Mao's New World: Political Culture in the Early People's Republic (review)

This book is a beautifully researched study of political propaganda in the People's Republic of China during the 1950s. Hung argues that the top leadership of the Chinese Communist Party kept tight control over cultural productions in a range of genres and effectively ensured that they supported party rule. The book makes a welcome contribution to the study of the People's Republic under Mao, a new and growing field for historians.

Each chapter of the book deals with a different genre of propaganda: the planning of Tiananmen Square in Beijing, a set of ten major building projects constructed in Beijing during the Great Leap Forward, yangge folk dances, National Day parades, the Museum of the Chinese Revolution, oil painting, cartoons, New Year prints, the idea behind the Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery, and the building of the Martyrs' Memorial in Tiananmen Square. Most of the chapters have been published as articles, and because they stand well on their own, they are useful for teaching. Given the emphasis on major national monuments, the focus of the book is naturally on Beijing and the central government. Hung also carefully analyzes the exact role played by Soviet experts in a number of the projects, proving that their influence—in this field, at least—was considerably less than might have been imagined. The leadership of the Chinese Communist Party, Hung argues, was too nationalistic to accept foreign expertise on such important national projects.

This is truly a historian's history, with a strong emphasis on detailed archival research. But given the wide range of materials, the author inevitably uses a variety of approaches, especially in his analysis of texts, buildings, and images. In one of the best chapters in the book, dealing with oil paintings, Hung brings much archival material and numerous interviews to bear in his analysis of the images. Despite his general argument that propaganda makes bad art, he is clearly sympathetic to his interviewees, making it very apparent that they were genuinely committed to their work and that they had their own agendas, aspirations, and interests. Another excellent chapter examines the new reformed New Year prints of the period and discusses their popular reception. Hung looks at how artists attempted to replace traditional images (door gods, deities, and money trees) with modern subjects (soldiers, political leaders, and collective fruit trees). He then consults government reports from the time and data about sales figures to argue that these new prints were unable to replace the more popular traditional style of prints.

The book contains much comparison of Mao's China with Joseph Stalin's Russia, Adolf Hitler's Germany, and the early years of the French Revolution, but little with the earlier Chinese Nationalist government. Such a comparison would be illuminating, and Hung, who has an excellent earlier book on the subject, would be well qualified to make it. Nevertheless, this authoritative survey of an important subject will be welcome to students of the period.