Even before the founding of the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, posters formed a major component of the communication and propaganda strategy of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). After emerging from the remote rural strongholds where it had gained strength over more than 15 years, it stands to reason that the CCP would devote considerable effort to swaying the population of the urban areas where it still had to establish its control. Paradoxically, this was not the case: while Party policy after 1949 drifted away from its previous fixation on rural China and focused on the urban, propaganda very much remained inspired by, and directed at, the countryside. (Re)construction and (re) organisation of the rural areas were stressed as desirable aspects of rehabilitation, modernisation and development, rather than urbanisation. Coupled with explicit policies to restrict internal migration, the rural was presented more frequently and as more desirable, in metropolises, provincial capitals, medium-sized cities, towns, townships, villages and hamlets.

As a result, the city-as-city served only as a stage, a backdrop against which a message could be presented, and only played a supporting role in the hegemonic visualisations of the future. Notably, on the few occasions a city did (or does) appear, it was (and is) Beijing, rather than Shanghai. The many posters devoted to the spectacles of ‘The founding of the nation’ (开国大典) and First of May Parades, or the song ‘I love Beijing's Tiananmen’ (我爱北京天安门) have less to do with Beijing as a city than with the symbolic and political centre of the nation, which happened to coincide with Beijing's Tiananmen. Likewise, the few posters that featured the skyline of Shanghai never focused on Shanghai as a city, but rather used it as a stage where other events were performed, such as demonstrations against American imperialism in Southeast Asia. But then, of course, Shanghai, with its colonial heritage, was a contested city grappling with problematic political issues and struggling to shed its image of a decadent Oriental version of Paris; its redevelopment did not really take off until the late 1980s (Abbas 2000).

With a few exceptions, the city only emerged as one of the topoi of propaganda after the reform policies took off, and the depoliticisation of society set in, in the late 1970s.