Helpless Women vs. the Big Bad in Chinese Wartime Propaganda

by: Beth Price , March 26, 2026

Introduction

War is supposedly the ‘mother of invention’, but times of international conflict and heightened nationalism only serve to reinforce the suppression of women by men. Whether out of a paternalistic desire to protect weak women and fulfil one’s masculine role of man and soldier, or in the execution—too often literally—of newfound power by invading men, women are consistently forced into subordinate or victimised positions during times of war (Morris 1996). The figure of the innocent woman is part of a global visual language of male protectionism and patriotism, with her influence heightened as she is assaulted and killed.

The Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945) is remembered in China for the brutality inflicted on its citizens by Japanese soldiers, with the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, also known as the ‘Rape of Nanking’,[1] among the worst of the atrocities. Despite ultra-nationalist Japanese scholars still maintaining that the massacre was propaganda fabricated by China (Zarrow 2005: 307), the consensus is that Japanese soldiers committed state-sanctioned war crimes in Nanjing which horrified Nazis who witnessed the acts (Rabe 1998: 67). These war crimes against Chinese citizens included the rape of between 20,000 and 80,000 women, disembowelment, castration, nailing women to walls alive, forcing men to rape their family members, and part-burying people to be torn apart by dogs (Chang 1998: 6).

In the wake of the Nanjing Massacre, the Chinese government capitalised on the anger of its citizens and the world. In an attempt to organise the popular feeling and maximise the impact of propaganda, the Cartoon Propaganda Corps (Jiuwang manhua xuanchuan dui) were founded in 1937. Their mission? To politicise entertainment, fuelling rampant patriotism and anti-Japanese sentiment in the populace (FitzGerald 2013: 81, Pozzi 2014: 100). The work, themes, and impact of the Cartoon Propaganda Corps has been analysed through different lenses (see Hung 1994, Shen 2005, Pozzi 2014), with Louise Edwards’s (2013) analysis of the use of hyperviolent, hypersexualised imagery of women and Japanese soldiers informing the initial investigation of this paper. However, the focus of scholarship on the shock value of the graphic images has meant that artistic intent and compositional choices have been overlooked.

This paper seeks to recentre the artists as active creators of emotionally impactful propaganda cartoons. Rather than being passive actors who simply document social events, the cartoonists of the Propaganda Corps deliberately crafted their images to be as emotive as possible, using symbolic and compositional techniques to that end. Through a close analysis of four images from two publications produced by the Cartoon Propaganda Corps—Resistance Cartoons (Kangzhan manhua) and National Salvation Cartoons (Jiuwang manhua)—this paper seeks to demonstrate the importance of such techniques in producing emotionally impactful images. Considering the Cartoon Propaganda Corps’ images as deliberately constructed pieces of visual propaganda rather than merely as graphic imagery can provide insight into the development of a national visual language in modern China and indicate the role of women in the emerging country.

Visual Language & Visual Media in Republican China

Chinese visual media does not share the same lineage as Western visual media, with roots in Western satire and political cartoons dating back to the mid-eighteenth century.[2] In comparison, at the turn of the twentieth century, mass print media such as newspapers were seen as an ‘alien medium’ which did not naturally fit with Chinese culture (Mittler 2004: 43-44). It would be a mistake to argue that pre-twentieth-century China had no visual language or no history of illustrating naked bodies—woodblock printing and printed erotica had existed for centuries; however, visual media were not widely used as a means of communication before the twentieth century. This seismic shift in visual culture has been called the ‘Pictorial Turn’ by scholars (Pang 2005: 18).

Three main factors combined to bring about this ‘Pictorial Turn’: the rise of foreign capital and advertising in major cities, technological change that allowed for cheap pictorial printing, and the political and intellectual shift which characterised the tumultuous period between 1880 and 1945 (Wang 2021: 9, Pang 2005: 19-20). Chinese intellectuals and political leaders saw great potential in the rapid development and adoption of a new visual-centric mass media as a means through which to disseminate and encourage the acceptance of their new republican order (Chi-Ching Sun 1984: 283). By the late 1930s, Chinese visual media had exploded, and a new visual literacy had developed across the country. Print illustrations had been tried and tested as a highly effective medium through which to communicate radical ideas (Laing 2013: 315) and to ‘provoke’ viewers (Chi-Ching Sun 1984: 282), and print and visual culture were seen as a fundamental part of modern Chinese society (Pang 2005: 21-22).

