Publishing Houses and Popularization

Functional distinctions between institutions such as the Art Workers Association, the academies, the publishing houses, and other arts units were unclear between 1949 and 1952, since all arts organizations produced nianhua and other art for the masses. The AWA was ostensibly a popular organization, and its members usually had regular jobs in another unit. The three highest officers of the AWA, Xu Beihong, Jiang Feng, and Ye Qianyu, were concurrently

Image not available

Figure 27
Luo Gongliu, Tunnel Warfare, 1951, oil
on canvas, 138 cm × 167.5 cm, Chinese
National Art Gallery.

administrators at the academies in Beijing and Hangzhou. Both the AWA and the publishing houses undertook educational activities, while the academies spent an inordinate amount of time in the organization and production of functional art, to say nothing of their involvement in unrelated political work such as land reform. The rewarding of excellence in art, a function one would expect the AWA, as a professional organization, to assume, was undertaken by the government, specifically the Ministry of Culture. The Ministry of Culture awarded prizes for superior nianhua in 1950 and 1952.^[111]

A 1950 chart published in the Renmin meishu as part of a report on the national production of nianhua shows that practical sponsorship of art in the early period was assumed by a variety of work units, including local branches of the FLAC and AWA, pictorial magazines, and publishing houses, depending upon the locale (chart 3). In one particularly isolated area, western Gansu, the Dunhuang Research Institute, an archeological organization, took responsibil-

ity for local production. The Ministry of Culture itself directed nianhua production in Beijing.^[112] The 1950 national nianhua exhibition was jointly organized by the party structure, through the Shanghai branch of the AWA, and the civil government, through the Shanghai Municipal Cultural Bureau.^[113]

While nianhua production absorbed the energies of most artists, particularly those in the academies, another form of popular art, lianhuanhua , was being promoted outside the academies. Lianhuanhua , or linked picture stories, had flourished before liberation in China's urban centers. They had been particularly popular in Shanghai, where they reached a wide audience through the practice of renting them to borrowers from stalls or mats on the street.Lianhuanhua possessed a particularly Chinese form before 1949; printed very cheaply, most were small books, about three by five inches in size, horizontal in format, and with one picture per page. Although some artists used balloons for dialogue, in the Western manner, the majority relied on lengthy captions written above, beneath, or beside the pictures to tell the story (fig. 28).^[114] After 1949 the literary possibilities of the genre were reduced by censorship, but the artistic quality improved. Lianhuanhua expanded to include work well beyond the genre of comics, including high-quality illustrations.

In 1950, the Ministry of Culture's Arts Bureau founded a new publishing house, Masses Pictorial Press (Dazhong tuhua chubanshe ), under the direction of Cai Ruohong. It was mandated to issue popular art publications, such as new year's pictures and serial picture stories. Soon after, Cai, writing under the pseudonym Zhang Zaixue, compiled the text for Jimao xin (Urgent Letter),a work illustrated by the Beijing artist Liu Jiyou and published by Masses Pictorial. The work became a model for writers and artists elsewhere.^[115] In 1951, People's Art Press was founded in Beijing. It absorbed Masses Pictorial Press and began publishing a popular magazine, Serial Pictures (Lianhuanhuabao ), and serial picture books.^[116]

Shanghai was China's publishing center in the preliberation period and the nation's principal producer of serial picture books. Like other parts of China, Shanghai was under military administration during the years immediately following liberation. Marshall Chen Yi was appointed mayor, and the cadres as       signed to reorganize the Shanghai art world were largely drawn from the New Fourth Army. In June 1949, Chen Yi and his assistants met with 152 non-Communist cultural figures, including the artists Liu Kaiqu, Pang Xunqin, Zhang Leping, and Chen Yinqiao, to reassure them. Chen further urged CCP cultural workers not to question the patriotism of non-Communist intellectuals, for they had taken a pro-Communist stand by remaining in China. That such exhortations were necessary might indicate that abuse of artists and intellectuals by Communist functionaries had occurred.^[117]

Former New Fourth Army art cadres, as part of their reorganizing work, soon went to work as supervisors at the presses. Indeed, many artists who

