Visualizing Modern China: Image, History, and Memory, 1750–Present
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20. See ZYBG, 1:5 (1934).
21. Guo Youshou, “Er shi er nian zhi guochan dianying” (Chinese film in 1933), in China film year book 1934. Guo later defected to mainland China while serving as a diplomat to Europe for the Nationalist government. See Qian Wen, “Yi pian danxin bao chunhui – Guo Youshou qiyi qianhou” (A loyal heart to motherland—the defection of Guo Youshou), in Minguo chunqiu (Republican forum), no. 5 (1992), pp. 59–64.
22. ZYGB, 1:6 (1934), p. 3 and The Work Report of the National Film Censorship Committee, Nanjing: 1934, p. 43.
23. For instance, in Jia Mo’s critique of the ideological orientation in Chinese filmmaking. See Jia Mo, “Yingxing yingpian yu ruanxing yingpian” (Hard films versus soft films), in Xiandai dianying (Modern cinema), 1:6 (1933).
24. Jiang Shangou, Yinguo neimu (Inside the film world), Shanghai: Tiandi chubanshe, 1946.
25. Paul Clark, Chinese Cinema: Culture and Politics since 1949, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
26. “Shanghai shi dianying ju guanyu san shi niandai wenxue yanjiu suo de renyuan peibei chuangzuo qingkuang” (The film bureau of the Shanghai municipal government: details concerning the Institute of Literary Studies in the 1930s—its personnel and output), SMA, B177-1-297. The document is dated 1964.
27. Yu Ling, “Dang zai jiefangqian dui Zhongguo dianying de lingdao yu douzheng” (The Communist party’s leadership in the film industry before liberation), in Zhongguo dianying (China screen), 5 (1959), pp. 29–33 and 6 (1959), pp. 42–46. Yu himself was actively involved in writing film criticism in the 1930s and was a close ally of Xia. After 1949, while Xia served as the director of the Cultural Bureau of the Shanghai Municipal government, Yu was Xia’s deputy director.
28. Among the more influential derivative accounts, Jay Leyda’s Dianying: An Account of Films and the Film Audience in China (Cabridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1972) has in turn become the source of many English writings about 1930s Chinese film.
29. For examples of Red Guard publications, see “Yi Jianghua wei wuqi, chedi zalan dianying jie fan geming xiuzheng zhuyi wenyi heixian” (Using Mao’s talk as weapon, smash the counter-revolutionary black line in the film industry), May 3 1967.
30. Hu Qiaomu, “Zai jinian ‘Zuolian’ chengli wu shi zhounian dahui shang de jianghua” (Speech at the conference commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Left League), originally published in Renmin ribao (People’s daily), April 7, 1980, reprinted in Zhongguo dianying nianjian 1981 (China film year book, 1981), Beijing: Zhongguo dianying chubanshe, 1982, pp. 187–88.
31. Yu Ling, “Dang zai jiefangqian dui Zhongguo dianying de lingdao yu douzheng” (The Communist party’s leadership in the film industry before liberation), in China Screen, 5 (1959), pp. 29–33 and 6 (1959), pp. 42–46.
32. For Cheng’s discussion of leftist cinema, see his Zhongguo dianying fazhan shi (A History of Chinese Cinema), Beijing: 1981, pp. 171–493.
33. Chen Bo, ed., Zhongguo zuoyi dianying yundong (The Leftist Cinema Movement in China), Beijing: China Film Press, 1993.
34. One rare exception is Lu Hongshi, who questions the notion of leftist cinema in a footnote. See his Zhongguo dianying shi, 1905–1949 (A History of Chinese Cinema, 1905–1949), Beijing: Wenhua yishu chubanshe, 2005, p. 61, footnote 1.
35. Li Yizhong, “Zhongguo dianying jiushi nian liu da maizuo pian tanxi” (An analysis of six box office hits in the 90 years of Chinese film history), in Dangdai dianying (Contemporary Cinema) 6 (1993), 8–16.
36. Xuan Jinglin, “Wo de yinmu shenghuo” (My Life as a Movie Actress), in China Screen, 3 (1956), 72–75.
37. “Guochan pian bisai jiexiao” (The results of domestic film competition), Dianying shibao (Movie Times), July 16 (1934), 2.
