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It was only with the transition to socialism that capitalists appeared in China as a state category. While university students and labor activists had introduced the concept of the bourgeoisie in the early twentieth century to make sense of society's industrial reorganization, the Chinese Communist Party's expropriation of private industrial and commercial enterprise in the 1950s elevated capitalist identity to administrative-legal status. The capitalist status became a necessity when the government took the capitalist population as a target for socialist management and transformation. For if the dispossession of the bourgeoisie had put an end to its existence as a class in the Marxist sense, the same development required the bureaucracy to be able to identify capitalists on an individual level so as to find a suitable place for them in the socialist workplace and urban society. The history of how the government worked to define and solve the problem of capitalists shows that Chinese socialism was as concerned with the differentiation from an illegitimate past as with the reorganization of economic production. This dissertation finds evidence of this process of differentiation in the political and bureaucratic practices that targeted capitalists in the city of Shanghai. It argues that the classification of capitalists was not a high-modernist project forcing local realities into rigorous and artificial categories but rather the expression of a political effort to reconcile a socialist commitment to end the social injustices of the past with the demands of industrial growth and national defense. As the first socialist government to abolish private ownership while recognizing the bourgeoisie's historical entitlement as an ally in the struggle against imperialism, the Chinese state came to organize capitalists as a population with a liminal but legitimate place within the socialist community of production. Triangulating previously unexamined sources from state archives and research collections, the dissertation demonstrates how political and bureaucratic responses to complex issues of entitlement and belonging came together in a shaky arrangement that allowed the capitalists' inclusion in the community even as it reified their difference. Full of inherent tensions, this institutional arrangement finally broke down in the Cultural Revolution after widespread calls for more radical solutions to the capitalist problem. Without reliable support from the party leadership, however, these solutions proved no more successful than earlier policies. Only after the death of Mao did the leadership abolish the category of capitalists, closing the book on revolution and declaring the bourgeoisie a thing of the past---even as it enlisted former capitalists in its program of economic reform and opening-up.

"Usage of the political keyword "propaganda" by the Chinese Communist Party has changed and expanded over time. These changes have been masked by strong continuities spanning periods in the history of the People's Republic of China from the Mao Zedong Era (1949-1976) to the New Era of Xi Jinping (2012-present). Redefining Propaganda in Modern China builds on the work of earlier scholars to revisit the central issue of how propaganda was understood within the Communist Party system. What did propaganda mean across successive eras? What were its institutions and functions? What were its main techniques and themes? What can we learn about popular consciousness as a result? In answering these questions, the contributors to this volume draw on a range of historical, cultural studies, propaganda studies, and comparative politics approaches. Their work captures the sweep of propaganda - its appearance in everyday life as well as during extraordinary moments of mobilization (and demobilization) - and its systematic continuities and discontinuities from the perspective of policymakers, bureaucratic functionaries, and artists. More localized and granular case studies are balanced against deep readings and cross-cutting interpretive essays which place the history of the People's Republic of China within broader temporal and comparative frames. Addressing a vital aspect of Chinese Communist Party authority, this book is meant to provide a timely and comprehensive update on what propaganda has meant ideologically, operationally, aesthetically, and in terms of social experience"--