Taunting the Turtles and Damning the Dogs:
Animal Epithets and Political Conflict in Modern China

Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom and Sin-kiong Wong
Indiana University

How could you organize people and charge into the Forbidden City armed with knives? Even brutes and beasts would not go this far?

If we do not kill every one of you pigs and dogs, then we are not true sons of the Han. . . .

With their little pig-eyes and their large pig-tails,
And their diets of rats, dogs, slugs, and snails,
All seems to be game in the frying-pan,
Of that nasty feeder, JOHN CHINAMAN . . .
JOHN BULL has a chance--let him if he can,
Somewhat open the eyes of JOHN CHINAMAN.

The class had by now forgotten the teacher's existence and every tongue wagged . . . if the Revolutionaries had captured Shanghai . . . everybody would have to cut off their pigtails . . . whoever kept his pigtail on was a pig!

From the day the decision to strike was reached, notices vilifying foreigners as desperadoes, murderers and monsters, and denouncing all Chinese who worked for them as slaves, dogs, cuckolds and reptiles were posted. . . .

A Viper Wriggles Southward.

The present-day Chinese [have become] docile and submissive until they are no more than a flock of sheep or an ant-heap. . . . An ant-hill, yes, that is what they have become--ants, blue ants.

TURTLE XIPING!

Confucius spent his whole life going from place to place, worked for restoration everywhere, but eventually met failure. The masses cursed him as a "skinny, worn-out stray dog" . . .

At midnight on the 19th [of May] a strange cold-blooded beast (given name: Peng), who has the ability to take human form, escaped from the Beijing Zoo . . .

Dear Deng Xiaoping,
So, backed by your lap dogs, you've won another victory. . . . Life in prison is simply worse than that of a barnyard animal. It's worse than the life of a slave. It's a subhuman existence. . . . Political parasites have attached themselves to you as a host. These parasites and insects couldn't care less whether the host lives or dies . . .

Animal imagery has recently attracted the attention of a variety of different types of scholars, including cultural historians, philosophers, political scientists, folklorists, linguists, and commentators on popular culture.⁽¹²⁾ Fascinated by the role that zoologically inspired symbols, categories, and terms play in the texts and rituals of communities scattered around the globe, anthropologists in particular have taken pains to show that animals are much more to people than just creatures of flesh and blood to be hunted as prey, adopted as pets, studied as biological subjects, raised for food, and so forth. Mammals, birds, fish, reptiles, mythical beasts, and even insects are also symbols that members of very different types of societies have found (and continue to find) useful for communicating about such distinctively human concerns as business and religion. Animals, as the large set of epigrams relating to China provided above illustrate, seem to be especially good for swearing at and denigrating people whose political stances or cultural affiliations are different than one's own.

One of the first scholars to take a close look at this particular feature of zoological imagery was the British ethnographer and theorist Edmund Leach. His "Anthropological Aspects of Language: Animal Categories and Verbal Abuse," which first appeared in the early 1960s, quickly became a classic within the subfield that interests us here. Leach's main concern in this piece was to understand why only some animals end up associated with linguistic taboos, and why people find it so offensive to be linked to beasts that have this status within their communities. He makes his concern clear by posing the following question about contemporary British culture: "Why should expressions like `you son of a bitch' and `you swine' carry the connotations that they do, when `you son of a kangaroo' or `you polar bear' have no meaning whatever?"⁽¹³⁾

Leach presented his famous discussion of "verbal abuse" as an attempt to build upon and modify some of the points raised in what were then the very recently published studies of totemism by Claude Levi-Strauss--an anthropological theorist whose main interest had been with analyzing the tendency of many groups to see themselves as related in a positive way to specific animals.⁽¹⁴⁾ When read together, these revisionist studies of totemism and taboo from the late 1950s draw attention to the frequency with which people in varied settings turn to the animal world when looking for ways to symbolize affinities and antipathies. It has recently become unfashionable (at least within the academy) to speak of "cultural universals" of any sort. If such elusive things do exist, however, studies by Leach and Levi-Strauss and other anthropologists with similar concerns suggest that a tendency to find zoological metaphors good for thinking and talking about loyalty and antagonism, similarity and difference, is probably one of them.⁽¹⁵⁾

Social scientific investigations written before World War II tended to obscure the universality or near universality of these phenomena. This is because scholars tended to focus their attention on either the artifacts and myths of "classical" civilizations such as Minoan Greece, or on the religious practices of contemporary hunter-gatherers and pastoralists such as the Australian aborigines and the African Nüer. These works thus left the casual reader with the impression that zoological symbolism was an exotic subject, which had little to do with the way members of "modern" nations lived and thought. Levi-Strauss and Leach did a great deal to undermine this misleading assumption, since they took pains to show that totems and taboos associated with animals played very central roles indeed in the contemporary European cultural context in which they were raised.

Even though their works have little to say about either the United States or China, as anyone familiar with the histories and cultures of these two countries knows, counterparts for the examples provided by Levi-Strauss and Leach are easy enough to identify in each of these cases. The United States is, after all, a land where many state flags contain totemic pictures of animals, dollar bills are decorated with eagles, and political cartoons often use either an elephant or a donkey to portray the political party to which a presidential candidate belongs. We also live in a land where the popular lexicon is filled with zoologically inspired terms for parts of the body associated with sexual taboos, and where many terms of abuse and denigration are drawn from the animal world. The prevalence of zoological totems and taboos in American slang and American politics is, moreover, far from new. A recent essay by Edmund Morgan, a leading colonial historian, reminds us that the late eighteenth century was a time when "Peter Porcupine" was used as a pseudonym by an influential propagandist; caricaturists took delight in portraying political enemies as venomous snakes; and tracts appeared that called on readers to view each of the leading Federalists as "a ravening wolf" intent upon causing harm.⁽¹⁶⁾ The era of the American Revolution was also, of course, a time when tar-and-feathering rituals were used to transform ostracized individuals into beasts, at least in symbolic terms.

The centrality and endurance of positive and negative animal imagery in Chinese politics and slang is equally clear. The role of dragon symbols in dynastic lore and imperial icons, the adoption of animal nicknames by secret society and religious sectarian leaders of the nineteenth century, as well as by warlords of the 1920s, and the formation of protest groups with names such as the "Flying Tigers" and the "Wild Geese Dare-to-Die Brigade" during the upheavals of 1989; these are just a few of the phenomena that could be cited to illustrate the prevalence of zoological totems.⁽¹⁷⁾ So, too, could the fact that, as John Fitzgerald notes in an insightful recent essay, when patriotic intellectuals of the late Qing and early Republican eras attempted to present their nation as "an organic whole, awakening to its autonomy," they often invoked metaphors associated with "heroic members of the animal kingdom." In writings from this time, he claims, "the Chinese nation was frequently likened to an awakened lion, tiger and, sometimes, dragon, which had been rudely awakened from its peaceful sleep to find its progeny under threat" and was now poised to strike back at its enemies.⁽¹⁸⁾

The epigrams provided at the start of this chapter, meanwhile, have already given the reader a taste of the wide range of documents that can be cited to show that participants in and commentators on Chinese political conflicts have been fond of looking to the animal world when seeking to disparage those with whom they disagree. A glance through any dictionary or collection of popular chengyu (sayings) provides further proof of the prevalence of animal imagery linked to both totems and taboos. Sprinkled throughout such reference works one finds a variety of colorful zoologically inspired phrases, which allow one to suggest that one's opponent has "the appearance of a human but the heart of a beast" or that members of a hated group are so vile that "even beasts will avoid eating their flesh when they die."⁽¹⁹⁾

One indication of just how important and prevalent a role animal imagery and related forms of naturalistic dehumanizing rhetoric play in modern Chinese political discourse is that, even though this is the first Indiana East Asian Working Paper to focus on the topic explicitly, references to biological symbolism can be found in many previous contributions to the series. Chinese examples of the type of verbal abuse that interests Leach are cited, for instance, in both of the essays contributed to the series by Michael Schoenhals. In his first piece on Chinese Communist party (CCP) rhetoric, Schoenhals describes a Red Guard asking an official to define the precise meaning of zichan jieji gou de zaizi (bourgeois son-of-a-bitch).⁽²⁰⁾ He has considerably more to say about this type of language in his second piece, which stresses the fact that terms for real animals (ranging from "black sheep" to "poisonous insects") and imaginary beasts (such as "ox-monsters" and "snake-demons") were often used by propagandists of the 1950s through 1970s to denigrate "non-people" (those classified as enemies of the party).⁽²¹⁾ In the same vein, Elizabeth Perry and Li Xin's paper on the politics of rudeness in China during the 1960s refers to several texts from the first years of the Cultural Revolution that use animals with negative associations as political epithets.⁽²²⁾

Patricia Stranahan and Patricia Thornton's contributions to the series highlight a different sort of use to which biological imagery can be put--that of criticizing powerholders for treating human beings as if they were members of lesser species. In her study of pre-1949 CCP propaganda, Stranahan quotes a 1941 Jiefang ribao (Liberation daily) article that decries the fact that women outside the "liberated" areas were still being "treated like donkeys, cows and horses," presumably by both local officials and male family members.⁽²³⁾ Thornton, in her piece on corruption discourse of the pre-Communist era, notes that during both the Qing and Republican periods officials were sometimes castigated by their superiors for treating "human life as grass"--a use of botanical imagery that functions in much the same fashion as the zoological variation Stranahan cites.⁽²⁴⁾

Christopher Atwood's essay on the language of revolution in Inner Asia, meanwhile, draws attention to yet another way in which biological--or perhaps, in this case, we should say biological and pseudo-biological--imagery can be used in political rhetoric. His working paper quotes from a text by a Mongolian author in which various ethnic groups are presented as being descended from specific non-human creatures. The work in question then associates the supposed greediness of the Chinese to their presumed dragon ancestry, links the "proud" but undependable nature of the Mongols to their descent from monsters, and so forth.⁽²⁵⁾

Many other academic writings on modern China--ranging from specialized essays on prostitution to textbook surveys of cultural history to interpretive anthologies of writings by contemporary dissidents--also refer in passing or indirectly draw attention to the part animal imagery plays in everything from official texts to popular slang.⁽²⁶⁾ A much smaller number of scholarly works go beyond casual treatment of the subject to look closely at the significance of zoological metaphors in particular movements, analyze the importance of imagery drawn from the natural world in small sets of literary texts, or present information on the symbolic meanings of individual animals.⁽²⁷⁾ As far as we know, however, no general attempt has yet been made to survey the role of animal imagery in the various political upheavals that have taken place in China over the course of the last two centuries. This essay is a very preliminary attempt to do just that.

