ANNA HESTLER
T
hey were young, of good parentage, admired and courted in the select circles of their social milieu. The richly provided life-style they led flowed like an endlessly serene river. How could they know that it wouldn’t – all too soon – reach its apogee in a tumultuous sea?
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Some calendar posters were
bulk produced, then pre-sold to a variety of manufacturers who in turn overprinted their products either in the foreground or background of the image. Printers were known to reward loyal clients with posters of languid, provocatively posed women as gifts for Chinese New Year.
The women in calendar posters did far
more than advertise products. They helped redefine the role of women and set trends in female fashions.
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As Chinese society became more liberal, advertisers spent more to
employ film stars as models. The highest paid performers never failed to command attention. Hu Die 胡蝶 (Butterfly Wu) was the most celebrated Chinese film actress in the twenties and thirties. Her multitude of fans in Shanghai ‘felt she belonged to them’. They queued for hours to see her light up the screen. Gossip about her sold newspapers and manufacturers clamoured for her endorsement to promote their products. 31
K
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eeping fit was an exceptionally novel concept of the thirties lifestyle in Shanghai. Women were introduced to archery, golf lessons and tennis, and even went horseback riding. The ĂŠlite joined the Circle Sportif, a French-run social club that broke with custom and admitted female members.
N
o activity was more liberating to the Chinese female form than indulgence in the more risquĂŠ pursuits introduced by the West, such as disporting oneself in beach attire or riding a bicycle.
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The Cultural Revolution With the start of China’s War of Resistance against Japan in 1937, China’s industry and commerce went into decline. Then, on 14 August 1937, disaster struck. Chinese pilots attempting to strike a Japanese flagship accidentally dropped several bombs over the Bund and some of the busiest parts of the city. Three thousand people were killed or injured. Panic seized the city. Shop fronts were boarded up and business came to a standstill. The British Consulate General staff fled from their office, and all the banks along the Bund locked their doors. To the terror-stricken population it must have appeared that the British were fleeing Shanghai. By December 1937, the Japanese had occupied the
Western families gather at the passenger jetty waiting to leave the treaty port besieged by invading Japanese troops. World War II began for Shanghai on 13 August 1937, on the day of the blockade. The following day is remembered as ‘Bloody Saturday’ when hundreds of civilians died when the Chinese Air Force mistakenly dropped several bombs on the busiest parts of the city.
Chinese parts of Shanghai. Surrounded on all sides, Shanghai’s western concessions – often referred to as the
advertise products made by cooperatives. The posters
‘lonely island’ – weathered the storm for a short period and
took on a completely new look and the themes became
calendar posters continued to be produced with foreign
patriotic. Pictures of women who wore drab green military
funds. The outbreak of the Second World War in September
uniforms and caps with red stars replaced the glamorous
1939 forced Britain to withdraw its troops from the port,
beauties so loved by Shanghai society. In time, the posters
and foreign governments began evacuating women and
no longer carried advertising messages, but were used to
children. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbour on
communicate the Chinese Communist Party’s vision to the
7 December 1941, Shanghai ceased to be a treaty port and
illiterate masses.
the foreign concessions were occupied by the Japanese. It was the end of a world of dreams. Artists were forced to
During the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), calendar
paint calendar posters for the Japanese and the models in
posters were used exclusively for the propagation of
the posters became increasingly Japanese looking. Some
political slogans such as ‘Long Live Chairman Mao’ and
artists used the posters to express political messages about
messages extorting peasants and workers to give their
the occupation, and works with themes such as Heaven and
utmost to the communist cause. Many aspects of everyday
Hell and The Ten Kings of Purgatory appeared. Some pre-
life came under attack. Shopkeepers no longer carried
war calendar posters were smuggled out of the city, only to
western-style clothing, and women stopped wearing
re-emerge almost 80 years later in modern Shanghai.
western-style hairdos. In bookshops, Mao’s ‘Little Red Book’ replaced novels and magazines. As the propaganda
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The city was liberated in 1945 and lived in a strange
of the Red Guards reached its climax, members of the
limbo during the civil war between the Nationalists and
intelligentsia were labelled as reactionaries and thousands
the Communists until it fell to the Red Army in 1949.
of ‘beautiful lady’ calendar posters were confiscated and
Calendar posters experienced a revival in the early days
burned – Shanghai’s beautiful ladies and a generation’s
of the People’s Republic of China, and were used to
dreams went up in smoke.
A Shanghai revolutionary poster
depicts a young combatant studying to emulate Norman Bathune, the Canadian physician whose services to the Red Army were extolled in the Little Red Book of Mao quotations.
With fire in her eyes a young
ballerina dances in a scene from the 1964 revolutionary opera, ‘The Red Detachment of Women’ which depicts the liberation of a peasant girl on Hainan Island and her subsequent rise in the Chinese Communist Party.
C
omrade Jiang Ching 江青, better known as Madame Mao, transformed revolutionary ballet into a propaganda vehicle, redirecting the talents of thirties Shanghai artists to an official toeing of the Party line. The very names of the various ballets were redolent with revolution.
‘Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy’, ‘Raid on White Tiger Regiment’ and ‘Red Detachment of Women’.
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D
uring the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), ‘entertainment’ was considered bourgeois decadence. Revolutionary ballet however, as in ‘The Landlord’, here being vilified by the ‘Red Detachment of Women’, was deemed appropriate. Entertainment became a ‘proletarian statement’.
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A scene from the ballet, ‘The White-Haired Girl’
depicts the downfall of class enemy and landlord exploitation. The opera is based on legends circulating in the border region of Shanxi Province, describing the misery suffered by local peasantry, particularly the drudgery of its female members.
O
n seizing power in Shanghai in 1949, The Communist Party utilised the propaganda potential of women to further its message of Mao’s class struggle. “All our literature and art are for the masses of the people and in the first place for the workers, peasants and soldiers.� Quotation from Chairman Mao.
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Emphasising suffering and
hardship by wearing a tattered and torn garment, a tearful Red Guard ballerina embraces the national flag in a scene from the revolutionary opera, ‘Dawn in the Motherland’.
Coquettish and provocative, yet coy and demure, the art-deco based design of the 1930s was perfected by fashionable young women in the promotional material of per-war Shanghai. Advertising and posters of the time defined the image of China’s prosperous iconic city. If the true power of advertising lies in seduction, here was a style that subtly hinted at much more than it revealed, even when promoting products as innocuous as lip-rouge, talcum powder, soaps, perfumes, cigarettes and the ubiquitous Shanghai movies. Many of those same artists of the 1930s were quick to obey the doctrines of Chairman Mao in the 1960s, continuing to utilize the potential of women to produce blunt Communist propaganda based largely on the all pervasive images of an idealistic Soviet Union.
ISBN 978-988-98270-0-7