2025 Theses Doctoral

A National Cinema in Search of a Nation: Media Culture, Spectatorship, and Colonial (After)Lives of Manchuria, 1900s-1940s

Zhao, Xinyi

This dissertation investigates the media and cultural history of cinema in Manchuria (today’s northeast China) from the 1900s through the 1940s. Situated where China, Russia, Korea, and Mongolia meet, Manchuria was a region marked by ethnic diversity and political conflict throughout during the first half of the twentieth century.

Between 1932 and 1945, Manchuria was also known as Manchukuo, Japan’s multi-ethnic client state. Existing literature that has directed attention to Manchuria has been preoccupied with the Manchukuo period, with a focus on the Manchuria Film Association (Chinese: Manying; Japanese: Man’ei, 1937-1945) and its efforts to construct a national cinema for this artificially engineered nation. Building on previous scholarship while moving beyond the timeframe of Manchukuo and the bounded region of East Asia, this dissertation argues for a rewriting of the history of cinema in Manchuria from translocal, transcolonial, and media archaeological perspectives.

By situating cinema in Manchuria within a broader regional and global media environment, this dissertation explores what cinema really meant to Manchuria as a locality, and how cinema was transformed by, and in turn shaped, the everyday lives of Manchuria’s multi-ethnic populations beyond its role as a vehicle for imperial propaganda.Drawing on multi-lingual archival research conducted in Japan and China, the dissertation unfolds in three parts. Starting with the uneasy relationship between cinema and ethno-nationality in Manchuria and opening onto global questions of race and imperialism, the dissertation situates the filmic practices in Manchuria not only within the colonial encounter between China and Japan but also in the broader histories of empire and modernity.

The first portion explores the construction of local film culture in early twentieth-century Dalian and Harbin, highlighting the dynamic interplay of Chinese, Japanese, and Russian cultural encounters. It then moves on to the Manchukuo period and examines how melodrama films produced by Man’ei played into transregional knowledge production about race, ethnicity, and nation among Japan, China, and the United States. Viewing Manchuria as a locality while reconsidering film as event and encounter, the second portion uncovers cinema’s embeddedness in the everyday cultural life of the region through case studies of colonial expositions, public health campaigns, and mobile screenings.

By probing cinema’s symbiosis with other media technologies of visualization and nation-building, I further highlight the shifting cultural logics and technological dynamics underlying the mutual constitution of Manchuria as a locality and the medium itself. The final portion critically reflects on the aporia of Manchuria’s film historiography and its contested legacy in postwar Communist China. Centering on Sakane Tazuko, Japan’s first female director with a career spanning prewar Japan, colonial Manchuria, and communist China, the portion offers a lens for rewriting film history through feminist and queer perspectives.

The dissertation unfolds across five chapters, each examining cinema in Manchuria from a distinct angle—as a translocal practice, a carrier of global racial discourses, a nodal point in a cross-media network, a site-specific and embodied experience, and gendered articulation. By challenging the East/West and imperial/national dichotomies, the dissertation not only works towards a more expansive reflection on the cinematic (de)construction of nation and race and ethnicity in a global context, but also offers a deeper understanding of cinema’s cross-cultural and cross-media articulation of colonial modernity in the larger transformation of this contested region.