Spring 2007, Volume 17, No. 2

China’s Pre-1949 Film Industry: A View from the Northeast

Matthew D. Johnson
University of California, San Diego

This paper examines film production, distribution, and exhibition in Northeast China during a period (1902-1949) of considerable change. Using gazetteers, memoirs, and recent historiography, I investigate the origins of China's post-1949 national film industry in the expansion of institutional and market networks linked to a variety of overlapping imperialist, colonial, and nation-building projects. This paper thus builds on existing research on the importance of wartime crisis for generating the conceptual and organizational shifts which led to the emergence of China's post-war state enterprise system. In the process, however, I emphasize the undeniably significant role played by institutions of the Manzhouguo colonial regime in creating horizontal and vertical links between state, studio, distributor, and theater which foreshadow these same arrangements following the establishment of the People's Republic. In part because film was seen as such a vital cultural aspect of territorial rule, transfers of capital, technology, and knowledge continued to strengthen this industry throughout the wartime period. Examining the first half of the twentieth century, it is obvious that a variety of actors were responsible for the industry's growth, even as political instability in the Northeast ensured that film�Lenin's "most important art"�would increasingly attract state efforts to monopolize its uses.

The history of Chinese cinemas has demonstrated increasing interest in the economic and business dimensions of film production. New national histories characterize the early decades of Chinese cinema (1896-1929) in terms of the commercial nature of enterprise.[1] Even scholars of the impact of political movements on cinematic production during the 1930s admit that leftist screenwriters remained largely constrained by the expectations of audiences, and thus the merciless principles of the market.[2] Invariably, the entire history of pre-1949 film is linked to foreign interests, and China's semi-colonial status. This "evolutionary" concept of cinematic development—in which the relative weakness of the pre-1949 industry is unfavorably contrasted against its post-1949 vigor—has, according to one author, overshadowed a more refined understanding of the complexities of early film culture.[3] Rightly included in this notion of "culture" are the specific mechanisms of film's production and consumption. One of the vital questions concerning China's film industry, then, asks why during this early period there failed to emerge studios and distribution chains capable of competing with Hollywood and other foreign competitors.

Research patterns in the field of Chinese cinema studies should also be somewhat familiar to scholars of business history. Because pre-1949 Chinese film production was largely confined to Shanghai, there is a consistent emphasis on the significance of that city's economic environment—albeit most often subsumed by the simultaneously more encompassing and imprecise notion of "modernity"—for assessing patterns of success and failure, or rise and fall. Moreover, much of this research has been limited to particular firms (studios) and entrepreneurs (producers and directors) in a way which tends to emphasize the particular experiences of these entities with respect to networks, competitors, and other features of the market system. Less obvious from these accounts, respectively, are the realities of film-related economic activity in other regions of China, and the large-scale features of film production and consumption as an industry. Moreover, there is a kind of logical disconnect between histories of production which focus on Chinese firms exclusively, and histories of consumption which include audiences for the foreign films which flooded—and often dominated—China's markets during the pre-1949 period.

The approach taken in this paper is to explore the history of China's film industry from the perspective of a particular spatial case study. I have chosen the Northeast (i.e. the present-day provinces of Heilongjiang, Jilin, and Liaoning) because it is one of the regions in China other than Shanghai to exhibit a high level of change in terms of transport facilities and economic expansion from the early twentieth century onward.[4] Film and mass media, like the railroad, can be associated with the transformation of space and time by capitalism/"modernity." In particular, I am interested in the ways in which, regardless of the experiences of particular firms, film began to regularly reach greater numbers of people. While I do not delve into the implications of this change for existing patterns of cultural consumption, the spatial approach is intended to highlight how film-related investment, technology, and human skills continued to increase in ways which spanned Chinese, Russian, and Japanese dominance in the region. Some of the consequences of this change, which I discuss at greater length below, are the number of ways in which Northeast film facilities and filmmakers became important resources on which the Communist Party was able to draw during the Civil War (1945-1949). One outcome was a Northeast-based film industry which, with Beijing was established as the new capital of the People's Republic of China, gradually overtook Shanghai as the center.

By contrast, the earlier twentieth century raises questions of how much Shanghai mattered to the development of film exhibition in Northeast China. What opportunities for Chinese entrepreneurs existed in this nascent industry? How did flows of technology and knowledge interact with patterns of local employment? Throughout this paper, I attempt to focus on the international dimensions of film-related enterprises. While the degree to which non-Chinese individuals and governments influenced the Northeast course of affairs may seem to suggest a return to imperialism-dominated narratives, I hope to show instead that there is no other way to understand the rise of film-related networks and institutions during this period without some explanatory recourse to the imperialist market systems of Russian Manchuria and Japanese Manzhouguo—both undeniably important forces within the Northeast's pre-1949 economic history.

Sources

This paper makes frequent use of gazetteers published during the late 1990s. According to Ba Zhaoxiang, the impetus to collate official, "new" gazetteers can be traced back to the first meeting of the National People's Congress in September 1954, at which Shandong provincial representative Wang Zhuchen suggested that academics and state planners "move early to compile and revise local gazetteers."[5] From the perspective of institutions and publishing activity, gazetteers experienced a brief heyday during the late 1950s and early 1960s. However, because the enterprise was perceived as closely linked to contemporary economic construction and the "real" conditions of China's revolutionary history, it was temporarily suspended by the Ministry of Propaganda in August 1963, pending the implementation of more rigorous controls over editing and circulation.[6]

After a series of fitful starts from 1979 onward, this centralized vision of local gazetteer production was circulated with State Council approval in April 1985. Public confirmation from the Party Center was delivered by chief propagandist Hu Qiaomu that following year, at a conference hosted by the China Local Gazetteer Guiding Group (Zhongguo difang zhi zhidao xiaozu), and was followed by a flurry of activity devoted to producing gazetteers describing historical change at the provincial, municipal, and county levels. In anticipation of the fiftieth anniversary of the People's Republic of China, a national exhibition of more than 10,000 volumes was held in Beijing during October 1999. These publications also included histories of enterprises and industries, lower-level territorial units (such as townships and urban districts), and yearbooks (nianjian).

