Abstract
Photographs from the 1938 photobook Rikou Baoxing Shilu (Records of the Japanese Army's Atrocities) made their way to postwar viewing contexts as iconic visual evidence of war crimes committed in the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–45). Instead of narrating histories of violence as long-term memory, this article shifts focus to wartime audiences’ short-term experience of violence by shedding light on the photobook's wartime role as high-profile, government-sponsored propaganda, edited by artist Ye Qianyu. It examines this photobook as a praxis that helps readers make sense of war and further questions the politics of making China legible. My analysis focuses on the aspect of type—printed letters and photographic stereotypes. It argues that the typographic-photographic paradigms in Records configured new categories of modern Chinese victimhood characterized by Chinese reader-subjects’ ability to feel pain and vengeance. This affective readership was transnational by design, demonstrating the world war as a relational learning process.
Editors' note: Readers should be advised that this article includes graphic images of wartime atrocities.
Photographs from the 1938 photobook Rikou Baoxing Shilu (Records of the Japanese Army's Atrocities; henceforth Records) have made their way to postwar museums, film, and historical writings as visual evidence of war crimes committed during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–45). Serving as firsthand historical materials, these photographs are displayed at the Memorial Hall of the Nanjing Massacre founded in 1985 and inspired Chinese film director Luo Guanqun to create Tucheng xuezheng (Blood Evidence of Massacre in the City) (1987), the first movie in contemporary China to depict the Nanjing Massacre. Centering on atrocity photographs reproduced from the 1938 photobook, this film represents taking pictures as an act of aggression, alternating between shots of a Japanese soldier-photographer pressing the shutter button and scenes of bombing and killing. The migration of these photographs from the wartime medium of the book to postwar viewing contexts consolidates their power in shaping long-term memories of war, terror, and trauma, yet eclipses the photobook's production process and its role as atrocity propaganda.1
This paperback photobook opens with a three-color printed map detailing the Japanese invasion, followed by forty sheets of photographic pages on both sides. The striking typography-photography layout juxtaposes designed fonts with 169 photographs in black and white in varying sizes. The sequential viewing builds up a binary narrative of Japanese atrocities and Chinese resistance. An appendix at the end features textual reporting, numerical data, and a war mobilization song. The Nationalist government's Political Department of the Military Commission (Junshi weiyuanhui zhengzhibu, or PDMC) published this photobook as a high-profile piece of visual propaganda targeting both domestic and international readers in the summer of 1938 when the Imperial Japanese Army was proceeding toward the city of Wuhan in central China. Though published without artist credit, this book was edited by a group of artists and writers spearheaded by Ye Qianyu (1907–95). Existing different editions of Records indicate its transnational readership and the unstable nature of propaganda photograph. There are two Chinese editions, which differ in one photograph depicting sextual violence. A bilingual edition with minimal English captions shares the same visual content with one of the Chinese editions.
Instead of narrating histories of violence as long-term memory, this article shifts focus to what Susan Sontag called “the short-term unassimilability of catastrophe.”2 It investigates this photobook as a praxis that processes the short-term experience of violence and further critiques the political consequences of making wartime China legible.3 I focus on the different aspects of “type,” more specifically, photographic stereotypes, typography of printed letters, and type as categorization. I examine how the typographic-photographic design in Records mediated wartime audiences’ multisensorial, emotional, and physical engagement with war atrocities. I argue that the photobook modifies transnational visual tropes and reading patterns to configure new categories of Chinese victimhood that foreground readers’ affective responses to war calamities. The centrality of vengeful feeling brands China as a modern nation built upon sentimental subjectivities and bonds whose suffering would also appear relatable to international sympathy in an impending world war.4
The first section of this article discusses the production, circulation, and readership of Records in contexts of ever-changing military circumstances and wartime displacement. Next, I analyze how the book's fonts and layout reworked standard typeface, modernist lettering, and machine-aesthetic photomontages in shaping readers’ sensorium of mechanized warfare. During this process of making sense of war, typographic design in Records played a role in abstracting individual victims into categorical collective suffering. The following section probes into how its photographic representations of decapitation and rape changed conventions of imperialist photography and visualized the very violence of the photographic apparatus to make audiences identify the enemy. Lastly, I investigate how typographic-photographic combinations in the book depicted motifs of victimized mothers and children to evoke simultaneously national and international sympathy for Chinese pain. This mode of representing violence on Chinese bodies was new and by its nature a form of sentimental education circulating transnationally. This case study contributes book history approaches and a transnational perspective to studying anti-fascism atrocity photography.5 Beyond its role as a repository of the brutality of war, the medium of the photobook helps to ask: according to what parameters was the war framed?
