‘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

Introduction

In December 1917 the doctor, journalist, amateur ethnographer, and lately adviser to the Chinese President, George Morrison, returned to his home country of Australia. He spent most of his trip to Australia seething, leaving a litany of complaints in his diary of drunkenness and idleness in the cities despite the ongoing World War and the ignorance of Australians about China.¹ In August 1942 Harold Timperley, the journalist-turned-adviser and propaganda agent for the Chinese Nationalist government, arrived in Sydney. While he did not have as many complaints about drunk idlers, Timperley found the attitude of his fellow Australians to both Asia and the Second World War strange. While in Melbourne he grimly suggested that ‘a bombing raid or two’ might cure the ‘unreality’ of Australian complaints about the shortage of luxuries when millions in China were ‘on the verge of starvation’.² After years of living in China, both Australians felt that their countrymen were complacent about the situation in Asia, but they were also out of touch with many Australian attitudes. The timing of their visits during world wars provided a sense of urgency as they set out to make Australians more aware of, and friendlier to, China.

Morrison and Timperley attempted to cast China as a loyal ally to Australia in the First and Second World Wars. They sought to both increase Australia’s international presence and support China during the upheavals of the early twentieth century and worked where these two goals complemented each other. They did so by playing into discourses of Australian anxiety of, and vulnerability to Asia, especially Japan, all the while also stressing Chinese friendship. These efforts were a continuation of their earlier work as advisers which, despite what their job titles imply, was mainly focused on managing the overseas image of the Chinese government.³ Analyses of Australia’s changing attitudes to Asia usually emphasise the tension between anxiety and optimism in Australian reactions to its situation as an outpost of Anglo–Saxon culture in the South Pacific. They often refer to a fearful response towards their neighbours in the ‘Near North’.⁴ The anxiety in Morrison and Timperley’s depictions of China, was not the result of an inherent Australian antipathy to Asia: rather, it came about because of their experiences in China and their political goals as advisers to its government. While they invoked some of the same tropes as fearful Australian depictions of Asia (usually strategically), their goals of fostering closer engagement between Australia and China meant that they also used their perceived expertise on China to put more familiar faces on its alterity.

In presenting China as an ally to Australia, Morrison and Timperley spoke from their positions as white journalists with expertise to a white Australian audience. Their roles with the Chinese government lent to their claims of intimate knowledge of China and their ability to speak on its behalf. This produced a very different set of discourses to other images of China at the time, including those by Chinese–Australians.⁵ Both claimed knowledge over the Far East in order to present it as familiar even while maintaining their claims of Australia’s vulnerability towards it. While this was a simple matter for Timperley, who cast China as Australia’s ally in the war against Japan, for Morrison the contradiction was borne throughout his depictions of China. To use Adam Aitken’s phrase, he presented it as both ‘desirable and disgusting’, mixing praise and hostility with no apparent contradictions.⁶ Tensions between claims of both threat and opportunity in Asia were not unique to optimistic Australian discourses on Asia, and ‘Asia’ has always remained a sufficiently fluid category in the Australian imagination to allow for such tension.⁷ Morrison and Timperley were different from other Australian interlocutors in that they attempted – more out of political conviction and personal experience than duplicity – to employ these contradictory discourses in the service of their Chinese employers.

In this article, I will first outline the poles of scholarship on Australian perceptions of Asia and the tensions between anxiety and optimism they have identified and explored, before outlining the careers of Morrison and Timperley. I will then address their tours of Australia. Where Morrison’s efforts at crafting pro-Chinese messages for the Australian press were ad hoc, improvised, and a result of what he was otherwise prevented from doing by the Chinese government, Timperley’s were much more tightly integrated within both Chinese and Australian propaganda machinery.

Following the re-examination of what historians David Walker and Agnieszka Sobocinska call ‘the master narrative of antipathy’, scholars have begun to highlight the contradictions and tensions of Australian racial anxieties with acceptance of Asia and its peoples, as well as a more flexible application of ‘White Australia’ than previously appreciated.⁸ In this vein, my article uses comparative biography to link arguments for Australian vulnerability with the people who made them, demonstrating the overlapping dynamics, which led Morrison and Timperley to employ discourses of anxiety.⁹ This is a departure from other studies of Morrison, both biographical and academic, that usually consider him only as an individual rather than one of many western journalists that worked for the Chinese government over the early twentieth century.¹⁰ A combination of hagiographic biographies, a significant collection at the State Library of New South Wales, and the annual lecture named after him at the Australian National University have imparted Morrison with ‘great man’ status in narratives of Australia and China. Not only does an expansion of scope beyond the individual provide grounds to take more critical approaches to many of the narratives around Morrison, it highlights the different ways by which Chinese governments have presented themselves to the west through foreign advisers. It also draws attention to how the images of China crafted by these Australians had more to do with their roles in Chinese politics and their positions as frustrated advisers than their Australian origins and the antipathy that is often assumed to inherently follow.

