Hua Junwu (华君武) died in Beijing on Sunday, aged 95.
Xinhua wrote on Monday that
Hua Junwu’s original name was Hua Chao [华潮]. He was native of Wuxi, Jiangsu Province, and born in Hangzhou on April 24, 1915. In his early years, he attended Zhejiang First Secondary Provincial School [浙江省立第一中学] and Shanghai Datong University High School [上海大同大学高中部, in an organizational measure in 1952, its departments were allocated to to Fudan University and Tongji University]. He initially worked for a bank and the China Travel Agency [中国旅行社] in 1936.
After the outbreak of the Japanese war, Xinhua writes, Hua was involved in propaganda against the enemy, and most of his further biography can be found in this China Daily article (which adds the information that Hua was apparently no model student of his times, but with good revolutionary characteristics from early on). From Yanan in 1938, he became a Northeastern Times (东北日报) reporter in 1946, having joined the Chinese Communist Party in April 1940. During the early 1940s, he was a current-affairs cartoonist for Liberation Daily (解放日报) in Yan’an, and a co-organizer of an Ironic Cartoon Exhibition (讽刺画展) with Cai Ruohong (蔡若虹) and other cartoonists. He was received by Mao Zedong back then, writes Xinhua.
War and Popular Culture, Resistance in Modern China, 1937 – 1945, by Chang-tai Hung, London 1994, offers some background to Hua’s reception by chairman Mao, and its purpose:
In the eyes of Mao, however, the early Yan’an drawings had some serious shortcomings. They focused too heavily on problems existing within the CCP, paying insufficient attention to the Communists’ political struggle against external foes. In short, as one modern Communist art critic put it, the artists had failed to realize that there were two major enemies: “the national enemy [Japan] and the class enemy [the Guomindang].”[..]
For Mao, nowhere was this deficiency more evident than in the famous “Three Man Satirical Cartoon Show” (Sanren fengci manhua zhan) held in Yan’an in February 1942. In their introduction to this exhibition, Hua Junwu, Zhang E, and Cai Ruohong declared their purpose in holding such a show: “We have seen the beauty and radiance of the new society. But we have also witnessed its ugly and dark sides, which are inherited from the past. These archaic dregs cling to the new society and are gradually corrupting us. Our responsibility as cartoonists is to root them out and bury them.”[..]
The significance of Mao’s meeting with Hua Junwu, Zhang E, and Cai Ruohong can be understood only within the context of the Rectification Campaign. It was, in essence, a reaffirmation of what Mao called “concrete Marxism.” Different forms of art, according to Mao, must be channeled or refashioned to meet the current needs. And in this task, the CCP had a responsibility to take command. He once again asserted the Party’s authority to dictate the direction of art in the Communist areas.
(…)
The style and content of cartoonists’ work underwent a series of adjustments after Mao’s “Talks.” Instead of focusing on party cadres, cartoons now targeted “the aggressors, exploiters, and oppressed,” and artists took pains to reach a wider audience through a closer and more realistic portrayal of the people’s life (the practice of “popularization” that Mao stipulated). While Cai Ruohong, a diehard Marxist, was so affected by Mao’s criticism that he admitted his past ideological errors and almost completely abandoned cartooning,[..] Hua Junwu took a more positive step: as Communist dramatists had done with their foreign models, he relinquished the style of Sapajou and Plauen from his Shanghai days and attempted to “sinicize” his art, incorporating folk idioms (such as proverbs) into his cartoons to present a more familiar look to the peasants. He and Zhang E also turned their drawing pens against the Guomindang.
Hua Junwu had started drawing cartoons in 1930, at the age of about 15, writes China Daily. In December 1998, the National Art Museum of China (中国美术馆) organized an exhibition of 131 cartoons drawn by Hua since September 1936.
Eastday television reporters (东方新闻) who interviewed some younger customers and readers in a bookstore found that not too many interviewees were familiar with the old cartoonist. “Not really”, a young lady told them with some pious unease, “it’s more the new cartoons. That kind of Japanese-influenced cartoons.”
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