So, I presented a paper at AAS in San Diego. Obviously the high points were meeting Konrad Lawson in person and eating really good fish tacos, so I could taunt the kids when I got back. The paper was on air-mindedness in China. Air-mindedness was the interwar idea that aircraft were about to lead to a transformation of human affairs. This was a big deal in Europe, the U.S. and Soviet Russia, among other places. I dealt a little with how the idea was imported into China before the war, especially after the bombing of Shanghai in 1932. While there were some air-minded writers who talked about how air travel would lead to universal peace, China was more influenced by those who foresaw a new form technological warfare that a modern nation would have to learn how to cope with. My paper mostly looked at wartime efforts to deal with air-raids, but the best reactions I got came from some of the pre-war pictures. If you are the type who only reads scholarly journals for the pictures this post is a good substitute for going to AAS.

Here is a map showing the WWI bombing of London, superimposed on the city of Shanghai, to give the Chinese people an idea of the scale of modern war. In 1932 only a handful of places in Shanghai had been bombed, and part of the purpose of pre-war propaganda was to convince Chinese that they needed to be ready for a new type of war.

How do you prepare? Well, you have to become a different sort of person, as the picture below suggests. I’ve seen this reproduced in a few places. It shows how, based on American experiments, you can tell what size bomb made the crater you are looking at. Your natural reaction to seeing the building next to you turned into a smoking crater might be to panic, but the air-minded citizen will climb into the hole and report the event to the proper authorities

You also have to become a different sort of society. Here is a map, based on European models, that shows a proper modern air defence net for a city, going from the observers far away (all linked by modern communications) to the layers of defence of the city.

How well did the Chinese do at all this? Well, as the picture of an air defence net below, taken from a wartime journal, suggests, they had the idea, but the execution was lacking, at least in the early part of the war.

A lot of the pre-war modernity was pretty vague, like these fliers urging the Chinese people to pay attention to air defence, but not really explaining what that might mean

Modernity was also not very evenly distributed in the pre-war period, with most of what was being done happening in Nanjing. That changed during the war of course. It was not much of a paper, but I did like digging around and finding some of this pre-war stuff on air-mindedness and tying it into the more familiar narrative of the wartime bombings.

Above is a charm carried by a Chinese soldier in 1938, re-printed in the journal Youth Front in 1938. It seems to be a Communist publication, although this being the period of the United Front it is pretty mild in its communism, calling for the unity of all groups and parties in opposing the Japanese. In any case, both the Nationalists and the Communists were, as good children of May 4th, opposed to superstition. The article praises both freedom of religion and the contributions religious groups had made to the war effort.¹ Still, given China’s long history of corrupt government and uneven education superstition (presumably meaning religious views that did not count as proper religion) was quite common. Even the Japanese ridiculed these charms.

“It is laughable that they carry these charms, showing not only that they fear death, but how badly they need to die. These charms also show why our brave soldiers kill them so easily.”

Always good to be able to cite an (unnamed) enemy source on topics like this. Of course the charms don’t work and may actually do harm. This one, like most, was to be written on paper, then burned and drunk with water. Charms like this were an old part of Chinese popular religion. The Boxers had ones that would make you immune to bullets. This one reveals something about the anti-Japanese resistance of Chinese soldiers/militia/whoever, as it will make it possible for you to go without eating for ten days. The article says that this is laughable. but I might go with tragic instead.

from 青年战线 No 1, 1938, p.20

1. Gregor Benton has a lot of nice stuff on the Communists and religious groups in New Fourth Army [↩]

So, today is Labor Day in the U.S.A., which means that you can celebrate the achievements of the working class without being a Communist. The rest of the world, including China, celebrates on May 1st, but American images of labor have been imported to China in the past. Over the summer I looked into some of the issues of 工合画刊, the illustrated journal of the Co-operative movement in China. Although not enough scholarly work has been done on the movement, it is usually associated with Rewi Alley’s attempts to bring knowledge of western industrial techniques to China. Apparently they also brought techniques of illustration, since a lot of their stuff seems to borrow from western techniques.

This guy, who is calling for the people of the Northwest to produce more stuff might have come from Madrid, and the composition seems western to me as well, although I’m not a good enough illustrator to explain why.

This guy (and they are all guys) might have come from an American propaganda poster of an evil Japanese, showing how thoroughly Chinese artists were borrowing American conventions.

The two that I found most striking were the Son of Vulcan

and, most impressive of all, John Henry

I guess what I like best about him is that he seems not only confident in his own power, but confident that this will be accepted. He looks innocent but not naive. Needless to say, this type of image did not become common in China, but it is nice to see it there.

Are you keeping up with China Postcards on Flikr? You should be, as he is posting an amazing collection of old cards, press photos and other stuff.

Above we have Vietnamese colonial troops preparing to defend Shanghai in 1927. Below we have Taiwanese soldiers on their way to the front during the war.

Below we have people knitting and, presumably, being reformed though labor, in 1965. There are a lot of great images in here

Press Photo 1132 新闻老照片-北平学生反日大游行 Beijing 1936

Press Photo 1225 新闻老照片-由大陆来到印度支那 1950

Lots of people have already commented on the Chinese professor video, which is getting a lot of play in the US. If you have not seen it, it is  set in the year 2030, and shows a Chinese professor (an updated Fu Manchu) laughing at the Americans whose empire has fallen because (unlike China) they have allowed the government to interfere with the free market.

Fallows and others have pointed out how absurd the content is, and he suggests that we will see more like this. I suppose so, but I don’t predict ads claiming that Chinese Baozi are made with the blood of American babies till at least 2016.  Actually some of these anti-China ads are coming out already.