Caveats and Boundaries

We are aware of the enormity of the topic we have outlined above, and we want to begin by making clear that we are not going to try to cover all of it. China's modern history is filled with hundreds if not thousands of social movements, factional conflicts, international struggles, and the like that might justly be called "upheavals," and we have yet to find one of these in which animal imagery of some sort did not play at least a minor role. We want to stress, therefore, that our goal here is to be suggestive rather than comprehensive, and that we have imposed upon ourselves five basic limitations relating to such things as the kinds of conflicts and sorts of zoological symbols to be examined. They are as follows:

Events. We focus primarily upon three sets of upheavals: peasant movements that took place between the 1830s and the 1860s; anti-Christian protests of the late Qing period; and urban-based anti-imperialist agitations that took place during the period lasting from 1901 to 1925. The attraction of the first two sets of events is that many gifted Chinese and foreign scholars have studied them over the course of the last several decades. As a result it is fairly easy to find information about the role of animal imagery in such events as the unrest that accompanied the First Opium War (1839­1842) and the Boxer Uprising (1898­1900). The attraction of the final set of events is that it includes struggle that one or both of us have looked at in some detail in previous works.

Texts. In a sense, we are casting our net fairly widely in this regard, since we assume that everything from political cartoons and wall posters to official reports and polemics may provide appropriate grist for our mill. Nonetheless, we intentionally avoid focusing on explicitly literary genres, such as plays, short stories, novels, poems, and zawen (miscellaneous essays). Our decision to steer clear of these sorts of literary works is significant, since specialized studies by Perry Link, Leo Ou-fan Lee, Rudolph Wagner, Michael Duke, Rey Chow, and others have demonstrated that very interesting zoological images--which sometimes have important political implications--can often be found in just these types of texts.⁽²⁸⁾

Categories. As the use of the term "epithets" in the title of this piece indicates, we are primarily concerned here with a particular type of animal imagery--that in which one person or group uses zoological symbolism to dehumanize other individuals or groups. This means that a variety of potentially interesting kinds of totemistic or positive uses of zoological terms and metaphors fall outside the scope of our essay, ranging from the adoption by Nian Rebellion leaders of nicknames such as "Small White Dragon" to Wuer Kaixi's claim that many of the male student protesters of 1989 identified with the "lone wolf from the north" depicted in a popular rock song of the day.⁽²⁹⁾ There are also some forms of negative animal imagery that we do not look at below, including ones that are designed to show humility or demonstrate self-abasement in the face of authorities. Three examples falling into this category are: a pirate leader's reference to himself and his band of outlaws as mere "ants" in a confession written early in the nineteenth century; Lu Xun's famous couplet describing his determination to bow his head "like a willing ox" in order to "serve the children"; and Jiang Qing's claim, during her trial for treason, that she was nothing more than "Mao's dog" during the Cultural Revolution period.⁽³⁰⁾

A much more common type of negative imagery about which we have little to say in the following pages is that found in texts in which Chinese authors, such as the Jiefang ribao reporter quoted in Stranahan's working paper in this series, complain that a particular group is either being treated as if they were animals or are in some way even worse off than particular lowly beasts.⁽³¹⁾ This sort of imagery has been used many times during the modern era, finding its way into texts created by such famous and diverse figures as the Qing reformer Zeng Guofan (who criticized the Taipings for treating the people in the area under their control as if they were animals), the revolutionary leader Sun Yat-sen (who complained in the 1920s that Shanghai's Westerners viewed Chinese as being no better than dogs), and the cartoonist Zhang Leping (whose Sanmao strips often played with the idea that the orphan hero was denied comforts that were enjoyed by pets and at times even wild animals).⁽³²⁾ This particular type of animal imagery seems to have been extremely common during the late Qing and early Republican eras. Examples from these periods include Zhang Binglin's reference to the Manchus as rulers who acted as though all Han Chinese were "pheasants and hares only suited to be hunted;" texts associated with the Boxer Uprising that speak of participants in that event being angered by being treated like niuma (chattel) and express a fear that all Chinese may someday become the "goats, dogs, and slaves of barbarians;" a Guangdong revolutionary's 1902 proclamation complaining that the Han people are in danger of ending up as the "dogs, horses, and slaves of the Westerners, and fish and meat on the chopping board;" Chen Tianhua's 1903 call to his tongbao (compatriots) to avoid letting themselves become "sheep and cattle in the foreigners' corral" and "fish and meat" in the foreigners' pot; and the many handbills that appeared around the time of the May 30th movement of 1925, which complained of Japanese mill owners and members of the Western-run Shanghai Municipal Police force acting as though Chinese were cows or horses.⁽³³⁾ While we ignore most such variations on the "they treat us like beasts or lowly creatures" theme, we do view as epithets statements whose main thrust is to criticize specific people for their willingness to let others treat them as animals.

Ambiguity. We focus primarily upon the most blatant types of efforts to use animals to dehumanize enemies. Our main concern, in other words, is with cases in which a) a person or group is directly compared to or symbolically represented as a beast, and b) there is relatively little doubt about who the object of the barb is supposed to be. Dehumanizing animal imagery is not always this straightforward, and there are many instances in the analysis of Chinese as well as English political discourse when one finds something much subtler or harder to decode going on than having X say Y is or is like a beast or visually portraying Y as a particular type of animal. For example, propagandists working in English sometimes use verbs (such as "bark") or adjectives (such as "mulish") associated with particular animals to cast an opponent in a bad light. In addition, these same authors sometimes find it advantageous to be vague about the identity of a referent or the implications of a zoological analogy, since being explicit may lead to censorship or punishment. Parallels for both of these phenomena are easy to find in the modern Chinese case. In light of some of its special characteristics--including the linkage between certain radicals and particular animals and the large number of homophonic words it possesses--the Chinese language is, in fact, one that lends it self quite easily to subtle and ambiguous forms of insinuation relating to zoological imagery.⁽³⁴⁾ A concern with censorship and a fear of being punished for criticizing the wrong person too blatantly in a publicly distributed text has, moreover, been an endemic feature of the political landscape in China for much if not all of the last century and a half.⁽³⁵⁾

Geography. Finally, it is worth noting that we ignore the key issue of regional variation. Recent studies of Chinese protest movements and many other topics have made it abundantly clear that it is always dangerous to make generalizations about China that do not take into account the differences between locales within that country. In the case of animal imagery, there are at least three obvious ways in which regional variation can make a difference. First, the folkloristic connotations of specific beasts is likely to vary from place to place. Second, since animal imagery often plays upon homophonic associations, the differences between dialects is bound to be significant. A pun involving an animal may be quite forceful to people in one region but mean nothing at all to those living a couple of hundred miles away. Third, if we are to take seriously Edmund Leach's theory of animal abuse, we might also expect regional variations associated with cuisine to be a key factor.

This final point requires a bit of special explanation, so we will summarize a few of Leach's key points here. In his work on animal taboos and their linguistic effects, he stresses that symbolic distinctions between creatures often exist that are linked to assumptions about their edibility or lack thereof. Leach claims, for example, that in England there is a basic four-part distinction between animals that are routinely raised for food (livestock), thought of as appropriate to be hunted and eaten on special occasions (game), considered too close to us to be killed for food (pets), and imagined as too disgusting to be consumed (vermin). He goes on to argue that the harshest linguistic taboos tend to be associated with animals that seem to fall between the cracks of these conceptual categories. One reason that the British find pigs to be so "good for swearing," he suggests, is that in some rural settings they are fed table scraps and given names (as one would do for a pet) but also routinely eaten (as though they were ordinary livestock). It is the fact that a pig is (or at least was) often considered "much more nearly a member of the household than any of the other edible animals" that made eating it seem a "sacrilege," and the sense of shame that came with this led in turn to the development of a language of abuse associated with swinishness.⁽³⁶⁾ Whether or not we accept completely Leach's theories--and, pardon the pun, some aspects of them deserve to be taken with a grain of salt--his general line of argument is persuasive enough to convince us that it makes sense to at least consider the issue of edibility. In the case of China, to do this is to confront important regional distinctions, since there are many animals that are placed in different categories of edibility in different parts of China, and hence one would expect that beasts that are particularly good for swearing in one province might be much less so in another. This seems little more than common sense when one remembers that food-related practices are sometimes quite self-consciously used in China (as elsewhere) as markers of cultural difference. This the case when Chinese Muslims refer to the fact that they do not eat pork, or when Shanghairen make disparaging remarks about the fact that Guangdongren will eat many strange animals that should not be consumed.

