Studying Chinese cannibalism at the imperial centre

In light of the nineteenth-century French gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s bon mot, ‘Tell me what kind of food you eat, and I will tell you what kind of man you are’,Footnote ²⁴ Maggie Kilgour suggests that food, as the most basic human need, functions as a complex symbolic system used to define both personal and national differences.Footnote ²⁵ In other words, cultural identity is constructed by dietary taboos that dictate what is considered edible and what is not. To demarcate imperial Japan’s cultural and moral superiority from the rest, Kuwabara adopted the traditional dualistic construct of ‘self’ and ‘other’ in the discourse of cannibalism: ‘“we” are civilized and eat nicely, “they” are barbaric and eat savagely; “we” eat normally, “they”, perversely’.Footnote ²⁶ Consequently, the popular idea of ‘you are what you eat’, through Kuwabara’s investigation into cannibalism among non-Japanese peoples, specifically the Chinese, becomes a colonial notion that ‘they must be what they eat’. Nevertheless, prior to the emergence of discourse on Chinese cannibalism, the Japanese people—subjected to a series of unequal treaties in the mid-nineteenth century—were confronted with Western scientific research suggesting that they, too, were man-eaters.

It was a summer day in June 1878 when an audience of over 500 gathered at Ibumurarō, a large assembly venue in Asakusa, Tokyo, to attend a highly anticipated presentation by American zoologist and archaeologist Edward S. Morse, who had made the groundbreaking discovery of the Ōmori Shell Mounds the previous year.Footnote ²⁷ One of the most fascinating excavations was a batch of human bones from the Jōmon period (circa 14000–300 bce) marked with artificial cuts, scattered among a heap of wild animal skeletons. Morse soon concluded that these fragmented bones were ‘the first indication of a race of anthropophagi in Japan’.Footnote ²⁸ The newly excavated shell mounds in southern Japan, moreover, ‘[disclosed] the most abundant and unquestionable evidences of cannibalism’.Footnote ²⁹

As ‘the father of Japanese anthropology’, whose research confirmed that many Indigenous peoples in North America consumed human flesh and that their ‘monstrous’ habit persists in some part of the Americas, Morse was not surprised by the evidence per se but rather its significance to Japanese history because ‘the minute and painstaking chronicles of her historians, running back with considerable accuracy for fifteen hundred years or more, give no trace of so monstrous a practice’.Footnote ³⁰ Hence, Morse’s discovery resulted in a disquieting question for the nation about their ancestry, ethnicity, and civilizational history: could modern-day Japanese people be descended from prehistoric cannibals—those whom Western human sciences ‘othered’ as Homo monstrosus?Footnote ³¹ Under the exploitation of the treaty-port and extraterritorial systems imposed by American, European, and Russian imperialists, and now at the risk of being represented as the monstrous and Oriental ‘other’ in a human history hegemonically narrated by the West, early Meiji intellectuals were beset by the accusation of cannibalism.Footnote ³² Agitating and provocative aside, Morse’s scientific evidence nonetheless became one of the catalysts for establishing anthropology as an academic discipline in modern Japan.

Tsuboi Shōgorō 坪井正五郎 (1863–1913), then a student in the Department of Zoology at the Imperial University, founded the Anthropological Society of Tokyo (AST) in 1884 and applied the methods and conceptual framework of the Western ‘study of human species’ to investigate the racial origins of the Japanese people.Footnote ³³ As Tierney notes, Tsuboi and his colleagues shared a ‘strongly “nationalist” agenda to liberate this new discipline from Western domination and to establish their own autonomy as scientists’.Footnote ³⁴ However, to scientifically and critically converse with Morse about not only cannibalism but also the roots of Japan, they had no choice but to turn to Western epistemology and research methodologies, which could provide them with the same language to autonomously document and present their own culture and history to the world. When the science of physical anthropology was being developed in Japan, early Meiji intellectuals quickly expanded the scope of their research beyond the nation. The study of Chinese cannibalism subsequently emerged, but strictly speaking, it was not a scientific ethnography, as it predates Japanese anthropologists’ first overseas in-depth fieldwork, conducted in Taiwan—the empire’s initial colonial venture following its victory over the Qing dynasty (1644–1911) in the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895).

As early as 1881, Kanda Takahira, who supported Tsuboi in establishing the AST, had already pioneered research on Chinese cannibalism through ‘Theory of Chinese People Eating Human Flesh’.Footnote ³⁵ This article, which became the blueprint for subsequent studies on the subject, begins with Kanda’s assertion that:

Kanda further argued that whenever war or famine disrupted social order, the Chinese eagerly consumed human flesh without the slightest hesitation or shame. To support his thesis that the Chinese were, historically, a cannibalistic race, Kanda cited 23 references drawn from a wide range of texts spanning multiple dynasties, while admitting that these were ‘extremely few, no more than one hair from nine oxen among the Chinese historical records’.Footnote ³⁷

Kanda, later appointed the first president of the AST in 1887, was, however, not an anthropologist but a Meiji statesman, one of the first-generation intellectual elites who bridged official and scholarly circles. Thus, methodologically, he did not rely on first-hand observation or fieldwork—the core of ethnographic writing—but instead on philology and historiography. On the one hand, Kanda’s cross-disciplinary approach to the study of cannibalism nonetheless anticipates the characterization of early Japanese anthropology as ‘a heterogeneous discipline that subsumed the later divergent fields of archaeology, physical anthropology, ethnology, folklore studies, ethnography, and linguistics’.Footnote ³⁸ On the other hand, Kanda’s preliminary survey can be loosely defined as an early attempt at cultural anthropology, a field that received little support in Japan until the 1920s, whose typical objects were ‘exotic’ populations or ‘primitive’ cultures. A paradox therefore emerges, as the Chinese would never have been classified within any of the categories by Japanese ethnographers.

Studying Chinese cannibalism thus became a task almost exclusively for Sinologists and historians. It was a means for Japan, as an emerging imperial power, to define itself in relation to China and assess its position vis-à-vis the older yet declining civilization not only in East Asia but also globally. Kanda’s concluding words are worth noting: during the Edo period (1603–1868) in Japan, killing cranes was prohibited by law. Once the law lapsed, people hunted them freely, leaving no whole birds behind.Footnote ³⁹ Perplexing as it may seem, Kanda recounted a Japanese story that cast his own people in a morally ambiguous light while discussing Chinese cannibalism. Given Japan’s lingering fear of Western colonization before the war with China, he seemed to be using this cautionary tale to warn that the masses could descend into the same barbarity as the Chinese if social order and legal restraints collapsed, thereby providing Western powers with a pretext for intervention.

