This dissertation examines the campaigns for the creation of new nianhua which took place in the 1940s and 1950s. These images designed for domestic propaganda are based on the folk art of nianhua ("New Year prints"), which are polychrome woodblock prints with a worship, protective or auspicious function, to be displayed in specific places in the home. In order to shed light on how the artists appropriated this folk art, a large number of images are paired (political vs folk version) and analyzed. The analysis shows that, in order to create new nianhua that could replace “old” nianhua deemed superstitious and feudal, artists used formal imitation and/or content reform. But more than mere corrective reforms, the many "allusions by substitution" also aimed at borrowing the rich and positive symbols of the nianhua and thus strengthen the rhetoric of these propaganda images.