MORE ON HIDDEN PROPAGANDA IN CHINESE BANKNOTES

The history of Chinese propaganda currency is so rich that I wrote about it on two occasions. The first was "Secret Symbols on WWII Occupation notes of China for Coins, June 1973. The second article was "Propaganda Currency of China," International Banknote Society Journal, Volume 23, No. 3, 1984. Readers who want to study the propaganda of China in more depth should obtain these original reference works. For the purposes of this article I will just state that the Chinese printers who prepared the banknotes for the puppet banks under Japanese authority allegedly placed a number of propaganda symbols on the various banknotes that they designed. These may or may not be actual propaganda. Chinese patriots say that they are, others doubt the claims.

In some cases they added letters to the scrollwork on the banknotes. For instance, on the Central Reserve Bank of China 50 cents note of 1940 they dispersed the English letters "C G W R S." The letters allegedly represent "Central Government Will Return Soon." The Central Reserve Bank was chartered 19 December 1940 under the authority of Wang Ching-Wei, chief of the pro-Japanese collaborationist government.

The English letters "CGWRS" are dispersed within the scrollwork above and below the word "Reserve" on the back. In the upper scrollwork four letters are in a line from left to right in the following order: "G," "R," "C," and "W." The "S" is at upper center in the lower scrollwork. The front of the note contains five hidden Chinese characters that have a similar meaning, located on the Sun Yat Sen mausoleum and in the trees surrounding the mausoleum. The true meaning of the letters has been questioned, but "Central Government Will Return Soon" was a popular and well known propaganda slogan, so there is some reason to believe that these symbols were hidden on the banknote for propaganda purposes. This banknote underwent three printings, with color changes, without the propaganda being detected by the Japanese. The 50 cent banknotes are found in red-brown, orange, and purple.

The same message is hidden in Chinese characters on the back of the 50 cents note. Chinese banknote collector Yuyuan Gu told me in 2012 that he had also found secret Chinese characters hidden on the back of the Central Reserve Bank Chinese 50 cents banknote. He says they can be arranged as “Central Government Will Return Soon.” I thought this was new information, but when I mentioned this to my friend and advanced collector Frank Prosser, he told me that I had written about these very characters in Coins, June 1973. Frank knows my research better than I do.

To read the complete article, see:
WWII ALLIED PROPAGANDA BANKNOTES : China (www.psywarrior.com/WWIIAlliedBanknotes2.html)

To read the complete article, see:
HIDDEN PROPAGANDA IN WWII-ERA CHINESE BANKNOTES (www.coinbooks.org/esylum_v19n50a31.html)

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