Breaking the Siege
Records was edited in the city of Wuhan under siege. The Imperial Japanese Army was advancing aggressively, as can be seen from the blurry edge of the gray-colored patch in the opening map of the book. This page uses three-color printing—blue, black, and gray—to delineate, respectively, geopolitical borders, railroads, and the Japanese invasion, highlighting the temporal urgency of war and invaders’ spatial proximity. The gray area has already covered Xuzhou, a crucial strategic city in the central Yangtze region where the Chinese army resisted the Japanese troops for five months before they conquered it in mid-May in 1938. Uniting their forces from northern and eastern China, the Japanese army's next move was to besiege and vanquish the city of Wuhan. War fever spread throughout Wuhan at this moment. Fundraising and propaganda events organized by the Third Bureau (Disanting) of PDMC churned a multisensorial public environment for shoring up emotions of patriotism.6 Established in 1938 in Wuhan, the Third Bureau united a lineup of artists, writers, and intellectuals across the political spectrum. It became a powerful wartime cultural propaganda engine for transmedial artistic collaborations. The year 1938 in Wuhan also marked a turning point of international support for China's resistance. As historian Stephen R. MacKinnon has pointed out, Western correspondents who were from younger generations or who had recently worked during the Spanish Civil War came to Wuhan. Together with voices from the Chinese side, they portrayed Wuhan as “China's Madrid.”7
In late May 1938, the Nationalist government's official news agency, the Central News Agency,8 issued a call for submissions of photographs and reporting for the upcoming publication Records of the Japanese Army's Atrocities before the Battle of Wuhan formally began in mid-June. According to the call, the PDMC appointed a group of writers, painters, and photographers as the editorial committee, who aimed to create photobooks for frontline soldiers and the populace in the hinterland. They welcomed submissions from national and international communities, which could be mailed to the Central News Agency in Hankou (Hankou zhongyangshe) or the editorial team based at the Hunan Guild Hall in Wuchang (Wuchang hunan huiguan).9 Under the PDMC's supervision, poet Feng Naichao (1901–83), filmmaker Shi Dongshan (1902–55), dramatist Ma Yanxiang (1907–88), and Ye at the Third Bureau of PDMC participated in editing this photobook. By this time, previously Shanghai-based artist Ye had retreated to Nanjing and Wuhan. Like many other artists who joined the Third Bureau, the PDMC granted Ye military rank and pay.10
The editorial team combined submitted photographs with existing images published in Chinese, Japanese, and foreign newspapers and magazines and classified them as burning, killing, rape, and robbery. In August, Ye traveled with the manuscript to Hong Kong to use the more advanced printing machines from the Commercial Press, China's first modern publishing company, which relocated from Shanghai to Hong Kong due to the Japanese attack. Ye spent nearly one month on the makings of the publication, which had a print run of ten thousand. He carried some books with him back to Wuhan. According to reports by the PDMC in the fall of 1938, they received five hundred copies of the photobook in Wuhan in September, of which two hundred were bilingual in Chinese and English. Copies in Chinese were first sent to officials at the PDMC. Fifty copies of the bilingual version were sent to the International Propaganda Department (Guoji xuanchuanchu). The remaining bilingual copies were delivered globally to the United Kingdom, the United States, New Zealand, the West Indies, Canada, Palestine, South Africa, Rhodesia, Egypt, Gibraltar, India, Ireland, and Australia.11 Meanwhile, the Guangzhou Railway Bureau was responsible for transporting the rest of the copies from Hong Kong to Wuhan. However, in late October, Guangzhou was occupied by Japanese forces. Wuhan surrendered a few days later. As a result, most of the photobooks never arrived in Wuhan but in Changsha, a further inland city in the central Yangzi region, to which the Third Bureau retreated.12
Printed books functioned as guerrilla media for domestic readers in constantly shifting military situations. Readers of Records were expected to be on the move—on the train, in the street, and during fundraising events.13Records was featured in the collections of “wartime libraries” (zhanshi tushuguan), a form of mobile library envisioned by the Zhejiang Province Education Bureau in 1939, targeting soldiers as well as citizens. The collections of wartime libraries circulated across populated towns and public gathering places in rural areas via mobile warehouses, temporary reading stations, and book buses.14 Nevertheless, the medium of the book had difficulty keeping up with forced displacement. Ye especially regretted being unable to circulate Records widely among international readers in the wartime cosmopolitan center of Wuhan before the Japanese army took over the city.15 The case of Records illustrates a complicated wartime network of the circulation of media products.
Making Sense of Mechanized Violence
The typography of two facing pages from Records communicates the violent act of bombing and its consequences in an easily legible yet expressive way (fig. 1) On the left page, the character zha, an active verb, means “bombing.” The character's form allies with its textual meaning and abrupt pronunciation. Its monumental size and robust structure possess a metal-like sense of weight in the graphic space. The angular outlines and sharply protruding ends of individual character strokes allude to the killing force of explosive shells. Juxtaposed with this character is a photographic page featuring blood drops and footprints on the right side. Emblazoned with the phrase “xue zhai” (debt of blood), the close-up and cropped framing on the page concretize military machines’ damage to human bodies and the struggling embodied movement. The caption below the photograph further identifies the partial view as representing the entirety of victims. It reads, “Traces of blood left by more than six hundred refugees at the Shanghai South Railway Station after being bombed.”16 In light of the explanatory texts, readers relate the blood to the victimized collective body. Texts on the left page further give a panoramic description of Japanese aerial attacks on civilian populations at a mass scale, calling for national vengeance. The facing pages produce shocking text-image compositions and visual contrasts between black and white, negative and positive spaces, blasts and blood, and military machinery and wounded bodies.