We realize that, by limiting ourselves in the five ways described above, what we offer can be nothing more than an idiosyncratic and selective look at the role of animal imagery in modern Chinese politics. Or, to put a slightly more positive spin on it, what we plan to offer here is just a rough map to what is still a largely uncharted area. Our hope is that this guide will nonetheless be enough to help later scholars orient themselves when setting out on more sophisticated explorations of this interesting terrain.

The Importance of Epithets

We will not describe in detail why we have decided to impose on ourselves the various limitations described above, since each case involved a complicated mixture of pragmatic and intellectual motivations. The one thing worth explaining here is why we decided to focus on epithets rather than other types of animal imagery. Three fairly clear reasons can be cited.

Some of the most impressive works on zoological symbolism that have been done in the past--usually by scholars interested in other parts of the world--focus on this type of animal imagery. The most ambitious short study of this sort remains the essay by Leach alluded to above, which uses English and Burmese examples to construct a general theory to explain the role of terms of abuse involving animals.⁽³⁷⁾ A variety of works by historians also have interesting things to say about zoological epithets. This list includes several influential studies of French riots and parades by scholars such as Natalie Davis, Robert Darnton, and Mona Ozouf.⁽³⁸⁾ It also includes John Dower's influential book on racial imagery during the Pacific War; one of its most powerful chapters compares efforts by Japanese and American propagandists to present this conflict as a struggle between a group of heroic and very human soldiers and a pack of monstrous beasts.⁽³⁹⁾

Moreover, in texts associated with Chinese upheavals, variations on the enemy-as-animal theme seemed to outnumber all other kinds of animal symbolism. The "oppressors treat us as chattel" motif ran a close second at times, and totemic efforts to associate one's own cause with a strong or noble animal have been very popular at some points in recent Chinese history. Nevertheless, the "our enemies are beasts" variety of zoological imagery seems to us to have always been of equal or greater importance than either of its main competitors.

Finally, in many of the upheavals that interest us, animal epithets are used by both protesters and their opponents. In the discussion below, we focus mainly on the zoological swearing and name-calling engaged in by participants in riots, rebellions, and revolts. Nonetheless, the fact that participants in these upheavals were often being portrayed as bestial by their opponents allows us to pose, if not necessarily answer, some interesting comparative questions. For example, what should we make of the fact that, at the same time that Taiping insurgents were presenting the Manchus as vile beasts, a Qing government handbook was describing the millenarian movement's sacred texts as "concocted stealthily from the dregs" of Christianity and having little more sense than "the barkings of a mad dog" and "the crowing" of a particularly despicable type of owl, which Rudolph Wagner describes as a bird that "eats its own mother"?⁽⁴⁰⁾ Similarly, what might be gained from looking at the parallels between late nineteenth-century Chinese propaganda denouncing Christ as a squealing pig, on the one hand, and Western editorials and political cartoons of the same era that used the occurrence of events such as the Boxer Uprising to reinforce European and American images of China as a vicious dragon and the Chinese as superstitious and potentially dangerous subhuman creatures?⁽⁴¹⁾ Or, in more recent times, what significance should we attach to the fact that the protesters of 1989 who graphically presented Li Peng as various types of animals--a bear and a horned beast as well as a gorilla--were themselves continually portrayed as somehow less than fully human in propaganda issued by the government?⁽⁴²⁾

Before taking up interpretive questions of any sort, however, it is worth simply laying on the table some of the evidence concerning animal epithets we have gathered, and taking stock of the range of imagery of this sort that can be found. For the sake of simplicity, we do this in chronological order, looking first at the protests that accompanied and came in the wake of the First Opium War.

Uprisings and Revolts: The 1830s­1860s

Looking back to the anti-foreign and anti-official proclamations used to stir up popular discontent in the 1830s­1860s, we find many documents that denigrate foreign and domestic foes as beasts. The following passage from a placard drafted during the Opium War--a line from which has already been given above as the second epigram to this essay--gives a sense of the tone of texts of this sort that appeared during the late 1830s and early 1840s:

The thoroughly loyal and patriotic people of the whole province of Guangdong instruct the rebellious barbarian dogs and sheep for their information. We note that you English barbarians have formed the habits and developed the nature of wolves, plundering and seizing things by force . . . even the ghosts and spirits will not tolerate you beasts.⁽⁴³⁾

Placards from the late 1840s attempted to dehumanize Westerners in a similar fashion. For example, one such document from 1846 (translated in Frederic Wakeman's seminal study of popular and gentry-led protests of the era, Strangers at the Gate) decries the fact that Chinese officials in Guangzhou had been too weak in dealing with the British, who are described as "barbarians" from "beyond the pale of civilization" with "wolfish hearts and brutish faces," as well as the "looks of the tiger and the suspicion of the fox."⁽⁴⁴⁾ Wakeman cites a comparable document from 1849 that reminds Chinese readers of the glorious victory at Sanyuanli and says that, in the ongoing struggle against the Westerners, patriots should strive to make it so that not "one of this class of dogs and sheep [is left] able to eat . . . so that not one of the sails of their ships will return" to South China.⁽⁴⁵⁾ Strangers at the Gate shows, moreover, that while references to foreigners as bestial most often appeared in tracts aimed at stirring up popular anger, similar imagery also peppered the writings of high officials and members of the Qing court. Wakeman cites, for example, an official document from 1847 whose main goal was to remind its readers that "barbarians were like dogs," who "once angered . . . could not be restrained."⁽⁴⁶⁾

Texts from the 1850s and 1860s associated with the Taiping uprising and Nian Rebellion show that participants in these struggles also used animal imagery to denigrate their opponents. The most common dehumanizing epithet the Taipings used for the Manchus was yao, a term that is usually rendered as either "imp" or "demon." But zoologically inflected phrases also appear in some documents from that struggle. For example, alongside generic denigrations of the "northern barbarians" (Manchus) and the "treacherous slaves" (Han collaborators), one finds a Taiping proclamation from the late 1850s that speaks of a time in the not too distant future when the Manchus "will be hunted like deer" and driven out of China "like packs of red dogs."⁽⁴⁷⁾ One finds similar imagery in a pair of proclamations on the "extermination of demons" that appeared at roughly the same point in the uprising.⁽⁴⁸⁾ The first of these claims that China's resources have been "lavishly wasted by the Manchu dogs in the various provinces," while the second calls on the people to rise up against the demons from the north and "wipe away their goatlike stench."⁽⁴⁹⁾

The most graphic uses of animal imagery we have found in our cursory surveys of Taiping documents appear in an 1852 tract denouncing the Qing dynasty.⁽⁵⁰⁾ After accusing the Manchus of deceiving and brutalizing the nation in nearly every conceivable way, of having "defiled the celestial throne" and spread "poisonous influences throughout China," this document turns to several different kinds of animal imagery. First, it implies that the Manchus are no better than snakes, since instead of worshipping God the barbarians from the North revere the "demon of Hades," who is a serpent. Next, the tract criticizes the Manchus for ordering all Chinese to wear queues, which gives them the appearance of "brute animals" with long tails, and for encouraging them to wear "monkey caps" and other uncivilized clothing.⁽⁵¹⁾ Later, the document refers to the horrors of Manchu "demons" defiling Chinese women, claiming that "three thousand beautiful women have been ravished by the barbarian dogs [i.e., members of the Manchu ruling family], one million pretty girls have slept with the odorous foxes," and that even to speak of such things "distresses the heart" and "pollutes the tongue."

Not content simply to say that the Manchus worship and resemble animals in the way they look and act, the same tract goes on to claim that the yao ruling China are literally descended from beasts. "We have carefully investigated the Manchu Tartar's origins," it claims, "and have found that their first ancestor was a crossbreed of a white fox and a red dog." Then, after mocking the Chinese who sought favor from these offspring of foxes and dogs, the document moves on to mix zoological metaphors a bit. It concludes by saying that the Manchus are nothing more than "dogs and swine," and that even ignorant children should know better than to bow down before lowly animals of this sort.⁽⁵²⁾

The Manchus were the main foreign group the Taipings were concerned with denigrating, and during the early stages of the uprising references to Westerners tended to take a neutral or even positive form. Not surprisingly, this changed after the mid-1850s, as Western adventurers and troops began to play increasingly prominent roles in the Qing campaigns against the Taipings. The following victory song from the period illustrates this point:

The foreigner [Westerner] is like an eagle

With his yellow hair, hooked nose and green eyes.

Kites and eagles are savage and wild,

But they fear the bow.

Likewise the foreigner fears the red-turbanned army.⁽⁵³⁾

The most interesting examples of negative animal imagery relating to the Nian Rebellion we have found appear in folksongs and folktales that were not written down until roughly a century after the uprising took place. Gathered together in collections such as Nianjun gushiji (Collected tales from the Nian army) and Nianjun geyao (Songs and tales of the Nian army), both of which were published in the early 1960s, these texts are said to have been passed down for generations in their original form. It is impossible to tell, however, just how much the language and imagery of the stories and songs in question changed during these various transmissions. As a result, historians looking for insights into nineteenth-century popular mentalités must use these sources with considerable care. They are less problematic sources for the scholar interested in charting the enduring importance of animal epithets in modern Chinese political discourse. We have no qualms, therefore, about including them in the present discussion, as long as readers keep in mind that we are leaving open questions about whether they are best read as examples of nineteenth-century imagery or reflections of twentieth-century trends or both.

