Engineers of the New Chromatic World

Abstract

What color was the Chinese revolution designed, conducted, and experienced in? How was it implemented, historicized, remembered? This dissertation is a new media history of modern China from socialism to globalization. The new nation’s (1949) utopian image yearned to be constructed in color, complementing the unification of socialist ideology with an independent aesthetic horizon, and here, colors adorned almost every material surface. This dissertation brings together three major color media technologies – photography, cinema, and television – uncovering their complex roles in national construction as protagonists of intellectual discourse, grassroots practice, representational politics, and industrial development. I advance a materially based framework of photo-chemical entanglement as the conceptual and historical guide. Connections between color and chemistry are governed by valences of the verb "ran" 染: to dye, to color, to implicate and infect, a sentiment that ideologically charged national color projects at their inception, and practices that prefigured environmental, geopolitical, and social consequences on a longer duration. Color’s scattered media-industrial legacies coalescence into a “chromatic historiography” of Chinese socialist modernity, imbricated in great successes and catastrophic failures on the world stage. Efforts to materialize chromatic utopia called for sophisticated inventions in the field of chemical sciences and engineering. I thus treat media as sets of historical relations among scientific processes, production cultures, and human agents, constructing a dual “chemical historiography” re-mapping the contours of media politics across half a century of watershed transformations. While canonical studies of revolution and its afterlives have centered on politics, social change, and artistic movements, I propose a radical reorientation of revolutionary subjectivity by focusing on various groups of engineers dedicated to decades-long pursuit of color media. Theoretically, this project elevates chromatic engineers to co-producers of a theory of Chinese history in their labors as artists, writers, and scientists interlocked in various scales of grand social engineering. Each chapter highlights a certain group of color engineers and makes a case for the operate verb “coloring,” ran. Chapter one discusses hand-colored photo practices of the socialist era, arguing that the ubiquity of professional colorists countermands the preeminence of indexicality theories in visual studies, which have ignored a major category of cultural laborers. Chapter two excavates the birth of a nativist color film discourse underpinning PRC ideology and aesthetics. I unearth and evaluate the significance of specific hues, tones, and perceptual models brought forth by cinematographer-writers of the time, placing them in dialogue with canonical paradigms of “hot/Cold war; hot/cold media” with new insights into cinematic sensation, perception, and spectatorship extending into the 1990s. Chapter three combines scientific-industrial history with media archaeology, tracing 50 years of vicissitudes at the Baoding Film Stock Factory, an experimental research institution that enshrined the city of Baoding as China’s color capital by way of consumer color rolls, papers and acrylics that dominated domestic markets in the 1990s. My exploration of color TV in chapter four is a sociology of science, charting color’s genesis in national broadcast projects to the images, economies, and mechanics of the first batches of consumer sets. I conclude with how the mass recycling of analogue color media informs a prehistory of the moniker “plastic China.” The juncture of color, science, materiality, and labor takes methodological cues from media-infrastructure and ecological approaches, attending to broader comparative dialogues on 1950s transnationalism, 1970s revolution and 1990s globalization. Chromatic media’s aesthetics and politics are inextricably linked to parallel practices in chemical engineering, resulting in corresponding practices of social and political engineering. As such, this dissertation is likewise a study in of modern China’s histories of sensation. As actors in broader industrial networks, China’s color engineers also played a large part in steering the longevity of modernity’s most influential media cultures through several erratic historical transitions, thereby constructing previously unlinked networks of affect. Attending to these relationships gradually breaks with those eternal images of “Red China,” and the violent intellectual legacies they carry.