The Might of the People: Counter-Espionage Films and Participatory Surveillance in the Early PRC

Lu, Xiaoning

Abstract

The increasing penetration of surveillance technology in everyday life as well as the widespread concern for national security in the face of global terrorism in the past decade has not only boosted surveillance studies in general but also fostered critical attention on surveillance cinema. Aside from film narratives and the new realist aesthetics informed by pervasive surveillance in contemporary societies, issues pertaining to the mutual implication of cinema and surveillance are of particular interest to film and media scholars. For instance, Sébastien Léfait in his study of contemporary film and television programs suggests that cinema engages surveillance structurally through its fictional creation of surveillance microcosms. In the meantime, by being a reality-capturing device, the cinematic apparatus “translates the problem of the ambiguity of the visible into terms of mediated watching,” which is also a matter at the heart of surveillance (ix). Similarly, Catherine Zimmer states that surveillance cinema is not simply one of the recurring tropes or iconographies of surveillance, but also concerns “the multiple mediations that occur through the cinematic narration of surveillance, through which practices of surveillance become representational and representational practices become surveillant” (2).

Citation

Lu, X. (2017). The Might of the People: Counter-Espionage Films and Participatory Surveillance in the Early PRC. In K. Fang (Ed.), Surveillance in Asian Cinema: Under Eastern Eyes (13-32). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315647708

• Acceptance Date: Mar 22, 2025
• Online Publication Date: Feb 24, 2017
• Publication Date: Feb 24, 2017
• Deposit Date: Feb 20, 2019
• Publicly Available Date: Feb 20, 2019
• Publisher: Routledge
• Pages: 13-32
• Book Title: Surveillance in Asian Cinema: Under Eastern Eyes
• ISBN: 9781317298816
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315647708
• Keywords: Surveillance subject, Panopticon, national security, PRC, Chinese cinema