Engaging with key films from the decade and a half between 1949 and '66, this book explores the aesthetic experiment of socialist cinema in China. In the years succeeding the Communist Revolution, the state produced a diversity of genres that functioned as propaganda for the newly established People's Republic. Breaking from past forms, revolutionary cinema adapted and revised Chinese literature for the screen, incorporated aspects of Hollywood narration and appropriated Soviet montage theory for its own means, as well as orchestrating a new, glamorous, socialist star culture. Chinese film periodicals were quick to project and disseminate the country's redefined self-image to both domestic and international domains as they helped to create an alternative vision of modernity and internationalism.

Jessica Ka Yee Chan is Assistant Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Richmond, USA. She teaches courses on Chinese cinema, the action genre in East Asian cinema and myths and parables in Chinese literature and film, amongst other specialisms and her research has appeared in journals such as Modern Chinese Literature and Culture and East Asian Journal of Popular Culture. She received her PhD on Asian Literatures, Cultures and Media from the University of Minnesota in 2012.