Perhaps unsurprisingly, and despite claims for truly "national" coverage, materials have proved more plentiful for central regions such as Jiangnan, and sparser in the case of border territories such as Xinjiang. From the perspective of business historians, however, the undeniable utility of these recent publications should come from the fact that they have been specifically compiled to reflect changes in economy and technology, as well as "human knowledge and transformation of the natural world."[7] Focusing in particular on China after 1949, gazetteers thus provide one of the most systematically-organized research tools for quantitative and institutional inquiries into historical change in China, with the important caveat that the sources on which these volumes are based have often been scrupulously reviewed and edited by official committees. As noted in an anticipatory 1992 article by Stig Thogersen and Soren Clausen, the purposes of the "new" local gazetteers have been described (albeit in 1985) by the Guiding Group as follows: 1) to provide ... local leaders with scientific information so that they can make correct decisions; 2) to serve as reservoirs of information for local cadres in all trades by preserving important documents and other materials; and 3) to inculcate patriotic, communist and revolutionary values.[8]

Finally, it should be noted that "new" gazetteers, like their dynastic and Republican antecedents, possess considerable potential for mapping networks—trade networks, firm expansion, and the like—in space and time. The results of this mode of research are already being demonstrated via historical Geographic Information Systems (GIS) such as the China Historical GIS project initiated by Fudan and Harvard universities.[9]

The Northeast Film Industry During the Early Twentieth Century

The Northeast city of Ha'erbin occupies a singular, and rarely acknowledged, position of importance in the history of Chinese cinema. The extraordinary characteristics of the city itself have been commented on by historians Sǿren Clausen and Stig Thǿgersen, who note that its role as host to several non-Chinese populations (e.g. indigenous, Russian, Japanese) raises the following difficult questions:

• How should one look at "economic imperialism" when foreign inputs have contributed so evidently to the construction and development of the city?
• Where lies the dividing line between Soviet "legitimate interests" in the area and pernicious imperialism?
• What is the proper evaluation of early Chinese capitalists in the city, forced as they were to collaborate with foreign masters?[10]

Even doing away with the language of "foreign masters"—a reference, perhaps, to "spheres of influence" and the importance of imperialism as a dominant force in this region's political economy—Ha'erbin, and the Northeast generally, raise important questions for historians wishing to assess the agency of Chinese firms in regional development.[11]

Exhibition

Such complexities are illustrated by examining Ha'erbin's cinematic claim to fame. In the opinion of local historians, Ha'erbin—and thus not Shanghai—has been home to China's first film-only theater.[12] Although most historians credit Beijing's Pavilion (Ping'an) Cinema, built in 1907, and Shanghai's Hongkou Cinema, built in 1908, as the earliest examples of these new venues, Ha'erbin was already home to six different theaters by the time of the Qing dynasty's overthrow in 1911. The earliest, founded by a Russian "Kaobuqiefu" (Kabyshev?) in 1902 (Guangxu 28), coincided with the construction of the China Eastern Railway in 1901.[13] Thus, the rise of a specialized film exhibition network in China seems to have been a consequence of the arrival of Russian investors, with film-as-commodity arriving to the Northeast via the same channels as many other aspects of Russian imperialist influence in the region—the railroad.

Russians were not the only group of speculators on this "modern" entertainment form. Fengtian prefecture (later, Liaoning province) provides evidence that by 1906 Japanese entrepreneurs were already screening short films, including newsreel reportage of Japan's victory over Russia in the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905). While Russian interests may have dominated the film markets of Heilongjiang, in Fengtian it was Japanese investors who established some of the first venues with space devoted solely to film exhibition although the earliest, built in 1909 and 1910 respectively, catered mainly to Japanese employees of the Southern Manchuria Railroad Company.[14] By 1930, Shenyang boasted fourteen theaters (nine Chinese-owned, four Japanese owned, and one Sino-French venture), compared to nine for the port city of Dalian (three Chinese-owned and six Japanese-owned). In Jilin, to the north, film did not emerge as an independent industry until the 1920s, when feature-length films began replacing the "attraction"-type cinema of wartime newsreels and comedic shorts which enjoyed limited popularity during the previous decade. Here too, Russian entrepreneurs staged some of the earliest film screenings in 1907, while Japanese investors are largely credited with establishing the first film-only theaters, in Changchun, during 1920.[15] Russians also established the province's first film distribution company in 1913, which rented films to both Russian and Chinese exhibitors.[16]

The expansion of the film market was thus accompanied by a change in patterns of consumption which affected Chinese audiences as well. Film-only exhibition venues, while appearing earlier in the Northeast than anywhere else in China, were mainly patronized by foreign customers and built by foreign capital. During the early twentieth century, "teahouse" entertainment facilities provided the most frequent context for Chinese filmgoing.[17] Film distribution was mainly provided by Western companies, in some cases working with Chinese agents (e.g. the Far East Company). The early 1920s film industry in China was dominated by Western films, in part because World War I had cut off Chinese studios from supplies of film stock needed to maintain domestic production.

Additionally, due to the prohibitive cost of renting foreign films, what Chinese-run theaters did exist were often at a financial disadvantage when competing with foreign-run establishments. Distributors typically took sixty to ninety percent of ticket sales, which in the long run seems to have led to an increase in ticket prices and diminishing attendance.[18] By the late 1920s, some Chinese theater-owners promoted domestic films as "assisting in the education [of] society" (fuzhu shehui jiaoyu), yet these "nationalist" strategies were only one of several means—including the distribution of free cigarettes, hiring of live performers, and use of elaborate external displays and advertisements—by which they battled for market share with the comparatively successful community of foreign entrepreneurs.[19] As an example of the undeniable importance of Shanghai in domestic film production and reputation among filmgoers, a visit to Ha'erbin by the Mingxing (Star) Motion Picture Company actress Wang Hanlun (1903-1978) in 1930 brought significant numbers of onlookers to the Huaguang Theater, where Wang performed and interacted with her admirers.[20]

While U.S. distributors arrived in force in 1924, entering a market primarily occupied by Russian entrepreneurs, the mid-1920s were notable as marking a shift from foreign to domestic titles as the most frequently-screened films in Ha'erbin.[21] The occupation of Heilongjiang province by Japanese forces in 1931 transformed this situation in two important ways. First, Japanese investors, theater manager-owners, and officials began to play a dominant role in controlling the film exhibition market. In addition to taking over certain theaters and official institutions, they also contributed to the spread of new theaters and mobile projection teams throughout the Northeast region. In Fengtian/Liaoning, however, Japanese and Chinese investors collaborated to operate distribution companies from 1920 onward, with the majority of capital often supplied by the Japanese partners in the venture.[22] Chinese-owned distribution companies, such as the China New Life Film Company (Zhongguo xin shenghuo yingpian gongsi) and China Film, Ltd. (Zhongguo yingpian gufen youxian gongsi) provided regional representation for Shanghai studios from 1929 onward. In this case, direct Japanese military occupation in 1931 seems to have again driven Chinese distributors from the market, both opening the door for representatives of European and U.S. firms, with the Manchuria Film Company (Zhushi huishe Manzhou dianying xiehui) playing an increasingly important role as principal distributor and regulator after 1937.[23]

Exhibition during the 1920s and 1930s thus suggests two trends. Western—and increasingly, Hollywood—cinema continued to succeed in Chinese markets. First-run theaters were largely owned by foreign investors, who signed exclusive contracts with overseas distributors. One estimate suggests that the majority of China's film-only theaters were owned by six companies, while distribution was limited to forty-plus firms comprised mainly of agents for Hollywood studies such as Warner, Paramount, Fox, and Columbia, in addition to the French studio Pathé. Nonetheless, Chinese film production picked up during the mid-1920s, while Chinese investment in exhibition expanded—in some cases as part of joint ventures with foreign involvement. And while the exhibition of Chinese films seems to have reaped lower returns than those brought in by Western productions, promoters employed a variety of methods in order to keep screenings profitable.

