Yingjin Zhang, in Chinese National Cinema, provides a useful, and very complete, chronological account of the development of film in the People’s Republic of China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. An important subtext of Zhang’s history (he makes it his central goal, but the organization of the book is really that of a chronological history) is the idea that Chinese cinemas do constitute a national cinema, not in the sense of the nation-state, but in the sense of the nation people. Andrew Jones’ Yellow Music, and Geremie Barmé’s In the Red both operate under similar assumptions. First, that popular culture is most effective and valuable when it is a de-centralized product of a self-defined group (Zhang’s nation-people). Second, that when used by the state popular culture is little more than a blunt instrument for propaganda, easily read and ineffective. And third, that cultural history can be read through the intentions of culture producers and the environment and technology by which they are informed. All three authors address these points while dealing with essentially the same chronological structure, which frames their analysis in nearly every way.
I discovered upon reading the three assigned books for this week: Andrew Jones’ Yellow Music and Geremie Barmé’s In The Red, that the chronology followed by Zhang is by no means unique among scholars attempting to decode Chinese popular culture in the twentieth century. In fact, for all the criticism that these three authors heap upon the CCP for its blunt-instrument style use of popular culture to inculcate mass national values in the Chinese people, they seemed to me to be surprisingly willing to follow the political chronology of Chinese history when defining moments of popular culture change within Chinese society.
The fact is that all three accept this chronology and write around it. Zhang makes it the centerpiece of his history of national film, where Jones actually begins with it, and rotates his whole story around this periodization scheme. Barmé, trying to be revolutionary himself, tackles only the last piece of it, and makes the assumption that he is dealing with a piece of Chinese time that, by definition, is the end-point, the late-stage, of the very same chronology.
This chronological system of analysis begins with the prewar period, the search for modernity and national unity in a fragmented China threatened from without, and gloriously, though also infuriatingly, diverse within. The Second World War then occurs, and this necessitates a shift toward nationalism in cultural production. At the end of the war, the Revolution brings an end to KMT rule, and the People’s Republic of China, born of the nation, attempts to use culture to indoctrinate the masses in national and communist value systems. Upon the end of the Cultural Revolution, and the death of Mao Zedong, a new opening to the world is engineered by Deng Xaoping, and that includes a freeing of cultural constraints, paving the way for Zhang’s Fifth Generation of filmmakers, and other producers more able, or willing, to buck the system, and less likely to be incarcerated for doing so.
The key to the entire chronological system being used here is the Maoist period from the 1950‘s to 1976, during which all three writers assume what Barmé has called the “Culture as Cudgel” model.[1] This is Barmé’s reference to the period between 1950 and 1978, when to produce culture products was to be required to produce state-sponsored, state-censored films with state-specified symbolism and dialogue.
All three authors implicitly set this period, or the attitudes toward the necessity of turning culture to some social use that characterized it, as the center-stone, and sort of a straw man despite its accuracy, as the fulcrum for their analytical projects.
For Zhang, it is this period that helps him set up the idea of Shanghai provenance and Chinese chronology as the essential features of Chinese national cinema, as opposed to the imposed national-state culture of the CCP.
For Jones, it is the desire of CCP culture worker predecessors such as Nie Er, who see the need to make popular culture have some social utility, some meaning, which sets up the whole discussion of “Yellow Music” – the western-influenced predecessor and erstwhile model for the New Music – as a cultural product.
For Barmé, it is the “Culture as Cudgel” period that makes it possible to imagine a freedom in contemporary Chinese culture that may not exist. Since contemporary culture producers in China do not have the proverbial ax over the head when it comes to content in their culture products, it is easy to imagine that they are not co-opted by the state, when Barmé believes that in fact it is their co-optation by the state that makes them the artists they are.
Yingjin Zhang begins Chinese National Cinema with a short and useful explanation of his project. He admits that China is a geographically and culturally diverse place, and takes note of recent approaches to cinema in general, and Chinese cinema specifically, that reject the idea that there is a single ‘national cinema’ history for China. Zhang wants to compare Chinese cinematic history in all of its centers – Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Taipei, looking for a set of cultural assumptions that show these traditions as Chinese not in the sense of the nation-state, but in the sense of what Zhang calls the “nation-people”.[2]
Concentrating on this cultural view of the nation-people, and thus giving some agency to the producers of Chinese popular culture even during the Cultural Revolution years, Zhang eventually succeeds in making a case for Chinese film as roughly comparable in all of the centers which he addresses. Zhang’s point that this constitutes a kind of national cinema is not as securely founded. His regional approach does a fine job of exposing the myths that have obscured the diversity of Chinese cinema in the name of the nation, but is unable to securely fasten them together as a national cinema with all of their differences intact. Instead, Zhang connects the various cinematic traditions of Shanghai, Taiwan, and Hong Kong to a common set of origins, which, ultimately, seems to make them Chinese in provenance rather than in terms of a nation-people which he never fully defines.
