The Heroic and the Banal:Consuming Soviet Movies in Pre-Socialist China, 1920s–1940s
Soviet cinema as part of the socialist cultural landscape in Maoist China has been well recognized and extensively researched. This article looks at the earlier exhibition history of Soviet movies in pre-socialist China (from the 1920s to 1940s). It demonstrates that the early Chinese consumption and reception of this film culture involved two intertwined attitudes. On the one hand, Soviet movies were greeted as a much-needed Hero in the Chinese nationalist and anti-imperialist discourses. On the other hand, the exhibition of Soviet movies operated commercially, and commercial sectors promoted the popular appeal of these movies to fulfill the carnal desire of spectators. By examining film reviews, advertisements, and censorship reports, this article explores the ways in which the Hero image and the banal side of the Hero were constructed in the pre-socialist milieu of China.
Soviet cinema, Republican China, film exhibition
Soviet cinema was a significant part of socialist cultural life in Maoist China, which has been extensively researched.1 After Hollywood films—the "poisonous weeds" of imperialism and capitalism—were driven out of China in the early 1950s, Soviet films dominated the country's film markets until the Sino-Soviet split in the mid-1960s. Statistics show that Soviet movies occupied nearly half of [End Page 93] all imports between 1949 and 1964.2 Audience numbers were striking. A number of Bolshevik heroes/heroines like Vasily Chapayev (in Chapayev, 1934), Pavel Korchagin (in How the Steel Was Tempered, 1942), and Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya (in Zoya, 1944) even became household names in China and still retained their aura in the collective memories of the generations that experienced the Mao era.3 In the 1930s, however, moving pictures from this newly established socialist country had little chance to prevail against those made in the American dream factories. For example, in 1934 there were only seven feature-length films imported from the Soviet Union, which occupied 1.71 percent of all the imports, whereas Hollywood-made feature films numbered 345, which occupied 80.87 percent.4
How did the Soviet film share grow from less than two percent to nearly fifty percent? To be sure, it was not the movies alone that decided. The Communist takeover in 1949 and the Cold War situation in the 1950s and 1960s played the most crucial role in the boost in imports of Soviet movies. However, this article will demonstrate that the domination of Soviet movies in the Mao era was also the result of gradual changes in quantitative terms. The 1930s and 1940s should not be forgotten. Drawing upon archival materials, prints of Soviet films, intellectual and popular journal articles, newspaper advertisements, diaries, memoirs, and biographies, this article will provide a close look at the Chinese consumption and reception of Soviet movies in a pre-socialist milieu.
I argue that, on the one hand, Soviet movies received warm acclaim in pre-socialist China because China was eager to seek a Hero and a new path leading to sovereignty and prosperity. On the other hand, the exhibition of Soviet movies operated within a commercial environment. It was first and foremost a business. Contrary to the conventional assumption, Soviet propaganda films also had their worldly appeal to Chinese eyes and were integrated well into the urban culture of Republican China, Shanghai in particular. Various facets of this dynamic urban culture have been examined, including print culture and literature in Leo Ou-fan Lee's Shanghai Modern,5 cinema in Zhen Zhang's An Amorous History of the Silver Screen,6 and commercial culture in Sherman Cochran's edited volume Inventing Nanjing Road,7 to name just a few. Soviet cultural products were generally absent in this landscape as represented in these works and elsewhere. [End Page 94] This absence may have resulted from the preconception that Communism and commercialism are mutually exclusive. This study will challenge this view and demonstrate that consuming Soviet movies in pre-socialist China had its "banal" side.
This article examines both the heroic and banal faces of Soviet cinema in Republican China. In Part One, I first delineate the early trajectories of Soviet movies in China. I employ a historical character's life story as a thread to connect the different locations reached by Soviet movies, the multiple agencies that helped circulate these images, tales, and messages, as well as the mentalities of savoring the supposedly oppressing realms of politics and aesthetics. I will demonstrate that these elements were all entangled into the big picture of modern Chinese history filled with struggles with colonialism, war, and sovereignty. Soviet movies played a small role, but they were part and parcel of this history and mirrored it in profound ways.
Travelling across China in War and Peace
Many years later, as Jiang Chunfang (姜椿芳 1912–1987) sat in his office in the Shanghai-based Russian-run film distribution company, the Asiatic Mercantile Co., he was to remember that distant bright summer day when his mother took him to Harbin. It was August 1928. The sixteen-year-old boy and his mother travelled over 2000 kilometers by train from their hometown in the lower Yangtze Delta, Wujin 武進, to come to the North Manchurian city in order to reunite with his father. Half a year earlier, the jobless father had followed his brother's lead and went to the distant city to make a living.8 A by-product of the construction of the Chinese Eastern Railway (CER), an extension of the Russian Trans-Siberian Railway, the city of Harbin was established in 1898 from a small village. A site of competing colonialism and conflict between Russia/the USSR, Japan, Western powers, and China, Harbin became a multiethnic city where over fifty nationalities came to live in the first half of the twentieth century.9 Nevertheless, Russians left the most visible imprint on the physical and cultural landscapes of Harbin, once even known as the "Oriental Moscow."
The city that greeted Jiang Chunfang in the late 1920s was at its peak of Russian cultural development. Revolution and war brought 100,000 to 200,000 Russian émigrés to Harbin, newcomers who built schools, churches, shops, and entertainment establishments, including movie theaters.10 In 1927, a Russian [End Page 95] company controlled the motion picture business in Harbin, operating six principal theaters, and their patrons were mainly Russian.11 At the same time, CER staff clubs were also regular sites for showing movies.12 Since Russians composed their largest audience, it was only natural that Russian and Soviet films were brought to this city. Jiang Chunfang, who became a low-ranking CER clerk in 1929, heard from his colleagues that in the early 1920s CER Russian employees brought reels of silent films, either pre-revolutionary or Soviet productions, from their home country to Harbin to show at those clubs and theaters.13 Jiang remembered that he watched a newsreel about the Red Square Labor Day parade at an internal screening for celebrating the anniversary of the October Revolution in 1932. In the early 1930s a number of Soviet feature films also started screening in Harbin cinemas, including The Road to Life (Putiovka v zhizn, dir. Nikolai Ekk, 1931) and Golden Mountains (Zlatye gory, dir. Sergei Yutkevich, 1931).14 These films were initially shown to Chinese workers in the Russian Far East. When they were brought to Harbin, they had Chinese subtitles in order to cater to both Russians and Chinese. However, the Japanese invasion of Harbin and the establishment of Manchukuo in 1932 severed the channels for screening Soviet films in Harbin. The alternative markets were Shanghai and elsewhere.
But during the period of Jiang Chunfang's stay in Harbin, it was still Hollywood and European films that dominated the city's film market for several reasons.15 First, Hollywood's domination in the 1920s and 1930s was a global phenomenon, and Harbin was no exception. Second, Soviet Russia in the 1920s was not yet able to produce an adequate number of high-quality films for export.16 Third, before the restoration of the Sino-Soviet diplomatic relationship in December 1932, showing Soviet movies in China was risky.17 Government archives reveal that, for example, in 1928 the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs sent a dispatch to the Ministry of the Interior to alert it to the possible infiltration of Soviet propaganda [End Page 96] movies, which would be sent to India, Egypt, China, and other Western colonies.18 The Ministry of the Interior then sent the dispatch to the provincial governments. The Heilongjiang provincial police force soon decreed that the exhibition of Soviet propaganda films was prohibited.19
The effectiveness of such decrees was dubious, however.20 We should not overestimate the role politics played in this picture. As mentioned above, the Soviet film industry had not developed a strong export system and its trade links with foreign cinema industries were only basic. Showing Soviet movies in Harbin was small-scale and occasional, rather than a systematic industrial operation.
