Scott No: 997
Serial number: W11
Values in set: 1
Date of issue: August 1, 1968
Denomination: 8 fen
Designer: Sun Chuanzhe
Engraver: Sun Hongnian
Size of stamps: 52*31mm
Perforation: 11.5
Sheet composition: 50(5*10)
Printing process: Engraving and photogravure
Printing House: Beijing Postage Stamp Printing Works

Issued on 1 August 1968, the set consists of a single stamp, printed in photogravure by Beijing Stamp Factory, with a face value of 8 fen. The design is dominated by the handwritten inscription, which fills the entire stamp. The postal inscription is in Mao Zedong's handwriting, and the stamp carries no serial number.

Main Theme of the Stamp

On 1 August 1965, the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications issued the C74 special stamp set The Chinese People's Liberation Army, eight stamps in all, reflecting activities of the armed forces such as studying Mao Zedong's works, carrying out the movement to learn from Comrade Lei Feng, creating "four-good" companies and striving to be "five-good" fighters, and training hard to master the skills of killing the enemy. For the issue of that set, Lin Biao wrote an inscription on 26 July 1965. On Army Day 1968, the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications issued this inscription as a separate single stamp.

Stamp Design and Historical Context

The Handwritten Inscription

The design reproduces the handwriting of Lin Biao's inscription of 26 July 1965, the full text of which reads: "The Chinese People's Liberation Army is a force armed with Mao Zedong Thought, a force that serves the people wholeheartedly, and therefore a force that is invincible." The characters are enlarged and set across the full width of the stamp, with the date of the inscription at the end. The entire stamp uses calligraphic text as its only design, with no figures, scenes or other elements, belonging to that category of W-series stamps composed purely of inscription text. The original inscription was written at the request of the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications to support the publicity for the C74 stamps; a year later it was transferred onto a stamp on its own, becoming an example of a personal inscription appearing on a stamp during the Cultural Revolution.

The issue and withdrawal from sale of this stamp are directly connected with Lin Biao's own political fate. After the incident of 13 September 1971, the official assessment of Lin Biao changed fundamentally. In 1980 and 1981, when the Special Tribunal of the Supreme People's Court tried the case of the Lin Biao and Jiang Qing counter-revolutionary cliques, Lin Biao was identified as a principal culprit of that clique. Thereafter, postal items bearing Lin Biao's inscription, portrait or name were successively withdrawn from sale and recalled, and W11 accordingly left circulation. Because the issue period was short and the stamps were subsequently cleared away, both used covers and complete sheets of W11 are scarce today; used copies commonly bear heavy postmark impressions, and collectors generally regard copies with clean surfaces and intact perforations as superior.

Artistic Features of the Design

The layout of this stamp is extremely simple: throughout there is nothing but the handwritten text together with the face value and the postal inscription, with no border ornament or background pattern, so that the visual focus rests entirely on the handwriting itself. It is the most unadorned in form among the W-series stamps. The stamp uses a vertical format, with the lines of characters arranged from top to bottom, consistent with the habit of writing letters and documents; together with the "Chinese People's Postal Service" inscription in Mao Zedong's handwriting, the whole stamp surface takes on a strong documentary character. Within the sequence of the W-series stamps, it both records a specific stamp-issuing activity and preserves the trace left by the personality cult of that era on a postal certificate, making it a stamp that cannot be bypassed in studying the postal history of the Cultural Revolution.