--- title: The Mao cult before the state:'Mao Zedong Thought' and 'The East Is Red', 1943-1949 url: https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/mao-cult-origins-1943-1949/ description: Between a March 1943 Politburo decision giving Mao Zedong the final word inside the Chinese Communist Party and the party's seizure of state power in… section: Case studies --- ![Illustration: a Second World War naval-intelligence collage of a Pacific theatre map, aerial reconnaissance photographs and radar plots.](https://propagandaarchive.org/static/generated/detail/hero-wwii-pacific.jpg) [Case studies](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/) # The Mao cult before the state:'Mao Zedong Thought' and 'The East Is Red', 1943-1949 At a glance Between a March 1943 Politburo decision giving Mao Zedong the final word inside the Chinese Communist Party and the party's seizure of state power in October 1949… - **When:** March 20, 1943 - **Actor:** The Chinese Communist Party's Central Committee and Politburo… - **Target:** CCP cadres and the Comintern-trained 'returned students' faction… - **Source:** Identified Openly sourced: the speaker is who they say they are - **Confidence:** **documented** Primary documents, court records, official disclosures - **Techniques:** [Testimonial](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/testimonial/) [Glittering generalities](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/glittering-generalities/) [Transfer](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/transfer/) [Narrative laundering](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/narrative-laundering/) [Manufactured consensus](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/manufactured-consensus/) [Bandwagon](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/bandwagon/) [Identity fusion](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/identity-fusion/) - **Regime:** [People's Republic of China under Mao Zedong](https://propagandaarchive.org/regimes/peoples-republic-of-china-mao/) Full details - **Actor:** The Chinese Communist Party's Central Committee and Politburo; the Yan'an-based Liberation Daily and Xinhua News Agency; Party theorist Wang Jiaxiang; Liu Shaoqi; Yan'an cultural workers and art troupes - **Target:** CCP cadres and the Comintern-trained 'returned students' faction (Wang Ming and others) in 1943-45; peasants, soldiers and the wider Chinese public reached by the press, radio and army as the party expanded through the civil war, 1945-49 On this page - [What happened](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/mao-cult-origins-1943-1949/#what-happened) - [How it works](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/mao-cult-origins-1943-1949/#how-it-works) - [Then and now](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/mao-cult-origins-1943-1949/#then-and-now) - [Positions on the record](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/mao-cult-origins-1943-1949/#positions-on-the-record) - [Same-method test](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/mao-cult-origins-1943-1949/#same-method-test) - [How to spot it](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/mao-cult-origins-1943-1949/#how-to-spot-it) - [Images](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/mao-cult-origins-1943-1949/#images) - [Sources](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/mao-cult-origins-1943-1949/#sources) On this page > **Content note.** This page quotes hagiographic Yan'an-era language ("great saviour", "our beloved leader") about Mao Zedong as evidence of how the cult was built. Quoting it is not an endorsement, and it says nothing about the later famine and purges of his rule (1949-76), which this page does not cover. **In one line:** Between a March 1943 Politburo decision giving Mao Zedong the final word inside the Chinese Communist Party and the party's seizure of state power in October 1949, the CCP's own organs coined the term "Mao Zedong Thought," wrote it into the party constitution, adapted a Shaanbei folk tune into "The East Is Red," and rewrote party history to make Mao's line always the correct one, all before Mao held a single state office. ![Diagram: a 1938 Comintern nod and a March 1943 Politburo decision give Mao final say; a July 1943 article names "Mao Zedong Thought"; a remade folk tune, "The East Is Red," spreads through Yan'an; an April 1945 history resolution rules Mao's line always correct; the Seventh Congress writes his name into the party constitution; the press and portraits carry the cult through the civil war to the October 1949 founding, where it hands off to the much larger post-1949 state cult](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/images/mao-cult-origins-1943-1949-diagram.svg) ## What happened - **September-November 1938.