Abstract
International tensions and the atmosphere of anxiety were felt in the decade before World War II in all countries of the world. Military conflicts appeared to be the symptoms of a nearing calamity - primarily, the fights between Italy and Ethiopia and the Civil War in Spain.
The Republic of China was undergoing severe hardships at the time: it was balancing on the verge of a war between the Guomindang and the Communist Party, and was slowly yielding to the encroaching Japanese occupation. Nevertheless, China closely observed the trends on the other side of the continent.
The article studies the response of Chinese society to the growing threat of world catastrophe in the mid-1930s through the prism of manhua cartoons published in illustrated magazines highly popular in Shanghai and other cities at the time. Such cartoons employed rich details and succinctly reflected the way the Abyssinian Crisis and the Spanish Civil War were perceived by a part of Chinese society.
Looking into these sources brings the conclusion that discussions of China's own sorrows intertwined with the narration of cruelties and mercilessness of the faraway wars. Thus, the angle of view of the Chinese cartoonists and their readers shifted: the focus remained on China, but included a more global perspective, while the hardships pestering China became just a detail of the grim prospects of the whole plane, especially the "weak" countries, defenseless against the aggression of the "powerful" ones.