One of the Nian stories that is particularly rich where zoological symbolism is concerned is "Fu Chenggu and Zhang Heng." This tale--at least according to one version that has come down to us--begins by describing a time when the Nian forces laying siege to the Shandong city of Jiaozhou found themselves in a very difficult position. A group of foreign "grandsons of turtles" had come to the aid of the Qing forces and had stationed themselves atop the city's walls. "Whenever they spotted a shadow on the outside, they would shoot it down" with their foreign guns, the storyteller claimed. Zhang Heng outsmarted the foreigners, however, by leaping into the moat atop his "red rabbit-horse" and creating a spectacle that fooled the Westerners into sticking out their necks "like old wild geese." When this happened, Fu Chenggu ordered his troops to attack, and soon many of the "curious foreigners were slain. Flesh and blood were strewn over the embattlements of the city wall, like skinned rabbits hanging in a butcher shop." "Turtles that they were," the storyteller says, the remaining foreigners "withdrew their heads inside the embattlements and dared not stick them out again." Eventually, after Zhang Heng had tried without success to convince the "Eagle-nosed foreign devils" to return to the "sea turtle cave" from whence they had come, Fu Chenggu led troops to tunnel under the wall of the city, blast open the gates, and allow Nian forces to take control of Jiaozhou.⁽⁵⁴⁾

Whereas this story uses animal imagery to dehumanize foreign enemies, folksongs related to the uprising sometimes use similar techniques to discredit the Chinese officials and landlords who opposed the rebels. One such song uses the following lines to describe the fear the Nian inspired in local elites:

Thousand-qing bastards flee to Shouzhou,

Hundred-ch'ing turtle's eggs stay in Suzhou,

Stinkers with thirty to fifty qing

Hide in the xian capital and organize militia.⁽⁵⁵⁾

The list provided above of animal epithet usage in anti-dynastic upheavals such as the Taiping and Nian struggles could be extended to include many other specifics. For example, in the case of the Nian, Jean Chesneaux claims that when members of the uprising came to a settlement with no adherents to their cause, they referred to it as "the village of tortoises" and used the phrase "capturing tortoises" to describe the taking of prisoners there.⁽⁵⁶⁾ But it is time to move on now to a series of later upheavals in which dehumanizing animal imagery figured more prominently: the anti-Christian disturbances of the final decade of the turn of the century.

Anti-Christian Upheavals, 1891­1901

Three decades ago, in his now classic study, China and Christianity, Paul Cohen drew attention to the central role that anti-missionary propaganda tracts, which often went to great lengths to present Western preachers and their converts as bestial, played in laying the groundwork for collective violence. He pays particularly close attention to one widely distributed and oft-reprinted 1861 text, Bixie jishi (A record of facts to ward off heterodoxy).⁽⁵⁷⁾ Many Western observers of the time believed that this infamous tract--which Cohen claims was "compiled by a man from Hunan province, possibly as part of an officially inspired effort to stimulate opposition against the Christianity-tainted Taipings"--and the derivative works it inspired were responsible for the physical assaults against missionaries and converts that became increasingly common during the period between roughly 1870 and 1900.⁽⁵⁸⁾ One goal of Bixie jishi is to convince its readers that Christianity is an uncivilized religion, whose practitioners routinely commit vile sexual acts, ranging from incest to rape to pederasty. After detailing some of the most salacious examples of missionary perversions, the author of the tract notes that "Hard as it may be to believe, some of our Chinese people also follow their religion. Are they not really worse than beasts?"⁽⁵⁹⁾

Another particularly influential piece of anti-Christian propaganda that Cohen analyzes and which certainly drew some of its inspiration from Bixie jishi, is entitled Jincun shengyu bixie chuantu (Heresy exposed in respectful obedience to the sacred edict: A full pictorial gallery). Composed of thirty-two illustrations, each of which is accompanied by a brief caption, this work contains some of the most vivid and explicitly zoological attacks on Christianity created during the late imperial period. Widely distributed in 1890 and 1891, the tract was clearly designed with an eye toward encouraging people to take violent action against missionaries and converts.⁽⁶⁰⁾ Pigs and goats or sheep appear in every illustration of the collection, with the pigs standing for Jesus (and sometimes his disciples) and the goats or sheep (sometimes with the character xi, for West, written on their clothing) representing missionaries. The punch to these identifications came from the fact that a Chinese character for "Lord" is a homophone for the term for pig--both are pronounced zhu, though the tones are different--while a common term for Westerners at this time was yangren (ocean people), the first half of which sounds the same as a word that can be translated as either "goat" or "sheep."⁽⁶¹⁾

Seven out of the thirty-two illustrations in this collection of illustrations depict crimes Christians were alleged to have committed, including such gruesome practices as castrating Chinese boys. Other illustrations offered visual and textual suggestions of specific ways that Chinese patriots could punish "pigs" and "goats" for these crimes, such as by shooting, piercing, pounding, boiling, grinding, and chopping the bodies of the offenders. Each picture came with words of explanation. Under the picture entitled "Shooting the pig and beheading the goats," the caption read, "After we pierce the body of the pig with ten thousand arrows, will this monster dare to squeak again?" Another caption read, "After we sever the neck of the goats with one stroke of knife, will these beasts still think of coming [to China]?"⁽⁶²⁾

Exterminators of pigs and goats, according to anti-Christian tracts, included Buddha, the founder of Taoism, legendary heroes such as the military strategist Zhu Geliang and General Yu Fei, and folk heroes such as the god of thunder and other celestial generals and soldiers. Interestingly, another group of animals including tigers, panthers, lions, and hunting dogs helped in eliminating pigs and goats. Unlike pigs and goats, these animals, especially tigers, were chosen because they were strong and brave.⁽⁶³⁾ In an illustration entitled "Tigers exterminating goats," the caption read, "to withstand one tiger is difficult. When all the tigers rise in awful majesty, who can approach them? Henceforth all the goats will be eliminated."⁽⁶⁴⁾

Since Chinese converts to Christianity were vilified along with foreign missionaries during all of the anti-Christian agitations of the late nineteenth century--including the famous case of the Boxer Uprising--it should come as no surprise that animal epithets were also applied to members of this group. Instead of being portrayed as lascivious goats, however, these "secondary foreign devils" were often presented as animals willing to humiliate themselves in order to gain the protection of Westerners and as beasts who were basically weak but became haughty and threatening because of their association with the increasingly powerful missionaries. Thus, for example, a poem written in the aftermath of the Boxer Uprising castigates the Chinese converts for their willingness to become the "tame rabbits" of the foreigners. The same poem also notes that in the first years of the twentieth century, a convert who not long ago trembled before the Boxers could be seen acting "like a tiger come down from the mountains," and warns that this beast possesses "scorching breath" that "can devour people" who come his way.⁽⁶⁵⁾

It is worth noting in closing this section that the Boxers themselves were also sometimes presented as no better than animals. The case of Western texts that played upon images of China as a bloodthirsty dragon has already been alluded to above, but there were also Chinese counterparts to this kind of rhetoric. In a famous memorial to the throne, which was written in July of 1900 and ultimately led to the execution of the authors, a pair of officials by the names of Xu Jingcheng and Yuan Chang called for the Qing to suppress all violent anti-Christian groups. According to Xu and Yuan, when pro-Boxer officials gave their tacit or explicit approval to the actions of "undisciplined masses" it was like "giving wings to tigers."⁽⁶⁶⁾

Urban Protests, 1901­1925

The foreign suppression of the Boxers laid the groundwork for the next upheavals in which animal imagery would figure prominently: the anti-Russian agitations of the first years of this century. These involved a series of protests against Tsarist actions in North China, the first of which were inspired by Russia's refusal to withdraw from Manchuria the troops it had sent into China in 1900 to join the international effort to suppress the Boxers.⁽⁶⁷⁾ From the moment the anti-Russian movement began, polemicists turned to zoological imagery. The earliest case we have come across dates from 24 March 1901 and involves a speaker at a public meeting held in Shanghai's Zhang Garden, who warned the assembly that "if we lose our lands, we will be treated like cows, horses, and slaves, and will have to act under the orders of others [Russians]."⁽⁶⁸⁾ Variations on this kind of "we are in danger of becoming their chattel" theme would continue throughout the agitation.⁽⁶⁹⁾ Soon, however, it was being supplemented by epithets designed to convince people that the Russians were rapacious beasts.