** At the Sixth Plenum (Enlarged) of the Sixth Central Committee in Yan'an, Politburo member Wang Jiaxiang, recently returned from Moscow, reports that Comintern general secretary Georgi Dimitrov told the CCP's delegation that party leadership "should be resolved in Mao Zedong's favour." Wang had himself been one of the Soviet-trained "returned students" (the "28 Bolsheviks") grouped around Wang Ming, the figure the Comintern had previously favoured; his report is read by historians (Gao Hua, Pantsov and Levine) as removing the last external check on Mao's rise inside the party. - **February 1942 - 1944.** Mao launches the Yan'an Rectification Movement (*Zhengfeng*) with speeches including "Rectify the Party's Style of Work" and "Oppose Stereotyped Party Writing" (February 1942), a campaign against "subjectivism, sectarianism and Party formalism" that in practice targets the Comintern-aligned "returned students," Wang Ming chief among them, through study sessions, self-criticism and, for some cadres, prolonged interrogation. This campaign is the subject of a separate FRAME case study, [The Yan'an Rectification Movement: doctrine, self-criticism and the Rescue Campaign (1942-1945)](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/yanan-rectification-movement-1942-1945/); it is the ground the 1943-45 developments below grow out of. - **20 March 1943.** The Politburo adopts the "Decision on Adjusting and Simplifying the Central Organs" (中共中央政治局关于中央机构调整及精简的决定), restructuring the Secretariat around three members - Mao, Liu Shaoqi and Ren Bishi - with Mao as chairman of both the Politburo and the Secretariat. The decision states that on Secretariat resolutions, "final decision-making power rests with the chairman" (对于书记处所讨论的问题，主席有最后决定之权). For the first time, one person inside the CCP holds a formal veto. - **8 July 1943.** To mark the CCP's twenty-second anniversary, Wang Jiaxiang publishes "The Chinese Communist Party and the Path of the Chinese Nation's Liberation" in the party's Yan'an paper, *Liberation Daily* (*Jiefang Ribao*). The article is the first public use of the term "Mao Zedong Thought" (毛泽东思想), presented as Marxism-Leninism's "unification" with "the concrete practice of the Chinese revolution." - **1942-1943.** In Jiaxian county, northern Shaanxi (Shaanbei), an older local tune - known regionally as "Sesame Oil" (芝麻油) or the "White Horse Tune" (白马调) - is given new words, conventionally credited to a peasant singer named Li Youyuan: "The east is red, the sun rises; China has brought forth a Mao Zedong; he works for the people's happiness; he is the people's great saviour" (东方红，太阳升，中国出了个毛泽东... 他是人民大救星). Cultural workers from the Lu Xun Academy of Arts, part of the same Yan'an cultural-rectification push that reshaped the press (see below), collect, polish and circulate the song through art troupes performing in the "national forms" style Mao's 1942 Yan'an Forum talks called for. The song's exact authorship and the sequence of who first wrote which line are not fully settled; see "What is contested" below. - **1942-1944.** As part of the same Rectification Movement, propaganda chief Lu Dingyi reorganizes *Liberation Daily*, reducing space for international wire copy and foreign correspondents' dispatches and increasing space for Mao's own writings and party directives; historian Patricia Stranahan, who studied the paper's files, and Timothy Cheek both describe the shift as one from a newspaper of general news toward a disciplined party organ whose language for Mao becomes consistently honorific - "our beloved leader" (我们敬爱的领袖) and similar formulas recur where earlier coverage had used his name alone. ![Mao Zedong addressing a crowd beside a banner, in a U.S. National Archives photograph dated 6 December 1944](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/images/yrm-mao-addresses-followers-yanan-1944.jpg) *Mao Zedong addressing a crowd beside a banner, 1944 (NARA record 196235, dated 6 December 1944; the record names no photographer and no place). From the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library collection at the U.S. National Archives, via Wikimedia Commons, which tags it public domain as a U.S. federal government work. Also shown on [The Yan'an Rectification Movement: doctrine, self-criticism and the Rescue Campaign (1942-1945)](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/yanan-rectification-movement-1942-1945/). It shows the leader before a mass audience in the year the honorific press style was being fixed; it is a single undated-place frame and says nothing by itself about how the audience regarded him.