Technology and Organization

During the late Qing and early Republican periods, film exhibition technology in the Northeast consisted exclusively of silent projectors imported from overseas manufacturers. After 1931, equipment was more readily available from a variety of sources—Chinese-foreign partnerships in Shanghai, Beijing's "Qiangsheng" projector, Ha'erbin-produced models based on Russian designs, and increasingly omnipresent Japanese brands.[24] Overall, the rise of capital-intensive facilities seems to have accompanied Japanese efforts to transform the region into an economically productive, but nonetheless politically dependent, territorial unit. In colonial state of Manzhouguo (discussed at greater length in the following section), one Russian émigré, "Wei-si-meng-te", was able to manufacture projectors using the facilities of a formerly German-owned bicycle repair shop.[25] By 1939 the operation employed more than thirty laborers, all Russian, and released a new model of 35mm projector—the "A-la-fa" (Aleph?)—the next year.[26]

In addition to technology and skill transfer in the areas of filmmaking and projection, it is important to consider the growth of institutional mechanisms by which local governments regulated and controlled exhibition. Evidence suggests that by 1914, provincial administrative offices (xingzheng gongshu) began issuing temporary permits to Russian exhibitors, with supervision of these activities carried out by the police (jingcha ting).[27] By 1928, the establishment of fixed committees for inspecting, and in some cases censoring, films shown in Heilongjiang province—particularly those imported by the Soviet Union—brought together representatives of municipal, police, and educational institutions as regulators of popular entertainment. In this official capacity, censors targeted films which "challenged (you'ai) the dignity of the Chinese people, violated the Three People's Principles, harmed customs of decency or the public order, and advocated superstition and falsehoods."[28] Such patterns were apparently repeated throughout the Northeast. Jilin province's Education Department (Jiaoyu ting) issued official restrictions against any film harmful to "the [Nationalist] Party's reputation" (dang yi) and "national prestige" (guo ti) in early 1929, before adopting the "Film Censorship Law" (dianying jiancha fa) of the Nationalist Party Central Committee in December of that same year.[29]

Conclusions

Gazetteer data from the early 1900s through 1932 suggest several trends concerning the growth of a film industry in Northeast China. First, film as a sector of the modern economy accompanied the arrival of Russian and Japanese territorial imperialism. However, it quickly attracted investment from Chinese entrepreneurs, who occupied an increasingly prominent position in film distribution and exhibition. Anecdotal evidence, however, suggests that the majority of technology and commodities (film) were largely those produced by non-Chinese firms and studios, although this situation also began to shift during the 1920s as Chinese studio production of films became capable of generating regular profits. Finally, the increase in economic and social activity associated with film led to a corresponding expansion of state institutional functions to anticipate and monitor the effects of mass media on China's civilian populace.

Manzhouguo, 1932-1945

The Manzhouguo puppet state, established by the Japanese military in 1932, expanded and temporarily solidified direct Japanese control over the Northeast region. This period of history poses several considerable dilemmas for research into the history of Chinese cinema. The canonical History of the Development of Chinese Cinema, one of the first encyclopedic research projects on this subject published in the People's Republic, simply excludes the products of Japanese-controlled studios from its filmography, with the clear suggestion that these works—despite the involvement of Chinese filmmakers in their creation—have not contributed to Chinese cinema's development, nor are they Chinese at all. On this point, editors Cheng Jihua, Li Shaobai, and Xing Zuwen have written that "the emergence of Japanese hegemony and traitorous films (hanjian dianying) are a reflection of Japan's imperialistic invasion of China, and the heinous crimes of a small group of shameless [Chinese] traitors who sold out their ancestral nation (zuguo)."[30] From this perspective, cultural production not explicitly associated with underground or resistance activities is portrayed as "opposing" the good, patriotic, or heroic forces with which anti-Japanese resistance and the subsequent liberation of China itself are associated.

History of the Development of Chinese Cinema has become something of a straw-man in for film historians writing against the grain of nationalist discourse. At the same time, complication of its central narrative concerning Communist Party-led cinematic development has produced some of the most complex English-language writing on wartime cinema in recent years.[31] Likewise, growing interest in the history of Japan's claims to sovereignty in northeast China has led to a similar revival; this scholarship tends to portray the Japanese imperialist project less in terms of its exploitative character than its role in disseminating some of "the most sophisticated and powerful technologies of state expansion of the time."[32] Shifting the focus away from questions concerning "patriots" and "enemies," scholarship of northern East Asia (e.g. Japan, Korea, and Manchuria) suggests that Manchuria's transformation from disputed territory to developmental wartime state (i.e. Manzhouguo) can be attributed primarily to Japan's similarities to other industrializing societies, rather than the peculiarities of non-Western or Axis nations. As Louise Young writes, "the way that imperialism shaped the growth of government in Japan is particularly striking when considered in a comparative frame of reference, for the 1930s was a decade of rapid government expansion throughout the industrialized world."[33]

Manzhouguo is thus central to histories of wartime Chinese filmmaking for two reasons. The first, and perhaps most simplistic, is that its examination promises to reveal more about the historical dynamics which have shaped the Northeast, albeit during a period in which Manzhouguo officials deliberately attempted to refute the notion—one which was by no means unanimously agreed upon by others outside of Manzhouguo and Japanese governments—that this territory was in any sense "Chinese." It is perhaps equally accurate, then, to say that Manzhouguo's history has had an important impact on post-1945 efforts to make the Northeast part of the Chinese state. Second, although Manzhouguo's colonial structure undeniably privileged the rights of its Japanese subjects ahead of Chinese and Koreans (and without denying that variations in treatment according to class, gender, and other markers of social difference also existed), the emergence of a totalizing cultural apparatus—Duara's "identity project"—as a feature of state institutional activity reveals much this aspect of China's wartime politics in general.

