A fundraiser parade of Chinese beauty activists organized by overseas Chinese in order to fund anti-Japanese activities in Wuhan. New Yorkers not only threw money in the banner but also gold rings, earrings, necklaces.
Part of our China History Archive
National Humiliation Day and the Solidarity Parade
The demonstration took place on 9 May 1938, chosen deliberately because the date marked China’s “National Humiliation Day” (国耻日), commemorating the day in 1915 when the Chinese government was forced to accept Japan’s Twenty-One Demands. Around 12,000 Chinese Americans, coming not only from New York but from Newark, Jersey City, Baltimore, Boston, Philadelphia, Wilmington and Washington, D.C., took part, marching roughly three and a half miles from Mott and Pell Streets in Chinatown through Lower Manhattan. In New York alone, some 1,500 Chinese-owned laundries, restaurants and shops closed for the day so that owners and employees could join the march. Organizers styled the event as a “Solidarity Day,” using the slogan “To Save China, To Save Ourselves,” a phrase that deliberately tied support for China’s war against Japan to Chinese Americans’ own struggle against discrimination in the United States.
The Giant Flag and the Donations
Roughly a hundred young Chinese American women, dressed in fashionable cheongsam (旗袍), carried a giant Nationalist Chinese flag reported at somewhere between 45 by 75 feet and 100 by 50 feet, said to have weighed as much as 200 pounds once loaded with coins. Although no formal appeal for funds was made, spectators lining the route began showering the flag with donations, pennies, half dollars and dollar bills, and, according to contemporary accounts, gold rings, earrings and necklaces as well. The flag reportedly had to be emptied of its contents several times during the march because of the sheer weight of the money and jewelry thrown onto it. The proceeds were destined for China’s war effort, at that moment centered on Wuhan, which served as the Nationalist government’s provisional wartime capital between the fall of Nanjing in December 1937 and the city’s own fall to Japanese forces in October 1938.
Part of a Wider Fundraising Movement
The New York march became something of a prototype for similar fundraising parades that followed in Chinese American communities across the country over the next few years, part of what became known as the “Bowl of Rice” movement, a series of community fundraising drives held annually from 1938 to 1941 in Chinatowns and cities nationwide to support Chinese civilians and the war effort against Japan. Organizations such as the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association and the newly formed Chinese War Relief Association helped coordinate these campaigns, which over the following years combined parades, dinners, concerts and pageants to draw both Chinese American and wider American support for China’s resistance.
Related articles: the Unit 731 in China, History of the Chinese Diaspora in America
Pictures: LIFE
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