* ![Map of northern China marking Yan'an, Jiaxian county and Beijing](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/images/mao-cult-origins-1943-1949-map.svg) *The places the cult's origins run through: Yan'an, where the 1943 decision was taken; Jiaxian county, home of the folk tune; and Beijing (Beiping until 1949). Drawn by FRAME from Natural Earth's public-domain outlines; it takes no position on borders.* - **20 April 1945.** The Seventh Plenum (Enlarged) of the Sixth Central Committee adopts the "Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party" (关于若干历史问题的决议). It rules that the "third 'Left' line" of the early 1930s, the period of Wang Ming's ascendancy inside the leadership, was mistaken, and that the alternative course associated with Mao was correct. The resolution does not extensively name individuals; its effect, discussed further below, is to fix the party's own history around the correctness of Mao's line. - **23 April - 11 June 1945.** The Seventh National Congress of the CCP meets in Yan'an, the first congress in seventeen years and the last before the party took power. On 14 May, Liu Shaoqi delivers "On the Party" (关于修改党章的报告), proposing that the party's constitution name "the thought of Mao Zedong" - combined with Marxism-Leninism - as the guide for all its work. The new constitution, adopted 11 June, does so in its general programme. The congress elects Mao chairman of the Central Committee, a title (later, Chairman of the CCP) he holds until his death in 1976. - **1945-1949.** Through the Chinese Civil War, *Liberation Daily*'s successor organs - the *People's Daily*, which becomes the party's central organ in 1948, and the state Xinhua News Agency - carry the honorific style established in Yan'an nationwide as CCP-held territory expands. "The East Is Red" travels with army cultural troupes and is broadcast increasingly widely; Mao's portrait appears at rallies and, from the army's entry into cities, on public buildings. This period of press and army propaganda is covered in more depth in a separate FRAME case study, [Propaganda of the Chinese Civil War, 1945-1949: land reform, surrender leaflets and the fall of the mainland](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/chinese-civil-war-propaganda-1945-1949/). - **21 September 1949.** Mao opens the first Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference in Beiping (soon renamed Beijing). His address is the source of a line commonly rendered in later propaganda as "the Chinese people have stood up" (中国人民从此站立起来了); the precise wording most often quoted is a later condensation rather than a verbatim transcript match, a point historians flag without disputing the speech's substance. - **27 September 1949.** The CPPCC adopts "March of the Volunteers" (义勇军进行曲), the 1935 song written by Tian Han and Nie Er for the film *Sons and Daughters in a Time of Storm*, as the PRC's provisional national anthem. "The East Is Red" is never formally adopted as the state anthem, though it becomes far more central to public ritual than that formal fact would suggest. - **1 October 1949.** Mao proclaims the founding of the People's Republic of China from the Tiananmen rostrum. A large portrait of Mao already hangs over the gate - the practice of displaying his portrait there begins with the People's Liberation Army's entry into Beiping in February 1949 - and a new portrait is prepared for the founding ceremony itself. "The East Is Red" is played widely around the founding, without ever becoming the country's legal anthem. From this point the much larger, state-resourced personality cult of the People's Republic - the subject of a separate scope, touched on in FRAME's [Big-character posters: how the opening labels of China's Cultural Revolution did the work of charges (1966-68)](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/cultural-revolution-big-character-posters/) case study - takes over from the party-internal cult this page covers. ## How it works - [Testimonial](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/testimonial/): Wang Jiaxiang supplies the cult's two foundation stones, and both trade on his own standing as a former