Cartoonist Draws Respect at Last

Stretched out in his bed at the Peking Union Medical College Hospital, where he is recovering from kidney surgery, Ding Cong hardly looks like one of the most dangerous men in China.

During World War II, Ding worked with the American Office of Strategic Services, precursor to the CIA, and was instrumental in the propaganda campaign against Japan. Later he took the winning, Communist side in China’s civil war.

Ding, 80, has never wielded anything more lethal than a paintbrush. But his skills as a political cartoonist made him a national hero during time of war and an enemy of the state during time of peace. He did a celebrated color scroll in 1947 that powerfully depicted the corruption of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist regime and the collusion of its American allies.

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Not long after their victory in 1949, the Communists lost their sense of humor about political matters. Despite a whispered warning from his friend Chou En-lai, the late Chinese premier, Ding kept producing cartoons satirizing the political order.

“Chou told me I’d better stop what I was doing,” Ding recalled in an interview this week, after the first exhibition of his work in a Beijing museum. “I wrongly believed that after the liberation I could keep working. I soon learned that the realities had changed. The new reality was socialism. This was a reality beyond criticism.”

Describing former Chinese leader Mao Tse-tung, he spoke elliptically, but his point would not have been lost on any Chinese who underwent the famines of Mao’s 1957-60 Great Leap Forward or the terror of his 1966-76 Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.

“At that time,” Ding said, “China worshiped a certain deity. I had to constantly ask myself if the deity was right or if I was right. At the time, I believed I was wrong, which is why I lived through my ordeals. Later, looking back on things, I realized that I was right after all, and that is when I started getting fat.”

Ding was exiled to labor camps, hounded by the Red Guards and banned from painting and drawing. When he was allowed to leave the camps, he was ordered to work at the Museum of Fine Arts in Beijing, scrubbing floors under works by artists whose skills were vastly inferior to his own.

Sometimes, to amuse himself while he arranged exhibitions in the museum, Ding sketched on the back of display cards. Later, when the political restraints on him loosened, he used these sketches to illustrate books.

In 1979, he was among the last of China’s intellectuals to be rehabilitated after the Cultural Revolution. Except for a series of drawings of the notorious “Gang of Four”--including Jiang Qing, the widow of the late Chairman Mao--Ding never returned to the political caricature that marked his work in the war years of the 1940s.

However, his cartoons in the monthly academic journal Dushu and many popular newspapers are among the most biting social satires produced in China today.

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Political figures such as ailing patriarch Deng Xiaoping and his seeming successor, President and Communist Party leader Jiang Zemin, are still off limits. But Ding’s satiric sketches of comically trendy youth, corrupt and greedy officials and obese brats produced under the one-child family planning program offer a rare glimpse at the side effects of economic reform in China today.

In the time-frozen world of political criticism in China, Ding’s work stands out for both its subtlety and its artistic merit. Most other cartoons are crudely drawn and delve into politics only on the rare occasions when a political figure has been publicly disgraced.

An example of the regime’s sensitivity to caricature is the work of Morgan Chua, cartoonist for the magazine Far Eastern Economic Review of Hong Kong. On several occasions in recent years, Chua’s cartoons lampooning Chinese leaders were enough to ban the magazine from circulating in China.

In an exhibition that closed this week, Ding was featured in a one-man show at the Museum of Fine Arts that was one of the most successful ever. Among the works displayed were the sketches he made when he worked there as a janitor.

Unfortunately, Ding was unable to attend his own triumphant return to the museum. Doctors discovered a tumor on his kidney and ordered surgery.

In the interview, Ding said he was hoping to get back to work. One of his projects, he said, is a long scroll depicting the horrors of the Cultural Revolution.