38. The surviving print of the film being circulated today no longer has these details, and, interestingly, in the reprint of the director’s own reflective article on this film in the early 1990s, his comments about these specific details are also deleted. One wonders if the disappearance of such details from the current film print and in documentary references to them is merely coincidental. For Zheng Zhengqiu’s article, see his “Zimei hua de ziwo pipan” (Self criticism on The Twin Sisters), in Shehui yuebao (Society Monthly) 1 (June 15, 1934), 39–41; for reprint of his article, see “Zhongguo zaoqi yingren zishu” (Early Chinese filmmakers: in their own words), in Shang ying huabao (Shanghai Film Studio Pictorial) 10 (1991), 22.
39. Ya Fu, “Zimei hua ping yi” (Comments on The Twin Sisters, I), in Yi Ming ed., San shi niandai Zhongguo dianying pinglun wenxuan (An anthology of reviews of the 1930s Chinese films), pp. 34–5.
40. Lu Xun, “Yunming” (Fate), in Lu Xun, Lu Xun quanji (The Complete Works of Lu Xun), vol. 5, pp. 442–3.
41. Yuan Wenshu, “Jianchi dianying wei gongnongbing fuwu de fangzhen” (Upholding the principle of film serving the workers, peasants and soldiers), in China Screen, 1 (1957), 20.
42. Yang Deli, “Zunzhong lishi he qianren” (Respect history and forerunners), in China Screen, 5 (1957), 1–3.
43. Yu Ling, “Dang zai jiefang qian dui Zhongguo dianying de lingdao yu douzheng” (The Communist party’s leadership and struggle in the Chinese film industry before liberation), China Screen, 5–6 (1959), 29–33; 42–46.
44. Xia Yan, “Jinian Zheng Zhengqiu xiansheng” (Remember Mr. Zheng Zhengqiu), Shangying xinxi (Shanghai film studio news bulletin) (February 20, 1989), reprinted in Zhongguo dianying nianjian (China Film Yearbook) 1989, 311–12.
45. Li Jinsheng, “Lun Zheng Zhengqiu” (A study of Zheng Zhengqiu), in Dianying yishu (Film Art), 1–2 (1989).
46. Tan Chunfa, “Shunhu shidai he guanzhong de yishujia – jinian Zheng Zhengqiu danchen yi bai zhounian” (Conforming to his time and serving his audience—commemorating Zheng’s 100 anniversary), in Dangdai dianying (Contemporary Cinema) 1 (1989), 86–95.
47. Paul Cohen, History in Three Keys: the Boxers as Event, Experience, and Myth, New York: Columbia University Press, 1997, pp. 213–4.
Chapter 9
Imagining the Refugee
The Emergence of a State Welfare System in the War of Resistance
Lu Liu
In late-August 2005, Hurricane Katrina pounded the Gulf Coast of the United States, leaving a trail of devastation and human suffering. For the millions of television viewers worldwide who had been following the news, initial curiosity quickly turned into fear, concern, and profound sorrow at the catastrophe that destroyed neighborhoods, killed 1,300 people, and displaced 1.1 million residents. Soon this sorrow turned to frustration and outrage at the patent failure of the government—local, state, and federal—to respond effectively to the crisis.1 The disaster exposed gaping flaws in the government’s emergency management. The 600-page National Response Plan to coordinate federal agencies and integrate them with state, local, and private sector partners was put to the test and came up tragically short. Waves of criticism across the political spectrum assailed the relief response by national and local governments to the disaster.
Now imagine if Hurricane Katrina had broken out on a much larger scale. Not limited to the Gulf Coast, its devastation covers an area ranging from Massachusetts to Florida; not confined to just the one historic city of New Orleans, it batters multiple political, cultural, and financial centers such as New York, Washington D.C., Boston, and Miami—all would have to be abandoned. Imagine tens of millions of refugees as well as thousands of businesses, factories, universities and other institutions had to be evacuated. How would the government react to meet the challenges of such a catastrophe?
That was precisely what happened in China toward the end of the 1930s. The Nationalist Guomindang (GMD) government was facing exactly such a challenge as China was plunged into a total war that would soon develop into World War II. Beginning in July 1937, Japan initiated a series of invasions first along the eastern coast and in central China, then in 1938 pushed its military advance farther westward. After a series of military frustrations, the GMD government was fo
rced to relocate the national capital from Nanjing, located near China’s southeast coast, to Chongqing, a mountainous city deep within the western interior.
