Ashmolean Eastern Art Online, Yousef Jameel Centre for Islamic and Asian Art

This is a papercut from the series ‘New Women’, which expresses women’s equal contribution to the new achievements of the Cultural Revolution. The female character on this papercut is the heroine from the novel Island Militia Women, written by Li Ruqing (b. 1928) and first published in April 1966. The story is set in the early 1960s on one of the China’s southeastern sea islands, where a group of female militia soldiers made a living by fishing but also armed themselves to defend their territory against enemies who ‘wanted to deconstruct the new China’. As the publication of literature works was highly controlled and fiction was rare, the book was well received throughout the country. In February 1972, the second edition was published with several changes according to the requirement of the political atmosphere of the Cultural Revolution. In 1974, the fiction was made into a movie named after the heroine Haixia, which was later criticized by Jiang Qing because ‘the actress was too beautiful to be a militia soldier’. Only one week before the director Xie Tieli (b. 1925) was due to be arrested, the Gang of Four was arrested and the Cultural Revolution ended.