soon, editorials in Pravda condemned “formalist perversions” in Shostakovich’s music, which was castigated for its anti‑popular character (Gerovitch 2002a: 32). To analyze the phenomenon more thoroughly, one can start with Muddle Instead of Music: On the Opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District (Сумбур вместо музыки – Об опере «Леди Макбет Мценского уезда») appearing on January 27, 1936. In this editorial, Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth is accused of being contrary to “popular musical language accessible to all” along with calling it a “left‑ ist confusion” (левацкий сумбур) that is created “instead of natural human music” (вместо естественной, человеческой музыки) and “formalist attempts” (формалистические потуги) to create originality through “cheap clowning” (Pravda 1936). It is no wonder that the advent of the so‑called Russian formalists in linguistics was basically waiting for ideological scrutiny, so their work was often referred to as “bourgeois phonology” or they were just being accused of “a general formalistic approach” (Gerovitch 2002a: 40), which, as we recall, is already a derogatory term. Another term that was often denounced by the Soviet government was idealism, which was often marked as “reactionary and idealistic science.” The Russian translator Sof’ia Ianovskaia faced ideological criticism for her role in the publication of the Russian translation of Hilbert and Ackermann’s Principles of Theoretical Logic and immediately published a repentant letter admit‑ ting to “idealistic confusion” (Gerovitch 2002a: 47). The idea of logic as “idealist” seemed to be rooted in a trivial Platonism, but this did not last since by imputing Platonism everything could be dubbed “idealist.” The need for concrete mathematics while at the same time avoiding “idealist” mathematics seemed to be grounded in the finite infinite divide. Everything finite was “material,” while any logical or mathematical theory dealing with infinity had a strong chance of being re‑ garded as “idealist.” How does this all tie to cyberspeak? Gerovitch (2002a: 166) illustrates a classical newspeak attitude with the Soviet Academy of Sciences in 1940, who published a paper titled “Is It Possible to Prove or Disprove Mendelism by Mathematical and Statistical Methods?”, where Mendelism was a part of the newspeak. The word itself was a derogatory label and the whole of classical ge‑ netics in the background was ridiculed by the usage of the term, contrasted to the Soviets backing Lysenkoist biology. Cybernetics was often the holder of similar derogatory labels such as “a reac‑ tionary pseudo‑science” (Peters 2012: 150), similar to the mentioned etiquette of “formalism.” In 1955, the journal Voprosy filosofii (“Philosophical questions”) published a paper “Who does cyber‑ netics serve? (Кому служит кибернетика?)”, which condemned cybernetics as a “misanthropic 247

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pseudo‑theory” consisting of “mechanicism turning into idealism” (Holloway 1974: 150). The paper mentioned Marx who described the mathematical investigation of the most complex regu‑ larities: social and economic ones. Suddenly, mathematics became a powerful instrument and a methodological guide in the Khrushchev years. Russian cyberneticists such as Lyapunov, Sobolev, and Kitov actually had to “ideologically legitimize cybernetics” (Gerovitch 2002a: 179). It is intriguing how one can change the meaning of the term to be or be not ideologically colored and invoke or not various philosophical and political ideas, just depending on the common knowledge or the “official interpretation” of the term. This is what happened to cybernetics – from a “reaction‑ ary pseudo‑science” to a legitimate discipline that maybe could be reconciliated with Marxism. However, according to Gerovitch (2002a: 179), the first Soviet cyberneticists did not try to reconcile cybernetics with Soviet dialectical materialism: they insisted that questions of philoso‑ phy and ideology were utterly irrelevant, attacking the foundations of the official philosophical discourse. That is, they refused to use the conventional terminology of newspeak and insisted on the validity of cyberspeak, the language of cybernetics (Gerovitch 2002a: 181). Gerovitch (2002b: 354) mentions that Sobolev claimed that “cybernetics is neither mechanistic, nor idealistic” since “it is first and foremost a science of facts” and “there can be no idealistic or materialistic facts: a fact is always a fact.” Sobolev (1963: 82) states that “in cybernetics, one calls a machine a system that is capable of performing actions leading to a specific goal. That means that living beings, man in particular, are in this sense machines.” He claims that since one of the main parts of cybernetics is information theory, which implies the existence of a material carrier, but the information itself is immaterial (Sobolev 1963: 86). By refusing to incorporate cyberspeak terms into newspeak con‑ notations, the use of cyberspeak was here to refer only to scientific ideas in the background, and not ideologies. Soon, the fight for cyberspeak was won but at the cost of cyberspeak becoming politicized as well. Philosophers started adapting their discourse to incorporate cybernetic advancement, and cy‑ bernetics was tamed to go along with dialectic materialism (Gerovitch 2002a: 257–258). Such an attitude peaked with the 1961 symposium Cybernetics—in the Service of Communism, where cy‑ bernetics was described as “one of the major tools of the creation of a communist society” (Peters 2012: 164). In the proceedings (Berg 1962), one can see how various scientists see cybernetics as a general science applicable to various specialized fields. For example, Novik (Berg 1962: 43) sees it as “characterized by the most general and abstract approach to control.” Gnedenko (Berg 1962: 69) calls cybernetics “a particular scientific trend” that deals with “clarification of those regularities to which the processes of efficient control of complex systems are to be subordinated.” Dobrushin and Khurgin (Berg 1962: 93) see information as “one of the basic concepts of cybernetics” since “any controlling system deals with information.” While Arutyunov and Svecharnik (Berg 1962: 105) emphasize the application of cybernetics to biology, Sergeychuk (Berg 1962: 141) sees elec‑ trocommunication as “an inseparable component of cybernetic technique and exerting a great in‑ fluence upon the development of the automatic control theory and the cybernetic machine theory.” Belkin (Berg 1962: 256) concluded that “one of the most important and promising fields of appli‑ cation of cybernetics is economics,” which was also emphasized by Kitov (Berg 1962: 281), who saw cybernetics as “the science of the methods of optimum (the best) control and construction of controlling systems,” along with “development of methods of finding optimal solutions in com‑ plex situations and the study of similar phenomena in living nature” (Berg 1962: 282). As seen above, cybernetics started to include more and more subdisciplines, such as infor‑ mation theory, information systems, bionics, chemistry, psychology, energy systems, transporta‑ tion, and justice, along with semiotics and linguistics, followed by medicine uniting with biology ­(Peters 2012: 167) and soon grew out of the public mainstream view, giving rise to “informatics” 248

Newspeak and Cyberspeak

and nowadays information science and computer science. Its terminology was not emphasized anymore, but we will now observe whether its remnants can be found in modern science and what consequences are there regarding the usage of such terms.

Cyberspeak Then and Now The mentioned Wiener’s 1948 book drew upon parallels between digital computers and the nerve structures in organisms (chapter “Computing Machines and the Nervous System”). “A diverse set of man‑machine metaphors” was used to describe living organisms, control and communication devices, and the whole of human society using the same terms: information, feedback, and control (Gerovitch 2002a: 53). Wiener (1961, xi–xvi and 11–13) argued that the task of cybernetics was to research the analogies of the processes in the animal and the computer and explore its philosophi‑ cal ramifications. As Ashby (1956: 1) points out, cybernetics does not ask what something is, but what it does, that is, how it behaves. One might be tempted to correlate this to behaviorism, but there are two major problems here. First, behaviorism came later than cybernetics. Second, and more important, while behaviorism says that methodologically one should focus on behavior, cy‑ bernetics says that it wants to ontologically focus on behavior: to see what a thing is and consider how it behaves. In this regard, it is similar to pragmaticism, not behaviorism. Ashby (1956: 4) pinpoints that cybernetics “offers a single vocabulary and a single set of con‑ cepts suitable for representing the most diverse types of system.” Let us illustrate this using Wie‑ ner’s (1961: 120) terminology regarding neurons, so we can then easily observe such remnants in modern scientific terminology. Wiener considers human and animal nervous systems to be capable of the work of a computation system and states that neurons are ideally suited to act as relays. In a computer, Wiener describes that relays might be mechanical, electromechanical, or electrical, while in animals, they have an active phase and an inactive phase, i.e., the neuron fires or is in repose. Human memory is described as the ability to preserve the results of past operations for use in the future. Notice how the human mind is now described using words such as result or opera‑ tion. It is no surprise that Wiener (1961: 121) almost immediately states that memory is a function of the nervous system, “equally in demand for computing machines.” Cyberneticists would follow Wiener’s path: they are trying to describe analogous systems, a living one and an artificial one us‑ ing a joint, unified set of terms. Memory is not just a psychological phenomenon anymore; it is a function, for both a human being and a computer. And if we have a function, we can talk about the inputs and outputs for that function. Following the traditional cyberspeak, Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts (1943) were the first ones to suggest that something resembling the Turing machine might describe the human mind, and mental processes such as reasoning, decision‑making, or problem‑solving are computations analogous to computations executed by a Turing machine (Rescorla 2020). McCulloch was a cyberneticist and a neurophysiologist, while Pitts was a philosopher and psychologist, and their idea was to provide a mathematical description of a neuron. The goal itself has a cybernetic back‑ ground: find a common language to describe both the animal and the machine. Not only were we now describing the mind with notions such as computation, but we were also describing both biological and artificial neurons using the same language involving terms such as function or com‑ putability. So, one is describing the human mind using terms related to machines, but one is also describing the machines using biological or psychological terms such as neuron or memory, which leads us to the modern usage of cybernetic terms. Moving away from theories of the mind, even today one can easily observe how such terminol‑ ogy is present in modern‑day computing. For example, we are talking about machine learning, 249

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applying a psychological term reserved for humans and animals to machines. Machine learning is used to improve a computer’s performance in certain tasks (Skansi 2018). In machine learning, we are also talking about neural networks mimicking the way the human neural network computes and gives rise to mental states. Computer science also uses terms such as mentioned memory, which is used analogously: we are using the term since we believe (or once did believe) they are referring to the same kind of a process. A cyberneticist would be happy with such a definition since both memory as a neurophysiological and psychological process and memory as a computer’s way to “remember” past states could be described using the same language of terms such as function or state. Neural networks can be feed‑forward, with elements passing signals forward, again terms borrowed from control theory, one of the richest sources of cybernetic terminology. Taking the cybernetic stance of process analogies (Skansi and Šekrst 2022), a cyberneticist would use the same language to talk about essentially the same process. Namely, the study of the human mind and machine mind is talking about the same thing since we are using the word mind in both cases. Wiener (1961 [1948]) himself talks about control and communication in both the animal and the machine, using the same terms to describe analogous processes. Today, using terms such as machine learning or artificial intelligence is not just an empty usage of the word. Namely, it states that machine learning is a type of learning and that artificial intelligence is a type of intel‑ ligence. The question of whether the animal mind can be described in computationalist terms or whether the computation can be described in neurophysiological terms is an irrelevant one: we can always use cyberspeak to find a common language, often the one talking about inputs, outputs, communication, and information. Nowadays we often use scientific terms devoid of any meaning, but it seems that quite a number of terms in computer science, cognitive science, philosophy, mathematics, biology, etc. have either their roots in early cybernetics and control theory (exemplified by the mentioned ­Cybernetics—in the Service of Communism conference) or can be seen as connected to such research. One could argue that this does not suffice for a notion of mind engineering since we might be using the term without knowing its background. However, from a philosophical standpoint, using the term, even in a metaphorical way, pinpoints a certain analogy. And if there is an analogy, no matter how big or small might be, between two systems, then it has repercussions on ontology. Our concepts and entities in scientific disciplines will be influenced by the use of words. For example, there are a number of misconceptions regarding machine learning and artificial intelligence (Emmert‑Streib, Yli‑Harja, and Dehmer 2020), thinking that we are already dealing with a certain kind of powerful machine intelligence, leading to various problems of explainability. People are often thinking that artificial intelligence is explaining the brain; i.e., they think that “AI aims to explain how the brain works” (Emmert‑Streib, Yli‑Harja, and Dehmer 2020). We consider such misconceptions easy to explain using language: we are, after all, using the term intelligence, finding an analogy between two processes. It is no wonder that a layman will use the term to create her own idea about a cer‑ tain concept or a term if the scientific community is using a remnant of a cybernetic language that highlights the likeness of different concepts. A cyberneticist would see AI as a type of intelligence overall that could be applied both to animals and machines. The ignorance regarding the back‑ ground of such terms leads to surprising misconceptions about what artificial intelligence really is and common misuses of this and similar terms. The same is valid for terms such as machine learning. Laurent (2018) has shown common misconceptions regarding the terms, including one that AI can learn. According to Laurent (2018), most advanced AI models nowadays all seem to use machine learning, but the term machine learning, according to him, is misleading since iteratively approximating the best parameters for a model can hardly be considered learning in the classical sense. 250

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We have focused here on computer science terms that may lead to misconceptions. However, we will not take that road: we believe that the advent of terms such as artificial intelligence, neural network, or machine learning only leads to a misconception if the cybernetic background is not known. A cyberneticist would not see any contradiction between machine learning as an interac‑ tive process or human learning: in cybernetics, they are both described as the same process using the same vocabulary. That is the main reason why the usage of such terms engineers people to actually see it as a type of learning, intelligence, or a network. Of course, there are various other terms and definitions that might seem innocent at first but carry a huge ontological commitment. For example, in linguistics, Jakobson’s (1960) functions of language include sender, receiver, message, channel, code, and context. This can describe human communication, but there is nothing stopping us from applying it to communication between two computers, and Jakobson himself was under a big influence of cybernetic ideas. For example, consider NASA’s (Astrobiology at NASA 2022) definition of life as a “self‑sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution.” Such a definition could be applied to a robot (everything is a chemical!) that might use machine learning to modify its development to follow the path of fitness, that is, we might picture a scenario where such a definition would lead to a machine being encompassed by it. Even using the most basic terms such as life and accepting definitions as the mentioned one carries with itself a cybernetic background of the term.

Newspeak as Speech Acts It is easy to see how using newspeak, one commits oneself to a certain ideological background. We have also argued that, by using cyberspeak today, one is actually talking about certain philo‑ sophical ideas that might not be in style anymore but are visible in certain terms or definitions. Talking about machine learning commits us that it is a type of learning, compared to human learning the same way using an ideologically colored word commits us to a certain interpretation of our addressees. A cynic might comment that all language is newspeak and that the only differ‑ ence from true newspeak is that it was fabricated by more sophisticated minds, but the underlying non‑neutrality is an essential property of any language, not an accident. From aspects of the philosophy of language and pragmatics, such usage is actually invoking a certain response in the target audience and it is not only used to transmit a message, it actually does something else: it establishes a background idea. Austin’s (1962) theory of speech acts refers to the fact that when something is expressed by a speaker, he or she might not only present some in‑ formation but perform some action as well. For example, if I say to my friend “it’s cold,” and he’s standing next to an open window, I’m also implying a request to have the window closed. Speech acts can be performative as well meaning that by saying something, we are actually doing some‑ thing. For example, when one says I do in a marriage ceremony, the utterance of these words actu‑ ally performs the act of marriage, and I name this ship Queen Elizabeth establishes the name of the ship immediately (Austin 1962: 5). Similar examples may be found in promises, curses, com‑ mands, wills, and similar occasions, where the sentence uttered does not describe one’s doing and does not describe that one is doing it: it is actually doing it (Austin 1962: 6). For Austin (1962: 6), such sentences are performative sentences or performatives. Let us observe what happens if someone utters Spy! in the Soviet era. We have mentioned that the word was inapplicable to Russian spies: in newspeak used by the government texts and public addresses and papers, they are patriots. It is no wonder that the official newspaper of the Volun‑ teer Society for Cooperation with the Army, Aviation, and Navy was Soviet Patriot (Советский патриот). All those ideologemes have a certain conventional procedure in the background since 251

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there is nothing inherent to the word spy that makes it refer to an American or a Russian agent. If you are an appropriate person under appropriate circumstances, the performative will work. For example, if you utter Spy! today in Croatia, there is not the same effect present as if you had uttered it in Soviet Russia 70 years ago. However, if your target audience is acknowledged with the circumstances and ideology behind it, then the performative fulfills both conditions. You are being declared a spy, but being declared “a spy” also does something else: it establishes an ad‑ ditional ideological narrative. You are not a Russian patriot, you are someone else, most probably an American. You are not a part of materialist dialecticism, and you are against the ideas that are guidelines in the (then) current society. Wierzbiński (2012: 40) observes that enemies were called deviators, traitors, kulaks, wreckers, saboteurs, spies, agents, diversionists, etc. (уклонисты, предатели, кулаки, вредители, саботажники, шпионы, агенты, диверсанты). For example, in his speech in 1961, Khruschev (1961: 100, emphasis added) mentions that “they want us, like traffic police, to safeguard the uninterrupted transportation to West Berlin of their military freights, spies and saboteurs for subversive acts against ourselves and our allies” and that “they were ‘persuaded,’ persuaded by the use of certain methods, that they were either German, or British, or some other spies.” Unlike Austin’s speech acts that mostly deal with utterances on a sentential level, we believe that words themselves can function as speech acts in newspeak and cyberspeak. If you were using the term cybernetics before it was reconciled with the past regime’s ideas, you were also adding an extra layer of ideological meaning. You were not only saying cybernetics, but you were also influencing your speaker by stating an additional layer of utterance, namely, the one that states that it is a reactionary pseudo‑science. In that way, it also functions as a so‑called perlocutionary act, which references the effect of an utterance for an interlocutor. By using that term and agreeing with the usage, you are also performing an action of agreeing with the ideological background of the word and passing the ideologeme to your target audience. In other words, we are seeing words as shortened utterances: the use of connotative terms is actually a shortened propositional attitude, establishing the speaker’s valuation and/or background ideol‑ ogy of such a term.

Cyberspeak as Speech Acts A performative, of course, does not have to be negatively or politically value‑laden; it can also carry a positive or neutral connotation. By using cyberspeak, one is committing oneself to a certain ontological obligation. And this stands in stark contrast to the sociological and political obligations you are committed to by using newspeak. By using newspeak, you are committing to a political position, or in the case of the Soviet times, to a sociological group. And this in fact holds true even today, e.g., in abortion debates in modern Russia: one can use the terms women’s reproduc‑ tive rights or rights of an unborn baby to denote not just the same issue in this debate but also ascertain one’s adherence to a political position and even belonging to a certain social group. But the ontological obligations stay the same. There is no difference in the underlying ontology de‑ pending on the choice between “women’s reproductive rights” or “rights of an unborn baby.” But cyberspeak, as a scientific language, is fundamentally different. In cyberspeak, one does not use word differentiation for political belonging, but the same word for two different phenomena while considering them to be the same fundamental process. If you are using a term like input and output while describing human communication or language, then you are pinpointing the background philosophical idea of a common language or a mathematical description that describes both hu‑ man and machine communication. If you are using a term such as artificial intelligence, you are 252

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committing yourself to the idea that it is a type of intelligence, even though it might differentiate from human intelligence, no matter what the meaning of the term intelligence is. One might argue that terms are just terms and just denote things. We argue differently: even the usage of scientific terms, as we have seen, might lead to “misconceptions.” But those misconcep‑ tions were happening because we were using the terms in a cyberspeak way, accepting the ideas in the background, such as those related to machine learning which is a type of learning, common to both men and machines. The pragmatic use of words has a performative aspect to invoke an idea in the addressee’s mind about the peculiarities and consequences of such terms. There are examples of negatively connotated terms in various scientific disciplines. For ex‑ ample, the use of the word materialism might often be negatively pictured in various discourse communities, even though it might be a philosophical stance with no connection to dialectic ma‑ terialism whatsoever. A recent widespread discussion in computer science was dealing with com‑ monly used terms such as master and slave, for example, master disk and slave disk. Eglash (2022) has recently investigated that usage of such metaphors is fairly recent, dating to the beginning of the 20th century, and the most controversial technical setting is in computing.

Newspeak Today: Performativity We have established that both cyberspeak and newspeak terms might have an extra performative layer connected to them, either a neutral/positive or a negative one, whereas the latter is most often the case with newspeak. It is no wonder that we can find examples like this not only in Soviet Rus‑ sia but in political propaganda today as well, regardless of nationality or ethnicity. One is not going to find a complete language such as newspeak, but some phrases might hint at similar properties even in the United States or similar Western countries as a part of rhetoric devices used in vari‑ ous political speeches and discourses. However, the current situation in the Russian war against Ukraine seems to mimic the pragmatic context and conditions of those in the Cold War area and might serve as a starting point in our analysis. Newspeak has often used a rhetoric device of euphemism, which refers to an expression or another term that replaces a word or a phrase that might be seen as offensive or not suitable in the current context. Euphemisms are often used in bureaucracies, for example, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency used the term enhanced interrogation to refer to systematic torture (McCoy 2007: 16). Berdy (2022) mentions how in oldspeak, meaning the regular language (use) without background ideology, one might use the word war (Rus. война), but, today, a Russian politician would use a certain euphemism like special military operation (специальная военная операция) or a special op (спецоперация). For example, Kremlin (Putin 2022d) published a federal law on November 11, 2022, regarding “the course of special military operation in the territories of the Ukraine” (в ходе специальной военной операции на территориях Украины). From a performative aspect, when one is using the term war, one is also bringing the whole background knowledge of what war is. By using the term спецоперация or a special op, one is diminishing the current situation. You are not just using the term, you are doing something else: adding an extra pragmatic layer of attitude or stance toward the fact it is referring to. Euphemisms and metaphors such as “special military operation” were not seen here for the first time, it is a part of historical political propaganda continuing to this very day. For example, the term Lebensraum (“living space”) was coined before the advent of Nazism, whose proponents were eager to pro‑ vide more living space for Aryan Germans. In the Holocaust, gas chambers were “showers” and “The Final Solution” or Endlösung is the world’s strongest euphemism referring to genocide (Yad Vashem 2022). 253

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In 1947, Nachman Blumental, who survived the Holocaust, published Slowa niewinne or “­Innocent Words” covering Nazi euphemisms, which might be viewed as the first analysis of newspeak. In his 1947 book, Victor Klemperer (2013) analyzed the Nazi language which might be connected to newspeak in its strong positive or negative connotations. For example, fanatisch, “fanatical” or Fanatismus, “fanaticism” denotes a threatening or repulsive quality (Klemperer 2013: 61), which became a compliment similar to “courageous” or “devoted” when applied to Nazis (Klemperer 2013: 62). Michael and Doerr (2002: viii) state that “the same newspeak was an indispensable accessory to the persecution and murder of the European Jews.” They give an example of Abbeförderung meaning “dispatching” or “removal,” a euphemism for “killing,” while abdirigieren, “to direct away,” was a bureaucratic euphemism for killing a person or sending them off to a concentra‑ tion camp because of their inability to work (Michael and Doerr 2002: 49). Doerr (2002: 33) mentions that code words (Tarnwörter) were used to conceal actions or facts, and when the mur‑ derous connotation of a euphemism had become too well‑known, sometimes an official would request another word to be used instead, making the old word a dysphemism. For example, both Evakuierung, “evacuation,” and Auswanderung, “emigration,” were used for forced transportation of Jews, along with Sonderbehandlung, “funneled,” used as a euphemism for “killed in a death camp.” Sonderkost (Michael and Doerr 2002: 378), “a special diet” referred to starvation experi‑ ments in the camps, while durchgeschleust (Michael and Doerr 2002: 134) was a new euphemism used on Himmler’s orders to replace other euphemisms for “murdered.” To emphasize again, by selecting different words, we are also doing something: expressing our implicit propositional attitude toward a certain proposition. You can emphasize something, diminish it, agree with it, disagree, or bring a whole spectrum of associated beliefs and ideas just by using a single word. For example, Berdy (2022) mentions how the enemy troops in Ukraine are named “neo‑Nazis” (неонацисты) or “Nazis” (нацисты), and the enemies of the special op‑ eration in Russia are called “extremists” (экстремисты), “even though no one has ever figured out what they are extreme about.” One can easily see how this mimics the newspeak terms used in Soviet Russia: today, a foreign agent or an enemy is not called a spy (шпион) but an extremist, and the Russians do not conquer (покорять) the territory anymore but liberate (освободить) it. Some words, marks Berdy (2022), are not used, such as “death” (смерть) since the Russian soldiers are not killed, but “missing in action” (пропавший без вести). This is interesting from a performative perspective since even not using a word does something, that is, the act of avoiding a word has pragmatic consequences: again, the enemy’s strengths are diminished and there is a layer of persuasiveness toward the target audience. This encompasses a certain Sapir‑Whorfian hypothesis of shaping our knowledge of the world by using language, but in this case, we believe that others shape our world as well by incorporating a pragmatic layer in word usage.

Newspeak Today: Russian Political Speeches Let us now move on to concrete examples. In his speech delivered on February 21, 2022 (Putin 2022a), in Moscow, Putin starts by saying that the parts of the Ukrainian territory were “united” (всоединились) with the Russian territory, referring to a devastating 30‑year war for control of the Cossack Hetmanate. Stalin was also “incorporating” (присоединил) territory that previously belonged to Poland, Romania, and Hungary. Putin was repeating that we are dealing with a “histor‑ ical fact” (исторический факт), even though the recounting of the events was severely language‑­ engineered. In his speeches, nationalism is a pure example of newspeak since the word itself cannot have a positive connotation whatsoever when used to refer to western nationalism, he refers 254

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to it as “infected by the virus of nationalism” (поражена вирусом национализма) or calls “against the contagion of nationalism” (против заразы национализма), and the word itself comes only with derogatory adjectives, cf. “to the side of cavemen and aggressive nationalism” (в сторону пещерного и агрессивного национализма) or “far‑right nationalism” (крайний национализм), and there is a “national, aggressive character” (агрессивный, националистический характер) as well. The mobilization was announced on September 21, 2022 (Putin 2022b). In the speech, there is no talk about the ongoing war, but instead of the mentioned “special military operation” (“the course of the special military operation,” ход специальной военной операции). In this “special military operation,” the portions of the territory were “liberated” (освобожденные), includ‑ ing Donbas (“liberation of the whole territory of Donbas,” освобождение всей территории Донбасса). One can notice that territory is not taken or conquered, the usage of the verb “to lib‑ erate” adds an extra ideological layer that the territory was Russian to begin with. Russian sol‑ diers are referred to as “Russian military personnel” (кадровы военнослужащих российской армии), “volunteers” (добровольцы) and therefore “patriots” (патриоты), while enemy soldiers are “neo‑Nazi militants” (“by the Neo‑nazi militants,” со стороны неонацистских боевиков), “nationalists” and “mercenaries” (“new gangs of foreign mercenaries and nation‑ alists,” новые банды иностранных наёмников и националистов). These examples mirror the mentioned usage (cf. Wierzbiński 2012: 40) from Soviet Russia, where enemy soldiers were “spies” (шпионы) or “saboteurs” (диверсанты), while this could not be said about the ­Russians themselves. On September 30, 2022 (Putin 2022c), Putin delivered a speech on the annexation of Ukrainian territories, calling the current war “a liberating mission for our people” (освободительная миссия нашего народа), again using a euphemism similar to the mentioned Nazi propaganda. Soldiers are still not fighting in a war but “in a special military operation” (в специальной военной операции), while the west is fighting “a war” against Russia (“reasons for this hybrid war,” причины той гибридной войны). It is interesting to note how the word war seems to be reserved only for the perceived conflict between the West and Russia but not for the current ongoing war between Rus‑ sia and Ukraine. In the same speech, the annexation itself is referred to as “the choice” (выбор), but one would not say that there was much of a choice for the Ukrainian people. “The West” is by itself full of negative connotations; it is “colonial” (cf. неоколониальная модель, “neo‑colonial model”) or it is said that the West “has their colonial politics” (свою колониальную политику). It is often fol‑ lowed by the epithet “elite” (“Western elite” or западные элиты) or “hegemony” (“the collapse of the Western hegemony,” слом западной гегемонии). All of these terms create an ideological layer of depicting the West as the real usurpator. Namely, such usage adds an additional pragmatic layer: one cannot say that Russia is the conquerer since the West is the real usurpator. In a speech from February 21, 2023 (Putin 2023), it is not surprising that there is still talk about a “special military operation” instead of “war” (“a decision to conduct a special military operation,” решение о проведении специальной военной операции). However, the closest to the word war itself was the phrase of “terrible conflict” (“out of this most difficult conflict,” из этого тяжелейшего конфликта), which is again a euphemism. It is interesting to compare this to Biden’s (2023) speech that was given on the same day. In it, there is no mention of any euphemisms like “special military operation,” the war is referred to as “the war” and even as “the largest land war in Europe since World War II had begun,” along with talking about the “Russian onslaught” and “Russian aggression.” By not using euphemisms, a speaker is presumably taking an opposite or neutral stance toward the conflict in question. 255

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Let us move back to the most recent Putin’s (2023) speech. Dombas is illustrated as believing and waiting for Russia to come to the rescue (верил и ждал, что Россия придёт на помощь). One can see the repetition of previous ideological discourse: Russia is not occupying or conquer‑ ing territories; it is liberating what is presumably theirs. The usage of such phrases constructs an ideological background that offers a perlocutionary layer of influencing the listeners to react to such euphemisms with approval. To continue, “Western elites,” a euphemistic phrase itself, were the ones who “unleashed the war” (это они развязали войну). Now, one can see that again, the word war (война) is reserved for the West only. This was repeated explicitly by stating that “we are not fighting a war with the people of Ukraine […]. The people of Ukraine themselves are the victims of the Kiev re‑ gime.” This is an interesting justification of previously seemingly concealed word and phrase us‑ ages where they once again blame the “Western elites,” along with the “Kiev regime.” “Regime” (режим) itself is a strongly connotated word, referring only to enemy modes of rule. On the other hand, the notion of “real patriotism” (настоящий патриотизм) is, of course, only applied to the Russian civilians or even soldiers (“say thank you to […] patriots, who fight in the lines of Com‑ bat Army Reserve of the Country BARS.” The enemies are “neo‑Nazis” and “punishers” (“at the hands of neo‑Nazis and punishers,” от рук неонацистов и карателей), where the term punisher in Russian denotes a member of occupation forces that carries out repression against the popula‑ tion in a certain occupied territory.

Pragmatic and Philosophical Issues We have observed how both cyberspeak and newspeak developed in Soviet Russia, but we have found their remnants today in modern Russia as well. Cyberspeak, as a technical language, aimed to describe the control, feedback, and mechanisms in both animals, including humans, and com‑ puters. Such a language then developed into an all‑unifying metalanguage of various scientific disciplines, treating analogous processes in various scientific disciplines as analogous. We have shown that remnants of such terminology are still present today and that their use may pinpoint to some either ontological obligations or possible confusions regarding their usage. In Soviet Russia, cyberspeak was attacked at first but then was highly politicized as well. An‑ other form of language, Orwellian newspeak, was used to describe highly connotated terms. For example, Marxism was always positively regarded, while formalism or idealism was not. A spy could be only a foreign agent, but a Russian one was a patriot. Such language was not typical for Russia since it is a part of standard political propaganda, so we have also observed similar euphe‑ misms and semantic changes in the language of Nazi Germany. Political newspeak is still actively used today, which we have illustrated using recent political speeches by Vladimir Putin regard‑ ing the current war in Ukraine, or, in the language of modern‑day newspeak, a “special military operation.” Finally, we have viewed both newspeak and cyberspeak examples as carriers of extra infor‑ mation. We have used the pragmatic context of speech acts to extend its behavior not only to utterances but to newspeak or cyberspeak words themselves, which we considered shortened ut‑ terances as well. That way, the use of terms is also establishing an extra layer of discourse. For example, by using a newspeak euphemism such as a “special military operation,” you are also bringing an additional implied utterance that you do not consider to be a “war.” If one is using the word “spy” in Soviet Russia, there is an extra utterance implied meaning “this person is not a good Russian citizen” or a similar negatively laden proposition.

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Newspeak and Cyberspeak

But there is a real danger here. Newspeak in essence is, pragmatically speaking, a divisive l­anguage style, used to separate groups by allowing the groups forming the language to add se‑ mantic differentiation to seeming synonyms. As such it might be an instrument of separation and even an instrument of implicit fake news and distortion. But cyberspeak is a different beast. As a language of science, it provides the means of communicating the equivalence of underlying pro‑ cesses by claiming that two seemingly different words define the same entity. Intrinsically, it re‑ duces the ontology from a canonical semantic ontological universe where each word and each new word has a meaning of its own to a reality in which language minimizes itself to clearly capture the ontology of reality, which is by definition a substantially reduced ontology from the canonical semantic ontology. As such, the transition from newspeak to cyberspeak in science is one of the best things that can happen to a scientific language. Namely, such change removes layers of hidden meaning dependent on the context and the time in question and uses a neutral language that is not subject to background circumstances that change both with time and space. But the same process is a deadly force in politics, since the (biased and non‑objective) plurality present in newspeak is reduced to a parsimonious language of cyberspeak. There is no plurality of words anymore, just one way to speak of many phenomena, and, if controlled by a social group, this will inevitably degenerate the language into a language that will not be able to express subtlety and true dissent. In that regard, should Russian as used today evolve to cyberspeak, it would actually mark one more crucial step away from any real possibility to even ontologically understand and define dissent or opposition to the current position using cyberspeak. In that case, a new newspeak should emerge to redifferentiate meanings to allow any opposition to gain coherence in Russia. Cyberspeak and newspeak may seem like two extreme opposites, but the development of cy‑ berspeak into a politicized language weapon, as was the case in Soviet Russia, shows us that views can change and that language can be a powerful weapon to do things with words.

References English References Astrobiology at NASA (2022) ‘About Life Detection’. Available at: https://astrobiology.nasa.gov/research/ life‑detection/about/ Ashby, W. R. (1956) An Introduction to Cybernetics. London: Chapman & Hall. Austin, J. R. (1962) How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Berdy, M. (2022) ‘Newspeak in the New Russia’, The Moscow Times, 23 September. Available at: https:// www.themoscowtimes.com/2022/09/23/newspeak‑in‑the‑new‑russia‑a78816 Berg, A. (ed.) (1962). Cybernetics at Service of Communism ‑ USSR, Volume I, Moscow/Leningrad, 1961. Translated by Office of Technical Services, U. S. Department of Commerce, Washington, DC, 1962. Available at: https://terna.to.it/CybCom/ Biden, J. (2023) ‘Remarks by President Biden Ahead of the One‑Year Anniversary of Russia’s Brutal and Unprovoked Invasion of Ukraine’, whitehouse.gov, 21 Februrary. Available at: https://www.whitehouse. gov/briefing‑room/speeches‑remarks/2023/02/21/remarks‑by‑president‑biden‑ahead‑of‑the‑one‑­year‑ann iversary‑of‑russias‑brutal‑and‑unprovoked‑invasion‑of‑ukraine Emmert‑Streib, F., Yli‑Harja, O., and Dehmer, M. (2020). ‘Artificial Intelligence: A Clarification of ­Misconceptions, Myths and Desired Status’, Frontiers of Artificial Intelligence. https://doi.org/10.3389/ frai.2020.524339 Eglash, R. (2022) ‘Broken Metaphor: The Master‑Slave Analogy in Technical Literature’, Technology and Culture 48(2): 360–369. Gerovitch, S. (2002a) From Newspeak to Cyberspeak: A History of Soviet Cybernetics. Cambridge: MIT Press. Gerovitch, S. (2002b) ‘Love‑Hate for Man‑Machine Metaphors in Soviet Physiology: From Pavlov to “­Physiological Cybernetics”’, Science in Context 15(2): 339–374.

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Kristina Šekrst and Sandro Skansi Holloway, D. (1974). ‘Innovation in Science—The Case of Cybernetics in the Soviet Union’. Science Studies 4(4): 299–337. https://doi.org/10.1177/030631277400400401 Jakobson, R. (1960). ‘Linguistics and Poetics’, in T. Sebeok (ed.) Style in Language. Cambridge: MIT Press, pp. 350–377. Khruschev, N. (1961). Report of the Central Committee of the CPSU delivered by N. S. Khrushchev, ­October 17, 1961 and Khrushchev’s concluding speech to the 22nd Congress, October 27, 1961. New York: Cross‑ currents Press. Klemperer, V. (2013). Language of the Third Reich: LTI — Lingua Tertii Imperii. London: Bloomsbury. Laurent, C. (2018) ‘In Defence of Machine Learning: Debunking the Myths of Artificial Intelligence’, Eu‑ rope’s Journal of Psychology 14(4): 734–747. Michael, R. and Doerr, K. (2002) Nazi‑Deutsch / Nazi German. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. McCoy, Alfred (2007) A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror. New York: Henry Holt & Co. McCulloch, W. S. and Pitts, W. (1943). ‘A Logical Calculus of Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity’, The Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics 5: 115–133. Orwell, G. (1949) Nineteen Eighty‑Four. New York: Plume, 2003. Peters, B. (2012) ‘Normalizing Soviet Cybernetics’, Information & Culture 47(2): 145–175. Rescorla, M. (2020) ‘The Computational Theory of Mind’, in E. N. Zalta (ed.) The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2020 Edition) https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2020/entries/computational‑mind. Skansi, S. (2018) Introduction to Deep Learning Basics. Cham: Springer. Skansi, S. and Šekrst, K. (2022) ‘The Role of Process Ontology in Cybernetics’, Synthesis Philosophica 36(2): 461–469. Sobolev, S. (1963) ‘Da, eto vpolne ser’ëzno!’, in A. Berg and E. Kol’man (eds.) Vozmozhnoye i nevozmozh‑ noye v kibernetike, Moscow: AN SSSR, pp. 82–88. Wiener, N. (1948) Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. Reprint, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1961. Yad Vashem (2022) ‘Deceptive Definitions: The Use of Language during the Holocaust’, Yad Vashem, 22 June. Available at: https://www.yadvashem.org/blog/deceptive‑definitions.html

Russian References Pravda (1936) Сумбур вместо музыки, Pravda, 28 January, editorial reprinted at WikiSource. Available at: https://ru.wikisource.org/wiki/Сумбур_вместо_музыки. Putin, V. (2022a) ‘Обращение Президента Российской Федерации’, kremlin.ru, 21 February. Available at: http://kremlin.ru/events/president/news/67828. Putin, V. (2022b) ‘Обращение Президента Российской Федерации’, kremlin.ru, 21 September. Available at: http://kremlin.ru/events/president/news/69390. Putin, V. (2022c) ‘Подписание договоров о принятии ДНР, ЛНР, Запорожской и Херсонской областей в состав России’, kremlin.ru, 30 September. Available at: http://kremlin.ru/events/president/news/69465. Putin, V. (2022d) ‘Федеральный закон от 21.11.2022 г. № 450‑ФЗ’, kremlin.ru, 21 November. Available at: http://www.kremlin.ru/acts/bank/48540. Putin, V. (2023) ‘Послание Президента Федеральному Собранию’, kremlin.ru, 21 February. Available at: http://kremlin.ru/events/president/news/70565. Wierzbiński, J. (2012) Языковой монументализм в России ХХ века (диахроническая экспликация научных парадигм). Łodz: Wydawnictwo UŁ.

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17 UNDERSTANDING THE ROLES OF VIOLENT EXTREMIST DREAM ACCOUNTS IN RADICALIZATION AND RECRUITMENT Noor Aqsa Nabila Mat Isa, Nurul Miza Mohd Rashid, and Ahmad El‑Muhammady Introduction Dream, or dreaming, is an experience that differs from the waking experience (Foulkes 1993). Wamsley (2013) refers to it as a conscious experience during sleep. The erratic nature of dreams, likely due to their content that often betrays human logical construction of reality occurring in the waking consciousness, may make us feel somewhat in a different place – one that strips us of the physical world. Despite its nonsensical element, Kuiken and Sikora (1993) propose that dreams can influence waking moments. In cognitive neuroscience, human dreams serve their func‑ tions to consolidate memories, integrate existing and new knowledge, and maintain memories to assist with future planning (Wamsley 2013; Wilhelm et al. 2011). Kuiken’s research found that dreams could move dreamers to experience intensive self‑reflection, spiritual transformation, and enhanced creative thinking (Kuiken 2015; Kuiken et al. 2006, 2018). The influence of dreams is also pervasive in extremist discourse. An instance is the case of ­David Koresh, the leader of a religious cult called the Branch Davidians based in Waco, Texas, who claimed to have had prophetic dreams and was believed to be a messiah figure. Another ­instance is an opposition against the Saudi Kingdom in late 1979 that led to an insurgent attack on the Grand Mosque in Mecca (the holiest place in Islam), which is said to have been partly moti‑ vated by the leader, Juhayman bin Seif al‑Utaybi’s dream. Along the same vein is the 9/11 attack, whereby Bin Laden and his followers had prophetic dreams pertaining to the destruction of the World Trade Center (Devji 2017). Additionally, dream can also become the ‘source of strategic military action and decision‑­ making’ (Edgar 2006, p. 268) as it has guided Mullah Omar, a former Taliban leader who claimed to have been instructed in his dream by the Prophet to liberate Afghanistan from corruption and foreign invasion. More recently, we were enlightened by a first‑person account of a Malaysian family whose late husband decided to travel to Syria to fight for Daesh (also known as ISIS – the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria). He claimed to have had a dream in which he heard a Had‑ ith (‘a narrative record of the sayings or customs of Prophet Muhammad and his companions’,

DOI: 10.4324/9781003289746-22 This chapter has been made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 international license 

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Merriam‑Webster, n.d.) telling him to die in Syria as a martyr. These instances are some of the many dream accounts included as part of extremist recruitment materials that have led to violent actions in the real world. A search in the literature on dreams in extremism research reveals predominant works in this as‑ pect by Iain Edgar. Looking at dreams from an anthropologist’s point of view, his studies involved examining whether dreams play a role in inspiring and guiding extremist group members such as those from Al‑Qaeda, Taliban, and Daesh (Edgar 2004, 2006, 2007, 2011, 2015). In the Islamic tradition, lying about dreams is considered sinful and this type of accounts has often been utilized by fundamentalists to corroborate their worldviews and their pathway to martyrdom (Edgar 2011). Edgar argued that, while issues on validating dream accounts may arise, researchers could look at the ‘worldly usage … and the politically legitimating function of dreams’ (2011, p. 27). He found that dreams are essential in decision‑making in that it is used as a form of justification and a show of authority. Edgar (2015) also pointed out that violent actions may be informed by the dream accounts. While Edgar’s works look more broadly at the roles of dream accounts in mobilizing extremists, our study examines the micro level of these accounts in terms of the construction of words and ideologies in dreams and the psychological process behind them. It is also useful to explore how dreams could be strategically used to ensure the success of radicalization, which involves changing an individual’s mindset to accept radical and extreme viewpoints, including the use of violence (Bott et  al. 2009; McCauley and Moskalenko 2008). One popular psychological theory of radicalization is from Kruglanski’s line of research on the quest for significance as a major underlying motivation of violent extremist engagement (Dugas and Kruglanski 2014; Jasko et al. 2017; Kruglanski et al. 2014a, 2014b, 2017, 2019). The radi‑ calization process involves activating the quest through actual or anticipated loss of significance and perceived opportunity for significance gain (Kruglanski et al. 2019). Therefore, the loss of significance in life, e.g., losing identity and life purpose due to ethnic marginalization, may cause an individual to be vulnerable to extremist ideology. The theory explains what makes an individual vulnerable to extremist ideology and what makes the ideology attractive. We hope to further con‑ tribute to the current literature by analyzing how the dream accounts found in the disseminated work of Daesh could further propel ideological formation and readiness to commit violence.

Data and Framework of Analysis Daesh has published magazines in various languages, namely English, Bahasa, Bosnian, French, German, Kurdish, Pashto, Russian, Turkish, and Uyghur (Mahzam 2017), to reach audiences from different backgrounds. However, we only focus on their English materials and there are three publi‑ cations in this language: Islamic State Report (4 issues), Dabiq (15 issues), and Rumiyah (13 issues). As part of our ethical consideration, the magazines were collected on ‘Jihadology’, a scholarly re‑ pository founded by Aaron Zelin. As the focus is on the accounts of dreams being the thoughts and images perceived during sleep (Wamsley 2013), the search terms we used to gather relevant data were dream, night, vision, and prophet or prophecy based on our preliminary analyses of several dream accounts. Texts not related to dreams were excluded, for instance, the use of the word ‘dream’ to refer to a metaphorical indication of future hope, a better situation for oneself or society as a whole (Mittermaier 2015). Out of the 32 magazines, only 5 contain dream accounts – although the sample size is small, our aim is not on the representativeness of the data but rather on how we can offer insights into the ways dream accounts can cause emotional and cognitive change in individu‑ als, which may motivate or inspire them to join violent extremist groups and even commit violence.

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There may be concerns over the validity of the data since dream reports may not be as accurate as waking reports as they are subjected to fabrication due to poor memory and the erratic nature of dream content (Rosen 2013). Some may even recall dreams that have never occurred due to situ‑ ations of misinformation, e.g., suggestive remarks made by others (Beaulieu‑Prévost and Zadra 2015). However, we argue that the debate surrounding the accuracy of dream content should not invalidate the written dream accounts in Daesh magazines for two reasons. Firstly, the inclusion indicates the importance of the accounts narrated to the target audience – the members of Daesh and their supporters to legitimize the group and their ideologies even though there is no way of authenticating the dreams. Secondly, our focus is on the linguistic construction of dreams that play a role in the psychological and ideological formation of the audience. In terms of data analysis, the integration of linguistic, psychological, and ideological ap‑ proaches may enhance the explanatory power of how dream accounts can be employed as a re‑ cruitment tool to garner support for Daesh’s cause. To understand how the dream accounts have been constructed linguistically, we drew on Reisigl and Wodak’s (2016) discourse historical ap‑ proach (DHA) to critical discourse studies to see how the different elements (e.g., objects, actors, their actions) in the data are positioned and labeled – either negatively or positively (via nomina‑ tion and predication strategies), how the treatment of the elements are justified (via argumenta‑ tion strategies), from which point of view they are expressed (via perspectivation strategies), and finally in what manner they are represented (via intensification and mitigation strategies). The DHA provides the premise to understand the macro‑level (i.e., sociocultural, political, historical contexts) surrounding the dream accounts under study, alongside the micro‑textual level, that is, all the semiotic (mainly verbal) components that are essential to understanding the dream con‑ struction extensively. The linguistic elements identified from the narrated dreams were then evaluated for their po‑ tential link to a psychological process related to awe cultivation among the target audience. The psychological analyses focus on the latent, underlying meaning of the dream and its potential cognitive and emotional impact on the dreamer and the audience. Seeing dreams that are diffi‑ cult to be conceived with a logical mind may make one feel a sense of ecstasy and awe (Kuiken 2015; Kuiken and Sikora 1993; Kuiken et al. 2006). We propose that the changes in motivation and willingness to commit to the ideologies of Daesh could be attributed to the awe emotive as a result of the dream experience. Awe is an emotional response involving the process of perceiving and accommodating into the mind an object, a person, or an event that is much larger than the ordinary self either in physical size, divinity status, or power (Keltner and Haidt 2003; Shiota et al. 2007; Tyson et al. 2022; Upenieks and Krause 2022). As per our data, for instance, this pertains to the experience of positive valence and thought about Islam, such as feeling relatively small and amazed in the presence of greater beings (e.g., connection to God or the divine world), reduction of a personal sense of self, and enhanced personal purpose constructed by Daesh. We then looked at how the experience or feeling may move the target audience to commit spiritual or religious actions endorsed by Daesh (e.g., committing suicide attacks). The experience of awe could in‑ crease willingness to commit selfless actions (Piff et al. 2015; Van Kleef and Lelieveld 2022), and awe‑induced dreams could affect spirituality and motivation (Kuiken 2015; Kuiken et al. 2006), work resilience (Belinda and Christian 2022), feeling of gratefulness, and wishes to be good to others (Andresen 1999). Finally, based on the discursive and psychological analyses, we decipher the ideologies em‑ bedded in the dream accounts. An ideological approach also reveals how dreams may strengthen the dreamers’ conviction in the legitimacy of their cause and belief system, which could later

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Figure 17.1  Analytical model used in exploring the dream accounts in Daesh propaganda materials

be translated into actions, such as performing martyrdom operations (amal al‑ishtishhadiyyah). Briefly, our analytical model is summarized in Figure 17.1.

The Discursive Construction of Dreams – A Linguistic Analysis An overview of the analyses of dream accounts shows that such element has been narrated by Daesh’s top leader himself, Abu Hamzah al‑Mujahir, who was the Prime Minister and the Minister of War, as well as the media producer (Alhayat Media Center). Dream accounts are also found in eulogies of their deceased fighter (Abul Muthanna as‑Sumali who was based in the so‑called Islamic State) and foreign supporter (Khalid al‑Bakrawi, a suicide bomber in Belgium).

Dreams Narrated by Daesh Top Leader and the Media Producer A section in one of the magazines written by Abu Hamzah al‑Mujahir was dedicated to the rest of the leaders within his government. The section contains advice for them which includes how to be good leaders, manage war operations, and handle their armies in battles. In getting the leaders to encourage their armies to remain steadfast and envision victory in the upcoming battles against the enemies, Abu Hamzah made a reference to the Quranic verse 43 from chapter 8 (Surah Al‑Anfal), which mentions the dream of Prophet Muhammad. According to Schmid (2015), a Quranic verse is meant to refer to the time when it was revealed to the Prophet to address any issue that arose at that particular point in time. This specific verse refers to the time when the Prophet experienced a dream before the Battle of Badr that took place in 624 between his people in Medina and the people in Mecca (Tucker 2011). In his dream, he saw the enemies being small in number (although the reality showed otherwise), and, when such a dream was narrated to his people, they became more encouraged and bolder to face the enemies. Eventually, the Prophet and his people achieved victory despite battling with limited resources (i.e., army and weapons). Daesh has recontextu‑ alized this dream to refer to the modern‑day situation involving their own armies, which were fewer and less powerful in contrast to their enemies (Mat Isa 2020). By narrating the dream, Abu Hamzah al‑Mujahir attempted to get the leaders to belittle their enemies and keep on mobilizing their armies for war. Also worth noting is the origin of the dream – it was given by Allah to Prophet Muhammad as narrated in the Quran. Citing holy verses is a practice known to extremist groups such as Daesh and Al‑Qaeda. This citation is a form of argumentative strategy whereby a reference to authorities (Allah and the Prophet), known as the topos of authority, is made as a way to show confidence in establishing a claim, and in this case, the message was for the leaders to do what has been done by the Prophet historically to keep the war spirit high. In the meantime, the use of dream accounts by the producer of the magazines, Alhayat Media Center is predominantly to get the target audience to perform hijrah, that is, to migrate to the so‑called Islamic State. Again, the topos of authority is observed here as the dream account came from Prophet Muhammad’s companion, Jabir who reported about the account of At‑Tufayl Ibn

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Amr as‑Dawsi and a man from his tribe who migrated to Medina where the Prophet resided. The man eventually took his own life and later appeared in At‑Tufayl’s dream. The dream saw the man being forgiven by Allah for his act of ending his own life, which in Islam is considered as a forbid‑ den, sinful act (Pouradeli et al. 2021). This is due to the account of his migration, which Daesh has skilfully exploited to get their target audience to do the same by putting forward the idea that sins can be forgiven as long as hijrah to the so‑called Islamic State is performed. In this way, the mitigation strategy is evident in that Daesh is diminishing the burden of committing sins.

Dreams in Eulogies – The Deceased’s Personal Accounts Daesh also includes accounts of their deceased fighters’ prophetic and apocalyptic dreams as one of the motivations for attacks against their enemies. For instance, there are detailed descriptions of three dream accounts described as ‘vivid’ and ‘life‑changing’, experienced by the deceased Khalid al‑Bakrawi who was responsible for the attacks in Paris in 2015 and in Brussels in 2016 where he blew himself up, causing the deaths of approximately 20 people and injuring more than 100 others. He was reported to be a known criminal for carjackings, possession of weapons, kidnapping, and bank robbery (Grierson 2017) and was in prison where he was radicalized and claimed to have dreams. These were the dreams that ‘motivated him to carry out an istishhadi (‘suicide’) opera‑ tion’, which corresponds with what Edgar (2015) describes as ‘[confirming and legitimating] … the path of holy jihad’ (p. 80). In the eulogies, Daesh shows appreciation for their deceased fighters by informing what they have done for the group and how they died as ‘martyrs’. However, it is not known whether these are actual or made‑up accounts. They provide quoted speeches from the fighters telling the audiences about the motivations for their actions prior to their death that are written from the first‑person per‑ spective (e.g., ‘I arose to a high place’, ‘I detonated my belt’, ‘my soul then became full of light’). These first‑hand accounts which demonstrate the perspectivization strategy used by Daesh may en‑ hance the audiences’ engagement with the protagonists (i.e., the fighters) – in this case, al‑Bakrawi. There is a possibility that this type of narrative may build trust and empathy toward them. Additionally, al‑Bakrawi’s dreams are both ‘explicit’ and ‘opaque’, as described by Edgar (2015) – ‘explicit’ in that it is clear what is said or done in a dream (e.g., ‘I saw myself as an archer shooting arrows at the enemy’), and ‘opaque’ in that it needs further interpretations as it tends to be metaphorical (e.g., ‘I arose to a high place, as if I was in space, surrounded by stars; but the sky was like the blue of night’). In the more opaque dream, al‑Bakrawi claimed that he dreamed about being alongside Prophet Muhammad in a battle, fighting their enemies. He made a reference to chapter 48 (Surah al‑Fath) from the Quran, which was ‘recited in a loud voice’. The significance of this is evident in the title of the chapter itself (al‑Fath), which means ‘the victory’, in which the chapter talks about the achievement obtained by the Prophet and his followers fol‑ lowing the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah that led to the conquest of Mecca and eventually the formation of Islam (Ab Halim 2018). Mentioning this chapter in the dream may mean that al‑Bakrawi was anticipating or signaling a victory for the modern Muslims, and this aligns with Daesh’s aim to ‘revive Islam’ and establish a caliphate. Meanwhile, in the more metaphorical dream, al‑Bakrawi saw himself ascending to the sky, which was described as ‘the blue of night’, and was surrounded by the stars. In Abrahamic religions, it is believed that heavens are in the sky and beyond, as stated by van Bladel (2007) that ‘[as] in the received Judaic and Christian traditions, so also in the Quran God holds rewards for the pure in a place literally located at the top of the sky, that is, in the heav‑ ens’ (p. 231). This may be an indication of his journey to heaven, emphasizing the result of mar‑ tyrdom as being promoted by Daesh to their potential recruits and existing fighters. This was then 263

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followed by a voice telling him that the purpose of his existence was solely to worship Allah and imploring him to fight for Islam (i.e., ‘fight for His (Allah’s) cause and make His word supreme’). On the other hand, al‑Bakrawi’s dream was also described as a precognition that resembles the actual suicide operation at the Maelbeek metro station in Brussels which saw him detonating his explosive belt. Edgar (2015) describes this situation as part of ‘dreams … (that are) redeemed in action’ (p. 80). Similar to the dream of fighting alongside Prophet Muhammad, an authorita‑ tive figure was mentioned here, as well but in this case it was Abu Mohammad al‑Adnani, the group’s spokesperson and leader in Syria who later was killed during a US airstrike. As discussed previously, the use of authorities may further legitimize the group’s actions and thus give greater persuasion power. Eventually, al‑Bakrawi saw himself die in his dream on the battlefield, in which he saw his head falling on the ground. His head was then picked up by another fighter and shown to al‑Adnani who then asked if he had a smile on his face. This is evidence of the intensification strategy through the use of hyperbole whereby the decapitated head of al‑Bakrawi in the dream is exaggerated as hav‑ ing the possibility to smile. According to de la Paz (2019), the smiling faces of deceased fighters are another story of miracles used in Daesh’s materials, and this may signify a good ending (going to heaven). Often illustrated visually, Cohen and Kaati (2018) state that ‘[these] images are pre‑ sumably staged in order to make the prospect of death on the battlefield more appealing’ (p. 49). Following the smile at death, al‑Bakrawi’s soul and the Daesh flag that appeared from the earth are described as becoming ‘full of light’ and ‘shining brightly’, respectively. The reference to light is often associated with what one may perceive as sacred elements, which in this situation refers to the ‘martyr’s’ soul and the group’s flag. On the contrary, the enemies’ souls have been described as ‘burned’, or, in other words, in the state of being on fire which is a central imagery of (entering) hell in the Islamic context (Rustomji 2012). Another account told in the third‑person perspective is of Abul Muthanna as‑Sumali who was imprisoned in Canada for seven years for terrorism‑related charges before leaving for Syria in 2012. As‑Sumali was described to have received good news in his dream that he would die as a martyr. What draws our attention is the inclusion of the word Hur in his dream account, described as ‘the maidens of Paradise’. In Daesh’s narrative, their fighters have been described as those who look forward to meeting the ‘maidens’ in heaven (deemed as angels) after having achieved martyrdom (Mat Isa 2020). This can be seen as a mitigation strategy, whereby death as the conse‑ quence of war is downplayed by the idea of heaven and living with the angels. According to Perry and Hasisi (2017), in the Quran it is stated that human beings will exist alongside divine‑looking (male and female) companions, but ‘jihad’ spiritual leaders often imbue this concept with sensual‑ ity. They add that the idea of ‘martyrs’ going to heaven and having the opportunity to wed these ­maidens has long been ‘ingrained into the minds of these so‑called [‘martyrs’] during recruitment and at the outset of attack’ (p. 60), and that it is seen as a sexual reward for them. By mention‑ ing the maidens in as‑Sumali’s dream account, it aligns with Daesh’s narrative of such reward in heaven which may entice the target audience to join the group’s cause. Table 17.1 summarizes the discursive analysis of the dream accounts as discussed previously, that is, in the ways these accounts have been described (i.e., the nomination and predication strat‑ egies), how Daesh justifies its actions and claims through the accounts (i.e., the argumentation ­strategies), the perspectives from which the accounts are told (i.e., the perspectivization strate‑ gies), as well as how it exaggerates or downplays specific situations to appeal to its target audience (i.e., the intensification and mitigation strategies).

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Understanding the Roles of Violent Extremist Dream Accounts Table 17.1  Discursive analysis of dream accounts in Daesh magazines Discursive strategies

Purpose

Nomination strategies: How are persons, objects, phenomena, events, processes, and actions related to the dream accounts named and referred to linguistically?

Discursive construction of social actors: Allah, At‑Tufayl, him, the Prophet, the disbelievers, Khalid al‑Bakrawi, horse, archer, enemy, myself, Abu Sulayman, brother, Turkish soldier, hostage, soldiers, Shaykh al‑Adnani, Abul Muthanna as‑Sumali, he, Hur, maidens of paradise Discursive construction of objects/phenomena/events: dream, last verse of al‑Fath, battle, distance, vision, battlefield, arrows, stars, sky, voice, boat, pistol, belt, head, ground, operation, soul, banner of Islam, Daesh flag, earth, deliverance, glad tidings, martyrdom Discursive construction of processes and actions: saw (in a dream), fight (the enemies/for His cause), shooting (arrows), take cover, arose (to sky), surrounded (by stars), created to worship (Allah), heard (voice in dream), make Allah’s word supreme, advanced (with hostage), close in (on other soldiers), (head) descended (to the ground), (al‑Adnani) took head, check to see if (al‑Bakrawi) is smiling, (enemies’ soul) burned and vanished, (flag) shining, achieved (deliverance), expecting (martyrdom), narrated (dream) Discursive characterization/qualification of social actors (positively or negatively): alongside the Prophet (fighting the disbelievers), better (having detonating belt) Discursive characterization/qualification of objects, phenomena, events, processes, and actions (positively or negatively): loud (voice reciting a Quranic verse), vivid and life changing (dreams), beyond (the battlefield), high (place/ sky), like blue of night (sky), (Allah’s word) supreme, (flag shining) brightly, (soul) full of light Persuading audience Topos of authority • Intertextual reference to Quranic verse to get Daesh leaders to emulate Prophet Muhammad’s leadership skill Intertextual reference to Hadith to get the target audience to travel to the so‑called Islamic State Recontextualization of Quranic verse and Hadith as a means to juxtapose the past with modern‑day events Positioning Daesh’s point of view and expressing involvement or distance: First‑person point of view • Enhance reader engagement with personal dream accounts Third‑person point of view • Show relations with deceased fighter/supporter

Predication strategies: What characteristics, qualities, and features are attributed to social actors, objects, phenomena/ events, and processes? Argumentation strategies: What arguments are employed in discourses of the dream accounts? Perspectivization strategies: From what perspective are these nominations, attributions, and arguments expressed?  Intensification/ Mitigation strategies: Are the respective utterances articulated overtly; are they intensified or mitigated?

Intensifying or mitigating utterances Intensification through hyperbolic descriptions of: • Al‑bakrawi’s decapitated head smiling and soul beaming with light to amplify the appeal of death on the battlefield • The enemies’ soul burning to signify them being burned in hell Mitigation • Death in war is downplayed by promoting the hereafter (heaven and life with ‘maidens of Paradise’) • Sin is forgiven when migrating to the so‑called Islamic State

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The Latent Meaning of Dreams and Their Impacts – A Psychological Analysis Following the linguistic analyses, the narrated dreams were examined with the intention of iden‑ tifying elements that could induce awe, including describing the events in the dream as bigger than the perception of oneself, existing in the spiritual realm or elements that are supernatural and difficult to be conceived in immediate reality. Based on the analyses, we have arrived at four relevant elements of dreams cultivating awe toward the dreamers, the narrators of the dream, and, potentially, the readers or supporters of Daesh. In addition, the earlier findings on the linguistic strategies used in the dream accounts are identified and categorized according to their presence and relevance in cultivating the experience of awe in the dreamers and their potential to affect the target audience’s feelings of awe.

Perceived Connection with Spiritually Divine Being The first key element of awe is perceived vastness, which is central to the connection between humans and God or a divine being (Keltner and Haidt 2003). Van Cappellen and Saroglou (2012) outlined that the connection of awe to God involves spiritual and mystical experiences. In the case of Daesh, the entity that is most superior to men is God (Allah), and, in our analyses, the dream experienced by the Prophet (narrated by Abu Hamzah al‑Mujahir) was conveyed by Him. The dream elucidates the divine origin of dreams and accentuates the presence of a Greater Being in providing good news to the fighters of Islam. The experience of vastness illustrates the connectiv‑ ity between the dreamer, the Prophet, and the source of the dream, Allah, who is divine in nature. The next most divine Being to the followers of Islam is Prophet Muhammad. Many followers wish for a dream of an encounter with the Prophet, perceiving it as the promised reward in the afterlife, and they perceive that this would be a revelation sent through a dream (Edgar 2015). One narrated dream in the magazine was experienced by al‑Bakrawi, and he perceived it as a life‑changing experience. The linguistic strategy used in the two dreams narrated under this element is the argumentative strategy, that is the topos of authority with the purpose of persuading the audience through the men‑ tion of the divine Being, Allah and His Messenger, Prophet Muhammad. Their presence in the dream highlights the divine origin and purpose of the dream. Additionally, as indicated earlier, the strategy further involved intertextual references to Hadith and Quran to show confidence in establishing a claim. This strategy may further convince the readers of the divine origin of the dream and cultivate a sense of awe as they perceive that their overall actions are of divine motives as well.

Personal Elevation A personal elevation, inspired by Keltner and Haidt’s (2003) work, refers to a perceived experi‑ ence of oneself being raised to a higher position, either physically or spiritually. It is an experience in which one is placed in an alternate reality that ascends one’s physical position or divine status. It is the account of a temporal change, or quality change from worldly, which is within the immediate reality of the current world lived in, to beyond in the spiritual realm. From the data, we found that there is a similar elevated experience in the dreams experienced by deceased members of Daesh. The elevation of self was found in al‑Bakrawi’s dream containing illustrations that are difficult to be perceived within an immediate reality. In the dream descriptions, the elevation of self is a shift of self from normality or a normal self toward a higher status in divinity. Al‑Bakrawi recalled being raised to a higher place surrounded by stars, hearing a voice with the speaker nowhere in

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sight, and seeing one’s soul full of light. This almost out‑of‑world experience transcends the logic of the current world. The dream indicates a change in al‑Bakrawi from being a mere fighter to a person achieving the most significant status as a Muslim. In his dream, the vastness is conceived from seeing himself rise to a higher place, in relative comparison to the world or earth, that is, to space. Additionally, there are two other references to personal elevation to his status. The first compares the condition of al‑Bakrawi’s soul to those of the enemies. While the enemies’ souls ‘burned and vanished’, his ‘became full of light’. The second sees his transformation from being a regular fighter to a soul beaming with light following the appearance of the Daesh flag. This narra‑ tion symbolizes a personal elevation in the dream as he envisioned personal success as a Muslim and a member of Daesh as he achieved martyrdom. In this case, the details in the dream accounts could perpetuate feelings of awe in the dreamer, which may be transferrable to the target audience susceptible to Daesh’s content and manipulation.

