Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review E-Journal No. 16 (September 2015) • (http://cross-currents.berkeley.edu/e-journal/issue-16) Regional Cultural Enterprises and Cultural Markets in Early Republican China: The Motion Picture as Case Study Matthew D. Johnson, Grinnell College Abstract The transition of the motion picture from foreign amusement to local enterprise was primarily the result of transnational commercial activity linking investors, entrepreneurs, and entertainment professionals. Amid the ongoing urbanization of China’s early Republican period, the enterprises emerging from this activity became increasingly profitable and, as a result, film production and exhibition became regularized phenomena, rooted in identifiable genres and standardized approaches to engaging audiences within the immersive space of the theater. By the early 1920s, those closest to the nascent industry were eager to legitimize its power by portraying the medium as a tool for political and social reform. However, commercial strategies and aesthetics remained relatively undisturbed despite this progressive rhetoric. In geographic terms, motion picture– related enterprises and culture remained strongly regional: affected and constrained by the non- Chinese national industries operating in politically divided China, by competing forms of local popular culture, and by existing geographies of exchange and infrastructure. The early Republican “experimental” period in Chinese cinema was, from an enterprise-centered perspective, one of numerous coexisting subnational cultural centers and zones. Keywords: modern Chinese history, Republican era (1911–1949), business history, cultural geography, Sino-foreign enterprise, media change, cinema, motion pictures (production and exhibition), film theaters, popular culture To Chinese audiences before 1907, the motion picture was a foreign-created amusement that depicted strange lands and scenes and was consumed as a foreign curiosity. In the waning years of the Qing empire, this state of affairs began to change. Though concentrated at first in zones of foreign control, the technology radiated outward into the world of theatrical and street-level amusements frequented by urbanites and those from surrounding areas. Exhibiting films became one of many modern trades built on commercial transportation links between distant urban centers and the gradual electrification of urban life (Strand 2000). China’s late imperial and early