Cartoons, in particular, are convenient, easily reproduced, and easily comprehensible, making them powerful vehicles for transmitting propaganda. Since they are more universal than other forms of media, a much wider audience can access them and, therefore, be incentivised through the distribution of cartoons than through other wartime media such as newspaper reports. The Cartoon Propaganda Corps were founded with the explicit mission to stir up patriotic feelings and anger towards Japanese soldiers and Japan. Their work was designed to have as wide an impact as possible with three key audiences: largely illiterate peasants and soldiers, educated Chinese intellectuals, and foreigners resident in China. They produced magazines and flyers in English for the foreign readers, ‘picture books’ and pamphlets with simpler imagery and limited captions for the illiterate rural population, and magazines with more text and complicated images for the educated native audience (FitzGerald 2013: 83). Distribution and consumption of each category of propaganda was not strictly delineated. Cartoons tailored for rural residents were no doubt seen by literate people, and vice versa. Likewise, propaganda is not a neutral entity, and the audience’s role in interpreting and consuming the work produced by the Propaganda Corps should be considered, particularly with regard to images of extreme gendered violence (Mittler 2008: 472-474).

This paper focuses on four images from two publications aimed at literate Chinese readers: Resistance Cartoons (Kangzhan manhua), published in 1937, and National Salvation Cartoons (Jiuwang manhua), published in 1938. Although the publication of these journals was relatively short-lived, the impact of the images produced by the cartoon artists and the propaganda culture they established helped define Chinese comic art and visual literacy (Hung 1994: 94-95). The word manhua is often translated as ‘cartoon’, but as with many translations, the two words are not fully synonymous. Today, manhua is often used to refer to Japanese and Manga style comics rather than as an umbrella term for simple—often humorous or satirical—drawings of figures (Wu 2018: 17). The term manhua only came into widespread use in the 1920s, as artists like Ye Qianyu drew inspiration from Western serialised cartoon strips in newspapers and periodicals (Hung 1994: 111). There is a marked difference between comedic manhua of the 1920s and ‘30s and propaganda manhua produced during the war (Pozzi 2018: 40), with pre-war manhua functioning as urban entertainment and wartime manhua actively conveying messages of nationalism and patriotism. Artists adopted and developed new rhetorical and visual techniques to make their wartime work as visually impactful and emotionally charged as possible. It is this radical shift in style and skill which my research investigates further.

The Position of Women in Republican China

It is important to briefly contextualise women’s position in China at the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War. Following the deposition of the last emperor in 1911, China underwent a period of radical, revolutionary change in the first decades of the twentieth century. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, gender roles and feminism were a central topic of debate for both the Communists and the Nationalists (Edwards 2000: 116). The figure of ‘modern’ women in the private and public spheres was central to the creation of the new Chinese nation-state. The behaviour, rights, and appearance of women was a common topic of public debate, communicated through visual media in pictorials (Dong 2008: 195, Barlow 2004: 57). To simplify somewhat, women enjoyed an expansion of their rights and freedoms during the Republican Era (1911-1949) and, as is so often the case when women expand their horizons, their behaviour and bodies were routinely dissected and policed by men.

Reform and ‘modernity’ meant that love,  marriage, and sexual activity were no longer as strictly beholden to the Confucian traditions of the Imperial Era (Dikötter 1995: 2, Paramore 2020: 534) but ensuring that the future sons of China would be born to ‘virtuous mothers’—educated, healthful, and nationalist young women—was paramount to reformers (Beahan 1981: 234). Female virtue and sexual morality had been a key concern for male state builders and reformers in China for centuries, with female chastity seen as the ‘foundation’ of family units and, by extension, social order (Theiss 2005; 17). The reformers of the Republican Era were no exception to this, despite their claims to ‘modernity’. For women in Chinese society, maintaining one’s virtue and chastity was paramount. Even in instances of rape, it was not the woman’s agency or assault which mattered, rather her involvement in the ‘pollution’ of her body and any line of succession (Sommer 2000: 67).

