Cloth: 978-0-472-07858-5

Paper: 978-0-472-05858-7

eISBN: 978-0-472-90712-0 (OA)

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.

License: CC BY-NC