Exhibiting Socialist Chineseness Abroad: PRC’s Audio-visual Propaganda in Cold War Hong Kong and Beyond, 1950s-1970s
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Date
2024-08-07
Authors
Tao, Sabrina Y.
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Publisher
University of Oregon
Abstract
This dissertation investigates how socialist Chinese audiovisual productions (especially cinema) that incorporate folklore, regional, and traditional Chinese cultural elements after socialist reform were exported internationally to win the hearts and minds of diasporic Chinese audiences via the intermediary of Hong Kong in the early Cold War era. In contrast with previous conceptions on PRC’s domestic propaganda that highlight revolution and class struggle, my dissertation argues that “socialist Chineseness” was an alternative as it blurred revolutionary messages in its audiovisual representations and marketing strategies for the purpose of circumventing censorship from the British colonial government and to construct a benevolent image of the new PRC to global audiences. Muting overt political themes while still shadowed by ideologies of socialism and anti-colonialism, these audio-visual texts created a nostalgic space of “cultural China” that blurred boundaries between regions, nationhood, social class, political and cultural identifications. In the meantime, they also had anti-colonial and anti-capitalist stances and acted as a contesting discourse against pro-rightist and pro-American culture in Cold War East Asia. By tracing these long-neglected transnational cultural interactions, this study hopes to reexamine the national boundary of Chinese cinema, as PRC films in the early socialist era were circulated in the broader regions of the Sinosphere. Meanwhile, by building a bridge between PRC and Hong Kong studies, this study explores the role of Hong Kong as a cultural nexus for the PRC’s audiovisual propaganda overseas. The dissertation not only reexamines how China presented itself to the world historically, but also explores how the socialist bloc conducted and responded to the global cultural Cold War in the realm of “soft power.”
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Keywords
Chinese diaspora, Cultural Cold War, Hong Kong, Socialist Chinese cinema and audiovisual media, Socialist Chineseness, Transnational circulation