Surprisingly unknown to the Westernworld, but there is the salient fact of very successful cases of "brainwashing" in China and Japan which had, and still has, a devastating effect in terms of the issues of post war compensation between China and Japan.
One case that represents the "brainwashing" against the Manchus is of their Last Emperor, Pu-Yi.
You can read and see some glimpses of his experience of the "thought reform" in books such as "From Emperor to Citizen", his Communist authorised autobiography, and in the film "The Last Emperor", so I leave it to your option.
Another is a completely untold (to the Westerners) story of former Japanese Imperial Army soldiers.
Followings are excerpts of the accounts of two Chinese officials, one of them worked for Mao Tse-tung as an interpreter for 18 years. They appear in a special feature issue of the Japanese left-wing magazine called "Sekai" (May, 1998), on the cofession papers of soldiers mentioned above, that "found" in China by a Japanese photo-jounalist, who also interviewed the two Chinese officials.
In July 1950, by the direct order from Stalin, 969 Japanese soldiers were transferred from Siberia, where those soldiers had been kept for slave labour suffering from starvation and despair for 6 years after war ended, to Fushun (Fuxuan) War Criminal Camp, in China, where, by the way, Pu-Yi was also transferred to at the same period.
At this point, the soldiers' mental health had already been deteriorating.
Unlike the people whose experiences were cited in this Lifton book, the Japanese, as well as the Manchus, received no phisical violence. Instead, they were treated rather too well for their status of "war felons".
It was Premier Chou En-lai himself who had given such instruction in which the camp authority were ordered to treat the Japanese and the Manchus especially well.
Because panishing the "criminals" was not their aim. Releasing them as ideological advocates was.
In a few years, their "reform" were gradually, yet steadily progressing.
The first stage of the "reform" is: Self-consciousness of the guilt.
After the unsuccessful military campaign of the U.S.A. in the Korean War, the Japanese soldiers' hopes of being rescued by the U.S. Army was dashed, and as if they were clutching at straws, they became absorbed by reading Marx's works and Japanese proletarian literatures. Those intense reading and study of communism in groups made the "Imperialist" soldiers re-think their righteousness little by little.
Then, came a significant breakthrough when a Japanese officer did "Tan-pai" (Chinese word for "to recognise and to criticise one's own guilt, and to cofess them) in front of the whole Japanese inmates. A "confessions" of a soldier triggered everyone's "confessions" as if it was competition.
The inmates soon realised that the more barbaric crimes they confessed, the more the camp leaders were pleased for their "honesty" and they even mentioned their early release. Thus the gruesomeness of their atrocities escarated on and on... They called this movement as "creative study".
As the Chinese authority planned, all Japanese "war criminals", who "confessed" their terrible crimes such as "Three All campaign" (Kill all, Burn all, Rape all) and numerous massacres including "Nanking Massacre", were released and back to Japan where they formed "Association of the Soldiers Returned from China" and many of them still stick together to this day and are actively working as anti-Japanese Imperialism advocates.
Like Father Luca Lifton mentioned in this book, the Japanese soldiers are still in a state of confusion. They cannot distinguish the reality from their own creations.
And left-wingers who have used them in their anti-nationalist campaign just not allow them to realise that they were "brainwashed".
Maybe it it the communists themselves who were "brainwashed" by their own thought that if they are against the communism they would fall down to some "interectual hell", just like the members of the cult "Aum shinrikyo" who attacked Tokyo with sarin gas in 1995 believed.