"Ruan Ling-Yu, Shanghai's Femme Fractale: Actress as Educator ...

Gentry – Ruan Ling-Yu, Shanghai’s Femme Fractale 1 

Ruan Ling-Yu, Shanghai’s Femme Fractale: 

Actress as Educator, Star as Commodity in 1930s Shanghai 

“Our present-day Chinese actually do not care about 

political parties – all they want to see are ‘heads’ and 

‘female corpses.’ If these are available, no matter whose 

they are, our citizens will go have a look.” 

Lu Xun, “Wiping Out the Reds – A Great Spectacle, 1928 i 

Brinni Gentry 

ASIA328 

Dr. Barlow 

April 22, 2013


Film is a medium unbound. As a mode of discourse, it synthesizes the relatively 

traditional act of narrative storytelling with the fragmenting technologies of 

modernization. Predicated on capital flow as well as audience involvement, it functions 

as a paradoxical realm somewhere between discursive site and commodity product. 

Perhaps the only certain definition of cinema is that it depends on the spectacle of 

moving pictures to relay information to an audience. Similarly, the figure of a womanrendered 

national icon through the essentializing process of conflating the imaginary 

ideal persona with the newly public, flesh-and-blood body of a woman on display utilizes 

the moving images of her body to symbolically sacrifice her as a discursive site for social 

change. As Lu Xun, the Chinese left-wing intellectual puts it, the best way to convey 

information to a politically-apathetic public is through manipulation of the commodity of 

the spectacle. It is with this mindset that I will explore how cinema in 1930s Shanghai 

conflated the commodity of the spectacle with the commodity of a studio system starlet, 

to render Ruan Ling-Yu as both a representative modern girl and a commodity to “sell” 

increasingly anti-feudal and anti-capitalist political sentiments. 

On the evening of August 11, 1896, in the bustling transnational metropolis of 

Shanghai, moving shadows began to traverse the nightscape of Shanghai in vivid relief. 

Picture shows, or “western shadow-plays” ( 西洋影戏 xīyáng yǐngxì), in the form of the 

collected works of the Lumière Brothers, made their debut into the entertainment culture 

of China (Denton). It is significant that in this city perforated by colonial concessions the 

introduction of the filmic medium would be described in a phrase of cultural duality – 

film was perceived at once as a Western import and a modern iteration of an intrinsically


Chinese entertainment form. 1 After this initial introduction to Western film, China would 

enter a decade inundated by the ever-flickering shadows of Hollywood stars and 

American dreams. A full ten years after this introduction of motion pictures the first 

Chinese film, a recording of the Beijing Opera, would be produced. The broad time gap 

between the introduction of Western cinema and the production of Chinese cinema can 

be considered a sort of litmus test of the colonial reality of modernizing China. As Zhang 

Zhen eloquently asserts in her essay “An Amorous History of the Silver Screen: The 

Actress As Vernacular Embodiment in Early Chinese Film Culture," 

“The time lag between early Euro-American cinema and early Chinese 

cinema speaks certainly to the semicolonial nature of Chinese modernity, 

especially with regard to "belated" technological transfer and 

implementation. This temporal disparity, ironically, also supplies 

testimonies to the persistence of early cinema not so much as a rigidly 

defined aesthetic or period category, but as an emblem of modernity, or 

rather multiple modernities, on the "non-synchronous synchronous" global 

horizon of film culture,” (Zhang Zhen, 235-236). 

Clearly the process of etymologically transforming the duality of “western shadow play” 

into the successfully modernized, culturally unaffiliated gestalt term “electric shadow” ( 

电影 diànyǐng) parallels this shift in film creation in the Chinese nation. The shift from 

the profusion of Hollywood cinema’s dominance to a successful flow of locally-produced 

films required transforming Chinese cinema from a mimetic and culturally bifurcated 

system into a vertically integrated expression of vernacular modernism. Thus, Chinese 

cinema in Shanghai moved from a system of small, competing film industries to a 

business-scape dominated by the unifying force of studio-system giants such as Lianhua 

Film Company and its largest rival, Mingxing. Undoubtedly, this transformation from 

1 “Shadow play,” or shadow puppetry, dates back to the Han Dynasty.


colonially repressed medium to capitalist studio empire necessitated a fragmenting, “nonsynchronous 

synchronous” presentation of reality. 

In the early 1900s, Chinese cinema had yet to develop a means of integrating both 

the production and distribution of its works. In fact, viewing the beginnings of Chinese 

cinema as a national movement would be entirely wrongheaded, as Yingjin Zhang 

indicates in his essay, “Transnationalism and Translocality in Chinese Cinema,” “neither 

film production nor distribution and exhibition started at the national scale. On the 

contrary, local film operations specific to a city were the norm in the 1900s-1910s” 

(Zhang Yingjin, 137). The films produced by these diasporatic, cottage industries 

struggled to compete with the slick studio-system commodities of imported Hollywood 

films. However, by the 1920’s a horizontally integrated studio system (which operated on 

a similar theory as the vertically integrated system of Hollywood) was beginning to form 

in China, and Shanghai, the site of China’s first introduction to “western shadow-play,” 

was becoming the locus of this “Golden Age of Chinese Cinema.” There are a variety of 

reasons why Chinese owned and operated studios mushroomed in Shanghai, but perhaps 

among the most important was that interwar Shanghai was several cities at once, a city 

that precisely because of its foreign presence was spared the brunt of the first world war 

and was the first, and largest, city in China that became an economic, rather than 

political, capital. 

