When Mao Zedong came to power in 1949, both he and several of his colleagues were already widely known as enthusiastic calligraphers. Despite the rigour of the times, most of them managed to amass large collections of fine calligraphy, either as purchases they had made in antique shops (where such pieces could be bought cheaply) or as gifts received from people wishing to curry favour.  | | The British Museum |  Mao Zedong
(1893–1976)
Mao’s reputation was greatly enhanced by the publication of his poems in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The powerful classical imagery of these pieces highlighted his historic achievements. He used his often dramatic calligraphic renderings of them to build up a cult of personality before he launched the Cultural Revolution in 1966.
See an example of his calligraphy in 'The Long March'. |
|  | | The British Museum | Guo Moruo
(1892–1978)
Guo was the leading cultural figure in New China and one of its finest calligraphers. He served as President of the Academy of Sciences and Vice-Chairman of the National Peoples’ Congress. During the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), he worked behind the scenes to make traditional culture acceptable once more. |
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Before the Cultural Revolution began in 1966, these Party leaders would often write out for their friends traditional poems covering a wide range of subjects, or they might compose poems of their own, which were usually about the pleasures of nature or visits to famous cultural sites. Occasionally they would write more personal, even humorous, poems for their families. Within the central bureaucracy the standard of calligraphy was high and writing was nearly always done with a brush. The secretary-general of Mao's Secretariat, Chen Bingchen, was a fine stylist who would not tolerate poor brushwork from his subordinates. The Chinese text of the 'Sino-Soviet Treaty of Peace and Friendship' signed by Mao and Stalin in Moscow in 1950, for example, was not typewritten, but handwritten by Chen with a brush. In these circumstances it is hardly surprising that there was a strong impetus for many of the less well-educated people within the Party to aspire to understand calligraphy and write well. The interest of China's new leaders in calligraphy might have boded well for the future of the art, had Mao not also been the most revolutionary ruler to which China had ever been subjected. From the outset Mao believed that the culture surrounding calligraphy was synonymous with the elitist and conservative traditions of Old China which he and many of the rank-and-file members of the Party wished to eradicate.When he came to power, Mao knew that he had won control of a country in which only about 15 percent of the population could read anything more than simple texts. This high level of illiteracy was an impediment to the modernization of China. The situation was all the more serious because Mandarin Chinese was not widely understood at that time, and local dialects were so different that people were often unable to understand others who lived elsewhere in their own province, let alone further afield. Mao recognized that the written language would have to play a key role in unifying the country.
Despite these constraints, Mao wanted no one to be in any doubt that he continued to regard calligraphy as an art form, although not necessarily a high-profile one. When the minister of culture, Zheng Zhenduo, declared in the early 1950s that calligraphy was just a script, Mao responded quickly. In the rather elliptical way in which he often chose to express himself, he said that he did not think it mattered whether China kept one more art. He also gave a modest amount of practical support to the art. In the late 1950s and early 1960s Mao agreed to the establishment of calligraphy research associations in both Beijing and Shanghai. More importantly, he allowed the Party's youth league to arrange for distinguished calligraphers to teach young enthusiasts at its own 'Youth Palaces'.
The Cultural Revolution
ln the summer of 1966 Mao unleashed the 'Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution', an evocative title that carried with it a more destructive sense than the later simplified version, 'The Cultural Revolution'. Its ostensible aim was to 'smash the Four Olds': old thought, old culture, old customs, old practice. Students were mobilized to act as the 'Red Guards' who would carry out this task. Mao's real aim, however, was to overthrow those in the Party hierarchy and throughout the establishment who, he believed, were opposed to him.
![[mao character]](character.jpg) |
| The British Museum |
| Following Mao's call to 'Bombard the Headquarters', there was a dramatic upsurge in the use of the big-character posters. |
From the very beginning of the Cultural Revolution the Red Guards, under the careful guidance of Mao's henchmen, made use of big-character posters to vilify Mao's opponents. Then, on 5 August 1966, Mao called upon the Red Guards to 'Bombard the Headquarters' of the Party. This exhortation was widely promoted by an illustration of Mao holding a large brush, coloured blood-red in some versions, accompanied by the words: 'My first big-character poster'. The violence that followed Mao's call to action soon ran out of control. Across the country tens of millions of posters were pasted up. They exhibited the largest collection of lies and slanders ever publicly displayed in history.