Comintern-trained rival. His 1938 report of Dimitrov's endorsement lends Mao the Comintern's authority at the moment it mattered inside the party; his 1943 article, naming "Mao Zedong Thought" for the first time, carries extra weight precisely because its author had been one of the "returned students" grouped around Wang Ming. Two years later, Liu Shaoqi's congress report performs the same function at a higher level: the party's second-ranking leader proposing, in his own voice, that Mao's name be written into the constitution. - [Glittering generalities](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/glittering-generalities/): "Mao Zedong Thought" and "the people's great saviour" are honorific labels that assert a claim - universal ideological correctness, salvific stature - without specifying the content being praised in the sentence itself. The phrase "Mao Zedong Thought" was defined at length elsewhere (in Liu Shaoqi's report and later commentary), but its power as a slogan came from repetition of the name-plus-honorific formula itself, independent of any single argument. - [Transfer](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/transfer/): "The East Is Red" borrows a familiar peasant folk melody, a form already carrying the warmth of home and community, and layers solar imagery long used in Chinese folk and religious idiom for legitimate rule ("the sun rises") onto Mao personally. The song's promotion through Yan'an's "national forms" cultural policy - drawing on rural performance styles rather than imported or urban ones - transfers that same folk authenticity onto the party's own message. - [Narrative laundering](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/narrative-laundering/): the 20 April 1945 history resolution is not a report of debate but a verdict on the party's own past, adopted by the body whose composition Rectification had already reshaped. It fixes, as settled party history, that the pre-Mao "Left" line was wrong and Mao's alternative was right - folding a real internal power struggle into a single, retrospectively inevitable narrative in which Mao's leadership was the correct answer all along. - [Manufactured consensus](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/manufactured-consensus/): the Seventh Congress vote to write "Mao Zedong Thought" into the constitution followed three years of Rectification study sessions and self-criticism that had already disciplined the delegates' range of permissible positions; the congress's near-unanimity is then presented, in Liu Shaoqi's report and the press coverage that followed, as the party's spontaneous, considered judgment rather than as the outcome of that prior narrowing. - [Bandwagon](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/bandwagon/): the congress's own adoption of the term, followed by its rapid, uniform use across *Liberation Daily* and then the wider CCP press through the civil war, presents "Mao Zedong Thought" as something the whole party had already agreed on, inviting cadres and, later, the public to fall in with a consensus whose formation they had not observed. - [Identity fusion](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/identity-fusion/): by 1949, "the Chinese people have stood up" fuses national vindication - the end of a century of war and foreign incursion - with Mao's own person and speech; loyalty to the nation's new standing and loyalty to Mao become, rhetorically, the same thing. The March 1943 grant of "final decision-making power" had already fused the party's internal decision process with Mao individually in a narrower, organizational sense six years earlier. ## Then and now The clearest comparison is with the cult built around Vladimir Lenin after his death in January 1924 - embalming, the Lenin Institute, the flood of "Leninism" as a codified doctrine - covered in the sibling case study [The Lenin cult after 1924: an embalmed body, a mausoleum and a doctrine called "Leninism"](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/lenin-cult-after-1924/). Both pages score the same mechanism: a revolutionary party turns a leader's name into its own orthodoxy through official resolution, a coined "-ism," and mass ritual repetition. The difference in timing is the point of this page's scope: the Lenin cult was built by a party that already held state power and could stage a state funeral; the Mao cult examined here was built by a party that would not hold a national capital for another four to six years and had to build its authority with a mimeograph press, touring art troupes and a fifteen-household-a-day newspaper run out of cave dwellings in Shaanbei. The device recurs, at much smaller scale, wherever a movement wants an internal line to look like inevitable, settled history rather than a choice made among rivals: a corporate "founder's philosophy" retold after a boardroom fight, or a campaign's origin story rewritten once its early rivals have been pushed out. None of these carry remotely the stakes of a ruling party rewriting the history that justified two decades of purges to come. ## Positions on the record - **The CCP's own position, then and since.