Imagining Peace in Comics

When I was 15 my mom told me about the land reform movement in China in the 1950's. I'm now 19. She'd lived in China during that time.

I was interested in the Children of Jerusalem exhibit, which is about the Israeli/Arab conflict and is why I wanted to do conflict resolution for my final project. It was after looking at that show that I started to remember my mom's story. So I decided to do the story that my mom told me because it was related to the Children of Jerusalem, conflict and resolution, and it was happened in the real live and it was took place where I was from, China.

Land Reform is about redistributing arable land, whether previously collectivized by the state or held by rich farmers. The farmers are forced by the government to give up their land at prices thats unfair. Landowners evicted the farmers without their consent, and that's why they were so rich. The goals of Land Reform is to take from the rich and give to the poor, reducing poverty, expanding rural development, or returning land to it's previous owners.

I was inspired by the show of the Children of Jerusalem, and I like the symbols that they used in their paintings. Birds. flags, the colors, wall. mystery, sea.

My thing is that I like comics a lot, so I wanted to make a comic strip. My favorite is Case Closed. So I'm going to draw and make a comic strip about the land reform conflict. I will be also using symbols and some text like what the Israeli and Arab children did for their paintings. First, I will draw it on white paper with pencil, then go over with pen, and color it. Cut it out and paste them on a bigger hard cardboard.

I've already sketched out the two comics. What you see here are those rough sketches. I did two pages, one is the conflict as it happened for real and the other one is how I think it could have ended more peacefully. The conflict is that during the 1950s in China, the people were equal, but the wealthy people made the scale unbalanced. So the government needed to do something about it, and it was to punish the wealthy people by forcing them to kneel on the broken small pieces of glass. Thats what the original ending was. But i want to make an alternative ending to it to make it a peaceful conflict resolution. Instead of punishing them so harshly, I want to free the people and take their money and give it to the poor. So there's no violence and everybody is equal.

I used a scale to show the unbalance of the rich with paper money and a Chinese dollar symbol on it, and poor with only coins. At the end, I will draw white birds flying over the balanced scale to represent peace.

I want to show people that violence can't solve problems. People have to work together to make a resolution. To compromise.