RED STAR, WHITE FLOWERS

by Alan Robertson

The small town of Newburgh in the north of Fife, Scotland, lies on the south side of the beautiful River Tay, not far downriver from Perth. It was the somewhat unlikely setting for an interesting event to coincide with the 60th anniversary of the PRC, an exhibition of Chinese propaganda posters of the 1980s, and various other related items, which ran daily from 1 October to 11 October 2009.

The exhibition was staged in The Steeple, formerly the Town Hall, which has been converted into artists’ studios and a large, well-appointed project room available for hire. The items displayed, running to more than fifty large posters and half as many smaller ones were collected by Ingrid Haas, now resident in Newburgh, during years when she taught English in Wuhan. Although such posters, colourful or lurid, depending on standpoint, were commonplace all over China, they have been largely supplanted by modern means of conveying the official line and are therefore now collectors’ items. Besides printed panels interspersed between numbered exhibits, visitors benefited from carefully written laminated sheets explaining the posters, etc. in greater detail, handed out on loan as they arrived. It was nostalgic to see a huge poster urging emulation of that young PLA ‘hero’ Lei Feng, whose premature death singularly failed to move me and my N3 classmates as we ploughed through that book of such exploits. Was he really run over by his own truck?

First visiting the exhibition on its second day, I took along several tape-cassettes: ‘The East is Red’, ‘Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy’ and ‘The Yellow River’, souvenirs of my N3 days. Ingrid Haas and her helpers were happy to borrow them, using them as background music, and I had a lengthy chat with her. When I returned on the penultimate day of the exhibition, mainly to recover my treasured cassettes, I again met Ms. Haas and found that there had been many visitors. I had meant to stay only briefly. However, the visitors included a couple from Auchtermuchty who had spent four years working in Shanghai only a sort time previously. They had travelled to Xinjiang and to other distant parts, so I took the opportunity to chat with them.

Should you wish to follow up this article you may contact Alan at alan_robertson@talktalk.net (underscore in gap)