Posters In The Great Leap Forward: An Analysis Of Political Socialization

In the early 20th century, propaganda poster became popular as an art form in China. With the rising of national revolutions in modern Chinese society, the posters were added much political colors during the process, and gradually became an effective means of political propaganda. In order to consolidate the political power, the CPC put great emphasis on strengthening the ideological education through political propaganda after the founding of the People's Republic of China, and as one of the key approaches, posters displayed from an important aspect the characteristics of the CPC's process of promoting political socialization. Based on the transformation of Chinese national and folk arts and absorption of the characters of Soviet poster art, and with the full penetration of the concept of "art serves politics" posters attained the climax in the "Great Leap Forward" period. The "Leap Forward" policy and a series of political movements led by the CPC were exaggeratively expressed by propaganda posters during this period, and the political culture, with the Communist ideology as the core, deeply penetrated into people's ideas through the popular, simple and intuitive visual form of posters. Meanwhile, people's aesthetic standards and values were so strongly guided by the designing and expressing patterns of the posters that their thinking and behavior were gradually politicized. Posters'theory and mode of creation also got its shape during the "Great Leap Forward" period, and was successfully applied in the political socialization process by way of mass movement and steadily eroded the field of fine arts and even other art forms, which was the concentrated embodiment of art politicization.With the fading of the political movements, posters quickly faded out of Chinese history. Compared with other art forms, posters had a relatively short course of development and an embarrassing position in the domain of art due to their over-politicized character. However, for the CPC's ideological education and political propaganda, posters made up a very important part and their content and social effect during the "Great Leap Forward" could by no means be ignored. The composition and image building of posters revealed the CPC's political intention of reshaping the political symbols of the Communist ideology, redefining the identities, and rewriting the meaning of the "masses" through the method of class analysis; the popularization of poster creation exhibited the process of the CPC's applying mass movement to achieving political socialization:by giving the people senses of mission and responsibility as masters, their political behaviors were gradually transformed from superficial whitewashing of public policies to their own initiative. Thus, it is not difficult to understand that people's blindly unanimous behaviors during the "Great Leap Forward" were greatly due to the changes of their thinking and behaviors resulting from institutional factors. Just like the application of many other tools, the CPC went far beyond the reasonable limits when applying posters as a means of promoting politicization, and that was the reason why the process of contemporary Chinese political socialization turned radical and the Chinese people maintained an excessive political enthusiasm for a long period of time.