My research traces the material and epistemic afterlives of an under-examined media form in Chinese film history: the science and education film (科教片). Produced under state commission starting from the socialist era, these films were circulated by major studios in Beijing, Shanghai, Changchun, Guangzhou, and elsewhere, as part of a massive pedagogical media complex. Their purpose was educational and sometimes didactic—to disseminate scientific and ideological knowledge to both the urban but also a predominantly rural and largely illiterate population—and their reach extended to millions of people. At its height, this genre was not peripheral but infrastructural: a primary vehicle for translating the ambitions of socialist modernity into an audio-visual vernacular.

Today, this genre has largely faded from public consciousness in China. One might argue that it has "disappeared in communication" [1] —not through forced erasure, but through the gradual erosion of the material and affective infrastructures that once sustained its visibility and relevance. Its disappearance is symptomatic of broader shifts in media ecologies and communicative regimes: the film-based infrastructure that once supported knowledge dissemination has been overtaken by digital platforms and algorithmic circulation, rendering this formerly central mode of cultural transmission nearly obsolete. And yet, its archive still promises.

Building on Anjali Arondekar’s reflections on the epistemic anxieties surrounding colonial archives—especially her critique of the empiricist tendencies often present in efforts to recover minoritized histories—she reminds us that “the critical challenge is to imagine a practice of archival reading that incites relationships between the seductions of recovery and the occlusions such retrieval mandates.” [2] With this in mind, I invoke the notion of the post-socialist archive—if such a term can be mobilized—not as a stable repository of facts or a coherent narrative, but as a field marked by partial access, infrastructural decay, and stubborn inaccessibility. The post-socialist archive is characterized less by what it contains than by what remains inaccessible, ephemeral, or dislocated. In this ongoing project, I follow Arondekar’s methodological imperative to shift the analytical focus from the archive as an object to the ongoing processes and practices of archiving.

More precisely, this project approaches Chinese socialism through its disappeared and reappeared cinematic objects, with a desire shaped not only by historical inquiry but also by the limitations and seductions of the archive itself. Access to socialist-era film, especially genres deemed marginal or utilitarian, remains notoriously difficult. This issue of inaccessibility was earlier noted by Matthew Johnson [3] and more recently by Qian Ying [4]. But this difficulty is not merely logistical—it is also epistemological. What kind of archive does a recuperative desire for socialist media produce? What does it mean to read their disappearance not as a void to be filled, but as a historical trace in itself?

Rural Hinterland

It was precisely this tension—between presence and absence, visibility and decay—that led me to an unlikely site: a village in rural Henan. During fieldwork, a vendor mentioned a community where villagers had developed a kind of informal economy around obsolete film equipment—old projectors and discarded prints from the Maoist era. 

Henan, a province in PRC today recognized as both an agricultural powerhouse and a major source of migrant labor, occupies a paradoxical position in China’s longue durée. Known contemporarily as a locus of agricultural production and a principal site of internal labor migration, it was historically the nucleus of imperial statecraft and dynastic consolidation. 

Economists have long considered Henan a keystone in the history of Chinese political economy. As Chao-Ting Chi once noted, the development of centralized state power in premodern China hinged on control over agrarian regions with the capacity to supply consistent grain tribute. These “key economic areas,” as Chi described them, were indispensable to dynastic consolidation and military expansion [5]. Henan’s legacy as a core agricultural zone, equipped with historically advanced irrigation and water-control systems, continues to shape its economic profile and social structure to this day.

The socialist period rearticulated Henan’s economic and symbolic significance. Amid the geopolitical reconfigurations of the Cold War and the rupture of the Sino-Soviet alliance, the province became a paradigmatic site for Maoist developmentalism. The Red Flag Canal, constructed in the early 1960s through mass peasant mobilization, became emblematic of the “self-reliance” ethos central to Maoist ideology. Iconographic representations of collective labor—villagers breaking stones, digging irrigation channels, or repairing machinery—were widely circulated as visual affirmations of the mass line in practice. Henan thus functioned as both the stage and subject of socialist modernity, a terrain where the agrarian question was rendered infrastructural and ideologically legible.

