As major state-run media, online influencers and propaganda pundits gathered in Shanghai in August 2024 for a conference on how to best innovate international communication, the event’s theme drew on a Chinese idiom, or chengyu (成语), with its origins in classical Chinese poetry. “Soundless Saturation” (润物无声), the four characters splashed across the conference’s promotional poster, a map of the globe faintly visible behind. 

This evocative phrase, which could also be translated “quietly nourishing,” references an early spring drizzle falling gently over the world. It is a colorful phrase that now describes the drive by the Chinese Communist Party leadership for more innovative and evocative deployment of state propaganda themes both domestically and internationally. The phrase expresses a trend in CCP thinking about the need for more subtle and effective means to disseminate and inculcate the party’s thoughts and agendas.

The objective of the August conference in Shanghai, which was led by the local division of the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) along with the government information office, was to discuss how best to push Chinese culture abroad and help create a “community of common destiny for mankind” (人类命运共同体). Attending the conference along with major Shanghai and national media groups was Fudan University’s Zhang Weiwei (张维为), who in recent years has been an outspoken proponent of Chinese “discourse power,” which he understands as the more robust global influence of what he calls a “Chinese discourse system” — a set of values and value pronouncements that are distinct from those of the West. It was Zhang who in May 2021, as China’s Politburo met for a collective study session on external propaganda and messaging, was invited to address the body with his views on the subject. 

One key idea to emerge from the 2021 collective study session was that the goal of communication should be to make China both respected and “lovable” (可爱) — a notion somewhat akin to “soundless saturation,” with its sense of the subtle insinuation of ideas, as opposed to their loud, full-frontal assertion. In this context, “soundless saturation” — which derives from a poem by the great Tang dynasty poet Du Fu (杜甫) about how the spring breeze and rain quietly rejuvenate the land — is a key qualifier for innovating the Party’s messaging at home and abroad, finding ways to more subtly influence domestic and global audiences that are more primed for the internet age on the one hand, and on the other far more skeptical about the bold value claims generally made in traditional forms of state propaganda. 

The values and messages of the CCP, in other words, should ooze and suffuse, softly working their magic on audiences.

From Popular to Political 

The four-character phrase “soundless saturation,” as a long-standing idiom, has plenty of everyday uses in Chinese life. It can refer simply, and poetically, to soft spring rains and their nurturing effect. Or it can refer to the positive impact that arises from solicitous acts, or the steady application of education, a common use that has appeared in state media through the decades (as in this piece in the People’s Daily in 1999, which referred to the sure and steady power of “civilized” behavior to instill a sense of public morality). 

Uses of the phrase in the CCP’s flagship newspaper over the years have often appeared in the context of public education campaigns around specific agendas — conducted so smoothly and determinedly that people are barely aware (or so is the hope) that they are being educated. Examples include the campaign on national defense education in 2002, and the push for good morals in 1996, both cases when “soundless saturation” was mentioned in related official coverage. 

Under Xi Jinping, “soundless saturation” has come to be used more commonly in the political discourse of the CCP, and can more often be found in close proximity to political slogans related both to propaganda and to domestic political and ideological education (思政), programs integrated with general education to ensure that students’ ideas align with the political line, values and discipline of the Party. In 2021, under the title “Soundless Saturation — Making ‘Golden Courses’ of Ideological and Political Education Courses in School,” the official CCP journal Party Building, directly under the Central Propaganda Department, explained that political and ideological education needed to become “more down-to-earth, touching, convincing and moving” in order to convince the next generation to work toward the idea of national revival under the leadership of the CCP, which Xi Jinping refers to as the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.”

When discussing ideological education, some state media outlets have linked the notion of “soundless saturation” with Mao Zedong’s remarks in late 1949, shortly after the founding of the People’s Republic of China, about the need to deal delicately with insurgents still fighting the newly-established nation. The aim, he said, was to unite with them and turn them to their way of thinking, which required greater subtlety of approach. “You can’t be rough with them, you can’t rain heavily on them, it has to be like a light rain in order to penetrate.” 

