Xiaoning Lu, "Moulding the Socialist Subject: Cinema and Chinese Modernity (1949-1966)" (Brill, 2020)

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This sale only lasts for a month. So go and get some books. Welcome to the new books network. Hello everyone, this is Victoria Lppash, one of the hosts for the Asian Studies Channel by the new books network.

And today we are here with Dr. Shiaoning Lu, reader and modern Chinese culture and language at Soa's University of London. Hello Dr. Lu and welcome to our channel.

Hello Victoria, thank you so much for inviting me. So, thank you for agreeing to talk to us about your new book, Moulding the Socialist Subject, Cinema and Chinese Modernity 1949-1966, published by Brill in 2020. Before we start the questions of how the book itself, I wanted to start by getting to know you and your work better. And I was wondering whether you could please tell us how you came to this project, what got you interested in cinema as a broad category, and in studying the intersection between politics and cinema in the PRC as a more specific topic?

Well, I think to a large part, academic training led me to this project. I studied Chinese literature, both in China and in China, but I went to study comparative literature at the Stony Brook in the United States. The reason was I wanted to do something completely different. So I wanted to learn something new.

And the Graduate Program at my graduate program, so my graduate training at the Comparative Literature really opened my eyes to the cinema studies. So I was exposed to this very new field. I learned courses such as film history and theory, but I also noticed at the time in the English language scholarship, most works addressed the fifth generation, most work addressed Chinese cinema by fifth generation directors. There was relatively very, very few works on Chinese cinema during the Mao era.

So I was intrigued by this gap. Of course, I know many people wouldn't be interested in cinema, it wouldn't be interested in cinema in that period time, because many people think it's a kind of propaganda film, it's boring, simplistic, etc. But in the meantime, I noticed around 2002, 2004 at the time, there were many VCDs and DVDs available in the culture market in Manantana. Those are really the old Chinese films reissued on the DVD and the VCDs.

So those films include not only 1930s Chinese cinema, classic Chinese films, but also films from the Mao era, from 1949 to 1966. So this contrast really made me think maybe I can do something to address this gap. Another factor is my personal experience, because I remember when I was a child, I often heard my father singing those songs, the movie songs, movie thing songs from those old films, so you have the difference between the lack of academic interest in that period of time, and also the emerging culture market of the old films issued in DVD. So all those contrast made me think maybe I can do something.

Then you asked about the intersection between politics and cinema. For me, the issue is really about the popular cinema, because I think I'm interested in the idea, of the cultural hegemony, the popular culture, how popular culture can create consent, and not by a co-host of means, but by a very subtle means to create a consent and to support a dominant ideology. So it's from there, I began to be interested in exploring this topic. That's fascinating.

And as you're talking, I realized that in teaching a Chinese cinema survey, as well, there is still, before your book came out, this gap that you mentioned in the 4966 period, at least in the English language scholarship, that you teach the 20s and 30s, and then a little bit of the 40s, and then there's some sort of gap, and then you have the 80s and 90s and so on. So I was very happy when I saw your book, and that's why I was so proposed an interview, because it's such an important period. And there's so many films that got re-introduced to the larger public, but we haven't actually got access to a lot of analysis or presentations on them. So I got very excited about your book, which comprises of six chapters, accompanied by the introduction and the conclusion, and quote, each chapter pairs a particular bio-political measure with specific case studies of Chinese socialist cinema to investigate how they were deployed together to form the socialist subject, and in this entirety, the manuscript quote takes cinema as a particular form of the spectacle in Mao's China and asks how it was imbricated in the creation and operation of the new socialist cultural hegemony, in constructing socialist subjectivity and shaping new social relations, and a quote.

So in the introduction, we get a glimpse of what it means to be a socialist subject, and I was wondering whether you could provide us with a bit of context or better yet, show us the bigger political and humanistic picture for the concept. Of course, so the socialist subject, at this term, has its historical equivalent. In Mao's era, in Mao's China, normally people use the term of singrin or new men, new socialist person. So what is a new socialist person?

I think these type of new men possess certain qualities. For example, strong identification with and wholehearted support of socialism, and they are also the vanguard of the revolution, they should have a class consciousness, they are not arrogant to opportunists, but they should be a selfless individual who serve the people wholeheartedly. In short, we would say a new man is a kind of a desired citizen in a new socialist society. I think the term new man, the new, really the word new indicates a kind of optimism.

It also really indicates a socialist project has a humanist dimension, because the socialism would provide a favorable historical and material conditions for human beings to be reborn and to develop their potential and attend true happiness. So this is in contrast with feudalism or the capitalism, capitalist exploitation. So only in the social society, people, human beings can flourish to reach their full potential. So in my book, I use the term subject, social subject, because I want to emphasize the process of subjectification.

In other words, the making of this type of new person. So especially when I look at that period of time, I feel men and women, they were not just the recipients of the multiple forces, but they were also actors within that multiple forces in the process of transforming China into the so-called modern socialist nation. So in the process of building socialism, they also transformed themselves into the desired new socialist subjects. So there are many writings about this concept, but I think the most interesting one would be from Mao Zedong's speech.