Coinciding with the outbreak of total war between Japanese and Chinese forces, the Manzhouguo Film Studio's founding coincided with the Japanese policy of creating a unified, all-China cultural "system" as a supplement to military conquest. On 2 October 1937, the Manchuria State Council (Manzhou guowu yuan) approved and subsidized the creation of a new corporate body (zhushi huishe)—the Manzhouguo Film Association (Manzhou yinghua xiehui; Ch: Manying; Ja: Manei). During its eight years of operation, the association's Manzhouguo Film Studio produced 108 features, 189 educational and documentary films, 307 Japanese-language newsreels, 313 Chinese-language newsreels, and 55 newsreels for children.[34] According to historians Hu Chang and Gu Quan, the primary purpose of these films was to promote Japanese-Manchurian unity, or build support for Japanese imperial policies both in Manchuria and elsewhere.[35] While their allegations that the Manzhouguo Film Studio existed to "enslave" (奴化) Chinese people certainly fail to capture the complexities inherent in this cultural project—for one, Chinese citizens of Manzhouguo were by no means the only consumers of the studio's films—it is undeniable that institutions like Manying existed for the purpose of buttressing the legitimacy of the Manzhouguo state.

Within Manzhouguo, the principal government institution directly responsible for film-related affairs was thus the Manzhouguo Film Association. The administrative scope of its activities included not only feature film and newsreel production—the bulk of which was carried out within the Manzhouguo Film Studio—but also surveillance over film distribution and screening. Association and studio thus represented the principal means by which the state sought to ensure that officially-sanctioned films would occupy an advantageous position within the cinematic market.[36] By 1943, Manzhouguo state-run film institutions had become one of the biggest investors in the regional film and music industries, and thus an important means by which the production and consumption of these mass media became subsumed within the state's larger administrative structure.

Studio Filmmaking and Personnel

The Manzhouguo Film Studio, completed in 1939, consisted of a massive (163,963 square meters, including six indoor sound stages of 6,000 square meters each) facility containing state-of-the-art equipment and based on Germany's Ufa (Universum Film A. G.) studio. The majority of this enterprise's administrators and technical workers had previous work experience in either the State Council's Public Information Department (Hongbao chu)—a propaganda organ and institution of cultural control—the Manzhouguo Daily, or one of several Japanese film companies.[37] According to former actor Zhang Yi's memoir "The Manzhouguo Film Studio I Knew," the studio's highest positions of authority were occupied by three principal officials, including the longtime "Manchuria expert" (Manzhou tong) and member of the Manchu royal family Jin Bidong.[38] The Manzhouguo Film Studio maintained offices in Tokyo, and contracts with Japanese distributors guaranteed its films release in Japanese markets.[39] It was, initially, an entirely Japanese-run enterprise; the only exceptions were Chinese actors. Censorship was carried out within studio offices by employees of the Ministry of Security (Zhi'an bu). Images that either promoted or did not otherwise contradict positive depictions of Manchuria and Manchurian-Japanese harmony (Man-Ri xiehe) typically passed the censors. Problematic films that could not be easily edited were banned. Much like Republican officials before them, cultural administrators in Manzhouguo appear to have been primarily concerned with films which spread pro-Soviet and pro-Communist ideas, or exerted an unduly negative influence over social order, political stability, and public sentiment.

Despite the state security apparatus' controlling interest in studio affairs, representatives of the Japanese film industry, including several prominent directors, assisted in ensuring the Manzhouguo Film Studio's economic health. As the enterprise began to expand, however, one of the greatest challenges proved to be finding suitable Chinese actors to play the role of Manzhouguo citizens (Man ren). To this end, the establishment of a "Manzhouguo Actors' Training Institute" (Manzhou yanyuan yangcheng suo) in October 1937 was announced in periodicals like the Kangde News (Kangde xinwen) and Great Harmony (Da tong bao).[40] This first class ultimately consisted of twenty-two male and twenty-one female actors between the ages of fifteen and forty.[41] During subsequent years, the studio would result to a variety of recruiting tactics in addition to public calls for auditions—actress Bai Mei was a Beiping theater performer recruited through the Huabei Film Company while one of the studio's top stars, Zhang Jing, was invited to do a screen test after a brief stint as a recording artist.[42]

By 1939 the growing facility employed 690 individuals, of which 142 were actors.[43] During this same period, classes were taught by Japanese instructors and films directed by Japanese crews, invariably with the aid of a translator. Such divisions were further reinforced by other aspects of the studio system—Japanese employees enjoyed higher wages, and students were separated by nationality.[44] Shelley Stephenson, writing about Manzhouguo Film Studio diva Li Xianglan, has noted that among even Shanghai filmgoers confronted with an ambiguously "Asian" actress, "rigid national distinctions" continued to shape audience expectations.[45] What evidence taken from the Manzhouguo Film Studio suggests is that these distinctions manifested themselves throughout the structures of film production as well; in this sense, the Manzhouguo rhetoric of multi-national empire remained in constant tension with an underlying structure of social differences based on nationality, among other factors. Public announcements offering film industry opportunities for Manzhouguo citizens resulted in a growing cohort of Chinese-speaking actors (drawn principally from the city of Shenyang).

The studio's continued growth in terms of personnel and construction throughout the 1937-1939 period failed to reap corresponding profits. Consequently, concerned investors—primarily the Manzhouguo government and Southern Manchuria Railroad Company—ordered a rapid restructuring of studio administration and finances beginning in 1940. Their chosen agent was the high-ranking military and police official Amakasu Masahiko, a figure infamous in leftist circles for his assassination of a prominent Japanese anarchist in 1923.[46] Many of the studio's Chinese actors, however, remembered Amakasu as a "mysterious personality" (shenmi renwu).[47] In particular, they seem to remember how upon his arrival Amakasu ordered that Chinese and Japanese employees be paid according to the same scale, that classes in directing and other technical work be opened to Chinese employees, and that food items otherwise forbidden to ordinary citizens under Manzhouguo's rationing laws were often available as a result of Amakasu's considerable influence.[48]

One can only speculate on Amakasu's reasons for these abrupt policy shifts, but two motivations seem most plausible. The first is that in creating greater economic equality between Chinese and Japanese employees, Amakasu was attempting to implement the principles of a pro-Japanese "Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere" based on community, cooperation, and interdependence among the inhabitants of Japanese-occupied territories. The second is that Amakasu's emphasis on training Chinese directors and technicians—an advocacy which later included the notion of all-Chinese production teams—proceeded directly from a concern with creating films that would gain attention, and ticket sales, among Chinese communities.[49] Chinese literary figures from throughout Manzhouguo were hired by the studio's scriptwriting body, adapting the Japanese-penned scenarios (jiaoben) by fleshing them out with dialogue and characters more reflective of local tastes. Finally, the studio's overall reliance on Chinese personnel from approximately 1943 onward was at least partly a matter of necessity, as increasing numbers of Japanese employees were drafted to participate more directly in an desperate war effort. Anecdotal evidence thus suggests that within certain limits, and spurred on perhaps by the increasing lack of viable alternatives, Japanese-run enterprises like the Manzhouguo Film Studio became legitimized as viable career alternatives within north China. The establishment of a second, more comprehensive Manzhouguo Film Studio Training Institute in 1941 attracted both would-be students of filmmaking and experienced actors—not only from Manzhouguo, but also Beiping.

