Big-character poster

"Dazhai military and people's big-character poster column of 'Fighting Against Private Ownership and Criticizing Revisionism'" in Dazhai, taken in October 1967.
Big-character poster
Traditional Chinese大字報
Simplified Chinese大字报
Literal meaningbig-character reports
Transcriptions
Standard Mandarin
Hanyu Pinyindàzìbào
Wade–Gilesta4-tzu4-pao4

Big-character posters (Chinese: 大字报; 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 were used as a means of protest, propaganda, and popular communication. A form of popular political writing, big-character posters did not have a fixed format or style, and could 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 the People's Republic of China in 1980, people still occasionally write big-character posters to express their personal and political opinions.


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