This city would be the proverbial stage to the political-intellectual changes taking 

place in China during the increasingly “modernizing” years to come; Shanghai would be 

a city dominated by the Chinese Nationalist Party’s communist-censoring Kuomintang 

(KMT), a city ravaged by the Japanese-Imperialist forces sweeping Asia just before


World War II, and a city where young intellectuals were becoming increasingly 

“Western” and anti-Confucian. In 1919 a series of student demonstrations had broken out 

across China and in Shanghai; broadly known as the May Fourth Movement, these 

demonstrations illustrated young intellectuals’ anger toward the presence of Western 

concessions literally crippling China’s modernizing economy and blamed China’s 

traditional, feudal, Confucian-centric culture for making the nation vulnerable to this 

sacrifice of national autonomy. In fact, the locus of this movement moved from the 

intellectual capital of Beijing to the economic capital of Shanghai, where workers’ 

increasing awareness of the gaps that transnational modernity had bored into their lives 

made them a valuable critical mass for the movement. 

This city, a site where young intellectuals began to comingle with the perturbed 

proletariat, perhaps more than any other city in China, is best representative of the effect 

of modernization on post 1911-China. It was into this realm of capitalist colonization and 

revolutionary reaction that Li Min-Wei and Luo Ming-you decided to merge several local 

film studios with their production company, Lianhua Film Company. Hiring a huge 

number of May Fourth screenwriters, set designers, and directors, such as Bu Wancang 

and Cai Chusheng, Lianhua permanently aligned itself as a studio “eager to discuss 

modern social issues in [its] work” (Pickowisz 75-76). This move forever changed the 

landscape of Chinese cinema (and perhaps Shanghai itself) by utilizing horizontal 

integration to create a system of capital production which could be utilized to propagate 

Lianhua’s paradoxically Leftist and cultural-nationalistic slogan of “Rescue national 

cinema, propagate national essence, promote national industry, and serve national


interest,” to a public which demanded commodities resembling the products of the 

Hollywood studio system (Choi, Lai Man-Wai: The Father of Hong Kong Cinema). 

It was simply not enough to create a studio system that resembled Hollywood’s; 

they also adopted a star system like that of Hollywood. In such a system a “star” persona 

is utilized as a conduit for the film commodity and thus rendered a commodity herself. 

By creating a desirable public persona for these stars and starlets, the production studio 

exploits the “cult of personality” to lure audiences into watching a particular film. Thus 

audience members, who Lu Xun vitriolically claims “do not care about political parties – 

all they want to see are ‘heads’ and ‘female corpses,” generally do not attend a movie 

because it expresses a particular, subversive political message but because it is a Butterfly 

Hu, Lily Li, or Ruan Ling-Yu vehicle. The spectacle of the screen star thus becomes a 

sort of parasitic colonizer in the minds of the public, and this is particularly true in the 

case of the desired/desiring body of the female screen star. By gazing at this figure the 

audience fragments and digests her – but they also digest the anti-capitalist and antifeudal 

political sentiments she expresses through the public presentation of her body. 

Interwar Shanghai was several cities at once. Interwar China is best 

conceptualized as “two Chinas: the modern, semi-Westernized cities of the eastern 

coastal provinces, inhabited by the urban elite, who had little contact with life in the 

countryside, and [the] rural China, which was unchanged in its poverty, ignorance, and 

hardships” (Meyer, 2). Within this already divided context, Shanghai was further 

fragmented into Western concessions, creating a city that was at once hyper-transcultural, 

a vestige of the past, colonial, and socially stratified by the uneven distribution of capital. 

As a result of classic industrial-revolution mass exoduses of workers to the city and the


close proximity of the elite bourgeois to the impoverished proletariat, jobs were 

exceedingly hard to come by and aspirational desire was constant in the public 

consciousness. Hard as it was to find work, the early 20 th century Shanghai urban setting 

of “aspirational desire” and failed dreams (which I am defining as the process by which 

an individual is capable of temporarily becoming a part of the “elite” class of his desire 

by dreaming of or possessing a certain commodity) did create an unprecedented number 

of job opportunities for young women. In her research on interwar Shanghai, Gail 

Hershatter has estimated that “approximately one in thirteen women in Shanghai were 

prostitutes with the total number at about 100,000” (45). Other job options included silk 

workers, factory girls, and countless other forms of labor that required women to utilize 

their bodies in newly public ways in an effort to survive in the capitalist city. 

With this backdrop of “aspirational desire” and a Shanghai cinema looking to 

create a star system Ruan Ling-Yu entered the scene, becoming at once a conduit for 

commodity and commodity herself. Though virtually since the day of her death on March 

8, 1935, Ruan Ling-Yu’s biography has become a thing of legend, a few biographical 

facts shed light on what impelled Ruan Ling-Yu, at the age of sixteen, to pursue the 

career of an actress at a time when displaying one’s body on film was socially equated 

with those “one in thirteen women” on Shanghai’s streets. The only child of Guangdong 

emigrants, Ruan Ling-Yu’s early life was marked by events which characterize the 

socially stratifying nature of the modernizing, transcultural city: her father worked as a 

mechanic at a British oil company and was paid dismal wages, this same British company 

evicted the Ruan family (and countless other employees) from their home in a company 

dormitory when the company chose to make a profit on the land by using it as a golf-


course for the city’s elite, and, allegedly, Ruan’s father’s dearest wish was to “take the 

whole family to the cinema” (Meyer 10). However, the family never got the chance to 

participate in the escapist spectacle of cinema together – when Ruan was just six years 

old, her father died suddenly of tuberculosis, leaving his small family in a state of social 

and economic shock. In the years that followed, Ruan’s mother, He Ah Ying, was able to 

secure a job as the live-in maid of the Zhang family in Shanghai. Somehow, Ah Ying 

managed to put Ruan through the elite Chongde Girl’s School until Ruan reached the age 

of sixteen. 

