Images at turn of the century (19th - 20th Century): the yellow

China is a vast and an immense country, which was acknowledged by Polo, Ricci, De Mendoza, Du Halde, and now Williams. He stated in his survey, “The circuit of the whole Empire is 12,550 miles, or about half the circumference of the globe. The coastline from the mouth of Amur to Hainan is 3,350 miles.”¹¹⁷ If the country were compared with other nations in Europe, “it is about seven size of the France, and fifteen times that of the United Kingdom”.¹¹⁸ The concept of China as a large Kingdom has been preserved from the ancient times to the present day.

Before the era of imperial expansion and colonization began, China in Europe had mainly enjoyed a flattering image which had persisted since ancient Greek and Roman times, when Europe occupied a relatively lower position in comparison with the national strength of the Middle Kingdom. By the late eighteenth century, thanks to the industrial revolution, European power had grown so astonishingly that Europeans became far more confident about their cultures and scientific inventions.

China missed the first industrial Revolution and productivity was not as greatly promoted as in European nations, which meant that it was no longer considered to be either a mighty Kingdom or the centre of the world as in the old days.

Eurocentrism began to take shape. Nonetheless, traditional trade between China and Europe still continued, including the exporting of silk, porcelain and tea. On the whole, this was an era of image transition for the Chinese Empire and its people, from a wealthy, advanced, orderly kingdom to a poor, unimproved and flawed country.

This image transition coincided with the economic development that had taken place in Europe and then was thus a self-reflection of perceived European superiority.

This conceptual alteration was linked to the successes that Europe achieved in the fields of economy, science and culture in the nineteenth century, which accounted for their increasing self-confidence and pride in their civilization. They believed that Europe was superior and that it had surpassed the quality of Chinese civilization in many respects. As Davies summarized, “There is dynamism about nineteenth-century Europe that far exceeds anything previously known. Europe vibrated with power as never before: with technical power, economic power, cultural power, intercontinental power…Europeans, in fact, were made to feel not only powerful but superior.”¹¹⁹

Since the ambiguous existing records about China as a silk land in the early times, the Chinese Empire had remained under the European eye. By the nineteenth century, a declining China became an inferior counterpart to the superior Europe.

Most typical “Chinese things” like silk, porcelain and tea were already very familiar to Europeans. As a result, it was the legendary ancientness or antiquity that fascinated Europeans throughout all the eras as far as image of China was concerned. Ancient architecture, like the royal palace, for instance, managed to keep its enigmatic appeal to Europeans. Even if the royal court had begun to lose its golden glamour in Western minds, it was still difficult to provide a detailed description of the palace, which meant that the royal residence remained an inscrutable mystery. The name of the Forbidden City came from its Chinese translation, “Purple Forbidden City”.

Literally, the word “forbidden” evoked a sense of exotic mystery; as Murdock remarked, “This imperial city with its beautiful contents was the habitation of a royal family. It became so exclusive that it shut itself absolutely in and the world absolutely out.”¹²⁰ As Geremie Barmé argued, the former royal residence was to Western imaginations “a secret and hidden world at the heart of the enigma of China”.¹²¹ Both the Forbidden City and the Kingdom itself remained mysterious, enigmatic and exotic to Europeans. On top of its mysterious character, the Forbidden City symbolized capricious feudal rule. Inside the court, dark conspiracies and secrets thrived, and were not to be accessed and shared by the public. In Franz Kafka’s story in 1917, he

119 Norman, Davies1996: 759 120 Murdock, Victor 1920: 247 121 Barmé, Geremie 2008: pix

describes the former imperial court in these words, “The emperor is always surrounded by a brilliant and yet ambiguous throng of nobles and courtiers – malice and enmity in the guise of servants and friends, who form a counter-weight to the Imperial power and perpetually labour to unseat the ruler from his place with poisoned arrows.”¹²²