As employees of the Chinese government and as established China Hands, Morrison and Timperley were rooted in direct experience of Asia and broader political approaches towards it. Their origins did not play as significant a role as historians have suggested.¹¹ As Sophie Loy-Wilson has demonstrated, treaty ports were sites in which Australians were rendered marginal. This led them to adopt British identities in order to make the most of the mobility and modernity that whiteness afforded them.¹² This, in addition to their mobility throughout the networks of empire, means that Morrison and Timperley are best thought of as British imperial figures tied to China. This is slightly complicated by the ways in which other Britons in China identified them as Australians, as well as the reception they encountered when they returned to Australia.¹³ Nevertheless it remains too simplistic to cast Morrison or Timperley as having ‘Australian’ approaches to China without taking into account the roles and experiences in China that shaped them.

For Morrison, his presentation of China reflected his tendency to appropriate symbols of Asia to establish his credentials to speak on it. For Timperley, emphasising the Japanese threat from which China would save Australia fit within the goals of the Chinese Nationalist Ministry of Information, as well as his adoption of the ethos of the anti-fascist United Front. Both, as advisers to the Chinese government, carried with them a lingering sense of superiority and a belief that their work would transform China along the lines they envisaged. In reality, their efforts were significantly influenced by their employers in the central government, rather than the other way around. While the Chinese government of 1917 made inconsistent and informal use of Morrison as an adviser and much of his efforts were launched on his own initiative, the Nationalist government used Timperley as part of a consistent propaganda strategy with key messages that shaped his work accordingly. Just as Morrison and Timperley took different approaches to China, the ways in which China presented itself to Australia through western journalists changed between the wars, shifting to a more explicit use of journalists for propaganda purposes with much clearer directives from the Chinese government. Morrison and Timperley’s depiction of Australian vulnerability served Chinese international purposes as much as it did Australian fears about its proximity to Asia.

Between anxiety and optimism? Australia’s response to Asia

A range of historians have captured the evolution of Australia’s approach to China in a broad sweep from 1850 to the time of writing. Since the nineteenth century the chief tensions identified have been between anxiety and optimism, but both are bound in imperial fantasies. David Walker’s Anxious Nation (1999) concerns itself with Australia’s ‘periodic rediscovery of our proximity to Asia’ between 1850 and 1939.¹⁴ This rediscovery prompted anxiety in the form of invasion fears, with images of a ‘rising Asia’ threatening Anglo–Saxon ownership over Australia.¹⁵ Coexisting with this anxiety over the near northern threat was the hope that ‘proximity to Asia might bring considerable trade benefits’ and a fascination with Asian cultures.¹⁶ The inability of an entire continent to fit a single convenient narrative fed the tensions between this anxiety and optimism: ‘Asia’, Walker argues, ‘was sufficiently protean to promise both elimination and greatness and almost every shade of possibility in between’.¹⁷

Lachlan Strahan, in Australia’s China (1996), covers Australian approaches to China from the 1930s to the 1990s. Where Walker also concerns himself with Australian images of India and Japan, China is Strahan’s sole focus. He rejects the model of a pendulum swinging from positive to negative images of China used by earlier historians and instead describes ‘a continuous dialogue between contrasting points of view, each struggling for pre-eminence’, and a ‘multifaceted, highly textured and sometimes contradictory body of stereotypes concerning Chinese’.¹⁸

While anxiety over Asian invasion is sometimes conceived as a shadow of collective memory or guilt hanging over the Australian settler colonial project, Foucault’s concepts of power and discourse are more helpful for thinking through Australia’s perceptions of Asia.¹⁹ Australian discourses on China have featured resistance, contradictions, and tensions, just as the power structures they reflect have done so.²⁰ Not only did Morrison and Timperley’s depictions of Asia reflect the geopolitical shifts of East Asia over the course of the twentieth century but their own positions in Chinese and British imperial politics. As the historian Chengxin Pan argues, the tensions between anxiety and optimism say more about Australia than they do China: both strains are rooted in imperial fantasies and an Orientalist tendency to ascribe a false unity to Asia, ignoring its complexity.²¹ Morrison and Timperley’s arguments about Australia and China were rooted in their claims to knowledge and understanding of China, but their optimism was based, as Pan has observed, on fantasies of China.

