When the Chinese Communist Party’s wave of revolution gained control of the entirety of Mainland China, the nation sought to redefine itself into a New China. The ways of the past were largely to be abandoned and the Chinese people would work towards socialism and perhaps eventually communism.
Nonetheless, with a government composed of revolutionaries a vastly different situation arose in tiehua and art at large: with the authoritarian nature of this party art had little room to resist the status quo. Yet, even more interestingly, China was now ruled by a prime demographic of resistors themselves, thus the focus of all art was to propagate their new ideology, to resist the “old ways.” Until Mao Zedong’s death, art would resist Old China, while promoting “New China” in a style seen in many communist states of the twentieth century: socialist realism.