The historical moment known as “The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” that lasted from 1966 to 1976 is today (some argue for a shorter period see Unger). This is a podcast by a historian based in China.
Two things made me want to blog about this. First is the death of celebrated Dutch sinologist Prof. Dr. Stefan Landsberger (1955-2024) who was one of the world’s foremost experts in Chinese propaganda posters and had one of the biggest collections in the world. Please feel free to check the fabulous https://chineseposters.net/ with a collection of 4,850 Chinese propaganda posters. You can browse through a Gallery of 200 highlights. There are 300 theme presentations, and you can search and browse posters, artists and check tags. The gallery with 200 highlights is just amazing. They do not cover just the Cultural Revolution but other key periods such as the War of Resistance Against Japan (1937-1945) for example.
Stefan Landsberger also contributed to an incredible book (Chinese Propaganda Posters : From Revolution to Modernization, 1995) detailing the traces of the style and content development of the Chinese propaganda poster in the key decade of the reform (late 70s and 80s till early 1990s) and the production of futuristic imagery promising a bright socialist future – from abstract SF-like cityscapes, high-speed bullet trains to space-age imagery.
The last two are particularly telling: the first “Foster a correct spirit, resist the evil spirit, resist corruption, never get involved with it” by designer Jiang Jianzhang (姜建章) and the second “Love the people 1983” Love the people (Ai renmin 爱人民) Publisher: Shanghai renmin meishu chubanshe (上海人民美术出版社) by designer: Xu Wenhua (徐文华). The first depicts a civil servant that refuses to accept liquor (bamboo wine) and cigarettes as gifts (Fuzhi zhengqi, dizhi waiqi, ju fushi, yong buzhan (员工规则-扶造正气, 抗歪风, 拒腐, 永不沾). Combatting corruption becomes a major policy for the Party. Funny enough to compare this with the posters devised by US-Romanian poster bombing guerilla advertising Mindbomb from Cluj in 2000s combatting bribery. Caring for the old becomes essential as the number of elderly people in China is growing (China joining the same trend as developed countries such as Japan, Germany etc.). They are not always cared for by their families or in their village communities anymore. This is becoming a new social problem and even a subject for documentaries and movies.
Secondly, Netflix dropped its adaptation of Liu Cixin’s trilogy, Three Body Problem – with that memorable opening scene with the Chinese physicist martyr of science during the “struggle session” by the Red Guards. This key scene plays during the infamous Cultural Revolution mid 1960s. Cultural Critic and cinematographer Charles Mudede picks up on some of those predictable responses to that scene from the right-wing reactionary international. In the diegesis of the Liu Cixin SF book, this scene somehow explains astrophysicist Ye Wenjie went full antihumanist and pessimistic in regards to the evolution of the human species (spoiler for those who did not read the book: she becomes a traitor facilitating the invasion of the alien Trisolarians). In the recent Michael Bérubé’s book The Ex-human: Science Fiction and the Fate of Our Species, Ye Wenjie perfectly encapsulates this SF of the ex-human, a perspective that reflects and looks back on humanity from a vantage point that questions human triumphalism and hubristic Prometheanism. After witnessing plausibly some of the worst Homo sapiens behaviors during the Cultural Revolution, Ye Wenjie decides to hand over the planet to the Trisolarians.
Now to return back to Mudede’s comments and quotation, I acquiesce that today it is absolutely ridiculous when the Musk-loving right felt absolutely validated after watching the Three-Body Problem opening scene, picking up on the Cultural Revolution to attack their usual targets (especially in the case of the US): a strawmen cultural Marxist, critical theory curriculum and mind-virus (?!) dubbed “woke mind virus”. This has nothing to do with the Cultural Revolution and just tries to equate social justice warriors with red guards, with the racist and xenophobe implication that they are castrating or wrecking the Western Civilisation. In our topsy-turvy world of capitalism, the actual wreckers of civilization – the anti-science and climate emergency denialists love to portray themselves as underdogs and ostracized commonsensical victims. Some of them semi-seriously speaking of revolutionary purges and Tech-Bro victimization (another case of reverse victimization):
TimeSpace Warps 