London and New York: Routledge India, 2022. 188 pp. (B&W photos.) US$38.36, ebook. ISBN 9781003025573.
Amy Matthewson’s engaging book, Cartooning China: Punch, Power, and Politics in the Victorian Era,is a welcome contribution to the growing scholarship on popular political art that comprises cartoons, posters, and prints. In recent years, whether the subject is wartime Japan (John Dower’s War without Mercy, 1986), Stalin’s Russia (Victoria Bonnell’s The Iconography of Power, 1997), or Hitler’s Germany (Olaf Peters’s Degenerate Art, 2014), cultural scholars have wrestled with the contested question: How are the stereotyped images of what is construed as the Civilized Self versus the Barbarian Other constructed, circulated, and proffered to readers?
Matthewson joins this discussion by focusing on political cartoons about China that appeared in Punch, the celebrated British satirical magazine that ran from 1841 to 2002. Her central argument is that the visual and textual satires published in the magazine during the Victorian era from 1841 to 1901 created a host of racial stereotypes and political representations that shaped Britons’ popular attitudes toward China in the age of imperialism. She contends that these images are “not about China,” but “Britain’s knowledge of China” (1–2) as seen through their creators’ eyes.
The book comprises five chapters and a conclusion. The first is an introduction that offer a quick overview of theoretical approaches and existing literature on the topic. Drawing on the work of cultural critics (Edward Said and Homi Bhabha, among others), Matthewson contends that the production of stereotyped images is inextricably tied to hegemonic institutions. These images of power, racial, and colonial stereotypes in particular, gradually fashioned a set of images of a backward and crumbling China in the British popular imagination.
Chapters 2 and 3 tell the story of the special design of the “Large Cut” (full-page or double-page) cartoon—the centrepiece of the magazine—that elevated Punch to a Victorian cultural icon. Matthewson vividly introduces the editors, writers, and artists who gathered for dinner on Wednesday evenings to decide on the week’s Large Cut that would comment on the biggest headlines of the day.
In chapters 4 and 5—the heart of the book—Matthewson examines Britons’ changing perceptions of China from the First Opium War (1839–1842) to the Boxer Uprising (1900). She skillfully presents a concise history of Punch’s portrayal of China—what she calls “the trajectory of negating China” (71)—in line with British imperialistic foreign policy in Asia.
Matthewson tells us that after Britain’s victory in the First Opium War, Punch, with a mixture of curiosity and mockery, began to comment on Britain’s dependency on tea, imported from far-away China that the Britons had recently defeated, while simultaneously looking condescendingly at this country as being ruled by a despotic emperor and populated by a barbaric people.
Punch took a clear anti-China stand by the end of the Second Opium War (1856–1860), during which China’s capital, Beijing, was devasted by the invading Anglo-French troops. Prime Minister Lord Palmerston described the incursion as a justified act of a civilizing mission. In his words, Britain was administering justice to a “half-civilized” government (101). John Tenniel’s 1860 Large Cut, “What We Ought to Do in China,” echoes this attitude (103). In this cartoon, China is dehumanized as a grotesque dragon that a mounted British warrior is forcing into submission with two chained metal balls.
The Boxer Uprising greatly alarmed British leaders. They saw a weakening China and Western powers’ intensified effort to scramble for spheres of influence over it. Punch wasted no time in justifying Britain’s needed presence in China for upholding the global balance of power.
With its wealth of illustrations, Cartooning China shines in many areas. Methodologically, Matthewson convincingly argues that cartoons—long disparaged by traditional art historians as lowbrow—are an important visual tool for documenting historical events and capturing the mentality and emotions of an age.
In Punch, images were often intermingled with texts to deliver weighty points. Matthewson reminds us that the textual accompaniment is as important as the image. Indeed, the text gives the cartoon a biting story. Words often amplify emotions that images alone cannot do. I would also add that Punch satires were more often in the pithy writing, less in the drawing.
Matthewson offers a compelling analysis of the intertwined relationship between racial stereotypes and imperialist politics. Her categorization of Punch’s imperial narratives into several types of stereotypes demonstrates a highly observant eye. First, China is depicted as a “Sick Man,” forlorn and doomed. Second, the “queue”—a unique Manchu male hairstyle—is ridiculed as a “tail,” signifying “resonances of animality” (87). Third, China is dehumanized as a wild dragon, barbaric and uncontrollable. Finally, the country is feminized as a vulnerable woman in need of male protection. The males are outside forces eager to help, often with lecherous intentions in disguise. These images marked an insurmountable divide between the Self and the Other in the imperialist world order.
I have two reservations about the book. First, the bibliography contains no primary Chinese sources. Second, regarding readership, Matthewson focuses on the home audience. While she cogently demonstrates Punch’s wide appeal to British middle-class readers as well as to the rich and powerful (including Queen Victoria and Prince Albert), she also claims that the magazine “forged a connection between Britain and its readers in the colonies” (11). However, these colony readers are inadequately explored. Moreover, a related question inevitably arises: What about the readers in China, whose country was Punch’s object of satire? Punch cartoons—primarily about British urban life—were intermittently reprinted in English-language newspapers such as the North China Daily News and the China Press, which were published in treaty ports like Shanghai in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The China Press even carried a brief obituary of Francis Burnand, eulogizing him a “famous Punch editor” (24 April 1917). Clearly, Punch’s readership in China was confined primarily to the small English-speaking community in the treaty ports and seldom entered the natives’ reading circles. However, in the 1930s of the Republican period, Punch cartoons—its title playfully transliterated as Benzhuo (clumsiness) by the literary scholar Lin Yutang—appeared more frequently in literary and art journals such as Shidai manhua (Modern cartoons) and Lunyu (The Analects). But to be fair, this Republican period is beyond the scope of Matthewson’s book.
Overall, this excellent book helps readers reach a more nuanced understanding of cartoons as a valuable art form for chronicling history and grasp the nature of Punch’s close ties to nineteenth-century British imperialist politics.
Chang-tai Hung
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong