There is an extensive body of literature about the mass culture of Maoist China (1950s–1970s), but less often examined are the various human agents who were involved in building, expanding and ultimately sustaining a nation-wide film network at a time when technology was scarce and infrastructure poor. Jie Li's timely monograph, Cinematic Guerillas: Propaganda, Projectionists, and Audiences in Socialist China, therefore stands out as an important work of scholarship that aims to recover this unwritten chapter in the history of Chinese cinema from the perspective of the grassroots. Through a theoretically informed analysis of previously untapped archival materials and a vast collection of oral-history interviews, Li argues in her book that film exhibition and reception in Maoist China functioned as a “guerrilla media network woven of human agents” (p. 26). As the political-ritualistic value and exhibition value of the moving image synergized in the wake of this media revolution sweeping across the country, such a guerrilla film network significantly reshaped the socialist subject's perceptions of cinema and propaganda across “material and spiritual, bodily and social, quasi-militaristic and quasi-religious aspects” (p. 26).

Central to Li's theoretical premise is that the human labour invested in film exhibition and reception during the high socialist period of the 1950s–1970s should not only be historically contextualized but must also be understood as a vital factor in the integration of a once-scattered rural population into a revolutionary collective with a heightened political spirit. Drawing on Mao Zedong's famous remark on guerrilla warfare, which emphasized the reconciliation of local improvisation and central organization during military battles in the 1930s and 1940s, Li proposes the concept of “cinematic guerrillas” to pinpoint the ways in which various human agents took part in this national guerrilla film network (p. 5). Over the course of the book, Li identifies three interrelated dimensions of the so-called “cinematic guerrillas”: the guerrilla heroes represented on screen (introduction and chapter six), the mobile projectionists who brought cinema to the rural masses through their embodied practices of film exhibition both within and beyond the physical setting of a township cinema (chapters one to four), and grassroots audiences in both rural and urban areas who embraced the experience of moviegoing with guerrilla tactics and responded to the film texts with heteroglossic interpretations (chapters five to eight).

Another major theoretical intervention of this book is Li's religious framing of Maoist propaganda, or what she refers to as “revolutionary spirit mediumship.” To unravel the interdependent and mutually influencing relationship between cinema and propaganda in Maoist China, Li deploys the concept of “revolutionary spirit mediumship” to describe how the propagandist practices of the high socialist era, especially those that were carried out in the vast countryside, incorporated elements of traditional religiosities while giving rise to new political religiosities during the process (p. 20). Perhaps the most illuminating example of this argument is found in Li's analyses of the mobile projectionists, a particular kind of “ritual specialist” that is not only extensively addressed in chapters two to four, but also frequently brought up in other chapters. Diverging from existing discussions of the Maoist mobile projectionists, most notably in Xiaoning Lu's Moulding the Socialist Subject (Brill, 2020) and Chenshu Zhou's Cinema Off Screen (University of California Press, 2021), Li reminds us that the projectionists’ guerrilla tactics of film exhibition and their on-the-spot improvisation of local resources were also ritualistic acts and live performances that resembled religious practices. In the service of the state project as well as the enhancement of the Mao cult, Li contends, the mobile projectionists’ “electrified mediation and embodied mediumship of propaganda” helped mobilize the previously neglected rural population amid the incessant purges and political campaigns across Maoist China (p. 29).

Li, whose book foregrounds “guerilla” as an overarching concept that denotes the versatile and participatory manifestations of this film network, aptly describes her own research methodology as guerilla-like: it is “characterized by mobile and versatile fieldwork of ‘going to the people’” and an “openness to changing perspectives, circumstantial discoveries, and local knowledge” (p. 31). This guerrilla methodology is best demonstrated by an extensive collection of oral-history interviews with former moviegoers, mobile projectionists, film company managers and more over the span of some seven years. In addition to conducting oral-history interviews with more than 160 participants, Li's ethnographic approach – oftentimes underexplored in Chinese film studies – also asserts a strong guerrilla ethos. For instance, Li's participant observation includes detailed descriptions of the equipment carried by mobile projectionists ranging from not only projectors and power generators, but also wooden clappers, lantern slides and more, enabling the author to weave the embodied experiences of these cinematic guerrillas back into the larger social and political fabric of the high socialist period when film screenings sometimes meant political preaching conveyed through live performances and other theatrical repertoires alike (for example, see chapter two).

Li's sophisticated archival scholarship both detects and exposes historical nuances throughout the book. Since the focal point of this book is the thriving film culture nourished by dedicated mobile projectionists and enthusiastic countryside moviegoers, Li naturally directs much of her critical attention toward rural film exhibition and reception. Nevertheless, this discussion would certainly benefit from a more extensive inquiry into the inevitable tensions caused by the uneven access to cinema among different political and social groups, often due to the deeply polarized urban–rural divide permeating Maoist China: did this disparity of cinematic infrastructure affect the ways in which these audiovisual products were consumed by their respective audiences? How can we understand this hierarchical tendency that appears embedded within the Maoist film network, and which reflects a wider polarization between the city and the country during this period? By evoking such salient questions, Li's work gestures beyond its own scope, providing solid ground for future inquiries and inviting scholars of Maoist film history to further explore the uneven distribution of cinema and other media resources.

A theoretically rigorous analysis complemented by extensive fieldwork research, Cinematic Guerrillas offers a new conceptual framework for understanding the history of film exhibition and reception in Maoist China. Li's book does not dwell upon canonized film texts, nor does it deploy a top-down account of Maoist cinema as a centralized and standardized product of state intervention. Instead, Li exquisitely restores the memories and testimonies of mobile projectionists and audience members, who elaborated on various guerrilla tactics to reshape their relation with cinema in ways compatible with their surrounding social-political environment and infrastructural realities. Li's pursuit of the centrality of humans to Maoist cinema studies brings the much-needed visibility to the creative agency and spectatorial subjectivity of those cinematic guerrillas. As Cinematic Guerrillas makes clear, those who took part in this national film network were not passive executors of state agenda nor mere observants of filmic spectacles onscreen, but active agents and practitioners who responded to and engaged in the localization, popularization and, most importantly, mobilization of Maoism at the grassroots.