I just got an e-mail asking me to subscribe to The Current Digest of the Chinese Press. Given the prices I don’t think I will, but you might want to consider it, as the free sample issue is pretty good. I would not mind it if they included the Chinese text, or at least proper names, and a version I could download to my Kindle would be better than a big ol’ PDF, but they have lots of good stuff.

They have a couple articles on the attempts of Fangzheng County 方正县 (Harbin) in Heilongjiang to attract Japanese tourists. Apparently they built some sort of a monument to Japanese settlers. According to the article the monument cost 700,000 RMB and was in an area restricted to Japanese people. After ‘vandals struck the monument’ it was taken down by the government, but according to the paper (新京日報) the matter cannot be left there as the whole affair ‘infringed upon taxpayers right to know where their money goes.’ The settlers were of course the Japanese migrants brought to Manchukuo. While “many of the settlers were ordinary Japanese civilians….once they came to China they took on the role of invaders.” A follow-up article was written by a reporter sent to the county who found that local government was forcing local businesses to put up signs in Japanese and that “most young Chinese women here aspire to marry Japanese men” with many women even divorcing their husbands and abandoning their children to go abroad.

Although the articles are not always very explicit about the ‘appropriate’ way to view Japan and China’s history with it, they give a pretty good implicit view of the state of the paper’s attitudes, though obviously not those of all Chinese.

I rather wish the paper had managed to dig up a picture of this monument, since I would like to see it and what it says. The first article points out that “many countries, including China, view the erection of  monuments as a symbolic way to praise certain aspects of a country’s culture or history.” That’s not actually true, since in lots of countries monuments are intended to memorialize things, some good, some bad, and some mixed. The line about the settlers being ordinary Japanese gave me hope that the ‘mixed’ might apply in this case, but I can’t tell without seeing the monument.

In honor of Black History Month I thought I would post something on W.E.B. Dubois and China. I knew that DuBois had dabbled in almost every radical movement imaginable during his long life but I had not known that he was also for a while much enamored of Japanese Pan-Asianism. I knew that the Japanese made considerable efforts to convince intellectuals from around the world that Manchoukuo was a heaven on earth, but I had not known that they got him.¹ in 1936 Dubois toured Manchoukou as part of a Japanese-sponsored tour of East Asia. One result was the article below, which was published in the Pittsburgh Courier in February of 1937.

Japanese Colonialism

I brush aside as immaterial the question as to whether Manchoukuo is an independent state or a colony of Japan. the main question for me is: What is Japan doing for the people of Manchuria and how is she doing it? Is she building up a caste of Superiors and Inferiors? is she reducing the mass of the people to slavery and poverty? Is she stealing the land and monopolizing the natural resources? Are the people of Manchuria happier or more miserable for the presence of the foreign power on their soil? I have been in Manchuria only a week. But in that time I have seen its borders north, west and south; its capital and their chief cities and many towns; I have walked the streets night and day; I have talked with officials, visited industries and read reports. I came prepared to compare this colonial situation with colonies in Africa and the West Indies, under white European control. I have come to the firm conclusion that in no colony that I have seen or read is there such clear evidence of

(1) Absence of racial or color caste
(2) Impartial law and order;
(3) Public control of private capital for the general welfare;
(4) Services for health, education, city-planning, housing, consumers’ co-operation and other social ends;
(5) The incorporation of the natives into the administration of government and social readjustment.

There is undoubtedly much still to be done in all these lines, but the amount already accomplished in four years is nothing less than marvelous. the people appear happy, and there is no unemployment. There is public peace and order. A lynching in Manchoukuo would be unthinkable. There are public services to improve crops, market them and increase their prices. Manchoukuoans are in the police force and the schools and public services. I could see nothing that savored of caste: they separate schools for Manchoukuoans and Japanese. But this is based largely, if not wholly, on the fact that one people speak Chinese and there is no separation in the higher schools. The Japanese hold no absolute monopoly of the offices of the state. The new housing and the new cities take account of the Chinese as well as the Japanese. There has been private investment of capital on a considerable scale; but the railroads are partially owned by the state; electricity, water, gas, telegraph and telephone are public services. The largest open cut coal mine in the world is in Manchuria.: these mines send out 23,000 thousand tons of semibituminous coal in a day; they manufacture coke and sulphuric acid and 24,000 tons of gasoline; they employ 30,000 miners, they have schools, library, hospital, water, sewage and parks. Electricity for a large part of Manchuria is made here — a total of 130,000 kilowatts. Yet all this is not only half owned by the government, but the private employer is under strict government control and regulation. This does not mean that the government of Manchoukuo is controlling capital for the benefit of the workers. But neither, so far as that is Japan. There is, however, no apparent discrimination between motherland and colony in this respect. Nowhere else in the world, to my knowledge, is this true. And why? Because Japanese and Manchoukuoans are so nearly related in race that that there is nor can be no race prejudice. Ergo: no nation should rule a colony whose people they cannot conceive as Equals.