Greater Purpose for Self Past research has indicated that an aspect of awe is about instilling a greater sense of being be‑ yond oneself that could lead to the feeling of diminishment of personal self upon realizing that one could be part of a larger scheme of existence (Chen and Mongrain 2021; Yaden et al. 2019). Recent research focused on the process of awe causing the shift of focus from oneself to others as a result of the connection with humanity or a sense of ingroup cohesion (Critcher and Lee 2018; Naclerio and Van Cappellen 2022; Tyson et al. 2022). Being in awe of God’s omnipotence improves the sense of significance and purpose of life (Upenieks and Krause 2022). Studies on radicalization have consistently found that members of Daesh have been attracted by the promise of spiritual and religious prominence and elevation in self‑status as humans (Kruglanski et  al. 2019; Jasko et al. 2018). Our analyses reveal that the dream accounts of al‑Bakrawi depict his experience of seeing himself in a third‑person perspective, and he saw his dream as foretelling that he was meant for a greater purpose. This purpose is beyond the immediate reality of the world and rather divine in nature. The dream informs him of his purpose in this world, which is not only to worship Allah but also to be a fighter. Another dream experienced by as‑Sumali is also related to a greater pur‑ pose, that is martyrdom. The utilization of the dream accounts is meant to familiarize the group members with paramilitary culture and death as a martyr. Seeing themselves in a dream as fighters who fought in a God‑blessed battle may build mental preparation, emotional readiness, ideologi‑ cal assurance, and commitment to undertake the challenge of war and impending death. Even the concept of death is altered as a ‘sweet experience’, not painful or horrible as depicted or imagined by viewers, as visibly depicted in the intensification strategy we highlighted earlier pertaining to al‑Bakrawi’s decapitated head that was potentially smiling. The framing of death as a positive ex‑ perience may emotionally impact followers as they come to the realization that it may be a sweeter and more meaningful purpose that is meant for them. Instead of seeing death as painful and hor‑ rible, it can be perceived as an act of sacrifice. By that virtue, it may also instill positive hope in the dreamer and the target audience whereby committing martyrdom would be seen as lifting them to a noble position in the eyes of God, which is their ultimate purpose.

Dream as a Prophecy for Religious Sacrifice It is assumed that the experience of awe could lead to a willingness to commit religious action. This is a consistent finding in various research attesting to the induced experience of awe through 267

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the view of nature toward individuals’ willingness to commit various acts of prosocial behavior such as sharing, donating, and helping others in need (Guan et al. 2019; Lin et al. 2020; Piff et al. 2015), making ethical decisions (Tyson et al. 2022), tolerating mistakes by others (Sawada and Nomura 2020), migrating to a spiritual destination (Van Cappellen and Saroglou 2012) or sacrific‑ ing oneself for the sake of religion or fellow believers (Naclerio and Van Cappellen 2022). The willingness to sacrifice oneself for religious groups could be related to feelings of awe due to the perceived element that is greater than oneself (the experience of vastness) and a deep emo‑ tional bond with one’s religion (Naclerio and Van Cappellen 2022). Given the special position of dream in the Quran as experienced by Prophet Muhammad and Prophet Yusuf and its mention in the Hadith, a dream is taken as the source of motivation and commitment for the fighters to remain in the cause of struggles. Our data reveals that the willingness to sacrifice oneself for one’s religion may have been induced by perceived supernatural experiences occurring through dreams. The ex‑ periences include al‑Bakrawi hearing a mysterious voice that asked him to worship Allah and fight for Islam, and as‑Sumali seeing the ‘maidens of Paradise’. Other instances are the experiences of being elevated to the sky and surrounded by the stars and the soul becoming full of light. These phenomena and events may further signify the symbolic nature of the dreams as a prophecy for the dreamer. The transcendental and supernatural nature of the dreams could cause feelings of awe in the dreamers recalling it and the target audience who are immersed in the narrative. They may cause strong emotional and motivational changes to partake in a battle or engage in martyrdom operations (istishhadi). In short, dreams should not be seen as a fantasy in the discourse of a jihadi movement. It is a spiritual, transcendental experience that may propel an individual to engage in an actual act of violence due to the cultural relevance of dreams in the group.

The Centrality of Dreams in Daesh Discourse – An Ideological Analysis Following the linguistic and psychological analyses of dream accounts earlier, we will now ex‑ plore how they are conceived and employed to strengthen Daesh’s ideologies. In doing so, three key points will be highlighted. First is the centrality of the dream in Islamic discourse and how it is exploited by Daesh. Second is the mental, emotional, and spiritual conditioning to familiarize fighters with the paramilitary culture. Third is how a dream is employed to motivate violence‑ oriented actions. It is also important to note that the ideological component related to dreams is also well‑embedded in linguistic and psychological analyses discussed previously.

Dream Account as a Legitimizing Tool It is evident in our data that dreams have a special role in Daesh discourse, particularly in enhanc‑ ing the conviction of the legitimacy of the Daesh struggle. This is demonstrated in Daesh’s ability to convince its followers to undertake suicide missions (amal al‑ishtishhadiyyah), using dreams as a source of guidance, inspiration, and motivation. In the Islamic tradition, dreams have a special function in Muslims’ lives as depicted in the Quran, such as the dreams experienced by Prophet Muhammad and Prophet Yusuf. In the context of our data, it is interesting to observe how Daesh has exploited the dream accounts by recontextualizing them to speak about the modern‑day strug‑ gles to defeat the enemies and establish a caliphate. In other words, Daesh has made use of dreams to verify the veracity of its struggle and ideology, and, in doing so, they employ several Quranic verses as a legitimizing strategy for its existence and ideology using chapter 8 verse 43 regard‑ ing the Battle of Badr, and chapter 48 regarding the victory of Prophet Muhammad following the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah. This discursive strategy, specifically the argumentation strategy, which 268

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is evident in the use of Quranic verses, Hadith, and the experience of the companion regarding dreams, provides compelling narratives to convince followers and fighters alike to support Daesh’s struggle, ideology, and act of violence. There are several examples of how dream accounts have been infused with religious ­elements to form a belief system in the discourse of extremism, particularly Daesh discourse. Such be‑ lief system manifests in the following forms: (1) the conviction that they are the true warriors (­mujahiddin or ‘jihadi fighters’) and liberators who defend the weak, as well as fight and sacrifice their life for the sake of God and religion; (2) the conviction that they are fighting the true jihad or armed struggle against the enemies of God; and (3) the ultimate aim of establishing a cali‑ phate in modern times to replace democracy, which is regarded as an anti‑thesis to monotheism (tawhid). Having some of these elements in the dream accounts as demonstrated in the analyses may strengthen the legitimacy of Daesh’s ideologies and inspire the target audience or already radicalized individuals further by validating their beliefs and strengthening their sense of belong‑ ing within extremist circles.

Mental, Emotional, and Spiritual Conditioning Leading to Actualization and Radicalization The exposure to Daesh’s dream accounts, especially the ones about meeting or fighting alongside the Prophet or his companions, is in actuality a form of conditioning. Specifically, it is a cognitive, emotive, and spiritual conditioning or indoctrination to prepare prospective fighters to engage in battles and undertake life‑threatening missions in real life. This conditioning may reduce the fear of imminent death as often experienced by Daesh fighters. Additionally, Daesh often cites chapter 3 verses 169 and 170 as a spiritual and religious basis, in which the verses state that those who have died in a battle (martyrs) are in fact still alive. The use of these verses, which underscore the promise of continuity beyond death, may bolster the fighters’ dedication to Daesh’s cause and strengthen their readiness to participate in combat. The target audience of such narrative being promoted in dream accounts may find the idea of the hereafter particularly appealing, especially in terms of ascending to heaven as the result of joining a violent cause. The dream accounts can also be seen as an integral element in the radicalization process, which sees an individual gradually embracing certain ideas, usually extremist ideas, cognitively and emotively, and subsequently translating those ideas into a form of action (Edgar 2015). For in‑ stance, the experience of al‑Bakrawi mentioned earlier demonstrates the transformation of an in‑ dividual from a long‑time criminal to a suicide bomber after having radicalized while incarcerated and experiencing dreams of dying as a martyr. In this context, the dreams served to strengthen his existing belief system and made him more convinced of the truth of his ideology – a finding simi‑ larly revealed by Edgar (2011) in his work on dreams serving as inspirations for extremists. In the studies of radicalization (e.g., El‑Muhammady 2020), relating the theories to al‑Bakrawi’s case, there are two phases involved: (1) the formative phase, in which he went through a learning pro‑ cess, inculcating and embracing extreme ideologies at the cognitive, emotive, and faith level; and (2) the action phase, in which the ideas were then translated into actions, which saw al‑Bakrawi eventually becoming a suicide bomber. Radicalization, however, does not necessarily lead to the commission of violent acts (Wieviorka and Sageman 2017). In other words, adopting an extreme ideology doesn’t always imply an inclination toward violence. Yet, the experience of dreams might motivate individuals to transform the ideology into violent actions. It is also useful to note that the experience and meaning behind dreams have been understood as serving social and political functions in a group, and their meanings may be specific to the 269

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culture  and ideology embedded within the group (Dentan and McClusky 1993). Based on our analyses, we observe that a dream, in Daesh discourse, is considered a God‑given privilege seen as guidance, affirmation of truth, motivation, and encouragement to remain composed in the cause of struggle for individuals who are sincerely engaged in the battle or jihad against their enemies. Thus, in this context, a dream is not a mental projection of an unreal situation, nor is it an unrea‑ sonable element subjected by the subconscious thoughts during sleep. Instead, it is seen as theo‑ logically rooted and is considered a form of spiritual experience given by God for a selected few, especially those who sincerely seek His rewards. Briefly, our analyses demonstrate how dream accounts in Daesh propaganda materials have been creatively exploited to be used as a recruitment and legitimizing tool to garner support for its religiopolitical cause, i.e., the establishment of a caliphate. We also propose that there may be a psychological change caused by a dream due to its potential to cultivate awe in the dreamer and likely the target audience. This process itself could be pertinent to explain the process of radicali‑ zation through experiencing a dream or reading about dreams. In the case of the dreamers and followers of Daesh, they may experience an enhanced moral and spiritual connection to the values and missions of Daesh.

Concluding Remarks Our analyses of the dream accounts could be extended for research and prevention practices by examining the use of linguistic and psychological strategies to engineer an extremist mindset in the radicalization process. Linguistically, various discursive strategies (i.e., nomination, predication, argumentation, perspectivization, intensification, and mitigation strategies) have been identified and explained in terms of how they may be used strategically to manipulate the target audience to subscribe to extreme ideologies. For instance, the inclusion of historical and contemporary lead‑ ers in the dream accounts as part of the nomination and argumentation strategies adds credibility to the messages delivered through the accounts. An example from the analyses is an account of fighting alongside Prophet Muhammad (topos of authority). While the era of prophecy ended with him, divine messages are believed to persist through dreams, as echoed in Bukhari Hadith (Edgar 2007). Therefore, narrating such dream could tap into the target audience’s familiarity with Islamic history and symbolism, making it relatable and engaging. It is also noteworthy to observe the dis‑ cussion about attaining heavenly rewards through martyrdom, as described using the predication strategy (e.g., ‘arose to a high place’, ‘soul … became full of light’). This may act as a compel‑ ling tool to inspire existing members to achieve martyrdom or draw in new followers who seek a deeper sense of purpose or spiritual fulfillment. Psychologically, we propose that the content of dream accounts must be scrutinized for poten‑ tial narratives that could induce awe. In our analyses, we have identified four relevant narratives that could cultivate awe: perceived connection with a divine being, perceived personal elevation, the greater purpose of self, and the prophecy of future martyrdom or the afterlife rewards. Con‑ clusively, we infer that the narrated dreams with content that could induce awe could strengthen Daesh members’ and supporters’ ideological commitment and enhance their readiness to perform violent actions. The target audience who read the dream accounts could vicariously experience the dreams and feelings of awe due to the vivid and evocative narration. Relevant examples include al‑Bakrawi’s dream, in which he heard a mysterious voice that asked him to worship Allah and fight for Islam, and as‑Sumali who saw the ‘maidens of Paradise’ in his dream. The audience may become immersed in the narrative which could in turn ignite deep emotional and motivational

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changes to commit acts of extremism. Although the behavioral effect of awe is not examined in our study, it has been consistently recorded in other research exploring awe through viewing videos of nature or remembrance of God (Guan et al. 2019; Lin et al. 2020; Naclerio and Van Cappellen 2022; Piff et al. 2015; Sawada and Nomura 2020; Tyson et al. 2022; Van Cappellen and Saroglou 2012). We hope that our research findings could supplement the current knowledge of factors con‑ tributing to radicalization, such as exposure to news or other materials related to extremism that may cause a change in mindset (e.g., Rashid and Mat Isa 2022). As a final point, the linguistic and psychological strategies that we have identified could be reverse engineered to prevent individuals from being susceptible to the content of Daesh materials by rectifying the extreme ideologies promoted by the group. Many Quranic verses promote and encourage spiritual and prosocial activities that are non‑violent in nature. The verses may be an in‑ genious means to promote goodness and prevent susceptibility to Daesh’s manipulative strategies among individuals at risk of radicalization. It is recommended that future practices in preventing radicalization and violent extremism could educate members of the public on how dream accounts could be a manipulative source to induce individuals into embracing radical extremism.

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18 FRAMING AND METAPHOR IN MEDIA DISCOURSE Multi‑Layered Metaphorical Framings of the COVID‑19 Pandemic in Newspaper Articles Tetsuta Komatsubara Introduction Metaphors that allow us to highlight one aspect of a concept in terms of another will hide other aspects of the concept (Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 10). This central function of metaphors has of‑ ten been discussed related to the notion of framing (Burgers, Konijn, and Steen 2016; Boeynaems et al. 2017; Semino, Demjén, and Demmen 2018). Based on the framework of metaphor analysis in cognitive linguistics, this chapter discusses how metaphorical framings work to “foreground a particular problem definition, give a causal interpretation, address a problem evaluation, and/ or promote a possible problem solution” (Boeynaems et al. 2017: 119) in media discourse. For instance, framing immigration as a natural disaster (e.g., “Britain also faces a further massive and unnecessary wave of immigration from Eastern Europe”) portrays immigration as something negative, which causes trouble and is difficult to control (Charteris‑Black 2006). An influential way the media may shape public opinion is by framing events and issues in particular ways (de Vreese 2005: 51), and metaphors are one of the triggers of framing. Laypeople are usually un‑ conscious of the framing effects of metaphors and rarely think critically about their metaphorical framings. However, journalists are more likely to consciously choose metaphorical words to frame an issue. Metaphor analysis is a useful approach to probe the asymmetry between journalists and non‑journalists, and this asymmetry could be utilized for mind engineering in media discourse; journalists can use metaphorical framing to influence thoughts and beliefs and manipulate impres‑ sions and evaluations of the issue. Newspaper articles are useful materials to compare the metaphorical framings of journalists with those of non‑journalists because they typically include alternations between authorial and quoted voices (Fairclough 2003: Ch. 3). While authorial accounts by the narrator directly reflect the voices of journalists, quotations are inserted as the voices of non‑journalists. Both journal‑ ists and non‑journalists use metaphors to frame an issue. By comparing metaphorical framings in authorial texts with those in quoted texts, we can analyze how these framings are layered and interact in media discourse. Moreover, because newspaper articles include a publication date, we can identify when a metaphor was used and how metaphors changed over time. As a case study, we focus on metaphorical expressions to describe the COVID‑19 pandemic in Japanese newspaper articles and discuss what metaphorical framings are dominant in media discourse on the pandemic, DOI: 10.4324/9781003289746-23 This chapter has been made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 international license

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how metaphorical framings in authorial and quoted texts change over time, and how multi‑layered metaphorical framings interact in newspaper articles.

Framing and Metaphor The notion of framing has its roots in various disciplinary traditions (Tewksbury and Scheufele 2020: 51–52). This chapter, focusing on metaphor analysis of media discourse, connects linguistic approaches to sociological approaches to framing research. Metaphorical framings are linguistic phenomena because they are cognitive processes triggered by specific linguistic expressions of metaphors. Framings in media discourse are sociological phenomena because they help journalists organize enormous amounts of information and package them effectively for their audiences. After a brief introduction to framing theory and metaphors as framing devices, this section summarizes perspectives on framing in media discourse studies and outlines the framework of discourse and diachronic analyses of news framing. We also discuss methodological issues in metaphor analysis for empirical research on framing, whose results depend heavily on identifying and classifying examples of metaphors.

Framing Theory The notion of framing, widely used in communication science including health communication, news and journalism research, and political communication research (Lecheler and de Vreese 2019: 7), has two broad foundations: sociological and psychological (Borah 2011: 247). In the sociological tradition, Goffman (1974) takes the starting point that “frames are useful devices for human beings to make sense of the world in (…) everyday situations” (Lecheler and de Vreese 2019: 7) and, for him, “frames are culturally bound and serve to reduce the complexity of our eve‑ ryday world” (ibid.). In the psychological tradition, Kahneman and Tversky (1984) are typically referred to as the starting point. They developed prospect theory, which suggests that “new infor‑ mation is evaluated differently depending on whether a gain or a loss frame is applied” (Lecheler and de Vreese 2019: 7). They found that “individuals were inclined to take risks when ‘losses’ are highlighted” (Borah 2011: 248), but “when the same information is presented in terms of ‘gains,’ individuals shy away from risks” (ibid.). In sociological approaches to framing research, since Entman (1993) picked up the notion of framing and “transferred it to the study of the mass and news media” (Lecheler and de Vreese 2019: 8), it has been highlighted that framing foregrounds some aspects of reality while excluding other elements. Although it has been demonstrated that framing is more than a unified paradigm and that theoretical diversity has been beneficial in framing research (D’Angelo 2002, 2019; Reese 2007), it was crucial that Entman (1993) defined framing as “select[ing] some aspects of a per‑ ceived reality and mak[ing] them more salient in a communicating text […] to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation” (ibid., 52) because this selective function of framing makes metaphor relevant to framing research, as noted in the Introduction. Metaphors, as well as exemplars, catch‑phrases, depictions, and visual images, have been counted as a rhetorical type of framing devices (Gamson and Modigliani 1989: 3), which are “tools for newsmakers to use in composing or constructing news discourse as well as psycho‑ logical stimuli for audiences to process” (Pan and Kosicki 1993: 59). By calling up a metaphor, the rest of the coverage of the story can be interpreted within the terms of the metaphor (Hertog and McLeod 2001: 148), and most important for the study of news framing, figurative language 275

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including metaphor “can influence audience interpretations of an issue without explicitly present‑ ing new information and arguments concerning the issues” (Tewksbury and Scheufele 2020: 57).

Framings in the News Frames that are concerned with the presentation of issues in media discourse are called news frames or media frames (D’Angelo 2017). They are “parts of political arguments, journalistic norms, and social movements’ discourse” (de Vreese 2005: 53) and “alternative ways of defining issues, endogenous to the political and social world” (ibid.). Cappella and Jamieson (1997: 47 and 89) suggested four criteria a news frame must meet: First, it must have identifiable conceptual and linguistic characteristics. Second, it should be commonly observed in journalistic practice. Third, it must distinguish one frame from other frames reliably. Fourth, a frame must have representational validity (i.e., be recognized by others) and not merely a figment of a researcher’s imagination. News frames evoked by metaphors, such as war‑framed discourse on social issues (e.g., the war on poverty), meet the first and second criteria in that meta‑ phorical expressions are pervasive in public discourse (Flusberg, Matlock, and Thibodeau 2018). Rigorous procedures are more difficult to establish because metaphors are conceptual in nature (Lakoff 1993), and we will discuss how to deal with these problems later.

Discourse Analysis According to Tankard (2001: 101), there are 11 framing mechanisms or focal points for identifying framing: (1) headlines and kickers; (2) subheads; (3) photographs; (4) photo captions; (5) leads; (6) source selection; (7) quote selection; (8) pull quotes; (9) logos; (10) statistics and charts; and (11) concluding statements and paragraphs. Among them, quote selection is related to intertextuality, or “voices” layered, in media dis‑ course, and one of the various approaches to discourse analysis of framing is to focus on quo‑ tations. When the speech, writing, or thought of another is quoted, “two different voices […] are brought into dialogue, and potentially two different perspectives, objectives, interests, and so forth” (Voloshinov 1973 [1930]; cited in Fairclough 2003: 48). Fairclough (2003) characterized newspaper articles and press reports as “an alternation between authorial accounts and indirect reports, backed up or substantiated with direct quotations” (ibid., 50) and demonstrated that the genre of the press report favors distribution of information between “the authorial and attributed voices” (ibid.). A newspaper article is written by a journalist, and in a habitual interpretation, it is the journal‑ ist who is responsible for the texts in the article because the journalist is the author. However, the author of a newspaper article can insert texts that are attributed to someone else, typically a non‑journalist, with linguistic devices including quotation marks or reporting clauses. There are various linguistic styles for attribution, which include direct speech (e.g., She said, “He’ll be there by now”), indirect speech (e.g., She said he’d be there by then), and free indirect speech (e.g., She gazed out of the window. He would be there by now. She smiled to herself.). For example, direct speech with quotation marks explicitly marks quotations, inserts another perspective, and layers framings in a flow of discourse. Although a journalist may deliberately choose a quote that includes metaphorical expressions that journalists aim to introduce, the quoted utterance should reflect the speaker’s framing. Con‑ trasting metaphors in authorial texts with those in quoted texts reveals how different journalistic and non‑journalistic framings are, and how they interact in media discourse. 276

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Diachronic Analysis Frames persist but also change over time. As a preliminary investigation of framing analysis, Hertog and McLeod (2001) encouraged analysts to identify changes in frames over time and advised that to trace the evolution of frames, analysts must “develop frame models from at least two time points and then compare the content and structure at different time points” (ibid., 151). Exposure to media discourse can cause reframing of an issue in that “when journalists select and produce news, how they frame it is consequential for citizens’ understanding of important issues” (Lecheler and de Vreese 2019: 1). Changes in media discourse do not always cause changes in public opinion; however, describing how media discourse changes on an issue provides an essen‑ tial context for interpreting how journalistic discourse and public opinion interact (Gamson and Modigliani 1989). Metaphors, as a framing device, can reflect the interaction between journalists and non‑­ journalists. Because variations in metaphors can occur diachronically as well as synchronically (Nerlich and Hellsten 2004; Burgers and Ahrens 2020), the way metaphors change can reveal how conceptualizations of social issues change over time (Burgers 2016). In the case of newspapers, using the publication date as a temporal variable is an easy way to trace the changes in framings at a fine resolution. Quoted texts are the voices of non‑journalists embedded in media discourse, and they provide time‑series data of non‑journalistic framing at the same temporal resolution as jour‑ nalistic framing. By combining the discourse analysis focusing on quotation with the diachronic analysis using publication dates, we can use two variables, social and temporal, which provide the empirical method to analyze the change in framings in media discourse.

Metaphorical Framings Figurative language was thought of as being one aspect of what gives a text special aesthetic value, but researchers in cognitive linguistics have revealed that it is far from being just decorative (Lakoff and Johnson 1980, Gibbs 1994, Dancygier and Sweetser 2014). The figurative meaning is part of the basic fabric of linguistic structure (Dancygier and Sweetser 2014: 1), and rhetorical figures are pervasive in language. Among the various rhetorical figures, metaphors are highly conventional in public discourse and efficiently structure our ability to reason and communicate (Flusberg, Matlock, and Thibo‑ deau 2018). A metaphor is an important clue that reveals how a problem is defined and evaluated (Boeynaems et al. 2017). Investigating what metaphors are used in the discourse on social issues, including the COVID‑19 pandemic, allows us to analyze the frame in which people capture them and what aspect of the issue they focus on (Wicke and Bolognesi 2020, Komatsubara 2023). While metaphor analysis can be a useful approach to framing research, an explicit procedure of metaphor analysis is needed because it is not easy to detect and analyze metaphors in discourse, thereby reducing the risk of arbitrariness. Therefore, a reliable methodology for metaphor analysis should include explicit explanations of identifying and classifying metaphorical expressions in discourse.

Identification of Metaphors Metaphor identification is crucial for assessing the validity of metaphor research because if an‑ alysts cannot agree on what counts as an instance of a metaphor, their findings are not much less than personal interpretations (Steen 2014: 136). Metaphor identification procedure (MIP; 277

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Pragglejaz Group 2007) has been widely discussed in metaphor research as the first attempt to formalize a systematic procedure for identifying metaphorical expressions in a text. MIP VU Uni‑ versity Amsterdam (MIPVU) (Steen et al. 2010) was proposed as an updated version of the MIP that covers a broader range of expressions related to metaphorical meaning, including similes, explicit comparisons, and analogies. The MIP and MIPVU share the basic strategy of identifying any lexical unit that has the poten‑ tial to be processed metaphorically, as described below: We first divide a text into lexical units and then identify its meaning in the context of each lexical unit. We then use a dictionary to establish each lexical unit’s basic (i.e., more concrete, physical, and precise) meaning. Finally, if the basic meaning is distinct from the meaning in context and the contextual meaning could be understood by referring to the basic meaning, we coded the lexical unit as metaphorical. As fully described in our case study, we applied the procedure described above to metaphors of the coronavirus in Japanese newspaper articles. For example, in (1), the words teki “enemy,” tatakai “fight,” and kachinuka “win” are identified as metaphorical expressions, which refer to the coronavirus, living a life in the pandemic, and eradicating the coronavirus, respectively. kachinuka‑nakereba. 1 Mie‑zaru teki=to‑no tatakai=ni enemy=with‑pos fight=in win‑must see‑neg “[We] must win the fight against the invisible enemy.” (Yuriko Koike, Governor of Tokyo, March 13, 2020) Boldfaces in Japanese examples and italics in English translations indicate that the expressions are metaphorical. The glossing notation in this chapter follows The Leipzig Glossing Rules (Comrie et al. 2015).

Classification of Metaphorical Patterns The cognitive linguistic approach to metaphors, conceptual metaphor theory (CMT; Lakoff 1993; Kövecses 2010), provides useful terminology for classifying metaphorical examples that vary in semantic type. The CMT defines metaphors as mappings across different domains (or frames) in a conceptual structure. Expressions such as “He shot down all of my arguments” are regarded as lin‑ guistic manifestations of conceptual metaphors, in this case, of argument is war. This conceptual metaphor involves mapping aspects of the source frame of the war onto those of the target frame of argument, such as attacking onto refuting, defending onto arguing, and winning onto persuad‑ ing. We followed the general convention in CMT to use small capital for concepts (e.g., war) and for the formulation of conceptual metaphors (e.g., argument is war). Metaphors can be direct or indirect. Some metaphorical utterances refer directly to the central participants of the target frame. For instance, in (1), the coronavirus is construed as an opponent in the war frame through the explicit metaphorical expression teki “enemy.” However, others de‑ scribe aspects of the target frame in which the metaphorical meanings of the participants remain implicit. For instance, the utterance in (2) includes a metaphorical expression mochikoma (an inflectional form of the compound verb mochikomu “bring”), and it is a metaphorical verb that in‑ directly introduces a metaphorical meaning to the reference of the object noun (i.e., korona “coro‑ navirus”) as a movable physical object such as a laptop or book. We can consider (2) an example of framing the coronavirus as a physical object, in that spreading the coronavirus metaphorically corresponds to bringing a physical object.

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2 Korona=o mochikoma‑zu=ni ki‑tekudasai. bring‑neg=in come‑please coronavirus=acc “Please come without bringing the coronavirus.” (Toshizo Ido, Governor of Hyogo, June 19, 2020) Because MIP is not dependent on the assumption of conceptual metaphors and does not aim at identifying them (Steen 2014: 135), while (2) counts as one example of metaphor, the words teki ‘enemy’, tatakai ‘fight’, and kachinuka ‘win’ in (1) count as three separate metaphorical lexical units according to the procedure. However, these lexical metaphors share the same metaphorical source and give rise to the framing of the pandemic through the concept of war. From the per‑ spective of framing research, to evaluate how frequently a type of framing is used, it will be more beneficial to count them as one example of framing by war metaphor than as three examples of lexical units of war metaphor because multiple lexical units have a coherent metaphorical meaning and function as a single type of framing in discourse. To achieve the inductive generalization of metaphorical framing, it is reasonable to initially undertake a lexical semantic description of each lexical unit in a metaphorical expression and then inductively classify it into a type of source frame. Reducing the arbitrariness of classification is a problem discussed in framing research. Hertog and McLeod (2001) regarded “the tendency for scholars to generate a unique set of frames for every study” (ibid., 150) as “one of the most frustrating tendencies in the study of frames and framing” (ibid.). It is desirable to be “aware of an array of potential frames for the topic under study” (ibid., 149) and to use a set of common cat‑ egories to avoid assuming an arbitrary term of source frames to describe only a few idiosyncratic examples. This means that a deductive set of frames can support inductive generalizations. To our knowledge, however, no established typology of metaphorical sources enables us to classify an example of a metaphor. Therefore, the analyst needs to review the previous literature focusing on the same target of metaphors and find what sources are common in framing the target based on the descriptive results. When a list of common source domains is not accessible to the targeted topic, a large structured repository of conceptual metaphors, MetaNet, is a good start‑ ing point for classification. MetaNet (https://metanet.icsi.berkeley.edu/metanet/) is a database of conceptual metaphors that adopts a frame‑based approach to the representation of meaning and assumes the existence of an analogous frame in FrameNet (https://framenet.icsi.berkeley.edu/) (Petruck 2018). It is well known in metaphor research that abstract concepts are metaphorically structured by more concrete concepts (Kövecses 2010: 18–23), and MetaNet provides a large‑scale summary of previous studies on conceptual metaphors.

An Example of Metaphor Analysis of Framings As a case study, this section presents metaphorical utterances in Japanese newspaper articles that feature the coronavirus from 2020 to 2021 to discuss the framings adopted to conceptualize the COVID‑19 pandemic in Japan. Based on the distinction between authorial and quoted texts, we contrast metaphors in authorial accounts with those in direct quotations and compare journalistic framings with non‑journalistic framings. In addition, we analyze changes in framings over time using the publication date of newspapers as a temporal variable. Through an investigation of the linguistic aspects of metaphorical framing in newspaper articles, we present several quantitative and qualitative results on how metaphors reflect the multi‑layered framings of the COVID‑19 pandemic.

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Background While the economic and social impacts of the COVID‑19 pandemic have reverberated globally, we need at least a brief description of the situation in Japan to understand the target of framing correctly. The number of new infections has increased since the first case of the coronavirus was reported in January 2020. The timeline of the pandemic in Japan is as follows. The facts and sta‑ tistics on the pandemic in Japan described below are based on reports by the Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare (https://www.mhlw.go.jp/), the Cabinet Office (https://www.cao.go.jp/), and the Japan Broadcasting Corporation (NHK) (https://www.nhk.or.jp/) (accessed on May 20, 2021). Dates followed by bracketed numbers indicate important dates from March 2020 to February 2021 and the number of new infections each day. March 13 (40): The National Diet passed an amendment to the Special Measures Act for an influenza outbreak that included COVID‑19. April 16 (596): Prime Minister Shinzo Abe declared a nationwide state of emergency. May 25 (20): The state of emergency was lifted, and the rate of increase in new infec‑ tions remained low. June 19 (54): The “self‑restraint” request not to travel across prefectures was lifted. July 22 (792): The high record of new infections signalled the arrival of “a second wave” of the pandemic. August 7 (1,597): “The second wave” came to its peak. September 17 (478): The Suga administration came to office. October 1 (619): The government began campaigns to boost consumer spending and help the economy recover from the losses caused by the pandemic. November 18 (2,173): Japan saw a record number of new infections. December 15 (2,400): The campaigns to boost economy were partially stopped. January 7 (7,793): The government declared a state of emergency again. February 17 (1,443): Vaccinations for healthcare workers started.

Methods Data A total of 2,502 newspaper articles that include the keyword koronauirusu ‘coronavirus,’ one of the most common expressions referring to COVID‑19 in Japanese, were extracted from “Kikuzo II Visual” (updated as “Asahi Shimbun Cross‑Search” in 2022), the largest newspaper article da‑ tabase by Asahi Shimbun Company. To trace the timeline of the pandemic in Japan throughout the year, the aforementioned 12 dates from March 2020 to February 2021 were sampled. We manu‑ ally excluded articles whose topics were irrelevant to the pandemic, although they included the keyword koronauirusu. Translated utterances (e.g., a comment by President Trump translated into Japanese) were also excluded because we focused on investigating the metaphors that frame the pandemic in Japanese.

Identification of Metaphors Using the metaphor identification procedure described in the previous section, we manually iden‑ tified all metaphorical expressions that describe the coronavirus directly (e.g., teki ‘enemy’) or an event in which the coronavirus takes a role as a participant (e.g., korona ni tachimukau ‘to 280

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confront the coronavirus’) in the sampled articles. Grammatical morphemes were excluded from the analysis. To compare the meaning in context with the basic meaning of a lexical unit, we used Supa Daijirin 3.0 (Sanseido) as a reference. The target frame of metaphors is the situation around the COVID‑19 pandemic, which is very complicated in that it involves political, economic, social, and cultural factors as well as epide‑ miological factors (Seixas 2021: 2–3). To delimit the range of relevant entities, we regarded a metaphorical text as relevant to the target frame only when the metaphorical text implied a map‑ ping relationship between coronavirus and an element of the source frame. For example, mamora ‘protect’ in (3) implies the fight against the coronavirus, and the concept of enemy is mapped onto the concept of the coronavirus, and (3) is regarded as relevant. In contrast, while kakae ‘hold’ in (4) is metaphorical in the collocation with abstract nouns such as fuan ‘anxiety’ and kunou ‘anguish’, which are metaphorically conceptualized as heavy physical objects, we have no clue to decide what entity is mapped onto the coronavirus; thus, (4) is irrelevant to our study and excluded from the data. kansen kara mamora‑naitoikenai 3 Shokuin mo staff also infection from protect‑must “(We) also must protect the staffs from infection” (Manager of an adult day care center in Sapporo, March 13, 2020) fuan ya kunou o kakae‑nagara seiippai yat‑teiru 4 Minna as.possible do‑prog everyone anxiety or anguish acc hold‑while “Everyone is doing their best holding anxiety or anguish” (Naoto Kanesaka, Chief of Rokkoumichi Children’s Library, April 16, 2020)

Classification of Metaphorical Patterns We classified each example into a type of source frame of conceptual metaphors. Based on the descriptive results of previous literature, we identified sources that are common to frame the ­target (i.e., the coronavirus), which include opponent in war (Bates 2020; Seixas 2021) (or in sport (Olza et al. 2021; Semino 2021)), natural phenomenon, especially natural disaster (Wicke and Bolognesi 2020; Semino 2021), path (or direction) in journey (Rajandran 2020; Olza et al. 2021; Semino 2021), physical object (Komatsubara 2023), animal (Olza et al. 2021), and neighbor (or guest) (Olza et al. 2021, Komatsubara 2023). Each source element metaphorically corresponds to the coronavirus and is embedded in a larger frame structure evoked by a metaphorical text. As the six metaphorical sources of the coronavirus–opponent, natural phenomenon, path, physical object, animal, and neighbor–are embedded in the corresponding source frames, we assumed that the six frames–war, disaster, journey, physical activity, hunt, and society–consist of a set of categories of common source frames to classify the data. We described the source concept of coronavirus and classified it as a source frame. For ­example, based on the semantic analysis of metaphorical verbs, we identified the source con‑ cept of the ­coronavirus as a movable physical object in (2), a chain‑like object in (5), and a machine‑like object in (6), and then classified them into a physical object metaphor in the physical activity frame. 5 Rensa=o chain=acc

tachikiru‑koto=ni churyokushi‑teki‑ta. cut.off‑nmlz=in try‑prf‑pst 281

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“[We] have made an effort to cut the chain [of the patient clusters] off.” (Kenji Shibuya, Senior Advisor of the WHO, April 16, 2020) 6 Seigyofunona mono dewa‑nai. top‑neg uncontrollable thing “[The pandemic is] not uncontrollable.” (Keiichiro Kudo, Director of the Medical Policy Office of Iwate, January 7, 2021)

Analysis of Metaphorical Framings Each example is coded as authorial or quoted. For example, (7), an example translated into Eng‑ lish, consists of two sentences: the first sentence is an authorial text, and the second is a quoted text (we will experience hardship at the end of the year) with quotation marks and a reporting clause (the person in charge of Keio Plaza Hotel said). The metaphorical word blow is included in the first sentence, and we identified it as authorial. In (8), the metaphorical word protecting is observed in a text that the author attributes to a non‑journalist, Koji Endo, a representative of an after‑school care center in Osaka, so we identified it as quoted. 7 The hotels in Sapporo, which have already experienced the severe blow of a shutdown, continue to suffer from an extension of the shutdown. The person in charge of the Keio Plaza Hotel said, “We will experience a hardship at the end of the year.” (The Asahi ­Shimbun, December 15, 2020; English translation and boldface by the author) 8 Koji Endo, the representative of an after‑school care center in Osaka, said, “Many ­institutions have to endure hardship with a sense of mission for protecting children.” (The Asahi Shimbun, April 16, 2020; English translation and boldface by the author) We sampled examples at monthly intervals from March 2020 to February 2021 to analyze changes in the metaphorical framing of the pandemic. The publication date was used as a temporal vari‑ able, assuming that the fluctuating distributions of the types of metaphorical sources indicate how people reshaped their conceptualization of the pandemic. Combining discourse and diachronic analyses, we discuss how the choices of metaphors reflect diverse perspectives in a rapidly chang‑ ing pandemic context.

Principal Metaphorical Framings Table 18.1 summarizes the metaphors observed in the data. A total of 345 examples (155 in autho‑ rial texts and 190 in quoted texts) were extracted, and almost all of them were classified into the six metaphorical frames described in the previous literature. The three principal metaphorical sources were war, journey, and disaster, and their sum covered more than three‑quarters of the data in both the authorial and quoted texts as well as in the total. This result implies that regardless of whether authorial or quoted, newspaper articles contain few innovative metaphors and consider‑ ably depend on several framings using conventional metaphors. Before discussing the principal framings in detail, it is worth noting that among the less princi‑ pal framings, the number of examples of society framing from quoted texts was more significant than that from authorial texts. Metaphors that map the concept of neighbor onto the coronavirus personify the coronavirus similarly to opponent metaphors in war framing, but they do not imply 282

Framing and Metaphor in Media Discourse Table 18.1  Metaphorical sources of the coronavirus Source frame and example

Authorial

Quoted

Sum

WAR e.g., mie‑zaru teki=to‑no tatakai ‘fight against an invisible enemy’ JOURNEY e.g., saki=ga mie‑nai ‘[we] cannot see the road ahead’ DISASTER e.g., dai‑i‑ppa=no tachiagari ‘the rise of the first wave’ PHYSICAL ACTIVITY e.g., korona=o mochikoma‑zu=ni ‘not bringing coronavirus over’ HUNT e.g., korona=o mazu fujikome=te ‘caging coronavirus first’ SOCIETY e.g., korona=to kyouzonshi‑nagara ‘living together with coronavirus’ Other e.g., dare=mo mada seikai‑o shira‑nai “no one knows the correct answer yet.” Sum

  56 (36.1%)

  81 137 (42.6%) (39.7%)

  47 (30.3%)   24 (15.5%)   13   (8.4%)   12   (7.7%)    2   (1.3%)

  31 (16.3%)   32 (16.8%)   17   (9.0%)   16   (8.4%)   13   (6.9%)

   1   (0.7%)

   0    1   (0.0%)   (0.3%)

155

190

  78 (22.6%)   56 (16.2%)   30   (8.7%) 28   (8.1%)   15   (4.3%)

345

that it should be eradicated. Yuriko Koike, the Governor of Tokyo Prefecture, in May 2020 advo‑ cated the slogan wizu‑korona ‘with coronavirus’. The slogan was widely known at that time, and it prompted inhabitants to construe the coronavirus as an accompanying person, as reflected in metaphors such as (9), (10), and (11). Politicians seem to have been at least partially responsible for society framing in everyday discourse (Komatsubara 2023). In contrast, the results imply that journalists, at least ones of Asahi Shimbun, seem to have been careful not to use this political fram‑ ing, despite the idea that journalists are likely to adopt frames suggested by interest groups or po‑ litical actors when no frames have yet been established for the issue at stake (Scheufele 1999: 116). 9 Shin‑gata coronauirusu=no mi‑ttsu=no kao=o shiro‑u three‑clf=pos face=acc learn‑let.us new‑type coronavirus=pos “Let’s learn the three faces of the new‑type coronavirus.” (Mari Yamaguchi, junior high school student, May 25, 2020) 10 Korekara=wa korona=to kyozonshi‑nagara coronavirus=with live.together‑as in.the.future=top “[We will] live together with the coronavirus in the future.” (an office worker, May 25, 2020) tonari‑awase=no seikatsu=wa tsuzuku 11 Korona=to life=top continue coronavirus=with next.to‑fit=pos “[We must] continue to live next to the coronavirus.” (a college student, September 17, 2020) 283

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War Framing Previous studies on metaphors of COVID‑19 have coherently reported, irrespective of language or register, that the metaphorical framing through the concept of war (e.g., “the fight against an invisible enemy”) is most commonly observed in the discourse around the current pandemic (Bates 2020; Rajandran 2020; Wicke and Bolognesi 2020; Seixas 2021; Komatsubara 2022, 2023), and the results illustrated the general trend. Two variants of war framing, aggressive and defensive attitudes (Komatsubara 2023), clarify the difference between authorial and quoted texts. Some war metaphors indicate an aggressive attitude toward the coronavirus (i.e., the viewpoint of seeing the coronavirus as something to be eradicated), such as uchikatsu ‘defeat’, teki ‘enemy’, and tatakai ‘fight’. However, many war metaphors indicate a defensive attitude (i.e., the viewpoint focusing on the preventive measures and the recovery), such as mamru ‘protect’, dameji ‘damage’, and dageki ‘blow [by the coronavi‑ rus]’. Defensive metaphors, such as (12), explained 60.5% of the examples (49 out of 81) of war framing in quoted texts and 85.7% (48 out of 56) in authorial texts. 12 Keieisuru ba=ga dageki=o uke‑teiru‑no‑da. receive‑prog‑nom‑be manage bar=nom blow=acc “The bar [he] manages has received a blow.”

(January 7, 2021)

13 Jinrui=ga shin‑gata‑koronauirusu=ni uchika‑tta  akashi. mankind=nom new‑type‑coronavirus=acc defeat=pst   proof “[Tokyo Olympics will be] proof that mankind will have defeated the new coronavirus.” (Yoshihide Suga, Prime Minister of Japan, January 7, 2021) In the quoted texts, 40.6% (13 out of 32 examples) of aggressive metaphors came from utterances by people affiliated with the government or political organizations. Under the second state of emergency declaration in January 2021, Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga tried to impress that the Tokyo Olympics will be proof that they defeated the coronavirus, using the metaphor in (13), in which the expressions uchikatsu ‘defeat’ implies that people should take an active role in the “war on COVID‑19.” Former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe repeatedly used this phrase during the first declaration of the state of emergency in April. While using aggressive war metaphors conveys “a sense of risk and urgency” (Flusberg, Matlock, and Thibodeau 2018: 4), the low rate of the aggres‑ sive metaphor in authorial texts implies that journalists did not follow the framing by politicians, as in the case of the society framing discussed above.

Journey Framing While journey framing is pervasive in everyday language, as in “Look how far we’ve come” and “We can’t turn back now” (Lakoff 1993), the concept of journey is also an apt metaphorical source for the pandemic because trouble can happen in a journey, such as getting lost, getting mugged, feeling sick, or feeling anxious. When a physical object metaphor is embedded in a journey frame, it is often interpreted as an obstacle in the way (or landscape; Komatsubara 2023) of journey. For example, in (14), kiki ‘crisis’ caused by the coronavirus is metaphorically an obstacle, as indicated by the metaphori‑ cal verb norikoeru ‘get over’. We observed more obstacle metaphors in the authorial texts and 284

Framing and Metaphor in Media Discourse

explained 63.8% (30 of 47 examples) of the journey framing. An example of way metaphor is (15), in which the journey framing indicates how people try to deal with the coronavirus persisting for a long time. The metaphorical expression tachidomaru ‘stop’ does not imply that the coronavirus interrupts us, and the coronavirus is rather portrayed as an element of the way of the journey. In the quoted texts, the way metaphors covered 61.3% (19 of 31 examples) of the journey framing. 14 Kiki‑o norikoeru shinario‑ni kanshin‑ga atsuma‑tta. crisis‑acc get.over scenario‑loc interest‑nom focus‑pst “[Their] interets focused on the scenario to get over the crisis.”

(July 22, 2020)

tachidomaru hitsuyou=ga a‑tta. 15 I‑kkagetsu=hodo mae=ni exsit‑pst one‑month=about before=in stop need=nom “[We] needed to stop about a month ago.” (Yoshihito Niki, visiting professor at Showa University, December 15, 2020)

Disaster Framing The water metaphors typically introducing an image of a tsunami, such as in (16), occupied 71.9% (23 out of 32 examples) of the disaster framing in quoted texts, and conventionalized expressions in the pandemic, such as dai‑i‑ppa ‘the first wave’, dai‑ni‑ha ‘the second wave’, dai‑sam‑pa ‘the third wave’ were common in the data. According to Charteris‑Black (2006), disaster metaphors relating to water (floods and tidal waves) were common in the conceptualization of immigration in right‑wing discourse in Britain (e.g., “massive and unnecessary wave of immigration”), implying that immigration was excessive and out of control, which potentially linked to conceptualization with the related image of crisis. In authorial texts, we observed various metaphorical sources, including fire, which, according to Semino (2021), can be versatile in communication about the COVID‑19 pandemic, such as hi‑dane ‘fire‑seed’, kusuburu ‘smolder’, and shitabi ‘low.flame’ in (17). 16 Fuyuba=ni‑wa honto=no “nami”=ga oso‑ttekuru kanosei=ga real=pos wave=nom hit‑ben possibility=nom winter=in‑top aru. exist “Possibly, the real “wave” might hit in winter.” (Shuichi Nishimura, Sendai Medical Center, September 17, 2020) 17 Chugoku‑de aratana kansen‑ga new infection‑nom China‑loc “The new infections in China have died down.”

shitabi‑ni low.flame‑to

nari become (March 13, 2020)

Change in Metaphorical Framings over Time In addition to the synchronic analysis of the distribution of metaphorical sources, this section describes the results of the diachronic analysis using the publication date as a temporal variable. Figure 18.1 shows the frequency of metaphorical examples per 100 articles and the number of 285

Tetsuta Komatsubara Authorial

Quoted

n of new infections

examples per 100 articles

25

9000 8000 7000 6000 5000 4000 3000 2000 1000 0

20 15 10 5 0

new infections

Sum

Publishing date Figure 18.1  Changes in the number of examples and new infections

JOURNEY

DISASTER

Others

new infections

100%

9000 8000 7000 6000 5000 4000 3000 2000 1000 0

80% 60% 40% 20% Feb-21

Jan-21

Dec-20

Nov-20

Oct-20

Sep-20

Aug-20

Jul-20

Jun-20

May-20

Apr-20

Mar-20

0%

new infections

WAR

Figure 18.2  Change in framings of authorial texts

new infections. Arrows indicate the “the waves” peaks corresponding to the number of new infec‑ tions. Figure 18.2 shows the monthly distributions of the three principal metaphorical framings in the authorial texts, which contrasts with Figure 18.3, which demonstrates those in the quoted texts. While the authorial and quoted texts shared the principal conceptual types of framing, the diachronic analysis revealed several contrasts between them. First, the dominance of war framing in March and April is salient in Figure 18.3, compared with the rates in the same period in Figure 18.2. To examine the characteristics of the war framing in detail, Figures 18.4 and 18.5 show changes in the standardized frequencies of the war framing with the proportions of aggressive and defensive metaphors. Although defensive metaphors are 286

Framing and Metaphor in Media Discourse

JOURNEY

DISASTER

Others

new infections

100%

9000 8000 7000 6000 5000 4000 3000 2000 1000 0

80% 60% 40% 20% Feb-21

Jan-21

Dec-20

Nov-20

Oct-20

Sep-20

Aug-20

Jul-20

Jun-20

May-20

Apr-20

Mar-20

0%

new infections

WAR

Figure 18.3  Change in framings of quoted texts

more common than aggressive ones, as pointed out above as a general tendency, the first half of the sampling period (i.e., the period from March to August) covered 78.1% (25 out of 32 examples) of the aggressive war metaphors in the quoted texts (Figure 18.5). Figure 18.4 shows defensive metaphors dominated in authorial texts, specifically in the latter half of the sampling period. Con‑ sidering that the aggressive metaphors were often extracted from utterances by people who are affiliated with governmental and political organizations, this contrast implies that the aggressive war framing was concentrated in governmental and political contexts during the period around the “first wave” of the pandemic, and the authors of newspaper articles did not prefer to follow the framing. Second, an interesting parallel can be observed between the convex curve from August to No‑ vember in Figure 18.4 and that from November to February in Figure 18.5. The preceding trend in authorial texts appears to have moved three months forward in quoted texts. After the peak of the “second wave” in August, newspapers often reported that the economic damages caused by the pandemic were quite serious, adopting the defensive war framing, such as dameji ‘damage’ and dageki ‘blow’ in (12). Although we avoid making certain causal assumptions and do not argue that changes in authorial texts “caused” changes in quoted texts, as Gamson and Modigliani (1989) deliberately did, it is interesting to see the same kinds of defensive metaphors were common in quoted texts during the period from November to February, as illustrated in (18). Defensive meta‑ phors were common in the latter half of the sampling period, and authorial texts seemed to lead the trend. 18 Ima=no jiten=de dameji=ga oki‑sugiru. now=pos moment=loc damage=nom big‑too.much “The damage is too serious at this moment.” (Shintaro Inada, the manager of the seafood restaurant Gimpei, December 15, 2020) Third, the journey framing was concentrated in the latter half of the quoted texts (Figure 18.3), whereas the authorial texts contained it throughout the sampling period (Figure 18.2). The contrast 287

Tetsuta Komatsubara

examples per 100 articles

Aggressive

Defensive

WAR

5 4 3 2 1 0

Figure 18.4  Change in frequency of the war framing in authorial texts

examples per 100 articles

Aggressive

Defensive

WAR

7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0

Figure 18.5  Change in frequency of the war framing in quoted texts

can be seen more clearly in Figures 18.6 and 18.7, which show the changes in the proportion of obstacle and way metaphors in the journey framing. We can observe a parallel between the autho‑ rial and quoted texts; the convex from August to October in Figure 18.6 seems to have moved two months forward in Figure 18.7. Both the journey framing and the rate of the way metaphors dras‑ tically increased at the peak of each convex, and journalists seemed to have led the trend earlier than non‑journalists, just as in the case of the defensive war framing. Typical examples of the way metaphor in the latter half of the sampling period, as illustrated in (19), included sakiyuki ‘road ahead’, mitosu ‘get a clear view’, and yukue ‘direction’. The way metaphors make the coronavirus less agentive, and the increase of this type after the “second wave” probably reflects the situation in which people reframe the coronavirus as an entity embedded in the “new normal” lifestyle. Re‑ framing by journalists is explicit in the case of (20), where the opponent metaphor is highlighted with quotation marks, which implies that the author stresses that the war framing is questionable (cf. Kövecses 2010: 54–55) and getting less apt. 288

Framing and Metaphor in Media Discourse

examples per 100 articles

OBSTACLE

WAY

JOURNEY

7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0

Figure 18.6  Change in frequency of the journey framing in authorial texts

examples per 100 articles

OBSTACLE

WAY

JOURNEY

7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0

Figure 18.7  Change in frequency of the journey framing in quoted texts

19 Shin‑gata   korona=no   shusoku=mo mitose‑zu get.a.clear.view‑neg new‑type  coronavirus=pos end=top “[We] cannot get a clear view that [the pandemic of] the coronavirus comes to an end.” (September 17, 2020) 20 Genzai=no   watashitachi=no   “teki”=ga   uirusu=nomi‑narazu   taisetsuna “enemy”=nom virus=only‑neg precious present=pos we=pos mono=o mirai=eto tsunagukoto=o akirameru kokoro=nanoda future=to connecting=acc give.up mind=be thing=acc “Our ‘enemy’ is now not only the coronavirus but the idea of giving up passing precious things to the future.” (October 1, 2020)

289

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The synchronic analysis of this study showed that war, journey, and disaster were the three prin‑ cipal metaphorical sources in Japanese for conceptualizing the coronavirus, whether authorial or quoted. However, the diachronic analysis indicated that the timing of the peak uses of war and journey metaphors for authorial and quoted examples differed: Authorial examples of defensive metaphors in the war framing peaked three months earlier than quoted examples. Similarly, the peak use of way metaphors in the journey framing in authorial texts peaked two months earlier than in quoted texts. Although we should be careful about the causal interpretations of these re‑ sults, it is interesting to note that journalists led the trends of metaphorical framings for these two sources, which could constitute alternatives to the aggressive metaphors in the war framing typi‑ cally observed in politics and government. In this respect, journalists, at least in the case of Asahi Shimbun, seemed to resist following politicians’ orientation toward the aggressive war framing, and consequently they might have influenced public opinion by framing the coronavirus in terms of less aggressive and less agentive alternatives.

Conclusion Metaphors implicitly frame complex social issues in media discourse, and their framing functions give the audience different definitions, impressions, and evaluations of these issues. For metaphor analysis of framing, newspapers are useful material in that we can (1) compare the framings of journalists with those of non‑journalists using alternation between authorial and quoted texts as a social variable and (2) trace changes in framings over time using the publication date as a temporal variable. Methods for identifying and classifying metaphorical framings are necessary, and the cognitive linguistic approach to metaphors provides a robust descriptive framework. Empirical approaches to metaphors have been developed for several decades, and future research dealing with metaphors in media discourse will provide critical analyses of various social issues and new insights for qualitative and quantitative framing research. A case study on how metaphors were used to frame the COVID‑19 pandemic in Japan from 2020 to 2021 revealed that there were significant diachronic changes in proportions between the three principal metaphorical framings (i.e., war, journey, and disaster), implying that the war (specifically the defense‑oriented war) and journey framings in authorial texts preceded the trends in quoted texts, which can be an example of diachronic interactions between frames. Analyzing the effects of framings by conceptual metaphors in media discourse seems less straightforward than in the case of specific metaphors in political slogans, such as Gorin=wa korona=ni uchikat‑ta akashi ‘The Olympics will be the symbol of victory against the coronavirus’ by Prime Minister Abe. However, this does not mean that metaphor analysis at the conceptual level is not useful for revealing how metaphors influence people as a form of mind engineering. While people are often able to make a conscious decision to accept or reject the framing evoked by an explicit metaphori‑ cal slogan, sophisticated critical thinking on metaphorical framings is needed to be conscious of the conceptual source they adopt to describe a social issue, because conceptual metaphors are basically manifested in a system of conventional expressions, such as keizaitekina dameji ‘eco‑ nomic damage’ or kiki=o norikoeru ‘get over the crisis’. Our finding that some metaphorical framings by non‑journalists followed the trends of framings by journalists might be a sign of non‑­ journalists’ unconscious acceptance of the conceptual framework provided by journalists. In this respect, ­metaphor‑based framing strategies in media discourse can give rise to a trend of framing in public opinion and influence people’s perspectives on a social issue.

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19 UNCOVERING THE LINGUISTIC AGENDA OF ‘HINDI’STAN The Political Implications of Language Imposition in India Raisun Mathew Introduction Noam Chomsky shares the view that “a language is not just words. It’s a culture, a tradition, a unification of a community, a whole history that creates what a community is. It’s all embodied in a language” (Makepeace 2011). Nevertheless, the concept of a language gets much more elaborated with the intentional association of an ideology that can provide immense strength to the existence/ endangerment/extinction of other languages (Basak 2022a). Such conditions of a language can become intricate and toxic, leading to adverse conditions than progressive construction and unity of a community. Language, as a quintessential reflection of human culture, has played a signifi‑ cant role in shaping the course of history and influencing the dynamics of power within societies. The long list of 7,168 active languages in the world (Eberhard et al. 2023) would provide a rough sketch of the diverse population that directly and indirectly are prone to challenges from one or the other. Language has been used by dominant and strong groups to advance their ideas and maintain control over the weaker sections of society from ancient civilizations to contemporary nation‑states. Invading the language borders of the victimized group of people has a profound impact on their cultural interaction (Wang and Minett 2005) and could be used as a tool to conquer them. Language, as it is interconnected with many indigenous aspects of living is considered a tool of the invader to attack the cultural, traditional, and sociological aspects of the colonized. Having the notion that language constructs identity (Sayedayn 2021: 134), the domination and imposi‑ tion of languages have boosted the thought and pace of coloniality in several parts of the world. Language ideologies are not direct and automatic reflections of an individual’s social position and experiences or their moral and political beliefs. Instead, they act as mediators between one’s social standing and linguistic practices, influencing various aspects of communication in diverse domains (Gal 2006). This phenomenon has been particularly evident during colonial periods and invasions, where the imposition of specific languages has left indelible marks on the victimized societies, perpetuating its effects for generations to come. Language repression often occurs when a language that is considered dominant or used by people of powerful nations/empires gains significant political, economic, and cultural power in a particular region or country and represses other languages through various mechanisms and soci‑ etal dynamics. Louis Althusser mentions that the non‑native learner gets exposed or ‘interpellated’

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DOI: 10.4324/9781003289746-24

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by the cultural and ideological influence of the language during the process of operating it (as cited in Ashcroft et al. 1995). It may not be a sudden process but a gradual imposition of the same along with the exercise of culture and power. In the wake of modern advancements and transformed ‘civilizations’, it would be right to quote: direct colonialism has largely ended; imperialism, as we shall see, lingers where it has a­ lways been, in a kind of general cultural sphere as well as in specific political, ideological, economic, and social practices. (Said 1993: 3–8) The imperialist and colonial attitudes of dominant groups have restructured into a more powerful, but silent subtype of linguicism coined by Tove Skutnabb‑Kangas (1988) that draws parallels with racism and ethnicism, which involve hierarchies based on race and ethnicity, and sexism, and it includes hierarchies based on gender. In the case of linguicism, hierarchization occurs based on language. Notwithstanding the advantages that it provides to the imperialist, the adverse effect on the victimized groups is high as it leaves behind a profound impact, causing cultural erosion, the loss of diversity, and the dilution of identities. As native languages diminish, they carry with them a vast reservoir of cultural knowledge, memories, traditions, and narratives. This attrition of culture is not limited to individual or communal losses but represents a regrettable reduction in humanity’s collective heritage (Clayborne 2023). The perception of local languages as inferior in the evolving social perception leads to the stigmatization of these languages. When languages with higher social status, prestige, and modernity invade a cultural existence, the stigma caused by the local languages influences the overall linguistic culture of the society and can lead to a situation called ‘trans‑national identity’ (Lieberman 1979). The Indian subcontinent, with its remarkable diversity of languages and cultures, provides a compelling backdrop to explore the intricate relationship between language, politics, and power. As a vibrant multicultural society, India is a microcosm of linguistic plurality where myriad re‑ gional languages have coexisted for centuries, enriching the tapestry of its heritage. However, the post‑independence history of the country has witnessed complex language policies, ambigu‑ ity in practices, and perpetuating anxieties in its perception in diverse communities. Out of the 19,500 languages and dialects spoken as mother tongues in India (Basak 2022b), only 22 are offi‑ cially recognized as scheduled under the Eighth Schedule of the Indian Constitution. According to the 2011 census data, 1210.19 million people are living in the country, and 57.09% of them speak Hindi, making it the most widely spoken language in India (see Table 19.1). Although Hindi continues to be the most common language in India, it is not the national language of India. The interesting fact is that there is no national language for India as per the constitution. The Indian Constitution, under Article 343 (1) and (3), has acknowledged both Hindi and English as the official languages while preserving the rights of states to choose their regional languages for administration and education. However, the constitution also recognizes the signifi‑ cance of protecting and fostering the linguistic variety of the country. India’s dedication to inclu‑ sion and unity in variety is reflected in the country’s lack of a national language designation. All linguistic communities are more likely to have a feeling of belonging when many languages are accepted and linguistic pluralism is promoted, which encourages respect and coexistence. This chapter aims to delve deep into the historical, political, and linguistic agendas that under‑ lie the imposition of Hindi over other regional languages in India. Analysing the recent language policies and practices, the chapter seeks to uncover the intentional motives and consequences

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Uncovering the Linguistic Agenda of ‘Hindi’stan Table 19.1 Total (first, second, and third Language) speakers of selected languages in India (Census 2011) Language

Speakers

Speaker % in population

Hindi English Bengali Marathi Telugu Tamil Gujarati Urdu Kannada Malayalam Punjabi Assamese

692 129 107 99 95 77 60 63 59 36 24 14

57.09 10.67 8.85 8.18 7.77 6.36 4.99 5.18 4.84 2.93 2.97 1.94

of this linguistic phenomenon. The multifaceted interplay between politics and language in the sociocultural situations of India necessitates a comprehensive examination to better understand the impact of such policies on the diverse population of the country. To understand the imperialist nature of language in the Indian context, an investigation tracing the historical trajectory of the English language in India during the colonial era is utilized. English was a colonizer‑imposed lan‑ guage that was earlier used for communication, instruction, and administration. The current issue presented by the predominately spoken Indian language can be examined by looking at how this historical precedent may have influenced subsequent linguistic decisions and power relationships in the post‑independence era. Therefore, the objectives of the study are categorized as follows: 1 Understand the historical, political, and linguistic motives behind the imposition of Hindi over other regional languages in India. 2 Examine the complex interplay between ideology and language in the multicultural context of India. 3 Analyse the effects of imposed language policy on linguistic and cultural diversity in Indian society. The significance and relevance of the research in the Indian context go beyond merely understand‑ ing the current issues posed by the dominant and powerful ideology of the country. They also relate to maintaining linguistic diversity, addressing language politics, fostering inclusivity and national unity, advocating for equitable language policies, and comprehending the sociocultural effects of such an exercise of power through a dominant language. The research is very important for advancing social justice and community empowerment for linguistic minorities. It raises the voices and struggles of those affected by language imposition, providing a platform for advocacy and policy reforms that uphold linguistic rights and representation. Understanding the sociocul‑ tural effects of dominant language imposition helps in revealing hidden narratives of resistance and resilience within these communities. Recognizing language as a site of power and agency, the research contributes to the broader discourse on decolonization and the restoration of cultural

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autonomy, which in turn has developed into the political and linguistic agenda of language imposi‑ tion hindering the existence of linguistic and cultural identity of the minority/non‑Hindi speaking Indian population.