In a speech, a very famous one in 1957, how to handle the, you know, in his 1957 speech, he mentioned that in the building of a socialist society, everyone needs remoting, including himself. Then he goes on, he talked about how he transformed himself first by reading books of Maxisyn, but mostly by taking part in class struggle. So in this process, he transformed himself. So I think when we talk about the socialist subject, or how to make a socialist person inevitably, it involves a kind of a reflexivity, a self-cultivation, because you need to, you know, mode yourself in accordance with the standard, the mode, or that is the socialist ideals.

I wonder whether that explains your answer to your question. Yes, it is absolutely. It does. And, you know, it opens the conversation for us to go into more details towards the chapters.

But also, like you mentioned Mao's speeches, and I think it's very important to mention them and to see how Mao himself participated very actively in this current right of remolding and offered himself as a subject as well. So he didn't portray himself as the initiator. He was also a subject in his own. So I found that quite interesting.

And then, you know, you can see it through the chapters. And I'll start with chapter one entitled Terror and Mass Surveillance, the country's Pionach Phil. And the chapter brings forth the concept of surveillance, but with a twist. The chapters suggest that the masses were the agents instead of the subjects of surveillance.

And, you know, I was wondering how did cinema aesthetically represent such principles and how did narratives such as the one in the might of the people, sorry, the might of the people help sculpt socially subjectivity. Oh, thank you for your question. I actually want to take a step back and talk about this genre first, because this chapter really addressed the genre of the counter espionage film for lack of better translation, because in Chinese it's called a fan-tir-pian. So, literary tour refers to special agents or crimes.

But in fact, in this genre, it's very different from the Western, you know, spy films, etc. The genre actually, I chose this genre because it addressed the question of the healthy body politic. So then it ties it is tied back to the question of how to mode the socially subjects. So previously, I briefly mentioned about individual qualities, how to be an ideal social person.

But on the other hand, if we really just zoom out on a larger scale, we would have the question about what is the proper boundaries of the collective, in other words, who should be excluded, who should be included in this new body politic. So I think so in the early years of the PRC, especially in the early 1950s, there were like a huge political campaigns to suppress the counter-revolutionaries. So, counter-revolutionaries are, you know, it's a very loose category. It includes the local bandits and also the Nationalist Army remnants, those like, because, you know, the National Smart Army retreated to Taiwan Island, but some of them stayed remained over, remained on the mainland China.

So the counter-revolutionaries could refer to anybody who harbors or garage against or harbors, resentment against the socialism or communist revolution. So I think, so this type of genre, the counter-espionage film, really is about how to uncover the hidden enemies within the people. So, so we here, we have the the people and the enemies of the people. They are like two oppositional categories, and they are also the political concepts, because not all citizens of China are members of the people, right?

So, so this is the genre, and then you mentioned about the surveillance. Okay, so the surveillance, I think, yeah, why did I come to the idea of surveillance? So this genre, I think, has attracted much attention, in fact, in Chinese, among Chinese scholars, because this is quite interesting genre, you know, compared to many, like, very blank, narrative, this type of counter-espionage films are usually full of suspense in trees, etc. So, it's interesting, but I'm particularly interested in the early manifestation of this genre in the 1950s.

So, because for me, the early 1950s, under espionage films, really addressed the question about how to purify the body politic, and what normal ordinary people can do to help, to achieve this goal. So, normally, and also the surveillance, so I was thinking about like, how to really analyze this type of genre film, because many scholars, they focus on gender and other aesthetic features. You know, the gender is quite interesting, because only the female scholars, the bad women, right? They exhibit femininity, so they are alluring female characters of uncommon being, like, socialist cinema, so they are very interesting figures.

But when I look at this genre, I was thinking like, from which angle I can't offer some new analysis. And so, I tied this genre with the ongoing political campaign, you know, the suppression of the counter-revolutionaries, and I feel this particular function, especially during the early 1950s, because it really mobilized people to ferret out those hidden enemies. And then, with regard to the idea of surveillance, I think normally, when we think about Maoist China, or, you know, we often tend to use totalitarian China, or China, that's fine. And people often come with the idea of, you know, big brother is watching you, right?

So, it's this, like, a panopticon model, like, because it's totalitarian society, everybody is watched by the party. So, but if I look at what's going on in the 1950s, I feel that's not the case. It really doesn't explain the social phenomenon and the Chinese Communist Party's work style. So, for this type of genre, I think most clearly, illustrate that what people were expected to do, for example, they were expected to be actively involved in uncovering hidden enemies.

So, they are practiced, they are ordinarily practiced, were important. So, these type of surveillance, for me, you know, the subject of surveillance are the enemies of a people, but the agents of the surveillance are the masses, changing the ordinary people. That's why I want to really unsettle the previous analytical paradigm of analyzing surveillance in totalitarian society, authoritarian China. And then you mentioned the film, which I analyzed in this chapter, The Might of the People.

It was produced in 1950, and it was scripted by a very famous veteran, Square and player, and also party leader, Xiaoyin. So, I think this film really illustrates this different paradigm very, very well. If we don't use the panopticon as a model, right? So, what kind of a visual model we can use to explain these type of mass surveillance or participatory surveillance?

