Illustration:
ill. 6.32 a (set: 6.32)
Author:
清华大学井冈山兵团 不怕鬼战斗队 编
Date:
1967
Genre:
comic, comic strip
Material:
scan, paper, black-and-white; original source: print on paper, black-and-white
Source:
Wagner 1990: Wagner, Rudolf. The Contemporary Chinese Historical Drama: Four Studies. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990:201.
Courtesy:
University of California Press Berkeley
Keywords:
Mao Zedong, Liu Shaoqi, Zhao Hongben, iconography, hero, villain, Cultural Revolution, Red Guards, revisionism, criticism, parody, radiance, sun, sunrays, fight, Sun Wukong

Excerpts from Sun Wukong defeats the white-boned Demon four times (Sun Wukong si da baigujing (jiexuan) 孙悟空四打白骨精(节选))

The early years of the Cultural Revolution saw almost no official publications of new comics. While during the 1950s several hundreds of new titles were published every year, this number went down dramatically and came to an almost complete standstill after 1966. It began picking up only since after 1970, when at first a good 100 and soon several hundreds of new titles appeared every year (Hwang 1978; Seifert 2001; Seifert 2008).

While the comic presses did not publish much officially, then, in the first half of the Cultural Revolution, a flood of comic strips and caricatures appeared in Red Guard newspapers and pamphlets. In February of 1967, for example, the Red Guard newspaper Jinggangshan wenyi (井冈山文艺) published a parody of Sun Wukong Thrice Defeats the White-Boned Demon, an excerpt of which can be seen here (see Wagner 1990, 200-204). Here, the white-boned demon, identified with Liu Shaoqi who was criticized as the “Chinese Krushchev” in the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, is defeated not just three but four times (孙悟空四打白骨精).