India, Imperialism, and Languages: Historical Challenges Before India gained independence in 1947, its territorial boundaries encompassed present‑day ­India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. It formed a subcontinent of immense linguistic and cultural diversity. The intricate web of languages and cultures that made up India’s ancient and pre‑­ independence society was extremely influential. The development of many modern Indian lan‑ guages was influenced by Sanskrit, an ancient Indo‑European language that played a significant role in religious texts and classical literature. Through centuries of cultural exchange, its pervasive influence spread beyond the realms of religion and literature and permeated numerous regional languages and dialects. Dravidian languages like Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and Malayalam, each with a rich literary history spanning centuries, flourished in the southern regions. The Indo‑Aryan language family, however, predominated in the northern regions, with Hindi and its many dialects being common in the plains, Bengali being spoken in the eastern region (including present‑day Bangladesh), Gujarati in the western region, Marathi in the western‑central areas, Punjabi in the northwest, and Odia in the eastern coastal regions. Urdu, a language with Persian and Arabic roots that emerged during the mediaeval era, took on the role of a lingua franca, facilitating commu‑ nication between various communities, particularly in the northern regions, and within cultural exchanges, whereas, the northeastern part of the country has yet another list of languages spoken by ethnic groups that are primarily under the Tibeto‑Burman language family such as the Bodo, Manipuri, Mizo, and many more. India’s complex linguistic scenario of the pre‑independence era reflects both its historical past and the difficulties and opportunities presented by linguistic diver‑ sity. This analytical investigation emphasizes how important language is in forming Indian society, acknowledging the importance of regional languages, the foundational role of Sanskrit, and the rise of Urdu as a unifying force. Understanding the dynamic linguistic landscape of pre‑independ‑ ence India enriches our comprehension of its complex history and cultural identity. India’s literature, arts, and religious practices were closely woven into its linguistic culture before it attained independence, resulting in a complex sequence of numerous linguistic expres‑ sions. The literary heritage of each language was distinct and comprised of epics, poems, dramas, and philosophical treatises. A number of the most renowned literary works in the history of the subcontinent were inspired by the historical resonance of languages like Sanskrit, Tamil, Bengali, and Urdu. Further enhancing the diversity of India’s language culture and expressing the com‑ plex identities of its numerous areas were the oral storytelling tradition, folk music, and regional festivals. These regional vernaculars not only operate as languages but also function as carriers of local, patriotic, traditional, and regional identities that collectively form the core of India’s national identity (Peers and Gooptu 2012: 125). Despite being a source of cultural strength, this linguistic diversity posed difficulties for administration and communication under British colo‑ nial control. The old multilingual system was disturbed when English was mandated as the lan‑ guage of governance and education. This led to the formation of privileged elite that was fluent in English while marginalizing people who were fluent in regional languages. In the theoretical con‑ struct of Phillipson (1992), linguistic imperialism is the result of structural and cultural inequal‑ ity between the dominant language and others. Both material wealth and ideological inequality contribute to such imperialism based on language. In the development of the theoretical aspect of linguistic imperialism, he proposes three stages that help in the process such as imposing the 296

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colonizer’s power and language, training a group of local elites and privileged classes who serve the benefit of the colonists, and ideological persuasion using media and technology. Despite these colonial pressures, Indian languages displayed remarkable resilience, enduring the odds to maintain their significance and cultural value. An analysis of India’s linguistic milieu reveals the dynamic interplay between language, culture, and power during the pre‑independence period, underscoring the need to preserve linguistic heritage while addressing the challenges posed by external influences. Imperialism significantly influenced the course of India’s historical records and permanently altered the country’s social, cultural, and political landscape. The British colonial policy in the nation was driven by imperialism. The introduction and exchange of language have historically been associated with the expression of power, particularly in the context of military and economic dominance in the modern world. However, this dynamic can sometimes lead to linguistic impe‑ rialism when one language is enforced upon speakers of other dialects or languages (Serrao and Shani 2022: 6). Macaulay’s process of creating “a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals and in intellect” was towards refining and enriching the vernacular dialects of the country having the notion that “English is better worth knowing than Sanscrit or Arabic” (Macaulay 1835). With the notion of superiority as in Charles Grant (1792), it was instructed that the communication of knowledge should be made in the English medium itself (Mahmood 1895: 11). Such imposition of the English language had been opposed by freedom fighters like Bal Gangadhar Tilak mentioning that “mere knowledge of the [English] language is no true education. Such a compulsion for the study of a foreign language does not exist anywhere except in India” (Tilak and Ghose 1918) and Mahatma Gandhi strongly opposing by writing in Harijan in 1937 that “the excessive importance given to English has cast upon the educated class, a burden which has maimed them mentally for life and made them strangers in their own land” (quoted in Varkey and Hussain 1940: 3). As a result of the repercussions of the colonial period, post‑independence India embarked on a journey to recognize and protect linguistic diversity. The Cultural Revolution and ending of the foreign rule were considered from the perspective that This slow and complex process involves dismantling and adapting inherited colonial atti‑ tudes towards indigenous languages and culture on the one hand and towards the language and culture of the former colonial power on the other. This is part of the search for new symbolism and cultural ideologies, the reconstruction of a national self‑image. (Spencer 1975: 193) More or less, the multifaceted process of decolonizing the English language in India has been characterized by a conscious and deliberate challenge to colonial attitudes towards the language, as well as the adaptation of English to reflect Indian sensibilities. According to Sharma (2022), the decolonization stages are categorized when, 1 2 3 4 5

the colonized mind seeks to reclaim its cultural heritage, history, and traditions the community processes and understands the victimization experienced during colonization the proposed independent colony plans its governance, culture, and future people unite for a single cause; and after political decolonization, the colonized reevaluate institutions, social values, education, language, and other issues developed by colonizers. (Sharma 2022: 195–196) 297

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The promotion of Indian languages in government and education, encouragement of the produc‑ tion of new English‑language works that celebrate Indian culture and identity, and raising public awareness of the colonial legacy of English in the nation are just a few of the strategies used to achieve this goal. A thorough transformation of English in India is a challenging endeavour that requires further attention and effort, notwithstanding considerable progress in these initiatives. It is also interesting to note that the establishment of linguistic states like Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, Kerala, and others made language a methodological consideration, further enhanc‑ ing the linguistic distinctiveness of various regions. Despite the fact that before independence, states were primarily divided along political and administrative lines, the demand for linguistic division of states was on the rise due to a number of factors, including: 1 The desire of linguistic groups to have their own state government that could promote their language and culture. 2 The belief that linguistic states would be more efficient and responsive to the needs of the people. 3 The fear that linguistic minorities would be discriminated against in non‑linguistic states. While considering the linguistic division of states, Dar Commission’s statement that “linguistic homogeneity in the formation of new provinces is certainly attainable within certain limits, but only at the cost of creating a fresh minority problem” (Mukhopadhyay 2018) was significant be‑ cause in a way the British imperialism influenced the creation of linguistic states in India. Despite efforts to decolonize the colonial imprints of the British in India through several efforts, it is a fact that “the English language has a prominent place in India, a place that no other indigenous Indian language has” (Gargesh 2007: 138). It may be due to the reason that there is no language common to the country to unite them together facilitating people to communicate with each other.

Language as an Identity: Cultural, Emotional, and Linguistic Perspectives The shared Indian identity post‑independence has given rise to several macro and micro identities and consequent challenges. Among the many other challenges related to ideologies, religion, caste, and so on, language plays a key role in uniting and dividing the people in the country. Though not prominent and highlighted in the recurring mainstream discussion, linguistic division of society and the social mobilization strategy of ‘elite closure’ that is possible through three sociolinguistic universals such as linguistic variety, situational allocation, and evaluation by community mem‑ bers. It means: 1 Linguistic Variety: Within a community, not all individuals speak the same linguistic varieties. 2 Situational Allocation: Different linguistic varieties are typically assigned to specific situ‑ ational uses within the community. 3 Evaluation by Community Members: All linguistic varieties are subject to positive or nega‑ tive evaluations based on their use in particular types of interactions. (Myers‑Scotton 2009: 149) This existentialist notion of language categorization in the country can lead to alienation, isola‑ tion, and identity crises in marginalized linguistic communities. Many people believe that Hindi, being India’s national language, brings the diverse population together. However, promoting this 298

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idea can be seen as political and acts against India’s democratic and linguistic diversity. It is not valid for the reasons that (1) Hindi is not the only language spoken in India and (2) the promotion of Hindi as a national language leads to the marginalization of other languages. Shashi Tharoor (2014) argues that India is a multicultural and pluralistic society and that this is what makes the country unique in its existence. Primarily, there is no single identity as Indian because each per‑ son’s experience of India is different, having several micro identities that form the macro identity. The collective convergence of several micro identities of a person in India brings the macro iden‑ tity of becoming an ‘Indian’ and thereby expressing the identity of ‘Indianness’. This diversity is what makes India a vibrant and exciting place to live, but it can also be a source of conflict (Tharoor 2014: 111). The Indian Constitution, founded on democratic principles, establishes a framework for effectively managing the country’s diversity. Within this structure, the judiciary and legislature play pivotal roles, safeguarding the rights of all individuals to freely practice their re‑ ligion, use their preferred language, and uphold their distinct customs. India’s unique and tolerant identity is shaped by this inclusive approach. However, the escalating intolerance towards minor‑ ity groups poses a significant threat to India’s multicultural and pluralistic essence.

Hindi as a Tool to Facilitate the Decolonizing Process of English The process of decolonization amidst the influence of globalization and residuals of linguistic imperialism is a challenge to India, mainly because of the widely scattered and diverse population, linguistic patterns, and cultural differences. Reducing the influence of the colonial language and promoting the revitalization and recognition of indigenous languages are perceived as possible by the governing bodies through encouraging the use of Hindi, which is the most popular and widely spoken Indian language. The complete replication of the British education system in India, despite the difference in socio‑economic and linguistic differences (Nurullah and Naik 1943: 406–411) has a major role in the emphasis given to English than the vernacular languages. It is expected that by elevating Hindi alongside regional languages, the government can help restore linguistic pride, national identity, patriotic unity, and value to the diverse linguistic heritage of the country. As language is deeply intertwined with culture, there has been a conception that promoting Hindi can help preserve and celebrate Indian cultural expressions through literature, arts, and media, which in turn contributes to the decolonization of cultural representations that might have been influenced by the dominance of English. The Government of India led by the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) is enthusiastic about taking action to decolonize the country through renaming slogans, cit‑ ies, and union territories, celebrating cultural heritage, providing accessibility to localized digital content, and promoting mother tongue through the recent National Education Policy (2020). The Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s decision to speak Hindi with his foreign visitors is a clear statement to uphold the Indian‑ness and reject the supremacy of the English language over the Indian languages (Srinivasan 2014). However, the global influence of English remains undeniable in the age of globalization. While the decolonization process seeks to reduce the influence of the colonial language, the pragmatic re‑ ality is that English continues to play a vital role in international communication, trade, and educa‑ tion. A complete disregard for English education would limit India’s participation in international affairs and impede the nation’s economic and technical development. The hegemony through the language of English that the British pushed and exercised in India during the colonial era is a contributing factor to the current state of the nation. A sociolinguistic concept called linguistic hegemony examines the dynamics of uneven power amongst languages in a given social, political, or cultural setting. It explores the ways in which one language, which is frequently connected to 299

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powerful organizations or groups, exerts control and influence over other languages in a commu‑ nity. This exercise of control can be without force, through legitimation and by consensual rule (Suarez 2002: 512). English exerts linguistic hegemony in India through its historical colonial legacy, dominance in elite education and job markets, prevalence in media and governance, associ‑ ation with social aspirations and modernity, and its global significance. The language’s dominance over other languages is upheld consensually, sustaining it without the use of coercion. The conflict between linguistic variety and the benefits of knowing English remains a difficult challenge in Indian society, despite initiatives to promote Indian languages. At the same time, the imposition and promotion of learning Hindi is expected to have the effect of unlearning the colonial language. However, if the language of the education system gets replaced by Hindi, it would be dangerous for development and integration (Babu 2019).

Imposition of Hindi: An Undemocratic Path to Linguistic Dominance If a single language becomes dominant through the provisions of policy or law, it would cre‑ ate unnecessary perplexity causing social tension and inequality among other language‑speaking populations. Hindi, as a prominent and widely used language in India, is eligible for the position of a national language only if all the parts of the country speak the language. Historically, there have been contentious debates over the imposition of Hindi as the sole official language, especially in the southern and northeastern states where Hindi is not widely spoken. Imposition of a language or subjugation of one’s language without respecting it leads to resistance, mainly because of the reason that most of the states in India were divided by respecting the linguistic diversity of the people (Ranjan 2021: 333). The linguistic divide between the northern, northeastern, and southern states of India is a complex issue that reflects the country’s diverse cultural and linguistic land‑ scape. The ‘Hindi heartland’ (Kumaramkandath: 2019) primarily comprises states in the northern and central regions, where Hindi is widely spoken and serves as a means of communication among the local population. On the other hand, southern states like Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Kerala, and Andhra Pradesh have a rich history of using classical languages like Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam, and Telugu, respectively. The case is not different in the northeastern states such as Assam, Bengal, Tripura, Manipur, and Mizoram having their regional languages with historic importance. These regions have consistently advocated for the preservation of their languages and have expressed concern that Hindi’s dominance may lead to linguistic marginalization and cultural assimilation. The dimensions of the influence of the linguistic dominance of Hindi over non‑Hindi‑speaking states are large in themselves. The preferential treatment of the dominant language in institutions, political arenas, and media perpetuates direct and indirect social inequalities, limiting access to resources and opportunities for speakers of other languages. It will also foster itself as a tool for national identity, but it may marginalize minority languages and communities, thereby causing tensions and conflicts over language rights. In India, Hindi is often perceived as a natural linguistic expression linked with the dominant religious and cultural groups, particularly the North Indian Hindu power elites, who endorse it as the national language (Ranjan 2021: 333). The notion that the people who speak the dominant language have supremacy in general could be mainly rooted in the innate fear of the other language speakers who have experienced marginalization from the national identity because of the perceptions of power dynamics and hierarchy among language communities by population, historic significance, and cultural influence. It impacts intergroup relations and identity formation, causing unfortunate cultural homogenization, loss of linguistic diversity, and social discrimination.

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The consequences and challenges of imposing Hindi on non‑Hindi‑speaking states in India could lead to situations of cultural invasion that give rise to resistance from the local population. The ongoing activities to expand the Hindi language to non‑Hindi‑speaking states have given rise to anti‑Hindi agitations which in turn reject the agenda propagated through the National Education Policy (2020) and All India Radio broadcasts (Mariappan 2022). It gives the notion that any ef‑ fort to impose Hindi as the dominant language can evoke sentiments of linguistic marginalization and suppression, leading to protests, political unrest social divisions, and thereby heightening the North‑South divide and threatening social cohesion and national integration.

Hindi as a National Language: The Gandhian Perspective The discussion on imposing Hindi on the non‑Hindi‑speaking states began with the statement of Amit Shah, the Union Home Minister of India for a unifying language for the country. His state‑ ment led to widespread criticism and opposition stating it as a move towards ‘Hindi imperialism’ (The Hindu Bureau 2022). While it was not about imposing Hindi over other regional languages, it should be noted that Mahatma Gandhi did support the idea of making Hindi the national language of India (Shekhar 2019). Gandhi emphasized the significance of having a national language and argued that Hindi was the best option because it is widely used by the Indian populace. Given that Hindi is the language that the majority of Indians speak, he thought that making it the nation’s official tongue would help to bring the nation together. Gandhi did not, however, support the na‑ tionalization of Hindi in its entirety. He outlined five key characteristics that a language must fulfil to be regarded as India’s national tongue. 1 It has to ensure successful communication and governance throughout the nation; for which the national language should be simple for government employees to learn and use effectively. 2 It should work as a channel for political, economic, and religious dialogue throughout India, fostering harmony and facilitating easy interregional exchanges. 3 As it is important to avoid any perception of linguistic encroachment on speakers of minor‑ ity languages, the language must be that of the majority of Indians. 4 It must ensure accessibility and inclusivity for all citizens to engage with it, the national language should be simple for the entire country to learn. 5 The choice of the national language should be devoid of temporary or passing concerns and focus on a language that will stand on a permanent basis and serve as a unifying factor for future generations. (Gandhi 1956: 4) When examining Gandhi’s writings and speeches, it becomes clear that he did not push for the com‑ mon language to replace regional languages but rather to complement them (Deshmukh 1972: 7). Gandhi proposed the name Hindustani as a resolution to the ongoing animosities between Hindus and Muslims in North India. He believed that by combining Hindi and Urdu, Hindustani could promote harmony between the two communities. According to Gandhi’s plan, Hindus would con‑ tribute to a Sanskritized Hindi and Muslims would contribute to a Persianized Urdu, resulting in a language that would incorporate both Hindu and Muslim linguistic characteristics (Gandhi 1956: 5). Though Gandhi aimed to bridge the linguistic gap between the communities and promote harmony by emphasizing shared linguistic elements and cultural heritage (Sengupta 2019), it led to further consequences related to cultural, linguistic, and religious differences in the country. However,

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considering the linguistic perspective, conflicts and anti‑Hindi movements arose when the centre tried to impose Hindi on non‑Hindi‑speaking states.

Cultural and Emotional Identity of Language Considering how crucial it is to communicate with other people in a diverse population, commu‑ nication is in fact a core goal of language use. But its dimensional value is far more than merely informational. It promotes social cohesion, problem‑solving, and decision‑making by allowing for the expression of emotions, building relationships, and facilitating cultural transmission. In line with the fundamental goal of communication, it is crucial for dialogue and diplomacy, and its symbolic representation improves intercultural understanding. People become more emotion‑ ally invested in a language when such emotions are expressed culturally. Language is a vehicle through which emotions are expressed, enabling people to communicate their thoughts, opinions, and worldviews and promoting empathy and understanding among participants in society. Stud‑ ies related to emotionality differences between a native and foreign language state that emotional expressions are felt stronger in the native language than in the foreign language because it is influenced by human associative memory (Caldwell‑Harris and Aycicegi‑Dinn 2016). However, when linguistic dominance of a language becomes a threat, the consequences are significant. The imposition of Hindi can lead to the loss of knowledge about traditional cultures and practices asso‑ ciated with the non‑Hindi‑speaking states. When a language is lost, so too is the knowledge that is associated with it. This can have a devastating impact on the cultural heritage of a community and such a homogenization can result in the dilution of traditional practices and customs, impacting the cultural richness of a community. It is yet another threat to the innate identity of people who speak regional languages other than Hindi. Speakers of minority languages often face feelings of alienation and identity crisis, as their emotional connections to their mother tongues are severed. According to Baez (2002), language is intertwined with culture and identity, forming crucial com‑ ponents that shape the sense of self and also establish the parameters for inclusion and exclusion, belonging and alienation, and achievement and setback. In short, language imbues social systems with significance, both in terms of identity formation and the potential for oppression. It is very critical and crucial that linguistic dominance of a particular language can perpetuate social inequalities, and access to education, economic opportunities, and political representation become limited for those who do not speak the dominant language fluently. The intricate relation‑ ship between language, culture, and identity is an interconnected phenomenon marked by the complex interplay of influences, where language is not just a means of communication but a pow‑ erful tool for expressing, preserving, and constructing cultural and individual identities. Gegeo and Watson‑Gegeo (1999) illuminate the significant role language plays in the development of cultural identity and the survival of a particular cultural group. When individuals lose proficiency in their native language, they often face a challenge in connecting with their cultural heritage. This can lead to a sense of disconnection from their native cultural community, as language is a fundamen‑ tal aspect of cultural identity.

Anti‑Hindi Agitation: Pre‑ and Post‑Independence Struggles According to Kandasamy (2022), the agitations and movements against the imposition of Hindi have consistently emerged from the grassroots, with marginalized and oppressed communities taking the lead in advocating for their language rights. These language movements have been driven by the people’s determination to preserve their linguistic and cultural identities. In 1937, 302

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the first anti‑Hindi imposition agitation was held against the compulsory teaching of Hindi in the schools of the Madras Presidency. Later, the agitations of 1946–1950 broke out again when the government tried to bring back Hindi in schools. The anti‑Hindi agitation of the mid‑1960s holds significant historical importance in shaping India’s language policy. The protests against the im‑ position of Hindi as the sole official language highlighted the importance of preserving linguistic diversity and cultural identities across the country. The movement underscored the significance of linguistic diversity and cultural autonomy, with protesters expressing concerns about the potential marginalization of non‑Hindi speakers. In response to the protests, the Indian government even‑ tually adopted the Official Languages Act of 1963, which recognized both Hindi and English as the official languages of India. The agitation and movements have always been vigorous in Tamil Nadu as for them the emotional attachment for Tamil is high. Criticizing the BJP‑led central gov‑ ernment for imposing Hindi on non‑Hindi‑speaking states, M. K. Stalin declared that the efforts against Hindi imposition would continue to protect Tamil (PTI 2023). Opposition parties have consistently employed a strategy of harnessing linguistic and regional sentiments in response to the BJP‑led central government’s push for the ideological imposition of Hindi. This approach was evident in their election slogan, Bangla Nijer Meykei Chai (Bengal wants only its own daughter), which strongly emphasized Bengali identity and language. This slogan served as a clear and resounding rejection of the BJP’s persistent efforts to homogenize culture and language (Chattopadhyay 2022). The BJP government contends that their aim is not to supplant native languages with Hindi, but rather to replace English, which was imposed during the colonial era. Nevertheless, given English’s entrenched position in the Indian system, there ap‑ pears to be little realistic prospect of it being supplanted by Hindi (Ellis‑Peterson 2022). Opting for Hindi as a replacement for English, especially considering Hindi’s limited global reach, could have detrimental consequences for both the educational and economic spheres at this juncture of the country’s development. Another instance is the recent debate on whether to support the nomen‑ clature of the country as ‘India’ or ‘Bharat’. While the supporters may find justification in Article 1 of the Indian Constitution, which states, “India, that is Bharat, shall be a Union of States”, or to the notion that ‘Bharat’ envisions an authentic self‑identity and cultural self‑governance, independent of Western influence and control (Dasgupta 1993), the sudden promotion is primarily driven by political and ideological motives that have many times been around the name ‘Hindustan’ (PTI 2021) which was never considered by the Constituent Assembly during the debates on naming the country (Clémentin‑Ojha 2014).

Linguistic Hegemony to Dominance: The Ideology behind Language Imposition The imposition and exercise of power and hegemony through the English language have always been criticized during and after the independence of India by the British. The criticism that con‑ tinues as part of the language’s hegemony in India is that it has created division in the country. This situation is a fact because colonialism and the hegemony that continues to affect the local languages are high. The colonial language policy aimed to alter the cultural identity of ‘native subjects’, using language as a tool. This fostered an obedient, loyal class, dividing India into Eng‑ lish‑educated elites and vernacular‑speaking masses, ultimately consolidating British rule (Naik 2004: 254–255). Considering this argument and its possible effects, the question related to the imposition of Hindi also remains valid. If the introduction and imposition of English are consid‑ ered to have adversely affected the cultural and linguistic knowledge of the country and have led to a sense of inferiority and alienation from their native languages and heritage, so are the efforts 303

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for the domination of Hindi over other regional languages. Concerns about the marginalization of languages and probable endangerment arise from the dominance of Hindi over other regional tongues. Even if considering the argument and intention of promoting Hindi as innocent, the ad‑ verse impact that it can have on the unity of the country in the latter phase after seven decades of independence is high, as it is considered a similar attempt to establish the supremacy of a particular language and thereby the authority of people having specific ideological interests to be dominant. With hundreds of languages being spoken all over India, a country with great linguistic diversity and culture, each language contains its own cultural knowledge, expressions, and historical value. In an effort to elevate Hindi above other languages, there is a danger that regional languages would be ignored or completely lost, depriving their communities of their cultural richness and sense of identity.

Linguistic Polarization: Is There a Political Agenda? While considering the linguistic diversity in India, it is also significant to mention the linguistic minorities in the country because of the numerous regional languages, the distribution of the lan‑ guages due to migration and geographic peculiarity, distinct tribal languages, and dialects within the regional languages. While some languages have a more extensive reach than others, no single language can claim to be spoken by a majority population on a national scale, which makes the country the land of linguistic minorities (Austin 2009: 68). The strong emotional connection to native language, which carries deep‑rooted cultural knowledge and historical significance has given rise to protests in several parts of the country, especially in the South’s non‑Hindi speaking states which gave rise to new discourse with regard to language policy (Kim and Kumar 2020: xxiii). The political tensions in these states have at times resulted in signals of national divide, recurrent clashes between the policies of the central and state governments, and demand for linguistic autonomy and protection of regional languages. As local languages bring a regional identity to the people in the non‑Hindi‑speaking states, the promotion of Hindi as a national language can be seen as an imposition of northern cultural norms on the rest of the country. This could create a sense of an ideological divide where ‘us’ versus ‘them’ becomes prominent in the discussions and debates. The divide in terms of religion has already separated India into majority and minority groups with the politics of hate (Reddy 2011; Dena 2022). Ideological, political, and cultural clashes be‑ tween the divided groups have given rise to several riots, inequalities, and violence in the country. The ‘Hindutva’ ideology that seeks to establish a ‘Hindu Rashtra’ gives prominence to the Hindi language as they believe that a common language can serve as a unifying force for the diverse population of India and create a belonging among Hindus who form the majority of the Indian population. According to them, Hindi is an important part of Hindu culture and legacy and serves as a link to ancient India. The proponents of the agenda hope to reinforce the notion that India is a country with a dominant Hindu population and a unified cultural identity by elevating Hindi to the status of the country’s principal language for communication, governance, and education. Hindu‑ tva proponents of Hindi imposition frequently claim that it can help Hindus develop a feeling of national identity and pride that transcends linguistic and geographic barriers. Shashi Tharoor in his article criticizes the Hindutva ideology of imposing Hindi by the ruling party as, The “Hindi‑Hindutva‑Hindustan” ideology has historically been impatient with the notion of Indian multilingualism, which it sees as a babel undermining national unity rather than 304

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the proud showcase of diversity that our constitutional nationalism celebrates. It has been a long‑standing policy plank of the Hindutva movement that Hindi, the language of the north‑ ern and central Indian states, where the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) has sunk its deepest roots, should be the ‘national language’ of India. (Tharoor 2022)

Divide and Rule: The British versus the Right‑Wing Politics The three major strategies used by modern colonial powers to maintain their control of the colo‑ nized are colonization, co‑opting the native elite, and ‘divide and rule’ (Morrock 1973: 129). The strategic approach of ‘divide and rule’ practised by the British during the rule in India from the mid‑18th century to 1947 essentially created and exploited divisions among the diverse communi‑ ties, cultures, and regions within India, thus weakening the collective resistance to British author‑ ity. By exploiting religious and cultural differences, the British successfully pitted Hindus against Muslims, as well as various other communities against each other. They created and perpetuated stereotypes, misconceptions, and prejudices among different religious groups, which have un‑ fortunately persisted to some extent even after India gained independence. In the context of the broader discussion on societal dynamics in India, it is crucial to address the intertwined nature of religious and regional identities with culture. This fusion has, unfortunately, led to a neglect of the inherently pluralistic and heterogeneous character of Indian society. Moreover, this misalignment has resulted in the inaccurate interpretation of conflicts between communities, often viewing them through sectarian lenses (Shukla 2001: 61). Alongside it, the British also leveraged linguistic and ethnic differences to sow discord among the Indian population and ensure their continued domi‑ nance, where the English language was a major tool. Even after decades of independence from the colonial power, English, a legacy of colonial rule, has retained its status as a language associated with prestige and success in India, leading to the perpetuation of societal hierarchies and potential internalized oppression (Bhatia 2017). The psychological dimensions of colonialism, experienced by both the colonizers and the colonized, give rise to a shared cultural legacy deeply rooted in historical forms of collective consciousness (Nandy 2009: 2). While colonialism’s dominance through culture and language is clear, there’s also a natural pushback seen in ‘decolonization’, where promoting Hindi as the main language is termed as one among the actions. As an inspiration of the colonial ‘divide and rule’ policy exercised by the British, the Hindutva ideology follows the track of domination over the cultural, religious, and linguistic diversity of India. This can be called ‘internal colonialism’ as the exploiter and exploited belong to the same state (Bacchus 1980: 224). Hindutva is a distinct political ideology that goes beyond the religious aspects of Hinduism. It advocates for India to be recognized as a Hindu nation and seeks to shape the country’s cultural identity based on Hindu cultural values. While related to Hinduism, Hindutva is a separate concept with specific political implications (Ramachandran 2020: 16). It is essential to understand the nuances of these two terms and their impact on India’s cultural and political landscape to foster informed discussions about the country’s identity and values. The imposition of Hindi on non‑Hindi speaking states is a part of the extremist agenda of the Hindutva political ideology that considers India as a ‘Hindu nation’ and proposes the concept of ‘Akhand Bharat’ (Kumar 2023), meaning united India. For a nation to be united is a concept that would be appreciated by its citizens. However, unification at the cost of the submission of diversity and marginalization of other cultures, religions, and languages does not validate the genuineness of the interest. It’s crucial to realize that using similar methods as colonial systems—like using rewards and punishments to enforce new norms—can be oppressive 305

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and authoritative when examined closely (Nandy 2009: 3). The increasing number of violence, communal riots, and hate speech based on religion, culture, and caste in the country is an effect of the gradual imposition of the Hindutva agenda through the ruling party. The right‑wing politics in the country has become the tool for exercising the Hindutva agenda in the country, turning the heterogeneity into autocracy (Ali 2022). Analysing the ongoing cultural, political, linguistic, and religious challenges in the country, it is evident that the ruling party with power at the centre has been silent when the Hindutva agenda of dividing the country in the name of uniting it continues to affect the well‑being and existence of minorities. The government at the centre attempts to impose an unparalleled majoritarian shift in politics (Chatterji et  al. 2019), through the deliberate discrimination and marginalization of ­minority groups in the country. The imposition of Hindi is yet another agenda of the ­Hindutva ideology to divide the country by destroying the diversity that it currently possesses, thereby ­advancing to the proposed ‘civilizational majoritarianism’ and completing the Hinduization of India (Jaffrelot 2021: 82).

Conclusion The political trajectory of India from its most attractive and democratic ideology of ‘unity in diversity’ to relatively undemocratic ‘civilizational majoritarianism’ proposed by the Hindutva majoritarianism (Julka 2021) is becoming more critical and complex. The view that majoritarian ideology should be the identity of a country with immense diversity threatens the existence of minority sections in terms of practising their caste, religion, ethnicity, and linguistic diversity. The interest of the ruling party to officially recognize Hindi as the national language does not seem to be rooted in the urge to overcome the colonial hegemony of English, but to exercise the agenda of Hindutva ideology. This gives a strong base to the argument of internal colonialism exercised by people who advocate the ideology of domination. Although there have been anti‑Hindi movements from opposing states, the existing language policy as per Article 343 (1) is in danger due to the immense support given by the ruling party of the central government for the ‘Hindi‑Hindutva‑Hin‑ dustan’ ideology (Tharoor 2022). Language, as a tool of expression, eventually turns into a tool for political expression, power, and identity, leading to linguistic dominance by a group of people over others that in turn acts against the inclusive approach of the country. This complex interplay between politics and lan‑ guage often perpetuates sociocultural hierarchies, where marginalized and oppressed communities take up grassroots movements to assert their linguistic rights and preserve their distinct identities. The repercussions of imposing a language in Indian society have been substantial, as it has re‑ sulted in cultural disorientation and discomfort. On the one hand, the promotion of Hindi has led to a certain level of linguistic homogenization and decolonizing linguistic hegemony imposed by the British, facilitating communication and administrative efficiency on a national scale. However, it has also resulted in linguistic and cultural divisions, as communities resist the imposition of a dominant language and assert their right to maintain and promote their languages and heritage. Language imposition in India has been part of altering political ideologies and agendas, whether it be the colonial power or the ruling government after the independence of the country. The recent developments of communal violence, linguistic marginalization, and increasing threat to minority groups have immense scope for researchers in the future because of the reason that the enforce‑ ment of Hindutva ideology in various sectors has brought turbulence in the existence of the diverse population.

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20 LANGUAGE CORRUPTION IN CHINESE A Cognitive Linguistic Perspective Haidan Wang and Albert H. W. Jiang

Introduction Language as an integral part of human cognition is fundamentally symbolic. Although sound‑­ meaning connections are generally arbitrary and most of the connections are conventionalized, language is the medium connecting human thought and the world they seek to conceptualize. Despite being constrained by its morphological and grammatical rules for word formation or sen‑ tential expressions, languages are dynamic, responsive systems, as speakers produce new expres‑ sions and conventions as their cognition of the world evolves. Any linguistic community across the world, large or small, has the continuous power to either adopt novel expressions and maintain them or to reject and abandon them. In this sense, language is, and has always been, a living, evolving entity, borne by its speakers. Natural language as a social practice exists only when people of the linguistic community use it for communication clearly and effectively. However, as posited by George Lakoff, ‘language is far more than a means of expression and communication.’ In his insights about language and brain, Lakoff (2009) characterized language as ‘the gateway to mind’ as it ‘organizes and provides ac‑ cess to the system of concepts used in thinking’ (p. 231). Therefore, people utilize language as a tool to influence the opinions and understandings of their audiences or readers, for good or for ill. For purposes of daily communication, people do not usually use rhetoric maliciously to express ideas or convey information. However, more than a half century ago, George Orwell (1946/1981) raised concerns about language ‘decadence’: i.e., the ‘ugly and inaccurate’ English (p. 157) that he observed to be used by politicians and the media. In his other works as well, Orwell argued that English is constantly deteriorating as a result of the promotion of prolix and convoluted phrases, as well as outdated metaphors that have been twisted from their original meanings. Orwell con‑ tended  that these nonsensical and unnecessary descriptors render language ‘insincere,’ result‑ ing in its exponential propagation among speakers, thereby spelling language’s ultimate decline (Miller 2019). However, it is unsurprising to note that this observed ‘insincerity’ is not exclusive to the English language. The phenomenon of insincere language adoption in Chinese can be found as early as the late 1950s, when it propagated during the Cultural Revolution. In his comprehensive study of Chinese used in that era and on along with political movements one after another and the decades DOI: 10.4324/9781003289746-25

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after, Perry Link (2013) illustrated the bifurcation between daily‑life language and ‘officialese’ (i.e., language employed by the government officials and state‑affiliated media). In addition to the rhythmic and rhetorical features of the manipulated language, Link analyzed the government language from the perspective of conceptual metaphors—accounting for their linguistic vagueness, semantic abstractness, and euphemisms, all of which have become pervasive and have served po‑ litical purposes. In contemporary mainland China, these ‘corruptive’ forms have emerged in media and metastasized thanks to technology over the past decade. In contrast to the widely identified cor‑ ruption found in politics, bureaucracy, judiciary, academic, or education, the ‘language corruption’ (Zhang 2012, 2013) in Chinese is unprecedented in scale and has become pernicious as the cor‑ rupted expressions become weaponized for unspoken purposes—i.e., where the intended meanings are warped and unrecognizable through deliberate word choice. Also observed in Taiwan, another large Chinese‑speaking society, these distorted linguistic forms have been characterized by lin‑ guists as ‘cancerous’ expressions (Her et al. 2016). Scholars (Her et al. 2016) termed these redun‑ dant wordings or ill‑structured sentences as 垃圾话 ‘trash speech’—which are not only spewed from the mouths of central government officials (or even from schoolteachers via multimedia plat‑ forms) but have also infiltrated popular slogans, government announcements, and formal texts. In this chapter, we prefer the term ‘corruption’ to the more widely utilized ‘decay,’ as the former more accurately encapsulates the integrative and moral impairment to society. These ill‑formed deviations from their original meaning are often first attributed to those with political power or social influence. Sporadic studies on language corruption mostly comprise political commentaries, semantic and sociolinguistic analyses, or are ascribed to society collapse or moral disintegration, as reviewed by Her et al. (2016) and Yu (2018). However, the corrupt expressions are discreetly crafted through deliberate contemplation (Her et al. 2016). Each of these approaches certainly has yielded interesting insights about language corruption. Analysis in political discourse and framing only attributes this phenomenon to variations in sociolinguistic perspectives, but it fails to answer important questions, such as how new phrases can distort the original meaning in such a way that unconsciously manipulates how people perceive and interpret the phrase. These corrupted language forms, often factually misleading, contain a concealed objective that is motivated and conceptualized at the cognitive level, much like the way regular language is in our daily lives, and ultimately engineer our minds. Generally speaking, language—corrupted or uncorrupted—can be either metaphorically constructed in such a way as to help us unconsciously conceptualize our experiences, or conceptually integrated in well‑formed grammatical structures through mapping and blending, while operating under coherent principles in a variety of mental and cultural worlds (Fauconnier and Turner 1998, 2002). To better understand how corrupted forms successfully achieve their ulterior intentions, this chapter probes language use in Chinese under the cognitive linguistic framework. In the following sections, we first describe various examples of what are considered corruptive language use, as found in both traditional and social media in contemporary China. We then outline related con‑ cepts under the cognitive linguistic framework regarding Conceptual Metaphor and Conceptual Blending. Finally, we illustrate how these theoretical tools contribute to our understanding of how specific ideas and ideals can be seamlessly integrated through corrupted language expressions in various contexts. The conclusion speculates on the future direction of this phenomenon.

Claims of Chinese Language Corruption When Zhang (2012) equated the Chinese word 腐败 ‘putrefying’ (lit. ‘rotten‑ruined’) to ­Orwell’s ‘decay,’ he brought attention to the linguistic phenomena used by government officials in 311

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contemporary Chinese media as the major media are under the government supervision in China. Zhang characterized this corruptive language use as having one of two purposes—either to dignify sordid behaviors ‘冠恶行以美名’ or to demonize decent actions ‘冠善行以恶名’—in an attempt to deliberately blend the conventionalized semantics of language stemming from political, ideo‑ logical, or economic motivations. All of this seeks to achieve the hidden objective of misleading the public via the obfuscation of the nuances of factual reality and manipulating their mind or ways of thinking. While Zhang’s critiques (2012, 2013) concern language manipulation in officialese, users of several online forums have extended the concept of Chinese language corruption to its usage as found on social media. The inundation of Pinyin abbreviations such as ‘yyds’ or 绝绝子 to indi‑ cate positive extremity1 by Chinese netizens has been characterized as a form of linguistic ‘hy‑ perinflation’ (drawing from the economic phenomenon) that may spell the ultimate demise for the language as a whole (YT 2022). When praising the extreme beauty of a young lady, the Chinese phrase used online is “卧槽姐妹绝美yyds啊啊啊啊啊啊啊’ (lit. “f**king sister stunning pretty yyds ah‑ah‑ah‑ah‑ah‑ah‑ah …’). Such a string of words—found widely across popular short video apps such as Douyin2 or Bilibili3 used by netizens across a wide range of age groups—prompted some intellectuals to incisively describe such bizarre expressions as a ‘murder of the Chinese language.’ These Chinese expressions appear as live comments, i.e., ‘弹幕’ (lit. ‘bullet screen’), overlaying the computer or phone screen. All instances of this improper language found on social media posts and comments are labeled as ‘虎狼之辞’ (lit. ‘words as fierce as tigers or wolves’), effectively ruining normal and productive communication in Chinese (MM 2022). According to YT (2022), such ‘low‑level, infantile’ use of Chinese in media is a manifestation of the impover‑ ishment of language—and a trashy level of thinking that can be ascribed to the degeneration of society’s critical reasoning skills and the retrogression of their aesthetics. Chinese language use across other platforms has also been corrupted, according to one Chi‑ nese YouTuber (Rong 2022). In contrast to the ‘vulgarized’ Chinese represented by Zhao Shuli4’s ‘local’ or ‘native’ literature in the Yan’an era,5 contemporary media Chinese intentionally use mispronounced characters 错别字 or phonograms 谐音字 to substitute sensitive words that may likely trigger the government’s censorship system. Words like 民主 ‘democracy, democratic’ or 集权 ‘centralization of the state power’ are intentionally written as corresponding phonograms 皿煮 (lit. ‘vessel cook’) or 几圈 (lit. ‘a few circles’). The forbidden forms are not limited to political terms only; words originally used in daily life have also taken on secondary applications, such as 秒杀 ‘second kill, seckill [in video game contexts],’6 赚钱 ‘make money,’ or 直播间 ‘live‑broadcast room,’ will have a character substituted in an abundance of caution to avoid be‑ ing blocked or deleted (e.g., 秒秒 ‘second‑second,’ 赚米 ‘make rice,’ or 啵啵间 ‘popo [sound of smooching] room’ (Fuxi 2022). Although Douyin had announced that its platform would not censor these seemingly mundane words (ZZZJ 2022), the creation of homophonic stalks reflects the fear of unpredictable censorship on media platforms—even concerning terms that are not necessarily politically sensitive. Considered by some commentators to be the ‘grisliest’ Literary Inquiry in Chinese history, the expressions highlighted above exhibit tactics by civilians to by‑ pass censorship and maintain their ability to exercise ‘free’ speech, even though it comes at the expense of maintaining a proper ‘linguistic environment’ (Rong 2022). However, we argue that though words have been twisted and repurposed from their original meanings, these examples of ‘decay’ are not, in fact, true examples of language corruption in the sense defined earlier. This phenomenon comes merely as a result of citizens creatively relying on irregular vocabulary to avoid online censorship and differs significantly from purposefully manipulated word meanings with political objectives in mind. 312

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Politically Motivated Corruption of the Chinese Language In this section, we will closely examine a considerable number of expressions in public or state media as used by government authorities, which have incurred criticism from the public in China. Most of such examples fall across four major categories: euphemisms, contradictory modifica‑ tions, rephrasings, and attribute additions. The first category consists of euphemisms that try to soften the harsh realities of a social prob‑ lem by using alternative, milder terms. For instance, 创业人员 ‘entrepreneur,’ 下岗 ‘off‑post,’ 待业 ‘awaiting employment,’ or 灵活就业者 ‘flexibly employed’ have all been used to eu‑ phemistically refer to unemployed or dismissed workers. Similarly, college graduates unable to find a job are labeled as ‘slowly obtaining employment.’ The term, 待富者 ‘individuals await‑ ing prosperity,’ was proposed by a government‑endorsed economist as an alternative for 穷人 ‘the poor’ in a state‑run TV forum. Recently, as highlighted in a Jinri Toutiao7 post, the term 灵活居住者 ‘flexible dweller’ was adopted to describe a ‘vagrant’: a clear attempt at mocking the government’s use of 灵活就业者 ‘flexibly employed’ to refer to unemployed individuals (Figure 20.1):

Figure 20.1 ‘Flexible dweller living under the bridge | At 40, one no longer suffers from perplex: What have you been through’; A post in Jinri Toutiao titled with 灵活居住者 ‘flexible dweller’8: Case #15: male, age 40, living in Futian District, Nanyuan Street, under the S. Huaqiang cloverleaf inter‑ change,9 identified during the community PCR screening test.’

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This post was intended to showcase due diligence by the community officials during the PCR screen mandate during the pandemic, showing that no one was left behind, not even a houseless individual. However, in this case, this individual was described as a ‘flexible dweller,’ suggest‑ ing that the original poster had empathy for the vagrant who was tested, even while living under the bridge. The second category is the ‘modification type’: a typical Chinese phrasal structure where a modifier word precedes the modified element. Importantly in this case, however, the modifier and the modified element comprise contradictory semantics to each other and are linked by the word 性 ‘in the nature of.’ For instance, 维修性拆除 ‘dismantle for (the purpose of) preserva‑ tion’ comprises the components: lit. 维修 ‘preserve, maintain’—性 ‘in the nature of’—拆除 ‘dismantling.’ Another example, 礼节性受贿 ‘accept bribery as (part of) a cultural protocol,’ comprises: lit. 礼节 ‘protocol’—性 ‘in the nature of’—受贿 ‘accept bribes.’ And yet another example that uses this grammatical structure, 确认性选举 ‘the election for (formality of) confir‑ mation comprises: lit. 确认 ‘confirm’—性 ‘in the nature of’‑选举 ‘election.’ As seen in all three instances, the modifier is intentionally designed to obfuscate or otherwise dishonestly justify the modified element. e.g., (1) 开发单位考虑到故居房屋腾退后，因陈旧、几经翻建、无人居住等原因， 10 易出现险情，因此进行了‘维修性拆除’ 。 (Considering the potential danger because of out‑of‑date, multiple renovations/­ reconstructions, and vacancy of this [historical] residence when it was returned [to the ­government], the development unit has carried out a ‘maintenance demolition’ of the ­former residence.) Here, a government proclamation, as reported on the website of state‑affiliated Central Chinese Television, announced the illegal demolition of a historical home but attempts to obscure the true nature of the ‘demolition’ with the word ‘maintenance’ to protect a developer planning to build on the site. The next type of expression deviates from the de‑facto semantics of the original meaning of words by rephrasing entirely. e.g., (2) 8月22日，河南省扶沟县练寺镇大蒲村一个63岁的男性村民，因不满当地政 府的违法征用土地和强行拆除房屋，在镇政府跳楼身亡。9月2日，在公众大都休息 的星期日，扶沟县警方为在镇政府跳楼自杀的男性村民定性为‘自主性坠亡’。 (Source: http://opinion.china.com.cn/opinion_48_52648.html) (On August 22, a 63‑year‑old male villager from Dapu Village, Liansi Town, Fugou County, Henan Province, jumped off the township government building and died as he was dis‑ satisfied with the local government’s illegal land acquisition and forcible demolition of his house. On September 2, a Sunday during which the public was mostly resting, the Fugou County police characterized the death of this male villager who committed suicide by jump‑ ing off the township government building as a ‘self‑guided fall to (his) death.’) The official government acknowledgment of the villager’s suicide was rebranded as an ‘self‑guided fall,’ a newly concocted expression in Chinese. In doing so, the proclamation sought to absolve themselves from the responsibilities of their own actions and portray the suicide as entirely uncon‑ nected to them. 314

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Similarly, the evolution of the expressions for lockdowns during the COVID‑19 pandemic especially in 2022 on Chinese media can also be considered Orwellian Chinese, e.g., (3). 封城 ‘lockdown’ →(全域)静态管理 ‘(entire region) static management’11; or (全)闭环管理 ‘(all‑round) closed‑loop management’; →按下暂停键 lit. ‘press on ‘pause’ button,’ ‘life on pause’; →静默 ‘quiescence’; →流动管理 ‘mobile management’ All these evolved expressions appearing on Chinese media at different times throughout the pandemic are veiled references and euphemisms for the notoriously strict lockdown that barred residents from leaving their homes (e.g., 居家静止 ‘residence quiescence’), or their workplace (e.g., 原岗位静止 ‘job/post quiescence’), or even places they were just visiting (e.g., 原地静止12 ‘in‑situ quiescence’), such as a restaurant or even public restrooms, all referring to different ways the lockdown order was enforced. A news article on Kunshan’s government webpage titled ‘开发区静默第一天:安静温暖 且坚定 (The First Day of Quiescence in the Development Zone: Quiet, Warm and Firm),’ depicting the purported serenity under the Covid‑Zero policy in China, using a series of metaphorical expres‑ sions, i.e., the bold characters and their English equivalences, as exampled in the following passage. e.g., (4) 昆山开发区全域调整为静态管理区，静态管理时间为4月12日24时至4月19日 24时。4月13日，静态管理第一天，开发区按下 ‘暂停键’ 。昔日繁忙的工地、热闹 的社区、美丽的公园，静了下来、慢了下来、停了下来。 (Source: http://www.ks.gov.cn/kss/ttxw/202204/43585aa5dfb 84a9dbe0b838a19188a23.shtml) (All of Kunshan Development Zone has been adjusted to a static management area, from 12 a.m., April 12–19. On April 13, the first day of static management, the Development Zone pressed the ‘pause’ button. The formerly busy construction sites, lively communi‑ ties, and beautiful parks have quieted down, slowed down, and come to a halt.) The fourth and final type of language corruption can be exemplified by a series of phrases compris‑ ing words of routine activities with modifiers indicating their attributes such as 恶意 ‘malice.’ Ex‑ pressions such as 恶意不买房 ‘spitefully refuse to buy a real estate’ occurred in media in various contexts, as in this post found on a sub‑district website in Qingdao, a coastal city and the largest in Shandong Province (Figure 20.2). e.g., (5)13 (Qingdao | Sub‑district Office Whether one purchases real estate will be included in their performance assessment Whoever spitefully refuses to buy a home, if found with a large savings, will be reminded and talked over (i.e., warned) without exception) The authenticity of this announcement was confirmed by a staff working at this sub‑district office when interviewed by a reporter.15 In many Chinese cities, the real estate sector contributes signifi‑ cantly to its GDP, which may be used as an important reference when assessing the performance 315

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Figure 20.2 The Qingdao sub‑district announcement issuing a warning to those who 恶意不买房 ‘­spitefully refuse to buy real estate’14

of officials at various administrative levels. This manipulation of words and their collocations has quickly aroused attention. Chinese netizens coined the ‘恶意+action’ construction used above to describe actions when Chinese citizens do not comply with authoritarian policies and rules, such as 恶意不生育 ‘spitefully refuse to have a child’ and 恶意自学 ‘malignantly self‑study.’ The former was used to refer to young couples who refuse to answer the government’s call to [or even incentives for] having more children due to the increasing cost of raising children in contempo‑ rary cities. The latter referred to individuals who attended independent cram schools and training ­centers after the government cracked down on them. 316

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This ‘恶意+action’ form has grown in popularity during the pandemic, used by netizens to satirize the absurdity of new policies. Phrases were coined to describe once‑routine activities that were newly denounced as illegal or in violation of China’s Covid‑zero policy. When witnessing police officers seize villagers working in the field to prepare for spring sowing, Chinese netizens sarcastically portrayed the villagers as 恶意春耕 ‘maliciously spring plowing.16 Similarly, a news headline17 proclaimed that two civilians 恶意看病 ‘spitefully visited a doctor’ as a story broke that a police bureau in Hebei Province pulled over a couple for taking advantage of their sickness (a high fever) to ‘cheat’ their way into a hospital amid the lockdowns. It is important to note that each of these examples in isolation does not necessarily imply ‘­corruption’ of language. However, when used in context and popularized, these newly adopted meanings can construct a mental space to draw particular inferences and achieve a particular intended objective (Fauconnier 1997), which can be characterized as a form of manipulation of the mind. In the following section, we turn to the cognitive linguistic framework on conceptual mapping and blending, illustrating how the mental spaces are built by these expressions, which then activate various components in the conceptual discourses and ultimately lead to a new but manipulated semantic scope.

The Cognitive Account Before analyzing how ‘corrupted’ terms can manipulate the mind, we first need to briefly introduce a few key concepts under the cognitive linguistics framework. In cognitive linguistics, conceptual metaphor and mapping were pioneered by Lakoff and Johnson (1980) and extended in a series of works on mental space and conceptual blending by Fauconnier (1997) and Fauconnier and Turner (1998, 2002) on cognitive semantics. Further, Lakoff (2009) drew attention to the relationship between the brain and language: that is, the neural connections between various language forms (e.g., speech sounds, writing, or signs) and meaningful ‘brain structures’ (e.g., frames, metaphors, or narratives).

The Cognitive Framework: Conceptual Metaphor, Mental Space, Conceptual Mapping, and Blending In their seminal work on conceptual metaphors, Lakoff and Johnson (1980) identified the conceptual domain from which we draw the metaphorical expressions in language to understand other, more abstract concepts. Conceptual metaphors are part of a common language and draw collectively from cultural understanding, thus becoming linguistic conventions. In the sentence ‘I don’t want to waste time on this, so I want to spend my weekends at home,’ the abstract concepts of ‘time’ and ‘week‑ end’ are metaphoricalized as a resource similar to money, such that it can either be spent or con‑ served. In the metaphor, TIME IS MONEY, the concept of ‘money’ as the source domain is mapped onto a target domain so that we can understand the abstract concept ‘time.’ This mapping relies on the similar properties of being valuable or measurable between these two domains. Metaphors have entailment, and though metaphorical entailments may be hidden and go unnoticed, they can none‑ theless have potency if they are intentionally purposed as a basis for social policy (Lakoff 2009). The metaphorical mapping from source to target domains conventionalized in our daily expres‑ sions connects different mental spaces. As an idealized cognitive model, the mental space is a theoretical construct (Fauconnier 1994, 1997), and does not necessarily represent reality faithfully. This construct comprises a base space and a built space, the former representing the interlocutors’ shared perception of the real world, and the latter depicting a situation that is assumed true for 317

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that space (but may or may not be necessarily true in objective reality). In other words, language expressions are constructed at a cognitive level, where language is related to the real world. Ex‑ pressions can superficially reveal hidden, or highly abstract cognitive constructions, where the essential operation of structure projects between domains. As described by Fauconnier, ‘[m]ental spaces are the domains that discourse builds up to provide a cognitive substrate for reasoning and for interfacing with the world’ (p. 34). The base space containing elements or knowledge from the real word could be input space. Through various space builders—i.e., linguistic devices such as subject‑verb pairs, time expres‑ sions, and conjunctions—these built spaces are established in natural language expressions with properties transferrable from the base spaces or input spaces through some fundamental princi‑ ples (Fauconnier 1997) related to ongoing cognitive construction during discourse. Different input spaces, originating from the same generic space, may be conceptually integrated into a blended space, which inherits partial properties from the input spaces and has its own emergent struc‑ ture. Everyday language, which manifests either in simple words or complex expressions, is pro‑ duced and understood via conceptual networks that are manipulated consciously or unconsciously ‘through the activation of powerful neural circuits’ (p. 1) in order to construct meaning. Mental spaces help organize our conceptualization of abstract terms (e.g., time) in discourse and can help solve fundamental problems such as the opacity of language. For a more detailed account of men‑ tal spaces, see works by Fauconnier (e.g., 1994, 1997/2021, 2018, etc.). Different mental spaces that are conceptually or metaphorically connected can have many fea‑ tures in common at the generic level. Organizing a frame within one or two mental spaces can project it into a novel mental space, with its space elements selectively mapped onto the emergent structure. Certain properties or elements of value from the input can evoke relevant knowledge necessary for comprehension in language receivers (i.e., hearers or readers), which are then pro‑ jected to a blended space to construct meaning. This blended space, also known as an integration network, can be simple or complex, with either one (single‑scope) or two (double‑scope) or more input spaces projected into a blended space. This idea can be illustrated with a Chinese sentence analog to the English expression, ‘Kobe Bryant was the 21st‑century Michael Jordan’. e.g., (6): 146万志愿者，就是潍坊街头活雷锋18 ‘the 1.46 million volunteers on the streets of Weifang are Comrade Lei Feng19 reborn.’ The inputs comprise a ‘志愿者 volunteer’ space and a ‘雷锋 Lei Feng’ space, both of which share commonalities in the generic space ‘volunteer,’ but also contain differences that can be dia‑ grammed in Figure 20.3 in a manner similar to Fauconnier’s (2018). As shown in Figure 20.3, each circle in this figure represents a space, each corresponding to the semantics that are built in a (Chinese) language user’s mind. In the mental space of 志愿者 ‘volunteers,’ we see the elements such as ‘citizens,’ and ‘free assistance.’ In the mental space of those who understand the meaning of 雷锋 ‘Lei Feng,’ they know its semantics contains elements such as ‘a model citizen,’ ‘active between 1950s–1960s,’ ‘selflessness,’ ‘Chinese Communist Party (CCP) member,’ ‘People’s Liberation Army (PLA) soldier,’ ‘generosity,’ etc. The commonalities across these spaces—‘Chinese citizens,’ ‘free assistance,’ and ‘generosity’—form the eventual connections that are drawn between these two spaces. The semantics of 志愿者 ‘volunteers’ and 雷锋 ‘Lei Feng’ can form the input space of a blended space, where the Chinese volunteers self‑ lessly helping others are equated to Lei Feng himself. Especially on March 5, the official ‘Learn from Lei Feng Day’ in China, people usually strive to do what Lei Feng did, in the form of helping others. In the discourse constructed in Sentence #6, the common elements in both input spaces 318

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Figure 20.3  Conceptual blending of Example 6: Weifang and Lei Feng

are projected and integrated into a new space: i.e., on March 5, 2022, throughout many streets in Weifang city, about 1.46 million volunteers followed in the footsteps of Lei Feng—reincarnating the true altruistic spirit of Lei Feng himself. We can see that discourse elements with semantic clues relate to ongoing cognitive construc‑ tion in natural language sentences such as the one discussed above. These elements function as dis‑ course participants and, to achieve the expression intention built in the blended space, ‘find their way through the maze of mental spaces [and use] partitioning for drawing inferences properly’ (Fauconnier 1997: 54). Blending is the integration of multiple related concepts or events into one at ‘a special transcendent time’ (Fauconnier and Turner 1998: 4) and can be highlighted in jokes, cartoons, and metaphoric expressions through conventional or unconventional connections. In the following section, we illustrate how the meaning potential of corrupted language is accomplished via mental configuration across various blended conceptual spaces.

The Mental Space and Space Blending in Corrupt Expressions For the four types of corrupt Chinese expressions identified in the previous section, we will di‑ agram their mental spaces, or input spaces and blended spaces in accordance with Fauconnier (1997, 2018), and Fauconnier and Turner (1998, 2002). These diagrams will reveal how back‑ ground knowledge and word semantics affect the mapping between the framed mental spaces in almost an innate way. The cognitive and cultural models allow the composite structure projected 319

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into the blended spaces from the inputs to be viewed as a part of a ‘larger self‑contained struc‑ ture’ (Fauconnier 1997). Eventually, some of the semantic properties will be selectively projected, whereas others will be skipped or purposely omitted. We can first see how the mental spaces are built into the Chinese expression, 失业(者) ‘laid‑off,’ and its related terms as used at different periods in Chinese media. The two words, 下岗 ‘off‑post’ and 待业 ‘awaiting employment,’ made common appearances on TV and in Chinese newspapers in the 1980s and 1990s. Nowadays, the same terms have been replaced in favor of 创业人员 ‘en‑ trepreneur,’ or 灵活就业者 ‘the flexibly employed’ when used in news or official announcements. The semantics of these words and their corresponding mappings are illustrated in Figure 20.4. The first two entries, bolded, in Figure  20.4a illustrate the mental space containing the se‑ mantics of 失业(者) ‘laid‑off’ are the sememes essential to its meaning. The last two italicized entries are what is presupposed in their meaning; however, those presuppositions are not always immediately triggered when Chinese speakers interpret this word. In the same vein, the mental spaces of the other words are shown in Figures 20.4b, 20.4c, 20.4d, and 20.4e. We may see that there are correspondences between the essential sememes of 20.4a and 20.4c, but this relationship does not similarly hold true between 20.4a and 20.4b, 20.4d, or 20.4e. Therefore, any primary interpretations of 创业人员 ‘entrepreneur,’ or 灵活就业者 ‘one who is flexibly employed’ would not result in any semantic associations with 失业(者) ‘laid‑off,’ or 下岗人员 ‘off‑post’ or 待业 ‘awaiting employment,’ or vice versa. However, 创业人员 ‘entrepreneur,’ or 灵活就业者 ‘flex‑ ibly employed’ appear frequently on Chinese official media to refer to those who are laid off, such as in this title of the Chinese Central Government website20: e.g., (7). 2亿灵活就业者安全感谁来给? 国家发话了 ‘Who is ensuring the sense of ­security for the 200 million who are flexibly employed? The nation [i.e., central government] speaks out.’

Figure 20.4  The mental spaces of 失业(者) ‘laid‑off’ and its related phrases Note: Bolded elements are the sememes of this word, and italicized elements are presuppositions

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Despite using the term 灵活就业者 ‘flexibly employed’ in the title, the entire report, however, focuses on various steps that the government takes to help the hundreds of millions of unemployed get hired. The ‘unemployed’ is euphemized as ‘flexibly employed’ through shifting the sememes to their nonprimary parts, nonetheless obscuring the reality of high unemployment. In the next category, we analyze the mental spaces and their integration, where the two words in a phrase semantically contradict each other, as seen in the example, 维修性拆除 ‘dismantle for (the purpose of) preservation.’ A 故居 ‘former residence (of a famous person)’ in Chinese is usually preserved for its historical value associated with an important figure. Maintenance or repair (i.e., 维修) may be necessary; however, it could also be demolished if the former resi‑ dence falls into disrepair and becomes potentially hazardous, as stated in the discourse. Indeed, the residence was eventually 维修性拆除, literally ‘dismantled for the purposes of maintenance.’ The blended space shows that there is no mapping at all that can be projected from the input space of 维修 ‘maintain/repair’; instead, it projects solely from the space of 拆除 ‘dismantle,’ as Figure 20.5 shows. The blended space of 维修性拆除 does not contain any sememes of 维修 ‘maintain or repair’; rather, only those of 拆除 ‘dismantle’ are projected. The phrase describes the former residence in question as obsolete and uninhabited despite previous renovations/reconstructions; even so, the building remains hazardous and is fit for demolition. Here, 维修性 ‘maintenance purposes’ is added to modify the act of 拆除 ‘demolition,’ with the intention of diminishing the destructive connota‑ tion of ‘dismantling.’ However, as shown in Figure 20.5, no element from INPUT 2—a misleading modifier—is integrated into the new blended space. This modifier seeks to blunt and obscure the semantics implied in the headword. In doing so, it constructs a reference to an ­alternative, positive connotation in an act of cognitive manipulation, rendering the language use corruptive.

Figure 20.5 The blended space for 维修性拆除 ‘dismantled for the purposes of maintenance’

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Now, we probe the third category, as represented by Example 3: the deliberate deception p­ racticed by Chinese municipal governments in their aversion to the Chinese word for ‘lockdown,’ i.e., 封城, throughout the ongoing COVID‑19 pandemic. The terminologies used on government websites deliberately attempt to sidestep the negative connotations of 封城 ‘lockdown’—which was originally used to mean sealing off Wuhan City with force in early 2020. Later on, the term of choice (全)闭环管理 ‘(all‑around) closed‑loop management’ increased in popularity to avoid any associations with 封 ‘sealing (off)’ the city. Instead, 管理 ‘management’ of a 闭环 ‘closed‑loop [system]’ was used to describe the quarantining of anyone who newly enters, or resides in, a city. In one notable case, the entire quarantined Beijing 2022 Winter Olympic Village was a classic model of this type of management.21 The actual restrictions listed on various municipal websites are much stricter than the initial Wuhan lockdown. (全域)静态管理 ‘(Entire‑region) static management’ is termed similarly, as is 流动管理 ‘mobile management,’22 with the word 静态 ‘static’23 being replaced by 流动 ‘mobile, fluid’ in an effort to falsely portray the freedom of city residents. 按下 暂停键 ‘(Life) on pause’ came to replace the term ‘lockdown’ (The Economist 2022), as did 静默 ‘quiescent’ as a metaphorical euphemism, both in an attempt to obfuscate the level of government control. The following figure visualizes the mapping of 封城 to all other semantic terms, despite the differences between literal meanings and the government’s public definitions. Taking 封城 as the semantic base for ‘lockdown,’ Figure 20.6 details the set of semantics for the other constructed terms. All are based on official interpretations with respect to their discourse, and configured to the largely identical mental spaces with properties implied in the lexical infor‑ mation. All semantic features of other terms align to the specifications reflected in 封城 ‘lock‑ down’ and connect to similar mental‑space elements, despite the evolution of terminology.

Figure 20.6  The mental spaces of ‘lockdown’ and its related Chinese terms that are used

And, finally, in addition to the naming/renaming scheme observed in the examples above, cor‑ rupted words or expressions contain conceptual frames, which have the potential to activate the individual mental spaces of language speakers, and ultimately, their worldviews (Lakoff 2009). In Example 5 and in other related expressions, preceding an innocuous activity with 恶意 ‘mal‑ ice; spite’ reframes the action in a mental configuration that demonizes the act in such a way that implies an underlying nefarious motivation. The mental space triggered by 恶意 ‘malice; spite’ 322

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Figure 20.7  The mental spaces of 恶意+ 攻击 ‘spitefully attack’

is normally associated with highly negative connotations, according to evidence in the Peking University Modern Chinese corpus.24 Within the 582 million entries in the modern Chinese corpus, 330 action words collocate with 恶意 ‘malice; spite,’ among which 55% contain negative conno‑ tations. The ‘恶意+action’ construction triggers a mental space that blends an otherwise innocuous action with sentiments of 恶意 ‘malice; spite,’ as seen in the example of 恶意攻击 ‘spitefully attack’ (diagrammed in Figure 20.7), which has the most instances found in the corpus. In the blended space 恶意攻击, the intention of doing evil expressed by 恶意 is well‑aligned with 攻击 ‘attack,’ an action that is aggressively or violently conducted with a purpose against a person, place, or thing. However, the examples that can be considered corrupt instead trigger ele‑ ments in each space which are projected to a blended space with clearly mismatched elements. Below, we take the phrase 恶意看病 ‘see a doctor with malice’ from the previous example about the husband and wife’s being pulled over by Hebei police for their hospital visit during the lock‑ down mandate, and diagram it in Figure 20.8. Portraying a patient’s visit to a doctor—to get their illness diagnosed or treated—as evil or malicious appears to be a fundamental contradiction. However, the couple leaving their home to see a doctor which necessitated breaking the lockdown policy was sarcastically termed as 恶意 看病 ‘visit a doctor with malice’ by netizens to ridicule the government’s previous diametrically opposed pairing of ‘恶意’ with an innocuous action. The four analyses above demonstrate that utilizing cognitive concepts and terms to examine the language corruption phenomena is quite instrumental in illustrating the mental spaces and 323

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Figure 20.8  The mental spaces of 恶意+ 看病 ‘see a doctor with malice’

conceptual blending that are projected from original semantics. Two general features are espe‑ cially important in this regard. First, we see that the power of the intended goals of these corrupt expressions lies primarily not in their forms or their primary meanings, but rather, ‘in the totality of brain circuitry that activation can spread to’ (Lakoff 2008). And, second, it is apparent that with the mental spaces triggered in these expressions, some elements in the semantics are mapped into a blended space with mismatched elements that are not normally or directly projected. Over time, these mismatches or twisted conceptualizations are consciously adopted and eventually widely propagated in the multimedia age. In doing so, the receivers’ (e.g., hearers, readers, or interlocu‑ tors) perception of reality is manipulated via bizarre word formations or other syntactic operations.

Closing Remarks This chapter offers a sampling of language corruption that has been perpetuated by Chinese media and examines this from the cognitive linguistic framework of how these corruptive expressions are designed to achieve ulterior goals at the conceptual level. Though this chapter only touches on a few manifestations of this phenomenon, we hope that this approach provides a unique way of understanding how thoughts and perceptions of ordinary language can be manipulated amid conventional social discourse. The analysis of language corruption is, of course, not limited to the cognitive linguistic approach exampled here. Further explorations of this phenomenon from perspectives of psycholinguistics or sociolinguistics are explicatable. The various elements hid‑ den within corrupted expressions either are activated unconsciously within the primary mental 324

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spaces of language speakers or are conceptually integrated in such a way that draws attention to the speaker’s displayed connotation. Language is noted for its power to ‘activate, communicate, regulate, and even challenge all aspects of our understanding’ (Lakoff 2009). This power, however, can be harnessed in either posi‑ tive or negative ways, especially when wielded by authority figures. Even our everyday language can be used in a way that perpetuates harmful biases and stigmas that may be difficult for people to overcome (Olszewski 2021). The Sapir‑Whorf hypothesis of linguistic relativity suggests that the structure of one’s native language can specifically influence their perceptions and thoughts (Brown 1976). Orwell (1981) expanded on the ties between language and thoughts, remarking that ‘if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought (p. 167).’ When corruptive expres‑ sions come from those with a stronger voice (such as government authorities) and subsequently propagate through media, they cause damage—which may spell ‘disaster for the governed people and gives power to the government’ (Miller 2019). Chinese intellectuals have vocalized their concerns in publications or speeches on the societal impairment that language corruption could have. Linguists in Taiwan have blamed the afore‑ mentioned ‘cancerous’ forms for weakening language users’ thinking ability (Her 2016), but oth‑ ers suggested that language could also serve as its own self‑healing mechanism (Chang 2016). Scholars in mainland China, however, have purported that corrupted language is a reflection of morality or even society itself. The behavior of officials and government has even been viewed as a weathervane of the fall of social morality; however, the true nature and extent of this correlation demands further in‑depth exploration from interdisciplinary perspectives. Some have attributed these trends to the collapse of the Chinese language environment (Modern 2022) or the result of moral nefariousness (Aozhou 2020). Others are pessimistic about the corruption and fragmenta‑ tion of expressions in modern Chinese media, labeling it as being actively toxic rather than just ‘simple and crude.’ In the wake of the pathological spread of polluted and corrupted expressions, they have predicted the degeneration of the public’s critical thinking capabilities in contempo‑ rary China (Xianzhi 2021). Furthermore, corrupted phrases function as a form of language vio‑ lence, acting ‘like small doses of arsenic’ that cause lasting damage to society’s culture, morality, mentality, and ways of thinking (Xu 2013). Some offer an even more dramatically despairing outlook, suggesting that those who dominate the Chinese language can ultimately control our thoughts (YT 2022). If this degradation of language continues, the decline of communicative efficiency and the cred‑ ibility of the Chinese language may eventually result in abnormal societal relationships. Meaning‑ ful and conscientious discussions or exchanges guided by empathy may disappear (Rong 2022). Language itself is intrinsically impartial as a medium through which to conceptualize the world; however, this impartiality and any vagueness can be intentionally manipulated and exploited using the subjectivity of human cognition. And, unsurprisingly, these corrupted expressions inevitably may persist as a product of individuals’ ongoing political or socioeconomic motivations. Equilibrium is a critical attribute of language and meaning. When language is polluted or cor‑ rupted by those with power, intellectuals need to remain keenly aware. The responsibility falls on them to hold those who actively abuse the language accountable and in check (e.g., Orwell 1981; Hayek 1988; Lakoff 2009; Link 2013; Zhang 2012, 2013, etc.). Despite the despondent outlooks of many critics, there are still reasons to remain optimistic about the future of the Chinese, even if corruptive expressions continue propagating as long as their creators or users remain in power. Regardless of how corruptive ideas can be rephrased or euphemized, observers who call out these acts of deception will ensure that lies and obfuscations are not accepted at face value (Pingying 2020). In the era of media and self‑media, the ubiquity of the internet equips common people with 325

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more channels to speak out and communicate to counter each instance of corrupted language, as Chinese netizens have so creatively and valiantly done.

