Propaganda by Mao with Arts - Essay Example

25 November 2007 Mao's Propaganda with Arts To build and sustain his strength, Mao constructed his own forms of political edification and propaganda to reach a vast audience and spread his revolutionary message of peasant revolution, social equality, and character formation (Meisner 83). The lack of anything resembling an information infrastructure forced Mao to create simple but effective mechanisms to coordinate the flow of information, political education, information, and indoctrination. In this case, the absence of mass media, including newspapers, radio, film, and later television prompted Mao to turn to such alternate modes of communication as wall newspapers and posters to applaud courage, bravery, and sacrifice. In an effort to reinforce democratic principles, he even provided soldiers with a column in their military newspapers where they could openly criticize one another and the failings of their officers Art propaganda was based on the cult of Mao and his unique vision of communist China. As a charismatic leader, he directed propaganda to mass publics and mass media amplified political and social messages. Mao's art propaganda was a product of the more egalitarian, participant forces that emerged in the communist China (Cheek 82). Unlike members of mass cultures, who were almost wholly dependent on their leaders for propaganda, members of the popular culture have gained the ability to initiate messages as well as respond to them. The aim of art propaganda was to remold the individual (Brady 98). Art propaganda was a part of new mass culture created by Mao. On the domestic front, the new government introduced a system of rationing cards to purchase food, clothing, and other scarce commodities essential for everyday living. Curbing and eliminating social ills also loomed large on the agenda, prompting government officials to crack down on black marketeering, religion, and the sale of opium (Cushing and Tompkins 43). In the case of opium, the government imposed stiff criminal penalties, including the execution of suppliers and dealers. By 1951 addiction to opium had fallen off sharply, enabling the government to focus more on the social consequences of drug abuse and on educational and rehabilitation programs for victims and users. The most extreme of this art propaganda was that which went under the name of the new republic and new social order established by Mao (Cushing and Tompkins 45). Art propaganda was one of the most effective and simple ways to influence Chinese society and form national ideals and values. The propaganda was grounded in the needs of totalitarian society to create and exploit mass cultures. Art propaganda flowed from the leader, Mao, to the led, from a few to many, not from many to a few (Cheek 81). Posters and wallpapers were used to educate the peasants in the political process by making them aware of their political power and encouraging them to seize the land and kill their landlords. Following Knight (2002): "He [Mao] recognized and admired the revolutionary potential of China's peasants that had resulted from centuries of feudal exploitation and oppression. He recognised, too, that conditions were deteriorating in the countryside due to the economic effects of imperialism and the political instability resulting from the collapse of the Qing dynasty and the division of China between hostile warlords" (29). In fact, estimates of the number of counterrevolutionaries executed during the early period of Mao's domestic revolution range between 1 and 3 million people, figures that raised the specter of a government-sanctioned reign of terror (Cheek 80). Emotional appeal was made in every major section of art propaganda, and even legal arguments were fundamentally based upon emotionalism. The effort was constantly made to arouse fear and hate of the capitalists, and pity, love, and admiration for the workers and communist regime. A most important phase of this technique was the practice of exploiting idealism. The Chinese did all they could to identify their ideals and to picture capitalists' actions as attacks upon democracy.. The fact that it was especially influential among the highly educated seems to indicate that learning is not an impregnable defense against appeals made to the emotions. Mao looked beyond the land question into other areas of social inequality, including the role and status of women in Chinese society. Many of the posters depict women workers and mothers, teachers and peasants. Image of a working woman was on every poster and wallpaper (Appendix, Posters 4,5). Art propaganda recognized the basic injustice within a system that accorded "men . . . rights and women . . . duties" (Cheek 82).. Mao set out to destroy the patriarchal order of Chinese society and put an end to arranged marriages, the selling of wives, and the abusive treatment of women. True to his Marxist perspective, he also maintained that "genuine equality between the sexes" could be achieved only through a complete "socialist transformation of society" (Cheek 82). in which women were allowed "to own property, use their own names, . . . sue for divorce," and enter the professions. He also regarded women as a "vast reserve of labor power" (Cheek 84). embraced "the principle of equal pay for equal work", and sought to weaken the traditional bonds of the family as a means of modernizing the Chinese economy and encouraging greater geographical and social mobility within the workforce (Lago 47). Red color dominated in art propaganda, in all posters and wallpapers. A large part of