CHINA: Clifford Coonan reflects on the Chinese Cultural Revolution, which began 40 years ago today
In a small museum in Shanghai, Yang Peiming has gathered the largest collection of communist propaganda posters in China, thousands of powerful images of ruddy-cheeked peasants, powerful workers and soldiers, with slogans urging the masses to attack the imperialist running dogs.
The posters are a vivid testament to the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution, which began 40 years ago today and destroyed millions of lives, a catastrophic period of upheaval that is still off the official agenda.
"The Cultural Revolution is necessary and urgent for building socialism against capitalism and strengthen the proletarian dictatorship" reads a poster from 1969, with the figure of Mao Zedong looming large.
Mao's Cultural Revolution declared war on bourgeois culture, capitalist roaders and class enemies.
But many believe it was primarily a bloody purge aimed at entrenching Mao's hold on power and maintaining the cult of personality built up around him.
He had been sidelined politically and it was a brutal reminder of just who was boss.
"History is history and it's important to let young people know about what happened.
"It's important not to forget," says Mr Yang, speaking in the Propaganda Poster Art Centre, a tiny museum in two rooms of tiny basement of a Shanghai apartment block.
"I understand why nobody wants to keep these things. But I'd like to take this collection to the schools and universities, to give lectures, to fill in the missing parts in the textbooks," he says.
On May 16th, 1966, the Communist Party's decision-making Central Committee issued a document to start the ideological campaign which Mao described as "a single spark that started a prairie fire". The blaze scorched China for 10 long years until Mao's death in 1976.
Carrying their little red books containing the thoughts of chairman Mao, Red Guards, leftist students and schoolchildren, roamed the streets attacking intellectuals, forcing them to wear dunces' hats, beating them up and sending them to the countryside.
In a poster from 1968, a phalanx of fierce Red Guards, soldiers, workers and farmers push a dishevelled old man into the corner of the picture.
The man is Liu Shaoqi, who was then president and Mao's heir apparent.
The caption reads: "Drive the traitor Liu Shaoqi out of the Communist Party".
His comparatively moderate views and reformist economic policies cost him his job and his life.
He is said to have died after being beaten and locked in a bank vault.
Mr Yang's museum is not officially sanctioned. He gets around 20 visitors a day, mostly foreigners drawn by the posters' communist chic.
He sells some posters that he has more than one copy of to keep the centre running.
By some estimates, millions died in the ideological frenzy of those 10 years and China still bears the scars of the Cultural Revolution.
The legal profession was decimated during the Cultural Revolution, and it is only now that a young group of lawyers educated since that time is coming on stream and starting to introduce the rule of law.
Educators and scholars were forced to dig ditches and herd swine in the remote countryside and many never returned.
Artists and writers were jailed and committed suicide in their thousands.
Looking at a remarkable early print of a charcoal drawing from 1949 of workers looking with zeal into a new socialist dawn, Mr Yang points out the free style of the early revolutionary posters.
"From an artistic viewpoint, some are very good.
"The artists had to show respect, it's like the religious art of the 13th and 14th centuries."
A People's Liberation Army soldier with fire in his eyes holds open the hatch on the turret of a US army tank, a grenade in his powerful fist, above the slogan "Imperialists and their running dogs are all paper tigers".
In other posters, American imperialists are depicted as rats and mosquitoes. In another a little boy sits in a barber chair, cradling a machine-gun on his lap as a soldier cuts his hair in a military buzz-cut.
"Army and people are one family," is the message.
The dogma in China back in 1966 was that art had to serve politics and it served it well.
"Big-character posters," large hand-painted posters stuck on the walls of public places, were the traditional way of spreading propaganda after the revolution in 1949 which brought the Communists to power and they became the "struggle weapon" of choice for the proponents of Mao's Cultural Revolution.
In an event that was crucial in spreading the campaign around the country, philosophy professor Nie Yuanzi posted "China's first Marxist big-character poster" on a wall in the canteen at Peking University on May 25th , denouncing Peng Zhen, Communist Party chief of Beijing, and Lu Dingyi, the party's propaganda head.
Both were right-hand men of Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, who were members of the secretariat of the party's Central Committee.
Deng, whose son was thrown out of a window by Red Guards and has spent his life in a wheelchair, was sent into internal exile, returned to Beijing after Mao's death and as leader, began the process of reform and opening up in 1979 which continues today.
He stopped the cult of personality, put an end to the "big-character posters" and many of the other revolutionary posters were sent to the recycling plant.
The Communist Party Cultural Revolution was a disaster for China and its people, and it is often referred to as "the 10-year catastrophe".
However, any 40th anniversary commemorations have been banned and the party is holding study sessions and encouraging cadres to stress harmony and progress.
The party denies responsibility for what happened and Chairman Mao still looks out over Tiananmen Square and gazes up from every bank note.
The "Great Helmsman" is described as 70 per cent good, 30 per cent bad.
Mr Yang, a former tour guide whose own family suffered under Mao, says Mao was important to help rid China of foreign invaders.
"But afterwards he was worshipped like a god, and he treated society like a laboratory for his ideas," says Mr Yang.
The events of the Cultural Revolution are blamed on a conspiracy around Mao, led by Marshal Lin Biao and the Gang of Four, which included Mao's wife Jiang Qing and three other leftist hardliners.
"Today's China comes from yesterday's China and the people today want money because they had none before.
"The Cultural Revolution was a bit like an illness.
"But you have to remember why you were sick," says Mr Yang.