"Open fire on Li"

[China - Cultural Revolution]. "Dazibao" [Big-character poster].

€ 6,500.00

Singular big-character poster from the early wave of Cultural Revolution political writing.

Big-character posters (dazibao) were a central medium of mass mobilisation, protest, and propaganda, covering schools, factories, and city walls with slogans, accusations, and rebuttals, launching personal attacks against colleagues, classmates, friends, neighbours, and even family members. Essentially a means of mass mobilisation, Mao considered dazibao an "extremely useful new weapon" in 1958, one that quickly came to dominate the visual culture of the Cultural Revolution.

The present example denounces "Li", presumably Li Daiguang, a shift manager at a porcelain manufacture in Shanghai, for accusing a worker of laziness and disregarding basic rights. The poster records the worker's protest in defiant terms: "Once, when I was working, you said to me: 'You only work four or five hours a day, while I work from morning until late at night.' You criticized me like this, but what you said was nothing but empty talk! You claim that when I leave, I am slacking off, that I am not truly working. You even say I am not fulfilling my duties. This is utterly false! Groundless! You trample on my right to survive, and you still use your so-called 'authority' to suppress me. I will absolutely not allow you to insult me like this!".

Such posters not only conveyed political slogans but also served as arenas for settling social tensions, often provoking rebuttals scrawled in larger characters by the accused. Despite the important role dazibao played in the visual and political landscape of the Cultural Revolution - as well as the subsequent Democracy Wall movement - they were never intended to be permanent, and so the vast majority were destroyed or simply decayed, making extant examples near unobtainable to collectors.