More than simply policing women’s behaviour in the public sphere, the ‘state-chastity cult’ of late-imperial China, and its philosophical continuation in the Republican Era, gave tacit approval to, and even encouraged, women committing suicide when their virtue was cast into doubt, either through consensual sexual activity or following rape (Theiss 2005: 17-18). While the exact reasoning behind an otherwise virtuous woman’s decision to end her own life was debatable, it was generally concluded to be a combination of preserving virtue and demonstrating female agency (Goodman 2005: 67). In the Republican Era, mass media and print culture provided a new arena in which men could debate female suicide, which was increasingly seen as a reflection of social instability as much as an individual act (ibid.: 69).

By the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, the icon figure of the modern Chinese woman was at once the embodiment of China’s modernity and morality, and a potentially corrupting force which could bring about the downfall of individuals and the state (Chung 2016: 164, Stevens 2003: 88). Cartoons regularly featured ssexualisedand eeroticisedwomen, hinting at the dangers they posed to China as a whole if they were to succumb to their sexuality (Edwards 2013: 568, Lei 2013: 111). It is therefore of little surprise that sexualised naked women featured heavily in wartime cartoons when the very survival of China as a nation—literally and conceptually—was at risk.

Methodology & Media

Other analyses of Sino-Japanese wartime propaganda focus heavily on the symbolism and signs used within manhua images (Edwards 2013; Shen 2005). It can be useful to investigate how audiences interpret signs in images to construct cultural meanings (Bal & Bryson 1991: 184). However, an over-reliance on interpreting the often graphic symbolism of manhua propaganda can foster a ‘useless dispute’ (Groensteen 2007: 11-14) wherein the artistic choices made by the artists are routinely overlooked in favour of audience interpretation. While comparative Western propaganda has been subject to analysis of the artists’ innovations and compositional techniques (see Groensteen 2007), this is not yet the case for the Propaganda Corps’ work. This research seeks to address this gap by analysing the artists’ compositional choices and symbolism, namely linework and shading, framework and sequence, facial detail and gaze direction, and spatial organisation and proportion.

The four images selected for close analysis contain the same key elements of Japanese soldiers assaulting naked Chinese women. In each image, we see the immediate aftermath of a violent assault, with the women explicitly dead in two images and presumed dead in a third. In ‘The Destruction of the Nine-Power Treaty’ (Riben yu jiu guo gongyue) by Zhang Ding (1931) (Fig. 1), a grinning Japanese soldier holds the body of a woman by her wrist. She has been raped and murdered. Her head lolls back so we cannot see her face, and her long hair hangs down her back. Her limp body folds over her knees as her legs hang open and her entrails spill out. Her breasts are exposed, emblazoned with Chinese characters reading ‘Nine-Power Treaty’ (Jiu guo gongyue).[3] The soldier leans back, grinning at his conquest. His trousers are unfastened, and his bayoneted rifle drips blood; he has only recently finished his assault by killing and disembowelling the woman. Apart from his unbuckled trousers, he is fully clothed, including his helmet.

‘Nine-Power Treaty’ is the only selected standalone image; the other images are panels taken from a longer narrative comic. The sixth panel of ‘The Consequences of Extreme Evil’ (Qiongxiong ji’e de jieguo) by Zhang Leping (1937) (Fig. 2) shows a Japanese soldier standing in the foreground, fastening his trousers. He has recently finished raping the woman who lies on the floor in the background. His uniform is partly unfastened, revealing the vest under his jacket, and his rifle is upturned in the ground with his helmet resting on the butt. His head is tipped back, and he holds a large knife dripping blood between his teeth, leading us to assume that the woman has been murdered. She is relegated to a prop in the background, lying on her back. Her left arm is flung out with her fist clenched, suggesting that she tried to resist the soldier. Her clothes are pulled down around her ankles, exposing her bare legs and breasts. Her breasts are the only feature of her body which we can clearly see, and we cannot see her face.

In the third panel of Wang Yan’s 1938 cartoon, ‘Anything Goes Under Japanese Occupation’ (Lunxian qu li de xingxing sese) (Fig. 3), the women are still alive. In this panel, two Japanese soldiers are raping two women. In the foreground, the soldier grins as he looms over the woman who lies on her stomach. Her face is turned towards us; she is distressed but no longer resisting the assault. The soldier pins the woman down with his left hand on her waist and his right hand on her shoulder. They are both naked. In the background, a second soldier assaults another woman. He stands behind her, large hands holding her up. Her right arm is thrown out, and her left hand covers her genitals as though she is still trying to resist. The soldier is still in his uniform, including his hat, while she is completely naked.

