Introduction

The government of the PRC recognizes the importance of disseminating political ideologies through visual means in public spaces. During the Communist era, the portrait and words of Mao, together with other communist imageries, were hung on the walls throughout the nation to inform and reinforce state-sanctioned political thoughts – a legacy still visible in some minor cites and the remote countryside. With China's reform and opening up, the steadfast communist imageries have largely been replaced by words and images that the government deemed more suitable for conveying its current political agendas. China's rapid economic development and its reckless urbanization in the past two decades have changed much of the country's outlook and the lifestyle of Chinese urban residents. Nonetheless, the ever bigger and more spectacular political billboards established in cities across the country demonstrate the government's continuous efforts in using visual representations as a means to regulate a society under dramatic transformations and to pass on new political directives. If anything has changed, it is that the government used to have a monopoly on urban public spaces, but now it has to compete for urbanites’ attention with the ever-inventive billboards from both domestic and foreign commercial brands in the age of global consumerism.

To do so, the government has largely adopted the advertising strategies of the commercial world.