Stefan R. Landsberger (1955-2024) was trained as a sinologist at Leiden University, The Netherlands. Fascinated by totalitarian propaganda, he started to collect Chinese propaganda posters in the 1970s. His collection grew into one of the largest private collections in the world. Having had access to these posters for such a long time, he came to consider them as rich primary sources for research on contemporary Chinese developments. For that reason, Landsberger used them as the basis for his Ph.D. research, which focussed on materials published in the 1980s. The results were published as Chinese Propaganda Posters - From Revolution to Modernization (Amsterdam / Armonk: Pepin Press / M.E. Sharpe, 1996, reprinted in 1998 and 2001). The book also appeared in German, under the title Chinesische Propaganda - Kunst und Kitsch zwischen Revolution und Alltag (Köln: DuMont, 1996).
Over the years, Landsberger continued his collecting activities, as well as his research on Chinese propaganda. This led to numerous publications, including "Learning by What Example? Educational Propaganda in Twenty-first-Century China", Critical Asian Studies, vol. 33, No. 4 (December 2001), pp. 541-571; Paint it red - Fifty years of Chinese Propaganda Posters (Groningen: Uitgeverij Intermed, 1998); and "The Deification of Mao: Religious Imagery and Practices during the Cultural Revolution and Beyond", Woei Lien Chong (ed.), China's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution: Master Narratives and Post-Mao Counternarratives (Asia/Pacific/Perspectives) (Boulder, CO: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2002), pp. 139-184. He (co-)curated exhibitions in Hamburg (1995), Groningen (1998) and Rotterdam (2008). He maintained the website "Stefan Landsberger's Chinese Propaganda Poster Pages" (1997-2010), and its successor chineseposters.net.
Landsberger was Associate Professor of contemporary Chinese History and Society at Leiden University, and Emeritus Olfert Dapper Professor of Contemporary Chinese Culture at the University of Amsterdam. He was a member of the editorial board of the journal China Information, published by Sage Publications, and secretary of the Chinese Posters Foundation.
A longer text published after his sudden death, 26 September 2024, can be found at https://chineseposters.net/news/2024-landsberger
