While the world is absorbed by the coronavirus, China’s nominal legislature decided take away any doubts about Hong Kong independent “special status.” Protestors are now facing the full brunt of China’s heavy hand. I drew this as the Chinese panda digesting Hong Kong, and burping.
I debated whether I should make the burpy umbrellas yellow; yellow umbrellas were the symbol of Hong Kong’s protestors in 2014, and more recent protests have embraced black umbrellas as protection against projectiles and water cannons from police, so I went with black
There aren’t many cartoons about Hong Kong now and my cartoon probably won’t get much ink – still, this should be a time for Hong Kong cartoons. I have selected some of my favorite Hong Kong protest cartoons from the past few years. At the end there are three Hong Kong cartoons from Luojie, our CagleCartoonist who draws for the China Daily, China’s official English language newspaper and voice of the communist government.
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For today’s BLAME CHINA installment we have four cartoons from Luojie, our CagleCartoonist from Beijing who draws for The China Daily, China’s state owned, national English language newspaper – and four cartoons not by Luojie.
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Sean Delonas (yes, that Murder Hornet came from Japan.)
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It looks like President Trump will continue to blame China for the coronavirus, deflecting criticism for the administration’s late and slipshod reaction to the pandemic. China isn’t blameless, but how much China is blamed is up to the cartoonists.
I’m starting out with three more cartoons from Luojie, our CagleCartoonist from Beijing who draws for The China Daily, China’s state owned, national English language newspaper. Loujie draws the Chinese government’s official point of view, pushing back against the criticism coming from America. Defending China is not a popular point of view with cartoonists around the world and Luojie is likely the only cartoonist seen drawing this point of view in newspapers outside of China.
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Here is part two of our BLAME CHINA cartoons! See part one with cartoons defending China pushing against criticism. Since we hear so much about China from the Trump administration, it is interesting that most of the China bashing cartoons come from the international cartoonists.
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We had a tie for the most popular cartoon this week (April 11 – 18) here are both. Scroll down for the next EIGHT of our ten most popular and most reprinted editorial cartoons from last week (which are below the video).
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This popular cartoon by John Darkow rounds out the top ten.
Tomorrow we’ll have part two of the BLAME CHINA cartoons (see Blame China! Part One in case you missed it), and then we’ll have a new remembrance by my cartoonist buddy, the legendary Randy Enos.
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I’m starting out with the cartoons from Luojie, our CagleCartoonist from Beijing who draws for The China Daily, China’s state owned, national English language newspaper. Loujie draws the Chinese government’s official point of view, pushing back against the criticism coming from America.
Interestingly, most of the “blame China” cartoons come from international cartoonists and few come from American cartoonists, even though China focuses on criticism coming from the USA.
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Our newspaper clients are crashing now as Coronavirus is crushing their advertisers. We need your support for Cagle.com (and DarylCagle.com) now more than ever! Notice that we run no advertising! We depend entirely upon the generosity of our readers to sustain the site. Please visit Cagle.com/heroes and make a contribution. You are much appreciated!
President Trump claims that he wasn’t late in taking action about the pandemic, he argues that he was early, by declaring a travel ban on China on January 31st, to take effect on February 2nd. Trump’s claims are in dispute and there have been many reports of early warnings that the White House didn’t respond to, and recommendations of stronger measures that Trump should have ordered earlier.
Among those sounding an early alarm about the coronavirus threat are the world’s editorial cartoonists. Here is a batch of cartoons from our cartoon first-responders who were among the first to draw about the threat.
This quote is from our conservative cartoonist, Rick McKee,
My first coronavirus cartoon is dated January 31, and I remember thinking at the time, “I wonder if enough people know about this to get the reference?” I was following the story very closely while the virus was still limited to China and hearing stories about how they were quarantining residents by welding them in their homes, monitoring them with drones and building emergency hospitals in 10 days. I knew this was not a normal virus and if it came to the US, things would get bad very quickly. My son lives in Los Angeles and I remember the first documented case of the COVID-19 virus was in L.A. on January 23 at LAX. I texted him that day to alert him to start preparing for the possibility of a city-wide lockdown. Rick McKee
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The next three are by our photo-realistic, Dutch cartoonist, Bart van Leeuwen
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Here are my three most recent Corona Virus cartoons.
This is the most recent one, on the stock market drop, the oil price drop and the Corona Virus …
I actually like the line art better than the color version.
Editors and readers always like color or grayscale better than line art like this – but I like line art versions of cartoons best –without tone. There is something more elegant about line art, even if I can’t convince anyone else that line art is nicer.
My next cartoon has the Corona Virus licking the continental United States. Here’s my rough sketch. I looked up a map of the USA on Google, printed it and taped it into place, so I could get the shapes of the states right when I traced it with my finished lines. In the old days I would do things like this on a “lucygraph”. (These are better days.)
And here’s the final art …
Back in February, when the Corona Virus was only in China, I drew this one about the world freaking out …
That’s it! Three cartoons today!
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UPDATED March 6, 2020, with a new cartoon – scroll to the bottom of the post to see it, along with another explanation from Benedick.
