The Degeneration of Young Li Changkuan 靑年李長寬的堕落 (1956) #

The Degeneration of Young Li Changkuan 靑年李長寬的堕落, illustrations by Gao Lifang 高季方 and Shu Hua 舒華, translated by Lena Henningsen, Damian Mandzunowski, Jiu Song, Astrid Xiao, and Aijia Zhang, Wuhan: Hubei renmin chubanshe, 1956.¹

translation and introduction: 1 August 2026

Translators’ introduction #

Lena Henningsen, Damian Mandzunowski, Jiu Song, Astrid Xiao, and Aijia Zhang

ChinaComx: Translations showcases a considerable number of stories about heroic models. Some of these are based on real figures, such as the young soldier and moral exemplar Lei Feng or the internationalist communist fighter-doctor Norman Bethune. Others are adapted from novels and popular stories, such as the young hero Niqiu, who outwits spies and puppet soldiers during the Anti-Japanese War, or Guoqing, a boy growing up in the Mao era who learns to swim in order to protect collective property. Most of these lianhuanhua were produced in the 1970s and after, when the medium had already served for many years as an instrument of education and propaganda for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

The present lianhuanhua, however, dates from the early years of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Although we catalogue it under the entry “Tales of youth and socialist-patriotic ideals,” it can in equal measure be read as a counter-reading to such narratives. The teenage protagonists of the two stories, Li Changkuan and Zhou Zhensen, are neither brave heroes nor admired role models. On the contrary, as the titles of the two stories—“Degeneration (堕落)” and “Path of Crime 犯罪道路”—make clear, they go astray at a young age. Instead of fulfilling their responsibilities as students to study diligently, they are drawn into the seductive world of evil and debauchery as depicted in old xiaorenshu (小人书, another name for lianhuanhua, which foregrounds that a large portion of its readership consists of minors); following, they are further misled by unsavory influences outside school. Despite being given multiple chances to reform, they persist in their mistakes and ultimately end up as convicted criminals. As the back cover of the book states: “…this lianhuanhua thoroughly exposes the evil nature of the reactionary, licentious, and absurd yellow books.”

Since these “yellow books” clearly refer to lianhuanhua itself, a paradox therefore emerges: although the creators harshly condemn the “evil nature” of lianhuanhua, they nevertheless choose exactly this form to deliver their warning to their readership. To unravel this paradox, this introduction contextualizes and historicizes The Degeneration of Young Li Changkuan .

Cover of The Degeneration of Young Li Changkuan 靑年李長寬的堕落 (1956) depicting the protagonist at a reform through labor camp; courtesy of lianhuanhua fan Wulinren 武林人.

Historical context #

Already in December 1949, Mao Zedong told Zhou Yang, the Vice Minister of the Central Propaganda Department:

“Lianhuanhua are not only read by children; adults read them as well. The illiterate read them, and the educated read them too. Why don’t you establish a publishing house to produce a batch of new lianhuanhua, and eliminate the old lianhuanhua that promote the supernatural, martial arts, and superstition.” (Chen 2023, 7)

This early remark shows that the CCP leadership recognized the broad readership of lianhuanhua and its potential as a tool for education and propaganda. In May 1951, Zhou Yang further emphasized this point at a speech held during the first national conference on propaganda work:

“In the field of art, let us speak only of xiaorenshu. In the past we did not attach importance to them, but now we see that they are also a great force. In Shanghai alone, twelve million copies of xiaorenshu are published, and there are at least three thousand stalls selling them. If there are twelve million copies, it does not mean only twelve million readers; in reality one copy is read by several people, so at least several tens of millions read xiaorenshu. […] If they are bad, then this is a harmful weapon; if they are good, then it is a very good weapon.” (Zhou 1985, 67)

In Zhou Yang’s more blunt formulation, lianhuanhua becomes a political weapon. In the past it was wielded by class enemies; now it could be used to recount the experiences of criminals as a warning to youth, or to narrate the deeds of exemplary figures to inspire the public. The resulting socialist transformation of the lianhuanhua industry was thus part of a broader campaign in the early-PRC to cleanse and reform “old” literature and the arts. By removing, both symbolically—via criticism and the creation of a new visual language to replace the old—and literally—by collecting and pulping old lianhuanhua and replacing them with new socialist-themed ones—the PRC effectively incorporated the mass medium into its centrally-managed realm of visual-textual propaganda.

