Avital Avina; Qiuyang Chen; Barclay Bram-Shoemaker
Avital Avina
Year 3 PhD Candidate Chinese Studies, University of Edinburgh
Revolution in Paint: A Semiotic Reading of Cultural Revolution Propaganda Posters and Female Motivated Violence (1966-1968)
Revolution in Paint: A Semiotic Reading of Cultural Revolution Propaganda Posters and Female Motivated Violence (1966-1968) This paper looks at one of the means of communication during the Chinese Cultural Revolution (CR): propaganda posters. This research builds on existing historical and descriptive scholarship by looking at the visual grammar and semiotics that construct the internal messages of the posters. By adapting the theories of Kress and Van Leeuwen (2002, 2006) that images can be ‘read’ like any other text through distinct visual grammatical rules, the construction of meaning is broken down into the semiotic categories: iconography, semantics, and pragmatics. These categories are then used to analyse posters from 1966-1968 and specifically hone in on the interaction and communication with the female audience and their motivation towards violence. Records of an increase in female perpetrated violence during this three-year period consists primarily of anecdotal and memoir based information; my research explores how this aspect of female motivational violence is represented in posters through internal constructions of meanings to add another angle to this heretofore understudied phenomenon. By looking at the motivation of women and the messages about violence this research attempts to link government communication and commendation of the violence with the ideas of a potential increase in females committing violent acts during this short burst of revolution in the name of Mao. The paper will present my initial findings and concentrate on the final of the three grammatical categories, pragmatic deixis, to explain the theoretical underpinnings of my research.
Qiuyang Chen
MA student in World History & Cultures, King's College London
The Making and De-making of the Iron Girl: 1960s-1980s
During the Cultural Revolution, the Iron Girls Brigade was the most conspicuous image of Chinese women, alongside Jiang Qing. However, attitudes towards the Iron Girls have undergone significant changed since 1978, when the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) started to distance itself from high socialism. Once glorified and modelled in state propaganda, the Iron Girls were quickly dragged out of the revolutionary pantheon and became the target of mockery. Together with the gender policy implemented in the first thirty years of the People's Republic of China (PRC), the Iron Girls came under criticism from multiple sources. The essay traces the making and de-making of the Dazhai Iron Girls in the early PRC and investigates the reasons behind their fluctuations, starting from the late 1950s to their peak in the mid-1960s and fall in the 1980s. The essay argues that as Iron Girls have been conceived as the embodiment of socialist state intervention or coercion, the public narrative and academia have long ignored their own voices, rendering them invisible and unrecognised in historiography and leading to insufficient understanding of PRC gender policies. In response to the neglect, I first explore the emergence of the term "Iron Girl" in the context of the general policy on women and rural collectivised agriculture in the early PRC. I also use memoirs and interviews of the Iron Girls to retrieve their agency in their unprecedented social advancement.
Barclay Bram-Shoemaker
Year 1 DPhil in In Area Studies, University of Oxford
“We let the objects speak”: the complicated politics of memory in China’s only museum to the cultural revolution
Comprising eight million items spread through twenty-nine separate museum buildings over a geographic area of thirty-three hectares, the Jianchuan Museum Cluster (JMC) is China's largest private museum. A museum to Contemporary Chinese history (近代历史) the JCM does something largely unseen in other museums in China-it attempts to present what it describes as 'the true face' (真像) of the Mao era and does not skirt the Cultural Revolution (CR). The purpose of this article therefore is to investigate how it is that the JCM presents the history of the CR, grounding the study within the literature of museum anthropology and memory studies to try to understand how the museum's intent to record the lessons of the past (记住教训) translates into the actual experience for the museumgoer. It will be shown that the political imperative to present history abstractly by 'letting objects speak', and the commercial imperative to ensure the museum's survival, complicates the ability of the JCM to achieve its aims. This is not however to say that the JCM is not worthy of study; in fact, it will be argued that it is precisely these tensions that makes the JCM such a compelling site from which to explore how the memory of the CR exists in China today.