Aerial bombardment was unfamiliar to most people in China before the Second Sino-Japanese War. The combinations of photography, texts, and typography, including the design of fonts and layout in Records, configures a particular perceptual and emotional reading structure for contemporaneous domestic readers to grasp mechanized violence. Bombing can be difficult to grapple with for various reasons. On the one hand, residents in remote inland and rural areas had no idea of what modern warfare was. Two years after the war, a native of China's southwestern hinterland still did not know what bombs meant.17 On the other hand, bombing was too horrifying to assimilate for those who experienced it. Writer Xia Yan's (1900–1995) essay on the Japanese bombing of the city of Guangzhou captured so well the difficulty in absorbing violence. He wrote that, amid intense bombing, people “experience a sense of calmness that surpasses fear” and “numbness of sensation.” Lying on the ground, some people even focused on gazing at small insects. Among hundreds of evacuees, “silence hung like a forest.”18 For people in close proximity to war, such as survivors and refugees in exile, reading Records on the road helped them piece together fragmented and overwhelming experiences into a picture of collective suffering from mechanized warfare. In his published diaries, writer Ba Jin (1904–2005) mentioned showing his copy of Records to a man who had just escaped from the bombed city of Guangzhou and worked as a ticket inspector on Ba's train from Guangzhou to Wuhan. After reading this photobook, the ticket inspector, in tears, began to perceive his own narrow escape in relation to the shared pain.19
What kind of typography can make the war legible? The clear fonts and layout in Records indicate how artists and designers increasingly negotiated with the Nationalist government's tightening policy on typography. As early as 1934, the Nationalist government established a policy to rectify heterogenous typographic styles. According to design historian Zhou Bo's research, when the government's New Life Movement began, education bureaus in Jiangsu and Shanghai, as well as government gazettes in Nanjing, Beiping, Guangdong, Anhui, Fujian, and Henan, issued bans on modernist typography such as “three-dimensional shadowed fonts” in book and magazine covers, newspaper headlines, and slogans, although, in practice, there still existed a farrago of typographic design.20 The outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War strengthened typography's role as a powerful tool for propaganda. Designed letterforms were widely used in public spaces, ranging from propaganda slogans on cloth to mural paintings. In 1939, the government's Executive Yuan issued a directive to standardize fonts used in political propaganda. It ordered that all slogans should use kaishu (regular script). More specifically, “for those that are read vertically, they should be written from top to bottom; for those that are read horizontally, they should be written from right to left. Reversing or tilting is not allowed, and it is especially forbidden to write so-called artistic and strange characters.”21
But legibility was not the only goal. Artists and designers faced the double challenges of creating new design strategies that could convey the sensorial dimensions of modern war yet counter the aestheticization of sensorial regimes evoked by mechanized violence. As can be seen from Futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's manifesto “Estetica futurista della Guerra” (“The Futurist Aesthetic of War”; 1935), his beautification of the Italian invasion of Ethiopia celebrates a cyborg future and a technologically mediated multisensorial environment.22 In 1930s China, right-wing, left-wing, and commercial print media shared machine-aesthetic graphic design.23 With firsthand experience in book editing, illustration, publishing, and printing technologies, Shanghai-based Ye served as the editor of the illustrated magazine Modern Miscellany (Shidai huabao) and cofounded the Epoch Book Company (Shidai tushu gongsi) with a group of cultural entrepreneurs and artist-designers including Shao Xunmei, Zhang Guangyu, Zhang Zhengyu, and Cao Hanmei.24 Their commercial publications creatively used both hand-drawn letterforms and typesetting in letterpress printing to experiment with modernist typography and machine aesthetics. Artistic lettering (meishu zi) designed by hand became commonly used in book covers, magazine spreads, advertising signs, and movie posters in 1930s Shanghai. In a photographically illustrated article titled “Magazine Signage and Editor,” various letterforms were paired with individual portraits, showcasing the distinctive characteristics of each publication and its creators. Modern Miscellany's bold geometric font with solid black shadow is in tune with Ye's audacious direct gaze, promoting the magazine's forward-looking vision.25 Modernist literature published by the Epoch Book Company explored material dimensions of letterpress printing to convey ideas of action, agency, and modern subjectivity. In poet Xu Chi's (1914–96) anthology A Twenty-Year-Old Man, kinetic types achieved by diagonal and upside-down printing function as first-person movements. In correlation with the literal meanings of poetic lines, movable types of “I” (wo) were enlarged, inverted, and rotated, eliciting in readers a sense of exuberant motion (fig. 2).26
A typographic war had already begun on the verge of the full outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War. The typographic layout in Modern Miscellany communicated the Japanese army's military proceedings vividly and facilitated readers to anticipate global warfare. One page from the 1936 issue of Modern Miscellany utilized the spatial layout on paper to comment on the Japanese army's territorial aggression. It superimposes two headlines, which read “Japanese Military Action” and “Within Borders of China,” and pairs the headlines with a photograph featuring Japanese cavalry training in northern China.27 Another example further illustrates how Modern Miscellany combined hand-drawn masthead, diagonal printing, and photomontage to convey the escalation of the arms competition among major powers on the eve of a world war.28 The machine-aesthetic fonts, in correspondence to the dynamic representation of mechanized infantry, equipped popular readers of commercial publications in urban Shanghai with a militarized vision to foresee modern warfare. Scholar William Schaefer uses “representational violence” to describe the violent “dismembered embodiments of modern life” in photomontages in Modern Miscellany.29 In the composition of this montage, a modern soldier towers over a tank that presses boldly forward as an impregnable vanguard. This composition and the thematic focus on transnational fighters and their firearms visualize the specter of global war machines.
How did Records help readers make sense of mechanized violence without reproducing the representational violence of fascist imagery? In Records (fig. 1), the eye-catching character for “Bombing,” with geometric contours, sharp corners, straight lines, and metallic strength, replaces powerful representations of fascist mechanized weapons to evoke a sense of machinery and militancy. Although the overall structure of this font is largely based on the existing standard Song typeface (songti) commonly used in letterpress printing, it varies in details that were uniquely designed, hand-drawn, and customized for this photobook.30 The strong opposition between the character for “bomb” and the photographic representation of human suffering on the same spread further debunks the Futurist celebration of the intertwinement of human and machine and its aestheticization of mechanized violence into abstract beauty.
What are the political and ethical implications of abstraction in times of war and genocide? Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman argues that Nazi violence operated on abstraction, which classified many “concrete Jews” into the “abstract Jew.” The very violence of categorization resides in “effacing the face” and “the owner of the face is but a specimen.”31 Comparing terms used by Bauman, such as “specimen” and “face,” to terminologies used in industrial printing, such as “specimen of font” and “typeface,” what is the logic behind this shared vocabulary? As English typeface designer Eric Gill theorizes, for the sake of mechanical reproduction, the typography of industrialism effaces individual idiosyncrasy.32 This tendency toward standardization devoid of individuality is inherent in industrial modernity. The shared terminologies underline Bauman's argument that the Holocaust was not an abnormal savage event but was embedded in the mechanism of modernity.
