How do the dominant cultural narratives in art and mass media affect our politics?

Preceding the PRC, the Republic of China under Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek was very clearly an authoritarian single-party military dictatorship.

Yet they wooed the US by convincing them that they were a potential liberal democracy, as the ROC was under the "People's Tutelage" stage, which was ideologically meant to prepare China for democracy after a period of single-party rule.

Also, the ROC made concessions to end the People's Tutelage, rewriting the constitution for a transition to democracy. However, China's first actual election was simply Chiang making himself President for Life and keeping the KMT in power.

edited 24th Jan '18 9:59:51 AM by TheWildWestPyro

I will note that the PRC's name isn't really false or misleading, yes from the American definition of republic (a government form where a nation's people elect its leaders) the name is wrong. But from another just as appropriate definition (a government form where its leaders are elected or appointed instead of given their offices through birth) the PRC is a republic.

edited 24th Jan '18 11:51:52 AM by Fourthspartan56

It's worth mentioning that the early ROC under Sun Yat-Sen was a genuine primitive republic thougu, complete with opposing factions which disagreed whether or not China should emulate the West like Japan was doing or go about "modernizing with Chinese characteristics". The Mandarin-speaking ex-Qing officials wanted go about the latter path, while the Cantonese dominated KMT preferred the former. In fact, the KMT then was so left-leaning that the Soviets actually became its first foreign benefactor, sending advisors and equipment to the National Revolutionary Army (NRA) with the expectation that the Communists inside its ranks would seize power one day.

The former Qing officials led by field marshal Yuan Shikai eventually split with the KMT and attempted to restore the monarchy, causing a civil war that ended with Chiang Kai-Shek leading the KMT forces to victory over Yuan's Beiyang government with the assistance of the Soviets.

Since he now possessed China's most valuable capitalist economic centers of Canton, Shanghai, Nanking, and Beijing, Chiang rightly suspected the Soviets of planning to usurp him with the Communists within the KMT. His marriage to Soong Mei-Ling, the daughter of one of the most powerful Shanghai business tycoons, was the most prominent of his efforts to cement an alliance with both the legitimate and underground Chinese business world; another was his enlistment of the Green Gang, a consortium of Shanghai mobsters.

The ROC more or less became a right-wing military-business oligarchy with Chiang's purge of the Communists within the KMT in 1928, which was made possible with the assistance of the Chinese underworld in syndicates such as the Green Gang. The Marxist urban-based Communists were destroyed, leaving only the chapters based in the countryside to flee northwards under the leadership of one urban survivor and son of a rice merchant named Mao Tse-Tung . . .

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Chiang didn't need to "woo" the US over to its side. His side was the only practical choice to support when contrasted with self-explanatory Communists and the imperialist Japanese.

edited 24th Jan '18 11:10:19 AM by FluffyMcChicken

It's a Republic, but not a Democratic Republic. Which it doesn't claim to be anyway.

Exactly.

Thanks! I didn't know just how left-leaning they were to attract the Soviets, so that was new to me. And thanks for your excellent insight into Chiang's position.

Not to mention that within the ROC, the USA had plenty of missionaries and business interests there, plus a sizable Marine garrison in Tianjin and Shanghai.

Interestingly, some have noted that Sun Yat-sen had to resort to becoming a warlord himself under the Canton government, what with building up the National Revolutionary Army, inviting foreign military advisors and all.

edited 24th Jan '18 1:48:32 PM by TheWildWestPyro

The name is still false—you can't be a People's Republic when the people have no say in governing.

Well, when the most powerful warlord faction in China consists of The Remnant of the Qing's elite North Ocean Army and its commander (Yuan), one doesn't really have a choice but to have a foreign-supported military of their own if they want to sustain any ambitions in Chinese politics.

Which is where Chiang came in to begin with actually: Sun, a civilian idealist, was uninterested and intimidated with the task of commandeering an army. He left that duty to a select group of trusted military officers that included Chiang, who had attended a Japanese military academy while in exile there. Behind Sun's ailing back, Chiang quietly eliminated his competitors in time for his mentor to pass away and leave him in command of the ROC's new Soviet-trained military. After defeating the Beiyang government, it was only a matter of time before Chiang moved to eliminate the other civilian idealists in the KMT and replace them with NRA military men, allied warlords, or businessmen and mobsters he owed favors to.

edited 24th Jan '18 1:22:34 PM by FluffyMcChicken

It's pretty common to view comics in the 90s as being excessively dark, gory and sexually exploitative. And this is certainly true for a lot of the content of that time, particularly from Marvel and Image. But I don't think this applies to DC comics. This was the era of DC that gave us the Young Justice comic and John Henry Irons aka Steel and the Connor Kent Superboy. Tim Drake got his solo series and reconstructed the Robin persona as a light-hearted character and we got lots of great legacy characters like Cass Cain, Kyle Rayner and Connor Hawke who were arguably more idealistic than their predecessors. Not to mention fantastic gender and racial representation stories.

It's especially odd that this is a period that is deemed a dork age for DC when the late 2000s and the 2010s were a thousand times more dark with stories like Cry For Justice, Identity Crisis, Amazons Attack and Flashpoint.

Our own The Dark Age Of Comic Books page has a pretty in-depth write up about this. And as interesting as it might be, it's not quite related to real life politics. Unless one wants to get into the general misogyny and violence and such in some of those works and how they might have had an impact on real life.

Well as I mentioned, the 90s was when DC was it it's most diverse and I found it a bit troubling that this gets lumped in with DC's Dork Age when the 2000s and 2010s were far worse in their handling of stuff like gender and race. I mean, Cass Cain alone is the most successful woman of color character from either DC or Marvel.

