The type of communication used by Chinese Cultural Revolution leader Mao…

Concept

Approaches to communication are named by who sets the agenda and how the audience takes part. The mass line is the method formulated in Chinese Communist practice and stated as "from the masses, to the masses": leaders gather the scattered, unsystematic ideas held by the people, study and systematise them into policy, and carry that policy back to the people for action, repeating the cycle. It is mass-directed and two-way, but the systematising step stays with the leadership.

Application

The stem asks for the established name of the method Mao Zedong used to address the masses, not for a general description of talking to a crowd. The doctrine Mao himself named and wrote about is the mass line, so the type of communication being asked for is mass line communication.

Contrast with the other choices

• Group communication names a level of communication - exchange inside a small, bounded set of people who are co-present and can respond to one another directly. It is defined by group size and setting, not by a party-to-people policy cycle.

• Participatory communication is a development-communication approach in which the community itself sets the agenda and controls the message flow; the systematising authority sits with the community, not with a leadership.

• Dialogue communication describes the form of an exchange - symmetrical turn-taking between two parties, each alternating as sender and receiver - rather than a named method for reaching a whole population.

Hence the named type of communication is mass line communication, the "from the masses, to the masses" method of Maoist practice.