This chapter describes the massive human tragedy and exodus instigated by the Japanese invasion—but that is merely the setting of our story, not its primary focus. The comparison with Hurricane Katrina not only helps us understand the enormous scale of the wartime catastrophe, but also its important political and historical consequences. Catastrophic events like Katrina and the Japanese invasion are certainly real occurrences that directly affect the lives of millions of people, but they are also events that become media spectacles for even larger national and global audiences. The representations of such catastrophes can have a tremendous impact on how they are interpreted—particularly on how they are interpreted politically—and therefore also on how they are handled when governments respond to them.
Let’s look at Hurricane Katrina first as an example (Figure 9.1, see website). To the hundreds of thousands of the victims and the viewing public, the floods were initially experienced as horrible acts of nature. But within hours of the dikes collapsing in New Orleans the news media began representing the tragedy as quite probably involving political incompetence. Criticism was largely prompted by televised images of residents who remained in New Orleans without water, food, or shelter, as well as images of the deaths of citizens by thirst, exhaustion, and violence days after the storm itself passed. For television audiences, the city’s descent into disorder was epitomized by the scene at the convention center. Starting August 31, images from the New Orleans Convention Center dominated the television news. Television networks started to run a montage of graphic scenes from the center, including pictures of dead bodies. As CNN correspondent Chris Lawrence reported, “[T]here are thousands of people just lying in the street. They have nowhere to go. . . . Some of these babies, 3, 4, 5 months old, living in these horrible conditions. Putrid food on the ground, sewage, their feet sitting in sewage. We saw feces on the ground. It is—these people are being forced to live like animals.”2
More than representing suffering, the images of the refugees exposed the ignorance of relief officials. While television stations were broadcasting images of victims stranded and starving, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) director Michael D. Brown was shown expressing his satisfaction with the city’s preparation for the hurricane, and city officials were telling people that the convention center had food and evacuation facilities. With the official rhetoric in such sharp contrast to the refugees’ actual plight, the public could not help directing their anger toward officialdom: “We have been abandoned by our own country,” Jefferson Parish President Aaron Broussard sobbed on NBC’s Meet the Press, “Bureaucracy has committed murder here in the greater New Orleans area, and bureaucracy has to stand trial before Congress now.”3 Neither was the President of United States spared public critique. The image of President George W. Bush staring out the window thousands of feet above the devastation as Air Force One traversed the Gulf Coast epitomized the impression that he was aloof and out of touch, discrediting his ability to lead. His popularity plummeted: 63 percent of Americans disapproved of Bush’s handling of Katrina.4
As this sketch of the coverage of Hurricane Katrina makes clear, images can be presented to pursue specific political goals. Televised images of neglected hurricane refugees contributed greatly to framing the public’s interpretation of the tragedy as a direct result of political incompetence. A natural storm led to a political storm for the Bush administration.
The refugee crisis wrought by the Japanese invasion in 1937 followed a somewhat similar trajectory: news media focused on the plight of millions of war refugees, while social and cultural elites elaborated on a variety of responses to the refugee crisis, including criticizing the GMD government’s indifference to their dire needs. This chapter examines visual representations of the Chinese refugee crisis of the late-1930s, and the official and unofficial interpretations and reactions to that crisis. The primary point is to highlight how the Japanese invasion and the consequent refugee crisis became a source for transforming people’s ideas on the management of disaster relief, and how the media discussions and images of the refugee plight led to national supervision and involvement of the GMD state in a sphere that had historically been dominated by local elites and charities. The first section focuses on visual representations of Chinese refugees created by the news media in the first months of the invasion in late 1937 and early 1938. Images of war refugees stirred up public anxieties about chaos and public health and contributed to the constructed knowledge of “the refugee problem.” The next two sections examine political responses to the media representation. First, we look at how the U.S. media used images of Chinese refugees to help collect aid for wartime China and boost the war effort. We then turn to Chinese interpretations of the crisis, where perceptions of the refugee crisis led to a consensus on the insufficiency of the existing relief measures, and where intensive news coverage of war refugees finally impelled the full engagement of the central government. The last section surveys the services and facilities that the GMD extended to mass evacuees en route to the interior. By the end of the war, the GMD government had displaced the private sector of voluntarism—native-place associations in particular—as the primary provider of welfare.
