Communication in the Global South must be rebuilt as a form of organized popular mobilization, distinct from the Western model centered on electoral politics, argued Professor Lu Xinyu of China’s Institute for International Communication Studies. She delivered the opening address on Friday (14), the second day of the Global South Academic Forum.
Lu based her analysis on three cases: the memory of resistance against Japanese aggression in China, the political transformation of a former Japanese war criminal, and the contemporary phenomenon of the “Cun Chao” (the Farmers’ Super League) in Rongjiang County, Guizhou Province.
The scholar recounted that her mother was born in July 1937, during Japanese bombing raids that devastated Xuancheng in Anhui Province. The family fled nearly 200 kilometers to an ancestral village, and the name given to the child, Zhu Yongping, meaning “eternal peace,” reflected the desire of people living under war.
According to Lu, this historical context shaped the Chinese communist understanding of communication. Citing Mao Zedong’s 1938 text “On Protracted War,” she emphasized that large-scale political mobilization was understood as a core foundation of military victory.
The second case focused on Ishiwata Takeshi, a Japanese soldier who took part in massacres in China during World War II. Captured in 1945 and later educated at the Fushun War Criminals Management Center, he read Mao Zedong’s works. After returning to Japan in 1956, he dedicated the rest of his life to the antiwar movement until his death in 2015.
The third example highlighted Rongjiang’s Cun Chao farmers’ football league, in one of the last counties to be removed from China’s extreme-poverty list in 2020. In 2023, the local football tournament became a national and online sensation, generating an estimated 70 billion online engagements, attracting 7.65 million tourists, and producing revenue of 8.398 billion yuan (about US$ 1.2 billion) in that year alone.
Many local residents received training to use social media to promote the county and its agricultural production.
Chen Xuemin, Rongjiang’s deputy mayor, explained at a previous conference that “development depends on the masses, the masses depend on mobilization, and mobilization depends on activity.” According to him, building public trust in local authorities was the first step in this process.
When floods submerged two-thirds of Rongjiang in June 2025, the mass-mobilization system strengthened through the Cun Chao initiative, combined with local and central government action, enabled a rapid response. The tournament resumed within one month.
For Lu, the three cases illustrate the same principle: effective communication in the Global South requires organized mass mobilization rather than simply transmitting information. Resistance to Japanese aggression showed how propaganda becomes material force when connected to popular needs. Ishiwata’s transformation demonstrated the power of political education over punishment. And Cun Chao proved that, 80 years later, the model of organized popular mobilization continues to deliver practical results in both economic development and disaster response.
“Unlike Western political communication, centered on electoral politics, the political line, organizational line, and mass line of the Communist Party of China constitute the basis of Chinese political communication,” Lu said. She described this system as a form of “party-based organizational communication.”
The professor contrasted Western “mass communication,” aimed at atomized audiences and shaped by market forces, with the communist practice of “organizing the masses for self-emancipation.” In her view, this takes the form of “communication-action-movement, completely different from the system under capitalism.”
Lu concluded by situating China within a “New Long March” facing new forms of encirclement amid global transformations. “The Community of Shared Future for Humanity is a major practice of communication,” she said.
The Global South Academic Forum, co-organized by East China Normal University, the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, and the University of Johannesburg, is held under the theme “Promoting a new order for the peaceful development of global information and communication.”