No matter how film culture was prospering in Harbin, Jiang Chunfang did not have the luxury of going to the cinema frequently. Admission was too costly for him, and he had his own preoccupations and responsibilities to fulfill. In the autumn of 1928, he entered the Third Middle School of Harbin. At the same time he was learning Russian with a Russian émigré in order to secure a job at the CER in the future. The 1920s witnessed rising nationalist sentiments in Harbin's Chinese communities. Chinese residents were making efforts to combat the Russian monopoly and Japanese invasion, to promote the city's Chinese identity, and to assert Chinese sovereignty. The apex of such efforts in the 1920s was the student demonstrations of 1928 in opposition to five new Japanese railway lines under construction in Northeast China.21 The storm of protest started in early November, only a few months after Jiang Chunfang's enrollment in the Third Middle School, which was exactly one of the strongholds of student demonstrators. A hot-blooded student at sixteen, Jiang Chunfang was naturally involved in the demonstrations. Nationalism or patriotism was contagious and connected people in various ways.
In the years that followed, when Jiang's impoverished family could not afford his education, he had to quit school and worked at the CER before he joined several news agencies and newspapers as an editor responsible for translating news reports from Russian newspapers into Chinese. Unsurprisingly, his working and living environment exposed him to Communist influence from multiple sources like Russian-language journals and books, Russian Communists on the CER line, as well as his fellow Chinese young people with "left-leaning" political orientation.22 Jiang Chunfang joined the CCP Youth League (共青團 Gongqingtuan) in 1931, and became a formal CCP member in 1932. His main [End Page 97] work for the party was to edit propaganda journals. For these activities he was detained by Japanese police in 1936 for several months. After release he fled to Shanghai.
Russian dancing girls in Shanghai (Liangyou, no. 89 (June 1934)).
The exhibition of Soviet movies in Shanghai on a regular basis started in 1933. Until then there were only sporadic screenings of Soviet documentaries and experimental films. Ordinary Chinese film audiences had few, if any, channels to see Soviet avant-garde and propaganda films of the 1920s.23 At the time when Soviet movies arrived in Shanghai, it was dancing girls that were deemed emblematic of Russian culture in Shanghai's international settlement (Figure 1), along with Indian policemen, French sailors, American movies, and English banks.24 [End Page 98]
Soviet movies had to join these sexy women and to find a way to integrate into the urban culture of Shanghai, the most cosmopolitan, Westernized, and commercialized city in Republican China. Showing Soviet movies became legal in the city's Chinese-administered territory thanks to the restored diplomatic relation between China and the USSR in 1932. But most movie houses were located in the foreign settlements under British, American, and French jurisdiction, and Hollywood monopolized the market. Movies from the Bolshevik country were not welcomed in those theaters. In 1933 the Municipal Council of the Shanghai International Settlement implicitly expressed its attitude towards "politically sensitive films," saying that "any film that carries political message" should be handled carefully.25 Many Soviet films were banned in the foreign concessions and could only be shown in the Chinese area, including Pudovkin's Storm over Asia (1928) and Sergei Yutkevich's Golden Mountains (1931).26 An ideal site for showing Soviet films emerged: the Isis Theater (上海大戲院 Shanghai da xiyuan), located in the Chinese area just 500 meters north of the settlement boundary. This location provided the advantage of evading foreign censorship, while making use of the commercially bustling environment and convenient public transportation. It is interesting to note that, when showing Soviet films banned by foreign censors at this theater, theater ads always highlighted the fact of "being banned" as a tactic to attract curious spectators.27 In this way, Soviet movies built a niche in this grey zone, maneuvering on the margins of complicated political situation and fierce commercial competition.
The people who brought Soviet films to Shanghai were mainly those CER Russian employees who had exhibited Soviet films in Harbin. According to Jiang Chunfang, they came to Shanghai and approached Soviet organizations devoted to import and export businesses—initially an organization affiliated with a British trading company and later a Soviet state-run corporation named the Soviet Association for Grain Exports, which had a film division. In late 1932 or early 1933, they cooperated with several Chinese merchants and formed a distribution agency (Chinese company name: 明信 Mingxin). The Mingxin Company signed a contract with the Isis Theater and became its main provider of Soviet movies. In [End Page 99] 1936, as their business was expanding, an entirely Soviet-run company, the Asiatic Mercantile Co. (亞洲公司 Yazhou gongsi), was founded.28
The Asiatic Company was where Jiang Chunfang found his first job in Shanghai in 1936 with the help of two friends he had known in Harbin: a Chinese working at the Soviet Association for Grain Exports and a Jewish Britain running a Russian bookstore in the French Concession.29 After the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1932, many Harbin Russians migrated to Shanghai. Census data show that, at the end of 1934, 10,856 Russians lived in Shanghai, constituting the second largest foreign population of the city.30 The Jewish British bookstore manager, the former CER employees/film merchants, and Jiang Chunfang himself, were all involved in this general move from Harbin to Shanghai and coincidentally acted as the brokers of cultural products during the move. Soviet cinema was part of this flow.
From February 1933, when the Isis screened its first Soviet movie, until it closed in July 1937, the theater screened over thirty Soviet feature films.31 The number was not large, but the cultural responses to Soviet culture were apparently significant. The Asiatic Company also distributed films to second and third-run movie theaters in Shanghai, as well as to Suzhou, Wuxi, Nanjing, Hangzhou, Chongqing, and even as far as British Malaya, the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, and Burma in Southeast Asia.32 These were the usual routes for distributing Shanghai-produced films in the 1920s and 1930s.33 Through established commercial channels, Soviet movies gained a toe-hold in the film markets of pre-socialist China and beyond.
The war with Japan did not bring the Asiatic Company to an end. Rather, it followed the Nationalist government and established branches in Hankou and Chongqing, bringing Soviet films to the southwestern provinces, places where those films would not have reached otherwise. Evidence shows that Soviet movies [End Page 100] were warmly received in Guangxi and Xinjiang, and were also welcomed by soldiers when they were brought to the front.34 After the end of the war in 1945, the headquarters of the Asiatic Company was relocated in Shanghai. It continued distributing Soviet movies until its liquidation in 1948.35 Meanwhile, a Soviet corporation for the international circulation of Soviet films—Sovexportfilm—established offices in Harbin and Dalian in 1945 and 1946. Sovexportfilm also established a Shanghai branch in 1946 and cooperated with the Asiatic Company to distribute Soviet films in China, excluding Manchuria, Xinjiang, and Hong Kong.36 The number of Soviet movies shown in the post-war period increased remarkably. Between May 1946 and July 1948, the Shanghai Bureau of Social Affairs (上海市社會局 Shanghai shi shehui ju) reviewed 259 films imported from the USSR, eight percent of the total, up from just one or two percent in the mid-1930s.37 Seen in this light, the Chinese market for Soviet movies had been expanding during these two decades, and the Chinese audience was familiar with the aesthetic style of this cinema before Soviet movies flooded into the country in the early Mao era.
This picture suggests that a number of factors facilitated the spread of Soviet cinema in pre-socialist China. First, the commercial factor was of great importance, considering the key role that Soviet merchants, trading companies, and commercial theaters played. This differed greatly from the post-1949 situation, when political elements played the central role in Soviet cinema's domination in the Chinese film market. Second, geopolitics were vital: Harbin was a geographical and cultural frontier of Sino-Russian/Soviet contact, and the Isis Theater was located in a grey zone where the interplay between the policed and the transgressive fostered cultural dynamics in fascinating ways. Much the same can be said of the southwestern provinces and Xinjiang in wartime, although this subject is beyond the scope of this article. These places played different roles in modern Chinese history. The fate of Soviet cinema in pre-socialist China was closely linked with this history. Last but not least, as the life story of our tour guide Jiang Chunfang has demonstrated, patriotic and nationalistic sentiments facilitated the circulation of Soviet cinema culture. Jiang Chunfang was not alone; he had legions of comrades who were feeling the same. [End Page 101]
Scenes from The Circus (DVD snapshots).
