For Yang Mao-lin’s "Prominent Leader" series he revisited politically oriented themes for the first time in almost twenty years. In the series he continued with his strategy of appropriating cartoon characters and adapting them with different techniques. This time he blended these amusing characters with historical intellectuals, politicians and religious leaders. He created a hybrid of SpongeBob’s friend Patrick Star and Confucius, the first teacher and sacred source of Confucian knowledge in Chinese culture. And he created a hybrid of Sheldon J. Plankton and two of the most ruthless and notorious dictators of the twentieth century: Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin. These lighthearted parodies are very different from his work of the 1980s and 90s, as they lack the antagonism, criticism and hatred he felt at those times.