Visualizing Modern China: Image, History, and Memory, 1750–Present
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Figure 1.7 This still is from footage produced by a Guomindang film company and included in Frank Capra’s famous Why We Fight film series, which was shown in both China and the United States. The image portrays the Chinese as united against the onslaught of Japanese aggression. From: Why We Fight: The Battle for China. Directed by Frank Capra. 1944; Los Angeles, CA: U.S. Army Signal Corps.
With the outbreak of full-scale war between China and Japan in 1937, the Guomindang’s energies shifted from cultivating moral citizens to surviving a massive military onslaught. Lu Liu’s chapter deals with the national government’s desperate attempts to mobilize popular support in handling a disaster that remains one of the most iconic and devastating moments in China’s national history. The propaganda images they produced highlighted not only the misery of conditions in wartime China but perhaps still more importantly their ability to organize in their struggle to survive as a nation. Some of these images were immortalized in Frank Capra’s classic propaganda film “Why We Fight: The Battle of China,” co-produced with Chinese filmmakers in the wartime capital of Chongqing. This film, shown widely in the United States and in other countries, including China, portrayed the Chinese people as worthy allies and helped galvanize support for them in their time of need (Figure 1.7).
To maintain its power, a state cannot rely solely on producing images for popular consumption; it must also learn to “see” its population. The techniques governments use to oversee populations are often inherently visual and entail, to use James Scott’s term, seeing like a state. The unprecedented migration of tens of millions of Chinese refugees who fled with the Nationalist state from eastern to western China during the war of resistance against Japan involved an extraordinary effort on the part of the state to “see” its citizenry in rational, bureaucratic terms—numbers of needy, tons of available supplies, dollars spent—in order to relocate, employ, and enroll millions of people along with entire universities and factories. The high degree of regimentation, even militarization, of society this entailed is well captured in Figure 1.7. We must remember, however, that “seeing” is always a two-way street. In other words, while the state is always trying to see, it is also being watched by its citizens, as well as by citizens of other countries. The massive upheaval of the anti-Japanese war provided some of the most heart-breaking images of World War II. Accounts of wartime suffering were potent ammunition for propaganda, and Liu shows how they could be used both to sway public opinion and pressure the government to take action. The experience of migration helped transform people’s expectations of the state, which in turn forced the Nationalist government to respond by taking on far greater responsibilities over public and refugee welfare.
The Power and Limits of the State’s Gaze 2: Envisioning Socialist China
Despite the defeat of Japan in 1945, the Guomindang’s days in mainland China were numbered. During the late 1940s, the Communists increased the territory under their control; in 1949, Mao Zedong proclaimed victory, and the Guomindang retreated to Taiwan. When the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) came to power, it built on foundations the Guomindang had laid in its attempts to cultivate patriotic citizens and its administrative efforts to “see like a state.” However, its aims went far beyond stepping into the old government’s shoes. The CCP sought to recreate Chinese society in a socialist mold where ideal citizenship and patriotic sacrifice were linked to, if not synonymous with, class struggle and overcoming the legacies of capitalism and imperialism.
This necessitated transforming what people saw and how they saw it. Where possible, the new leadership sought to replace images associated with the old society with new socialist imagery. However, in many cases this was impossible. For example, large structures associated either with the colonial powers or with the Guomindang were too valuable to tear down, and a great many visual markers were too embedded in daily life to be transformed all at once. And so the state often had to attempt to change the way people saw these things—in other words, the meanings they attached to them.
Christian Hess’s chapter brings us to the city of Dalian in China’s Northeast in the 1940s to examine how the socialist state attempted to eliminate vestiges of colonialism from urban life. Occupied by Russia and then by Japan, Dalian had for decades presented one of the most striking public facades of colonialism. Japanese planners had designed a rational city of segregated neighborhoods. As a result, longtime residents and first-time visitors to Dalian knew at a glance who belonged where: poor Chinese laborers lived in the shanties by the docks; Japanese colonizers resided in attractive neighborhoods; government and business leaders worked among edifices that visually symbolized their power. Urban planning in Dalian was thus a visual practice aimed at making political identities—who were the conquerors and who were the conquered—immediately visible and legible to everyone who entered the city.
After the Japanese defeat in 1945, Dalian came under joint Soviet and CCP control. The new government viewed the people of Dalian through a very different lens: the ideals of socialism rather than capitalist imperialism. Leaders faced an immediate conundrum. They wanted to transform Dalian from a model colonial city into a modern Chinese socialist city, but the logic of the colonial social order was quite literally built into the city itself. The medium of Dalian’s redesign would not be stone and concrete but rather political spectacle. Through attention-grabbing campaigns of housing redistribution, Dalian’s new socialist government tried to create a new urban image. Redistribution followed a statistical analysis of individual families’ economic conditions and the application of class labels. Dalian’s housing campaign culminated in “moving day,” marked by huge parades and media fanfare when Chinese residents, having been officially stamped as the oppressed poor, were ushered by the new socialist government from their shanties into the fashionable modern houses formerly occupied by the Japanese. The spectacle of “moving day” was an impressive attempt to mobilize the population to envision a new socialist Chinese Dalian and bolster support for the new government (Figure 1.8).
