Radio Technology and the Chinese Communist Party's Information Infrastructure: Strategy, Technology, and Culture, 1927–36

This poster analyzes the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s establishment of a superior information infrastructure in its revolutionary struggle against ruling Nationalist regime in 1927–36. Since the nineteenth century, information infrastructure has become an indispensable part of modern state and society, while the effectiveness in organizing and operating information infrastructure often influenced the rise and fall of states, empires, and political movements. The fact that the CCP’s revolutionary base areas were divided and scattered across China, and could not communicate easily with each other, only increased the importance of information infrastructure for the Party. This poster analyzes the strategic, technological, and cultural factors that explain how and why the CCP was able to build a superior information infrastructure than the Nationalist regime, which was essential for the rise and survival of the Communist revolution. As such, the poster sits at a significant intellectual position at the intersection of the histories of revolution, science and technology, and information.

My poster argues that, after acquiring radio technologies from the Soviet Union and the domestic Chinese market, and by capturing equipment and personnel from the Nationalist Army, the CCP was able to develop superior radio telegraphy and cryptography operations than the enemy. This efficient and secure information infrastructure allowed the Party to effectively transmit and disseminate civilian and military information, and to exploit the weaknesses in the Nationalist regime’s information infrastructure to acquire intelligence against the enemy. This remarkable achievement was based on close cooperation between CCP leaders, captured Nationalist radio technology experts, and the CCP-trained radio operators. This was made possible by the Party’s culture of information that helped to overcome ideological and social divisions, and created a favorable environment for the development of revolutionary professionalism. The Party’s information culture originated from its experience of life-or-death struggles against Nationalist and foreign police forces in urban centers, and against the Nationalist Army in rural areas.

My poster challenges previous interpretations of the Chinese revolution as a rural struggle based on the mobilization of peasants, which took the Party’s technological impotence for granted. It shows that the CCP was actually adept at exploiting the spread of radio telegraphy and cryptography in Republican China to construct its own modern information infrastructure. Furthermore, through placing Communist documents into dialogue with archival records of the Chinese Nationalist and Japanese Armies, the poster reexamines the Party’s success in waging revolution in the global context of information infrastructure’s increasing importance in twentieth-century politics and military conflicts.

My poster would employ a wide range of visualization techniques to deliver the scholarly arguments as delineated above. For example, the poster would use the Microsoft SmartArt to show the organizational structure of the CCP’s information infrastructure. In order to conceptualize the Party’s information infrastructure in spatial terms, the poster would use the GIS tool to visualize data from Chinese Communist, Nationalist and Japanese archives. Finally, the poster would use photos of contemporary CCP radio equipment and personnel to materialize and humanize the story of the CCP’s information infrastructure building in 1927–36.