Notes 1 ‘yyds,’ one of the most popular Pinyin acronyms for yǒngyuǎn de shén ‘永远的神,’ means ‘eternal god’ or ‘forever idol’ for someone or something that is exceptionally awesome. Alternatively, it can also be used in different contexts such as ‘forever a loser (yǒngyuǎn diǎosī 永远屌丝),’ ‘forever single (yǒngyuǎn dānshēn 永远单身),’ or ‘one person (simultaneously) fights ten (contestants) (yǐ yī dǎ shí 以一打十).’ 绝 绝子 is used to highlight extremity in a way that could either mean ‘extremely awesome’ or ‘extremely ridiculous,’ depending on the context. Both expressions, however, are considered bastardization of the Chinese language. 2 An app similar to TikTok but accessible only in mainland China. 3 Nicknamed ‘B 站’ (lit. ‘B site’), Bilibili is a video‑sharing platform in China. Its live‑streaming services and multiple themes offering 弹幕 ‘bullet screen’ capabilities featuring live‑commenting are popular among the youth in China. 4 Zhao Shuli 赵树理 (1906–1970) was a novelist, whose fictional works portrayed the lilemas and conflicts of villagers confronting social upheaval and unrest in the countryside of northern China. 5 Yan’an era refers to the Yan’an Rectification Movement between 1942 and 1945, following Mao ­Zedong’s speeches in a forum in Yan’an, Shaanxi. These speeches advocated for the idea that literature and arts should reflect the lives of the working class and should contribute to political or socialist advancement. 6 ‘Seckill,’ a slang used by the online gaming community, defined as ‘killing an enemy within seconds.’ 7 Jinri Toutiao, or Toutiao, owned by ByteDance, is one of China’s largest mobile platforms. It displays a feed of news and information, where users can interact with the content. 8 Source: https://www.toutiao.com/article/7142761747743670814/?wid=1693047535061 9 The bold words correspond to the underlined text. 10 Data source: http://news.cntv.cn/20120201/101458.shtml 11 This phrase was quoted to be interpreted as ‘a strict lockdown in which residents are barred from leaving their homes’ by Bloomberg, according to 外宣微记 (2022). However, this translation could not be inde‑ pendently verified by the authors on the Bloomberg website. 12 Data source: https://china.huanqiu.com/article/47i9r5CjbGu (烟台全域静态管理 (‘entire region static management’ in Yantai)) 13 Source: https://new.qq.com/omn/20220625/20220625A08NMV00.html 14 Source: https://new.qq.com/rain/a/20220625A08NMV00 15 Source (房市困境：恶意不买房 ‘The real estate market dilemma: maliciously refusing to buy a house’) 16 Peasants in Hebei Province are required to obtain a pass to work in the field to avoid violation of the quarantine policy. 17 Source: https://www.163.com/dy/article/H60GE1SD05533F8G.html. (河北夫妻 “恶意看病” ‘a husband and wife in Hebei Province “visiting a doctor with evil intentions”’) 18 Source: https://www.mca.gov.cn/article/xw/mtbd/202203/20220300040190.shtml 19 Info of Lei Feng could be referred at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lei_Feng. (潍坊街头“活雷锋” ‘living Lei Feng on streets in Weifang’) 20 Source: http://www.gov.cn/zhengce/2021‑05/13/content_5606191.htm (灵活就业者 ‘flexibly employed’) 21 In contrast to the official China Daily (state media) translation, foreign media favored the term ‘bubble.’ See definition 7b from Merriam‑Webster.com/dictionary/bubble: ‘a usually small group of people (such as family members, friends, coworkers, or classmates) who regularly interact closely with one another but with few or no others in order to minimize exposure and reduce the transmission of infection during an outbreak of a contagious disease.’ 22 As found in the Henan (state‑sponsored) newspaper: https://china.huanqiu.com/article/4AajTK4ULK0 23 Qinghai government website describing 静态管理 ‘static management’ http://www.qinghai.gov.cn/msfw/ system/2022/04/16/010407064.shtml 24 The dataset surveyed is available in the Center for Chinese Linguistics at Peking University http://ccl.pku. edu.cn:8080/ccl_corpus/index.jsp

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Chinese References Aozhou Xuelizi 澳洲雪梨子 (2020). ‘Language corruption and moral depravity’ 语言腐败与道德堕落. Retrieved on August 16, 2022, from https://www.backchina.com/blog/382356/article‑323477.html Chang, Jung‑Hsing 張榮興 (2016). ‘Metaphor and rhetoric: An in‑depth analysis of language cancer’ 譬喻與 修辭：語言癌的深度剖析. In O. Her et al. (Eds.), Is Language Cancerous or Not: Views from Linguists 語言癌不癌？語言學家的看法 (pp. 82–108). Taipei: Linking Press 台北：聯經出版社. Fuxi 复兮 (2022). ‘Can ‘live‑room’ only be presented as ‘poo‑poo room’? The platform is responsible for standardizing terminology’ 直播间只能用啵啵间？规范用语平台有责. Retrieved on October 22, 2022, from https://www.163.com/dy/article/HD4RK2BL0514DTKM.html Her, One‑soon. et al. 何萬順 (2016). ‘Is language cancerous or not?’ 語言癌不癌. In O. Her et al. (Eds.), Is Language Cancerous or Not: Views from Linguists 語言癌不癌？語言學家的看法 (pp. 36–50). Taipei: Linking Press 台北：聯經出版社. Modern Middle (MM) 摩登中产 (2022). ‘Chinese is being murdered’ 中文正在被谋杀. Retrieved on Sep‑ tember 20, 2022, from https://new.qq.com/rain/a/20220908A034X100 Pingying 屏营、先知书店店长 (2020, April 1). ‘A lie shall not become the truth even if it is repeated 10 thousand times’ 谎言即使重复一万遍，也不应该成为真理. Retrieved on November 27, 2021, from https://posts.careerengine.us/p/5eb28bf761dd477c25e8d9bf Rong, Jian 荣剑 (2022). ‘Mr. Rong Jian talks about corruption in Chinese’ 榮劍先生談漢語腐敗現象. In Channel 老楊到處說 Retrieved on October 9, 2022, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&a pp=desktop&v=avJpdGGvVKQ Waixuan Weiji 外宣微记 (2022). ‘How to translate Shanghai’s “citywide static management”?’ 上海 “全 域静态管理”，如何翻译? Retrieved on December 18, 2022, from https://kantie.org/news/600827718.

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Haidan Wang and Albert H. W. Jiang Xianzhi Bookstore先知书店 (2021). ‘The decadence of civilization begins with language’ 文明 的堕落，从语言开始. Retrieved on December 19, 2021, from https://posts.careerengine.us/p/ 60fcbde772a34031217b164e Xu, Ben 徐贲 (2013). ‘Refusing to sink in the river of filthy delusions’ 拒绝在肮脏的歪理之河里沉沦. In B. Xu (Ed.), ‘What Kind of Faith Is Needed in the Era of Disbelief?’ 怀疑的时代需要怎样的信仰. (pp. 69–72). Beijing: Oriental Press 东方出版社. Retrieved on September 28, 2022, from https://baike. baidu.com/tashuo/browse/content?id=ed96b43e4fccba7a3becac4f Ying Tan (YT) 影探 (2022). ‘Chinese language is corrupted in the mouth of these people’ 中国话败坏 在这些人嘴里. Retrieved on October 14, 2022, from https://qnmlgb.tech/articles/634641a2e3d3921d7 f5fd398/ Yu, Hua 于华 (2018). ‘Research on the phenomena of “language decay” from the perspective of Speech Act Theory’ 言语行为理论视角下的“语言腐败”现象研究. Modern Linguistics 现代语言学 6(1): 86–92. Zhang, Weiying 张维迎 (2012). ‘Language corruption in China has become extremely dreadful’ 语言腐败 在中国已经到无以复加地步. Retrieved on November 27, 2021 from http://finance.sina.com.cn/review/ hgds/20120427/230211947838.shtml Zhang, Weiying 张维迎 (2013). ‘Chinese language corruption is unprecedented; Chinese has lost its ­function for communication’ 中国语言腐败前所未有 中文已失去交流功能. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=G_eHivAe9jk, May 17. Zhanzhang Zhijia (ZZZJ) 站长之家 (2022). ‘Douyin standardizes the creative expressions of homophonic memes, and announces top 50 frequently used words’ 抖音规范谐音梗创作表达，公布50个高频使用 词语. Retrieved on April 29, 2023 from https://baijiahao.baidu.com/s?id=1739038809934302734&wfr= spider&for=pc

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21 VISUAL LANGUAGE AND MIND ENGINEERING The Case of Multicultural Emojis Amin Heidari

Introduction This chapter hypothesizes that multicultural emojis convey neoliberal values about the human body regardless of the context in which they are used. Multicultural emojis are viewed here as a part of neoliberal discourse in establishing the normative and Western standards of the human body in their representation of diversity. The scope of investigation here consists of emojis of the body (such as people holding hands emojis) and emojis incorporating skin tone color as a switch‑ ing feature (such as hand gestures emojis). To pursue my hypothesis, I look at three questions. (A) What is the scope of ‘mind engineering’ in relation to images? (B) What discursive elements make the role of emojis in the process of mind engineering prominent? (C) What neoliberal codes are inscribed in the body of multicultural emojis and, thus, are engaged in emojis’ designed mind engineering? The structure of this article is based on three assumptions. (A) Images play an es‑ sential role in mind engineering advancement. (B) With their claim to be a ‘universal language,’ emojis play a unique role in that framework. (C) Multicultural emojis mirror a neoliberal design of the human body rooted in a traditional Western reading of race and human body proportions. The body of studies on the concept of mind engineering is a slim one. The concept has been looked at mainly through the lens of stress management as a positive strategy for managing the mind and gaining a peaceful status. While most studies that have taken this approach do not differ‑ entiate mind engineering from other similar terms, e.g., mind management or mind directing, Ba‑ nerjee (2021) suggests a helpful distinction: ‘mind engineering is an art as well as a science’ (xv). As he defines the term, mind engineering is the ‘process of changing the poise of the mind’ to make it ‘cool and calm’ and ‘remove and reduce the effects of any wrong or unfavourable development to a personality’ (ibid). This scope aligns with the literal meaning of ‘engineering’ as ‘calculated manipulation or direction (as of behavior)’ (Definition of ENGINEERING 2023). Although this definition of mind engineering comes from a different context other than the one in this chapter, it is helpful for my argument in two senses. First, it lays the general ground for understanding ‘mind engineering’ as a process in which the mind’s disintegration with its sur‑ roundings should be bridged through subtle means. Second, it conceptualizes mind engineering as a synthesis of art and science. Mind engineering is a scientific process in that it takes its effective‑ ness from scientific approaches and calculations. At the same time, it subtly deals with the delicate

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DOI: 10.4324/9781003289746-26

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nature of the mind and tries to align it with its predetermined estimates. Hence, mind engineering can be considered a process that represents detailed measures in an artistic guise. The process gently invites the mind to integrate with its calculations and promises the mind the reward of this alignment: compatibility with the world. Based on this understanding, emojis are the visual language of mind engineering. They repre‑ sent ‘cute’ visions of the world to online users. These representations, however, are not accidental or out of nowhere. They are the result of meticulous measures in constructing a standard version of the world aligned with the purposes of neoliberalism. Regarding multicultural emojis, I argue that they are wrapped in the stimulating package of multiculturalism and diversity. Nevertheless, a closer look at them reveals a calculated direction toward acknowledging a Western reading of the human body. It is worth noting that the concept of ‘mind engineering’ is not ipso facto positive or negative. The goal, compatibility with the environment, can be viewed from different angles. Bridging differences can result in a more desirable existential experience. It can also lead to silenc‑ ing differences in a contrived manner. In this chapter, I draw on the latter sense. As I propose, emo‑ jis’ portrayal of human diversity can be seen as a call for minds to forget about their differences and turn themselves into the standard colors of their ‘global’ environment. The way multicultural emojis define diversity is not based on the appreciation of diversity in itself but relies on engineer‑ ing the mind of global subjects to integrate with a Western reading of variety.

Mind Engineering and Images Images play a significant role in the framework of mind engineering. The importance of visual perception in human decision‑making has witnessed numerous examinations from a neurological perspective. Recent neurological studies have shown that the visual cortex of our brain is much more critical than previously thought: it has the power to make decisions for us (Henion and Bras‑ camp 2015). Any plan to contrive the mind and stimulate it to perceive it according to a particular line of thinking must seek its expression, or a significant portion of its presentation, in images. In locating the function of images as a core to the process of mind engineering, I have in mind Stuart Hall’s (1999) reflection on images’ operation: [M]any of the image’s ‘effects’ operate, not just ‘discursively’, but at the symbolic and psychic level of the unconscious. The symbolic power of the image to signify is in no sense restricted to the conscious level and cannot always easily be expressed in words. In fact, this may be one of the ways in which the so‑called power of the image differs from that of the linguistic sign. What is often said about the ‘power of the image’ is indeed that its im‑ pact is immediate and powerful even when its precise meaning remains, as it were, vague, ­suspended – numinous. In noticing this, we register the image’s capacity to connote on a much broader symbolic field, to touch levels of awareness, and which disturb by the very way in which they exceed meaning. (311) According to this interpretation, images can immediately impact their beholders regardless of their usage context. Patterns inscribed in images speak to the viewer’s subconscious even though the viewer might not be entirely conscious of the context in which the pictures are communicated. This way, images become the ideal vehicle for mind engineering. In the case of emojis, the operational level of mind engineering is even more prominent since they are proposed to form a universal hieroglyph of modern times. Whether one agrees or disagrees 330

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with this proposition from a linguistic perspective is not important here. More crucial to the cur‑ rent argument is the claim itself and its wide distribution among media channels. Rarely a day goes by without emojis being discussed on an online webpage as a global language. Regardless of its accuracy, this proposition empowers a discourse that understands emojis as potent commu‑ nicational objects and a must for a global subject. Therefore, it becomes a task for online users to educate themselves about emoji literacy and how to use them. These two discursive ­elements—the immediate operation of emoji images and the urge to acknowledge them as a global language1— make emojis the ideal vector for mind engineering worldwide. Let us not forget that emojis have been standardized by Unicode2 and are available and easily accessible on every online platform and digital device, a feature that makes them more repetitive for online users than many other visual icons. In what follows, I discuss how neoliberal values regarding the human body and ethnic diversity are inscribed in images of multicultural emojis.

Emojis: A Short History In the 1990s, when the internet was at its primary development stages among the public, chatroom conversations were dominated by emoticons. This relatively new way of interacting highlighted an underlying fact: users tend to convey their emotions even though their bodies are absent. ‘;‑)’ for sarcasm, or ‘¯_(ツ)_/¯’ for ambivalence, and ‘:‑)’ for jokes were among examples of such usages. The first set of emojis was developed in 1999 by a Japanese artist named Shigetaka Kurita. Com‑ ing from the Japanese ‘picture’ (絵, pronounced eh), plus ‘character’ (文字, pronounced mōji), an emoji is ‘a digital image that is added to a message in electronic communication in order to express a particular idea or feeling’ (emoji, n.d.). Emojis were established as a way to further DoCoMo’s3 nascent mobile internet network, known as ‘i‑mode.4’ To make it easier to converse in pictures rather than words, Shigetaka Kurita created a grid of 12 × 12‑pixel images that could be chosen from. Emojis swiftly gained traction in Japanese pop culture. Because of their popularity in Japan, emojis gained attention from other global technology businesses as potential prospects in online interactions. Emojis have been formally standardized by the Unicode Consortium, a non‑profit group that upholds the standards for writing across com‑ puter platforms. After Google’s petition in 2007 and its approval by the Unicode Consortium, emoji’s global surfing began in 2010. Apple launched the first official emoji keyboard on iOS in 2011, and Android did the same two years later. In combination with Unicode, Apple released iOS 8.3 on April 8, 2015, as the first update to include ‘emoji modifiers,’ allowing users to change emo‑ jis’ skin tone. On August 22, 2016, Google’s Android 7.0 provided the same capability. Unicode and its technology‑giant members have since adopted this trend of diversification. Later upgrades included gender‑neutral characters, persons with disabilities, people wearing hijabs and turbans, and professional women. Along with the traditional icons of emojis, technology companies appropriated the name to release their branded visualization software foregrounding a more semi‑realistic body representa‑ tion in online communications. In July 2016, Snapchat released Bitmoji,5 an ‘app that lets users create cartoon avatars that looks like themselves’ (Leswing 2016). Samsung released AR Emoji (augmented reality emoji) on March 16, 2018, for users with Galaxy S9 and S9+ smartphones.6 According to Samsung, ‘The AR Emojis use deep learning and facial recognition technology to map more than 100 facial features to produce a 3D replica, allowing users to create fun, custom‑ ized messages’ (Samsung and Disney Create AR Emoji Magic for the Galaxy S9 and S9+ 2018). Apple’s Memoji was released with iOS 12 on September 17, 2018, allowing users ‘to create an animated avatar of themselves’ (Silver 2018). Memoji7 is customizable with users’ ‘skin color, 331

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hairstyle, freckles, glasses, and many other features’ (ibid). The latest visual trend of this sort is the Meta avatar8 which was introduced in 2022 with the slogan, ‘Be Uniquely You’ (‘Introducing the Meta Avatars Store’ 2022). Although Bitmoji, Memoji, AR Emoji, and Meta avatars differ from emojis in that they portray a more semi‑realistic image of the person, they are very similar to emojis in how they depict the human form and show various ethnicities. They all illustrate diversity in the same way, using the same visual regime, which, I propose, is a result of neoliberal multiculturalism. Neoliberal mul‑ ticulturalism as ‘the signifying systems and cultural repertoires that produce and fix the meaning of human bodies and human groups’ (Melamed 2011: 138) is portrayed in multicultural emojis through two principal visual codes: color categorization and the Vitruvian Man body template. Alongside, all those apps call users to turn themselves into their designed images. It is no coincidence that along with the Meta avatar’s ‘Be Uniquely You’ that was mentioned above, one can also witness Bitmoji’s ‘Your Personal Emoji’ (Bitmoji, n.d.), AR Emoji’s ‘Turn yourself into an emoji’ (Turn yourself into an emoji on your Galaxy phone or tablet, n.d.), and Memoji’s ‘You can create a Memoji to match your personality and mood’ (Use Memoji on your iPhone or iPad Pro 2022). This call to ‘be yourself’ through emojis is an invitation to translate subjectivity into predetermined codes that will be discussed shortly. This is a practical aspect of emoji’s mind engi‑ neering process: turn yourself into these codes and see yourself in the figure of these visuals. The neoliberal rhetoric, whose exterior is intended to demonstrate diversity but whose internal logic supports the privilege of the Caucasian body, is, in turn, embedded in those visual codes.

Emojis and Neoliberalism Although emojis originated in Japan, I suggest their cultural package must be understood globally. What Iwabuchi (2002) coins as ‘culturally odorlessness’ comes in handy here: ‘Transnationally circulated images and commodities, I would argue, tend to become culturally odorless in the sense that origins are subsumed’ (46). This is evident in the case of emojis too. For example, although the first 176 emojis created by Shigetaka Kurita did not include any skin color or representation of diverse bodies, the changes made by Unicode and other software companies incorporated a West‑ ern reading of the human body over the years and emitted the Japanese cultural odor. This is also the case when the function of corporations such as Samsung (originally from South Korea) comes under the spotlight. Regardless of their origins, they are ‘multinational’ companies and try to stay as odorless as possible. In most cases, this odorlessness is a soft means to further the neoliberal project of ‘reorganization of international capitalism’ and reestablishing ‘the conditions for capital accumulation and to restore the power of economic elites’ (Harvey 2007: 19). Few studies have examined emoji’s function as a neoliberal visual advocate. Stark and Craw‑ ford (2015) suggest that emojis give us ‘a visual vocabulary for the neoliberal digital everyday.’ Along the same line, Phillip Seargeant (2019) proposes, ‘Emoji are the perfect manifestation of a communications system tailor‑made for the neoliberal times in which we live’ (178). More specifi‑ cally, regarding the representation of ethnic diversity in emojis, the subject under the examination of this chapter, Miriam Sweeney and Kelsea Whaley write Race as a system is wholly obscured and subsumed under a celebratory model of ‘differ‑ ence’ and as a neoliberal opportunity for user expression. This approach mirrors other kinds of white liberal interventions to racism that rely on ‘additive’ models within existing struc‑ tures (equality), rather than offering an epistemic challenge to (or reorganizing of) the struc‑ ture itself as status quo (justice). 332

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Using Foucauldian discourse analysis, I argue that the neoliberal discourse, which affirms the supremacy of the Caucasian body and places the Western subject at the center of its values, is inscribed in the images of multicultural emojis. Foucault investigated how human subjectivity is formed and impacted by institutions. The theme of his research was how various organizations and behaviors shaped our understanding of what it means to be human. Emojis are standardized by a major organization—the Unicode Consortium—as well as by several independent tech com‑ panies—like Apple and Samsung—that create their own emoji designs. Although their platform‑­ specific emojis differ, there are certain commonalities in how they portray images of various races. In a Foucauldian sense, those technological institutions define and symbolize what it is to be a ‘universal’ human subject in our neoliberal moment. According to recent literature, ‘emoji alone are ‘unreadable’’ (Freedman 2020: 45). I ­contend that the contrary is true by drawing on Foucault’s idea of ‘systems of dispersion’ and ‘discursive ­formation,’ which points out ‘an order in […] successive appearance.’ As Foucault (2002) suggests, Whenever one can describe, between a number of statements, […] between objects, types of statement, concepts, or thematic choices, one can define a regularity (an order, correlations, positions and functionings, transformations), we will say, for the sake of convenience, that we are dealing with a discursive formation. (41) According to the concept of ‘discursive formation,’ investigating the potential of mind engineering in multicultural emojis entails examining the sequence of meanings that emojis’ visual codes set off. I shed light on how the rhetoric of white supremacy shapes the visual codes of multicultural emojis and orients the viewer’s mind to a traditional Western reading of the body. To research how ‘specific views or accounts are constructed as real or truthful or natural’ in emoji images, the focus will be on the ‘image itself’ (Rose 2016: 193). I study how the primary visual components used in the final pictures of the human body in emojis express particular doctrines and values. I have included Meta avatars, Memoji, Bitmoji, and AR emojis in my discussion. That is not to minimize the digital settings and procedures in which those images are produced and distributed. But it is important to note that all those emoji generators share the ‘color classification’ and ‘the Vitruvian Man body template’ in their diversity representation.

Neoliberalism and Globalization Neoliberalism’s cultural artifacts present a ‘skin‑deep’ and frequently flawed image of various human identities. This phenomenon results from the neoliberal drive for ‘propagandistic globali‑ zation.’ Numerous economic, social, and political ideas have come to be understood as neoliberal‑ ism. Many governments and financial entities also alter neoliberalism’s look to suit their cultural and geographic needs. However, the term ‘neoliberalism’ and its discourse spin around the same pivot: ‘how the overall exercise of political power can be modelled on the principles of a market economy’ (Foucault 2008: 131). As a political and economic worldview, neoliberalism facilitates the integration of market‑corporate rationale and behavior into all spheres of human life (Leyva 2019: 11). In Wendy Brown’s words, it is a governing rationality through which everything is ‘economized’ and in a very specific way: human beings become market actors and nothing but, every field of activity is seen as 333

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a market, and every entity (whether public or private, whether person, business, or state) is governed as a firm. (Shenk 2015) Globalization is one of neoliberalism’s tenets. The territorial barriers should fade to the extent that the ultimate goal of neoliberalism, ‘market economy,’ is served. This way, capital can flow beyond territorial borders in the most expansive way. According to Brown (2015: 20), ‘neoliber‑ alism as economic policy, a modality of governance, and an order of reason is at once a global phenomenon.’ The literal meaning of ‘globalization’ is ‘international integration’ (Chomsky and Drèze 2014: 120). However, it has primarily been used in the context of international relations’ economic aspects as ‘trade liberalization and the freeing of cross‑border financial flows’ (Cerny 2014: 260) and ‘the global free movement of goods, capital and elites’ (Davies 2014: 113). Noam Chomsky calls this sense the ‘propagandistic meaning of globalization, which is used and enforced by concentrated power, refers to a very specific form of international integration: one […] which is designed in the interests of private concentrations of power’ (Chomsky and Drèze 2014: 120). Different laws and policies have been created in our current neoliberal period to recognize foreign investors and increase the power of capital. Along with required legal measures, a ‘mar‑ ket civilization’ has emerged, encompassing ‘cultural mechanisms connected with consumerism, education, leisure activity and the construction of individualist identities’ (Gill 1998: 31). The two wings of culture and law allow globalization to soar over national boundaries. Layers of prob‑ lematic and one‑dimensional definitions of people and their identities lie beneath propagandistic globalization and the subsequent formation of individual identities. That is to say, the neoliberal structure of individual identity is biased with, and based upon, the privilege of a Western worldview. One reason is that the promise of improved welfare for Westerners was globalization’s main objective. As Michel Foucault (2008: 55) discusses, globalization is formulated on reaching a limitless enrichment of Europe ‘as a collective and unlimited enrichment,’ according to which ‘the whole world is summoned around Europe.’9 It is natural, then, that the global ‘reconfiguration of capitalism’ comes along with ‘the transmission and reproduction of deeply embedded social hierarchies and prejudices rooted in a past characterized by territorial concepts of belonging and notions of civilization that both generated and were generated by racial inequalities’ (Thomas and Clarke 2013: 306). In other words, although propagandistic globalization symbolically passes across borders, it does not reject or dismiss the old capitalism’s hierarchies and prejudices but wraps them in a new, attractive cover suitable for its neoliberal mode of government.

Multiculturalism The success of neoliberal globalization of the market depends on its acknowledgment of global agents. Non‑European bodies, which were previously considered nonhuman (see Walcott 2013: 233), should now integrate into the spectrum of accepted identities. As a result, it becomes crucial to consider the ‘managed’ admission of race and ethnicity. The methods used by the political and economic elite to take advantage of the customs of human agency in developing countries are at the core of globalization. In the late 20th century and beyond, several fresh governance models emerged or were revitalized to accomplish this goal. Through these strategies, new administrative domains have been created, allowing for the expansion and regulation of new racialization pro‑ cesses built on the foundation of historical and social divisions and human worth classifications. One of those strategies is multiculturalism.

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Multiculturalism ‘stands for a wide range of social articulations, ideals and practices’ (Hall 2000: 210). Nevertheless, all different approaches to multiculturalism collectively ‘concern the way in which cultural and ethnic differentiation may be accommodated in social, political and eco‑ nomic arrangements’ (Festenstein 2000: 70). Multiculturalism can highlight issues such as immi‑ gration, support for cultural differences, managing diversity, and adding the spirit of tolerance to the public sphere (Fleras 2009: 4). Although ‘multiculturalism’ is characteristic of most ­societies in that they naturally consist of diverse cultures, propagandist globalization takes this premise a step forward ‘by making diversity a goal to be furthered by means of state policy’ (­Nagle 2009: 6). This is where neoliberal multiculturalism is born. Neoliberal multiculturalism, along with the expansion of capitalism throughout the world, is also ‘a name for the signifying systems and cultural repertoires that produce and fix the meaning of human bodies and human groups within the biopolitics produced by neoliberal calculations enter‑ ing into the governmentality of states and regions’ (Melamed 2011: 138). Neoliberal multicultural‑ ism, which categorizes diversity using neoliberal calculations, has many cultural manifestations, like multicultural emojis. Claims of ‘neutrality’ between and ‘equality’ among human ethnicities have been used to support multiculturalism in the framework of neoliberalism. However, the neo‑ liberal definition of multiculturalism is predicated on the covert acknowledgment of a dominant race.

Multicultural Emojis’ Design For many of us, the body’s physicality is a fully ingested reality. We eat, sleep, move, chat, and do other activities without considering them as bodily functions. The aim of any ‘body’ represen‑ tational regime is to transform these unconsciously performed actions into prearranged signals. These cultural creations can be seen as attempts to orient the mind, shape its understanding, and align the body in its future activities. In her expansion upon the concept of the ‘human body,’ Elizabeth Grosz (2005: 32) argues, [b]y body I understand a concrete, material, animate organization of flesh, organs, nerves, muscles, and skeletal structure which are given a unity, cohesiveness, and organization only through their physical and social inscription as the surface and raw materials of an integrated and cohesive totality. The body is, so to speak, organically/biologically/naturally ‘incom‑ plete’; it is indeterminate, amorphous, a series of uncoordinated potentialities which require social triggering, ordering, and long term ‘administration.’ One way to bring this inevitably broken thing—the body—together is through representational codes. No representational code is and can be neutral. They cite specific meanings and evoke par‑ ticular conceptions of the human body. This is where Foucault’s ‘discursive formation’ enters the stage: how a text, a picture, a design, and other visual codes cite a particular chain of meanings. Perhaps this is why Nicholas Mirzoeff (2005: 171) wonders ‘whether drawing the body, and ob‑ serving it in art, can produce anything other than monsters of the imagination.’ Emojis that depict different human bodies and identities are not an exception in this regard; they employ a variety of representational protocols each of which evokes a chain of meanings. The classification of colors and the Vitruvian Man body template are two codes that will be covered in the following sections. I will explain why these two codes hold the implications of the superiority of the Caucasian body beyond simply displaying differences in identities and races.

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Color Categorization In most kinds of media representation, the relationship between ‘conventional’ colors assigned to various skin tones and diversity representation is somehow taken for granted. Specific colors are frequently used to describe people and to establish ethnic groups. The concept is regarded as neutral and natural. Nonetheless, color categorization can be regarded as part of the neoliberal discourse in acknowledging global actors in which ‘the particularities of racial bodies are present empirically but often absent analytically’ (Thomas and Clarke 2013: 315). Color‑based categori‑ zation of human bodies barely contributes to a thorough understanding of people, their history, or their life stories. By emphasizing what is ‘empirically’ assumed to be a person’s ‘color,’ neoliberal multiculturalism simplifies human ethnicities and characteristics. At its finest, such a viewpoint is a more attentively defined version of the Jim Crow racial segregation system.10 Despite the long‑unchallenged falsification that ‘all humans naturally belong to one of a few biological types or races that evolved in isolation’ (Barbujani 2005: 215), selecting specific physi‑ cal characteristics as signifiers of human diversity is a social and historical process.11 For instance, Donna Zuckerberg (2018) suggests that the image of the Greeks as shining examples of whiteness is zealously pushed and, in fact, highjacked by sections of the alt‑right who regard themselves as successors to the supposed European warrior masculinity. In the same vein, Tim Whitmarsh (2018) proposes that Greeks simply didn’t think of the world as starkly divided along racial lines into black and white: that’s a strange aberration of the modern, Western world, a product of many differ‑ ent historical forces, but in particular the transatlantic slave trade and the cruder aspects of 19th‑century racial theory. Far from being ‘natural,’ racial categorization revolves around societal power distribution. In the words of Gregory Smithsimon (2018), ‘Race is a power relationship; racial categories are not about interesting cultural or physical differences, but about putting other people into groups in order to dominate, exploit and attack them.’ This very ‘modern, western obsession with classification by pigmentation’ (Whitmarsh 2018), regardless of its reactionary and conservative implications, is employed by Unicode (UTS #51: Unicode Emoji, n.d.) to display ‘diversity’: ‘Emoji characters can be modified to use one of five different skin tone modifiers. Each tone is based on the Fitzpatrick Scale’ (Emoji Modifier Sequence, n.d.). Following a 1972 Australian study on skin burning, Harvard medical pioneer Thomas B. Fitzpatrick created the Fitzpatrick scale. Despite Australia’s significant Aboriginal population, Fitzpatrick only focused on the skin tone of Caucasian people there. Categories for skin tones with darker tones were later introduced by Fitzpatrick. Since the Fitzpatrick scale is a scientific resource, the Unicode Consortium adopted it in its diversity representation. It was a way for them to avoid probable controversial consequences and achieve ‘technological neutrality.’ Nevertheless, it seems that the Fitzpatrick scale is not as neutral as Unicode desires it to be. The Fitzpatrick scale implies a ‘European‑cultural’ centrality even in its sequential steps in representing skins (first, ‘whites,’ then ‘nonwhites’ as additives to ‘fix’ the problem). According to Fitzpatrick himself, the Fitzpatrick scale was created to ‘better clas‑ sify persons with white skin in order to select the correct initial doses of ultraviolet’ (Fitzpatrick 1988: 869). It was not until later that the representation of other skins was incorporated into the main chart. A similar sequential order can be seen in emojis’ diversity representation: the core, the ‘white,’ was assumed as the default. Later, other ‘colors’ were added to propose a ‘technical fix’ (Miltner 2021: 530) to a problem. 336

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This chronological order has implications in both medical and cultural contexts. For instance, in a dermatological context, reports show that people of non‑Caucasian backgrounds struggle to identify with the spectrum of colors provided by this scale (Pichon et al. 2010). In the cultural context, as Stark and Crawford (2015: 7) argue, the employment of the Fitzpatrick scale evokes ‘hierarchies of gendered and racialized authority and inequality.’ Sweeney and Whaley (2019) also discuss that ‘limited representations of non‑white identities’ and ‘repeating patterns of rac‑ ism’ show that ‘emoji skin‑tone modifiers are culturally produced around, and interpreted through, sets of racial logics that extend American technocultural beliefs.’ Sweeney and Whaley (2019) use ‘technoculture’ to address ‘the interconnected sets of ideologies that shape technology as both a material and semiotic cultural product.’ The Fitzpatrick scale, thus, can reinforce racist ideologies that centralize ‘whiteness’ as the default race: the subconscious vehicle of ‘white‑first/black‑last’ (Miltner 2015: 527) that reincarnates the ‘back of the bus’12 policy. The relativity and inaccuracy of such scales are more apparent when one considers, perhaps with more attention, the infinite spectrum of skin colors. An exemplary work in this respect is the photo series, Humanæ, by the Brazilian photographer Angélica Dass. I argue that her collection (Figure 21.1), which started in 2012, can be seen as a challenge to the mental trend of quickly sim‑ plifying human beings as this and that ‘color.’ Dass takes an 11 by 11 pixel from the subject’s face after snapping a picture of them and compares it to a Pantone color. The Pantone shade number is then put to the bottom, and the portrait is positioned on a background of that color. The artist ex‑ plains her work as a ‘discussion platform on identity independent from factors such as nationality, origin, economic status, age or aesthetic standards’ (Goorwich 2015). The work is an apparent confrontation with the concept of colored identity. The artist locates the viewer in front of multiple subjects and colors. In one sense, the diversity of colors is much

Figure 21.1.  Exhibition of Humanæ project in Valencia, Spain

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more than what exists based on the media’s stereotypical depiction of ethnicities. The people featured in this collection cannot simply be put in black, brown, or white packages. From an even more meditative perspective, we can see that the subjects’ skins are not wholly consistent with the colors extracted from them. This is where the relationship between color and identity becomes further debased. Brown, black, and white turn into relative myths that, at their best, contain an unstable rule regarding representation. Viewed from this angle, the series can be positioned as contrary to the underlying perception of multicultural emojis that package people and their identi‑ ties in a limited spectrum of colors. By using the color code, multicultural emojis stand at the intersection of ‘color‑blind’ and ‘color‑bind’ in formulating the diversity of the human body. Multicultural emojis are an excellent example of how the racially driven mindset of neoliberalism pushes everyone to adhere to their so‑called color and simultaneously pretends to create a colorblind world in which racial anxieties play no role. The concept of ‘color‑bind’ (Mahiri 2017) or ‘color‑boundness’ (Jonahs 2021) high‑ lights ‘how people’s identities are imprisoned within the limited spectrum of color categories that have been generated by and distinguished from whiteness’ (Mahiri 2017: 29). Color blindness, with the literal meaning of ‘not influenced by differences of race’ (Definition of COLORBLIND, n.d.), has been seen as a ‘failure to deal straightforwardly with the pervasive practices of exclu‑ sion’ (Williams 1997: 5). Colorblind rhetoric implies a ‘false prematurely imagined community’ in its ‘purity,’ which is, indeed, ‘achieved through ignorance.’ Emojis empower color‑bind by, on the one hand, creating ‘cute modes of self‑presentation’ (May 2019: 11) that attract users and, on the other hand, molding the ‘self’ and ‘identity’ into specific ‘color’ units. One must find their own pigmentation among different options and represent themselves by that ‘natural’ reference. At the same time, emojis also pretend to be colorblind by putting forward an image of a perfect world in which all different colors are holding hands.13 In colorblind racism, one can observe the declaration that ‘there are no real problems with racism in our society’ and ‘challenges stem from individuals rather than our institutions and collective think‑ ing and behavior’ (Bruke 2018: 1). In this ideal picture that emojis present, the problem of race is fixed. Coming from a different background is no longer an obstacle; everyone wins! Outside this ‘lovely’ frame, however, the story is different. Emojis’ idealism propagates a perfect image in us‑ ers’ minds that render racial struggles an expired phenomenon. But the story does not end there. Even this ideal image is based on the monotonous standards of a Western mentality. For example, having big eyes is a universal criterion for beauty. The natural features of the Caucasian hairstyle are imposed on the bodies of other races. The same is the case with the way emoji characters dress. And all bodies are proportioned according to the Vitruvian Man body template. In the end, we have an ideal image of a world whose people’s attitudes and appearances do not go beyond the borders of Western Europe and North America.

The Vitruvian Man Body Template The neoliberal pallet of racial colors cannot be applied to any human body template. Its represen‑ tational strategy requires a template rooted in a tradition of thought that shares the same doctrines and values. Every ‘body template’ is based on a specific conception of human beings and is not, and cannot be, void of a valuation system. Sometimes, the projected body challenges the dominat‑ ing discourse of the ‘harmonical’ or ‘perfect’ body. In other cases, the template conforms to the prevailing model of thought based on reaffirming the superiority of people of a specific cultural and regional background. I suggest that the body template of multicultural emojis, with a touch of cuteness, follows a traditional Western idealism of human body proportions. 338

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Discussing the iconography of the ‘typical body charts’ of forensic pathology, Joseph Pugliese (2004: 295) proposes that ‘forensic body charts reproduce an unreflexive racism, even as these visual images strive to position themselves as scientifically ‘neutral’, ‘objective’ and ‘universal’.’ This ‘typical body template’ is based on Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man whose ‘geometric grid establishes a type of matrix that disciplines the very contours of the human body and determines the normative dimensions and figurations of its features and its surfaces.’ Looking at the issue through a Foucauldian lens, it is arguable that such images operate as visual technologies in fulfill‑ ing the ‘art of distribution’ of the dominant conceptions (see Pugliese 2004: 293–294). Many artists, notably the Greek sculptor Polyclitus14 and the Roman architect Marcus Vitru‑ vius Pollio,15 had done comprehensive studies on the ‘ideal’ human proportions. Their accounts were followed by several attempts to establish a canon of ratios for the human figure during the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Da Vinci began a comprehensive human proportions analysis with enthusiasm and precision during 1489–1490. He took several assessments to create a complete cor‑ respondence system between all body regions, which he documented in a series of drawings. One of the primary sources for da Vinci’s anatomical sketches was Vitruvius’s treatise, De architectura (Vitruvius 2009). Da Vinci’s sketches led to one of his most famous works establishing the ‘ideal’ proportion of the human body, the Vitruvian Man (Figure 21.2). In addition to da Vinci, other artists such as Cesare Cesariano (Figure 21.3), Geoffroy Tory (Figure 21.4), and Heinrich Cornelius Ag‑ rippa (Figure 21.5) also followed Vitruvius’s De architectura and drew their own Vitruvian Man. To compare emoji bodies with these Vitruvian Man images, we must remember that emojis are cute images. Cute here refers to something ‘often, characterized by a big head, the lack of a nose or mouth, and large eyes to show emotion’ (Freedman 2020: 54). Cuteness can also be positioned with ‘freakishness and the grotesque’ (Dale et al. 2016: 4). Almost all emoji characters can be con‑ sidered as cute. Their big heads and large eyes represent them as vulnerable and elicit a tender re‑ sponse in the viewer. Emojis synthesize this cuteness with the sense of ‘symmetrical proportions’ that stem from the Vitruvian Man model. The use of precise proportions to make a symmetrical image has been further facilitated by digital calculations. This fact has led to a meticulously bal‑ anced sense of the human body in emojis, both in body parts (eyes, mouth, nose, hands, feet, hair) and the relation of those parts to the body. Each emoji of the human body can be placed at the center of the Vitruvian Man’s circle and square without disturbing the harmonical ratios of the original image. To examine this proposition, I conducted a simple experiment. As I mentioned above, the face and head of the emojis are the central touch of cuteness in their design. I removed this element. Then, I tried to lay emoji bodies over the Vitruvian Man body template without changing the emojis’ original ratios. The result can be seen in Figures 21.6–21.9. What we see here indicates that similar proportions work in both sets of images. This, in turn, results in the propagation of a similar symmetrical sense regarding the ‘proper’ proportions of the human body. In a nutshell, the Vitruvian Man model and its balanced proportions are repeated and highlighted, times and again, through the images of emojis. Despite the Vitruvian man’s wide embracement as the depiction of the ‘ideal’ man, one can detect several problematic features embedded in the model. The Vitruvian man and his idealism are not and cannot be universal. Instead, it is ‘a singular Roman body modelled as universal Man/Human’ (Mi‑ gnolo 2017: 41). The model prompts a colonial ‘Caucasian body’ that ‘supplies the normative ground against which to measure all other racial ‘deviations’’ (Pugliese 2004: 294). Considering ‘Blackface’ as a performance of wearing dark makeup in a caricature of the appearance of a person from African origins, multicultural emojis, with a Caucasian body as their backbone, form a silent ‘Nonwhite‑face’ performance in the digital context, regardless of their usage. In other words, multicultural emojis paint ‘color’ over a Caucasian male body template and caricature people of different origins. 339

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Figure 21.2.  Leonardo da Vinci’s The Vitruvian Man

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Figure 21.3.  The Vitruvian Man by Cesare Cesariano

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Figure 21.4.  Geoffroy Tory’s The Vitruvian Man

Figure 21.5.  Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa’s The Vitruvian Man

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Figure 21.6.  An AR Emoji laid over Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man

The Goal At first glance, emojis may seem like ‘just’ fun images that are helpful in the context of online com‑ munications. However, the way different ethnicities and identities are represented in this collection is such that the old policy of Australia and Canada in solving the ‘aboriginal problem’ comes to mind: the assimilation policy. Since Aboriginal people were not considered ‘of full blood,’ they were supposed to be gradually absorbed into the wider population, or to be more precise, the ‘whiter’ population. In the assimilation path, the roots should be forgotten, and the body must ap‑ pear and act in accordance with the expectations of the ‘civilized’ society. Over time, this blatant cruelty gave place to another policy suitable for our neoliberal time, which may seem charming at first glance, but its problematic roots remain strong: multiculturalism. In his contemplation on the definition of neoliberal multiculturalism, Will Kymlicka (2013) argues that ‘the goal of neoliberal multiculturalism is not a tolerant national citizen who is con‑ cerned for the disadvantaged in her own society but a cosmopolitan market actor who can compete effectively across state boundaries’ (111). This way of seeing multiculturalism which can be called ‘democratic social cohesion’ (Bickmore 2006) focuses on how individuals interact rather than their shared ideals or trust relationship. Diversity and difference are not an asset in themselves but should be bridged. The ideal society of this approach to multiculturalism stays limited to the principles of income distribution. Katharyne Mitchell (2003) expands upon this sense and suggests that being ‘a good citizen is no longer synonymous with constituting a well‑rounded, nationally 343

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Figure 21.7.  A Bitmoji laid over Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa’s Vitruvian Man

Figure 21.8.  An emoji laid over Geoffroy Tory’s Vitruvian Man

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Figure 21.9.  A Meta avatar laid over Cesare Cesariano’s Vitruvian Man

oriented, multicultural self, but rather about the attainment of the ‘complex skills’ necessary for individual success in the global economy’ (399). For a neoliberal mindset, ‘money’ is the regulator of everything. Diversity and multicultural‑ ism are not different in that respect. They are welcome as long as they mean something in mon‑ etary terms. Thus, neoliberal multiculturalism focuses on not valuing but governing diversity as 345

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an effective means of competition in the global market. In their co‑authored Selling Diversity, ­Yasmeen Abu‑Laban and Christina Gabriel (2002) argue that, This reading of diversity is also narrow insofar as it fails to problematize structural in‑ equalities that exist between groups of people. In each of the policy areas—immigration, multiculturalism, and employment equity—the focus on economic rationalism has rendered a profoundly narrow vision of diversity, which is basically a selling‑out of an agenda on pursuing substantive equality for those marginalized by race/ethnicity, gender, and class. (173) In the same vein, Kymlicka (2013) points out, ‘Neoliberal multiculturalism […] silences debates on economic redistribution, racial inequality, unemployment, economic restructuring, and labor rights’ (113). Multicultural emojis can precisely be comprehended via this way of looking at di‑ versity: an affirmation of commercial linkages and silencing any inequality debate. The presence of ‘colored’ and ‘white’ emojis together gives a view of the perfect world of equality and peace‑ fulness. This image of togetherness functions as a ‘shop‑window show’ of color categories, ideal bodies, and racial silence that neither challenges nor allows pondering neoliberalism’s structural premises. Discussing pornographic photographs, Roland Barthes (1981: 41) suggests that they are a set of unary photographs. Their transformative impact on ‘reality’ is marked by a distinct lack of dual‑ ity, indirection, or disturbance. In other words, this type of photograph emphatically alters reality without introducing conflicting elements. Barthes further argues that they function as a ‘shop window’ that showcases a single, well‑lit piece of jewelry. This emphasizes the singular focus and cohesion in the transformation of a one‑faceted reality through the lens of the photograph. Ashley La Grange (2013) adds to this account that ‘these are banal photographs and are tightly composed’ (104). Whether or not we agree with this account about pornographic photos, the ‘shop window’ argument seems applicable to the case of multicultural emojis. Are they not images that disturb no profound premise of neoliberalism and ask no real question about or of the—­supposedly—rep‑ resented people? Are they not tightly composed to transform a mainstream reading of diversity without doubling it?

Conclusion Neoliberal racism is a difficult concept to deal with. In terms of appearance, this racism is not in line with the conspicuous historical ones: a group does not capture others with whips and hand‑ cuffs and does not force them to put their labors at their service. However, it governs the popula‑ tion by modeling them on patterns that reaffirm white supremacism. Mind engineering is a process that can play a significant role in neoliberal governing policies. In his reflection on neoliberal racism, Joshua Inwood (2015) argues that One of the things that makes neoliberal racism so difficult to confront is that it takes the overt white supremacy of previous generations and repackages it in a language and context that offer ‘plausible deniability’ to those who profit from it. (415) This chapter viewed multicultural emojis through the same lens: a neoliberal manifestation of diversity that has repackaged white supremacist codes, namely color categorization, and the 346

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Vitruvian Man body template. Through their standardization by the Unicode Consortium, emojis distribute their depicted values globally. By pushing the discourse of ‘universal language,’ emo‑ jis are raised to be read as pictures of diverse human bodies and identities worldwide. Despite this effort, emojis’ visual codes are rooted in a monocultural reading of diversity. They engineer minds through this paradoxical nature (apparent demonstration of diversity/underlying privilege of Western reading of the human body and diversity) and lead global subjects to assimilation into the Western spectrum of standard subjectivity. There is a general inclination to frame media technologies ‘as certain vehicles for universal transformation […] as a simple, taken for granted given’ (Chan 2014: 5). Similarly, Thomas Streeter (2010) suggests that ‘creation‑from‑nowhere assumptions’ accompany media technolo‑ gies and form ‘structures of understanding that are systematically blind to the collective and historical conditions underlying new ideas, new technologies, and new wealth’ (12). Emojis are a good example here: they are supposed to form a ‘universal, taken‑for‑granted’ picture with no underlying bias in representation. As one member of Unicode’s Symbols committee tries to reason, ‘Emojis are just a set of symbols proposed for encoding and have to be judged as just that.’ In the big picture, nothing is just a sign. There is no ‘neutral’ symbol, and any image, sign, and cultural manifestation could always be subject to scrutiny. But even more specifically, con‑ cerning emojis, it is the Unicode that maintains ‘universality’ as its agenda (Miltner 2021: 522). Almost no day goes by without an article about the ‘universality’ of this ‘visual language.’ Thus, it seems entirely justified to investigate how a supposedly universal set of images manifests their global ambitions. Through the concept of discursive formation, I tried to explore how visual codes in emojis design the ‘universal’ human body and define what it means to be a global subject in our neo‑ liberal time. In the field of emoji literature, this article is a continuation of efforts that analyze the neoliberal layers embedded in emoji images from a discursive perspective. This article un‑ dertook the task of unfolding the meanings of two visual codes in multicultural emojis that may seem ordinary and given: color classification and the Vitruvian Man model. Attributing color to identity is one of the remnants of the Atlantic slavery era (c. 1526–c. 1867). This trait was later reincarnated in the Jim Crow era (c. 1877–c. 1950) in the United States society through laws that enforced adherence to color as a primary factor of identity. By bounding human and ethnic identity to a limited range of colors, emojis call users to a stereotypical understanding and ex‑ pression of identity. On the other hand, emojis give an imaginary picture of a world in which colors (ethnicities) are entirely accepted and welcome. This way, emojis strengthen the neoliberal rationale based on which the racial struggles are eliminated from macro structures, and whatever challenge is left is up to individual strive. Furthermore, emojis propagate a traditional European sense of human body proportions using the Vitruvian Man template to design their final images. I examined this proposi‑ tion by laying the images of emojis over the Vitruvian Man body templates. The results showed that without changing the body ratios of the emojis, they are clearly in harmony with the Vitruvian Man body templates. This manifests that emojis cultivate the same symmetrical sense and ideal proportions boosted by the Vitruvian Man pattern. To conclude this article, we can think of some further questions. The first question can be asked about identity representation in emojis. Is it possible for a limited number of company representa‑ tives or any other limited group to determine the identity representation of the whole world? Is representing diverse identities in a set of images possible at all? What could be the solution here, if any? Are multicultural emojis the best existing option to represent diversity? Also, we can think of claims about emojis’ universality: are emojis a set of universal symbols? Which parts of the 347

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world are included in this ‘global’ when emojis are considered a universal language? Which hu‑ man, identity, geographical origin, and culture are we talking about when we call emojis global symbols? Marcel Danesi (2017) argues that ‘the emoji code might well be the universal language that can help solve problems of comprehension that international communications have always involved in the past’ (vii). Even if we take this proposition for granted, we may ask about the nature of the solution that emojis bring forth: do they offer a multicultural solution, or are they a monocultural umbrella arched over all global subjects? And how could their usage yield different from other visual objects in ‘international’ communications? Perhaps, even thinking about seemingly apparent terms like ‘universal,’ we must remind ourselves that we deal with not one but several different ‘universals.’

Notes 1 Perhaps the most famous one is Oxford Dictionaries’ decision in 2015 to announce “face with tears of joy emoji.” as the word of the year. 2 ‘The Unicode Consortium is a non‑profit corporation devoted to developing, maintaining, and promoting software internationalization standards and data, particularly the Unicode Standard, which specifies the representation of text in all modern software products and standards.’ (Unicode Consortium, n.d.) 3 Japan’s largest telecommunications company: Overview | NTT DOCOMO,’ NTT Docomo, accessed May 23, 2022, https://www.docomo.ne.jp/english/corporate/about/outline/index.html 4 World’s first mobile Internet‑services platform: History | NTT DOCOMO,’ NTT Docomo, accessed May 23, 2022, https://www.docomo.ne.jp/english/corporate/about/outline/history/ 5 You can see some examples at Bitmoji Support, https://support.bitmoji.com/hc/en‑us/articles/360037603 511‑Mix‑and‑Match‑Outfits 6 You can see some examples at ‘‘‘AR Emoji Can Be a Visual AI Assistant’: Developers on the ­Galaxy S10 AR Emoji,’ Samsung Newsroom, July 15, 2019, https://news.samsung.com/global/interview‑ar‑ emoji‑can‑be‑a‑visual‑ai‑assistant‑developers‑on‑the‑galaxy‑s10‑ar‑emoji 7 You can see some examples at ‘Apple previews iOS 12: Shared AR Experiences, Fun New Ways to Com‑ municate and Screen Time Come to iPhone and iPAd this Fall,’ Apple Newsroom, June 4, 2018, https:// www.apple.com/sn/newsroom/2018/06/apple‑previews‑ios‑12. 8 You can see some examples at ‘Introducing the Meta Avatars Store,’ Meta, June 20, 2022, https://about. fb.com/news/2022/06/introducing‑the‑meta‑avatars‑store/ 9 It is worth noting that more than a geographical indication, here ‘Europe’ marks out a cultural heritage. As a member of the United States government speaks about the ‘Atlantic Union’ in the hearing of the House of Representatives on 20 September 1966, ‘The natural forces that tend to bind together the peoples of the North Atlantic are clear for all to see. We share a common history and a common civilization. We are legatees of the great civilization of the Greeks, the political institutions of Rome, and the unifying moral force of Christianity.’ (Hearings 1966: 165–166) 10 For more on Jim Crow segregation system see (Thompson‑Miller, Feagin and Picca 2014) 11 See (Omi and Winant 2014) 12 ‘‘Back of the bus’ is a reference to the Jim Crow policy of forcing Black riders to sit in the back of the bus, separate from the White riders in the front of the bus.’ (Miltner 2015: 532). 13 You can find the holding hand emojis on Apple list of emojis provided by Emojipedia.org, at https://­ emojipedia.org/apple/show_all/#more 14 480 BC–420 BC. 15 80 BC–15 BC.

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Amin Heidari Inwood, J.F.J. (2015) ‘Neoliberal racism: The ‘Southern Strategy’ and the expanding geographies of white supremacy’, Social & Cultural Geography, 16(4), pp. 407–423. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/146 49365.2014.994670. Iwabuchi, K. (2002) Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822384083. Jasso‑Aguilar, R. and Waitzkin, H. (2011) ‘Multinational corporations, the state, and contemporary medicine’, Health Sociology Review, 20(3), pp. 245–257. Available at: https://doi.org/10.5172/hesr.2011.20.3.245. Jonahs, A. (2021) ‘Colorblind and colorbound: Everyday neoliberalism in the discourses on romantic inter‑ racial relationships’, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 18(1), pp. 1–18. Available at: https:// doi.org/10.1080/14791420.2020.1854801. Kymlicka, W. (2013) ‘Neoliberal Multiculturalism?’, in M. Lamont and P.A. Hall (eds) Social Resilience in the Neoliberal Era. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp.  99–126. Available at: https://doi. org/10.1017/CBO9781139542425.007. Leswing, K. (2016) ‘Snapchat just introduced a feature it paid more than $100  million for, Business In‑ sider’. Available at: https://www.businessinsider.com/snapchat‑just‑introduced‑a‑feature‑it‑paid‑more‑ than‑100‑million‑for‑2016‑7 (Accessed: 24 December 2022). Leyva, R. (2019) Brains, Media and Politics: Generating Neoliberal Subjects. London: Routledge. Mahiri, J. (2017) Deconstructing Race: Multicultural Education beyond the Color‑Blind. New York: Teachers College Press. May, S. (2019) The Power of Cute. Princeton, NJ; Oxford: Princeton University Press. Melamed, J. (2011a) Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism. 1st ­edition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Melamed, J. (2011b) Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism. Minne‑ apolis: University of Minnesota Press. Mignolo, W.D. (2017) ‘Coloniality is far from over, and so must be decoloniality’, Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry, 43, pp. 38–45. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1086/692552. Miltner, K.M. (2021) ‘‘One part politics, one part technology, one part history’: Racial representation in the Unicode 7.0 emoji set’, New Media & Society, 23(3), pp.  515–534. Available at: https://doi. org/10.1177/1461444819899623. Mirzoeff, N. (1995) Bodyscape: Art, modernity and the ideal figure. London; New York: Routledge. Mitchell, K. (2003) ‘Educating the national citizen in neoliberal times: From the multicultural self to the stra‑ tegic cosmopolitan’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 28(4), pp. 387–403. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0020‑2754.2003.00100.x. Nagle, J. (2009) Multiculturalism’s Double‑Bind: Creating Inclusivity, Cosmopolitanism and Difference. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd. Nettesheim, H.C.A. von (1533) De occulta philosophia libri tres. Johann Soter. Omi, M. and Winant, H. (2014) Racial Formation in the United States. 3rd edition. New York: Routledge. Pichon, L.C. et al. (2010) ‘Measuring skin cancer risk in African Americans: Is the Fitzpatrick skin type ­classification scale culturally sensitive?’, Ethnicity & Disease, 20(2), pp. 174–179. Pugliese, J. (2004) ‘‘Demonstrative evidence’: A genealogy of the racial iconography of forensic art and illus‑ tration’, Law and Critique, 15(3), pp. 287–320. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978‑004‑5447‑3. Samsung and Disney create AR Emoji magic for the Galaxy S9 and S9+ (2018) Samsung US Newsroom. Available at: https://news.samsung.com/us/samsung‑disney‑ar‑emoji‑galaxy‑s9‑s9plus/ (Accessed: 24 December 2022). Seargeant, P. (2019) The Emoji Revolution: How Technology Is Shaping the Future of Communication. ­Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108677387. Shenk, T. (2015) ‘What exactly is neoliberalism?’, Dissent Magazine. Available at: https://www.dissentmag‑ azine.org/blog/booked‑3‑what‑exactly‑is‑neoliberalism‑wendy‑brown‑undoing‑the‑demos (Accessed: 24 December 2022). Silver, S. (2018) ‘Apple’s iOS 12 introduces personalized ‘Memoji’ and camera effects’, AppleInsider. ­Available at: https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/06/04/apples‑ios‑12‑introduces‑personalized‑memoji‑­ and‑­camera‑effects (Accessed: 24 December 2022). Smithsimon, G. (2018) ‘Race is not real: What you see is a power relationship made flesh | Aeon Essays’, Aeon. Available at: https://aeon.co/essays/race‑is‑not‑real‑what‑you‑see‑is‑a‑power‑relationship‑made‑flesh (Accessed: 25 December 2022). Streeter, T. (2010) The Net Effect: Romanticism, Capitalism, and the Internet. New York: NYU Press.

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Visual Language and Mind Engineering Sweeney, M.E. and Whaley, K. (2019) ‘Technically white: Emoji skin‑tone modifiers as American ­technoculture’, First Monday, 24(7). Available at: https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v24i7.10060. Thomas, D.A. and Clarke, M.K. (2013) ‘Globalization and Race: Structures of Inequality, New Sovereignties, and Citizenship in a Neoliberal Era’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 42(1), pp. 305–325. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev‑anthro‑092412‑155515. Thompson‑Miller, R., Feagin, J.R. and Picca, L.H. (2014) Jim Crow’s Legacy: The Lasting Impact of ­Segregation. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Tory, G. (1529) Champfleury au quel est contenu lart & science de la deue & vraye proportio[n] des lettres attiques, quo dit autreme[n]t lettres antiques, & vulgairement lettres romaines proportionnees selon le corps & visage humain … est a vendre… par Maistre Geofroy Tory… Et par Giles Gourmont. Turn yourself into an emoji on your Galaxy phone or tablet (no date) Samsung Electronics America. Available at: https://www.samsung.com/us/support/answer/ANS00078920/ (Accessed: 24 December 2022). Unicode Consortium (no date). Available at: https://unicode.org/consortium/consort.html (Accessed: 11 ­February 2023). Use Memoji on your iPhone or iPad Pro (2022) Apple Support. Available at: https://support.apple.com/en‑au/ HT208986 (Accessed: 24 December 2022). UTS #51: Unicode Emoji (no date). Available at: https://www.unicode.org/reports/tr51/tr51‑12.html#Diversity (Accessed: 25 December 2022). Vitruvius (2009) On Architecture. Translated by R. Schofield. London: Penguin UK. Walcott, R. (2013) ‘Afterword: Sentiment or Action’, in K. Dobson and A. McGlynn (eds) Transnationalism, Activism, Art. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, pp. 227–237. Whitmarsh, T. (2018) ‘When Homer envisioned Achilles, did he see a black man? | Aeon Essays’, Aeon. Available at: https://aeon.co/essays/when‑homer‑envisioned‑achilles‑did‑he‑see‑a‑black‑man (Accessed: 25 December 2022). Williams, P.J. (1997) Seeing a Color‑Blind Future: The Paradox of Race. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Zuckerberg, D. (2018) Not All Dead White Men: Classics and Misogyny in the Digital Age. Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Press.