I suggest that we can use the metaphor of a net or network. In fact, in there's a classical Chinese phrase or Chinese saying, Tian Wang, Qui Huayi, Shua Abrilou, heaven's net is vast, its mesh is loose, but at least out nothing. So, this phrase simply remains retribution and punishment are inevitable, if you do something bad. So, if we take a closer look at the film text, you will see the director, the screenwriter, everyone involved.

They really created a very unique cinematic aesthetics to illustrate this new idea of participatory or mass surveillance. So, for example, at the narrative level, we have a large cost of characters, right? So, the characters come from all walks of life, office, clerk, union activist, veteran, soldiers, etc. And then also, the film features episodic, dispersed narratives to foreground this ever-expanding network of citizens surveillance.

So, the film is not really centered on individual character, not centered on spy intrigues, because at the very beginning of the film, as audience members, as audience, we already know who is a bad guy. So, the key of this film is really to show how to bring the counter-revolutionaries under the power of the people. So, the key is to show how we form this network of citizens surveillance. So, that's why I think they have this strategy.

They use many episodic narratives. On the other hand, I think the camera movements are quite interesting. So, if we look at cinematography, you have the typical area shots, tilted camera angles, dramatic change of short sizes, dramatic change of short size, for example, from like long short to big close up, etc. But those techniques are utilized in scenes featuring the nationalist party's aggression, for example, the KMT, the Goming Down parties, the AR rate.

But when we look at how the citizen surveillance network is formed, you will see the horizontal camera movements and ordinary median shots are used. So, it really like to, but by using such a cinematic strategy, the film connect disparate characters together. And therefore, they individually wave on expensive network of surveillance. That's fascinating.

And the use of camera moves to further the message and to make this distinction right between different political sides or different characters. It's quite interesting, I find. And I think, this is a question that I have for you, whether these types of approaches continue in a different genre film, which is the sports film. And that comes with chapter two, entitled The New Physical Culture and Volatile Attraction, the sports film.

And then the chapter engages with the new physical culture movement and analyzes the interconnectedness between techniques of the body and political subjectivity as encoded through the sports film genre. So, how did this genre come to develop its aesthetic tropes? And what were some of the ways in which it put forth the party's vision of the socialist subjects, you know, here, including the healthy body politics and all of that? Yeah.

So, the sports film is also a genre that I personally have enjoyed. So, in Chinese, it's called T.U.P.N. So, there's, again, I think it's very difficult to find the equivalent English term. So, T.U.E.

or T.U.E. basically can be translated as a physical culture. That's why the chapter title is also used the term, the new physical culture. So, basically, I think T.U.E.

is much closer to the German word, Kupur-Katur. It refers to the totality of physical activities that includes all kinds of body, cultivation, sports, and exercises, etc. Of course, when we introduced the term into China in early 20th century, T.U.E. carried a special connotation of Western-style athletic activities, such as board games, track and field, etc.

etc. So, for the emergence of the sports film or T.U.E.P.N. I think it was closely linked to the party's effort to promote simply new physical culture. So, this type of new physical culture is really like mass oriented, you know, as opposed to elite sports, right?

So, the party encouraged everybody to take part in physical culture, in playing sports, doing exercise, move your body, and so you can be, you can stay healthy at the feet, and therefore, you become a more productive and efficient socialist workers, etc. But I think this new political movement or political campaign for moving every body, literally every body, physical body, is also like tied to the long term, discursive tradition of T.U.E. in relation to Chinese modernization. Because in the early 20th century, Chinese intellectuals already, when they envisioned how to modernize China, of example, Yang Xichao, he proposed, we need to really look into three elements, right?

Not only the intellectual power, moral power, morality, but also the physical powerness, the physical power. So, those three elements should be integrated together. And only by cultivating those three aspects, we can have new people, new people, and who are essential to build modern China, to modernize China. So, I think this kind of intellectual discourse, intellectual vision, continued into the mouse period.

So, I think your question also mentioned about aesthetic troops and how to build ways that are encoded in those films. Okay, so for this genre, I think as for a party vision of a social subject, it generally addresses you need to be a self-disciplined individual who put national interests or collective interests before your personal needs or preferences. For example, there's a very famous film called Woman Basketball Player Number Five, directed by Xi Jinping. I think this film is really a good illustration, and it's actually a masterpiece of this genre.

So, the film presents two narratives, but two narratives interwoven together. It features like a double, right? You have a double characters, or you have the older generation of woman basketball number five, and a younger generation of woman basketball number five. So, the young one, the young player is a protagonist, and her mother used to be a basketball player too.

And more importantly, her mother's former lover in the old China was a very excellent basketball player who actually becomes the younger coach at the present in the new China. So, at the very beginning of the film, you will see the young basketball player number five, and she is a wayward girl, and she chases her own phone, she ignores the turning, etc. And she doesn't even care about playing basketball, because there was a social bias that only those who do not ex-opidemically play sports. So, there's this very prevalent social bias, and so she didn't want to devote herself, right?

But then, we see the coach educates her, and there's a very moving speech, although the coach used the third person narrative, and the coach basically talked to her, and was saying, like, oh, I was young, I knew an athlete who represented his country at the far eastern gains, but the moment when he appeared, foreigners were into laughter, the sick men of East Asia also came to the sports meet. Journalists also asking to take off his clothes so that they could take a bare-body picture of him. At the time, he didn't understand, but now he understands that. That was not just an insult to him, it was an insult to our country and our nation.

