China’s plight under Japanese occupation – how artist Martha Sawyers drew America’s attention to it
- Sawyers eschewed pre-war tropes of other Western artists depicting Chinese people as weak and backward
- She created artworks for the United China Relief’s fundraising poster campaign
In the summer of 1941 in New York, United China Relief (UCR) was founded, bringing together eight organisations that had been working towards the same ends: to raise the American public’s awareness of China’s resistance to Japan, and to collect funds to directly aid civilians.
The images chosen to promote their work were a series of full-colour posters that appeared in newspapers, magazines and on billboards nationwide, images that would be seared into many people’s memories long after the war, and they were all the work of Martha Sawyers.
The aim was to raise US$5 million in aid for China’s estimated 50 million refugees, displaced after four years of resisting the Japanese invasion. The appeal easily surpassed this target. The UCR board included first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, the China-raised author Pearl Buck, and the publisher of Time, Life and Fortune Henry Luce – born in Shandong province, eastern China, to missionary parents – who had specifically chosen Sawyers as their in-house artist.
The first of Sawyers’ images to be published was a striking portrait of a Chinese man, lean, stern and strong of jaw, but with his arm in a sling. Alongside him stands a woman, presumably his wife, displaying a weary sadness. Their child, barefoot, is carried on her back, a China on fire behind them.
The trio are symbolic of China’s suffering and the millions of people forced to become refugees due to the Japanese invasion. However, the image also displays a sense of courage and resilience, a desire to resist and overcome adversity, captioned at the bottom, “China Shall Have Our Help!”
Sawyers had built herself a reputation for her detailed portraits of Chinese and Southeast Asian subjects, and throughout World War II she would continue to promote the UCR cause with images such as that of a Nationalist soldier, his wife with her arm bandaged, and their clench-fisted young daughter, all looking straight out over the slogan, “China: First to Fight!” Another features Uncle Sam along with a determined Chinese mother and child beside a soldier with a head wound: “China is Helping Us – Help China!”