For Morrison and Timperley, there were two chief issues in their arguments for embracing China. The first was that Australia was missing out on opportunities that it could ill afford to ignore. For Morrison, this was an economic opportunity to take advantage of China’s Open Door and access markets of millions. For Timperley, it was the opportunity to win China over as an ally into the post-war international order. Missing any of these opportunities would prove, it was claimed, a dire mistake.

The second issue was the potential of another power threatening Australia. For both Morrison and Timperley this was Japan, from which China was Australia’s bulwark. Where China has not been the existential threat to Australia, then, it has been the source of its salvation from another, more dire challenge. Rather than a sign of constant anxiety, these contradictions reflect a discursive tension in white Australian perceptions of Asia that points away from a binary of anxiety and optimism. Morrison and Timperley’s depictions of China reflected the tensions in Australian discourses on Asia, but they also cannot be understood without accounting for their direct experiences of Asia, the other ways in which their approaches to it were formed, and the uses to which their Chinese employers put them.

Morrison and Timperley’s careers

Comparing the discursive output of two individuals prompts a consideration of how Morrison and Timperley’s careers led to the point at which they were working for the Chinese government and selling its contribution to the Allies across two world wars. Thinking about their lives comparatively avoids the artificial isolation often imposed on biographical subjects, linking them more effectively to historical processes around them.²² Morrison and Timperley’s trips to Australia were continuations of the same work that they did as advisers to the Chinese government. This involved managing how China was perceived overseas more than any advice that their titles implied.

The first important similarity between them was the ‘standpoint of superiority’ that western advisers brought to China. As journalists-turned-advisers to the Chinese government, this was a standpoint that Morrison and Timperley shared.²³ With it came a belief that the advisers’ work would shape China according to their ideals. Despite this belief, Chinese politicians always took the advice of their foreign employees on their own terms. Foreign advisers from the west and Japan proliferated after the establishment of the republic, their appointment often a condition of loan negotiations between the Chinese government and foreign powers. Their presence dwindled after the end of the Second World War, to be replaced by Soviet advisers.²⁴ Morrison and Timperley operated during the peak of western advisers in China. Unlike diplomatic, military, legal, military or technical advisers, as former journalists their work entailed using their skills in the press to shape China’s image overseas rather than shaping China’s internal organisation.²⁵ This led to the other important similarity between Morrison and Timperley: when they travelled to Australia, they did so at points in their careers where their hopes of being the guiding hands of the Chinese government had been firmly dashed, leaving them disappointed in their roles as advisers.

George Ernest Morrison was the more famous of the two Australian journalists with a much more storied career in China. He was appointed as the Peking correspondent of the Times in 1897, where he built a reputation on seeing through the ‘atmosphere of lies’ in China and regularly scooping official sources such as the British Foreign Office on what the other imperial powers were doing in the Far East.²⁶ Lacking a byline to his copy, the Times’ Peking Correspondent remained acclaimed but anonymous until the Boxer War of 1900–01, when false news of the fall of the foreign legations in Peking spread in the western press. Presuming Morrison dead, the Times lauded his work as a journalist in an obituary, launching him into an international fame, which he leveraged to support Japan in the lead-up to the Russo–Japanese War of 1904–05.²⁷ Morrison hoped that Britain would reap the rewards of Japanese victory in East Asia. When these rewards were not forthcoming, he turned on Japan, seeing it as a threat to Chinese integrity and the British position in East Asia.²⁸ After the 1911 Xinhai revolution, when the Qing dynasty was overthrown in favour of a republic, Morrison was offered a job as an adviser to the new president on the basis of his connections with Chinese officialdom.

Morrison’s hope was that he would work to establish China as a great nation and increase its international standing while also deepening its ties to the British Empire. However, the only action his employers truly permitted him involved using his reputation and knowledge of the foreign press to improve their image in the Anglo world. This was an informal role that relied on Morrison’s reputation in the west and his links with his former employers at the Times which, reflecting official British opinion, took it as an encouraging sign that the new republican government had recruited a prominent British citizen to such an important position.²⁹ The Times and the Foreign Office, along with Morrison himself, hoped that he would be able to guide China to modernity while aligning it internationally with Great Britain. In this, Morrison attempted to work at the intersection of Chinese and British interests. His appointment in itself was calculated to inspire confidence in the new Chinese government.³⁰ Morrison enhanced this effect through his own interactions with the press, including interviews with British media in August of 1912, attempting to reassure readers and potential investors in the new republic and to dispel what he described as ‘hysterical and sensational forecasts of civil war and disruption’.³¹ This overly optimistic image of China’s prosperity and stability was one to which he would return throughout the rest of his career as an adviser. However, the reality of Morrison’s position as, to use the historian Eiko Woodhouse’s phrase, ‘an expensive strategy … to acquire loans and recognition from the foreign powers’, was deeply unsatisfying for a man who had been expecting to play a guiding hand in Chinese policy.³² Morrison revealed his frustrations to an Australian friend in Peking, who reflected: ‘I see Morrison daily, and he does not know whether to be tired of his job or not … Advice is easy to give, but – a horse can be led to a stream, etc. The Chinaman will listen to advice, but will do what he thinks he wants to do. Morrison feels that frequently’.³³ Privately, Morrison summarised the effects of his career as an adviser in his diary: ‘I have gained in health perhaps I am better in pocket … but I have lost in influence and in prestige and I fear sometimes in self-respect – though I am nowise deceived myself’.³⁴ Despite his title of adviser, then, the only role, which Morrison’s employers allowed him to truly pursue, was that of managing how China was perceived overseas.

