Thought Remolding and “Brainwashing”

Thought remolding is also referred to as xi’nao, or “brainwashing.” Many Chinese people consider the Chinese term xi’nao to have originated from the English word “brainwashing.” In the preface to her novel Bathing [Xizao], Yang Jiang remarks that the term xi’nao is of Western derivation (a view that I formerly held as well). Even Mao Zedong assigned xi’nao's patent rights to the Americans. Taking a slightly different tack, the scholar Liu Qingfeng viewed xi’nao as something that happened in the U.S.S.R. and was not all that similar to Chinese thought remolding.

However, some Westerners have insisted that what xi’nao refers to is none other than Chinese thought remolding. In 1951, the American journalist Edward Hunter wrote a book entitled “Brainwashing” in Red China. In 1956, Hunter came out with another book entitled Brainwashing. The American psychologist Robert Jay Lifton also used the term xi’nao on many occasions in his 1969 study, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism. We can see from these examples that the Chinese term for “brainwashing” is not actually an imported item, but is instead an example of “goods for export that have been sold back to the home market.”

Admittedly, we have never come across the term xi’nao in any of the Chinese Communists’ formal documents, articles, or speeches. Nonetheless, everyone is already familiar with similar phraseology. For example, the politically charged term xizao [bathing] was popular as early as the 1950s (the subject of Yang Jiang's Bathing is none other than the thought remolding of the intelligentsia during the early 1950s). During the “Four Clean-ups” political campaign of the 1960s, a common nostrum was “Cadres go upstairs to wash their hands and bathe.” One can infer that xi’nao or “brainwashing” originated from this type of campaign, and while this term did not get written down in formal documents, it nevertheless was a popular oral usage. The amusing thing is that the Chinese Communists themselves seem not very fond of the term xi’nao. Were we to look into the reason for this state of affairs, perhaps it is because the term xi’nao became popular through the Americans’ critique of thought remolding, which thus caused the term to be tarnished by suspicions about a certain variety of “anti-communism.” Yet in all fairness, “brainwashing” and this special connotation of “bathing” signify similar phenomena.