‘Our friends the Chinese’: Australian advisers and images of China in the world wars

Abstract

Across the two world wars two Australian former journalists – George Morrison (1862–1920) and Harold Timperley (1898–1954) – produced propaganda for the Chinese government. In doing so, they employed discourses of vulnerability and anxiety over Australia’s position in Asia. Previous arguments that Morrison or Timperley represent an Australian approach to Asia have not taken into account their biographies and their positions within the Chinese government. In this article, I argue that Morrison and Timperley’s depictions of Asia were heavily influenced both by their individual experiences and by developments in how successive Chinese governments made use of foreign journalists to communicate to the west.

Keywords:

• Australia
• China
• First World War
• Second World War
• advisers

Disclosure statement

Research for this article was conducted as part of a visiting scholar fellowship at the State Library of New South Wales. I report there are no competing interests to declare.

Notes

1 See, for example, George Ernest Morrison, ‘Diaries’, 3 December 1917 and 25 December 1917, George Ernest Morrison Collection, State Library of New South Wales (SLNSW), Sydney, MLMSS 312/25/3, 337, 359.

2 ‘Raids Would Teach Lesson’, Daily Telegraph, 12 October 1942, 2, https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/247892059.

3 While ‘public relations agent’ or another similar term might be a useful title for Morrison and Timperley, I refer to them as advisers in this article largely because this was the title that they used for themselves and, as I outline in the section on their careers, they bore many similarities to other western advisers in China and the title itself played a significant role in shaping their expectations in China.

4 This phrase was first evoked by then-prime minister Robert Menzies in a broadcast to the nation. See ‘Ministry’s Policy: Broadcast by Mr. Menzies’, Sydney Morning Herald, 27 April 1939, 9, https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/17578971.

5 See Mei-Fen Kuo, Making Chinese Australia: Urban Elites, Newspapers and the Formation of Chinese Australian Identity, 1892–1912 (Sydney, Australia: Monash University Publishing, 2013); Mei-fen Kuo, ‘Confucian Heritage, Public Narratives and Community Politics of Chinese Australians at the Beginning of the 20th Century’, in Chinese Australians: Politics, Engagement and Resistance, ed. Sophie Couchman and Kate Bagnall (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2015), 137–73; Sophie Loy-Wilson, ‘Peanuts and Publicists: “Letting Australian Friends Know the Chinese Side of the Story” in Interwar Sydney’, History Australia 6, no. 1 (2009): 06.1–06.20, https://doi.org/10.2104/ha090006; Paul Macgregor, ‘Alice Lim Kee: Journalist, Actor, Broadcaster, and Goodwill Ambassador’, in Locating Chinese Women: Historical Mobility between China and Australia, ed. Kate Bagnall and Julia T. Martinez (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2021).

6 Adam Aitken, ‘Australians Going Native: Race, Hybridity and Cultural Anamorphism in G.E. Morrison’s An Australian in China’, The Journal of the European Association for Studies of Australia 6, no. 1 (2015): 39.

7 David Walker, Anxious Nation: Australia and the Rise of Asia, 1850–1939 (Perth: University of Western Australia Press, 2012), 11.

8 David Walker and Agnieszka Sobocinska, ‘Introduction: Australia’s Asia’, in Australia’s Asia: From Yellow Peril to Asian Century (Perth: UWA Publishing, 2012), 13; See also Pam Oliver, ‘Japanese Relationships in White Australia: The Sydney Experience to 1941’, History Australia 4, no. 1 (2007): 05.1–05.20, https://doi.org/10.2104/ha070005; Kate Bagnall, ‘Potter v. Minahan: Chinese Australians, the Law and Belonging in White Australia’, History Australia 15, no. 3 (2018): 458–74, https://doi.org/10.1080/14490854.2018.1485503; Rohan Howitt, ‘The Japanese Antarctic Expedition and the Idea of White Australia’, Australian Historical Studies 49, no. 4 (October 2, 2018): 510–26, https://doi.org/10.1080/1031461X.2018.1509881; Aaron Marston-Pattison, ‘Un-Australian? White Australia’s Visions of Identity and the Racialisation of the Pacific War’, Australian Historical Studies 54, no. 3 (2023): 1–19, https://doi.org/10.1080/1031461X.2023.2175879.