He won a championship at the games, but it was of no use to China. In order to make a living, he had to play basketball for his boss and for commercials. So, I think this speech really encapsulates the differences between the old sports, the old physical culture, and the new physical culture, of course, from the party's perspective. So, toward the end of the film, as we can expect, the better transforms herself to be a very disciplined and dedicated basketball player, a good team player.

And then, all the girls, all the women players gather together, assemble together under the national flag because they are prepared to depart, they are prepared to go abroad, to compete for China. So, yeah, so I think this, but also there are other types of sports films which really focus on mobilizing people to engage in physical activities, like to engage in what we call the workers' sports, etc. So, for this genre of film, I think it's quite interesting. We don't have a unified or unified genre formula.

It is quite diverse, but the key message is this type of film really wants to show you the difference between the old type of physical culture and the new one, and also always link the individuals to the national cause, the nationalism, etc. Right, and I think there are a few films too that deal with erasing, so, athleticism and competing in terms of running and other types of physical activity that also, women are there, and it doesn't become, as you mentioned, this type of activity that you dedicate yourself to because you did an excel in your studies. It's just as important and it portrays the way society should go. So, I think it's a very pivotal, very important moment in the ways in which the party's vision, but also the people understood this kind of activity, right, and the physical activities.

Yeah, especially if you think about in China, from 1955 to 1962, China actually suffered from great famine, all this memory, the great famine. So, it was extremely important for the party to promote the physical fitness right after the famine. And also, I think I forgot to mention, interestingly, if you look at the iconography, right, we have so many females. Simply looking at the movie titles, you have a girl divers, ice skating sisters, so like a female image, like a female aesthetic that really dominates the screen.

I think it's kind of like maybe, it not only kind of promotes the moralist idea of gender equality, but it's also very subtle response maybe to the early stigmatization of China as a sick man of the East Asia. So, it's kind of response to this pro-musculum model of modernization. Absolutely. Yeah, I think that's a very interesting point.

And the examples, as you said, are plentiful, right, specifically from film, but I think we could find some examples from literature as well. And speaking of the national subject, but also this idea of collaboration and fraternity even, I think chapters three in title, ethnicity and social fraternity, the national minority film, moves from questions of representation to those of performance, spectatorship, and extra cinematic cultural discourses. And here, I was wondering how is ethnicity factoring into socially subjectivity at the performance and spectatorship levels? Or if I were to rephrase that, how is cinema through its actors, audiences, and local contexts trying to depict the unified nation while emphasizing fraternity, collaboration, and all of that?

Yes. I think it's a very interesting question. If we normally use the word ethnicity, and a Chinese social scientist also use the word ethnicity, although the Chinese is means, remains who can be translated into race, race, nation, or ethnicity. But for the Chinese Communist Party, it adopted the Soviet Union style.

It adopted the Marxist idea of a nationality to for this question. Because I think if we look at socialism, ultimately, its idea is, you know, we need to transcend all our differences. We will come together to realize this is a wonderful utopian vision of socialism. But interestingly, before we overcome our ethnic differences, we need to create those differences.

I was very intrigued. Well, I did research for this chapter. I was very intrigued by other scholars' research on the ethnic classification project, this monumental project, which was launched in 1953. So the goal of the project was really to identify the so-called national minorities or ethnic minorities.

So the minority people, they can submit their application. They apply to be recognized as a distinct ethnic minority, but they need to be approved, right? And of course, as a hypothesis, other social scientists were involved. So this classification project continued, like from 1953, continued all the way to 1978.

So it was an ongoing process really to build this multinational nation. And so for the four or two years of the early PRC, we saw a flourishing genre of the minority nationality films. So these films were also very popular among Chinese audiences, because normally they portray very outlandish landscape and they portray different customs, etc. And visually, it was really, really attractive.

So I think for many scholars, when they analyzed in this journal film, previously, they tend to focus on representation, iconography, film narrative, etc. And so they normally focus on, I think, the, what do we call it, the the Sahedian type of binary reading, the self and the other. Many scholars take this film genre as the Han Chinese, Han Chinese other in practice, because the Han Chinese is the majority of the ethnicity in China. And they have many, many different ethnic minorities.

Of course, this type of reading really tries to point out the unequal power relations among different ethnic groups. I don't deny that at all. But I just feel maybe I can't offer a different perspective, because for me, these type of analysis, if you only focus on representation, focus on, you know, othering, you know, the self and other practice, somehow, I think it leaves some blind spots of people. If you only focus on self and other, you presupposed as distinct ethnic border.

And you also presume that identification was a certain aspect category characterized by viewing experience of this film genre, this type of films. But I think it's a bit more complicated. I don't think this film is type of film, encourage the people to really identify with the Han Chinese, you know, to really to consolidate the norms of the Han. Its message is really how do we transcend all the ethnic division and we should work together.

And that's why we need to form our fraternal community to work on the to build socialism. So that's, that's the reason why I shift my attention, like from the representation to performance. So for example, I noticed when I read the film, I noted that many reports behind these things reports, like how to make this type of film. For example, there's a very famous Chinese actress called a Qing Yi.

