From Manchuria to Shanghai: Transborder Infrastructure Enabled the Mobility of Early Chinese Socialist Filmmakers, 1930–1953

Abstract This study examines the migration trajectories of early Chinese filmmakers, focusing on the role of transnational infrastructure in facilitating industrial mobility and reshaping the landscape of the film industry. By tracing the relocation of film production from Changchun to Beijing and Shanghai, this paper explores how colonial-era infrastructures (such as railways, cable, and film institutions) provided the material foundation for filmmaking and were subsequently transformed or replaced during China’s socialist industrialization. This study argues that filmmakers’ migration reflected shifts in political ideology and underscored their dependence on, reconstruction of, and reproduction of transnational infrastructure. Through an analysis of the role of Manchukuo’s film infrastructure and personnel deployment, the Soviet influence on China’s film industry infrastructure, and socialist filmmakers’ reimagining of transnational infrastructure, this paper further elucidates how these infrastructures shaped the spatial distribution of film production and the evolution of its technological systems.