Despite his frustrations with his role, Morrison made renewed attempts at providing advice after the outbreak of the First World War. His chief aim was to bring the Chinese Republic on to the side of the Allies, hoping to both provide support to the republic and forestall Japanese attempts to seize further concessions from China while the other powers were distracted by the war. From 1915, Morrison put forth arguments to this effect to the Chinese government, although he was careful to publicly downplay the possibility of China recovering the German concessions seized by Japan.³⁵ A growing body of nationalist politicians and students supported China’s entry into the war, but the greatest obstacle remained Japanese resistance to the idea until it guaranteed its hold over German concessions in China and relented in 1917.³⁶ In the west, this shift in Chinese foreign policy was credited to a group of foreign interlocutors known as the ‘Flying Wedge’, of which Morrison was part. They instigated China’s severing of relations with Germany and Austria–Hungary.³⁷ Erroneously or not, Morrison believed that his efforts as an adviser had finally born fruit. His overall mood, however, remained one of frustration with his employers, who had mostly used him to improve their image in the foreign press.

Harold John Timperley had a less spectacular career in China journalism until the Second Sino–Japanese War. After serving in the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) in the First World War – he was deployed in France during Morrison’s trip to Australia – he travelled to China in 1921 to work as a journalist. He became China correspondent for the Manchester Guardian while working for progressive publications such as Asia and the China Press. At the outbreak of war between Japan and China in 1937, Timperley began to work unofficially for the Chinese Ministry of Information under his old colleague at the China Press, and now director of Nationalist propaganda, Hollington Tong.³⁸ This was part of a broader shift in Nationalist propaganda, as the Ministry of Information recruited western journalists to spread their message through the foreign press.³⁹ This was a significant change from the more ad hoc use of Morrison to present images of a stable China by the early republican government. After the fall of Nanking, Timperley’s articles on Japanese atrocities were censored by the Japanese government, and at Tong’s urging he compiled a number of accounts of Japan’s actions into a book, What War Means (1938).⁴⁰ Not only did this publicise the infamous Rape of Nanking for British and American audiences, it established a line of argument on Japanese militarism that Timperley would continue for the rest of his career with the Nationalists. In the foreword he argued that his intention was not to vilify the Japanese people but rather to give an accurate account of Japanese atrocities ‘so that war may be recognised for the detestable business it really is and thus be stripped of the false glamour with which militarist megalomaniacs seek to invest it’.⁴¹ Timperley attempted to ground his criticisms of Japan in pacifism and anti-fascism rather than racial antipathy towards Japan.

In the years following the publication of What War Means Timperley was given a more formal position as an adviser to the Nationalist government. Despite the title, he acted as a propaganda agent for the Nationalists and was sent to the United Kingdom and United States to coordinate pro-Chinese propaganda efforts there. Using the work of British agents in the United States during the First World War as a model for his actions, he organised pro-Chinese interest groups to elicit support for the Nationalists.⁴² Within the United Kingdom, Timperley worked with leftist groups such as the China Campaign Committee that were inspired by the principles of the anti-fascist United Front.⁴³ Coming from western socialist circles in Shanghai, Timperley successfully inserted himself into this milieu.⁴⁴ Working alongside these pro-China groups, he lobbied the governments of the United Kingdom and United States in an attempt to secure support for China.⁴⁵ The situation, however, was not to either Timperley or Tong’s satisfaction.