What I find most interesting about the Chinese professor ad though is the iconography. There are lots of administrators in my school who would no doubt laugh till they choked at the idea that in 2030 an advanced country would still be delivering educational products through the appallingly old-fashioned method of putting tuition-generating units and an instructional employee  in a room and having them talk.

Even more interesting are the Mao-period posters on the walls of the classroom. Are they predicting a resurgence of Maoism in China? Yes, the old guy gets some face time even now, but I have never seen anything like these in a Chinese lecture hall. Or maybe they wanted pictures that would say “”China” to an American audience. I presume the decision went something like this.

Pandas  -Say China, but are too cute to be a threat.

Yao Ming -Says China, but can’t stay healthy. Sick Man of Asia is not what we need here.

Ichiro Suzuki- Says China to Americans, still healthy and still hitting well, but Seattle stank last season. No threat.

Great Wall. Possible, but not scary enough. Just sits there. Sure you can see it from space, but how many Americans go into space nowadays?

So Mao is pretty much all that is left. I could actually imagine a world where by 2030 Chinese nationalists were recycling Maoist imagery as sort of a we Chinese are bad-asses type of thing. (Maybe not the Mao as bald guy pics, but certainly some of the heroic poses from the C-R stuff. )

From Gawker a set of military recruitment ads from around the world. Representing East Asia we have Taiwanese who gain skills while defending 20 million people from an unknown enemy, a Singaporean battleship that transforms into a giant robot, and an ad for the Japanese Navy that is quite remarkable.

(Japanese ad intercut with an American one)

Lots of American military recruitment ads (which turn up a lot on the type of shows my 15-year old son watches) emphasize how joining up connects you to a glorious history, not just the few, the proud, etc. but pictures of the G.I.s who defended freedom by beating Hitler. They tend to avoid pictures defenders of freedom in blue uniforms shooting defenders of slavery in gray, since that brings up some history that they don’t want brought up.

The British ad is maybe the best and most historical. The ad shows as screaming armed black guy (ohh a native) who is calmed by the sheer stiff upper lip  and steely eyes of a British officer. Remember when Britain was an Empire? Well that was before your time, but IF you could be a real British officer that would be something. Beats sitting around Oldham getting pissed, anyway.

In East Asia military history is a very fraught subject. The PLA has killed lots of people, but many of them were Chinese. Even stirring up anti-Japanese feelings (or even bringing up the Revolution) may not be a good idea.

The Japanese Navy of course also has a glorious history, if one assumes that for a Navy a glorious history means sending lots of foreigners to watery graves. Needless to say they don’t want to emphasize that. Maybe a dance routine is best.

Here is a PRC version. Comparing ads you might think Taiwan and Chinese Beijing were the same country.

Via Tapped

As readers of Orwell know, the British of the interwar period were fond of buying comic and risque postcards while on seaside vacations, and Donald McGill was the king of postcard artists.

Thanks to China Postcard (Via JJ) you can now look at lots of postcards about China. There are a bunch of English ones, and although none by are by Donald McGill probably would have been sold on the same racks. Unlike modern postcards they are not really linked to a place, and are just supposed to be insightful or funny. They are the viral videos of the Good Old Days.

So what did the average Brit think of China?¹

Well, to some extent, China is a place just like England, with women on the prowl.

Like the English the Chinese can also be sappy and  romantic.

As Orwell points out, these ”racy” postcards tend to have a pretty conventional idea of sexuality. Marriage and your honeymoon are the high-point of your romantic life, and transgressions may go past canoodling behind a newspaper, but not much beyond. So the Chinese are just like us, and even speak good English. They dress oddly but that’s about it.

There is at least one series where the Chinese are tied to technological backwardness (and Pidgin English)

And of course they are an odd, Topsy-turvy type of people.

They stand with their backs to the teacher while reciting lessons!

There are also a fair number that emphasize the child-like innocence of.. children

Some of these have bible quotes, and may or may not have been issued by Christian groups.

You’d need more pictures, and above all better dating to do anything serious with these, but it’s a fun collection to look through.

1. note that I’m not sure of the dates for some of these, or even if they are English [↩]

A beautiful Spring day. What could be better on a day like this than grading papers?

Cubs lost the opener 16-5. Spring really is here

Here, from Stapleton’s Civilizing Chengdu is Yang Wei, Chinese Revolutionary, in prison, November 25, 1911. Below is a picture of Yang as superintendent of police in March 1912. I use both of these in class when talking about 1911, but I am posting the top one here because it is such a striking picture. It’s obviously posed, as most pictures had to be back then, and Yang clearly has a sense of himself as the dramatic revolutionary that is lacking from every other picture of the 1911 crowd I can think of.  Is anyone aware of anything else like this from the period? Any guesses as to what the others in the shot are there for?

It occurred to me that some of our readers may also have occasion to teach about Chinese conceptions of the afterlife, and specifically Chinese Hell. I got some pictures of Hell while I was in Xian, specifically at the Daxingshan Temple. Like a lot of sites it Xian it has a very old history, but much of what is there now is quite recent. Also like many mainland temples it is pretty eclectic in its Buddhism, with Tibetan-style prayer wheels..

and a pond full of animals that have benevolently not been eaten

Lots of mainland temples seem to assume that you received very little religious instruction and thus you will need to learn about it here. Thus they have a nice Hell room, that illustrates the punishments that you can expect if you misbehave. My apologies for the picture quality, as it was kind of dark, my camera and skills were poor, and I was reluctant to disturb the occasional worshiper.

Like Dante’s version, the Chinese Hell has specific punishments for specific sins.

Kidnappers are sawed in half.

(more…)