INTRODUCTION TO

CHINESE LITERATURE
LESSON OBJECTIVES

share knowledge of the culture

and literature of China through
active participation in class
discussions
review art from China and discuss
implications of these cultural
products in the context of Chinese
history
THINK TANK
What do you think would happen to
our society if we killed the ideas of
gods (diyos), ghosts (multo) and
superstitions (pamahiin)?
The “death” of religion happened
in China during the Cultural
Revolution, part of which was the
Destruction of the Four Olds in
1966. Mao Zedong called for the
"Four Olds"—Old Customs, Old
Culture, Old Habits, and Old Ideas—
to be destroyed (Spence, 1999).
To wipe out the dissident
elements, Mao and his cadre
engaged in a massive propaganda
campaign over the media,
including the production of
posters.

“Scatter the old world, build a new world"

This poster shows a Red Guard at
work destroying a crucifix, a
statuette of Buddha, a vinyl
record, and mahjong tiles. All of
these were seen as old, bourgeois
or decadent (Chinese Posters.net,
n.d.), and many youths heeded the
call to take up the Maoist
revolution once again.
These youth left their schools in the cities to
join the Red Guards, who went around the
country--with Mao's blessing--to destroy
capitalist symbols and torture dissidents (Bo,
1987).
Later on Red Guards were also tasked to head
to the countryside and spread Maoist slogans,
copied from propaganda posters, among the
peasantry (Bernstein, 1977).
But over time, these youths became
disenchanted when they saw the mass
famine and poverty resulting from
Maos policies in the countryside, and
Maos cult of personality died down.
Nowadays, news and information
broadcast over the heavily state-
controlled Chinese media have held less
sway over the populace, who mostly
cynically see the news as a propaganda
tool with little substance (Bo, 1987).
In the current age, the government's
online“Great Firewall" programme is
also constantly evolving to enforce
censorship and surveillance over the
Internet (Xu & Albert, 2017) in the name
of protecting the state.