Like Morrison before him, Timperley hoped that the title of adviser would allow him to shape Chinese politics, but his efforts at actually influencing the Chinese government failed. When Madame Chiang Kai-shek’s famous Australian adviser, William Donald, left China, Timperley offered his services to her but was politely rebuffed.⁴⁶ Furthermore, his relationship with Tong continued to deteriorate, meaning that whenever he returned to China he was quickly sent back overseas again.⁴⁷ Timperley’s papers, and any personal reflections on his situation that they may have contained, have not survived, but what is available from his correspondence hints at a frustration similar to Morrison’s. Timperley reflected to one American friend that without Donald he was cut off from any connection to the Chiangs and that he and Tong ‘could very easily get on each other’s nerves if we worked in too close contact’. He added, ‘We are both very positive in our ideas of the way things ought to be done and that must necessarily make for occasional friction’.⁴⁸ The British diplomat Sir Berkeley Gage, on considering the advisability of allowing Timperley to proceed to China and attempt to take a closer role with the Chiangs, described him as ‘bitter and arrogant and in everything he undertakes his own prestige comes first’.⁴⁹ Even allowing for Gage’s frustration as a frequent target of Timperley’s propaganda efforts, Timperley does not emerge as being especially contented in his role as an adviser.

Morrison and Timperley’s returns to Australia both lay towards the end of their careers, when they were at their most frustrated with their employers, but each remained convinced that his work was important. Lacking the ability to shape China as desired, they attempted to use their skills as journalists and their personal experiences of Asia to shape instead Australia’s approach to it.

‘It would give me and fellow Britons in China great pleasure if we could be of service to you’: Morrison’s ad hoc speaking tour of Australia

While Morrison was not as vital to China’s entry into the war as he liked to think, he saw this as the perfect high note on which to end his career in China, and when he left for Australia at the end of the year his vague intention was to retire after a period of rest.⁵⁰ Morrison’s fame in Australia meant that he was well received wherever he visited. One article in the Daily Telegraph, for example, read ‘Australia is apt – too apt – to forget her illustrious sons. Only when one of them comes back from the busy world of affairs is it realised that this country has produced men who count in the counsels of nations. Of such is Dr G.E. Morrison’.⁵¹ As Karen Fox notes in her studies of famous Australians, Australian celebrity at this time was bound up in both imperial and national identities, but the Australian public was quick to reclaim its internationally famous members and welcome them home.⁵² Not only was Morrison a returned illustrious son, he was one whose experiences and career had imparted on him that status of – to use Benjamin Mountford’s phrase – ‘Australia’s Far Eastern Oracle’.⁵³ Fame and expertise turned Morrison’s holiday into a press tour that he attempted to turn to his employers’ and Australia’s advantage by fostering closer trade links between China and Australia.

Despite his stated goal of resting, Morrison found little time to relax. He was exhausted by invitations to attend events, to the point where he complained in his diary of being ‘on the brink of a nervous breakdown’.⁵⁴ Morrison’s biographers Peter Thompson and Robert Macklin cast the itinerary as an intentional speaking tour where he would present a few prepared remarks.⁵⁵ His diary, however, suggests that it was a great deal more impromptu. After the first invitation caught him by surprise and left him ‘uncomfortable and nervous and embarrassed’, Morrison prepared a stock speech around a series of anecdotes from his adventures.⁵⁶ Building from his previous work as an adviser in improving China’s image overseas, he also tried to present China’s entry into the Allies as an opportunity that Australia could not afford to ignore.

One of Morrison’s specific goals in his impromptu speaking tour was the creation of an Australian commissioner to Shanghai to facilitate trade. He became convinced this was necessary while on the boat from Hong Kong to Brisbane, where he was dismayed by the ignorance of the Australian businessmen he met. He complained to a friend that ‘Australians are spending thousands in Japan and are ignorant of the existence of China’.⁵⁷ This offended him on both pro-Chinese and anti-Japanese grounds. In arguing for closer connections, however, Morrison used the language of China as a threat, as he had done since he first began to write about East Asia. He told one audience that ‘living … in luxurious ease, blinded by our prosperity, we were disregarding the signs and portents, and the fact that outside our undefended borders there were other worlds, coming nearer and nearer to us’.⁵⁸ Rather than stressing the benefits of trade with China, Morrison presented opportunities of the Chinese economy as something advancing upon Australia, evoking the language of the Yellow Peril to argue for the importance of deepening its trade links. This followed one of the strains of Australian thinking on China – that Australia might miss out on the economic opportunities it represented – but it was inspired by Morrison’s experiences in travelling through the Pacific and a desire to benefit the government he served.