While Kanda’s nationalist undertones expressed through cannibalism were subtle, they grew more pronounced in subsequent fictional texts. As Tomoko Aoyama notes, one of the earliest literary archetypes of the man-eater, though not Chinese, appears in Yano Ryūkei’s 矢野龍渓 (1851–1931) popular fiction Ukishiro Monogatari (Tales of the Floating Castle, 1890). In this adventure story, a group of young men attempt to build an ideal Japanese nation abroad. The protagonist, encountering cannibalistic natives in the South Seas (Southeast Asia in fact), positions himself as civilized, more superior than both the savages and European exploiters.Footnote ⁴⁰ By the time Kuwabara investigated Chinese cannibalism, Japan had become a dominant imperial power. It is thus unsurprising that his stance was far more aggressive and expansionist than those of Kanda and Yano’s protagonist—he could, to borrow Said’s words, ‘make statements about it [China], authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching about it, settling it, ruling over it’.Footnote ⁴¹

The construction of the Chinese cannibal

During the Taishō era (1912–1926), the figure of the Chinese man-eater, articulated through Kuwabara’s most authoritative study of the subject, reached full maturity. More than four decades had passed since Kanda’s theory of Chinese cannibalism, yet Kuwabara still praised the Meiji intellectual’s study as ‘foremost’ in his literature review.Footnote ⁴² Nevertheless, Kuwabara deemed it insufficient. Described as ‘as much of a mathematician manqué as anything else’, Kuwabara approached the study of Chinese cannibalism with precision—carefully structured, methodical, and exacting—as he painstakingly unearthed and systematically analysed over 200 pieces of textual evidence.Footnote ⁴³ This also shows that Kuwabara was influenced by the positivist historiography of his teacher, the German historian Ludwig Riess (himself a disciple of Leopold von Ranke), which emphasized rigorous use of primary sources. He also drew on his own expertise in ‘evidential scholarship’ (kaozheng/kōshō 考證) as a Sinologist. Most crucially, the institutionalized Tōyō studies at Kyoto Imperial University—encompassing Sinology, philosophy, literature, history, archaeology, anthropology, and sociology, and which Kuwabara helped establish—served as the context in which the definitive discourse on Chinese cannibalism was articulated. Synthesizing these influences, he expanded Kanda’s study of Chinese cannibalism from 2,600 to nearly 40,000 words.

Structurally, the research paper is clearly organized, comprising 13 coherent sections, including an introduction and a conclusion. The first section, following the introduction, stands independently, as Kuwabara offered a comparative and critical analysis of the English and French translations of the Book of News from India and China (كتاب اخبار الصين والهند), an Arabic manuscript from the ninth century that serves as the key source.Footnote ⁴⁴ Kuwabara’s primary objective was to verify the accuracy of these Arabic accounts by cross-referencing them with Chinese records from the same period.Footnote ⁴⁵ The second and third sections chronologically trace cases of Chinese cannibalism from the pre-Qin period to the Republican era. In the sixth section, Kuwabara briefly examined depictions of cannibalism in Chinese classical plays and fiction. Lastly, the large amount of evidence in the remaining sections was categorized based on the motives of Chinese people for eating human flesh, including gastronomic, medicinal, animosity towards enemies, and survival.

To better understand Kuwabara’s study within Japan’s colonial discourse, it is crucial to situate his research within its historical context—specifically, by returning to the site of its original publication, Reports of the Tōyō Society (Tōyō Gakuho 東洋學報, 1911–) of the Department of Academic Research within the Tōyō Society (Tōyō Kyōkai 東洋協会). Footnote ⁴⁶ The society’s stated purpose was ‘to contribute to the cause of peaceful civilization in tōyō, examining various matters pertaining to Taiwan, Korea, and Manchuria, thereby clarifying mutual circumstances and endeavouring to enhance mutual welfare’.Footnote ⁴⁷ Crucially, Shiratori Kurakichi 白鳥庫吉 (1865–1942), who trained Kuwabara and established tōyōshi as a discipline at Tokyo Imperial University, spearheaded the department’s research and its publication.Footnote ⁴⁸ Stefan Tanaka argues that Shiratori organized his research on Asian peoples into ‘a dynamic framework that combined various theories and concepts prevalent during the Meiji period—ideas of progress, the scientific study of man, [and] positivistic methodologies’.Footnote ⁴⁹ Accordingly, Kuwabara’s research paper echoed the society’s goal of promoting a peaceful civilizing mission, primarily towards China.

Kuwabara began his paper as a researcher of Chinese history, yet by its conclusion, he had positioned his work as serving both nations, taking on a sense of diplomatic and national responsibility to shape Japanese understanding of China’s civilizational history:

The phrase ‘darker aspects’ not only positioned cannibalism as the antithesis to Chinese virtues but implied that it was an intrinsic part of China’s culture—savagery had always been present. The Middle Kingdom (Chūgoku 中国), with its classical texts and poetry, no longer held its former stature; its dark side had rendered itself into the decaying China—or, more precisely, Shina in the ideological system of tōyō. In early twentieth-century Japan, Shina emerged as a word that indicated ‘a disorderly place—not a nation—from which Japan could both separate itself and express its paternal compassion and guidance’.Footnote ⁵¹ Kuwabara’s clarion call to understand China sensibly and comprehensively, including its dark aspects, is thus to distinguish Japan’s noble civilization from the benighted one of China. More importantly, Kuwabara established an epistemological and ontological distinction between the modern Japanese self and the barbaric Chinese ‘other’.

Kuwabara believed that ‘Japanese should first become fully conversant with Chinese primary materials and then read Western scholarship on top of that; their scholarly arsenal would thus be complete’.Footnote ⁵² A great emphasis was thus placed on Chinese-language sources in his search because ‘no other nation [like China itself] has passed down such a wealth of historical evidence of [Chinese] cannibalism’.Footnote ⁵³ Kuwabara further contended that it was equally important to examine a wide range of materials from early foreign travellers, explorers, and traders who encountered Chinese cannibalism. His conclusion is unequivocal: cannibalism was indisputably a barbaric custom (banshū 蠻習) practised for thousands of years in China and persisting even in recent times. Like his predecessor Kanda, Kuwabara initially praised China’s ‘timeless culture that its people can be proud of in the world’ but pointed out that cannibalism was ‘not much of an honour for the Chinese’.Footnote ⁵⁴ Thus, implicit in Kuwabara’s thesis is that China’s revitalization and the eradication of this enduring barbarism could only be accomplished with the guidance of Japan, the most advanced nation in Asia.

Much of the evidence Kuwabara presented demonstrates how his discourse on Chinese cannibalism was closely intertwined with the socio-political realities of the Japanese empire. For instance, he cited an 1896 report in the Hongkong Daily Press claiming that during the period of Chinese occupation in Taiwan, Chinese settlers customarily consumed the flesh of the island’s Indigenous peoples—flesh that was, at times, even sold in markets alongside pork.Footnote ⁵⁵ By representing the Chinese as cannibalizing those who themselves occupied the position of ‘savages’ in Japanese anthropological discourse, Kuwabara once again implicitly reinforced Japan’s moral and civilizational superiority, thereby legitimizing its colonial governance over Taiwan’s population.