I further argue that what Bauman describes as the “categorical murder” exemplified by the Holocaust parallels the categorical victimhood in Records. In May 1938, after the editorial board issued an initial call for photography submissions, they soon publicized more-detailed submission guidelines. They gave a list of categorized crimes by the Japanese army that one could submit.33 In Records, the section “Bombing” is followed by sections titled “Burning,” “Killing,” “Raping,” and “Looting.” Each section starts with a monumental character using a consistent style of font. Records utilizes categorization for readers to understand unprecedented mass atrocities such as bombing yet meanwhile presents anonymous victims as specimens. Type foundries in 1930s Shanghai and Hong Kong marketed their products in type specimens, such as a booklet titled The Specimen of Font Chinese Type published by Huafeng Type Foundry (Huafeng yinshua zhuzichang) in Shanghai. The whole reason Ye traveled with the manuscript of Records all the way from Wuhan to Hong Kong was because the editorial team insisted on using the advanced mechanical printing machine owned by the Commercial Press. In other words, the logic of industrial printing persisted in Ye's publishing practices during the early stage of the Second Sino-Japanese War. In Records (fig. 1), the phrase “debt of blood” applies the standardized typeface instead of artistic lettering to generate new types of Chinese suffering. Rather than representing individual bodies, traces of blood and footprints served as samples of numerical and national victimhood. In sum, typography in Records dealt with more of a perceptual than a formal question.34 Its potent and lucid fonts and layout transitioned from prewar modernist artistic lettering and machine-aesthetic montages, and they communicate new dimensions of mechanized and categorical violence. Altogether, the combinations of typography and photography in Records afford wartime readers clear-cut patterns to parse out the chaos.
Returning the Gaze of the Enemy
A gruesome set of pages from the section on killing (fig. 3) shows, on the right-hand page, a man whose gown was stripped off his shoulder kneeling on the ground. A Japanese soldier stands tall beside him, holding his military sword to the sky. In the photograph on the left, a Japanese soldier points his sword downward while his left hand carries a head. The decapitated body falls between his legs. The Japanese soldier looks provocatively into the camera, making direct eye contact with whoever is viewing the photograph. The third photograph, in a much smaller size at the upper left corner, features the aftermath of the execution in which two apathetic Japanese soldiers flank the fallen head. The horror lies precisely in the close encounter between reader-spectators and the violent act. The montage pairing the before and after moments of the beheading creates an illusion of organic realities and subsequent actions unfolding in linear time, producing an effect of witnessing the event. The two full-page photographs conduct a perspective equal to the height of the executioner's waist. The Japanese swordsmen are framed at full height, appearing imposing and proximate to audiences. Readers can see clearly a spectrum of highly individualistic and emotional facial expressions across the murderer, the victim, and the spectator. The compact composition in all these three photographic reproductions also shows a deliberate exclusion of the larger environment. The reader-spectators are forced to confront the enemy's gaze.
In Lin Anor's (1926–2003) accounts of life in the wartime capital of Chongqing in southwestern China, her Sichuanese maid Fusao, who had never seen a Japanese, was terrified to learn that the Japanese people look very much alike to the Chinese.35 First and foremost, this page facilitates readers’ identification of the enemy. Governmental censorship of the transitional ten months between the loss of Nanjing and Wuhan preconditioned publishing such an extremely atrocious image. The Japanese invasion resulted in a political vacuum and weakened control of the media.36 However, do beheading scenes risk falling into the imperialist stereotypical display of Chinese execution as a public spectacle (fig. 4)? Like other forms of Chinese punishment, it had been a recurring theme in Western discursive and visual representation from the late eighteenth century to the turn of the twentieth century.37 I argue that Records displaced imperialist and colonial gazes of Chinese punishment onto a new form of wartime racism as a means of anti-fascism. It shows the Japanese army's act of decapitation, a manual way of killing—as opposed to Japan's advanced modern military weapons—as evidence of being primitive, brutal, and inhumane. Writer and politician Guo Moruo (1892–1978), director of the Third Bureau, traced a racialized history of Japanese atrocities, denouncing Japan as “originally a semi-civilized nation” that misused tools from Western civilization and committed crimes more savage than barbarians.38 One sees parallels between Guo's discourses and nineteenth-century Western ideas on Chinese judicial torture as reflections of Chinese cruelty and barbarity.39 Although the photobook breaks the ethnographical taxonomy of Chinese people in European colonial photography, it generates racialized types of Japanese soldiers.
More importantly, the accompanying texts identify the source of these three photographs as Japanese soldiers’ trophy photography recently seized by the Chinese army. The active identification of the authorship indicates the photobook's self-referentiality, a characteristic of modernist bookmaking, which encourages readers to pin down the makers of these violent images. Another page in Records features facsimiles of pages of Japanese soldiers’ diaries bearing original handwriting, a design strategy often seen in “modernist layout devices.”40 Furthermore, according to observations from Susan Sontag and curator Hilary Roberts, trophy photography functioned as souvenirs.41 By identifying their authorship, the photobook shifts the purpose of trophy photography from souvenirs to testaments. The shifting format from one-of-its-kind photo albums to industrially printed books shows that public circulation counts more than private collecting. Photographs of beheadings in the book echo yet twist the widely known anecdote about Lu Xun's encounter with a war-themed lantern slide showcasing a Chinese man being decapitated by a Japanese soldier, surrounded by a group of indifferent Chinese spectators.42 With the authorship underlined, Records turns the Chinese man with indomitable facial expressions into a martyr and Japanese soldiers around the beheading scene into cannibalistic spectators.
