Not sure where this diagram originally comes from, but it turned up in my morning deluge of Tweets (with cuddly furry friend embellishment of mine)…
How does the Deputy Assistant Vice-Secretary of the Propaganda and Thought Work Leading Group cram his phone number on his business card? And how do they conduct ‘thought work’? Do they all sit silently around a table staring down intensely? Even more mystifying are the Spiritual Civilization Offices (in the plural – just one isn’t enough). This takes creepiness onto a whole new Orwell-meets-Vatican level.
The ‘organogram’ describes the domestic propaganda system. The offshore equivalent might include the following…
And, instead of the Central Party School, it would include an institution in Beijing (whose name I forget – possibly something to do with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs) that hosts Hong Kong civil servants and other innocent victims on short familiarization-with-the-motherland courses.
Someone I know who spent a week at this place a year or so ago was told in one class that Taiwan’s now-president-elect Tsai Ing-wen was above all else a spinster, and by implication a worthless and laughable waste of space of no consequence to anyone. In another class, the Hongkongers were informed by a straight-faced, matter-of-fact lecturer that, as a result of demographic and other trends, Russia’s Far East would become part of China one day. The attendees got the impression that this was self-evident (only clueless Hongkongers had to have it spelled out to them) and the day was due within a in-our-lifetimes time span.
The scariest scenario, which explains the occasional tantrums and other-worldliness of the official line: the leaders at the very top of the ‘correct thinking’ hierarchy actually believe the stuff themselves.
http://biglychee.com/?p=15236
