Colonialism Undressed: How Women’s Bodies Became Symbols of “Modern” China

In a 1937 opinion piece in issue 283 of Linglong, a women’s magazine, Xiu Ying outlined in no uncertain terms the misery which an artist’s model could expect from her career. From strict requirements for the size of one’s breasts and buttocks to prying questions over one’s virginity and health, all with a pittance for payment, the message was clear. Nude modelling was as bad as, if not worse than, sex work.

And yet nudity was almost everywhere in Republican Shanghai. From the end of the Qing Dynasty in 1911 until the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, female nudity appeared in art galleries, postcards, propaganda, calendars, and almost every other form of visual media. Supporters of the female nude as an artistic symbol even risked criminal charges for creating nude images. The people driving the cultural and social reform of which female nudity was a part were, to generalise only slightly, Western-educated men. They believed that modelling China on colonial states like the UK, the US, France, and Japan was the best way to build a stronger nation on the global stage.

My doctoral thesis explores the use of female nudity in three pictorial periodicals published in Shanghai between 1929 and 1937. Shidai Manhua (Modern Sketch) was a satirical magazine in the style of Punch, Linglong (lit. “elegance”) was a women’s magazine in the vein of The Lady or Woman & Home, and Liangyou (The Young Companion) positioned itself as the handbook for navigating modern life and culture, drawing inspiration from magazines like Vanity Fair (USA) and L’Illustration (France). Together, these periodicals give historians like me a great overview of the different ways female nudity was used for different audiences.

Partly as a deliberate methodological break from existing scholarship on the female image in Republican China, and partly to put boundaries on the scope of my research, my investigation is

led by the sources themselves. Inevitably, that meant beginning with an exhaustive quantitative analysis of the 370 or so surviving issues of the three periodicals. Much of my last twelve months have been spent tallying the number of times that bare breasts and bums appear on the periodical pages, weighing up whether to include one bikini-clad woman and not another.

As I slowly sorted each image into different categories – art reproductions, satirical cartoons, nude photographs – common themes started to crystallise across the different visual mediums. Black and Indigenous bodies were exoticised or described as “primitive”. White bodies, on the other hand, were variously idealised as the pinnacle of beauty or held up as the epitome of robust health. The acts of creating and interpreting art of the Female Nude were solidified as ways for Chinese people to prove their own level of “modernity”.

The periodicals followed the colonial playbook, using visual stereotypes and written comments to guide readers’ interpretation. Whether it was describing nude art by French Salon painters as examples of “masterpieces”, or commenting on the simple ways of life which Indigenous people led, Republican readers were encouraged to see themselves as having more in common with the colonial powers than colonised states.

Only occasionally visible through comments added to cartoons or brief messages to the readers, the editors of Shanghai periodicals wielded a remarkable level of influence over the discourse of what it meant to be a “modern” reader. Using the figure of the naked woman as both a symbol and a test of modernity, editors challenged their readers to rethink how they perceived gender, cultural values, and even China’s national identity.

In Shanghai, a city architecturally and geographically shaped by colonialism, proving proximity to Western culture and social norms was a way of proving that imperial traditions had long been abandoned. To generalise, Republican intellectuals believed that proximity to Western culture and social norms would transform China from a weakened imperial state to a strong modern country, able to stand independently on the global stage.

Some intellectuals even risked criminal charges for their outspoken support of female nudity in art. Liu Haisu, an artist and ardent supporter of the female nude, set up the Shanghai Institute of Fine Arts in Shanghai, defiantly running life classes with nude models from as early as 1917. Liu only escaped arrest in 1924 when a local warlord was thwarted by the school’s location in the French Concession of Shanghai, meaning that it was exempt from Chinese laws of decorum.

The deeper I dig, the more I find contradictions between different kinds of nudity, different editorial opinions, and the different messaging with which female nudity was imbued in these periodicals. Tracing the provenance of one painting reproduction to a French periodical and of supposedly artistic photos to pornographic postcards does little to clear things up.

It is clear that female nudity was seen as a cornerstone of colonial culture, woven into Western art, religion, and the patriarchal social order. In turn, Republican intellectuals saw its potential as a performative tool to not only educate their readers but to add legitimacy to the newly founded Republic of China in the eyes of the colonial powers. Ultimately, whether female nudity was being used as an example of great art or as the punchline in a cartoon, artists, editors, and other intellectuals used women as objects to show off how modern a modern man could be. The final leaf from the colonial playbook was to make women’s nakedness not just visible but meaningful – so long as that meaning served the ambitions of men.

Image credit: Composite: Beth Price/Linglong 268 (1937).

Beth is a PhD student in Chinese Studies in LLC, supported by an AHRC doctoral training partnership. Her research explores how gender and feminism is influenced by media and colonialism, specifically focused on the use of female nudity in Shanghai periodicals in the 1930s. Outside of research, her writing has been published widely and you can find her portfolio here [https://authory.com/BethPrice]. Currently, she is the host of LLC’s podcast, Beyond the Books [https://llc.ed.ac.uk/research/beyond-the-books].

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/beth.c.price/