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Moving away from the text-centered paradigm in film studies, the present research explores the relationship between the growing popularity of the film in Shanghai during the first two decades of the twentieth century and city governance in the International Settlement. It argues that the rise of movie halls contributed to creating a new kind of crowd that blended Chinese moviegoers with non-Chinese viewers. The emergence of the cinema as a space where people of different racial and ethnic origins encountered impelled the Shanghai Municipal Council – the governing body of the International Settlement in Shanghai – to respond by implementing new measures of public safety and altering its decades-long unspoken rules of segregation in the realm of everyday life. For Chinese enlightenment intellectuals and government officials, meanwhile, anxiety over their fellow Chinese's lack of basic decorum in public spaces arose with the intense intermingling of Chinese and non-Chinese filmgoers under the same roof. Thus, the cinema became a “contact zone” – a space of asymmetrical relations resulting not necessarily from colonists' exercise of colonial power but from the Chinese elite's wrapping of the discussion of movie theater etiquette reform within a political and ideological framework of modernization, patriotism, and anti-imperialism.

This article examines the afforestation movement in the West Lake area in Mao's China (1949–1976). I argue that this campaign was, by its nature, propagandistic, for it created a narrative of a deforested China before 1949 and a greener land after 1949 to serve the purpose of justifying China's new political system and popularizing socialist ideologies. Hence, such projects helped to define what socialism was in China and thereby solicited the participation of the general population. This afforestation project, engineered to legitimize the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) rule in China both domestically and internationally, was, however, marred by both human and non-human actors. Local inhabitants who were intent upon protecting their own private properties vis-à-vis the collectivizing state, poachers who illegally felled trees for firewood and timber, and tea growers who were keen on expanding their tea plantations at the cost of mountain forests sabotaged the CCP's afforestation efforts. Meanwhile, various pests contributed to the massive death of newly planted trees and prompted local cadres and citizens to adjust afforestation policies throughout Mao's times. I argue that human and non-human actors possessed non-purposive agency—that is, agency not driven by their intentions and purposes but defined by their actions—to affect, deflect, and undercut the CCP's political agendas.

This article focuses on Zhao Dan’s (1915–1980) career in film after 1949 to investigate a specific type of stardom unique to Mao Zedong’s China (1949–1976). We argue that this new stardom was similar to what conventionally defines stardom, but with an added political dimension: Zhao Dan’s acquisition of high political standing in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). To arrive at a fuller understanding of the state–artist relationship in the PRC, this article challenges the paradigm of accommodation and resistance between the tyrannical state and subordinated artists, which presupposes a subjectivity or selfhood on the part of artists that pre-existed and was maintained against the intrusive hegemonic ideologies of the state. Instead, we underscore that the making of Zhao Dan’s subjectivity in the PRC—his subjectivity-in-stardom in this case—was a dynamic process, a “becoming.” Zhao Dan’s checkered career indicates that he not only acclimated himself to the ever-changing political atmosphere of Mao-era China but also sought to benefit from it.

This article focuses on the extravagant funeral procession of Sheng Xuanhuai (1844–1916) in November 1917. This mile-long procession attracted over a million spectators and, thereby, lent the residents and sojourners in Shanghai of the day a unique visual sensibility of the modern urban milieu. Various parties to the funeral procession—namely the colonial authorities, the bereaved family, businessmen, and lower-class spectators—developed various tactics to manipulate the spectacle of the procession for political control, commercial gains, and visual pleasure. The author argues that the spectacularization of daily life, as exemplified by the 1917 funeral procession, and a collective will to look and to be looked at in early twentieth-century China, contributed to binding together otherwise segregated people, thus restructuring interpersonal relationships in the modernized city of Shanghai.

This paper examines the resistance ofpingtanstorytellers to Communist political domination and economic exploitation on the eve of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). In the early and mid-1960s, storytellers rarely mounted resistance through direct confrontations with the political authorities, but often in ‘everyday forms’ such as by libelling cadres, asking for sick-leave, refusing to conform to the dress code during performances, and threatening to withdraw from troupes. In order to vent their disappointment at the economic hardships following the Great Leap Forward (1958–1961), storytellers resorted to the flexible ways of narrating and performing pingtan stories to manipulate the storylines and characterizations in their stage performances. Hence storytellers engaged in counter-propaganda by telling ribald jokes and distorting stories that were originally designed to praise Communist revolutions. This investigation of the resistance of storytellers, both on and off stage, is intended not merely to raise a long overlooked history of the 1960s from oblivion, but also to highlight the Party-state's inability to ideologically transform Chinese artists prior to the Cultural Revolution.

This article investigates the distribution and consumption of Way Down East (directed by D. W. Griffith, 1920) in Chinese cities in the 1920s in an attempt to explore the impact of foreign films on early Chinese filmmaking in particular and on Chinese society in general. Griffith’s Way Down East highlights a young woman’s trials and tribulations caused by male tyranny and deception. Such films by D. W. Griffith struck a chord in China in the 1920s, when the concerns of women and the loss of family values after the May Fourth movement found expression in film. The embracing of Way Down East in China, particularly among progressive intellectuals, indicates the existence of an anti-May Fourth conservatism. Chinese intellectuals were inspired by Way Down East to deny Chinese women’s subjectivity as new women who could control their own destinies; such a denial thereby rejected romantic love as a means of women’s emancipation and enlightenment. The intellectual class’s jettisoning of the rhetoric of “free love” and free marriage and re-emphasizing family values in the 1920s were conducive to the Nationalist Party’s conservative agenda to discipline individuals and Chinese society in the late 1920s and 1930s. Therefore, the “partification” of China during the Nanjing Decade (1927–37) was a direct outgrowth of a conservative consensus that followed upon May Fourth.

This article examines the complex relationship of the state, market, and artists in pingtan storytelling in post-1949 China. By focusing on Su Yuyin, a pingtan storyteller, and his performing career, this article explores the persistence of cultural markets after the Communist victory in 1949 and argues that the market continued to play a significant role in shaping China’s popular culture, which the government was keen on patronizing and politicizing. By comparing the regime’s management of pingtan storytelling before and after the Cultural Revolution (1966—1976), this article further argues that the regime’s censorship of popular culture in the 1950s and 1960s was handicapped by its lack of financial resources and the continued existence of cultural markets. The result was that censorship was not as strictly and efficiently enforced as has been assumed.

On April 1, 1914, Zhijiang ribao (River Zhi Daily), one of Hangzhou'fs leading newspapers in early Republican China (1911-1949), celebrated its first anniversary. The daily'fs interest in covering national affairs was evident in one of its editorials: Although our newspaper is a regional one, [our] journalists'f outlooks transcend one area. Whatever we focus on is relevant to the current situation [in China]. The editorialist then proceeded to discuss banditry in Henan and political unrest in the Northwest, both of which, according to the editorial, were concerns of the daily. On Zhijiang ribao'fs tenth anniversary, by contrast, its editors felt compelled to exclusively serve readers in Zhejiang: In the past decade… Zhejiang was able to preserve its territory and narrowly escape the sufferings of wars. Our colleagues can therefore relish the chance to… [celebrate] this moment (the tenth anniversary).… From now on, we will do nothing but try our best not to let Zhejiang people down.… [Let'fs] rely ...