Classical Calligraphy
The admirers of classical calligraphy in modern China regard it as an art of exquisite refinement and the ultimate expression of Chinese culture. They delight in its antiquarian flavour and erudite forms of expression, and admire most those practitioners who excel in combining an excellence of technique with a mastery of poetry.
The Classicists believe that the styles of calligraphy developed in the past provide a rich variety of themes on which the talented can perform endless variations. Traditionally, these variations did not involve mixing styles; instead, the variations were intended to reflect the personality of the artist working within a recognized style. The Classicists generally use thick black ink, which they can work into the paper to make their characters stand out clearly. But a skilled calligrapher can use such ink to create a whole range of moods. Shen Yinmo, for example, could write characters which the famous calligrapher Sun Guoting (648-703?) would have praised for being so sharp that you felt chilled when you looked at them, or so soft that they brought to mind the blush on a young girl's cheek or a pearl of dew on a lotus leaf.
 | | The British Museum | Deng Sanmu
(1898–1963)
Deng was one of old Shanghai’s most popular calligraphers and colourful eccentrics. He was admired for his bold brushwork, for his ability to make his characters seem to float on the paper and for the strength of his seal-carving. In 1958, he was branded as a right-winger and banished to the fringes of society.
The poem 'Protest' precisely expresses Deng's sentiments. |
|  | | The British Museum | Lin Sanzhi
(1898–1989)
When Guo Moruo saw Lin’s rendering of Mao’s poem Huichang in 1972, he said it was the best calligraphy written in China for three centuries. Lin’s ‘iron line’ became famous overnight. This enabled him to give a new respectability to the art of calligraphy during the final years of the Cultural Revolution. |
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Amongst the Classical calligraphers in modern China, Qi Gong has been admired for his innovative approach to the shaping of his characters. He made them more pert by writing them according to new ratios of proportions that emphasized their verticality. He also used a mixture of thick and thin strokes to create tensions that generate an unusual excitement in his running script. Huang Miaozi, on the other hand, often takes one of the ancient forms of script that were originally carved or etched and then rewrites them with a brush in, say, running script, which gives them an unexpected liveliness. Calligraphers are not just concerned with the individual characters, however; they are also interested in the patterns those characters create on the paper. Some calligraphers delight in the regular pattern created by uniform, evenly-spaced characters. Westerners generally like this style, but the Chinese have seen a surfeit of such calligraphy and will usually save their praise for those pieces that contain 'something extra'. This is most often the tension and energy generated by asymmetrical compositions, which reflect the artist's vitality and experience of life.
The overall composition of a piece is often discussed in musical terms. Viewers look to see whether the different elements have been successfully integrated into a kind of visual symphony through the interplay of black and white spaces and the changing tonalities of the ink. For instance, when the 85-year-old Huang Miaozi saw a certain work after more than a decade, he raised his hands above his head and began to dance a little jig, exclaiming as he did so: 'Wonderful, wonderful, just like a symphony!' On the other hand, when Liu Zengfu looked at a scroll by Sha Menghai, he dismissed it with the words: 'There's no music in it--it's doh, doh, doh, all the way through.'
Content was a difficult issue for Classical calligraphers in China after the Communist take-over of 1949. In the first three decades of New China, calligraphers had little scope for free expression. Some happily provided words to support the new regime, while others stuck to copying out innocuous classical poems. The poetry of Mao Zedong genuinely appealed to many calligraphers, who wrote it out endlessly, safe in the knowledge that it was acceptable. A few--for example, Deng Sanmu--did subtly express their own feelings. In the 1980s and 1990s there was a real renaissance in the content of Classical calligraphy. For example, the poems written by Qi Gong, Huang Miaozi and Wang Shixiang were still classical in flavour, but their content had become more personal, and at times savagely satirical. These three and others wrote about their experiences during the decade of the so-called Cultural Revolution (1966-76), their life since then and religion, as well as recording their reflections on modern society and the pleasures of friendship and nature.