The final image in this analysis is also by Wang Yan. The eleventh panel of ‘Persevere, Fight for Final Victory’ (Baizhe bunao, zhenqu zuihou de shengli) (1938) (Fig. 4) has the most detailed setting. A Japanese soldier stands in a ruined Chinese home, head thrown back in laughter, over the dead body of a woman. His foot rests below her exposed breasts in a show of dominance. She lies prone on a low bench, long hair tumbling to the floor and underwear pulled down. Her large breasts are exposed, and her entrails spill from her stomach. The soldier holds a knife dripping blood onto the woman’s body. He is fully clothed, with only his untucked and rumpled jacket suggesting any dishevelment following his assault and killing. Through the open door in the background, smoke billows as the Japanese army razes the town to the ground.

Powerful Symbolism

Interpreting the meaning of symbols is a central aspect of how an audience interacts with and understands images. Meaning is created by the viewer in their interpretation and by the artist at the point of creation (Williamson 1978: 41), with both points depending on the image being viewed within a particular cultural order (Bal & Bryson 1991: 184). Within this cultural order, images can transmit preferred meanings to their audience, conveying the ‘institutional/political/ideological order imprinted on them’ (Hall 1980: 134). In the context of propaganda images, the ideological order is one of patriotism and radical nationalism, as we see in the Cartoon Propaganda Corps’ images.

Animalised humanisation of the enemy is used to explicitly encourage confrontational group identities between the ‘ingroup’ (in this case, Chinese citizens) and the ‘outgroup’ (Japanese soldiers), which leads to justification of violence against the outgroup (Quiamzade & Lalot 2023). Animalised humanisation in propaganda is closely related to the comic tradition of caricature (Baker 1993: 108). It therefore follows that in the ‘almost totally uninstitutionalized’ world (Crespie quoted in FitzGerald 2013: 87) of ‘SSinicisedCartoons’ (Zhongghuohua manhua) (Pozzi 2018: 82), the artists of the Cartoon Propaganda Corps drew from long-established Western visual and political techniques of ‘othering’ the enemy (Baker 1993: 84-85, Hung 1994: 97-98). In ‘Destruction of the Nine-Power Treaty’, ‘Anything Goes Under Japanese Occupation’ and ‘Persevere, Fight for Final Victory’, the Japanese soldiers have grotesquely oversized lips and bulging eyes. The exaggerated, ape-like expressions were common in visual portrayals of Japanese soldiers (Dower 1986: 234-261), connoting the brutality and sub-human nature of the enemy and their actions. This imagery was used across the Propaganda Corps’ publications as well as in posters displayed throughout China (Hung 1994: 105), and the ape imagery was immediately recognisable as representing the Japanese; in other words, it conveyed the preferred meaning of the Propaganda Corps.

Another common symbol used in Chinese depictions of Japan and Japanese people is the skull. This symbolism can be seen in some of the earliest pieces of Chinese cartoon propaganda and was a well-established signifier of Japan by the Sino-Japanese War. Shen Bochen’s 1919 image ‘Qingdao, Shandong’ (see Fig. 5 in Hung 1994: 98). This image depicts Japan’s imperialist policies towards China, with the implacable, grinning skull marked by the rising sun emblem. The skull is almost four times the size of the men who are struggling to save their home from the aggressive foreign power and demonstrates the directness of symbolism in Chinese cartoons (Hung 1994: 98). The skull imagery is more subtle in ‘Destruction of the Nine-Power Treaty’ (Fig. 1) and ‘Anything Goes Under Japanese Occupation’ (Fig. 3), but the large teeth and heavy rimmed eyes of the Japanese soldiers have clear skeletal connotations, drawing on the established visual language of Chinese propaganda cartoons.

In contrast to the oversized, exaggerated faces of the Japanese soldiers, the faces of the Chinese women in the four Cartoon Propaganda Corps’ images are almost non-existent. In ‘Destruction of the Nine-Power Treaty’ and ‘The Consequences of Extreme Evil’, as viewers, we cannot see their eyes at all. In ‘Anything Goes’ and ‘Persevere’, the women’s facial features are minimal. In ‘Anything Goes’—the only image where the women’s faces are fully turned towards the viewer—the main impression the viewer has of the women is the despair on their faces, as shown by furrowed brows. Their eyes and lips are single ink-strokes, enough to make the viewer rerecognise them as human features, but not enough to draw our attention.

