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What role did cinema play in the Chinese Communist Party’s political project of shaping ideal socialist citizens in the early People’s Republic? In Moulding the Socialist Subject, Xiaoning Lu deploys case studies from popular film genres, movie star culture and rural film exhibition practices to argue that Chinese cinema in 1949–1966, at once an important political instrument, an enjoyable yet instructive form of entertainment, and a specific manifestation of the socialist society of the spectacle, was an everyday site where the moulding of the new socialist person unfolded. While painting a broad picture of Chinese socialist cinema, Lu credits the human agency of film professionals, whose self-reflexivity and individual adaptability played an intrinsic role in the Party’s political project.
Price: $151.00
Pages: 200
Publisher: Brill
Imprint: Brill
Series: Ideas, History, and Modern China
Publication Date:
30 January 2020
ISBN: 9789004423510
Format: Hardcover
"Moulding the Socialist Subject by Xiaoning Lu is a concise yet insightful book. It addresses the instrumental role of cinema in textual form and as a state apparatus in ‘remoulding’ (改造, pp. 5 and 165) socialist subjectivity, as well as the intersection and interaction of cinema with other key discourses such as sport, ethnicity, theatre, melodrama, spectatorship/reception, and the urban/rural dichotomy. [...] Moulding the Socialist Subject is a welcome addition for students who love diverse movies, the general public eager to understand the ‘structure of feeling’ prevalent in a socialist regime, and scholars of China studies."
-Lunpeng Ma, Communication University of Zhejiang, in China information, Vol 35 (2021), pp. 113-114
"The book provides clearly written and engagingly illustrated pathways to understand the underlying histo-ries of contemporary conundrums"
-Stephanie Donald, Monash University Malaysia, in The China Journal , No. 86, July 2021, pp. 208-210
-Lunpeng Ma, Communication University of Zhejiang, in China information, Vol 35 (2021), pp. 113-114
"The book provides clearly written and engagingly illustrated pathways to understand the underlying histo-ries of contemporary conundrums"
-Stephanie Donald, Monash University Malaysia, in The China Journal , No. 86, July 2021, pp. 208-210
Xiaoning Lu is Lecturer in Modern Chinese Culture and Language at SOAS, University of London and co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures (Oxford University Press, 2020).