War Leaflet: Mild Weapon Behind The Smoke Of Gunpowder

Sun Tsu's Art of War indicates that psychological warfare is better than army battle. Since ancient times, the war of human society was accompanied by psychological warfare time and again. For we known that psychological operations could demoralize enemy's fighting aspiration via information attack, the media by which information can be transmitted are very important. There are a lot of types of media like rumor, scream, fighting books in ancient society, and leaflet, newspaper, books and broadcast in modern society, which made use of word, picture and language to affect enemy's mind, spirit and movement with glamorous result. Among all those media, leaflet is such a significant one with long history and great power.In China, the research on psycho-rivalry media, mainly using text analysis without systematic case studies, is around the application of mass media in war times with little attention to leaflet. So, the reasons that this thesis chooses content study to make quantitative analysis on leaflets, are to disclose "what to cay" as leaflets' content and "how to say" as communicative knacks.Two gulf wars have the same countries which joined the battle, and face the same target whose name is Saddam. Twelve years apart, the scenes are so alike. Of course, history is not repeated. This thesis selects leaflets of US army during two gulf wars as the research object. And it tries to figure out the persuadable arts of leaflets, and the changes from the intention of psycho-rivalry in leaflets' content and making arts in two gulf wars. The thesis is composed of five chapters. The prelude is history description of war leaflets and recommendation of leaflet media. Chapter one includes researching motive, intention and frame. Chapter two to chapter four are carried out respectively from macro, mediative, micro aspects, with chapter two for leaflets' theme and target people, chapter three for appealing strategy and propagandistic knacks, chapter four for color application, word codes, picture type and roles in picture. The summary part contends war leaflets' revelatory function and enlightenment of US war leaflets to Chinese army.Although gulf war could be seen as the experimental site of US army's high-tech weapons, old fashioned war leaflets can still show their extraordinary vitality. Above all,future war attaches importance not only to sophisticated technology, but also to war leaflets as psycho-rivalry media.