She actually plays the older woman basketball player number five in the previous film I mentioned. So she was really, really well known to Chinese audience. But she plays the protagonist of a dye doctor, you know, so she plays this female doctor of a dye ethnicity, in fact. And then the film magazine, Mass Cinema, Dan Jung Ding, really rounds reports on how the film was made.

And you also have like audience letters to to the film, mixing. For example, I remember there's a Tibetan viewer, he wrote a letter to the magazine, he said he complains, Oh, so many ethnic minority film or minor, ethnic minority films are so identical. It's been kind of like formulaic or generic, come to come up with new ideas. So we found like disregarding your particular ethnicity, some of how the stories are really similar.

They either, you know, portray how ethnic minority fight together, like shoulder to shoulder was the communist soldiers, you know, they work together how to fight against the foreign powers or counter-revolutionaries, right? Or maybe those films portrayed their common sufferings, how the ethnic minority people also suffer from class exploration, exploitation, etc. So I think those reports really kind of a draw our attention to how people, to the people who were involved in the making of this film. So I also noticed like the cross-ethnic performance, I mentioned about the Chinese, but there are other actors and actresses, for instance, we had a very famous actress of ethnic minority, Orange and like she is so-called from Yiju, right?

And the young equal, she plays a bio-through character in five golden flowers. So not just the Han people playing ethnic minorities, you also have the ethnic minority people, you know, playing the other group of ethnic minorities. And then I feel this type of cross-ethnic performance is intentional and it is it was meant to be transparent because of those behind the scenes reports, because of the audience, audience prior knowledge. So those factors determine their viewing experience.

So I think by strategically casting people, you know, to perform cross-ethnicly, this film, this type of film really creates, creates an opportunity for the audience to reflect on their own identity, right? They don't actually need to identify with a particular ethnic group, but what is important, what is important is really the position of ethnic minorities in this structure. If we also look at the film text closely, we also see like the discrepancies between the visual and the oral audio. Visually, you see we have a very clear markers, the visual markers of ethnic identity.

For example, you have a unique hairpiece or costume, and you even have ethnic music instruments, right? But on the audio track, you're just, normally you're here in pecable Mandarin Chinese. So you know immediately, it's really not really, it's really not authentic, the so-called authentic depiction of ethnic minority. But so for me, but those are intentional strategies because the purpose is to cue the audience, to overcome those ethnic divides really to think about like how we position ourselves in this horizontal fraternal community.

Absolutely. Yeah, it's fascinating, and I've been thinking about this dubbing process and just overlaying the sound on top of the image as a strategy that was common to a lot of countries from Eastern Europe, for example, and also the subtitles for movies that were imported from North America. But not only that, just all the films that were imported from China, or even from Japan sometimes, had this dubbing. And I was wondering, it's not a question, for to answer right now, but in just general kind of research direction, I was thinking how that can be a very interesting way to think about this connection, performance, spectatorship, right?

And the politics behind dubbing and subtitling as a strategy, right? So anyway, maybe for a later book, or if someone is interested. But you mentioned the behind the scenes part, and in chapter four, modeling the model, Red Stardom, we see Jung Rifeng and her unique position in a complex system that allow for startup. And my question is more of an invitation here to tell us about the creation of Stardom and molding behind the scenes and the changes in the film star culture happening at the time.

Because I mean, you know, and this is highly just one-sided, because when I was reading the chapter, I was thinking about film stars and the image that popped into my head was that of running you and the film star culture of the 20s and 30s, which is very different than what happens right in the Maoist period and what the chapter focuses on. But I was just curious to hear about the Jung Rifeng and Stardom, the Red Stardom. Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned running you, huge film movie stars. Of course, we all know about running you as funeral in 1935.

That was really hugely publicized in media. So I think any start and making a start cannot be separated from the public discourse and media culture, etc. And of course running you is the most essential symbols of Shanghai cinema, kind of a commercially oriented cinema that the CCP planned to repute it or to abolish. So yeah, I think the rise of the Red Stardom such as the John Rifeng, I think it needs to be really considered in this changing film culture, the changing sphere of the film culture.

So I want to go back to the very term star, minxing, right? So the term star actually fell out of fashion in Mao's China. Because minxing the star really carries many negative connotations, exactly because like, movie stars are running heat, right? So she symbolizes certain kind of beauty, certain kind of decadent lifestyle.

Or if you look at the Republican Chinese film mixings, right? You will see they have very different, many different kind of fashion pictures, etc. So the star also carries connotations such as individualism, loftiness, liberalism. So everything which is derived from capitalism.

So the term star really fell out of fashion. So in its place, the Communist Party, they promoted a new term. For example, the film worker was a more so-called more appropriate or more prevalent term used for that age, because of workers, right? Emphasize the labor, you're doing the labor, you're offering a labor, and to work, yes, glorious.

So by using this specific term, the film worker, the party tries to emphasize, to promote egalitarian understanding. The film star, you're not, you're not about other people, you are also a member of our laboring masses. So then we actually look at how the film culture was transformed. I think other scholars in their study, they mentioned about the campaigns to eliminate Hollywood influence in the early 1950s.