Like Tsuboi, who aimed to free Japanese anthropology from Western influence, Kuwabara asserted authority and autonomy by castigating early European Orientalists for their superficial studies of Chinese cannibalism. Although ‘no one was as well read in Western-language scholarship on Asia as he [Kuwabara] was’, he disregarded Greek and Latin sources in his research.Footnote ⁵⁶ Instead, because of his own knowledge of commercial and cultural exchanges between China and the Islamic world, Kuwabara emphasized the Tales of India and China for its rich content and historical significance.Footnote ⁵⁷ Despite its introduction to academia by French Orientalists, Kuwabara argued that customary cannibalism in the late Tang (618–907), as documented in this Arabic manuscript, had not been sufficiently examined. The first section of his paper criticized the inadequate translations and annotations by Eusèbe Renaudot (1646–1720) and Joseph Toussaint Reinaud (1795–1867). For instance, Reinaud suggested that wartime food scarcity may have caused temporary cannibalism in an almost anarchic China. Kuwabara, however, countered that cannibalism was a long-standing practice, particularly pervasive during the late Tang.Footnote ⁵⁸

In the concluding section, Kuwabara reiterated his critique of Western scholarship. He first noted that Dr Behrens’s article ‘Cannibalism of the Chinese’ (Der Kannibalismus der Chinesen, 1902) was an overly brief and insufficient piece.Footnote ⁵⁹ Moreover, Scottish Orientalist Henry Yule’s The Book of Ser Marco Polo (1903) was markedly deficient in its lack of Chinese-language sources. While Dutch Sinologist J. J. M. de Groot’s The Religious System of China (1892–1910) referenced more Chinese materials, Kuwabara criticized de Groot’s bibliography, as he had cited ludicrous and unverifiable tales from fictions of unofficial history (haishi shōsetsu 稗史小説).Footnote ⁶⁰ Kuwabara eventually remarked that ‘it can be imagined that [writing this book] would have required considerable effort on the part of a Westerner [like de Groot]’, suggesting that the study of Chinese cannibalism was ill-suited to white academics, who lacked the geographical, linguistic, and cultural connections with China.Footnote ⁶¹ After all, by concluding that no comprehensive research on Chinese cannibalism had been published in Anglo-American academic circles, Kuwabara positioned himself as a more competent intellectual than Westerners and as a culturally more appropriate representative for Asian peoples.

Ultimately, the figure of the Chinese cannibal created by Kuwabara differs from that of the ‘primitive’ ‘other’ in both Western and Japanese colonial discourses, who was typically classified as an absolute savage—lacking intellect, history, and thus considered only partially human. As Kuwabara was unable to sever the cultural ties between the two civilizations, such as the shared written language and Confucian beliefs, his discourse constructed a self-contradictory species of Homo monstrosus: the savage-yet-literate cannibal. Arriving at this conundrum, Kuwabara shone the spotlight on the darkness of Chinese Confucianism. The Chinese fondness for human flesh, in his view, was a consequence of the infiltration of their corrupted Confucianism across all social strata. Shiratori’s studies of Confucianism revealed how scholars of tōyōshi selectively reinterpreted this Chinese philosophy to conform with Japan’s national essence (kokutai 国体) while diminishing elements inappropriate to Japanese cultural identity.Footnote ⁶² Chinese Confucianism, as Shiratori argued, had become institutionalized over the centuries, leading to stagnation; in Japan, it evolved into values that actively facilitated historical change. As a result, the concept of filial piety (xiao/kō 孝), the bedrock of Confucianism, came under Kuwabara’s scrutiny, as he discovered from historical records that its expression was conflated with cannibalism in China.Footnote ⁶³

In the eleventh section of his work, Kuwabara referenced the New Book of Tang (Xin Tang shu 新唐書) to validate the prevalence of using human flesh as medicine in ancient China. Kuwabara emphasized that the expression of filial piety through the practice of cutting one’s own thigh had existed for approximately 1,200 years, and that its presumed medicinal effect was widely believed.Footnote ⁶⁴ To highlight that this form of cannibalism was not entirely bygone, Kuwabara, for the first time in his research, included first-hand evidence: he had witnessed a young Chinese man, possibly during his studies in Qing, proudly displaying a self-inflicted wound made to treat his mother’s illness, much like a samurai boasting of his battle scars.

According to Kuwabara, this type of therapeutic cannibalism had become omnipresent during the Song (960–1279) and Yuan (1271–1368) eras because human-flesh medicine was hailed as the uppermost expression of filial duty among the hoi polloi; and subsequently, the government had started to praise and reward them with money in the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing dynasties. Consequently, the Chinese people, ‘driven by a tendency to follow others blindly and by avarice’, increasingly consumed human flesh for medicinal purposes.Footnote ⁶⁵ Kuwabara echoed Kanda’s observation: not only did the masses have a taste for human flesh, but Chinese governments throughout history were also acquiescent, if not complicit, in perpetuating cannibalism. By linking the pervasiveness of cannibalism to the Chinese rulers who elevated what was supposedly a disgraceful act to a socially sanctioned, and even commendable, duty cloaked in Confucian virtue ethics, Kuwabara again suggested the necessity of a more progressive form of governance, presumably Japanese, to revitalize the decaying Confucian ideals in China.

The Japanese as the pinnacle of civilized races

By the time Kuwabara began researching Chinese cannibalism, as noted earlier, Japan had already entered the world stage, abrogated the unequal treaties, and, having gained Taiwan through the Treaty of Shimonoseki, had emerged as a menace to the Western powers after its victory in the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905). Furthermore, Japan’s autarky and its control of former German territories in China and the Pacific islands after the First World War (1914–1918) conferred greater power and authority on Kuwabara in Western academia, enabling him not only to portray the empire as more modern and civilized but also to represent the West and the rest through his production and dissemination of knowledge about the non-Japanese ‘other’. It is thus unsurprising that Shiratori contended that ‘in terms of geography and civilization […], Europe is no more than a peninsula of Asia’.Footnote ⁶⁶ The notion of tōyōshi ultimately established the idea that while the West was represented as the ‘other’ against which Japan measured itself, China became a different ‘other’, not as a model to emulate, but as a historical and cultural space from which Japan had evolved.Footnote ⁶⁷

Averring Japan’s intellectual, cultural, and moral superiority, Kuwabara broadly projected the accusation of cannibalism onto everyone except the Japanese. First, China’s four neighbours—Tibetans, Mongols, Koreans, and the peoples of Annam and Champa—practised cannibalism. Secondly, on the islands of the South Seas, the custom had been widespread until recent times, likely curtailed by Japanese administration, Kuwabara seemed to imply.Footnote ⁶⁸ He further noted that cases of cannibalism among Europeans were recorded in the Middle Ages and, more recently, during periods of starvation in Austria and along the Russian frontier.Footnote ⁶⁹ Except for extremely rare cases of medicinal cannibalism—attributed by Kuwabara to Chinese superstitions imported from a declining Confucian China—there is no trace of this barbaric practice in Japanese records. Kuwabara thus concluded that Japanese civilization was not only nobler but, crucially, free from savage cannibalism—implicitly countering Morse’s claim that man-eaters had once existed in the archipelago.