9 Barbara Caine, Biography and History (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 61.

10 For biographies of Morrison see Cyril Pearl, Morrison of Peking (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1967); Peter Thompson and Robert Macklin, The Man Who Died Twice: The Life and Adventures of Morrison of Peking (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2004); and Peter Thompson, Shanghai Fury: Australian Heroes of Revolutionary China (Sydney: Random House, 2011), which does consider Morrison as one among other Australians active in twentieth-century Chinese politics, albeit with much of Morrison’s myth remaining intact. For academic studies featuring Morrison see Lanxin Xiang, The Origins of the Boxer War: A Multinational Study (London, United Kingdom: Routledge, 2002); Ian Nish, ‘Dr G.E. Morrison and Japan’, in Collected Writings of Ian Nish (London: Edition Synapse, 2004), 141–7; Eiko Woodhouse, The Chinese Hsinhai Revolution: G.E. Morrison and Anglo–Japanese Relations, 1897–1920 (London, New York: Routledge, 2004); Adam Aitken does consider Morrison alongside other Australian examples of self-orientalisation in Aitken, ‘Australians Going Native’.

11 See, for example, Woodhouse, The Chinese Hsinhai Revolution, 2.

12 Sophie Loy-Wilson, Australians in Shanghai: Race, Rights and Nation in Treaty Port China (London: Routledge, 2017), 24, 61–5.

13 For more on Britishness and Australian identity see Neville Meaney, ‘Britishness and Australian Identity: The Problem of Nationalism in Australian History and Historiography’, Australian Historical Studies 32, no. 116 (2001): 76–90, https://doi.org/10.1080/10314610108596148; Russell McGregor, ‘The Necessity of Britishness: Ethno-Cultural Roots of Australian Nationalism’, Nations and Nationalism 12, no. 3 (2006): 493–511, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-8129.2006.00250.x; Christopher Waters, ‘Nationalism, Britishness and Australian History: The Meaney Thesis Revisited’, History Australia 10, no. 3 (2013): 12–22, https://doi.org/10.1080/14490854.2013.11668476.

14 Walker, Anxious Nation, 1.

15 Ibid., 5.

16 Ibid., 10.

17 Ibid., 10, 11.

18 Lachlan Strahan, Australia’s China: Changing Perceptions from the 1930s to the 1990s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 2, 5. For a continuation of the arc of Australian perceptions of China into the present day see James Curran, Australia’s China Odyssey: From Euphoria to Fear (Sydney: NewSouth Publishing, 2022), which frames more recent Australian suspicion of China as a return to a ‘collective memory’ of anxiety over proximity to Asia.

19 For examples of the idea that Australia’s Asian anxiety is rooted in a collective unconscious and a settler fear of repeating the fate of the Indigenous Australians that they conquered, see, Walker, Anxious Nation, 9, 37, 38; Curran, Australia’s China Odyssey, xx. That these examples can be found in works grounded in other methods of analysing Australian perceptions of Asia demonstrates the power of this explanation, even if a discursive approach is more useful.

20 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: The Will to Knowledge (London: Penguin, 2020), 95.

21 Chengxin Pan, ‘Getting Excited about China’, in Australia’s Asia: From Yellow Peril to Asian Century, ed. David Walker and Agnieszka Sobocinska (Perth: UWA Publishing, 2012), 258.

22 Caine, Biography and History, 61, 62; Krista Cowman, ‘Collective Biography’, in Research Methods for History, ed. Simon Gunn and Lucy Faire (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 96.

23 Jonathan Spence, To Change China: Western Advisers in China, 1620–1960 (Boston, Toronto: Little, Brown and Company, 1969), 291.

24 Robert Bickers, Out of China: How the Chinese Ended the Era of Western Domination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 245–88; James L. Hevia, English Lessons: The Pedagogy of Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century China (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 13; Deborah Kaple, ‘Agents of Change: Soviet Advisers and High Stalinist Management in China, 1949–1960’, Journal of Cold War Studies 18, no. 1 (2016): 5–30, https://doi.org/10.1162/JCWS_a_00617.

