Words as Weapons: The Strategic Power of Chinese Slogans in Modern Propaganda

Words as Weapons: The Strategic Power of Chinese Slogans in Modern Propaganda

No political culture is more slogan-saturated than China’s.  When Xi Jinping stood before the United Nations (U.N.) in 2015 and declared China’s commitment to building a “Community of Shared Future for Mankind,” many Western observers heard a vague soft diplomacy platitude rather than a strategic signal. The slogan, however, functioned as a rhetorical trap, reframing China’s authoritarian model as morally legitimate and future-oriented while portraying liberal democracies as selfish and out of touch with humanity’s collective destiny.

From rural banners to urban subway screens, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) floods public life with concise ideological formulas designed to structure thought and shape behavior. These slogans are poetically engineered, often using rhythmic structures like wǔyán (five-character lines) and qǐyán (seven-character lines), serving as tools of mass persuasion, social discipline, and international signaling. Yet Western analysts often dismiss them as ornamental rather than strategic. Thus, the goal of this essay is to reveal the nature of slogans, identify the psychological mechanisms they operate through, and explain how the CCP understands and employs slogans as propaganda and communications.

What are Slogans and How do they Work?

A good comprehensive definition of a slogan is: “A slogan is a short, memorable phrase used in marketing, or political communication that encapsulates the essence of a brand, message, or ideological stance, aiming to influence perception and provoke recall through concise, persuasive language.” Slogans leverage formatting tools like brevity or rhythm to create cognitive shortcuts. They encapsulate the essence of a brand, message, or ideological stance in a few words. Brevity enhances a slogan’s encoding into memory by condensing complex information into compact and digestible chunks. This makes it more likely to be encoded and retrieved as a single, coherent mental image. Brevity also reduces cognitive load, allowing the brain to process and store messages more efficiently in the working memory.

Rhythmic patterns, including rhyme, alliteration, and cadence, activate the phonological loop in working memory, which processes and retains auditory information. The predictable structure of rhythmic slogans facilitates rehearsal and recall, as the brain is more likely to encode repetitive, melodic phrases. Additionally, the “rhyme-as-reason” effect suggests that rhymed statements are perceived as more truthful, further reinforcing their mnemonic power. The impact of a slogan can be amplified through visual elements, such as typography, color, and imagery. Polysemiotic integration allows the message to be encoded through multiple sensory channels, increasing its impact and memorability. Polysemiotic messages leverage multiple communication formats by integrating text, image, sound, gesture, spatial layout, and color in mutually supporting ways. Each mode contributes distinct layers of meaning, and when integrated, they engage multiple sensory channels simultaneously. This multisensory engagement enhances attention, improves memory encoding through dual coding, and evokes emotional responses that simple verbal slogans cannot.

Psychology of Slogans

Elaboration Likelihood Model

There are a number of theoretical frameworks that can explain how people cognitively interact with slogans. The Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) is an application of the dual processing model of cognitive psychology to the context of communication and persuasion. Essentially, people cognitively process messages through two distinct routes, peripheral (System 1) and central (System 2). The peripheral route processes information very quickly by assessing several contextual cues in the environment, like whether a message appears credible based on the technical quality of that message’s format. Almost everyone uses System 1 most of the time since our environment bombards us with more perceptual stimuli than we can ever hope to effectively process. Thus, we don’t think very much about System 1 stimulus, and this may lead us to uncritically process a slogan and fail to detect a threat from it. In general, slogans are designed to be processed rapidly using System 1 by making the message so simple but interesting that it gets processed uncritically.

The System 2 central route processes information in a more systematic and deliberate way. It focuses the brain on analyzing evidence and assessing argument quality. It is necessary for the person to be motivated enough to dedicate investing more time and effort required to process a message. However, it can lead one to more effectively reject propaganda messages by generating counterarguments that refute the message. It also plays an important role in persuasion by helping to encode the message into memory or by modifying an existing belief to incorporate new information. A slogan can be designed to trigger System 2 processing if it is conceptually dense, abstract, or intellectually provocative, provided the audience is motivated, educated, or deeply involved with the issue. A marketing example of this is the Capital One “What’s in Your Wallet” slogan. Framing it as a question could trigger System 2 reflection and evaluation.

