The cult of happiness: paper gods, popular culture, and revolution in rural North China

Since the late Ming Dynasty the Shandong village of Yangjiabu has been a major production centre for the highly expressive and symbolically rich works of art known as TSfew Year's wood-block prints', or nianhua. Being mass produced by the millions of copies annually and distributed throughout North-China on the occasion of the Lunar New Year Festival these icons serve as an excellent chronicle of the cosmology and popular culture of the Chinese peasant. In the twentieth century, the Chinese Communist Party recognized nianhua as a potential propaganda tool and undertook reforms of the genre toward achieving cultural revolution in the countryside. As a result we have been left with both a pictorial and a textual chronicle of the attempts to reform the classical and ritualistic perceptions of the Chinese peasant in the 1940s and 1950s. Nianhua therefore serve as a unique narrative and historical representation of a people who left few other indications of their ideals and reactions to change, and of the modernizing state which sought to direct them.Arts, Faculty ofHistory, Department ofGraduat