Unlike the Manzhouguo Film Studio itself, Japanese state-sponsored film production predated full-scale military conquest of the Northeast. The Southern Manchuria Railroad Company's establishment of a Public Affairs Department (Hongbao xi) and "film team" (yinghua ban) in 1923 was followed by documentary releases on various topics extolling the nascent colonial regime's "civilizing" benefits. Such depictions, filmed mainly in 1931, included the Guandong Army's advance on northeast urban centers (Shenyang, Jilin, Changchun, Qiqiha'er, Ha'erbin), and the Southern Manchuria Railroad Company's role in repairing damage done to local railways and infrastructure.[50] As positive representations of the war effort, they were shown to audiences in Tokyo, Osaka, Hokkaido, Kyushu, and Taiwan; thereafter, railroad company and Guandong Army representatives screened the films throughout Japan. These agents' activities were supplemented by similar events staged during 1932 in northeast China, which sought to incite pro-Japanese "self-government" movements by screening short films extolling Japanese culture, the Guandong Army's military prowess, and incipient plans to establish the independent state of Manzhouguo. During one screening tour lasting from 18 February to 27 March, such films were estimated to have reached over 45,500 individual audience members.[51]

Within the context of policies limiting acceptable films to those that did not "offend the honor of the imperial household, ... transgress the principles of ethnic harmony, or harm the prestige of the nation and constitutional government," Manzhouguo Film Studio productions appeared more frequently on Manchuria's screens.[52] In other words, the "growth" of Manchurian film production can be attributed both to investment of financial and human resources and to the mechanisms of tariffs, censorship and surveillance which opened up a space through which Japanese and Manchurian production—the latter hardly numerous in relation to those of Shanghai or Hollywood—assumed a position of dominance within the cultural marketplace.

Among the eighty-one individual features produced between 1938 and 1942, however, few proved as successful as their producers and investors hoped. Critics writing for the Film Pictorial unleashed a litany of complaints—within the film market, Manzhouguo Film Studio productions were like an "ugly daughter" forced to conceal her looks (a reference to the studio's own publicity campaigns).[53] Another contributor opined that "within Manzhouguo, ... [these] films will never be able to completely gain the people's confidence ... to have a market and no customers is the sorrow of their producers."[54]

Regional Monopolies

An October 1938 conference held in Beiping on "policies and tendencies concerning Japanese film on the Chinese mainland," sponsored by the Japan International Film and News Agency (Riben guoji yinghua xinwen she), focused specifically on these issues.[55] Concluding that a "Chinese industry" (Zhongguoren de shiye) should be established, the conference put forth a plan of "using Chinese to manufacture [for] China" (yi Hua zhi Hua)—in other words, further supplementing Japanese imports with locally-produced films more likely to gain approval from Chinese audiences. The following year, investors from the New People's Film Association (Xinmin yinghua xiehui), Provisional Government of China, Manzhouguo Film Association, and other Japanese-owned studios in the north China region established a North China Film Company (Huabei dianying gufen youxian gongsi) for the purpose of consolidating Japanese-backed control over the sale and distribution of Chinese-language films.[56] At the same time, complementary Japanese-backed studio systems began to appear in Shanghai (1939), and later the foreign concessions (1942). Film historian Li Daoxin writes that the simultaneous establishment of regional film companies throughout China served Japan's "mainland policy" by creating market linkages between north China, east China, and Manzhouguo; within this context, the Manzhouguo Film Association's establishment of a "Mainland Film [Industry] League" (Dalu dianying lianmeng) provides further evidence of monopolistic intent on the part of cultural planners.[57] Hu Chang and Gu Quan echo this notion, arguing that in addition to promoting Manzhouguo identity, cultural institutions in the north and northeast reflect an attenuation to Japan's war effort on the Chinese mainland.[58]

It is tempting to view the Manchuria Film Association and its related institutions as anomalous vestiges of an unusually oppressive colonial system. More accurate, perhaps, would be to view its development in terms of two broader trends present in the field of international film production as a whole. First, despite the fact that Chinese audiences balked at pro-Japanese fare, Japanese-dominated film industries and distribution hubs located principally in Manzhouguo, Beiping, Nanjing, and Shanghai bear more than a passing resemblance to the "mature oligopolies" of the United States insofar as they "produced motion pictures, operated worldwide distribution outlets, and owned chains of theaters where their pictures were guaranteed a showing."[59] Second, total war between Japan, China, and later the United States had an ongoing effect on this system, as shifting political and military realities resulted in an increasing emphasis on the role of cultural production in mobilizing for the war effort.

Theaters and Projection Teams

The year 1937 thus marked a significant expansion of the Manchuria Film Association into both the Northeast and North China. This effort coincided with the Manzhouguo Film Association's efforts to expand distribution channels and screening venues, with the result that film-related activity in Manzhouguo greatly increased in cities and county seats.[60] The Association secured agreements with German, Italian, and Korean export companies to ensure that state-approved films would continue to play in theaters even when Japanese or Manzhouguo products were unavailable. Such policies contributed to the decline of Hollywood, European, and even Chinese films within Manzhouguo as measured in market share.[61]

The city of Shenyang provides an illustrative example of the transformations in Manzhouguo's motion picture industry at the level of distribution and screening. Moreover, it shows how practices ranging from surveillance to direct investment served to reinforce the position of Manzhouguo's Japanese citizens within the industry hierarchy. Certainly, the presence of overseas investors in mainland China's urban theaters was nothing new. By 1910, roughly two hundred small theaters were owned and managed by Japanese entrepreneurs in the vicinity of Southern Manchuria Railway Company operations.[62] Following the "Mukden Incident" (Liugoutiao shibian) of 18 September 1931, however, the Guandong Army's occupation of Shenyang was accompanied by increasing pressure on all theaters to show pro-Japanese films—including many of those produced by the Southern Manchuria Railway Company during this period—and efforts to police the screening of any material deemed harmful to the occupation.[63] Thus, while Hollywood- and Shanghai-produced films still circulated, they appeared before audiences with diminishing frequency; theater owners who did not comply with the 1934 "Regulations Concerning Banned Films" (dianying pian qudi guize) were fined by the police, and in some cases imprisoned.[64] As Japanese forces began to expand rapidly into Chinese territory again beginning in 1937, this system was tightened further, requiring that all of Shenyang's theaters be observed and inspected before being issued permits for continued legal operation. Escalation of wartime hostilities, in other words, seemed to bring with it an increasing concern for the regulation of Manzhouguo's theater system. If films were like "bullets," as claimed on the pages of Film Pictorial, was the silver screen the gun?