Frequently in this sort of propaganda, Tsarist invaders were likened either to wild bears (a play upon Russian uses of a heroic bear as a totemic symbol for their country) or to tigers and wolves (two animals that, in Chinese folklore, are often associated with cunning and greed, though sometimes also with bravery, and can be seen as in a sense almost interchangeable).⁽⁷⁰⁾ In a single 1903 issue of one of the leading newspapers of the movement, for example, we find a direct attempt to link the Russians with bears and a more general attempt to link them with tigers. The association with bears appears in a cartoon depicting the then-popular notion that the foreign powers were in the process of dividing all of China amongst themselves. In the form of a map of the nation covered with animals, it shows a huge bear (standing for Russia) occupying Manchuria, a greedy dog (representing Britain) sitting over the Yangtze river, a frog (identified as France) stretching its feet to cover South and Southwest China, a serpent (representing Germany) winding around Shangdong peninsula, a half-animal and half-human sun (standing for Japan) extending its toe to Taiwan and Fujian, and an eagle (the emblem of the United States) flying over from the Philippines to claim its share of the spoils. In publishing this map, the editor of the newspaper expressed his intention to awaken readers, and expected that "if one brought the map back to children and explained it to them, even seven- or eight-year-olds will get angry about the partition." An editorial in the same issue employs a slightly different set of zoological metaphors, claiming that the Chinese are niuma (cows and horses) who are being threatened by a group of foreign powers (in which Russia is a key player) that is like a qunfu (pack of tigers).⁽⁷¹⁾ Other pieces in periodicals of the time sometimes contented themselves simply by saying that the behavior of the Russian invaders was like that of "tigers and wolves" whose actions in Manchuria were "extremely barbarous" and violated international law.⁽⁷²⁾

Animal imagery also played a central role in the propaganda campaign that accompanied the anti-American boycott of 1905­1906.⁽⁷³⁾ This boycott was launched as a form of retaliation against American exclusionary policies designed to keep Chinese laborers out of the United States. To drum up support for the struggle much was made of the inhumane ways that American customs officials treated people from China. Zoological metaphors were sometimes used to castigate the customs officials themselves, as was the case when Ng Poon Chew (a Chinese American journalist who was one of the most important critics of the exclusionary acts in the United States) told a crowd at Madison Square Garden that the immigration service should get rid of the "pigheaded" and "oyster-brained" inspectors it currently employed.⁽⁷⁴⁾ In other cases, however, attempts were made to present America as the kind of vicious beasts (tiger, wolf, or both) that had so often been used to represent Russia just a few years previously. A poem entitled "Guozhichou" (National indignities), for example, suggested that if action was not taken to prevent foreigners from mistreating China's populace, the Chinese people would find themselves being devoured by the "jaws of fierce tigers" and the "claws of giant wolves."⁽⁷⁵⁾

Activists often turned to animal imagery when trying to promote the boycotting of American goods, and one finds evidence of this in everything from the placards they put on walls to the pamphlets they distributed on the streets to the public lectures they gave at rallies. One even finds some zoological symbols appearing on material objects that were used to stir up anger against the United States. One of the most interesting cases in point involves a set of fans that were purchased and distributed by a group of Guangdong residents. On one side of these objects were pictures of Chinese being ill-treated by Americans. The other side showed bison being whipped by their owners.⁽⁷⁶⁾

The animal that played the most prominent role in the Anti-American Boycott movement was probably the turtle: Chinese who were unwilling to support the embargo on American goods, though occasionally likened to dogs, were most frequently compared to members of this species. According to a leading student of Chinese folklore, although tortoises and turtles have sometimes been thought of as having positive associations linked to longevity, they are often viewed as odious creatures that are immoral and routinely mate with snakes.⁽⁷⁷⁾ The terms gui (which literally means turtle or tortoise) and wangba (which literally means "forget eight" but is a common nickname for the turtle) have for some time been used to suggest that a man is a cuckold (a play on the phallic suggestiveness of a turtle's head) or a bastard (a play on the idea that turtles either do not know who there own fathers are or are descended from matings between female gui and male snakes). Popular periodicals of the late Qing era are filled with pictures and articles that denigrate different types of people by linking them to turtles. Our own casual survey of one of the main pictorial magazines of the late Qing era, Dianshizhai huabao (Dianshizhai pictorial) turned up no less than sixteen texts in which this animal was used to stand for a cuckold, a pimp, or a patron of a brothel. As common as such uses of turtle imagery were before 1905, it was during this year that the animal seems to have come into its own as a common symbol for traitors to a Chinese patriotic cause.⁽⁷⁸⁾

One of the most creative and controversial examples of such imagery was a cartoon posted in Canton in early September 1905. The poster, entitled "Turtles carrying an American beauty," was in response to the visit of Alice Roosevelt, daughter of President Theodore Roosevelt. The visit took place at the height of the anti-American boycott. While Miss Roosevelt was in Hong Kong, the American consul in Canton warned that it was not safe for her to come to the latter city. The consul had found the cartoon posted in marketplaces and sent a copy to Alice, who nevertheless visited the city without incident.⁽⁷⁹⁾ Only on one occasion, she recalled, did a coolie on the opposite riverbank shake his fist at her.⁽⁸⁰⁾ In fact potential troublemakers had been put in jail before her arrival, and the Cantonese authorities (who were under pressure from consuls to ensure that the visit went smoothly) arrested three people on suspicion that they were responsible for drawing and distributing the turtle cartoon. The same turtle cartoon caused more serious consequences in Hong Kong: the editor and two staff members of a newspaper that printed the cartoon were expelled from the Crown Colony by British authorities.⁽⁸¹⁾

In addition to likening traitors to this particular cold-blooded animal, supporters of the boycott sometimes used the more general term liangxue dongwu (cold-blooded animal) to denigrate their opponents. Boycotters called merchants who betrayed their boycott commitment and continued to sell or order American goods liangxue dongwu.⁽⁸²⁾ At times they also used the term to refer to anyone who did not participate in or sympathize with the boycott.⁽⁸³⁾ In one instance, when a group of merchants in Chaozhou refused to join the movement, activists not only called the members of the group cold-blooded animals, but went so far as to build a "zoo" in a nearby area where these liangxue dongwu were to be put on display.⁽⁸⁴⁾

Many of the animals discussed above would reappear in the pamphlets, wall posters, cartoons, and material objects produced during the urban-based anti-imperialist movements that continued to break out sporadically throughout the final years of Qing rule and the first decades of the Republican era. For example, according to one press report, there came a point during the May Fourth movement of 1919 when, in the Chinese-run parts of Shanghai, "practically every electric light pole was decorated with Japanese straw hats cut in the shape of turtles."⁽⁸⁵⁾ It is unclear whether these displays were meant to suggest that the Japanese were turtles, or that Chinese who violated the boycott on goods from Japan fell into this category. This ambiguity may well have been deliberate, since if left vague it meant that people of both sorts were no better than wangba.

Documents associated with the May 30th movement that broke out six years later make it clear that, then too, attempts to link both certain foreigners and Chinese who refused to join anti-imperialist boycotts to turtles were a mainstay of the symbolic repertoire of protesters. A report compiled by an American diplomatic officer contains a photograph of a poster showing two turtles with the characters for Japan and Britain on their backs, as well as a photograph of a poster that visually suggests that the only Chinese who smoke foreign cigarettes are turtles.⁽⁸⁶⁾ Other familiar sorts of animal imagery (such as portrayals of Chinese citizens being threatened by dangerous foreign beasts) also reappeared in May 30th movement propaganda publications, material objects created for distribution during the struggle itself (such as fans covered with textual and visual critiques of imperialism), and autobiographically based fictional accounts of the 1925 bloodshed published long after the fact.⁽⁸⁷⁾

New sorts of animal imagery would also start appearing or would at least start to become more prominent around the time of the May 30th movement. Perhaps the most notable development of the mid-1920s was the increasing importance of the term zougou (running dog). This became a frequently employed epithet that was most often used to denigrate those who worked for, failed to strike out against, or in other ways were perceived as being somehow in cahoots with one or another warlord or imperialist power, and its negative charge was sometimes reinforced by pictorial representations of political figures as dogs or dog-like beings.⁽⁸⁸⁾ In many cases, not surprisingly, the phrase zougou was used by radical participants in mass movements, who turned to it in their condemnations of those who refused to participate in boycotts of foreign goods or other forms of militancy. At other times, however, it was the radicals themselves who were denounced as running dogs, and the people calling them this name were those closer to the center or on the right of the political spectrum. Most notably, in anti-Bolshevik publications of the day, such as the Taochi xunbao (Reports on red suppression), it became common to find members of the Chinese Communist party and the Guomindang alike portrayed as the running dogs of Soviet "red" imperialists.⁽⁸⁹⁾

In addition to turtle and dog imagery, there were a variety of animals that made at least isolated appearances in May 30th­era propaganda tracts intended either to bolster or to delegitimize radical activism. For example, phrases and adjectives used by protesters to describe their opponents in general and the killings carried out by the Laozha police in particular often equated imperialists with vicious animals such as snakes and wolves.⁽⁹⁰⁾ On the other end of the political spectrum, one finds Western texts by opponents of Chinese radical nationalism, such as the publishers of the Shanghai-based North China Herald, in which colorful statements such as the following occur:

Like the cuttlefish which eludes its enemies by emitting clouds of ink, the Shanghai General Labour Union [a leading May 30th movement organization], having gotten itself in hot water with the Chinese labouring classes now hope to escape their vengeance by heaping abuse on the foreigner . . . to make him the scapegoat of their misdoings.⁽⁹¹⁾

Conclusions and Questions

Where does all this leave us? If nothing else, we hope the preceding discussion has made clear that one can never hope to have a complete picture of the rhetoric associated with many Chinese upheavals of the mid- to late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries if the topic of animal imagery is ignored. We would be prepared to argue further--based on an admittedly unsystematic survey of primary and secondary sources associated with earlier and later struggles--that the same is certainly true of many riots and uprisings in other periods of Chinese history as well. Time and time again, one finds two very different types of political actors turning to a variety of zoological epithets: participants in and leaders of popular movements, who think that linking native and foreign powerholders or competitors to beasts will help inspire crowds to take militant steps; and opponents of these struggles, who think that linking activists to lowly or dangerous creatures will help delegitimize the movements in question. The push and pull between these two types of strategies, which sometimes mirror each other quite closely--as in the 1920s, when the charge of "running dog" was hurled in both directions--is, it seems to us, a rhetorical dynamic well worth taking seriously if one wants to make sense of the symbolic struggles that so often accompany physical ones.