Zhang’s first, and primary focus throughout the book, is the physical process of producing culture – in this case, specifically films – and relating that directly to the system by which audiences (the nation-people, presumably) were induced to view, and become comfortable with, this new form of art/entertainment.
Zhang’s first point, which he returns to quite often in the book, is that the new motion pictures, which premiered in 1896, were early on taken in China as being related to the shadow play in traditional Chinese entertainment culture.[3] The use of this term, according to Zhang, “foregrounds a conscientious effort of the Chinese to treat film as historically related to and conceptually indebted to some kind of Chinese tradition.”[4] In fact, film was placed within a chain of events which saw the shadow play move from China to the West, where film started.[5] Thus, in a sense, Chinese could take credit for the new art form, and so comfort in viewing it.
Still, film debuted primarily, as in the West, not as a fully developed art, but as a curiosity. The technology for creating was new, venues suited to showing it did not exist, and so had to be improvised, and audiences were unsure what to expect, and whether they had gotten what they paid for.[6]
One of Zhang’s most critical points is that Chinese national film culture originated in Shanghai. The first production company in China, Yaxia, was formed in Shanghai in 1909.[7] Zhang’s exhibition of Chinese film culture as it develops mostly in Shanghai gives readers a blow-by-blow of the art prior to the war with Japan which secures for Shanghai the title of origin. Zhang’s narrative makes it clear throughout the book after this point that Shanghai is the place where the majority of pre-war production companies was born and died, where the largest number of theatres existed, and where the greatest box-office results were found. Shanghai, with its growing middle class, its international character, and trading city status was the birthplace of the cinema that Zhang wants to call Chinese.
Zhang spends the majority of his space from Chapter one on talking about three things in a literal step-by-step history of film in Shanghai, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. His first step in each part of each chapter is to introduce a new development in the film industry, usually introduced historically by a studio. The focus of this is always on two things: production process, and new methods of production, acting, and screenwriting that make up the content of film in each era.
This is the case when Zhang discusses the move of film from curiosity to narrative drama, through the development of the pre-war giant Mingxing studio. Mingxing used the popular “butterfly” fiction of the day, full of stories of romance, emotion, and complex dramatic elements, all tied together by coincidence, to create narrative stories designed to pull the heartstrings of their audiences. According to Zhang, when May 4th intellectuals were critical of this form, Mingxing responded by updating their butterfly films with more edifying family themes that still used the elements of butterfly fiction, but gave a more moral, nationally oriented story.[8]
In fact, more than a national thread in the history of film, it is this type of stage-by-stage development of technology, plot elements, and film style that is the story Zhang wants to tell. The idea of the change from curiosity to narrative form is mirrored in nearly every chapter of the book. In Chapter 2, Zhang concentrates on connecting his vision of Chinese cinema to the experience of Chinese people in all areas (and specifically tries, rather unsuccessfully, to avoid tying this experience to the re-creation of the Chinese State) just before and during the war period from 1930-1949. The missing element here is evidence about consumption that might show how Chinese audiences actually responded to the intentions of producers.
Jones follows this kind of analytical model as well, though the fulcrum of his chronology centers where Zhang’s is just beginning – in the early to mid-1930’s, with Japan’s conquest of Manchuria, social tensions, cosmopolitanism, and Chinese nationalism.
Ironically, Jones’ project is much more transnational in aim. With the confluence of new musical technologies, Western music and Chinese music and musical traditions, Jones argues that in an attempt to be national, Chinese, and modern, New Music in fact became cosmopolitan, transnational, non-Chinese, and modern.[9] Jones is arguing that national history is not adequate to contain culture and the conflict between prewar popular music and the popular music of national utility created by Nie Er. Instead, there is a need for a process “whereby “national cultures . . . [are] rearticulated within the new global framework” of colonial modernity.”[10] In other words, Jones sees the regional and colonial in the national, whereas Zhang sees the national in the regional. These complex arguments bring us to a key question about popular culture in general which is worth asking: where do popular culture modes begin and end? Is popular culture a sign of increasing globalization, or simply cultural expressions of the national at the global level?