Priming

Slogans can serve as a priming tool within the peripheral route by providing a critical heuristic cue. Priming is the psychological phenomenon where exposure to one stimulus (the prime) influences audience members’ responses to a subsequent stimulus. For example, if a cosmetic goods consumer repeatedly sees the L’Oréal brand’s slogan “Because You’re Worth It,” they are primed to interpret later ads through a self-worth lens. The slogan can positively prime the consumers’ emotions by invoking a sense of empowerment and deserved indulgence. This preconditions the consumer to experience positive emotions when they engage with other marketing messages. This can reduce potential resistance to the message while increasing persuasiveness. However, if the slogan is perceived by the audience to be a persuasion attempt, they may reject the message, creating a reverse prime that causes resistance to persuasion.

Illusory Truth Effect

Slogans have a hidden superpower through the mechanisms of repetition. Research proves that when a person is exposed to false information or propaganda repeatedly, even experts who know better start to accept the messages as being true. This is because repeated messages that are encoded into human memory increase the processing fluency (leveraging System 1 thinking) by making it easier for the brain to decode the message. Since we have seen that message before, the brain is more likely to process it uncritically, which inadvertently bypasses our cognitive defenses. When Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels famously stated, “Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth,” he inadvertently discovered this cognitive bias. This offers one powerful mechanism for the success of propaganda. If you compel people who initially don’t accept the slogan to publicly repeat it over time, then they could eventually internalize it.

Slogans in the Chinese Language

Chinese slogan culture emerged as a cultural phenomenon at least 3,000 years ago and is rooted in their language. Chinese classical language has very concise syntax and high information density, allowing more meaning to be communicated with fewer words.  For instance, the classical quote from Sun Tzu, “If you know yourself and know your enemy, you will not be defeated in a hundred battles,” requires only eight characters to write. Thus, the nature of the language naturally lends itself to slogan usage. Another linguistic factor is that traditional Chinese is a tonal language, where pitch variations distinguish meaning between words. This tonal aspect contributes to the musicality of the language, especially in poetry. Classical Chinese poetry often adheres to strict tonal patterns and rhythmic structures, creating a harmonious and melodic quality that enhances its emotive power.  A recent study of Chinese University marketing slogans revealed how they often incorporate poetic elements from classical Chinese literature. This musicality enhances cognitive fluency and the cognitive processing of slogans. Thus, the Chinese language seems as if it were designed to enhance System 1 central processing. Slogans were a common method of communicating complex philosophical and religious ideas. For example, “The universe and the individual unite,” which reflects the Daoist belief that all things in reality are interconnected into a single whole.

Slogans in Chinese Collectivist Culture

Slogans also fit well within the collectivist nature of Chinese culture and its accompanying high context communication style. Collectivist societies emphasize the creation and maintenance of societal harmony through the pursuit of group goals, social cohesion, and moral conformity over personal autonomy and welfare. People must align their thoughts and behaviors with the needs, norms, and goals of the group. Slogans support group harmony by condensing group values and norms into simple and repeatable formulas that serve as moral and social guideposts. They tell people what to believe, what to prioritize, and how to behave without lengthy debate or individual interpretation, while creating an opportunity for performative declarations of loyalty and belonging. A recent study of Chinese commercial advertising slogans revealed that their meanings were rooted in traditional Confucian philosophy, which undergirds Chinese culture. For instance, the emphasis is on maintaining societal harmony by showing respect for others, especially those with higher social status.  A common slogan is “Serve the People,” encapsulates the moral mandate that individuals subordinate and sacrifice personal desires to the needs of the collective.

East Asians and other collectivist cultures have a unique communication style that supports the maintenance of group harmony, essential for collectivist cultures. High-context communication style conveys meaning implicitly through more indirect methods like non-verbal communication or ambiguous verbal messages. On the other hand, Westerners with an individualistic culture use a low context communication style. It emphasizes direct verbal messaging with explicit meanings that reduce ambiguity and increase clarity. Inter-group conflict is considered less undesirable in these cultures, compared to collectivist ones who avoid or mitigate conflict through this style. However, high-context styles can create ambiguity that people need to interpret. Thus, high-context communicators search the information environment for contextual cues present in that situation to aid in interpretation.

For the CCP, slogans are high-context, dense symbolic packages loaded with unstated assumptions, ambiguities, and coded expectations throughout the political discourse. The Chinese slogan, “One Country, Two Systems,” describes Hong Kong and Macau’s integration into China. Low context communicators would interpret this phrase as being relatively clear: two different economic and political systems under one sovereign government. However, high context communicators understand that this message is loaded with unstated assumptions and coded expectations like the freedoms Hong Kong enjoys is only tolerated as long as they do not challenge CCP authority.