In 1926 Ruan Ling-Yu’s mother was accused of pilfering from the purse of her 

mistress and cast out onto the streets. At the age of sixteen, Ruan Ling-Yu was forced to 

cease her progressive education in order to find a way to provide for herself and her 

mother. In fact, the youngest son of the Zhang family, Da-min (a notorious gambler) was 

the one who had taken the money from his mother. According to legend (word of mouth 

interviews) Da-min had taken a shine to his maid’s beautiful daughter and, after 

confessing to her that he had caused the chain of events that resulted in her mother’s 

joblessness, he offered to rectify these wrongs if Ruan would consent to marry him. She 

refused and was subsequently raped. Humiliated, in a position of intense social 

vulnerability, Ruan agreed to a sort of common-law marriage of the day. At the age of 

sixteen, Ruan was not only forced to drop out of school to provide for her mother and 

herself, but forced into a paper marriage that would result in years of her having to 

provide for her husband, as well. 

1926-1927, Ruan’s sixteenth year, was a year of immense upheaval both in the 

political and cinema spheres of Shanghai. In 1927 Chiang Kai-shek took over Shanghai


and instigated three weeks of ‘white terror’ when he outlawed communism and 

proceeded to slaughter 12,000 suspected communists in the span of 21 days (Hildreth). 

During this time the KMT began informally instituting its censor-code by twisting the 

proverbial arm of the Shanghai mob that held stake in the film studios scattered across 

the city – the KMT deployed the ‘Green Gang’ to rough up and threaten studios 

producing films that they viewed as anti-national and too communist. However, the 

loosely defined outlines of this KMT policy would not be made official until 1930 (the 

same year Lianhua subsidized other major film studios to create a mega-film 

conglomeration) and the gaps in this censoring policy left immense loopholes in how a 

Leftist film might be produced. As long as nothing too radical was said in the inter-titles 

and the movie concluded in a narrative that toed the KMT party line, a film could pass 

through the system without much of a stir. It was within this tug-of-war between 

violently repressive politics and poetically subtle deviations that Ruan Ling-Yu finally 

found her first job – as the protagonist of Mingxing’s 1927 film “A Husband and Wife in 

Name Only.” In three years’ time, Ruan would be, like her film studio, subsumed into the 

growing and paradoxical machine of capitalist production and Leftist dissemination that 

was the Lianhua Film Company. 

An examination of the cinematic career of Ruan Ling-Yu (paying special 

attention to her role in three of Lianhua’s Leftist films) will exemplify how the 

representative modern girl figure is a duality like Shanghai, China, and modernity itself. 

The star persona of a modern girl is at once a totalizing meta-narrative for female roles 

and a figure who parallels the post 1931 production of Lianhua films, a narrative which, 

under serious censorship, must subtly utilize a traditional plot to subvert reactionary


sentiment and who’s endings do not corroborate with their apparent messages. In other 

words, having a single woman play many different characters provides a symbolicpopular 

understanding of the modern woman as a) a woman who looks one way but 

behaves in many ways, and, b) a woman who is nothing more than a projecting screen for 

the narrative around her. Focusing on a single film star will reveal how national 

obsession serves as a ‘fragmenting gaze,’ projecting modernity onto the figure of a 

woman and fragmenting that woman into digestible, conquerable bits and illustrate that 

the process of ‘modernization’ in turbulent interwar China was less about emulating an 

external, but finding an internal “threat” of the past or present and subduing it. 

Through a close examination of three of Ruan Ling-yu’s four extant films, Bu 

Wancang’s 1931 film The Peach Girl, Wu Yonggang’s 1934 film, The Goddess; and Cai 

Chusheng’s 1934 film New Women – I will argue that the highly public body of the 

woman-rendered-star parallels the dualized nature of Leftist cinema as something that is 

at once submissive to the powers of capitalist colonization and succeeds in a modern 

environment by becoming the colonizer itself. These films (and the body of Ruan Ling- 

Yu) reveal the fragmentation of identity which the gaze of the public exerted upon 

‘modern girls’ and which modernity exerted upon the narrative of China itself. However, 

what is notable in the figure of the modern (cinematic) girl is that she becomes 

successfully modern not through achieving a happy ending or narrative closure but by 

utilizing her polymorphic personality to disrupt the flow of capital and the hierarchy of 

the feudal family. 

