Wang Ping and Women’s Cinema in Socialist China: Institutional Practice, Feminist Cultures, and Embedded Authorship

This essay examines Wang Ping, the first Chinese socialist female film director, and her most representative film, The Story of Liubao Village (1957), retheorizing female cinematic authorship as a contingent articulation embedded within dynamic interactions among a multiplicity of historical forces. This analysis addresses critical issues in Chinese studies and cross-cultural feminist analysis: the dismissal of socialist cinema as mere propaganda, the influence of the Cold War on the study of socialist China and women since the 1980s in American academia, and the liberal and radical feminist approaches to gender, which tend to separate gender from other political, social, and cultural practices by adhering to a Western-centered universalism. Methodologically, this essay rehistoricizes and reconstructs the practice of early Chinese socialist cinema (1949–57) as experimental and situates Wang Ping within that dynamic filmmaking context to reconfigure women’s cultural agency as a historical effect of multiforce significations.