25 For more on the dynamics of journalists-turned-advisers see Tess Gardner, ‘Australian Journalist-Advisers in Republican China, 1897–1942: The Careers of George Morrison and William Donald’ (PhD thesis, Australian National University, 2023), 7–12.

26 ‘Dr G.E. Morrison’, Times, 17 July 1900, 4.

27 See ‘Dr G.E. Morrison’ Times’ obituary. For examples and analysis of Morrison’s early support of Japan see Ian Nish, ‘Morrison and the Portsmouth Conference’, Royal Australian Historical Society Journal 48, no. 6 (1963): 426–36; Ian Nish, ‘Anglo–Japanese Alliance, 1902–23: Triumphs and Tribulations’, in Collected Writings of Ian Nish (London: Edition Synapse, 2004), 18; Nish, ‘Dr G.E. Morrison and Japan’; Cees Heere, Empire Ascendant: The British World, Race, and the Rise of Japan 1894–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019); Woodhouse, The Chinese Hsinhai Revolution.

28 Explanations for Morrison’s change of heart abound. Ian Nish claims it was rooted in Morrison’s sympathy for the Chinese, Eiko Woodhouse a desire to protect Australia from Japan, and Linda Fritzinger the blinkered perspective of a foreign correspondent immersed in their surroundings to the exclusion of the long view. Morrison himself maintained that he had never truly trusted Japan as allies and simply wanted to use them as an instrument for his foreign policy goals. See Ian Nish, ‘Dr G.E. Morrison and Japan’, 146; Woodhouse, The Chinese Hsinhai Revolution, 22; Linda B. Fritzinger, Diplomat Without Portfolio: Valentine Chirol, His Life and The Times (London: I.B. Tauris, 2006), 344; George Morrison to Valentine Chirol, 1 November 1906, in The Correspondence of G.E. Morrison: I – 1895–1912, ed. Lo Hui-min (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 387.

29 See, for example, ‘A Foreign Adviser for China: Dr Morrison Appointed’, Times 2 August 1912, 4.

30 Woodhouse, The Chinese Hsinhai Revolution, 165, 166.

31 See, for example, G.E. Morrison, ‘The Outlook in China: a Reply to Pessimists’, Times, 23 August 1912, 4.

32 Woodhouse, 166.

33 William Henry Donald in ‘Mr Will Donald: A Letter From China’, National Advocate, 15 July 1913, 4, https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/157812265. Donald originally wrote this in a letter to a friend who edited an Australian newspaper, and these words were leaked throughout the Australian press.

34 Morrison, in Pearl, Morrison of Peking, 306.

35 G.E. Morrison to T’sai T’ing-kan, 1 November 1915, in The Correspondence of G. E. Morrison: II – 1912–1920, ed. Lo Hui-Min (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 466, 467.

36 Ian Nish, ‘Dr Morrison and China’s Entry into the World War, 1915–1917’, in Studies in Diplomatic History: Essays in Memory of David Bayne Horn (London: Longman, 1970), 327, 336; Frances Wood and Christopher Arnander, Betrayed Ally: China in the Great War (Havertown, United States: Pen & Sword Books Limited, 2016), 113.

37 Samuel G. Blythe, ‘The First Time in Five Thousand Years’, Saturday Evening Post, 28 April 1917, 28–34; Paul S. Reinsch, An American Diplomat in China (London: Allen and Unwin, 1922). For more recent iterations of this narrative see Thompson and Macklin, The Man Who Died Twice; Thompson, Shanghai Fury. For more measured analyses see Peter Lowe, Great Britain and Japan 1911–15: A Study of British Far Eastern Policy (London: MacMillan, 1969); Guoqi Xu, Asia and the Great War: A Shared History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).

38 Kristopher C. Erskine, ‘American Public Diplomacy with Chinese Characteristics: The Genesis of the China Lobby in the United States, and How Missionaries Shifted American Foreign Policy between 1938 and 1941’, Journal of American–East Asian Relations 25, no. 1 (2018): 35.