The symbol of a raped woman was used by the Propaganda Corps to both represent and exoticise China’s national violation by the invading imperialist Japanese forces. Chinese society’s sexual culture was still relatively conservative with a Confucian emphasis on chastity, particularly in rural and lower-educated communities where the Propaganda Corps’ images were distributed (Zarrow 2006: 168). The prevailing understanding of the act of socially acceptable sex was penetration by a man and comparatively passive acceptance by a woman (McMahon 1994: 231), and so the violent crime of rape only acquired its fully emotive meaning when committed by Japanese soldiers against Chinese women. Not only was the woman herself succumbing to deviant sexual desires, but to a violent enemy, racially inferior to Chinese men. The repeated motif of women being killed after they have been raped alludes to the fear of the pollution of the Chinese race by the Japanese in the ‘biologically figured notion’ of emerging Chinese nationalism (Edwards 2013: 578) and the centrality of female virtue and chastity to Chinese culture; women were better dead than sexually corrupted.

The figure of a dead, anonymous woman representing violence against China as a nation was a feature of patriotic manhua before the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War and was not limited to assaulted and eroticised women. In Feng Zikai’s ‘Death Rains From the Heavens’ (Fig. 7) (1939), the woman is fully clothed and non-sexualised but still totally anonymous and faceless. In ‘Death Rains From the Heavens’, the mother has had her head blown off by a Japanese ballistic strike. The viewer’s focus and sympathy are drawn not to the dead woman but towards the infant now nursing at their dead mother’s breast. The juxtaposition of the baby’s innocence against the brutality of the mother’s death elicits a greater emotional reaction in the viewer than the death of the woman herself. Feng’s influential work demonstrates another way in which the violent death of women was used by propaganda artists to represent the brutality of Japan against China as a nation (Hung 1990: 55). The codified symbol of desecrated and assaulted women’s bodies was emotive enough to momobilisenti-Japanese sentiment, but not nearly so humiliating as any depiction of naked, brbrutalisedhinese men would have been (Edwards 2013:  574). By using dead women as a recurring symbol, the Propaganda Corps trod the line between effective propaganda and emasculating their audience.

Dominating the Frame

In almost every aspect of the Cartoon Propaganda Corps’ images, Japanese soldiers are visually dominant and take up the active role in the panel. They are brutish and animalistic, visually dominating the frame and dominating the drawn women through their actions. The consistent choices of the manhua artists to exaggerate the size of the soldiers helped to convey their inflammatory anti-Japanese message. In each of the four images analysed in this paper, the soldiers are markedly larger than the women. This may not seem surprising—men tend to be physically larger than women off the page—but the proportional differences are deliberately dramatic. In Zhang Ding’s ‘The Destruction of the Nine-Power Treaty’ (Fig. 1) and Zhang Leping’s ‘The Consequences of Extreme Evil’ (Fig. 2), the women take up 70% and 75% less space on the page than the soldiers, respectively. Even in Wang Yan’s ‘Anything Goes Under Japanese Occupation’ (Fig. 3), where there are two women, their combined spatial presence is less than half that of the soldiers. Wang gave the dead woman more space on the page in ‘Persevere, Fight for Final Victory’ (Fig. 4), as she is only 13% smaller than the soldier, but she is situated at the bottom of the frame, still visually dominated.

Women lying prone is a recurring element in the Cartoon Propaganda Corps’ work. This was both a symbolic and compositional choice by the artists. Where women are not prone, they are passive, as in ‘Destruction of the Nine-Power Treaty’, where the dead woman is limp, only held vertically by the action of the Japanese soldier. These recurring compositional choices mean that the women are never centralised in the frame. By situating the soldiers in the central third of the frame or by having them literally support the women’s bodies, the manhua artists ensure they are the focus of the images. The salient component of each image is the soldier, with the woman effectively relegated to ‘prop’ rather than a character within the image.

The use of contrasting linework and shading for different figures was another technique which the Cartoon Propaganda Corps’ artists used to make the soldiers the most visually dominant element of the images, thereby drawing the viewer’s eye to the enemy. The images are simply black and white with very little grey or mid-tone shading. The limited choice of black and white does not restrict the cartoonists. On the contrary, the contrast it affords heightens the visual impact of their cartoons.

