Industrial Cultures: Cinema and Labor in China’s Modernization

From China’s Great Leap Forward production campaign in the late 1950s, to the industrial reforms of the 1980s and 1990s and the rise of China as “the world’s factory,” Chinese cinema has long shaped how work, labor, and industry are imagined, organized, and experienced. In this public talk, Dr. Ying Qian explores selected Chinese films across these periods, discussing how they interpreted the state’s developmentalist strategies, inculcated industrial temporalities and work ethics, while also communicating workers’ discontents and challenging dominant industrial cultures.

Dr. Ying Qian is associate professor in Chinese Cinema and Media at Columbia University. Her research and teaching center on Chinese-language media and its constitutive roles in social, political, epistemological and ecological formations from the late nineteenth century to the present. Her book Revolutionary Becomings: Documentary Media in Twentieth-Century China (Columbia University Press, 2024) excavates documentary’s multi-faceted productivities in China’s revolutionary movements and proposes a theorization of documentary as an “eventful medium,” around which the dialectics of media practice, political relationality and revolutionary epistemology can be examined. This book has received the Lionel Trilling Book Award (Columbia University), Honorable Mention for Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for East Asian Studies (MLA), and the Best Book Award on Journalism History (AEJMC).

**Enjoy a conversation with Dr. Qian and yummy Asian snacks after the talk!**

Directions: Park in Mesa Parking Structure (Mesa Rd) or Student Center Parking Structure (W Peltason Dr).
For an additional rate, you can park in nearby Lot 7 if you purchase an AR day permit.
From Mesa Structure, walk through Claire Trevor School of the Arts towards the bridge, or along the sidewalk on Mesa Rd. From Student Center, you can use the stairs behind Humanities Instructional Building

Illuminations: The Chancellor's Arts & Culture Initiative | Website | View More Events

Contact the organizers