Remaking China and the Chinese
Stefan Lansberger has been collecting Chinese posters since the 70s and by now has one of the world’s largest collections.
The Dutch academic has written books explaining and interpreting the propaganda, and this website provides a generous introduction, breaking the message and art styles into different periods and influences. He even identifies and makes notes about the individual artists.
The poster above was frowned on by the bureaucrats, btw — plainer women toiling on the land were preferred. The main point of the pic though was probably to show the Mao watching over the newly defined family like a benevolent uncle.
(In reality, would he have had two of those children killed?)
“In some cases, the artists were accused of tending to depict elegant ‘modern city girls’, with highly patterned blouses and scarves, pale skins and manicured hands, much in the vein of the starlets who had been shown endorsing soap or cigarettes.”
This was better:
See also Chinese Posters, a site that accompanies his book of that name.
