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Win-Win Monument bas-relief
View of bas-relief on the 117-metre-long engraved base of the Win-Win Monument. It depicts a busy street scene around the Central Market in pre-1970 Phnom Penh. The Win-Win Monument complex – photographed here in January 2020 – was inaugurated in December 2018 to mark the twentieth anniversary of the end of the post-Democratic Kampuchea civil war, with the final defection of the remaining Khmer Rouge factions, thanks to the DIFID policy (“Divide, Isolate, Finish, Integrate, Develop”) also known as the “Win Win” policy of Prime Minister Hun Sen.
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Drum major
Photograph of an RNG brass band led by a drum major in front of the Executive Yuan in Japanese-occupied Nanjing. The “occupation state” put great store in military parades.
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Subhas Chandra Bose in Nanjing, November 1943
Lin Baisheng, RNG publicity minister (second from right) and Chu Minyi (second from left) accompany a uniformed Subhas Chandra Bose (far left) (leader of the Indian National Army) during his visit to Nanjing in November 1943. Both Wang Jingwei and Bose had attended the Greater East Asia Conference in Tokyo in the same month, and Bose’s visit to Nanjing was celebrated by an administration which had few opportunities to welcome prominent international leaders to its capital.
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Entrance to RNG Government Headquarters
Chinese and Japanese soldiers guard the entrance to the ceremonial hall (litang) of the national government compound in Nanjing in November 1940. Above the door is a plaque, written by the head of the (non-RNG) national government Lin Sen, which reads: “Loyalty, benevolence, righteousness and peace” (zhongxiao, ren’ai. xinyi, heping). Note that the “unadulterated” Nationalist Chinese flag (without the yellow pennant that the RNG had been forced to attach by the Japanese in spring 1940) is flown here.
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Yonghu canzhan, baowei Dong Ya (Support the declaration of war; defend East Asia)
Poster of Chinese soldier celebrating the declaration of war on the Allies by RNG China. The poster reads “Yonghu canzhan, baowei Dong Ya” (Support the declaration of war; defend East Asia), and includes the text of Wang Jingwei’s declaration of war on the Allies on 9 January 1943. Note that some postwar owner of this poster has written “wei guomin zhengfu” (bogus National Government) to the right of the text by Wang Jingwei so as to clarify which Chinese administration was declaring war on this occasion.
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Kuai hui nimen de jiaxiang ba! (Hurry back to your homes!)
This leaflet, produced with the aim of encouraging civilians in occupied north China to return to cities and towns under Japanese rule, includes many of the standard tropes of early occupied north China propaganda: a “new woman”; city walls; the “five-coloured flag” (wuseqi). The text on the leaflet reads: “Hurry back to your homes! Return to your hometowns! The Japanese army will be here for a long time. Come and protect your livelihoods and your assets. Everyone can savour living in peace and enjoying their work again”.
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Celebratory ceremony marking the second anniversary of Guangdong’s ‘rebirth’
This series of photographs is taken from Huanan huabao (South China graphic) 2.6 (1940), and shows celebrations to mark the second anniversary of what the Japanese referred to as the “rebirth” of Guangzhou (i.e., the fall of Guangzhou) in October 1938. Note the prominence given to the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall, as well as the use of “folk” forms of cultural expression.
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Noodle cooking
From a collection of staged photographs produced under the title “Life at a Girls School in Peking”, and produced at the Peking Jiyu Gakuen in Japanese-occupied Beijing. The original caption reads: “A girl is pulling noodles according to a Chinese style instead of cutting smaller [sic]”.
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Shang gong (Off to work)
This woodcut, by an artist called Gu Yihua, was reproduced in Zhonghua huabao (Chinese Pictorial) 1.4 (November 1943). The importance of the muke (woodcut) form to artistic practice in occupied China has been almost entirely overlooked in the literature. The muke form has hitherto been almost exclusively associated with the art of resistance in China, despite being an important part of “occupation” visual cultures throughout the war.
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Xin Zhonghua huabao (New China Pictorial) cover, July 1943
This cover image from the Xin Zhonghua huabao (New China Pictorial) 5.7 (July 1943) shows a colourised photograph of an unnamed woman, probably from Malaya. The New China Pictorial was a bilingual (Chinese-English) magazine published from 1939 through 1944 in Shanghai by the occupation journalist Wu Linzhi for distribution in China and throughout Southeast Asia. This magazine employed cover images of women from areas of Southeast Asia that had been conquered by Japan with increasing regularity over the course of 1943 and 1944, having previously focused on Chinese film celebrities.
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Untitled (Boy dressed as angel of peace)
A boy is dressed as the “angel of peace” and rides on a float during celebrations marking the first anniversary of the founding of the Guangdong Provincial Government under Wang Jingwei in May 1941. The building in the background is the city’s Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall (Zhongshan jiniantang).
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Changjiang huakan (Yangtze Pictorial) cover, January 1945
This cover image is taken from Changjiang huakan (Yangtse Pictorial) 16 (January 1945), a Wuhan-based pictorial. The image was by Noa Miura, a prolific Japanese illustrator attached to the Japanese military’s Press Corps (Hōdōbu), and a founding member of the official China Cartoon Association (Zhongguo Manhua Xiehui) in occupied China.