Revolutionary Becomings: Documentary Media in Twentieth-Century China
by Ying Qian

From the toppling of the Qing Empire in 1911 to the political campaigns and mass protests in the Mao and post-Mao eras, revolutionary upheavals characterized China’s twentieth century. In Revolutionary Becomings¸ Ying Qian studies documentary film as an “eventful medium” deeply embedded in these upheavals and as a prism to investigate the entwined histories of media and China’s revolutionary movements.

With meticulous historical excavation and attention to intermedial practices and transnational linkages, Qian discusses how early media practitioners at the turn of the twentieth century intermingled with rival politicians and warlords as well as civic and business organizations. She reveals the foundational role documentary media played in the Chinese Communist Revolution as a bridge between Marxist theories and Chinese historical conditions. In considering the years after the Communist Party came to power, Qian traces the dialectical relationships between media practice, political relationality, and revolutionary epistemology from production campaigns during the Great Leap Forward to the “class struggles” during the Cultural Revolution and the reorganization of society in the post-Mao decade. Exploring a wide range of previously uninvestigated works and intervening in key debates in documentary studies and film and media history, Revolutionary Becomingsprovides a groundbreaking assessment of the significance of media to the historical unfolding and actualization of revolutionary movements.

About the Author

Ying Qian is an associate professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University. As a scholar of cinema and media, Ying Qian is interested in the role of media and mediation in shaping politics, forming knowledge, and connecting realms of experience. Her first book, Revolutionary Becomings: Documentary Media in Twentieth-Century China (Columbia University Press, 2024), excavates documentary’s multi-faceted productivities in China’s revolutionary movements, from the toppling of the Qing Empire in 1911 to the political campaigns and mass protests in the Mao and post-Mao eras. It approaches documentary as an “eventful medium” and as a prism to examine the mutual constitution of media and revolution: how revolutionary movements gave rise to specific media practices, and how these media practices in turn, contributed to the specific paths of revolution’s actualization. She teaches classes on East Asian cinema, Chinese media cultures, documentary media, media of science and technology, and comparative media theory and history.

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