This political cartoon is about the open door policy in China. The message of the cartoonist is that the craziness over getting trade in China was too extreme, since all the animals seem to be fighting over the dragon that is labeled China. Since some of the animals are carrying weapons and are glaring at each other, the feeling coming across is greed. Another opinion that could be had about this issue is that the way China’s open doors were dealt with was just fine, and there was no fault in the way the policy was constructed.
One technique that the cartoonist used was symbolism, because each animal in the cartoon represents a country that wanted in on trading with China. Since the US’s animal/symbol is the bald eagle, that is how the US was represented in the cartoon. Another technique that was used in this cartoon was labeling. Each animal in the picture is labeled with the country it represents, like the grizzly bear is labeled as Russia. Without these labels, I don’t think I would have understood what was going on in the cartoon. This supports anti-imperialism, because the vicious battle that seems to be raging over China the dragon, is scary and frightening and very unorganized.
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