English-Language Political Cartoons Published in Shanghai during the Xinhai Revolution

After the Xinhai Revolution in 1911, China became the third country, after the United States and France, to establish a democratic republic. Since the Powers of the time held concessions and special commercial rights in China, the progress of the various battles and negotiations were widely reported in the foreign and domestic newspapers, together with photographs of battle sites, revolutionary leaders, and Qing court representatives. Chinese newspapers favoring the revolutionaries also printed numerous cartoons promoting the revolution; these have attracted much recent scholarship in the mainland.The Boxer Uprising of 1900, however, had already transformed the cartoons in China’s foreign-language press. Whereas they had generally avoided criticizing Chinese politics before this, they began to satirize it thereafter, by presenting Qing officials as greedy and corrupt. While adhering to Western standards of political cartooning, they dared to poke fun of the images of the Guangxu Emperor and Dowager Empress Cixi. While the Xinhai Revolution was still under way, English-language political cartoons continued to be printed in the concessions, but unfortunately, no one has done in-depth research on these.In this project, the cartoons in the Yuan Shikai-leaning The National Review (1904-1916) and the independent periodical Quack (1912-1913) will be analyzed for their views on the Xinhai Revolution, in hope of achieving three objectives: (1) to fill in a lacuna of research on visual media; (2) to glimpse how foreigners in China at the time used artistic means to express their views; (3) to examine whether English-language cartoons from the concessions differed in any way from their counterparts in the European and American press.