Cinema and the Cosmopolitan City
Colonial Encounters in Shanghai, 1900–1930
Reenvisioning early Chinese cinema and the urban experience
Description
In early twentieth-century Shanghai, cinema was more than entertainment—it reshaped the city itself. As movie theaters appealed to city dwellers of all backgrounds, colonial authorities struggled to manage this new public space and introduced new safety rules, censorship, and anti-crime measures. Movie theaters unintentionally brought the unofficial way of racial segregation to an end. Moreover, imported films, though emblematic of Western modernity, paradoxically eroded the myth of Western civilizational superiority. These films revealed social ills in Euro-American societies, exposed Hollywood’s racist depictions of Chinese people, and galvanized anti-imperialist and nationalist sentiments among local audiences.
Cinema and the Cosmopolitan City adopts a “cinema off-screen” approach—stitching together urban history and film studies and foregrounding circulation, consumption, and spatial practice. Qiliang He draws on municipal archives, police records, censorship reports, trade journals, film reviews, and news stories to reconstruct the regulatory regimes imposed by the Shanghai Municipal Council and Shanghai Municipal Police, which was targeting both Bolshevism and “immoral” content. This book reveals how cinema didn’t just reflect modern life—it actively changed urban governance, fueled anticolonial feelings, and linked cosmopolitan culture with rising nationalism in China.
Qiliang He is Professor and Head of the Department of History at Hong Kong Shue Yan University.
Reviews
“In this meticulously researched book, Qiliang He reinterprets the early history of cinema in China by examining the challenges moviegoing posed to social order and the efforts of Shanghai’s colonial authorities to regulate cinema through legislation and censorship. With attention to Shanghai’s foreign residents, Cinema and the Cosmopolitan City reveals how cinema functioned as a contact zone where cosmopolitanism and nationalism mutually reinforced one another.”
- Chenshu Zhou, University of Pennsylvania
“Cinema and the Cosmopolitan City is a delight. Its characters of ‘multiple marginalities’ are carefully exhumed and placed on center stage. The result is an important revision of our understanding of the historical narration of early Chinese cinema and of Shanghai, China’s first film capital.”
- Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh, author of The Colonial Screen: Early Cinema in Hong Kong
“With rigorous archival research and incisive historiographical engagement, Qiliang He offers a riveting and deeply textured account of fugitives, migrants, diasporic communities and regulatory institutions that made Shanghai’s cinema culture. Emerging from this narrative is cinema—often treated as marginal—at the beating heart of colonial encounters: as an unruly medium and contact zone, cinema unsettled racial and social hierarchies, exposed contradictions in the colonial world, and inspired both cosmopolitan aspirations and nationalist passions. Unfolding colonialism’s full complexity with superb historian’s craft, this brilliant book offers an indispensable contribution to the history of Shanghai, and to the global history of cinema and media.”
- Ying Qian, Columbia University