Kuwabara foregrounded the purity and benevolence of the Japanese race by proudly quoting the writing of Tokugawa-era Confucian scholar Ōta Kinjō 大田錦城 (1765–1825):

Kuwabara claimed this fact ‘must surely be acknowledged by the Chinese’.Footnote ⁷¹ Yet a close reading of Ōta’s text reveals that Kuwabara deliberately omitted a key episode: the warrior Katō Kiyomasa 加藤清正 (1562–1611) and his soldiers ate their fallen comrades’ flesh during the 1598 siege of Ulsan—a practice Ōta condemned as ‘a great national disgrace’.Footnote ⁷² By excising this account, Kuwabara conveniently preserved the image of Japan’s superior civilization.

Similarly, an account of cannibalism in Nihon shoki (Chronicles of Japan), one of the oldest texts of classical Japanese history, was firmly rejected by Kuwabara. Scroll 19 recounts the history of Emperor Kinmei’s reign (539–571 ce), during which a famine in a prefecture (gunkoku 郡國) caused by severe flooding in 567 ce led some people to possibly resort to cannibalism. Claiming that this account referred to an incident in 48 bce China, as recorded in Hanshu (Book of Han 漢書), Kuwabara noted that the term ‘gunkoku’ held meaning only in the context of the Han dynasty and, therefore, was not relevant to Japan. Kuwabara’s conclusion was that there was no definitive evidence to prove that the Japanese had subsisted on human flesh during famines or sieges, much less out of preference or hatred.

Kuwabara’s alteration and refutation of the evidence of Japanese cannibalism reflects a desire to reinforce the legitimacy of the empire’s constructions of savagery at its height, which had to be achieved through the creation of an oppositional image of the cannibal. It also reflects Kuwabara’s anxiety over the persistent unease provoked by Morse’s hierarchical typology of humanity:

Kuwabara certainly had no interest in providing evidence to address Morse’s inquiries into survival cannibalism in Japanese history. It was more important for Kuwabara to substantiate the Japanese as ‘the highest of civilized races’, a notion defined by Morse. Kuwabara was thus galvanized to sever any association between Japan and cannibalism. The authority of elite scholars like him ensured that Japanese narratives between the Meiji era and the Asia-Pacific War rarely mentioned cannibalism, leading many to believe that Japan had never engaged in such a practice.Footnote ⁷⁴ Ultimately, Kuwabara’s ethnocentric and exploitative research reveals, in Vergara Reynolds’s words, that the cannibal is cast ‘less and less in the role of mere man-eater but as an increasingly complex signifier’.Footnote ⁷⁵

To do full justice to Kuwabara, he could indeed be recognized as a scholar who disrupted the dominant academic systems that legitimized the imposition of colonial rule in the ‘Orient’, particularly in China, rather than merely parroting the language of European Orientalists. His critique of European scholarship on Chinese cannibalism went beyond a literature review; it formed part of a broader stratagem for tōyōshi as a discipline to assert Japan’s academic authority in the Western dichotomy of ‘whites and the rest’. Yet, while aiming to surpass European scholars using their own academic language, Kuwabara fell into the paradox that Trinh T. Minh-ha identifies: language as a form of knowing is simultaneously the site of power and a vehicle of unconscious servility.Footnote ⁷⁶ He successfully constructed the figure of the Chinese cannibal and positioned Japan as the most civilized, but it remained subordinated to Western epistemic frameworks. As Tanaka suggests, tōyōshi ‘while recognizing the need for difference from and dialogue with the West … employed the very methodology that precludes such recognition’.Footnote ⁷⁷

Trinh asks, ‘Have you ever attended a white man’s presentation (often also ours) on a “native” society?’, where it seems ‘as if, unvaryingly, every single look, gesture, or utterance has been stained with anthropological discourse, the only discourse in power when it is a question of the (native) Other’.Footnote ⁷⁸ Trinh’s insight recalls Morse, a Western expatriate, who delivered a scientific presentation claiming to inform the Japanese about their cannibalism. Nearly five decades later, when Kuwabara usurped the imperialist role of representing the Chinese cannibal as the cultural ‘other’ from European Orientalists, he too perpetuated ethnocentric perspectives by professing to be ‘our’ man, portraying East Asian societies as less civilized and in need of Japanese guidance. In doing so, he reinforced Japan’s position as the sole producer of knowledge in modern East Asia, on par with or surpassing the West. As Trinh notes, ‘knowledge belongs to the one who succeeds in mastering a language, and standing closer to the civilized language is, in fact, coming nearer to equality’.Footnote ⁷⁹

Yet, as Audre Lorde cautioned, ‘the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house’.Footnote ⁸⁰ By wielding Western epistemology to defend his nation’s civilization and refute claims of cannibalism, Kuwabara used the master’s tools to construct a master’s house for Japan, justifying the mission to ‘civilize’ other Asian peoples. Lorde said furiously, ‘They [the oppressor] may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.’Footnote ⁸¹ Seeking autonomy and validation within Western frameworks of racial hierarchies, Kuwabara excelled within the game—but could not escape its terms or achieve true transformation.

Although Kuwabara opened his article by describing his work as a fragment of a broader investigation and hinting at the possibility of further research on Chinese cannibalism, he did not publish any subsequent work on the subject. Meanwhile, Japan’s imperialist ambitions persisted: between 1931 and 1945, the empire aggressively expanded its overseas territories, including the taking of Hong Kong from the British on 25 December 1941 at the outset of the Asia-Pacific War.

