The Picture as a Moving Image

For some longtime locals in Shanghai, China, street propaganda’s periodic renovations muddle the distinction between still and moving images. When the cyclic changing of propaganda pieces began to acquire filmic qualities for those who bore witness, they made recourse to these narrative and episodic properties to critique their experiences of political instability. Their discourses implicate media forms as genres of experiencing political transformation. Moreover, their refusal of still images in favor of fungible, overlapping filmic sequences lends ethnographic texture to ongoing scholarly debates about how to historicize the nonlinear development of contemporary Chinese politics, especially under the analytic of “postsocialism.”