Discussing techniques of ideological and political education in 2018, the People’s Liberation Army Daily, the official mouthpiece of the CCP’s Central Military Commission, directly invoked Mao’s 1949 remarks and his use of ”drizzle” (毛毛雨) to explain the work of conversion and indoctrination. Torrential rain is feared and doesn’t get absorbed, the paper wrote. By contrast, a slow, voluntary process is more likely to plant a “green patch” in the mind. “Ideological work is about springtime and rain, about soundless saturation,” it said. A 2019 article in the People’s Daily, again on ideological education, called “soundless saturation” the “only way to be effective,” and the only way to truly open “the window of the soul.”

Foreign Affairs and People’s Diplomacy

As Xi Jinping delivered a speech to UNESCO in March 2014, during an 11-day visit to Europe, he used “soundless saturation” to describe the mutual benefits of cultural exchange between different civilizations. “Civilization is like water, quietly nourishing” (文明如水, 润物无声), he said. This use of the term was an early reflection of Xi’s penchant for using more classical Chinese phrases, seeking to give his communication an air of deep-rooted cultural wisdom. Nearly a decade later, Xi’s appeal to ancient cultural sources of legitimacy would become more formalized in his claim to having achieved a new form of human “civilization” (文明), central to the construction of the CCP’s legitimacy.

Following Xi’s UNESCO speech, the “soundless saturation” (or “quietly nourishing”) phrase was more frequently used within the CCP’s propaganda apparatus. In May 2014, Liu Qibao (刘奇葆), the director of the Central Propaganda Department, used the phrase to discuss the “going out of Chinese culture” (中华文化走出去), a “major strategic task” defined in the political report to the 18th National Congress in late 2012, as Xi came to power, and seen as crucial to China’s development of soft power. 

By the late 2010s state media were regularly repurposing Xi’s UNESCO phrase when referring to cultural exchanges. In 2020, a professor from the Central Party School included it in an essay for Seeking Truth, the institution’s policy magazine, on the importance of mutual respect and exchange between different civilizations. In 2023, it found its way into an article from the chief economist of a think tank on international economic exchange under the National Development and Reform Commission, who celebrated the Belt and Road Initiative on its tenth anniversary as “an effective platform for interconnection.” 

Since the introduction of the Global Civilization Initiative (GCI) in March 2023, the phrase “Civilization is like water, quietly nourishing,” has often been associated with the goals and spirit of the program, which seeks to advance what the CCP calls “international people-to-people exchanges and cooperation” based on the principle of diversity and mutual respect (essentially, cultural diplomacy), but which is also grounded on a political positioning of CCP-led China as a new form of modernization opposed to “Western capitalist civilization.” A special feature on the GCI published in June 2024 by Xinhua News Agency bore the lengthy headline: “Civilization is Like Water, Quietly Nourishing: The World Looks to China to Promote Harmonious Coexistence of Civilizations Through Dialogue.” 

For the CCP, cultural (or civilizational) dialogue is closely linked to what it continues to call “external propaganda” (对外宣传). At a forum in November 2023 on strengthening China’s international communication, Xing Hengchao (邢恒超), an official researcher, said that more effective external propaganda demanded that the CCP find innovative ways to reach audiences, that it “dig deeper into [possible] communication paths under the new media conditions.” Only in this way, he said, could the Party achieve “spring breeze and rain, soundlessly saturating.”  

The August 2024 conference on international communication in Shanghai illustrated one key response to this need for new communication paths for message saturation. The CCP knows that, given the new landscape of digital communication, an effective strategy will have to include not just state-run media, but also major internet and entertainment platforms — anywhere audiences tend to congregate. This is why invited speakers to the conference included even video game developers and representatives from Xiaohongshu (China’s version of Instagram) and BiliBili (a rough equivalent to YouTube). In the Party’s eyes, clearly, each has the potential to plant a green patch in the mind.