Word: posterers
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...week's end Chinese authorities appeared to be putting the lid on this unprecedented outburst of free expression, which was seemingly confined to the country's capital. One poster went up saying that informal exchanges between foreigners and the masses should be ended for the sake of national unity. Gradually, the crowds at "democracy wall" grew smaller and less demonstrative. Yet even if there were no more public challenges to Maoist orthodoxy, foreign observers were left with two distinct impressions. One was that Peking's outbreak of poster politics had been tacitly authorized by the leadership...
...thousands, from dawn to well past nightfall, residents of Peking last week thronged the capital's Wang Fu Ching Street, site of the city's People's Daily headquarters. Jostling one another for view, some making notes, they avidly scanned an eight-sheet wall poster that had been put up on the street and signed by, of all people, an auto mechanic in a nearby garage. In a society where the wall poster is the semiofficial harbinger of political shifts and cultural upheavals, the document on Wang Fu Ching Street was undeniably momentous. As part...
While Mao was being nailed to the wall, Vice Premier Teng Hsiao-p'ing received flattering references in the same poster. Mao, it said harshly, "because his thinking was metaphysical in the last years of his life and for all kinds of other reasons, supported the Gang of Four in raising their hands to strike down Comrade Teng Hsiao-p'ing." Although the commentary omitted specifics, few people who read it were unaware of the reference to one of the strangest and most important events in recent Chinese political history...
Teng has so obviously strengthened his position that he can now safely reject those terms. In a society where little is permitted to happen without government approval, the poster remained on Wang Fu Ching Street for two days, indicating that the auto mechanic who wrote it, if indeed a mechanic was the author, had high-level approval. Moreover, as the week rolled on, additional posters supplemented the original. Words like "fascist" and "dictatorial" were used to describe Mao's rule. One poster attacked Mao openly for having purged Teng and suggested that Mao had been involved in the activities...
Hofheinz said the exchange was not a certainty. He said there was a risk that political troubles in China, as evidenced by recent wall poster campaigns in Peking, could cause the exchange to be delayed or canceled, especially if unrest spreads to the universities...