Illustration:
ill. 4.14 c (set: 4.14)
Date:
1953
Genre:
illustration, drawing
Material:
scan, paper, black-and-white
Source:
Tongsubao 通俗报, No.45, April 15, 1953.
Keywords:
Marriage Law, red sun, radiance, peasants, countryside, Mao's writings

Radiating Books: the Marriage Law

There was a relative dearth of Mao's works on the market since 1982--due to some of the destructions of Maoist writings in the early 1980s and restrictions in their republication (Barmé 1996:10). The book with Mao's writings also disappears as a symbol from visual evidence throughout the 1980s and 1990s. There are only rare examples of books being held up, radiating like a sun in propaganda posters and other visual materials from this period. If found, there is one significant difference to Cultural Revolution practice which in itself continues what had been prevalent in the 1950s and early 1960s: Mao and his works are no longer exclusive heroes. As had been the case in the 1950s and into the early 1960s, in the 1980s and 90s Marx and Lenin's books, too, or, like here even a new marriage law, not just Mao's writings alone, may be seen to emanate sunrays.