Writing as a literary cannibal on the imperial periphery

Following Japan’s invasion of Hong Kong on the morning of 8 December 1941, Ye Lingfeng, unlike most of his contemporaries from mainland China who fled their former refuge, chose to stay. He soon embarked on a career as a cultural collaborator. Co-opted by the Japanese cultural institution, he directed two major publishing houses, Datong tushu yinwuju (Tai Tung Illustrated Press 大同圖書印務局) and Nanfang chubanshe (Southern Press 南方出版社). In April 1943, more than a year after Hong Kong’s incorporation into the GEACPS, Ye founded and edited Dazhong zhoubao, a popular and propagandistic magazine intended both to entertain a war-weary public and to familiarize readers with Japan.Footnote ⁸²

Ye published both essays on cannibalism under the nom de plume Baimen Qiusheng 白門秋生 in the magazine’s column, ‘A Bibliophile’s Records of the Erotic and the Grotesque’.Footnote ⁸³ Its title and content may have been inspired by the Japanese media catchphrase ero guro nansensu (erotic grotesque nonsense), which characterized the popular culture of Taishō Tokyo in the 1920s and 1930s. The column’s genealogy is noteworthy: Ye had first launched it in Shanghai’s Xin Bao (辛報, 1936–1937), where it ran for over four months in 1936.Footnote ⁸⁴ Yet the Hong Kong revival diverged strikingly, introducing the theme of (Chinese) cannibalism which was absent from the earlier Shanghai version. Furthermore, as the title of the column suggested, Ye identified himself as a bibliophile (shuyin 書淫), and his ravenous intellectual appetite for books laid the foundations for his literary cannibalization. In what follows, I analyse how Ye’s essays, written from the imperial periphery, function as anti-colonial texts that ‘write back’, subtly cannibalizing Kuwabara’s dominant discourse as an act of protest, resistance, and defiance under occupation.

Scholars, however, have so far paid little attention to Ye’s discourse on cannibalism—a neglect unsurprising given that his literary work was overshadowed by his position as a beneficiary of Japanese imperialism and, more broadly, by the stigma surrounding literature produced under occupation.Footnote ⁸⁵ Ye’s post-war fate was steeped in irony: labelled a hanjian in the 1957 edition of the Complete Works of Lu Xun—Lu Xun himself being the canonical authority on the cannibalism trope in modern Chinese literature—his career was officially tainted. Consequently, his wartime cultural production was largely marginalized, if not entirely erased, from the Chinese literary canon. Much of the scholarship on Ye since then has focused on uncovering his elusive political identity—whether as a secret agent for the Kuomintang or an underground operative for the Chinese Communist Party—all in the hope of proving that he was not a traitor.Footnote ⁸⁶ While the effort to rehabilitate his reputation in Chinese-speaking cultural fields is crucial, a critical analysis of his literary work during the occupation is much needed.

Keru Cai notes that the intertextuality in ‘Diary of a Madman’, which metaphorically devoured Russian and Western literary influences, anticipated de Andrade’s ‘Cannibalist Manifesto’.Footnote ⁸⁷ Ye’s texts, however, embody both colonial trauma and an anti-colonial force, resonating more closely with de Andrade’s manifesto—what Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro has described as ‘decolonial avant la lettre’.Footnote ⁸⁸ As Tsai argues, May Fourth intellectuals such as Lu Xun sought to ‘battle cannibalism with cannibalism’, ultimately appropriating the colonial rhetoric that the ‘civilized’ self must educate the ‘uncivilized’, cannibalistic ‘other’.Footnote ⁸⁹ Rejecting this system of subordination, Ye follows de Andrade’s declaration—‘I am only concerned with what is not mine’—subversively devouring the colonizer’s culture and regurgitating it, as the Brazilian modernismo (1920–1930) artists did, to empower the colonized to liberate themselves from persistent European domination.Footnote ⁹⁰ The raison d’être of literary cannibalism, conceived of by de Andrade, is thus the repudiation of imperialism and colonialism.Footnote ⁹¹ Similarly, Ye’s literary cannibalization demonstrates that the ‘[…] most effective [revolt is] to take something that the empire cherishes or venerates and either destroy it or alter it to send a critical message’.Footnote ⁹²

As Condé incisively stated, a greater emphasis should be placed on the mocking tone of ‘Tupi or not Tupi’.Footnote ⁹³ With this playful yet powerful dictum as the guiding doctrine of his literary cannibalism, Ye did not submissively mimic or simplistically dialogue with the works of the colonizers intertextually, but sought to mock and irritate the oppressors through intellect and satire. Tomoko Aoyama also recognizes a form of intertextuality she calls ‘textual cannibalism’, which includes ‘not merely quotation, allusion, parody, and pastiche … but also critical reading and creative transformation within the text’.Footnote ⁹⁴ ‘Rather than simply mimicking a dominant European culture or insisting on cultural insularity,’ as Parama Roy writes, ‘[cannibalism] purportedly exhorted Brazilian modernists to revel in their capacity to cannibalize, to ingest and transform the power of European aggressors with wit and style [emphasis mine]’.Footnote ⁹⁵ For Ye, much like de Andrade, being a literary cannibal was not merely about vehemently retelling colonial narratives as an overt protest; it was a delicate form of subversion that drew on the author’s ingenuity. By cannibalizing Kuwabara’s dominant discourse, Ye not only mocked Kuwabara’s intellectual rigour by defacing the iconic value of his work but also destabilized the foundations of Japanese colonial epistemic authority.

When explaining the reason for reviving the column after a decade, Ye gave his readers an unequivocal answer—starvation.Footnote ⁹⁶ Almost two years after Hong Kong’s inclusion in the GEACPS, Ye had not experienced the cultural and economic prosperity promised by the Japanese; he was ‘sometimes unbearably hungry to the point of being unable to be content with austerities [like a Confucian]’.Footnote ⁹⁷ Ye stated that the essays in his column were intended to ‘fool around’ with his readers rather than to ‘sing praises’, and at the very least, he was able to earn enough military currency to afford some black-market rice.Footnote ⁹⁸ As privileged as Ye may have been as a key collaborator for the empire, he nonetheless lived in destitution; one can only imagine the hardships endured by ordinary Hong Kong people under imperial rule.

For Ye, to cannibalize literarily—and, for some Hong Kong locals, to cannibalize literally—was an act of survival. Situating Ye’s rewritings within the harsh realities of occupied Hong Kong evokes Condé’s early conceptualization of literary cannibalism as a ‘Caribbean strategy for survival’. Lorde’s assertion that ‘survival is not an academic skill’, found a deep resonance in Ye’s literary cannibalization, which revolves around ‘learning […] how to make common cause with those others identified as outside the structures in order to define and seek a world in which we can all flourish [… and] how to take our differences and make them strengths’.Footnote ⁹⁹ Ultimately, Ye’s cannibalization of Kuwabara’s research paper is thus an act of survival of the subjugated under Japanese imperialism. In this light, Ye’s cannibalization of Kuwabara’s research paper emerges as a strategy of survival for the subjugated under Japanese imperialism. Recognizing that his rewrites were written from the standpoint of the famished, colonized subjects under the GEACPS clarifies the ethical and political tenor of his literary cannibalism.

