Chris BerryParticularly useful here is the idea of an assemblage as a “contingent ensemble of diverse prac-
tices.” This can be contrasted to the language of “systems” and “networks,” which implies some-
thing closed and relatively stable (DeLanda 2006).
Also important in Ong’s formulation for our understanding of Chinese-language cinema as
an assemblage is the phrase “territoriality and deterritorialization.” For the drawing and redraw-
ing of borders over the long twentieth century that is also the century of cinema, is a significant
driver and shaper of both the flows of migration that determined language-based markets for
Chinese films and the flows of the films themselves. It also plays a crucial role in determining
where film production has taken place and how it has fared.
For example, Taiwan had no film production industry prior to the 1950s. Up until the end of
World War II, it was a Japanese colony. During most of this era prior to the outbreak of war, the
local Chinese-speaking population was served with imports from Shanghai as well as Japanese
films from Tokyo, which also served the Japanese settler population (Lee 2013, 154–156).
The withdrawal of the Japanese and the assumption of sovereignty by the Kuomintang (KMT)
Nationalist Chinese government, led by Chiang Kai-shek, did not automatically lead to the
establishment of a film industry, either. It was Chiang’s defeat in the Civil War and the establish-
ment of the PRC in 1949 that led the KMT government to establish various communications
industries, including the film industry, as part of its effort to consolidate control over the island
in the early 1950s (Yeh and Davis 2005, 17–19).
To give another example of how policy and geopolitics combine to determine where film
production takes place, the KMT’s vision of China as a modern nation included the idea of
a national language. They understood this language to be Mandarin, the spoken language of
northern China. Therefore, once they had established censorship mechanisms and the spoken
dialogue was starting to be part of Chinese films in the 1930s, they banned non-Mandarin film-
making. This policy decision led film producers, who wanted to continue making Cantonese-
language cinema, to move to Hong Kong, which, as a British colony in the southern part of
China, was not only free from KMT censorship and laws but was also in the Cantonese- speaking
area. This was the trigger for Hong Kong to become a major film-producing center. Stephen
Teo writes, “In 1935–7, it is estimated that a total of 137 Cantonese films were produced in
the territory. Before 1935, an average of only four Cantonese films had been produced per year
since the arrival of sound” (Teo 1997, 6–7).
The history of Chinese cinema can be recounted as a series of such events that change
the location of production, where the films travel, and the audiences that consume them. So
far, across that history, three major periods can be discerned. The first is the Shanghai period,
although the first Chinese film was made in Beijing in 1905. Beijing was the sleepy capital of
the Qing Empire, already in its dying days when Dingjunshan (Dingjun Mountain) was directed
by Ren Qingtai. But Shanghai was the center of the Chinese economy, its largest and richest
city, and its trading and transport hub. No wonder the cinema industry developed there. Fur-
thermore, in the 1920s and 1930s it also serviced most of the global Chinese-speaking market,
including the Japanese colony of Taiwan, as mentioned above. It did so again after the end of
the disruption caused by the Second World War, during which the city was occupied by the
Japanese.
As already indicated by the discussion of the origins of film production in Hong Kong
above, Shanghai did not monopolize production during this period, nor were flows of film
prints entirely smooth. But it was the establishment of the PRC in 1949 and its aftermath that
brought the Shanghai era to an end. A new configuration rapidly developed, one that divided
the Chinese-speaking film market along the so-called “bamboo curtain” that descended
across Asia with the advent of the Cold War. On each side, a new multi-centered production