But how effective were such attempts? Jeremy Brown’s chapter returns us to issues of rural/urban relations. He finds that despite pervasive socialist state rhetoric about the need to eliminate the rural/urban divide, stereotypes about the differences between peasants and city dwellers proved remarkably durable. Moreover, the gap between town and country was maintained not just through institutional means (such as the household registration system), but also through a visual process that Brown calls spatial profiling, in which both state and non-state actors participated. Visual markers like clothing, skin color, and personal hygiene coded people as either rural or urban. These markers identified peasants with a host of stereotypes (e. g., simple-minded, naïve, and unhygienic) that had important consequences for the treatment rural folk could expect to receive. This culture of seeing was already deeply entrenched well before the founding of the People’s Republic, and as much as the official propaganda of the Mao era professed to refute these stereotypes, they continued without any significant weakening. Indeed, the Beijing government’s efforts during the 2008 Olympics to rid the city of rural migrants confirms Brown’s argument that spatial profiling remains alive and well, and this particular form of visual stereotyping continues to play a powerful role in Chinese politics and society.
Figure 1.8 Photograph of a moving-day celebration orchestrated by the Chinese Communist Party in 1946 in the city of Dalian. From: Dalian shi shizhi bangongshi, ed., Dalian shizhi wenhua zhi (Dalian city cultural gazetteer). Dalian: Dalian chubanshe, 2003.
Matthew Johnson’s essay further explores the urban/rural gap from the vantage point of Great Leap Forward (1958–1960) films. Though narrowing the divide between city and countryside was always an important principle on the CCP’s agenda, the Great Leap Forward was unprecedented in its utopian aims (and claims) of bringing industrial and modern living to China’s rural areas veritably overnight. It was quite befitting then, that during this period millions of villag
ers were exposed for the first time to the powerful—and up to then preeminently urban—medium of film. The effort to bring film directly to the communities of tens of millions of rural residents for the first time shook up the film world, prompting changes in personnel and administrative priorities that are relatively easy for a historian to document. But Johnson moves a step further to ponder a more difficult question: How might Chinese audiences, and particularly those new rural audiences, have responded to these films? Without the benefit of Nielsen ratings, Johnson uses interviews, archival documents and images, and an analysis of unique aspects of Great Leap Forward film production, distribution, and genre to gauge the 1950s viewing habits of rural Chinese people. He finds that film-viewing experience in rural areas differed from that in the cities: films were screened outdoors, often to very large crowds, and were subject to a variety of interventions by projection crews. Rural filmgoing was not simply about watching the film: “talking, eating, meeting potential romantic partners, getting together with one’s friends and family, or just watching the general excitement were also important draws for audience members.” However, the propagandistic messages of the films could not be missed. The very fact that the Chinese state was making such efforts to introduce film to the hinterlands supported its claim to be bringing modernity to everyone, everywhere in China. In this sense it might be apt to apply to Great Leap Forward-era film Marshall McLuhan’s famous insight: the medium is the message.
Figure 1.9 This photograph, by a photographer of a brigade propaganda team in Yunnan, presents a happy image of sent-down youth laboring in the countryside. Today such images are often used to bolster the idea that former sent-down youth should have “no-regrets” about their experiences. From: Personal collection of Xie Guangzhi.
Narrating Experience: Visual Texts and Metaphors
If the medium is the message, what of the medium of historical narrative itself? Increasingly, historians are recognizing that the human penchant for creating narratives (i.e., telling stories) has a profound impact on how we derive meanings from specific historical events. This operates at the levels of personal memory, official commemoration, and professional history writing alike. Images do not function merely to “illustrate” existing historical narratives like the pictures for assembly in an Ikea instruction manual. Instead, they often inspire contradictory narratives; or they can spark the reorganizing of memories into stories that are meaningful to people in their contemporary context. Analysis of the relationship between narrative and image demonstrates the inevitability of multiple perspectives on history, even as the state (and not only the socialist state) seeks to imprint a single definitive set of images.
Xiaowei Zheng’s essay explains that histories of the Cultural Revolution typically use photographs to tell one of two different stories: violent images of youths destroying cultural artifacts or attacking authority figures portray a “scarred youth” narrative, while old propaganda images of exuberant youth participating in rural labor or bringing revolution to the countryside tell a tale of “no-regrets” (Figure 1.9). Uncovering a trove of stories and visual artifacts preserved by “ordinary” urban youth “sent down” to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution, Zheng is able to move beyond these polar-opposite dominant narratives and bring to light a richer, more personal history. Combining oral history interviews with analysis of photographs and art created by the former “sent-downers,” she captures both the drama and the everyday experiences of ordinary people who lived through extraordinary historical events.