By 1953-54, the state administration regarded the cleansing of the lianhuanha industries as more-or-less completed. Why, then, publish such a visually striking indictment against lianhuanhua as The Degeneration of Young Li Changkuan in March 1956? A number of concurrent events needs to be considered. On the one hand, the Hundred Flowers cultural thaw which encouraged stronger criticism of the nascent Chinese state-socialist project was underway in literature and arts circles for a few months by then already (Lekner 2026). Lianhuanhua creators could have felt empowered to critique in a harsher manner than thus far the perceived bad influence of old lianhuanhua. In a way, the explicitness of The Degeneration of Young Li Changkuan actually bears resemblance to the visual language of many pre-1949 lianhuanhua it aimed to criticize. On the other hand was the refocusing of the lianhuanhua cleansing campaign toward stricter regulation of existing bookstalls and comic shops started in 1956. The reason behind this drive, as discussed at length by Rebecca Scott (2015) and others, was that considerable numbers of publications regarded as “unhealthy” or “vulgar” continued to circulate in the grey market despite the successfully concluded stages of nationalization and street stall cleansing. To depict the dangers of these lianhuanhua in a shocking albeit plotwise coherent way was to alert the adult readers of lianhuanhua - very often parents of young children themselves — about the grave dangers these stories posed. And in between these developments there were the many ongoing party-internal conflicts, such as the criticism campaign against the writer Hu Feng 胡风 (1902-1985) referenced in the second story (panel 11), as well as party-external developments (such as the deteriorating relationship with the Soviet Union and tensions around Taiwan) which, by and large, presented challenges to the ideological superstructure. The fact that both Li Changkuan and Zhou Zhensen end up in cahoots with counterrevolutionaries points to the seriousness with which, at that moment in time, the party-state regarded the issue of youth “hooliganism” and being led astray by “wrong” ideas.

A word on Bai Chunxi, the writer of this lianhuanhua #

Bai Chunxi 白纯熙, the scriptwriter for both stories presented in The Degeneration of Young Li Changkuan, graduated from Zhongyuan University, a CCP-administered institution providing political and ideological training, in April 1949. Six years after his graduation, he produced this work. Compared to most artists trained through institutional lianhuanhua production programs at the time, Bai’s storytelling more closely follows the narrative conventions of Communist military-region lianhuanhua established in the 1930s. These are characterized by a strong sense of realism, a grounding in everyday life, and a close connection to lived experience all contributing to the didactic functions of early-Communist lianhuanhua (Bai, Liu, and Zhang 1993, 169). In Bai Chunxi’s own account, the creation of new socialist lianhuanhua was framed within a narrative carrying a sense of eventual triumph. As he stated during a public speech in 1989:

“Since the founding of the People’s Republic, lianhuanhua has consistently appeared before readers in a correct, healthy, and progressive form, winning the trust of the broad masses… It has become beneficial spiritual nourishment for people of all social strata, especially for young readers, actively functioning as a ‘textbook of life.’”(Fig.2)

It follows that the old xiaorenshu depicted in The Degeneration of Young Li Changkuan are criticized for leading readers toward moral decline and criminality and, as the narrative progresses, gradually excluded from the category of legitimate lianhuanhua. Their role as such affectively powerful devices arises from the (presumed and/or perceived) power attributed to the act of reading.

Manuscript of Bai Chunxi’s 1989 speech, in which he characterized new socialist lianhuanhua as “correct”, “healthy” and “progressive”, and as functioning akin to a “textbook of life” for the masses, especially young readers. Source: ChinaComx collection.