The flip side of Morrison’s image of a Chinese danger to Australia was an attempt to make China familiar. This followed the pattern he had set early in his career, always depicting it as both ‘desirable and disgusting’ with no apparent internal contradiction.⁵⁹ Morrison’s praise for and demonisation of China were deeply intertwined throughout his career, leading to the depiction of a nation advancing nearer and nearer upon Australia that he could nevertheless render familiar. At a meeting of the Millions Club, Morrison told his audience:

No Chinese ever questions the word of an Englishman … I have been treated with courtesy, consideration, and generosity, the recollection of which I never can forget … I am in the employment of the Chinese government. It would give me and fellow Britons in China great pleasure if we could be of service to you.⁶⁰

Using ‘we’ in this final sentence played into Morrison’s tendency to self-orientalise in order to establish his expertise, another common pattern in his career.⁶¹ In Australia, however, he also used it to put a more attractive face on the Chinese government, eliding his frustrations with China in the process. In addition, Morrison stressed the ongoing modernisation of China alongside its contribution to the war effort, predicting that the country would be able to send 800,000 troops to the front.⁶² While it is unlikely that Morrison himself believed the number, he used it to present China as Australia’s strategic ally alongside its economic opportunity in the Pacific, but trade and the consequences of remaining ignorant of China remained his focus.

The other argument that Morrison made while in Australia, albeit privately, was the threat of Japan. This continued an anti-Japanese trend that had been present in his thinking since the conclusion of the Russo–Japanese War. When Morrison tentatively referred to Japan as Britain’s ‘trusted ally’, in one lecture, however, he was met with applause, stopping him from pressing the matter further.⁶³ Distrust of Japan grew in the British World during the First World War, but not to the extent that Morrison was comfortable criticising Japan publicly. This did not, though, stop him from presenting Japan as a threat in his private conversations. Over the course of his time in Melbourne, then the capital of Australia, Morrison met important figures in Australian politics such as James Legge, the Army Chief of Staff; William Hughes, the Prime Minister; and Major E. L. Piesse, the director of Military Intelligence.⁶⁴ There, he put his case to a more receptive audience.

Chief among Morrison’s invectives against Japan were his assessment of its contributions to the Allied war effort, finding particular fault in Japan’s convoying transports through the Pacific and the capture of Tsingtao. In a letter to James Allen, the New Zealand Minister of Defence, for example, Morrison argued that Japan was not in fact convoying Allied shipping: ‘Has one of their ships ever exchanged a shot with an enemy ship? “Convoying” is not the correct word to use. Even “escorting” would be too great a claim. “Accompanying” is the proper term’.⁶⁵ This conveniently ignored the loss of the Japanese destroyer Sakaki by an Austro–Hungarian submarine in the Mediterranean. At times his thinking about Japan bordered on the conspiratorial, as he wondered why German raiders never seemed to target Japan’s shipping: ‘are we not justified in suspecting that Japanese protection to German trade in China and Japan, and Japanese immunity from Germany submarines were in some way related[?]’⁶⁶ For Morrison, Japan’s contribution to the war effort was limited by its sympathy for Germany, if not its outright collusion. As a result, he was able to cast the nation as a threat to Australia despite being on the same side in the war.

Morrison largely ignored the Japanese presence in China except to further disparage Japan’s contribution to the war. He described, for example, the German concession at Tsingtao, seized by an Anglo–Japanese force at the beginning of the war, as ‘a weakly defended fort garrisoned by an untrained mob of German Bank clerks and potbellied pastry cooks’ and said of its capture that ‘out of all proportion to the effort were the immense advantages thereby obtained [by Japan] in China.⁶⁷ Where Morrison discussed Japan’s role in China, he rarely brought up Japanese expansion.⁶⁸ This was the same approach he had taken while arguing for China to join the Allies, believing that British audiences would be unsympathetic to the Chinese plight against Japan.⁶⁹ Morrison instead focused on Japan’s lack of loyalty to the Allies, as he had done throughout the war. He framed this more in terms of British interests than Chinese, but both fuelled his anti-Japanese stance and were rarely far from his mind. Morrison’s biographer, Cyril Pearl, describes his audiences in these arguments as ‘listening politely’ while Morrison railed against Japan’s duplicity as an ally and warned that it should not be allowed to keep the Marshall Islands, formerly a German colony in the Pacific.⁷⁰ He repeated arguments that he had been making since early in the war, but with limited effect.

