Drawing on what used to be the erstwhile internationalist cultural space of Communist Eurasia, the author reads socialist-era and postsocialist films made in Romania and China as promoting a common aesthetics predicated on the miserabilism of Third Cinema. The book argues that, despite indictments that socialist cultures were saturated with the oppressing ideology of socialist realism in the 1950s and various forms of indoctrination thereafter, in practice, film directors had the leverage to tackle social issues even in those works that are deemed today “propagandist.” Refusing to endorse contemporary theories that seek to align the Romanian and the Chinese New Waves solely to Western cinematic practices, the author argues that China’s fifth and sixth generation films as well as New Romanian Cinema are hugely indebted to socialist-era themes, as well as to the dogmatism of socialist realism. Identifying continuity rather than rupture between the socialist past and the capitalist present, the author seeks to redress an imbalance that contemporary scholars of Romanian and Chinese cinemas oftentimes ignore.

When Ceauşescu and Mao split with the USSR, they found each other. Bringing comparative and alternative socialisms to film studies, this refreshing read reveals parallels and differences in Romanian and Chinese socialist cinemas that extend into their encounters with the market economy and their successes on the international film festival circuit. * Chris Berry, King's College London *

Lucian Țion is a lecturer in Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam and Babeș Bolyai University, Cluj. He received his PhD from the National University of Singapore and his research areas are Eastern European cinemas, Chinese cinemas, postsocialism and cultural studies. He has published in Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Comparative Literature Studies, Cineaste and Senses of Cinema, among others. He contributed chapters to the edited volumes Cold War II: Hollywood’s Renewed Obsession with Russia, as well as Third Cinema, World Cinema and Marxism, published in 2020.