‘The Chinese are cannibals, but it’s no big deal’

In his first rewrite, ‘The History of Eating Human Flesh’, Ye cannibalized Kuwabara’s depictions of flesh-eating Chinese, drawn from literary works of the Yuan and Ming eras, as presented in the sixth section of his research paper.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Despite being a literature professor, Kuwabara admitted to having limited knowledge of the cannibal topos in pre-modern Chinese novels and therefore relied on the French Sinologist Antoine Bazin’s Modern China (Chine Moderne, 1853) as a reference. One of the most salient cannibal scenes in Chinese literary fiction, mentioned by Bazin in a footnote and later cited by Kuwabara, is from Chapter 26 of Shuihu zhuan (Water Margin 水滸傳), in which the ruthless Sun Erniang 孫二娘 slaughters her lodgers to make meat buns in the human-flesh workshop.Footnote ¹⁰¹ As discussed, Kuwabara dismissed European, particularly French, Orientalists for their inadequate grasp of Chinese-language primary sources, yet his critique targeted chiefly those who denied the existence of the man-eating Chinese.

Ye set the stage for his act of cannibalization with a conversational opening, addressing Bazin and Kuwabara directly: ‘Anyone who has read Water Margin won’t forget those vivid depictions [of cannibalism] by Shi Nai’an.’Footnote ¹⁰² Rather than refuting the evidence Kuwabara had deemed ‘peripheral’ (bōshō 旁證), Ye retold the story in greater detail and reproduced the entire gory scene verbatim from the original, seemingly further suggesting the existence of Chinese cannibalism. Pragmatically, the extended excerpt from a well-known vernacular Chinese novel served to entertain his popular readership; more importantly, the passage can be read as a riposte to Kuwabara, as a critique of his misuse of the Chinese literary text. Ye exposed how the classic novel had been reduced under Kuwabara’s imperialist gaze to little more than testimony to the nation’s supposed savagery.

Ye’s cannibalization of the novel cited by Kuwabara, originally a Chinese-language text, differs from the linguistic anxieties characteristic of francophone literary cannibals. Post-colonial Caribbean authors, for example, often struggle with whether to write in proper French (bon français), Creole, or both, in order to challenge the dominance of the colonizer’s language as primary sites of knowledge, value, and power. Ye, however, encountered no such aporia. The Chinese language was never entirely supplanted by Japanese in the cultural sphere during the occupation, nor in other regions of China under Japanese control. Writing under Japanese occupation, the crux was not the choice of language but that the canonical text Ye consumed had been written in his native tongue and later translated, interpreted, and misrepresented by Kuwabara. To be precise, ‘translation’ does not fully capture Kuwabara’s engagement with pre-modern Chinese texts, which he annotated with furigana (ruby characters) and reading marks like kaeriten to guide readers through complex syntax and pronunciation. In turn, Ye stripped away Kuwabara’s scholarly apparatuses, restoring the text in its unmediated, original language and form, while turning prior colonial distortion into an instrument of anti-imperialist critique.

This aspect of Ye’s cannibalization, which I term ‘literary restoration’, exemplifies a distinctive decolonizing strategy in the anti- and post-colonial Sinophone world, where authors reclaimed their cultural archive by writing back as cannibals. The irony deepens when juxtaposed with Ye’s earlier ‘She lun (Social commentary 社論)’ in Dazhong zhoubao, where he promoted learning the colonizer’s language, lauding Japanese literature as globally significant and Hong Kong as an ideal site for its study.Footnote ¹⁰³ Yet, during the occupation, Ye never published in Japanese, making his cannibalization of the misrepresented Chinese-language texts thus not only, in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s (1938–2025) words, an act of resistance against colonial linguistic domination and ‘spiritual subjugation’,Footnote ¹⁰⁴ but also a deliberate effort to preserve and reclaim linguistic integrity.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

After telling the horrifying story—at least as Kuwabara perceived it—from Shuihu zhuan, Ye wryly noted that Shi Nai’an’s depiction, albeit fictional, ‘may indeed have a certain sociological grounding’, yet brushed it off, ‘eating human flesh is not such a big deal, either in the past or present’.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ He then recapitulated several historical accounts of Chinese cannibalism from Kuwabara:

Kuwabara’s supposedly infallible findings are met with Ye’s ridicule. While Kuwabara marshalled extensive evidence to show that Chinese—from emperors and governors to the masses—were cannibalistic, Ye once again did not refute the claim. He deliberately extended Kuwabara’s argument by pushing the timeline of cannibalism even further back to the first dynasty in Chinese historiography, envisioning a bloodthirsty panorama in which everyone in ancient China devoured one another. Ye concluded—as if responding to Kuwabara—that the scene of Sun Erniang selling human flesh as beef was unremarkable. Ye feasted on the evidence in Kuwabara’s research—historical or fictional—and, with exaggerated flourish, turned it into a mockery of Kuwabara’s scholarly rigour.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

Ye’s mockery, parody, and creative transformation of Kuwabara’s research crystallized when he cannibalized what Kuwabara considered ‘the most savage’ examples of the Chinese people’s penchant for human flesh.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Ye reproduced the same excerpts that Kuwabara had extracted from Jiu Tang shu (The Old Book of Tang) and Northern Song medicine expert Zhuang Zhuo’s 莊綽 Jile bian (Compilation of Chicken Ribs). According to both historical texts, Zhu Can朱粲, a ruthless warlord during the disintegration of the Sui dynasty (581–618), described the flesh of a drunken person as ‘Wine-Pickled Pork’ (zao cang zhurou 糟藏豬肉), human corpses in general as ‘Two-legged Sheep (liang jiao yang 兩腳羊)’, and even referred to the stewed flesh of children as ‘Bones as Tender as Meat (he gu lan 和骨爛)’. As these Chinese human-flesh dishes appalled Kuwabara, he asked: ‘is he [Zhu Can] not truly a terrifying shokujin oni (man-eating demon 食人鬼)?’Footnote ¹¹⁰

Ye remarked in jest that human flesh must have been considerably popular in ancient China, given that cannibals like Zhu even went so far as to invent alluring names. These appellations that dismayed Kuwabara, in Ye’s view, were not different from Cantonese culinary euphemisms. Dog meat, for example, is referred to as ‘Fragrant Meat’ (heung yuk 香肉), while ‘Dragon-Tiger-Phoenix’ (lung fu fung 龍虎鳳) is a dish made with snake, cat, and chicken. Ye likened human flesh to dog and cat meat, both condemned by supposedly civilized cultures, not to pass moral judgement or justify consuming domesticated animals. What Ye suggested was that cannibalism, like other gastronomic taboos, served as a convenient colonizing tool for ethnocentric imperialists to assert cultural and moral superiority and rationalize the eradication of the alleged savagery of ‘the other’.