** The 1945 constitution's general programme states that the party "takes the united thought of Mao Zedong Thought... Marxism-Leninism and the practice of the Chinese revolution as the guide for all its work." The 1945 history resolution frames Rectification and the elevation of Mao's line as a necessary correction after "Left" and "Right" errors. Deng Xiaoping's 1981 "Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party since the Founding of the People's Republic of China" - the same resolution FRAME's Cultural Revolution case study cites for reversing the verdict on Liu Shaoqi - reaffirms Mao Zedong Thought as "a crystallization of the collective wisdom of the Chinese Communist Party," explicitly distinguishing it, in the party's own later telling, from Mao's personal errors after 1957. - **What is documented.** The texts and dates of the March 1943 Politburo decision, Wang Jiaxiang's July 1943 article, the April 1945 history resolution, Liu Shaoqi's "On the Party" report and the Seventh Congress's constitution, and the CPPCC's 27 September 1949 adoption of "March of the Volunteers" as provisional anthem. - **What is contested.** The precise authorship and drafting history of "The East Is Red" is not settled to primary-source certainty: Chinese and Western accounts differ on how much of the lyric Li Youyuan wrote unaided versus how much Yan'an cultural workers from the Lu Xun Academy of Arts shaped or added, and on whether earlier local variants of the tune had carried comparable praise-lyrics for other figures before being redirected to Mao (a form of borrowing not unusual in the party's wartime folk-song collection campaigns). The exact wording of Mao's 21 September 1949 remarks, as opposed to the condensed phrase "the Chinese people have stood up" that later propaganda universally quotes, is also a point some historians flag as an approximation rather than a verbatim record. - **Not ruled on here.** Whether Mao Zedong Thought, as a body of political and economic ideas, was correct on its merits, and whether the "Left" and "Right" lines the 1945 resolution rejects deserved rejection on the substance. This page scores how the elevation of Mao's name was built and spread, not the policy arguments underneath it. ## Same-method test The same tags apply outside the CCP and outside dictatorships. In the United States, the 1940 and 1944 Democratic and Republican conventions' roll-call broadcasts, and earlier the 1896 and 1900 "Cross of Gold" and "Full Dinner Pail" campaigns, used [Bandwagon](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/bandwagon/) and [Glittering generalities](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/glittering-generalities/) in essentially the same structural way FRAME's own case studies on 1930s American radio and campaign advertising describe: a candidate's name paired with an undefined but positive abstraction ("Americanism," "The New Deal"), spread through a friendly press as though consensus already existed. [Testimonial](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/testimonial/) recurs whenever a former rival's public endorsement is used to settle an internal argument - for example, a defeated primary opponent's convention speech backing the winner. The scale and stakes were not remotely comparable. A U.S. party's internal consensus-building in this period settled a nomination decided again every four years by voters the party did not control; no rectification campaign, interrogation or purge of the losing faction followed a party convention. The CCP's 1943-45 consolidation used a three-year internal discipline campaign to narrow the range of permitted dissent before the vote that made "Mao Zedong Thought" orthodoxy, then held sole power over a country of roughly 540 million people (the 1953 census figure) from 1949, with no scheduled mechanism for voters to remove the leader so named. Same tags, very different