I further argue that one can understand the photobook's staging of execution of Chinese people metaphorically as a form of self-decapitation. In twentieth-century Chinese literature, self-decapitation can ironically empower one's radical subversion against tyrannical powers.43 In Lu's novel Zhujian (Forging the Swords), the young man Mei Jian Chi seeks vengeance by cutting off his own head as a sacrifice to the king who murdered his father. His head was later resurrected to bite back the tyrant fiercely.44 I propose that exposing embodied humiliation in such painful and confrontational ways in Records was a semi-suicidal act. The beheaded Chinese bodies In Records shifted the Confucian tradition that views self-sacrifice for one's parent as “an extreme expression”45 of filial piety into one's sacrifice for the nation. Faced with agitated images, it would be the photobook's target audiences—Chinese soldiers, citizens, and anti-fascist international communities—who held the agency to turn their gaze to the enemy and revive the dead head to launch a deadly attack. Restoring the decapitated victim's subjectivity would require the affected readers to wreak vengeance against the Imperial Japanese Army.
Above all, the photobook's self-referentiality concerns the photographic apparatus itself. Media theorist Ariella Azoulay points out that the image of rape was absent from various public sites.46 One exceptional example of the phenomenon is the photography of rape victims from Nanjing during the Second Sino-Japanese War.47 The section on raping from Records features trophy photography of female rape victims who were forced to pose naked or who were killed after being raped. At the left corner of one photograph on the page, what indicates the perpetrator's presence and the camera's materiality is the shadow of the photographer included alongside the bodies of rape victims (fig. 5). In this case, the gaze of the photographer is as harmful as the crime of rape. The shadow, while implicating the existence of the photographic apparatus, emphasizes visualizing the embodied form of the damaging gaze. In other words, the shadow warns readers that the photographer is the enemy. In the wartime novel Yuji (Rainy Season) by Sima Wensen, a propaganda team of young female students who escaped from Nanjing to the hinterland present atrocity photography in Records to audiences during a fundraising campaign. They warn audiences specifically about those rape photographs. By further pointing out the authorship of atrocity photography in the book, they help people in the hinterland identify the enemy and bring forth proximate war terror.48 By putting appalling beheading and rape scenes of Chinese bodies by Japanese soldiers on display—rather than images of Japanese war machines—the book, anticipating readers’ revenge, demonstrates its hypothesis that photojournalistic self-decapitation can lead to gendered liberation.
Mourning the Mother-and-Child Duo
A group of five photographs from the section on bombing in Records thematizes the victimized bodies of a mother-and-son duo (fig. 6). Poignant images showcase hugging corpses of mother and son, boys crying alone, or a surviving kid confused about his mother's lifeless body. All of the children's mothers are dead. Accompanying texts explain that these pictures depict women and children attacked by Japanese air bombs in Shanghai, Xuzhou, and Guangzhou. A close-up view of a howling young boy is paired with white-on-black texts that suggest his verbal expression: “Mama!” “Mama!” Furthermore, this page applies other means of editing to amplify the affective materiality of the image. For instance, the pool of blood surrounding the mother and her baby in the photograph at the lower right corner was retouched with paint.49
The affective depiction of a mother-and-child duo was a newly emerged photographic representation exemplifying Japanese military violence on Chinese bodies. The Republican Chinese government had begun to utilize photographic albums on Japanese atrocities to seek international support in the 1920s. For instance, after the 1928 Jinan Incident, a military conflict between the National Revolutionary Army and the Imperial Japanese Army in Shandong province, a photographic album was made entitled Souvenir Presented to the Members of the Party of American Journalists Visiting China in the Summer of 1929 by the People of the City of Tsinan.50 With equally sized photographic prints arranged rectilinearly on the page, the album was a photographic inventory of dead bodies. The album's layout, to borrow photographer and theorist Allan Sekula's term, packages photographs of Chinese victims as a “visual document” of “legalistic truth” testifying to Japanese war crimes and violation of modern Chinese sovereignty.51 Exceptionally, one photograph hints at dissatisfaction with the album's morbid design. Accompanied by the caption “the wounded revolutionary soldiers, stuck [sic] dead by the Japanese soldiers,” the photograph was retouched by painted strokes highlighting blood gushing out of the soldier's neck (fig. 7).
Diverging from the depiction of Chinese bodies as lacking vitality or sensitivity in nineteenth-century imperialist and colonial travel albums and the 1928 album of the Jinan Incident, victimized women and children in Records rebrand Chinese nationhood as being rich in emotion and sympathy. White-on-black characters (heibaizi), a particular typographic style, differentiate texts evoking the sense of sound from other explanatory texts in a standard typeface (fig. 6).52 The war song at the end of the book further serves as a score for readers to sing and perform with. Based on Records, dramatist and director Dong Xinming wrote a street play entitled The Enemy's Bestial Behavior (Diren de Shouxing). Designed to be performed at public squares and on the street, this play appropriated percussion instruments used in peep shows to attract attention from audiences and displayed cartoons on large-scale cloth depicting scenes adapted from Records. The play featured three performers. Two of them acted as refugee siblings whose parents were killed by Japanese soldiers. They stood and sat on stools, flanking the pictorial exhibit. Showing a series of atrocious cartoons one by one, they explained the picture by repeating texts from Records and narrated stories as their own experiences. One of the cartoons depicted the crying child next to his dead mother. The script copied explanatory texts from Records as fervent monologues: “His mother was killed in an air raid.” The third performer acted as a young worker who pretended to be a local resident and led audiences to chant slogans such as “We want revenge!” and to donate money to the two “refugees.”53 The intertextuality between the photobook and the street play suggests readers’ participatory and public ways of animating the graphic image-text interactions.