The 1931 occupation of Shenyang also brought with it an increase in the construction or renovation of theaters boasting state-of-the-art projection technology and seating arrangements. Almost invariably, the principal investors in these projects were Japanese citizens of Manzhouguo or recent émigrés from Japan. Again, while Japanese-run theaters had been part of the urban landscape for several decades, their sudden proliferation between 1933 and 1937 shifted the city's cinematic balance of power, prompting the Chinese theater community to adopt new business practices that would allow them to compete with their economic rivals.[65] One result was that the 1930s marked a kind of efflorescence in Shenyang cultural consumption, with several first-rate theaters like the Citizen (Guomin), Asia (Yazhou), and Cloud Pavilion (Yun ge) all built during the middle of the decade; between 1938 and 1941 two theaters that supposedly ranked among the largest in the world were built in Shenyang by Japanese investors.[66] This dynamic began to shift again, however, when aggressive buy-outs leveraged by both private and state capital had the effect of driving some Chinese owners from the market altogether. In at least one case, forced conscription employed as a means of driving recalcitrant sellers from this increasingly profitable sector of the economy.

Within Manzhouguo, as in other parts of Japan-occupied China, this did not mean that Chinese citizens were barred from attaining certain gains under the new regime, and theater ownership remained an undeniably complex affair until the end of the war. By 1944, of the 213 total film theaters open for business, 91 were operated by Japanese owners, 79 by Chinese owners, and 43 by "mixed" partnerships involving individuals of both groups.[67] During the same period the state began to establish its own theaters, with the Manzhouguo Film Association opening ten new screening establishments, and the Manzhouguo General Film Office (Manzhou dianying zong she) fifty-six.

As suggested by the number of mobile screenings during this same period, however, theaters can only be considered one of several elements within a larger history of wartime film distribution and exhibition. State-sponsored events such as outdoor exhibitions and rallies not only sought to capture revenues, but also the hearts and minds of newly-minted Manzhouguo citizens. During April 1932, following a state announcement that "the majority of the people (minzhong) have not yet grasped (wei ming) the true significance of [this] new nation (xin guojia), outdoor film propaganda rallies will be specially arranged."[68] Such events were staged routinely in subsequent years showing, among other things, Southern Manchuria Railway Company-produced documentaries which extolled Japan-Manzhouguo unity and the Japanese Guandong Army's "contributions to Manzhouguo life."[69]

The creation of a "mobile film team network" (xunhui fangying wang) in 1939 represents another means by which the Manzhouguo state's monopolization of film markets coincided with efforts to not only increase contact with existing audiences, but also establish cinema as a feature of everyday life in areas beyond the reach of the existing theater-based distribution system.[70] Schools, waste-clearing and agricultural brigades, and other state-sanctioned organizations served as the initial focal points for these activities. Later, with the outbreak of the Pacific War, mobile screening teams recorded over 4.5 million attendances in 1943, and over 5 million attendances in 1944; these rather astonishing numbers also include irregular screenings held for members of the military and occupants of banner (qi gongshu) territories along Manchuria's borders.[71] By 1945, virtually every banner and province was assigned a projection team, administered either by the Manzhouguo Film Association or provincial and local "mobile projection committees" established for the purpose in 1939.[72]

Table 3. Manzhouguo Film Association mobile screenings, 1939-1942

Source: Changchun shi difang zhi bianzuan weiyuanhui, ed., Changchun shi zhi: dianying zhi, 182.

Conclusions

As early as 1942, Japan's domestic film industry was in dire straits as a result of the war effort. Within this context, the dreams of occupation planners on the mainland briefly came to fruition, as Manzhouguo Film Studio and North China Film Company productions accounted for some of the most heavily-circulated films in Manzhouguo until the end of the war in 1945.[73] Within the Manzhouguo Film Studio itself, almost 70% of the Japanese staff was reassigned to military duty between 1941 and 1945; Chinese filmmakers thus gained new opportunities within the studio system, albeit within a worsening economic and political environment.

Japanese rule in Manzhouguo was undeniably repressive, establishing difference between colonizers and colonized along racial grounds. At the same time, it left behind a substantial institutional and technological legacy. In the case of the Northeast film industry, forms of economic autarky desired by Japanese planners also maintained positions for Chinese subjects in the areas of film production and, albeit in an unpredictable and unequal fashion, film exhibition.

The Civil War, 1945-1949

As Japanese forces in Manzhouguo surrendered to their Soviet counterparts, both Nationalist and Communist Party forces raced to reclaim the territory for their respective governments. Accepting and managing (jieguan) former Manzhouguo institutions was seen by both sides as a crucial step in the process of establishing regional control. For this reason, the Manzhouguo Film Studio became a focal point of competition between the two parties.

Based in the city of Xinjing—now referred to by its pre-Manzhouguo name of Changchun—both Nationalist and Communist forces worked to organize studio employees, and gain control over the studio's remaining equipment and production facilities. By 1 October 1945 it seemed that underground Communist operatives had gained the upper hand, establishing the Northeast Film Company (Dongbei dianying gongsi) as a "front" organization through which former Manzhouguo Film Studio personnel and other resources would remain protected from Nationalist Party attempts to intervene in the handover process. Company operations also included the distribution of old Shanghai films, and subtitling Soviet titles in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.[74] Among the company's approximately four hundred employees—all of them former Manzhouguo Film Studio personnel—as many as half were of Japanese or Korean nationality, within which group the vast majority were Japanese.[75] During early 1946, however, Nationalist military forces drove the Communists from Changchun and the Northeast Film Company toward the relatively isolated mining facility of Hegang further north. This peripatetic operation nonetheless represented one of the Communist Party's most significant attempts at establishing a viable film industry during the Civil War period.

