Orionblamblam said:
Dreamfighter said:
But what Hergé does in "The Blue Lotus", is choosing the side of the Chinese (depicted as hungry, poor peasants) and ridiculising the "civilized" Japanese occupiers (and the industrials from the West looking for opportunities to exploit those Chinese).
Well, that's an easy one too. Who was colonizing Africa in the 1930's? Europeans, including French and Belgians. For a European of the time, this may have seemed entirely proper. But the *Japanese* colonizing someone? That may have been seen as improper, since the Japanese were "lesser" people (or a "lesser" culture). Thus the Japanese doing *exactly* the same thing as the Belgians might have been seen entirely differently based on built in biases. Thus an "anti-fascist" message against Japanese imperialism might not have been truly "anti-fascist" so much as "anti-someone-other-than-us."
Belgians and French indeed colonized Africa, starting in the 19th century. In the 1930's, this was indeed still regarded as "normal" by Europeans, as I and also Stargazer tried to point out in our replies.
But to average Europeans there wasn't much difference in their knowledge about Japan and China, or these countries' cultures. Hergé's criticism on the Japanese occupation of (a part) of China did not originate from an "anti-someone-other-than-us"-idea, but was one of the first signs of Hergé's change of mindset about political and social matters. Why did he chose side of the underdevelopped, starving and occupied Chinese? No, not because he regarded the Japanese as an inferior race. In fact, it were the Japanese who considered Westerners as inferior and did not allow foreigners into their country, unless they could use them.
One should know that the young Chinese guy, who Tintin meets in the album "The blue Lotus", is a real person: Zhang Chongren (sometimes written Chang Chong-Chen). Back in the 1930's, Zhang was studying for a while in Belgium, and Hergé got to meet him. Zhang provided Hergé (the pseudonym "Hergé" comes from his real name;
Remi
Georges) with a lot of background information about China and contributed a lot to Hergé's changing view on society and polictics. Though Zhang returned to China even before the release of the book, he and Hergé remained friends for life. Hergé honours in the 1950s this friendship with another album in which Zhang plays an important part; "Tintin in Tibet".
Their short reunion in reallife in Brussels in 1981, 2 years before Hergé's death, made worldwide news (though this might have gotten less attention in the US ? )
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOWiSSG8xGk
Orionblamblam said:
(Some claim the Bordurian regime in the book is inspired on the Soviet Union, though I and many others are convinced it is based on Nazi-Germany)
Not like there was any really important difference. Apart from swapping some names around, and a *slight* increase in racism on the part of the Nazis, there wasn't really a whole lot of difference between fascism and communism, or between the murderous genocidal Hitler and the genocidal murderous Stalin.
It may seem so today, or to non-Europeans, but here it does matter. It mostly matters to Belgians themselves, as more then a few were persuaded in the 1940's to go fight with Nazi-Germany's Wehrmacht & Waffen-SS on the Eastern Front, against the Soviet-Union. And in more then a few cases, they were persuaded to do this by Catholic clergy: "to stop the rise of evil communism".
So, whether the fictional Bordurian regime in Hergé's work is based on Nazi-Germany or rather on the Soviet-Union & communism, is not unimportant here.
