The Art of Wartime Propaganda: Chen Lin's Xi Written on Behalf of Yuan Shao and Cao Cao

Abstract

By the second and the third century in China, the strategic employment of refined literary language as a form of propaganda was highly sophisticated. The men at the center of the power struggles of the day competed not only by building armies and weapons, but also by availing themselves to rich arsenals of linguistic and rhetorical tools, which they deployed to help their own causes. While certainly different from modern forms of political propaganda, the propagandistic writings of the third century not only remind us that propaganda has a very long and old history, but also shed important light on how propaganda functioned at a specific historical moment. Focusing on the wartime proclamations—called xi 檄—attributed to Chen Lin 陳琳 (d. 217), this article raises the question of what aspects of war—assuming they were meant to aid war—these compositions were helping. Highlighting their aesthetic intricacy, it also questions why literary artistry mattered in the political environment of the time.