‘The Consequences of Extreme Evil’ and ‘Destruction of the Nine-Power Treaty’ have no scenery or setting, and so are worth comparing directly. The large soldier in ‘Destruction’ has the most three-dimensional rendering of all of the figures ananalysedn this paper, with both fabric texture and shadow. Although there is no scenery to position him in, he is lit from the middle-left with his shadow falling behind him and extending beyond the frame, suggesting an extension of his own physicality beyond the framed space. The flat contrast of black lines and dark shading against the white space draws the viewer to examine him in detail. The comparatively flat linework on the woman cements her relegation to prop, not person. She does have a shadow falling in the same direction as the soldiers’, but it is quickly cut off by his boot, reinforcing the message of the image that his presence has cut off hers. ‘The Consequences of Extreme Evil’ has much lighter linework than ‘Destruction’, with Zhang Leping favouring a simple outline with no shading. This allows for some finer details; the soldier’s pubic hair is visible, and the woman’s nipples and toenails are distinct. These levels of detail in an otherwise relatively simplistic scene lead the viewer to study each section of the image more closely, moving from the busier left side of the frame to the right, where the dead woman lies against white, empty space. The progression of the viewer’s gaze means that the woman’s body is the last object examined, and the contrast between her body and the white background, compared with the soldier’s greater rooting within the frame, further relegates her to a prop illustrating the soldier’s actions.

Wang Yan roots his images, ‘Anything Goes Under Japanese Occupation’ (Fig. 3) and ‘Persevere, Fight for Final Victory’ (Fig. 4) in a more physical setting, with distinct frames and objects that the figures interact with. His images were often part of short comic strips, where the setting was an important component in constructing the image’s overall narrative. As well as conveying an overarching story sequence, the physical environments of Wang’s images worked to draw the audience’s interest and eye. In ‘Anything Goes’, the black background provides a strong contrast with the white, unshaded bodies of the soldiers and women. The jagged outline of white space surrounding the figures conveys a sense of explosive movement and aggression. The jagged outlines belong to the soldiers and extend only around the women where they are physically held, for example, around the woman’s head in the foreground. This use of outline and contrast helps to heighten the sense of passivity for the assaulted women and the extreme Japanese control. In ‘Persevere, Fight for Final Victory’, Wang makes use of contrast in a different way, almost subverting the impact of high contrast linework from his other images. In this case, there is a deliberate lack of variation in the lines used to depict the figures and the scenery. This seemingly detracts from the visual impact of the soldier and the woman, an odd choice when compared to Wang’s other work and the work of the other Propaganda Corps artists, where high contrast, eye-catching imagery was used to highlight the brutality of Japanese soldiers. Wang’s deliberate subversion of this stylistic form demonstrates the artistic skill of the Cartoon Propaganda Corps.

Despite the brutality of the assault in this image, the background scenery and the woman’s hair share are constructed from almost identical curved linework. This visual language unifies the scene of destruction through the open door and is one of the only distinguishing features of the woman. In contrast, the soldier’s connection to the scenery comes from his leaning on the table, and his form is highly visually distinct from the rest of the scene. His physical presence in the frame is heightened by the white space that surrounds his upper body, and the shading of his large boot, the darkest point of the image, draws the viewer’s eye to the centre of the scene. The vertical link between the soldier’s boot and the blood at the intersection of the horizontal and central thirds of the image makes the disembowelment of the woman the main focus of the scene, centring the active agency of the image on the soldier and rendering her a passive object.

The artists of the Cartoon Propaganda Corps did not rely solely on graphic detail to convey extreme violence and emotion in their images. Each image, though produced quickly and with relatively basic technology such as woodcut printing, maximises the emotional impact of its component parts. The innovative use of proportion, composition, and linework by the manhua artists not only made the images attention-grabbing but also demonstrated how they expanded the genre of Chinese cartoons. By creating a dominant code of symbols and signs within their cartoons, regardless of individual artists’ styles, the Propaganda Corps transformed Chinese cartoons from disconnected, humorous images into a cohesive genre, imbued with clear ideological meanings immediately recognisable to their viewers.

