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The OED records its earliest known English-language usage of “brainwashing“ by Edward Hunter in New Leader on 7 October 1950. During the Korean War, Hunter, who was working both as a journalist and a U.S. intelligence agent, turned out a steady stream of books and articles on the theme of Chinese brainwashing. The Chinese term (xi nao, literally “wash brain“) originally referred to methodologies of coercive persuasion used in the (gai zào, “reconstruction“, “change“, “altering“) of the so-called feudal ( feng jiàn) thought-patterns of pre-revolutionary Chinese citizens. The goal of the Maoist regime in China was to transform an individual with a “feudal“ or capitalist mindset into a “right-thinking“ member of the new social system. To that end they developed techniques that would break down the psychic integrity of the individual with regard to information processing, information retained in the mind and individual values. Chosen
