This Man Is Your Friend (1942), the Chinese soldier on the Office of Facts and Figures sheet

This Man Is Your Friend: Chinese. He Fights for Freedom is a 1942 poster of the Office of Facts and Figures, printed by the Government Printing Office. A photograph of a smiling Chinese Nationalist soldier in a field cap is framed by ten words of text (NAID 515793).

What the sheet prints

One photograph carries the sheet: a smiling Chinese Nationalist soldier in a field cap, as the archive describes him. The text above and below it is short, with two words set in capitals. The rest is an ordering line and the printer's imprint.

This man is your FRIEND

Chinese

He fights for FREEDOM

For additional copies write to Graphics Division, Office of Facts and Figures, Washington, D.C. . . . Specify GPO Jacket No. 435918.

U. S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE : 1942—O

Who issued it

The ordering line names the Graphics Division of the Office of Facts and Figures in Washington, and the imprint dates the printing to 1942. In the archive's fields, the audience is the domestic public and the purpose is persuading or winning support, under war and the military and race and ethnicity. Its copy comes from the National Archives via Wikimedia Commons. The record gives no photographer, no print run and no posting places. The archive holds a Russian sheet in the same series.

How to read it

FRAME's tags are glittering generalities and transfer. One friendly face and one virtue word introduce an ally. The archive also says what the poster leaves out: anything about the government the soldier serves, or the war China had been fighting since 1937. That silence is the technique. "Freedom" is asserted, not described.

There is something worth crediting here too. In the same year that other American sheets, such as Alaska - Death-Trap for the Jap, drew the Japanese enemy as vermin or caricature, this one uses a photograph of a real man, smiling, and calls him a friend. It asks American viewers to see a Chinese soldier as a person on their side.

The open question is the word "freedom." The poster vouches for a foreign government's cause in the American public's name, without describing it. A reader is entitled to ask what freedom meant in that army's service, and the sheet gives no help.

For contrast, see Jim Berryman's Five Years of Dragon-Swallowing on Japan's war in China, and the Chinese-language sheet America's resources are China's resources. The anti-Japanese propaganda hub shows the caricatures this poster avoids.