capacity to enforce the resulting orthodoxy. ## How to spot it - Ask who coined the label and what they had to gain. Wang Jiaxiang's 1943 endorsement carried weight because he had been on the other side; a rival's conversion is a stronger signal to the audience than a loyalist's routine praise, which is exactly why it gets featured. - Check whether "unanimous" adoption followed a period of narrowed debate. A congress vote taken after years of study sessions and self-criticism is not the same evidence of belief as a vote taken among people free to have argued the other side up to that morning. - Watch for a party's own history being rewritten as inevitability. A resolution that declares a past internal dispute settled, with one side simply "correct," forecloses the question of whether the dispute was closer than the resolution says. - Notice when a folk or popular form (a tune, a slogan, a local hero story) is redirected toward a leader. The warmth attaches to the form; the redirection transfers that warmth to whoever is named in the new words. - Distinguish formal state symbols (a constitution, a national anthem) from ritual ones (a song, a portrait) that carry more real weight than their formal status suggests - "The East Is Red" never became China's anthem, yet mattered more in practice than the anthem that did. ## Images | Image | Source | Licence | | --- | --- | --- | | Mechanism diagram (above) | Drawn for FRAME from the sources below (`make_diagrams_rtp_maocult.py`) | CC BY 4.0, FRAME | | Mao Zedong addresses a crowd, NARA record dated 6 December 1944 (reused from [The Yan'an Rectification Movement: doctrine, self-criticism and the Rescue Campaign (1942-1945)](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/yanan-rectification-movement-1942-1945/)) | [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mao_Tse-Tung,_leader_of_China%27s_Communists,_addresses_some_of_his_followers._-_NARA_-_196235.tif), Franklin D. Roosevelt Library via U.S. National Archives (NARA 196235) | Public domain (U.S. federal government work, per the Commons tag) | | Yan'an, Jiaxian county and Beijing (map) | Drawn for FRAME (`make_yanan_maps.py`) from Natural Earth | CC BY 4.0, FRAME; basemap public domain | ### Image gaps - **The U.S. Army "Dixie Mission" photograph of Colonel Barrett with Mao (Yan'an, 1944).** Hosted earlier and removed: Commons credits Barrett, who appears in the picture, so the photographer and its status as a U.S. government work could not be verified. - **The U.S. Army "Dixie Mission" photograph of Colonel Barrett with Mao (Yan'an, 1944).** It was hosted earlier and removed: Commons credits Barrett, who appears in the picture, so the photographer could not be verified and neither could its status as a U.S. government work. - **The Seventh Party Congress (Yan'an, April-June 1945).** No openly licensed photograph of the congress hall or delegates was found on Wikimedia Commons or loc.gov; period Xinhua and *Liberation Daily* photographs of the congress are PRC-origin works whose U.S. copyright status is unclear (see below). - **"The East Is Red" performances and sheet music, 1943-49.** No openly licensed period photograph or scan was found. A studio recording or later printed score would postdate this page's 1943-49 scope in any case. - **The 1 October 1949 founding ceremony and the Tiananmen portrait.** A widely reproduced photograph, "Mao proclaiming establishment of PRC" (1 October 1949, distributed via the Finnish agency Lehtikuva from a PRC official release), is tagged public domain in China on Wikimedia Commons but carries the file page's own URAA warning that it "might not be in the public domain" in the United States and lacks a U.S. public-domain tag; per this project's rule on pre-1996 PRC-origin images, it is cited rather than hosted: [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mao_proclaiming_establishment_of_PRC.jpg). - **Yan'an cave dwellings and *Liberation Daily* offices.** Western correspondents (Edgar Snow in 1936-37, Harrison Forman in 1944) photographed these, but their photographs remain under archive or estate copyright, not PD or openly licensed, and were not used. - **Wang Jiaxiang and Liu Shaoqi portraits from the period.