Reviving film production in northeast China was a complex process, insofar as Communist and Nationalist competition for former Japanese enterprises like the Manzhouguo Film Studio meant that no immediate resolution to the question of who would take over the reins of ownership and production was apparent. Soviet Red Army offices exerted nominal control over urban Changchun, yet these same forces were among those responsible for removal of industrial and communications equipment worth approximately two billion U.S. dollars.[76] During some periods, the Communists seemed to be in control of the city's administration; during other periods, the Nationalists.[77] After a week of further negotiations with Soviet Red Army headquarters, the Manzhouguo Film Studio was finally transferred to the League of Northeast Filmworkers, and members of its Communist Party "core" given official papers linking them with the army's local administration.[78] Nonetheless, Soviet Red Army dominance in the region allowed both Nationalist and Communist officials some degree of influence in administering Changchun.[79] Representatives of both parties, it seems, were compelled to negotiate on a case-by-case basis with Soviet authorities. Both Communist and Nationalist parties staged demonstrations and rallies during late 1945 and early 1946; one of the largest Nationalist rallies of this type was a six- or seven-hundred person demonstration against the Soviet Union, held in Ha'erbin.[80]

The Changchun Film Studio

Recapturing Changchun did not mean that Nationalist authorities had completely swept the city's remaining studio facilities of all Communist Party influence. As was the case in Shanghai, attempts to "nationalize" film production in the northeast inadvertently resulted in an influx of operatives; here, the hidden leftist was Jin Shan, an actor and underground Communist agent.[81] Connected to the Nationalist Party's Ministry of Propaganda through his brother-in-law, Pan Gongbi, Jin soon gained a position as one of about twenty Chongqing artists designated for assignment to the Changchun Film Studio (Changchun dianying zhipianchang), established on 7 July 1946 within the former Manzhouguo Film Studio site.[82]

Producing only a scant number of films until its closure in August 1947, this filmmaking facility has remained something of an understudied anomaly from the perspective of those writing on Communist cultural production in the northeast. Nonetheless, it illustrates a second strategy by which Communist Party leaders like Zhou Enlai—who supposedly instructed Jin to accept the assignment—attempted to maintain a degree of influence within Nationalist-dominated institutions during the Civil War period by sanctioning active collaboration with the post-1945 regime, particularly in urban settings.[83]

The Northeast Film Studio

With Nationalist armies advancing toward Changchun by railroad, Northeast Film Company chief executive and Communist Party propagandist Shu Qun ordered supporters to begin preparing the company's equipment for evacuation. Shu and other Party members also worked to organize among Japanese personnel, many of whom were the studio's best-trained filmmakers and technicians.[84] In the end, many joined the group of approximately four hundred evacuees, some only as Nationalist airplanes began to unleash their bombs over Changchun's southern train station. Faced with the likelihood that Ha'erbin would also fall into Nationalist hands, the group pressed further north toward the city of Xingshan, roughly equidistant between Ha'erbin and the Sino-Soviet border. Company leaders selected the nearby Hegang Mine (Hegang kuang qu) as their future studio site.

By late 1946, two hundred and forty-six personnel remained, approximately one-third of whom were former Japanese employees of the Manzhouguo Film Studio. Yan'an filmmakers such as Chen Bo'er and Wu Yinxian began arriving as early as August. Reopened as the Northeast Film Studio (Dongbei dianying zhipianchang) on 1 October 1946, the Xingshan film production site thus represented an almost complete transition to former Communist base area leadership; Zhang Xinshi remained the only representative of the Manzhouguo "old guard" to serve in the studio director's office, now occupied by Yuan Muzhi, Wu Yinxian, and Tian Fang.[85] Ma Shouqing, Jiang Hao, Yu Yanfu, and other experienced northeasterners were mainly entrusted with studio administration and technical operations, while the Yan'an artist-cadres Chen Bo'er and Yan Wenjing were placed in charge of creative work. Two north China propagandists, Yu Lan and Yuan Naichen, managed the studio's agit-prop and acting corps (wen gong tuan). Over time, the Hegang Mine became a northeast stronghold of Communist Party-sponsored cultural production. Wang Yang, head of the North China Film Team, arrived in June 1946 in search of equipment and technicians. The Norman Bethune Medical University (Qiu bai'en yike daxue) was relocated to the region sometime thereafter; members of Northwest Work-Study Film Team (Xibei dianying gong xue dui), and Northeast First Cultural Work Regiment (Dongbei wen gong yi tuan) arrived steadily throughout 1947 and 1948. Additional technical exchange took place in the context of visits from Korean and Hungarian cultural delegations, who toured the new studio during 1947 and 1948.[86]

Distribution and Exhibition

At the time of Japan's military defeat in 1945, Heilongjiang province possessed over 40 film theaters. Chinese and Russian officials all sought to control formerly Japanese-managed film distribution centers in Ha'erbin and Qiqiha'er, with the Soviet Film Import-Export Company (Sovexportfilm) taking a leading role in regional administration. As Communist forces gained the military upper hand in 1948, those theaters operated for the profit of the "puppet" Nationalist government were absorbed by the Northeast Film Company distribution chain, or given over for military use. As such they represented yet another iteration of the kind of production-distribution-exhibition "chain" which characterized the film industry during the 1920s and 1930s. These patterns were more or less repeated in Fengtian/Liaoning, where by 1944 the number of theaters in the province had jumped to 86 (37 Chinese-owned, 38 Japanese-owned, and 11 directly managed by Manzhouguo Film). In 1945, however, those theaters outside of the port complex of Lü-Da (Lüshun and Dalian)—in other words, in cities beyond the immediate scope of Soviet military control—fell under the purview of Nationalist state institutions or were managed by private Chinese owners. Apart from Soviet imports, titles in the cities of Dalian, Ha'erbin, and Qiqiha'er became increasingly hard to come by; film historians' allegations of Nationalist "mismanagement" in the hinterland seem primarily motivated by the accumulation of many films still circulating in the Northeast by enterprising merchants, leaving the Soviet and Communist areas culturally barren by comparison. Measures taken by post-1945 authorities to ban the exhibition of Japanese films and withdraw other foreign titles for inspection left theater owners without a steady supply of product and revenues, despite the fact that some theaters continued to screen Manzhouguo Film Studio productions under misleading titles, and that private distributors still controlled a share of the increasingly state-dominated market. This situation would not improve significantly until 1949, when Soviet films were imported on a regular basis via a partnership between Sovexportfilm and Northeast Film Studio-administered distribution offices, or "stations" (zhan), located in Ha'erbin, Qiqiha'er, and Jiamusi.

The vast majority of Communist cinematic forays were thus initially restricted in their circulation to People's Liberation Army-controlled areas, or cities where heavy concentrations of Communist Party or Soviet personnel could guarantee that screenings would not be disrupted. The Northeast Film Studio maintained distribution offices in both Jiamusi and Ha'erbin; The Democratic Northeast was circulated more widely through these offices than any other film.[87] While films themselves may have created any number of impressions among troops and locals, the official language of film consumption stressed that these documentaries functioned to "encourage" audiences, giving them "faith in [Communist] victory."[88] During 1947, the studio managed five mobile projection teams, while the majority of its urban screenings were restricted to northern Heilongjiang.[89] By 1949, Northeast Film Studio productions had reached most cities in northeast China.

