Every increase in production eliminates another enemy

Artist: Zhao Yannian

Year: 1953

Publisher: East China People's Fine Art Publishing House

Size (mm): 525x760

Condition: very good, small tears to margins repaired on rear and front

The graphic image in the background of a Chinese soldier bayoneting US soldiers is used here partly as metaphor for the need for China to develop industrially to compete with foreign powers - with the slogan that every increase in production eliminates another enemy. Posters from this early period of the People's Republic still often displayed quite explicit anti-imperialist imagery; many of the artists involved would have produced posters for the resistance against the Japanese occupation of China (1937-45) and the fight for liberation. 

Zhao Yannian (1924-2014) was a renowned woodblock printer. During the Cultural Revolution he was criticised and imprisoned along with another artist, Pan Tianshou.