** Contemporary (1940s) portrait photographs found on Commons are, again, PRC-origin works with unclear U.S. status under the URAA; not hosted here. ## Sources - Wang Jiaxiang, report to the Sixth Plenum (Enlarged) of the Sixth Central Committee on Dimitrov's view of party leadership, Yan'an, September-November 1938, as discussed in Gao Hua, *How the Red Sun Rose: The Origin and Development of the Yan'an Rectification Movement, 1930-1945*, trans. Stacy Mosher and Guo Jian (Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 2018 English ed.). - Alexander V. Pantsov with Steven I. Levine, *Mao: The Real Story* (Simon & Schuster, 2012), on the 1938 Comintern position and Mao's rise relative to Wang Ming. - CCP Central Committee Politburo, "Decision on Adjusting and Simplifying the Central Organs" (中共中央政治局关于中央机构调整及精简的决定), 20 March 1943; discussed in Tony Saich, ed., *The Rise to Power of the Chinese Communist Party: Documents and Analysis* (M.E. Sharpe, 1996), and in standard CCP institutional histories. - Wang Jiaxiang, "The Chinese Communist Party and the Path of the Chinese Nation's Liberation" (中国共产党与中国民族解放的道路), *Liberation Daily*, 8 July 1943, on the first public use of "Mao Zedong Thought"; see Nick Knight, *Rethinking Mao: Explorations in Mao Zedong's Thought* (Lexington Books, 2007), and Raymond F. Wylie, *The Emergence of Maoism: Mao Tse-tung, Ch'en Po-ta, and the Search for Chinese Theory, 1935-1945* (Stanford University Press, 1980). - Mao Zedong, "Talks at the Yan'an Forum on Literature and Art" (May 1942): [marxists.org](https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-3/mswv3_08.htm), for the "national forms" policy under which "The East Is Red" was promoted. - On "The East Is Red" (东方红) and Li Youyuan's credited authorship: accounts collected in Ellen R. Judd, "Cultural Articulation in the Chinese Countryside, 1937-1947," *Modern China* 16, no. 3 (1990): 269-308, and in general histories of Yan'an cultural policy; the song's textual history is treated as not fully settled in Chinese-language scholarship (see "What is contested" above). - Patricia Stranahan, *Molding the Medium: The Chinese Communist Party and the Liberation Daily* (M.E. Sharpe, 1990), on the 1942 reorganization of *Liberation Daily* and its shift toward disciplined, honorific coverage of Mao. - Timothy Cheek, *Propaganda and Culture in Mao's China: Deng Tuo and the Intelligentsia* (Oxford University Press, 1997), on Yan'an-era press reform and the political education of party journalists. - CCP Seventh Plenum (Enlarged) of the Sixth Central Committee, "Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party" (关于若干历史问题的决议), 20 April 1945: excerpted and discussed in Saich, *The Rise to Power of the Chinese Communist Party* (as above). - Liu Shaoqi, "On the Party" (关于修改党章的报告), report to the Seventh National Congress of the CCP, 14 May 1945: [marxists.org, Selected Works of Liu Shaoqi](https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/liu-shaoqi/1945/on-party.htm). - Constitution of the Communist Party of China, adopted by the Seventh National Congress, 11 June 1945, general programme, on "the thought of Mao Zedong" as guide for party work; discussed in Saich (as above) and in standard CCP institutional histories. - Daniel Leese, *Mao Cult: Rhetoric and Ritual in China's Cultural Revolution* (Cambridge University Press, 2011), chapter 1, for the pre-1949 antecedents of the post-1949 state cult and the continuity this page's final section hands off to. - Mao Zedong, address to the first Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, 21 September 1949 (the "the Chinese people have stood up" speech, on the exact wording of which see "What is contested" above): [Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, vol. 5, marxists.org](https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-5/mswv5_01.htm). - Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, decision adopting "March of the Volunteers" as provisional national anthem, 27 September 1949; and Tian Han and Nie Er, "March of the Volunteers" (1935), background from *Sons and Daughters in a Time of Storm*. - Colonel David D. Barrett, *Dixie Mission: The United States Army Observer Group in Yenan, 1944*, China Research Monographs (Center for Chinese Studies, University of California, Berkeley, 1970), source of the photograph above. - Frank Dikötter, *The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution, 1945-1957* (Bloomsbury, 2013), for the 1945-49 civil-war-era press and army context. - FRAME case study, [Big-character posters: how the opening labels of China's Cultural Revolution did the work of charges (1966-68)](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/cultural-revolution-big-character-posters/), for the post-1949 state cult this page's scope stops short of, including the Little Red Book and Lin Biao's 1966 foreword.