State Filmmaking and International Documentary in Maoist China
Matthew D. Johnson, Taylor's University
Introduction
The motion picture is perhaps the most important twentieth-century communications medium for those seeking to understand how political power was exercised through culture in socialist states. Chinese Communist Party (CCP) elites, like their counterparts elsewhere, were devotees of the belief in film as an ideal tool for shaping mass opinion. Repeating V.I. Lenin’s oft-cited dictum that cinema was the “most important art” for revolution, they harnessed studios, filmmakers and audiences to an ever-expanding bureaucratic propaganda apparatus whose twin goals were to persuade and mobilize.
This essay explores the history of international propaganda films produced by filmmakers working within the People’s Republic of China (PRC) from 1949 to 1962. It should be noted at the outset that the history of CCP, and thus socialist, involvement in cinematic activity within China precedes this date, starting with the establishment of the Left-Wing Cinema Movement in Shanghai during the early 1930s. However, as indicated by the 1937 film The Bombing of Canton, also included in this collection (produced by a studio owned and operated by the CCP’s main domestic political and military rival, the Nationalist Party [KMT]), the primary setting in which socialist cinema evolved in China was one characterized by total war and instability of the domestic political order.
As shown below, the impact of war and internal conflict on international documentary filmmaking – that is to say, on CCP external propaganda activity – was to focus emphasis on three main qualities of the PRC party-state: military strength, economic and technological modernization, and the legitimacy of its leaders. While post-1949 film production did contain numerous portrayals of the ideal socialist society, it was also relentlessly obsessed with national identity and “New China’s” status as a full-fledged sovereign member of the international community, despite US-led non-recognition of the PRC by the United Nations until 1971. Throughout the 1950s, and particularly during the earlier part of that decade, CCP leaders sought to establish connections with supporters both inside and outside of the socialist world (which included both Eastern bloc and Asian communist countries, as well as supporters across a wide range of capitalist, non-aligned, and colonial contexts) in order to ensure that the PRC’s position, as well as the officially sanctioned version of the experiences of its people, were communicated and understood. The result was not “Maoism” but, rather, a complex and even cosmic view of the PRC as Chinese civilization reborn, and of the outside world as a Manichean universe comprised of good and evil forces. It was, in this sense, a quintessentially Cold War vision, though viewers able to use this collection to gaze across the Cold War-era socialist landscape will be left to determine whether, and in what ways, it was unique.
Images of Victory and Liberation
A series of decisive victories by CCP-led military forces over the armies of the KMT led to the creation of the People’s Republic of China by official proclamation on October 1, 1949. Life in New China was characterized by mass mobilization, bureaucratization and propaganda – political forms that were hardly new, but which nonetheless served as the foundations for a Maoist political vision that mixed orthodox Stalinism with more idiosyncratic theories of permanent revolution. The motion picture was, as during prior decades, viewed as an important tool of mass education and propaganda by seasoned CCP cultural officials such as Lu Dingyi and Zhou Yang; other leading figures within the central government’s Film Bureau came from a wide range of backgrounds in terms of aesthetic predispositions and experiences as cultural producers. Nonetheless, they all shared the belief that the mass media could be employed to transform society.
Where international documentary filmmaking was concerned, the primary task was to make a new country and leadership appear legitimate in the eyes of the global community of nations. Responsibility fell chiefly to the Northeast Film Studio and Beijing Film Studio, two Japanese-built facilities which had survived the War of Resistance and Civil War. (Studios located within the cosmopolitan and commercial hub of Shanghai were seen as politically unprepared and thus potentially untrustworthy.) International newsreel and documentary production, though not initially robust, increased steadily. Within the year 1953, for example, the film industry as a whole was able to release twelve new feature films, ten long documentaries, sixteen short documentaries, ten scientific education films, fifty-two weekly edition newsreels, fifteen special edition newsreels and twenty-four international newsreels in total; an additional forty features and thirty scientific education films imported from abroad were dubbed or subtitled.
Models drawn from the USSR remained important to PRC filmmakers, though the films themselves were intended for audiences beyond the socialist world. During the PRC’s 1 October 1949 national inauguration ceremony, Soviet director Leonid Varlamov worked together with Beijing Film Studio camera teams to carefully document the scripted interactions between leaders appearing on the Tiananmen Square rostrum; military and civilian paraders below; and the audience which filled the Square. Two feature-length documentaries, The Chinese People’s Victory (1950, here presented in two versions) and Liberated China (1950), both of which were Soviet-directed, were released to affirm the new nation’s military might, the legitimacy of its leadership and the reconstruction of its economy. The films also contain other themes less typically oriented with Maoist mass culture: pride in China’s ages-old history, technological advancement and civilizational sophistication and uniqueness. Insofar as these films were emblematic of a broader international propaganda effort, the goal of their joint Sino-Soviet producers appears to have been to make the PRC appealing to international audiences by emphasizing both the achievements of its revolution and the distinctive history and identity of its people.
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