I got some interesting emails from Chinese cartoonist and freelance photographer, Benedick Bowen, with some cartoons about his experiences with China’s extreme quarantine measures to restrict the spread of the Corona Virus, COVID-19.
At first, Chinese authorities tried to downplay the threat and punished a few whistleblowers who sounded the alarm –we had the same experience his with Preisdent Trump’s comments minimizing the virus threat. Benedick writes:
“… I heard about the ‘unexplained virus’ was was told it could be controlled and not contracted from human to human, many times on the the Chinese domestic media.
When I heard the news, I heard many people were rushing to buy face masks and medical alcohol and food. Some pessimistic friends thought that the material supply shortage would keep long and may wreak famine. My father asked me to buy rice, wheat flour and oil for months use. I didn’t agree with them … but I did buy much more food than before.
Finally Beijing was quarantined. People were not allowed to go on the street at will. Employees have to ask their companies to write out a “testimony” to get a pass for an employee to leave his home for work. I am not an employee so I can not leave my house. I can only go out within 3 hours per day to buy food. My son’s kindergarten delayed the opening time few times. By now we have bought 60 kilograms rice and 50 kilograms wheat flour and many bottles of oil. “
Benedick has been suffering from the quarantine, and from not being able to ply his trade as a freelance photographer while he’s stuck in his house, because he has no employer to write a note to the authorities, he is stuck at home. (We might face Corona Virus quarantines in California too, where freelance photographers are banned under the new law AB 5, so there will be no employer excuses in the USA either.)
Here are more of Benedick’s cartoons …
UPDATED March 6, 2020
Benedick writes: “This cartoon is about the quarantine in China’s rural areas. The security guards who wear red armbands supervise the people to wear face masks and stay home. The security guards have no enforcement power so they always make violence when people don’t obey them.”
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The huge, English language, official, government owned newspaper, The China Daily, subscribes to CagleCartoons, and we syndicate their lead cartoonist, Luojie. I have included a bunch of recent cartoons at the bottom of the page, from Luojie about the protests in Hong Kong. As we would expect, Luojie’s cartoons express the official view of the Chinese government, that the Hong Kong protesters are rioting terrorists.
Luojie‘s cartoons capture the tenor of the Chinese press reports and editorials about the Hong Kong “riots” which mention nothing about the protestors’ demands for continued autonomy and democracy, and have no mention of excessive violence by Hong Kong police that we are used to seeing in Western coverage. In fact, Luojie’s Hong Kong cartoons stand in stark contrast to all of the other cartoons from CagleCartoonists, and I would guess, from any editorial cartoonists outside of China.
I just got back from a couple of weeks visiting China for a big festival in the coastal city of Xiamen, put on by ASIFA China. I was invited to be a judge for their big cartoon competition.
They had two categories of judges for print and animation (I was on the print jury).
Here I am in the photo below, with my colleagues from both juries – that’s me in the center/front. The other Westerners are cartoon scholar John Lent on the far right, and Bosnian animator/DJ Berin Tuzlić behind me in the colorful shirt.
It took my jury three days of work to go through all the print submissions. The top prizes are $15,000.00 USD each, which is a hefty prize. I’m surprised that American cartoonists don’t enter this generous, annual competition. The Xiamen festival has invited a bunch of CagleCartoonists to be jurors in recent years, including Steve Sack, Bruce Plante, Milt Priggee and Pat Bagley. We all thought the competition and festival were great.
This big poster shows all the nominees in the animation and print categories.I took my son, Michael along on the trip. Here we are standing with our lovely interpreter, Jasmine Xu, at the beautiful Buddhist temple in Xiamen.
Like other cities in China, Xiamen looks brand new; it is busy, bustling and crammed full of tall skyscrapers. Xiamen is a small city by Chinese standards, with a population close to the size of Los Angeles, and it is home to lots of CGI animation studios.
I see Xiamen, and all of China, as a gastronomic adventure – eating is a joy in China!
The festival looked more like a business conference than a Comic Con. Here’s a photo from a room listening to a presentation about the business of a CGI animation studio.
I saw that the major Western news sites were blocked by China’s “Great Firewall” and I learned how to use a VPN (Virtual Private Network) to read the Western newspapers and download my podcasts through Japan. The TV in my hotel room included CNN International, which was running regular updates on the conflict in Hong Kong that were either entirely blacked out, or selectively blacked out, showing criticism of the protestors but going silent and black when each segment turned to criticism of the government or police.
This festival photo shows the orderly, businesslike kiosks on the convention floor.
China’s “One Country, Two Systems” plan for Hong Kong isn’t looking very good; China makes the same pitch to Taiwan – a pitch that isn’t very attractive right now as it looks more likely that Hong Kong will be fully consumed and digested into China’s communist system, as the protests continue and intensify. I didn’t find anyone in mainland China that agrees with me. The Chinese folks I talked to privately told me that they shared the official view that the Hong Kong protestors were terrorists that must be put down.
I’m disappointed that President Trump seems to side with the government in China against the protestors, even so, the official view in China is that America is “supporting the terrorists” in Hong Kong, as Luojie illustrates. Here’s Luojie‘s official take on the Hong Kong protests …