Greeting the Hero: A Road to Life
An editorial in the January 1, 1933 issue of the Shanghai pictorial Liangyou (良友 The Young Companion) opens with a short and strong sentence: "Coming as a thunderbolt, China and the Soviet Union restored their diplomatic relationship!" The author further remarks that the Soviet Union has pointed to "a new path" for China and has encouraged "Chinese people to fight against imperialism."38 When writing, this optimistic author did not know there would soon be a Soviet film entitled The Circus (Tsirk, dir. and scr. Grigorii Aleksandrov, Mosfilm, 1936) that conveys a similar message. The film tells the story of an American circus performer who suffers racist discrimination after giving birth to a black baby and leaves the United States on a circus journey across the USSR. The film's opening scene features a moving train, on the front of which a globe is spinning rapidly, starting from the USA and stopping at the USSR (Figure 2). The implication is clear: the USSR represents the new hope for humankind, not the USA or the West in general. It is intriguing to note that the optimistic tone of the editor of this Chinese popular magazine is in tune with this message of Communist propaganda.
This editorial represented a tiny voice amid a sea of applause for the arrival of an "alternative," namely, Soviet culture. The first Soviet film shown at the Isis was The Road to Life. Its Chinese title was Shenglu 生路, which literally means "a way out." However, its original Russian title, Putiovka v zhizn, means "the voucher of life."39 Clearly, Shenglu sounds stronger and better echoes the message conveyed both in the Liangyou editorial and the opening scene of The Circus, the message that the Soviet Union points to "a way out" of imperialist hegemony, a road to a new life, and an alternative culture to counter "decadent" capitalist culture. The meanings that emerge in the translation of the film title alone provided a glimpse of the positive attitude toward Soviet culture. This section begins with a close look at Chinese reactions to The Road to Life and further investigates the factors that gave rise to these reactions.
The Road to Life was the first Soviet-made sound film, released in June, 1931. It describes how the Communist educator Nicolai Sergeev transforms Moscow's [End Page 102] homeless juvenile delinquents into useful members of society by means of labor and self-governance in a youth commune.40 The theme underscored this Soviet social problem in order to combat massive juvenile homelessness in the 1920s. Due to its high artistic quality, its director Nikolai Ekk won the award for Best Director at the First Venice International Film Festival in 1932.41 The film offers a gripping narrative, excellent music, and powerful cinematic rhetoric. Explicit propaganda elements were few. These included several inserted slogans, a shot of Lenin's statue, and a short soundtrack of The Internationale. Instead, the director relied chiefly on cinematic devices to depict the transformation of the street children. For example, it is a snowy winter night when the juvenile thugs are arrested in a police raid. But when they join the youth commune and start building a railroad, there is a scene that depicts ice thawing in a river. The metaphorical meaning is obvious: Socialist education brings a spring thaw to the homeless children's lives. Another powerful sequence features Mustafa, who was previously a clownish thief and is now a shoemaker in the youth commune. The scene in which he is cutting a leather sheet shifts to a flashback of Mustafa cutting the leather coat of a woman absorbed in applying make-up standing at a corner. When she turns around with her back facing the camera, we see that the back part of the coat is missing and her underwear is exposed. The dramatic effect is further reinforced by a reaction shot which shows the shocked face of a passer-by.
The parallel editing, flashback and reaction shot powerfully produced a comic effect and showed to the audience the transformative power of socialist education. Examples are abundant. When the film was shown at the Isis Theater in Shanghai between February 16 and 24, 1933, how did Chinese audiences react to the film? Advertisements for the film appeared in Shenbao and other local newspapers four days prior to its screening (Figure 3, left). The ad asserts that the film showcases "the success of the USSR's Five Year Plan" and "embodies a grand didactic mission." It also highlights that there are "no depictions of women's legs and gentlemen's top hats." "Women's legs and gentlemen's top hats" referred to the Hollywood stereotypes of bourgeois heroines and heroes, as portrayed in the ad for Smart Money (dir. Alfred E. Green, 1931, Warner Brothers, see Figure 3, right).
The message conveyed in the ad for The Road to Life resonated with a widespread discourse about the contrast between the "West" and the USSR. For example, Hollywood films were invariably depicted in the contemporary press as frivolous entertainment and Soviet films as an educational tool.42 We do not know whether these written texts really affected how the audience understood films, but these texts clearly reinforced the idolization of Soviet culture. A film review entitled "Where is Our Life?" provides further details about this discourse.43 The [End Page 103] author states that for many Chinese people the Soviet Union is mysterious, but now its "true face (真面目 zhen mianmu)" appears on the silver screen in the film The Road to Life. "Doesn't the film clearly show," he/she continues, "before the Five Year Plan, jobless people were everywhere and crime and depravity thrived. […] But when they entered factories, the country regained its peace. Isn't this the result of the Five Year Plan?" At the end of the essay the author expresses his/her worry about China's future and asks when a Chinese hero will emerge to lead China on to shenglu, the road to life.
(left) Ad for The Road to Life (Shenbao February 16, 1933: b8); (right) ad for Smart Money (Shenbao February 14, 1933: b6).
No evidence suggests that the author was affiliated with any Communist organization. This kind of voice from an unknown author writing for the most widely circulated commercial newspaper demonstrates how ordinary educated people in China looked at Soviet culture at that time. But there were more conscious and well-prepared audiences who openly welcomed Soviet cinema. The early 1930s saw a booming of left-wing cultural activities in China. The most famous left-wing organization was the League of Left-wing Writers (左聯 Zuolian).44 Many members of this League were in the audience of The Road to Life, including Lu Xun (魯迅 1881–1936), Yang Hansheng (陽翰笙 1902–1993), and many others.45 They organized workshops to discuss the film and wrote [End Page 104] complimentary reviews. Eight reviews and fourteen short essays about the film were published in the film section of the Shanghai newspaper Chenbao (Morning Post), a major forum of these writers.46 Most writers spoke highly of the film. Xia Yan (夏衍 1900–1995), a core member of the League of Left-wing Writers, wrote that in this Soviet film, "the new replaced the old, healthy and lively emotions replaced decadent and sentimental moods."47 Hong Shen (洪深 1894–1955) and Zheng Boqi (鄭伯奇 1895–1979), both members of the League, said: "The film not only provided the Chinese people with a new and healthy object of entertainment, but also pointed the Chinese film industry in a correct direction."48 Generally speaking, there was a broad consensus of opinion in the pages of this newspaper.
Enthusiastic spectators of the film were not restricted to this "left-wing" group. For example, Sun Yatsen's widow Song Qingling (宋慶齡 1893–1981) watched the film and spoke highly of it.49 Hu Shih (胡適 1891–1962), a professor at Peking University and a prominent liberal intellectual, noted in his diary (dated January 27, 1934) that he watched the film with his sons. For him, the film was "emotionally touching," "powerful," and conveyed a "pedagogical philosophy": "Labor is education, the road to life, shenglu."50 Popular writers of the so-called Mandarin Duck and Butterfly School (鴛鴦蝴蝶派 Yuanyang hudie pai) were also members of the audience, including Bao Tianxiao (包天笑 1876–1973) and Chen Dieyi (陳蝶衣 1907–2007).51
Intellectual voices were certainly crucial in molding public opinion. But it is noteworthy that the power of this film spread further through or was reinforced by miscellaneous texts that appeared in the print media. For example, shortly before the premiere of The Road to Life in Shanghai, an advertisement was published in Shenbao for two books on Soviet-related topics. The ad reads: "In order to get prepared for watching The Road to Life, you had better read Stories of the Five Year Plan and Impression of Moscow!"52 Four months after the film's screening, the Chinese translation of the screenplay was published in Mingxing yuebao 明星 月報 (Mingxing Monthly), a promotional journal of the Mingxing Film Company.53 Later, a Chinese-produced film was named after it, Women de shenglu 我們的生路 (Our Road to Life). The film was described as comparable with "the great Soviet movie The Road to Life."54 Another Chinese film released [End Page 105] in August 1933, Yapo 壓迫 (Suppression), was declared to be "a Chinese version of The Road to Life."55 The two Chinese films in fact had little relationship to The Road to Life. The former depicts a love triangle story set in the countryside, and the latter is a drama set in a factory.56 References to The Road to Life in the film title and ad text are sheer rhetoric. But this well illustrates the symbolic power of the phrase.
Taken together, I argue that these bits and pieces of phrases, images, and opinions—in other words, major or trivial, conscious or unconscious media artifacts—all contributed to the favorable Chinese reception of Soviet culture. It was not one dominant agent—the Communist propaganda apparatus—at work, but a combination of diverse factors including commercial drives, audience responses, or simply acts of imitation. But beneath the surface there was a mentality that may have played the most vital role. In the following I will examine this mentality against the backdrop of the political and intellectual ethos of the time.
