Brainwashing: what is it and how effective can it be?
The term, which originates from a Chinese phrase, is now applied to prison camps in North Korea, cults and controversy over national education in Hong Kong
“Brainwashing” is a term which is used very liberally.
In former cult member Alexandra Stein’s groundbreaking book, Terror, Love and Brainwashing: Attachment in Cults and Totalitarian Systems (2016), she explained how the term had evolved from the Chinese word xinao (which literally translates as “wash brain”) during commentaries about prisoner-of-war camps in early communist China and North Korea.
She said it referred to when regimes “used methods of indoctrination to neutralise opponents of the regime, and in many cases, convert them to sometimes enthusiastic support”.
She further explained how “a cult employs brainwashing in its efforts to keep members under its control”.
But closely linked to “brainwashing”, she said, a cult may use techniques we could term as “coercive persuasion”, “mind control” and “thought reform”. There are therefore various degrees of controlling human thought.
Most recently in Hong Kong, government critics have continued to condemn the growing emphasis on “national education” in the city’s schools as a “brainwashing” exercise, because it actively persuades children from kindergarten onwards to embrace their Chinese identity and be patriotic to mainland China.
