Teaching Film from the People's Republic of China ed. by Zhuoyi Wang, Emily Wilcox, and Hongmei Yu

As Chinese film becomes an increasingly integral part of college curricula, Teaching Film from the People's Republic of China, edited by Zhuoyi Wang, Emily Wilcox, and Hongmei Yu, provides a thoughtful response to this growing trend. Focusing on films produced in the People's Republic of China (PRC) from the 1950s to the present, the volume both intersects with and departs from conventional film studies methodologies by emphasizing historical and cultural specificities. The central question, what and how do we teach through Chinese film, demands exploring visual and media literacy on the one hand and broader issues of historiography, representation, social realities, and intercultural competence on the other. Among its strengths, the book's breadth and diversity make it an invaluable resource across disciplines, academic levels, class sizes, and institutional settings. Covering genres from revolutionary films and blockbusters to documentaries and opera films, the discussed works can be taught not only in Chinese culture and cinema courses but also for film studies, comparative literature, cultural studies, history, sociology, theater, political science, urban studies, and gender and women studies.

In the introduction, the editors articulate their aim to "widen the scope of Chinese film studies to include film pedagogy" (p. 6). The volume is divided into seven sections that showcase how critical orientations of academic research can be extended, translated, and enriched through innovative course design and classroom discussion. The first section, "Pedagogical Methods," examines the multiplicity of connections, positionalities, and interpretations in teaching Chinese film. This is followed by six thematic sections: "Reexamining Revolutionary Narratives" addresses how films offer alternative readings of the grand narratives of the Chinese Revolution; "Image and Reality of a Changing China" looks at documentaries and urban cinema that reflect, reinterpret, and respond to contemporary Chinese society; "Recontextualizing National Culture" unravels the layered construction and mediation of Chinese cultures; "Intercultural and Comparative Approaches" highlights the cosmopolitan dimensions of Chinese film; "Film in Chinese Language Courses" bridges language pedagogy with cultural insights through film; and "Multidisciplinary Approaches" repositions Chinese film in broader theoretical frameworks. While each part is cohesively organized, five recurring themes weave through the chapters.

The book's opening chapter effectively frames one of its central themes: complicating assumptions about mimetic, indexical, or allegorical relationships between film and historical or social realities. Critically reflecting on the widely adopted China-through-film mode, Chenshu Zhou warns of the risks of instrumentalizing film and totalizing China. To address the limitations, Zhou proposes a "rhizomatic approach" through which instructors and students co-create new research avenues by mapping connections across content and encouraging multidirectional discussions. Many chapters embrace such openendedness to redirect linear, teleological, or dualistic thinking to critical inquiries, historical imagination, and cultural sensitivity. Formal analysis and close reading emerge as foundational tools to move discussions beyond the search for authenticity. For instance, Ping Zhu draws on Levi-Strauss' structural analysis to guide students in comparing plots and characters in The Red Detachment of Women, Yellow Earth, and The Road Home. Examining re-narrativization of themes such as women's liberation reveals "different historical truths coexisting in one historical narrative" (p. 100). In their course on Chinese cinema and urban studies, Han Li and Shaolu Yu direct students to analyze specific scenes and sequences through a describe-observe-interpret framework. In the process of learning about China's urbanization, students also see how spatial practices and human-environment interactions are visualized and mediated.

Documentary films, often perceived as inherently tied to reality, similarly offer opportunities to problematize the reflection theory of realism. In different course settings, Hongwei Thorn Chen and Aleksander Sedzielarz pair Chinese documentaries with Chinese narrative films and Euro-American documentaries. Their "series approach," aligning well with Zhou's rhizomatic approach, positions documentaries as spaces for exploring localized and historically grounded practices of cinéma verité. Seio Nakajima uses the cultural-diamond framework to teach independent Chinese documentaries in a sociology classroom. By incorporating creators, receivers, transnational connections, and historical change, Nakajima offers a kaleidoscopic lens that complicates the text-context dual. The genre boundary of documentary is further questioned and destabilized in Yanshuo Zhang's course on Chinese ethnic minorities. Through the concept of "docu-fiction," the interplay between documentary and fiction reveals the limits and possibilities of representing ethnic identities.