Following the onset of market reforms in the late 1970s, Henan’s rural population was re-inscribed into a new economic imaginary—this time as surplus labor in China’s rapidly industrializing coastal zones. Vast numbers of rural migrants entered low-wage urban occupations, ranging from textiles and sanitation to electronics assembly and recycling. It is precisely through this infrastructural marginality that new modes of access emerged. In the course of fieldwork, I discovered that many former peasants, having entered the informal urban recycling economy, began to encounter abandoned regional film repositories and obsolete cinematic equipment. Their physical labor—sorting, dismantling, and transporting analog projection materials—enabled the formation of an emergent vintage media economy. These individuals, often overlooked in histories of Chinese film circulation, functioned as infrastructural intermediaries, facilitating the continued mobility of socialist film prints long after their ideological momentum had passed.

State Cinema, Feral Cinema

When I arrived at the village in the summer of 2024, the cornfields were nearing harvest, their tall stalks swaying in the heat. The landscape conjured the visual memory of the 1965 science and education film Double Cross Hybrid Corn, whose opening sequence features a striking panoramic shot of dense, orderly rows of corn—an image emblematic of both agrarian abundance and the cinematic aesthetics of socialist modernization.

One villager near Kaifeng explained, with marked confidence, that his hometown had become the primary node for circulating secondhand 16mm and 35mm prints in contemporary China. This claim is not without substance. According to local accounts, the trade began in the late 1990s when a family in the village realized the extractive value of discarded cinematic apparatuses—copper wiring, tungsten bulbs, and steel projectors. What began as material salvage soon evolved into an informal business model. Groups of villagers would travel to cities undergoing cinema modernization—facilitated by the digital turn—and offer to dismantle old theaters free of charge in exchange for the right to take possession of analog materials. Back in the village, barns and granaries doubled as storage spaces, where reels of cellouid film were stacked beside bags of grain, and rusting projectors and wooden theater seats occupied open courtyards. Platforms like Xianyu (闲鱼), an online secondhand marketplace, accelerated this process, enabling circulation of film artifacts to collectors, cinephiles, and researchers—myself included.

What I found in the village was not a sealed archive, but a living, and disarticulated one: reels sold as commodities, celluloid film repurposed, fragments of a media form now circulating outside the logistics of institutional preservation. This encounter foregrounds what I have come to think of the post-socialist archive as the dispersed archive: one constituted not by state holdings or official catalogs, but by the accidental afterlives of media in informal economies, private hands, and rural geographies. The science and education film, among the larger volume of revolutionary cinema—so long thought of as a genre of command and clarity—now appears in broken form, raising not the promise of full retrieval but the ethical question of how to read what remains. This is not simply an act of extraction, but of critical proximity: to an object that flickers between presence and disappearance, instruction and debris, ideology and the unconscious traces it leaves behind.

The persistence of socialist media objects within this ecosystem complicates narratives of obsolescence. Rather than fading into irrelevance, film prints and projection equipment continue to circulate as both material residues and speculative commodities. Their reanimation through the labor of migrant villagers challenges dominant paradigms of media history and preservation. Here, the archive is not merely institutional but informal, not a repository of static memory but a dynamic infrastructure maintained by precarious hands. In Henan, the socialist memory is neither wholly forgotten nor nostalgically revived—it is disassembled, repurposed, re-sold, and put back into motion.

Footnotes

[1] Hediger, Hoof, and Zimmermann, Introduction, in Films that Work Harder: The Circulation of Industrial Film, Amsterdam University Press, 2003, p.24.

[2] Arondekar, Anjali. Introduction in For the Record: On Sexuality and Colonial Archive in India, Duke University Press, 2003.

[3] Johnson, Matthew D. “The Science Education Film: Cinematizing Technocracy and Internationalizing Development.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 5:1, 31-53, p.34.

[4] Qian, Ying. Revolutionary Becomings: Documentary Media in Twentieth-Century China, Columbia University Press, 2024. p.169.

[5] Chi, Chao-Ting. Key Economic Areas in Chinese History: As Revealed in the Development of Public Works For Water-Control, Paragon Books Reprint Corp., 1963. p.4.