The People Eat For Free Summary

544 Words2 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: How communism rose to power in china

The introduction to “The People Eat for Free and the Art of Collective Production in Maoist China” by Christine I. Ho begins with background information on the piece itself along with the standing of Mao and the socialist party during the 1950’s. While detailing this, Ho begins discussing how due to the communist influence over China, the collective nature of it leaked into the world as art as well. As, many works started being created anonymously and through the efforts of many individuals instead of just one. This notion was also true for the piece entitled The People Eat for Free, in which depicted a utopia of optimal communism where everyone helps everyone else and food is readily available for all. The collective nature of this piece was done to further the notion of a collective society in itself along with the intertwinement of government ideology and art. This leads Ho into delving into collective creation and how it was implemented. Early notions of collective production are seen in the nationalism of the Sino-Japanese war. In order to properly create as a collective, there needed to be a shift in the …show more content…

A notion that is furthered by other works of art that fall under the category of “Art at the service of politics” was abundant in early People’s Republic. However many artists found it difficult finding a style that expressed the notions of the collective rather than the individual. This style is something that The People Eat for Free was able to accomplish. Ho furthers this notion by going into detail on the aspects of the artwork and how it displays the collective in ways such as the bird eye view, the spacing, structure, and overall content that makes the world within the art seem like a self-sufficient organism. Then talks about other various renditions of People Eat for Free before the one that we know as such would be

Show More
Related

  • The Struggles of Liang Heng in Son of the Revolution

    1190 Words  | 3 Pages

    The Sun of the Revolution by Liang Heng, is intriguing and vivid, and gives us a complex and compelling perspective on Chinese culture during a confusing time period. We get the opportunity to learn the story of a young man with a promising future, but an unpleasant childhood. Liang Heng was exposed to every aspect of the Cultural Revolution in China, and shares his experiences with us, since the book is written from Liang perspective, we do not have a biased opinion from an elite member of the Chinese society nor the poor, we get an honest opinion from the People’s Republic of China. Liang only had the fortunate opportunity of expressing these events due his relationship with his wife, an American woman whom helps him write the book. When Liang Heng and Judy Shapiro fell in love in China during 1979, they weren’t just a rarity; they were both pioneers at a time when the idea of marriages between foreigners and Chinese were still unacceptable in society.

    Read More

  • Rise Of Communism Dbq Analysis

    1071 Words  | 3 Pages

    William Hinton, a US born member of a Chinese Communist land reform task force in 1948, noted that the peasants were challenging the landlords and money lenders in regards to overcharges and restoration of lands and property seized in default of debts (Doc 4). This was due to the newly found confidence in themselves through the defeat of the Japanese. Although Hinton was born into the communist party, his recount of the actions he saw concerning the peasants was simply from a look from the outside in. He personally did not experience this sudden upsurge of challenges, which gives the public a view of what the communist party thought of what looked like a move towards social equality. Although Hinton’s recount may not have been thoroughly verified, the communist party did indeed aid in fueling what was known as a struggle meeting, where Chinese peasants humiliated and tortured landlords, as seen in the picture, organized by the Communist Party as part of the land reform process, of a group of peasants at a meeting where in the center a woman is with her former landlord (Doc 7). Alongside the destruction of the landowning infrastructure that was previously followed, the Communist party also aided the peasants in a form of social reform. One important law that granted specifically women more freedom in their social life was the creation of the Marriage Law of the People’s Republic of China in 1950, where it states that the “supremacy of man over woman, and in disregard of the interest of the children, is abolished” (Doc 5). The newly introduced concepts of free choice in partners, abortion, and monogamy that derived from this law changed the societal position on women and peasants which greatly expresses the amount of new social mobility

    Read More

  • Jonathan Spence´s Mao Zedong

    1446 Words  | 3 Pages

    Jonathan Spence tells his readers of how Mao Zedong was a remarkable man to say the very least. He grew up a poor farm boy from a small rural town in Shaoshan, China. Mao was originally fated to be a farmer just as his father was. It was by chance that his young wife passed away and he was permitted to continue his education which he valued so greatly. Mao matured in a China that was undergoing a threat from foreign businesses and an unruly class of young people who wanted modernization. Throughout his school years and beyond Mao watched as the nation he lived in continued to change with the immense number of youth who began to westernize. Yet in classes he learned classical Chinese literature, poems, and history. Mao also attained a thorough knowledge of the modern and Western world. This great struggle between modern and classical Chinese is what can be attributed to most of the unrest in China during this time period. His education, determination and infectious personalit...