(Table continued on next page)

(Table continued from previous page)

Image not available

Figure 28
The Serial Illustrated Romance of the
Three Kingdoms (Lianhuan tuhua san
guo zhi), Gu Bingxin collection.

became prominent got their start in the 1950s at one Shanghai publishing firm or another. An important goal of the Shanghai publishers during this decade was to produce new, revolutionary comics for an audience of housewives, workers, and children. These works contrasted sharply with preliberation comic books, which have been characterized as being filled with ghosts, superstitions, pornography, and violence, and as being low class and coarsely executed.^[118]

A young revolutionary artist named Gu Bingxin (b. 1923) was assigned in 1949 to the Creation Research Center of the Shanghai AWA.^[119] In August 1950, he went to work for a consortium of 190 private publishers called the Joint Bookstore (Lianlian Sudan ), under the direction of the AWA. Although the publishers were still private, the consortium controlled the distribution of their wares; this enabled the AWA and the Communist party to approve the contents of publications sold.^[120] Gu was assigned to a section of the company called the Serial Pictures Design Committee, charged by the AWA with regulating the artistic and didactic quality of the new lianhuanhua . The committee's specific mission was to censor the contents of serial picture books, to reform the stock of preliberation books still being sold by merchants, and to direct

production of new lianhuanhua— in short, to replace undesirable preliberation books with better ones. One important change introduced by the Communists was that artists no longer wrote their own stories. Instead, text editors prepared captions, which were then presented to the artists for illustration. Gu Bingxin and a colleague, Luo Pan, directed the art section; two other cadres were responsible for censorship of contents.^[121] Early liberation-era lianhuanhua contained edifying stories of land reform, the Korean War, items from the news, or themes taken from the plots of movies, plays, and novels.^[122] The most prestigious were those based on Chinese or Soviet literary themes; American and Western European stories were largely avoided.

Preliberation serial picture artists were self-taught or had learned their craft by working for older artists in a master-apprentice relationship.^[123] Communist administrators considered most of the older serial picture artists to be poorly trained. In 1951 and 1952, the Shanghai Municipal Cultural Bureau and the Shanghai branch of the AWA conducted special serial picture study classes with the aim of reforming, regularizing, and raising standards of lianhuanhua production. Gu Bingxin led the 1952 sessions. "Raising of standards," a phrase from Mao's Yan'an Talks, in this context meant raising both technical standards and ideological level. The two or three hundred artists who studied drawing techniques and the principles of Communist thought in these classes were of three types. The first were the old comic book artists, the second were young art enthusiasts, and the third were painters who had previously worked in other media, such as oils or Chinese painting, but who could not make a living as artists under the new regime.

In general, the old artists, who were accustomed to being paid only a few Chinese cents per page, worked at great speed but without finesse. For them, raising technical quality meant more careful execution. Intensive political indoctrination was also needed to teach them what new subjects to depict and how to switch from the beauties, demons, and bandits of ancient times to more edifying modern themes. Changes in subject matter from mythological and imaginary stories to modern ones mandated rethinking many conventions of narration, including gesture, costume, and setting. There were a few notable exceptions to this generalization about old artists. Zhao Hongben (b. 1915), for instance, was a top illustrator in preliberation Shanghai who had worked underground for the CCP since 1947. In addition to being a Communist, he had been strongly influenced by American comic books such as Prince Valiant and Tarzan ,^[124] so was well equipped to work in the new styles, which required skill in Western drawing.

Artists who were young at the time, such as Wang Guanqing (b. 1931), Yao Youxin (b. 1935), and He Youzhi (b. 1922), recall their own easy and enthusiastic acceptance of ideological and stylistic indoctrination, in contrast to

the struggles many of their elders suffered.^[125] For them, the challenges were mainly technical—how to improve their drawing skills.^[126] A career in illustration was the only future the teenage artists in the class saw for themselves.^[127]

For more traditional Chinese painters in their thirties or forties, whose numbers included Lu Yanshao (b. 1909), Ying Yeping (b. 1910), and Cheng Shifa (b. 1921), the only way to reenter the art world was to undergo retraining as book artists.^[128] Artists who attended the class were given jobs in publishing firms in Shanghai or in other parts of China. Traditional-style artists beyond their mid-forties, of whom there were many in Shanghai, were not included in this study session, and their social and economic status remained a problem until well into the 1950s.