Power on the Page

The Cartoon Propaganda Corps mamaximisedhe reach and impact of their images, producing large banners and street art murals as well as their printed periodicals (FitzGerald 2013: 82). Within the magazines, the images were not printed in isolation with one or two on each page, rather there were full pages of images crammed in together, with comic strips next to standalone images and captions filling in the white space. It is a mistake to merely consider each image in isolation, as the visual language and compositional choices of the Propaganda Corps’ artists were undoubtedly developed to work with the somewhat jumbled format of the periodicals. If we analyse each image in isolation, we miss both the overall visual impact of the artists’ work and the unique tone of the Propaganda Corps’ publications (Taylor 2015: 410). The size of each image and its placement on the page alongside other cartoons should be analysed, considering the impact of the artists’ compositional choices. The contrast in size between the soldiers and women is even more evident when the images are viewed in context, and the detailed elements that draw the viewer’s eye when looking at each image individually are lost or altered in the busyness of the full page.

The lack of a frame around the soldier in ‘The Destruction of the Nine-Power Treaty’ makes more sense when the image is viewed on the page rather than in isolation. Positioned in the top-right corner of the third page from National Salvation Cartoons, issue 10 (Fig. 6), with the descending caption ‘the Japanese treatment of the Nine-Powers Treaty’, the viewer’s eye is drawn to this image as it sweeps across the page. By not putting a frame around the soldier, Zhang Ding does not restrict him to a fixed arena and makes his presence on the page much more active. The images on the page are not uniform in size and are not arranged in a strict sequence, although most have a rectangular black border framing them. In contrast, Zhang’s soldier has much more freedom on the page, almost as though he could move wherever he wanted to between the other cartoons. Thierry Groensteen termed this relationship between comic elements that are not adjacent panels ‘tele-arthrology’, arguing that images which are not immediately linked ‘are suddenly revealed as communicating closely, in debt to one another’ (2007: 158). In the same way that Zhang conveys the soldier’s dominant power over the dead woman, he uses tele-arthrology to extend the soldier’s agency across the entire page, demonstrating his narrative skill as a comic artist.

Zhang Leping’s ‘The Consequences of Extreme Evil’ is the sixth panel of an eight-part sequence and can be seen at the bottom-right of the page from issue nine of National Salvation Cartoons (Fig. 7). Returning to Groensteen’s investigation of comics, he explains the narrative power of panel comics as holding ‘nothing but the fragments of the implied world in which the story unfolds’, although the illustrated world is ‘continuous and homogenous… as if the reader, having entered into the world, will never again leave’ (2007: 17). The panels of ‘Consequences’ show a series of atrocities committed by Japanese soldiers, or possibly a single individual soldier. He is prepared for war in his full uniform, then sent into action by his commanding officer. He shoots with a sniper rifle, marches, murders an infant child with his bayonet, rapes and kills a woman, sets fire to a building, and beheads a (presumably) Chinese man who is on his knees and begging for mercy. The narrative that the viewer infers from these snapshots of the soldier’s day is more important than the graphic violence in any individual panel; Japanese soldiers were committing atrocities in every part of their campaign in China. By aligning rape and murder alongside infanticide and a beheading, Zhang Leping utilises a comic narrative to emphasise the brutality of Japan to an extreme level.

The same almost contradictory effect of comic narrative can be seen in the fourteen-panel strip in Resistance Cartoons, issue 29, where Wang Yan’s ‘Persevere, Fight for Final Victory’ is given a full double-page spread. The panel depicting the rape and murder of the woman is on the second page of this spread (Fig. 8), at the top-right of the page. In each panel, Wang makes the Japanese soldiers large, visually dominating the frame, often placing them with their front leg bent and their booted foot elevated, a symbol of conquest. In a similar way to Zhang Leping in ‘Consequences’, Wang makes the violent assault and murder of the woman almost incidental when viewed as part of the full-page spread. The visual impact of the soldier’s boot and the woman’s spilt entrails is magnified. While the soldiers in the other panels may have their legs raised, only this soldier’s boot is shaded in bold black, drawing the viewer’s attention. The soldier’s face is still distinctive, with deliberately dehumanised features, but the woman is even less distinctive and her face even more blended with the background. The panel’s accompanying caption encapsulates the supposed universality of this kind of assault, at least according to the Cartoon Propaganda Corps: ‘the earth will burn, the countryside will burn, all the women will be raped’ (sharen re huo yi jianyin ke jin suo cun cheng wu tu).

