ABSTRACT
The Quotations of Chairman Mao Zedong, the Little Red Book, has endured as one of the infamous images of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. The Little Red Book has generally been portrayed, particularly in the western media, as a collection of slogans to be learned by rote, recited, shouted, and used to test and intimidate those categorised as the ‘nine bad elements’.1 As a material object, it was a book to be waved, thrusted upon and used as a centre piece in demonstrations, and in visual culture. This is to a degree an accurate portrayal, and the Little Red Book takes up formal and representational space in the traces of the times. It is visible, blatantly so, in posters, badges, photographs and even alarm clocks. To leave it there, however, is to play the easy game of describing revolutionary cultural objects as propagandistic, with all the assumptions of ‘bad’ art and ‘bad’ literature that the term carries. It is to miss the significance of the Little Red Book as an icon of power, with its own aesthetic force within revolutionary visual politics. In order to understand the nature of Mao’s power and continuing effect, one needs also to understand the penetration of popular communications through politics and society. The Little Red Book was the narrative and visual instrument of the largest experiment in the politicisation of society ever undertaken.