Beyond this basic conclusion, we think that the preceding discussion raises a variety of interesting questions worthy of further research, and in some cases also suggests the form answers to these questions might take. Here we will list and comment very briefly on just three that seem particularly interesting:

What kind of connection is there between symbolic dehumanization, such as the use of zoological epithets, and the physical violence engaged in by protesters and their opponents? There is undoubtedly some kind of association, not only in the Chinese context but in many others as well. It is no accident that the struggles alluded to above were almost all ones in which the kinds of people linked verbally to animals by one side or the other were often also the main types of people who were hurt or killed by crowds or by representatives of the official order. The trick is to figure out what exactly the link is and why it varies from context to context. There may be times when symbolic dehumanization leads directly to physical assault, but there may be others in which using verbal abuse or symbolic action to link an opponent to an animal serves as a cathartic substitute for other kinds of violence.

What difference, if any, does it make when the two sides in a conflict have contrasting as opposed to overlapping notions of the positive and negative valence of particular animals? The Chinese cases described above include several examples of struggles in which the same zoological epithets are hurled by each side, but it also includes some in which opponents did not share the same image of a particular animal. Take, for example, the use of dragon imagery in Western cartoons denigrating the Boxer Uprising. Dragons tend to have positive associations in China, where they are at least as likely to be presented as beneficial creatures as they are to be presented as dangerous ones. By contrast, in the West, while they certainly can have regal associations, dragon imagery tends to emphasize their potential for destructive action. This means that, even though terms like "running dog" have fairly comparable meanings in both China and most Western countries, when it comes to dragons--or for that matter turtles, which are more negatively charged animals in China than in many other lands--we are dealing with a different kind of situation. In some cases, one would imagine, this could lead to the hurling of insults that leave their targets confused rather than offended; in others, perhaps, explicit attempts to translate the meaning of the insult might be carried out; in no cases, however, would the impact be quite the same as when opposing sides shared the same understanding of the creature in question.

In attempting to make sense of Chinese uses of animal epithets and other kinds of zoological imagery, does it make sense to try to figure out basic categories in which particular creatures fall? As mentioned at the outset, one possible schema for doing this already exists in Edmund Leach's theorizing about culturally defined notions of edibility and how they affect the positive and negative connotations of animals. There may be something there worth thinking about in the Chinese case, but it seems to us that another perhaps more fruitful approach would be to focus not so much on distinctions between what might be called (playing off of terminology associated with Levi-Strauss) the "cookable" and the "uncookable," but rather the tame and the wild. In many of the texts discussed above and related documents, one often finds animals that are thought of as easy to domesticate--such as dogs, pigs, sheep, goats, and cattle--linked to traits such as weakness and timidity and presented in a negative light, that is, as creatures that hated opponents are like or as ones that members of the group to which a set of actors belong should not let themselves become. On the other hand, wild or presumably untamable mythical animals such as lions and dragons are often associated positively with character traits like strength and bravery and independence. Just how far this line of reasoning might be pursued is unclear to us, and there are certainly some contradictions to be sorted through. For example, in our own discussion, the undomesticated turtle is described as one of the creatures most commonly used to denigrate opponents, and we provide examples of tigers being used to both legitimize and delegitimize political actors. Nevertheless, if our essay serves, as we hope, as a rough map for those who will go on to make more detailed explorations of what we have found to be a very interesting terrain, thinking more about categorization schemas is something that may prove worthwhile. Such thinking will have to wait, however, until further expeditions by others have provided more comprehensive pictures of the rhetorical landscape that has been of interest to us here.

1. Translated in Susan Naquin, Millenarian Rebellion in China: The Eight Trigrams Uprising of 1813 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), p. 187.

2. Translated in Frederic Wakeman Jr., Strangers at the Gate: Social Disorder in South China, 1839-1861 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), p. 61.

3. Reprinted in Raymond Dawson, The Chinese Chameleon: An Analysis of European Conceptions of Chinese Civilization (London: Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 133.

4. Yeh Sheng-tao, Schoolmaster Ni Huan-chih, trans. C. A. Barnes (1929; Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1958), p. 22.

5. "Police Report for June," Municipal Gazette, 6 August 1925, p. 245.

6. Reprinted in Chang-tai Hung, War and Popular Culture: Resistance in Modern China, 1937-1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), p. 102.

7. Robert Guillain, The Blue Ants: 600 Million Chinese under the Red Flag, trans. Mervyn Savill (1956; London: Secker and Warburg, 1957), p. 107.

8. A photograph of this poster, in which a picture of a turtle appears where Zhang's surname should be, is reproduced in Neale Hunter, Shanghai Journal: An Eyewitness Account of the Cultural Revolution (Boston: Beacon, 1969), after p. 250.

9. The Mass Criticism Group of Peking and Tsinghua Universities, "Confucius--What Kind of Man Was He?," in Selected Articles Criticizing Lin Piao and Confucius, vol. 2 (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1975).

10. Photograph reproduced in Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, Student Protests in Twentieth-Century China: The View from Shanghai (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), after p. 318.

11. Wei Jingsheng, "Letters to Deng; From the Pit of Repression," New York Times, 18 February 1996, pp. E7, E14.

12. A good introduction to general trends in the literature on the subject is provided by the contributors to R.G. Wills, ed., Signifying Animals: Human Meaning in the Natural World (London: Unwin Hyman, 1990). There are also more specialized introductions to the subject, such as the survey of feminist approaches to thinking about the importance of animal imagery and related topics provided in a new collection, Carol J. Adams and Josephine Donovan, eds., Animals & Women: Feminist Theoretical Explorations (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995).

13. Edmund Leach, "Anthropological Aspects of Language: Animal Categories and Verbal Abuse," in New Directions in the Study of Language, ed. Eric H. Lenneberg (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1964), pp. 23-64, esp. p. 29.

14. Claude Levi-Strauss, Totemism, trans. Rodney Needham (1962; London: Merlin Press, 1964).

15. Levi-Strauss and Leach do not always pay as much attention as they might to the way that animal imagery is used to construct and describe gender-related similarities and differences. For interesting discussions of this issue that focus on contemporary Western societies, and in one case explicitly link feminist arguments to a defense of animal rights, see Joan Dunayer, "Sexist Words, Speciesist Roots," in Animals & Women, ed. Adams and Donovan, pp. 11-31.

16. Edmund S. Morgan, "Pioneers of Paranoia," New York Review of Books 41:16 (1994): 11-13.

17. Wu Hung, The Wu Liang Shrine: The Ideology of Early Chinese Pictorial Art (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), pp. 91 and 139; Ch'i Hsi-sheng, Warlord Politics in China 1916-1928 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976), p. 183; Andrew Walder, "Popular Protest in the 1989 Democracy Movement: The Pattern of Grass-Roots Organization," USC Seminar Series, 8 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Institute of Asia-Pacific Studies, 1992), pp. 9-10.

18. John Fitzgerald, "The Invention of the Modern Chinese Self," in Modernization of the Chinese Past, ed. Mabel Lee and A. D. Syrokomla-Stefanowska (Sydney: Wild Peony Pty Ltd., 1993), pp. 25-41, quote from p. 32.

19. The first is mentioned in C. C. Sun, As the Saying Goes: An Annotated Anthology of Chinese and Equivalent English Sayings and Expressions (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1981), p. 154, a work that contains dozens of other interesting zoological colloquialisms and finds matches in the other language for many common Chinese and English aphorisms. The second is mentioned in Liang Shiqiu, A New Practical Chinese-English Dictionary (Taipei: Far East Books Co., 1971), p. 679, as part of a fascinating list of dog-related terms.

20. Michael Schoenhals, "Talk About a Revolution: Red Guards, Government Cadres, and the Language of Political Discourse," Indiana East Asian Working Paper Series on Language and Politics in Modern China 1 (1993): 28.

21. Michael Schoenhals, "`Non-People' in the People's Republic of China: A Chronicle of Terminological Ambiguity," Indiana East Asian Working Paper Series on Language and Politics in Modern China 4 (1994): esp. 12-15.

22. Elizabeth J. Perry and Li Xun, "Revolutionary Rudeness: Notes on Red Guard and Rebel Worker Language in China's Cultural Revolution," Indiana East Asian Working Paper Series on Language and Politics in Modern China 2 (1993).

23. Patricia Stranahan, "The Politics of Persuasion: Communist Rhetoric and the Revolution," Indiana East Asian Working Paper Series on Language and Politics in Modern China 4 (1994): 31-48, esp. 43.

24. 24. Patricia M. Thornton, "Discerning the Public from the Private: A Lexicon of Political Corruption during the Nanjing Decade," Indiana East Asian Working Paper Series on Language and Politics in Modern China 8 (1996): 43.

25. Christopher P. Atwood, "National Questions and National Answers in the Chinese Revolution; Or, How Do You Say Minzu in Mongolian?," Indiana East Asian Working Paper Series on Language and Politics in Modern China 5 (1994): 37-73, esp. p. 48.

