Socialist Chronopolitics: Cine-Ethnography and Stagism at China’s Borders, 1956-1965

Public Talk w/ Ying Qian (Columbia University)

//Friday, February 20, 2026

//2:00 PM

//GEM Lab, 630.15

//1250 rue Guy

This project takes ethnographic documentary filmmaking in Yunnan in the late 1950s and early 1960s as a point of departure to think about filmmaking as a chronopolitical technology employed by state and local actors to contest over conflicting regimes and experiences of time during China’s socialist transition. I focus my analysis on two films, The Wa (Wa Zu, 1958, 50 minutes) and Serfdom of the Sibsongbanna Dai (Xishuangbanna daizu nongnu shehui, 1962, 120 minutes). Attending to indigenous participation in the filmmaking, their tactics of negotiation, cooption of stagist developmentalism, and assertion of local temporal epistemologies, I show that these films, made under different political circumstances and formally distinct from each other, reveal complex and divergent temporal operations associated with the state’s incorporation of population and resources in the ethnic border regions.

As a scholar of cinema and media, Ying Qian is interested in the role of media and mediation in shaping politics, forming knowledge, and connecting realms of experience. Her first book, Revolutionary Becomings: Documentary Media in Twentieth-Century China (Columbia University Press, 2024) excavates documentary’s multi-faceted productivities in China’s revolutionary movements, from the toppling of the Qing Empire in 1911 to the political campaigns and mass protests in the Mao and post-Mao eras. It approaches documentary as an “eventful medium,” and as a prism to examine the mutual constitution of media and revolution: how revolutionary movements gave rise to specific media practices, and how these media practices in turn contributed to the specific paths of revolution’s actualization. This book has won the Lionel Trilling Book Award from Columbia College, and the best book in journalism history award from the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC). Ying Qian’s articles have appeared in positions: asia critique, Critical Inquiry, New Left Review, China Perspectives, New Literary History of Modern China, Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinemas, and other journals and websites. She is also the co-editor (with Nicholas Bartlett) of a special issue, Neng 能 and China’s Long 1980s (positions: asia critique, 33.3 August 2025).