To Lead the Public and Shape Perception, One Must Entertain the Masses!: Teaching National Security Through Comic Books in China

 

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Global Times journalists recently published reporting on the ramping up of efforts by China's Ministry of National Security to more broadly reach out to the masses with respect to expectations for the protection of national security and states secrets. 

China's Ministry of National Security unveiled its first national security-themed comic series on Sunday, which is adapted from real cases of counter-espionage operations cracked down upon by frontline officers. In bright-colored pictures and with an intriguing plot, the first episode tells the story of national security police officers who outsmart overseas spies, which, Chinese observers say, is particularly appealing to younger generations and can better improve public awareness of the importance of national security.

The ministry on its official WeChat account released the first episode, titled "The Secret Special Investigation Division (SPD)." The episode features several excerpts including a scene where a person of Western appearance is being interrogated for suspected violation of the anti-espionage law. The comic series introduce several main characters. Xiao'an, an experienced scout, has six years of experience in the national security organization. Dandan, a long-haired female police officer, excels in wrestling. Azhe, who wears glasses, is skilled in technical tactics and enjoys bubble tea while working. Laotan is an experienced police officer with undisclosed skills. Tan, the division head within the national security organization, has 25 years of experience.

The first episode concludes on a suspenseful moment as the SPD embarks on a case at the Xishan Mining Area, based on a crucial piece of intelligence. According to the Ministry of National Security, the comic series is a salute to the Chinese People's Police Day that falls on January 10 annually. * * * Li Wei, an expert on national security at the China Institute of Contemporary International Relations, told the Global Times on Sunday that the comic series is visually appealing to teenagers and children in particular and the impressions they form after watching the comic series are likely to be deeper, which can better foster awareness of national security among the young generation.

In recent years, China has released multiple films and TV series in the national security genre, such as "Storm Eye," "In the Silence," "Enemy," and "Spy Game." All of these efforts aim to continuously improve public awareness of national security and bring this concept into the life of everyday people. Li explained that as both the international and domestic environments are becoming increasingly challenging for national security, the areas and aspects touching national security are also expanding.

 The idea is to foreground national security and the protection of state secrets in the ordinary interactions of people engaging in the ordinary course of their lives--especially, it might seem, when they brush up against foreigners or fellow citizens bent on exposing state secretes or threatening the national security in everyday life. Its effectiveness for its specific objective has yet to be assessed; it is far too early.  

 But its discursive effects  are quite clear; as are its semiotics. In order to manage public perception, one must embed the message forming that perception into ordinary entertainment.  This applies as much to movies with a "message" in liberal democracies, as it does to programming in Marxist-Leninist states where the "message" is meant to foreground selected policy or objectives. The trick, of course, under both systems, or with respect to any collective seeking to use entertainment for instruction and meaning management (through the narratives or tropes of the art form into which it is inserted), is to avoid the "inartful" or heavy handedness. There are times, though, when heavy handedness is precisely the entertainment that best expresses the message--for example in times of war, or in the course of preparation for it (however one engages in warfare nowadays).  Here object (the comic or film or whatever), is a means for the signification of the more abstract object (ideas, perceptions, "truths", and the like) that is itself manifested in the object. Together the form and its message produce a signification that acquires its highest form of utility to the collective when that signification is the means by which a quite strategic interpretation is also embedded. None of this is bad; and all is well known.  What makes for irony is that the appetite for such entertainment is that it is most effective when the message is so deeply embedded in the object (in accordance with the expectations of the form of entertainment) that it is both subliminal inextricable from the entertainment that is, when the message becomes the entertainment. The rest is just tedious education, and is unlikely to have the intended effect.  And the criticism of the form more tedious still.

The Tao goes on forever; we/wei--doing nothing; And yet everything gets done.

How? it does it by being; and by being everything it does. (Tao Te Ching (Man-Ho Kwok; Martin Palmer, Jay Ramsey (trans); Shaftsbury, Dorset: Element, 1993); Chp. 37)

And, of course, every fable needs to break out of its virtual worlds and burst into the lives of flesh and blood analogues. "China has taken into custody an alleged British spy, the country's national security agency said, as Beijing steps up warnings over national security and the infiltration of foreign spies inn the country." (Liza Lin, "Chinese Intelligence Says it has Detained a Spy Hired by Britain," Wall Street Journal 9, January 2024). This recruit, identified in the Chinese official social media outlet of the Ministry of State Security, as a person surnamed Huang, was specially trained and inserted into China. "According to MSS, the British instructed Huang to enter China as a representative of a consulting agency and send back intelligence." (Ibid.). 

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It is here the virtual and incarnated reality merge; it is here as well that the growing divide between Marxist Leninist and liberal democratic states will appear more starkly. The borderlands of these structuring systems and their legalities--the spaces that distinguish between information useful to business, information about business that may be required to be disclosed in furtherance of other policy objectives (human rights, sustainability, conformity to sanctions based limitations and the like); and the forms of organizations through which these activities are pursued (state organs in Marxist Leninist states (at least primarily), or private enterprises focused on markets in liberal democracies (at least primarily)--will become increasingly more difficult to rationalize and harmonize. And yet that is precisely what is to be done: "it does it by being" (Tao Te Ching, supra, Chp 37). It entertains--in virtual spaces; providing the (for the moment) 2 dimensional holographic memory of a reality that is then proven to be so by the proffering of a different sort of entertainment in the world inhabited by flesh and blood creatures. Everything else follows--fodder for the scholars, officials, and the security and military establishments through which they now appear to be meant to be connected.   Everything, it appears is in line with Dao. And entertainment is built into the semiotic intersubjectivity of the conversation between comix and the world made flesh. But its object--an aspect of its 'firstness'--is neither the comix (which is its signifier), nor the work of the security ministries aided by its national apparatus (also a signifier and object). Its object is information--or at least the idea of information--the significance of which requires the deployment of substantial energy by the apparatus of human social relations in the political spheres. One engages here in the intelligent naming of a thing which may be identified by its characteristics, and those characteristics are not inherent in the object, but in the object in relation to the ideologies which help give them form, makes them real, in the mind's eye of the collective. That, indeed, is entertainment.