The second through line is to challenge stereotypical, static, and essentializing notions of a totalized China. To that end, key terms such as socialism, propaganda, and Chineseness are interrogated through theoretically informed readings of Chinese film. Both Zhuoyi Wang and Angie Baecker tackle the concept of propaganda and its localized workings in cultural productions. In Wang's chapter, in-depth analysis of the narrative, style, and reception of Wandering Earth proves to uncover potentially sophisticated messages, often obscured by the film's apparent veneer of nationalism. Bringing rich materials authored by filmmakers and actors during the Cultural Revolution, Baecker demonstrates that films often dismissed as mere propaganda are, in fact, "an inherently contested, collective, and experimental site of creative cultural production" (p. 85).

The chapters by Emily Wilcox, Vincent Casaregola, and Jasmine Yu-Hsing Chen accentuate the ethics of addressing stereotypes, an increasingly urgent issue amid rising Asian xenophobia. Wilcox employs "intersectionality" to approach socialist culture and challenge students to move beyond their empirical and cognitive comfort zones. Examining gender-class and gender-ethnicity relationships in films from the 1950s and 1960s enables students to read against a flattened image of women in socialist China and, further, reconsider socialist revolution as lived experiences rather than monolithic ideology. Casaregola's juxtaposition of the Hollywood-made Flower Drum Song and the Chinese revolutionary film Red Detachment of Women makes visible different manifestations of "integration propaganda" in the portrayals of Chinese women. Teaching China's left-behind children through the independent documentary Children at a Village School, Chen uses topic-based analysis of scenes and their broader implications to underscore the dangers of erasing internal diversity within underprivileged social groups.

The generalized term "traditional Chinese culture," along with its variations (such as "traditional Asian culture"), is also critically examined for its persistence in class discussions. In Josh Stenberg's chapter, contextualizing the yinpeixiang ("sound matched to images") genre in xiqu films illuminates the multilayered re-invention of tradition. Undertaking a similar task, Ho Chak Law points out that ethnomusicological analysis of female singing voices in Yellow Earth inspires discussions linking the film's plot, soundtrack, stylistic features, and ethnological representation to the history of appropriating and imagining folk culture in modern China.

Related to Stenberg's and Law's endeavors, the third recurring theme is multimedia and intertextual engagements of Chinese film with literature, music, performance arts, and visual cultures. Teaching Hero alongside classical texts, novels, and TV dramas, Shirley O. Lua demonstrates how important wuxia themes such as honor and gallantry persist and evolve in transmedia storytelling. In Yanshuo Zhang's class on multicultural China, premodern visual portrayals of the Miao people provide valuable background knowledge for analyzing modern ethnographic accounts. Lily Li's chapter juxtaposes the mermaid imagery in Suzhou River with Anderson's fairy tale The Little Mermaid, the Chinese opera film Chasing the Carp, and the Czech film Rusalka, which altogether presents Suzhou River as "a cultural hybrid" with "Western or other non-Chinese elements as integral precedents" (p. 217).

Integrating multimedia materials also helps to "bridge the language-culture divide" and enhances Chinese language pedagogy (p. 256). In Jin Liu's chapter, analyzing the water imagery in Shower is enriched through excerpts from Daodejing, which seamlessly transitions to Bruce Lee's philosophy of water about Kungfu and the Confucian concept of ren in Ip Man. In another advanced-level course designed by Jingjing Cai and Su-I Chen, multimedia resources of film, clips, and film reviews introduce varied language registers to balance intensive and extensive learning. Both cases argue that intercultural competence is reciprocally related to language proficiency, with Chinese film serving as a vital yet often overlooked resource.

