Arts and Design

The Sleeping Giant: how Chinese posters pushed products and propaganda


Made in China has become shorthand for mass production and cheap labor but now, with the impact of the coronavirus, which may cost the global economy $1.1tn in lost income, this stronghold may not be quite the same.

Even with the spread of disease, China is urging roughly 300m migrant workers to return to their jobs. It’s a timely moment to look back at the history of the Chinese economy with The Sleeping Giant: Posters & The Chinese Economy, a new exhibition featuring over 50 posters from the 1920s to the early 2000s, covering a century of poster design – everything from products to political propaganda.

“Everyone knows that the Chinese economy, and trade with China, are hot button issues,” said Angelina Lippert, chief curator of the Poster House in Manhattan. “But this show explains its backstory; a lot of the posters illustrate how the Chinese economy got to where it is today. Economic and trade policy are narratives in these posters.”

The exhibition, curated by Steffi Duarte, details how foreign companies expanded into the Chinese market, how Mao Zedong used socialist realism to get through to Chinese citizens and the latest wave of Chinese design.

“We didn’t want to do just a Chinese poster show, so many of these posters talk about the influence of foreign trade or the reaction to foreign trade,” adds Lippert. “You see them push western products into China, in some cases it worked, others, it didn’t. When communism came to power, they rejected all of that.”

The earliest posters in the show advertise soap, candles, fabric dye and even a few rather out-of-place, misguided tobacco ads featuring babies and children. They’re all marked with a pastel palette, glamorous women and utopian teatime – very Victorian, very Versailles. It stems from the “yuefenpai” (calendar posters), which promoted everyday products, dressed in luxury.

The Rat Cigarettes, 1938



The Rat Cigarettes, 1938 Photograph: Robert Feliciano/Xie Zhiguang

“They used demure, gorgeous women in high fashion to advertise condensed milk,” said Lippert. “They missed the whole avant-garde era, the revolutionary European art movements in the 1920s, and got the whole ‘when everything is controlled’ art movement, which is fascinating.”

Things take a dark turn in the late 1930s, with a collection of violent military posters ahead of the second Sino-Japanese war, one which reads: Military First — Victory First.

Things took an even stranger turn in 1949, when Mao Zedong came into power, as Chinese posters were made with overt overtones of soviet socialist realism. One from 1977 shows a countryside worker, bearing the phrase: Hard Work and Innovation are Rooted in the Countryside.

“This idealized pro-countryside worker aesthetic that’s very rah-rah worker,” said Lippert. “It isn’t acknowledging that the people pictured wouldn’t be that strong, they would be half their body weight, starving.”

Unite to Fight and Accelerate the Construction of Districts on the Dazhai Model



Unite to Fight and Accelerate the Construction of Districts on the Dazhai Model Photograph: Robert Feliciano/Collective of Jin Xian Worker-Peasants’ Propaganda Team & Yan Chengfu

The Soviet-inspired posters – an aesthetic trailblazed by the Sternberg brothers – continued in China throughout the 1950s, illustrating the country’s friendship with the Soviet Union. One sealed with a handshake, reads: “With the Great Support of the Soviet Union, and Our Own Greatest Strength, We Will Realize the Industrialization of Our Nation Step by Step!”

Even still, presenting a show that includes Mao was complicated. His face is only in two posters and one wall piece as part of a century-long timeline. “In the posters, he is surrounded by adoring fans and citizens,” said Lippert. “His cult of personality was very comparable to Stalin’s, making him into a God or savior of humanity.”

There’s an important objective behind how these posters are presented within the exhibition. “We didn’t want to glorify this time period,” said Lippert. “We think of Stalin and Lenin as these horrible bad dictators, but Mao was given a pop culture appeal through Andy Warhol prints, but would Warhol do a silkscreen of Hitler? Probably not, but just as many people died under Mao.”

The aesthetic continued even after the Sino-Soviet split, throughout the Cultural Revolution and after Mao’s death in 1976. “This time period is selling an ideology, not products,” said Lippert. “Beauty and sex appeal sold the 1920 products, the 1950s ideologies were sold by fear, camaraderie and violence.”

The posters may represent a bygone era, but they also reflect today’s North Korean propaganda posters, which are militaristic, anti-American and detail a fanatic devotion to the state.

The American Nuclear Bomb is Nothing but a Paper Tiger



The American Nuclear Bomb is Nothing but a Paper Tiger Photograph: Robert Feliciano/Designer unknown

“A lot of it is glorifying the soviet feel,” said Lippert. “Stalinist soviet realism is idealized, ruddy-faced peasentry, everyone was strong, smiling and happy. All of them are anti-America, anti-capitalist.”

“Today, we see it as campier,” she adds. “It made everything seem ideal, but millions of people were dying of famine at this time.”

In the posters from the 1960s and 1970s, one features a soldier in a red landscape in 1963, declaring: “American Imperialism Must be Driven Out of Southern Vietnam!” Another, from 1972, echoes the same anti-American sentiment: “The American Nuclear Bomb is Nothing but a Paper Tiger.”

In many, a group of smiling citizens hold up their Little Red Books, the citizen’s guidebook distributed across China during the Cultural Revolution, between 1964 and 1976. The poster reads: “Long Live Chairman Mao!”

The last leg of the exhibition, recent posters from the 1990s and 2000, is decidedly less interesting. With a minimalist aesthetic, they advertise Chinese art and design expos, classical concerts and logo festivals. But resistance remains.

“Hong Kong is still part of communism because still controlled by China,” said Lippert. “Then, you end up with the protests that are happening today. It’s still ongoing.”



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