The power of reading (lianhuanhua) #

Both stories in The Degeneration of Young Li Changkuan set out by highlighting the fascination of children with lianhuanhua. In the first panel of the first story, a group of children sits in front of a lianhuanhua stall; several of them huddle together, reading a single lianhuanhua with great absorption. Li Changkuan, the young protagonist (identified in the following panels by his clothing as the boy wearing a flat cap) reacts impatiently when another child tries to join in the reading. He even waves his elbow to push him away. This gesture suggests that the young protagonist’s mind has already been corrupted by lianhuanhua. In the second story, a group of children similarly crouches inside a dim bookstore collectively reading lianhuanhua (panel 2). As they read, they imitate the fighting gestures of martial-arts heroes, or wear strange masks they have somehow found. While dozens of historic photographs bear evidence to the fact that this was indeed how generation upon generation of lianhuanhua fans engaged with the medium, these two depictions from the lianhuanhua add interpretative layers of indecency or even conspiracy. Outside the shop stands the owner, dressed entirely in black, a cigarette in his mouth, his back turned and arms folded. The blurred and chaotic posters on the wall, together with the darkness inside the room—so deep that even a kerosene lamp cannot dispel it. All these elements suggest that this lianhuanhua bookstore is a corner where the light of New China and New Society has not yet reached. When depicted in such way, the lianhuanhua book stall appears as the breeding ground for bad ideas, the first step on the path of youthful degeneration. (All this bears uncanny yet almost surely coincidental resemblance to Frederic Wertham’s infamous attack against American comic books, Seduction of the Innocent, which, published in 1954, presented virtually identical arguments albeit in the very different context of McCarthy-era witch hunts; see Tilley 2012.)

Xiaorenshu of the wrong type morally corrupt their readers, we learn from this lianhuanhua. These old lianhuanhua possess considerable appeal for their young fictional readers, and their temptations take many forms: “flying saints” and “chivalrous swordsmen” “leaping onto roofs and vaulting over walls” and “looting the mountains and robbing the fortresses” (panel 2 of story 1), as well as “like a GMD officer or an American gentleman, lead a life of debauchery” (panel 4 of story 2). Led astray by such stories, the protagonists’ degeneration gradually unfolds in a panel-by-panel progression: from reading wuxia xiaorenshu (i.e. martial arts xiaorenshu) there is a straight line to licentious sexual fantasies, to sexual transgression, to violence in general and to turning into a counterrevolutionary. Sexual transgression, in essence, is equated with politically undesired conduct, emphasized also by the fact that the villains in the stories are not just “bad guys” but spies and counterrevolutionaries–as well as rapists and murderers. This convergence of different types of moral misconduct heightens not only the evilness of these characters, but also the dangers inherent in these xiaorenshu. The paratext to the stories is clear about this, pointing out that the minds of the two young protagonists were “poisoned” on account of their “obsession with reactionary, obscene, and absurd yellow books from old society” 舊社會迷戀反動、淫穢、荒誕的⿈⾊書籍.

The term “yellow books” neatly points out how these moral transgressions are also ideological ones. It also underlines the continued efforts of the nascent CCP regime to fight such licentiousness and to grassroots reactions to these using official discourse to legitimize their own actions (Wang 2021). While the stories themselves are a veritable thesaurus of expressive words for sexual licentiousness, “yellow books” only pop up in the paratext of the back-cover summary. The term is often translated as “pornographic" but given the attempts of the CCP to cleanse modern China of all negative remnants of old, feudal and bourgeois society, “pornographic” was easily turned into a catch-all term for books requiring censorship. A mild suggestion of romantic relationship could suffice for this, and it could also be thrown at pieces of writing not in line with the political mainstream. The two stories in this lianhuanhua, however, emphasize that the two - pornographic and ideological licentiousness - essentially are two faces of the same coin thus necessitating resolutely taking action against both and resolutely taking action against the “poison” that causes these evils in society: xiaorenshu from old society. This “poison” is, in fact, a conflation of many evils ranging from martial arts fiction, to fantasy and superstition, to licentiousness as well as to, finally, violence and counterrevolution (see also Lin 2021, 26-41). By implication, these stories thus also legitimate the consolidation and streamlining of the book market and of the lianhuanhua industry in the preceding years: Li Changkuan sets an example how a reader of such “yellow books” could be reformed thanks to reading the correct books instead, while Zhou Zhensen is an example of what awaits a person resisting the new order including the reading of new socialist books (i.e., severe punishment).