The mother-and-child duo became an emotionally empowering icon in war art and photojournalism internationally to condemn the global fascism war machine and its violence toward vulnerable civilians across national borders. As early as 1931, Lu introduced German artist Käthe Kollwitz's work on the subject of the mother-and-son duo, entitled Sacrifice—from her war series in memory of the First World War—and later published the book Käthe Kollwitz's Prints Florilegium in 1936, which featured multiple illustrations on the theme of mother and child.54 During the Second Sino-Japanese War, Kollwitz's art took on new connotations among wartime Chinese audiences as anti-war, anti-Nazi, and anti-fascist manifestos.55 Also known among Republican Chinese and global audiences was Picasso's mural painting Guernica, which was first exhibited at the 1937 Paris World Exposition and canonized as a great piece of war art in 1940s China.56 The mother lamenting the dead body of her child has become an emblematic icon of twentieth-century war tragedy. The mother is the survivor in both Kollwitz's and Picasso's works. Mothers’ agonized mourning questions the legitimacy and meaning of war. However, in Records, mothers became the center of vulnerability, waiting to be saved by their soldiers-to-be sons. For example, a full-page photograph features a close view of an old lady and a young man. The old lady, with her weathered face and blind eyes, holding a crutch and handkerchief in her right hand, could not go anywhere without being guided by the young man. The photobook's simplified rendering of mothers as powerless victims intends to galvanize male readers to action. The Chinese caption in the bilingual version of Records describes them more generally as “Refugees along the Beijing-Shanghai Railway Line.” In contrast, the English caption “An eighty-year-old refugee woman led by her son along the Shanghai-Nanking Railway” clearly identifies the relationship between the two refugees, indicating editors’ belief in the trope's effectiveness among international readers.57
The repeated representational types of the mother-and-child duo in Records are also in line with visual tropes of suffering children and mothers in the Spanish Civil War, which circulated among global audiences via the rise of war photojournalism and illustrated news media such as newspapers, photobooks, and illustrated magazines.58 The 1936 Modern Miscellany published a photojournalistic article entitled “War and Children: A Few Pictures to Show What the Civil War in Spain Has Meant to the Children.” The most prominent image on the page employs the camera angle at the same level as the child's height. The Chinese caption explains that this weeping child refugee lost her parents. The English caption further indicates she was “one of the many children among the refugees who poured into Madrid as the rebels advanced.”59 The photograph in the top left-hand corner features the displacement of the mother and children. Art historian Nadya Bair's research on Robert Capa's photographs of the Spanish Civil War demonstrates that images of refugee mothers and children were a limited set of pictures selected by book and magazine publishers from a larger pool and became “the foundational visual tropes of anti-fascism.”60 The shared visual vocabulary of mother and children in exile between Robert Capa's 1938 photobook Death in the Making and Records implicates a global circuit of anti-fascism representations (figs. 8–9).
Furthermore, as MacKinnon argues, the “Madrid effect” was inseparable from the “Chinese propaganda victory” of the Wuhan era.61 Leaders of the Third Bureau, Guo Moruo and Zhou Enlai, delivered speeches highlighting the bond between Wuhan and Madrid. Guo put the fight against fascism in Europe and in China side by side while Zhou called out “workers and the army” to defend Wuhan “in the manner of their Spanish brothers and sisters.”62 The Chinese mother-and-child duo later developed into a frequent motif in anti-fascist propaganda posters of the United China Relief, initially designed in the late 1930s and reprinted in the 1940s, representing a new image of China among American popular audiences.63Records also contains the iconic photograph of a Chinese baby orphan sobbing in ruins, widely reproduced and circulated in illustrated magazines, event posters, and paper ephemerals in the United States.64 Selected photographic prints of images in Records later traveled around the United States in the 1940s to various cities, such as San Francisco, Seattle, New York, and Washington, DC, through the blockbuster exhibition China at War. The discrepancy between photographic prints featured in the exhibition and photographic pages in Records reveal how editors of Records hand-cropped and grouped existing photographs to spotlight the collective presence, instead of the individuality, of China's victimized bodies. The headline “Our Children” in Records highlights the communal ownership of Chinese children, enriched by the English caption “Sudden and horrible death brought by Japanese planes to innocent children” in the bilingual version.65 Their dead bodies provoke feelings of agony that function as emotional bonds between the nation and the world (figs. 10–11).
Historian Hugo García argues that anti-fascism remains “a ‘structure of feeling’ rather than a coherent concept.”66 The dissemination of moving representations of mothers and children among wartime domestic and international spectators reveals the traffic between local and global feelings and underscores the universalized ideological basis of these emotions. Commenting on the “global project of Enlightenment humanism,” David Denby explains that “what the sentimental text enacts is the recognition of the universal category of humanity in each individual case of suffering encountered: this child, this mother, this destitute old man are exponents of a universal value system.”67 The multisensorial and emotionally charged photographic representations and typographic texts in Records debunk Western missionaries’ and Japanese cultural theorists’ stereotypical notions that the Chinese are especially cruel and lack human sympathy. Even more, these touching photographic pages simultaneously enhance and testify to Chinese people's capacity for national sympathy, a key component of modern human subjectivity and nationhood long pursued by highbrow modern Chinese intellectuals such as Lu.68 In the case of Records, it was the image and the middlebrow commercial artist-publisher that transformed the agonizing self-portrait of victimhood into a means of modernization. What has been mutilating is modern China. The specter of a global conflict accelerated the merger of national and international mechanisms for sympathy. The mutilated Chinese bodies in Records exemplified the universal category of humanity in danger, calling for a world war to come.