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22 BRAINWASHING AT HOME AND ABROAD IN COLD WAR FICTION AND FILM David Seed

Novelists and film‑makers speculatively explored the technologies of mind control which emerged from the 1950s onwards, applying and frequently criticizing their sinister applications. This in‑ teraction between scientific experiment, politics, and fiction is embodied in the political scientist Paul M.A. Linebarger, who published his seminal study Psychological Warfare in 1948 and who served as adviser to the CIA on ‘psyops’. In a 1951 lecture he paused over the case of Cardinal Mindszenty and announced: ‘Somehow they took his soul apart’, finally building him up as a ‘puppet’ (Linebarger 1951: 30). Linebarger discusses the differences between Soviet and Chinese brainwashing here and went on to incorporate this practice in his Science Fiction stories, published as by Cordwainer Smith. In his 1959 story ‘No, No, Not Rogov!’, for example, he describes a secret Soviet project to design a ‘brain‑equivalent machine’ ‘designed to confused human thought over great distances’ (Smith 2003: 8–9). The term ‘brainwashing’ entered the English language as a translation of the Chinese xi nao (literally ‘wash brain’) in a news report of 1950 on Chinese political education by the US journal‑ ist Edward Hunter, who then went on to explain its significance in Brainwashing: The Story of the Men Who Defied It (1956). ‘Brainwashing’ took on the meaning of an institutional process where individuals without their volition had their beliefs changed, sometimes with the help of drugs or hypnosis, to induce positions or actions favourable to that regime. From 1949 to 1950 Hunter worked for the CIA and right from its inception the term ‘brainwashing’ had a specific relevance for totalitarian regimes, specifically Communist ones. For Hunter the very coinage of the term was a political act since it identified a process without a name and thus counteracted the secrecy exploited by those regimes. Hunter’s account set the pattern for subsequent discussions of brain‑ washing in taking its initial bearings from Ivan P. Pavlov. He describes seeing a film about the lat‑ ter’s experiments called The Nervous System where a human subject has a reflex induced by lights and explains that ‘instead of a light, the Kremlin could use words as signals – any words would do – imperialism […] friend of the people, big brother, without any relationship to their actual meaning’ (Hunter 1970: 24). While drawing attention to the trigger terms of Communist political discourse Hunter slips in a clear allusion to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty‑Four to reinforce his point that the Soviet aim was to produce acquiescent orthodoxy in their citizens. Hunter identified two stages of brainwashing. The first was the ‘conditioning, or softening up process primarily for control purposes;’ the second was an ‘indoctrination or persuasion purposes DOI: 10.4324/9781003289746-27 352

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process for conversion purposes’ (Hunter 1970: 14). The religious connotations of ‘conversion’ were picked up and developed by the British Pavlovian psychiatrist William Sargant in his 1957 study Battle for the Mind. A Physiology of Conversion and Brain‑Washing, a work enthusiastically endorsed by Aldous Huxley. Sargant had connections with MI5 and possibly the CIA mind‑control programme MK‑ULTRA (Streatfield 2007: 243–256). The word ‘brainwashing’ was a hybrid term applying physical action to the mind. This became central in another early study by the Dutch American psychologist Joost A.M. Meerloo, whose Rape of the Mind (1956) included an explanation of the treatment of Korean prisoners as ‘menti‑ cide’, i.e. ‘murder of the mind’. Like Hunter, Meerloo stressed the virtual impossibility of resisting the process, which frequently depended on the use of drugs and extended hypnosis. He implicitly confirmed that brainwashing was an othering term suggesting an external attack on the individual self where the end product would be ‘robot man’. Even as he was coining the term ‘brainwashing’, Hunter was considering its relevance to at least one work of fiction, the novella Anthem by his friend the Russian‑born novelist Ayn Rand (pub in UK 1938, USA revised 1946) AR testified to HUAC 1947 hearings on ­Hollywood). The narrative evokes a future dystopia run on eugenic lines where every utterance begins with the collective pronoun ‘we’ and where a small dissident group speculates on the ultimate ‘­Unspeakable Word’ which is finally revealed to be ‘Ego’. Anthem was included in the 1960 list of fiction published by the CIA‑funded Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology (Seed 2004: 261–262). The revelations of brainwashing were helped by a pamphlet published anonymously in 1955 with the title Brain‑Washing: A Synthesis of the Russian Textbook on Psychopolitics, purporting to be a summary of a 1930s Communist manual. It was sent to the FBI who refused to authenticate it. Sometimes wrongly attributed to the novelist Dorothy Baker, the work was in fact a piece of propaganda written by the founder of Scientology and novelist L. Ron Hubbard. The pamphlet’s epigraph defines psychopolitics as the ‘art and science of asserting and maintaining dominion over the thoughts and loyalties’ of the populace and the text is ostensibly designed to warn the reader about its penetration of American life (Introvigne 2017). One author who practised scientology for a time was William Burroughs, who will be discussed below. Hubbard’s Dianetics also informs A.E. Van Vogt’s 1962 novel The Violent Man where it offers mental strength to an American POW resisting the mind control methods applied in an experimental Chinese prison camp. As news about brainwashing began to circulate, a number of novels were cited as precursor texts. Brainwashing became a standard issue in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), where children are manufactured on an industrial scale according to a classificatory hierarchy descend‑ ing from alphas. Behaviour is thus induced even before birth and then reinforced by a process of hypnopaedia or sleep‑learning as recorded data is played through the subject’s pillow. Strictly speaking, brainwashing is neither possible nor needed in this utopia because the population has open access to a happiness‑inducing drug called soma. Another novel frequently included in the brainwashing debate was Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon (1940) which was praised by Joost Meerloo for its skill at describing the twists and turns between the inquisitor and his victim. Based on the Moscow show trials, Koestler’s narrative de‑ scribes the experiences of Rubashov, a party member under arrest for holding heterodox opinions. The novel traces the complex psychodynamics of his interrogations where he has no doubt of his ultimate fate. He internalizes the voices of his captors into an exchange between self and accuser: ‘“So I shall be shot, thought Rubashov … “So they are going to shoot you,” he told himself … “So you are going to be destroyed,” he said to himself half‑aloud’ (Koestler 1970: 20). The effect here is of closure, the blocking of any dialogue before the absolute premise of party rectitude. 353

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Here again, however, the process is not quite brainwashing because the dialogue operates on the level of his conscious mind. The most famous novel to be linked with brainwashing was published one year before the term was coined. George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty‑Four famously evokes a future dictatorship where all news media are rigidly controlled and where state surveillance is endemic, not least through the two‑way telescreens in every home. Winston Smith is an official in the ministry which is constantly rewriting history and discovers what he takes to be prime evidence of state deception. However, it is in Part 3 following his arrest by the Thought Police that the key process takes place which is closest to brainwashing. The phases of his treatment are spelt out clearly, from his initial confinement with other criminals, through his isolation in a clinically white cell where he meets characters from his earlier life who are themselves captives, through beatings and interrogation to the final climax in Room 101 where he collapses completely. The whole process traces a progres‑ sive disorientation of Smith where he loses any sense of time. Neither his electric shocks nor his questioning are designed to elicit information since the authorities apparently know everything about him already. The purpose is to empty his mind of all preconceptions about his identity and reality in general, and then to fill him with the state‑approved sentiments summed up as love for Big Brother. The key agent in this process is the official inquisitor O’Brien who articulates the state ideol‑ ogy of total submission to the ruling party. He attempts to replace crime and punishment with a presentation of dissidence as pathological. Early in his dialogues with Smith, he declares ‘You are mentally deranged’ and later insists that the purpose of his arrest is ‘to cure you!’ He even uses the same trope as Edward Hunter when he insists that ‘everyone is washed clean’ (Orwell 1989: 258, 265, 268). The sequence oscillates between attacks on Smith’s mind and physical assaults on his body. As if participating in a travesty experiment, Smith is strapped on a bed while electric shocks are administered; he is physically humiliated by mirrors which reveal his physical collapse; and the climax comes when he is forced to confront his own abreaction when a caged rat is held be‑ fore his face, possibly a grim adaptation of one of J.B. Watson’s 1920 experiments with the infant Albert. The ‘success’ of the process is marked when he writes down general statements of state orthodoxy like ‘FREEDOM IS SLAVERY’ (Orwell 1989: 290). In the 1956 film adaptation of Nineteen Eighty‑Four, directed by Michael Andersen and cov‑ ertly funded by the CIA through the US Information Service, the interrogation of Smith takes place in a deep‑level room where different camera angles constantly vary the perspective on Smith (Saunders 1999: 295–298). Sometimes scenes are shot from above as if by invisible observers, sometimes close up, and at other points addressed by O’Brien as if he is speaking directly to the viewer, as when he asks Smith how many fingers he is holding up. The camera shows an inverted image of Smith’s head as if implying that his sense of reality is being reversed. Orwell uses the third person throughout his novel which suggests that Smith is constantly under observation, even at his most private moments, and during his interrogation the treatment he receives is never clearly specified, which blurs any distinction between his perceptions and physical actuality. The film loses this effect from the clarity of its imagery. At one point, for instance, we see Smith receiv‑ ing shocks through electrodes fixed on his head. It also seems that Edward Hunter’s writing has been incorporated into the script when O’Brien declares: ‘See how the mind can be controlled, washed clean’. The film concludes with Smith joining the cheering crowds chanting ‘Long live Big Brother’ after news has broken of another military triumph. A final coda points to the moral that the narrative ‘could be the story of our children if we fail to preserve their heritage of freedom’. In the late 1950s, Aldous Huxley drew together scientific developments, the evolution of mar‑ keting, and political commentary to make important additions to the debate on brainwashing. His 354

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1958 essay collection Brave New World Revisited devotes a whole section to that subject, where he makes the following summary statement: Brainwashing, as it is now practised, is a hybrid technique, depending for its effective‑ ness partly on the systematic use of violence, partly on skilful psychological manipulation. It represents the tradition of 1984 on its way to becoming the tradition of Brave New World. (Huxley 2002: 261–262) Surveying post‑war American culture, Huxley stresses the wide‑spread use of tranquillizers, the rise of film and TV media, and experimental applications of hypnopaedia, concluding that ‘today the art of mind‑control is becoming a science’ (Huxley 2002: 245). He draws on figures as diverse as Eric Fromm in relation to mental hygiene, William Sargant for political conversions, and Wil‑ liam H. White for his 1956 study The Organization Man, the latter identifying a new collective social ethic reinforced through such terms as ‘adjustment’ and ‘adaptation’. His discussion clearly has the aim of naturalizing the concept of brainwashing as a standard politically‑directed practice in the Communist world, but one which is already being partly implemented in American society. Throughout his essays, Huxley stresses a general progression away from the physical bru‑ tality of a regime like Stalin’s (who had died in 1953) towards a system informed by ongoing research into the working of the mind. One particularly important development for Huxley was the technology of ‘subliminal projection’, which had been indicated partly by Vance Packard’s 1957 study of the advertising industry The Hidden Persuaders. The latter warned that the ‘chill‑ ing world of George Orwell and his Big Brother’ had already arrived in America through the development and application of motivational research (Packard 1957: 5); and Norman Cousins, editor of The Saturday Review, shared Packard’s sentiments in an editorial that same year where he announced ‘Welcome to 1984’ (Cousins 1957: 20). Huxley accepted this warning and stressed that ‘by ­systematically using the psychological, chemical and electronic instruments already in existence […] a tyrannical oligarchy could keep the majority in permanent and willing subjection’ (Huxley 2002: 193–194). As Hunter’s publications on brainwashing were coming out, a series of films were being re‑ leased throughout the 1950s which dealt with different kinds of invasion and take‑over. It Came from Outer Space, Invaders from Mars (both 1953), and The Brain Eaters (1958) all describe an alien invasion of a small American town, where they transform the inhabitants into passive agents of the invaders’ will. The process of transformation is generally left unspecified and the victims are left visually identical to their previous appearances. A rare exception occurs in The Brain Planet Arous (1957), where the eyes of the transformed human shine like metal; and a different exception can be found in I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958), where only the men are targeted by the invading organism. Invaders from Mars comes closest to the brainwashing paradigm in that the victims receive an implant in their neck, a miniature control mechanism so that they can be guided to acts of military sabotage. These narratives induce paranoid anxiety in the protagonists and viewers alike in that it becomes virtually impossible to distinguish the transformed humans from the normal townsfolk, the only signs of the former’s change being a fixed stare, monotonous speech, or mechanistic movement (Cf. Seed 2018: 21–41). The most famous of these films was Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), based on Jack Finney’s 1955 novel The Body Snatchers, later re‑titled to match the film. A local doctor discovers that in his California home town Santa Mira strange transformations are taking place where individuals become alienated from their selves and fellow citizens. The catalyst for these changes seems to be the arrival of large pods from out of space which host transformations while 355

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their subjects sleep. In the novel the doctor witnesses this process apparently happening to his girlfriend Becky one night in the basement of her house: I’ve watched a man develop a photograph, a portrait he’d taken of a mutual friend. He dipped the sheet of blank sensitised paper into the solution […] Then, underneath that colourless fluid, the image began to reveal itself – dimly and vaguely – yet unmistakably recognizable just the same. This thing, too, lying on its back on that dusty shelf in the feeble orange glow of my flashlight, was an unfinished, underdeveloped, vague and indefinite Becky Driscoll. (Finney 1989: 59) Here Finney applies the metaphor within brainwashing of fluid transformation which dehumanizes Becky into a representation or at best a simulacrum being formed by another. The process represented here differs from brainwashing in that the agents of change are not human, which makes the changes worse because they seem irresistible. On the contrary, just as the victims of brainwashing are estranged from their former selves, so the townsfolk become unrecog‑ nizable to the panicking doctor, with the added complication that they remain physically identical to their former selves. This is where the paranoia of the subject kicks in because it becomes virtu‑ ally impossible to distinguish the changed from the unaffected. As Kathleen Taylor has argued, one of the main fears in brainwashing is the fear of losing control and there seems nothing the bemused doctor can do to even slow the process (Taylor 2017: 115; on the social context, v. Dunne: 2013). The novel returns us to normality when the pods finally fly back into space, whereas the film’s last scene is of the doctor on a busy highway shouting into the camera and therefore to the viewers: ‘Burn them! There’s no escape … no time to waste. Unless you do, you’ll be next’ (Siegel: 122). We are thus brought into a threatening process which a number of critics have linked with brain‑ washing. Nora Sayre, for one, has argued that as soon as alienation is shown in Body Snatchers ‘the image of brainwashing arises’ (Siegel 1989: 184), and surveying the invasion films of this period Peter Biskind has commented that ‘possession by pods – mind stealing, brain eating and body snatching – had the added advantage of being an overt metaphor for Communist brainwash‑ ing’ (Biskind 2001: 140). The formative novel to engage with brainwashing was Richard Condon’s The Manchurian Candidate (1959), which probably drew on Edward Hunter for its title. The latter had explained how the Chinese P.O.W. camps during the Korean War had been constructed along the Yalu River on the border of Manchuria. Condon drew on reports that returning American soldiers had been brainwashed in his account of one soldier being a programmed assassin. He may also have known of the 1945 novel, Death in the Mind, by the hypnotism specialist George H. Estabrooks and Rich‑ ard Lockridge, which describes the use in the Second World War of couriers carrying hypnotically induced secret messages which they can’t disclose, having no knowledge of their contents. The main difference between the novel and John Frankenheimer’s 1962 film adaptation lies in their treatment of brainwashing. While the film presents the conspiracy as already in place, the novel describes in a linear narrative, the capture and indoctrination of American soldiers, and their subse‑ quent behaviour after returning to the USA. The brainwashing process is explained in details which substantiate Edward Hunter’s claim that ‘the Red P.O.W. camps were simply large clinical labora‑ tories in which the prisoners were dealt with as patients and as mental cases’ (Hunter 1970: 253). The programming of Raymond Shaw is dramatized as an invasion of his psychic space by his op‑ erators, a mental counterpart to their covert physical activity within the USA. The official directing the brainwashing of the American prisoners is a Chinese scientist named Yen Lo, who explains to his military audience – and thus to the reader – the experiments underpinning the process. He 356

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draws particular attention to the American behaviourist Andrew Salter, whose 1949 study Condi‑ tioned Reflex Therapy is quoted directly to stress that conditioned reflexes ‘do not involve voli‑ tional thinking’, but can be triggered by words (Condon 1975: 34; Salter 2002: 3). Condon draws our attention to the role of language in conditioning, which by implication applies to the discourse of his own culture. The verbal dimension to the brainwashing process is shown when Bennett Marco and the other members of Shaw’s unit repeat the statement that ‘Raymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful being I’ve ever known in my life’, whereas he is shown to be cold, solitary and aloof. Here again Condon ironically inverts the stereotype of the brainwashed subject who was repeatedly compared to a machine or automaton. Although we might expect the novel to give us a negative demonized vision of the Communist regimes, this us/them polarity is questioned by the ironies in the narrative, not least the fact that Yen Lo gives priority to an American Pavlovian in his exposition of behaviourism, citing other researchers and thus giving the impression that the science is Western even though it is being applied by Eastern officials. Yen Lo ridicules the solemnity of his Russian colleagues and even appears in New York later in the novel. This shift in location forewarns the reader that Raymond Shaw actually has two operators – Yen Lo and none other than his mother. Correspondingly he has two triggers: the verbal invitation ‘Why don’t you pass the time playing a little solitaire?’ and the visual image of the Queen of Diamonds in a deck of cards. The mother embodies the link between brainwashing and McCarthyism in her promotion of Shaw’s step‑father, a senator who repeatedly tries to exploit the impact of an accusatory term like ‘Communist’. Ironically at this point extremes from the Right and Left converge. Soon after the Kennedy assassination Condon reported on that event in terms that made explicit the purpose of his novel. Calling his article ‘“Manchurian Candidate” in Dallas’, he explained: Brainwashing to violence and assassination is the line taken in my novel. On its melodra‑ matic surface, the book is a study of the consequences of ‘a mind warped by alien violence’, but I had also hoped to suggest that for some time all of us in the United States had been brainwashed to violence, and to indicate that the reader might consider that the tempo of this all‑American brainwashing was being speeded up. (Condon 1963: 449) He then continues to list similarities between Lee Harvey Oswald and Raymond Shaw, quot‑ ing again from Andrew Salter, in order to demonstrate that the assassin was at least partly a home‑grown product. The 1962 film The Manchurian Candidate opens with the hero’s welcome given to Raymond Shaw on his return from Korea and then gradually reveals the conspiracy already in place mainly through the recurring nightmare of Bennett Marco (played by Frank Sinatra) who was a member of Shaw’s army group. This nightmare opens as a meeting of a ladies’ gardening club in a New Jersey hotel, but the camera slowly pans around to the lecture theatre in the prison camp where Yen Lo is explaining brainwashing to his audience, specifically that the hotel scene is an induced illusion. Briefly the viewer is embedded in the process, which becomes increasingly surreal. As the camera continues its circular pan, the speaker in the hotel uses Yen Lo’s words and the alternation between settings and speakers blurs the two scenes together, destabilizing the viewer’s sense of reality. Throughout the film appearances are shown to be theatre, as when Shaw simulates the casualty of a traffic accident and more generally in a fancy‑dress reception shortly before the climax. Thanks to Marco’s investigations with US intelligence, Shaw has learned of the conspiracy and at the last 357

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minute kills his mother and step‑father, his domestic operators. On the intelligence connections, v. Willmetts 2016. On Korean War fiction, v. Seed 2004: 81–105. The 1974 film The Parallax View returns to the theme of political assassination in the USA, presented as a domestic issue possibly engineered by the Parallax Corporation of Los Angeles. The investigative journalist Frady undergoes a test, usually referred to as the ‘brainwashing scene’, which opens in darkness with an electronic voice giving instructions. The scene is gradually re‑ vealed of Frady sitting in a huge hall with his fingers resting on electronic monitors. The point of view then reverses to what he sees and hears, a shift which draws the viewer directly into the programming. Frady is subjected to a montage of images confusingly mixing family life and as‑ sassinations, punctured by words like ‘HOME’ and ‘ENEMY’. Walter Wager’s novel Telefon (1975) and its 1977 film essentially recapitulate The Manchurian Candidate but during a period of détente. Back in the 1960s the Soviets had set up a plan where programmed ‘sleepers’ embedded in American society would be activated by a telephone trigger to sabotage different military targets. The plan lapses until. following a failed right‑wing coup in the Soviet Union, a disenchanted cipher clerk comes to the USA determined to start the operation. A KGB agent is despatched to stop him with an assistant who is actually a double agent for the USA, the one played on Don Siegel’s 1977 film adaptation by Charles Bronson, the other by Lee Rem‑ mick. The activation process, triggered by reciting a line from a Robert Frost poem, is presented as being entirely mechanistic, shown in the film as a sudden shift in the operatives’ behaviour to that of automata. The main difference from The Manchurian Candidate, however, is that the KGB agents pursuing the clerk are trying to prevent the plan from succeeding. The conspiracy is presented as possible, but anachronistic because there has been such a positive shift in East‑West relations. The author whose work is packed with conspiracy networks is William Burroughs, who wrote to Allen Ginsberg in October 1956, while working on Naked Lunch: ‘Brain‑washing, thought con‑ trol, etc., is the vilest form of crime against the person of another’ (Harris 1993: 331). Although brainwashing was originally conceived as an alien assault on the self, throughout his career Bur‑ roughs relocated it within the systems of control surrounding the individual in contemporary US society. Orwell offered him a reference point. Early in his 1979 dystopia of medical smuggling, Blade Runner, he comments on the ‘brainwashed standardized human units postulated by such linear prophets as George Orwell’ (Burroughs 1994: 10) to contrast with the emergence of a new underground resistance to the status quo. His general approach to mind control was based on a resistance to what he perceived as Western psychiatry’s turn away from ‘Pavlov’s lead’ towards Freud and ‘mystical unworkable abstractions’ (Burroughs 1995: 72). Through a series of grotesque and startling ‘routines’ (his term) Burroughs challenges our presumptions about identity and populates his fiction with threatening technicians starting with Dr. Benway in Naked Lunch (1959), who is described as a ‘manipulator and controller of symbol systems, an expert on all phases of interrogation, brainwashing and control’ (Burroughs 2005: 19). We see Benway in a series of different contexts: as Director of a Reconditioning Centre in the ironically named Freeland; as performing operations ‘of no medical value’ in a packed audito‑ rium, and as a worker within the Ministry of Mental Hygiene and Prophylaxis. The variety of his roles suggests that he is presented as a type figure, embodying social coercion masked as therapy. More specifically the second parodic clinician in the novel is Dr. ‘Fingers’ Schafer, the Lobotomy Kid, who, during a conference on Technological Psychiatry, unveils his master creation, Clarence the ‘Complete All American Deanxietized Man’ with the following introduction: ‘Gentlemen, the human nervous system can be reduced to a compact and abbreviated spinal column’ (Burroughs 2005: 87). The attempted reduction of the subject’s brain activity to physical organs collapses into chaos when Clarence refutes the theory as a product of the doctor’s ‘perverted brain’. 358

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The same close attention to procedures like the lobotomy and apomorphine treatment informs Nova Express (1964), which draws explicitly on John C. Lilly’s experiments on sensory depriva‑ tion through isolation tanks. Sometime in the 1950s Lilly gave a presentation to an ‘Intelligence Committee D’ on ‘modified human agents as reconnaissance and intelligence devices’ Williams: 2019). In Burroughs’ novel the device is converted into ‘Biologic Merging Tanks’ where partici‑ pants in ‘Operation Sense Withdrawal’ drift towards each other, experiencing a surge in sexual pleasure. We are told that here ‘vast immersion tanks melt whole peoples into one concentrate’ (Burroughs 2013: 161), dehumanizing participants into a chemical substance. In the same novel, again explicitly, Burroughs refers to Wilhelm Reich’s orgone accumulator box which was designed to concentrate energy in a metal‑lined container. These are described in the novel as sex cubicles, whereas Burroughs later recorded his respect for the fact that Reich was the ‘first investigator […] to actually measure the electrical charge of the orgasm and correlate these measurements with the subjective experience of pleasure or displeasure’ (Burroughs 1985: 165). Burroughs also en‑ countered the work of the neurologist William Grey Walter, whose study The Living Brain (1953) he read. In particular he was drawn to Grey Walter’s experiments with hallucinations induced by flashing lights through a stroboscope, which he incorporated as ‘flicker technology’ in The Soft Machine (1961) and The Ticket That Exploded (1962). Burroughs recommended Walter to his col‑ laborator Brion Gysin, who devised a ‘Dreamachine’ which projected light pulses at a precise rate, sometimes inducing dreams (Geiger 2003: 45–60). An important influence on Burroughs’ writing was exercised by L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics: The Modern Theory of Mental Health (1950), which launched the Scientology movement. He was drawn particularly to the notion of the reactive mind receiving data as ‘engrams’ or memory traces which carried what Burroughs called ‘command value’ over the unconscious mind (Burroughs and Odier 1974: 40). According to Hubbard these effects could be reversed through a process of deconditioning. In the early 1960s Burroughs went through training in Scientology and was briefly a committed follower. Later, however, he became disenchanted by Hubbard’s authoritarian admin‑ istrative procedures, but even then retained a conviction that ‘the Reactive Mind as set forth by Mr. Hubbard […] is a model control instrument well worth the attention of anyone who is looking for inner freedom’ (Burroughs 1995: 72). Control remained a major concern for Burroughs throughout his career and in his 1975 essay ‘The Limits of Control’ he declared that ‘brainwashing, psychotronic drugs, lobotomy [and] the technocratic control apparatus of the United States […] if fully exploited could make Orwell’s 1984 seem like a benevolent utopia’ (Burroughs 1985: 116). The Soft Machine (1961) has been described as ‘utterly inspired’ by Scientology, especially in its focus on the human body as a re‑ cording device, hence the title’s depiction of the human body (Wills 2013: 71). The secret agent narrator at one point flicks through a newspaper archive, seeing the contents ‘on a subliminal level’, then enters a film studio where he learns ‘to talk and think backward on all levels’ by run‑ ning films of himself at different speeds (Burroughs 2014a: 80). Technology merges with mental processes through expressions like ‘mind screens’ and all processes are controlled by the ‘Think Police’. The Ticket That Exploded (1962) already implies that Burroughs was distancing himself from the new cult. It opens with an account of the ‘Logos group’, a burlesque of Scientologists as a conspiratorial gang, and then explores the technologies of recording, transmitting and receiving images. Throughout The Ticket an anarchic figure called the Subliminal Kid appears sporadically in the action, reminding the reader of the 1957 controversy over the use of brief cue images being embed‑ ded in film sequences which work below the viewer’s conscious attention level, giving yet more in‑ stances of media manipulation. In J.G. Ballard’s 1963 story ‘The Subliminal Man’ the protagonist 359

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tries to warn a doctor of the huge electronic signs being erected around a city: ‘They’re invading your brain, if you don’t defend yourself they’ll take it over completely!’ (Ballard 1977: 280). Burroughs’ character takes over the city streets projecting images on walls which accelerate and decelerate towards a fragmentary conclusion. Here as so often in Burroughs, process is prioritized over content. The last section of The Ticket invites the reader to carry out experiments to verify that ‘what we see is determined to a large extent by what we hear’ and in an interview he has declared that ‘image and word are the instruments of control’ (Burroughs 2014b: 191; Burroughs and Odier 1974: 59). A critical question which recurs throughout Burroughs’ work is: who exercises control? In that sense his fiction can be taken as a series of warnings about our susceptibility to manipula‑ tion by the media and other agencies. Although ‘brainwashing was largely a campaign waged in the United States home press’ and media (Bowart 1978: 54), a small number of British novels play an important role in further extending the imaginative projection of mind control. Brainwashing even featured in Ian Flem‑ ing’s last James Bond novel, The Man with the Golden Gun (1965), where Bond has been held captive in Russia and programmed to kill his superior, which he attempts. In Len Deighton’s 1962 debut novel The Ipcress File an agent in military intelligence stumbles across a conspiracy mas‑ terminded by an individual named Jay, who declares: ‘one of these days brain‑washing will be the acknowledged method dealing with anti‑social elements’ and to further this process Jay has rigged out a London house as an experimental laboratory, a ‘small private zoo’ (Deighton 2021: 204, 78). The Ipcress of the title is an acronym for the ‘Induction of Psycho‑Neuroses by Conditioned Re‑ flex with Stress’, in turn, taken from the Pavlovian psychologist Howard S. Liddell (Liddell 1952). Liddell and H.J. Shorvin, writing on abreactions with William Sargant, are both named in the novel, to authenticate its subject rather than to shape its narrative. However, this grandiose ‘plan to brain‑wash the entire framework of a nation’ is smothered by the drama of preserving nuclear secrets (Deighton 2021: 203). The 1965 film adaptation of The Ipcress File focuses more closely on brainwashing and intro‑ duces the subject by showing a victim of the process: a British scientist whose speech is frozen, like a halted tape, when he tries to articulate his theories. Harry Palmer, the intelligence officer investigating the conspiracy, is himself seized and subjected to brainwashing. Unlike the novel which gives hardly any details of the process itself, the film shows Palmer (played by Michael Caine) strapped in a boxlike space whose walls resemble screens, being subjected to pulsating electronic sound loops. Marcia Holmes has shown how the container drew on an experimental ‘Knowledge Box’ described in a 1962 article in Life magazine designed to offer students a maxi‑ mized learning environment (Holmes 2017; Welch 1962). Ironically the film inverts this device as one designed to empty the individual’s consciousness, a purpose stated by the main operator who tells Palmer: ‘Listen to my voice. Nothing but my voice … You will forget all about the Ipcress file. You will forget your name’. His command phrase resembles those of the operators in George Estabrooks’ Hypnotism (1943, 1957) inducing hypnosis and articulates a process of sensory reduc‑ tion to sound (Estabrooks 1957: 37), whereas the film shows the whole container, the facial expres‑ sions of the subject, and above all his attempts – ultimately successful – to resist conditioning by wounding his hand with a nail. By alternating shots between Palmer’s immediate perspective with images going in and out of focus and broader shots of the programming box, the film draws the reader into the psychodrama of Palmer’s ordeal. Though the action is framed within the broader polarities of the Cold War, one of the film’s main ironies lies in the revelation that when he escapes Palmer discovers that all this time he has been not in Albania as he thought, but in central London. A container also figures in James Kennaway’s novel and film The Mind Benders (1963), but his time as an immersion tank modelled on John C. Lilly’s experiments and transposed to Oxford. 360

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The narrative opens as an espionage thriller with one Professor Sharpey under surveillance by an intelligence officer, who throws himself off a train. Convinced of the latter’s treason, Major Hall consults Sharpey’s assistant Dr. Longman (played in the film by Dirk Bogarde), who insists that Sharpey was suffering from excessive immersion in a water tank and therefore was no longer re‑ sponsible for his actions. To prove his point Longman voluntarily submits himself to the tank, suf‑ fering psychological trauma as a result. Major Hall contextualizes these actions within the debate over brainwashing, deciding that a new depth of human erasure was being discovered: ‘Here were the first experiments in the physics of the soul’ (Kennaway 2014: 85). The film’s trailer foregrounds this subject and explicitly announces its scientific subject, de‑ claring: ‘We are going to let you witness a terrifying experiment in human endurance, an experi‑ ment in isolation’. In contrast with the novel, the film shows Longman’s experiment on himself, dramatically recording his screams as he flails in the tank, implicating the viewer in the complex ethics of the action. Insisting to Hall earlier that immersion could potentially ‘dissolve’ identity, he enters the tank with the knowledge that this could be virtually suicidal (Burton 2018: 101–103). Paddy Chayefsky’s 1978 novel Altered States, adapted by him for the 1980 film, also draws directly on Lilly’s experiments which supply their opening image: The isolation tank itself was nothing more than a coffinlike bathtub made of plywood and lined with aluminium, eight by eight by ten feet and half filled with a 10 percent solution of magnesium sulphate in water to increase buoyancy (Chayefsky 1980: 3) The novel establishes a regular experimental routine with volunteers before introducing the pro‑ tagonist Jessup, whereas the film moves more starkly inwards from tank to the human body, his face and finally mind. Clearly modelled on Lilly, Jessup combines the roles of scientist and ex‑ perimental subject, returning again and again to the tank to gain access to a ‘cosmic force’ as he believes. Chayefsky drew on Lilly’s publications of the 1970s and Lilly for his part acknowledged the accuracy of the film’s hallucination scenes (Hooper 1983: 78). Though the narrative takes historical bearings from the Korean War, its thrust is away from political manipulation towards possible transcendence. The UK TV series The Prisoner, starring and scripted by Patrick McGoohan, which ran from 1967 to 1968, presented an extended drama of survival. The protagonist, known as Number Six, is a member of British intelligence who has tried to resign only to find himself confined in the surreal Welsh coastal village of Portmeirion, known simply as ‘the village’. In each episode he is subject to assaults from induced regression, to aversion therapy, memory wipes, instant learning technol‑ ogy, and dream manipulation, among other experiments. The village thus doubles as a prison and laboratory, setting the scene for a serial drama of survival. It should by now be clear that, although brainwashing was initially conceived as a Commu‑ nist threat, from the very beginning writers dramatized the process as an increasingly domestic issue. Indeed from 1953 to 1973 it was a set of practices being developed by the CIA known as MK‑ULTRA. Since this programme was secret, details were slow to emerge and therefore slow to appear in fiction. Thanks to revelations by his biographer Roger Lewis, it is now known that Anthony Burgess’s intelligence connections fed such data, specifically echoing Ewen Cameron’s experiments with multiple ECT in Montreal, into the ‘therapy’ sequence of A Clockwork Orange (1962) (Lewis 2002: 285–287). In prison the narrator Alex is offered the possibility of a cure for his antisocial behaviour and voluntarily enters an experiment in aversion therapy where he is given pills, not vitamins as he 361

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is told, but which induce nausea while he is forced to watch violent film sequences. As the narra‑ tor he engages in a dialogue with his Pavlovian operator Dr. Brodsky and with the process more generally. Alex is strapped in a seat ‘like a dentist’s chair’ (Burgess 2011: 66) and his eyelids are clipped open so that he is compelled to watch every scene. During his treatment Alex addresses a community of sympathetic ‘brethren’ as he simultaneously undergoes the so‑called ‘Ludovico Technique’ and explains the process, registering such details as film editing and the shadows of his anonymous observers. In Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 film the emphasis falls more directly on the visual. Alex’s gaze is controlled by the technicians as he watches the sequences, but at the same time he is the object of the viewer’s gaze as we become implicated in the experiment. One of the most striking images in the film, indeed of brainwashing generally, shows Alex’s head bound by a black strap and framed by an apparatus of eye control so restrictive that he can only show reac‑ tions through his mouth movements. In the novel he accuses his operators of failure because they have induced aversion not only to violence but also to his favourite composer Beethoven. To this Brodsky admits: ‘delimitation is always difficult’ (Burgess 2011: 76). Commenting on A Clockwork Orange in his autobiography, Burgess states the novel’s subject explicitly, but also brainwashing to the language of the narrative itself: As the book was about brainwashing, it was appropriate that the text itself should be a brain‑ washing device. The reader would be brainwashed into learning minimal Russian. The novel was to be an exercise in linguistic programming, with the exoticisms gradually ­clarified by context. (Burgess 1991: 38) Burgess clearly saw his novel as an attack on state brainwashing, which reduces Alex’s capacity for choice. By conflating his slang with Russian Burgess blurs the difference between domestic and Communist practice and enables word play like the shift in his film viewing from ‘horosho’ (‘good’ in Russian) to a ‘horror show’. Burgess shows the coercive dimension to the therapy undergone by Alex and a similar po‑ liticization informs Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962), set in an American psychiatric hospital. Kesey had participated in the CIA drugs programme under MK‑ULTRA by taking LSD and, focusing again on the issue of control, Kesey dramatizes a series of challenges to the institution’s regulations through the anarchic inmate McMurphy, who is ultimately reduced to a vegetable state by lobotomy. In this novel and in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (1963) electrocon‑ vulsive therapy (ECT) is perceived by subjects as a mode of punishment rather than as curative. The latter opens with the news of the electrocution of the Rosenbergs in 1953 for espionage which dominates the imagination of the narrator. Cuckoo’s Nest is set in an American psychiatric hospital whose practices are depicted as restrictive and directed towards promoting administrative order at the expense of the inmates. Into this context enters McMurphy, who refuses to follow the hospital rules. A former Korean War veteran and POW, McMurphy draws the analogy between the hospital and a Chinese prison camp, tacitly with brainwashing. In Milos Forman’s 1975 film adaptation McMurphy is shown undergoing ECT, surrounded by medics, with electrodes clamped on his tem‑ ples and a tongue guard forced into his mouth. A nurse cradles his chin as if from concern, but the electric shock is followed by grimaces of agony and a series of convulsions. The next time we see McMurphy in the ward, he is shambling forward with a sagging jaw and upturned eyes, but then he triggers applause when he reveals this to be an act. However, the institution triumphs when he is finally administered a lobotomy.

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In A Clockwork Orange Dr. Brodsky views Alex’s mind as a technician in contrast with the subjectivity of the latter’s narration. A similar stance informs the collective brain surgeons in Michael Crichton’s The Terminal Man (1972). Here a new treatment for psychomotor epilepsy is trialled where a patient has a number of electrodes implanted in his brain, partly modelled on Jose Delgado’s experiments with ‘stimoceivers’. These prove to have unexpected effects which induce bursts of violence leading to murder and the patient eventually has to be shot down. In the middle of this action the perspective surgeon reflects ironically on the sensational associations of ‘mind control’, whereas control was a fact of life: ‘newborn children were little computers waiting to be programmed’ (Crichton 1972: 298). However, the novel demonstrates the limitations of the attempted control which goes fatally wrong – ‘terminally’ to pick up on the title’s ironic implica‑ tions. The Terminal Man is a hybrid text incorporating images and charts as if presenting a medical dossier complete with a final bibliography. Its crowning irony lies in the fact that a procedure to induce control itself causes loss of control. The Terminal Man is essentially a case narrative, as is Ralph Blum’s The Simultaneous Man (1970), which locates itself initially in a military hospital and describes an attempt to transfer a whole personality from one body to another. Blum’s subject grows out of the Korean War brain‑ washing stories and explicitly locates its action within the secret experiments into chemical war‑ fare agents pursued at Edgewood Arsenal from 1954 to 1975. The novel opens as the coloured ‘prisoner‑volunteer’ (also known as the ‘Subject’) arrives, having already been subjected to sev‑ eral days of administered drugs. A veteran of the Korean and Vietnam wars, his treatment will be administered by another Korean veteran, Russian‑born Dr. Andrew Horne, who managed to survive brainwashing by inventing a duplicate self for his captors. Under his direction the ‘prisvol’ as he is known is subjected to electronic brain interventions and is fed hours of film footage recon‑ structing Horne’s youth so that he becomes a second Horne or ‘Remake’ – and then he disappears. When the Americans realize that he has become a security risk in possessing Horne’s knowledge, the action shifts from the West Wing (i.e., USA) to the East Wing, the Soviet Union, where Horne meets his Russian counterpart and learns that similar experiments are being conducted in Len‑ ingrad. The novel gradually reveals a whole series of duplications which reflect the mirroring polarities of the Cold War and the outcome of the experiment challenges the crudely mechanistic assumptions of the security technicians, one of which states: ‘You have a man. You want what he knows. So you extract the contents of his mind’ (Blum 1973: 27). Although one experimental trial has resulted in the disintegration of the subject, Horne’s group failed to grasp the implications and remained trapped within an assumption that the mind can be infinitely reshaped and a political system where West mirrors East. Novels published after 1970 should be read against the background of the revelations com‑ ing from the Church Committee and other sources throughout that decade of the CIA’s domes‑ tic activities including the MK‑ULTRA programme. Walter Bowart’s Operation Mind Control (1978) was one of the leading reports, arguing that after The Manchurian Candidate fiction turned into CIA practice. Richard Condon returned the compliment by supplying a foreword which paid testament to Bowart’s revelations, but contextualizes them within American culture generally, declaring: ‘Brainwashing’ per se is no news to any of us. Controlled assassins are not known to us only through fiction. Advertising assaults on behalf of poisonous materials to induce us success‑ fully to buy and consume are early on bastions of mind control. (Bowart 1978: 15)

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Equally prominent, John Marks used Condon’s title for his own 1979 expose, The Search for the ‘Manchurian Candidate’: The CIA and Mind Control, which makes out a detailed case for full disclosure of covert experiments. Throughout this discussion Pavlov has occupied a central place and Thomas Pynchon’s 1973 novel Gravity’s Rainbow deconstructs the theoretical premises of behaviourism through a US intelligence officer, Tyrone Slothrop, who was himself subjected to behavioural experimentation in his childhood. Set in the last year of World War II, the novel speculates that Slothrop’s sexual climaxes might coincide with the distribution of V‑2 strikes on England. He is thus investiga‑ tor and also the subject of investigation by a devoted Pavlovian who ‘imagines the cortex of the brain as a mosaic of tiny on/off elements’ (Pynchon 2000: 56). The novel undermines these ‘Pavlovian brain‑mechanics’ by disrupting causal sequences and reducing to farce the investiga‑ tion of ­Slothrop by a devotee who sees Pavlov’s Lectures on Conditioned Reflexes as scripture. In his 2003 foreword to Nineteen Eighty‑Four, Pynchon gives a non‑committal acknowledgement of that novel’s context including the ‘alleged Communist practice of ideological ­enforcement through “brainwashing,” a set of techniques said to be based on the work of I.P. Pavlov’ (Krause 2010; Pynchon 2003: x). The timeline of Gravity’s Rainbow (1944–1945) predates the debate over brainwashing, but the text feeds a retrospective scepticism towards its possibility from the perspective of the 1970s. From that decade onwards novels dealing with mind alteration programmes repeatedly drama‑ tize their failure and human cost. For example, Stephen King’s Firestarter (1980) draws on a 1968 experiment to produce ‘drug‑induced psionics’ in students at a Virginia college (symboli‑ cally close to CIA HQ), which is then covered up when one develops ‘pyrokinesis’, the capacity to cause fires by will‑power. Among the novels engaging with MK‑ULTRA, Scott O’Connor’s Half World (2014) explores the programme’s cost for a CIA operative and Paul Vidick’s The Coldest Warrior (2020) investigates the mysterious death of Dr. Charles Wilson after receiving LSD. The latter is based on the actual death of Frank Olsen in 1953. More famously, the production of a programmed assassin is the subject of Robert Ludlum’s Bourne Trilogy. The opening volume, The Bourne Identity (1980), opens with the rescue from the sea of a man with total amnesia. Only a chip from Zurich bank implanted in his body provides a tangible link with his past. From that point on the narrative grows backwards with the man, referred to initially as ‘the man’, then ‘the patient’, finally named as Jason Bourne, gradually dis‑ covering that he was an American agent trained under the secret CIA Treadstone programme. One of its operators explains how ‘a man is placed in a highly volatile, maximum stress situation for a long period of time, the entire period in deep cover. The cover itself is a decoy’ designed to draw the target for assassination out into the open (Ludlum 2004: 367). The surface action conceals a complex uncovering of Bourne’s past and the gradual recovery of an identity the CIA has tried to hide. The novel’s epilogue finally reveals the suppressed details of his file. Summarizing the ex‑ periments of Ewen Cameron and others, Joel E. Dimsdale comments that ‘the Canadian MKUltra studies made their way into fiction in Robert Ludlum’s books and movies about Jason Bourne’ (Dimsdale 2021: 103). Ludlum’s The Ambler Warning (2002) makes explicit the historical basis to its subject, which probably also informs the Bourne novels. Here again we have an operative who, despite hav‑ ing a name, cannot verify any of his past experiences. Escaping from a CIA psychiatric prison, Ambler is later given a thumbnail history of MK‑ULTRA practices combining depatterning and psychic driving and is warned that, though ostensibly closed down in the 1970s, the project merely changed department and the research continued. As happened in his case,

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subjects would be put under the influence of all sorts of psychomimetic chemicals, and then exposed to the feed, a stream of vivid episodes, presented in jumbled, constantly changing order [and then] a name, that of the overlaid identity, would be repeated again and again. (Ludlum 2010: 132) Almost immediately after this Ambler’s informant is assassinated. Unlike the earlier novel, this information is not integrated into the narrative and seems designed to vouch for the authenticity of its violent action, a validation strategy common to the fiction surveyed here. Brainwashing has remained a catch‑all term to describe behaviour out of character (Streatfield 357). It also carries the suggestion of manipulation of the individual’s mind by others, while leaving the exact nature of that process only partly known. Since the 1960s its use has expanded into areas as diverse as religious cults, sexual practice, induced racism, and even the BBC.

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David Seed Huxley, A. (2002). Complete Essays. Volume VI: 1956–1963, eds. Robert S. Baker and James Sexton. ­Chicago, IL: Ivan R. Dee. Introvigne, M. (2017). ‘Did L. Ron Hubbard Believe in Brainwashing?’ Nova Religio 20: pp. 62–79. Kennaway, J. (2014). The Mind Benders. Richmond, VA: Valancourt. Koestler, A. (1970). Darkness at Noon. London: Cape. Krause, M. (2010). ‘Ultraparadoxical. On the Gravity of the Human Experiment in Pavlov and Pynchon,’ in Ludwig Jaeger, Erica Linz, and Irmela Schneider, eds. Media, Culture, and Mediality. New York: Colum‑ bia University Press, pp. 405–428. Lewis, R. (2002). Anthony Burgess. London: Faber. Liddell, H.S. (1952). ‘Experimental Induction of Psychoneuroses by Conditioned Reflexes with Stress,’ in H. Kruse, ed. The Biology of Mental Health and Disease, New York: Paul B. Hoeber, chapter 36. Linebarger, P.M.A. (1951). ‘Psychological Warfare,’ Naval War College Review 3.vii: 19–47. Ludlum, R. (2004). The Bourne Trilogy. London: Orion. Ludlum, R. (2010). The Ambler Warning. London: Orion. Orwell, G. (1989). Nineteen Eighty‑Four. London: Penguin. Packard, V. (1957). The Hidden Persuaders. London: Longmans, Green. Pynchon, T. (2000). Gravity’s Rainbow. New York: Penguin. Pynchon, T. (2003). ‘Foreword’, in George Orwell, ed. Nineteen Eighty‑Four, New York: Harcourt Grace, pp. vii–xxvi. Rand, A. (1995). Anthem. New York: Signet. Centennial ed. Salter, A. (2002). Conditioned Reflex Therapy. Gretna, LA: Wellness Institute. Centennial ed. Saunders, F.S. (1999). Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War. London: Granta Books. Seed, D. (2004). Brainwashing: The Fictions of Mind Control. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press. Seed, D. (2018). ‘Social Factors in Brainwashing Films of the 1950s and 1960s,’ in Homer, B. Pettey, ed. Cold War Film Genres. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 21–41. Siegel, D. (1989). Invasion of the Body Snatchers. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Smith, C. (2003). The Rediscovery of Man. Framingham, MA: NESFA Press. Streatfield, D. (2007). Brainwash. The Secret History of Mind Control. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Taylor, K. (2017). Brainwashing. The Science of Thought Control, 2nd edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Welch, P. (1962). ‘The Knowledge Box,’ Life (14 September), 53.11: pp. 109–112. Williams, C. (2019). ‘On “Modified Human Agents”: John Lilly and the Paranoid Style in Ameri‑ can Neuroscience’, History of the Human Sciences (October 9), https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/ full/10.1177/0952695119872094 Willmetts, S. (2016). In Secrecy’s Shadow: The OSS and CIA in Hollywood Cinema, 1941–1979. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Wills, D.S. (2013). Scientologist! William S. Burroughs and the ‘Weird Cult’. Temple, PA: Beatdom Books.

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PART V

Mind Engineering in Educational Setting

23 ENGINEERING THE MIND OF A CHILD The Potency of Japanese Language Lessons in Colonized Korea Catherine Ryu Introduction ‘I, a native of Chōsen, lost the Chōsen language in Chōsen in my second year of elementary school’ (Kim 2001, 18; Ryu 2022b, 8). So writes Kim Sijong (b. 1929) in Japanese, a poet who has been residing in Japan since 1949, in his autobiographical essay, ‘The Song of Clementine’ (1979). The second year of Kim’s elementary education approximately corresponds to 1937–1938, when the teaching of the Korean language at public school was finally abolished in Chōsen (henceforth Korea) as part of the intensified imperialization (kōminka) of colonized subjects in the wake of the Second Sino‑Japanese War in 1937 (Yi 2018, xxii). Broadly speaking, the colonial era (1910–1945) can be divided into three periods: the ­military period (1910–1919), the cultural period (1919–1930), and the war period (1930–1945). The need to issue a new education ordinance in each period, including two during the war period (­Table 23.1) underscores the critical role that education played in advancing imperial rule in colonized Korea (Pak and Hwang 2011). In fact, colonial education functioned as an ideological apparatus of the Japanese colonial government to implement the imperial policies of transforming Koreans into docile colonized subjects (Yi 2018, 3–4). From the outset of the colonial era, the education of the national language (kokugo, a.k.a. the Japanese language) was specifically enforced to reshape chil‑ dren in colonized Korea into what Toby (1974, 58) terms ‘a substructure of loyal young minds’. Article 8 of the first Korean Education Ordinance (1911) not only recognized the Japanese lan‑ guage as the national language but emphasized that ‘stress is to be placed upon instruction in the national language’ (Government‑General of Korea 1911: 78, cited in Toby 1974, 58). Japanese became since then the language of instruction in all subjects and classes (Heinrich 2013, 245), and the goal of colonial education as such was ‘to create a base of loyal subjects susceptible to propaganda through the medium of the schools’ (Toby 1974, 59). The disappearance of the Korean language curriculum in public schools after 1937 was thus an insidious expression of the imperial agenda. This intent became overt with the Japanese colonial government’s announcement on May 9, 1942, that they planned to conscript eligible males to support the empire’s military campaigns (Palmer 2007, 69–70). In other words, the elimination of the Korean language from colonial edu‑ cation served as their strategy to educate male subjects, aiming for them to achieve proficiency in



369

DOI: 10.4324/9781003289746-29

Catherine Ryu Table 23.1  Education ordinances issued during the Colonial Era

1 2 3

Periodization of the Colonial Era

Education ordinances issued during the Colonial Era

The military period (1910–1919) The cultural period (1919–1930) The war‑time period (1930–1945)

The first Korean education ordinance (1911) The second education ordinance (1922)  The third education ordinance (1938) The fourth education ordinance (1943)

Japanese and thereby become functional in the military. At the same time, it is also important to recognize that colonial education ultimately turned out to be an utter failure with only a 22% lit‑ eracy rate by the end of imperial rule in 1945, similar to the year 1943 when 22.15% of the Korean population understood Japanese (Kim 2002, 266–267). Against the historical backdrop of the Japanese language education policy in colonized Korea, this study investigates how the implementation of such a policy was carried out through ‘mind engineering’. The editors of this volume define the term as ‘a new concept and protocol of mind work that integrates language, media, and technology in a highly sophisticated fashion to ma‑ nipulate the victim’s perception of reality, indoctrinate beliefs and prime for action’ (emphasis in original, Shei and Schnell 2021). While the term ‘mind engineering’ is presented as ‘a new concept and protocol of mind work,’ Chris Sei, one of the co‑editors, has already investigated to a degree the instances of mind engineering in his previously edited volume, Taiwan: Manipulation of Ide‑ ology and Struggle for Identity (2021). This volume, in his own words, is ‘a collection of essays concentrating on the issue of Taiwan identity including its political complication and implication, its permeation into language, culture, and ideology, and its involvement in various intellectual and sociopolitical battlegrounds’ (Shei 2021, xvi). In his introduction, titled ‘The Truman Show con‑ tinues, en masse’, to the publication, Shei shares his reflections on the linguistic and ideological landscape of Taiwan in the 1960s, focusing on his personal experiences of having been subjected to mind engineering, as early as in primary school, to privilege Mandarin Chinese and devalue Taiwanese, his mother tongue. This tongue was marked as the forbidden language in the classroom and subsequently became entrenched in his mind as a ‘degraded’ language (Shei 2021, xv). Drawing inspiration from Shei’s critical insight into mind engineering situated in different temporal, historical, and geopolitical contexts, this study examines how the national language campaign, an instrument of mind engineering education in colonized Korea, was narrativized and memorialized in cultural production by putting into conversation two narratives in which Japanese language lessons constitute the most crucial aspect of their respective stories: • My Precious Granddaughter (Kawaii magomusume, 1942), a Korean Japanese bilingual piece of ‘paper theater’ (kamishibai), which was collaboratively produced expressly as an instrument of propaganda by the Tokyo‑based National Association for Educational Paper Theater and the Government‑General of Korea. • The Song of Clementine’ (‘Kurementain no uta’, 1979), with which this chapter began. Given its inherent function as propaganda, the first narrative serves as the primary case study of mind engineering. It is a bilingual script intended for live performance in colonized Korea, spe‑ cifically during the escalated efforts to support Imperial Japan’s Pacific War campaign that began on December 7, 1941. The second narrative, by contrast, operates as a frame of reference. It is a 370

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deeply personal essay, penned in 1979—almost four decades later—by a survivor of mind engi‑ neering and published in Japan. This essay reflects on the author’s lived experiences with Japanese language lessons. By pairing these two primary sources that have been hitherto overlooked in English scholarship, this study aims to illuminate differing perspectives on the shared facet of colonial reality at the intersection of imperial fantasies and personal recollections. Ultimately, this study seeks to elucidate not only the detrimental legacies of Japanese language lessons as tools of mind engineering but also the unique linguistic strategies of such manipulations. In essence, this study strives to reveal how these imperialist strategies, when employed in propaganda, are intrinsi‑ cally riddled with contradictions and omissions—a characteristic feature of the coercive practice of mind engineering.

Research Design Conceptual Framework To operationalize the definition of mind engineering as conceived by the editors, this study begins by calibrating what they refer to as ‘a highly sophisticated fashion,’ a method utilized to bring about the desired outcomes of mind engineering. In this connection, Abdullahi Ahmed An‑Na’im’s broad concept of ‘the imperial impulse’ is generative: The imperial impulse is manifested in an act of domination, but more importantly [for our purposes here,] in an attitude that authorizes and legitimizes the act of domination as appro‑ priate, even necessary. The act of domination can be emotional, intellectual, psychological, economical, or physical, but it is the combination of both the act and underlying attitude that constitutes the imperial impulse on the large complex and protracted scale of modern imperialism. (An‑Na’im 2011, 50) Of the varying channels through which the act of domination can occur as explicated by An‑Na’im, this study focuses on the emotional one. As will be discussed, this conduit provides a direct route to unpacking the ‘highly affective packages’ to which Sharilyn Orbaugh alludes when characteriz‑ ing the unique mode of kamishibai messaging: ‘kamishibai plays often transmitted their messages in highly affective packages, heightening the impact of those messages’ (Orbaugh 2015, 3). In short, this study seeks to lay bare the imperial impulse that runs through the propaganda play. By delving into the narrative strategies, it investigates how the play psychologically manipulates the audience to emotionally identify with the protagonist and assimilate the play’s core message, with the final aim of prompting the audience’s actions.

Experiential Framework Orbaugh’s insights into the ‘highly affective packages’ shed light on both the performance mode of kamishibai and its inherently participatory nature, characteristics that define this form of street entertainment. Originating in the 1930s in Japan, kamishibai swiftly proliferated, becoming pop‑ ular among children. The period, spanning from 1930 to 1940, is known as the ‘first golden age of street kamishibai’ (Ishiyama 2008, 54 cited in Hayashi 2019, 91). A storyteller‑cum‑itinerant merchant would set up a stage—a simple wooden frame mounted on a bicycle—anywhere chil‑ dren were gathered: a street corner, a park, and others. He would first sell candies to the children 371

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and then entertain them with stories while animatedly voicing all the characters. His storytelling was accompanied by images shown on the wooden frame. As the story progressed, he would change pictures (initially hand drawn on cardboard; approximately 39 cm × 27 cm) one at a time. The other side of the picture included the script to be performed by the storyteller. In other words, this form of low‑cost outdoor storytelling spontaneously engaged the audiences visually, aurally, and emotionally in an intimate setting (Orbaugh 2015, 37–40). The performer and the audience thus participated in the story world and experienced it together, forming an organic sense of unity among all present at the scene. As experts and scholars have pointed out, kamishibai thus inher‑ ently fosters a dynamic interaction between the performer and the audience. As an audiovisual medium, it also grants the reciter considerable interpretative freedom, allowing for adaptation as deemed contextually appropriate (Abe et al. 1991 cited in Miyama et al. 2015, 52). Kamishibai as such is a particularly affective form of storytelling, which was soon adopted by educators and Christian proselytizers to teach social, moral, or religious lessons to young children (McGowan 2019; Orbaugh 2015, 47–52). As the military campaigns intensified, kamishibai—a tool of entertainment and education—was transformed into an instrument of war propaganda, which was produced, disseminated, and performed under the auspices of the government, targeting people of all ages. As Orbaugh points out, war propaganda kamishibai propagated unambiguous messages of self‑sacrifice and loyalty to the emperor by engagingly narrativizing emotionally gripping stories using a set of 10–30 printed play cards (2015, 90–91). Such a strategy is evident in many examples available in the digital collection of Kamishibai Propaganda Plays, available on the University of British Columbia Library’s Open Collections website (2022). Similar to war propaganda kamishibai in Japan, My Precious Granddaughter is one of the many kamishibai plays produced during the war‑time period in various colonies (Horner 2005, 27–28). Not unlike war‑time national policy kamishibai in Japan, the main functions of kamishibai plays in the colonies were to disseminate information about colonial governmental policies and to indoctrinate colonized subjects with the moral imperative to cooperate with the empire’s military efforts (Caprio 2009, 158; Ōtake 2008, 333). In colonized Korea, kamishibai was to be performed in remote regions of the country, where the usual propaganda media of urban areas such as radio, newspaper, film, and others were not available or effective due to the low level of literacy in farm‑ ing communities (Ōtake 2008, 331–334). Unsurprisingly, My Precious Granddaughter features a protagonist, a well‑to‑do 60‑year‑old man engaged in farming, hailing from a northern province. By the end of the play, he willingly embraces the national language, both as his own and as rep‑ resenting the nation’s future, and vows to learn this language. In other words, the unique format of kamishibai, combined with the content of My Precious Granddaughter, served as an effective means to further what Kim Eun Gyong describes as the ‘countrywide campaign for the spread of Japanese’ prior to the enforcement of conscription on May 8, 1942 (Kim 2002, 266)—the same year this play was produced. Given the ephemeral character inherent to kamishibai, both in terms of its materiality and per‑ formance, and considering the destructive impacts of air raids and fires during the war, as well as the disposal of war‑time national policy kamishibai by the GHQ (General Headquarters of the Al‑ lied Occupation of Japan), historical records documenting kamishibai performances in Japan are almost entirely absent (Hayashi 2019: 93). This scarcity extends to My Precious Granddaughter, a product of colonized Korea. Despite the lack of data concerning the experiential aspect of its per‑ formance, the materials that constitute the play—a complete set of 20 printed play cards—remain. The script includes minimal performance instructions in terms of the speed and the manner of oral delivery and scene changes. The very inclusion of such instructions suggests that this play was to be performed in a uniform manner, even when performed by different storytellers. This in turn 372

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illuminates the way propaganda messaging was precisely crafted and tightly controlled to elicit specific audience responses, a stark contrast to the interpretive freedom that storytellers enjoyed in earlier times in Japan.

Analytical Framework To analyze the play as an instance of mind engineering, this study extends the conceptual frame‑ work of mind engineering to include what I would term ‘the narrative structure of mind engineer‑ ing’. This term pertains to how various parts or aspects of a narrative are put together within the totality of the story for a specific purpose. The primary objective of this study is then to illuminate the narrative structure of mind engineering by revealing the narrative logic underpinning the se‑ quencing of the 20 play cards of My Precious Granddaughter. This approach throws into high relief the resulting emotionally charged, appealing story that operates as a propagandistic instru‑ ment. It should be noted, however, that this study is solely concerned with the play’s script, leaving another critical facet of the kamishibai experience—namely, the relationship between the textual and the visual—for a future study.

Method and Tools of Analysis To delineate the narrative structure of mind engineering, the play’s script is analyzed to answer two research questions: RQ 1. How is the overall narrative structure of the play designed to generate the protago‑ nist’s emotional movements toward naturalizing the imperial impulse that governs the play’s propaganda messaging? RQ 2. How does the narrative structure of the play naturalize the imperial impulse by am‑ plifying and heightening the affective dimension of the play through the title character Gyokuhi and her relationship with her grandfather? To address these questions, I employ a critical discourse analysis (CDA) approach, as proposed by Teun A. van Dijk, to uncover the narrative strategies used in the play specifically as a form of ‘mind control’ (van Dijk 1995, 22). Incorporating a quantitative method into this CDA approach allows for the consistent parsing, computing, and interpretation of the two selected narratives for this study, despite their substantial differences in aspects like format and genre. Steps taken for quantitative analysis include: • Manual transcription and translation of each story into English • Manual tabulation of narrative units, including the number of lines, paragraphs, and margins, to quantify emotional movements within each narrative space The proposed critical discourse analysis, when combined with a quantitative method and close reading, effectively reveals the extent to which the play’s affective dimension was orchestrated to naturalize the imperial impulse to dominate colonized subjects in Korea. As will be shown, this play is an embodiment of the national language policy, often framed as ‘natural or even necessary’ (An‑Na’im 2011, 50), within the broader context of imperial assimilation policies intended for the supposed betterment of the colonized subjects. 373

Catherine Ryu Table 23.2  Line distributions of the 20 My Precious Granddaughter Cards Card numbers

Number of lines

Card numbers Number of lines

Card numbers Number of lines

Card numbers

Number of lines

0 1 2 3 4

16 23 16 15 15

5 6 7 8 9

10 11 12 13 14

15 16 17 18 19

13 15 16 17 14

13 13 14 15 13

14 7 19 17 15

Data and Results RQ 1. How is the overall narrative structure of the play designed to generate the protagonist’s emotional movements toward naturalizing the imperial impulse that governs the play’s propa‑ ganda messaging?

Line Distribution When My Precious Granddaughter is performed live, it consists of 291 lines, including lines for pauses and instructions for changing the picture cards, which are part of storytelling. These lines are distributed over the space of 20 play cards (henceforth Cards), in the range of 7 to 23 lines per Card with an average of 14.5 lines (Table 23.2). Such variations simultaneously contribute to the pacing of storytelling and highlight the narrative function of the event(s) described in individual cards. Card 1, for instance, has the largest number of lines (23), while Card 11 has the smallest (7). Since Card 0 serves as the opening of the play in which the narrator greets the audience, sets the scene, and presents the first character with whom the protagonist will soon interact, Card 1 marks the proper beginning of the story. It is here that the protagonist, Kanai (identified in the script by his first name; henceforth Eishoku in Japanese [Kr. Yŏng Sik]), makes his first appearance as he sets out for his journey to the capital. The brevity of Card 11, slightly over the midpoint of the story, by contrast, reflects the quick‑ ening pace of the performer’s storytelling as the plot transitions, as will be seen, into the most dramatic event experienced by the protagonist. Card 12 stands out as well since it consists of 19 lines, the longest one in the second half of the story. In fact, the most critical event of the play— a family medical emergency—starts to get addressed in this card, and the tension thus generated is sustained until Card 18, only a moment before the play comes to an end, when all tensions are resolved by the time the protagonist returns home in Card 19. Even this kind of basic quantitative analysis of the play provides an important glimpse into the fundamental narrative structure of the play, on which the protagonist’s emotional movements are overlayered, ultimately forming an integrated narrative structure of mind engineering, as will be seen.

The Structural Arc of Emotional Movements By juxtaposing the protagonist’s emotional state at the beginning and the end of the play, the over‑ arching emotional thrust of the play can be rendered visible. These two key narrative moments are similarly marked by Eishoku’s involuntary smile. In Card 1, the narrator describes his smile in this way: ‘The moment the name of his granddaughter was mentioned, Eishoku’s serious face suddenly 374

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softens, breaking into a smile’ (Ryu and Hale 2023, 1; henceforth page numbers only). In Card 19, the narrator presents the protagonist’s smile in this light: The old man suddenly broke into a smile. In his lap is the carefully placed national language book that his granddaughter, Gyokuhi, gave him. Once he returns to the village, he will no doubt soon become jōzu [Japanese in original, “good”] at the national language. (13) In both cases, the narrator explains Eishoku’s sudden, involuntary smile as an expression of this grandfather’s joy and delight intimately connected with his granddaughter. The specific meaning or reason for Eishoku’s smile, however, differs each time. The first one reveals his unbounded love for his granddaughter and his cheerful anticipation of seeing her for the first time in a whole year. In other words, his smile in Card 1 foreshadows his happy reunion with his granddaughter, while still being concerned about his land property‑related business, the reason for his trip to the capital. In Card 19, Eishoku figuratively returns home with his beloved Gyokuhi sitting in his lap in the form of the national language book that she gave him. His smile at this narrative moment, however, cannot be attributed solely to his love for her. It rather signi‑ fies his pleasure as he optimistically contemplates his promising future linked with the national language—a sentiment palpably evident in his internal dialogue moments before the narrator’s observation of Eishoku’s smile: Eishoku, slowly: ‘Farming is the foundation of this country’. So, it’s also good for me to devote myself to farming. And it will be advantageous for me and for the country to use the national language, our country’s language. Then, the wonderful country Japan will grow more and more prosperous. short pause ‘Yes, that’s right. That’s right’. (13) In other words, Eishoku’s optimism starts from his familial love for Gyokuhi and ends with his patriotism and loyalty to the nation. Having been newly indoctrinated about the power of the na‑ tional language, Eishoku is now ready to take immediate action—fulfilling his earnest desire to learn the language. This action is fully endorsed by the narrator, the mouthpiece for the imperial impulse, who confidently assures the audience that Eishoku will soon become adept at the national language. The play concludes at this point. This comparative analysis of the protagonist’s smiles in Cards 1 and 19 unequivocally reveals the imperial impulse that courses through the entire play, while indicating the required series of events that must take place to naturalize that impulse. Notably, Eishoku’s enthusiasm for the na‑ tional language is completely absent in Card 1, but it is most elevated and celebrated in Card 19. This grandfather’s positive turn toward the national language thus must be freshly forged in the intervening spaces (from Cards 2 to 18) through his granddaughter’s own connections with the language. This necessitates that the grandfather and the granddaughter interact at least twice in the course of the play. This, in turn, allows his adoption of the national language to be viewed as a natural progression resulting from his emotional shifts (both pre‑ and post‑conversion) influenced by Gyokuhi. As will be seen, this is exactly what happens. The overall narrative design of the play is specifically crafted to generate emotional shifts in the protagonist, making the imperial impulse at the heart of the play’s propaganda seem natural. 375

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RQ 2. How does the narrative structure of the play naturalize the imperial impulse by amplifying and heightening the affective dimension of the play through the title character Gyokuhi and her relationship with her grandfather? For Gyokuhi to perform her role in the play as Eishoku’s granddaughter without bringing at‑ tention to her propagandist operation requires what I would refer to as ‘a complex narrative cho‑ reography’. This expression concerns the narrative strategies utilized to move the play forward, while manipulating the audience’s perception of the Gyokuhi character and the world that she inhabits. The narrative choreography pertains specifically to the sequencing of events, speech acts (comprised of direct and indirect speech), and emotions centering around the title figure and her relationship with her grandfather.

