The CCP has been prone to laud itself as the
champion of women's liberation. Right from the start, however, the
CCP-revolutionaries seemed to have had a dual, and even contradictory
approach to questions where women were positioned in the revolutionary
process, and this has influenced the way in which women were
represented in propaganda posters. On the one hand, there was the
demand from the Party that women were to be shown in their entire
liberated splendor, as conscious and active participants in the great
enterprise of reconstructing (socialist) China. The liberation of the
female half of the population had attracted a lot of support for the
CCP. Various policies the CCP had experimented with had been codified
into legislation after coming to power in 1949. But in the eyes of many
women intellectuals at the time, even these measures were not radical
enough.
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Old-fashioned artistic ideas about the
representation of women proved to be tenacious. By the early 20th
century, a relatively well-established visual tradition had come into
existence that treated women as objects that could be consumed by the
male gaze. Numerous companies, both foreign and native, had settled in
the treaty ports and the foreign settlements along the eastern
seaboard. The advertising agencies the manufacturers brought with them
promoted the use and appreciation of Western art techniques in their
advertisements. The advertising posters featured delectable young
women, beautiful actresses and popular singers in colorful and
tantalizing 'Shanghai dresses' (qi pao),
endorsing various products, ranging from cigarettes and alcoholic
beverages to fabrics and pesticides. The advertisments often were
designed by Chinese artists such as Li Mubai, Jin Meisheng and Jin Xuechen, to cater to the specific Chinese sense of aesthetics. Most of them were calendars (yuefenpai 月份牌)
that were given away as free promotional gifts and hung up in homes and
offices. This commercial printed matter became enormously popular, and
its influence spread beyond advertising to other types of publications
and design practice in general, where it became synonymous with
modernity.
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Even though these materials turned women into
objects that served both commercial and titillating purposes, the genre
as a whole nonetheless was seen by many as supportive of the demands
for the emancipation of women. Instead of treating females as
non-entities as Confucian orthodoxy had prescribed, the posters not
merely showed them, but presented them as gorgeously dressed,
professional women that radiated an air of self-confidence. To many,
these 'modeng
[modern]' girls were a reflection of women's search for a separate
identity. The supporters of the calendar girls thus included many of
the women who themselves were actively involved in the political
struggle for women's liberation.
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With the founding of the PRC, both the theory and
practice of the Chinese advertising industry had to change completely.
The designers of the commercial calendars, well versed in design
techniques and able to visualize a product in a commercially attractive
way, were quickly co-opted and incorporated in the various government
and army organizations devoted to the production of propaganda posters.
But they and their works continued to be regarded with suspicion by the
representatives of the new ruling elite. And even though the officials
from the cultural bureaucracy that took over had to admit that these
designers could make rather acceptable 'new' New Year pictures, at the
same time they could not refrain from allegations that their works
still were marred by numerous political shortcomings.
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While these cultural authorities insisted that they
did nothing more than pass on the correct proletarian viewpoints of
(female) representatives of the masses, they usually complained that
the artists still lacked the proper ideological standpoint. They
acknowleged that the designers dutifully attempted to follow the new
rules and regulations pertaining to the arts by producing scenes set in
industry or agriculture. 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.
These times, however, called for the depiction of
peasant or working women taking obvious pride in their work, but whose
faces and hands had been marked by unrelenting sunshine and hard labor.
In the views of the laboring masses that the art critics allegedly had
consulted, such images lacked verisimilitude: nobody in the villages or
factories looked like these women. Moreover, no woman dressed in the
latest fashions was able to take part in hard physical labor while
still looking as spic and span as the poster models did.
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When looking at the practice of depicting women for
propaganda purposes, it is safe to say that the 'pretty girl' pictures
continued to dominate the world of the propaganda poster, with the
exception of the periods when high Maoism was the norm. Was this done
in an attempt to make the latter's message more palatable to the
population? Or was it simply because such representations could be read
as a way of discounting women as revolutionary contenders, as
expressions of the widely held belief that women were more interested
in matters of clothing and physical appearance than men? Whatever the
reason, attractive female forms were used for political propaganda
purposes in a manner very similar to commercial advertising, a practice
that also has been noted by Chinese writers.
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s.r.landsberger@let.leidenuniv.nl
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International Institute of Social History