GREAT LEAP FORWARD.

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Shanglan gongren shihua xuan ("Selected Poems and Drawings by Shanghai's Electric Cable Workers"). Sole edition and printing of this literary collection mirroring the Great Leap Forward's emphasis on ambitious production targets and the vanguard proletariat. The lively illustrations show the capitalist nations being swept aside by a triumphant forklift driver, a diligent worker studying after hours, and Father Christmas preparing for December 1959 while China celebrates already having surpassed targets for 1960.During the 1950s and 1960s, industrial and commercial organizations in China often privately printed their own publications to demonstrate their ideological fealty. During the Great Leap Forward - a nationwide push to astronomically increase industrial and agricultural output - these demonstrations were especially opportune. This example, issued by Shanghai's main electrical cables factory, was inevitably issued in small numbers and is unrecorded institutionally.

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