    Read More

  • Analysis Of Capitalism In Street Angel

    921 Words  | 2 Pages

    In his 1937 film Street Angel, Yuan explores the inequities facing Shanghai’s urban proletariat, an often-overlooked dimension of Chinese society. The popular imagination more readily envisions the agrarian systems that governed China before 1919 and after 1949, but capitalism thrived in Shanghai during that thirty-year buffer between feudalism and Communism. This flirtation with the free market engendered an urban working class, which faced tribulations and injustices that supplied Shanghai’s leftist filmmakers with ample subject matter. Restrained by Kuomintang censorship from directly attacking Chinese capitalism, Yuan employs melodrama to expose Street Angel’s bourgeois audience to the plight of the urban poor. Yuan presents capitalist Shanghai as a binary and deeply unequal society, at odds with the “more pluralistic sense of cosmopolitanism” desired by leftist filmmakers of the 1930s (Pang 62).

    Read More

  • Ai Weiwei´s Art and Censorship

    1742 Words  | 4 Pages

    “I don’t want to be part of this kind of denying reality. We live in this time. We have to speak out” (Klayman). Ai Weiwei is an internationally known Chinese artist as well as activist, and his motivation and determination can be summed up by this quote. In all of his pieces, Weiwei critically examines the social and administrative issues facing China today. Many of his works exhibit multiple themes that can be interpreted in various different ways. This lends itself to the universal appeal of his art and makes it a more effective medium of conveying his messages to viewers. Ai Weiwei’s activist artwork—and activist artwork in general—is important to society because it effectively forces the viewer to engage in a self-reflective process that makes the viewer critically examine his or her own beliefs and world. Nevertheless, censorship greatly hinders the dissemination of the critical and thought provoking messages of Ai Weiwei’s art and makes his artwork less effective. In order to gain a better understanding of the relationship of Ai Weiwei’s activist art and the Communist Party’s subsequent censorship, I will examine Ai Weiwei’s influential childhood, his specific brand of activist artwork, the censorship of the Chinese government and the effects of censorship on the effectiveness of Ai Weiwei’s art.

    Read More

  • When Art Loses Its Sting: The Evolution Of Protest Art In Authoritarian Contexts: Analysis

    997 Words  | 2 Pages

    What is art and how is it used as a tool for communication? These multifaceted questions are answered by analyzing ancient and modern art. In the article “When Art Loses Its Sting: The evolution of Protest Art in Authoritarian Contexts” Jacqueline Adams explains how art captures the interest of sociologists. Art executes a unique duality in society. In both recent and ancient history, art has been used as propaganda. Now, contemporary art works to challenge or protest ideologies. Analyzing art provides an interesting insight: the art of today holds as much influence as it did in history. Art has not “lost its sting,” but rather gained a phenomenal impact.

    Read More

  • Communism and its Unfortunate Flaw

    1087 Words  | 3 Pages

    In Marx's ideal communist world, the entire populace is equal, and shares everything.  There is no competition, and no one is rewarded more or less based on his or her individual achievement.  Yet with this newfound sense of a worldwide sharing, there, in theory, is no poverty or hunger.

