China and Inner Asia

Organized Panel Session

(4) - Behold the Apocalypse: World Powers in Shanghai Cartoon Magazines of Mid-1930s

Perception of foreign peoples in Qing and Republican China was often dualistic. They were alternately scorned as barbarians and seen as potential sources of valuable knowledge. In other words, foreigners were simultaneously perceived as a threat and a model. Such contradiction was reflected in Shanghai's cartoon magazines, the high tide for which were the 1930s. Shidai Manhua 時代漫畫, Shanghai Manhua 上海漫畫, Wanxiang 萬象, Manhua Shenghuo 漫畫生活, etc. (published between 1934 and 1937), imitated the overall style of Western magazines, such as Punch, Vanity Fair or Vogue. At the same time, these Shanghai pictorials strived to produce a view of events that would be relatable to their Chinese readers. Not surprisingly, the calamities of the 1930s inspired an intensely pessimistic vision both of the domestic and of international affairs, with world powers becoming a threat not only to China, but to the whole planet.

The aim of this paper is to reconstruct the visualization of such planetary catastrophe forefelt by a part of Chinese public through addressing Shanghai cartoonists' response to the spread of totalitarian ideologies, the horrors of Spanish Civil War and the Abyssinia crisis, together with other signs of an encroaching disaster. Traditional devices of Western caricature and satire were applied, adjusted and enriched in Chinese cartoons to ridicule the very countries from which these devices came. Dehumanizing metaphors, allegorical representations, Christian fables all served to portray the world powers as apocalyptic figures driving the Earth to Doomsday.

Speaker(s)

• MG

  Mariia Guleva

  St. Petersburg State University, Russia