3: Shooting Enemies on Location: Cine-photographic Policing and Media Militarism in Wartime China

In an effort to respond to ongoing concerns about global militarized cultures in a digital age and the forensic turn in contemporary art and media studies, this paper rethinks how media practices confront and enact militarization in 1940s China. The paper focuses on two military media projects which are critical to the foundational decades of early Chinese Communist Party (CCP) filmmaking and image (re)production. One is the photojournalistic work exemplified in the communist-controlled Jin-Cha-Ji military region’s Jinchaji Pictorial and other periodicals of the time (1942–48); the other one is a documentary from the understudied film project Democratic Northeast (1947–49) that involved and depicted the operations of the Northeast People’s Liberation Army in Manchuria. The two cases constitute a prelude to the Chinese socialist image warfare that was performed more broadly and systematically across political campaigns after the founding of the People’s Republic of China. Juxtaposing the two projects reveals their shared mechanism: what I call the exposure complex (in conversation with Tony Bennett’s “the exhibitionary complex” and Wasson and Grieveson’s “cinema’s military-industrial complex”), through which photographic and cinematic encounters became the actual practice of military-policing and exorcising class enemies. Overall, the paper suggests that the cine-photographic rendered class struggle as a set of penal spectacles and punitive encounters, large and small, material and mediated, producing the banality of the wartime and displacing military justice and (post-)war justice with class justice, or rather, revolutionary justice coded in “class.”