Visualizing New Republican China: Pictorial Construction of the Chinese Citizen (1912-49)

This dissertation analyzes several ways in which propaganda posters both drew upon and conceptualized a newly emergent "public body" during the Guomingdang Regime of the Republican Period (1912-1949). During 1922-1927, an alliance between the Guomindang and the Soviet Communists advanced a mass media campaign aimed at wresting control from a regime dominated by warlords and unifying the Chinese nation. Propaganda posters emerged at this time as a novel approach towards engaging with the masses and facilitating the state's organization. Additionally, I analyze and reconstruct the processes by which the Guomindang government and radical intellectuals utilized urbanizing, propagandistic, and filmic representations to shape and define the ideal of the new Chinese citizen. In effect, this dissertation interrogates and re-interprets Chinese political art produced between 1895-1937, by concentrating on the dynamics between mass media and national body politics. My dissertation investigates how the ideal of a modern citizen was defined and shaped through the changing concepts of time, urban space and print. Each of the chapters centers on a specific theme related to the question of how Chinese national political programs attempted to constitute, control and discipline the body of the modern Chinese citizen. By examining symbolic expressions in political imagery that demonstrate ascending political tendencies in Republican China, especially those produced under a one party-state model, I argue that political periodizations of Chinese history in the 20th century (i.e., Nationalist vs. Communist Period) have tended to obscure the inherent correlation and continuity between the Guomindang and the Chinese Communist Party regimes, both of which relied on propaganda networks and personality cults in order to maintain power. In the aftermath of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911)'s demise, China endured instability and turmoil as various political groups struggled for primacy. Under these conditions, warlords and factions thrived, and by the time of the Northern Expedition (1926-7), it had become clear that only rigid party organization with military discipline could achieve the goal of national unity. Therefore, a similar pictorial strategy was deployed in GMD-CCP political art during the Republican Period, and through the early stages of the People's Republic of China (1949-64).