Turn the page over: a 1953 Chinese upside-down face against the Communist Party

A U.S. Information Agency sheet for Asia, catalog date 22 April 1953, printing one line-drawn face twice. Read upright, the face smiles over "before the Communist Party came"; turned upside down, it frowns over "after the Communist Party came" (NAID 5729931).

How the trick works

A simple line drawing of a face sits between two lines of Chinese, one printed the right way up and one inverted. Held normally, the face smiles. Turn the paper through half a circle and the same strokes make a frown, and the upside-down line now reads correctly. The sheet carries two identical copies of the drawing side by side.

後之了來黨產共

前之來未黨產共

[English, as given by the archive:] After the Communist Party came [inverted line; reads 共產黨來了之後 once turned 180 degrees]

Before the Communist Party came [upright line; reads 共產黨未來之前 right to left]

The file

FRAME credits the U.S. Information Agency's Asian poster series and dates the sheet 22 April 1953. The image came to the archive through Wikimedia Commons from the National Archives, where the item is NAID 5729931 in Record Group 306. The archive keeps a second record for that same NARA item, titled as a U.S. turn-it-over face card. Nothing printed names a sender, and FRAME classes the source as blurred. The purpose field reads "Demonize"; the theme is security and surveillance.

A verdict with no evidence

The archive files this under card stacking, and the description is blunt: the device delivers a verdict and offers no fact to check. That is the whole design. There is no place on the sheet, no date, no policy, no number, only a mood before and a mood after, with one political party named as the cause of the change.

The trick is clever, and it works for the same reason it should make a reader cautious. A drawing that flips its meaning when the paper is turned shows how little the picture itself proves. Any party, any government, any arrival could be written above and below those strokes. The reader who wants to know whether life under a ruling party got worse needs prices, arrests, harvests and the names of the dead. Other sheets in the same program printed figures, whatever their quality. This one printed none.

For an anticommunist sheet that argued with figures in place of a gag, see Kremlin's Words and Deeds, which tabulates contributions to UN programs. Red Star Over Asia sets a drawn brute beside columns of facts. More sheets from the program are on the USIA poster gallery.