The Communist Press, Participatory Journalism, and Class Formation in Wartime Chongqing

As the sole legal entity of the Communists in wartime Nationalist China, Xinhua ribao (New China Daily) (1938-1947) became an effective opposition force through its innovative practice of participatory journalism. In response to state censorship and the Communists’ Rectification Campaign, New China Daily published over 500 worker letters by the mid-1940s. These testimonials helped workers create an ‘imagined community’ of class that fuelled the post-war labor movement. Moral concerns were an integral part of working-class formation. The writers’ sense of class relations was predicated on stark contrasts—good versus evil, the powerful versus the powerless—that permeated workers’ discourse and shaped representations of the labor movement. This paper examines several violent episodes that illustrate how New China Daily disseminated a language of class by constructing a narrative around the theme of injustice. Workers’ reasonable demands were met with violent repression that led to the death and injury of workers and the imprisonment and torture of labor activists. Exposing these “massacres,” the term preferred by Xinhua ribao, often amidst a news blackout, led to expressions of solidarity among workers across Chongqing, and contestation with government and factory authorities over what had actually transpired. New China Daily’s reportage of the labor movement allowed the CCP to achieve several political goals. Drawing on the moral language of class that had been used in worker testimonials reinforced workers’ sense of class consciousness that was simultaneously informed by participating in the very same conflicts that were being reported. Reporting factory arrests and publicizing worker demands exerted pressure on the government to reach a compromise between labor, capitalists, and the state. Further, the Communist press used the events to sway public opinion by branding the Nationalist government as a militaristic regime reliant on its spy network to maintain a grip on power.