Chinese Christian Poster Project Connects US and China through History
While many people are familiar with Chinese communist propaganda posters, a lesser-told tale exists in the Chinese Christian propaganda posters of the early twentieth century. From 1927 to 1949, bright, eye-catching posters were displayed in tea shops, pasted on city walls, hung on temple gates, or unfurled for street evangelism. They were the most common Christian visual imagery in China in the first half of the twentieth century. These beautiful prints and posters are now readily available to view online, thanks to a dedicated team of researchers at the Center for Global Christianity and Mission (CGCM), a center of the School of Theology.
“These posters are important because they reveal a past that has been hidden. They show us that China’s political parties were not the only ones with a vision for a New China. Christians, we are discovering, promoted a third way to ‘save the nation,’” said Daryl Ireland, the project manager of the Chinese Christian Posters project, and associate director of the CGCM. “Poster production was a rare combination of Chinese Christians and foreign missionaries working together, often in equal parts. It has been special to recreate something like that as this digitizing project has brought all sorts of people together. It was started here in Boston, but it has grown to include people and institutions around the world. What I am especially happy about is that our primary users are in China. Yesterday, for example, we had about 2500 visits. Most of those came from China.”
The Chinese Christian Posters website showcases the posters by category, such as “Biblical Stories, “Social Issues,” or “Evangelism”. Viewers to the site will be able to read a bit about each poster, its context, and its publication date.
