Antonio Yijiao Guo, “Happy Together: The Socialist Utopia in a Shanghai Worker’s Apartment.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 38, no.1 (2026): 120-145. https://doi.org/10.3366/mclc.2026.0092
Abstract
This paper analyzes the visual manifestation of happiness in the propaganda poster A Happy Life Given by Chairman Mao, designed by Xin Liliang and published in 1954 in Shanghai. Special attention is paid to how material abundance defines a utopian vision of socialism via the potlatch composition. The poster embodies a paradox: people can only understand socialism by celebrating and fetishizing an array of commodities such as foodstuffs, furniture, appliances, and the poster itself. At the same time, the symbolic contentment of materiality forges a “nostalgia” for a socialist utopia that is ambiguously defined in time and space. The poster consequently validates the policies regarding labor, production, and redistribution, which, in turn, are believed to bring about the envisioned contentment and happiness. Eventually, the individual pursuit of happiness is intertwined with a national metanarrative of the promised bright future, even though the tension between individuals and the state is ubiquitous and irreconcilable.