Zheng’s chapter asks us to think about the relationships among visual images, memory, and history. By examining both the Cultural Revolution-era events depicted in the images and the later circulation of those images in the present, this chapter charts the movement of images across two historical periods (the Mao and post-Mao eras) and two distinct cultures of seeing. The people she interviewed meet regularly to share memories of their days as sent-down youth in the countryside. They often interpret images from the Cultural Revolution in distinctive ways, and they also share images from their specific experiences that have not found their way into the dominant literatures. As Zheng demonstrates, these former sent-downers are using images not only to reminisce about the past but also to bind them together as a community in the present. The meaning of the images has thus changed over time: the images serve as evidence of present as well as past experiences of community.
Historians are trained to be skeptical, ask questions, and maintain a certain distance from the historical actors we study. Indeed, some of the authors in this volume wish to turn this skepticism on the discipline of history itself. Historians (in this volume and elsewhere) frequently employ such metaphors as “take something as a window on a historical period,” “view something through a certain lens,” or “offer a different perspective on something.” Sigrid Schmalzer and Elena Songster pursue the implications of this language to investigate “the powers and limits of historical sight.” Using the metaphor of the telescope, they show that the picture one gets of history depends on the case, or lens, one selects for study. State writings and images on panda preservation offer a very optimistic view of the Deng-era Four Modernizations program and its effects on wilderness, while those by non-state actors on the search for the Chinese version of Bigfoot frequently present a much more critical perspective on the same subject. The co-authors leave us with a set of related questions: Can two such cases be understood together, and if so, does historical vision thus become more objective? Or is history inherently subjective, with the picture rotating as in a kaleidoscope each time we shift our gaze? Can the contradictions between simultaneous visions be resolved, or must historians simply accept that tensions will always remain to prevent us from achieving a single clear picture of history?
Sue Fernsebner’s chapter on the 2010 Shanghai World Exposition serves as a combination case study and epilogue, bringing this volume up to the present Internet era in a global economy in which China is one of the most powerful players. The reader will find many of the volume’s themes (rural/urban, state society) reverberating here. Most importantly, with regard to questions of historical narrative, we find what in many ways amounts to a real-time struggle over what the Expo represents. The Expo itself, Fernsebner observes, is a complex congeries of image-producing media, from built sites in Shanghai (many of which themselves incorporated imaging systems), to promotional videos and ads, to online virtual tours, to Expo-themed video games. But the internet is raising the old problems of narrative interpretation to a new level, for it opens to the public not just the ability to consume state- or corporate-sanctioned images with clarity and convenience. Netizens can now capture, comment upon, doctor, and redistribute images as quickly as they are made. Image consumers are now also image-makers. But is it perhaps naïve to think that this significantly shifts the balance of power in the state-society equation? Does the Expo mark the Chinese state’s triumphant arrival on the global cultural stage? Or should we see it (following some netizens’ depictions) as yet another opportunity for crony elites to enjoy their VIP privileges at the expense of the general public? Which images will prevail?
Toward a Visual History of China
With their focus on visuality and visual media, the essays in this volume contribute to a richer, more nuanced picture of modern China’s history. Over the course of the modern era we see popular participation in politics increasing alongside state efforts to control daily life; we also see the influence of non-state forces, including commercial activities and popular resistance; and we see profound transformations in the relationship between urban and rural areas.
Through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the relationship between the state and the Chinese people underwent radical change. The Qing dynasty monarchy that invited little participation in politics by the Chinese people became, after 1949, a revolutionary state that attempted to mobilize every individual. A crowd of admiring villagers was an important prop in the spectacle
of Qianlong’s southern tours, but it was in no way Qianlong’s main audience. By contrast, Sun Yat-sen’s Mausoleum and Republican-era sporting events were designed with the central purpose of encouraging greater citizen participation. Yet Republican-era public spectacles and the visual media that publicized them reached primarily urban audiences; the rural millions hardly played a role. The CCP was more committed not only to recruit both rural and urban publics, but also to put them in far more active roles, not merely as viewers but as active participants in the public spectacles at the heart of their political campaigns. Like the housing redistribution campaign discussed in Christian Hess’s chapter, the land reform movement, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution all involved myriad public spectacles, parades, and mass rallies that aimed to recruit nearly every social group into visibly public action. Moreover, the CCP was extraordinarily committed to bringing forms of visual media to poor and rural publics that previously had little access to them. Taking these points together, the CCP was clearly extremely savvy about the power and uses of visual culture. Fast-forward to the 2008 Olympics and the 2010 Shanghai World Expo, we find the state continuing to master new interactive technologies—including 3-D film, video game design, and sophisticated websites—to mobilize and monitor public participation in China’s self-promotion on the world stage.