The Sino-Soviet relationship during the Republican period fluctuated together with changes in the international and domestic political situations. Soviet cinema's fate was subject to these external influences. Early 1933—when the Nationalist government restored its diplomatic relationship with the USSR—is one example. The Chinese government acted mainly out of the need for an ally against a common enemy, Japan.57 A byproduct of diplomatic recognition was Soviet access to the Chinese film market. Starting in the late 1920s, the Nationalist government tightened its control over the cinema world. With the establishment of a film censorship system in the early 1930s, both domestic productions and imported films were subject to scrutiny before public screenings.58 While Soviet culture was often associated with the Communist propaganda machine, we should not neglect the fact that the Nationalists authorized the showing of Soviet movies.
But the favorable reception of Soviet cinema had much to do with the Chinese feeling of national humiliation in the aftermath of the Japanese invasions of Manchuria in 1931 and Shanghai in 1932. These military invasions gave rise to a strong anti-Japanese sentiment, which was naturally linked with anti-imperialism. In the world of cinema, Hollywood became a scapegoat and a synonym for imperialism and capitalism, whereas films from the USSR represented a promising alternative, a beam of hope, and an idolized model. Yang Hansheng explained how Chinese intellectuals became enthusiastic about Soviet cinema: the September 18 Incident (Manchuria Incident) awakened Chinese film workers. But at that time, Hollywood was their only textbook and they had no idea from whom they [End Page 106] should learn to create "revolutionary work of art." Soon they found the answer: the Soviet Union. They watched and discussed Soviet movies with great passion. The Soviet Union was the only country established by means of revolution and thus constituted a model for China. No other country could provide a model for China to follow.59
The conflict against Japan encouraged the consumption and appreciation of heroism, which was not scarce in Soviet movies. The Japanese-educated dramatist and film director Shen Xiling (沈西苓 1904–1940) wrote in an article about his feelings for Soviet movies:
It makes you feel a kind of "fervent power [熱的力 re de li]." Fervent power brings forth hot tears, excites your mind, and burns your heart! It makes you feel there is a new call—a call for human justice! The thing that produces this effect is Soviet cinema.60
This kind of expression is typical of what has been termed "Revolutionary Romanticism," chiefly manifest in the literary works of Ding Ling and many left-wing writers in the 1930s as "part of an international political culture that gathered much momentum during the decade of capitalism in crisis."61 However, the craving for heroism was not exclusive to the intellectual circle, but was shared by a wider public. Ge Yihong (葛一虹 1913–2005), also a dramatist, offered a personal observation on audience reactions to the Soviet movie Chapayev. In the darkened auditorium, he observed, when White forces win the battle, audiences felt agitated and nervous. When the "revolutionary hero" Chapayev is evading his enemies' pursuit and machine-gun fire, the whole auditorium was quiet and audiences dared not even breathe. When White force reinforcements appear, unrest grew in the audience. When the Red Army finally wins victory, there was an explosive burst of applause.62
Literary historian Ban Wang has pointed out: "From May Fourth to June Fourth, Chinese culture has never ceased to search for a sublime, lofty Hero."63 In this case, Soviet Red Army general Chapayev satisfied this Chinese search. This Hero, as many contemporary writers claimed, was exclusive to Soviet cinema and did not exist in Hollywood movies. The Soviet films imported to pre-socialist China fall broadly into the category of so-called Stalinist cinema, which arose in the late 1920s, when Stalin tightened his control over economic, political, and cultural matters. The nationalization of the Soviet film industry started in 1919, but the chaos of the Civil War (1917–1922) and the relatively relaxed atmosphere of the New Economic Policy period (1921–1928) gave much free space for artistic [End Page 107] experimentation and commercial practices. The late 1920s saw the start of a political movement referred to as Russia's "cultural revolution" (1928–1932), that is, "the proletarian seizure of power on the cultural front" against the bourgeois cultural establishment.64 Against this background, the film world saw a significant transformation, characterized by thematic planning, strengthened censorship, and the mandatory adoption of "socialist realism." Although recent scholarship has revealed multiple facets of Stalinist cinema, its dominant facet was propaganda and making a Socialist Hero for public emulation was one of its chief tasks.65
Many contemporary Chinese writers were conscious of the propaganda nature of Soviet cinema, but they expressed no revulsion. For example, Wang Qixu 王啓 煦, a lesser-known author who wrote for Chenbao, expressed his "weariness over capitalist movies and eagerness for watching Socialist ones." He commented on The Road to Life: "This is a film of significance in didactic terms; in the USSR cinema has been the most powerful weapon for cultural and ideological propaganda."66 Reading this line in context, we can see that he spoke in laudatory terms of Soviet film as the weapon for propaganda. Shi Zhecun (施蟄存 1905–2003), a non-Communist writer, offered in his memoirs further insights into this intellectual passion for Soviet culture:
We did not look at left-wing theories and Soviet literature from the political perspective. Rather, we regarded them as a new school or trend. […] Between the early 1920s and mid-1930s, people who were interested in Soviet literature all around the world treated it simply as a Left Wing branch of Modernist literature. [The italicized words are in English in the original text]67
In other words, as literary scholar Liu Zhen argues, in the particular historical environment of the 1930s, so-called left-wing culture could be as avant-garde as the so-called New Sensationalist School (新感覺派 xin ganjue pai), which is seen as a quintessential ingredient of Chinese literary modernism by Leo Ou-fan Lee in Shanghai Modern and others.68 Soviet culture, like every form of culture, has more than one face, but the Hero image dominates. The making of the Hero, by both producers and receivers, occurred within complex entanglements of historical temporalities. The reception of this Hero in this particular Chinese context fit with [End Page 108] the mentalities of Chinese who were eager to find a savior to rescue the country. But Soviet cinema in China simultaneously had another face. The following section will explore the banal side of this story.
The Banality of the Hero
In June 1935, a short article entitled "Soviet Movies Also Need to Be Sexy" appeared in Ling Long 玲瓏 (Elegant and Fine),69 a pocket-sized women's magazine which was so popular in the 1930s that nearly every female student had an issue in hand, as Eileen Chang (張愛玲 1920–1995) once pointed out. This short report says that Soviet film factories are sending their employees to big cities and remote rural areas to scout for "beauties" because of their need for "sexy women" for upcoming productions. Written in a slightly serious and slightly humorous style, the article invites us to rethink the seemingly dominant heroic image of Soviet cinema analyzed in the last section. Did "sexy women" exist in Soviet movies that were associated with "the road to life," a "pedagogical philosophy," and "fervent power"? Did audience responses that differed from those reported in the above-quoted periodicals also exist? To answer these questions, this section starts with a discussion of women's legs.
Images of women's legs were at the very center of the contested field relating to Hollywood vs. Soviet cinema in the 1930s. Whereas the advertisement for The Road to Life stresses that the film features no "women's legs" (Figure 3), Hollywood films were nicknamed "movies with legs (大腿片 datui pian)."70 Whereas people hailed the Soviet success in turning cinema into a "tool for educating the masses," films from capitalist countries were condemned for providing nothing but "women's legs" and frivolous images to stimulate the senses.71 Whereas women's legs were deemed quintessentially Hollywood, Soviet cinema was largely desexualized in this discourse. But is this picture accurate? The amusing report in Ling Long suggested that Soviet movies also needed sexy women. Thus, I will situate Soviet movies within a mediascape, in which various media products coexisted,72 and I will argue that visual representations of women's legs, no matter Western, Soviet, or Chinese, created a visual spectacle that linked ostensibly disparate genres, media forms, and practices including Hollywood musicals, chorus girls, Soviet propaganda movies, Chinese dance troupes, popular pictorials, and political magazines. In this way, Soviet cinema showed its banal side and merged into urban popular culture in pre-socialist China.
