Contemporary Chinese Visual Culture: Tradition, Modernity, and Gl ...

materialism and a revolutionary approach to cultural transformation. This does not, however, mean that tradition was uniformly dismissed by the young communist state in its early manifestation. To ensure the success of the republic’s early reforms, the communist state apparatus promoted a form of ‘Confucian communism’ (Ikeo, 1996, p. 179) that relied on traditional views of personal responsibility, loyalty, discipline, thrift, and education to cement a feeling of national solidarity in the young socialist republic.

Mao Zedong was the first chairman of the People’s Republic, but after fluctuating success in managing the economy (especially after the disastrous economic results of his 1957 initiative known as the ‘Great Leap Forward’), Mao’s influence had begun to wane by the middle of the 1960s. The pragmatic association of social Confucianism with practical economic management by the Communist Party had resulted in slow economic growth. Mao had become sidelined by Party pragmatists, amongst them Deng Xiaoping who later initiated the Open Door Policy. To regain power, Mao instigated a populist attack on the country’s intellectuals (the ‘liberal bourgeois’ elements in the party) that would cause chaos for over a decade. What is now known in the West as the ‘Cultural Revolution’ was built on this unrest created by Mao. In 1966, the Communist Party, with the ambition of transforming China’s education, literature, and arts, formally announced the ‘Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution’. The impact the Cultural Revolution had on traditional culture was devastating (Lu, 2004).

A clarion call of the Cultural Revolution was the slogan ‘destroy the four olds and establish the four news’, which referred to the substitution of old ideology, culture, customs, and habits with new ones. This viewpoint was used to legitimise the wholesale destruction of the physical legacy of traditional Chinese culture. The Red Guards, the zealous young revolutionaries who considered themselves the Maoist vanguard, destroyed many sculptures, paintings, ancient shop signs, museum artefacts, and traditional buildings. It is this moment in Chinese history that frames much of the discussion in the chapters that follow. If the authors of this book had spoken enthusiastically of maintaining traditional practices