Jones sets this question off by making some important observations about two of his protagonists. Li Jinhui, “to whom the creation of a hybrid genre of American Jazz, Hollywood film music, and Chinese folk music known in China as “modern songs” . . . is usually credited.”[11] This hybrid music, redolent of colonialism as of Chinese tradition, was eventually rejected by one of Li’s protégés, Nie Er, who wanted to create a form of popular music to inspire national sentiments and to increase awareness among Chinese of their plight within the world and within China. Nie Er’s music was to be useful, and he thus tried to set it off against that of Li Jinhui, claiming both musically and in articles that were critical specifically of Li Jinhui’s style of modern music, its decadence and lack of social utility. Yet, Jones notes that Nie Er and his fellow critics shared much with Li Jinhui musically. In early leftist film scores, some of the simplest critiques of Li’s music were done by putting leftist words to Li’s own music.[12]
Nie Er himself was heavily influenced by what Jones calls phonographic realism – a rejection of the subjective techniques of Li’s mixed origin, emotionally driven songs performed by sing-song girls, with the explicit intent to be objective and scientific in representing the world through music. The idea comes from Marxist cultural criticism, and was expounded, Jones says by the Creation Society, a group of leftist activists who shared Nie Er’s desires here. A phonograph, it was said, did not observe the world from a particular perspective, hearing only what it wanted to hear. A phonograph was objective, and to attempt to write music like a phonograph, hearing and creating an objective recording of the conditions of the world, was Nie Er’s and the Creation Society’s objective.[13] To be like the technology of recording, mechanistically to capture the world and present it to the nation-people, to borrow a term from Zhang, was to make oneself useful as a composer.
Ironically, Nie Er’s music drew on the same traditions, the same multi-cultural mix, as that of his teacher, Li Jinhui. In making music useful and modern, Nie Er did not succeed in making it Chinese.
For Zhang in regards to film, as for Jones when it comes to music the point is that nationalist film was an increasingly popular product for directors and studios – particularly those in Shanghai, who were isolated in the International Settlement when Japan occupied Chinese Shanghai in 1937. The same was true for ‘nationalist’ new music such as that created by Nie Er. The 1930’s and 1940’s were a period of reaffirmation of Chinese identity, and the desire was not to broaden or contest what it meant to be Chinese, but to unify and solidify Chinese culture as a monolithic defense against conquest.
According to Zhang, the growing concern about Japanese control of Manchuria after 1932, and the war with Japan after 1937, engendered two major reactions. These reactions coincide with the political/military realities of China at the time, though not with the geography of that political split. Shanghai film-makers existed in a world where it was possible to collaborate with the Japanese, become both nationalist and leftist, or follow a line that encouraged a Chinese sense of nation without leftist ideology. There were, according to Zhang, many films that were in between these extremes, and though censorship existed in all areas of China, many films were able to tread the fine line of censorship while expressing their messages in one or more of the above ideological camps.
Zhang characterizes this period as one of possibility, dynamism, and real subjective agency by film producers and directors. Films explored, according to Zhang, “ideological struggles between the Nationalists and the leftists, between heroic glorification and humanistic exploration, between social realism and aesthetic modernism.”[14]
The possibility and freedom of expression that Zhang explores in the pre-war period is portrayed as having so much energy and creating such competition between studios that despite the existence of censors and a need to make profit or find financing, studios produced a plethora of films in art and popular genres. Zhang’s discussion of this era almost seems like the foreshadowing of a communist straw man film industry after the revolution, which Zhang can then knock down later when he discusses the post-Cultural Revolution period. This turns out to be exactly the case, but not until after Zhang takes a brief interlude to discuss Hong Kong and Taiwan and their relationship to Shanghai film during and before the war.
Zhang gives a critical foreshadowing of his most important contribution in this book in Chapter 4, “Cinematic Reinvention of the National in Taiwan, 1896-1978.” Here Zhang makes the first point that, “Taiwan did not have a film production history of its own until the 1950’s.”[15] The chronology that Zhang has constructed in this book, with the goal of showing the culture of film as a part of national culture, is one that involves the development of China from one China through the war to multiple Chinas.