The advent of sound in the late 1920s spawned Hollywood productions of a key film genre, the musical. Major Hollywood studios produced numerous musicals that featured singing, dancing, glamour, and fantasy. Hollywood's global distribution [End Page 109] networks brought this trend to China. Most Hollywood-produced musicals soon appeared on the Chinese silver screen, including The Love Parade (dir. Ernst Lubitsch, 1929, Paramount), 42nd Street (1933, Warner), Cleopatra (dir. Cecil B. DeMille, 1934, MGM), and numerous others. The chief attraction of this genre was, according to a contemporary Chinese writer, "women's legs and breasts."73 Chorus girls dressed in short skirts dancing in a chorus line made up the typical scene of Hollywood musicals.74 This visual spectacle triggered a boom of popular dance troupes in China. Similarly, Chinese chorus girls were also scantily clad and their legs were also the bright spots of their performances (Figure 4). They were even nicknamed "girls wearing no trousers(不穿褲子的姑娘 buchuan kuzi de guniang)."75
Cold Swallow Dancing Troupe (冷燕社 Lengyan she), Liangyou, 99 (December 1934).
Impacted by this trend, Chinese film studios began to produce musicals featuring similar scenes and also produce their own film stars with beautiful legs. One of these stars was Li Lili (黎莉莉 1905–2005), who played various roles dressed in short trousers and showing most of her legs to the audience (Figure 5, left). Leafing through popular Chinese pictorials of this period, we find that images of women with strong, naked legs abound. They were chorus girls, athletes, movie stars, and even common people in the street, dressed in swimming suits, dance dresses, or just fashionable outfits (Figure 5, right). Contemporary writers criticized this phenomenon as a sign of "hedonism," "self-indulgence," "sensuality," and "sex worship,"76 and called it the source of decadence in Chinese society.77
Did the "sublime, lofty Hero" look different? Communist propaganda tells people that the Communist heroes who make history should be the workers, [End Page 110] peasants, and soldiers.78 They are certainly not women showing sexy legs like those pictures above. History itself, however, reveals something else. In fact, images of women's legs also existed in Soviet movies of the 1930s, and Chinese audiences savored those sexy legs.
(left) Li Lili as cover girl of Lianhua Pictorial,6.10 (November 1935); (right) cover image of Liangyou, 118 (July 1936).
On November 5, 1936, the Isis Theater started screening The Circus, the aforementioned 1936 Soviet musical. The film showed at the theater for twelve days and had a second run soon after for another few days. This box-office achievement was impressive, since the average runs for Soviet movies were five days or so, and for Hollywood films three or four days.79 What was the secret to the extraordinary success of The Circus? Interestingly, advertising characterizes the film as "glamorous (富麗 fuli)" and "spicy (香豔 xiangyan)."80 Both were much-criticized stereotypical catchwords that normally appeared in Hollywood film ads. These phrases are revealing. In fact, Soviet cinema also had a "glamorous" and "spicy" face. The Circus contains important elements of Western entertainment: a melodramatic storyline, singing and dancing scenes characteristic of Hollywood musicals, grandiose mise-en-scène, the heroine's [End Page 111] elegant clothing, and the luxurious places she inhabits. These styles were produced as part of the Soviet agenda of "catching up with and surpassing the West" and "cinema for the millions", and the film was an instant success at the box office in the USSR.81 Another notable trait of the film is its lavish display of women's legs. Five long sequences feature the singing and dancing of the American circus performer Marion Dixon, sometimes together with Soviet performers. Not unlike their Hollywood counterparts, they are all dressed in glamorous costumes with sexy naked legs (see Figure 6).
The heroine's circus performance in The Circus (DVD snapshot).
This image is reminiscent of the 1934 photo in Liangyou of White Russian dancing girls (Figure 1). In fact, images of Soviet women's legs are abundant in popular journals of the period. For example, the cover image of August 16, 1936 issue of Su'e pinglun 蘇俄評論 (Soviet Review) depicts a parade of Soviet women dressed in sport suits showing strong, naked legs (Figure 7, left). Another photo in Liangyou features a line of legs of Soviet women ballet dancers, behind which, interestingly, there is a man's gaze (Figure 7, right).82 Is there any difference between Western, Soviet, and Chinese women's legs? One may argue that the Hollywood legs represent sexual allure and Soviet legs health and vigor. But if we juxtapose all the images in this richly textured mediascape and read them horizontally, we find that images of women's legs that entered the audience's visual mindmaps were of a similar type: sturdy, athletic, and mostly naked. In other words, Soviet images were not exceptional in this visual repertoire. Visual evidence of this kind reveals the "banal" side of the Chinese reception of Soviet culture, different from the thrust of the reviews analyzed in the last section.
Soviet depictions of female bodies, desire, and sexuality (explicit or implicit) met with a passionate audience reaction. Another Soviet film that caused a box-office [End Page 112] sensation in China was a documentary entitled Modern Womanhood (健美的女性 Jianmei de nüxing) produced by the Mezhrabpomfilm Studio. According to the Chinese ads, the film was made for "sex education" and "the promotion of eugenics and nudism," and it was "praised by Mussolini and Hitler" and "banned in the foreign settlements." The contents of the film were also listed in great detail in the ads, including women's breasts, sexual organs, menstruation, and so forth.83 In the middle of the ad was a still photo featuring strong-bodied semi-naked Soviet women doing gymnastics (Figure 8). On the penultimate day of its exhibition at the Isis, an ad boasted that 48,000 spectators had viewed the film.84 Reviewers commented that these publicity strategies were designed to sensationalize the film.85 However, I would suggest that these strategies clearly illustrate that film publicists and audiences did not treat Soviet cinema as a completely distinctive genre and that the banal side of Soviet cinema converged well with the consumer culture and materialism rampant in "Westernized" Chinese cities in the 1930s, Shanghai in particular.
(left) Su e pinglun,10.8 (August 16, 1936); (right) Liangyou, 103 (March 1935), 9.
A contemporary writer provided an "unromantic" (rather than the "revolutionary romantic") analysis of the ways in which his fellow Chinese movie-goers embraced Soviet cinema. He explained that, since Chinese film spectators had watched too many Hollywood films, Soviet movies were welcomed as an alternative type of "ice-cream" which was "refreshing and fascinating." He further pointed out that the criticism of Soviet cinema as a tool of "Communist propaganda" that "poisoned youth" was not completely applicable to the Chinese [End Page 113] situation because propaganda factors had been reduced to the minimum in the Soviet movies shown aboard, including in China.86 The writer's observation may be true. Bulletins of the Board of Censors in China reveal that shots or scenes containing explicit messages of Communist propaganda had to be cut. The examples include a subtitle in Sea of Madness (Mosfilm) which reads "Building collective farms is the only path leading to Communism,"87 a scene of singing The Internationale in Three Girl Friends (Lenfilm),88 and a shot of Stalin's statue in The Circus.89 At the same time, although film production in the Soviet Union was subject to thematic planning and tended to convey "correct" ideological messages at the expense of entertainment qualities throughout the 1930s, there were a small number of exceptions which maintained a good balance between politics and entertainment, with gripping plots, excellent performances, and great music.90 Some of the most popular Soviet films in the Chinese markets, including Chapayev, The Circus, and And Quiet Flows the Don (dir. Ivan Pravov and Olga Preobrazhenskaya, 1931), were exactly those "exceptions."91
Ad for Modern Womanhood (Xinwenbao, December 7, 1933).