26. Virgil Kit-yiu Ho, "Selling Smiles in Canton: Prostitution in the Early Republic," East Asian History (1993): 101-32, esp. pp. 107, 113-14; and Gail Hershatter's book-length study of prostitution in modern Shanghai history (forthcoming from University of California Press). Richard J. Smith, China's Cultural Heritage: The Ch'ing Dynasty, 1644-1912 (Boulder: Westview Press, 1983), pp. 94, 102, and passim; and Geremie Barmé and John Minford, Seeds of Fire: Chinese Voices of Conscience (New York: Noonday Press, 1989), esp. pp. 193-97.

27. See, for example, Michael S. Duke, "Past, Present, and Future in Mo Yan's Fiction of the 1980s," in From May Fourth to June Fourth: Fiction and Film in Twentieth-Century China, ed. Ellen Widmer and David Der-wei Wang (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), pp. 43-70.

28. Perry Link, Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies: Popular Fiction in Early Twentieth-Century Chinese Cities (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), pp. 176-77 and passim; Leo Ou-fan Lee, Voices from the Iron House: A Study of Lu Xun (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), pp. 56, 77, and passim; Rudolph Wagner, The Contemporary Chinese Historical Drama: Four Studies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), esp. pp. 139-235; Duke, "Past, Present, and Future in Mo Yan's Fiction of the 1980s"; and Rey Chow, "Male Narcissism and National Culture: Subjectivity in Chen Kaige's King of the Children," in From May Fourth to June Fourth, ed. Widmer and Wang, pp. 327-59.

29. Ma Changhua, "The Relationship Between the Nien Army and the White Lotus Society," in Chinese Perspectives on the Nien, ed. Elizabeth J. Perry (Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 1981), pp. 59-69, esp. pp. 66-67. Some of the lyrics to Qi Qin's song "Wolf" and Wuerkai's comments about their meaning, which he made at a symposium held at Brandeis in September of 1989, are reprinted in China's Search for Democracy: The Student and Mass Movement of 1989, ed. Suzanne Ogden et al. (Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 1992), pp. 253-54.

30. Dian Murray, Pirates of the South China Coast 1790-1810 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987) pp. 173-74. On Lu Xun's couplet and the famous reworking of it in Mao Zedong's Yanan talk on literary work, see Chow, "Male Narcissism and National Culture," pp. 332-33. On Jiang Qing, see Ross Terrill, The White-Boned Demon: A Biography of Madame Mao Zedong (New York: William Morrow, 1984), p. 15.

31. This was a common theme in texts produced by the CCP for use in base-area propaganda campaigns of the 1930s and 1940s, including not only newspaper articles but also folksongs collected or rewritten for Communist booklets. For an example of the latter, see the excerpt from "Contracted Laborer's Song" translated in Hung, War and Popular Culture, p. 257, which refers to the life of such a worker as being "as hard as that of an ox or horse" and of his food being "as bad as a pig's or a dog's."

32. For Zeng, see J. Mason Gentzler, ed., Changing China: Readings in the History of China from the Opium War to the Present (New York: Prager, 1977), p. 65. For Sun and other revolutionaries who have made similar arguments about Shanghai's Westerners, see Robert Bickers and Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, "Shanghai's `Dogs and Chinese Not Admitted' Sign: Legend, History, and Contemporary Symbol," China Quarterly 142 (1995): 444-66; for Zhang Leping, see Zhang Leping, Adventures of Sanmao the Orphan trans. W. J. F. Jenner and C. M. Chan (Hong Kong: Joint Publishing, 1981), pp. 1, 50, 70.

33. The quotation by Zhang is taken from a translation provided in Kauko Laitinen, Chinese Nationalism in the Late Qing Dynasty: Zhang Binglin as an Anti-Manchu Propagandist (London: Curzon Press, 1990), p. 63. The references to Boxer-era anxieties come from poems in A Ying, ed., Gengzi shibian wenxueji [Literary collection on the 1900 incident], vol. 2 (Beijing: [n.p.], 1959), pp. 1001, 1150. The 1902 proclamation is translated in Gentzler, Changing China, pp. 130-31; and Chen's statement is translated and discussed in Joseph Esherick, Reform and Revolution in China: The 1911 Revolution in Hunan and Hubei (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), p. 47. May 30th­era references to foreigners treating Chinese workers as less than fully human can be found sprinkled throughout both volumes of Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, Wusa yundong shiliao [Historical documents on the May 30th movement] (Shanghai: SASS, 1981 and 1987), esp. vol. 1, p. 338 and vol. 2, pp. 14, 737. Autobiographically based novels from the time are also filled with related references; see, for example, the excerpt from a Ba Jin work dealing with May 30th translated in Olga Lang, Pa Chin and His Writings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), pp. 90-91.

34. The creative possibilities opened up by a language rich in homophones is stressed below in our discussion of anti-Christian propaganda.

35. The recent controversies provoked by t-shirts bearing pictures of animals, which may or may not have been intended to be read as critical of the CCP, provide a good sense of the kinds of problems involved in figuring out how to read the subtler forms of animal imagery that can and often do emerge in China. For a good overview and insightful analysis of these controversies, see Geremie Barmé, "Culture at Large: Consuming T-shirts in Beijing," China Information 8:1/2 (1993), pp. 1-44. We are well aware that subtle or ambiguous forms of dehumanization can sometimes be the most powerful and when the implications seem clear enough we do draw attention below to gray area cases. For example, we cite as an instance of epithet usage a phrase in which a polemicist uses the compound shexie--a term for "vicious," the first part of which is the most common word for "snake" and the second part of which contains the "snake" radical--to describe a group of political opponents. For the most part, however, we refrain from venturing down the linguistic rapids of ambiguous imagery, since these waters are at best hard to navigate effectively and at worst quite treacherous. For similar reasons, we avoid texts containing explicit animal epithets that leave open the question of who exactly is being attacked.

36. Leach, "Anthropological Aspects of Language," p. 51.

37. Ibid.

38. Natalie Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1973), pp. 152-87; Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Basic Books, 1984), pp. 75-104; and Mona Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), pp. 88-89.

39. John Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon, 1986), pp. 234-61.

40. Taiping dehumanizations of the Manchus are treated in some detail below. Excerpts from the anti-Taiping tract quoted here are translated in Rudolph Wagner, "Operating in the Chinese Public Sphere: Theology and Technique of Taiping Propaganda," in Norms and the State in China, ed. Chun-Chieh Huang and Erik Zurcher (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1993), pp. 104-38.

41. Chinese anti-Christian imagery is dealt with in some detail below. For contemporaneous dehumanizing Western images of the Chinese, see Jonathan G. Utley, "American Views of China, 1900-1915: The Unwelcome but Inevitable Awakening," in America Views China: American Images of China Then and Now, ed. Jonathan Goldstein et al. (Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press, 1991), pp. 114-31, and the cartoon ibid., p. 179; Colin MacKerras, Western Images of China (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 67. Presentations of China as a vicious dragon that needed to be subdued by Westerners were appearing in the popular press decades before the Boxer Uprising even broke out. See, for example, the cartoon from Punch reprinted in Dawson, Chinese Chameleon, p. 151. This kind of imagery has continued to appear periodically throughout this century. See Harold Isaacs, Scratches on Our Minds (New York: John Day, 1958) and, for very recent examples, the political cartoons that appeared in various Western newspapers and magazines during the diplomatic crises of the last two years relating to the Spratley Islands and the Taiwan Strait, in which the People's Republic of China was routinely portrayed as a menacing dragon with sharp talons.

42. Various pieces in Xuechao, dongluan, baoluan [Student tide, turmoil, rebellion] (Chengdu: Sichuan renmin chubanshe, 1989), compiled by the editors of Sichuan ribao [Sichuan daily], attempt to dehumanize the protesters and those who criticized the massacres of early June. See, for example, the use of shexie, ibid., p. 251, and the use of compounds containing kuang--a term for crazy behavior that contains the "dog" or "beast" radical and has dehumanizing implications roughly comparable to those of the English word "rabid"--on pp. 209 and 262. Portrayals of Li Peng as various types of animals can be found in Ming Pao News, June Four: A Chronicle of the Chinese Democratic Uprising (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1989), pp. 92, 102; Wasserstrom, Student Protests in Twentieth-Century China, picture following p. 318; and David Turnley and Peter Turnley, Beijing Spring (New York: Stewart, Tabori and Chang, 1989), p. 99.

43. Teng Ssu-yu and John King Fairbank, China's Response to the West: A Documentary Survey, 1839-1923 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1954), p. 36. This seems to be the same document excerpted in Wakeman, Strangers at the Gate, p. 61, which we have quoted earlier in this essay.

44. Wakeman, Strangers at the Gate, p. 76.

45. Ibid., p. 94.

46. Ibid., p. 88. See also the reference to a memorial a Manchu Prince sent to the Emperor a bit later that referred to the foreigners as having "the nature of brute beasts;" quoted in Christopher Hibbert, The Dragon Wakes: China and the West, 1793-1911 (London: Penguin, 1984), p. 287.

47. On the prevalence of the term "imp" in Taiping propaganda, see Jen Yu-wen, The Taiping Revolutionary Movement (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), p. 59. For the quote about "red dogs," see Franz Michael (in collaboration with Chang Chung-li), The Taiping Rebellion: History and Documents, vol. 2 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1971), p. 700.

