The Communist Party of China used the phrase "Xi Nao" ("wash brain") to describe their methods of persuasion in ensuring that members who strayed from the Party message were brought back into orthodoxy. The phrase was a play on "Xi Xin", ("wash heart") a commandment found in many Daoist temples ordering the faithful to cleanse their hearts of impure desires before entering.
In September 1950, the Miami Daily News published an article by Edward Hunter (1902-1978) titled "'Brain-Washing' Tactics Force Chinese into Ranks of Communist Party." It contained the first printed use of the term "brainwashing," which quickly became a stock phrase in Cold War headlines. Hunter, a CIA propaganda operator who worked under-cover as a journalist, turned out a steady stream of books and articles on the subject. An additional article by Hunter on the same subject appeared in New Leader magazine in 1951. In 1953 Allen Welsh Dulles, the CIA director at that time, explained that "the brain under [Communist influence] becomes a phonograph playing a disc put on its spindle by an outside genius over which it has no control."
In his 1956 book "Brain-Washing: The Story of the Men Who Defied It", Edward Hunter described "a system of befogging the brain so a person can be seduced into acceptance of what otherwise would be abhorrent to him". According to Hunter, the process is so destructive of physical and mental health that many of his interviewees had not fully recovered after several years of freedom from Chinese captivity.
Later, two studies of the Korean War defections by Robert Lifton and Edgar Schein concluded that brainwashing had a transient effect when used on prisoners of war. Lifton and Schein found that the Chinese did not engage in any systematic re-education of prisoners, but generally used their techniques of coercive persuasion to disrupt the ability of the prisoners to organize to maintain their morale and to try to escape. The Chinese did however succeed in getting some of the prisoners to make anti-American statements by placing the prisoners under harsh conditions of deprivation and then by offering them more comfortable situations such as better sleeping quarters, better food, warmer clothes or blankets. Nevertheless, the psychiatrists noted that even these measures of coercion proved quite ineffective at changing basic attitudes for most people. In essence, the prisoners did not actually adopt Communist beliefs. Rather, many of them behaved as though they did in order to avoid the plausible threat of extreme physical abuse. Moreover, the few prisoners influenced by Communist indoctrination apparently succumbed as a result of the confluence of the coercive persuasion, and of the motives and personality characteristics of the prisoners that already existed before imprisonment.
Lifton and Schein also discussed coercive persuasion in their analysis of POWs. They defined coercive persuasion, in terms of a mixture of social, psychological and physical pressures applied to produce changes in an individual's beliefs and attitudes. Lifton and Schein concluded that such coercive persuasion can succeed in the presence of a physical element of confinement, "forcing the individual into a situation in which he must, in order to survive physically and psychologically, expose himself to persuasive attempts". They also concluded that such coercive persuasion succeeded only on a minority of POWs (only 11 out of 3,000 Korean War POWs actually converted to Communism) and that the end result of such coercion remained very unstable, as most of the individuals reverted to their previous condition soon after they left the coercive environment.