Consistent with this theme, this chapter on Taiwan cinema really gets going only when it begins to discuss the postwar transition. Taiwan’s experience of Japanese rule prior to the war, then KMT rule, and finally, as the site of KMT power and political propaganda made this a particularly difficult place for a film culture to set down roots. When Japanese films were banned in the postwar, the Taiwan reaction, according to Zhang, was to dust off old Chinese silent films (probably mostly produced in Shanghai) and import “over 100 Shanghai films. . .”[16] This direct connection to Shanghai is the source of the Chinese national in Taiwan film, as far as Zhang is concerned. This provides the roots, and the experience of war, and particularly post-war and post-revolutionary trauma, martial law, and KMT propaganda, define the Taiwan film industry in its early incarnation.
The separation from mainland film culture comes in the early 1950’s with the emergence and popularity of Taiwanese dialect films. These films emphasized the differentiation of Taiwan from the Chinese mainland, and catered to audiences who were becoming middle class and economically successful. They also dealt with the social difficulties of becoming a modern, capitalist, urban state.
According to Zhang, the separation from mainland China was incomplete, caused insecurity, especially among displaced mainlanders, and this provided a market for Mandarin cinema, as well. Zhang’s take is that the very cosmopolitan nature of Taiwan’s film market is evidence that Taiwan is a part of Chinese cinema history, apparently because it makes it clear that whatever the reactions, Taiwan is dealing with the same chronology as the other “Chinas” he is writing about.
In the same way, Zhang places Hong Kong within the chronology of Chinese cultural development, and connects Hong Kong film to roots in Shanghai cinema. Since these connections are the only really stable ones, they are the bearers of his national standard. In Chapter 5 he connects Hong Kong cinema to the pre-war Shanghai experience by claiming that so many Shanghai film-makers moved to Hong Kong during and after the revolution that Hong Kong underwent a cultural Shanghainization. Major film companies that had had Hong Kong branches relocated production there, and others started it in the confines of the British colony in response to the arrival of the Chinese film industry.
Zhang maintains that the ideological battle between the KMT and the CCP were continued in Hong Kong Mandarin cinema, with left-leaning and bourgeois, market-oriented directors producing films about the nation as a whole, often ”in the tradition of postwar Shanghai realism.”[17] The shadow of Shanghai, and thus mainland China, as the arbiter of Chinese art and national identity, looms large here. The development of Cantonese cinema in Hong Kong wins world-wide popularity and is diverse and well-produced. Still, despite the linguistic victory of Cantonese in Hong Kong film, the local nature of these films is, according to Zhang, eventually subsumed back into a mainstream of Chinese film culture.
Jones, too, sees the creation of a new vocabulary of Chinese nationalism in music not simply as a replacement of pre-revolutionary idioms with new nationalist-socialist terms, but as an absorption and regurgitation of those idioms within the new cultural context. The critical point, of course, is that Jones sees the chronology of these events in the same terms as Zhang. Thus Jones’ story about the transformations of a song in the movie New Year’s Coin sees the possibility of salvation for the sing-song girls who have come to symbolize the decadence of Li Jinhui’s modern songs and the culture to which they are categorized as belonging. The sing-song girl can become a part of society, but only by giving up her decadent ways and becoming a part of the collective.[18] Nie Er and others used Li Jinhui’s formula for popular songs to create a new nationalist song that reflexively attempted to negate its own roots.
A key theme in the Zhang and Jones books, whose chronology is taken up by Barmé, is the assumption that the popular culture in China comes from pre-war Shanghai. This “sprouts of popular culture” idea is what informs Zhang’s idea of the Chinese national in cinema, and creates the Chinese colonial cosmopolitan in Jones’ understanding of Li Jinhui’s “Yellow Music”.
To a great extent, the evidence they share seems to bear them out. Shanghai’s cosmopolitan nature, large population, and economic importance made it the popular culture capital of Republican-era China. As Zhang notes, here was where the first movie studio came into existence in China. Jones makes it clear that Li Jinhui’s broad popularity really began to soar when he and his troop came under the umbrella of the popular and market-oriented Lianhua movie studio in Shanghai.[19]
Further evidence that both Zhang and Jones see Shanghai as the source for Chinese popular culture comes in the discussions of competition which occur primarily in Shanghai. Zhang discusses the cutthroat competition of movie studios, and then of theater chains, in Shanghai, as a driving force in the production decisions of the industry, dictating what kind of films would be made, what niche each company would fit itself into, and ultimately the survival of producers themselves.[20]
Finally, though, for both Zhang and Jones, the Second World War creates a difficult period for culture producers, most of whom felt some need to express themselves in support of national goals of defense. These expressions, though, were often of varying ideological quality, with artists on the left, and others on the right, and frequent interchange between them.
