Socialist Builders on the Rails and Road: Industrialization, Social Engineering, and National Imagination in Chinese Socialist Films, 1949–1965

In the 1950s and early 1960s, a series of films were produced in China in which modern transportation vehicles—trains and trucks—transferred idealistic youth out of cities (particularly Shanghai) to participate in socialist industrialization. Railway travel and the construction site figured prominently in these mobilizational films: both were closely intertwined as part of the larger industrialization and social engineering project. This essay focuses on the human-machine dynamic and argues that railway travel and the construction site symbolized the poetics of socialist industrialization in its representational form: an industrial enterprise, at once affective and technologized, that staged both a grand enterprise of conquering nature and a quotidian, intimate human community. Forms of affectivity—camaraderie, professional care, domestic warmth, and communitarian intimacy—were mobilized into productive energy to raise productive efficiency.