PolicyByBlog

David D. Perlmutter. Picturing China in the American Press: The Visual Portrayal of Sino-American Relations in Time Magazine, 1949-1973. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007.

Journalism, it is often said, is the "first draft of history," but very few verbal descriptions of major news events survive the fading of newspaper pages. Pictures, however, can become mnemonic shorthands, whether as icons or in the stream of familiar "pictures of the past." In PICTURING CHINA, my task was to assess photography and other images such as maps, charts, cartoons, paintings, and drawings of China within a chronological survey of the major events (and many minor happenings) over a crucial period of America's interaction with the People's Republic of China (and Taiwan). This sweep of 1949-1973 is conducted from the present, that is, using some of the latest sources and scholarship—the "what we know now" historical perspective. Then I evaluate, image by image, the view that the average American newsreader would have had of America's China relations through one of the most important sources both of foreign affairs coverage and China news: Time magazine.

Although I approach the American view of China chronologically, certain themes emerge. One is China's "mass," often distinguished not just as a big group of people or a large swath of land but as further symbolism of some quality about China. The people of China could be perceived as an opportunity: missionaries might see them as a mass of souls who required saving; business interests would look upon the Chinese multitudes as a trading, investing, and labor opportunity; American laborers might see them as fatal competition. China's mass could also refer not to her people but to her resources, her wealth: when Marco Polo raved about China's "millions," he meant the number of gold pieces in her treasury. The Chinese mass of population could be seen as a threat, as in the Yellow Peril vision of the turn of the century or the hordes of the Chinese "volunteers" in Korea, human wave battalions attacking American soldiers with a great stamp of feet and a bugle call. Or they could be the perceived threat of the Chinese mass army that so highly influenced the course of America's Vietnam War strategy. Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, angry at Mao Zedong and his regime in a period of Sino-Soviet hostility, would describe China as "a mass of human flesh and nothing else." But Richard Nixon, in 1967, arguing that America should reach out to China, would point to the mass as a reason for rapprochement: "There is no place on this small planet for a billion of its potentially most able people to live in angry isolation." At last, when the President did travel to China, a Time cartoon transmographied the Chinese mass into a pop culture incarnation of '70s Americana, where Nixon and Mao shake hands amid a closely packed assembly of both slant-eyed and round-eyed smiley-faces.

Obviously, such an overview of China images for some 25 years can be organized in several different ways: by themes, for example, or clustered around great events. But I chose to create dual chronologies. Each chapter contains two major sections. First, I offer the "what we know now" examination of history, a narrative and analytical description of the events of certain eras of Sino-American relations such as, for instance, the Taiwan Straits crises of the 1950s. My goal here is to explain in detail to the reader what, as best as we can tell from present sources, was "really" going on. I admit candidly that scholarship marches on, and so do the prejudices of the contemporary, so that a future historian might offer a different version of, say, the Korean War than that which I have provided here. The second part of the picture-study chapters is the chronological description and analysis of the images--the maps, the photographs, and so on--of and about China. As I often will note, many of these images have discordances with the narrative history to which present sources testify. And that is a key point: I want to illustrate how Time's editors showed China, from 1949 to 1973, and how Time's readers would have seen, week by week, the panorama of the Middle Kingdom.

The result: a portrait of the changes in the way China was pictured via every picture in a publication that represents one important slice of the data universe that almost all Americans who were not area experts or political leaders probably saw as portraying China.

The questions I wish to answer about these pictures are:

• What did we see?
• What did we not see?
• What were we told the pictures meant, symbolized, or stood for?

In looking at an image in its context, historical background, cultural allusions, and words surrounding it on the page will be important for what I hope to accomplish here. In our image-dense society, we rarely encounter any picture in isolation from others, whether on a magazine page or in the flitting of a television screen. Pictures conceptualize and contextualize other pictures; so do words on the soundtrack or the voiceover of a documentary or the caption of the news photograph. Typically, in news, the purpose of pictures is to illustrate words: an item on flooding in the Hubei province of China is accompanied by a picture of storm waters engulfing a quay with sampans, for instance. A few images, then, serve as metonyms for the greater story. And captions and context affect what we think about an image's meaning. For example, Time of January 5, 1970 contained the following ironic item: "Vatican officials were taken with an anonymously-donated portrait of a handsome young man in a windblown, cassock-like robe. In their eyes, it symbolized a devoted missionary priest, and they hung the painting near Pope Paul's own likeness in the pressroom of the Holy See." Suspicions about the painting's origins mounted, however, and later the Vatican removed the picture when "a little investigation revealed [the artist] had copied a portrait of Chairman Mao as a youth of 27, striding through Jiangxi Province in China's traditional gentleman's robe."