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5 - China Dreaming: Representing the Perfect Present, Anticipating the Rosy Future

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 February 2021

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Summary

Abstract

As China has developed into a relatively well-off, increasingly urbanized nation, educating the people has become more urgent than ever. Raising (human) quality (素质) has become a major concern for educators and intellectuals who see moral education as a major task of the state. The visual exhortations in public spaces aimed at moral education are dominated by dreaming about a nation that has risen and needs to be taken seriously. The visualization of these dreams resembles commercial advertising, mixing elements like the Great Wall or the Tiananmen Gate building with modern or futuristic images. This chapter focuses on posters, looking at the changes in contents and representation of government visuals in an increasingly urbanized and media-literate society.

Keywords: visual propaganda; governmentality; normative propaganda; Chinese Dream; Beijing Olympics 2008

Sometimes one still encounters hand-painted faded slogans in the countryside urging those working in agriculture to learn from Dazhai, or to energetically study Mao Zedong Thought. By and large, political messages and the images they use have disappeared from Chinese public spaces, in particular in urban areas. Yet, the production of these images, of what we would call propaganda, has not stopped; the government remains committed to educating the people, as it has over the millennia. Compared to the first three decades of the People's Republic, the messages have shifted to moral and normative topics, and their visualization has become much more sophisticated than in the earlier periods. This is partly because they have to compete for the public's attention with omnipresent commercial advertising, a point also emphasized by Meiqin Wang in the previous chapter. As Yomi Braester (2010: 270) has noted in his analysis of Chinese cinema, the distinction between state propaganda, art and commercial entertainment has become blurred; this also is the case with printed propaganda (posters). Many of the crude and blatantly revolutionary images have been commercially appropriated and successfully turned into ‘real’ art (vide Wang Guangyi and other less famous artists) (De Kloet, Chong, and Liu 2008: 24). Along with the appropriation in contemporary art, the increased media literacy of the population has forced those responsible within the government and party for moral and political education to reassess both the contents of and techniques implemented in their campaigns.

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Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Print publication year: 2018

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