An increasing number of missionaries and Western travellers travelled to China and stayed there for a long time, while they produced a host of in-depth reports regarding Chinese traditions, culture and many aspects of life. The Jesuit missionary James Dyer Ball lived in China for forty years, and compiled a special encyclopaedia concerning China, listing all “things Chinese” in alphabetical order. In the section on Art, he described the difference between Chinese painting and Western painting by stating, “Chinese ideas of painting differ widely from those obtaining in Western countries: the laws of perspective, and light and shade, are almost unknown, though the former is occasionally honoured with a slight recognition.” Although the art of painting “rough outline sketches, in ink, of figures and landscapes are much admired”, from a Western perspective and for Western observers, it consisted merely of “impossible mountains, chaotic masses of rock, flowers, trees, and boats, [which were] depicted in such a manner as to call forth but little enthusiasm.”¹²³

The general image of Chinese people at the turn of this century era was inclined to head in an entirely different direction: a dangerous species. All these critical images of China in Europe were aggravated by the escalated conflict between the local Chinese and the imperial powers which ignited the Boxer Uprising. At the end of the nineteenth century, the Boxer uprising erupted in China in response to increasing imperialist control over China and the Western manipulation of Chinese politics and economy. The Boxers besieged the embassies until the army of the Eight-Nation Alliance patrolled Peking. After the Boxer Uprising in Peking, the Chinese were savagely denounced by the Western media, as from the Western perspective, innocent Westerners were killed during the movement. The Boxer rebellion was

122 Kafka, Franz 1933: 90 123 Ball, J. Dyer 1903:44

considered to be prompted by “a blind desire for vengeance and slaughter, the mad lust for blood and the brutal deeds”¹²⁴, according to the Guardian reporter Harry Thomson. The Manchu governor Yu-xian, in quelling the Boxer Uprising, earned a reputation for his “efficient, incorrupt administration and quick, if sometimes brutal, execution of justice”.¹²⁵ In the American journalist Utley’s view, “The Boxer Uprising proved to Americans what they had already believed; that the Chinese were not a trustworthy people, that they valued duplicity and deceit rather than honesty…Betrayal and deception were presented as Chinese national characteristics.”¹²⁶

However, there was an exception which showed real sympathy and understanding given to the Chinese people. The Austrian ambassador Arthur von Rosthorn (1862 – 1945)¹²⁷ denied flatly that there was any inherent hostility to foreigners. According to Mackerras’s book, Rosthorn believed that if the Boxers were angry, and indeed hated the representatives of the great powers, these had only themselves to blame for the acts of plunder they had inflicted on China since 1842.¹²⁸ He was of the opinion that the motive of the Boxers was patriotism or nationalism rather than cruelty to foreigners.

No matter whether the Boxer Uprising was a cruel rebellion or a violent expression of patriotism, the image of the Chinese was now constructed as being both violent and threatening in Western eyes. The threat was moreover intensified by the immigration trend from Asia to Europe in the late nineteenth century. The “Yellow Peril”, a major image of the Chinese in the Western world due to increasing Eurocentric hatred of Chinese immigrants, originated from British author M. P. Shiel’s fiction novel The Yellow Danger. In the novel, he portrayed Yen How, a Chinese administrator, who weakened Europe and flooded England with his countrymen. The whole storyline revealed to the readers his anti-Chinese feelings. With Japanese expansion,

124 Thomson, Harry Craufuird 1902:124 125Esherick, Joseph 1988: 192 126 Utley, Jonathan G. 1991:116

127 Arthur von Rosthorn was the Austrian ambassador in China from 1883, hitherto a symbol ofthe friendship between China and Austria.

128 Mackerras, Colin 1999: 62Colin Mackerras first taught Chinese literature in the Australian National University, and later became a professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Sydney.

the ”Yellow danger” was extended to refer to all East Asians in general, including the Chinese, Japanese, Koreans and Indians.