Conclusion

The mass media in China were still in their first decades when the Second Sino-Japanese War broke out. As propaganda needed to be quickly reproduceable, understandable, and highly emotive, exploiting a combination of familiar symbolism and gendered ideologies was an effective means through which to communicate the overall message of outrage and to incite citizens to mobmobilisationd vengeance against Japanese invaders (Edwards 2013: 581, Hung 1994: 93). Women were, perhaps predictably, a favourite symbol of wartime propagandists, building on the emergent visual culture of Republican Era media. In previous analyses of the work of the Cartoon Propaganda Corps, there has been a heavy focus on the graphic elements of the images at the expense of analysis of the compositional or artistic techniques utilised by the manhua artists.

Beyond graphic symbolism, manhua artists such as Zhang Leping, Zhang Ding, and Wang Yan employed innovative techniques to maximise the impact of their comic panels and narrative strips. They did not simply emulate Western comic techniques but developed their own styles and modalities in a remarkably short length of time. The visual tone of the Cartoon Propaganda Corps’ images is dramatic and highly impactful. Through exaggerated proportion and linework, the Japanese soldiers literally dominate the scenes, making them and their brutal actions the most substantial and memorable element of the images, with the dead and raped women effectively reduced to props. The small size of the women may have presented practical limitations for the artists, but they used the limited scope of the identification or facial detail to their advantage in conveying their overall message. The greatest visual detail on the women is afforded to the ways in which they have been murdered; their bloody entrails routinely make more impact than their faces.

It is important to contextualise images produced by the Cartoon Propaganda Corps artists and view them as they were published, i.e., part of a full page of cartoons rather than in isolation. While gruesome details are perhaps more tantalising analysis, the artists’ compositional choice, particularly the exaggerated size differences, was designed to maximise visual impact and clarity of their message on a crowded, black-and-white page. At both a brief glance and a more detailed viewing, the images of dead women and Japanese soldiers are designed with the other components of the page in mind. Single panel images such as ‘The Destruction of the Nine-Power Treaty’  (Fig. 1) and ‘Anything Goes Under Japanese Occupation’ (Fig. 3) utiutiliseace and framing to grab the viewer’s attention, whereas panels of narrative comic strips such as ‘Extreme Vicious Consequences’ (Fig. 2) and ‘Persevere, Fight for Final Victory’ (Fig. 4) juxtapose rape and gruesome assault against women with other brutal acts carried out by Japanese soldiers in such a way as to make the extreme violence almost commonplace.

Women’s bodies are used globally to represent mythic origins,[4] nationhood, and racial purity (Weiss 2016: 437). Depictions of rape and the violent killing of women in wartime are, therefore, a common means through which nationalism and patriotism can be communicated to a widespread audience. By depicting women as small, anonymous victims, physically dominated and assaulted by Japanese soldiers, the Cartoon Propaganda Corps effectively utilised position as well as symbolism in their mission to highlight the graphic brutality of Japan against China. The works of the Cartoon Propaganda Corps artists played into a gruesome sexual politics of gender and war, with the efficacy of the visual propaganda heightened by the artists’ skill and innovation in composition. Ultimately, there is far more to understanding the power of imagery to radicalise than simply considering the component parts.

Notes

[1] Chinese postal romanisation uses ‘Nanking’ and was widely used until the 1980s, when pinyin replaced it as the formal way to romanise the Chinese language. Other differences in romanisation include Peking (postal) vs Beijing (pinyin) and Canton (postal) vs Guangdong (pinyin). This paper uses pinyin except where convention dictates the use of postal as the accepted term.

[2] Among early caricaturists and satirists in the West, George Townshend, 1st Marquess Townshend (1724-1807), was known as much for his notorious caricatures of political figures, including Napoleon, as for his military career.

[3] The Nine-Power Treaty was a 1922 treaty between Belgium, France, Great Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, the United States, Japan, and China, signed to affirm the sovereignty of the Republic of China. In theory, it was put in place to protect China’s stability, but in reality, it was designed to protect the economic interests of Western nations and preserve global market stability. While the United States did try to punish Japan’s invasion of Chinese territory in the 1930s with a conference (the Brussels Conference, 1937) and an embargo, the treaty was ineffective at preventing the outbreak of war and ultimately came to symbolise the aggression of Japan in China.

[4] The Haudenosaunee’s Sky Woman, Christianity’s Eve, and Greece’s Pandora, to name just three.