39 Shuge Wei, News Under Fire: China’s Propaganda against Japan in the English-Language Press, 1928–1941 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2017), 187.

40 H.J. Timperley, What War Means: The Japanese Terror in China – A Documentary Record (London: V. Gollancz Ltd., 1938).

41 Ibid., 8.

42 James M. McHugh, ‘Memorandum’, 8 March 1939, Winston George Lewis Collection, SLNSW, MLMSS 7594/6/3, 3. For the development of these tactics see Philip M. Taylor, Munitions of the Mind: A History of Propaganda From the Ancient World to the Present Era, 3rd edition (Manchester, New York: Manchester University Press, 2003), 177–80.

43 Tom Buchanan, East Wind: China and the British Left, 1925–1976 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 75–80.

44 Helen Foster Snow to Winston George Lewis, 29 May 1969, ‘Correspondence of Winston George Lewis’, Winston George Lewis Collection, SLNSW, MLMSS 7594/1. 2. This is not to say that Timperley was sympathetic to the Chinese Communist Party, or that his support for the Nationalists was a contradiction. As Snow notes, he supported both the Industrial Cooperative movement and notions of ‘democracy’ in China.

45 For Timperley’s work in the United States with the Trans Pacific News Service and the American Committee for Non-Participation in Japanese Aggression see Erskine, ‘American Public Diplomacy with Chinese Characteristics’. For an example of Timperley’s lobbying see ‘Summary by China Campaign Committee of United States press articles on the Far East’, British Foreign Office Archives (BFOA), London, FO 568/193/61.

46 For Timperley’s attempts to sell the British Foreign Office on a role as adviser to the Chiangs, see Telegram to Archibald Clark Kerr, 23 November 1940, ‘Return of Mr Timperley to China’, BFOA, F 5140/3281/10; H.J. Timperley to R.A. Butler, 5 November 1940, ‘Application for a Steamship Passage’, BFOA, F 5261/3281/10. The exact details of Soong Mei-ling’s response to Timperley’s offer are unavailable, but it rendered his discussion with the Foreign Office moot.

47 H.J. Timperley to J.M. McHugh, 2 August 1939, ‘Photocopies of papers re James M. McHugh’, Winston George Lewis Collection, SLNSW, MLMSS 7594/6/6, 2. Tong had, for example, attempted to cut Timperley’s funds while he was in London.

48 Ibid., 3.

49 Berkely Gage, ‘Application for a Steamship Passage and Exit Permit’, BFOA, F 5261/3281/10.

50 ‘“Chinese” Morrison: Notable Australian Comes Home’, Daily Telegraph (Sydney), 12 December 1917, 10, https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/239236337.

51 Ibid., 10.

52 Karen Fox, ‘Melbamania: Nellie Melba and Celebrity in the British World’, in Revisiting the British World : New Voices and Perspectives, ed. Jatinder Mann and Iain Johnston-White (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2022), 104.

53 Benjamin Mountford, Britain, China, and Colonial Australia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 235.

54 Pearl, Morrison of Peking, 357.

55 Thompson and Macklin, The Man Who Died Twice, 328, 329.

56 Morrison, ‘Diaries’, 12 December 1917, SLNSW, MLMSS 312/25/Item 3, 346.

57 Morrison to Donald, 23 November 1917, in Hui-min, The Correspondence of G. E. Morrison: II – 1912–1920, 643.

58 ‘Outlook in the Far East: Address by Dr G. E. Morrison’, Argus, 31 December 1917, 4, https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/1671662.

59 Aitken, ‘Australians Going Native’; Peter Monteath, ‘Peripheries of Empire: G.E. Morrison’s An Australian in China’, in Colonialism, China and the Chinese, ed. Peter Monteath and Matthew Fitzpatrick (London: Routledge, 2019); see also Tom Gardner, ‘Sympathetic or Sinister?: Representations of China in George Ernest Morrison’s An Australian in China’, ANU Historical Journal II 2 (2020), 19, 20.

60 ‘Millions Club: Mr. Watt and Dr. Morrison Entertained’, Sydney Morning Herald, 13 December 1917, 6, https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/15738089.

