'Enemy of the People': Visual Representations of Chiang Kai-shek in communist, Japanese and Taiwanese propaganda

I am applying for this AHRC Fellowship so that I might develop my existing work on the historiography and personality cult of Chiang Kai-shek in new directions, and look specifically at the ways in which Chiang was derided, satirised and caricatured by his many enemies at different points throughout the twentieth century. Chiang Kai-shek was arguably one of the most divisive leaders in twentieth-century Asia: worshipped by his supporters within the Chinese Nationalist Party and its allies, yet demonised by his many enemies in Japan, China and Taiwan. While questions of how Chiang was depicted were largely ignored in scholarship emanating in the 1980s and 1990s, Chiang has become the focus of intense academic, media and lay attention over more recent years as his legacy is reappraised and new sources relating to his life become more accessible.As yet, however, virtually no work has been done on the ways in which Chiang was visually depicted by his detractors and enemies - despite his ubiquity in Japanese wartime propaganda on the Asian mainland, communist Chinese media and propaganda during the Chinese Civil War and the immediate post-1949 period, and in publications by exiled Taiwanese pro-independence activists in the 1950s and 1960s. This project seeks to fill this gap in the literature. Building on my extensive work on positive depictions of Chiang created through the Chiang personality cult, and incorporating many of the new methodological approaches that are being pioneered by scholars of Soviet visual culture, I seek to examine the following research questions:- How did visual depictions produced by enemies or critics of Chiang change and develop over the decades, and can we trace the development of specific tropes in these depictions?- Who specifically created such depictions, and how did their images of Chiang influence the work of other artists and propagandists?- To what extent, and in what ways, were certain ideas about China and the Chinese Nationalists projected onto representations of Chiang by his detractors?- Is it possible to learn anything about the reception of such images amongst their perceived audiences in China, Taiwan and elsewhere?- What can a cultural history of 'anti-Chiang' propaganda contribute to wider scholarship on representations of twentieth-century dictators?The fellowship will result in the completion of two journal articles (one to be submitted to Modern China, the other to Art Journal), one magazine article (in Chinese) and the establishment of an on-line image bank (of negative or satirical depictions of Chiang by various different artists) at Sheffield's Humanities Research Institute.

While two of the stated outputs arising from this fellowship are academic journal articles (one of which has an area studies readership, and the other an art history readership), I also plan to make the research undertaken accessible to a much wider lay audience. This will be done by writing a more lay-focused essay to be submitted to the magazine 'Lishi Yuekan' (Historical Monthly) - a Taiwanese publication comparable with 'History Today' (see http://issue.udn.com/CULTURE/HISTORY/). This will bring the research to a much wider, non-academic audience in the Chinese-speaking world. However, it is primarily in the production of an on-line image bank at Sheffield's Humanities Research Institute, which shall be designed to be used by people beyond academia (school teachers, museum curators, amateur historians) where the project will have its most substantial impact. As well as including images collected from various sources in the course of the fellowship, the image bank shall include features such as suggestions for further readings on representations of Chiang and comparable figures in twentieth-century history, and 'significance statements' for selected images. It is my particular hope that the image bank will be utilised by users in East Asia itself, and to this end I intend to include bilingual features on the site. In China and Taiwan, Chiang Kai-shek's legacy continues to stir substantial public debate, and I see this project, via the image bank in particular, as having an impact on this debate by moving it beyond the current focus on the visual residue of the Chiang Kai-shek personality cult, or the wider fascination with the recently opened Chiang Kai-shek diaries.