Before discussing these films individually, it is important to examine the degree 

to which Ruan Ling-Yu “sold” these reactionary films. While the directors and plots of


these films differ significantly, the range of characters Ruan plays (from peasant girl to 

prostitute to new woman) varies even more. Nonetheless, patterns abound. The characters 

Ruan plays in these movies can be divided into two categories in terms of their fates: 1) 

those who die, subverting narrative closure and 2) those who live, in subservience to 

narrative closure. The characters who die, in a sacrificial act of undeniable cementation 

(death) render themselves as multi-valent identity ‘freaks,’ whose sacrifice paves the way 

for more fully integrated social change. The characters that live are portrayed as having 

to surrender their dual identities either as a) a means of guaranteeing their own pleasure, 

to the detriment of society; or, b) as a means of bettering the lives of others, providing 

social change through a symbolic castration of identity. 

These films also share nearly identical opening sequence patterns. Each film 

opens with a title screen establishing an image that will be a recurring motif throughout 

the film and which harkens back to the title, becoming an essentialized symbol of the 

movie’s meaning. For example, The Goddess opens with a bas-relief sculpture of a 

naked, female figure who, hands bound behind her back, uses her body to shield a child. 

Just as this image comes into focus the title is transposed onto the screen [Appendix A]. 

This image will recur at critical moments in the plot as a literal discursive site for the 

Chinese and English intertitles, symbolically binding the plot to this image and creating a 

feedback loop that sequentially binds the scene in question to this extra-diegetic, selfreflexive 

image. Following this establishing title screen is a screen that introduces all that 

is to follow as a product of “Lianhua Film Studios. The First Shanghai Film Studio” 

[Appendix B] (The Goddess) 2 . Historical accuracy aside (Mingxing Film Company 

2 Lianhua had changed this screen to read “Shanghai’s Second Film Studio” for New Woman, released only 

months after The Goddess.


technically predated Lianhua) this a clear use of the film-commodity as a means of 

asserting dominance in the capitalist market. Finally, a cast list, (in the case of The 

Goddess, transposed onto a screen capture of Ruan Ling-Yu in a late scene of the film) is 

shown. What is fascinating about these cast lists is that, in each film Ruan Ling-Yu’s 

name is listed before all of the other actors and in print nearly twice as large – regardless 

of whether she played the protagonist, appeared first, or even dominated the screen time 

of the given film. Occasionally, her name even preceded the credits of her fellow cast 

mates on her own titular screen [Appendix C]. 

Much as the title screen served to bind the commodity of the film to the 

ideological text of the film; this positioning of Ruan Ling-Yu’s name so predominately 

(and frequently with a reproduction of her likeness) solidified this film not just as a 

movie, and not just as a Lianhua movie, but as a pre-packaged Ruan Ling-Yu film. Her 

public persona was thus inextricably welded to whatever screen personae followed 

onscreen. Indeed, this welding of the star to the screen rendered tremendous profit for 

Lianhua and, frequently, “Ruan’s popularity and Lianhua’s need for more income 

resulted in her being asked to make two films at the same time” (Meyer 47). 

Months before Bu Wancang’s The Peach Girl made its debut in Shanghai 影戏生 

活 (Movie Life Magazine) ran an article declaring 

“If Ruan Ling-Yu’s artistry is to become a force of social change, she 

should shift from just being in the pocket of the movie bosses to becoming 

a focal point for social evolution…Ruan Ling-Yu’s artistry will one day 

service all mankind and not simply be a means of lining the pockets of a 

chosen few.” (Baskett, 110) 

Utilizing language to render Ruan Ling-Yu as a commodity (owned either by “movie 

bosses” or “a chosen few”) this article demonstrates that Ruan Ling-Yu’s import to her


audiences was predicated both on her screen image and on her ability to affect real 

societal change. What this article fails to recognize is that the “chosen few” “owners” of 

this precious star commodity were hoping to utilize films to kindle a growing nationalist 

mood, to call attention to the May Fourth sentiments that China’s feudal past had made it 

vulnerable to the threat of foreign invasion, and battle the capitalist western invasion by 

Hollywood. In fact, in an interview, Bu Wancang revealed that Peach Girl’s target 

audience consisted of two “audience demographics: intellectuals and women,” two 

groups who would be most receptive to the idea of the female character as representative 

of China’s class conflict (Baskett, 110). 

While most critics do not consider Bu’s film as politically motivated and 

characterize it as little more than a basic melodrama of the lascivious city corrupting the 

naïve country girl, the social context, editing, use of symbolic imagery, and mise-enscene 

mark Ruan Ling-Yu’s portrayal of a peasant girl as a deviant feminine figure 

whose true ruin is not in her modern-impelled actions, but in the codifications that 

representatives of both the traditional-feudal and modern-capitalist societies attempt to 

enact upon her body. The Peach Girl, a movie which is prefaced by an annotative 

intertitle explaining the Chinese literary tradition of utilizing the peach tree as a symbol 

of “love, sorrow, and of tears,” links the figure of Ruan Ling-Yu’s character, Lingu, to 

not just to this symbolic vocabulary of Chinese tradition, but to the transformation of 

Chinese landscape. 

The movie opens with the image of a painted peach blossom dissolving into a 

panoramic view of a Chinese agricultural landscape, replete with wide-open spaces, 

grazing cows, and a pacing male figure. Because the camera’s panning movement


parallels this male figure, and because the agricultural scene is truncated by a sudden 

medium-close cut of his worried face staring to screen left, one could easily assume that 

this man is to serve as the entry point for the plot. However, rather than lingering on this 

figure, the film immediately cuts to yet another male figure (this time within the domestic 

compound of a home) gazing anxiously to screen right. This use of editing creates an 

eyeline-match exchange between two otherwise unrelated bodies; whatever the anxious 

face of the man in the pastoral scene is awaiting thus parallels whatever the anxious man 

in the domestic sphere is awaiting. 