The Sequencing of Events The sequencing of events related to Eishoku’s much‑anticipated reunion with Gyokuhi is particu‑ larly illustrative of the narrative choreography at work. Notably, the Gyokuhi that the audience first encounters in the play—the granddaughter that brings a smile to her grandfather’s face—is in essence an image of her former self that remains vividly in Eishoku’s mind from a year ago as he physically moves toward her in the capital. The play begins piquing the audience’s interest, as it does Eishoku’s, in encountering her before this title character makes her first appearance in the play. To set the narrative in motion, however, Gyokuhi needs to be situated outside the bounds of her grandfather’s familial love. In other words, her propagandist function must be embedded within the reality of colonial Korea to situate the grandfather–granddaughter relationship therein. Born in 1929, Gyokuhi had been fully imperialized by 1942, the temporal setting of the play, through the national language curriculum in school. To showcase this sociolinguistic aspect of Gyokuhi to both Eishoku and the audience, another character fluent in the national language needs to be introduced alongside Gyokuhi as soon as the plot starts to unfold. Hence the inclusion of Yo‑ shiko, a 13‑year‑old schoolgirl—the same age as Gyokuhi—in the scene of Eishoku’s first reunion with his granddaughter (Cards 5 and 6). The narrative logic casts the initial encounter of the three characters as a source of tension by timing it such that the two girls make their first appearance just as they depart Gyokuhi’s house, coinciding with Eishoku’s arrival. His only experience with the national language so far has been a disconcerting encounter at a train station where all announcements were in Japanese. His conversa‑ tion with his granddaughter and her friend unexpectedly becomes increasingly frustrating. Eishoku speaks only Korean, while Gyokuhi, after initially greeting him in Korean, switches completely to Japanese. Meanwhile, Yoshiko only converses with Gyokuhi in Japanese. The linguistic fragmenta‑ tion immediately leads to an emotional disintegration: Eishoku becomes even more exasperated by Gyokuhi’s use of the national language; seeing the anger cross his face, Yoshiko quickly excuses herself and leaves the scene; Yoshiko’s sudden departure saddens Gyokuhi. This ensuing tension— linguistic and emotional—drives the narrative forward, ultimately shaping the play’s core message. In other words, the much‑anticipated scene of a happy reunion with Gyokuhi does not come to pass as anticipated by the grandfather because this scene is choreographed to achieve other, more pressing narrative goals instead, at this point of the story: (1) to further reinforce the protagonist’s negative attitude toward the national language, this time via his own granddaughter’s use of it; (2) to illustrate Gyokuhi’s new relationship with the national language through her one‑sided response to Eishoku’s questions and her conversation with Yoshiko exclusively in the national language; (3) to display Gyokuhi’s emotional attachment to her friend Yoshiko; and (4) to portray Yoshiko as 376

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a sensitive girl keenly aware of Eishoku’s growing frustration due to Gyokuhi’s use of the national language. At the same time, this narrative choreography is crafted to reveal the less‑than‑ideal aspects of the three characters in their respective personae: the grandfather’s love for Gyokuhi becomes tarnished due to his inability to separate it from his negative experiences with the national language; the granddaughter appears to be uncaring and selfish; Yoshiko emerges as an unreliable friend through her act of abandoning Gyokuh to avoid an uncomfortable situation. The highlighted aspects of the three main characters—Eishoku, Gyokuhi, and Yoshiko—­ converge to form the heart of the play’s narrative choreography. As the choreography unfolds, these characters are gradually transformed into their idealized forms, and by the end of the play, they are, as will be seen, emotionally reunited and restored through their connections with the national language.

The Sequencing of Speech Acts Another important aspect of the narrative choreography is the sequencing of speech, which serves as a means of controlling the audience’s access to the characters’ interiorities. This propaganda play is strongly mediated by the narrator, who speaks most throughout the play (91 of 291 lines; 31%) except for the scene of the second meeting between Eishoku and Gyokuhi in Cards 15 and 16. The narrative choreography tightly controls the characters’ direct speech within the limited space, and thus, the audience’s experiences with the characters—especially Gyokuhi—in their own voices. This control is achieved through a meticulously arranged timing and setting of their interactions. The sequencing of speech acts that connect Cards 5 and 6 with Card 7 is illustrative of how the narrative choreography manipulates the audience’s perception of the world delineated in the play. Despite the narrator’s mediating presence in the scene of the first meeting (Cards 5 and 6), the audience still gets to experience Eishoku, Gyokuhi, and Yoshiko in their own voices, as well as perceive their varying relationships, or lack thereof, with the national language. For instance, Gyokuhi’s persistent use of the national language leads Eishoku to express his exasperation for the first time: ‘At the station and elsewhere, everyone is speaking the national language. So, I just can’t understand anything!’ (5). This statement crystallizes his growing awareness of his aliena‑ tion in a world that has been drastically altered. The use of direct speech at this juncture is crucial in emphasizing Eishoku’s faltering sense of self, heightened particularly in his interactions with his granddaughter and her friend, within the linguistic environment dominated by the national language. The narrator’s uninterrupted speech serves to further demonstrate the carefully orchestrated sequencing of speech acts in the play. The narrator emerges as the sole character in Card 7, that is, immediately following the initial encounter among the three main characters in Cards 5 and 6. As such, Card 7 marks a special moment in the play, being the unique scene where all 13 lines belong exclusively to the narrator. His speech here heightens Eishoku’s anger directed at Gyokuhi and his dislike of Yoshiko due to their close association with the national language. Eishoku’s ban on Gyokuhi’s friendship with Yoshiko deepens Gyokuhi’s sadness, further distancing her emo‑ tionally from her grandfather. The narrator imparts this information to the audience in a series of cause‑and‑effect statements (because of A, B), thereby depicting Eishoku’s anger and Gyokuhi’s sadness as natural reactions to the situations each has experienced. The narrator’s speech, crafted as such in Card 7, already gestures toward a path for resolving the tension in the play. In fact, the contours of this path are already visible: if and only if Eishoku were to change his negative perception of the national language, his relationship with his granddaughter 377

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would be restored, as well as the friendship between Gyokuhi and Yoshiko. ­Additionally, the narrator provides the audience with more reasons to wish for a felicitous resolution of the ten‑ sion. Even though Gyokuhi was initially shown as an insensitive girl blind to her grandfather’s discomfort with her use of the national language, the narrator now relays to the audience that she is a filial granddaughter who cares deeply about her grandfather and thus merits the restoration of her grandfather’s affection. In essence, the narrator’s commentary on the growing rift between the grandfather and granddaughter serves two purposes. It not only forecasts a straightforward resolution for the audience, but it also shapes their expectations to align with the ultimate nar‑ rative outcome of this propaganda play. Despite the absence of recorded audience reactions, the play’s narrative progression suggests that Eishoku’s eventual acceptance of the national language would likely have appeared as the most natural and necessary resolution to the problem presented. In this manner, the strategic choreography of speech acts naturalizes the imperial impulse, subtly manipulating the audience’s perception of the world depicted in the play.

The Sequencing of Emotions The narrative choreography, via the sequencing of events and speech acts, is designed to incite a progression of emotional responses, culminating in the climax of the play, which finally unfolds during the second encounter between the grandfather and Gyokuhi over Cards 15–17. Toward the end of the play, Gyokuhi’s voice is controlled to perform her propagandist function and compel her grandfather to embrace the national language in Card 17, where she shares her deepest desire with him. This crucial juncture is thrown into high relief by the narrator’s complete absence in Cards 15 and 16, followed by a brief reappearance in Card 17 where he delivers only a single line. As will be seen, the near‑total silence of the narrator over these three cards—despite his typically dominant presence—is a strategic orchestration. It sets the stage for Gyokuhi’s own pivotal speech act, the key propagandistic voice, to align the imperial impulse governing the narrative logic with her deepest desires, presenting it as a natural development to the audience. Unlike the first conversation, which occurred in a semi‑public place (i.e., before the gate of Eishoku’s son’s house), the second conversation materializes in the privacy of a room as Gyokuhi recovers from an acute stomachache (Card 15). The change in the physical location of their meet‑ ing symbolically parallels a movement into Gyokuhi’s interiority. The timing of their conversa‑ tion, too, is designed to take the audience further into Gyokuhi’s mind. She is just waking up from sleep in response to her grandfather calling her name. It is a liminal moment when her unguarded thoughts and desires can easily surface. Notably, Gyokuhi initially responds to her grandfather’s call in Japanese, conveying to her grandfather and to the audience alike the extent to which she has internalized this language as her very own. In her physically weakened state, Gyokuhi’s utterances are delicately choreographed to present her as an ideal girl. Her first thought voices concerns her mother’s wellbeing, reemphasizing her filial piety while recalling her earlier filial piety toward her grandfather. Her speech in fact echoes a similar emphasis in Korean colonial education on Confucian virtues by way of displaying the imperialists’ understanding of local mores and sensitivities (Yuh 2010, 137). Only after she is as‑ sured of her mother’s recovery does Gyokuhi, apparently still in pain, express that she might die. In so saying, she brings the specter of imminent death in Eishoku’s mind, already guilt‑ridden for having wronged her, thereby simultaneously elevating the tension and conditioning him emotion‑ ally to be most responsive to her words—her dying wishes. It is in this context that the grandfather begins to interact with the national language in a way dif‑ ferent from his previous encounters with it. Immediately after Eishoku mentions to her not to say 378

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things like dying, the word that then slips out of her lips is ojiisama (grandfather in Japanese, 10), the very last line in Card 15. Unlike in previous cases when he needed an interpreter to under‑ stand the national language spoken to him, the grandfather immediately figures out that the word must refer to him (Card 16). Moreover, he sounds out this Japanese word one syllable at a time, ‘O‑Ji‑I‑Sa‑Ma,’ using his own speech organs. The sounds of the national language are no longer merely external stimuli—noises with no personal meaning. While Gyokuhi might not have consciously chosen to use the appellation at this particular moment, it is not by chance when viewed from the narrative logic of the play. Since ojiisama is a familial term, one that defines Gyokuhi’s kinship with her grandfather, their relationship is now newly defined through this foreign word in Card 16. Having thus initiated this mode of com‑ munication, Gyokuhi, though a granddaughter, is now in the position to dictate the terms of their relationship just when Eishoku is emotionally in the most vulnerable position. In his desperate wish for her to get better, he readily grants her first wish to see her friend Yoshiko, lifting his pre‑ vious ban on their friendship. In so doing, he not only restores his relationship with them but also deepens his bond with Gyokuhi on her terms. Gyokuhi’s second wish (Card 17) not only requires the grandfather to make another linguistic concession but also compels him to forge an even more intimate relationship with the national language. Gyokuhi: ‘Anyway, when I die, please say, “Gyokuhi, Sa‑Yo‑Na‑Ra”. This means   “goodbye” in the national language. Say this to me in the national language, please?’ (12) The grandfather’s immediate response to the expression ‘Sayonara’ is noteworthy. He repeats it; is moved by it; and comments that ‘it sounds really nice’. (12) While this is the first time that he said anything positive about the national language, given the context and what it means, his emotive comment sounds rather out of place, even though it might be a softer way of transition‑ ing to express his deepest desire by asking her how to say ‘get well’ in the national language. Even though his question pertains to a single verb, naoru, it not only captures his innermost desire for his precious granddaughter’s recovery but also communicates his love to her in the language that she holds dear to her heart. Significantly, the second meeting between Eishoku and Gyokuhi is turned into a veritable Japa‑ nese language lesson of its own. Once he learns the meaning of naoru, he repeats it (five times in Card 17) while continuously interacting with this foreign language corporeally and emotionally. The narrator even entertains an idea in Card 18 that her full recovery is likely to have been thanks to the power of the word repeated by the grandfather. Gyokuhi now assumes the role of an encour‑ aging instructor, praising her grandfather for being good at (  jōzu) the national language when he manages to conjugate untutored this verb correctly to indicate that Gyokuhi got better (naotta). As previously discussed, the narrator also uses the same term (  jōzu) at the end of the play (Card 19), predicting Eishoku’s speedy acquisition of this language as he returns to his village with the Japa‑ nese book given to him by Gyokuhi carefully placed in his lap. In short, by the time the play concludes, the narrative choreography has insidiously arranged a progression of events, speech acts, and emotions such that Gyokuhi’s propagandist function sub‑ tly operates without drawing attention to itself. In doing so, the play presents Eishoku’s ultimate acceptance of the national language to the audience as the most natural and necessary resolution, capable of restoring and deepening his familial bond with Gyokuhi. The term naoru, invoked 14 times in Cards 17 and 18 by Eishoku, Gyokuhi, and the narrator, thus figuratively encompasses 379

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all key aspects of the protagonist’s life, including his financial situation, his bond with his grand‑ daughter, and his relationship with both the national language and the empire of Japan.

Discussion As has been demonstrated, My Precious Granddaughter effectively delivers its propagandist mes‑ sage in ‘highly affective packages’, to borrow Orbaugh’s phrasing once more (Orbaugh 2015, 3). As long as the audience empathizes with the characters’ dramatic experiences, the imperial im‑ pulse threaded throughout the play remains imperceptible. This mirrors the protagonist, Eishoku, who is unaware that his acceptance of the national language signifies acquiescence to the imperial desire to dominate colonized Korean subjects. However, if the audience detects any contradictions, no matter how subtle, within the play’s narrative logic, this propaganda loses its persuasive power. One way to read against the grain of the narrative logic is to broaden the play’s narrative frame, which, by design, only offers an extreme close‑up of the emotional bond between the grandfather and granddaughter. If this frame were to be expanded, a series of questions regard‑ ing other key aspects or dimensions of the characters’ lives and experiences would emerge. For instance, what would have been Eishoku’s response to the Sōshi‑kaimei policy (1939–1940) that necessitated the change of his family name to the Japanese‑style ‘Kanai’? Considering the play’s emphasis on filial piety, what would be the nature of the relationship between the protagonist and his adult son? Why would he not be living with his son? Why would the father not inquire about his son, who has been unwell since before his wife and daughter fell ill? Given his advanced age (60), how would Eishoku feel about not having a grandson to carry on his family line? How proficient would Gyokuhi’s father be in the national language? Would he communicate with his daughter in this language at home? And what about Gyokuhi’s mother? What would be her rela‑ tionship with the language? And lastly, what would be Gyokuhi’s true feelings toward speaking Korean or Japanese? These are precisely the kinds of questions that the play avoids, as their answers would present the characters as three‑dimensional individuals with a rich and complex intergenerational history, extending beyond the constraints of imperial rule in Korea (given that Eishoku was 60 in 1942, he was 28 years old at the onset of imperial rule). The play can function as a propagandist tool only by reducing this complexity to a single‑issue crisis that can be resolved during the Kanai family’s medical emergency, which lasts only two or three days. Additionally, the play ends on an optimistic note, promising Eishoku’s and his family’s unquestionable future prosperity. In this manner, My Precious Granddaughter represents a realm of pure imperial fantasy in which a colo‑ nized subject’s love for self, family, and friends can be seamlessly and immediately transformed into the self‑same love for the nation, given that it is expressed through the national language and shared by all.

My Precious Granddaughter via ‘The Song of Clementine’ The mind engineering methods employed in the propaganda play become even more pronounced when juxtaposed with the narrative strategies utilized in Kim Sijong’s autobiographical essay, ‘The Song of Clementine’ (1979). Similar to the play, the essay’s two main foci are language and emotion interlaced, though they generate a personal drama of a different kind. This retrospective piece is in essence the author’s guilt‑ridden internal monologue. It retraces pivotal events from over half a century of his life, oscillating between his adult life in Japan and his childhood in colonized Korea. The focal point of his ruminations is the irrevocable relationship with his late 380

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anti‑imperialist father, whose forgiveness he fervently seeks but cannot receive (Ryu 2021). The stark contrasts between the play and the essay are thus readily apparent in the overall emotional tenor of each narrative and the scope of temporality framing each story. What connects the play and the essay, however, is the shared historical reality of the impe‑ rial language education in colonized Korea experienced by the child character in each narrative, Gyokuhi and Kim’s younger self. The play’s narrative concerns the early summer of 1942, when Gyokuhi is a 13‑year schoolgirl. This means that she was born in 1929, the author Kim’s own birthyear. Gyokuhi, even as a fictional character residing in the capital Keijō (present‑day Seoul), presumably would have gone through a similar process of acquiring the national language, much like Kim’s younger self did. Of course, there would have been some notable differences due to their respective genders and schooling locations (Kim attended elementary school on Cheju Island in the Korea Strait, marking the southernmost region of Korea, Ryu 2021). Yet, each narrative represents the relationship between the historical reality of imperial lan‑ guage education and the formative years of the child’s character in a strikingly different manner. In the play, by the time the title character Gyokuhi makes her appearance in Card 5, her acquisition of the national language is presented as a fait accompli, with no references to the process through which she has gained her fluency in that language. By contrast, in Kim’s essay, the negative impact of that process on his lifelong relationship with his father takes center stage in his recollections. His present thoughts and feelings are constantly overshadowed by this history, as his childhood trauma continues to haunt his mind (Ryu 2022a). The centrality of his childhood trauma in Kim’s recollecting mind is evident in the overall nar‑ rative structure of this essay. As shown in Table 23.3, ‘The Song of Clementine’ is comprised of 17 printed pages, forming 7 narrative units (A‑G), each unit separated by a space on a printed page. Narrative Unit E represents the largest portion of the essay in which ten paragraphs constitute 39% (97 lines) of the entire narrative (250 lines). In the uninterrupted narrative expanse of Unit E, Kim recalls his most painful and heart‑­ wrenching memories from the Japanese language lessons in his youth. These recollections paint a haunting mindscape, laden with unbearably visceral details. Against the carefully choreographed lacuna of such scenes in the play, particularly memorable are the vignettes of brutal physical pun‑ ishments meted out to students, both by teachers and by fellow students enforcing mutual policing, to reinforce the ‘national language only policy’ in the classroom. In his youth, Kim was earnestly committed to becoming a child of the emperor. He excelled in composition, reading, and speaking the national language, standing out from many of his classmates who clung to speaking Korean and ridiculed him for his model behavior, even as they faced punishment for their linguistic trans‑ gressions. The narrative thread of these experiences, including the disintegration of his relation‑ ship with his father due to his complete embrace of imperialization, stretches across seven pages (Ryu 2022b, 8–14). The minimal interruptions from the first‑person narrator seem to indicate that Table 23.3  The quantitative narrative structure of ‘The Song of Clementine’ Categories

Unit A

Unit B

Unit C

Unit D

Unit E

Unit F

Unit G

Pages numbers Number of pages Number of paragraphs Number of lines

10–11 1–2 4

11–15 2–5 8

15–16 5–7 3

16–17 7–8 2

17–23 8–14 10

23–24 14–15 2

24–25 15–17 5

21

52

18

14

97

13

35

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the older Kim is immersing himself back in those painful days, almost as though he were reliving his childhood experiences anew. At the same time, it is notable that the adult narrator, who ironically has become a Korean language teacher at a Japanese high school, devotes a substantial amount of narrative time and space (the first 105 lines, or 42% of the entire narrative) to reaching his school‑day memories. This significant allocation of text suggests just how deeply this memory has been buried in the recesses of his mind. The first‑person narrator prefaces his excruciating childhood recollections with these 105 lines that mainly pertain to his anguished ruminations on his late father’s memorial service and his pained recognition of his failure to carry out the most fundamental filial duties. Such a narrative configuration reveals the profound intensity and problematic nature of the narra‑ tor’s relationship with his late father, whose image is deeply etched in his childhood memories and inextricably intertwined with his experience of acquiring the national language. Notably, the figure of Kim’s younger self, recollected in Narrative Unit E, bears marked simi‑ larities to the character of Gyokuhi. As products of the imperial language education policy in colonized Korea, both Gyokuhi and young Kim embody the notion of ‘loyal subjects susceptible to propaganda through the medium of the schools’ (Toby 1974, 59), as discussed earlier in this study. What differentiates the play and the essay, however, is the divergent desire that governs their respective narrative logics. Unlike the play, where naturalizing the imperial impulse is its main narrative goal, Kim’s essay contends with several incompatible desires. In great contrast to Gyokuhi’s grandfather who finally but voluntarily embraced the national language by aligning his innermost desire with his granddaughter’s, Kim’s father—an erudite man well versed in written and spoken Japanese—categorically rejected his young son when he started to teach his mother some basic Japanese words. In fact, Kim identifies his effort to usher in the national language into the domestic space of home as the very cause of the rupture in his relationship with his father. This rift with his father thus persists in his mind for the rest of his father’s life and even beyond. Put differently, the power of the national language was unable to reconcile the young Kim’s profound longing for his natural father’s unconditional love with his paramount desire to be a loyal subject to his symbolic father, the emperor of Japan. Moreover, upon his father’s death, the adult narrator’s fervent desire for repentance and forgiveness became impossible. He was left to grap‑ ple with the painful realization that during his childhood, he had failed to comprehend his father’s wishes—a misunderstanding directly caused by the mind engineering of colonial education. Due to complex personal and geopolitical reasons, Kim has resided all his adult life in Japan with no hope of ever returning home to Korea, thereby committing the sin of turning his back on his filial duty as the only son. Hence, unlike the play, which ultimately concludes on an optimistic note toward a brighter future, the essay does not provide such straightforward closure. The driving desire behind Kim’s writing becomes evident in the concluding sections of the essay—Narrative Units F and G. In these sections, as the narrator revisits his earliest memories, he finds himself drawn back to the ‘Song of Clementine’—the only and the earliest song in Korean that he knew before his school years commenced. Most notably, it was his father who taught him this song, thereby transforming it into a symbol of a phase unmarred by the national language’s influence. The cherished memories of singing the ‘Song of Clementine’ with his father thus serve to harken back to a time when he could bask in the loving warmth of his father’s lap. Indeed, the narrator’s recollection casts a poignant parallel with the moment in the play when Gyokuhi’s Japanese book is tenderly placed in Eishoku’s lap during his return trip. In essence, the endings of both narratives similarly evoke the immense power of warm familial affection, but with divergent implications. In the propaganda play, these moments contribute to a utopian vision in 382

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the name of the emperor. In contrast, in Kim’s essay, they form part of a dystopian reality in which the author grapples with misalignments regarding language, identity, and national belonging. The first‑person narrator’s only emotional sanctuary lies in the reclaimed love of his late father—­ elusive and intangible as it may be—revived through the personal Chōsen language of his distant childhood, captured in ‘the Song of Clementine’. Unlike the clear‑cut message of the play, at the essay’s wistful and emotive conclusion, the reader is left wondering about the significance of this symbolic retrieval for the author. What the reader recognizes, however, is that the significance of the ending is intrinsically tied to Narrative E. As discussed previously, this part of the essay por‑ trayed the narrator’s younger self as a loyal subject, a figure thoroughly manipulated to willingly reject the Korean language and adopt the national language as his own. Kim’s essay thus testifies to the enduring, coercive power of Japanese language lessons in colonized Korea, illuminating their impact on the author’s consciousness even four decades later. The author, a survivor of mind engineering and a diasporic postcolonial subject residing in Japan, remains deeply traumatized.

Conclusion This study has examined the Japanese language education policy in colonized Korea, framing it as a historical manifestation of mind engineering designed to manipulate colonial subjects’ percep‑ tion of imperial domination as ‘appropriate, even necessary’ (An‑Na’im 2011, 50). Employing a critical discourse analysis, the study focused on My Precious Granddaughter (1942)—a piece of kamishibai (paper theater)—to illustrate the extent to which the narrative strategies, deployed to craft the play as a propaganda tool for promoting linguistic assimilation, manipulated the audi‑ ence’s perception of the reality depicted therein. By highlighting the play’s orchestration of the emotionally charged grandfather–granddaughter relationship, this analysis elucidated the play’s use of shared cultural values and emotions, such as filial piety and familial bonds, to resonate with the audience. Such an emotional identification, facilitated through what Orbaugh character‑ izes as ‘highly affective packages’ (2015, 3), was engineered by presenting its key characters as simultaneously idealized and relatable, while strategically glossing over the problematic nature of Japanese language lessons for them both at school and home. This study further illustrated the legacy of the Japanese language education policy in colonized Korea by juxtaposing the propaganda play with an autobiographical essay, ‘The Song of Clem‑ entine’ (1979), penned by Kim Sijong, a Korean poet residing in Japan. In stark contrast to the play, an imperial fantasy that ends on an optimistic note toward a bright future as the protagonist embraces the Japanese language as his own national language, Kim’s personal narrative unveils the long‑term detrimental impact of Japanese language education on his emotional life. This point is directly pertinent to the issues addressed in Taiwan: Manipulation of Ideology and Struggle for Identity, the publication mentioned at the outset as a source of critical inspiration for this study. In his introduction to the volume, Chris Shei—a survivor of mind engineering education during his primary school years—expresses discomfort speaking Taiwanese in public, even as an adult. He also voices regret over not teaching his own children to speak Taiwanese (Shei 2021). This poign‑ ant reflection underscores the profound and enduring impact of mind engineering. Similarly, a figure such as Kim’s younger self, who lacked the discernment to recognize propaganda as merely an embodiment of imperial fantasy, has grappled with the psychological and emotional trauma stemming from these imperial legacies long after 1945, when the Japanese empire officially came to its end. What this study thus ultimately illuminates are the lasting effects of mind engineering on colonized youth, thereby contributing to the ongoing discourse not only on the enduring legacies of imperial rule in Korea but also on the intricate intertwining of ideology, identity, and language. 383

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Acknowledgments I would like to express my deep appreciation to Dr. Sharalyn Orbaugh at the University of ­British Columbia, Canada, and Dr. Unoda Shoya at Osaka University, Japan for introducing me to My Precious Granddaughter and Kim Sijong’s ‘Song of Clementine’, respectively. My heartfelt thanks go to Ms. Olivia Hale for her invaluable assistance with the data collection and tabulation of these two narratives for this study.

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Japanese Sources Abe Akashi, Kamichi Chizuko, & Horio Seishi. (1991). Kokoro o Tsunagu Kamishibai. Dōshinsha. Hayashi, N. (2019). ‘Kamishibai wa Nandatta no ka: Kinnen kankō no nansatsu ka no hon de kangaeru’. Shakai Rinsho Zasshi, 26(3), 89–96. Ishiyama, Y. (2008). Kamishibai Bunkashi. Hōbunshorin. Kawaii magomusume. (1942). Nihon kyōiku kamishibai kyōkai sakuhin 318. Kim Sijon. (2001). ‘Kurementain no uta’. In S. Kim (Ed.), Zainichi no Hazama de (pp. 10–26). Heibonsha. Miyama, M., Tayama, H., & Shibutani, K. (2015). ‘Kamishibai Sakusei Katsudōu o Toriireta Jōkyū Dokkai Jugyō no Kokoromi’. Nihongo Kyōiku Hōhō Kenkyū Kai Shi, 22(2), 52–53. Ōtake, K. (2008). Shokuminchi Chōsen to jidō bunka: Kindai Nikkan jidō bunka bungaku kankeishi kenkyū. Shakai hyōronsha.

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24 CREATING ‘IGNORANCE OF IGNORANCE’ THROUGH SCHOOL EDUCATION A Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Victimhood Nationalism and Educational Ignorance in Japan* Mitsuhiro Tada Introduction: Peasants into Japanese This chapter aims to examine the connection between school education and nationalism through the lens of the sociology of knowledge, providing specific examples from school texts in Japan that seem to be related to mind engineering, a theme that runs through this book. The content of the knowledge taught in the modern school system is, in general, closely related to nation‑building. This relationship is reflected in the first emergence of total war, such as the First and Second World Wars, in the modern period; in these wars, every citizen in a country was supposed to participate in national defense efforts, either by fighting or cooperating. It is believed that recent technological advancements facilitated total wars through the creation of weapons of mass destruction. Additionally, in Japan, the National Mobilization Law (Kokka sōdōin hō) of 1938 legally established the total war system. More than these developments, however, total war required one precondition: a national identity whereby people in a country imagine themselves as a ‘community of fate’. Regarding the relationship between the two total wars and this imagining, Benedict Anderson points out: [T]he great wars of this [twentieth] century are extraordinary not so much in the unprec‑ edented scale on which they permitted people to kill, as in the colossal numbers persuaded to lay down their lives. Is it not certain that the numbers of those killed vastly exceeded those who killed? The idea of the ultimate sacrifice comes only with an idea of purity, through fatality. (Anderson 1991: 144) A ‘nation’ as a unified group is a modern phenomenon that emerged in the latter half of the 18th century. Before this time, the conditions for total war presumably did not yet exist. During the medieval period, battles were principally fought by certain ruling castes or occupational groups, DOI: 10.4324/9781003289746-30

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or both. The common (ruled) people, who did not believe in sharing the same fate with them, were unlikely to have willingly joined their battles without being forced or having a direct stake in the outcome. Regarding Japan, Ernest Satow’s recollection of the Shimonoseki campaign between the Chōshū Domain (han) and the United States, the Netherlands, France, and the United Kingdom in 1863 and 1864 suggests such a lack of solidarity. This campaign occurred just before Japan was opened up at the end of the Edo period and, during and after the campaign, local non‑samurai peo‑ ple in Chōshū acted as, and indeed were, mere outsiders to the war (see Satow 1921: 117–119, 126). However, with the advent of the modern era of freedom and equality, warfare was also ‘democ‑ ratized’. This ultimately laid the foundation for the two total wars that engulfed the world in the last century. A crucial condition for nation‑building is what Ernest Gellner referred to as the ‘[state] mo‑ nopoly of legitimate education’ (Gellner [1983] 2008: 33) in modern times. In Japan, the new Meiji government promulgated a universal education system in 1872, just four years after it came to power in 1868. Thus, compulsory public education began to be imposed ‘from above’ on an agricultural society, with some adjustments: 85–90% of the population were farmers in the pre‑ modern Edo period (Sekiyama 1958: 154, 286–314, 320–322), and therefore, commoners did not need and/or want their children to learn anything other than what was directly necessary in real life. The Meiji government’s intention was clear, as it sought to catch up with Western powers: industrialization and, to adapt Eugen Weber’s (1976) book title Peasants into Frenchmen, turning ‘peasants into Japanese’. One example of this nation‑building was linguistic homogenization through a ‘national lan‑ guage’ via school education. Besides making communication more efficient, this was also meant to induce a sense of national identity and belonging (Yasuda 1997: 27 and 35). Therefore, even in ‘uncivilized’ peripheral regions within the Imperial Japan territory—such as Hokkaidō, where the Ainu minority lived, Okinawa, fully annexed to Japan in 1879 by the Meiji government, and Taiwan and Korea, both of which had been Japanese colonies before World War I—the standard‑ ized Japanese national language (kokugo) was promoted as the medium for the indigenous people to acquire the national spirit (kokumin seishin), along with modern civilization (Yasuda 1997: 8–9, parts 1 and 2; Oguma 2000: 61–64). To enforce this assimilation policy, sanctions were im‑ plemented in schools; for instance, students had to wear a punitive card around their neck if they inadvertently used their vernacular, local, or minority languages (Yasuda 1997: 172–173; Oguma 2000: 62). The subject area (kyōka) of the Japanese Language, called Kokugo, whose literal meaning is ‘national language’, was introduced into primary education by an amendment to the Pri‑ mary School Act in 1900 (Yasuda 1997: 82–91). Since the Meiji modern era, schools’ role in nation‑building has not changed in principle. Japan’s Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) has exerted strong control over the curriculum through the Courses of Study (Gakushū shidō yōryō), which Mizuhara (2010) calls a ‘Design Specification for Nation‑Building’, essentially the general standards for all schools revised every ten years, and the Textbook Authorization System (kyōkasho kentei seido). More recently, with the rise of nationalism, conservative regimes have intervened in the curriculum, changing it into an increas‑ ingly nationalistic direction. In any case, it is not an exaggeration to say that all subject areas (including those on practical skills) and subjects (kamoku) in Japanese schools have been aimed at forming and integrating the Japanese nation. Therefore, this chapter, focusing on the Social Studies (Shakai) subjects, presents a case study of the content of knowledge taught in schools and its relationship to nation‑building. Specifically, by understanding the meaning of language broadly and taking certain instances of 387

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symbolic manipulation in these subjects, it examines how the collective (national) ignorance, which tends toward a type of nationalism known as victimhood nationalism affiliated with the conservative regime’s official nationalism, is constituted through school education: the constitu‑ tion of educational ignorance. To this end, the section ‘A Theoretical Consideration of the Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Nation‑Building’ concisely presents the sociology of knowledge approach employed to examine the relationship between educational ignorance and nationalism. The sections ‘Memory Wars in Social Studies Education’ and ‘Collective Ignorance and School Education’, using specific school materials, illustrate how History (Rekishi) education promotes ‘ignorance of ignorance’, possibly leading to memory wars surrounding the Asia‑Pacific War, as well as how Geography (Chiri) edu‑ cation cultivates children’s territorial awareness. Finally, the section ‘Conclusion: Return to Total War Education’ concludes by briefly addressing the recent re‑orientation of education toward a total war system, as evidenced by the nationalist regime’s emphasis on English and science/math‑ ematics education, as well as moral education. Rather than a systematic examination or comprehensive analysis of all school textbooks, this chapter serves as an overview of this topic. However, as the relationship between the production of ignorance and the promotion of nationalism through school education has received little attention and has not been approached from a sociology of knowledge perspective, this chapter will offer a novel understanding of the connection between school‑taught knowledge and nationalism or, more generally, of the national‑social construction of reality through school education. Incidentally, the school textbooks and supplementary materials cited herein are only examples selected from particularly well‑established sources to show general tendencies that can also be found in other textbooks and materials. As such, it should be noted that this chapter is not intended to criticize or highlight any flaws in these specific materials.

A Theoretical Consideration of the Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Nation‑Building The term ‘sociology of knowledge’ (Wissenssoziologie) was originally coined by Max Scheler, a German philosopher who focused on the influence of society on high‑cultural thought; this field of study was subsequently ‘democratized’ by Alfred Schutz, a phenomenological sociologist (Berger 2011: 81). According to Schutz, ‘only a small fraction of man’s stock of knowledge at hand origi‑ nates in his own individual experience. The greater portion of his knowledge is socially derived’ (Schutz [1955] 1982: 348, emphasis original). Knowledge is a key idea in the recently emerging concept of mind engineering, but its social dimension seems to be less considered. For instance, Albus and Meystel (2001) devote chapter 2 in their book to the topic of knowledge, following the description of their approach to mind en‑ gineering in chapter 1. What is actually discussed, however, is the naturalization of egology. The traditional philosophical theory of knowledge (i.e., the epistemology of an isolated I) is connected to their computational theory of mind, which is based on neurological mechanisms in the brain; the socialness of knowledge is rarely considered, if not completely ignored. In reality, knowledge cannot be reduced to an individual’s personal experiences. Most of the knowledge that ordinary people take for granted in daily life is that which is socially approved⎯in other words, knowledge that is socially typified as a particular view of a specific matter and, as such, socially distributed (see Schutz [1955] 1982: 349–350). Such knowledge, regardless of whether objectively correct, constitutes our cognitive reality that we, in our social life, believe to be self‑evident about the world. As Schutz says: 388

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It is entirely irrelevant for a description of a world taken for granted by a particular society whether the socially approved and derived knowledge is indeed true knowledge. All ele‑ ments of such knowledge, including appresentational references of any kind, if believed to be true are real components of the ‘definition of the situation’ by the members of the group. (Schutz [1955] 1982: 348, emphasis original) If this insight is valid, how does socially derived knowledge spread widely and become entrenched as taken for granted among members of society? As Schutz ([1955] 1982: 348) suggests, teachers, not only parents, play an important role in this process. The school system is, therefore, crucial for distributing knowledge. Like the distribution of wealth, knowledge may be unequally (or at least differently) distributed based on the family background (and the social stratum and/or local com‑ munity to which the family belongs), but the modern education system, by providing equal access to school, generally serves to correct this disparity and make knowledge relatively homogeneous among people: the redistribution of knowledge through school education. Furthermore, regardless of the social value placed on educational degrees in a meritocracy, the knowledge acquired through school education remains important for an individual’s social life in modern times. Klaus Mollenhauer states: The more complex the social world becomes, the less accessible for the child all those con‑ ditions become in which s/he will have to live in her/his biographical future, that is, the less all that s/he needs for her/his future is contained in her/his primary lifeworld (Lebenswelt), especially when the future of the community can no longer be reliably predicted, the more urgent becomes a second basic problem: the pedagogical culture of a society must then cope with the difficulty of how one can learn ‘in stock’, as it were. (Mollenhauer 1983: 20) What Mollenhauer means is that children, who will live differently from their parents in a de‑ veloped society, must learn not only through ‘presentation’ (Präsentation) but also through ‘rep‑ resentation’ (Repräsentation). They need to learn curriculum‑standardized knowledge at school, which constitutes reductively reconstructed knowledge representing the world beyond personal experience; knowledge presented directly in the adults’ lives around them is insufficient (see Mol‑ lenhauer 1983: 20; Hirota 2022: 87–98). In general, this pragmatic aspect of school education would be viewed positively. However, learn‑ ing through ‘representation’ in school implies that knowledge that may be difficult to reflectively revise because of its distance from immediate personal experiences in one’s environment (Umwelt) or everyday lifeworld is instilled into people. This means that by selectively instilling certain typified knowledge about the non‑immediate world, including the past, other knowledge and perspectives are inevitably excluded. Phenomenologically speaking, they are relegated to the horizon. Ulrich Beck (1986) argues that a side effect of the success of industrial modernization is a paradoxical increase in both knowledge and ignorance. As science and technology advance beyond everyday experience, they become a ‘black box’, increasingly generating by‑product risks no one can predict. Therefore, in his opinion, the sociology of knowledge, not the sociol‑ ogy of science (Wissenschaftssoziologie), should form the core of the theory of risk society (Beck 1986: 72). Beck states: The ‘experience logic’ of everyday thinking is, as it were, turned upside down. One no longer rises only from one’s own experiences to general judgments, but general knowledge 389

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without one’s own experience becomes the determining center of one’s own experience. Chemical formulas and reactions, invisible pollutant contents, biological cycles and reaction chains must dominate vision and thinking in order [for one] to go to the barricades against risks. In this sense, risk awareness is therefore no longer a matter of ‘experiences at second hand’ but of ‘non‑experiences at second hand’. Even more: In the end, nobody can know about risks as long as knowledge means consciously experienced. (Beck 1986: 96, emphasis original) This paradoxical, correlative increase in knowledge and ignorance can also in some respects ap‑ ply to receiving school education. As Talcott Parsons and Gerald M. Platt (1973: 1–4) indicate, comparable to the process of revolutionary structural changes referred to as the Industrial and Democratic Revolutions, the Educational Revolution, which included the development of public education, has also played a critical role in social evolution in modern times. However, as men‑ tioned, the knowledge taught through representation in schools can make it difficult for an indi‑ vidual to consider other perspectives. This is even more applicable if the knowledge is ingrained into the collective whole. The rational Enlightenment’s progressivist assumption that moderniza‑ tion (and modern education) will overcome ignorance may be naïve. Tomochika Okamoto posits, ‘As society changes, the educational knowledge people are asked to acquire as the nation shifts and the importance of nation‑building itself also changes’ (Oka‑ moto 2012: 114, emphasis added). Extending this pertinent observation on the connection between nation‑building and educational knowledge (and considering mind engineering in a socio‑political context), I argue that a type of ignorance is also socially derived through modern school education, a system closely tied to the nation‑state, contributing to nationalism. For instance, once a certain event and its official interpretation in ‘national history’ is taught at school as if it were self‑evident, people cannot readily notice that other facts or interpretations exist. In other words, their thinking becomes path dependent owing to educational ignorance, and as long as they are in the so‑called epoché of natural attitude, they are unaware of what they do not know. I refer to this state of self‑unawareness as ignorance of ignorance, a condition that helps the regime orient the nation’s collective mind toward a certain direction. In this context, mind engineering can be used as a control technology or social engineering that creates ignorance of ignorance among people on potential political issues. I do not claim that individuals can be completely subjected to mind control through certain teachings to the extent that self‑reflection becomes impossible. However, it is true that cognitive manipulation frequently takes place in people’s daily lives today, often without their awareness. This is exemplified by the growing sig‑ nificance of cognitive warfare in military strategies worldwide, as it plays a crucial role in actual warfare (Tsuchiya 2016). It is unlikely that school education can remain unrelated to cognitive warfare. Thus, the following sections critically investigate how ‘ignorance of ignorance’ is created in association with nationalism, especially through representations in school education, using the Social Studies materials in Japan as an example.

Memory Wars in Social Studies Education To form and integrate a nation, knowledge is crucial, but so is shared ignorance or, more precisely, the sharing of not knowing what one does not know. In particular, Social Studies (Shakai), which includes history‑related subjects, is most commonly used to form this shared ignorance of igno‑ rance, which functions as a blind spot for nationalistic observation of something. 390

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Teaching Japan‑related history substantially contributes to the formation of the national col‑ lective memory. People often share national remembrances even about events they never directly experienced because collective memories are typically a product of education and learning (i.e., representation). As something taught at school, national memory becomes more homogeneous and unreflected upon, as it is more distant from the immediate experiences that differ individually. It is, therefore, relatively easy for school education to selectively foster ignorance or forgetfulness about particular historical matters or viewpoints inconvenient for nationalism. In Japan, there has been a growing trend of debates and political intervention related to national collective memory, especially since the late 1990s. Phenomenologically, the meaning of the past is always an interpretation made in the present and can therefore be reinterpreted according to chang‑ ing present circumstances (see also Tada 2019; Narita 2020: 283; Lim 2021=2022: 370). As the number of people who directly experienced the Asia‑Pacific War has decreased significantly, the room for nationalistic reinterpretation (or alteration) of the meaning of wartime events may be in‑ creasing, especially since the 1990s, which Ryūichi Narita calls the ‘age of memory’ (Narita 2020: chapter 4, in particular, 292–295): an age when anyone can discuss the war on vague grounds (Narita 2020: 304). Thus, the History subjects within Social Studies, which teach the past through representation, have been the main battlefield of the so‑called memory wars. For example, the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform (Atarashii rekishi kyōkasho o tsukuru kai) was established by mainly right‑wing intellectuals in 1997. It has aimed to produce history textbooks that dispel what they called the ‘self‑deprecatory view of history’ (jigyaku shikan) by downplaying modern Japan’s role as a war perpetrator in incidents such as the issue of ‘comfort women’ or the Nanking Mas‑ sacre. The New History Textbook (Atarashii rekishi kyōkasho), a middle‑school textbook written by group members, was authorized for use in 2001. In parallel, many other textbook publishers, under pressure from right‑wing groups, avoided the topic of comfort women (Saika 2019: 26). Furthermore, in 1997, the Japan Conference (Nippon kaigi), Japan’s largest right‑wing lobbying group, was established through the merger of two right‑wing groups; this group characterizes the Asia‑Pacific War as Japan’s war to liberate Asia. Many Diet members, mainly from the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and incumbent cabinet ministers, were (are) members of this group; Shinzō Abe, who served as prime minister from 2006 to 2007 and 2012 to 2020, also served as a special advisor to the group. Subsequently, in the 2000s, a right‑wing civic movement advocat‑ ing exclusionary practices toward Korean residents in Japan, such as the Group of Citizens Who Do Not Tolerate Privileges for Ethnic Korean Residents in Japan (Zainichi tokken o yurusanai shimin no kai), also gained momentum. Around the same time, territorial disputes escalated with South Korea over the Takeshima Islands and with China over the Senkaku Islands. The tendency to blame foreigners for the deterioration of public safety in Japan also increased. During this pe‑ riod, nationalist politicians such as Shintarō Ishihara (governor of Tokyo from 1999 to 2012) and Jun’ichirō Koizumi (prime minister from 2001 to 2006), both of whom are considered right‑wing populists, gained significant public support. Abe comes from this lineage and is generally regarded as Koizumi’s successor. Under the Abe administration, right‑wing political intervention in education became more overt. Under Abe’s first cabinet (2006–2007), the Basic Act on Education (Kyōiku kihon hō), called the ‘Constitution of Education’, was fully revised: the 2006 act included the phrase ‘fos‑ tering the value of respect for tradition and culture and love of the country and regions that have nurtured us’ as an educational achievement goal (Ōmori 2018: 290–296, 305). Patriotic education (aikokushin kyōiku) had, thus, been gradually introduced under the LDP‑led administration. In 2007, the School Education Law (Gakkō kyōiku hō) also established patriotic education as a goal 391

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of compulsory education (Ōmori 2018: 290–296, 305). Furthermore, in 2014, under the second to fourth Abe cabinets (2012–2021), the authorization standards for Social Studies textbooks were revised as follows (MEXT 2014). • When describing an undetermined current matter, it shall be clarified that no particular aspect is overemphasized. • Regarding modern and contemporary historical events, when describing matters such as nu‑ merical figures on which there is no consensus, it shall be clarified that there is no commonly accepted view to prevent students’ misunderstanding. • When a unified view of the government has been expressed by a cabinet decision or other means or a Supreme Court judicial precedent, any description of a related matter shall be based on this view. These provisions are meant to weaken any problematic perpetrator memories concerning Japan in the Asia‑Pacific War. In fact, in the authorization process, MEXT required the publishers of many textbooks to rewrite, for instance, ‘military comfort women’ (jūgun ianfu) to ‘comfort women’ (ianfu) and ‘forcible taking away [from the Korean Peninsula to mainland Japan]’ (kyōsei renkō) of Korean wartime laborers, known as ‘chōyōkō’ (forced [civilian] laborers), to ‘mobilization’ (dōin) or ‘recruitment’ (chōyō) based on relevant decisions in April 2021 by Yoshihide Suga’s cabinet (2020–2021), which succeeded Abe’s cabinet. Through such wording changes in educational rep‑ resentation, the government wanted to produce ignorance of ignorance in the next generation regarding Japan’s perpetrator role in the Asia‑Pacific War, thereby dispelling the ‘self‑deprecatory view of history’ and restoring pride in being Japanese. However, many studies have already examined such historical revisionism and political in‑ tervention in history textbooks in Japan. Therefore, the following discussion centers on how any given history textbook in Japan can produce ‘ignorance of ignorance’ (or forgetting of forgetting) in a more fundamental, indiscernible way, for instance, through a map. To borrow phenomeno‑ logical terminology, a national map is imaginarily tied to a nation beyond immediate face‑to‑face interactions or actual ‘here and now’ in the immediate environment (Umwelt), demarcating all that is contained within the borders as ‘We’ (in‑group) and excluding what is outside as ‘They’ (out‑group). In this sense, it might be considered working as a kind of ‘symbolic appresentation’, a term used by Schutz ([1955] 1982: 332–339, 352–356), which refers to a symbol’s function of representing something beyond the time and space an individual is directly experiencing. Figure 24.1 depicts a map (colored in original) titled ‘Air Strikes in Mainland Japan: Number of Victims by Aerial Bombing’ (Hondo kūshū: Kūshū ni yoru hisaisha sū), from the Yamakawa Illustrated Catalogue of Japan History (Yamakawa shōsetsu Nihonshi zuroku),1 a high school supplementary material published by Yamakawa Shuppansha, an established publisher of school history textbooks. The filled dots (red in the original) indicate cities with more than 20,000 de‑ stroyed or burned houses/buildings, and the outlined dots (yellow with red outlines in the origi‑ nal) indicate cities with more than 10,000 such houses/buildings. The mushroom cloud symbol indicates the cities bombed with atomic bombs, that is, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Each prefecture is coded by color density according to the number of air raid victims. Okinawa’s main island is assigned a different color (green in the original), as it suffered over 100,000 dead and wounded in the ground battle. Overall, the map visually illustrates the widespread damage across Japan during the Asia‑Pacific War. It is indisputable that Japanese civilians suffered significant damage in air raids by the United States during World War II. The death toll from the atomic bombings reached 210,000 people 392

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Figure 24.1 Map titled ‘Air Strikes in Mainland Japan: Number of Victims by Aerial Bombing’ in the ­Yamakawa Illustrated Catalogue of Japan History Source: Shōsetsu Nihonshi zuroku henshū iinkai (2017: 298) Note: Originally in color.

in 1945 alone (140,000 in Hiroshima and 70,000 in Nagasaki). As for conventional air raids, in Tokyo, more than 115,000 people were killed in total and 850,000 houses and buildings were destroyed and/or burned in approximately 130 air raids (Tōkyō kūshū o kiroku suru kai [1982] 1995: 2). Nevertheless, this map may be somewhat misleading: it does not depict the air raids on Taiwan or Korea, which were part of Japan until the end of the war. For example, Taipei suffered an air strike on May 31, 1945, in which over 80% of the city’s built‑up area was damaged (Katakura 2005: 60), and some 3,000 people were killed or injured (Kawasaki 2015: 30–31). Even though the damage was relatively small compared to other areas on Japan’s mainland, this map does not represent such historical facts, as it only shows aerial bombing damage to Japan’s current territory. Thus, people are unaware that they do not know that Taiwan and Korea were also experiencing air raids. The map is certainly not wrong in that the marked cities and regions in ‘Mainland Japan’ experienced heavy damage. In this regard, the personal experiences and memories of those who directly suffered there should not be denied. However, because the air attack damage in pre‑war Japanese territories is not included in the map, it can bias Japanese students’ knowledge about the reality of the war without their awareness. Note here that from a sociological perspective, what constitutes society and moves it in cer‑ tain directions is not objective facts but rather what ordinary people subjectively remember, feel, and believe as facts. In brief, subjectivity creates our society and the social realities within it. 393

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Even what is considered objective is mixed with subjective interpretations and choices in some way. In fact, the map in Figure  24.1 appears objective at first glance but excludes Taiwan and Korea, where people were forcibly made into the Imperial Japanese ‘We’ until the end of the war. Whether on purpose or not, such selective interpretations have helped shape the Japanese people’s collective memory of the Asia‑Pacific War and may have led today’s Japanese people to forget Japan’s history as a colonizer and war perpetrator. It is true that around 1970 in Japan, the movement for a shift emerged in perceiving Japan as a perpetrator in addition to a victim in the Asia‑Pacific War (Narita 2020: 233–247). Additionally, there is room to discuss whether mainstream Japanese opinion has recently drifted to the right (Tanabe ed. 2019). However, it is unlikely that the public mainly regards Japan as a perpetrator. Most ordinary Japanese people today would first remember the war as a time when they suffered hardship, as their daily lives were destroyed. In other words, they primarily define themselves as victims, more or less sharing what Jie‑Hyun Lim (2021=2022) calls victimhood nationalism. By contrast, people in other Asia‑Pacific regions generally remember Japanese aggression and colo‑ nization, as well as being dragged into the war against their will (and, from the perspective of the sociology of knowledge, neighboring countries’ regimes, whether intentionally or not, might have also intervened in their national memories according to their domestic conditions). Naturally, then, this difference in knowledge (i.e., multiple national‑social realities) makes it difficult for Japan and its neighbors to reach a consensus or compromise regarding the war, leading to memory wars. Since around the mid‑1950s, when Japan, except for a few islands such as Okinawa, regained sovereignty under the San Francisco Peace Treaty, political intervention began in the war‑related national memory to obscure Japan’s perpetrator role toward other Asian countries. Okamoto (2012: 116–117) indicates that in the school textbook authorization of approximately 1953–1954, the then Ministry of Education required changing an elementary‑school textbook’s description re‑ garding the Liutiaogou Incident (Ryūjōko jiken), which was caused by the Kwantung army (Kantō gun: the Japanese army stationed in Manchuria) and led to the Manchurian (Mukden) Incident (Manshū jihen) starting in 1931, to a version in which the involvement of the Kwantung army was ambiguous. Then, in the mid‑1970s, textbook publishers incorporated the Nanking Massacre into their textbooks, but in the authorization, the then Ministry of Education added an opinion deny‑ ing the Japanese military’s involvement in the incident; it also offered an opinion regarding the phrase ‘forcible taking away’ (kyōsei renkō) of Korean wartime laborers, stating that the Koreans belonged to the Japanese nation at the time and therefore the incident did not constitute forcibility (Okamoto 2012: 132–135). In parallel to these incidents, under the increasing threat of nuclear war in the 1960s, the narrative of the Asia‑Pacific War became more biased toward victimhood nation‑ alism, highlighting Japan as the only nation to have suffered atomic bombings (Lim 2021=2022: 116–125, 139, 354). Later in the 1980s, Japan’s historical recognition of and behavior regarding the Asia‑Pacific War led to a dispute involving other Asian countries (see also Okamoto 2012: 135–140). Since the 1990s, the issue of war memory has emerged as a major diplomatic problem: the end of authoritarian regimes in other Asian countries has allowed their citizens to voice their criticism of Japan’s historical perceptions. As if in response to this, Japan’s conservative govern‑ ment, led by the LDP, has exhibited a growing sense of nationalism, particularly since the 2000s (Oguma 2019: 585–605; Lim 2021=2022: 351–356). Japan’s decline after the collapse of the bub‑ ble economy in the early 1990s and other Asian countries’ rise in expanding globalization would also have contributed to this upsurge of nationalism. In any case, rather than determining the truth behind historical perceptions, this chapter em‑ phasizes that, from a phenomenological perspective, the remembered past is the product of in‑ terpretation from the present and its meaning can, therefore, change depending on the observer’s 394

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present state. This is also why the meaning of something that should objectively be identical can greatly differ among observers. As such, when nations identify themselves as victims, a ‘zero‑sum game’ arises between them due to the territorialization of victimhood by each (Lim 2021=2022: 124, 145, 360), resulting in uncompromising memory wars over the interpretation of the past, being intertwined with the present state of each national society at any given time. The modern school system, as a kind of nation‑building institution, can be used in these competitions for national memories.

Collective Ignorance and School Education There is a persistent sense of victimhood among Japanese people about the Asia‑Pacific War. In‑ deed, the number of lives lost due to the recklessness of individuals in power—including young men forced to go on kamikaze suicide attack missions and young girls forced to commit suicide with a hand grenade in Okinawa—is staggering. Thus, personal testimonies of the war, especially if collected for following generations that did not directly experience the war, tend to include mis‑ erable experiences of a wide range of social strata, such as those of front‑line soldiers who endured extreme conditions due to military top leaders’ ineptitude and violence and of ordinary people who suffered at the home front (jūgo) while Japan was losing, although the collected testimonies also include perpetrator experiences (see also Narita 2020: 189–267, 292–295). Generally, those vic‑ tim experiences, rather than perpetrator ones, could be more sympathized with. Furthermore, the Japanese government’s avoidance of compensating Japanese civilians for war damage may have intensified the sense of being a war victim among the Japanese (see also Yoshida [1995] 2005: 254–260). The idea that their everyday lives were destroyed may also be the foundation for current Japanese public opinion on maintaining pacifism (although one‑nation pacifism) despite the recent upsurge in nationalism in Japan (see also Yoshida [1995] 2005: 265–257). Nevertheless, the destruction of Japanese people’s daily lives by the military‑dominated gov‑ ernment is a domestic issue and does not offset the state’s responsibility for violent and self‑­ interested acts perpetrated in other Asia‑Pacific countries. Figure 24.2 shows part of a table titled ‘Pacific War Damage’ (Taiheiyō sensō no higai) from the Yamakawa Illustrated Catalogue of Japan History, listing the number of victims on the ­Japanese side separately for ‘military and civilian military employees’ and ‘home front civilians’ during the war, based on data from the postwar Economic Stabilization Board (Keizai antei honbu). This table shows that there were approximately 1.56  million dead and 310,000  missing in the military, with asterisks indicating another 240,000  missing in the army, and 300,000 dead and 370,000 missing in the civilian sector. The total number of Japanese people dead and missing was approximately 2.78 million.2 This symbolically represents the magnitude of the sacrifices suffered by the J­ apanese people in that war. By contrast, the total number of deaths in other Asian countries, such as China and other parts of Japan‑occupied or Japan‑colonized Asia, is estimated to have surpassed 19  million (Sekai 1994; see also Yoshida 2007: 220–221; 2017: 22–26). This is a rough estimate based on the sum of official announcements made by each government and other statistics. Of course, there is a possibility that the individual numbers from which the estimate was derived may themselves be political and, therefore, be part of the memory wars. However, regardless of how small the esti‑ mate is, it is indisputable that the number of deaths was much higher in other Asia‑Pacific regions than in Japan. Here, I want to point out something beyond just total numbers. The number of deaths in other Asian regions in World War II is not included in the Yamakawa Illustrated Catalogue of Japan 395

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Figure 24.2 Table titled ‘Pacific War Damage: Number of Victims’ in the Yamakawa Illustrated Catalogue of Japan History Source: Shōsetsu Nihonshi zuroku henshū iinkai (2017: 299) Note: Originally a color table.

History, nor even in one of the main textbooks, Detailed History of Japan (Shōsetsu Nihonshi) (Sasayama et al. eds. 2015 [authorized by MEXT in March 2012]), published by the same pub‑ lisher and widely adopted by the high schools teaching the Japanese History B subject cover‑ ing the period from primitive or ancient times to the present day. The books do mention various well‑known Japanese criminal acts in Asia, such as inhumane experiments on living subjects for germ warfare in China, the Bataan Death March, which resulted in the deaths of 16,000 Ameri‑ can and Filipino prisoners of war (POWs), and the construction of the Thailand‑Burma Railway, which forced Allied POWs and laborers from Southeast Asia to perform harsh labor and caused many deaths (Sasayama et al. eds. 2015: 364–365; Shōsetsu Nihonshi zuroku henshū iinkai 2017: 294). However, data on the total number of people dead and missing in other Asian regions, which are many times higher than in Japan, are not included at all, not even as underestimated numbers. Unfortunately, this chapter cannot examine all the history textbooks and other relevant books dia‑ chronically, nor can it investigate the causes and circumstances of the omission; however, there is little doubt that this omission is a general tendency.3 The omission of that basic information that should be included in all history textbooks makes it difficult for Japanese people to realize the scale of the damage that Japan caused in other parts of Asia, and the ignorance produced by this education‑provided representation contributes to a col‑ lective memory in which the Japanese identify themselves primarily as a victimized nation sharing a harsh fate in the Asia‑Pacific War. That the title of the table in Figure 24.2 is not ‘Asia‑Pacific War’ but ‘Pacific War’ can also mislead Japanese people into believing that the war was only against the United States, and thus serves to detach Japan’s perpetrator acts in Asia from the Japa‑ nese national memory of the war, leading to Japanese people’s disremembering them. As suggested, since around the 1970s, or at the latest, the 1980s, the understanding of modern Japan’s foreign expansion as a history of Japanese aggression has become widespread among the Japanese public (see Yoshida [1995] 2005: 222–268). However, a ‘lived’ memory of Japanese 396

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people regarding the Asia‑Pacific War would primarily be a victimized one, even if they did not di‑ rectly experience it (or perhaps precisely because they did not directly experience it). Most would primarily have these victim‑related memories and even have forgotten the rest. This forgetting, or ignorance, was itself a foundation for integrating the postwar Japanese people, who once again pushed forward toward economic growth as a whole nation. In this respect, by teaching content within the official guidelines, schoolteachers are simulta‑ neously unintentionally ‘not teaching’ something else outside them as well. Teaching something always involves some choice. No matter how objective the taught subject matters seem, the par‑ ticular viewpoint one takes to teach them, and the very fact that one teaches these particular mat‑ ters, is a choice among many possibilities. Once one particular choice is made, other possibilities will naturally be pushed to the horizon. This is especially true regarding what people learn through representation in schools because it is far removed from their immediate experiences. In summary, school education is an institution not only for transmitting knowledge but also for creating ignorance about certain matters, and the said ignorance can be passed on to future genera‑ tions for nation‑building. More precisely, schooling has the function of ‘making people ignorant of being ignorant of a certain matter’ and creates a state in which people do not know that they do not know, as in the case of being ignorant of one’s unawareness that Japan inflicted enormous damage to other Asia‑Pacific countries, particularly during World War II. If the misery of this war is taught only through the representation of the hardships experienced by the Japanese people, it will create a national collective ‘ignorance of ignorance’ regarding other war‑related matters and viewpoints. This ‘ignorance of ignorance’ can be a fundamental difficulty for people in learning anything. If one knows that one does not know something, one can look it up or inquire about it. However, if one is unaware of one’s ignorance, learning more is impossible—especially when such ‘ignorance of ignorance’ is collective, the opportunity to become aware of one’s ignorance in everyday life is minimal. It should be added that the subject of Geography, although less discussed than History, is also closely related to nationalism. In fact, according to the Courses of Study, Geography should foster ‘a love of our country’s land’ (MEXT 2018: 48, 52, 515). By teaching Japan’s topography and the layout of its prefectures, Geography contributes to the formation of national knowledge and attachment to the land. Thereby, it creates a (subjective) sense of distance to anything outside the country and psychological cohesion to anything within. Japan is represented as ‘an island country centered on Tokyo and separated from neighbors by the sea’. Thus, for example, the following facts would not be recognized by the Japanese people in general: Fukuoka, the largest city on Kyūshū island in western Japan, is much closer to Seoul (South Korea) and Pyongyang (North Korea) than to Tokyo in terms of physical distance and is almost as close to Shanghai (China) as to Tokyo; and Naha, the capital of Okinawa Prefecture, is much closer to Taipei (Taiwan) than to Tokyo and somewhat closer to Hong Kong (China) and Manila (the Philippines). Japan’s proximity to its Asian neighbors was a crucial factor in the historical influx of continen‑ tal culture into Japan and in modern Japan’s military expansion in the region. Postwar perceptions, however, seem to have largely relegated this fact to obscurity, portraying Japan as a culturally distinct and insular island country. In fact, contemporary maps (e.g., that in Figure 24.1) tend to obscure Japan’s proximity to neighboring countries. This portrayal of Japan as an isolated island country, as a ‘map‑as‑logo’ (Anderson 1991: 175), has become deeply ingrained in present‑day Japanese national consciousness. In this regard, the map of ‘Japan as an island country’ could have contributed to the ‘self‑imaging of Japan as an ethnically homogeneous nation’ (see Oguma 1995=2002), a self‑image that has gained traction since the 1960s and has possibly reinforced Japan’s narrative as a war victim after peacefully existing with no contact with foreign powers. 397

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However, paradoxically, Japan’s territorial representation (i.e., the educational ignorance of Japan’s proximity to its neighbors in Asia) is changing with the emergence of a new territorial nationalism. One such example can be observed in the New Detailed Atlas for Upper Secondary School Students (Shinshō kōtō chizu), one of the most reputable high school atlases. Since the 2013 edition, a new map has been included (Figure 24.3) (Teikoku‑Shoin henshūbu 2013: 93–94). This map shows the lower half of Japan, including all of Okinawa’s islands, Taiwan, and the coast of China. The insertion of such a map, which clearly illustrates Japan’s positional and spatial relationship with China and Taiwan, comes at a time when the dispute over the Senkaku Islands (Diaoyu Islands in Chinese) has become particularly contentious between Japan and China. The Senkaku Islands are a small group of uninhabited islands in Okinawa Prefecture, located northeast of Taiwan, on the edge of the continental shelf in the East China Sea; they were previously almost unknown to the Japanese general public. Despite the Japanese government’s insistence that there is no issue of territorial sovereignty over the Senkaku Islands, the dispute has gained widespread public attention in Japan, for example, after an incident in 2010 in which a Chinese fishing boat in Japanese territorial waters near the Senkaku Islands collided with two Japanese Coast Guard patrol boats after attempting to escape. Presumably, this map was inserted into the school atlas to teach children where the Senkaku Islands are to create an attachment to them and subsequently sway public opinion to defend a so‑called ‘inherent part of the territory’ (koyū no ryōdo). The map

Figure 24.3 Map titled ‘① The Japanese islands (Ⅱ)’ in the New Detailed Atlas for Upper Secondary School Students Source: Teikoku‑Shoin henshūbu (2013: 93–94) Note: A centerfold color map in original. The added thick square enclosure indicates the Senkaku Islands.

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would also serve to convey the impression of the Senkaku Islands’ great distance from China and their inclusion in the long, narrow continuum of the Japanese archipelago. Likewise, the Takeshima Islands have been clearly depicted since the same 2013 edition of the New Detailed Atlas (Teikoku‑Shoin henshūbu 2013: 97). The Takeshima Islands (known as Dokdo in Korean) are located in the western part of the Sea of Japan (referred to as the East Sea in Korean), and their possession is disputed between Japan and South Korea. Originally uninhabited, the South Korean Coast Guard is now stationed there, and the territorial dispute has developed into a contentious ‘memory war’, with both sides also using premodern (therefore pre‑national) history to prove the islands are part of their national territory. However, only in the past 20 years or so has the territorial dispute become widely known in Japan, through actions such as an ordinance desig‑ nating ‘Takeshima Day’ by the Shimane Prefectural Assembly in Japan in 2005 and the landing of then South Korean President Lee Myung‑bak on Takeshima in 2012. Since then, the New Detailed Atlas has depicted the Takeshima Islands within a separate frame. Regarding the Northern Territories (Hoppō ryōdo), islands located northeast of the main island of Hokkaidō and under dispute with Russia (formerly the Soviet Union), the New Detailed Atlas has long depicted them unequivocally as Japan’s ‘inherent territory’. Indeed, the Japanese people have widely acknowledged the dispute over the Northern Territories. However, until recently, the disputes over the Senkaku Islands and Takeshima Islands were not popularly recognized, and their existence was not prominent in the school atlas. The emergence of these disputes as salient political issues for Japan’s sovereignty and national defense has prompted their inclusion in the atlas as part of the subject of Geography, as it is deemed imperative to teach children that they are Japanese territory. In the Courses of Study, too, nationalistic instructions regarding territory can be more clearly seen after the new revision announced in March 2018 (see MEXT 2018: 62, 69, 83, 89–90, and also 518, 525). The implication is that borders are contingent upon the collective imagination of individu‑ als. In other words, borders are never permanent objective facts; they can depend on subjective perceptions, which give meaning to a demarcating line as a border. Since even objective natural boundaries such as straits, rivers, and mountains cannot serve as borders in and of themselves, governments must consistently endeavor to solidify borders within the collective imagination. School education through representation plays a crucial role in this never‑ending project.