The Nineties were when Batman got his back broken and was replaced by Jean-Paul Valley. And while some of the Supermen who replaced Clark were okay, there was still Eradicator and of course Hank Henshaw.

The Nineties were also a time when Superman foe Toyman became a child murdering Serial Killer and Bloodsport got replaced with a fanatical white racist whose introductory story had him going on a spree killing through Suicide Slum with the explicit goal of murdering as many minorities and "race traitors" as possible. This was in a Superman comic.

Note that Cass' first appearance was in 1999, so it's arguable whether she was ever part of the "Dark Age" at all.

edited 28th Jan '18 6:38:41 AM by M84

And then it ended with Bruce coming back and kicking Valley's ass. It was never meant to be permanent and the story was more about lampooning 90s anti heroes.

Neither of whom ever had a chance in hell of ever replacing Superman. And frankly the creation of John Henry Irons alone, an African American who became a hero without super powers, pretty much redeems any issues with that event. It's one of the few times I actually felt there was something to the whole "Superman inspires people" nonsense DC loves to drone on about but rarely delivers on.

In an age of Dylan Roof and Stephen Paddock, I'd say this comic feels quite relevant today, moreso than the Joker . It at least was about race relations and featured some perspectives from minorities while Identity Crisis pretty much ignored the pov of the female character it affected the most.

The Toyman's reinvention maybe wasn't handled the best but his murder of Cat Grant's son was also the trigger for her character development. Development that Geoff Johns then pissed away in his Superman run.

Like I said, it's questionable if it was ever much of a dark age for DC.

edited 28th Jan '18 7:14:38 AM by windleopard

The artwork was also pretty damn bloody for a Superman comic. Just look at the first few pages of Blood Sport II's intro story "Skin Game".

Suffice to say, there was good reason the 90's were considered a Dark Age for comics. Much of it seems to have been influenced by the whole "Tough on Crime" shit that was so endemic to American culture in the late Eighties and Nineties.

edited 28th Jan '18 7:06:27 AM by M84

I think when a guy named Bloodsport is involved, that's kind of to be expected.

That much is true, but in the case of DC I find that this was the opposite case with it offering better views on such topics, when it handled them at least. DC actually got less progressive in the late 2000s if anything and even with Rebirth they're struggling to crawl out of it.

Oddly enough, comics with the original Bloodsport weren't that bloody. Heck, the stories with the second racist Bloodsport after "Skin Game" had less actual blood shown on-panel. Still plenty of killing though.

I dont think that believing in "thought of crime" stories are necessarily bad, is just the level of "thoughtness". Something like Demolition Man is actually problematic because it shows a world where only the Cowboy Cop can actually defeat crime, but Superheroes being particularly angry against crime, unless it involves a lot of needless violence against petty criminals is actually fine.

edited 28th Jan '18 7:45:37 AM by KazuyaProta

To me, dark age comics have their own unique trashy aesthetic that gives them their own sort of strange charm.

After having actually read quite a bit of 90's comics, I agree. Most aren't well written, but they are fun reads, with some that fall into legitametely good territory (such as Marvel's horror output like Ghost Rider and Morbius, which most of their current output to shame).

I mean things like Superman at Earths or the Doom comic are incredibly bad but they're very enjoyable in their terribleness be it Doom Guy's complete idiocy or Earths End with its Santa Superman hybrid who punches through the androids, the fact that what I presume to be Waynetech created twin clones of Hitler, or the tacked on anti gun psa which comes out of nowhere and is completely hypocritical given that the main conflict of the book is solved using guns. Honestly there are very few bad comics these days that can create that kind of ironic enjoyment.

Anyone ever see this article on scans daily?

https://scans-daily.dreamwidth.org/2821274.html

It talks about Jason Todd and how he often gets unfailry blamed for his death. One point it brought up is the classicism elements that underlie the way Jason was treated:

Note that Jason's successor, Tim Drake, pretty much had the opposite life of Jason and yet it's never really addressed that Bruce kind of ignored that.

On a somewhat related note, DC also has this creepy obsession with who you're born with determining who you are. Cass Cain is the daughter of two assassins and becomes a villain. Steph Brown is the daughter of a villain and is treated as a screw up. Wonder Woman gets retconned into being Zeus' daughter because those are the only heroes in Greek myth.

edited 29th Jan '18 11:13:01 PM by windleopard

What does this have to do with real life politics? This would be better suited to the Batman thread or DC comics thread.

The bad treatment of Jason Todd's character after his death was likely due to editorial and writers covering their asses after their ill-advised publicity stunt of killing him off got backlash from fans.

It probably didn't help that their bullshit 900 number readership poll which voted in favor of killing off Jason by a margin of 72 votes may have been faulty. It wasn't until years after the poll that Dennis O'Neil, the guy who suggested the poll in the first place, admitted that the results were skewed by a single person who voted multiple times in favor of Jason's death.

From the Wikipedia page:

I brought the classicism elements of Jason's treatment. I even quoted it from the essay.

That's more telling of the writers' and editorial's biases than anything else. These were the people who were dumb enough to kill him off in the first place in a stupid publicity stunt. Everything afterwards has been a years long attempt to retroactively justify a bad decision. Jason was sympathetic enough at the time that there was quite a bit of backlash over the decision to kill him off.

From the very beginning, DC's writers and editors haven't really known how to handle Jason Todd.

edited 30th Jan '18 12:36:07 AM by M84