The cloth banknote of the Sichuan-Shaanxi Soviet Government Workers’ and Peasants’ Bank

In China, during the turbulent decade of the 1930s, a number of Chinese soviet areas (also known as revolutionary base areas) were formed as a direct reaction to the violent government crackdown on membership of left-wing organisations that had taken place since the late 1920s.

The most extensive of the soviet areas, where large numbers of communists made their homes, was the Jiangxi Soviet, established by Mao Zedong in 1931. In one lesser-known soviet area, the Sichuan-Shaanxi Soviet, the regional government decided to use cloth as an alternative to paper to print their banknotes. This cloth banknote was distributed by the Sichuan-Shaanxi Soviet Government Workers and Farmers Bank in 1933.

The banknote displays many of the common symbols associated with the worldwide socialist movement: the hammer and sickle, the clenched fist, and Marxist rallying cry, “Workers of the World, Unite”, translated into Chinese. Examples can be seen in museum collections worldwide, including, in the UK, in those of both the Ashmolean and British Museums.

The reverse of the cloth banknote shows a design that features a number of large stylised Chinese characters that, on close examination, can be recognised as Constructivist design associated with modern “Art Deco” design in China, which ultimately had their origins in the USSR and arrived in China, via Japan in the 1920s. It is this aspect of Soviet Russian art and design, adopted by the creators of the cloth banknote in this remote area of China in 1933, that makes it so important in the fields of numismatics, textile history, and the history of art and design in China.

Image: Sichuan-Shaanxi Soviet Government Workers and Farmers Bank Notes, 1933. © The Trustees of the British Museum / CC BY-NC-SA 4.0