Conclusion: Return to Total War Education In addition to the previously discussed aspects of nation‑building and the infusion of nationalism, Japanese school education has enhanced its pragmatism amid intensifying competition among countries in the era of globalization for the last two decades. In summary, it has become a part of the return to the total war system. For instance, a draft of the ‘Growth Strategy’ (Seichō senryaku), released in June 2013 by the Industrial Competitiveness Council (Sangyō kyōsōryoku kaigi), chaired by then Prime Minister Shinzō Abe, identified ‘developing human resources capable of competing worldwide’ as one of the goals for economic growth. Among the measures to be taken immediately was to develop such human resources ‘at the high school level through education that responds to globalization’ (Industrial Competitiveness Council 2013: 18, emphasis added). The council proposed the des‑ ignation of ‘Super Global High Schools’ to develop students with capabilities such as language proficiency, particularly in English, and began implementing the program in fiscal year (FY) 2014. This program can be considered an expanded successor to the ‘Super English Language High School’ program instituted from FY2002 to FY2009 based on the final report by the Commission 399

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on ‘Vision for 21st Century Japan’ (‘Nijūisseiki Nihon no kōsō’ kondankai), an advisory panel to then Prime Minister Keizō Obuchi: the panel articulated ‘English as the second official language’ in the report in January 2000. Additionally, under the name ‘Super Science High School’, a similar science/mathematics education program was also instituted in FY2002, which continues as of FY2022. Through a neoliberal ‘selection and concentration’ (Sentaku to shūchū) policy, schools are compelled to compete with one another in pursuit of ‘advanced’ education in English and sci‑ ence/mathematics to receive priority budget allocation. These specialized programs, particularly for English and science/mathematics, were created because the government perceives them as essential for Japan to excel in the 21st‑century global economic warfare. As for foreign (English) language instruction, it continues to expand in elemen‑ tary education as well. In elementary education, foreign language conversation became teachable in the ‘Period of Integrated Study’ (Sōgōteki na gakushū no jikan), a general class established in 2002, to help promote education focusing on ‘international understanding’; later, in 2011, Eng‑ lish education was officially introduced as the class ‘Foreign Language Activities’ (Gaikokugo katsudō) for fifth and sixth graders. After the release of the ‘Growth Strategy’, as part of the im‑ plementation of the new Courses of Study for elementary education in 2020, ‘Foreign Language Activities’ was expanded to the third grade, and in the fifth and sixth grades, foreign language education was elevated from a mere ‘activity’ to a ‘subject area’. At the same time, to achieve economic ‘total war’ in the context of globalization, the ­government—paradoxically as a result of its neoliberal disposition—increasingly advocates in‑ stilling nationalism into all children to sustain national unity despite growing inequality (see also Tsujita 2017: chapter 6). Typically, the government seems to aim at restorationist moral integra‑ tion of the nation through school education. From 2002, MEXT began to distribute supplementary material for moral education, the ‘Notebook of the Heart’ (Kokoro no nōto), which contained na‑ tionalistic contents, to elementary‑ and middle‑school students. Subsequently, the extracurricular activity Morals (Dōtoku) was made a school subject area in 2018 in primary schools and in 2019 in secondary schools; Morals textbooks are produced according to the Ministry of Education’s authorization, and all elementary‑ and middle‑school students are graded. Moral education, which, under the subject name Shūshin, had sought to cultivate morality to foster the imperial nation and was abolished following defeat in the Asia‑Pacific War, was revived. Thus, Saika (2019: 3) states that the revival of moral education was ‘the most significant turning point in postwar education’. Indeed, it now aims at establishing a state in which all Japanese, particularly ‘non‑elite’ children as potential soldiers, have the same moral principles, or ‘love of our country and hometown’ (Ōmori 2018: 305–310). Symbolically, during the authorization process for moral textbooks, a surprising incident occurred in which a bread shop in a particular lesson was changed to a Japanese traditional sweets shop so the publisher could resolve the (almost paranoid) opinion of MEXT that it was ‘inappropriate’ in light of the aim of cultivating a love for the country and homeland (Saika 2019: 3–4). Bread is an everyday food in Japan and is even served in school lunches; children have ample opportunity to experience bread directly. Thus, it is unclear how relegating bread to the horizon in moral textbooks will effectively imbue children with a sense of Japanese identity. However, it would be unwise to underestimate the recent paranoid right‑wing movement to alter school textbooks’ representation through seemingly trivial word substitutions, as nationalism is largely achieved via the accumulation of banal everyday matters (Billig [1995] 2014). Meanwhile, this promotion of official nationalism could not be perceived solely as government control over the populace. That is, the rise of nationalism in Japan in the last decades is not only caused by one‑sided agitation and manipulation, for instance, by right‑wing populists. At least 400

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partly, it also seems that the general public, which has become increasingly anxious in the face of rapid globalization and social changes, uses such politicians to preserve their own daily lives (Su‑ gita 2003). Hence, simply criticizing people’s support of nationalists ‘from above’ would not solve the problem. Instead, to eliminate the root cause, an academic understanding of why people have allowed such right‑wing politicians to rise to power in the 21st century as well as observing how its foundation, namely ignorance of ignorance, is formed should constitute a mission of sociology or ‘sociological enlightenment’ (see Tada 2020b) today.

Acknowledgments This chapter was written with the permission of Kumamoto‑ken kōtō gakkō chireki kōminka kenkyūkai [The Kumamoto Research Association of Social Studies High School Teachers], the publisher of my lecture transcript (Tada 2020a), on which this chapter was based. I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the Association for their permission and Mr. Tsutomu Shimokawa (Tamana High School, Kumamoto Prefecture) for giving me the opportunity to deliver the 2019 lecture. I would also like to express my heartfelt gratitude to the teachers of the Kumamoto Prefectural Education Center for their valuable assistance in collecting materials, as well as to Mr. Jiwon Lee (Graduate School of Kyoto University) for his kind assistance in romanizing the title of the Korean text referred to in this chapter. Finally, I want to give my deepest thanks to my friends in and from other Asian countries, especially Ms. Yi‑Chun Liu (Taiwan), for many conver‑ sations that led to this chapter. This study was funded by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number 23H00875.

Notes ∗ This chapter is based on the author’s 2019 lecture in Japanese, whose transcript was later published as Tada (2020a). All translations of non‑English sources herein are my own, because maintaining consistency in translation choices is crucial for this chapter’s discussion. However, in selecting English translations of some controversial Japanese words such as ‘ianfu’ (‘comfort women’) and ‘chōyōkō’ (‘forced [civil‑ ian] laborers’), I consulted mass media sources such as English‑language newspapers and literature (e.g., Takeda 2020) when necessary, and adopted expressions generally used in (or appropriate for) news reports or academic contexts. English translations of quotations from the Basic Act on Education (Kyōiku kihon hō) were obtained from the following webpage, operated under the name ‘Japanese Law Translation’ by the Japanese Ministry of Justice (Accessed February 1, 2023. https://www.japaneselawtranslation.go.jp/ ja/laws/view/2442). Regarding Lim (2021–2022), I used the Japanese translation, not the Korean original. For readers’ convenience, the bibliographic information of all the Japanese sources used here that have existing English translations or titles is provided in the reference list in parentheses for each applicable source. When referring to them in the text, I also included the English translations’ publication years and, if required, corresponding page numbers, following an equal sign. For Japanese‑language sources without English translations or titles, I have indicated my English translations of the titles in square brackets in the reference list. Incidentally, some of the quotations contain expressions that are not gender‑neutral; however, I have left them in their original forms. 1 The seventh edition (Shōsetsu Nihonshi zuroku henshū iinkai 2017) is used here. 2 Although the Japanese government does not publish annual numbers of war deaths, it puts the total number of Japanese war deaths in the Asia‑Pacific War beginning in December 1941 (but including the Japanese‑Chinese War since 1937) at 3.1 million (including 50,000 Korean and Taiwanese military and civilian military employees mobilized for Japanese troops): 2.3 million military and civilian military em‑ ployees, 300,000 Japanese civilians in overseas territories (gaichi), and 500,000 people in the Japanese mainland who died from air raids and other causes. However, this estimate may understate the number of Okinawan war deaths and civilian deaths from air raids and atomic bombs: the total number of war deaths on the Japanese side is likely higher. See Yoshida (2007: 219–220) and Yoshida (2017: 22–26).

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Mitsuhiro Tada 3 Regarding this, one change can be seen at present. In accordance with the new Courses of Study for high schools, a new subject called Modern and Contemporary History (Rekishi sōgō) was introduced for stu‑ dents entering in FY2022 and later, integrating modern Japanese history and modern world history, which had previously been treated as separate subjects; a few textbooks, such as Yamakawa Shuppansha’s 2022 Rekishi sōgō: Kindai kara gendai e [authorized by MEXT in March 2021] and Teikoku‑Shoin’s 2022 Meikai rekishi sōgō [ditto], mention the number of war deaths in the Asia‑Pacific region. However, it is not certain that these changes can be sustained as right‑leaning interventions in school materials continue.

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25 LANGUAGE, IDEOLOGIES, DISCRIMINATION, AND AFROCENTRIC‑FOCUSED, CRITICAL LANGUAGE AWARENESS WRITING CURRICULA FOR AFRICAN AMERICAN LANGUAGE AND AKAN LANGUAGE SPEAKERS Shenika Hankerson and Monica A. Obiri‑Yeboah Introduction The Black population in the US is steadily growing. According to the 2020 US Census, just over 49 million individuals within the US self‑identified as Black alone or as part of a multiracial/mul‑ tiethnic group. This marks an increase since the 2000 US Census when there were slightly over 36 million Black Americans. While the Black population is continuing to grow, Blacks are still experiencing educational inequalities resulting from power dynamics and other social and politi‑ cal inequities that continue to persist in US education. One area of concern has been the ongoing presence of African American Language (AAL) discrimination in educational settings–that is the prejudicial and discriminatory practices and behaviors that prevent Black, AAL speakers’ full ac‑ cess and rights to quality education. Research shows that approximately 80–90% of US Blacks use some form of AAL in their everyday speech (see Mufwene 2001; Smitherman 1999; Spears 1988). Thus, this issue requires immediate educational responses. In this chapter, we address the issue of AAL discrimination in the US education system and offer a “best practice” response for resolving it. We explore the reasons behind AAL discrimi‑ nation in US education, then delve into the subject of critical language awareness (CLA) and explore its role in preventing such discrimination. Given that AAL discrimination is particularly pronounced in US writing classrooms (Hankerson 2017), our focus is drawn to this specific area of education. Here, we use empirical qualitative research to explore how a college writing cur‑ riculum centered on Afrocentric‑focused perspectives and CLA practices and principles influenced AAL‑speaking students’ writing skills. We then use this knowledge as a basis for describing how college writing instructors can effectively design and deliver Afrocentric‑focused, CLA curricula DOI: 10.4324/9781003289746-31

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to AAL‑speaking students. Additionally, we consider the ways that Afrocentric‑focused, CLA cur‑ ricula might be adopted and implemented in broader K–12 writing contexts and with broader Black student populations, with a particular focus on the Ghanaian, Akan language‑speaking stu‑ dents. This chapter offers important implications for using Afrocentric‑focused, CLA curricula to support AAL speakers’ academic success and well‑being in US education, in general, and college writing –“composition”– in specific. Furthermore, it provides valuable insights for the broader implementation of such curricula in K–12 writing classrooms, particularly among Akan language speakers (also called Akan speakers or Akans).

Language, Ideologies, and Discrimination There has been much discussion in sociolinguistic research about AAL and its speakers. Most of this discussion has centered on the linguistic norms and practices of Black, AAL speakers and its connection to culture and identity. In 1949, Lorenzo Dow Turner, “the first African American with professional training in linguistics” (Mille and Montgomery 2000: xi) shared noteworthy and revolutionary research which marked a “turning point in scientific work on American Negro English” (Hall 1950: 54)–especially in the context of the Gullah linguistic structure. In 1977, Geneva Smitherman, aka “Dr. G.,” shared groundbreaking research which played a vital role in enhancing our understanding of the history and evolution of AAL, including its linguistic fea‑ tures and communicative purposes. Over the past few decades, sociolinguist research on AAL has continued to grow with scholarship clearly demonstrating that AAL is a legitimate language with its own lexicon and grammar patterns (syntax, morphology, semantics, phonology) (Green 2002; Lanehart 2015; Baugh 1999; Rickford and Rickford 2000; Smitherman 2021). Despite such knowledge, AAL continues to be highly stigmatized and deemed inappropriate for use, especially in US educational contexts. The struggle to recognize AAL as a legitimate language in US education is attributed to broader standard language ideologies (SLI) in US society that actively privileges the standard English lan‑ guage and marginalizes everything else. Lippi‑Green (2012) defines SLI as a bias toward an abstracted, idealized, homogenous spoken language which is imposed and maintained by dominant bloc institutions and which names as its model the written lan‑ guage, but which is drawn primarily from the speech of the upper, middle class. (67) SLI assert the idea that there exists only one singular, superior and correct language variety (Lippi‑Green 2012, Milroy 2001, Siegel 2006)–and in the US that language variety is standard English (SE). Swann, Deumert, Lillis, and Mesthrie define SE as a “relatively uniform variety of a language which does not show regional variation, and which is used in a wide range of communi‑ cative functions.” It tends “to observe prescriptive, written norms, which are codified in grammars and dictionaries” (2004: 295). SE is characterized by its social prestige and is linked to qualities such as being educated, literate, and White (Charity Hudley and Mallinson 2011; Lanehart 1998). SLI in the US manifests as ideologies centered on SE language use (MacSwan 2020), perpetuating and exerting systems of advantage and authority for White, middle‑class Americans. SE language ideologies (also known as White language ideologies; see McIntosh 2018) underscore White su‑ premacy and anti‑Black sentiments across various sectors in US society, particularly within the realm of education, which leaves AAL speakers marginalized and excluded from meaningful par‑ ticipation in academic discourse. 405

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SE language ideologies have been shown to hinder AAL speakers’ language and literacy pro‑ gress. It has also been used as a vehicle for transmitting AAL discrimination in US education. Hankerson (2023) describes language‑based discrimination toward AAL or AAL discrimination as prejudicial and discriminatory practices and behaviors that have historically been present within US education and have predominately served as a means to stigmatize, marginalize, and exclude the Black racial, AAL‑speaking population in both spoken and written communication. AAL dis‑ crimination involves the consequential and unlawful practices, policies, and direct “acts” that damage, harm, and deny AAL speakers of their equal and just rights in US education. SE language ideologies assert the inherent correctness of SE language over AAL which provides the foundation for the perpetuation of AAL discrimination in US education. Consequently, AAL speakers face disadvantages and exclusion, preventing them from accessing a quality education due to the lack of opportunity they have to learn through their native language. CLA, however, interrogates SLI‑like SE language ideologies and challenges the underlying as‑ sumptions that continue to support the perpetuation of AAL discrimination in US education. It does not aim to regulate (read, police) or remove AAL from academic discourse, but rather to resocialize and transform the “discourses of appropriateness” (Flores and Rosa 2015) that underpin academic discourse. Often considered the “pedagogical arm” of critical discourse analysis, CLA is concerned with “how language conventions and language practices are invested with power relations and ideological processes which people are often unaware of” (Fairclough 1992: 7). It rejects the belief that AAL is “incorrect,” “deficient,” or “not a legitimate language.” Instead, it contends that such beliefs contribute to actions that sustain AAL discrimination and other language‑based inequities against AAL and its speakers. Since its emergence in the 1990s (see Clark et al. 1990, 1991; Fair‑ clough 1992), CLA pedagogies and programs have gained heightened attention due to their efficacy in facilitating students’ critical engagement with language. This involves considering language’s socio‑political implications, historical context, and the ways it can either reinforce or challenge social inequalities and discrimination (Clark and Ivanic 1997; Janks 1999; Shapiro 2022). There has been a small but growing body of empirical research on CLA for AAL speakers in literature on K–12 ELA instruction and college writing instruction. These studies have contributed to our understanding of how CLA pedagogies and curricula can serve as a valuable cornerstone for the K–12 language and literacy instruction of AAL speakers (Alim 2010; Alim and Smitherman 2012; Baker‑Bell 2013; Kirkland and Jackson 2009), as well as, how CLA pedagogies and cur‑ ricula can establish a strong foundation for the college‑level writing instruction of AAL speakers (Hankerson 2022, 2023). Hankerson’s empirical qualitative research, for example, has enriched our knowledge and understanding of how CLA‑centered college writing curricula empowers AAL speakers, particularly when these curricula also prioritize the racial and linguistic experiences of AAL speakers. Data from the research revealed that such curricula have the potential to fos‑ ter AAL speakers’ appreciation and acceptance for their native language. Additionally, the data showed that such curricula possess the capacity to boost AAL speakers’ writing skills and rhetori‑ cal abilities. In general, the data demonstrated that CLA curricula, especially when rooted in the racial and linguistic realities of AAL speakers, can effectively enhance the writing performance, writing motivation, and writing self‑confidence of AAL speakers. Recognizing the inherent value of CLA and its benefits for AAL speakers, it becomes im‑ perative for US educators to be given more guidance on how to design and deliver CLA‑based curricula and pedagogies to AAL speakers. This is particularly crucial in college writing con‑ texts where challenges linked to White language supremacy and the standardization of writing instruction and assessment continue to persist (Inoue 2019) and harm the writing progression and

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success of AAL speakers. Here, we offer this knowledge by drawing on curricular materials and insights from Hankerson’s (2022) empirical research examining a CLA curriculum’s influence on the written language skills and development of AAL speakers in college writing. As we delve into the curriculum outlined in this chapter, it’s important to note that it also placed a particular emphasis on Afrocentric perspectives (Asante 1991; Woodson 1933); therefore, we will refer to it as an ­Afrocentric‑focused, CLA curriculum going forward in order to properly recognize, ac‑ knowledge, and make visible the Afrocentric learning paradigm that the curriculum also attended to. By doing so, we aim to present a clear and precise representation of this curriculum, highlight‑ ing both the distinct emphasis placed on Afrocentric strategies and the core principles and ap‑ proaches grounded in CLA. We then expand our discussion to offer a more significant contribution to broader conversations about the role and potential value of using Afrocentric‑focused, CLA curricula with Ghanaian speakers of Akan language in US writing classrooms more generally. This broader discussion holds importance, particularly considering the growing number of Ghanaian diaspora members residing and pursuing education in the US (Migration Policy Institute 2015).

Afrocentric‑Focused CLA Teaching Concepts and Methods: The Case of the AAL Speaker Overview This section describes how an Afrocentric‑focused, CLA curriculum was designed and delivered to a predominate AAL speaking population enrolled in an Introduction to College Writing course. The curriculum, designed by the first author, was created with the task of exploring ways to im‑ prove college writing instructors’ access to pedagogical resources that promote AAL speakers’ writing skills and development and support their well‑being. The second author will extend the discussion in the next section of this chapter about the promises and possibilities of an Afrocen‑ tric‑focused, CLA curriculum for Akan language speakers in US writing classrooms more broadly.

Content The Afrocentric‑focused, CLA curriculum emphasized Afrocentric perspectives. Specifically, it honored, valued, and centered the social and cultural linguistic realities of the African American and Black Diasporic. The curriculum also foregrounded CLA principles to provide AAL speakers with the opportunity to enhance their critical consciousness of the ways in which language is con‑ nected to social ideologies, power relations, and issues of inequities and injustice. Furthermore, it foregrounded CLA principles for the purposes of empowering AAL speakers to acknowledge and celebrate their own rich linguistic experiences and become critically conscious of the rhetorics, discourses, and grammar available to them as skillful and intelligent language users. The curriculum included lessons, strategies, activities, and outcomes designed to provide AAL speakers with an accurate, descriptive, and celebratory account of the history and evolution of AAL. It also included content designed to inform and educate AAL speakers about the sociopo‑ litical ideologies underpinning oral and written language in US society and education, offering a broader view for critical analysis and critique. Below, I identify two specific high‑quality texts and videos that were carefully selected and implemented in the curriculum. These materials illustrate how the curriculum’s content was scaffolded to allow AAL speakers to explore and unpack various ideas and knowledge related to language learning and use:

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• “African American language: So good it’s bad” (Smitherman 2006; Smitherman and Alim 2012): This important text takes a strategic approach, examining the history and evolution of AAL as well as its sociopolitical status. The style‑shifting nature of this text is both insightful and empowering. As Smitherman accurately points out “African Americans from all walks of life speak” AAL and “it ain goin nowhere” (18–19). This text (with a relatable “Herb & Jamal” cartoon comic strip example) served as a central reading/viewing for session I and the subse‑ quent discussions (see Table 25.1). • “3 ways to speak English” (Lyiscott 2014): In this powerful spoken‑word TED talk, Lyiscott celebrates and complicates the three languages she uses in personal and academic settings. Chal‑ lenging the politics of White Language Supremacy, Lyiscott emphasizes the importance of rec‑ ognizing and embracing diverse forms of Englishes and languages. Her goal is to foster notions of equity and justice in language usage, advocating for an equitable and just linguistic approach that benefits everyone. Lyiscott’s celebration and unapologetic acceptance of her own trilingual skills and competence–which includes languages of the Black Diasporic–is empowering and enables AAL speakers to become critical viewers of their own meaning‑making practices in speech and text. This spoken‑word TED talk also served as reading/viewing for session I.

Design Various steps were taken to develop and design the curriculum. First, it involved gaining a com‑ prehensive understanding of CLA principles and approaches which would serve as the core of the curriculum design. Since the target population for the curriculum was AAL speakers, the next step included gaining a deeper understanding of the Afrocentric learning paradigm which would be used as a blueprint for selecting the curriculum’s content. The curriculum design followed the CLA instructional principles and approaches discussed in Alim (2010), Alim and Smitherman (2012), and Clark and Ivanic (1997), with special attention to the Afrocentric teaching and learn‑ ing perspectives recommended by Afrocentric scholars and supporters such as Molefi Kete Asante, Janice E. Hale, Asa Hilliard III, and bell hooks. The curriculum included four sessions, with each session lasting one hour a week. It was deliv‑ ered seminar‑style to a predominate AAL‑speaking student population enrolled in an Introduction to College Writing course offered by a Summer Bridge Program at an urban research university located in the Midwestern US. The curriculum encompassed the following session topics and goals as illustrated in Table 25.1.

The Curriculum’s Protocol Each session included a reading/viewing activity, followed by a class activity and a writing activity–­ all intended to be used consistent with the topics and goals covered in Table 25.1. The readings/ viewings were introduced at the beginning of each session to foster students’ critical consciousness about issues of race, language, writing, and power, particularly as they are related to AAL. The read‑ ings/viewings selected, for example, included: Jamila Lyiscott’s “3 ways to speak English” (ses‑ sion I) and H. Samy Alim’s “Hip hop nation language” (session III). Next, the class activities were introduced, serving the purpose of CLA‑raising. Their aim was to empower students to become more critical and conscious language users and text participants. Through these activities, students were encouraged to celebrate and appreciate the value of their own language (i.e., AAL). The class activities incorporated in the curriculum, for example, included: multigenre writing snippets de‑ signed to enable students to use poetry, narration, persuasion, visual imagery, and other genre‑based 408

Language, Ideologies, Discrimination Table 25.1  The curriculum’s session topics and goals Session topics

Goals

I: Sociolinguistic variation in the US

This session sought to increase students’ awareness of sociolinguistic variation, highlighting the systematic and rule‑governed nature of AAL. It also sought to reinforce and reaffirm the value and significance of Black speech. This session sought to guide students toward recognizing writing as a sociocultural practice encompassing various word choices, grammar, and discourses reflecting their social and cultural experiences and histories. It also sought to encourage students to explore broader sociopolitical issues, such as AAL discrimination and its impact on writing. This session sought to raise students’ awareness of the history and evolution of hip‑hop, shedding light on the diverse lexical innovations from the Black Language that are embedded within the genre. This session sought to present tools for combating AAL discrimination and feelings of racialized writing trauma– that is, feelings of writing anxiety, shame, and distress that occur after exposure to AAL discrimination and other systemic inequities in writing education (Hankerson, 2022; 2023).

II: Writing as a sociocultural practice

III: Hip‑hop and the politics of identity

IV: Combating linguistic discrimination

resources to convey written expressions and meaning about a specific topic related to language policies, practices and rights in US education (session II), and linguicism skits designed to illustrate the various ways in which linguicism (or language discrimination) in general–and AAL linguicism (or AAL discrimination) in specific–exists in US society and education, including approaches for combating it (session IV). Finally, the writing activities were introduced. Similar to US Introduc‑ tion to College Writing courses, the writing activities focused on expository writing and followed a summary and response essay format which asked students to first explain and inform the audience of the main ideas presented in the text (summary) then provide a critique or evaluation (response). Students were encouraged to leverage their linguistic critical consciousness and use it as a resource to guide their writing. This included strategically employing AAL or code‑meshing strategies (i.e., combining AAL with academic language in writing, see Young et al. 2018) in their essays.

Results and Themes from AAL‑Speaking Students The results and themes derived from AAL‑speaking students indicated positive and affirming experiences and outcomes. When sharing their experiences and outcomes, students consistently highlighted the influence of the Afrocentric‑focused, CLA curriculum on their overall learning and engagement. My reaction to this research study was confusion when first learning about this subject. I was not sure what it was going to be about but it seemed interesting. I learned so many things that I did not think that I would learn. But they are all beneficial and broadened my thinking. It was past awesome, enlightening, different (in a good way), and overall enjoyable. I loved it. I initially got involved for the girls but I really enjoyed learning about my culture’s language and my culture. 409

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Students also demonstrated heightened critical metacognition of the writing process and a deeper sense of critical consciousness after engaging with the curriculum. This serves as evidence that the curriculum effectively aids AAL‑speaking students in critically assessing their writing process. This includes a thoughtful consideration of writing genres, along with the rhetorics, discourses, and grammar that contribute to their sense of writing satisfaction and linguistic self‑actualization. A qualitative analysis of one student’s pre‑essay,1 for example, revealed no indication of critical metacognition or critical consciousness. A qualitative analysis of the student’s post‑essay,2 how‑ ever, did show evidence of these skills. The following excerpt exemplifies this point regarding critical consciousness in the student’s post‑essay: Jordan teaches Black people that our language is appropriate and that its ok to use our language when we speak and write. I now know Black English is real and its something that white people can’t take from us when we speak or write. We going to fight for our linguistic rights. Some students even suggested that college writing instructors use an Afrocentric‑focused, CLA curriculum to similarly teach them about the writing process, including the best methods for strengthening their writing skills and development: Why can’t writing courses be taught like this for real? The results and themes indicate that AAL‑speaking students need to see their cultural and lin‑ guistic experiences recognized, acknowledged, and centered in the college writing curriculum. ­Afrocentric‑focused, CLA curriculums help AAL‑speaking students engage with writing in thoughtful and informed ways–that is ways that center and sustain their own linguistic realities and modes of knowledge. When college writing instructors teach and respond to AAL‑speaking students’ writing using a sociolinguistic understanding of AAL and the “Students’ right to their own language” (SRTOL) commitment lens, they create an environment where AAL‑speaking stu‑ dents can flourish and reach their utmost potential as adept and capable writers.

Extending the Discussion: Afrocentric‑Focused CLA and Akan Language Speakers Akan is a Niger‑Congo, Kwa language spoken widely in Ghana and parts of the Ivory Coast in West Africa. Speakers of Akan are referred to as Akans. The native speaker population of Akans in Ghana is estimated as/around 9,100,000 (Eberhand et al. 2020). Akan has different dialects and these include Fante, Akuapem, Asante, Wassa, Bono, Akyem, and Kwahu, among others. These dialects are broadly categorized under Fante, Akuapem Twi, and Asante Twi (Abakah 2002). Fante is dominant in the Central and Western Regions, Akuapem Twi is Dominant in parts of the Eastern Regions, while Asante Twi is dominant in the Ashanti and Ahafo Regions of Ghana. Akan is one of the prominent languages spoken in Ghana (Apenteng and Amfo 2014) as it is the most commonly spoken indigenous language, with almost half of the population of the country using it as a first language (L1) and a lot more using it as a lingua franca in various social, cultural, religious and economic contexts (Anyidoho and Dakubu 2008). Lingua francas are neutral lan‑ guages that are used for communication between groups who do not speak each other’s languages and these languages may be contact languages (cf. Matras 2009). Also, Eberhand et al. (2020) show that Akan serves as one of the languages with wider communication in Ghana. They further claim

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that Akan is also used as the de facto national working language in Ghana. “Akan (especially Twi) is spoken by people across Ghana as a second language and used as a medium of cross‑ethnic com‑ munication” (Adika 2012: 151). In fact, Akan is a language that has received wider speakership in Ghana and the coastal parts of the Ivory Coast stemming from the migration of Akan speakers and other language speakers for economic, inter‑marriage, and educational purposes. Akan as a language has seven vowel orthographic letters represented in ten oral phonemic vowel sounds [i, ɪ, u, ʊ, e, ɛ, o, ɔ, æ, a] and five nasal phonemic vowel sounds [ĩ, ɪ,̃ ũ, ʊ̃, ã] (Dol‑ phyne 1988). The Akan vowel inventory distinguishes three heights (high, mid, and low), two tongue body parts (front and back), and two tongue roots (advanced or +ATR and unadvanced/ retracted or ‑ATR). Vowel harmony is a common feature in Akan where in any given word only vowels from either + or ‑ ATR will occur. The direction of the harmony is +ATR regressive where ‑ATR vowels that precede +ATR ones take on the +ATR feature. Consider the table of vowel in‑ ventory below adapted from Christaller (1881) and Dolphyne (1988): [‑ATR]

Front

High Mid Low

ɪ ɛ

Central

a

Back

[+ATR]

Front

ʊ ɔ

High Mid Low

i e

Central

Back u o

[æ]

Aside the +ATR regressive harmony, there is also rounding harmony in the Fante dialect where a round vowel transfers its round feature to unrounded vowel(s) preceding it as observed in the fol‑ lowing expression where the spread vowel ɪ in the progressive morpheme picks up a round feature ɔ from the verb it is preceding [rɪ + kɔ] becomes [rʊkɔ] “… is going.” Akan is also a tonal language noted for marking two types of tone, high and low (Dolphyne 1988: 52). Tone has grammatical and lexical functions where the changing of one tone type with the other can create meaning change. For example, the word [papa] can mean three different things [pápá] “good,” [pàpá] “father” [pàpà] “fan” depending on the tone that is assigned to the vowels within the word. Akan consonant inventory includes surface phonemes and labial consonants which are speci‑ fied as [+Round]. Whereas all other places of articulations have both [+Round] and [‑Round] seg‑ ments, the same cannot be said for the alveolar plosive and affricate consonants. The consonant system in Akan is presented in the table below adopted from Hall‑Lew (2006: 32): Labial

Alveolar ‑RND

Plosive Fricative

p b f

Affricate Nasal Lateral Approximant

m

t d s sj n l ɹ

Palatal +RND

sw

‑RND

Velar +RND

ç

ʃɥ

tç dʒ ɲ

tçɥ dʒɥ ɲɥ ɥ

411

Glottal

‑RND

+RND

k g

k gw

ŋ

ŋw

‑RND

+RND

h

hw

w

w

Shenika Hankerson and Monica A. Obiri‑Yeboah

The syllable structure in Akan is predominantly a consonant‑verb (CV) type. For example in the word [ko.to.ku] “sack” there are three syllables all comprising a CV. In terms of sentence structure, the Akan language has a subject‑verb‑object (SVO) structure with the subject and object consisting of a noun phrase, a noun head, an optional adjective phrase which consists of an adjec‑ tive and/or a degree word and an optional definite or indefinite determiner (article) which is repre‑ sented in word order as [Noun + (Adjective) + (Degree word) + (Determiner)]. Consider example 1 below for the word structures described above: 1 Abofra panin kakra no ama Owura Amoah aduane adi. Child old DEG DEF.DET COMPL‑give father Amoah food COMPL‑eat   “The little older child had given Mr. Amoah food to eat.” The Akan verb phrase also consists of a single verb or a serial verb construction (succession of verbs). Consider example 2 below: 2 Kofi sa nsuo wɔ abura no mu hohoro n’‑anim nom bi twitwi K. fetch water COP well DEF.DET LOC wash his‑face drink some brush ne se anɔpa biaa. his teeth morning DEG “Kofi fetches water from the well to wash his face, drink some and brush his teeth every morning” Possession is zero marked in Akan so the possessed structure consists of a possessser and the pos‑ sessed. See example 3: 3 Ama ntoma fɛfɛɛfɛ paa sɛn ahama no so. A. cloth nice DEG hang line DEF.DET LOC “Ama’s very nice cloth is hanging on the drying line.” The Afrocentric‑focused CLA strategies presented in Section “Afrocentric‑Focused CLA Teach‑ ing Concepts and Methods: The Case of the AAL Speaker” can also be used with Akan‑speaking students. The Afrocentric‑focused CLA curriculum values and respects the cultural and social backgrounds of the African American and Black Diasporic. Thus, it will play a significant role in ensuring the success of Akan students in US educational environments. Akans have an extraor‑ dinary rich folklore tradition known as “Anansesɛm” which follows a unique structured pattern consisting of an introduction, body, and a conclusion. The folktales shared often contain a lot of important moral lessons. There is also a call (by a storyteller, usually an elder) and response (by the audience) routine where the “narrator and narratee are free to make comments, ask questions, sing mmoguo or even dance” (Mireku‑Gyimah 2014: 311). Clapping and musical instruments (dondo, dawuro, firikyiwa) are also included and employed as a powerful means for convey‑ ing moral lessons. Additional Akan traditions include festivals, proverbs, riddles, cultural and praise songs, recitals, marriage celebrations, naming ceremonies, puberty rites, funeral rites, and traditional months celebration durbars (Ohum, Akwasidae, Fofie, Awukudae). Traditional cloths are also significant to Akans, with the most esteemed one being “Kente.” It is woven in various patterns, each carrying its own meanings, and sometimes even stories, and it is often usually worn during special occasions. In addition, there are adinkra symbols and a variety of other tradi‑ tional cloths with different patterns and colors that are suitable for all occasions and celebrations. 412

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Wood carving and molding are additional artistic expressions among Akans and they provide sig‑ nificant insight into their customs and belief systems. Akans are also religious people with the most prominent aspect of their religion being an ancestral cult, the rituals and rites which serve to enforce ethnic unity, respect for the elderly, communal living, and morality. There are other reli‑ gious practices which have their basis in a belief in a supreme deity, “Otweduampɔn Nyankropɔn,” who created the universe, and lesser deities “anyamenom” and spirits “ahonhom.” Akan‑speaking students bring these rich cultural traditions and practices to US writing classrooms, and their rich meaning‑making practices would be hugely supported with an Afrocentric‑focused, CLA curricu‑ lum. An Afrocentric‑focused, CLA curriculum emphasizes Afrocentrism which means that both Akan students’ language and cultural traditions and practices would be valued, honored, respected, positively reflected, and most importantly placed at the center of their learning. Akans, much like many Africans, tend to have high educational goals (Gambino et al. 2014) and are increasingly choosing the US as their destination for pursuing education abroad. While there are many benefits associated with migration and immigration for Akans (e.g., educational attainment, job security, financial support for themselves and their family abroad), there are also a great deal of challenges. Boateng (2020) highlights some of the challenges faced by Ghana‑ ian immigrant students, including Akans, in their educational journey. These challenges include financial constraints, language barriers, immigration issues, technological difficulties, discrimina‑ tion, cultural clashes, family responsibilities, insufficient information regarding college choices, academic preparation, and emotional stress. These factors can negatively impact Akans educa‑ tional progress and success (see also Erisman and Looney 2007). An Afrocentric‑focused CLA curriculum has the potential to alleviate some of these challenges in the US writing classroom. For instance, it can help Akan‑speaking students avoid issues associated with language barriers, discrimination, academic preparation, and emotional stress. In this situation, Akan‑speaking stu‑ dents will have the opportunity to experience empowerment, feel valued, and actively participate in classroom activities and interactions. This, in turn, will enhance their overall engagement and success in the writing classroom. Akans are also known to have a rich oral culture with proverbs and praise songs among other oral traditions. Allowing Akan‑speaking students to incorporate cultural‑related proverbs and praise songs in their writings offers a means for integrating their oral traditions into the US writing classroom. Moreover, predominant oral features such as tone, vowel harmony and nasality can be utilized as valuable resources for explaining concepts more effectively to Akan‑speaking students. By employing Afrocentric‑focused CLA strategies, writing educators can break down language hierarchies, which can ultimately aid Akan‑speaking students in cultivating a positive linguistic identity development. An Afrocentric‑focused CLA curriculum will empower Akan‑speaking students to incorporate their native language and tap into their social, cultural, ethnic, religious, and historical experiences in their writing. This will enhance their writing experience and performance because it will allow them to use the language and language varieties with which they are most familiar. By respect‑ fully acknowledging and supporting the sociocultural experiences and histories of Akan‑speaking students in US writing classrooms, we can cultivate a conducive and inclusive environment that fosters effective teaching and learning. Prohibiting Akan‑speaking students from using their native linguistic features will hinder their ability to express ideas and employ language in a sophisticated manner to give voice to their writing. Code‑meshing which is also featured in the Afrocentric‑­ focused, CLA curriculum is also a common phenomenon among Akan speakers especially stu‑ dents and younger generations (Obiri‑Yeboah 2019). Implementing an Afrocentric‑focused CLA curriculum in US writing classrooms for Akan‑speaking students will allow for the teaching and learning of topics specific to Akan‑speaking students, such as sociolinguistic variation, sound 413

Shenika Hankerson and Monica A. Obiri‑Yeboah

systems, word formation processes, sentence structure, and Akan concepts of meaning and prag‑ matics. Furthermore, implementing an Afrocentric‑focused CLA curriculum in US writing class‑ rooms will help to combat language discrimination not only against AAL, but also against the Akan language, as well as other languages of the Black diaspora. Such a curriculum would help writing classrooms accurately mirror the diverse nature of classrooms in US schools today. It would also work to counteract linguistic discrimination, champion linguistic diversity and multi‑ lingualism, and contribute to the success and well‑being of Akan‑speaking students in K–12 writ‑ ing classrooms and beyond.

Conclusion This chapter leverages curricular materials and insights derived from empirical qualitative research to provide college writing instructors with guidance on how to design and deliver Afrocentric‑fo‑ cused, CLA curriculum to AAL speakers. The curriculum introduces college writing instructors to a promising method for disrupting AAL discrimination in college writing practice, with the aim of supporting and enhancing AAL speakers’ writing skills, writing development, and overall well‑being in the college writing classroom. The curriculum also holds importance and relevance for K–12 writing instructors and broader Black student communities, including Black diaspora student populations like the Ghanaian and Akan language speakers highlighted in this chapter. The Afrocentric‑focused, CLA curriculum described in this chapter has practical implications for the fields of composition studies and applied linguistics. The field of composition studies has been concerned with methods and models for creating and implementing writing pedagogies and curricular materials that prioritize the centrality of the Black lived linguistic and rhetorical expe‑ rience (Kynard 2020; Young 2021). The curriculum here addresses this concern by introducing college writing instructors to a specific curricular model designed to center Black Language and Black rhetoric. Recent writing program administration (WPA) scholarship in the field of composi‑ tion studies has also called for greater attention to the Black lived experience within WPA itself. This includes placing Blackness at the center of WPA building and management (Perryman‑Clark and Craig 2019; Carter‑Tod and Sano‑Franchini 2021). The curriculum here offers a model of how to prioritize the integration of Black experiences and perspectives in WPA work. Specifically, it provides WPA with an explicit and intentional model that can be used as a foundation for WPA curriculum development initiatives and WPA faculty training and professional development initia‑ tives. Furthermore, the field of applied linguistics has recently been concerned with liberatory lin‑ guistics. Charity Hudley (2023) defines liberatory linguistics as “linguistics intentionally designed by Black people (as well as people from other communities in solidarity) and expressly focused on Black languages, language varieties, linguistic expression, and communicative practices within the ongoing struggle for Black liberation” (215). This curriculum was created by Shenika Hanker‑ son, a Black, AAL‑speaking woman seeking to eradicate the racial and linguistic inequities and injustices that she experienced and witnessed in college writing settings. Discussions about the curriculum and its applicability to Ghanaian, Akan language speakers in US writing classrooms was extended by Monica Obiri‑Yeboah, a Ghanaian, Akan language‑speaking woman and a vic‑ tim of language discrimination and marginalization through the English only language‑in‑educa‑ tion‑policy of Ghana whose focus is on disrupting language homogeneity and monolingualism in her research and engagements. By presenting and describing the curriculum, we, as Black women, strive to make a meaningful and critical contribution to the liberatory linguistics framework and its scholarship.

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The curriculum reported in the article also contributes to and extends existing scholarship fo‑ cused on pedagogical interventions for speakers of Black languages (e.g., AAL, Akan, Jamaican Patois, Swahili, Yoruba) in K‑12 and higher education language and literacy settings (see, e.g., Lee 1993; Milson‑Whyte 2015; Milson‑Whyte and Oenbring 2019; Milu 2021). Although this scholar‑ ship is indeed significant and valuable, there is a need for future research that focuses on Black languages and equitable and just pedagogical interventions across various disciplines.

Notes 1 Expository essay (summary and response of an excerpt from June Jordan’s His own where), administered before exposure to the curriculum. 2 Expository essay (summary and response of an excerpt from June Jordan’s ‘Nobody mean more to me than you and the future life of Willie Jordan’), administered after exposure to the curriculum.

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26 NAVAJO STUDENTS’ PERSPECTIVES OF THEIR HERITAGE LANGUAGE AND TRANSLINGUAL IDENTITY Yi‑Wen Huang Introduction Navajo is the second‑largest tribe with “more than 250,000” tribal members and governs the largest reservation (“25,000 square miles”) in the United States (McCarty et al. 2006: 663). As an instruc‑ tor teaching the majority of Navajo students at a two‑year institution near the Navajo reservation, also called, Navajo Nation, in the American Southwest for more than a decade, I have observed that more and more of my Navajo students claim not to be able to speak their language of herit‑ age. In their writings and discussions in class, I observed that the Navajo students often revealed their wishes to learn or re‑learn their language of heritage. The majority of them who acquired the Navajo language claimed that they acquired the language from their grandparents who could only speak Navajo but they did not acquire the language from their parents. In McCarty et al.’s (2006) study at a community school on the Navajo reservation, the scholars found out that the Navajo children were not being taught the Navajo language by their parents (p. 667) because their parents chose not to speak Navajo at home even though they speak the language fluently (p. 667). In contrast, Canagarajah (2008) stated that family is not responsible for language maintenance or heritage language loss because family has been constantly affected by outside forces such as practical issues: educational opportunities, employment advancements, government policies, and impacts from past colonization. In his study of the Sri Lankan Tamil families’ heritage language loss in the migrated countries, the parents desired their children to successfully climb the social ladder, so they neglected Tamil (Canagarajah 2008: 165) with “English craze” (p. 154). Due to past colonization by the United Kingdom, the Tamil families developed positive attitudes toward English and viewed English as superior (p.  155). The parents pressured their children to learn English and believed that lacking English proficiency represented backwardness and unciviliza‑ tion (Canagarajah 2008: 155). Canagarajah’s (2008) study results were similar to the results in McCarty et al.’ s (2006) study. Some of the Navajo youths in their study stated that they refused to speak Navajo even though they could because they believed that they existed in a “White man’s world” where they would like to progress in life, not going backward (McCarty et al. 2006: 671). For Tamil parents, English is viewed as an advantageous language with instrumental values because they want their children to have access to educational and employment opportunities by learning English well (Canagarajah 2008: 165). Similarly, Navajo parents encourage their children DOI: 10.4324/9781003289746-32

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to learn English to take part in mainstream American society (McCarty et al. 2006: 671). With my personal experiences teaching a majority of Navajo students for more than a decade, some of my Navajo students claimed that they wanted to succeed in their academic careers and fit into American society, so they switched to mainly speaking English in their daily lives. In this paper, I explored the relationships between my Navajo students’ personal experiences with the Navajo language and their translingual identities from their perspectives in my English composition and introductory Linguistics classes.

Review of Literature More and more of my Navajo students mentioned that they were aware that the youngsters were not interested in learning the Navajo language. Moreover, they also indicated that they were aware that the Navajo language was going extinct. McCarty et al. (2006) also stated that many Navajo youth on the reservation were concerned about the survival of their heritage language (p. 673). House (2002) emphasized that the elders were not willing to talk to the Navajo youth in Navajo; instead, they scolded them for not reaching their expectations of language proficiency (p.  54). Some of my Navajo students also shared with me and their classmates that they were scolded by the elders for their incompetencies in the Navajo language. Even though the elders did not choose to teach the youth the Navajo language (House 2002), the majority of my Navajo students revealed that they either took the Navajo language and culture class at public school or are taking it in college. Moreover, they stated that they hope to regain pro‑ ficiency in the heritage language by practicing with their grandparents or parents in Navajo. Many of these students emphasized that the Navajo language is the core of the culture, and the language is sacred. In McCarty et al.’s (2006) study, the Navajo youth and teachers also pointed out that the Navajo language connects to their identity as Navajos (p. 673). McNeil et al. (1999) emphasized that the Navajo held more ethnic identities than other ethnic groups. A few of my Navajo students expressed that they were not interested in learning Navajo or that they refused to learn it even though the Navajo language and culture class was offered at school. Due to the history of Long Walk, elders were afraid of being punished for speaking the heritage language (McCarty et al. 2006: 671). In addition, they were afraid of teaching their children the Navajo language (Goodkind et al. 2012: 1028). Elders encouraged the younger generation to give up speaking Navajo (McCarty et al. 2006: 671) in the hope that they would be able to achieve economic competitiveness in mainstream American society by speaking only English (McKen‑ zie 2020: 506). Due to historical trauma (i.e., Long Walk), in McCarty et al.’s (2006) study, the Navajo youth on the reservation school pretended not to be able to speak the Navajo language even though they did. In 1864, more than 8,000 Navajos (Denetdale 2008), including children, women, the ones on crutches, and elders were forced to march at the same pace by the US cavalry from their homes in Arizona to Fort Sumner, New Mexico (Hwééldi in the Navajo language), where they were incarcer‑ ated for four years. This march took 18 days. Hundreds of Navajos died marching 300 miles (Na‑ tional Library of Medicine n.d.: para. 1). After four years of imprisonment with hunger, the survivors were then released to return home but returned to lesser land (House 2002: 3) where their homes and food sources, such as livestock, corn, and fruits were also all destroyed (Witherspoon 1977: 183). The Navajo youth, who were ashamed of themselves as Navajo or the Navajo language, suf‑ fered from the “Long Walk Syndrome” (McCarty et al. 2006: 671). House (2002) indicated that the Navajo have viewed themselves as victims of the American federal government due to the military conquest and the Long Walk history and still feel the same way even in the present time 419

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(p. 40). The Navajo had the mindset that they were colonized and were ashamed of who they were and of their own heritage language (p. 671). They lacked self‑esteem and suffered from “self‑hate” (p. 671) as Navajos. In Conn’s (2013) study on the Navajo reservation, the dropout rates at high school were high due to the Navajo students’ shame and fear (p. 9). They were ashamed of being Navajo and of their parents’ socioeconomic status (p. 9). The Navajo youth were also afraid of leaving their home‑ town, the reservation (p. 9), which influenced the successful rates for graduating from high school and even going to college. Little Soldier (1989) also pointed out that Native American children have low self‑esteem and are ashamed of being Native American which impacts their success at school (p. 162). Due to this sense of self‑hate, shame, and fear, the young Navajos thought that speaking Navajo was “stupid” (p. 671). The young Navajos who spoke Navajo were judged by other Navajos who spoke better English as uneducated, had never left the reservation, or had never seen the world (p. 670). Based on his fieldwork, Webster (2015) indicated that many Navajos believe that the Navajo language is “under assault by the dominant society” (p. 23). This could often be related to the punishments for speaking Navajo in the history of boarding schools (p. 23). Due to the Treaty with the American federal government in 1868, “formal Western schooling” was implemented for the Navajo as their rights and welfare (p. 4). In the 1920s, the policemen forced the children to go to boarding schools due to only a small number of Navajo children attending school (p. 59). The Nav‑ ajo parents would be sent to jail if they refused to send their children to school (House 2002: 59). In the early period of boarding schools, the Navajo students who spoke the Navajo language were harshly punished (House 2002: 18). If caught speaking Navajo, their mouths were washed with “lye soap” (p. 18). The children received physical punishments by punishing them standing with “heavy dictionaries balanced at the end on their outstretched arms” (p. 18), or their names were put on the blacklist if speaking the heritage language at school or in the dormitory (House 2002: 19). In Goodkind et al.’s (2012) study, Navajo grandparents and elders indicated that the loss of both the Navajo language and oral traditions were caused by the historical trauma i.e., the boarding school experience (p. 1028). However, not all the Navajo viewed the experiences of boarding school negatively (House 2002: 40). Some of the Navajos stated that they were “never forbidden” to speak their language and that the heritage culture was not “threatened” (p. 40). Some of the Navajo people believed that schooling is beneficial for their children to climb the social ladder for success. They told their children to stop speaking the Navajo language and only learn English and that the Navajo language was going to be the past (House 2002: 58). The elders even advised the young Navajos to forget about the Navajo culture as long as they learn English (p. 58). They had this belief that learning English would benefit their children to obtain material resources and economic advantages (p. 58). In contrast, they believed that the Navajo language and culture cannot make the young generation “compete in the Anglo world” (House 2002: 7). In addition, McKenzie (2020) stated that some Navajo people residing in these tribal communities value the English language as the only lan‑ guage to obtain “economic prosperity” (p. 506) but tend to devalue their own Navajo language. Based on my experiences teaching a majority of Navajo students, I observed that the majority of them hold translingual identities. They either listened to their grandparents and parents speak the Navajo language at home or only during family gatherings or took Navajo language and cul‑ ture classes at school. Some of the Navajos also acquired the heritage language from their grand‑ parents when they were children. In her work, Jain (2014) offered a refined perspective on the concept of translingualism. She argued that languages should not be perceived as isolated entities and language users should not be 420

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compartmentalized into distinct users for each language they employ in each context (Jain 2014, p. 493). In this globalized world, people who know more than one language function in contexts involved more than one language. In this concept, the binary views of native speaker or non‑native speaker and monolingual or multilingual are no longer restricted (p. 493). Translinguals are not restricted to certain language context, either. They can hold ownership of multiple languages in multilanguage contexts, and they are also able to hold “the translinguistic self to create one iden‑ tity to cross borders” (p. 493). Canagarajah (2013a) stated that this term, translingual, emphasizes the “co‑existence of multiple languages” (p. 1). In addition, Canagarajah (2013b) indicated that unlike multilingual which views each language as separate entity, the concept of translingual, focuses on the combined effects of multiple languages and the constant contacts and influences from one another to create new meanings and grammars (p. 41). Mohamed (2021) indicated that translingualism represents the continuous changes and interconnection among various linguistic codes and the freedom to move among them and also “allows students to relate to their heritage and be themselves” (p. 222). Besides the four official languages in use there, Singaporeans are able to translingually speak any variety of languages based on their linguistic repertoire and the social contexts they are in. Their language usages are also associated with ideologies regarding language, “capital, and identity” (Bokhorst‑Heng 2022: 532). Based on my observations, the majority of my Navajo students hold translingual identities and are translingual users of English and Navajo from time to time in different multilingual contexts.

Methods After receiving the students’ consent, a background form was administered to collect students’ demographic information for one introductory Linguistics class and two English composition classes. At the beginning of the semester, an in‑class writing activity was administered in these two English composition classes. General observation was performed in these classes by observ‑ ing the students’ natural interactions with one another and myself.

Analysis McGregor (2018) wrote that researchers “become intimately familiar with their data” (p.  249) through the data analysis process by reading the data several times. I coded the data based on the research topics as described in Bailey (2007), “you should read every line of data, code whatever you think might be potentially useful for analysis, knowing that later, more codes will be added, some changed, and large sections of coded data will go unused” (p. 129). I combined codes to form categories and cut down some codes which were not important. Fur‑ thermore, I read previous literature on the topics to help myself with coding (Bailey 2007: 130). During coding, I memoed the data to help me with understanding, coding, and analyzing the data even more.

Results The results from the background form suggested that the majority of the students who participated in the study were Navajo. To ensure the validity of the results, only the Navajo students were in‑ cluded in the study. As for the in‑class writing activity, one of the Navajo students revealed that English is his first language. He was moved back to the reservation before his early teenage years during elementary 421

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school. He mentioned that moving did not help with his English acquisition. He took three Navajo language classes in elementary school. However, after taking all three classes, he is only able to speak a few words and phrases in Navajo. He wrote that they were “just enough to squeeze by with the elders or my community to seem adequate.” He pointed out that the elders and com‑ munity members laughed at him when he spoke a word or phrase incorrectly and he noticed the “one‑thousand‑yard stare” when he did not know what they were communicating in Navajo. He stated that he can be light‑hearted and laugh with the elders, but he is “a little hurt by it all.” He conveyed that he practiced the language with his “forgiving grandfather” who would laugh at his “version of broken Navajo” and correct his mistakes in speaking the words. He stated that he originally planned to pursue two languages: English and Navajo, but he ended up taking German instead. On the other hand, he believes that improving his English writing skills can benefit his “college career.” Another student indicated that he could comprehend some of the conversations in Navajo be‑ cause he was raised in the Navajo culture. Unfortunately, he “could barely speak Navajo.” He stated that he feels “disconnected” from his family members due to not being able to speak Navajo fluently. He wrote that for him personally “not speaking Navajo has to do with getting an education and having a better life to relate to the society we live in.” Another student revealed that she acquired Navajo from her grandparents as an infant. She was told by her grandmother that she was once fluent in Navajo as a toddler and could “converse with ease” with her and her grandfather. She stated that she is able to comprehend Navajo completely and can say many words and phrases in Navajo, but unfortunately she is unable to “form complete sentences” in Navajo. Before she grew into a young adult, her parents instilled in her the idea that “if I spoke good English and pursued my education, I would be able to get ahead in life and do things that they were not able to do.” Her parents wanted her to forget the “old ways” of the Navajo people because they would soon be gone and “not benefit” her in any way. She then obeyed her parents’ inculcation and decided not to learn to speak the Navajo language. Her uncles and aunts would criticize her for not being able to respond in Navajo during family visits even though she was able to understand what was told to her in Navajo. Even if she tried to respond in Navajo, her relatives would always laugh at her “funny” and incorrect pronunciation and sentences in Navajo. She wrote that at times she feels like “a stranger” in her land, the Navajo Nation, where she lives, with her own people for not being able to speak her native tongue, Diné Bizaad, the Navajo language. However, she is optimistic that she will be able to regain the language proficiency she once had as a child by practicing it every day and surrounding herself with the Navajo language by using the medium such as Navajo radio station and songs. She also plans to take part in more “traditional teachings” with elders in his community. Another student stated that he is trying to learn Navajo by taking the Navajo language class at the college. He shared that English is his first language and he does not have “close family or friends that just speak it [Navajo] on an everyday basis.” He stated that the only time his par‑ ents speak Navajo is during holidays or if there is a death in the family when his family comes together. He revealed that he really feels “embarrassed” that he has not learned his language of heritage. When his grandparents spoke to him in Diné, the Navajo language, he felt “frustrated” that he could not understand what they told him in Navajo. He complained that his parents do not speak to him in Navajo. They only speak to him some basic command words in Navajo and teach him how to answer “yes” or “no” in Navajo which does not help him learn the heritage language. He emphasized that he wants to learn more of his heritage language, not just the basic words. He would like to someday hold a conversation in Navajo and proudly speak his language of heritage. 422

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Another student indicated that she was provided many opportunities to learn the Navajo lan‑ guage, but she never took them because she did not believe that she had ever needed to learn the heritage language. During family gatherings, she felt “left out” when the relatives spoke Navajo. They looked at her differently because she did not understand what they told her in Navajo. She believes that they were “a little bit disappointed” in her that she never learned the heritage language because “my native language is dying out and not that many people want to learn it anymore.” Some of these students indicated that English is their first language. Some of them also shared that they acquired Navajo when they were children from their grandparents who could only speak Navajo. One student also indicated that she chose not to take any Navajo language classes offered at school because in her opinion, learning Navajo is unnecessary. Another student shared that he took three Navajo classes in elementary school but is still unable to speak the language fluently. These students mentioned being criticized or laughed at by elders and relatives because they were unable to either understand when spoken to or respond in Navajo. They expressed the feeling of disconnection and embarrassment for not understanding what grandparents or relatives said dur‑ ing family gatherings. A few of them also brought up the positive benefits of learning English in education and future life. One student revealed that her parents requested her to stop learning or speaking Navajo and only learn English well to advance in American society. During a small group discussion in the introductory Linguistics class, after I played a National Public Radio story about how people from all over the world learn English as a second language, one student mentioned that the Navajo people went through the history of boarding schools and the Long Walk which caused land reduction; therefore, learning English does not symbolize posi‑ tivity to them. Another student indicated that a long time ago the Navajo people were “stripped away from their language” and “the boarding school are the ones that have done this” to them. If this happened to her, she would be angry and scared. She knows this happened to a few people’s parents who were sent to the boarding school. When discussing a chapter on language acquisition, one student shared that when she was a child, she acquired Navajo as a second language from her grandparents. Her grandparents rarely spoke a word of English, which benefited her in acquiring Navajo as a child. She was once able to comprehend well what was spoken to her in Navajo, but she had trouble pronouncing some words in the heritage language, which made her wish that her grandparents were still alive. After her grandparents passed away, she decided to improve her skills in the language. So, she enrolled in a Navajo language and culture class during junior year of high school. The class taught her the his‑ tory of the Navajo people such as the Long Walk. She believes that her grandparents, if still alive, would be proud that she wanted to learn more about the Navajo traditions and that she is the first one in her family to attend college. Because Navajo is her second language, she knows that it will take her a long time to learn her heritage language. She hopes to improve her Navajo proficiency and to give back to her community by becoming a certified Emergency Medical Technician on the Navajo reservation and to translate for both native elders who do not speak English and the doctors who do not speak Navajo. She would like to spend extra time on her hands making sure that she really studies her heritage language and to take pride in speaking Navajo. Another student shared that he is still having trouble speaking Navajo even though his fam‑ ily members who are older than him can speak it with ease. Once he was helping out in a Squaw Dance ceremony, and he could understand what he was spoken to in Navajo. However, when it was his turn to introduce himself, everyone expected him to introduce himself in Navajo, but he introduced himself in English instead, which made him feel embarrassed. Another time, his great‑grandmother who had long passed and could not speak a word of English, talked to her own great grandchildren including himself in Navajo, but no one was able to understand one word of 423

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what she said. He then had to ask both his mother and grandmother to translate for him. He has tried to learn Navajo by asking his mother and grandmother to speak to him and ask him questions all in Navajo. He revealed that he hopes to be able to understand the Navajo stories and traditional songs in his language and to be able to pass down the stories and songs to his future children in Navajo. He is also hoping to be able to pray and to talk to the holy people, Navajo gods, in his language of heritage and that his future children can also do the same. One student shared with their classmates that when she was a little child, she was able to speak Navajo and understand what her grandparents and parents said in Navajo. However, ever since she started elementary school and made friends who were only able to speak English, she stopped speaking Navajo to associate with her teacher and friends who only spoke English. She revealed that most of the Navajos nowadays speak English as their first language and only a few do not speak English at all. Her grandparents were one of the people who did not know English at all. For her to communicate with her grandparents, she needed to use body language or have someone translate for her. She shared that not speaking Navajo does make her “feel disconnected” from her people. However, speaking English is common in the Navajo Nation, so the Navajo people do not look at her differently for being able to speak English. She indicated that the elders did look at her differently and looked disappointed when they found out she was not able to speak Navajo. She once was a volunteer in the Navajo community Chapter House for two weeks, and only a few of the volunteers were able to understand Navajo or introduce themselves in Navajo. The elderly looked disappointed at them including her because the Navajo language is beautiful but unfortunately it is “dying.” She stated that our language is “what identifies us as being Navajos.” She revealed that she can only speak objects and greetings in Navajo but she cannot speak Navajo in complete sentences. She chose to only speak English to communicate and get things done smoothly with the general public. How‑ ever, not being able to speak her language of heritage does “haunt” her because when the elderly talk to her in Navajo, she not only cannot understand what they say but also cannot respond in Navajo. Another student revealed that she was accused of being ashamed of speaking Diné Bizaad by her people, but the truth is that she was “ashamed” that she did not know her mother tongue as much as when she was a child. She was raised by her grandmother who spoke Navajo to her be‑ cause her parents were always busy at work. However, she was moved to a different city at a very young age, and the teachers in the daycare center only spoke English. She then learned English quickly due to all the adults around her only speaking English. Then she was sent to a boarding school for one year, and not a single teacher or student there spoke Navajo. After one year at the boarding school, she shared that her language had “slipped away.” After leaving boarding school and living with her parents, she then only spoke English. Until high school, she took a Navajo language class as an elective, she then realized that her Navajo was “lost” and “became a bit for‑ eign” to her. After moving at a young age, she and then her grandmother grew apart, and she was “ashamed” to see her grandmother because she “lost” the language of her heritage. She empha‑ sized that she is always worried that she may not be as fluent as when she was a child in speaking Navajo, but she is determined to re‑learn it. Knowing the Navajo language makes her proud, and she will continue to re‑learn it as long as she is alive even if it is just one word at a time. A few of the students indicated that the boarding schools took away the Navajo language. Some of the students claimed that Navajo is their second language. Some of them reported that they only acquired the Navajo language from grandparents when they were little for a certain period of time. Then they were moved away to a different city where teachers and classmates all only spoke English. A minority of them indicated that they acquired the Navajo language from their parents as children. Also, a minority of the participants shared that their parents speak Navajo to them as the primary medium to communicate. Some of them shared that they were embarrassed 424

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or felt disconnected from grandparents or relatives or their own people who could only speak Navajo. They requested their parents to translate what the great‑grandparents or grandparents said to them in Navajo. One student conveyed that she is ashamed of losing the Navajo language that she acquired from her grandmother as a child. The majority of these students are hoping to learn or regain proficiency in the Navajo language and become proud speakers in Navajo. After teaching the chapter on language acquisition, I played a video on Hong Kongers’ lan‑ guage usage in Hong Kong. The majority of the students agreed that co‑switching or code‑mixing is common in this region and some of the students claimed that they speak Englaho, a mix of Navajo and English, and have a “rezzy” or rez accent. This word, rez, means reservation. These students indicated that fluent speakers of Navajo can switch from Navajo to English in conversa‑ tions. Moreover, it is common for Navajos to also mix Navajo words in English sentences. One of the students shared with me and the classmates that she often hears her mother speak Navajo to her grandmother and other relatives but only English to her. The other student indicated that she helped out in her cousin’s Kinaaldá. This Navajo word, Kinaaldá, means a girls’ puberty cer‑ emony. In the Navajo tradition, parents celebrate their daughter’s first menstrual period with this ceremony. I also often listened to some of my students introduce themselves in Navajo including their clans, then switch to English when they delivered their oral presentations. When teaching the chapter on regional variation in language, I told my students that we all speak with an accent based on where we come from. I told my students that I also have a foreign accent speaking English since it is my second language and have an accent speaking my mother tongue based on where I grew up. In addition, I pointed out that we also speak a regional dialect. My students shared with me and the classmates the local accent/pronunciation they believe they have and several real‑life local examples. One Navajo student shared that the Navajo pronounce th as d, so when they say over there, it becomes over dere pronounced as over der, with both of their lips pointing up. The student indicated that they use lips to point instead of hand gestures. The other student provided another example, okay den for okay then. Another student expressed that the Navajo are fast talkers, so when they say skoden, it means let’s go then. The other student stated that she heard the Navajo say “is zzziiit?” with long [z] and [i] sounds which means Is it or really? Another student stated that they say nay which means just joking, at the end of a sentence. They also say aayy at the end of a sentence which also means just joking, but in this case the joke is outrageous. Another student brought up the word, glonnie, which means a habitually drunk person. In addition, she stated the phrase, paddy wagon, which means a police truck used to pick up glon‑ nies. Another student shared the expression, wah or wah‑hah, which means oops in English or to show surprise or disappointment. The other student brought up this word, yáadi lá or yadila, which means a sense of frustration or annoyance in Navajo. I often hear this Navajo word, hózhó, on the local radio which means balance, beauty, and harmony. These examples the students shared with their classmates and me illustrate the translingual identities they hold as Navajos. These students candidly expressed the rez accent they claimed they have and the local dialect or usage of Navajo words they often hear or speak in the region where they grew up. Even if they are not fluent speakers of Navajo, they hear, comprehend, or speak some Navajo words or phrases in their daily lives. These examples demonstrate that these students hold translingual identities.

