About Chin Chin Screen

Chin Chin Screen

Chin Chin Screen, in Chinese Qingqing Dianying, was a Shanghai film magazine published by the Qingqing Publishing House. It holds a singular distinction in Chinese publishing history: modern scholarship identifies it as the longest-lasting film magazine in China before the founding of the People's Republic in 1949. Its publication life, documented in the catalogue of the Paul Kendel Fonoroff Collection at the University of California, Berkeley, ran from a first issue on 15 April 1934 to a final cessation on 31 October 1951 — through five separate runs interrupted by war and political change. It served Shanghai's film fans with star coverage, film publicity and an intimate readers' correspondence that modern researchers still mine as evidence of Republican-era fan culture.

The longest-lasting film magazine of Republican China

The context for Chin Chin Screen's record is the extraordinary profusion of the Republican film press. The Complete Catalog of Chinese Modern Film Periodicals records 376 different film magazines published and distributed in China before 1949, most of them short-lived. The scholarly volume Global Movie Magazine Networks singles out two noteworthy and long-running cases that combined the trade, scholarly and fan elements of that press: the bestselling Movietone (Diansheng) and Chin Chin Screen, which it names the longest-lasting film magazine before the founding of the People's Republic. Longevity in that market was an achievement: magazines depended on a film industry centred in one city, on paper supply and advertising, and on a readership whose city was invaded in 1937, fought over again in the civil war and transformed in 1949. Chin Chin Screen's seventeen-year span, even with its interruptions, had no parallel among its competitors.

Publication history in five runs

The Berkeley catalogue, based on the Fonoroff Collection's holdings, reconstructs the magazine's complicated life in detail. It began as a monthly, small in format at 18.7 centimetres, with a first issue dated 15 April 1934; the first run ceased with volume 2, number 10 on 20 November 1935. It revived on 5 March 1937 as a semimonthly in a larger 26-centimetre format, with editors including Yan Ciping and He Zuoming, and ceased with year 3, number 8 on 1 January 1938 — a run broken by the outbreak of war in Shanghai in 1937. It revived again on 4 April 1939, now as a weekly, with Yan Ciping as editor, and continued to year 5, number 42 on 1 December 1940, with holdings extending into 1941. A wartime revival began on 1 September 1944 under the publishing house's editorial department, running to number 7 in July 1945, with Du Ao as chief editor from April 1945 and a "victory special issue" among its numbers. The final revival began on 1 June 1947, again with Yan Ciping as chief editor, and carried the magazine through the civil war and the founding of the People's Republic to year 19, number 20, dated 31 October 1951, when it ceased for good.

Editors and publisher

Throughout its life the magazine was published in Shanghai by the Qingqing Publishing House (Qingqing Chubanshe), whose editorial department is credited directly on some runs. The named editors give the title unusual continuity. Yan Ciping appears at the head of the magazine in March 1937, again in April 1939, and again as chief editor of the postwar revival from June 1947 — a span of a decade across war and revolution. He Zuoming shared the editorship in 1937, and Du Ao served as chief editor in the final wartime phase from April 1945. Such continuity of personnel helps explain the magazine's ability to revive: in a trade where titles were typically the projects of small, personal publishing houses, the Qingqing house preserved the title, the format knowledge and presumably the reader relationships that made each relaunch possible.

Content: stars, publicity and the readers' mailbox

Chin Chin Screen was a fan magazine. It served Shanghai's film audience with star coverage and film publicity through the Republican era, and its characteristic features are visible in the examples modern scholarship quotes from its pages. In 1939 it published "A Catalogue of the Most Updated Male and Female Stars' Addresses" (volume 8, number 21), telling fans where their idols could be written to. Its readers' mailbox columns carried the traffic in the other direction: a 1948 issue's "Readers' Mailbox: Addresses of Female Stars" shows the feature still running in the magazine's final years, and similar mailbox pages in rival magazines printed stars' birthdays and addresses in answer to fans' letters. These features are precisely why historians value the magazine: they document the practices of the yingmi, the film fans, who wrote, collected and organised around the star system, and they show a magazine functioning as the switchboard of that fan culture — supplying the information that allowed admiration at a distance to become correspondence and community.

Fan culture and the Shanghai star system

Chin Chin Screen's readers lived in the capital of Chinese cinema. Shanghai in the 1930s was earning its name as the Hollywood of the East; its studios had created China's first star system, and its actresses — Butterfly Wu (Hu Die), Ruan Lingyu and their peers — were national celebrities whose photographs filled the covers of the film press. After the country's first feature productions in 1921, a print culture grew up to forge a local pantheon of stars while also celebrating the top talents of Hollywood. Magazines were the machinery of that culture: relatively inexpensive, quick to respond to the industry's changes, and sold across urban China. Chin Chin Screen's survival through the decade meant that it chronicled the star system in its golden age, through the sound transition, and into the wartime and postwar years when the industry itself moved, fragmented and finally came under a new political order. The magazine's wartime "victory special" of 1945 and its continuation to 1951 — two years into the People's Republic, when independent movie magazines were disappearing as covers turned from celebrities to political subjects — mark the end of that era in a single title's run.

Survival in collections

Very little primary evidence from China's earliest decades of filmmaking survives, which makes the preserved record of Chin Chin Screen valuable. The Fonoroff Collection at Berkeley holds an extensive run — hundreds of issues across all five periods, from the 1934 first volume to the 1951 final numbers — catalogued by volume and year in the library's exhibition of the collection. Chin Chin Screen is also, with Movietone, one of the two major Chinese film periodicals documented in the China collection of the Media History Digital Library, giving researchers digital access to its pages. Paul Fonoroff's book Chinese Movie Magazines: From Charlie Chaplin to Chairman Mao, 1921-1951, drawn from his collection of over 500 covers from some 300 magazines, traces the evolution of this print culture through political and social upheaval to its demise in the 1950s — a periodisation that Chin Chin Screen's own dates, 1934 to 1951, fit almost exactly.

Why the magazine matters to scholarship

For film historians, Chin Chin Screen is a longitudinal source: a single fan magazine whose pages can be followed across the sound era, the war against Japan, the civil war and the arrival of the People's Republic. Its address catalogues and mailbox columns are quoted in current research on how the Hollywood star system was localised in China and how fans participated in it. Its bibliographic record — formats shrinking and growing, frequencies shifting from monthly to semimonthly to weekly as the market allowed — is a material history of Republican publishing in miniature. And its simple record, the longest life of any pre-1949 Chinese film magazine, makes it the natural benchmark against which the brevity of its 375 competitors is measured.

Legacy

Chin Chin Screen was never the largest of Shanghai's film magazines — that distinction belonged to bestsellers such as Movietone — but it was the most durable. Published by a small Shanghai house, edited for a decade by Yan Ciping, revived four times after suspension, it outlived the Republic that created it and published into the third year of the People's Republic before ceasing in October 1951. Its legacy is the archive it left: the longest continuous thread in Chinese film-magazine history before 1949, preserved at Berkeley and in the Media History Digital Library, through which the fan culture of Republican cinema can still be read in its own words.