In the meantime, we also see a lot of movie fan magazines vanished, disappeared. Then we see a new type of film magazines emerge. For example, Mass Cinema, the Chinese title is that mundane. Some people translate that into popular cinema, right?

But I actually think we should translate that into Mass Cinema, because it was a cinema, a new cinema intended for the masses. It's not only, it's a political term. I think it has political function. It's not just popular, right?

So in my book, I also use the term Mass Cinema throughout, just to emphasize its historical, just to give us historical specificity. And then we also see the most China had many film exchanges with other socialist counterparts, with other socialist countries. Then of course, the Soviet Union had exerted much influence on Chinese film culture. For example, the Soviet Union sent their film delegation to China, but also in the Soviet Union, I think they used the term people's actors as an analytical category.

For example, in some of the film essays, the Soviet specialists would say, oh, the actors are not just a citizen's artist, they are also social activists. They are masses educators. So they can, they are the people who are able to evaluate ours and to represent our lives from the perspective of the state. So those actors were called the people's actors.

And I think China adopted that term, you know, people's actors, you know, meaning even, really to use these terms to replace the movie star. So then you will also see some movie stars who prominent in Republican China in pre-4949 China. Suddenly they had the trouble with the founding jobs, founding works, etc. And some of them even had to write a sub-criticism.

For example, a very famous movie star, movie actress in pre-4949 China. And she had to write a public sub-criticism, which was published in the magazine basically to reflect on her her mistakes. Like she talked about, oh, the reason I entered the film acting profession was because I always want to be, you know, exceptional, extraordinary. I enjoy being famous, the fame, etc.

Right? And then it's kind of like reflecting, it's like self-criticism on her, you know, petty mindedness, etc. So in in the context of the Chinese socialist cinema, I think what we, I think the Western theory, which we're familiar with, are kind of inadequate in accounting the phenomenon of the red stardom. Because a lot of the film series, they focus on film actors, film, especially female, female film stars as a spectacle, right?

The attention of our gaze, etc. But I feel like when we study the start and the new star culture phenomenon, we really have to situate the stardom within a wider management of propaganda and culture production in Mao's China. So what is a right star? Right star like a John Revan.

On screen, she plays the so-called progressive characters, right? She is a model socialist workers on screen. And off screen, so many reports, essays, and she was portrayed or presented as a model worker, model leaders as well. So the red stars embodied socialist values and helped propel socialist movements both on an off screen.

So these type of people are the red stars. And I think they are, they should be, I think we should link the red stars to the model people, social phenomena in Mao's China, the model people, you know, are the example, exemplary members from different professions, right? So and more importantly, they, I think they play a very significant role in the structure, in terms of the structure, because they are the connection between the ordinary people and the party, right? They are the model for the people to emulate.

So yeah, yeah, so I think the whole discourse, public discourse, and the culture is different. And therefore, the Chinese cinema needed to create a new type of a stardom. Absolutely. And, you know, I was thinking that chapter five actually brings us to a very interesting example, right?

The villain stardom that was, I mean, also was created for a certain function, which I'm going to ask you about. So the cultural politics of affect villains stardom, in chapter five, right, continues the analysis in the previous chapter and shows that the villain was a necessary epistemological political and aesthetic category that enabled and propagated the communist revolution and the political campaigns during Mao's time. And I was just fascinated by this archetype and how it came about. And, you know, what were the notable features of such stardom, because I'm assuming that right is connected to the ways in which, right, red stardom as a concept, right, was created and instrumentalized.

And, you know, I was just more very, very curious to find more about it. Yeah, yeah, I think when we talk about the villain stardom in Chinese, we call it Fan Pai Dash. So this is the term people used for to to captorize the villain stardom in Maoist period. So the term Fan Pai literally means the negative characters.

So we are probably very familiar with like the main character supporting characters such kind of categorization. But in socialist Chinese social cinema, we have different categories. We have positive characters, you know, like the modern workers, people with advanced consciousness, etc. And then we have negative characters.

So these are two politically conceptualized character categories, right? So the positive one and the negative one. And in between, sometimes we have the pseudo category, the middle characters. So the middle characters are those people, you know, they are not the resolute communist people.

Sometimes they have hesitation. They are, you know, they are wivering, they have a wivering personalities, they couldn't choose a side, etc. So, but you know, in for example, in 1959, when the party promoted the revolutionary revolution of realism and the revolution of romanticism. So this was a really an aesthetic principle, which gradually would result into like the three prominence in the cultural revolution.

So during that period of time, there was very limited space already to allow the existence of the middle character. So basically, no ambiguities. We want to have absolutely, absolutely moral clarity between good characters and bad characters in the Chinese terminology. We would have absolutely clarity between positive characters and the negative characters.

The positive ones are always the heroes, right? Who invited certain social values, etc. And the negative one is a very loose category, right? And they can include, you know, for example, like a Japanese Imperial Army soldiers, the foreign invaders, they can also include like corrupted officials, like the previous Nationalist Party soldiers.