Crime and punishment through lianhuanhua #

The counterrevolutionary and other crimes in which Li Changkuan and Zhou Zhensen engage bear historical evidence about the fears that motivated the CCP of the mid-1950s: children dropping out of school to join hooligan gangs (i.e., the existence of such gangs as an actual social issue); the villainous influence of former GMD and/or Japanese spies (i.e., the presumed perception that such elements were still an actual danger to society); the equally villainous influence of bourgeois lifestyle choices (i.e., a consciousness about a certain allure and attractiveness of such lifestyle); the rapid turn toward molestation and sexual violence (i.e., the real-life problem of gender violence and sexual abuse, but also pedophilia); theft of state property (i.e., the well-documented problem of theft and corruption among bureaucrats and cadres); chains of criminal acts (i.e., one small misconduct can lead to a series of ever more serious crimes); damaging the power grid and attacking the police (i.e., destruction of key infrastructure and assault on the executors of state-sanctioned violence); and, finally, defection (i.e., the case of people living in the coastal regions defecting to Taiwan or Hong Kong).

Conversely, the lianhuanhua also needs to be understood not least as an exemplary story about how even the most vile person—as long as they show remorse and submit to the state system of reeducation through labor—are not beyond redemption. At the end of the stories, Zhou Zhensen is sentenced to spend his youth behind bars because his crimes are deemed too serious (panel 12 of story 2). Li Changkuan, by contrast, is judged more leniently: because he “was an accomplice to a crime, and was relatively forthcoming in his confession” (panel 27 of story 1), he is “only” sentenced to four years of reeducation through labor. In other words, while the first submits to the process and gets the chance to rejoin socialist society as a changed man, the second remains stoutly opposed to the communist order and therefore has a bleak multi-year prison sentence ahead of him.

The different fates of the two protagonists seem to mirror the fate of lianhuanhua itself in the New Society: those lianhuanhua deemed beyond redemption were decisively swept into the dustbin of history, while those considered reformable had the “the rotten and degenerate poison of bourgeois ideology” removed and would eventually “return among the ranks of the working class” (panel 28 of story 1).

By offering a high resolution scan, transcription, and translation of this lianhuanhua, we hope not only to present the diverse themes and practices of early-PRC lianhuanhua, along with the lively vulgarness in them, but also to celebrate the vitality of the medium during its process of formation and stabilization.

Notes on the translation and the materiality of our copy #

Regardless of its content, this lianhuanhua also differs in several respects from those produced in later periods. First, although it was published in 1956, the same year as the publication of the first part of the simplified Chinese characters, it still adopts traditional characters. Readers may also find the textual portion of the stories somewhat unusual, as they will encounter some Chinese characters that are not “standard.” These characters fall between the simplified and the traditional forms: while they share the same pronunciation and meaning as their standard counterparts, their written forms differ. Such characters are referred to as variant Chinese characters (yitizi 异体字). The existence of such variants in this lianhuanhua is thus a fascinating historical source of this particular historical moment of scriptural change. Second, the captions and images are not presented together within a single panel, as would soon become standard for most lianhuanhua, but instead separated across facing double-pages, with text on the left page and the image on the right. This is another remnant of how early-1950s but also pre-1949 lianhuanhua would be published.