48. Michael, Taiping Rebellion, vol. 3, pp. 859-69.

49. Ibid., pp. 863-64. Other uses of animal imagery found in these two texts refer to sea creatures (Qianlong's regime is said to have been as oppressive as that of a whale), rodents (Manchu troops are said to have "fled like rats" when confronted by Taiping armies), and reptiles (Chinese soldiers fighting with the imperial forces are warned not to even think about returning to their native villages after the war, since the residents of those places have come to "hate you as if you were snakes or lizards"); see ibid., pp. 862, 866-67.

50. The document is translated in Gentzler, Changing China, pp. 46-49.

51. This criticism of the Manchus for dehumanizing the Chinese might seem to fall outside the definition of animal epithets we have set for ourselves above, but in the context of the documents as a whole, it really has two intertwined implications, the second of which fits into the category we are focusing on here: a) the Manchus are trying to make the Chinese look like beasts by wearing foreign styles; and b) the Manchus have always found it natural to dress or groom themselves like beasts, since they are no better than animals.

52. Other examples of attempts to portray members of non-Han ethnic groups as descended from a mating involving at least one animal are mentioned in Dru C. Gladney, Muslim Chinese: Ethnic Nationalism in the People's Republic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), pp. 272-73. Note that, as he indicates, when such stories are not imposed from the outside but originate within a group (as in the case of the She national minority), they may have positive (totemic) in addition or opposition to negative connotations.

53. Quoted in Hibbert, The Dragon Wakes, 292. For a roughly contemporaneous negative visual representation of Westerners as birdlike savages, see the photograph in ibid., after p. 206, which is identified as "`Old Hairy One.' A Chinese impression of an English sailor, 1859."

54. Our version of this story follows that translated in Perry, Chinese Perspectives on the Nien, pp. 120-23.

55. Jean Chesneaux, "Secret Societies in China's Historical Evolution," in Popular Movements and Secret Societies in China: 1840-1950, ed. Elizabeth J. Perry (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1972), pp. 1-21, esp. p. 19.

56. Jean Chesneaux, Secret Societies in China in the 19th and 20th Centuries, trans. Gillian Nettle (London: Heinemann Educational Press, 1971), p. 97.

57. Paul A. Cohen, China and Christianity: The Missionary Movement and the Growth of Chinese Antiforeignism, 1860-1870 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963), pp. 45-59.

58. On the origins of the tract and sample Western texts that blamed it for inspiring acts of violence, see ibid., pp. 47, 277-81.

59. Ibid., p. 51.

60. The collection was translated with notes by missionaries and printed under the title The Cause of the Riots in the Yangtse Valley: A Complete Picture Gallery (Hankow: [n.p.], 1891).

61. Other denigrated words based on the homophone appearing in this collection include characters for "religion" and "squeak." Thus "Religion of the Lord of Heaven" (Catholicism) becomes "squeak of the pig of heaven," and "religious hall" (church) becomes "the hall of squeak."

62. Cause of the Riots, illustration 13. A color reproduction of this woodcut can also be found in Jean Chesneaux, Peasant Revolts in China, 1840-1949 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973), p. 47, and a similarly gory one entitled "The God of Thunder Destroying the Pigs and the Goat" appears on the preceding page of that work. See also the series of black and white reproductions from the same tract in Cohen, China and Christianity, after p. 140.

63. Tigers have both positive and negative associations in Chinese folklore. The negative connotations are dealt with in a later section; the positive ones include uses of the tiger as a symbol of courage and bravery and as a shield against demons. See Wolfram Eberhard, A Dictionary of Chinese Symbols: Hidden Symbols in Chinese Life and Thought (New York: Routledge, 1986), pp. 290-92.

64. Cause of the Riots, illustration 22.

65. Translated in Hibbert, The Dragon Wakes, p. 359.

66. Translated in Teng and Fairbank, China's Response to the West, p. 192.

67. For pamphlets, announcements, and other propaganda materials related to the protests see Yang Tianshi and Wang Xuezhuan, eds., Ju'e yundong, 1901-1905 [The Resisting Russia movement, 1901-1905] (Beijing: Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, 1979).

68. Ibid., p. 15.

69. See, for example, the reference to a vernacular newspaper's assertion that Russians would not be satisfied with Manchuria but would go on to lay claim to all eighteen provinces of China so that they could treat 400 million Chinese as niuma. Ibid., p. 303.

70. One sign of the interchangeability of tigers and wolves is that in Chinese versions of the "Little Red Riding Hood" story, the role of the animal villain is sometimes described as being one and sometimes the other. The anti-Russian protests were not the first event in which Chinese used wolves to stand for members of a particular foreign country. The literature on the Sino-French War of 1884-85 shows that during that conflict people from France were sometimes depicted as wolfish. In that case, the link seems to have been inspired primarily by a likeness in pronunciation: a common translation for "France" at the time was "Folang," and the second character in this term is a homophone for a Chinese term for wolf. See A Ying, ed., Zhongfa zhanzheng wenxueji [Literary collection on the Sino-French War of 1884-85] (Beijing: [n.p.], 1957), p. 35.

71. Eshi jingwen, 15 December 1903.

72. Yang and Wang, eds., Ju'e yundong, p. 300.

73. For details concerning this struggle and the propaganda associated with it, see Sin-kiong Wong, "The Genesis of Popular Movements in Modern China: A Study of the Anti-American Boycott of 1905-06" (Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 1995).

74. New York Times, 9 December 1905, p. 2; quoted in Susan R. Fernseber, "A `Chinese Mark Twain?': Ng Poon Chew and the Chung Sai Yat Po," unpublished ms. (in author's posession).

75. A Ying, ed., Fan Mei Huagong jinyue wenxueji [An anti-American literary collection on the exclusion of Chinese laborers] (Beijing: [n.p.], 1962), p. 4.

76. Huazi ribao, 3 July 1905.

77. Eberhard, A Dictionary of Chinese Symbols, pp. 294-95.

78. Dianshizhai huabao [Dianshizhai pictorial] (40 vols., Guangzhou: Guangdong Renmin Chubanshe, 1983), Jia 1, Wei 7, 11, Wu 9, Yuan 8, Xin 1, Xing 7, Mu 2, 6, Si 7, Tu 6, Ke 10, Kui 4, Xin 12, She 10, and Le 4. This pictorial was published in Shanghai from 1884 to 1898; for basic information concerning it, see Ye Xiaoqing, "Dianshizhai huabao zhong de Shanghai pingmin wenhua" [Shanghai popular culture in the Dianshizhai pictorial magazine], Ershiyi shiji 1 (1990): 36-47.

79. Michael Teague, Mrs. L: Conversations with Alice Roosevelt Longworth (Garden City: Doubleday, 1981), pp. 106-7.

80. Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Crowded Hours: Reminiscences of Alice Roosevelt Longworth (New York: Scribner's, 1933), p. 91.

81. Fang Hanqi, Zhongguo baokanshi [History of Chinese journalism] (Shanxi: Renmin chubanshe, 1981), vol. 1, p. 345; Jung-fang Tsai, Hong Kong in Chinese History: Community and Social Unrest in the British Colony, 1842-1913 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), p. 200.

82. For instance, after boycott activists revealed that tobacco traders in Soochow imported forty-four boxes of cigarettes, they labeled these traders Chen liang-hsue, or the lowest-class animal. See Yousuowei [Do-Care news], 4 September 1905.

83. Editorial, Juyuebao [Resisting labor treaty news], 3 November 1905.

84. Yousuowei, 3 September 1905, 19 October 1905.

85. China Weekly Review, 14 June 1919, p. 58.

86. These photographs are reproduced in Wasserstrom, Student Protests in Twentieth-Century China, after p. 124.

87. The use of fans with pictures of foreign wolves threatening China is described in Celestial Empire, 8 August 1925, p. 72. One of the fictional accounts we have in mind, which portrays those responsible for the May 30th killings and related violence as bestial, is Ba Jin, Siqu de taiying [The setting sun] (Shanghai: Kaiming, 1949), pp. 8-9 and passim.

88. See, for example, the description of a broadside portraying warlord Wu Peifu as a "small dog held on a short leash by a dominating figure of Uncle Sam," in Andrew Waldron, From War to Nationalism: China's Turning Point, 1924-1925 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 259.

89. For details and citations to some relevant works from the time, see Wasserstrom, Student Protests in Twentieth-Century China, p. 223; Jeffrey Wasserstrom, "The First Chinese Red Scare?," Republican China 11:1 (1985): 32-51, which includes a lengthy treatment of Taochi xunbao and anti-Bolshevik propaganda in general; Richard Rigby, The May Thirtieth Movement (Canberra: Griffen, 1980), especially the anti-red pamphlet reprinted as an appendix, pp. 200-202; and Waldron, From War to Nationalism, p. 194. See also virtually any issue of Taochi xunbao (on the right) or Xiangdao zhoubao [The guide weekly] (on the left).

90. See, for example, the documents from early June 1925 reprinted in SASS, Wusa yundong shiliao, vol. 2, pp. 14-15, 19-20. Admittedly, in some cases here there is a thin line between direct and implied animal imagery. For instance, in the latter document, one of the terms used can either mean "barbarous" or "python-like," depending on how one wants to interpret it. Even if interpreted as "barbarous," though, the connotation of snake-like qualities would probably linger.

91. North China Herald, 29 August 1925.