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This article takes the political campaign against  The life of Wu Xun  ( Wu Xun zhuan , 1950), launched by Mao Zedong in 1951, as a point of departure to explore the intertwining relationship between cinema and the new historiography in post-1949 China. While the criticisms of  The life of Wu Xun  highlighted the central role of peasant warfare in imperial Chinese history and thereby resulted in the growing popularity of the class view in Chinese historiography, the making of two other films set in the Qing dynasty,  Song Jingshi  (1955) and  Lin Zexu  (1959), attested to a tension between two historiographical trends in Mao’s China: the class view and historicism. This article argues that the entanglement of historians and non-historians, including filmmakers, allowed for the making of a history-centred public space of communication for both historians and laypersons alike to resort to China’s past to make sense of the present and even attack Mao. Second, such a mode of history- qua -political discussion and polemic paved the way for the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution. In the mid-1960s, the tension between two historiographical trends would finally lead to the purge of historical researchers, filmmakers, writers and dramatists during the Cultural Revolution.

Wu Xun , Song Jingshi and Lin Zexu : Cinema and Historiography in Mao’s China (1949-1966)