Morrison was not the only Australian to argue that it needed to both deepen its ties with China and be more suspicious of Japan, but others were not much more successful. In 1919, for example, the editor of the Brisbane Telegraph wrote that ‘every Australian business-man should carry a map of China in his head’, but other newspapers such as the Bulletin dismissed this idea for fear it would compromise White Australia.⁷¹ An Australian commissioner, Edward S. Little, was despatched to Shanghai in 1921, but his appointment proved controversial. Australians in Shanghai complained that he was too pretentious, too involved in Chinese politics, and accused him of corruption.⁷² The Australian trade commission to China proved to be short-lived, and Little resigned just over a year after he was appointed. Morrison may have expected his arguments on the threat of Japan to be better received. Between the end of the Russo–Japanese war and the beginning of the First World War there was a great deal of Australian anxiety around the imagined threat of Japanese invasion and Japanese espionage.⁷³ Australians often looked upon the Anglo–Japanese alliance with hostility and saw it as a potential avenue for the British to betray Australia. The First World War, however, briefly interrupted this trend with Imperial and Allied solidarity.⁷⁴ The timing of Morrison’s presentation of Japan as a threat, then, meant that it was not readily accepted.

Morrison’s pro-Chinese efforts in Australia were impromptu, undirected by his employers, and focused mostly on trade with China rather than its contribution to the Allies. This fits within his earlier work as an adviser to the Chinese government. The picture he presented of China was at once dire threat, economic opportunity, and loyal ally, all with no apparent contradiction. It reflected Morrison’s tendencies to self-orientalise, to view Asia as both desirable and disgusting, and to look askance upon Japan: all three were fuelled by his experiences in Beijing and his prioritisation of both the British Empire and China, acting where the interests of the two intersected.

‘Our friends the Chinese’: Timperley’s propaganda work with the ABC

When Timperley arrived in Australia in August 1942, he had only eight months left on his contract with the Nationalists. While it is unclear what Hollington Tong specifically directed Timperley to do while he was in Australia, from Tong’s perspective, despatching him south was likely a convenient way for him to serve the rest of his time. Not only had their own relationship deteriorated, but the general propaganda goals in the west of the Nationalist government had been achieved. From the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931, the Ministry of Information had set out to turn western public opinion in favour of China and against Japan in the hope of eliciting material support, if not drawing the United Kingdom and United States into the war against Japan.⁷⁵ The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour and other western colonies in the Pacific brought these countries into the war, although the Nationalists never received as much support, as they would have liked in the aftermath.⁷⁶ The Nationalists believed the best policy was to hold their positions and wait for Allied victory in the Pacific. Timperley was sent to sell the merits of the Chinese role in the war. With China as an ally to Australia, and a Nationalist propaganda network already in place, Timperley was able to contribute to the Australian press directly instead of organising lobbying groups as he had done elsewhere, and his work became integrated into an Allied propaganda apparatus that had already been set up for the war with Germany and Japan.⁷⁷ Timperley focused his attention on China’s participation in the war to a much greater extent than did Morrison. His efforts were aided by the fact that China had been fighting for the past four years instead of only having just joined the war, by how Timperley had financial and institutional support from the Ministry of Information, and by how he was able to reach much wider audiences than Morrison had.

As part of his work for the Nationalists, Timperley was a source to Australian journalists, gave public lectures on the situation in China, and wrote material for the Australian Broadcasting Commission’s (ABC’s) shortwave department. His lectures left a similar imprint in the press as Morrison’s tour did, but his radio talks allowed him to communicate to greater numbers. Some of these talks were aimed at Japanese audiences but the vast majority were pro-Chinese broadcasts in Australia. They came under two themes: ‘Our Friends the Chinese’ and ‘Japan Against the World’. Timperley’s broadcasts came a year after a series of broadcasts by the Australian Government Bureau of Information entitled ‘Know Your Enemy’, which vilified Japanese people and attempted to cast the war against Japan as a race war. As Aaron Marston-Pattison argues, this message faced resistance in Australia on a number of fronts, but its critics did not abandon racialised thinking entirely.⁷⁸ Borrowing the term from Wang Xiaofei, Marston-Pattison argues that Australia’s Chinese allies were subject to a process of ‘whitening’ as they were distanced from their negative Asian characteristics.⁷⁹ Timperley’s depiction of China was part of this process, although his personal experiences with China led him to still somewhat point out its alterity. ‘Our Friends the Chinese’ was an attempt to cast China as an alien yet friendly country, with titles like ‘Where Wheelbarrows have Sails’ and ‘What are the Chinese People Like?’.⁸⁰ The series included somewhat whimsical details such as the story of one foreigner bestowed with a Chinese name that translated to ‘Mister Know Nothing’.⁸¹ Where Morrison attempted to make China familiar through self-orientalisation, Timperley attempted to instead put a charming face on its alterity.

