“The East is Red” — Chinese propaganda of the “first seventeen years” period (1949–1966) on posters and in music

Abstract

Music has always played an important role in the People’s Republic of China propaganda machine; it served as a universally readable language that enabled the effective transmission of political and social content, and the integration of a multi-ethnic and multicultural country around the idea of revolution. In the Maoist era, when the so-called “Revolutionary music”, like in the Soviet Union color propaganda posters, accompanied almost every political event. These posters were intended to mobilize, inform, congratulate, inspire, instruct or calm people. In combining the visual and musical message, the Communist Party found a powerful, new propaganda tool, the impact of which went far beyond the methods used so far. Massive political campaigns of the ‘50s and’ 60s were largely based on this hybrid type of propaganda, in which the same message was amplified by various complementary elements. This article attempts to outline the history and analyze the relationships between the most famous pieces of the so-called “revolutionary music” used in propaganda campaigns, and the accompanying propaganda graphic illustrations: posters and covers of popular songbooks. Showing the relationship between the spheres of graphic and musical communication used for political purposes might allow a better understanding of the difficult and still relatively poorly researched history of Chinese music in the 20th century.