As it turns out, the domestic man is experiencing “the happiest and most anxious 

moment of his life;” the birth of his daughter. At the news of his daughter’s healthy 

arrival, his close-up face is shown gazing contentedly screen right. The film does not 

linger on this moment of domestic bliss; there is an immediate cut to the pastoral scene 

that shows the alarmed figure of the pacing man turning to follow the previously 

established gaze of the domestic man to find that what he has been awaiting has finally 

arrived. In a shot that parallels the birthing of a child, a band of raiders emerges from 

between two hills and proceeds to flood the landscape. And while, in a moment of superhuman 

ability, the new father manages to rush to the site of the cow field to beat the 

bandits into submission while declaring, “Behave yourselves, so long as I’m here,” the 

birth of his daughter has already been linked to this external threat. Moreover this 

daughter will also be ideologically beaten into submission with that patriarchal slogan, 

“Behave [yourself], so long as I’m here!” 

Fascinatingly, Lingu’s parents immediately attempt to censor the girl’s rebellion 

against the landscape: she first enters the scene as a squalling infant, disrupting both her


parent’s happy cultivation of the land and, with the frequent, staccato-metered extreme 

close up shots of her bawling face, the narrative flow of the film. In an effort to hush the 

unruly child, the father rips a blossom-adorned branch from a peach tree and waves it 

before the baby’s eyes. At this moment, the editing loses continuity-narrative 

organization: the wagon the family was riding on a path exiting screen left is suddenly, 

and inexplicably, shown retracing its steps and heading screen right. It is as though the 

moment when her parents censored her radical symbolism with a new and traditional 

codification Lingu’s path became one of regression. 

In the next scene, Lingu’s mother plants the peach twig in the household 

compound and declares to her daughter “This peach tree is going to be a symbol of your 

life. It will have beautiful blossoms. If you grow up to…” At this moment, a moment 

where Lingu has been codified by the feudalistic narrative of her parents, threat enters 

screen right once more – a palanquin is shown entering through the same hills as the 

earlier cattle raiders, and Lingu’s father proclaims “The landlady has come for her rent!” 

The proceeding shot compositionally highlights the figure of the toddler Lingu in such a 

way that links her no longer as the threat but as the bargaining chip against the threat, the 

rent. 

As the plot progresses Lingu grows into an otherized commodity; as she sits 

underneath a peach tree spinning wool (exhibiting symbolic control over the power of 

production and a socialist-feminist image of female freedom derived through manual 

labor), Teh-en, the landlady’s son (grown from bashful child to virile man) gazes at 

Lingu. In a shot-reverse-shot pattern that reveals his gaze, Lingu is transformed from a 

medium-shot of complacent worker to a long shot that puts her in the frame with a goat


and a cage-like fence. While Teh-en proclaims “a city girl’s beauty depends on powder 

and rouge, but this is truly beautiful, indeed” (exhibiting both a Leftist-maxim on how to 

be a good woman and a decrial of defining female identity through commodity 

application), he is revealed to be nothing more than a capitalist – viewing her as a 

commodity representative of past innocence, effectively caged by his gaze like a farm 

animal. In a scene incorporating the dual gaze of the modern man and modern technology, 

he removes her from her native context and, like her parents before him, places her 

amidst a landscape of peach blossoms directing her on how to pose for his camera. The 

long-shots of Lingu during this sequence paired with the close-up shots of the man reveal 

both her willingness to perform and her control over his actions. She uses her body to 

render him complacent – he argues with her about how to pose and she proceeds to 

flirtatiously scroll through a repertoire of facial expressions until he gives up laughing 

and she can pose as she pleases. 

In fact, Lingu’s methods of production within the cultural (and economic) sphere 

of her rural home are altered the moment Teh-en takes her out of her home. She goes 

from contentedly spinning wool into yarn (a symbolic act of condensation in and of itself) 

to halting this process of condensation to ponder how her outward appearance affects her 

social-romantic relationships. A later spinning scene, shot in precisely the same way as 

the first spinning scene, halts production with a close up of her face and reveals her 

staring at the homespun material. The film immediately cuts to Lingu’s imagination, an 

imagination filled not with the gaze of men or society but of inward gaze – she looks 

Teh-en up and down and the camera repeats this motion, literally scanning him head-totoe 

and she proceeds to enact this action upon herself. Her internal process of making


meaning is what dictates the gaze of the audience. This interior scene dissolves, revealing 

Lingu anxiously asking Teh-en how he can love her when their clothes connote such 

class division. He simply smiles at Lingu and proceeds to take up her spinning for her. 

Her internal gazing has rendered the man as her equal; however, this equality is shortlived. 

After Teh-en whisks Lingu off to the city, his opium-addicted dowager mother 

(the landlady) forbids their class-crossing love affair and demands that he “send that 

lowborn girl back to her people.” At this critical moment in the plot, Teh-en is too weak 

to publically disobey his mother – the camera alternates between close up shots of 

Lingu’s openly weeping face and Teh-en’s lowered (but shifty) eyes. As soon as his 

mother has left the frame, he defies his mother and quite literally drags Lingu to a house 

he has pre-prepared for such an event. As the couple enters this urban site of deviance, 

the camera follows Teh-en dragging Lingu by the wrist into a bedroom. Teh-en, 

previously bashful in the country, has become a physical enactor of patriarchy in 

response to his mother’s demand that he be more traditional. However, the space that 

they have entered is anything but traditional – it is plastered with photographs of Lingu 

and filled with western furniture: a vanity with a large mirror and a king-size bed. 

