Before the Platform: Cinephilic Writing and Cultural Labour in Republican China

This paper examines cinephilic writing in Republican China. While scholarship on creative labour often focuses on contemporary, digital, or Euro-American contexts, this paper brings attention to early film-related labour in China, where writing about cinema could be both a passion and a profession. Drawing on archival sources such as the Eastern Times, Pingbao, and Shenbao newspapers, I explore how writers in Republican China engaged in paid film criticism and commentary, which could supplement income or launch intellectual careers. According to my research, some writers even provided false information regarding film history. These commercial dimensions complicate the assumption that (amateur) cinephile labour is always devoted to low or unpaid work, showing instead how early media work operated within market logic.

Additionally, early cinephilic writing obscured social hierarchies by the norm of using pseudonyms and anonymous bylines. These conventions conceal the writer's gender, class, and educational background. Who had the means to write about cinema? Who could circulate as a legitimate critic? And whose perspectives were marginalised or erased?

The circulations of those writings rely on urban environments such as Shanghai teahouses, mobile cinemas, and gardens. These venues also shaped distinct viewing and writing practices that differed from Euro-American models of cinephilia based on art cinema and institutionalised film culture. Apart from treating cinema as an art form, cinephiles in Republican China responded to film as spectacle, social event, and moral discourse.

Finally, this paper aims to recognise the early Chinese cinephilic writing as a legitimate and under-examined form of media labour. Their work translates cinematic experience into discourse, negotiating the boundaries of taste, and participating in the symbolic construction of cinema and cinephilia. By highlighting this historical formation, this paper contributes to the symposium's goal of expanding the conceptual and geographic scope of media work in Asia. I also suggest there is a genealogical connection between early film writing and today's platform-based cinephile practices. By doing so, I aim to challenge linear histories of cinephilia and media labour that centre on the West or the digital present, offering a more layered, comparative perspective on creative work in Asia instead.