The conceptual origins of "brainwashing"
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Wolfgang Behr, "Towards a Conceptual Prehistory of 'Brainwashing' / xinao 洗腦". (pdf here and here)
In Jessica Imbach, Justyna Jaguścik and Brigit Knüsel Adamec, eds., Re-Thinking Literary China, Essays in Honor of Andrea Riemenschnitter. [Welten Ostasiens / Worlds of East Asia / Mondes de l’Extrême Orient; 40] Berlin: DeGruyter-Brill, 2025, pp. 7-66.
Introduction
When concepts and topics start to become treated as the subject of scholarly studies on the history of culture or knowledge, it is often an unmistakable sign that they have become a little bit dusty and deprecated, mentally encapsulated in a narrative of the past. This is precisely what has happened to the topic of “brainwashing” over the last two decades. A whole series of authors have approached the concept no longer exclusively from the perspective of a sinister present or a threatening future, but with the historian’s backward gaze into the presumed period of “origins.” Others have been less concerned with the phenomenon itself, but with its medializations in film, art or computer games. That said, the “further prospects” chapters by authors interested in the history of the concept throughout the second half of the 20th century seem also in agreement that the practice of enforced thought control at the heart of the term’s denotation is bound to continue. Although the “decade of the brain” (1990–1999) has already been over for a quarter of a century, they unanimously predict new twists in the painful history of techniques of mind manipulation, situated somewhere between psychology, pharmacology and politics. They also point to radically new dimensions of coercive persuasion in the age of the globalized internet and the ongoing digitization of everyday, even intimate practices on social media, as well as the boom of legal and illegal psychoactive substances, whether man-made or engineered with the help of artificial intelligence. All of this is happening against the backdrop of an increasingly unstable world order following the unequivocal end of US hegemony, or, at least, its transatlantic commitments, the widely lamented economic and cultural decline of Europe – a continent which will constitute less than six percent of the world’s population at the end of this century. Not to speak of the internal polarization of “Western” societies in times of media fragmentation, ever increasing economic inequities and post-pandemic disruptions. It is also accompanied by the rapid export of “surveillance capitalism” more sinico to the young global south and the rapid rise of the equally unsettling neo-authoritarian and fascist movements in the old Atlantic north.
The linguistic, philological, and philosophical aspects of "heart", "mind", and brain and the historical facets of the problem of its purging, plus the religious, physiological, and psychiatric manifestations of "cleansing the heart-mind / soul / brain", are examined in great detail, much of it quite grotesque and bizarre, in the bulk of the paper. The paper concludes with a lengthy, eclectic bibliography (13 pages).
Professor Behr presented a summary of the paper with many illustrations at the 50th Anniversary Symposium of the European Ass. of Ch. Studies held at the Collège de France three weeks ago. The slides can be downloaded here.
Selected readings
- Sam Roberts, "Harriet Mills, Scholar Held in ‘Brainwashing Prison’ in China, Dies at 95", NYT (3/29/16) — available in MCLC (Modern Chinese Literature and Culture) Resource Center, The Ohio State University (March 2016)
- Allyn and Adele Rickett, Prisoners of Liberation (New York: Anchor Books, 1973) — Allyn Rickett was the magisterial translator and annotator of the Guanzi; his wife, Adele, was the author of works on the poet, philosopher, and philologist Wang Guowei (1877-1927)
- David Cowhig, "Has Google Translate Been Brainwashed with Xi Jinping Thought?" (1/17/21)
- Wolfgang Behr grants
Philip Taylor said,
December 7, 2025 @ 6:38 am
Ah, the "European Association for Chinese Studies" — your "European Ass. of Ch. Studies" had me going for a while …
Olaf Zimmermann said,
December 7, 2025 @ 9:52 am
I read the paper. A huge "Thank you" for directing my attention to it. It's that kind of research that makes me feel glad to still have a pulse. (NB No sinologist I am, obviously; however, …)
Victor Mair said,
December 7, 2025 @ 11:06 am
You're warmly welcome, Olaf. I love the way you put that (having a pulse).
I knew Wolfgang Behr from the time he was a graduate student, and I knew then that he would have a phenomenal future, that he would make great contributions to the wealth of human knowledge, and so he has.
Perry Link said,
December 7, 2025 @ 1:57 pm
I, too, appreciate this erudite discussion of a topic that cries out for multi-disciplinary approaches.
The earliest use of the term 洗脑 that I can recall was in late-Qing when an ardent reformer was bemoaning how we Chinese are too set in our ways and can adapt to the tides from the West only by doing 洗脑 and starting over. Alas I can't remember who this was. I am 81, and Father Time has done his own 洗脑 on me.
JPL said,
December 8, 2025 @ 1:03 am
That's a very impressive body of serious scholarly work on a question that is of fundamental and timely importance (see the previous post on the Hong Kong apartment building fire), and I say that as someone who doesn't know Chinese. (I've been interested in this question for a long time, from when I used to read articles in the South China Morning Post about the citizens of Hong Kong complaining about the central government's approach to unification, especially their refusal to recognize and preserve the rights and freedoms Hong Kongers had enjoyed under the previous dispensation. When Hong Kong citizens objected to behaviour that was described in the articles by the English translation "brainwashing", they seemed to be using the Chinese word (which I didn't know) a bit differently from the way, say, an American would use the word 'brainwashing'. It seemed that their understanding of what they were referring to was much more definite and disciplined than what Americans understand in their use of 'brainwashing', and I suspected that if borrowing was involved, it could be from Chinese to English, rather than from English to Chinese, and behold, that is Prof. Behr's tentative hypothesis. From that I concluded that we in the English speaking world could learn a lot about how to identify and deal with the phenomenon from speakers of Chinese.)
In any case, I agree with Prof. Link that contributions to the question from all the relevant disciplines are called for. For example, a contribution from philosophy of language, especially the logic of empirical scientific inquiry (I want to locate the problem more in the area of praxis, than in psychology), might be valuable. In that light, I would identify the sentences in this article that (so far, for me) express the central question most helpfully as: "But how does the shift from ‘heart-mind’ to ‘brain’ as the object of purification occur in China, and when does the cleansing operating take on a decidedly sociopolitical, rather than religious meaning? When is the agent of purification not the self-perfecting ego any longer, but an outside coercive power?" (p. 17) Herein, I think, lies the difference between the Chinese political problem and the current American political problem, and the difference between the Chinese understanding of '洗脑' in the Chinese context, and the American understanding of 'brainwashing'. in the current American context.