Customer Reviews

Chairman Mao Badges: Symbols and Slogans of the Cultural Revolution (British Museum Research Publication)

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This books does everything it purports to and is a big help to the casual occidental collector. It is also the only English language publication on Mao badges that I am aware of. Therefore it was an essential purchase to me. For others, people who are not collectors or who can read the Chinese, this book is a discretionary purchase that may not be worth the money.

The purpose of this publication is to catalogue the collection of Mao buttons found in the British Museum. The collection of 348 items is large enough to enable the author to hit all of the main points concerning Mao buttons; although, a respectable collection lets at least a thousand buttons bloom, evidently. This should be no surprise as billions of Mao buttons were produced during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) when the button craze was in full swing.

The author of the book, a curator at the British Museum, does a good if, ahem, repetitive job of explicating the Chinese political button phenomenon beginning with a very brief discussion of pre-Cultural Revolution buttons and ending with a piece by piece description of the medals in the British Museum.

A great thing that she does along the way is explain the symbology of Mao buttons and includes both the English translations and the Chinese characters inscribed on the medals so that a person may both identify specific elements of the medals in his collection and grasp their meaning. This is especially helpful in regards to the ideopraphic pin bars which were often worn in accompaniment with the iconic pictorial badges. She also thoughtfully included pictures of the obverse and reverse of every item in the collection; an important point in identifying the manufacturers of the buttons; heretofore never done in Mao button references.

Two things that may irk buyers of this book is that it is paperback bound, and not particularly well-made. Still, the color reproductions are adequate, and the combination of English translations and Chinese characters is very well-executed.

I look forward to the day a book is published that focuses exclusively on Mao button aesthetics for, while the bulk of the Mao badges produced were rather proletarian, a fair number of them veer into art territory. Unfortunately, the British Museum collection contains only a single example of the genuinely remarkable bamboo pieces, and few of the appealing porcelain models; the bamboo and porcelain issues being generally more rare and attractive than the ubiquitous aluminum models.

In fact, even the casual collector of Mao buttons will rapidly come to the following ironic conclusions: Mao buttons can be boring because there are so many of them and they all look alike; Mao was doing Warhol long before Warhol did Mao.

I suspect that this book will soon be out of print and will immediately become collectible.