Aaron Gilkison & Maciej Kurzynski, Journal of Cultural Analytics 9 (1), 2024.

From personal memoirs and cooking recipes to revolutionary agitation and war coverage, the People’s Liberation Army Daily offers a wealth of insights into the sociopolitical and affective realities of post-1949 China. One of the few major periodicals that continued publication during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), the journal has received relatively scant attention from scholars, except for political science studies devoted to the PRC propaganda system. Combining close reading and historical analysis with quantitative conceptuality and text mining, we demonstrate how the PLA Daily legitimizes state violence differently through its representation of various soldier figures, the zhanshi, the junren, and the minbing. Our close reading is based on the collocation analysis of these major soldier terms. We also use a large language model (a fine-tuned bert-base-chinese) to show how the journal distributes violent sentiments to international topics in times of domestic turmoil.

Our article engages with the current scholarship on military and affective violence in the PRC. Whereas sociologists and political scientists have identified all-out war mobilization as the primary means through which the Communist Party grasped power and ultimately took over China in 1949, literary scholars and art historians have focused on formal mechanisms which harnessed political energy for the dual purpose of proletarian revolution and nation making. We propose a way of bridging the two paradigms by reconsidering the mechanisms of affective distribution underlying the institutional legitimation of violence in modern China. We show how quantitative approaches to texts offer unique perspectives not only on the problem of violence and its representation in the journal, but also on the Maoist mode of writing more generally; how the distribution of violence, legitimacy, and agency can be traced, measured, and visualized; and how state-directed sentiments complemented political propaganda, enhancing the impact and reach of this important official publication.

Read the article: The Journal of Cultural Analytics