boredom is always counter-revolutionary

On May 25th 1966, members of the Department of Philosophy at Peking University exhibited a poster they had produced that criticised the University management of counter-revolutionary actions and impeding the workers’ movement. Although the practise of producing large-scale, hand-written posters – called Dazibao, or Big Character Posters – dates to imperial times, the role of this form of public expression and political engagement would receive increased attention as the Cultural Revolution progressed. The University authorities initially suppressed the Department of Philosophy’s poster, called “What are Sung Shih, Lu Ping and Pen Pei-yun up to in the Cultural Revolution?”, although on June 1st Mao himself would approve the poster, as the country’s “first Marxist-Leninist big-character poster”. Mao encouraged the dissemination of this practise, and produced his own poster entitled “Bombard the Headquarters“. An article in the People’s Daily of June 20th further encouraged the production of big-character posters, emphasising that they “concentrate in a single day twenty years’ education of the masses” and are “magic mirrors to show up monsters of all kinds”.

In line with the Third Worldism and explicitly Maoist tendencies of many French students and intellectuals of the 1960s, the issuing of big-character posters was repeated during the events of May ‘68, with the poster workshops also producing large and text-heavy Journals Murals to criticise de Gaulle and support striking students and workers. However there is also a parallel in the aftermaths of these sudden surges of publicised polemic and often very personal denunciations. Jack Chen’s Inside the Cultural Revolution reports on how Chen happily produced many big-character posters, until he learnt that the local Communist Party secretary “had been engaged in a vast provocation… they had been egging people on to criticise ‘whether you have all the evidence or not’ while keeping dossiers on all the critics” (1976, p233). Likewise, Raymond Marcellin, appointed Minister of the Interior in France on May 31th 1968, was to assemble “the most complete collection possible of the some 20, 000 tracts, documents, journals, and texts of the ‘68 movement” in order to mobilise the “massive police identification, classification, and roundup of all known gauchists and other militants” (Kristin Ross, May 68 and its Afterlives 2004, p61) that followed the events in France.