Classroom Activities - Media Literacy

China: Frame by Frame can be screened or downloaded at https://vimeo.com/786122928

A Timeline of 20th Century Chinese History

1911 Qing dynasty, China’s last, collapses.

1912 Sun Yat-sen founds the Nationalist Party, the Kuomintang, which declares China a republic.

1916 The Kuomintang fails to unify China, which descends into control by regional military leaders, called “warlords” in the West.

1921-1935 The Communist Party of China, the CPC, is formed in Shanghai. One of the founders was Mao Zedong, a former college librarian. He would lead the Long March of the Red Army inland in 1935, consolidating his power as leader.

1925 After the death of Sun Yat-Sen, Chiang Kai-shek becomes leader of the Kuomintang, which partially unifies China following a series of military victories in 1927.

1937-1938 The Imperial Japanese Army, having savagely occupied northeast China in 1931 and setting up a puppet government, “Manchukuo,” in Manchuria, invades East China. Once again, there are massive civilian atrocities.

1946-1949 Following the end of World War II, civil war ensues between the Kuomintang and the CPC, won by the Communists, who establish the People’s Republic of China. The Kuomintang Nationalists flee to the island of Taiwan, for decades recognized by the United States as the legitimate government of China. During the Korean War, China and the United States fight on opposite sides.

1950’s Land is taken from landlords and redistributed in cooperative communes in a “Five Year Plan.” Thousands of landlords and “rich peasants” are executed. Critical intellectuals are sent to labor camps. An industrial “Great Leap Forward” fails to improve lives, and results in widespread famine killing an estimated 30 million people.

1966-76 The “Cultural Revolution” purges “counter-revolutionary” influences (capitalism, religion, western ideas and practices, even Chinese traditions) and sends those critical of the regime to labor camps. A One Child policy is introduced, which lasts until 2015.

1979 The United States recognizes the PRC and establishes diplomatic relations with it, as the sole legitimate government of China. While America breaks official ties with Taiwan, it also pledges to provide the Taipei government with weapons to be used in self-defense.

1980’s After the death of Mao and other leaders of his generation, market-oriented business practices are gradually adopted. While centralized state planning is never fully abandoned, a relaxation of regulations allows China to grow economically.

1989 Protesters calling for democracy in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, televised worldwide, are repressed by People’s Liberation Army tanks. Western media estimates 1000+ die.

2008 China hosts the Summer Olympics in an extravagant show of the new and prosperous China, now the second largest economy in the world.

2010-present Complicated international relations continue, as the U.S. provides limited support to the Taiwan government. China becomes a technological giant, with millions of subscribers to its social media app called TikTok outside of China. In 2019, a new Coronavirus emerges in China, which America’s Federal Bureau of Investigation and some other U.S. agencies argue resulted from a leak at a laboratory located in the central Chinese city of Wuhan. But there is no consensus on its cause, with some other Federal agencies declaring the virus occurred naturally.

Locate the following cities and places and mark them with a small X:

Guangdong Province, where Sun Yatsen was born in 1866

Hunan Province, where Mao was born in 1893

Shaangxi Province, where the Red Army’s Long March of 1935-36 terminated

Nanjing, city where thousands of innocent civilians were killed by the Imperial Japanese Army

Manchuria, heart of the “puppet state” Manchukuo created by Japanese invaders, pictured as idyllic in propaganda

Taiwan, where the defeated Kuomintang retreated in 1949

Beijing, where the People’s Republic of China was declared in October, 1949

Mao Zedong and Communist China in American Media

When the twentieth century began, Americans knew little about the “mysterious East,” but China’s long history impressed them. Returning American missionaries wrote: “Before Romulus built the walls of Rome, before Samuel anointed Saul King over Israel, she was a strong, well organized, mighty Empire.” As China Frame by Frame reveals, after the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911, that was about to change drastically.

Henry Luce and other American journalists were heavily drawn to the American-China alliance in World War II. The Japanese invasion of China, described in China Frame by Frame by Americans who grew up in Shanghai, had made a powerful impression on them. Often allies are idealized, and the U.S.-China ties were recognized as a “Special Relationship.” Chiang Kai-shek was featured on the cover of Henry Luce’s Time magazine -- then a leading source of news for millions of American readers -- ten times from the 1930s to the 1950s.

Then the Communist Party defeated Chiang’s Kuomintang and U.S. efforts to broker some kind of power-sharing deal failed. A deep fear of Communist infiltration in the United States added to the demonization of Mao’s China.

Newspaper and magazine coverage of the Communist-led People’s Republic of China reflected not only fear of its regime, but also of its alliance with America’s chief enemy, the Soviet Union.

In the clippings below, find expressions and vocabulary choices that show these apprehensions.

*Time* Magazine - February 7, 1949
Critics have long accused Henry Luce, a fervent anti-Communist who had grown up in China, of using publications, especially *Time* magazine, to promote General Chiang Kai-shek’s Chinese Nationalist government. The common theme throughout was always the need to fight Communist regimes around the globe, and Luce and his staff wrote their coverage with that mission in mind.
It had been the Year of the Rat—and the year of the Communists. In the Chinese calendar, the old year stood for misfortune and deceit. A few surreptitious firecrackers, still forbidden under martial law, last week heralded the new Year of the Ox, which signified hard work and persistence. In present-day China, inevitably, it also signified sorrow and loss.
*Communist armies stood outside Nanking last week. Nationalist troops gave no sign of preparing to defend the Yangtze.*
…A few days later, 20,000 smartly uniformed Communist troops marched in, with two brass bands. They had left their Russian trucks outside the city, displaying only the U.S. ones which they had captured from Chiang's armies. Picked Nationalist soldiers grimly guarded the Reds' line of march. Beneath pictures of Communist Boss Mao Tse-tung (none of Joseph Stalin), sound trucks blared: "Long live the liberation!" Crowds watched the Reds in silence.
**Hawaii Tribune-Herald - February 8, 1949**

New York Daily News - October 1, 1949