'Wipe out reactionaries thoroughly and completely!'

It seems fitting that Shanghai's Propaganda Poster Museum is the city's least publicized, hardest-to-find tourist destination.

The three adjoining rooms, plus a tiny gift shop, are down a grey hall at the bottom of a bare set of stairs in the basement of an apartment building--one of four nondescript brick structures in a complex just off Huasheng Lu, a street on the edge of the French Concession.

The place is run by an enthusiastic, bespectacled man who claims the hundred-odd posters constitute the largest collection of their kind in China. It took him 14 years to amass his impressive array of luridly colourful testaments to 30 years of the Chinese Communist Party's propaganda campaign, and he's visibly proud of the exhibits. (For those into propaganda-related memorabilia, he also has old-school, ultra-rare magazines from North Korea. I confess I have as intense a yellowing-newsprint fetish as the next journo-nerd. But the prices were too steep for my kwai-thirsty pockets, and I stocked up on postcards instead.)

The posters on display range chronologically from 1949, when a flushed-with-success Red Army declared a new, utopian era in Chinese history, to 1979, when Mao's successor Hua Guofeng was trying to make himself the focal point in new, equally adulatory "big character" posters (the result is far less impressive). The trail ends there, when Deng Xiaoping ended the big character craze shortly after coming to power. The vast majority of the posters were totally destroyed after that--kind of embarrassing for a country in the process of opening to have hard-core Cultural Revolution, kill-the-rightists-and-American-imperialists posters kicking around, they figured.

The harsh anti-rightist and anti-U.S. invective was impressive, and kind of scary: The grasping, hook-nosed (come on, was that touch really necessary?) Americans look positively alien with their claws, scales and sometimes green-tinged skin. Many sport bloody bandages--from wounds obviously inflicted by the strapping, clean-cut Communist workers, parading across the poster armed with shovels and a look of determination. It's clear these patriots are going to boost the country's iron production or die trying. In most cases it was the latter--one minor flaw in that otherwise brilliant plan is that people can't eat iron.

In some ways, though, the less hard-core posters are a little like zealous public service announcements: Carry out family planning and birth control for the revolution!








The most fascinating are the posters that illustrate Party infighting--several called for the execution of Deng Xiaoping (you know, the guy who took over after Mao and is almost as big a name as the Great Leader himself) as part of the power struggle after Mao's death. 'Cause he was a rightist and counter-revolutionary, right?

It almost makes Canada's Liberal leadership race seem civil in comparison.

(Apology/disclaimer: I wasn't supposed to take photos and the posters were all under gross reflective glass, so these are all really crappy.)