Although this suggests that distribution of Communist Party-sponsored films increased over time, they by no means represented a dominant presence in China's theaters. Despite efforts to add overdubbed Soviet films to the studio catalogue, Hollywood and Shanghai still threatened to crowd Northeast products from the market entirely. Moreover, the profit-minded theater industry was only barely connected to Communist Party cultural organizations prior to 1949; theater management was often deeply tied to local government or the police.[90] Theaters themselves had a reputation for filth and uncomfortable seating. According to a Northeast Film Studio distributor, the postwar squalor prompted one patron to scrawl this impromptu verse on a Shenyang theater wall:

Frigid central heating, no light anywhere;

A filth-spattered restroom.

This awful movie hasn't ended;

The [theater's] seating ruins my clothes.[91]

Nonetheless, theaters proved the most common means of disseminating Northeast Film Studio productions. Between May 1947 and May 1949, an estimated 9,189 screenings attracted more than 3.63 million viewers; film teams, by comparison, recorded only 2,893 screening occurrences, yet these massive outdoor events attracted over 4 million northeastern attendees.[92]

In addition to these efforts, Soviet films formed an important means of spinning a revolutionary narrative for nascent Northeast social forms.[93] The frequent lack of overdubbing, or even subtitling, proved an obvious obstacle to audience appreciation, despite Northeast Film Studio efforts to churn out Chinese-language versions of these films. Nonetheless, Party news organs such as the People's Daily praised Soviet cinema for its cultural and educational value.[94] Drawing attention to these films not only served to compensate for a lack of suitable domestically-produced propaganda, but also linked the Soviet presence with a "new life" (fanshen) for Northeast residents. In time, such screenings were augmented by lantern slide shows depicting successful battlefield actions taken by Communist forces—billed as part of the "war of self-defense" (ziwei zhanzheng)—and model soldiers from the north China areas.[95] Film screenings were, moreover, touted as harbingers of an even richer life to come. Newspapers advertised upcoming Northeast Film Studio productions depicting Yan'an, rural reform, and the urban anti-violence movement, or aimed at educating readers about which films were good to see.[96] Within the confines of far northern cities like Ha'erbin, 1947 brought with it regular screenings of the Northeast Film Studio-produced Democratic Northeast newsreel series; this represented a vast improvement over the previous year, when ongoing warfare limited studio dissemination efforts to factories adjacent to the regional Military and Political University (Jun da), where the first group of studio projectionists were trained.[97]

An important characteristic which distinguished the Northeast from Yan'an—yet which linked it to its Manzhouguo antecedents—lay in the Party's growing reliance on institutions of cultural regulation to secure regional monopolies for Soviet and Northeast features. Publicly, these efforts to took the form of banning films which "opposed" the interests of the people.[98] Internal directives, however, ordered provincial governments to inspect (shencha) all films screened within their jurisdictions, enforcing strictures on non-compliant with the aid of local police.[99] Items deemed to oppose nationalism, democracy, and the people—in addition to those which appeared pornographic, ludicrous, or fascist—were to be denied permits for future circulation and screening. Soviet films and "democratic" Shanghai films, on the other hand, were to be targeted for approval; in the case of Soviet films, no further inspection was deemed necessary.

The Northeast Film Distribution Company (Dongbei yingpian jingli gongsi) played a supporting role in not only distributing Northeast Film Studio, Soviet, and Eastern European films, but also arranging for the export of these to other countries such as Korea.[100] By 1949 it also became a regional distributor for films produced in Shanghai; at the end of that year, the company operated 179 theaters and 49 "clubs" (julebu)—special screening units typically set up within factories, military installations, and administrative facilities—and reached nearly every county in the Northeast.[101]

Conclusion: Nationalizing the Northeast

The region of China's "three Northeastern provinces" (Dongbei san sheng) during the first half of the twentieth century reveals a contradictory history. The presence of Russian economic and military power in Heilongjiang represented a "colonial initiative," one almost immediately taken up by Japanese investors and administrators of an expansionist military bureaucracy to the south in Jilin and Liaoning. As Parks Coble cautions concerning the Japanese-occupied Lower Yangzi region—China's other exceptional example of modern sector economic growth—"the New Order was nothing more than a colonial regime over China."[102] Yet throughout this history, it is clear that the colonial "new order" which gained increasing control over the Northeast was accompanied by an intensification of economic activity surrounding regional industries such as film. Moreover, this order was not entirely closed to smaller-scale Chinese investors, or to those who sought employment in state-sponsored studios which churned out colonial culture throughout the wartime period. As a consequence, the Northeast film industry did not simply collapse with the fall of the Manzhouguo state. Communist Party experimentation with a politically-directed, nationalized film industry did not begin with the military occupation of Shanghai after 1949; rather, as in so many other areas, the Northeast "laboratory" of industrial and other productive infrastructure provided opportunities for party operatives to begin absorbing fateful lessons in urban planning and enterprise management. Finally, it should be noted that Japanese and Russians all continued to play important roles in this process even after 1945, one example being the contributions of former Manzhouguo Film Studio employees to the technical and chemical processes of film production in Communist-directed Northeast cultural enterprises until 1953, when the last surviving members of that colonial project were repatriated to Japan.

In terms of film history, the relative abundance of evidence concerning film-related activity in the Northeast refutes claims for the temporal priority assigned to Shanghai as a forerunner or harbinger of "modern" cultural experience in the form of the cinema. Northeast theaters appeared earlier, perhaps as a consequence of direct colonial activity—represented by railroad zones, and the relative weakness of "traditional" cultural enterprise networks in a region in which recent migration was largely responsible for emergent trends of urbanization and population growth. Nor does the Northeast provide evidence for a period of "purely" commercial film production and exhibition, the latter having elicited attention from local Republican governments from 1914 onward while commodities (films) generated by the former circulated via a market system itself embedded in colonial and party institutions.

Further research holds the promise of generating more systematic data concerning the financial realities faced by Chinese entrepreneurs within this fraught regional environment. Clearly, public investment was directed as much by political regimes as by markets. Manzhouguo provides one important case for examining the degree to which ethnocentrism and market "closure" transformed pre-war patterns. Joseph Schumpeter, describing capitalism as a process of economic change, has famously observed that the creation of property and social wealth is one of "creative destruction." Likewise, Morris Bian has ascribed analytic significance to the effects of Japan's invasion of China—a "sustained systematic crisis"—in generating the conceptual and organizational shifts leading to the emergence of China's post-war state enterprise system.[103] To the extent that the post-1949 creation of a nationalized and integrated system of film production, distribution, and exhibition finds its precedents in both colonial economies and national responses to the terms imposed by such arrangements, inquiries into the transfer of knowledge and resources by which such similarities may have arisen seem worth pursuing.

Matthew David Johnson is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, San Diego. He has written articles and reviews on Chinese-language cinema, and is completing a dissertation on the origins of state culture industries, cinematic propaganda, and cultural diplomacy, from the late Qing to the early People's Republic.