the effectiveness of art propaganda depended upon its appearance of accuracy. The Chinese took care of this in the first place by utilizing as many famous images as possible. It did not matter what was the nature of the fame of the individual, for to the public an authority on one thing is an authority on all things. In addition to the appearance of authority gained by using the names of famous Chinese men, Mao was the main figure in art propaganda. In Mao's own words, he did not want China to "change color" or alter its revolutionary character (Hunter 101). To combat this tendency, he embarked on a campaign to imbue Chinese youth with the heroic sacrifices of the Civil War and secure China's "role as the vanguard of the world revolution" (Hunter 29). In addition to his desire to perpetuate the original purity and zeal of the revolution, Mao also hoped to build a monument to his own role as the living architect of that revolution. To accomplish these goals and recapture the original dynamism of the movement, Mao called upon China's youth to lead the revolution and denounce members of the new privileged elite. By closing schools for more than a year and organizing the students into zealous bands of Red Guards, the regime was able to create a new political instrument to mount a post-revolutionary wave of terror. Invoking the "class purity" of the Red Guards, Mao charged them with eliminating all forms of old ideas, culture, customs, and habits as well as demolishing the reactionary values of an antiquated educational system (Hunter 48; Meisner, 38). The method used to lend authority to the art propaganda arguments was the appeal to legality (Powers 53). This was supposed to have been especially effective because it was said that peasants base their judgment of right and wrong on the question of whether or not a rule has been broken rather than on the justice or injustice of a particular event. Although there is little validity to this generalization, it is true that the Chinese communists took every advantage of legal arguments. The communal structure also represented his attempt to reinstill the spirit of voluntarism and his own belief in human determination, "mass action," and "political zeal" as the means for overcoming China's lack of technology and machines and shaping the spiritual transformation of its people (Meisner 82). Though far from total, his retreat did place greater reliance on the role of party functionaries, administrators, and technocrats in managing the economy. The creation of socially and politically correct language produced conditions of art propaganda. Intended to rid population of old associations and introduce the new, they were a reminder of the need to revise their thinking about the newly designated object and to learn new words to describe it. Slogan and mottos were a part of art propaganda (Schram 73). For instance, the following mottoes were popular during Mao's era: "Chairman Mao is the Red sun in our hearts", "Carry on the criticism of Lin (Biao) and Confucius to the end" (Meisner 54). Art propaganda covered all spheres of life, including economy, politics, culture, and personal life of citizens (Appendix Posters 1,2,3). One recent writer has stated that "the art of persuasion consists largely in directing attention to those aspects of. . . which will influence the mind of the person to be persuaded" (Schram 32). It was this which the Chinese were doing throughout the entire period. Falsehoods were used, but they were comparatively unimportant. It was much easier and much safer to give warped interpretations. By omitting mention of good 'capitalists' or good actions by capitalist countries, these people were made to appear unregenerate. For instance, in 1966, the Red Guards relied on the use of large wall posters, personal denunciations, and carefully staged acts of public humiliation to vilify party, government, and educational officials and impose a strict puritanical code of dress, conduct, and political behavior, including prohibitions against wearing makeup, jewelry, sunglasses, and Western-style clothing (Lago 46). Liu Chunhua was one of the most famous painters of Mao's regime who promulgated Mao's cult and ideas in such works as: 'Chairman Mao goes to Anyuan', "Chairman Mao Leaves for the City of Anyuan", etc (Appendix, Portrait). Other symbols of counterrevolutionary behavior met a similar fate. Books and religious treasures were destroyed. For example, while stressing the need to promote spontaneity and grassroots initiative, it lionized Mao's personality and leadership and celebrated his stature as the "Great Helmsman." Featuring enormous public tributes to Mao with masses of people ritualistically singing the "The East Is Red" and reciting sections from the little red book of Chairman Mao Quotations, the staging of huge, monumental gatherings served as powerful testimony to the Chinese people's esteem and devotion to one man and his revolutionary legacy (Schram 54). For some, however, the virtually unlimited power Mao gave to the Red Guards called into question Mao's political maxim that "the party commands the gun, and the gun must never be allowed to command the party" (Schram 87). Using art propaganda, Mao tried to eliminate the influence of a book-learning elite was counterproductive for a society that was in the throes of modernization. By reasserting the popular base of the revolution at the expense of the bureaucrats and technocrats, Mao succeeded in stultifying creative thought, research, and scholarship, skills he himself had identified as critical for China's progress. Deng Xiaoping, observed: "No one dares to go near the laboratories. . . . Research personnel no longer read books". The same could be said of "artists [who] did not paint and actors and musicians [who] did not perform." Eventually, the chaos and havoc wrought by Mao's desire to smash "the entire party organization" (Powers 43). There had to be serious arguments for intellectuals and pseudo-intellectuals, exciting, sensational stories for those easily moved by hate and anger, dramatic and pitiful incidents for that great mass of people who wish to worship or to weep. Out of the idea that all arguments should be simple came the one most important technique of propaganda, repetition. To make a few concepts become an integral part of the persons propagandized it was essential to ring the changes on all the arguments upon which the concepts were founded. There had to be iteration and reiteration. The arguments had to be drummed into the consciousness of the people being propagandized with a never-ending repetition (Cushing and Tompkins 47). By placing the peasantry at the center of the art propaganda and challenging the Leninist persuasion and that of other revolutionary Marxists that the peasants occupied a secondary position to that of the industrial proletariat within the revolution, Mao struck at both the elitist assumptions of Leninism and the bureaucratic arrogance of Stalinism. Coupled with his insistence that the revolution must always combat revisionism and never cut itself off from the masses, these ideological differences defined the fundamental differences separating Maoism and Leninism (Powers 32). The same can be said for differences in military strategy. Mao, for example, allied with the peasants to win over the countryside, encircle the cities, and seize the political victory, while Lenin encouraged the urban industrial proletariat to seize the cities, fashion a revolutionary army, and extend the revolution to the countryside (Cushing and Tompkins 52). Government intervention, however, did lead to greater administrative supervision in the workplace in the form of "strict codes of labor discipline," internal passports, restrictions on travel, and the restructuring of unions to serve as "transmissions belts" for government instructions. Despite previous admonitions to avoid the use of compulsive measures in the formation of the public's political consciousness, conventional and unconventional forms of compulsion reinforced the practice of party oversight and the monitoring of political reliability. "Denunciation Boxes," propaganda campaigns, the ubiquitous presence of party slogans, loudspeakers, and the censorship of the written and the printed word, which "Mao controlled . . . with an iron hand" (Powers 43) continued to assure mass levels of political compliance. Over time, however, the combination of ideological fervor and Mao's enormous individual authority ultimately led to the emergence of a cult of personality (Cushing and Tompkins 76; Jiang, 34). The intensity of the cult manifested itself in the ubiquitous display of portraits and badges of Mao throughout China; weddings that turned into toasts and declarations in support of his leadership and the future of the revolution; and images of Chinese youth reciting from memory sections of Mao's writings and publicly proclaiming: "Long Live Chairman Mao". Mao reinforced this new level of political consciousness by inviting the peasants to participate in "speak bitterness meetings" against landlords and wealthy peasants, whose most notorious offenders were pilloried or executed, in effect putting an end to what remained of the hated "landlord class." The posters provided an extraordinarily clear example of the ways utilized (Powers 83). Art propaganda was an instrument of power, learning and motivation for the Chinese society. In keeping with the populist, revolutionary commitment that the land belonged to those who till it, Mao continued to pursue his land redistribution policies. Conscious of the need to maintain productivity, the government chose, however, to refrain from an excessively aggressive approach to land reform, which might have proven debilitating. The peasants, nonetheless, found the pace of land reform liberating. It also had a powerful political and psychological impact on their collective identity, injecting them with a new sense of hope and political power. Works Cited 1. Brady, A-M. Marketing Dictatorship: Propaganda and Thought Work in China. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2007. 2. Cheek, T. Propaganda and Culture in Mao's China: Deng Tuo and the Intelligentsia. Clarendon Press, 1997. 3. Cushing, L., Tompkins, A. Chinese Posters: Art from the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Chronicle, 2007. 4. Hunter, Edward. Brain-washing in Red China. New York, N.Y., USA.: Vanguard Press, 1953. 5. Jiang, J.-L. Red Scarf Girl: A Memoir of the Cultural Revolution. HarperCollins Canada, 1998. 6. Knight, N. Working Class Power and State Formation in Mao Zedong's Thought, 1931-1934. Journal of Contemporary Asia 32, 2002, pp. 29-30. 7. Lago, D.F. Personal Mao: Reshaping an Icon in Contemporary Chinese Art. Art Journal 58, 1999, pp. 46-48. 8. Meisner, M. Mao's China and After: A History of the People's Republic. New York: Free Press, 1986. 9. Powers, J. History As Propaganda: Tibetan Exiles versus the People's Republic of China. Oxford University Press, 2004. 10. Schram, S. Mao Tse-tung. Baltimore, Md.: Penguin, 1967. Appendix Poster 1 Poster 2 Poster 3 Poster 4 Poster 5 Portrait: Mao Goes to Anvuan Source: http://www.iisg.nl/landsberger/ay.html Read More