The Body as a Means for Political Mobilization: Portrait Photo between Journalism and Propaganda, Minli Pao 's covering of the assassination of Song Jiaoren as Case

Song Jiaoren(Sung Chiao-jen,1882-1913) was a revolutionist and the founder of the Kuomintang(KMT).He was assassinated in March of 1913 in Shanghai after his leading KMT to victory in China’s first democratic election.

This talk will investigate how the members of KMT who owned Minli Pao (民立报 ) published in Shanghai as both mouthpiece of the revolutionary party and mass media produce and use the images of Song’s corpse for the purpose of mobilizing the mass to.protest the assassination.

This talk will try to explore portrait photo’s function and practice between propaganda and journalism and its usage as a means of visual mobilization from three aspects of production, distribution and consumption in the Republican Shanghai.



Gu Zheng is born in 1959 in Shanghai, He received his Ph.D. from Osaka Prefecture University in Japan 1998. He is a professor of the School of Journalism and the vice-director of the Research Center for Visual Culture at Fudan University. He was a Harvard-Yenching Visiting Scholar from 2017-18. He is also a photographer and photo and art critic. He lives and works in Shanghai. He fields of research include: history of chinese photography, Chinese contemporary photography, and 20th Century avant-garde art.

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