ABSTRACT
This chapter switches to the politicized cultural production and aesthetic experience in the Mao era as a forceful way of telling oppression, revolution, and class struggle by focusing on three well-known “evil landlords” portrayed in Chinese revolutionary culture and socialist artworks. By mobilizing writers, sculptors, and filmmakers before and after 1949, the CCP's propaganda sector invented a series of heinous landlords to legitimize its agricultural revolution, and the works, with their various adaptations and revisions, left deep imprints on the Chinese minds, yet the stories also traumatized the descendants of the demonized real-life landlords who were used as prototypes because of the deliberate blending of history and fiction. In recent years, these images have been continuously doubted and challenged by the Chinese public who attempted to rectify the names of the landlords as well as the entire narrative about the “landlord” class.