The war, however, also forced many producers of popular culture to either live with Japanese occupation in Shanghai, or find a new place where production of culture without Japanese influence or interference was possible. The dearth of such places, and of consumers for their products, led to a period of drought which many production companies did not survive.[21]
Following the war was the revolution period, and this also created shake-ups in the industry. The growth of films produced by the CCP, the bald use by the CCP of popular culture to create national and collective consciousness (the “Culture Cudgel” of Barmé referred to earlier) as well as anti-communist propaganda in song and film, KMT training films and documentaries in pre-1949 China, and in Taiwan after 1949. Zhang wants to argue that the Communist victory makes Taiwan and Hong Kong as much a part of the Chinese nation-people as are those in the PRC, because of the fact that, although their experiences were different, they were reacting to the same post-revolutionary changes. Thus Zhang’s concentration on Taiwanese Mandarin cinema in Chapter 4, and on Hong Kong Cantonese cinema as an outgrowth of Shanghainization in Chapter 5.[22]
Jones is interested in this part of the chronology of Chinese popular culture, as well. It is in the post-revolution era when the reactionary music of Nie Er, his foil for Li Jinhui, comes into its own as pragmatic music of the Chinese Communist nation-state, in the service of the people through educating them about their essential and objective collective unity.[23]
It seems clear then that for Zhang and Jones, who have worked together closely, the chronology of the development of Chinese popular culture follows a clear pattern that reflects the chronology of Chinese political developments. The fulcrum for both books is the Maoist era of 1950-1978, during which subjective, individual expression was not only unacceptable, but not allowed by the state. On either side of this era, there is a period of possibility and amazing cultural production – a real counter-culture, as Barmé defines it – not as a binary opposite to the dominate or state-sponsored culture, but as a series of graded alternatives to the blunt simplicity and repetitive nature of state-centered symbols and narratives. This fulcrum period, which is, in effect, a popular culture wasteland in the minds of these two writers, provides a sort of steeping period during which lack of expressive opportunity allows Chinese producers of popular culture to store their collective productive energy for the more freely expressive time to come in the post-Mao period. It is here that the work of Geremie Barmé becomes most relevant.
Barmé, in his introduction, paints himself as a dissenter when it comes to popular culture analysis. He gives a long description of his education in China to establish his credentials, he spends time on eschewing recent scholarly trends toward theorizing in analyses of popular culture, while keeping himself in the game by not espousing a ‘just the facts’ approach for which he could be easily criticized. In fact, Barmé seems to define himself as a researcher and his argument about popular culture primarily in the negative.
In any case, after making his remark about the blunt brutality of cultural suppression in the Maoist period, Barmé goes on to say that, contrary to popular belief, Chinese artists and culture producers are not any more free today than they were then. In fact, he says, “[after] decades of rule by Proledic [the dictatorship of the proletariat], external political coercion and the internal pressures of the Chinese deep structure meld to create a new self-censoring cultural figure, the state artist. . .”[24]
In Barmé’s view, the new artists of the post-Mao period are not really any more free, they simply are better able to negotiate with the state a position of acceptance of the social contract which allows them some room to criticize society. The true art, according to these people, says Barmé, is in the ability to “write between the lines” and create culture products that can be passed into production by the state, but also contain critique of that state in subtle ways, coded into the writing in such a way that it is recognizable, but not clear or obvious.[25]
For Barmé, though, this new art of subtle critique, as well as the more overt critiques of Communist Party Rule that have appeared in the recent past are not a sign of a new freedom. They are instead relatively meaningless, barbs directed at officials, the state of society, or, ironically, and the media itself, but produce no action, and no material change.[26]
Conversely, the market itself, thought of in the West and by many Chinese as the agent of change in the possibility of self-expression, is frequently seen as corrupt by its participants, both producers and consumers alike, for the very reason that it is the market. This comes clear in the story of author Yu Jie’s book Fire and Ice, rushed to press in the ironic moment of celebration of the importance of Beijing University just as one of its most prominent students, Wang Dan, was being ejected from China for taking its tradition of free speech and criticism too seriously in 1989. Yu’s critique of the Maoist period and of critics of the new cultural and market freedom was barbed and direct, but appeared to many of its readers as redolent of the market pandering that was the target of the very people the book aimed at.[27]
For Barmé, then, Chinese contemporary popular culture is a circular argument that adjusts itself to the prevailing political winds for market purposes, but achieves nothing important through its cultural criticism in what is a kind of ultimate betrayal of the objectives of Lu Xun.