We ultimately decided to translate this lianhuanhua not only because of its unusual context and narrative, but also because of the distinctive material qualities of our copy. The condition of this lianhuanhua, as readers will see, is noticeably poorer than that of the other digital scans on our webpage: curled corners, torn margins, stains, scattered yellow mildew, scribbles, and a few missing pages. When converting this lianhuanhua into a digital version, due to this constrained condition, a black background was used to flatten the pages and to set off their contours. Through this arrangement, we hope to preserve the aura of the volume and to present its heavily used state to the digital readership. For it struck us that the “dirtiness” of this volume reflects, in a vivid and material way, not only the certain darkness of its storyline but more generally how lianhuanhua were consumed: not placed high up in the shelves or kept pristine by collectors to be read at tidy desks with gloved hands, but circulated clamorously, passed from hand to hand, and leafed through eagerly, often with little care; lianhuanhua were also very often used as notepads for casual scribbling or putting down thoughts. A good case is the drawing seen on the title page of the story of Li Changkuan depicting a female “feixian 飞仙” (flying immortal) in a reclining position. Aligned with the characters above, it is as if attributing the degeneration of Li Changkuan to the allure of these figures. The contextuality of this image offers a glimpse of how readers once engaged with lianhuanhua and the kinds of interpretations they brought to them. It suggests how these works were not merely published, stored, and forgotten, but actively read, handled, and responded to. All this points towards contemporary processes of circulation and recognition that made lianhuanhua a true mass medium.

*

We first learned about this lianhuanhua from the research of Chih-ho Lin (see Lin 2021, 26-29) and the Japanese scholar Takeda Masaya, the latter of whom also wrote an essay about various lianhuanhua depictions of the dangers of reading bad lianhuanhua (Masaya 2015). In order to make the volume complete, Jiu Song contacted lianhuanhua collector Wulinren 武林人 from Hangzhou for a better copy. Thanks to their efforts and generosity, we are able to present the complete story by supplementing the missing pages with those from their collection:

Missing pages #

Image panel for pages 12-13; courtesy of lianhuanhua fan Wulinren 武林人.

Text panel for pages 14-15; courtesy of lianhuanhua fan Wulinren 武林人.

Clean version of the contents summary page; courtesy of lianhuanhua fan Wulinren 武林人.

References #

Bai Chunxi 白纯熙, Liu Yuheng 刘玉衡, and Zhang Jinlu 张金路. 1993. An Illustrated History of the Development of Chinese Lianhuanhua 中国连环画发展图史. Beijing: Zhongguo lianhuanhua chubanshe.

Chen, Zhiyin 陈之殷. 2023. “In Conversation with Zhou Wei, Party Secretary and President of the People’s Fine Arts Publishing House—Lianhuanhua Today Remains Enjoyable for All Ages 对话人民美术出版社党委书记、社长周伟——今天的连环画依然老少咸宜.” Guangming Daily, July 7.

Lekner, Dayton. 2026. A Hundred Flowers: How Literature Shaped Maoism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Lin, Chih-ho. 2021. Illustrating a New Nation: Shanghai Lianhuanhua in the Early Maoist Period. PhD diss., University of California, San Diego.

Scott, Rebecca. 2015. The Production and Distribution of Lianhuanhua (1949–1966). PhD diss., University of Nottingham.

Takeda, Masaya 武田雅哉. 2015. “みんな連環画が悪いのさ―少年は連環画を読んで峨眉山をめざす……” [It’s All the Lianhuanhua’s Fault: A Boy Reads Lianhuanhua and Aims for Mount Emei]. Renkan-ga Kenkyu 4: 157–182. DOI: https://doi.org/10.14943/2115.98422.

Wang, Yvon Y. 2021. Reinventing Licentiousness: Pornography and Modern China. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Yan, Wei 阎伟. 2023. “The Practical Spirit of Zhongyuan University and Its ‘Sinicized’ Educational Philosophy: An Archival Study of President Pan Zinian (1948–1954) 中原大学的实践精神与“中国化”办学理念——1948–1954年潘梓年校长的工作档案探赜.” Zhongguo xinwen pinglun 4 (3).

Zhou, Yang 周扬. 1985. Collected Works of Zhou Yang (2) 周扬文集 (二). Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe.

Read the translated lianhuanhua #

❗ Please be aware that this lianhuanhua contains explicit descriptions and depictions of violence, including sexual violence.

Frontmatter

Contents

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