DING GUAN’GEN

b. September 1929, Wuxi, Jiangsu

CCP propaganda chief (1992–2002)

Known most for policies that modernized the CCP’s control over such cultural institutions as radio, film and television media organs, news agencies, publishing houses, artistic organizations and intellectual professional associations, Ding Guan’gen came from a distinctly technocratic background. Ding received a degree in railway transportation from Shanghai’s Jiaotong University in 1951, entered the bureaucracy, and rose to minister of railways in 1985. He resigned in 1988, accepting responsibility for major train accidents that year, but was rewarded for his loyalty post-Tiananmen by assuming control over the CCP’s propaganda portfolio.

As a member of the CCP’s powerful Politburo and Secretariat, as head of the Leading Group for Propaganda and Ideology, and as director of the Central Propaganda Department from 1992 to 2002, Ding ensured that state media and cultural institutions would continue to be the ideological ‘mouthpiece’ of the Party. He also directed campaigns to promote popular support for the economic and political reform policies of leaders Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin and Zhu Rongji, and as director of the ‘central guidance committees’ on socialist spiritual civilization and on cultural and ethical construction, he led crackdowns on pornography, intellectual piracy, ‘bourgeois liberalism’ and other reform-era phenomena deemed ‘spiritual pollution’. Finally, Ding modernized traditional propaganda organs through the formation of radio, film, television and publishing groups with major multi-national media corporation partners.

See also: state control of media