The Southern Film Corporation, opera films and the PRC's cultural diplomacy in Cold War Asia, 1950s–1960s 1

Abstract

In the 1950s, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) adapted numerous local Chinese operas (xiqu) into films which were then exported throughout Asia and other parts of the world in the hope of promoting friendship and blurring the boundaries of the “Bamboo Curtain”. Using recently declassified archival materials, oral histories, film studio records and press reports, this chapter examines the Hong Kong-based Southern Film Corporation, which was one of the most important distributors of PRC-produced films to Southeast Asia in the 1950s and 1960s. In the process, it sheds light on the complex interaction between communist propaganda, cultural diplomacy and Chinese opera films in Cold War Asia. The chapter argues that opera films played an important role in forging bonds of solidarity between the PRC and diasporic communities in Southeast Asia. The ideological power of such films was located in the way they imagined a community based on shared folk traditions and a nostalgic connection to China as a homeland. In other words, a bond of community was created through regional ties, rather than through an abstract concept of “Chineseness” per se.