ABSTRACT
In the political vocabulary related to people in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the concept of compatriot has a subtle meaning: compared with ‘comrade’, referring to the fellow mainland Chinese people, and ‘brothers and sisters’, referring to ethnic minority people, the word ‘compatriot’ indicated separation. In comparison to ‘friends’, referring to foreigners from friendly or allied foreign countries, ‘compatriot’ suggests a kinship and blood tie that can never be erased.
This chapter discusses the visual representation of ‘compatriots’ – people of Hong Kong and Taiwan – in the propaganda posters printed in the Mao era from the early 1950s to 1976. Due to the difficulty, if not impossibility, of determining the accurate influences of the posters on their target audience, the chapter focuses on their interpretation rather than their reception. The first step of the study is to reveal the differences between the images of ‘compatriots’ through comparison between the brothers and sisters of the ethnic minority people/friends of the foreign countries and the compatriots living in Taiwan and Hong Kong. The analysis of these propaganda posters then focuses on the methods used by the propaganda system to construct the superiority of the mainland Chinese people, who were living a happy life under the leadership of the CCP. I focus particularly on two aspects: the victim image of the compatriots and the indication of an unsurpassable gap of development between the advanced mainland and the other places by manipulating the idea of the ‘old’ and ‘new’ society. The purpose of the chapter is to draw a picture of the centre–periphery hierarchy that existed – and perhaps still exists – under the concept of ‘China’.
The methodology in this chapter includes iconography and discourse analysis. The former is to determine the correct meanings of the posters, while the latter can help by revealing the ‘hidden’ information conveyed through the visual communication.
