Introduction -- People, poverty, politics, and posters -- Nature and transformation -- Production and mechanization -- Women hold up half the sky -- Serve the people -- Solidarity -- Politics in command -- After the cultural revolution.

"Dating from 1917 to the end of the Cold War, the posters in this book feature the work of such major Russian groundbreaking avant-garde designers as El Lissitzky and Alexander Rodchenko as well as extraordinary works by lesser known artists." --Book Jacket.

Provides an innovative reinterpretation of the cultural revolution through the medium of the poster -- a major component of popular print culture in China.

This book presents carefully-selected posters created from the 1950s to 1990s, and categorizes them into the following chapters: leaders, politics, International affairs, military affairs and national defense, economic construction, national unity, and cultural education. The characteristic artistic approaches in these posters will definitely provides readers with a unique reading experience.

In 1966, when the Cultural Revolution took hold, posters, ceramic statues, "Little Red Books," and other material objects were the principal means that the Chinese government used to communicate with the masses. As art and as propaganda, the iconography of these artifacts was used to rally the people around the programs and personalities of the Maoist regime. For graphic artists, collectors, and Sino-historians, they have a growing importance. With nearly 500 color photos, this book is an introductory guide to the meanings and values of the material culture of the Cultural Revolution, along with brief explanations of their historical background.

From the early twentieth century until the Communist takeover in 1949, Shanghai commercial artists created thousands of colorful posters and black and white advertisements that formed an essential part of modern life in the city. This visually appealing and richly illustrated work describes the origin and evolution of modern commercial art in China, focusing on colorful advertisement calendar posters that featured distinctive feminine images. It makes clear how essential commercial art and its institutional backing were to the development of modern art and even modern society in China over the past century. Selling Happiness discusses not only advertising art but also the production and marketing of the calendar poster. These posters, like other advertisements, were rendered in a Western realistic technique and were wildly and widely popular. Ordinary people throughout China often acquired them to decorate their homes. Laing outlines how the Chinese commercial artist, who rarely attended formal Western art classes, gained skills in Western representational art. In the final chapter of the book, she explains how the styles developed by the commercial poster artists during the 1920s and 1930s became the basis for certain types of propaganda art under the Chinese Communists in the 1950s and 1960s.