But I think the evil landlords, evil landlords were really the most famous negative characters in Chinese social cinema. So the star, I don't know this chapter, Chen Chiang, an excellent actor, he actually played many different kind of roles. For example, like a factory workers overseas Chinese magicians, and also the calculating peasant, this could be considered as a middle character, calculating peasant, peasant, you should be good, but peasants have their own shrewdness. However, although he tries to be out very well rounded actor, he remembers by his villainous characters, by his playing negative evil landlords.

So I think this is quite interesting. The negative characters always have a political function, but specifically, I think, it really helped to cultivate a certain revolutionary feelings. So the villain character's pedagogical function is really to create inside necessary class feelings, for here is a class hatred. Okay, I think we can always go back to Mao's speech.

Like Mao, I think in his young talks, he famously pointed out, right, there is basically an ethics of emotion. We need to have appropriate emotions in our time of revolution, knowing what to love and what to hate, according to Mao, is no longer a matter of personal preference or taste, but an issue of a political attitude and motive. So I think it's quite interesting, the class formation, right? If we think about class formation, it takes time, it's a process.

So it's class feeling, class feeling is by no means intrinsic to class, but it needs to be cultivated. So I think the villain started really out kind of for feel this kind of realism role of cultivating the class hatred, especially if you think about the Chen Chan's film, for example, The White Hair Girl, in his film, he plays this evil landlord as usual. The film was screened in mass campaign, about like a class status classification campaign. So basically, the campaign was the meeting was intended to classify the villagers into different class.

Some are the landlord class, some are the poor peasant class, etc. So, and if I read some sociological studies of the land reform, it was really interesting to found out some peasants were actually reluctant to struggle against the landlords, right? Because they worked for certain landlords, like the landlord family, they were tenants for the landlord family for many years. So there were personal relations, etc.

And so how to mobilize people, how to mobilize peasants to participate in this kind of class campaign or class struggle, you need to model their behavior. So it's quite interesting that they screened the political campaign and then how the villain character was started in the movie really presents a model for people to emulate, to imitate, to speak. So I think the villain started and really serves the pedagogical function of a force-to-range certain political feelings. And I think also reactions to a certain extent, specifically if you're thinking about Chapter 6, Mobile Attractions, its Interim film projectionist and rules in my exhibition, right where you would have these teams, right, that would screen films in order to fulfill the pedagogical aspect, right, that you mentioned.

Not only that, but that being one of the goals. But going a bit further, the word Red Experts caught my eye as the organizing factor in Chapter 6, and I was curious to learn more about these film projectionists and their exhibition practices, as well as the overarching political and cultural goals, driving the mobile teams, assuming the official goal, but also their own personal goals in this endeavor. Yeah, I think the mobile film projectionist, they are really the new addition to Chinese socialist cinema. So we all know, people normally say, well, learning has famously said of all the arts.

The cinema is the most important political instrument, political tool. But there is a pre-condition that is the cinema has to meet its audience. Without meeting the audience, the cinema has no political function at all. So that's why I think the film projectionists are extremely crucial.

So the reason I use the mobile is because most of those projectionists that they worked in the rural area of China, of course, some of them work in the frontier regions of China, the border areas, but probably most of them work in the suburbs, towns, villages, etc. So the establishment of mobile projection teams started early into the PRC, early into the mouse era. The reason was really to address the underdeveloped film exhibition network, because as we know, only the big cities, right? Famous city like Tianjin, Shanghai, Wuhan, those cities had huge movie theaters.

Also, you have a big work units in the city, auditoriums were often used to screen films, etc. But in the towns, villages, in those places, the infrastructure was not there. And how do we fulfill the demands of those audience, the demands for culture, for culture life? And how do we actually educate them in part of political messages to those audiences?

It's also important. So the mobile projectionist or trend to fulfill this political function, so if you mention about the red as experts, yes, I think basically to be qualified as a red expert, as a film projectionist, you need to be technologically proficient and politically reliable. So if we look at the first part, experts, you have expert knowledge, you have technical expertise in running film screening successfully. So what does that entail and require?

For example, you need to know how to generate electricity, for example, because the mobile projection team in Mao era, they were really very small. Normally three to five people could form a team. They had very meager equipment. They normally carried a standard portable carry-up package that contains generator, projector, and attachments.

They would just travel to the villages by a car to put it by the horse or mules. It's very meager. It's nothing fancy. There's no steam train, steamboat to carry those projectionists to the countries.

So if they want to run successful film screening, they need to have a basic knowledge. They also need to be trained themselves on the job, how to handle equipment, because we also see from the film, many reports of the accidents. For example, you have static images when you start the film screening. Audience could not hear the sound and the projectionist need to change the reels.

The reel was broken. Those were disastrous. You really had an educated audience thing. We had an impact on the technical message at all.

That's about the technical expertise. But then we look at the red, the consciousness. You need to be qualified, propagator. You need to do an excellent propagation.

You need to be excellent propagandist, so to speak. I think one of the major tasks of the protectionist is to teach audience how to watch film. In the rural area, in the Malia era, many people were illiterate. That's why the cinema was important.

But it's not easy to watch a film. If you don't understand a flashback, if you don't understand a montage, you couldn't figure out the story and the plot. That's why we need a projectionist to teach the audience how to watch films. Also, I read some reports.

