Abstract:

With the spread of Mao cult in the 1960s, how did the Chinese Communist Party monopolize resources to make Mao’s iconographies into tons of copies? In fact, it was the publishing and printing industry built up in the 1950s which provided a cultural and economic foundation for the wanton production of Mao’s iconographies during the Cultural Revolution. The CCP promoted Mao as their leader from the late 1930s and explored a rough but efficient model of making Mao’s iconographies by various forms in Yan’an. However, when the CCP came into the cities in 1949 as the occupier, they found that private publishers, booksellers, and artisans were also proactive about this propaganda work because it was a profitable industry. Furthermore, most of the leaders’ portraits shown in public had countless mistakes and were displayed randomly. Therefore, the CCP propaganda department made standards and built a censorship system from 1949 to 1952. Then from 1953, the central government issued a series against new policies of private publishers and shopkeepers who supplied leaders’ portraits to the market. Eventually, the “socialist transformation” (shehuizhuyi gaizao) from 1953 to 1956 ended the production of Mao’s portraits as a business of private makers. The making of Mao’s iconographies by private corporations in early PRC period disappeared so fast that it has been ignored by scholars for a long time. Scholars who attempt to clarify the popularization of Mao cult should scrutinize how the CCP seized the “cultural capital” by absorbing private cultural industry in the 1950s. By tracing the evolution of making Mao’s iconographies from 1937 to 1956, this thesis attempts to provide a new perpspective to reexamine the origins of Mao cult.