Abstract
The 1930s Republican China exhibited a historically determinate and pervasive cultural logic in which children and commodities were consistently linked together as part of a larger narrative of national development. This is attested by the visual and narrative logic of Sun Yu's film Playthings. Often lauded as a classic of Shanghai cinema, Sun Yu's film narrates China's national salvation by way of a seemingly unlikely figure: toys. Released on National Day in 1933 and promoted in the popular press as a call to arms, this particular "toy story" — which focuses on a Chinese toy maker's struggle for survival in the face of imperialist economic encroachment and Japanese military invasion — ingeniously plays on the metonymic relation between toys and the things they represent in order to treat two sociopolitical questions persistently and passionately debated in the popular culture and public discourse of the 1930s: the making of modernized Chinese children, and the evolution of industrial China.
First Page
16
Last Page
24
Recommended Citation
Andrew, F. Jones, Dun Wang, and Yiren Zheng. 2015. "Playthings of History." Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art 35, (3): pp.16-24. https://tsla.researchcommons.org/journal/vol35/iss3/12
