China, like Japan, has had a long history of cartoon-like art that developed in the post-World War II era into a thriving comics industry.  Chinese comics are called manhua, a term which is applied, like “manga,” to all sorts of sequential art.

The primary English-language reference available on manhua is Hong Kong Comics: A History of Manhua, published in 2002 by Wendy Siuyi Wong.  She co-wrote the Chinese version of the book with Yueng Wai-pong.  Just about every website and article I found that talked about the history of manhua referred to this book, so I’m going to the source and pulling most of my information from there. The book also goes into greater detail about the history and development of manhua in several essays, although the bulk of the book reprints pages from manhua throughout the 20^th century.  I highly recommend tracking a copy down if you’re interested in the subject.  As the book focuses on Hong Kong, so shall this essay.

Some of the earliest forms of cartoon-like art in China are known as nian hua.  They are wood-block prints hung up in the house at the New Year to bring good luck, and started as early as the 16^th century.  In the late 19^th century, with the arrival from the West of new techniques for making magazines and fine-art prints, the cartoon arts began to spread rapidly.  A popular sequential art form similar to the comic book was known as lianhuantu.  This is a small picture book intended to tell stories, often traditional Chinese stories that could be understood by illiterate or partially literate people, consisting of small pictures with a few words as captions.  They were often rented from street kiosks, where people could borrow them for a fee, much like a DVD rental store today, and didn’t completely disappear until the 1970s.  Attitudes towards lianhuantu when they were available were much like attitudes of the mainstream towards comic books in the West: low-class, mass-marketed forms of entertainment for the masses.

Hong Kong was a British colony until recently, and so the art form that developed into manhua in the late 19^th and early 20^th century had a pronounced British influence: satire and caricatures ridiculing local politics and culture with a heavy bias towards Western superiority were published in The China Punch, a periodical created by a British journalist based on the British journal The Punch.  The first authentically Chinese voice in manhua was Tse Tsan-tai, who published a political manhua called The Situation in the Far East in Japan in 1899.

Politics were the focus of most manhua until the late 1920s, when serial fiction comics began appearing.  Newspapers added manhua pages in the 1930s, which brought them to the attention of the wider public. Cartoons were used widely as propaganda during World War II, but in the postwar period gave way to serial stories about daily life.

The rise of Hong Kong manhua began in the1950s as political turmoil in mainland China forced people to escape to Hong Kong and as it grew more prosperous.  China permitted only Communist literature to be printed, so most Chinese-language literature and art was produced by Hong Kong.  Manhua was influenced by American kids’ comic books during this time period, as a baby boom created an insatiable market for translated comics and home-grown manhua. 

Political manhua returned for a short while in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as creators criticized the Chinese Cultural Revolution, but never had the influence it did before World War II. 

The next movement in manhua came from the popularity of kung fu movies in the 1970s.  Television and movies brought these to new audiences, and manhua competing for entertainment time and dollars followed suit, producing action-filled and violent stories.  The violence came to the attention of the government, who restricted the amount of violence and the kinds of characters that could be used in manhua, in order to produce good role models for the youth of Hong Kong.

The 1990s brought a flowering in manhua art styles and stories, with creators experimenting with graphic design and different methods of telling stories, although violent action manhua remained popular.  The government’s loosening of some restrictions allowed manhua creators to experiment with edgier stories and artwork, and there was a return to political cartooning as social commentary.

Since Hong Kong Comics was published in 2002, the development of manhua in Hong Kong and mainland China in the 21^st century isn’t covered.  I’m sure that some interesting stuff is happening now that Hong Kong has been handed back to Chinese control, and since China has loosened some of its control over what the Chinese people can read and publish.  The book also has no information about girls’ manhua.  I don’t know if there was much manhua published for teenage girls and young women during the 20^th century, or if it’s been focused on boys and men, but going by scanlation sites on the Internet, there’s a decent amount of it coming out now, plus a good amount of shoujo manga being translated and sold in China.

Manhua is a thriving industry in China, and I look forward to seeing more of it make its way to the English-reading world.

This is an addendum to last week’s column on self-publishing manga.  I have been informed that there is a distributor who handles independent and self-published comics and manga, Cold Cut Distribution.  If they think that there may be a market for your book, they will take a small number and offer them to the comic-book stores who are their customers.  I’m glad to hear there’s another option for getting self-published manga out there.