Visualizing Modern China: Image, History, and Memory, 1750–Present Read online

  Visualizing Modern China

  AsiaWorld

  Series Editor: Mark Selden

  This series charts the frontiers of Asia in global perspective. Central to its concerns are Asian interactions—political, economic, social, cultural, and historical—that are transnational and global, that cross and redefine borders and networks, including those of nation, region, ethnicity, gender, technology, and demography. It looks to multiple methodologies to chart the dynamics of a region that has been the home to major civilizations and is central to global processes of war, peace, and development in the new millennium.

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  Visualizing Modern China: Image, History, and Memory, 1750–Present

  edited by James A. Cook, Joshua Goldstein, Matthew D. Johnson, and Sigrid Schmalzer

  Visualizing Modern China

  Image, History, and Memory, 1750–Present

  Edited by James A. Cook, Joshua Goldstein, Matthew D. Johnson, and Sigrid Schmalzer

  LEXINGTON BOOKS

  Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

  Top left: Xu Yang, Qianlong nanxun tu juan [Illustrated Scrolls of the Qianlong Emperor’s Southern Tour]. c. 1770. Scroll six detail. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Used with permission.

  Top right: Qinfen tiyu yuebao [Diligent Struggle Sport Monthly] 3.2 (November 1935)

  Bottom left: Zhang Fei competing for reserve tickets for Expo 2010. From: http://www.zonaeuropa.com/20100505_1.htm [accessed August 31, 2011].

  Bottom right: Popular Film (Dazhong Dianying), August 9, 1964.

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  Copyright © 2014 by Lexington Books

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Visualizing modern China : image, history, and memory, 1750-present / edited by James A. Cook, Joshua Goldstein, Matthew Johnson, and Sigrid Schmalzer.

  pages cm.—(Asiaworld)

  Summary: “This book is a teaching textbook for both lower and upper level courses on modern Chinese history and/or modern visual culture. The introduction provides an overview of key issues in the development of visual culture in China over the last 200-300 years, while each chapter is an original scholarly study of a specific topic providing chronological coverage for that period. Topics include: Qing court ritual, peasant rebellions, folk art, modern urban media such as illustrated sports magazines and movies, Great Leap Forward film, visual commemorations of the Cultural Revolution, and the Shanghai 2010 expo”—Provided by publisher.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-7391-9043-2 (cloth : alkaline paper)—ISBN 978-0-7391-9044-9 (electronic) 1. Popular culture—China—History. 2. Visual communication—China—History. 3. Arts, Chinese—History. 4. Memory—Social aspects—China—History. 5. China—Intellectual life. 6. China—Social life and customs. 7. China—Social conditions. I. Cook, James A. II. Goldstein, Joshua L. III. Johnson, Matthew D. IV. Schmalzer, Sigrid.

  DS727.V57 2014

  951—dc23

  2014024587

  The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

  Printed in the United States of America

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  1Introduction

  James A. Cook, Joshua Goldstein, Matthew D. Johnson, and Sigrid Schmalzer

  2Envisioning the Spectacle of Emperor Qianlong’s Tours of Southern China: An Exercise in Historical Imagination

  Michael G. Chang

  3In the Eyes of the Beholder: Rebellion as Visual Experience

  Cecily McCaffrey

  4Yangliuqing New Year’s Picture: The Fortunes of a Folk Tradition

  Madeleine Yue Dong

  5Monumentality in Nationalist Nanjing: Purple Mountain’s Changing Views

  Charles D. Musgrove

  6“The Me in the Mirror”: A Narrative of Voyeurism and Discipline in Chinese Women’s Physical Culture, 1921–1937107

  Andrew D. Morris

  7Rethinking “China”: Overseas Chinese and China’s Modernity

  James A. Cook

  8The Myth about Chinese Leftist Cinema

  Zhiwei Xiao

  9Imagining the Refugee: The Emergence of a State Welfare System in the War of Resistance