Discussion and Implications Based on a survey study of 3,500 Navajo six‑year‑olds in 1970, the results demonstrated that the majority, 70%, of the children knew either nothing about English or only a little English, 20% were 425

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reported equal speakers of Navajo and English at home, 6% were reported primary English speak‑ ers with a little Navajo, and only 5% were monolingual English speakers (Spolsky 1975: 348). In contrast, based on the results of this study, only a minority of the Navajo students claimed that they are fluent speakers or can hold conversations in Navajo. Obviously, the language paradigm has shifted from the majority of the Navajos speaking their Navajo language to English, based on the findings from this study. Some of the Navajo participants brought up the history of boarding schools which has greatly influenced the Navajo people’s language loss and has caused tremendous emotional pain or trauma on language ideology. Enoch (2002) stated that the aim of boarding schools was to erase Na‑ tive American cultures and languages, forcing upon them the dominant culture and the English language; therefore, Native Americans became civilized, not remain savages, and were able to self‑reliant (Enoch 2002: 118). One of the Navajo students emphasized that her parents encour‑ aged her to only learn English and give up learning or speaking Navajo, so she would be capable of doing things they were unable to and competing economically in mainstream American society. During the history of Long Walk, the Navajos were captured, imprisoned, and held under the condition of inadequate water and food supplies by the American government. The elders then encouraged the younger generation to learn English and to stop learning Navajo (House 2002: 3), in hopes that their future generation would be able to survive and live comfortably with abundant resources. House’s (2002) claim is consistent with Canagarajah’s (2008) study results. The Tamil parents who were “more deprived” in homeland would “pressure their children to learn English in order to make up for their earlier disadvantages” (Canagarajah 2008: 160). Some of these participants in the study also indicated that learning English well can benefit their academic careers and their future lives by helping them fit into mainstream American soci‑ ety. They view the English language as an economically advantageous language that can benefit their future. Some of these participants also brought up being criticized and laughed at for im‑ proficiency in the Navajo language by their grandparents, relatives, or elders during family gather‑ ings. These students were ashamed of their lack of proficiency in the heritage language when they were spoken to by family members in Navajo. They were given looks of disappointment or odd looks for not knowing the heritage language at all or only being able to respond in basic words and phrases in Navajo but not in complete sentences. Some of them feel disconnected or feel like outsiders from their grandparents during holidays when families come together and the Navajo language is spoken by family members. Some of the participants shared that they were embar‑ rassed or were given looks of disappointment for not being able to introduce themselves in Navajo when helping out in Chapter Houses on the reservation or during traditional ceremonies. Many of these Navajo students emphasized a sense of shame or embarrassment for their inca‑ pability to speak the Navajo language fluently, especially during family visits when the language was spoken and was expected to be used. Based on what they wrote and claimed, many of these participants have experienced language anxiety. Webster (2015) indicated that the Navajo ex‑ perienced “linguistic anxiety” (p. 22), which is the anxiety associated with language usage, i.e., Navajo and English. MacIntyre (1999) defined language anxiety as a form of “situation‑specific anxiety” (p. 27) associated with “the worry and negative reaction aroused” (p. 27) when using the target language. Pappamihiel (2002) also defined language anxiety as the anxiety associated with interactions in social situations when the language is expected to be communicated. In Sevinç’s (2022) study on Turkish families in the Netherlands, grandparents’ or parents’ monolingual mind‑ set toward maintaining the heritage language had a detrimental effect on the children’s future language practices and caused heritage language anxiety, tension, and negative communication in the families. These participants in this study felt ashamed and were criticized or given looks of 426

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disappointment by family members during holidays or family gatherings when they were not able to understand or respond in the heritage language. In Goodkind et al.’s (2012) study, the Navajo elders were worried and sad about the future survival of the Navajo language and traditions which also caused “generational rifts” (p. 1028) between themselves and the young. For some of these participants, English is their first language and Navajo is their second lan‑ guage. The majority of them only acquired Navajo from their grandparents when they were little but not from their parents. A minority of these participants revealed that their parents use Navajo as the primary means of communication. Some of them emphasized that they took the Navajo language class as an elective at school or at college but were still unable to speak it fluently. They reported that they only learned how to say the basic words and phrases in Navajo but were not able to speak it in complete sentences. These students claimed that they practiced speaking the lan‑ guage with parents or grandparents in the hope that they would gain fluency in the language. Some of the participants also indicated that they are hoping to pass on the Navajo traditional stories and songs to their children. Some of them learn the language and also hope to help the elders in the community who can only speak Navajo by translating for them. The majority of these students hold translingual identities because they are hoping to gain or regain proficiency in the Navajo language and have attempted to learn the heritage language by either taking Navajo language class or initiating to practice with parents or grandparents in Navajo. The majority of these students want to be proud speakers of Navajo. Some of these students expressed a sense of embarrassment for their im‑proficiency in Navajo, but they are also motivated to learn the heritage language or regain the language proficiency they once had as children. Lee (2009) pointed out that the Navajo youths in her study felt embarrassed about their limited Navajo language proficiency and they claimed that even without their language of heritage, they could still possess their identity as Native Americans (p. 318). Webster (2015) indicated that Navajo English or Navlish is a local language spoken or writ‑ ten by the Navajo people (p. 17). The Navajo utilized Navlish to create “social intimacy” (p. 21) with their peers. Besides being criticized as non‑standard English by outsiders, in contrast, the Navajo themselves also condemned their own Navajo people’s use of Navajo English as “an em‑ barrassment” or improper English (Webster 2015, p. 18). These Navajo participants offered sev‑ eral real‑life examples of how Englaho or Navlish was spoken in this region based on their own experiences. As a foreign‑born instructor, by sharing my own personal experiences on accents and dialects, my students’ usage or observations of the mixed usage of Navajo and English which took place in their households or communities were legitimized. Their translingual repertoire also illustrates their translingual identities. The Navajo youth were found to suffer from low self‑esteem toward themselves or their own Navajo language (McCarty et al. 2006). Jain (2014) stated that language instructors should em‑ power their students by acknowledging the various linguistic backgrounds they bring to the class‑ room. Macias (1987) indicated that instructors should bring culturally relevant materials that the students can relate to in class to empower students. Instructors must consider minority students’ cultures and utilize them when imparting mainstream knowledge in the classroom (p. 379). Boognl (2006) stated that instructors should take into account students’ cultures and experiences e.g., Na‑ tive American (p. 517). By providing resources related to Navajo students’ heritage language, such as readings related to the Navajo Code Talkers, instructors are able to empower students by il‑ lustrating how the Navajo language helped the American government defeat the Japanese during World War II. Language revitalization or reclamation is urgent on the reservation or in the border town where this study took place since many of the students enrolled at the college reside on the reservation 427

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and commute to campus. This concept of language reclamation shifts the colonized ideology of an indigenous language and affirms native people’s position as settlers. This concept also represents their determination to revitalize their language through their people’s interaction in the communi‑ ties (Henne‑Ochoa et al. 2020: 484). Henne‑Ochoa et al. (2020) recommended a language program by having indigenous children learn the heritage language by doing everyday activities related to their tradition and cultural heritage in a family‑and‑community led organization (p. 488). An elder may be invited to a class to tell indigenous children traditional stories or teach the students how to sew based on their tribal tradition (Henne‑Ochoa et al. 2020: 488–489). Indigenous children are expected to be able to use the heritage language with family or community members in daily life after participating in this family‑and‑community‑based program (Henne‑Ochoa et al. 2020: 488). Canagarajah (2008) pointed out that even though the government supports the maintenance of the heritage language, without parental support, the prospects of the heritage language maintenance will be “limited” (p. 170). McKenzie (2020) stated that “culturally grounded learning” (p. 502) is crucial in Navajo language revitalization. The Navajo people who did not value their heritage language but viewed the English language as a prosperous language need to change this belief and more importantly, they should view the heritage language as the core that sustains the Navajo people and represents who they are as the Navajo (McKenzie 2020: 505). Transmitting the Navajo language serves as a healing process for the Navajo (p. 505). The young ones were able to acquire the heritage language by observing and participating in traditional activities, e.g., cooking tradi‑ tional meals and chopping wood with a Navajo elder or taking part in traditional ceremonies led by a medicine man (p. 505). Language instructors, educators, and administrators should encourage parents who are able to speak Navajo no matter their level of proficiency, to speak the language to their children daily at home since they were born. Relatives or elders who can speak the heritage language are also encouraged to speak the language to the young at home or in the communities, so the language becomes a natural medium for everyday use to the younger generation.

Conclusion The results of the study suggested that the majority of these participants are not able to hold a conversation in Navajo. Some of these Navajo participants revealed that they acquired the Navajo language from their grandparents at first when they were children for only a period of time, but for some reasons such as their grandparents passing away or being moved away to a different city, they lost the Navajo language proficiency and English became the primary language of daily use. Some of them also mentioned learning the language in a Navajo language and culture class in school set‑ tings, but since they only learned the basics and their clans, they are still not fluent in Navajo. The majority of the participants reported that their parents did not speak their language of heritage to them on a daily basis. Some of these students indicated that they felt embarrassed or disconnected from grandparents and relatives during family gatherings. They were given looks of disappoint‑ ment or criticized or laughed at for their in‑competency in the language by elders or relatives. Nonetheless, the majority of these participants indicated that they strive to learn and gain and regain proficiency in the heritage language because the language identifies them as the Navajo. Holding translingual identities, they are hoping to become proud speakers of the Navajo language. Addition‑ ally, some of these participants hope to help native elderly in the communities by translating from English to Navajo for them or transmitting the heritage language to their future children to keep the Navajo tradition alive. Language revitalization is urgent on the reservation and the surrounding areas; however, without parental support, its effect will be deficient.

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Due to historical trauma, Navajo parents and elders who struggled to survive were scared to speak or teach the heritage language to the younger generation. They desire that their children will be able to reap the economic advantages and thrive in the mainstream by learning only English and learning it well. The young Navajo not only encountered parents’ and grandparents’ encourage‑ ment to only speak English but also peer pressure at school. Navajo students who spoke Navajo were judged by other Navajos as backward or uneducated. The Navajo people also criticized other Navajos’ versions of English. Their low self‑esteem of being Navajo derived from being colonized/dominated by the American federal government also caused them to devalue their own Navajo language. Some of these participants indicated the benefits of learning English for their academic career and potential economic stability in future life. Some mentioned that the Navajo language and the traditional ways of life are going to be in the past because they are hoping to go forward and fit into mainstream American society. More were aware of the fact that their heritage language might be going extinct and that the younger generation is not interested in learning the heritage language. However, the majority of these participants emphasized the sacredness of their heritage language which has sustained many generations of their people through many hardships. Language revi‑ talization in this region where the study took place may focus on the concept that the heritage language embodies the culture and without the language, the tradition and oral stories would be lost. The Navajo who are able to speak the language no matter the level of proficiency, are urged to speak or teach it to the younger generation on a daily basis to both use it as part of a healing pro‑ cess and re‑claim ownership of the heritage language which represents their identity as the Navajo.

References Bailey, C. A. (2007). A guide to qualitative field research (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge. Bokhorst‑Heng, W. D. (2022). ‘Book review [Review of the book Multilingual Singapore: Language policies and linguistic realities, by R. Jain]’. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 26(4): 530–533. Boognl, M. A. (2006). ‘A hands‑on approach to teaching composition of functions to a diverse Population’. The Mathematics Teacher, 99(7): 516–520. Canagarajah, A. S. (2008). ‘Language shift and the family: Questions from the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora’. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 12(2): 143–176. Canagarajah, A. S. (Ed.). (2013a, April 17). Literacy as translingual practice: Between communities and classrooms. New York: Routledge. Canagarajah, A. S. (2013b, August). ‘Negotiating translingual literacy: An enactment’. Research in the Teach‑ ing of English, 48(1): 40–67. Conn, D. R. (2013). ‘When two worlds collide: Shared experiences of educating Navajos living off the reser‑ vation’. The Qualitative Report, 18(25): 1–16. Denetdale, J. (2008). The Long Walk: The forced Navajo exile. New York: Chelsea House. Enoch, J. (2002). ‘Resisting the script of Indian Education: Zitkala Ša and the Carlisle Indian School’. Col‑ lege English, 65(2): 117–141. Goodkind, J. R., Hess, J. M., Gorman, B., and Parker, D. P. (2012). ‘“We’re still in a struggle”: Diné resil‑ ience, survival, historical trauma, and healing’. Qualitative Health Research, 22(8): 1019–1036. Henne‑Ochoa, R., Elliott‑Groves, E., Meek, B. A., and Rogoff, B. (2020). ‘Pathways forward for indigenous language reclamation: Engaging indigenous epistemology and learning by observing and pitching in to family and community endeavors’. The Modern Language Journal, 104 (2): 481–493. House, D. (2002). Language shift among the Navajos. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Jain, R. (2014). ‘Global Englishes, translinguistic identities, and translingual practices in a community col‑ lege ESL classroom: A practitioner research reports’. TESOL Journal, 5(3): 490–522. Lee, T. (2009). ‘Language, identity, and power: Navajo and Pueblo young adults’ perspectives and experi‑ ences with competing language ideologies’. Journal of Language Identity and Education, 8(5): 307–320.

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27 LINGUISTICALLY RESPONSIVE INSTRUCTION AND IDEOLOGIES IN PRESERVICE TEACHER PREPARATION Laura Mahalingappa, Jessica B. Crawford, and Astrid Sierra Introduction: The Education of MLLs The education of language‑minoritized students requires that educators hold positive, asset‑based perspectives about their inclusion and capabilities. Included in these asset‑based perspectives is a value for multilingual learners’ (MLLs’)1 funds of knowledge (Moll et al. 1992), which is the knowledge, identities, and languages that they bring with them to the classroom. Without such a perspective, teachers may see MLLs as a drain on classroom time and resources and may also have low expectations for their academic achievement based on their beliefs about language, language proficiency, and culture (Lucas et al. 2015). Deficit ideologies have historically had devastating impacts on schooling outcomes of culturally and linguistically minoritized students. Contempo‑ rary versions of deficit thinking about marginalized groups have deep roots in long‑standing racist and classist ideologies (Valencia 2010). Historically, differences in student achievement for the poor or racialized were attributed to language or culture rather than systemic injustices affecting marginalized communities (Langer‑Osuna & Nasir 2016; Raz 2013). Considering how deeply racialized, deficit ideologies impact MLLs in the U.S., it is no surprise that this ideology has also made its way into the discourses of teachers and school professionals (Paris & Alim 2014). Unfortunately, many content‑area teachers – those in general education classrooms not spe‑ cialized in language learning – hold deficit perspectives related to MLLs and their capabilities. Teachers enter the profession with beliefs about teaching and learning based on their own previ‑ ous experiences (Lortie 1975). Since the majority of teachers are monolingual speakers of the dominant language of the school (e.g., English in the U.S.) (Williams et al. 2016), they often ex‑ press tacit support for monolingual, dominant‑language classrooms, when research demonstrates that students perform best in multicultural, multilingual settings (Ladson‑Billings 1995; Paris & Alim 2014). In addition, a cultural mismatch between many MLLs and their teachers (Faltis & Valdés 2016), leads to a lack of understanding of their experiences and potential. Unfortunately, content‑area teachers often receive limited preparation focused on effectively supporting MLLs in their classrooms in their initial teacher education courses or professional development (Faltis & Valdés 2016; Villegas et al. 2018), preparation that could counteract these deficit beliefs. The significant and increasing population of MLLs in schools globally, across urban, suburban, and even rural districts (Irwin et al. 2022), requires that teacher preparation programs help further

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prepare teachers to support MLLs. Many researchers have identified the need to create more eq‑ uitable school systems and classroom practices for culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) students (Ladson‑Billings 1995; Nieto 2000; Paris & Alim 2014). This chapter describes critical approaches to teacher preparation that focus on teachers’ devel‑ opment of asset‑based perspectives about MLLs. Specifically, it describes the development of pos‑ itive, asset‑based multilingual language ideologies among preservice teachers (those training to be teachers). The chapter first presents an overview of language ideologies and their relationship to and role in education. Then, it examines the current situation of teacher beliefs and how language ideologies are realized within teacher beliefs. Finally, the chapter examines current approaches to addressing deficit ideologies about language, multilingualism, and MLLs.

Language Ideologies and Education Language, from a critical perspective, has the power to both express and perpetuate societal at‑ titudes and ideologies concerning diverse groups and the role of and use of language itself (Fair‑ clough 1992/2014). According to Silverstein (1998), language ideologies are “beliefs about language articulated by the users as a rationalization or justification of perceived language use and structure” (p. 193). Further, Woolard (2021) describes these language ideologies as “morally and politically loaded representations of the nature, structure, and use of languages in a social world” (Woolard 2021: 2), but that can also convey a sense of “false consciousness or distortion in service of domination” (Woolard 2021: p. 3). Thus, language can directly reference various ideas that explicitly denote the constructs they relate to, or it can indirectly index stances and attitudes that hold connotations about their referents. Put differently, the linguistic elements we employ, whether in speech or writing, can overtly manifest our perspectives on the world, or they can sub‑ tly achieve this, whether by intention or unconscious creation. Ochs (1992), however, claims that non‑referential indices far outnumber direct referents (p. 148). Therefore, numerous attitudes and beliefs find transmission through language that indirectly implies social meanings. Work exploring language ideologies examines how these beliefs about language and its con‑ nection to social groups and identities are communicated in various situations, assuming that language cannot be investigated, utilized, or learned in isolation from its socio‑historical con‑ texts. Individuals are socialized through language and how to use language as they encounter the world, developing language habitus (Bourdieu 1991) and internalizing dominant language ideologies (Milroy 2001), idealized language ideologies (Chang‑Bacon 2021), or monolingual ideologies (Yildiz 2012). They develop implicit or unconscious mental habits, perceptions, and feelings that are instilled through continuous experiences, and which ultimately, guide their ac‑ tions. Often these perceptions are based on stereotypes that have been created based on historical and hierarchical views of social groups. For instance, research on language and racism has inves‑ tigated how racist meanings and ideologies are expressed and perpetuated through both public and private discourses (Kubota 2020). These discourses link language use to both linguistic legitimacy as well as other personal attributes, such as overall competency and academic abilities. Society at large, through continual messaging, may uphold beliefs about language that perpetuate the belief in a favored language and its “standard” variety, which should be used in institutions (such as the classroom), mostly excluding alternatives. These ideologies prioritize one particular language and variety of that language as the “standard language,” which tends to be reflective of the dominant group in society. Lippi‑Green (1997) further defined standard language ideologies as “a predisposition toward an abstract, idealized uniform language, imposed and sustained by dominant institutions” (p. 64). 432

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She argued that this ideology provides a set of common‑sense notions by which minoritized and marginalized language varieties are stigmatized, trivialized, and subordinated. In the U.S., the “standard” language, known as “Standard English,” assumes racial undertones and embodies a White character. By learning and using “Standard English,” learners acquire linguistic capital (Bourdieu 1991). Thus, standard language becomes indispensable for academic achievement and future career prospects by all students (Flores & Rosa 2015), to the extent that speakers of mar‑ ginalized languages and varieties may reject their first language(s) and become complicit in the silencing of others such as themselves (Lippi‑Green 1997). Language ideologies thus can vary in terms of individuals’ backgrounds and experiences oftentimes grounded in ways that dominant, monolingual, and standardized forms are deemed to be superior and appropriate in certain contexts (Woolard 2021). Language ideologies are inherently related to language education and teaching language pro‑ grams. Classrooms are prime spaces for the socialization of children into language ideologies. Teachers and curriculum designers have a great impact on the classroom, choosing materials (i.e., textbooks), creating assessments, and enforcing the language of the school, conveying standard language ideology (Flores & Rosa 2015). Standard language ideologies have historically stig‑ matized the language practices of MLLs and have been an underlying force in language policies across the U.S. (Flores & Rosa 2015; Rosa 2016). These policies present both assimilationist and pluralist language ideologies (Henderson 2022) that create tensions and a lack of ideological clarity permeating language instruction and exacerbating social inequities. In the U.S., the educa‑ tion system is largely influenced by monolingual ideologies where the White listening subject (Flores & Rosa 2015) expects MLLs to use their ways of speaking at school. This is seen through top‑down and assimilationist education models such as “English only” and “transitional bilingual programs” rooted in hegemonic views and monolingualism expectations of language. The English language is frequently positioned as the language of authority and prestige that is tantamount to higher education background as well as the standard form of communication in the U.S. (Fitzsim‑ mons‑Doolan et al. 2017; Henderson 2022; Lew & Siffrinn 2019).

Teachers Beliefs Teachers’ beliefs play a pivotal role in influencing their instructional practices. Although a complex relationship, the connection between teacher beliefs and instructional approaches is widely ac‑ knowledged in educational research (Lucas et al. 2015). For instance, if teachers hold asset‑based perspectives about their students’ abilities, then they are more likely to engage in effective ped‑ agogical practices that meet their needs (Ladson‑Billing 2005; Paris & Alim 2014). However, deficit‑based perspectives are more likely to negatively affect the ways that they teach and hinder students’ success (Ladson‑Billings 1995). Preservice teachers, who are novices in the field of teaching, use their preexisting epistemologi‑ cal and pedagogical beliefs to guide their practice (Lortie 1975; Pajares 1992), and these beliefs about language, instruction, and learning may be persistent since they have been constructed over the course of their lifetimes. In particular, they use an “apprenticeship of observation” (Lortie 1975) based on their own schooling experiences to inform their understanding of teaching meth‑ ods and material development. Unfortunately, many studies into teachers’ beliefs about MLLs have demonstrated widespread negative perspectives, including bias about their abilities, culture, language, and ability to meet their needs (Lucas et al. 2015; Polat & Mahalingappa 2013). Studies in many multilingual societies indicate this is a global phenomenon (see recent studies by Iversen 2021; Moenandar et al. 2023; Wang 2022). Since many preservice teachers are from dominant 433

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cultures and monolingual backgrounds, their lack of diverse linguistic and cultural knowledge and experiences may lead to misconceptions about MLLs’ lives, experiences, and capabilities based on linguistic and racialized stereotypes. These in turn can influence teachers to hold debilitating beliefs and deficit views of their students if not contradicted (Lucas et al. 2015; Polat & Mahalin‑ gappa 2013). Included in these beliefs are ones about language in general, the value that society gives it (Bourdieu 1991; Espinet et al. 2020), and how language should be used in the classroom (Lucas et al. 2015). For instance, many content‑area teachers hold misconceptions about the most effec‑ tive ways for MLLs to learn the language, including the duration of time needed for the acquisition of a new language as well as methods and the role of students’ first languages in the process (Pettit 2011). These teachers erroneously believe that MLLs should be able to acquire the dominant lan‑ guage of the classrooms within two years, that using their first languages delays the acquisition of the dominant language, and that students should speak the dominant language outside of school (e.g., at home) to more quickly learn it (Karabenick & Noda 2004). However, research clearly demonstrates that dual language (e.g. bilingual education) approaches, where classrooms incor‑ porate students’ multiple languages into materials and instruction, support effective language ac‑ quisition (both the dominant and native language) as well as academic content learning (Cummins 2021). Using students’ first languages not only allows for more comprehension of materials and classroom discourse but has also been shown to increase motivation and positive identity‑building, which in turn promotes positive learning outcomes. Deficit beliefs can lead to the promotion of monolingual, standard language ideologies that de‑emphasize the importance of supporting all the languages, identities, and funds of knowledge (Bacon 2020; Iversen 2021) that students bring with them to the classroom. Indeed, these ideolo‑ gies permeate the education system and set expectations that every student should use standard‑ ized forms of language and practices that are deemed to be the language of schooling (Flores & Rosa 2015). These ideologies racialize learners and contribute to the enactment of forms of soci‑ etal inclusion and exclusion (Rosa 2016: 162), consequently perpetuating inequities and valuing the White monolingual speaker over other speaker practices. Similarly, the native and non‑native speaker construct creates power dynamics that shape interaction. Thus, teaching languages focus‑ ing on a standardized language based on the forms and structures spoken by White “native speak‑ ers” strengthens the ideology of native speaker authority (Liddicoat 2016). Native‑speaker‑based ideologies further racialize MLLs as “non‑native” and “Other” and conflate non‑native English speakers with nonwhiteness (Kubota 2020). These beliefs in turn may negatively affect the ways that they teach and subsequently negatively affect the academic success of MLLs. Classrooms, and schools as institutions where preservice teachers experienced their school‑ ing, are generally spaces that perpetuate monolingual ideals and emphasize the use of dominant and racialized linguistic varieties of language under the guise of “standard language” (Flores & Rosa 2015), which establishes and work to perpetuate these deficit beliefs about MLLs, languages, multilingualism, and language learning. Educators, who adhere to these dominant, standard, and monolingual language ideologies, can perpetuate the status quo about language in classrooms, as these ideologies are entrenched and viewed as common‑sense assumptions in so‑ ciety (Fitzsimmons‑Doolan et al. 2017; Henderson 2022; Woodard & Rao 2020). Prior research has shown that preservice teachers hold standard language ideologies that stem from previous experiences and epistemological beliefs about language use (Lew & Siffrinn 2019; Szwed & González‑Carriedo 2019). Many teachers start their teaching careers without critically examining their language ide‑ ologies, thus complying with prevailing and dominant discourses of language ideologies that 434

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perpetuate linguistic hegemony (Shepard‑Carey & Gopalakrishnan 2021). While teachers may acknowledge the importance of diversity and speaking other languages, they may also have deficit views of multilingual practices (Henderson 2022; Woodard & Rao 2020) due to the dominant language’s positioning of prestige. (Fitzsimmons‑Doolan et  al. 2017; Henderson 2022; Lew & Siffrinn 2019). These prevailing forces magnify the standard use of language in school contexts, exerting influence upon teachers as they tend to believe their role is that of assimilating MLLs into the school culture and making it hard for them to question and disrupt schools’ deficit ideolo‑ gies (Alfaro 2019). While teachers identify disparities of participation among their White, Latinx, and Indigenous students, some teachers described these two latter groups as having “heavy and weird accents” (Woodard & Rao 2020). This type of ideology continues to stigmatize and racialize students of color without critically disrupting the status quo and oppressive language ideologies that position these students in that classification in the first place (Rosa 2016). Therefore, the stig‑ matization and standard language ideologies as well as the idealization of hegemonic Whiteness and English as the language of opportunities in the U.S. have forced teachers to create a push‑pull or tension and contradictory ideologies toward MLL language practices (Flores & Rosa 2015; Woodard & Rao 2020). Teachers and curriculum designers have a great impact on the classroom, choosing materials (i.e., textbooks), creating assessments, and enforcing the language of school, conveying standard language ideology (Flores & Rosa 2015). This has also been shown not only with White, monolingual teachers but also with teachers from marginalized backgrounds. The experiences of multilingual teachers of color with linguistic hegemony have greatly impacted their experiences of language views. Lippi‑Green’s (1997) work on standard language ideology and linguistic subordination describes the ideologically‑based pro‑ cesses through which languages and language varieties come to represent societal groups with unequal access to power and resources and help legitimize, reproduce, and sustain those structures. Thus, speakers of stigmatized languages and varieties, including teachers, may have “internalized hegemonic perspectives” (Athanases et al. 2019) such that they do not find acceptance for their particular varieties and then ultimately buy into their denigration. Multilingual teachers of color may uphold these ideologies, keeping with the ideals of acquisition of the “standard language” (Flores & Rosa 2015). Teachers’ ideologies and linguistic backgrounds thus conflate to perpetuate inequities in classrooms. Some studies have found that multilingual preservice teachers may have more positive views toward multilingualism and translanguaging (Bacon 2020; Fitzsimmons‑Doolan 2014; Lew & Siffrinn 2019). The limited research on teachers and teacher candidates who are multilingual, those who were dominant in a language other than English, and those who are from marginalized racial backgrounds, propose that they generally have fewer deficit‑based perspectives regarding minoritized languages and language groups, suggesting that their own life and educational experi‑ ences have influence on beliefs (Athanases et al. 2015; Chávez‑Moreno et al. 2022; Mahalingappa et al. 2022; Zúñiga 2016). However, other studies have found that although they may hold positive views of multilingual‑ ism for personal use or for society at large, multilingual preservice teachers may also struggle with opposing standard and monolingual language ideologies and have “linguistic ideological dilem‑ mas” (Ozurlak 2015), where their teaching practice may be opposition to their values (Fitzsim‑ mons‑Doolan et  al. 2017; Henderson 2022). In addition, they have not had the opportunity to experience educational models for how to integrate multiple languages and language varieties into their teaching practices (Chávez‑Moreno et al. 2023). Thus, teachers from marginalized linguistic backgrounds may adhere to monolingual, standard language practices and thus uphold the linguis‑ tic status quo of the classroom (see research by Garza 2019; Zúñiga 2016). Research has found 435

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that teachers’ language practices showed their manifestation of language as a resource and as a problem articulating both their explicit and implicit language ideologies.

Critical Approaches to Teacher Education Undoubtedly, the population of MLLs globally has increased in schools over the past years. Thus, it is necessary to enact conducive practices for this population and guarantee that teachers provide equitable spaces. While colleges of education and school districts cannot control for the experi‑ ences of teachers before entering their programs, they can take proactive measures to include multicultural education experiences for preservice and in‑service teachers along with admitting and hiring diverse teachers and teaching candidates. The need for more asset‑based practices in today’s classrooms has become the impetus to prepare teachers to shape their understanding of language use and contest linguistic power. More importantly, there is a long‑standing need for preservice teachers to start challenging deficit views early in their teaching programs and careers to enable them to advocate for MLLs to provide conducive practices to have equitable classrooms. However, creating equitable spaces for MLLs requires much more than understanding pedagogical practices when undoubtedly most teaching programs prepare teachers to understand and execute effective instructional practices. While some research has found that some teachers’ beliefs are resistant to change, others have found that effective pedagogical interventions and professional development can shift beliefs and, consequently, teachers’ practices (Pettit 2011). Teacher ideological clarity is essential to meet MLLs’ needs in today’s classrooms. Preservice teachers’ critical stance must be seen as a space to reflect on larger societal discourses that are af‑ fecting the way teachers view MLLs in the classroom, and more importantly, it should be taken as an opportunity for sharing tools on how to improve instructional pedagogies that value their learners’ backgrounds, languages, and cultures. Consequently, teachers can be active agents and become advocates for social justice by developing a critical stance and in‑depth understanding by questioning standardized ideologies that perpetually devalue and wrongly pathologize MLLs (Flores & Rosa 2015; Rosa 2016, Seltzer 2022). While policy and curricular changes to improve practices in teaching MLLs are certainly posi‑ tive, individual teachers need to recognize their own deficit or assimilationist perspectives and biases and push against racialized, anti‑immigrant sentiments in schools and society. Teachers’ practices and pedagogies emerge from deeper perspectives of students and beliefs about their po‑ tential, which are harder to change and harder to uncover (Korthagen 2017). Teachers concerned with social justice, inequality, and cultural responsiveness need to be vigilant about inequalities in their school systems and their own conscious and unconscious biases, but it cannot only be a select few teachers in a system; there needs to be widespread shifts in perspectives to change inequities that are ingrained in school institutions. Teacher educators play a key role in teacher preparation programs, particularly when creating and nurturing spaces where preservice teachers can engage in challenging conversations that inter‑ rogate their own biases, language ideologies, structural power, and privileges (Franquiz & Salazar 2004; Villegas 2007). Since most teachers are from the dominant culture and speak the dominant language and variety, teacher education programs generally have curricula designed for their needs (Chávez‑Moreno et al. 2022). These curricula often address “diversity” through a racial, gender, or ability lens, often overlooking the importance that language has in education. Without targeted work to infuse critical perspectives about language, interrogating the position, importance, and power of language, however, teacher education will continue to reproduce monolingual, standard language ideologies, which ultimately helps maintain unequal power dynamics (Sleeter 2001). 436

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Linguistically Responsive Instruction and Critical Language Awareness There is an urgent need for teacher educators to create spaces in coursework and professional development for teachers to critically reflect on their ideas about language and education. Linguis‑ tically responsive instruction (LRI) is an impactful teacher preparation framework that is based on a foundation for preparing teachers for linguistically diverse classrooms (see Lucas & Villegas 2013). This foundation, grounded in culturally relevant pedagogy (Ladson‑Billings 1995), identi‑ fies certain knowledge, skills, and beliefs that teachers need to develop to work with MLLs. LRI suggests that effective teachers hold asset‑based beliefs about teaching linguistically marginalized students (Faltis & Valdés 2016), which include sociolinguistic consciousness, value for linguistic diversity, and an inclination to advocate for MLLs along with knowledge of the sociopolitical positioning of language from a sociocultural perspective. Within an LRI framework, critical language awareness (CLA) can help individuals understand what language is and how it is used in society. Previously, in the field of education, language proponents proposed that teachers and students should have language awareness, which is overt knowledge of language structures and how they are used in various disciplines in school – e.g., the language of math or science. These language awareness programs emerged mainly to help students become more adept at navigating the language of school and to help teachers understand language structures to better modify classroom materials and instruction for MLLs. However, Fairclough (1992/2014) proposed that language awareness was not sufficient in ex‑ amining the role that language plays in society. He and his colleagues proposed a critical language awareness framework that promotes students’ and teachers’ awareness of not only the structure of language, but how it is used in society. CLA helps teachers understand the sociopolitical posi‑ tioning of language (Fairclough 1992/2014) and prompts teachers to consider the ways in which power relations and ideological processes are contained in conventional language. These power relations privilege dominant groups, to the detriment of speakers from marginalized communities. Within this critical framework, language is never considered neutral – everyday language that is considered “natural” carries with in “invested power relations and ideological processes” (Fair‑ clough 2014: 77). Shapiro (2022) defines critical language awareness pedagogy as “an approach to language and literacy education that focuses on the intersections of language, identity, power, and privilege, with the goal of promoting self‑reflection, social justice, and rhetorical agency” (p. 4). CLA activities can include critical consciousness raising or conscientization (Freire 1974/2021), which can help teachers understand how monolingual, standard language ideologies develop and function as tools for dominant groups to shape the consciousness of marginalized groups in order to maintain an oppressive system that perpetuates social inequalities. Through critical consciousness raising, preservice teachers can question the dominant ideologies imposed upon them by critically analyzing how language functions in the world and work toward their own and others’ liberation. By incorporating CLA and critical consciousness raising, teachers can move away from acritical perspectives to critical ones where they perceive unjust social power structures, investigate their causes, and visualize and enact alternatives and challenges to the status quo (Gay & Kirkland 2003). Through self‑reflection and analysis of classrooms, teachers can position their own lan‑ guage and that of their students to make transparent the complex relationships between dominant and marginalized speakers and cultural groups to disrupt potentially harmful and oppressive rela‑ tions of power (Hawkins & Norton 2009). This approach can help preservice teachers critically analyze language and respond to inequalities perpetuated by standard language ideologies (Godley et  al. 2015; Wetzel & Rogers 2015) as a way to center the knowledge, skills, and dispositions necessary to support linguistically diverse students. They may also realize their own obligations 437

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to promote multilingualism and use of other marginalized language varieties and ­employ multilin‑ gual strategies to promote content learning and language acquisition in the classroom.

Teacher Education Practices to Develop Critical Perspectives Teacher education scholars have written about their successes and challenges in promoting critical language awareness in teacher education spaces (see Alim 2010; Deroo & Ponzio 2021; Mahal‑ ingappa et  al. 2022; Quan 2021; Shepard‑Carey & Gopalakrishnan 2021; Shi & Rolstad 2022; Zhang‑Wu & Tian 2023). To work on teacher education and the incorporation of critical stances toward language ideologies, de Jong and Gao (2023) and Seltzer (2022) discuss the importance of fostering a critical and multilingual stance to be agents of equitable spaces for MLLs in class‑ rooms. Similarly, Mahalingappa et al. (2022) showed in their study that teacher ideologies can be challenged by incorporating pieces in their coursework that provide critical perspectives on MLLs’ language repertoire. Among the themes that have emerged across this body of literature that can promote critical awareness among teachers are (1) the importance of exposure to diverse settings, (2) the value of critical self‑reflexivity, and (3) practice to enhance teachers’ knowledge, skills, and beliefs. Within the first theme, as mentioned in the previous section, having a multilingual background or being a member of a marginalized social group influenced teachers’ beliefs about language. However, since the majority of teachers are monolingual and members of the dominant social groups, teacher education programs have to consider other ways to build experiences that allow teachers to connect with students. Such background factors such as language experiences, socio‑ cultural experiences, teacher education activities, and in‑service exposure contribute to teachers’ beliefs about language (Polat & Mahalingappa 2013). Factors that mediated negative attitudes toward MLLs were observed in teachers that had experiences in diverse settings, travel abroad programs, foreign language studies, undergraduate courses alongside MLLs, and field experi‑ ences with MLLs (Mahalingappa et al. 2018; Martin‑Beltrán et al. 2023; Polat 2010). Yough et al. (2015), for instance, suggests that service learning is an essential element in the preparation of teachers to work with MLLs, allowing teachers to build confidence and empathy with their stu‑ dents, who may come from different backgrounds from themselves. However, experiences with linguistically marginalized students are not enough to develop asset‑based language beliefs. García‑Nevarez et al. (2005), for instance, discovered a troubling finding that “the more years a teacher taught, the more his or her attitude became negative toward his or her students’ native language,” pointing to a possible issue with more experienced teachers in that study having fixed or worsening deficit beliefs about students’ home language resources (p. 305). Similarly, other studies have noted that some minimal efforts, such as tutoring, do little to combat assimilationist views and deficit perspectives, which were resistant to change (Fitts & Gross 2012; Pappamihiel 2007). According to Fitts and Gross (2012), “As many researchers have noted, teacher educators cannot be so naive as to think that the beliefs, attitudes, and knowledge sought will miraculously accrue as a result of experience alone” (p. 91). In these studies, students made some strides in terms of caring about their students, but still positioned them as the Other, maintaining their positionality as the “knower” rather than the “learner or partner.” Some preser‑ vice teachers maintained a false binary view of MLLs as either “exotic” or “normal,” demonstrat‑ ing how they maintained their deficit ideologies concerning multilingualism (Fitts & Gross 2012). Other studies found that teachers’ perspectives shifted toward assimilation rather than nuanced views of culture (Fitts & Gross 2012; Hu et al. 2021), demonstrating a level of ignorance about MLLs and an emphasis on assimilation rather than valuing bilingualism as an asset or a central part 438

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of their identity. These efforts ultimately produced shallow changes, or even prompted students to leave the teaching profession when faced with the realities of teaching (Kolano & King 2015). Perhaps there was not ample opportunity for “professional dissonance” that created changes in perspectives of subjects (Brooks & Adams 2015). Thus, without systematic, critical approaches, experiences alone may be ineffective in changing beliefs. Teacher candidates ultimately need time for skills and beliefs to develop. The second theme in teacher education pedagogy highlights critical self‑reflectivity to develop teacher ideologies, which could have been a missing element in solely experienced‑based efforts at change in beliefs. Self‑reflection or critical autoethnography has been used as a way to promote reflection and investigate teachers’ language ideologies (Athanases et al. 2019; Lew & Siffrinn 2019; Seltzer 2022). A key aspect of promoting critical consciousness raising is the emphasis on critical self‑reflection to get teachers to acknowledge their own role in systems of oppres‑ sion (Gay & Kirkland 2003). Several studies have also highlighted the importance of engaging language teachers in reflective practices to examine their own beliefs, biases, and assumptions about language and educational issues and to critically analyze their instructional practices within the context of social justice and equity (Gay & Kirkland 2003; Gorski 2009). Through reflec‑ tion, teachers can become aware of their own positions of power, privilege, and cultural biases that may influence their teaching approaches and interactions with students. This self‑awareness enables teachers to challenge and dismantle oppressive practices, foster inclusivity, and create more socially just learning environments. Notably, one of the studies which did not assign self‑re‑ flexive activities (Godley et al. 2015) found that the mostly White preservice teachers avoided acknowledging their racial and linguistic privilege and were less comfortable teaching about power structures. Schools are entities that contribute to the reproduction of inequities and mirror social struc‑ tures, hierarchies, and power; therefore, they also reify language ideologies. It is important for teachers to challenge and understand the power dynamics that exert control over schools. In con‑ sidering the possibility of how to interrogate and disrupt language ideologies and power, Seltzer (2022) proposed a series of “activities to encourage critical inquiry and self‑reflection” as well as activities to construct an understanding of language and power in teacher education programs (p.  6). These activities have the potential to generate discussions in which preservice teachers could raise their critical consciousness while questioning and disrupting language ideologies from a critical perspective. By using various activities, studies have investigated teachers evoking critical self‑reflexivity. These included language portraits, autoethnographic narratives, or self‑reflexive inquiry (Mahal‑ ingappa 2023; Swed & González‑Carriedo 2019; Taylor et al. 2018; Yazan 2019). Another aspect that has emerged in the use of critical self‑reflexivity is the use of art and embodied experiences to excavate self‑reflexivity such as poems, art, role‑plays, and story‑telling (Cervantes‑Soon 2018), such as “Where I’m From” poems and multimodal digital collages (Seltzer 2022) to promote self‑reflection. By valuing multimodality in teacher education, it challenges the elevated status of the printed word, serving as an example of centering visual, oral, artistic, translanguaging modes which are often employed by multilingual youth (Hornberger 2007). Molina (2019) noted the importance of community in mediating the teachers’ growth as critically conscious teachers: “As teacher candidates are engaging in cognitively demanding tasks of simultaneously learning to teach and teaching to learn, mediation through readings, peer interactions, and the teacher educator became key” (p. 67). It is important to create supportive and non‑judgmental spaces for teachers to engage in self‑reflection, allowing for open dialogue, questioning, and exploration of personal and professional beliefs. These activities are jumping off points for discussions of language and 439

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power imbalances in social scenarios followed by debrief conversations on the assumption about language that teacher candidates enact. The third theme involves coursework on teaching practices. Several studies have described positive changes in teachers’ perspectives on multilingualism and critical language perspectives after participating in courses that address issues around the education of MLLs. These courses engage in critical discussions, teaching practice such as role‑plays, lesson planning, and crea‑ tion of teaching philosophies, and research analyses. These activities generally increased teachers’ understanding of the socio‑emotional importance of having students’ multiple languages in the classroom (de Jong & Gao 2023), views of students’ families as funds of knowledge (Fitts & Gross 2012; Moll et al. 1992; Walker‑Dalhouse et al. 2009), and emerging critical language awareness regarding the value of multilingualism (Barros et al. 2021; Mahalingappa et al. 2022; Zhang‑Wu & Tian 2023), and positive beliefs about MLLs (Pappamihiel et al. 2017).

Conclusion Teacher education programs need to consider how well they train content teachers to work with MLL populations by revisiting what courses are required and what teacher educators are teaching in these courses. Passing laws requiring preservice teachers to take courses in asset‑based pedago‑ gies, critical awareness, and multicultural education is one way to prepare future teachers to meet the needs of the large number of MLLs in public schools. Some teacher educators (Andrews et al. 2019) have warned of the possibility that these diversity‑focused field experiences can actually reinforce stereotypes in some preservice teachers, so thoughtful framing and program planning are recommended to ensure that these programs do not reify stereotypes and harm marginalized populations in the process of attempting to raise the critical consciousness of mostly white, female preservice teachers. Asset perspectives draw on the lived experiences of students of color as assets to be drawn from rather than barriers to achieving standard language practices and assimilation. Asset pedagogies center on the bilingual and biliteracy practices of communities and value their cultural resources as ways to connect prior knowledge to new learning (Hornberger 2007; López 2017). We can look to Huerta (2011) for examples of asset pedagogies that incorporate home culture into school content, increase teacher’s critical awareness, embrace translanguaging practices, and hold high expecta‑ tions for MLLs. The teachers featured in Huerta’s (2011) study cared deeply about validating stu‑ dents’ home cultures and treating their cultural backgrounds and life experiences as assets rather than barriers to learning. Teacher educators themselves also need to accept the unfinished work of becoming more socially just in their teacher education practices and passing on this stance to their preservice teachers. Dissonance rather than comfort is needed in order to change or shift teachers’ existing beliefs away from deficit stances toward MLLs (Gleeson & Davison 2016). More recent critiques have emerged that asset pedagogies are not dynamic enough to meet the needs of modern multicultural communities to sustain “linguistic, literate, and cultural pluralism as part of the democratic project of schooling and as a needed response to demographic and social change” (Paris & Alim 2014). This connection to social justice and advocacy is at the heart of what Paris and Alim (2014) propose as a better alternative to asset pedagogies which he calls cultur‑ ally sustaining pedagogies, although both conceptions come from similar foci of valuing student culture, voice, and language. The critical perspective shifts in inquiry‑focus studies with in‑service teachers (Brooks & Adams 2015) and cultural immersion studies with preservice teachers (Degol‑ lado et al. 2019) should be used to model future teacher education and professional development initiatives. 440

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As the history of deficit thinking in society has shown, these deficit lenses are able to shape shift and gain traction under a different name (Langer‑Osuna & Nasir 2016; Raz 2013; Valen‑ cia 2010). The culture of schools has long prioritized the needs of monolingual students while blaming lower income, culturally diverse populations for their own struggles within the educa‑ tion system. There is a need for more empirical, longitudinal research on teachers’ perspectives toward MLLs which includes observations over an extended period of time and considers how such professional development impacts student learning. Professional development and teacher education that will reveal biases, raise critical awareness, and promote asset‑based, humanizing, culturally sustaining pedagogies is only one step toward overhauling the inequalities in schools, but these studies have shown that it is essential for fostering a culturally sustaining schooling envi‑ ronment for MLLs through preservice teacher education and continuing professional development for in‑service teachers.

Note 1 The term MLLs refers to students whose first languages are not the dominant language used in schools. These students are often classified as ELL (English language language), EL (English learner), Emergent Bilinguals (EB), or Emergent Multilinguals (MB) in the U.S., a classification that is given after students take a language proficiency test. In this chapter we use the term MLL as a broader category, inclusive of students who do not have the ELL/EL/EM/MB label, but because of raciolinguistic perception, may be viewed as linguistically deficient even after exiting language programs (Flores & Rosa 2015). The term MLLs also recognizes that students may know more than two languages before learning English, and this term focuses on students’ linguistic assets, not deficits in English language proficiency.

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445

INDEX

administration 18, 80, 94, 148, 184, 188, 193, 194, 280, 294–296, 335, 391, 414, 415 advertisements 4, 28, 105–107, 111, 118 advocacy 95, 295, 440 affective 26, 27, 29, 30, 35, 51, 53, 97, 130, 229, 371–373, 376, 380, 383 aggression 1, 16, 255, 394, 396 algorithms 27, 28, 31, 169, 172, 176, 178, 179, 194, 206, 217 altruism 76, 147 anxiety 19, 69, 82, 97, 98, 125, 281, 355, 409, 426 app 53, 176, 179, 326, 331 apparatus 40, 185, 359, 362, 369 assimilation 235, 300, 343, 347, 373, 383, 387, 438, 440 association 34, 97, 99, 123, 225, 227, 293, 370, 377, 390, 401 assumption 12, 53, 58, 61, 110, 279, 363, 390, 440 audiences 2, 4, 39–40, 49, 52, 55, 105, 107, 111, 117, 118, 131, 157, 158, 162–164, 177, 178, 187, 193, 212, 214, 216, 217, 230, 260, 263, 275, 310, 372 authoritarian 3, 4, 7, 12, 16, 58–62, 64, 65, 67, 69–72, 101, 190, 316, 359, 394 autocratic 2, 59, 61, 76 awareness 1, 6, 69, 109, 125, 159, 206, 227, 228, 230, 232, 233, 235–238, 298, 330, 377, 388, 390, 393, 404, 409, 437–441 banned 54, 169, 188, 221 battle 92, 93, 130, 262, 263, 265, 267–270, 353, 392 behavioral 2, 4, 52, 59–61, 64, 69, 98, 171, 174, 179–82, 271 Beijing 80, 83, 184, 194, 215, 322

belief 12, 17, 26, 29, 31, 32, 49–51, 53, 58, 83, 124–126, 261, 269, 298, 406, 413, 420, 428, 432 belonging 14, 67, 77, 113, 124, 143, 192, 227, 252, 294, 302, 304, 334, 383, 387 biological 19, 34, 35, 226, 245, 249, 336, 390 blocked 177, 185, 186, 312 bourgeois 52, 55, 247 brainwashing 1, 3, 6, 11, 25, 26, 30, 32, 35–36, 60, 154, 198, 199, 352–365 British 6, 18, 76, 78, 92, 158, 186, 214, 230, 252, 296–299, 303, 305, 306, 353, 360, 361, 372 broadcasting 63, 67, 280 cadres 51, 52, 54 camera 96, 161, 187, 219, 354, 356, 357 canonical 50, 51, 257 capitalism 47, 80, 121, 123, 124, 127, 129, 133, 332, 334, 335 Chinese Communist Party 2, 3, 39, 43, 76, 177, 183, 212, 318 Chinese nationalism 5, 78, 83–85, 212, 213, 216, 217, 220 Christian 17, 263, 372 coercive 60, 137, 173, 362, 371, 383 cognition 3, 7, 32–34, 53, 59–65, 67, 69, 70, 176, 226, 310, 325 collective identity 16, 65, 69, 191 colonialism 78, 294, 303, 305, 306 communist 2, 3, 39–44, 48, 50, 55, 76, 177, 183, 212, 213, 248, 318, 352, 353, 355–357, 362, 364 concealed 105, 112, 256, 311 confrontational 1, 202 connotation 142, 154, 246, 252, 254, 321, 325

447

Index conscious 33, 53, 68, 109, 125, 128, 134, 138, 142, 158, 159, 175, 236, 237, 259, 274, 290, 297, 330, 354, 359, 407, 408, 436, 439 consumerism 108, 334 contradiction 44, 48, 51, 251, 323 controlled 58, 59, 64, 69, 124, 154, 188, 204, 246, 257, 354, 359, 362, 363, 373, 378 conversation 97, 146, 164, 370, 376, 378, 400, 422, 428 Covid 4, 5, 183–185, 187, 191, 274, 277, 279–281, 284, 285, 290, 315, 317, 322 credibility 28, 128, 143, 186, 270

framing 3, 5, 170, 171, 178, 206, 267, 274–280, 282–290, 311, 381, 383, 440 fraud 35, 36, 140 freedom 5, 25, 27, 29, 75, 76, 83, 84, 99, 108, 171, 193, 199–201, 225, 235, 297, 322, 354, 359, 372, 373, 387, 421

debates 75, 79, 81, 85, 121, 123, 134, 197, 198, 200, 203, 252, 300, 303, 304, 346, 391 deception 14, 35, 322, 325, 354 decolonization 132, 190, 295, 297, 299, 305 deliberately 105, 116, 227, 230, 247, 276, 288, 312, 322 denigration 2, 435 denounced 247, 317 derogatory 160, 218, 247, 255 deviations 41, 55, 247, 311, 339 dialectical 42, 48, 53, 248 dichotomy 77, 81, 197 dictatorship 55, 139, 354 differentiation 60–62, 246, 252, 257, 335 discrimination 6, 19, 160, 225, 228, 300, 306, 406, 409, 413, 414 disinformation 67, 99 distorted 41, 231, 311 distortion 257, 432 disturbance 81, 346 dominance 5, 11, 12, 14, 17, 19, 54, 164, 206, 286, 297, 299, 300, 302–306 downplaying 2, 206, 391 economic stability 77, 178, 198, 200, 429 emancipation 15, 129, 184 empathy 77, 163, 263, 302, 314, 325, 438 empower 197, 235, 338, 408, 413, 427 epistemic 3, 177, 332 ethics 3, 127, 133, 134, 361 euphemisms 253–256, 311, 313, 315 existential 4, 31, 52, 91, 97, 101, 330 exploitation 4, 18, 20, 121, 122, 129, 130, 133, 197, 201 extremists 2, 16, 254, 260, 269 fabricated 77, 198, 218, 251 Facebook 4, 5, 26, 118, 131, 169, 170, 173–178, 203, 204, 217, 219–221 fictional 3, 246, 326, 381 figurative 275, 277 forbidden 190, 214, 312, 370, 420 forceful 2, 60, 154

gender 129–131, 133, 204, 225, 230, 236–238, 294, 331, 346, 401, 436 genocide 2, 18, 184, 253 geographical 29, 113, 116, 129, 348 geopolitical 1, 4, 170, 178, 370, 382 globalization 11, 190, 221, 299, 333–335, 394, 399–401 governance 51, 52, 54, 75–79, 84, 85, 139, 204, 205, 296, 297, 300, 301, 303, 304, 334 guarantee 25, 78, 80, 85, 123, 128, 436 habits 27, 60, 61, 109, 112, 114, 126, 172, 174, 432 harmony 143, 186, 301, 347, 411, 413, 425 hegemony 20, 84, 190, 204, 212, 214, 255, 299, 300, 303, 306, 435 hierarchies 178, 179, 294, 305, 306, 334, 413, 439 historical significance 46, 192, 200, 304 Hong Kong 4, 74, 75, 77–85, 155, 158, 159, 188, 189, 191, 214, 215, 397, 425 hostility 3, 13, 16, 17, 61, 62, 64, 66, 67, 70, 77, 143, 221 hypothesis 26, 32, 254, 325, 329 idealized 12, 317, 377, 383, 405, 432 ideology 2, 5, 13, 20, 27, 42, 44, 46, 49, 50, 54–55, 58, 59, 61, 62, 119, 121, 124, 125, 132, 134, 177, 183, 202, 213–215, 218, 226, 227, 229, 236, 246, 248, 252, 253, 260, 268–270, 293, 295, 303–306, 370, 383, 426, 428, 431, 433–435 imaginary 77, 108, 124, 153, 347 immigration 11, 15, 17, 18, 274, 285, 335, 346, 413 impairment 311, 325 impression 27, 34, 96, 98, 141, 146, 153, 206, 357, 399 incentives 52, 54, 55, 63, 188, 189, 316 indoctrination 40, 269, 352, 356 inequalities 74, 76, 300, 302, 304, 334, 404, 406, 436, 437, 441 ingrained 14, 264, 390, 397, 436 institutionalized 82, 230 instrumental 323, 418 intellectual 122, 137, 161, 370, 371 intention 28, 134, 159, 185, 200, 266, 304, 319, 321, 323, 387, 432 interactions 28, 29, 82, 124, 140, 141, 147, 157, 187, 188, 201, 212, 214, 290, 298, 331, 377, 392, 413, 421, 426, 439 interrogation 253, 354, 358

448

Index journalists 5, 14, 65, 75, 95, 185, 193, 204, 208, 274–277, 283, 284, 288, 290 judgments 32, 67, 68, 139, 247, 389 justification 20, 40, 49, 68, 74, 75, 77, 80, 163, 164, 256, 260, 303, 432

optimistic 100, 325, 380, 382, 383, 422 orchestrated 40, 61, 185, 204, 236, 373, 377 orthodoxy 4, 39, 49, 50, 53, 55, 352, 354

labeled 39, 45, 47, 101, 169, 170, 175, 184, 246, 261, 312, 313 legacy 41, 43, 51, 298, 300, 304, 305, 383 legal 3, 51, 75, 78–82, 84, 85, 93, 95, 137, 163, 200, 202, 207, 212, 215, 217, 334 legitimacy 4, 54, 55, 58–67, 69, 70, 74–78, 85, 206, 213, 261, 268, 269, 432 Leninism 43, 55, 246 lexical 140, 231, 278, 279, 281, 322, 409, 411 liberation 42, 76, 126, 130, 184–186, 192, 193, 255, 318, 414, 437 linguistic strategies 3, 7, 266, 371 machine learning 172, 245, 249–251, 253 mainstream media 153, 160, 177, 198, 204, 205, 208 manifestation 54, 63, 106, 108, 124, 130, 137, 312, 332, 346, 347, 383, 436 manipulate 1, 3, 17, 19, 30–32, 35, 99, 107, 111–113, 147, 148, 153, 154, 157, 164, 173, 197, 201, 206, 214, 215, 246, 270, 274, 317, 383 Marxism 41, 43, 46–48, 54, 55, 246, 248, 256 media algorithms 27, 206 media platforms 3, 4, 25–30, 35, 36, 105, 107, 111, 118, 124, 154, 176, 184, 188, 197, 203, 205, 206, 236, 312 memory 6, 108, 249, 250, 261, 302, 359, 361, 382, 388, 390, 391, 394–396, 399 metaphoric 48, 319 mobilization 51, 59, 63, 65, 66, 69, 82, 92, 201, 203, 255, 298, 386, 392 modernization 83, 389 motivation 69, 99, 105, 109, 153, 178, 260, 261, 268, 270, 322, 406, 434 movements 14, 16, 65, 66, 68, 146, 179, 204–206, 208, 276, 302, 303, 306, 310, 362, 373, 374 nationalism 15, 20, 74, 76–79, 81–85, 212–217, 220, 254, 255, 305, 386–388, 390, 391, 394, 395, 397–400 neoliberal 6, 174, 176, 329, 331–336, 338, 343, 345–347, 400 newspapers 125, 277, 279, 288, 290, 320, 401 obedient 130, 303 obligations 55, 252, 256, 437 opposition 31, 33, 34, 58, 59, 67–70, 74, 77, 96, 148, 197, 199–202, 206, 216, 257, 259, 301, 303, 435 oppression 20, 72, 129, 227, 302, 305

paradoxical 134, 185, 347, 389, 390 patriotic 18, 186, 192, 193, 198, 213–217, 220, 296, 299, 391 peaceful 67, 85, 183, 185, 206, 229, 329 peasants 44, 45, 326, 386, 387 persuasion 12, 27, 29, 33, 105, 109, 116, 126, 128, 160, 264, 297, 352, 408 political manipulation 76, 361 presuppositions 170, 320 prioritized 123, 360 privilege 20, 132, 134, 229, 270, 332, 334, 347, 370, 437, 439 propaganda 2, 3, 11, 25, 40, 51–53, 58, 60, 61, 101, 123, 124, 131, 153, 177, 183–186, 188, 190, 192, 197, 198, 206, 207, 215, 253, 255, 256, 262, 270, 353, 369–373, 375, 377, 378, 380, 382, 383 psychological 6, 12, 27, 31–33, 35, 51, 66, 98, 101, 109, 128, 143, 145, 146, 148, 170–175, 178, 179, 197, 203, 207, 225, 249, 250, 260, 261, 266, 268, 270, 271, 275, 305, 352, 355, 361, 371, 383, 397 qualitative 11, 32, 33, 59, 62, 64, 65, 184, 193, 279, 290, 404, 406, 410, 414 quantitative 32, 105, 279, 290, 373, 374, 381 racist 13–19, 132, 235, 236, 337, 431, 432 radical 12, 15, 18, 20, 83, 217, 260, 271 rational 27, 97, 99, 139, 141, 174, 390 reality 4, 27, 29, 34, 36, 39–41, 45, 46, 49, 52, 55, 60, 61, 97, 105, 108, 116–118, 121, 128, 143, 172, 198, 208, 218, 226, 227, 257, 259, 262, 266, 267, 275, 312, 317, 318, 321, 324, 331, 335, 346, 354, 357, 370, 371, 376, 381, 383, 388, 393 reasoning 31, 98, 249, 312, 318 recognition 128, 133, 137, 138, 145, 147, 198, 201, 207, 232, 235, 299, 331, 382, 394 reconcile 40, 248, 382 reconstruction 4, 49, 55, 297 reframing 277 regime 2, 58, 61, 67, 70, 74–78, 83–85, 121, 184, 186, 191, 221, 256, 332, 335, 352, 355, 390 relations 40, 69, 80, 85, 124, 138, 139, 141, 142, 144, 146, 148, 186, 190, 191, 219, 221, 233, 234, 236, 265, 300, 334, 358, 406, 407, 437 religion 20, 164, 183, 186, 193, 268, 269, 296, 298, 299, 304, 306, 413 repeatedly 32, 34, 35, 39, 52, 64, 81, 184, 185, 284, 357, 364

449

Index representation 29, 74, 75, 77, 84, 92, 108, 115, 121, 129, 130, 132, 184, 185, 188, 193, 226, 228–233, 236–238, 279, 295, 302, 329, 332, 333, 336, 338, 347, 348, 356, 389–391, 396–400, 407 repression 58, 70, 88, 256, 293 resentment 13, 83, 213 reshape 4, 49, 55, 369 resistance 32, 41, 42, 67, 80, 85, 121, 123, 153, 190, 191, 206, 207, 212, 214, 218, 228, 236, 295, 300, 301, 305, 358 revelation 162, 266, 360 revolution 41–45, 48, 50, 53, 93, 191, 204, 208, 297, 310, 390 rhetoric 1, 2, 7, 13, 15, 16, 18, 19, 25, 29, 39, 45, 47, 49–52, 77, 80, 81, 106, 121, 186, 201, 253, 310, 332, 333, 338, 414 ridicule 143, 144, 198, 323 rooted 2, 19, 108, 116, 200, 201, 227, 247, 270, 300, 304–306, 329, 334, 338, 347, 406, 433 Russian 1, 2, 5, 40, 76, 146, 227, 245–248, 251– 257, 260, 353, 357, 362, 363 sacred 49, 51, 264, 419 sacrifices 99, 138, 395 safeguard 17, 76, 134, 216, 252 sanctions 76, 77, 387 scenario 18, 101, 198, 219, 251, 296 scholarly 58, 60, 74, 75, 77, 78, 82, 84, 85, 100, 260 selectively 2, 27, 225, 318, 320, 389, 391 semantic 28, 45, 140, 256, 257, 278, 279, 281, 311, 317, 319, 320, 322 sensitive 59, 163, 164, 176, 186, 197, 215, 216, 312, 377 sentiments 1, 27, 32, 197, 198, 213, 214, 301, 303, 323, 354, 355, 405, 436 sidelined 198, 229 silencing 95, 346, 433 skepticism 80, 83, 93, 232 smartphones 53, 169, 331 socialism 44, 46, 47, 51, 194 sociopolitical 121–124, 129, 132, 370, 408, 409, 437 software 70, 113, 133, 238, 245, 331, 332, 348 sophisticated 148, 154, 164, 173, 251, 290, 370, 371, 413 sovereignty 51, 59, 79, 84, 202, 216, 394, 398, 399 Soviet Union 41, 245, 246, 358, 363, 399 spontaneously 26, 216, 372 spreading 2, 25, 26, 30, 31, 61, 62, 64, 66, 69, 70, 203, 212, 221, 278 statistical 83, 146, 247 stereotyping 129, 159, 225, 229, 230, 237, 238 stimulating 16, 60, 64, 178, 330 strategic 6, 16, 58, 108, 109, 117, 170, 174, 200, 227, 259, 305, 378, 408

strengthen 53, 183, 192, 261, 268–270, 347 subjective 28, 29, 31, 185, 359, 394, 397, 399 subliminal 109, 355, 359 superior 14, 17, 20, 47, 81, 108, 213, 266, 360, 405, 418, 433 suppression 301 supremacy 6, 13, 14, 17, 18, 46, 227, 237, 299, 300, 304, 333, 346, 406, 408 symbolic 30, 40, 55, 76, 117, 127, 144, 268, 302, 310, 330, 382, 383, 388, 392 sympathetic 49, 362 systematic 40, 50, 55, 61, 69, 154, 184, 253, 278, 355, 388, 409, 439 taboo 65, 158 tactic 95, 96, 206 Taiwan 2, 80, 81, 177, 183, 189–191, 214, 216, 218, 311, 325, 370, 383, 387, 393, 394, 397, 398, 401 techniques 1, 32, 96, 110, 113, 122–124, 126–128, 130, 131, 137, 141–144, 146–148, 169, 184, 197, 205, 206, 364 television 2, 27, 63, 65, 96, 105, 110, 112, 186, 226, 314 tendency 28, 35, 98, 99, 101, 145, 170, 214, 217, 225, 227, 279, 287, 391, 396 tension 82, 83, 159, 300, 374, 376–378, 426, 435 terminology 125, 186, 245, 246, 248–250, 256, 278, 322, 392 territorial 183, 213–216, 296, 334, 388, 391, 398, 399 terrorism 15, 202, 264 textbooks 41, 235, 388, 391, 392, 394, 396, 400, 402, 433, 435 Tiananmen 213, 215, 221 TikTok 4, 154, 155, 161, 162, 169, 170, 173, 175– 178, 204, 326 tolerant 76, 125, 193, 237, 299, 343 totalitarian 154, 246, 352 tradition 137, 213, 237, 260, 268, 275, 293, 296, 338, 355, 391, 412, 425, 428, 429 traits 40, 54, 147, 174, 225–227, 231–233 transformation 1, 30, 42, 44, 55, 138, 139, 228, 259, 267, 269, 298, 346, 347, 355, 356 trauma 132, 133, 162, 361, 381, 383, 409, 419, 420, 426, 429 triggered 43, 79, 81, 82, 157, 275, 320, 322, 324, 357, 358 Truman Show 370 trustworthy 100, 127, 234 tweet 2, 15, 31, 33–35, 163, 207 Uighur 177, 185 Ukraine 1, 2, 246, 253–256 unification 5, 142, 213, 293, 305

450

Index United States 1, 35, 76, 92, 97, 108, 110, 111, 122, 138, 187, 253, 347, 348, 357, 359, 360, 387, 392, 396, 418 Utopia 30, 353, 359 validate 36, 55, 133, 305 verbal 28, 146, 157, 179, 247, 261, 357 victimhood 6, 19, 386, 388, 394, 395 violent 16, 18, 48, 82, 134, 153, 202, 205, 259, 260, 269–271, 353, 362, 365, 395 vocabulary 30, 33, 36, 47, 53, 249, 251, 312, 332 vulnerable 58, 101, 143, 145, 260, 339, 379

Weibo 188 willingness 17, 54, 137, 261, 267, 268 witnessed 79, 83, 85, 183, 197, 294, 330, 414 worldviews 14, 16, 70, 99, 148, 260, 302, 322 xenophobic 15, 76–78, 81, 85 Xinjiang 185, 186, 188, 190, 191 Xizang 185, 188, 190–192 YouTube 154, 161, 183–190, 193, 204

451