“Moving Heaven and Earth”: Visualizing Socialist Construction Campaigns in Mao-Era Propaganda Posters (1949–1978)

Abstract: This digital collection examines Mao-era propaganda posters (1949–1978) as powerful visual instruments that both reflected and mobilized socialist modernization and large-scale environmental transformation. Once ubiquitous across factories, communes, schools, and city streets, these images rallied millions by depicting heroic workers, monumental construction campaigns, and landscapes radically reshaped through collective will. From the Great Leap Forward to the Cultural Revolution, posters celebrated dam building, land reclamation, terracing, and other projects that framed nature as an adversary to be conquered. In doing so, they helped naturalize an anti-nature ideology that justified ecological disruption on an unprecedented scale. Revisiting these images reveals how visual culture legitimized extractive modernity and invites critical reflection on enduring global struggles over environment, progress, and power.