thought reform

English

Noun

thought reform (uncountable)

1. Individual ideological indoctrination, especially that conducted in Communist China under Mao Zedong.
   • 1986, Lewis Okun, Woman Abuse: Facts Replacing Myths, page 132:

     Although working prisoners to exhaustion was apparently not part of thought reform procedures, hard labor is well known to have been utilized in prisons and concentration camps elsewhere.

   • 2012, Robert Jay Lifton, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, page 248:

     As a group, they could not show as wide a spectrum of responses to thought reform as the Westerners whom I interviewed, for they were all essentially thought reform failures.

   • 2012, Aminda M. Smith, Thought Reform and China's Dangerous Classes, page 1:

     Stuart Schram, one of Mao Zedong's most astute analysts, argued that Maoism's characteristic faith in thought reform was born of the CCP's dependence on rootless wanderers with questionable loyalties.

   • 2019, Robert Jay Lifton, Losing Reality:

     When I began my study of Chinese Communist thought reform in the 1950s, the Western world had heard mostly about "thought reform" as applied in a military setting: the coerced bacteriological warfare confessions and the collaboration obtained from American (and other United Nations) prisoners during the Korean War. However, these were merely export versions of a thought reform program aimed not primarily at Westerners, but at the Chinese people themselves, and vigorously applied in universities, schools, special "revolutionary collages," prisons, business and government offices, and labor and peasant organizations.