In this bedroom, Teh-en will codify Lingu in a language of modernity and 

capitalism. He dresses her in a modern girl’s qipao, pantomimes how she should arrange 

her hair, and begins to gaze at her in staccato point of view shots that reveal her to be a 

fragmented entity of legs-breasts-face. His erotically-excited gaze is met with Lingu’s 

repetition of her repertoire of flirtatious faces. Rather than being able to use her bodily 

expressions to render man complacent as she had in her rural realm, in this enclosed


space of urbanity her bodily movements excite the male figure beyond her control – he 

deceives her into believing his mother has changed her mind about their relationship and 

uses his body to control the narrative: he points to Lingu and himself and proceeds to 

pantomime rocking a baby. Once more he becomes the pantomiming agent, teaching 

Lingu how to conform to his desire. The camera cuts to a deep shot of the bedroom 

wherein the figure of Lingu is turned away from the camera, subsumed into Teh-en. 

As the plot proceeds, Lingu’s father is made aware of Teh-en’s ruse, Lingu (now 

pregnant) decries Teh-en’s behavior and leaves for the country, and Lingu’s father, gone 

blind, is discharged from his job by the landlady. Returned to the country and forced by 

circumstances into the masculine role of providing for her family, Lingu has become a 

visual hybrid, neither feudal peasant or commoditized modern girl. As a peasant she 

donned simple clothes and a headscarf; as a modern girl she donned a qipao, shorter hair, 

and opulent earrings. Now she wears the clothes of a peasant, the earrings of a modern 

girl, and a utilitarian bun previously unrepresented in the film. This is visually relevant 

for it showcases Lingu’s successful integration of several entities into one being; this 

integration is juxtaposed with the unchanged Teh-en who, imprisoned by his mother, 

paces around a room alternately embracing an old portrait of Lingu-past and battering a 

portrait of his mother. Though Teh-en constantly attempts to escape, his mother is always 

just outside the door, smoking her opium pipe and tremoring with a perpetual headshake 

of denial – he and his opium-addled mother are locked in an urban center of unchanging 

images. It is Lingu whose constant change will break this cycle – she falls terminally ill, 

inciting Teh-en to disown his mother and rush to her side. Fascinatingly, the film 

intercuts images of Lingu’s euphoric dying face with Teh-en bumbling his way through


the landscape. The lovers reunite briefly before Lingu, smiling, cements her deviant 

identity through death. It is at this moment that Teh-en first notices their daughter and 

takes her into his arms. 

Buried body as part-peasant, part-modern, using her own death as a means of 

creating a future of upheaval within the social landscape of China, Lingu is not a tragic 

figure but a heroine who sacrifices herself as permanently deviant identity. The movie 

ends with the family of misfits (the opium addicted capitalist landlady embraces the blind 

father of the feudal past, the single father raises infant daughter) paying their respects to 

Lingu’s grave. True social change is enacted: moved to generosity the capitalist city 

family provides for the impoverished rural family in a highly communist social feedback 

loop. And, in the final shot, Teh-en declares to Lingu’s grave “I am waiting to meet you 

in the other world.” With the words “other world” he lifts his daughter to be level with 

his own face – a visual indicator that this other world might be contained within the body 

of this daughter of deviant parentage. 

On September 17, 1931, production of The Peach Girl wrapped – less than 24 

hours later, the Mukden (Manchurian) Incident sent shockwaves throughout all of China 

(Meyer 32). Japanese military personnel, hoping to expand the Japanese empire into 

Northern China, detonated an explosion near the tracks of the (Japanese-owned) South 

Manchuria Railway and proceeded to use the explosion as evidence of Chinese vandalism 

and as a “valid” rationale for occupying Manchuria (Duus 294). To the horror of many 

Chinese, Chiang Kai-Shek ordered the warlords of Manchuria not to take action against 

the Japanese invaders because “the KMT leader planned to save his army for the anticommunist 

campaign” (Meyer 32). The response in Shanghai was aggressive: hoping to


sever Japanese economic interests, the citizens of Shanghai began an anti-Japanese 

boycott, expecting to motivate Chiang Kai-Shek and his KMT to protect Shanghai 

against Japanese invasion. What the people of Shanghai received, however, was a double 

invasion – the catastrophic Japanese bombings of the city in 1932 coincided with an 

increasing vigilance in KMT censorship of films that did not corroborate with this 

autocratically dictated national narrative. The KMT crackdown “promoted nationbuilding 

by cracking down on sex and superstition in domestic films and by privileging 

Mandarin over Cantonese-dialect films” – an imaginary ideal creation of identity that 

paralleled the star-individual conflation of Ruan Ling-Yu’s modern woman 

identity(Zhang Yingjin, Chinese National Cinema, 70). However, Ruan’s personal life 

was no longer the most censor-friendly story. She had recently begun seeing Tan Jieshen, 

a wealthy (married) tea merchant, who wanted to make Ruan his mistress. He leaked a 

tabloid story that suggested an intimate relationship between the two and Ruan, who was 

emotionally and legally (but not fiscally) separated from Damin, elected to move in with 

Tang to avoid further tabloid scandal (Meyer). 

