The term “Chaoyang Masses,” or chaoyang qunzhong (朝阳群众), is used by Chinese media, local police and internet users to refer to Beijing’s community network of public informants, essentially groups of neighborhood volunteers empowered to monitor their areas for illegal activities as well as breaches of moral and even political norms. While the Chaoyang Masses refers specifically to such volunteer groups within the Beijing district of Chaoyang, the term has gradually come to stand in more generally for such forms of mass mobilization for the public security (political security) objectives of the Chinese Communist Party. Similar district-based “community groups” (群众组织) in Beijing include the “Old Neighbours of Shijingshan” (石景山老街坊), the “Xicheng Aunties” (西城大妈) and the “Fengtai Advising Squad” (丰台劝导队). The growing prevalence of groups like the Chaoyang Masses across China points to deeper changes in the Xi era around the idea of “innovated” social governance, including the contemporary application of the so-called “Fengqiao experience” (枫桥经验), a Mao-era notion re-introduced by Xi Jinping.

From its modern origins in the 1960s, the notion of “public diplomacy”, which broadly involves the cultivation by governments of public opinion in other countries and intercultural communications, was meant to distinguish government-led international public relations efforts from the distasteful notion of propaganda. The trend in China in the reform era, and particularly since the 1990s, has likewise been to distance international public relations from so-called “external propaganda,” a mainstay of the Chinese Communist Party since the founding of the PRC. Since 2013, however, the re-centralization of CCP power under Xi Jinping and a renewed emphasis on ideological conformity have reinvigorated the focus on “external propaganda” around the conviction that state media and even quasi-private actors must work internationally to “tell China’s story well” (讲好中国故事), thus enhancing the country’s “international discourse power” (国际话语权) as a key aspect of its “comprehensive national power” (综合国力).

In the PRC, democracy refers to the Marxist-Leninist system of democratic dictatorship (人民民主专政) and democratic centralism (民主集中制), in which the CCP is the ultimate representative of the peoples. This political system of “socialist democracy with Chinese characteristics” is explicitly distinguished from Western liberal democracy, which is seen as incompatible with China’s unique conditions.