Contemporary Slogan Use in China

The CCP defines a slogan as “Concise, powerful language forms used to promote Party ideology, mobilize the masses, and guide public opinion.” In contemporary China, research shows that slogans serve four primary purposes. The first is political indoctrination to help citizens adopt the desired version of the CCP’s Marxist ideology. While also instilling a sense of national unity, patriotism, and loyalty to the CCP. Many Chinese public agencies use “service slogans” that clarify how an organization’s employees should behave and communicate with the public. The second is social control through the enforcement of social norms that create compliance with the CCP’s vision of a harmonious society. By promoting specific behaviors and discouraging others, they function as instruments of social regulation.​ During the COVID-19 pandemic, offensive and negatively toned slogans using dark (gallows) humor were used by the CCP to demonize people who failed to follow government-specified safety mandates. These people were framed as harming the collective through a lack of filial piety, a sense of shame, and moral rectitude that destabilized Chinese society.

The third is public relations, whereby slogans serve as a guide to all Chinese communication professionals and journalists who derive themes and messages from them. This helps project a positive image of the CCP and its policies both domestically and internationally. Also, during COVID-19, Chinese communication professionals based in large cities had to contend with advancing the government’s health communications messaging for less advanced rural areas. They used CCP-approved slogans to develop health messages tailored to rural audiences. The fourth is cultural influence, whereby the CCP’s approved version of  Chinese cultural practices are advanced. For instance, they want citizens to reject undesired cultural forms like the Falun Gong. A slogan to demonize the Falun Gong as deviants states, “Be on the lookout for cults, build harmony,” which symbolically places them outside of Chinese culture despite the fact that the movement is thoroughly based in traditional Chinese culture.

More recently, Chinese scholars have advanced the “slogan politics” approach that argues that when CCP slogans are presented, they are not finalized policy strategies. Instead, political slogans are a method of engaging key domestic stakeholders within China in a dialogue to develop and gain consensus for ideas, as a tool for enhancing the legitimacy of an otherwise authoritarian system. Externally and in a communication context, slogans allow for the pre-testing of themes, gauging foreign public and elite opinion, which if successful could eventually translate in propaganda. Since slogan politics scholars discuss the policy and strategy discourse as a task for experts and other elites, slogans might be meant to serve more of a propaganda role for the common people.

Rhetorical Entrapment

The CCP’s three warfare’s doctrine attempts to employ public opinion warfare, to shape the battlefield in their favor. Slogans fit into public opinion warfare, which is defined as “creating a favorable public opinion environment to seize political initiative and military victory” through “comprehensively using all types of media means and information resources to struggle against the enemy.”  The CCP has used slogans to create rhetorical traps that would enable it to outmaneuver an adversary in the public opinion domain. Rhetorical entrapment occurs when a state or actor uses language that appears benign, moral, or widely acceptable, such as appeals to peace, development, or cooperation, but embeds within it strategic constraints that leave adversaries with no good rhetorical response. The trap works because rejecting the language makes the opponent appear hostile, arrogant, or hypocritical, while accepting it may require them to concede strategic ground or legitimize a competing narrative. When a targeted nation acknowledges the slogan’s language but refuses to align its behavior with China’s strategic expectations, its entire propaganda apparatus would attempt to influence and shape global media coverage about it.

The CCP could effectively utilize slogans as psychological warfare within the West by co-opting Marxist language to frame authoritarian principles as social justice imperatives. By aligning Chinese slogans with progressive causes like economic equality, racial justice, or anti-imperialism, the CCP could obscure their ideological intent, framing resistance as hypocrisy or betrayal of leftist principles. For example, slogans emphasizing ‘common prosperity’ or ‘collective progress’ could be strategically introduced through Western Marxist activists, compelling audiences to adopt CCP-aligned narratives under the guise of social justice. Utilizing the illusory truth effect, activists could be radicalized through the repletion of these propaganda tools.

Conclusion

Chinese slogans are not ornamental; they are strategic tools of political control, cultural signaling, and international persuasion. Their rhythmic simplicity, emotional framing, and repeated exposure foster internalization without overt resistance, normalizing authoritarian values as universal moral imperatives. To counter these narratives, democratic states must learn to decode slogans as rhetorical traps that structure thought and constrain dissent, transforming language into a weapon of ideological.