Seen in this light, the Ling Long article "Soviet Movies Also Need to Be Sexy" was not atypical. Soviet cinema did not have only one face, whether it was the hero, the educator, or the role model. At least for the spectators who consumed Soviet movies in pre-socialist China, Soviet movies also entertained them with women's legs, alluring bodies, gripping plots, and even memorable film titles. Translating foreign film titles requires much skill, and the earliest Chinese [End Page 114] publicists showed great talent in this realm. They knew how to translate foreign film titles creatively to cater to Chinese taste. For example, Hollywood director Cecil B. DeMille's Cleopatra (1935) was translated as "Captivating Beauty that Ruins Empires and Cities (倾國倾城 Qingguo qingcheng)," a Chinese expression that referred to the beauty of Concubine Yang of the Tang dynasty. Translating Soviet film titles followed the same principle. For example, Dubrovsky (dir. Aleksandr Ivanovsky, 1936), adapted from Pushkin's novel, was translated as "Romance during a Journey of Revenge (復仇豔遇 Fuchou yanyu)," and And Quiet Flows the Don, originally written by Michail Sholokhov, was translated as "Iron Calvary and Red Tears (鐵騎紅淚 Tieji honglei)." Seen in the Chinese linguistic and cultural context, these creative "translations" of both Hollywood and Soviet movie titles are obviously more "sexy." We do not know if Jiang Chunfang, the tour guide in the first section of this article, was one of the translators. Translation was one of his job responsibilities at the Asiatic Company. But even if he actually played such a role, it is understandable that he did not mention it in written statements. This was too "banal" for an heroic story. Much the same may be said of the psychology of the writers who ignored the entertaining facets of Soviet cinema in the articles analyzed in the last section.92 However, along with those seductive legs, sexualized bodies, stimulating titles, publicity texts, and popular journal articles, history itself displayed the many faces of Soviet cinema.
Conclusion
Cinema ranked highly in the minds of Bolshevik leaders. Vladimir Lenin coined this famous maxim: "Of all the arts, cinema is the most important." Boris Shumiatsky, the leader of the Soviet cinema industry in the 1930s, called for "a cinema for the millions."93 Soviet efforts to export Communist culture via films was fruitful. A Chinese writer argued that in the early 1930s Soviet films made a significant contribution in easing people's doubts about the Bolshevik state, winning popular sympathy, and promoting Sino-Soviet friendship.94 However, the importance of Soviet cinema in the Republican period has been largely underestimated, echoing the general erasure of the Nanjing government's contribution to the development of the Sino-Soviet relationship in post-1949 official discourses in the PRC.95 This article has demonstrated that Soviet movies already had a colorful history in China before the founding of the PRC. Film screenings as well as texts and intertexts from the print media provided a repository of images, narratives, and discourses surrounding Soviet cinema. The post-1949 reception of Soviet culture was built on this foundation. Whereas [End Page 115] comparisons of Hollywood films and Soviet films proliferate in the pages of the People's Daily (人民日報 Renmin ribao) in the 1950s, this kind of "Cold War rhetorical opposition"96 had already found its way much earlier in the 1930s Shenbao.
Excavating the forgotten history of Soviet movies in pre-socialist China, this article tells a story with two faces. On the one hand, the warm reception of Soviet movies was compatible with the intellectual mindset of seeking a "sublime, lofty Hero" in face of the imperialist invasions and national humiliation. This Hero, embodied in the Communist educator Nicolai Sergeev in The Road to Life, the Soviet Red Army leader Chapayev in Chapayev, and many others like them, was an indispensable agent of Communist propaganda. However, I would emphasize that, in this pre-socialist era in China, the Hero was not constructed by political and propaganda organs of the CCP alone, but was a collective construct of diverse forces, including intellectual discourses, media (inter)texts, popular sentiments, and commercial imperatives. The victory of the "heroic figure" as a broad trope and Soviet movies in this specific case may have foreshadowed the victory of Communism at large.
On the other hand, the other face of the story centers on the "banal" side. Tracing the distribution and exhibition of Soviet movies in the first section of this article unraveled a rarely noticed dimension of Soviet cinema: it was also a business (although its political nature was undeniable). By positioning Soviet representations of sexuality in the mediascape of urban consumer society in 1930s China, I further argue that Soviet cinema was part of this consumer culture which was arguably shaped by the influence of capitalism from the West, that is, the enemy of the USSR. This article has illustrated that the binaries of America vs. the USSR, capitalism vs. socialism, and decadence vs. progress are more rhetoric than truth. All the ambiguities and complexities hidden in this complex history raise questions about rhetorical opposites.
Stalinist cinema was primarily a form of highly politicized entertainment, a weapon for propaganda. But this does not necessarily entail the complete absence of elements appealing to popular taste. Political messages need to reach the masses through narratives and images. The two faces examined above coexisted in this film culture. A number of agencies were at work in pre-socialist China. Intellectual discourses highlighted the heroic facet of this cinema, while commercial sectors promoted its "banal" side. Exact audience responses are hard to trace. The heroic and the banal may be equally important.
Milan Kundera once said:
Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch.97 [End Page 116]
Soviet cinema has long been cast as a genre obsessed with the making of the Hero. It is true, but only partly true. By pointing out the coexistence of the heroic and the banal, this article has searched for the sources for the "first tear," the diversity and vitality of human existence which negates forced conformity under whatever name. [End Page 117]
Xuelei Huang is Chancellor's Fellow in Chinese Studies at the University of Edinburgh. Her book, entitled Shanghai Filmmaking: Crossing Borders, Connecting to the Globe, 1922–1938 (Brill), is forthcoming. She has published essays on Chinese cinema and popular culture in Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, Transcultural Studies, and The Chinese Cinema Book (BFI). She has won the Ruprecht Karls Prize, an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellowship, a Gerda Henkel Research Fellowship, and an Academia Sinica Postdoctoral Fellowship.
Correspondence to: Xuelei Huang. Email: Xuelei.Huang@ed.ac.uk
Acknowledgments
This paper was presented at the conference "Trends on the Move: Transcultural Dimensions of Popular Flows" in Heidelberg, Germany, in October, 2011. I would like to thank the Heidelberg Cluster of Excellence and all members of the research project "Rethinking Trends." I would also like to thank the following scholars for their valuable comments and other kinds of help: Yu Miin-ling, Tina May Chen, Liu Dishan, Lim Kien Ket, Chang Chechia, Xiao Zhiwei, Barbara Mittler, Lena Henningsen, James Carter, the anonymous reviewers, and Paul Pickowicz.
Footnotes
1. Cf. Yu Miin-ling, "A Soviet Hero, Paul Korchagin, Comes to China," Russian History-Histoire Russe, 29.2–4 (2002), 329–55; Tina Mai Chen, "Socialism, Aestheticized Bodies and International Circuits of Gender: Soviet Female Film Stars in the People's Republic of China, 1949–1969," Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, 18.2 (2007), 53–80; Liu Dishan, "Sulian dianying zai Zhongguo: wushi niandai de kaocha (Soviet Movies in China in the 1950s)," Dianying yishu, 321 (2008), 55–60; Hong Hong, Sulian yingxiang yu Zhongguo "shiqi nian" dianying (The Soviet Influence and "Seventeen Year" Chinese Cinema) (Beijing: Zhongguo dianying chubanshe, 2008).
2. Among a total of 860 foreign films imported from 42 countries between 1949 and 1964, 421 were from the USSR, while domestic productions number 564 between 1949 and 1964. Cf. Zhang Zicheng, ed., Waiguo yishu yingpian ziliao huibian, 1949–1992 (Collected Materials on Imported Foreign Films) (Beijing: Zhongguo dianying chubanshe, 1993); Paul Clark, Chinese Cinema: Culture and Politics since 1949 (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 185.
3. Cf. Chen, "Socialism, Aestheticized Bodies and International Circuits of Gender," 63.
4. Rudolf Löwenthal, "The Present Status of the Film in China," Collectanea Commissionis Synodalis, 9 (1936), 86.
5. Leo Ou-fan Lee, Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930–1945 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999).
6. Zhen Zhang, An Amorous History of the Silver Screen: Shanghai Cinema, 1896–1937 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
7. Sherman Cochran, Inventing Nanjing Road: Commercial Culture in Shanghai, 1900–1945 (Ithaca, NY: East Asia Program, Cornell University, 1999).
8. Unless otherwise noted, Jiang Chunfang's biographical data upon which I draw throughout this section are from his biography: Yang Zhe and Song Min, Zhongguo xiandai baike quanshu dianji ren: Jiang Chunfang zhuan (The Founding Father of Modern Encyclopedia in China: A Biography of Jiang Chunfang) (Beijing: Zhongguo wenlian, 2007), 1–153; a collection of research materials on Jiang Chunfang in Liu Yingli et al., eds., 20 shiji Zhongguo zhuming bianji chuban jia yanjiu ziliao huiji (Research Materials on Prominent Chinese Editors of the 20th Century), vol. 8 (Kaifeng: Henan daxue chubanshe, 2005), 8, 51–52, 90–91; as well as his short memoirs: Jiang Chunfang, "Harbin peiyu le wo (Growing up in Harbin)," Harbin ribao, 12 June 1983.