Visualizing Refugees
On July 7, 1937, Japan initiated an attack on Beijing, then known as Beiping. China reacted with the War of Resistance (1937–1945), which developed into the China theater of World War II. The invasion generated masses of refugees in unprecedented numbers. When the Japanese army reached the suburbs of Shanghai in early August, acute anxieties arose among urban residents. For some, fear of the unpredictable behavior of the Japanese troops was sufficient to induce an immediate abandonment of their homes. Rumor soon spread that the coming battle would be extremely violent and that civilians would not be spared. Figure 9.2 depicts Shanghai residents pouring into the French concession for refuge. The crowds were “like the waves of the Qiantang River. All kinds of sound—babies crying, elders yelling for help when pushed to the ground, parents screaming for lost children—pierced into everyone’s heart.”5 The local population started to desert their communities, loading their meager belongings onto their backs, carts or rickshaws. Day and night, roads and bridges leading to the foreign concessions were jammed with crowds.
Figure 9.2 Thousands of residents of Shanghai’s Native City press for admission to the French Concession on November 15, 1937. Many waited at the gates for days, but the French authorities did not grant entry due to sanitary and other concerns. This photograph (originally run in the 1937 North China Daily News) like many others recording these events, depict a “sea” of humanity, swamping cars and other vehicles, in such a dense crush that no ground can be seen. Taken at the end of the Porte du Nord, at B. des Deux Republiques. Much thanks to Christian Henriot for permission to use. From: Virtual Shanghai: Shanghai Urban Space in Time, at www.virtualshanghai.net.
The refugees’ plight was covered by news media, both through visual documentation and graphic description. While the foreign concessions provided a safe destination for the displaced, many found it extremely difficult to get in. Facing the torrent of refugees and an impending struggle over limited resources of food, water, and lodging, the concession authorities reacted with strict measures. Foreign patrolmen armed with guns set up bamboo fences and steel gates at the intersections to the concessions. Though a thin line of fence, as shown in Figure 9.2, it composed the demarcation line between “heaven” and “hell.” Every day thousands of refugees stood in front of the gates waiting for any opportunity to cross over.
Refugees endured shortages of food, living space, and money. Everywhere outside the fence was misery (Figure 9.3, see website). Refugees sat on sidewalks, leaned against walls, beside doorsteps and shop doors “like big piles of trash.” Frequent rains visited them too. Lying on the ground, they were soaked by muddy water.
“Too tired to care about rain or dirt, they remain asleep. One can easily read the exhaustion on their faces.”6 Food supplies hardly met demand, and the cries of children were inescapable. In a sea of refugees, social workers resorted to throwing buns and dough sticks directly into the crowds. Fights ensued: “The hungry cared least about social decency. Young adults jumped high for a quick catch in the air, with the weak, the old, and women crying for mercy.”7 Refugees were plagued with diarrhea and beriberi due to a lack of nutrition. According to news reports, nearly 200 refugees died each day of hunger or malaria.8
The relocation of refugees—first to their ancestral hometowns and then to “Free China” in the western interior—was deemed essential. Like many treaty port cities, Shanghai had a huge sojourning population. In September 1937, the northern part of the Jiangsu province received 250,000 returnees, among them many industrial workers and rickshaw pullers.9 But many refugees came from much farther away and had no means of transport home. Rail cars either faced bombing or were subject to military requisition. Shipping companies refused to lend their sampans and tugs for long distance use or asked impossibly high fees. Toward the end of 1937, when Shanghai and Nanjing were lost to the Japanese troops, millions of refugees voted with their feet and thus initiated one of the great migrations in human history.
The literature and media of the time carried graphic reports on the desperate plight of the refugees in relocation. When added to movements of armies and equipment, the relocation of civilians placed an intolerable burden on logistics. Photographs, artist renderings (Figure 9.4, see website), and written accounts of these scenes convey that the most striking impression for observers was the sheer mass of refugees: “[T]heir number! . . . They overran everything; they were everywhere.”10 Railway networks nationwide faced severe challenges. There were never enough trains available to use for relocation. Lines were frequently subject to traffic jams. The management of the railway system was anything but systematic. To miss a train was often nothing short of a tragedy. Trains arrived hours or days late and departed without warning, leaving crowds of passengers behind, pursuing cars along the track, shouting and waving.11 Thousands of families were separated. In response to the crises, by the end of 1937, the public was demanding sweeping social welfare reforms.