Another text Ye creatively cannibalized is from the third section of Kuwabara’s research paper, which recounts a capital punishment that exemplifies the flesh-eating custom in ancient China. According to Shiji (Records of the Grand Historian), the military figure Peng Yue 彭越 was punished by having his body minced into paste (haixing 醢刑) for treason during the early Han dynasty, and the remains then distributed to the feudal lords.Footnote ¹¹¹ Adopting the same mocking tone but in a more parodic manner, Ye humorously speculated that if Peng’s ground flesh was not prepared as Yangzhou’s famous stewed meatballs, ‘Lion’s Head’ (shizi tou 獅子頭), it must have been turned into another Cantonese delicacy, ‘Pork Cubes with Peppers’ (jiu jeung yuk 椒醬肉).Footnote ¹¹² Though the local dishes may have amused Hong Kong’s ravenous readers, Ye’s irreverent treatment of Kuwabara’s meticulously gathered evidence undercuts the research paper’s intellectual authority.

Reading Ye’s stinging mockery recalls the dark satire of Jonathan Swift’s ‘A Modest Proposal’ (1729), in which Swift unemotionally suggested that Irish children could be ‘stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled [… or severed] in a fricassee, or a ragout’.Footnote ¹¹³ Like Swift, Ye concocted his satire by presenting human consumption as just another culinary option, mocking imperialist attitudes towards the Chinese. The more he parodied Kuwabara’s claim that Chinese cannibalism was culturally ingrained, the more ludicrous Kuwabara’s argument appeared. Ye exposed the flaws in Kuwabara’s ethnocentric logic by transforming what was portrayed as horrifying historical reality into casual gastronomy, turning Kuwabara’s conclusions into something not only grotesque but nearly farcical—revealing the absurdity of a theoretically rigorous Sinologist reducing one of China’s most esteemed texts to little more than a record of cannibalism.

Who are the cannibals, and who are the cannibalized?

Less than a month after his first literary cannibalization, Ye published his second rewrite, ‘On the Customs of Eating Human Flesh’.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Despite its similar title to Kuwabara’s ‘The Custom of Eating Human Flesh Among the Chinese’, the contents of the two texts bear little resemblance to each other, as Ye explored how cannibalism manifests, whether literally or symbolically, through various religions and belief systems around the world. To be sure, literary cannibalism is not simply mimetic: for example, Senegalese novelist Boubacar Boris Diop’s Le temps de Tamango (The Time of Tamango, 1981) scarcely resembles the original cannibalized text, Prosper Mérimée’s Tamango (1829).Footnote ¹¹⁵ Diop’s literary cannibalization was ‘[taking] Mérimée’s text and, much like a palimpsest [emphasis mine], [inscribing] onto it the ills of a country struggling with the legacy of colonialism’.Footnote ¹¹⁶ In the same vein, Ye presented his non-ethnocentric understanding of cannibalism in transnational and transcultural contexts, superimposing them onto Kuwabara’s notion of totalized and generalized cannibalism as the most violent and inhuman act in Chinese history.

The practices of ceremonial and therapeutic cannibalism, considered ‘barbarous customs’ by Kuwabara but ‘extremely solemn’ and ‘progressive’ according to Ye, were widespread across the world.Footnote ¹¹⁷ It is thus not a coincidence that the title of Ye’s essay emulates that of Kuwabara’s research paper, differing only in the omission of the phrase ‘Chinese people (Shina ningen 支那人間)’. Discussing cannibalism through a global lens, Ye displayed an even more voracious appetite for source texts. The second essay constitutes a literary cannibalization of The Golden Bough (1890) by Scottish anthropologist James George Frazer and The Childhood of Man (1909) by German ethnologist Leo Frobenius, and, most strikingly, the Holy Bible. Borrowing Albert Memmi’s argument that ‘all the oppressed are alike in some ways’ and ‘all colonized people have much in common’, Vergara Reynolds was led to the conclusion that ‘all of the colonizers have much in common’.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Thus, Ye’s critique of both Japanese and Western epistemologies underpinning their colonial discourses on (Chinese) cannibalism becomes all the more powerful in this literary cannibalization.

The essay begins with Ye’s bold declaration: ‘Christians all over the world, no matter if they’re men or women, every single one of them eats human flesh’.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Ye foresaw that Christians might challenge him, so he imagined a dialogue with them, asserting: ‘I’ll say, wait a minute, let me show you the evidence. Just open the Gospel of Matthew in the New Testament and read it:’Footnote ¹²⁰

Reciting the biblical verses, Ye daringly confronted his imaginary Christian audience, asking, ‘If this is not cannibalism, what is?’.Footnote ¹²² Ye made a powerful move here by throwing the most sacred text of the Western world into the face of European colonizers, as accusations of Christian cannibalism were never taken seriously, dismissed as slander, and erased from collective consciousness.Footnote ¹²³ Throughout the course of European colonialism, cannibalism as a custom was believed to exist only in remote lands inhabited by monstrous races, often right before or during their ‘pacification’ by agents of Western civilization.Footnote ¹²⁴ As Steve Newcomb argues, Christian people, nations, or states believed in their right to dominate the ‘discovered’ lands and lives of non-Christians under the Doctrine of Discovery.Footnote ¹²⁵ And, without exaggeration, as Smith notes, this doctrine ‘will probably apply if humans choose to colonize a new planet’.Footnote ¹²⁶ This opening not only exposed the hypocrisy of Christianity but, more importantly, accentuated empire’s power matrix to define and dismiss transgressions on their own terms.

Ye told his readers that, according to Frazer’s The Golden Bough, ceremonial and therapeutic cannibalism—consuming enemies to transform their flesh and blood into strength and spirit—was practised among the people of the mountainous regions of Southeast Africa. But Ye expressed no astonishment, arguing that, much like the Catholic belief in transubstantiation, many practitioners of ritual cannibalism believe that human flesh is consecrated to represent the bodily presence of deities or revered figures. The double standard in the Eurocentric ‘gossip’Footnote ¹²⁷ about cannibalism, however, was prevalent, as Arens put it, involving ‘the a priori dismissal of the existing reports on cannibalism for Europeans and the acceptance of every report for non-European people’.Footnote ¹²⁸ Ye thus reminded readers that so-called civilized people still uphold and respect the meaning of ‘endocannibalism’—the only difference being that they no longer express it by literally eating someone’s flesh. His literary cannibalization of Frazer’s work advances a culturally relativistic understanding of ceremonial cannibalism—crucially without romanticizing the practitioners as ‘noble savages’, as Montaigne did in ‘Des Cannibales’ (circa 1580), but instead viewing those who practised it as no different from those who did not.Footnote ¹²⁹

While Kuwabara saw therapeutic cannibalism from the late Tang onwards as the embodiment of Confucian decay, Ye countered with Frazer’s view that using human flesh as medicine signified intellectual progress—from consuming plants to animals, then human organs. When hormones were extracted from urine, it was celebrated as modern medicine. Ye argued that, by the same logic, examining the therapeutic efficacy of human flesh that so-called ‘savages’ believe in reveals that modern science often derives from their knowledge. Once again, Ye exposed the double standard: while Western flesh-based remedies are hailed as rational science, similar practices among ‘primitives’ are dismissed as savage curiosities.