While Lianhua’s employees strove to imbue the editing of their films with 

subversive Leftist elements, it is important to remember that Lianhua’s success was first 

and foremost predicated on the capitalist feedback loop of commodity production and 

consumption. As a headlining star of the Lianhua silver screen, Ruan Ling-Yu was often 

publically molded by her company in ways that utilized her body to sell their product. 

Frequently, she appeared in women’s magazines as a role model of ideal beauty and 

modern deportment. In fact, contemporaneous to her appearing in soap advertisements 

mentioning the ‘white purity of her skin,’ Lianhua’s leading cinematographer, Huang


Shaofen, began to ‘experiment with the camera lens in order to disguise Ruan’s roughtextured 

skin and her pockmarks from childhood smallpox…he tried using a black silk 

sock over the lens….for a close-up he preferred a fine gauze, while on a long shot he 

employed a thicker one” (Meyer 39, 28). The fact that Lianhua altered and innovated its 

filming technologies solely to create an appearance of absolute perfection for their 

leading money-maker seems especially relevant when one considers that the first Chinese 

talkie was created by Mingxing in 1931 3 and Lianhua never produced a talkie starring 

Ruan Ling-Yu (Clark 11). Her Cantonese accent (and inability to speak in fluent 

Mandarin), like her skin scarred by a childhood of poverty and class struggle, marked her 

as something threatening both to the national narrative of the KMT and to Lianhua’s 

packaging of her as the femme ideal. 

It was through this gauzed lens of imagined perfection that Ruan Ling-Yu would 

enact one of her most socially progressive roles, that of a nameless mother who, to 

provide for her son, continues a life of horrifying and degrading prostitution. The 1934 

film, The Goddess, was one of Lianhua’s biggest successes. This sleekly packaged plot 

creates an encapsulated narrative that, if watched shallowly, provides a handy metonym 

of the good-hearted prostitute for nationalistic Chinese identity. But there can be no 

denying that the film’s closing with the prostitute’s act of heroism, life imprisonment and 

the sacrifice of her multi-identity past, corroborates with anti-capitalist, anti-feudal leftist 

notions. On a surface level, the film has no villain but the city – yet, the editing 

transforms Ruan Ling-Yu’s body into an iteration of the city itself: the individual cannot 

3 Sing-song Girl Red Peony, starring Ruan’s screen “rival,” Butterfly Hu Die.


be saved from the modern urban world by toeing the KMT party line, for it is the city, 

rather society, that must be changed first. 

Ruan’s body, or indeed any human body, does not appear until a full two minutes 

of expository shots have occurred. The film opens with a contextualizing shot – the sun 

low on the horizon of a Shanghai slum. However, it is not until the film cuts to a 

streetlight turning on that the viewer realizes that the action of this scene is taking place 

in twilight – it is inescapably clear that the setting is Shanghai, but until this moment it 

was impossible to define the time. This screen-privileged shot of the street lamp serves a 

number of functions: it represents the usurpation of technology over nature to create 

nights that are as productive as days, the light provides an entry point (through the 

window) into a tenement room, and the length of the streetlamp shot sets in motion the 

flow of information to follow – each image, until Ruan is introduced in the frame, will be 

presented in the same stable-camera span of time as this street lamp. For another full 

minute, the camera lingers over shots that juxtapose domestic commodities and petty 

commodities within the context of claustrophobic space. Milk powder is shown with face 

powder, rouge and toiletry bottles are shown with a baby doll. Likewise, the qipaorevealed 

legs of a young woman are shown with a baby’s cradle. 

Here the cinematic flow alters; no longer does the camera remain stable, but 

instead pans upward to reveal Ruan rocking a baby. Ruan’s character, and indeed her 

own body, is fragmented within this space into a duality – something natural (mother) 

and something produced (alluring, cosmetically enhanced prostitute). Just as Shanghai 

cannot be defined by time until the streetlamp is shown, these disparate shots of


commodities cannot be integrated into narrative until the stabilizing figure of Ruan Ling- 

Yu appears on screen. 

Out of the view of this bold symbol of the new city, in her cramped tenement 

room, the nameless prostitute is able to exercise some control over her image. She uses a 

Western vanity table to adjust her hair and makeup before, reluctantly, leaving her child 

for the evening – yet she is positioned within the frame of the camera in such a way as 

not to reveal her reflection to the viewer. The audience is denied the pleasure of rendering 

her as a fused-figure of “erotic pleasure, imaginary use-values, and the experience of 

being a subject” (Barlow, 289). Her image is thus not defined by commodities that 

promise the pleasures of a culturally colonized capitalist society but by what the audience 

does see – her reluctant farewell to her infant child. In a realm of autonomous identity 

shaping the prostitute is actually a selfless mother, resisting the meta-narrative of the 

prostitute as commodity and the meta-narrative of deviant-feudal woman as morally-bad 

woman. 

