James Flath
Western Ontario University

New Year Prints from Yangliuqing during the 1930s

This discussion will focus on a set of nianhua prints produced in Yangliuqing, Hebei during the early 1930s. At that time the nianhua industry was facing many challenges. Chinese visual culture was dominated by advertising genres such as yuenfenpai and other machine printed graphics produced in Shanghai and Japan, the ‘superstitious’ content found in older forms like nianhua had been denounced by Republican era political authorities, and many of the socially oriented narratives had been discredited by China’s newly emergent cultural elites. Nonetheless, the fashion and politics of China’s new urban elite were not all consuming, and at least as late as 1932 there continued to be a market for woodblock printed nianhua that were little changed from the late-Qing dynasty.
I will explain the continuing popularity of these narratives in terms of the residual effects of a late-imperial cultural mechanism that promoted these narratives as part of a social code that implicitly supported imperial authority. Although the imperial sponsor and its value system had lost all relevance in China’s more progressive enclaves, these narratives of official success, social hierarchy, bucolic pastoralism and patriarchal familism continued as the mainstay of the nianhua industry and occupied a central position in Republican era popular culture.

James Flath is Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Western Ontario. His research in Chinese history focuses on the subjects of popular print, museums and monuments, and the cultural life of rural North China. Selected Publications: The Cult of Happiness: Nianhua, Art and History in Rural North China (UBC Press, 2004), “It’s a Wonderful Life”: Nianhua and Yuefenpai at the Dawn of the People’s Republic” In Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 16: 2 (2004), “The Chinese Railroad View: Transportation Themes in Popular Print, 1873-1915” In Cultural Critique 58:3 (2004).