Interpreting Power in the Political Poster‪.‬

Although the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) has been documented in numerous scholarly and autobiographical works, it remains to be explained in ideological terms, as an event constructed by various discourses circulating through Communist China. In this paper, I attempt such an explanation through an analysis of the propaganda posters of the Maoist government. First, I examine the attempts to advertise collectivized agriculture in the 1950s before moving to the posters of the early 1960s, in which caricature is used to demonize counterrevolutionaries. With reference to Mao's Talks at the Yan'an Conference on Literature and Art (1943) and a 1966 newspaper editorial entitled "Sweep Away All Monsters and Demons," I demonstrate that the posters provide a material connection between official Maoist philosophy and the appearance of this thought in the psyches of ordinary Chinese civilians. My analysis, based on Louis Althusser's theory of Ideological State Apparatuses, discusses the syntax of Maoist propaganda and the methods by which it was produced. I conclude with an analysis of the personal experience of Xiaomei Chen (b. 1954) in order to evaluate the extent to which propaganda is responsible for inciting the Cultural Revolution. A Framework for Interpreting Power in the Political Poster