Iron Women and Foxy लेडीज

The CCP has been prone to laud itself as the champion of women's liberation। Right from the start, however, the CCP-revolutionaries seemed to have had a dual, and even contradictory approach to questions where women were positioned in the revolutionary process, and this has influenced the way in which women were represented in propaganda posters. On the one hand, there was the demand from the Party that women were to be shown in their entire liberated splendor, as conscious and active participants in the great enterprise of reconstructing (socialist) China. The liberation of the female half of the population had attracted a lot of support for the CCP. Various policies the CCP had experimented with had been codified into legislation after coming to power in 1949. But in the eyes of many women intellectuals at the time, even these measures were not radical enough.

Old-fashioned artistic ideas about the representation of women proved to be tenacious. By the early 20th century, a relatively well-established visual tradition had come into existence that treated women as objects that could be consumed by the male gaze. Numerous companies, both foreign and native, had settled in the treaty ports and the foreign settlements along the eastern seaboard. The advertising agencies the manufacturers brought with them promoted the use and appreciation of Western art techniques in their advertisements. The advertising posters featured delectable young women, beautiful actresses and popular singers in colorful and tantalizing 'Shanghai dresses' (qi pao), endorsing various products, ranging from cigarettes and alcoholic beverages to fabrics and pesticides. The advertisments often were designed by Chinese artists such as Li Mubai, Jin Meisheng and Jin Xuechen, to cater to the specific Chinese sense of aesthetics. Most of them were calendars (yuefenpai 月份牌) that were given away as free promotional gifts and hung up in homes and offices. This commercial printed matter became enormously popular, and its influence spread beyond advertising to other types of publications and design practice in general, where it became synonymous with modernity.