Tomorrow I leave Manchoukuo after a stay marked by courtesy, sympathy and hospitality. Today for four hours I have sat in conference with citizens, explaining by means of an interpreter the intricacies of the Negro problem. I was driven to Port Arthur and entertained at lunch and later invited for dinner. Graduates of several American universities were present. Tonight the American consul called.²

Du Bois also ended up visiting China, and in Shanghai made himself unpopular with the Chinese Banker’s Club. He “recklessly” suggested to the assembled dignitaries that China needed to free itself from European domination and that the only way to do that was under Japanese leadership. This was not a popular suggestion, and he was eventually denounced as a paid propagandist of Japan. Du Bois himself was unimpressed with the Chinese, referring to them later as Asian Uncle Toms in the grip of the “same spirit that animates the ‘white folks’ nigger in the United States”³

I find this piece interesting less because it shows how Du Bois saw everything through the prism of race (which is hardly news) but because of what it shows about Japanese attempts to manipulate foreign opinion about their empire. Although Du Bois may not have been given wads of cash by the Japanese government Mantetsu did sponsor his trip and his Japanese contact Hikeda Yasuichi was a frequent enough visitor to his home that he ended up giving Baby Du Bois piano lessons.  The Japanese no doubt concealed a lot from him, and could point to things like the absence of anti-black racism in Manchoukuo as signs of harmony  but he was not stupid or entirely passive. Du Bois spent 10 hours walking around Beijing on his own and during his stay in Japan became increasingly disenchanted with the place. The article however shows pretty clearly the line the Japanese were trying to sell. Their claims that Manchoukuo was a land of racial harmony would have seemed absurd (or pointless) to a European and obscene to a Chinese but obviously there was some audience for this type of talk, and Du Bois got an impression tailored to his biases.⁴ Du Bois’s talk about roads and hospitals and such is just a standard defense of colonialism that could just as well have been used by the British in Nigeria, but his emphasis on state control of capital seems to be explicitly Manchoukuoan. I hesitate to think about what conditions must have been like for the 30,000 Chinese coal miners working in the world’s largest open cut coal mine, but the fact that they were at least partly under state control rather than being oppressed by rapacious capitalists seems to count for a lot with Du Bois. I suppose I should check and see if Louise Young talks about Du Bois and his visit.

1. Although given that he managed to praise both Stalinist Russia and Mao’s China at various points in his life he was not the most discerning chooser of allies
2. from Lewis ed. W.E.B. Du Bois A Reader
3. from Lewis W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality p.414
4. Manchouguo was also presented as a bastion of anti-communism, but this seems not to have been mentioned to Du Bois

We welcome a guest posting by Alexander Akin, an occasional comment contributor here at Frog in a Well and currently a PhD Candidate in Harvard’s department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations. -K. M. Lawson

As a fan of Prasenjit Duara’s work on Manchukuo, I have long thought that it would have been interesting if he had illustrated his discussion of that state’s efforts to legitimize itself with some of the currency or stamps that it issued. These media were among Manchukuo’s most pervasive propaganda outlets, since everyone participated in the economy in some form or other. We can find examples of everything from the resurrection of Qing-era Manchu ideology to depictions of modern industrial development, slogans related to Manchukuo’s place in Japan’s grand project to realign East Asia, and even the illustration of a cartographic “geo-body” for the fledgling state. I thought I’d post images of some of the stamps issued by Manchukuo that use imagery or wording relevant to these themes. If you want to download the images for use in teaching a class or something like that, feel free- it’s not as if the Manchukuo imperial copyright enforcers will be coming after you!

