Red: China's Cultural Revolution

Jiehong, an art curator, explores the cult of Mao through a vivid examination of the Cultural Revolution's art and iconography%E2%80%94some 2.2 billion posters of Mao were produced during this period, as were four billion copies of his Little Red Book. Jiang refers briefly to the massive violence and repression of the period, noting that "over ten million homes were looted by Red Guards or people claiming to be Red Guards," but only rarely do his carefully collected photographs and reproductions document this; instead, they are in the mold of Stalinist "agitprop," with images of happy masses in thrall to the redemptive national leader. Particularly striking are a shot of rows of people, each holding aloft identical photos of Mao that block their faces and of train passengers at a stop performing a "loyalty dance" following the issuance of a new party directive. This important work is slightly marred by providing credit to a single list of photographers, rather than linking each with the photos he took, and by a "List of Chinese Terms," with Chinese words in the original characters and transliterated, but with no translations. Still, this is a fascinating record of a destructive period in modern Chinese history, and a chilling illustration of the gulf between propaganda and truth. (Sept.)