The China Daily, China’s main newspaper for foreigners (and read by many Chinese as well), has an interesting piece on their main modern dictionary, Xinhua (New China), which is in its 11th edition and has sold 400 million copies: 
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/usa/weekly/2012-03/16/content_14845579.htm

During cultural revolution, definitions & explanations were changed.  Here’s a few given in the article:

“For example, a sentence used to illustrate the meaning of 等不及 (dengbuji, cannot wait to) was previously “I cannot wait to go back home,” but this was changed to “I cannot wait to return to my work station."”
or
“Until the latest edition, the only explanation of “slave” had been: “People who had no freedom and were oppressed, exploited, and used as labor by the exploiting class in the pre-Liberation China.”

When I first visited China, one of the things that surprised me was that despite gov’t control, the China Daily discussed many problems in China, including pollution, AIDS & a myriad of other issues.  The paper also shows a willingness to look at curious aspects of China, such as the above.

Very interesting article. People must have bought those old definitions which allowed the mentality leading to the Cultural Revolution. Very Newspeak.

Not necessarily. I don’t know about the case of China specifically, but based on what I know about the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, people are perfectly capable of devouring propaganda without being taken in by it. It may very well be the popularity of the Xinhua dictionary in those days was largely due to it being an aid in spelling and recognizing words that use unfamiliar characters. People may have just snickered and made jokes about the definitions and usage examples.

“Until the latest edition, the only explanation of “slave” had been: “People who had no freedom and were oppressed, exploited, and used as labor by the exploiting class in the pre-Liberation China.”

I wonder if the change was necessitated by the 2007 slavery scandal in Shanxi.

Children betrayed their parents, and students their teachers, during the CR with no justification except believing the propaganda. Impunity was a factor. The Soviets historically had more exposure to western democratic ideas and may have been more sceptical as a result not that they could express it. Uneducated ideologues might have taken translations of Dickens as representations of contemporary capitalist societies but no one else did. Le Carre’s The Russia House is good on this - they love their poetical heritage and it is not a niche thing like in the west.

Social conditioning (they didn’t call it a cult of personality for nothing) is a much more plausible explanation for that than any kind of Orwellian linguistic brainwashing. And the penetration of the East German Stasi into society was the equal, if not superior, to anything achieved during the Cultural Revolution.

Another aspect of this is the Chinese teaching approach in schools that fosters one-way of thinking and inhibits dissenting opinions.  There is a great desire to change this & foster more creative thinking.

The paper has a section on English idioms to teach its Chinese readers.  They often use US gov’t press releases.  A number of years ago, they had one from NASA regarding “launch window”, a term that is instantly understandable to a native English speaker.

Something that made me laugh:  Today’s paper also has an article on new public toilet installations in a province.  The article notes that last year, the province built 40 public toilets last year, “six of which are classified as five-star toilets.”

Unfortunately, they don’t define “5 star toilet.”
http://usa.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2012-03/22/content_14889226.htm

My one experience in Chinese translation was sitting down with a translator in The Hague at the margins of the Chemical Weapons Convention Preparatory Commission and teaching him the English names for the parts of a chemical munition, like fuze, rotating band, and burster.

I only just became familiar with the term “fuze”. Thanks!