I would like to express my gratitude to Roberta Wue, Amanda Wangwright, the anonymous reviewers, and the TAP editors for their insightful comments, suggestions, and critiques. My sincere thanks go to Denise Y. Ho, Jonathan Hay, and Huixian Dong, for generously guiding me to resourceful materials, and to Josef Beery for sharing his expertise on printmaking. Earlier drafts of this article were presented at the College Art Association and Association for Asian Studies 2024 conferences, where I benefited greatly from the thought-provoking questions and feedback from fellow panelists and participants. Lastly, I thank the International Center for Writing and Translation at the University of California, Irvine, for their graduate student publication support grants, and Tina Chen for leading the UCI Global Asias publication workshop.
Notes
See photographs from Records featured in Xinhua News Agency, Riben Qinhua Tupian Shiliaoji; Yin, Shi, and Dorfman, Rape of Nanking; Cao, Nanjing Datusha Shiliaoji; and more discussions on the film Tucheng xuezheng in Berry, “Cinematic Representations of the Rape of Nanking,” 87. On the danger and challenges of studying atrocity photography as historical evidence, see Fogel, Nanjing Massacre, 145–46. On atrocity photography of the Nanjing Massacre in American publications, see Evans, “Nanking Atrocity.” In discussing photographs of Nazi atrocities, historian David Shneer identifies two different epistemological presumptions of the nature of atrocity photography: The Soviet views of photography problematized the very notion of documentary and blurred the distinction between representation and reality. By contrast, Western photojournalism believed in the veracity of photography as objective documentation. See Shneer, “Is Seeing Believing?,” 65–68.
Historian Rebecca Nedostup argues for a methodological shift from the focus on numerical consequences and commemoration of death to “the process and processing of death.” See Nedostup, “Burying, Repatriating, and Leaving the Dead,” 138–39.
On historicizing the nexus of violence, sympathy, and modern China in national and transnational contexts, see Lean, Public Passions, 13–20; Barnes, Intimate Communities, 6–9; Lee, Revolution of the Heart, 221–54; and Hayot, Hypothetical Mandarin, 1–35.
Art historian Allison Moore points out that recent scholarship on pictures of atrocity lacks a “non-Western perspective” (“Picturing Atrocity,” 382). On the transnational framework of anti-fascist studies, see Buchanan,“‘Shanghai-Madrid Axis’?”; Chan, “Shangri-La on the Popular Front”; Garcia, “Transnational History.”
Located at the confluence of the Han and Yangtze Rivers, Wuhan consists of the tri-city complex of Hankou, Wuchang, and Hanyang. According to artists Ye Qianyu and Zhou Lingzhao, streets in Wuhan were crowded with oversized national flags, silver, gold, paper money dropped from the air, and trucks with loudspeakers playing war songs and patriotic speeches. At night, torchlight parades with gongs and drums moved along riverbanks, lighting up hundreds of war cartoons. The reflection of torchlight in the water formed a splendid golden dragon. Even steamships and speedboats on the Yangtze River joined by honking. See detailed descriptions of these events in Ye, Ye Qianyu zizhuan, 112–13; Cai, “Guojia de Yishujia,” 33–35.
MacKinnon, Wuhan, 1938, 3, 99–100. The PDMC's leadership at this point represented the peak of the United Front. General Chen Cheng (1898–1965), the chief commander in the Battle of Wuhan, also served as the PDMC's director. Zhou Enlai (1898–1976) from the Communist Party and Huang Qixiang (1898–1970) from the Chinese Peasants’ and Workers’ Democratic Party served as deputy directors. In particular, MacKinnon points out that the political control of Wuhan under the Baoding military oligarchs, exemplified by Chen Cheng, gave rise to an unprecedented free environment for the press and cultural experimentation (Wuhan, 1938, 62–66). See more on the Third Bureau in MacKinnon, Wuhan, 1938, 78–79; Zhai, Kangri Zhanzheng, 327–45; Ye, Ye Qianyu zizhuan, 111–13; and Edwards, “Drawing Sexual Violence in Wartime China,” 564.
On the Central News Agency, see Shu, “Managing International News-Agency Relations.”
On Ye Qianyu's journey from Shanghai to Wuhan, see Crespi, Manhua Modernity, 58–62; Ye, Ye Qianyu zizhuan, 109–11.
See Ye, Ye Qianyu zizhuan, 114; Third Bureau of PDMC, Junshi Weiyuanhui Zhengzhibu Disanting, 75. The International Propaganda Department (IPD) was established in November 1937. It administered the Nationalist government's overseas publicity throughout World War II. It was initially supervised under the Military Commission and later under the Nationalist Party's Central Propaganda Department (Guomingdang Zhongyang xuanchunabu). The IPD was located in Wuhan between November 1937 and October 1938. The IPD also set up offices overseas in a number of cities in Europe and the United States. At the beginning of the Second Sino-Japanese War, offices in London and New York played the most crucial roles in calling for boycotting Japanese products and international aid to China. See Wu, “Kangzhan Shiqi de Guoji Xuanchuanchu”; Zhai, Kangri Zhanzheng, 345–60.
For more on songti, see specimens of Chinese types in Hanyun zhuzi yinshuasuo, Qianzi huabian yangben; Huafeng yinshua zhuzichang, Gezhong zhongwen qianzi yangban; Bowen zhuzi gongsi, Zhongwen gezhong qianzi yangben; Jiang, “Ershi Shiji Shanghai Zhongwen Qianhuozi Zitisheji Zhuzhi Jianbiao,” no page number; Li, Zhongguo mei shu zi shi tu shuo, 167–270. See typographic design based on songti in Zhu, Meishuzi Xinyanjiu, 23–59.
Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 228; see also Godfrey, Abstraction and the Holocaust, 7.
Gill, Essay on Typography, 1988. Originally published in 1931.