    Read More

  • Marx and Nietzsche's Theories

    3996 Words  | 8 Pages

    Society is flawed. There are critical imbalances in it that cause much of humanity to suffer. In, the most interesting work from this past half-semester, The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx is reacting to this fact by describing his vision of a perfectly balanced society, a communist society. Simply put, a communist society is one where all property is held in common. No one person has more than the other, but rather everyone shares in the fruits of their labors. Marx is writing of this society because, he believes it to be the best form of society possible. He states that communism creates the correct balance between the needs of the individual and the needs of society. And furthermore thinks that sometimes violence is necessary to reach the state of communism. This paper will reflect upon these two topics: the relationship of the individual and society, and the issue of violence, as each is portrayed in the manifesto.

    Read More

  • Ayn Rand: We the Living

    1180 Words  | 3 Pages

    The intrinsic values of communism rely on the basic tenet that all citizens will sacrifice individualistic ideals for the greater good of Society. Each member of society must sacrifice himself for the sake of others, resulting in a country where each citizen is effectively the same as others in terms of wealth, property, and class. Effectively, each member of society is but one part used to build an impressive machine: taken independently, each cog seems worthless, but in the context of the ...

    Read More

  • Wealth and Poverty: Karl Marx

    1702 Words  | 4 Pages

    The "Communist Manifesto" Mountain View College Reader. Neuleib, Janice. A. Cain S., of Kathleen. Ruffus, Stephen. The.

    Read More

  • Marx, Weber, Durkheim, and Simmel: The Relationship between Society and the Individual

    3473 Words  | 7 Pages

    Karl Marx noted that society was highly stratified in that most of the individuals in society, those who worked the hardest, were also the ones who received the least from the benefits of their labor. In reaction to this observation, Karl Marx wrote The Communist Manifesto where he described a new society, a more perfect society, a communist society. Marx envisioned a society, in which all property is held in common, that is a society in which one individual did not receive more than another, but in which all individuals shared in the benefits of collective labor (Marx #11, p. 262). In order to accomplish such a task Marx needed to find a relationship between the individual and society that accounted for social change. For Marx such relationship was from the historical mode of production, through the exploits of wage labor, and thus the individual’s relationship to the mode of production (Marx #11, p. 256).

    Read More

  • Essay On The Negative Impact Of Mao Zedong

    1202 Words  | 3 Pages

    An Analysis of the Negative Impact of Mao Zedong’s Legacy in China through the Totalitarian State and the Failure of Communist Ideology. This historical study will define the negative impact of Mao Zedong’s economic and cultural policies that defined the failed communist state and the rise of socialist/capitalist China. During the Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s, Mao was responsible for rapidly improving the industrial modernization of China, yet this policy resulted in poverty and famine. During the 1960s, the Cultural Revolution defined opposition to Mao’s economic policies, which utilized the state as a way to condemn political opponents, such as Deng Xiaoping, that defined the failure of the communist state.

    Read More

  • Communism in China

    835 Words  | 2 Pages

    ... This essay critically analyses and examines the effect of Communism on the Chinese Society during the period of 1946-1964. The overall conclusion that can be drawn is that the Chinese Communist Party managed to defeat the Kuomintang (Nationalist) Party and achieve victory in the Civil War, in spite of alienation by the Soviet Union and opposition from the U.S. This was primarily because of the superior military strategy employed by the Communists and the economic and political reforms introduced by this party which brought more equality to the peasants in the form of land ownership and better public services. This increased China’s production and manufacturing, which not only boosted the country’s economy but also provided a more sustainable supply of food, goods and services for the Chinese people.

    Read More

  • Differentiating Marx and Rousseau

    2202 Words  | 5 Pages

    In his Manifesto of the Communist Party Karl Marx created a radical theory revolving not around the man made institution of government itself, but around the ever present guiding vice of man that is materialism and the economic classes that stemmed from it. By unfolding the relat...

    Read More

  • Mao's Great Famine Chapter Summary

    1400 Words  | 3 Pages

    However, include the fact, China was starving while Mao was still exporting produce, factors in the inability and unfavorable thoughts Mao felt towards his people and their welfare. As always, Mao’s people did everything in their power to shift the blame from Mao, onto the leadership running the program in the villages throughout China. Mao’s plan was a perfect plan, poorly executed by lower level

    Read More

More about The People Eat For Free Summary

Open Document