61 Aitken, ‘Australians Going Native’, 39.

62 ‘Australia and the War: Declaration by Mr Hughes’, Morning Bulletin, 13 December 1917, 5, https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/53829069.

63 ‘Outlook in the Far East’, Argus, 4.

64 Pearl, Morrison of Peking, 351, 352.

65 G.E. Morrison to J. Allen, 22 February 1918, in Hui-min, The Correspondence of G.E. Morrison: II – 1912–1920, 661.

66 Ibid.

67 G.E. Morrison to Zumoto Motosada, 3 October 1916, in Hui-men, The Correspondence of G.E. Morrison: II – 1912–1920, 556. Morrison was fond of describing the German garrison in these terms, repeating it in at least one other letter.

68 Ibid., 557.

69 G.E. Morrison to T’sai T’ing-kan, 1 November 1915, in Hui-Min, The Correspondence of G. E. Morrison: II – 1912–1920, 464.

70 Pearl, Morrison of Peking, 352.

71 Walker, Anxious Nation, 195.

72 Ibid., 196, 202.

73 Ibid., 107, 108.

74 Heere, Empire Ascendant, 193.

75 Wei, News Under Fire, 127–29.

76 Lloyd E. Eastman, ‘Nationalist China During the Sino–Japanese War, 1937–1945’, in The Cambridge History of China, ed. John K. Faribank and Albert Feuerwerker, vol. 13 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 577.

77 Taylor, Munitions of the Mind, 208. For another example of Nationalist propaganda in Australia, see Macgregor, ‘Alice Lim Kee’.

78 Marston-Pattison, ‘Un-Australian?’, 2.

79 Ibid., 15, 16.

80 ‘Tuesday, March 16’, ABC Weekly 13 March 1943, 27, https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-1310072145/view?sectionId=nla.obj-1353921906&partId=nla.obj-1310166864#page/n26/mode/1up; ‘Tuesday March 9’, ABC Weekly 6 March 1943, 27, https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-1310072121/view?partId=nla.obj-1310154396#page/n26/mode/1up.

81 H.J. Timperley, ‘Chinese Names’, ABC Weekly 20 March 1943, 4, https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-1310202638/view?sectionId=nla.obj-1353952523&partId=nla.obj-1310216549#page/n4/mode/1up.

82 H.J. Timperley, ‘China – a second front’, ABC Weekly 17 April 1943, 2, https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-1310202718/view?sectionId=nla.obj-1354079181&partId=nla.obj-1310232127.

83 Ibid.

84 Strahan, Australia’s China, 41–45.

85 Marston-Pattison, ‘Un-Australian?’, 16.

86 H.J. Timperley ‘Wartime Yunnan: From an A.B.C. Talk by H. J. Timperley’, ABC Weekly, 13 March 1943, 7, https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-1310072145/view?sectionId=nla.obj-1353919943&partId=nla.obj-1310159718.

87 Timperley, ‘China – a Second Front’, 2.

88 Wei, News Under Fire, 223. For another example of this message crafted by an Australian in Nationalist service, see W.H. Donald, ‘Letter to H.J. Timperley, 30 December, 1938, from Headquarters of the Generalissimo, Chungking, Szechwan, China’, National Library of Australia, Canberra, SRq 480. Timperley played a part in distributing this content and adding to it while acting as a propaganda agent in the United Kingdom and United States.

89 H.J. Timperley, Japan: A World Problem (New York: John Day Company, 1942).

90 H.J. Timperley ‘Nipponism and Nazism’, ABC Weekly, 27 February 1943, 7, https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-1310072100/view?sectionId=nla.obj-1353810341&partId=nla.obj-1310132071#page/n6/mode/1up.

91 Robin Gerster, ‘War by Photography: Shooting Japanese in Australia’s Pacific War’, History of Photography 40, no. 4 (2016): 434.

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Tess Gardner

Dr Tess Gardner is a funded historian at the State Library of New South Wales, currently undertaking a research project into the George Ernest Morrison Collection at the State Library under a grant from the National Foundation for Australia–China Relations. She was awarded a PhD from the Australian National University's School of History in late 2023 for her thesis on Australian journalist-advisers in early twentieth century China.