Mao actually worried a ton about optics during the civil war. It was at the core of his strategy to be visibly the morally superior side to the other armies that had pillaged, r*ped and ransacked all across the country for decades, the likes of the colonizer troops, the royalists, the nationalists from the KMT, the imperial japanese invaders. Mao made it clear to the troops never to pillage, never to assault civilians, to always pay the peasants for food instead of taking it and to force nobody into conscription, whether adult or child. The PLA was built as a strictly voluntarist force, in stark contrast to every other armed force within china.

This was a huge part of how the communists won popular support. they just treated the people better than anybody else and that spoke for itself. taking optics seriously means much, much more than the aesthetics and respectability shit libs regurgitate when they want to tell us why using hammer and sickle emojis is bad. having good optics means to do right by the people because their support is the foundation of power for a true dictatorship of the proletariat.