Yang Zirong
I had a hard time thinking of a poster, so I asked my parents over dinner to name a poster that left a deep impression on them when they were growing up. Their first answer was Mao Zedong’s portrait. I asked which words usually accompanied it, since word and image are always intertwined in posters, and they answered, “Long live Mao Zedong”. But they warned me not to write about him, because “you never know”, in “30 years”, someone might uncover my passing intellectual interest in a famous communist and mistake me for a communist. Whatever. We all talk too much about Mao anyway.
So the second most familiar poster to my parents throughout their childhood is that of Yang Zirong, a slick People’s Liberation Army (PLA) soldier who goes undercover amongst a gang of armed bandits in the Tiger Mountain in Northeast China during the Chinese Civil War. His adventures, based off a real soldier’s life, were popularized by the novel Tracks in the Snowy Forest and its Beijing opera adaptation. Like any other person whose face would be on posters during my parents’ generation, Yang Zirong was a model communist.
But that’s not what he’s remembered for–according to my mom, Yang Zirong was cool. “Like 007”, she said. Looking at the poster now, she feels admiration. His striking eyebrows, fierce glare, and flushed face, rendered in painstaking detail, set an intense mood. The back lighting, which you can see from the highlighted outline of his hat, make the image more theatrical. Yang Zirong is strongly associated with model opera: his story told in Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy (both the name of the play and the large red text underneath his image) was one of only eight plays featuring model revolutionaries that could be shown during the Cultural Revolution. His pose in the poster is dynamic. With a gun in hand, he’s clearly an action hero – he even has a cape!
It might be just that my mom’s a bit of a fangirl though, since my dad isn’t nearly as excited about him–he finds his story to be a bit fake. But he agrees that Yang Zirong’s image was ubiquitous; people put him up in their homes, in stores, in classrooms. In my mom’s opinion, Yang Zirong’s personal heroism outweighs its propaganda. He’s definitely more like a wuxia hero – he fights a gang of bandits, generic and uncontroversial villains, rather than the Kuomintang or the Japanese, which makes him much less political.
But to me, the work just oozes Chinese communist vibes – just red Chinese characters underneath a PLA uniform alone is enough to make the association unbreakable. I honestly have a hard time seeing this as anything other than propaganda. This makes an interesting case study of how you have to grow up during a certain period with a certain culture to feel that emotional connection.
