The Chinese Railroad View Transportation Themes in Popular Print, 1873–1915

07Flath.qxd 9/27/2004 7:26 AM Page 168 THE CHINESE RAILROAD VIEW TRANSPORTATION THEMES IN POPULAR PRINT, 1873–1915 James A. Flath Historians have long been intrigued by the effects that imperialism and industrial technology had on traditional societies such as China. The classical approach to this question, however, has been to judge the “Third World” as technologically incompetent, and depen- dent on a Eurocentric path of international capitalism.1 Under the inXuence of postcolonialism, historians have widely addressed these distortions through methodologies such as the “China-centered” approach.2 This latter development has immeasurably improved the writing of Chinese social and cultural history, but it has also produced a tendency to neglect international inXuences upon China and especially the role of introduced technology in China’s historical development. In proposing a renewed emphasis on this problem, however, the critical question emerges—can historically colonial and semicolonial states such as China be viewed as being under the in- Xuence of imperialism and international capitalism without reinvok- ing Eurocentrism? To suggest that they cannot is to insist that the only way to think about imperialism and international capitalism is through the ideals of rational-humanism that initially produced them. Although it is true that the former could never have existed without the latter, it may also be said that the comprehension of this particular ideological conWguration was not a prerequisite for perceiving and participating in the manifestations of imperialism and capitalism. In fact, international capitalism extended its physical productions well beyond the reach of the speciWc cognitive orders that accompanied their inven- tion and exposed its machinery to the differing cognitive orders on which it intruded. At the same time, the local media carried the Cultural Critique 58—Fall 2004—Copyright 2004 Regents of the University of Minnesota 07Flath.qxd 9/27/2004 7:26 AM Page 169 THE CHINESE RAILROAD VIEW 169 knowledge of industrial technology such as the railway beyond its physical limits, so that the concept of a steam engine could circulate even where the machine did not. The consequence was neither a wholesale embrace nor a rejection of the introduced technology, but rather a new discourse over its meaning that may best be called colonial-modernism. Although there is no doubt that international capitalism was driven by politics and economics, it was (and is) also a thoroughly cultural phenomenon, and it is through cultural interpretation that the products of capitalism may be evaluated as some- thing other than the insidious agents of Western imperialism. The media form that I will use to illustrate this problem is the Chinese woodblock print form known as nianhua (New Year pictures). This genre had, throughout the nineteenth century, employed the simple but effective technique of polychrome xylography to sup- ply the Chinese market with a wide range of festive, decorative, and votive pictures. Despite the increasing availability of mechanized printing technology, this “low tech” production continued unabated into the twentieth century, when artists began to reproduce the imagery of industrial technology, even while making no appreciable changes to the state of their own technology. These images, emerging in response to a parochial experience of technology but still indepen- dent of universal standards of technical realism, demonstrate how con- spicuous representations of international capitalism could be locally appropriated, reproduced, and redeWned as popular texts. Although rural printing centers did not become a driving force behind social and cultural change in the early twentieth century, their production shows that rural China was not a blank slate to be inscribed by more highly organized cultural agents. To the contrary, rural China used its own cultural resources to produce an interpretation of modernity that hinged on the tensions presented by imperialism and industrial technology. PRINT PRODUCTION IN RURAL CHINA The prints that I consider in this essay can be attributed to two North China printing centers. The Wrst, Yangliuqing, controlled the largest share of the North China market in popular print and consistently 07Flath.qxd 9/27/2004 7:26 AM Page 170 170 JAMES A. FLATH produced the Wnest representations. At the turn of the century Yan- gliuqing was a town of seven thousand households located in the vicinity of Tianjin, North China’s leading treaty port and commercial center. Yangliuqing itself was also the center of a more extensive printing operation that supported a cottage printing industry spread out over local villages such as Chaomidian, where there were thirty printing workshops in 1900 and double that number by 1904 (A 1954, 27).3 Because of its proximity to the port city of Tianjin, Yangliuqing had transportation and distribution advantages that gave local printers access to markets throughout northern China. A second printing center was located in the county of Weixian, in eastern Shandong province. Like Yangliuqing, this industry was distributed throughout local towns and villages, as well as more distant locations around Shandong and even Manchuria, where entrepreneurs were inevitably forced to either compete or to cooperate with Yangliuqing (Yangjiabu cunzhi 1993, 25). While precise statistics do not exist, each of these industries is believed to have produced annual print runs number- ing in the tens of millions, which were then shipped and marketed through wholesalers and retailers throughout northern China in the last quarter of the lunar year.4 By the end of the nineteenth century the popular print industry thus operated as a network of competing and cooperative interests that were open and responsive to changes in fashion and capable of extending those changes throughout expansive marketing regions. The commercial popular-print network also allowed local artisans to get beyond the locality in both a physical and intellectual sense and to extend their knowledge networks to incorporate an ever-widening Weld of reference. The content of the prints thus became extremely varied and, at its height, the industry was able to provide a broad selection of household icons, auspicious and decorative pictures, and illustrations of myths, customs, and popular historical narratives. One form of knowledge that popular printers rarely incorporated into their trade before the end of the nineteenth century was the journalistic subject of current events. The appearance of train and steamship imagery in the early twentieth century, therefore, presents a signiWcant contrast to the standards of the late nineteenth century. Popular print was becoming a medium not only for spreading knowledge of ritual, status, and narrative, but also for spreading the 07Flath.qxd 9/27/2004 7:26 AM Page 171 THE CHINESE RAILROAD VIEW 171 knowledge of events and places. The emergent visual culture, however, did not eliminate the older visual culture, as both modern and traditional subjects would continue to circulate side by side for decades to come. The traditional media and its distribution networks thus carried the knowledge of technological change to the remotest corners of North China and, in its own peculiar way, made the knowledge of technology available well in advance of the actual technological experience. THE IRON ROOSTER MEETS THE WOODBLOCK PRINT Technology tends to be reproduced as text through media that reXect its own state of progress. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the British example of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, whose management commissioned a set of prints from the lithographic pub- lisher Rudolph Ackerman in 1831 and timed their issue to coincide with the opening of this early railway (Freeman 1999, 215–16). The marriage of these two new forms of technology thereby produced the lithographic poster series Railroad Views, complete with the novel lin- ear and panoramic perspectives that the new technologies enabled. As Michael Freeman demonstrates in Railways and the Victorian Imag- ination, the railway continued as a favored subject of representation throughout the nineteenth century, as graphic reproduction tech- niques graduated through lithography, to halftone print, and Wnally photography. By 1895, the Lumière brothers were causing audiences to literally jump out of their seats with their Wlm Arrival of the Train at la Ciolet Station. By graphically placing the railway within a spa- tial context, the media had progressively deWned the relationship between people and this most patent representation of industrial technology. In China there was no such neat correlation between the development of transportation and graphics technology. Visual culture arguably experienced a lag of up to twenty years between the arrival of the Wrst railways and the development of print technology and distribution networks able to carry the lithograph and photograph into rural markets. Owing to the eagerness of commercial interests to extract resources, the Chinese railway boom was well under way by 07Flath.qxd 9/27/2004 7:26 AM Page 172 172 JAMES A. FLATH the Wrst decade of the twentieth century. But at the same time, there were few periodical and lithographic publishers operating or marketing merchandise outside the conWnes of large urban centers such as Shanghai and Tianjin. The industrialized graphic printing sector had not developed in step with the industrial transportation

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