Some peasants couldn't even tell the friend from the phone. How to teach audience to watch film and take the correct message away with them. It was extremely important. To be a good propagandist, those projectionists had to be very resourceful and skillful.

For example, some of them would use picture storybooks to summarize the plot, the film. They also invented some slides to introduce the main characters. Sometimes they also used the opportunity of an intermission when they changed the reels. They need to summarize the story of the first part and prepare the audience for the second part.

Some people also do the narration accompanying the film screening. Interestingly, we noticed at least according to the cinema, a lot of the model projectionist were female. At the time, women were encouraged to participate in works. Women and men were equal.

Women were encouraged to enter into unusual, professional profession. That was not normally reserved for female. For example, we had a female tractor driver. We also had a female projectionist.

They loved learning the skills. This film projection exhibition offered opportunities for them to leave their village. To broaden their horizon, maybe simply for self-improvement, etc. It did offer some opportunities.

I'm sure there were a lot of these opportunities that were encouraging women and men as well to go and become projectionists. I was fascinated by the pedagogical aspect and the innovation, most of the time that the projectionist brought to the table, always trying to find ways to get the message across and to know the people that it would project to and to basically translate sometimes the message in a way that it makes sense. I thought it was very interesting to me. The concluding chapter brings everything together, but also offers some directions for future research.

I just wanted to briefly hear about these future directions of research, if possible. I think my book really offers a very broad sketch of various facets of Chinese cinema. I tend to focus on aspects that really had a great bearing on the party's political projects of moding new socialist person. You see I have analyzed the film genres, the counter-espionage film, the sports film, and the national minority films.

I also look at different standards because I feel like when we study cinema, we should not just focus on the film text, but we should also pay attention to the agents. We should pay attention to professionals, those professionals of course include not only film actors, but also the film projectionist. That's why I intentionally chose to analyze those aspects. The book did not provide very detailed analysis or account of historical development of a certain genre or certain aspects of film institution.

I hope my choice can at least kind of the kindle audience interest in learning more about cinema in this period of time. This camera cinema has just been easily dismissed as a simplistic, boring, probabilistic film. As for future directions, since the book was published in 2020, after the book was published in 2020, I already saw some new works coming out. For example, we had this wonderful book by Chen Shoujo off-screen, a movie going experience in socialist China.

She focused on the experience of going to cinema. She doesn't know the film text either, but it's a fascinating historical account of a movie going experience. In my concluding chapter, I also pointed out there are also aspects you can study. For example, we can look at a certain institution, Film Studio.

I think there's no English language book study of important film studios, such as Chen Shoujo Film Studio. It was transformed from off-screen studio in Montreal, controlled by the Japanese, but then because it's excellent equipment and some certain support on Japanese technicians, professionals. This was the most important film studio in the early PRC period time. We also could look at film technology.

For instance, some people would be surprised that white screen movie theaters were built in Moisthechana, and 3D films were also experimented in Moisthechana. Of course, there are many other directions of studying for this interesting film culture of film history. We can also do a very detailed original cinema analysis, not only focused on the urban centers. Absolutely.

I think it's so diverse and so rich. It's such a rich field of study that you can accommodate all of these topics and more. We have taken a lot of your time, and then I wanted to abuse it. I was just wondering whether you could tell us more about your current projects.

I have a small project, a big project. I need to finish the small one. It's comparative of film studies, over two documentaries. One is BBC documentary African Railway.

The other is it's a counterpart, a country narrative, Pazara, a journey without an end by a Chinese filmmaker. I was interested in the cinematic representation of infrastructure in Africa, because it's a railway that links the copper belt of Zambia to the Tanzania port of the restaurant. It was called the Freedom in Africa. It was built by the Chinese construction workers in the 1970s.

It's really the most visible symbol of a third world solidarity during the Cold War period. I just want to look at how the Western media and the Chinese filmmakers represent the China-Africa relations on screen. I finished the paper, so the paper really aims to shed light on how documentary cinema is implicated within a broader competition between the West and the China for discursive power in the newly configured global order. I look forward to meeting that, and the bigger project and the smaller project.

The bigger work is kind of a continuation of my monograph. After researching the Chinese social cinema for many years, I have come to realise the importance of the international dimension of Chinese social cinema and the culture. The second project in our short is about international practices from the young culture and politics in China from 1949 to 1989. By studying this international dimension of Chinese cinema, I also wanted to reflect upon the current discourse about China's exception, the exception of this.

You mentioned about the dubbing. I think it's going to be one of the chapters in the booklines project, the speaker project. Not only just the Soviet films, but also the films from Europe, Italian, Britain, etc. Those kind of dubbing were hidden from the public view during the culture revolution, even the early period of my channel.

Some of the films were widely accessible, but the film from the Western countries normally were hidden from the public view. But those films that the films were released after the culture revolution and it really created a new group of stars, the voice actors, etc. Yes, the voice, the voice start them, I find extremely intriguing and fascinating and also I think it can be analysed from many angles, the politics of ethics, just bio-politics, performance and all of that can be mixed in there. I very much look forward to reading the book, but also in particular that chapter and I want to thank you very much for for talking to us today Dr.

Lu and yeah I look forward to more interviews with you for the end. Thank you so much, thank you for your time, really appreciate it.