"Documentary film was central to the direction of twentieth-century Chinese revolutionary politics and in how the Chinese came to understand their social and political realities. Frequently dismissed as propaganda, documentaries in China played a complex and integral role in mediating and shaping particular paths of revolution from the nationalist government of Sun Yat-Sen to the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution. Far from having a fixed view of the world, Ying Qian argues that the Chinese state and state ideologies were unstable and in constant flux, only becoming actualized in concrete social processes and through media and mediation. Examining a wide range of documentaries, including educational, industrial, and scientific films, Qian places documentary filmmaking in the context of other institutions in a revolutionary and modernizing China. She considers how documentary films proposed different visions of leadership, industrialization, labor, ethnicity as well as China's relationship to the world, and the politics of history and remembering. Ultimately, her book proposes a new way of understanding documentaries in relation to political networks and social infrastructures to reveal cinema's participation in arenas conventionally considered quite separate to provide a better understanding of media's role in revolutionary processes"--