9. Thomas Lahusen, "Introduction (to the Special Issue 'Harbin and Manchuria')," The South Atlantic Quarterly, 99.1 (2000), 1–2.
10. Olga Bakich, "Emigré Identity: The Case of Harbin," The South Atlantic Quarterly, 99.1 (2000), 56, 59.
11. C. J. North, ed., The Chinese Motion Picture Market (Washington: United States Department of Commerce, 1927), 22, 39.
12. Heilongjiang sheng difang zhi bianzhuan weiyuan hui, ed., Heilongjiang sheng zhi (Encyclopedia of Heilongjiang Province), vol. 46 (Harbin: Heilongjiang renmin chubanshe, 2003), 648.
13. Jiang Chunfang, "Sulian dianying zai Zhongguo (Soviet Cinema in China)," Zhongguo dianying, 5 (1959), 23.
14. Ibid.; also see Thomas Lahusen, "Dr. Fu Manchu in Harbin: Cinema and Moviegoers of the 1930s," The South Atlantic Quarterly, 99.1 (2000), 147.
15. Cf. North, The Chinese Motion Picture Market, 39; Lahusen, "Dr. Fu Manchu in Harbin," 147.
16. Cf. Denise J. Youngblood, Movies for the Masses: Popular Cinema and Soviet Society in the 1920s (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 14–21; Jamie Miller, Soviet Cinema: Politics and Persuasion under Stalin (London: I.B. Tauris, 2009), 22–23.
17. "Dianying jiancha weiyuan hui chengli sannian lai gongzuo shuyao (A Review of the Work of the Board of Film Censors)" (dated 1934, archives of Executive Yuan), reprinted in Zhongguo di'er lishi dang'an guan, ed., Zhonghua minguo shi dang'an ziliao huibian (A Collection of the Archives of the Republic of China), vol. 5.1 "wenhua 1" (Nanjing: Jiangsu guji, 1986), 394.
18. Zhongguo di'er lishi dang'an guan, ed., Zhonghua minguo shi dang'an ziliao huibian (A Collection of the Archives of the Republic of China), vol. 3 "wenhua" (Nanjing: Jiangsu guji, 1986), 178–79.
19. Heilongjiang sheng difang zhi bianzhuan weiyuan hui, Heilongjiang shengzhi, 631.
20. Cf. Zhiwei Xiao, "Film Censorship in China, 1927–1937" (PhD thesis, University of California, San Diego, 1994), 86–133.
21. James Hugh Carter, Creating a Chinese Harbin: Nationalism in an International City, 1916–1932 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), 171–79.
22. For the communist influence in Harbin, see Chong-Sik Lee, Revolutionary Struggle in Manchuria: Chinese Communism and Soviet Interest, 1922–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).
23. For a contemporary review of Soviet cinema's exhibition in China, see Ge Yihong, "Sulian dianying yu sulian xiju geiyu women yi sheme? (What have Soviet Cinema and Drama Offered Us?)," Zhongsu wenhua, 7.4 (1940), 11–12. The author identified Storm over Asia (dir. Vsevolod Pudovkin, 1928), shown in Shanghai in 1931, as the first Soviet film shown in China. Apparently he did not count in the movies shown in Harbin. But his statement illustrates the small influence of Soviet cinema in 1920s China. As for the sporadic screenings, for example, Soviet diplomats brought Battleship Potemkin (dir. Sergei M. Eisenstein, 1925) to China and arranged an internal screening in Shanghai in 1926. See Cheng Jihua et al., eds., Zhongguo dianying fazhanshi (A History of the Development of Chinese Cinema) (Beijing: Zhongguo dianying chubanshe, 1963), 139.
24. Chen Jiazhen, Ouyang pu, "Ruci Shanghai: Shanghai zujie nei de guoji xingxiang (Outline of Shanghai: the 'International' Settlement)," Liangyou, 89 (June 1934), 20–21.
25. Shanghai gongtong zujie gongbuju (Shanghai Municipal Council), ed., Shanghai gongtong zujie gongbuju nianbao, 1933 (Annual report of the Municipal Council, 1933), reprinted in Shen Yunlong, ed., Jindai Zhongguo shiliao congkan (Taipei: Wenhua), 17.
26. See advertisements for these films: Shenbao, April 7, 1933, 7, Shenbao, September 8, 1933, 6.
27. For a detailed study of showing Soviet movies at the Isis Theater, see Xuelei Huang, "Through the Looking Glass of Spatiality: Spatial Practice, Contact Relation and the Isis Theater in Shanghai, 1917–1937," Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, 23.2 (2011), 18–24.
28. Jiang, "Sulian dianying zai Zhongguo," 24. The company's English name is given in Wang Zhicheng, Shanghai e qiao shi (A History of Russian Expatriates in Shanghai) (Shanghai: Sanlian shudian, 1993), 739. Its address: Middle Sichuan Road 410. I searched the archives of the Ministry of Industry and Commerce (工商部 Gongshang bu), with which commercial companies usually registered (kept in Academia Sinica in Taiwan), and could not find relevant data of the two companies. But the company names did appear in censors' reports and film advertisements. See Zhongyang dianying jiancha weiyuan hui gongbao (Bulletin of the Chinese Board of Film Censors), 4.2 (March 1937), 3; ads in Shenbao, October 12, 1934: 10, Shenbao, November 5, 1936, 5.
29. The bookstore was named after the founder's surname 佛利特 (Freed), i.e. Jiang Chunfang's old colleague in Harbin. See Yang and Song, Zhongguo xiandai baike quanshu dianji ren, 66. It is also mentioned in Wang, Shanghai e qiao shi, 602.
30. Kwei Chungshu, ed., The Chinese Year Book, 1935–1936 (Shanghai: The Commercial Press, 1935), 130.
31. This figure comes from film advertisements in Shenbao.
32. Jiang, "Sulian dianying zai Zhongguo," 24.
33. Xuelei Huang, "Commercializing Ideologies: Intellectuals and Cultural Production at the Mingxing (Star) Motion Picture Company, 1922–1938" (PhD thesis, University of Heidelberg, 2009), 224–26.
34. Cf. respectively, Lin Ming, "Kan le sulian yingpian Baba huilai le yihou (After Watching Soviet Movie Papa Is Back)," Guangxi funü, 3.4 (1943), 16–18; Zuo Hongwei, "Minguo shiqi xinjiang dianying fangying de shencha yu faxing (Film Censorship and Distribution in Xinjiang in the Republican Era)," Xinjiang yishu xueyuan xuebao, 2 (June 2010), 48–51; Ge Yihong, "Sulian dianying yu sulian xiju geiyu women yi sheme?", 10–14.
35. For the closing date of the Asiatic Company, see Tina Mai Chen, "Film and Gender in Sino-Soviet Cultural Exchange, 1949–1969," in China Learns from the Soviet Union, 1949–present, ed. Thomas Bernstein and Hua-yu Li (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010), 423.
36. For a detailed account of the organizations responsible for distributing Soviet films in China between 1945 and the early 1950s based on Soviet archival materials, see ibid., 423–24.
37. Cf. Li Kai-kuang, "Neizhan xia de Shanghai shi shehui ju yanjiu, 1945–1949 (A Study of Shanghai's Bureau of Social Affairs during the Chinese Civil War, 1945–1949)" (PhD thesis, National Chengchi University, Taiwan, 2009), 123–24. The original source is the archival file Q6-13-627, kept in the Shanghai Municipal Archives. I would like to thank the author for drawing my attention to this material.
38. Lu Zhou, "1932 zhi 1933 (From 1932 to 1933)," Liangyou, 73 (January 1933), 1–2. The focus of the essay is to analyze the diplomatic consequences of the event.
39. I would like to thank Rostislav Berezkin for helping with the Russian translation.
40. Peter Rollberg, Historical Dictionary of Russian and Soviet Cinema (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2009), 665–66.
