Prohibition, Politics, and Nation-Building: A History of Film Censorship in China

Abstract

That the history of any national cinema is inseparable from the political history of that nation hardly needs elaboration. For those interested in Chinese cinema, it is even more crucial to view the developments of the Chinese film industry and the evolution of the film censorship apparatus against the backdrop of major political events and regime changes in the last century.1 As a new formof massmedium, themotion pictures were introduced into China from the West at the end of the nineteenth century when the old social order was on the verge of collapse.2 In the first half of the twentieth century, China witnessed the fall of the Qing Dynasty in 1911, the civil conflicts in the ensuing decade, social unrests, invasion and occupation by Japan, and the Civil War between the Communists and the Nationalists, which ended in the former’s victory in 1949. In the second half of the twentieth century, China was involved in four international conflicts, suffered the disastrous consequences of the Great Leap Forward program, was traumatized by the Cultural Revolution, and transformed by the economic reform in the last two decades of the twentieth century. This turbulent history has left a profound imprint on the political orientation and aesthetic style of the Chinese cinema. As such, a meaningful discussion of Chinese film censorship must be situated in the context of that history.