Sapajou, Sokolsky, Shanghai: Border-crossing Perspectives on the Road to 1949

• In Event: Border-Crossers and Boundary-Breakers in Journalism in East Asia from the Interwar to the Cold War Periods

Abstract

This paper will be concerned with two journalistic observers of East Asia, based in Shanghai, both opposed to the Communist threat, but expressing their concerns very differently.

The account will be plentifully illustrated with political cartoons by the first of these observers, the White Russian ‘Sapajou’ (Georgi Aksentievich Sapojniknoff) lead cartoonist for the North-China Daily News (1923-41) and, in wartime, for a Nazi periodical.

Sapajou’s life and works overlap with those of the Jewish New Yorker, George Sokolsky, initially an enthusiast of the February-March 1917 Russian Revolution, then, disillusioned, a journalist and political player among Guomindang elites, where he moved between the British and US settler communities, Chinese high society, and Japanese interests. After returning to the US, Sokolsky was taken on by the McCarthy campaign as their ‘clearance man’ for prosecutions against left-leaning writers, journalists and actors in Hollywood.

This paper attempts to examine the circumstances, viewpoints, and compromises of two very different observers of impending systemic change in East Asia, and from these to synthesize some larger understanding of the impact of two border-crossing Western interpreters of the forces taking East Asia to the triumph, or to the tragedy, of the liberation of October 1949 and its aftermath.

Author

• Peter O’Connor, Musashino University