The image of the Chinese as the “Yellow Peril” was prolific in Western literature and media representations for several decades. In one cartoon picture (Appendix 6) published in the States in 1899, a Chinese man in the centre with a monstrous face and long pigtail has brutally murdered the woman lying on the ground. He holds a knife in his mouth and is brandishing a gun. This cartoon might not be a mainstream media representation; it still implied the increasing Western hatred towards the Chinese. The fictional character of Dr. Fu Manchu (Appendix 7) created by another English author, Sax Rohmer, first appeared in 1912, and fit right into the general European imagination of the cruel, threatening yet mysterious Chinese. The American cartoonist Robert Ripley (1890 -1949)¹²⁹ once created cartoon pictures about China, which showed the Great Wall, men with pigtails and women with bound feet, all skinny with running noses and dirty, ugly faces. The accompanying stories invariably dealt with theft, burglary, rape, plotting and assassinations, and these media images stayed in the Western mind for two centuries.

One exception to this overwhelmingly negative perception was the Chinese peasant.

A portrayal of Chinese farmers working on a rice field with buffalos and harrows appeared in Ms. Pearl S. Buck’s best-selling novel The Good Earth in 1931, which won the American Pulitzer Prize. She presented a vivid description of Chinese country life to her readers. In this popular novel, she laid out the tough life of a family of Chinese peasants, a hardworking farmer (Wang Lung) and his submissive and long-suffering wife (Oulan). Wang Lung’s daily working life with hoe and ox, the same as most peasants’ lives, was likewise portrayed: he put “his hoe upon his shoulder, walked to his plots of field, cultivated the rows of grains, and yoked the ox to the plough”.¹³⁰ Even though the story takes place in the harsh agricultural landscape of rural China, her depictions of Chinese peasants in her novel emphasize

129 Robert Ripley, an American cartoonist, created the image of Chinese people, Believe it or not,which was first published in May 1932.

130 Buck, Pearl S. 1944: 28

their patriotism and love of their land, a sentiment which was highly revered by Americans.

In Ricci’s times, Chinese farming was not mentioned as a primitive way of living.

Ricci simply noticed that rice was a sort of Chinese water plant served as a daily primary food. Yet in the nineteenth century, as described in the previous section, European farming efficiency had been greatly improved, due to economies of scale in the implementation of industrial machinery. Compared with European mechanized farming techniques, the purely physical labour of Chinese farming was inevitably perceived as primitive and harsh; however, Buck’s portrayal more likely intended to be sincere and sympathetic.

The complex Western image mix with regards to Chinese people was relentlessly changing from one extreme to another. Despite the fact that the Chinese were primarily classified as a threatening race in the West from the end of nineteenth century until the first half of twentieth century, some positive images were exposed to the public, in particular during the Second World War, when China fought against Japan’s invasion. According to an American survey made in 1942 in Isaac’s Images of Asia, there were ‘five main images of Chinese people as hardworking, honest, brave, religious, and intelligent,’¹³¹ in that order.

At the turn of the 19^th century, Western images of China represented a consistent view of China’s ancient products like silk, artistic ware and tea, calligraphy and painting as an art as well as agricultural and living traditions. The striking industrial development in Europe ensured Europe’s superior position over China. The notion of China as an enigmatic mystery still remained in the European perception of China, but other than that, China was no longer seen as a fantasy country or role-model as it had been in the early Roman era or indeed in Polo’s or even Ricci’s times; rather, it was a decayed and stagnated kingdom suffering a severe decline, lacking in vitality.

The image of the Chinese as the dangerous “Yellow Peril” was formulated during this period too, which accompanied the perception of Oriental exoticism and mysticism.

131 Isaacs, HaroldRobert 1972: 77

But during China’s war against Japan, there was a complete change of perception, and the Chinese were now viewed as intelligent and hard-working in America. This alteration was approved by the West because it was believed that China was moving in a direction which suited Western political, economic, and social interests, and the West therefore wished to encourage this trend. Yet when China took the absolute opposite direction to the one that the Western world had expected after the war against Japan, dynamic Western images changed once again, as will be seen in the next section.

2.7 Images after the birth of red China (October 1949 - present day): the red