Creative Project

With this propaganda poster, I made my best attempt at drawing the President of China, Xi Jingping looking over the world, using red and yellow for the land and water. Using a kind of traditional Chinese propaganda symbolism that was often used during Mao Zedong’s period in power, I drew red sunbeams emanating from from President Xi Jingping to show his radius of control over China and other countries.

As we read about, watched a documentary on, and discussed in class, there is an obvious struggle between Hong Kong’s desire for the maintenance and respect of the “One Country, Two Systems”  foundation that was set up when Great Britain handed Hong Kong back over to the Chinese in the 1990s. I made my best effort in writing Hong Kong in the Chinese characters enclosed in a sunflower, which has commonly used been in propaganda along with sunbeams. As we know, sunflowers move toward the sun, so what I tried to do with this poster is show how President Xi Jingping is trying to influence Hong Kong, whether it be through their politics and elections or their business sector, into moving toward the mainland and essentially the communist party practices.

As Beijing continues to exert their influence over Hong Kong, under the direction of President Xi Jingping, by trying to compromise with Hong Kong citizens through stating that they can elect their own governmental officials as long as they can hand pick the candidates up for election. With the growing relationship between the business leaders in Hong Kong and government officials in mainland China, Beijing has the support from an influential group as well as members of their LegCo to go along and do this. I tried to show this support and relationship the Hong Kong businessmen and Beijing officials on my propaganda poster by drawing a couple of sunflowers inside of President Xi Jingping’s pocket which are within his sunbeams of influence.

Through the growing support President Xi Jingping is receiving from the businessmen in Hong Kong, mainland China is likely going to be able to continue to slowly exert their control back over Hong Kong. In doing such, despite the widespread protests taking place against Beijing’s influence in their elections, the “One Country, Two Systems” approach is clearly weakening and essentially deteriorating. The idea of complete democracy in Hong Kong is unlikely to happen with businessmen, candidates, and members of LegCo in the pocket of the CCP and Beijing in general.

Help Received: Used google images to base my drawing of President Xi Jingping off of