  Lu Liu

  10Revolutionary Real Estate: Envisioning Space in Communist Dalian

  Christian Hess

  11Spatial Profiling: Seeing Rural and Urban in Mao’s China

  Jeremy Brown

  12Cinema and Propaganda during the Great Leap Forward

  Matthew D. Johnson

  13Images, Memories, and Lives of Sent-down Youth in Yunnan

  Xiaowei Zheng

  14Wild Pandas, Wild People: Two Views of Wilderness in Deng-Era China

  Sigrid Schmalzer and E. Elena Songster

  15Contextualizing the Visual and Virtual Realities of Expo 2010

  Susan R. Fernsebner

  Index

  About the Contributors

  Acknowledgments

  All the editors and authors whose work has gone into this volume were formerly the doctoral students of an extraordinary pair of advisors: Joseph W. Esherick and Paul G. Pickowicz. The program in modern Chinese history that they built at the Univers
ity of California, San Diego, was a unique experience for all who participated. The countless talks, research trips, conferences, and wonderful gatherings they put together infused the program with a spirit of human warmth and intellectual dialogue that extended well beyond the classroom. But the most important element of Joe and Paul’s approach to graduate teaching was their commitment to collaborative mentorship. Their cooperative ethic made them truly equal professional partners—they served as co-advisors for every student—and provided a model of teamwork and selflessness to their many grateful advisees. We offer this volume, designed primarily for use in the classroom, as a tribute to our experiences in Joe and Paul’s program, and to their amazing capacity for investing boundless energy in each and every student.

  Joe and Paul, we thank you.

  Chapter 1

  Introduction

  James A. Cook, Joshua Goldstein, Matthew D. Johnson, and Sigrid Schmalzer

  If a single image could be said to be the icon of modern Chinese history, it would probably be this portrait of Chairman Mao (Figure 1.1). Mao’s portrait has been reproduced literally hundreds of billions of times: on untold millions of Mao buttons and propaganda posters of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976); on rearview mirror ornaments, tee-shirts and cigarette lighters; on Chinese currency (his gentle smile graces every bill of legal tender in China today); and, most famously, on Tiananmen Gate in the heart of Beijing, where he surveys the enormous public square beneath and all who pass through it. This portrait of Mao has been charged with so many vital political and cultural meanings that we would be remiss to discuss modern Chinese visual culture without at least giving a respectful nod to his all-but-disembodied head. Travelers from all over China and the world have made sure to get their photos taken beneath Mao’s oversized portrait. The acclaimed author Yu Hua recalls how important that photo op was for him as a teenager during the Cultural Revolution:

  I used to have a photograph of myself when I was fifteen, standing in the middle of Tiananmen Square with Mao’s huge portrait visible in the background. It was taken not in Beijing but in the photography studio of our town a thousand miles away. The room in which I was standing cannot have been more than twenty feet wide, and the square was just a theatrical backdrop painted on the wall. When you looked at the photo, you might almost have believed I was really standing in Tiananmen Square—except for the complete absence of people in the acres of space behind me. This photograph crystallized the dreams of my childhood years—and indeed, the dreams of most Chinese children who lived in other places than Beijing. Almost all studios then were equipped with this same tableau of Tiananmen . . .1

  Figure 1.1 Portrait of Mao Zedong overlooking Tiananmen Square. Diego Delso, Gate of Heavenly Peace, Beijing, China. 2006. Available from: Wikimedia Commons, License CC-BY-SA 3.0 (accessed December 19, 2013).

  A potent icon indeed, when an image (a photo) of an image (a painted backdrop) of the image (the portrait in Tiananmen), is still powerful enough to “crystallize a dream.”

  What was that dream? Chinese people who experienced the political maelstrom of the Cultural Revolution have devoted memoirs, essays, novels, artworks, and films to unraveling the dreams and conflicts of that era, many highlighting the role that Mao played in Chinese peoples’ lives and psyches at the time—not just as a political leader, but as an idea and an image. The portrait that still hangs over Tiananmen today has long outlived that era, but over the ensuing decades it has accrued many new and often contradictory meanings, and Mao’s bust continues to provoke and inspire today, spawning a global-scale cottage industry of Mao-themed art that offers contradictory perspectives on the man, the revolution, and its aftermath. The reader will find dozens of these artworks and other images related to Mao and his iconic Tiananmen portrait (as well as a great deal of scholarly analysis of these images) on the website that accompanies this volume (http://visualizingmodernchina.org).

  We live, today, in an intensely visual culture. We learn, communicate, create, and seek leisurely escape through ever-proliferating modes of visual stimulation—TV, film, smart phones, video games, online media, etc. Yet we rarely pause to consider that this experience of “becoming visual” has unfolded very differently throughout the world and thus bears the indelible marks of unique and specific histories. This volume is intended to encourage just such a consideration of the multiple forms and transformations of visual culture in another time and place—China from the Qing empire (1644–1911) through the Republican era (1912–1949) to the People’s Republic of China (1949–present).