Manchukuo’s claim to “authenticity,” to use Prasenjit Duara’s term, was based in part on the revival of Qing-era Manchu origin myths, including the hailing of Changbaishan as a numinous ancestral region. This 5-fen stamp, issued in 1935, depicts the famous lake atop Changbaishan. What makes this interesting is the fact that Koreans also claim this mountain lake as their national ancestral site (not to mention North Korea’s claim that it was the birthplace of Kim Jong-Il). The mountain is of course called Paekdusan in Korean.

On this 4-fen stamp, issued on September 18, 1940, Manchukuo cozies up to its best ally/ de facto master by celebrating 2600 years since the foundation of the Japanese royal house (that is, year 2600 of the Jimmu era). Energetic boys perform a dragon dance to celebrate the epic occasion. Another stamp issued on the same day (not pictured) reproduces a congratulatory message in the calligraphy of Prime Minister Zhang Jinghui.

Any newly established state will use maps to aid in the naturalization of its territoriality – that is, “Our country is real because it has a map!” Just ask Thongchai Winichakul (see his book “Siam Mapped”). This stamp, issued on March 1, 1942 to mark the tenth anniversary of the establishment of Manchukuo, depicts a slightly cartoonish map with a building representing the barrier gate at Shanhaiguan, the famous pass through which the Manchus were admitted by Wu Sangui to take over China. A small stretch of the Great Wall is visible to the left of the gate. Was this an allegorical reference to the role of Manchukuo in supplying resources for the Japanese invasion of China? That strikes me as too crudely obvious, something Manchukuo would not want to admit, but otherwise why the emphasis on Shanhaiguan?

Another stamp commemorating the tenth anniversary of the establishment of Manchukuo, this one issued on September 15, 1942, shows three men – a fisherman, an industrial worker, and a farmer – harmoniously developing and gathering the bounty of the motherland. On the tenth anniversary Japan also issued stamps saluting Manchukuo, including one depicting little boys of Japan and Manchukuo adorably marching in unison.

Here Manchukuo again faithfully hails its closest friend with the slogan “Japan’s prosperity is Manchuria’s Prosperity,” written in both Chinese and Japanese. On these stamps, issued in 1944, the Chinese version is written in the calligraphy of Prime Minister Zhang Jinghui, while the Japanese version is in the hand of Takebe Rokuzo, Director-General of Manchukuo’s General Affairs Board. Both stamps are valued at one jiao (10 fen). If I am not mistaken, Japanese was by this point one of the official languages in Manchukuo.

Manchukuo often overprinted its own older stamps with slogans to mark recent events, then re-releasing them for use. The underlying stamp in this case is a 4-fen issue of 1936-1937, showing the Northern Mausoleum at Mukden (another example of the use of Qing-era Manchu imagery to instill legitimacy, as this was the burial place of the early Manchu rulers before the Qing capital was moved to Beijing). It was overprinted in 1942 with the slogan “In commemoration of Singapore’s return to our East Asia.” This refers to the fall of British-ruled Singapore to Japanese forces on February 15, 1942. The overprinting of stamps with this slogan began on February 16.

Another overprint, applied this time to a 6-fen stamp of the late 1930s depicting a horse-drawn cart transporting bags of soybeans, commemorates the first anniversary of the beginning of the Pacific War. It gives the date 8.12.8 (December 8, Kangde year 8 [1941]), and declares, “The flourishing of Asia began on this day.” December 8, 1941 was the day on which Japan launched attacks on multiple targets across Asia including the Philippines, Malaya, Thailand and Shanghai; it was also the day on which the U.S. declared war in retaliation for the raid on Pearl Harbor. To Japan and its allies the first anniversary in 1942 still looked like the dawn of a glorious era of “Asian co-prosperity.”

The last stamp printed by Manchukuo, about three months before it collapsed under the Soviet “August Storm” offensive, was this 10-fen stamp issued on May 2, 1945 to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the “Huiluan xunmin” edict, in which Puyi proclaimed that Japan and Manchukuo shared “One virtue, one heart (yi de, yi xin).” This slogan is inscribed in a circle in the center of the stamp.

Some may be surprised to learn that all of these stamps are very inexpensive; at the time of Manchukuo’s collapse there were countless sheets of stamps still sitting in storage that eventually found their way into the philatelic market. The dates of issue given for these stamps are based on the listings in Scott’s Standard Postal Stamp Catalog, volume 4.

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