Visual Propaganda on China’s Frontier Others: Newsreel Wong's Ethnic Photojournalism in the Republican Period

• In Event: Imaging Peripheral Others: Medium, Ethnographic Representation, and Empire

Abstract

This paper explores the Chinese news photographer H. S. “Newsreel” Wong’s (1900-1981) frontier travels and ethnic photography in the Republican period. Aside from his well-known photograph "Shanghai Baby" (or "Bloody Saturday") and wartime news coverage, Wong traveled extensively in borderland areas such as Sichuan, Tibet, Mongolia and Xinjiang. His ethnic photographs were published but seemed undervalued in the history of photography in China. Wong’s photographs of several ethnic groups, such as Lolos, Tibetans and Mongolians, offered clear images on Chinese internal others’ lifestyles in peripheral areas. Photographs of their unique dress, ways of living, and splendid festivals were published in prominent newspapers and pictorial magazines, and were meant to create comprehensive visual knowledge for readers on how the rest of Chinese multi-ethnic others lived. Wong’s frontier war zone reports also show his desire to appeal to the general public. I argue that Newsreel Wong was a forerunner of ethnic photographers in the Republican period. His ethnic photography was part of the Chinese pictorial media boom of the 1920s and1930s, when modes of representation and coverage on ethnic others diversified. These works portrayed ethnic others as encapsulated in different time and space. At a time when traditional modes of representation became obsolete and nation-building was on its way, Wong’s photographs functioned not only as a tool in the production of ethnic knowledge but also as visual propaganda for the promotion of a united multi-ethnic China.

Author

• Peng-hui Wang, Academia Sinica