If you do Republican period Chinese history you know that the various versions of the Chinese state loved graphical representations of data. (This may be something they picked up from the Japanese, who seem to have done a lot of this as well.)
These are often, to my mind, weirdly hybrid things, since I am usually finding them in government reports and collections of statistics presumably aimed at other bureaucrats, but a lot of them seem aimed at jazzing things up for a general audience. Here are a couple examples from 空軍抗戰三周年紀念專冊 (The Air Force in the First Three Years of the War of Resistance)1
The first is pretty straightforward, the number of Japanese planes that bombed China (upper left), the number of bombs dropped, total dead and wounded and amount of property damage. Each category is split into three years (1937,38,39, see upper right) with lines to connect it all
This is fairly legible, in the sense that it does not take long to figure out what the image is trying to represent, especially since you can find this data in more traditional tables. This might work as a public-facing poster.
Some are harder to figure out, particularly in this book, which is pulling from a lot of other sources. So you can get things like this that show the number of Japanese POWs, (presumably flyers) divided by year and officers vs. enlisted. These are just those under the control of one unit, but what that unit is is not clear. The numbers don’t match up with earlier numbers of total POWs. Still it is a graphic representation of the declining number of POWs they were taking. So maybe trying to puzzle this out might be worth it. I have no idea how doing it graphically like this is supposed to make it easier to understand.
Then you get the fun ones. This is a table of large and small achievements, which are not defined anywhere. Is it worth digging out what these things are? Probably not, in the sense that it would be a lot of work for not much information you could use. I just like the creativity someone put into the graphics for the bars. I assume the far right big achievement is shooting down a plane? (12 in total). Only one traitor was caught, but I like the little eyeglasses graphic. I have no idea what 工作努力(literally it is diligent work) refers to, maybe good staff work? It is the largest category, 104 awards, and seems to be represented by an impressive bar graph with a flag on it.2 Someone knows what really matters. 🙂
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