Timperley’s other aim in ‘Our Friends the Chinese’ was to depict China’s heroic resistance against Japan. In many ways this reinforced existing Australian images of China’s resistance against Japan. Timperley repeated, for example, the frequent claim that China was ‘keeping busy’ between half and three quarters of a million Japanese troops that would otherwise be used against the Allies.⁸² He stressed the human toll of the war on China, claiming that sixty million people had been made homeless, but that this only fuelled Chinese resolve, imbuing them ‘with a moral indignation from the start by Japan’s indiscriminate bombing and widespread atrocities’.⁸³ This narrative fit with a popular perception in Australia at this time that China was an ally in the fight against fascism. However, even during the war this was complicated by images of Chinese corruption and backwardness that cast it a victim of Japanese aggression rather than a partner in the war.⁸⁴ Timperley, for his part, emphasised the rapid modernisation of ‘Free China’ under Nationalist control, as many other Australian publications were doing.⁸⁵ In an article on wartime Yunnan province, for example, he wrote that

Nowhere are the changes more remarkable than in Kunming, the capital of the province … Its normal population of less than 100,000 has been tripled during the war. Hotels and restaurants have sprung up like mushrooms. Hundreds of old buildings that have stood for centuries have been torn down and replaced with modern three or five-story structures.⁸⁶

While detailing the horrors of the Japanese invasion, Timperley also noted that ‘one beneficial effect of the Japanese invasion has been to speed up the unification of China. Regional interests are being forgotten as the call for more united resistance becomes more urgent’.⁸⁷ While Japanese aggression had forced the Nationalist retreat westward, Timperley presented it as the source of modernisation and national renewal for China rather than a sign of its victimhood. Without his papers, it is difficult to know the extent to which, if at all, Timperley believed in the image of China he presented. There was little reflection of his bitterness towards the Nationalist government in his writing, which followed the key themes of Nationalist propaganda aimed at the west since the establishment of the wartime capital in Chongqing in 1937. The goal for the Ministry of Information was to convince western audiences that China had not lost the war and had the will to continue fighting.⁸⁸ As an agent of the Ministry of Information, Timperley shaped his writing along these lines.

Timperley’s other series, ‘Japan against the World’ was much more focused as anti-Japanese propaganda and more informed by his politics. Having written one book on Japanese atrocities in China and with another titled Japan: a World Problem on the way while in Australia, this was a field in which Timperley had established his expertise.⁸⁹ His arguments within both the book and the radio talks were that Japan had deep-seated cultural problems that the Allies needed to correct at the end of the war. In one talk, for example, he argued that Japanese militarism and German Nazism were inherently connected, saying

In addition to an inherited talent for mass regimentation, they have the same mystical belief in their supposed ‘destiny’ as a super-race, the same determination to establish themselves at the head of a group of slave States … There can be no lasting peace until the power of the Japanese military leaders – counterparts of the Prussian Junkers and the Nazi demagogues – is smashed forever.⁹⁰

Where Morrison cast China as a threat in his attempt to argue for greater links with Australia, while only raising the threat of Japan privately, the war with Japan meant that Timperley was able to shift his focus on to another Asian power, casting it as an inherent threat for as long as its societal structure remained intact. Unlike other depictions of Japan in Australian broadcasts at the time, Timperley’s criticism of Japan contained elements of racialised thinking but not extreme dehumanisation. Timperley’s analysis of the Japanese threat, for example, was informed by Japan’s similarities to Nazi Germany rather than, as Robin Gerster argues, Australian wartime photography.⁹¹ Timperley’s anti-Japanese propaganda was linked to the anti-fascist United Front with which he had worked as an agent for the Nationalists, and to his criticisms of Japan from a pacifist perspective established in What War Means. Timperley’s depictions of both Japan and China came about as a result of his work for the Chinese government and his approach to the politics of East Asia.

Conclusion

In their depictions of China during the world wars, Morrison and Timperley both attempted to cast the country as a loyal ally to Australia. Morrison attempted to present himself as the face of China compared to a vague threat of untold millions, where Timperley relied on Chinese alterity and the details of its struggle against Japan to serve his message. Where Morrison’s attempts were impromptu and largely on his own initiative, Timperley’s were much more integrated into Chinese and Australian propaganda machinery, reflecting the development of Chinese propaganda institutions and the more explicit ways by which the Chinese government employed former journalists to improve their image. Morrison and Timperley’s images of China contained themes of threat and opportunity. These themes were not deployed, however, to appeal to fears at the heart of the Australian psyche. Instead, they drew from Morrison and Timperley’s approaches to East Asia, whether from an imperial sense of ownership or an anti-fascist identification of China with the United Front, and the purposes to which their Chinese employers turned them. This article demonstrates one way of moving beyond the master narrative of Australian antipathy by considering the biography and political purposes of the individuals creating images of Asia.

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.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

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.

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.