41. See the official website of the Venice International Film Festival: http://www.labiennale.org/en/cinema/history/the30s.html?back5true [accessed 6 December 2013].
42. Huang, "Through the Looking Glass of Spatiality," 22.
43. Wan, "Women de shenghuo zai nali (Where is Our Life?)," Shenbao, February 25, 1933, 5.
44. Cf. Wang-chi Wong, Politics and Literature in Shanghai: The Chinese League of Left-Wing Writers, 1930–1936 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991).
45. See Lu Xun's diary in Lu Xun, Lu Xun quanji (Complete Works of Lu Xun), 15 (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1989), 65; Yang Hansheng, "Wo duiyu sulian xiju dianying zhi guangan (My View on Soviet Cinema and Drama)," Zhongsu wenhua, 7.4 (October 1940), 29.
46. See Chenbao, February 16–21, 1933.
47. Huang Zibu (Xia Yan), "Ping Yi (Review One)," Chenbao, February 16, 1933, 10.
48. Hong Shen and Xi Naifang (Zheng Boqi), "Shenglu xiangping (A Detailed Analysis of The Road to Life)," Chenbao, February 17, 1933, 10.
49. Yang Xiaofo, "Song Qingling dui wo de guan'ai (Song Qingling's Care for Me)," Shiji, 1 (2007), 32.
50. Hu Shih, Hu Shih riji quanji (Diaries of Hu Shih), vol. 7 (Taipei: Lianjing, 2004), 44.
51. Huang, "Through the Looking Glass of Spatiality," 21.
52. Shenbao, February 15, 1933, 8.
53. Mingxing yuebao, 1.2 (June 1933), 1.3 (July 1933), and 1.4 (August 1933).
54. Shenbao, July 7, 1933, 7.
55. Xinwenbao, August 14, 1933: benbu tekan 4.
56. Both films are lost. For the synopses of the two films, see Guan Wu, "Ping Women de shenglu (On Our Life to Road)," Shenbao, July 8, 1933, 5; Synopsis for Yapo (Suppression) in Zheng Peiwei and Liu Guiqing, eds., Zhongguo wusheng dianying juben (Scripts of Chinese Silent Films) (Beijing: Zhongguo dianying chubanshe, 1996), 2452–54.
57. Cf. Shen Zhihua, Yang Kuisong, eds., Zhong Su guanxi shigang, 1917–1991 (A History of the Sino-Soviet Relationship, 1917–1991) (Beijing: Xinhua chubanshe, 2007), 46–49.
58. Jiaoyu Neizheng bu dianying jiancha weiyuanhui, ed., Jiaoyu Neizheng bu dianying jiancha weiyuanhui gongzuo zong baogao (General Report of the Board of Censors of the Ministries of Education and Interior), Nanjing, September 1934, 3–5.
59. Yang, "Wo duiyu sulian xiju dianying zhi guangan," 28–29.
60. Shen Xiling, "Guanyu sulian dianying de zazhi (Random Thoughts on Soviet Cinema)," Zhongsu wenhua, 7.4 (October 1940), 28.
61. See Xiaobing Tang, Chinese Modern: The Heroic and the Quotidian (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 2, 97.
62. Ge Yihong, "Sulian dianying yu sulian xiju jiyu le women yi sheme? 12.
63. Ban Wang, The Sublime Figure of History: Aesthetics and Politics in Twentieth-Century China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 1.
64. Cf. Sheila Fitzpatrick, "Cultural Revolution in Russia 1928–32," Journal of Contemporary History, 9.1 (January 1974), 34–35.
65. For the historical development of Soviet film industry from the post-revolutionary period to the Stalin era, cf. Richard Taylor, The Politics of Soviet Cinema, 1917–1929 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). For revisionist scholarship on this period, see Youngblood, Movies for the Masses; Richard Taylor and Derek Spring, eds., Stalinism and Soviet Cinema (London: Routledge, 1993), Evgeny Dobrenko, Stalinist Cinema and the Production of History: Museum of the Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), among others.
66. Wang Qixu, "Ping Er (Review Two)," Chenbao, February 16, 1933, 10.
67. Shi Zhecun, Sha shang de jiaoji (Footprints on the Beach) (Shenyang: Liaoning jiaoyu chubanshe, 1995), 179–80.
68. Liu Zhen, Zuoyi wenxue yundong de xingqi yu Shanghai xinshu ye (The Rise of the Left-Wing Literary Movement and the New Publishing Business in Shanghai) (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 2008), 15.
69. Anon., "Su e dianying yi xu xinggan (Soviet Movies Also Need to Be Sexy)," Ling Long, 5.23 (1935), 1501.
70. Sima Wensen, "Wo dui sulian dianying de guangan (My View on Soviet Cinema)," Zhongsu wenhua, 7.4 (1940), 30.
71. Si Ming, "Sulian san yingpian (Three Soviet Movies)," Xiandai, 3.2 (1933), 183–84.
72. The term "mediascape" was coined by Arjun Appadurai, referring to a virtual space where various forms of medium and messages conveyed by the media coexist and affect people's perception of the world in complex ways. See Arjun Appadurai, "Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy," Public Culture, 2.2 (Spring 1990), 9.
73. Du Hengzhi, "Su e dianying yu meiguo dianying de bijiao guan (A Comparison between Soviet and American Films)," Huangzhong, 8.8 (1936), 2.
74. See http://www.arts-wallpapers.com/movie_wallpapers/Footlight%20Parade%20Wallpapers/02/Footlight-Parade16801050.jpg. Accessed 8 April 2014.
75. Huang Jiamo, "Zhongguo gewu ju de qiantu (The Prospect of the Chinese Musical)," Liangyou, 99 (December 1934), 6–7.
76. Du, "Su e dianying yu meiguo dianying de bijiao guan," 2.
77. Si, "Sulian san yingpian," 183.
78. Cf. Jinhua Dai et al., Cinema and Desire: Feminist Marxism and Cultural Politics in the Work of Dai Jinhua (London; New York: Verso, 2002), 102.
79. For the runs of The Circus, see Shenbao theater ads of respective dates (November 5–16, 1936; December 27–28, 1936). The numbers of average runs of Soviet and Hollywood movies are also obtained from my research in Shenbao ads.
80. Shenbao, November 1936, 5.
81. Miller, Soviet Cinema, 154–59.
82. More examples can be found in an illustration of the screen script of The Road to Life published in Mingxing yuebao, 1.2 (June 1, 1933); pictures in Liangyou, 80 (September 1933), 19–20.
83. Shenbao, December 2, 1933, 7.
84. Xinwenbao, December 7, 1933.
85. Cf. Yu Chien-ming, Yundong chang neiwai: jindai huadong diqu de nüzi tiyu (On and Off the Playing Fields: A Modern History of Physical Education for Girls in Eastern China, 1895–1937) (Taipei: Academia Sinica, 2009), 294.
86. Du, "Su e dianying yu meiguo dianying de bijiao guan," 1–2.
87. Zhongguo dianying jiancha weiyuan hui gongbao, 3.7 (July 1936). 38.
88. Ibid., 3.10 (October 1936), 56.
89. Ibid., 3.11 (November 1936), 56.
90. Miller, Soviet Cinema, 90–94.
91. Ibid., 98–99.
92. We do not have hard evidence to show why these authors did not comment on, say, the leg scenes in The Circus, as well as other "banal" facets of Soviet cinema. But considering the prevailing sentiments of nationalism and heroism, their motivation to stress the serious/heroic side of Soviet cinema is understandable.
93. Miller, Soviet Cinema, 35.
94. Sima, "Wo dui sulian dianying de guangan," 31.
95. Cf. Tina Mai Chen, "Sulian dianying de yinjin jiqi dui suzao Mao Zedong shidai Zhongguo de yiyi, 1949–1976 (The Import of Soviet Cinema and Its Implication on the Shaping of Maoist China, 1949–1976)," Lengzhan guoji shi yanjiu, 2 (2010), 123–24.
96. Chen, "Socialism, Aestheticized Bodies and International Circuits of Gender," 73.
97. Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, trans. Michael Henry Heim (London: Faber and Faber, 1999), 248.
