MAO, Zedong.

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Jingzhu weida de daoshi Mao zhuxi wanshouwujiang! ("Wishing the Great Teacher Chairman Mao a Long Life!") A large propaganda poster printed at the height of the Mao cult and intended to reinforce Mao's predominant position in Chinese politics. It shows a jovial Mao at one of the many events where representatives of the Cultural Revolution's radical revolutionary masses - especially students and workers - could bask in the light of China's "reddest, reddest, red sun." The featured photograph was first published under the same slogan in black-and-white on the front cover of the state newspaper People's Daily on 2 January 1968. The present poster was published by People's Fine Arts Publishing House, the central publisher in charge of disseminating portraits of Mao during the Cultural Revolution. Its decision to publish this poster in May 1969 is closely linked to political developments in China at the time. After almost three years of intense mass activism in which rival factions of students and workers competed in increasingly violent circumstances to topple party cadres from power and prove their loyalty to Mao's so-called "revolutionary line," in April 1969 the Chinese Communist Party convened its Ninth Congress. The meeting was a "congress of victors" (MacFarquhar and Schoenhals, p. 285) designed to reassert state control over the mass movement and cement the political positions of the factions who had won out in the conflicts of the previous years. Soon after, militant stud

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