Recent scholarship on wartime modernism during the Second Sino-Japanese War looks beyond urban modernism in the occupied regions of Shanghai and Beijing. Its focus on the formal issue redefines wartime modernism as a mixture of modernist, folk, and regional forms. See FitzGerald, Fragmenting Modernisms, 6–30; Ho, “In Search of National Decoration,” 149.
MacKinnon, Wuhan, 1938, 116. As historian Parks M. Coble articulates: “At the very time when details of the rape of Nanjing and other atrocities were becoming available, reporters had perhaps the greatest freedom from censorship in the whole of the war era.” He further points out that after the fall of Wuhan and Guangzhou in October 1938, “conditions did change. Guomindang authorities began to tighten their control over the press” (“Writing about Atrocity,” 381).
See Brook, Bourgon, and Blue, Death by a Thousand Cuts; Hevia, “Photography Complex”; Hayot, Hypothetical Mandarin.
Guo, foreword, 6–7.
On the changing attitudes toward Chinese judicial penalty in Western literature beginning in the late eighteenth century, see Brook, Bourgon, and Blue, Death by a Thousand Cuts, 200-202.
Sontag highlights the collectability of trophy photographs, see Sontag, “Regarding the Torture of Others”; and Roberts, “War Trophy Photographs,” 202.
Many photographs in the book were retouched and manipulated.
See Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC, lot 11488 (H) [P&P].
See more explainations on heibaizi in Zhu, Meishuzi Xinyanjiu, 137–45.
See reproductions of Kollwitz's works in Chinese publications in Kollwitz, “Xisheng”; Lu, Kaisui Kelehuizhi Banhua Xuanji. On more context of Lu's interest in Kollwitz, see Lu, “Weile Wangque de Jinian”; Bories, “Influence of Käthe Kollwitz on Chinese Creation.”
See Qianxian Ribao, “Muke Zuojia Keleweizhi he Maisuilaile”; Heping Ribao, “Ji Nvbanhuajia Kaifu Keleweizhi.”
For reproductions of Picasso's Guernica in Republican Chinese magazines, see Picasso, “Yanijia”; Picasso, “P. Bijiasuo de zuopin,” 6; Wen, “P. Bijiasuo,” 49–50.
Sontag points out the significant role of the Spanish Civil War in the history of modern media in “Looking at War.”
For one example of such posters, see James Montgomery Flagg's Help China! China Is Helping Us, Digital Maryland, https://collections.digitalmaryland.org/digital/collection/mdwp/id/213/. According to historian Christopher T. Jespersen's research on the political contexts of the United China Relief, “accounts of Japanese atrocities reached Americans and China's heroic resistance became a major story in 1937.” The Gallup organization revealed that “Americans’ sympathy lay with the Chinese, rising from 43 percent in August 1937 to 74 percent by May 1939” (Jespersen, “‘Spreading the American Dream’ of China,” 273).
Denby, Sentimental Narrative, 96. See also Lee's discussion on Denby's notion of universal categories in Lee, Revolution of the Heart, 223–25.
On how Chinese nationalists bridged universal humanism and modern nationhood when advocating for national sympathy, see Lee, Revolution of the Heart, 221–39.
![Figure 7. Souvenir Presented to the Members of the Party of American Journalists Visiting China in the Summer of 1929 by the People of the City of Tsinan. Photo album, 12 × 18 in., ca. 1928. Image courtesy of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, lot 11488 (H) [P&P].](https://dup.silverchair-cdn.com/dup/Content_public/Journal/trans-asia-photography/14/1/10.1215_21582025-11297274/2/m_tap11297274figure7.png?Expires=1737652197&Signature=A8csce5gJ5hxoy4LOxkUFoB157yNcb8Ycyvad1QZR4CZpTjZh~-PFG~5gTMhRHaEyr~L7SWqFIEg5U5mhvqEzwvuhfwZpdI~s3M1khXf6SksBB0PxB-6xwG9aup10waMMFTI22TjyupvBiSP1VT9zvIUXyaRj-D-NfJ6UKF8j9swtICpgstBm3HIQBSOmjy6oerVsFFR7r-Y5Lo9sjGPZjJf3zacEFDUAoPlQ7MK4TUPtqFKyYtiK6AYPE~bpKgZShzSjcnVf1daNhMkM~D3UG-zIK-Yvw3ANNlgmkRN3Pg0o1BJ3LIHv6-AkCfXv9rD21E8INZn8sPDXyiP6oosAA__&Key-Pair-Id=APKAIE5G5CRDK6RD3PGA)
![Figure 10. “Close-up of small child killed by bomb.” Photographic print from China at War series, 1937–1945. Image courtesy of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, lot 11511 (item) [P&P].](https://dup.silverchair-cdn.com/dup/Content_public/Journal/trans-asia-photography/14/1/10.1215_21582025-11297274/2/m_tap11297274figure10.png?Expires=1737652197&Signature=XMX0ESPeIsttjiMjVftA0~4T6Xnd0-8zKtp6FuV5uX8ehrJ0Dzmyhb57nKMnvpdqvBgbQSQKe8at2aeOYgGnAfwZSipXTNgPhyAXePWct9iu5MZpv-pq-47y5NWpDdQHq~x~BdThGEWmkkJCykB7H45sfVYJ2d74R8EKwFYzQdMYV92h8H-YKRnDYIwASFttgUD7hbq2jwryQamwJ9NXZbLDsCydltcHh8iMu6yV5grgJaTz3ZZ8JU5Se9UqM3beRbX~PAFcPmDn2RVEJFbWZsP0rTHOOF0sv1yL7B66VulaOMUhSwTsHI-TWCTa9tOBQTd2MJdPCAE5D0KrGHJX9g__&Key-Pair-Id=APKAIE5G5CRDK6RD3PGA)