In the summer of 1952, the Shanghai publishers were reorganized into two new publishing houses, both under the directorship of Lý Meng, a veteran of the New Fourth Army. The state-owned publisher, East China People's Art Publishing (Huadong renmin meishu woodblock ), was formed in August. This enterprise became the Shanghai People's Art Press in 1954. It included an inhouse studio (chuangzuo shi ) with several sections. The lianhuanhua group, which expanded to include book illustrations as well as comics, was directed by Gu Bingxin and Cheng Shifa. The staff artists included Ding Bingzeng, who was chosen by the publisher from the graduates of the Hangzhou academy, and Yao Youxin, a young artist from the 1951 and 1952 Shanghai classes.^[129] The second section, which included propaganda, oil, and new year's painting, redirected the energies of traditional and Western-style painters for the goal of popularization.^[130]

During the same period, many private publishers were consolidated in a joint public-private enterprise whose function was to publish lianhuanhua exclusively. This reorganized firm opened on September 1, 1952, and was called New Art Press (Xin meishu chubanshe ). Its chief editor was Li Lu (b. 1921), who had made woodcuts and lianhuanhua for the New Fourth Army. It absorbed the Communist artist Zhao Hongben and many professional illustrators who had attended the Shanghai classes. Zhao Hongben had incorporated the small left-wing press he ran before 1949 into the editorial section of the official New China Bookstore in 1950. In 1951, the artists were moved to the art section of the East China People's Press (Huadong renmin chubanshe ), which employed about twenty artists and several lianhuanhua text editors. Zhao became director of the art creation section of the New Art Press.^[131]

New Art Press, unlike the state press, had a board of trustees. Nevertheless, in addition to sharing its director with the state press, its manager was appointed by the East China News Publishing Bureau, its paper was supplied by the government, the prices of its books were fixed by the state, and its publications were distributed by the state via the New China Bookstore. The government decided how its earnings were to be allocated: one-fourth each to the

state, the private investors, employee benefits, and employee salaries. By verbal agreement, the state press had first choice in publishing illustrated versions of best-selling short stories.^[132]

According to one artist from this group, the procedures of the lianhuanhua studios of the two publishing houses were different. Artists who worked for the private New Art Press continued a relatively rapid production rate of five to ten drawings per day, reduced from a top speed of twenty to thirty a day in the pre-1950 period.^[133] Academically trained graduates from Hangzhou who were assigned to the government publishers in 1952 and 1953, by contrast, were extremely slow, producing, by one unsympathetic estimate, as few as thirty to forty drawings a year.^[134] In the mid-1950s, artists in both organizations were given quotas of one finished drawing per day. The per page fee for illustrations was raised substantially from preliberation standards,^[135] which enabled many comic book artists to attain such levels of affluence that their wives chose not to work.^[136] In the first few years of the PRC, lianhuanhua artists received both monthly salaries and payments for completed projects. Such payments have been abolished and reintroduced several times over the succeeding decades in accordance with national economic trends.^[137]

One of the private Shanghai publishers, Masses Art Press (Dazhong meishu chubanshe ), was founded immediately after liberation by an employee of the prestigious Commercial Press. Somewhat surprisingly, a stockholder was the East China campus of CAFA. The press hired Jiang Feng and several other revolutionaries to edit a lianhuanhua series that included both new Shanghai publications and reprints of lianhuanhua from the liberated zones. Among the latter were works by Yan Han, Cai Ruohong, and Shao Yu.^[138] State presses in other regions, such as Shenyang's Northeast Pictorial Press (later Liaoning Art Press), Hebei's Masses Art Press (later Hebei People's Art Press), and Tianjin People's Art Press similarly concentrated on serial picture stories in the early 1950s.^[139] Artists and writers throughout the nation threw themselves into production of lianhuanhua , an activity that flowered during the subsequent decade.