Surrogate Infrastructure: The Noncommercial Circulation of Chinese Films in the Early Cold War

Abstract

Abstract Recent scholarship elucidates the extent to which Chinese literary and film culture during the high socialist period (1949–1976) was engaged with the world. This article builds upon the literature by examining how Chinese films were distributed and exhibited in this period in nonsocialist countries. With Australia as my case study, I argue that China exported films to nonsocialist countries mainly noncommercially, that is, not for profit but for propaganda and diplomacy. Once there, Chinese films were disseminated and shown with the help of a variety of local communist, leftist, or otherwise People's Republic of China (PRC)—friendly individuals and organizations. The films, therefore, circulated in the world not just through the formal alliances among brother nations of the socialist bloc, but also because of what I term a “surrogate infrastructure” that bound various peoples and communities on the left at both the local and global levels. By consulting Chinese government documents as well as Australian newspapers, I demonstrate that, despite the language barrier, a didactic film art, and a Cold War geopolitical context that impeded the global flow of Chinese films, the noncommercial route nevertheless limned an alternative mapping of the 1950s.