  The chapters in this volume work explore key moments and themes in China’s modern history through an analysis of visual records. Together, they challenge the common assumption that visual materials are merely ephemeral images that supplement the substance of history. Rather, the study of visual images requires that we think more broadly about visual culture and engage in critical analysis of image-making as a force in shaping historical dynamics. The study of visual culture has arisen fairly recently. Historians usually emphasize written texts over pictures; art historians, on the other hand, tend to elevate “art” over all other forms of media and experience. But throughout history both written texts and works of art have typically had quite limited audiences and functioned in quite limited contexts. Other forms of display and visuality—parades and processions; domestic and public architecture; everyday clothing and decorations; nature, landscape, and its reconfigurations; and (more recently) magazine ads, personal photographs, and internet websites—have had greater impact on a larger range of creators, viewers, and participants. The idea of visual culture encompasses this vast and changing range of visual materials.

  Our goal as historians is not only to understand what certain historical images depict, but also to understand the changing ways that images have been produced, distributed, and experienced, as well as the intentions of their creators, the audiences they sought to address or to shape (loyal subjects, conscious citizens, nations, etc.), and the responses they elicited from those audiences. Of course, “image-makers”—be they governments, commercial interests, or individual artisans—rarely leave records of what they meant to convey when commissioning or crafting particular images. Nor is it easy to uncover the conditions under which historical audiences may have encountered images, how they reacted to those images, and what effects images might have produced in their everyday lives. The analysis of historical images requires great care and ingenuity, hence the strong emphasis on methodology in this introduction and the chapters that follow.

  While the subjects described in the essays here cover the eighteenth century to the present, visual culture in China is far from a mere three-hundred-year young. For at least two millennia, Chinese emperors used sumptuous court ritual and elaborate visual displays to establish their authority. In China, as elsewhere, political rulers and social elites sought to control symbols, and with them, culture. Moreover, China was historically on the cutting edge in developing printed media, with woodblock printing spreading both texts and images on a large scale from at least the Song dynasty (960–1279), if not earlier. Still, this primarily text-based media reached mainly an elite literate minority. Often far more influential were cultural displays that could reach literate and illiterate populations alike, such as the massive commissioned statues, temples, and palaces that contributed to a visually opulent elite culture in imperial capitals like Chang’an, Kaifeng, Hangzhou, and Beijing.

  But the imperial state was not the only, perhaps not even the primary, image-maker in Chinese history. Since the third century, Buddhism has furnished a vibrant pantheon studded with gods and demons whose riveting tales of spiritual and moral efficacy were believed to redound upon all who spread them. Visual media such as stone carvings and paintings were a favored means for celebrating and conveying these teachings. By far the most magnificent repository of such images is the Mogao Caves of Dunhuang on the famed silk road, a complex of 492 caves replete with stone statues, the walls a
nd ceilings covered in elaborate murals documenting over seven centuries of Buddhist worship, the earliest of which date back to 366 CE. These caves constitute arguably the single greatest treasury of visual culture in Chinese history. (For links to images see the book website). Over those same centuries imperial governments and elites attempted to ride the wave of religious spectacle as well, sponsoring the creation of towering stone Buddhas in grottos throughout China (Shaanxi, Sichuan, Henan) that were open to public worship and pilgrimage. And, while less permanent, religious festivals and ceremonial activities contributed to a rich spectrum of visual imagery through which ordinary people pictured both this world and the worlds beyond.

  Many of these forms of visual culture survive in one form or another today, but their functions and meanings have often changed significantly, particularly as they have had to compete with newer forms of visual media. The chapters that follow chart a series of revolutionary changes in image production and dissemination in modern Chinese history, including the emergence and spread of color lithography, photography, movies, and the internet. As historians our task is to investigate how these new media were shaped by and—perhaps even more importantly—how they have reshaped political, economic, social, and cultural practices in modern China.

  Methodological Issues in the Historical Analysis of Visual Images

  It is often said that “seeing is believing.” The cliché suggests that while words may distort the truth, visual evidence is objective and trustworthy. But, as anyone who has worked with Photoshop knows, images are also the products of human effort. Like written documents, visual records carry their own assumptions, obfuscations, and self-serving narratives. Images can be exaggerated, distorted, hastily or carefully composed, forged, copied, edited, and reinterpreted. These decisions are made consciously and unconsciously, seasoned by both society and culture; they might be demanded by authorities or constrained by the image-maker’s own views as to what is worthy of being recorded and what conventions or rules should be followed. Thus, when looking to the past or present, we must interrogate images rather than taking them for granted—a crucial lesson not only for historians but for all those inhabiting our contemporary, image-saturated world. A simple example makes this obvious: imagine that historians two hundred years in the future discover a television commercial showing women in bikinis smiling and holding cans of beer. They would be mistaken to infer from the commercial that in our time women typically wore bikinis to drink beer, that the particular brand of beer was actually popular among women, or that the images constituted an innocent record of people in their leisure.