A teahouse in Shanghai, and a year called the first

Chinese cinema, the notes say, is hard to separate from the times around it, and so it is usually read by generations of directors. The opening sketch is of a market that had grown large: box office of some seven billion dollars or more, they write, around sixty percent of the American figure that they call the world’s first. Capital from China was also going into American films. In 2019, they note, Tencent invested in the Academy Award winner Green Book, and Bona invested in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, which was nominated for Best Picture. Those sums and that year stay in the window the notes give, not recast as a later official total.

After the Lumière screening of 1895, they write, film reached China quickly, and the first showing there was in a Shanghai teahouse. In 1905 the documentary Dingjunshan, shot by Chinese people, is treated as the start of Chinese cinema, and that year as its first year. Before 1911, most production and exhibition was still in foreign hands, and the first dedicated cinema was opened by a foreigner as well. In 1913 a first dramatic film, which the notes title That Husband and That Wife, was released. Two studios are named as typical: Shangwu Yinshuguan, oriented toward art films, and Mingxing, toward popular ones. Wuxia, they argue, found an audience because people in hard years wanted to escape the present and to believe in a hero.

From the New Culture Movement to a decade of propaganda

The New Culture Movement, in this account, set new literature and a new morality against a Confucian view of the world, and later led into the May Fourth Movement of 4 May 1919. In the 1930s, they write, Chinese cinema took root as an industry, carried ideology, and matured as art, against a background of capitalist growth and the rise of Shanghai. Then came the Cultural Revolution. For ten years from 1966, values that stepped outside Maoism were treated as the enemy, and film shrank as it had not before. The films of that stretch, they say, told simple stories of confrontation, left realism behind, and ran to only about seven or eight propaganda titles a year. Those counts are left as the notes record them.

The Fifth Generation, the Sixth, and a market called Chinese-speaking

After the Tiananmen Square protests of 1976 and the death of Mao Zedong, the notes write, a new history began. With reform and opening, the Fifth Generation of directors drew the world’s eye, and, they say, helped people see that Chinese film had a character of its own and that its variety ought to be spoken freely. The Sixth Generation turned again toward the spaces in which reality and the individual still stood. Economic cooperation with Hong Kong and Taiwan, in this telling, sped the knitting-together of a single Chinese-speaking film market, and Xi Jinping’s Chinese Dream is also expected, the notes add, to leave a mark on the industry. The same Korean report, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. The notes, a student account of Chinese cinema by director generation, with the box-office and production figures left as the notes record them.

Last updated: 15 November 2026