Illustration:
ill. 5.62 (set: 5.48)
Author:
Liu Heung Shing
Genre:
photograph
Material:
scan, black-and-white, original source: photograph, black-and-white
Source:
China 2008: China: Portrait of a Country, edited by Liu Heung Shing. Hong Kong: Taschen, 2008:62.
Courtesy:
Liu Heung Shing, Honk Kong, Taschen.
Keywords:
Mao Zedong, Mao portrait, Mao Cult, everyday life, countryside, private, omnipresence

Mao in the Countryside (Mao Zedong zai xiangcun 毛泽东在乡村)

Photographic evidence seems to support the idea that during the Cultural Revolution, Mao was quite popular—at least in one sense of the word—as much as he could be seen everywhere: in public at Tian’anmen (ill. 5.48 a&b), as well as in private at home (ill. 5.49), in the cities (ill. 5.50), as well as in the countryside (ill. 5.51, 5.62), in the factories (ill. 5.52) as well as at the universities (ill. 5.53, 5.63).

In all of these depictions, we can see images, photographs, paintings of Mao, the old and the young, or Mao the sun and pattern, hung each in a fitting size, at the most central and prominent places. But these repetitious images are not only representative to the experience of the Cultural Revolution alone. Here we see an old man having lunch under Mao´s portrait. Black-and-white photograph as evidence for the omnipresence of the Mao portrait, here in a rural area.