The volume's fourth thread is a student-centered approach that values empirical knowledge and the importance of viewing positionality. This involves redefining the instructor's authoritative role while empowering a diverse student body as active contributors to knowledge production. Changing classroom demographics, with a mix of international students from China and non-Chinese students, introduces various cultural backgrounds and expectations. Angie Chau advocates for class discussions that acknowledge differences both between and within these two groups. Moments of emotionally varied responses are seen as opportunities to transform binary thinking into meaningful self-reflections. To "make foreign films less foreign" (p. 301), Corey Kai Nelson Schultz's phenomenological approach integrates viewing experiences with film theory and close analysis. Students are invited to make sense of their feelings and use them as a foundation to explore the "structure of feelings" elicited by cinematic scenes. Active learning in Marjorie Dryburgh's chapter engages students emotionally, imaginatively, and intellectually. Immersing in the filmic world through the perspectives of peripheral characters allows students to uncover alternative possibilities in historiography.

Last and by no means the least, the twenty-one contributions collectively practice non-reductive and generative comparison. Susan Friedman's article "Why Not Compare?" summarizes the intellectual and ethical dilemma posed by this foundational method in humanities research.¹ Uncritical comparison risks ethnocentrism, epistemological instrumentalism, and decontextualization that reaffirm dominant cultural structures as standards; yet completely rejecting the method could reify particularity, fantasize the local, and foreclose possibilities of intercultural communication. Hence, Friedman advocates for "a contradictory pull between the particular and the abstract, between identification of parallels and insistence on contrasts" (p. 758). This mode of comparison enables "cognitive capacity to conceptualize, generalize, and see patterns of similarity as part of a broadly systematic form of thinking" (p. 756).

Elaine Chung's chapter on Korean films and their Chinese remakes exemplifies this comparative knowledge. By analyzing similarities and differences, students interpret the in/commensurability of the two societies through the circuit-of-culture framework and test critical concepts such as transnational cinema and neoliberalism. Creative juxtapositions in this volume recontextualize classical films within new temporal, national, ideological, and textual frameworks, liberate ethnic minorities from a binary framework of cultural formations, link texts across media, genres, disciplines, and cultures, and reposition Chinese film as "a node or point of connections" (p. 30).

Ultimately, the volume itself embodies a comparative endeavor. Teaching films from the PRC in non-Chinese contexts promises to deliver divergent cultures, values, knowledge systems, and social structures, which requires students to critically engage with and navigate differences. While globalization elicits the perception of familiarity with other cultures and regions, this apparent understanding is frequently shaped by informational silos that perpetuate illusions of homogenization and reinforce nativism, nationalism, and racism. Defamiliarization fostered through "deep comparison," as demonstrated in the volume, brings a critical disruption that questions entrenched norms and naturalized notions.

While Teaching Film from the People's Republic of China presents impressive breadth and depth, the editors note a few omissions, including queer cinema, Hollywood's influences, cinematic adaptations, and animation. I would add two more subcategories: first, exploring "useful cinema," such as science education films, to provide new perspectives on cinematic aesthetics and utility; second, focusing on main melody films, which, though briefly discussed in the introduction through Wolf Warrior 2, deserve deeper analysis to illuminate their function as tools of China's soft power and trace a fuller genealogy of revolutionary cinema. Beyond Hollywood's impact, transnational ties with the Third World, such as Albanian, Cuban, or North Korean films, could integrate Chinese film into "minor transnationalism" and shed light on postcolonial discourses. In addition, the transmedia perspective could be enriched by examining interactions between film and new media, such as short video platforms. On a practical level, the inclusion of course materials, resource lists, prompt questions, assignments, and student samples makes the book a user-friendly reference. Adding an index would further improve usability, allowing readers to easily locate discussions on specific films, themes, or theories. Despite these minor gaps, this seminal book makes a foundational contribution and paves the way for future projects on Republican-era and Sinophone film.