The Cult of Happiness: Nianhua, Art, and History in Rural North China

Gary Watson is a former lecturer in Chinese studies at Queen’s University and is now a multimedia developer in Mississauga.

Deconstructing popular-culture artifacts for insights into social values
and political structures is an intriguing—if sometimes
tedious—approach to historical inquiry. James Flath’s study of
nianhua, or Chinese woodblock-printed New Year’s pictures, shows both
the potential and the problems inherent in stretching a narrow subject
across too large an analytical framework.

Flath’s chief interest is not so much a history of the rural
printing—an important specialist handicraft in certain villages of
Shandong, Hebei, and Henan provinces during the 19th and early 20th
centuries—but rather how an understanding of culture and society can
be extracted from traditional rural Chinese print media. After an
interesting but cursory discussion of the production and marketing of
prints—typically Door and Stove Gods, calendars, and mythical
heroes—Flath begins an extended discourse on what these largely
disposable pieces of folk art tell us about popular rural values and
perceptions of peasant relations with central power. Those portions of
the book’s six chapters that deal with these issues are unlikely to
provide much insight based solely on Flath’s discussions.
Unfortunately, the documentary basis is simply too thin at times to
support so wide a discussion.

By far the most convincing portions of The Cult of Happiness cover the
ways in which traditional woodblock printers brought the first glimpses
of the modern world to rural Chinese beginning in the late 19th century.
Prints depicting the Sino–Japanese War of 1894–95, the Allied
suppression of the anti-foreign Boxer Rebellion, European cities, and
rapidly modernizing Chinese centres such as Shanghai all made their way
to the countryside together with those focusing on traditional ritual
subjects. Given limited rural literacy, these single-frame prints never
evolved into the illustrated broadsides or newspapers that were
flourishing in China’s burgeoning cities by the early 20th century.

Traditional printmaking also served the Chinese Communist Party’s
propaganda needs during the 1940s, when revolutionary subjects finally
took the place of familiar traditional ones.