The Body as a Means for Political Mobilization: Portrait Photography between Journalism and Propaganda and Minli Pao’s coverage of the assassination of Song Jiaoren

Gu Zheng (Professor, School of Journalism, Fudan University; Visiting Scholar, Harvard-Yenching Institute)
Chair/discussant: Eugene Wang (Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Professor of Asian Art, Department of History of Art and Architecture, Harvard University)

Co-sponsored with the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies

Song Jiaoren (Sung Chiao-jen, 1882-1913) was a revolutionist and founder of the Kuomintang (KMT). He was assassinated in March 1913 in Shanghai after leading the KMT to victory in China’s first democratic election. This talk will investigate how members of the KMT who owned the Minli Pao (民立报), published in Shanghai as both a mouthpiece of the revolutionary party and mass media, produced and used images of Song’s corpse for the purpose of mobilizing the masses to protest the assassination. This talk will explore portrait photography’s function and practice between propaganda and journalism, and its usage as a means of visual mobilization from three aspects: production, distribution and consumption in Republican Shanghai.