Ye was not uncritical of Frazer’s work. He made a satirical remark at the end of his cannibalization: ‘the erudite Dr. Frazer, when listing all the instances of therapeutic cannibalism, of course, wouldn’t leave out some notable examples, such as the Chinese belief that eating the heart of a bandit can gain their bravery, or that eating mantou dipped in blood can cure tuberculosis’.Footnote ¹³⁰ Notably, Ye altered the first instance, while the second—though alluding to Lu Xun’s ‘Yao’ (Medicine, 1919)—is absent from Frazer’s text.Footnote ¹³¹ By putting words into Frazer’s mouth, Ye, in fact, imperceptibly cannibalized David Field Rennie’s Peking and the Pekingese (1865) and Edward Balfour’s The Cyclopaedia of India and of Eastern and Southern Asia (1885), both of which Kuwabara referenced in his discussion of therapeutic cannibalism in China.Footnote ¹³² Kuwabara cited Rennie’s account of executioners selling buns dipped in the blood of decapitated criminals, as well as Balfour’s hearsay during the Taiping Rebellion: a Chinese servant at a foreign trading house in Shanghai allegedly ate the heart of an executed rebel to boost his courage.Footnote ¹³³ All these cannibalized texts—by Frazer, Rennie, or Balfour—ultimately direct our attention to Kuwabara’s research. Records of Chinese cannibalism were gathered, classified, and shared among the colonizers, all while the Chinese under the imperial gaze neither asked for nor desired to be ‘observed’, ‘scrutinized’, or ‘documented’.

By devouring Frobenius’s The Childhood of Man, where cannibalism was described as ‘the most repulsive of misdeeds’ and ‘the crime of crimes’, Ye inverted the narratives, portraying the Chinese as victims rather than as perpetrators.Footnote ¹³⁴ The readers were first informed that, based on Frobenius’s research, Indigenous Australians from the south possessed a timid personality and were spiritless, which made them weak and indolent, and therefore, they lacked the strength to kill and eat other humans. On the contrary, the Queenslanders, from northeastern Australia, were violent and had a fondness for human flesh. Frobenius’s ethnography gains new meaning when read through the lens of the Japanese empire, rather than as a decontextualized source in Ye’s cannibalization. The Australian continent appears to serve as an apt microcosm of the GEACPS. Accordingly, the feeble southern natives and the aggressive northeastern warriors in Australia allude, respectively, to the people of Hong Kong—a southern island already incorporated into the sphere both geographically and ideologically—and the Imperial Japanese Army. More hints point to this reading: the Queenslanders even organized expeditions to hunt for humans. During their raids on southern tribes, the elderly and children were prime targets for cannibalism; a young, attractive woman might be spared, but an old woman would be heartlessly eaten. Ye eventually lamented that for these unfortunate people, ‘given the power imbalance, resistance is nearly impossible’.Footnote ¹³⁵

The most creative yet antagonistic instance of literary cannibalization lies in Ye’s appropriation of the oral evidence Frobenius collected from his Indigenous informants. Several of them told Frobenius that they felt extreme repugnance at the brackish taste of white people’s flesh, which they attributed to the typical European diet of beef, bread, tea, and salt.Footnote ¹³⁶ They favoured Chinese flesh instead, which they considered healthier due to the consumption of rice and vegetables. During his sojourn in northern Australia, Frobenius also heard that many Chinese were brutally killed, with one account noting that ten were consumed in a single feast.Footnote ¹³⁷ As illustrated above, Ye parodied Kuwabara’s use of historical records to undermine his academic authority. By contrast, Ye amplified the gravitas of Frobenius’s ethnographic accounts by consistently referring to him by his doctoral title, assuring readers that the prominent scholar would not have treated the matter lightly.

In European colonial discourse, the figure of the cannibal evoked fears of the primitive ‘other’ consuming whites, thereby justifying their extermination as if they were vermin. As Arens noted, the so-called cannibals from faraway lands—once imagined as cooking white people in their pots—are themselves extinct from human history. By cannibalizing Frobenius’s ethnographic research, Ye reversed the roles of victim and perpetrator in Kuwabara’s colonial discourse. Seen against the backdrop of Japan’s military expansion in Asia, the Chinese were hardly cannibalistic, as Kuwabara depicted; rather, they became the prey of Japanese imperialists. Ironically, the Indigenous Australians’ accounts of consuming Chinese flesh, gory and sensational as they may appear, also became a grim reality in occupied Hong Kong.

In his second rewrite, Ye superimposed a powerful counter-discourse onto Kuwabara’s work while retaining a mocking edge. Cannibalizing the abundant so-called evidence of (Chinese) cannibalism—primarily drawn from Western scholars’ ethnographies ‘riddled with prejudices as well as scientifical-professional-scholarly-careerist hypocrisy’—he reconstructed a human history that centred the colonized experience, not limited to occupied Hong Kong, and exposed the ethnocentrism underpinning Kuwabara’s research.Footnote ¹³⁸ Not only were the colonial dualities of self/‘other’, civilized/cannibalistic, and centre/periphery inverted, but the oppressive power embedded in cannibalism discourses across both Western and Japanese imperial projects was also contested.

Nevertheless, Ye’s rewrite does more than shift the narrative from ‘Chinese cannibal’ to ‘Chinese being cannibalized’; it shows that, whether portrayed as predator or prey, the ‘other’ was uniformly stripped of agency and reduced to an object distorted by colonial scholarship. If Arens is correct that ‘every human culture … including our own, has been labelled cannibalistic at one time or another by someone’, then any attempt—by colonizer or colonized—to answer the question ‘who are the cannibals?’ is an inherently self-perpetuating cycle of ethnocentric denunciation, which Ye clearly recognized.Footnote ¹³⁹ Citing archaeological evidence of Neanderthal endocannibalism at the end of the essay, he, from the perspective of the colonized, emphasized humanity’s shared ancestry, transcending cultural, temporal, and ethnic boundaries, hence an inclusive history of Homo sapiens, the sole extant human species.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Ye’s discourse anticipated Claude Lévi-Strauss’s essay ‘We Are All Cannibals’, in which he argued that ‘cannibalism in itself has no objective reality. It is an ethnocentric category: it exists only in the eyes of the societies that proscribe it.’Footnote ¹⁴¹ Rather than wielding cannibalism as a calumny or denying its possible presence among our prehistoric ancestors or modern humans, Ye exposed the irony behind the supposed racial equality and cultural unity of Asian peoples in Japan’s imperial vision of the GEACPS, while resonating with de Andrade’s genuine declaration that ‘Cannibalism alone unites us [the colonized]. Socially. Economically. Philosophically’.Footnote ¹⁴²