Chinese caricatures of European fascism. The aggressive other and the colonized self

During the 1930s, the city of Shanghai was affected by significant transmedial and transcultural phenomena, which were strictly linked to its peculiar semi-colonial status and wider geopolitical tensions. Since the Mukden Incident (1931), Chinese cultural agents had become more and more sensitive to the emergence of fascism in Europe and the spread of its influence in East Asia. With the approximation of World War II, Chinese cartoonists proposed a multilayered visual reflection on European Fascisms to comment on the past and present condition of their Nation vis-à-vis Japanese aggression. The present contribution analyzes several manhua 漫画 (cartoons) selected from Shidai Manhua 时代漫画, the most influential “cartoon magazine” of Republican China, published from 1934 to the eve of the Sino-Japanese war (1937-1945). In these texts, many cartoonists caricaturized the most prominent leaders of the fascist movements and projected Chinese relationships with Japan in the network of global affairs mainly through two interrelated narratives. The former, presents, dissects, and comments fascist visual lexicon. The latter ridicules the inefficiency of the United Nations in tackling Mussolini and Hitler’s authoritarian actions. In this narrative, the rhetorical connection between the disruptions of Western balance (exemplified by the Italian aggression of Ethiopia) and the Sino-Japanese tensions, discursively builds an identification between an aggressive colonizer (the Other) and a colonized victim (the Self). The analysis, which employs methodological tools of visual semiotics, visual rhetoric, and iconology, shows how, during this period “of high nationalism and stereotype”(Stankiewicz 149), Chinese cartoonists took part in the transcultural dialogue of political cartooning (Harder and Mittler, 2013), commenting about dynamics and conflicts that only apparently seemed far away but that ultimately mirrored East Asian power asymmetries.