Big-character poster
protest and propaganda method
Big-character posters (Chinese: 大字报; pinyin: Dàzì bào; lit. 'big-character reports') are handwritten posters displaying large Chinese characters, usually mounted on walls in public spaces such as universities, factories, government departments, and sometimes directly on the streets. They are used as a means of protest, propaganda, and popular communication. A form of popular political writing, big-character posters do not have a fixed format or style, and can appear in the form of letter, slogan, poem, commentary, etc.
Though many different political parties around the world have used slogans and posters as propaganda, the most intense, extensive, and varied use of big-character posters was in China in various political campaigns associated with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Big-character posters were first used extensively in the Hundred Flowers Campaign, and they played an instrumental role in almost all the subsequent political campaigns, culminating in the Cultural Revolution. Though the right to write big-character posters was deleted from the Constitution of China in 1980, people still occasionally write big-character posters to express their personal and political opinions.
History in China
Prototypes before 1949
Dazibao have been used in China since imperial times, but became more common when literacy rates rose after the 1911 Xinhai Revolution. They have also incorporated limited-circulation newspapers, excerpted press articles, and pamphlets intended for public display. Big-character posters can be seen as part of a long tradition of using writings to convey information and express dissent in public.
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This entry incorporates text from “Big-character poster” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.