My key point here is that, writing about the post-Mao period as he is, Barmé does not call into question the chronology used by Zhang and Jones, but works with it, simply correcting the view that the era after the fulcrum period is really an indicator of a return to subjectivity or agency. The fundamental structure of equating the popular culture chronology to the chronology of China’s modern political history remains unchanged.
Still, Barmé does add something new to the mix in the post-Mao period – a sense that popular culture is not linked to political or social change at all, except, because of the market, as a reflector – a mirror that inadequately expresses the opinions of the masses as contrary to, but not necessarily any better than, those of the holders of power in China. Worse, because the producers, and especially the consumers of Chinese popular culture are essentially subalterns themselves, popular culture functions as a way to provide the masses with a voice with little risk, because as shrill as it may be, this voice can say nothing. To twist a phrase from Spivak, the subaltern can speak, but it has no impact.
This brings several questions to mind. First, does the production of culture really fit the political periodization so neatly? If so, do the politics drive the culture, or does the culture, as Jones wants to think, provide us with the understanding of our time, which we therefore create in line with our understanding? In other words, is political culture the real driver of historical change? Another key question might be, is it possible to write a chronological history in terms of the production of culture, rather than the events of politics?
Finally, one primary missing piece to all three of these analyses is any clear sense of what consumers thought as they participated in re-producing these cultural artifacts, be they songs, movies, novels, etc., during each of the periods discussed. This is, of course, a tall order, especially, as Jones mentions, because of the relative difficulty of finding sources created by the producers themselves. The chances of finding evidence about how consumers – common Chinese from various classes, locations, etc., viewed these products as they were using them would be very hard to find indeed, especially from the pre-war period.
However, as Stuart Hall and John Storey have pointed out, and Jones has mentioned, the culture production system is a two-way street. Producers may have intent for the use of their products, and their meaning, at the time of production. Consumers, however, use products, even cultural products, for their own purposes. Even if it were possible for Nie Er to create an objective musical recording, the consumers of that recording would all use it in subjective ways.
Zhang gets close to this analysis – maybe as close as can be for the pre-war period – when he shows statistics of theater attendance, quotes from movie magazines and theater advertisements, etc. Still, these statistics are only slightly useful, and don’t give a complex story about individual consumption habits. The movie magazines are highly mediated, themselves selling to their audience ideas that they think people want to hear, but cannot be sure of, and they were mostly the products of the moving production companies.
The closest to this kind of analysis is Barmé, but his book reveals him as a participant in the wars over popular culture – one of the many voice-ful, but ultimately perhaps meaningless subalterns – in the debate. He has access to much of the evidence on consumption, and uses it to fire potshots at his critics rather than to make a critical reading that is really useful. Still, Barmé’s approach is useful.
Bibliography
Barmé, Geremie. In The Red: On Contemporary Chinese Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.
Jones, Andrew F. Yellow Music: Media Culture and Colonial Modernity in the Chinese Jazz Age. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2001.
Zhang, Yingjin. Chinese National Cinema. New York: Routledge, 2004.
[1] Geremie Barmé, In The Red: On Contemporary Chinese Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 1.
[2] Yingjin Zhang, Chinese National Cinema (New York, Oxon: Routledge, 2004; reprint, NY, NY: Routledge, 2005), 5-6 (page citations are to the reprint edition).
[3] Ibid., 13-15.
[4] Ibid., 15.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid., 17-20.
[7] Ibid., 19.
[8] Ibid., 22-28.
[9] Andrew F. Jones, Yellow Music: Media Culture and Colonial Modernity in the Chinese Jazz Age (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2001), 7-20.
[10] Ibid., 10. Here Jones is himself quoting from Wang Yuhe.
[11] Ibid., 6.
[12] Ibid., 113.
[13] Ibid., 108.
[14] Zhang, 59.
[15] Ibid., 113.
[16] Ibid., 121.
[17] Ibid., 159
[18] Jones, 130-133.
[19] Ibid., 97.
[20] Zhang, 58-81.
[21] Zhang, 83-95.
[22] Zhang, 113-185.
[23] Jones, 133.
[24] Barmé, 2.
[25] Ibid., 6.
[26] Barmé, 147-149.
[27] Ibid., 350-353.