All of this autonomy changes the moment the image of Ruan leaving for the 

evening slowly dissolves into the illuminated 新新 tower. While this nameless prostitute 

serves as a unifying figure for the commodities in her home, she is simply one of the 

commodities unified around the totemic, recurring image of Shanghai's flashing neon 新 

新 (‘New! New!) tower. A montage of city life edited for graphic matching ensues that 

links the nameless prostitute not as an individual but as a faceless, projecting site for 

urban desire. The blinking lights of the 新新 tower are a graphic match for the rushing 

headlights of automobiles; the forward movement of the vehicles is a graphic match for 

crowds of men bustling toward a shop window adorned with a lifeless mannequin; finally


this mannequin’s posture serves as a graphic match for the street-walking ‘goddesses’ 

(Ruan included) who stiffly pose to attract prospective customers. 新新 Shanghai 

refuses to recognize Ruan as anything other than what her external signifiers indicate – 

her threatening multivalent identity would call attention to the injustice of class-struggle 

and wealth-division, so in this world of novelty she is nothing more than a mannequin of 

desire. The film continues to pair close up shots of Ruan’s tormented, upward gazing face 

with a dissolve into this representative tower – she is at once one of the commodities that 

this tower represents and the tower itself; defined by the class divisions around her. In a 

particularly telling scene, she is pursued by a police officer – chased out of a ritzy 

downtown pavilion and into the slums where the man who will become her live-in pimp 

lurks. During this chase sequence, she and the police officer run past a mannequin who 

has her arms up in a defensive position – in the next shot, hidden in the slum’s shadows, 

Ruan repeats the image of the mannequin’s posture. She is trapped by the gazes of two 

societies: the screen right gaze of the bourgeois-oriented police officer renders her as a 

mannequin, the screen left gaze of the impoverished pimp who’s gaze will transpose with 

the 新新 tower, a commodity in the imagined, “other scene of use value,” which provides 

him with an aspirational gateway into bourgeois life [Appendix D] (289). 

Later, after Ruan has been rendered a virtual slave of the pimp, she attempts to 

flee to a rural satellite town of Shanghai – but 新新 and her pimp follow her to this rural 

community as well. Now donning a practical black blouse and trousers with her hair 

pulled into a modest bun, she blends in with the village amahs. However, the moment she 

enters a pawn shop this all changes – as she disappears into the shadowy depths of the 

store, the camera pans outward to reveal the name of the store 新新 . She emerges, not


the medium-shot amah of a minute before, but a diminished long-shot woman 

overwhelmed by the commodity she totes from the store. It is at this moment, that the 

camera shows a pair of village women stop in their tracks to stare at her pleased face. 

Before she has ever even discovered that her pimp has found her out and has taken her 

son hostage, her disguise in the village is blown by her dalliance in the pawnshop. Indeed, 

this act of purchasing a toy is shot in much the same way her moneymaking encounters 

with men are shot – she is seen approaching hotels with men, but the camera never 

follows her inside to showcase the commodity-exchange. 

As her son grows, despite the ostracization she suffers in the gaze of the village 

women, she uses her meager income to put her son through school. Curiously, the earlier 

themes of the city’s subordination of the natural cycles of day and night continue even 

here. In a school talent show her son performs a ballad, “The dawn is calling/The dusk is 

calling/The dusk is calling for a special edition/called the night is falling.” Before he 

sings this ballad, which speaks of the exploitation and reversal of natural cycles and the 

constant poverty of city dwellers, the son is shown in a parallel shot-reverse shot pattern 

with his mother. Both figures are shown in extreme close-up shots, emphasizing their 

emotional closeness and eliding their physical distance. However, as he sings, Ruan 

remains in extreme close-up, but he is now shown in a long-shot next to his school 

principal. This song, and the son’s involvement in the other world of the school, has put 

an irreparable gap between him and his mother, a dark premonition for what is to follow 

when the dusk continues to call for Ruan. 

Soon, the school principal catches wind of Ruan’s profession and makes a visit to 

her home to expel her son. In a shocking cinematic twist, the camera takes the place of


the principal and, for the first time in the film, Ruan stares directly at the audience as she 

protests, “I used the money I earned selling my body to support [my son] in school. I 

want him to become a good person. Why do you deny my child the opportunity of a good 

education?” If films do indeed provide “a sensory-reflexive horizon for the experience of 

modernization and modernity,” it seems this use of editing to shock the viewer out of this 

diegetic horizon of modernization enacts an inward gaze to examine what it means to be 

modern (Hansen 10). This moment of address to the audience itself is what moves the 

principal into revolutionary social action – he abdicates his position when he is unable to 

prevent the school board from expelling the child of a prostitute. This moment of internal 

gazing, or indeed of Ruan gazing into the eyes of the principal/audience has affected 

social change in at least one man – and it will soon affect change on another man in a 

very different way. 

Desperate to find an escape for herself and her ostracized son, Ruan returns to 

Shanghai with the aim of finding her pimp to extract the 200 yuan he had stolen from her. 

The montage that earlier introduced the nightscape of the city occurs with two key 

exceptions: 1) the prostitutes are no longer shown after the mannequin, 2) the image of 

Ruan determinedly marching toward the camera is transposed over all the movement of 

the city. In her refusal to be rendered into a singular identity (salacious prostitute or 

feudal mother) she has been able to ascend, goddess-like, above the machinations of the 

city. No longer do the buildings dwarf her; she is a figure as large as the city. Her march 

concludes with her finding her pimp and learning that he has gambled away her life’s 

savings. At this turning point, the camera takes the place of the pimp as Ruan hurls a 

bottle of liquor at the head of the pimp (and, thus, at the audience as well). After


committing this murder, Ruan is jailed, which causes the school principal to vow to adopt 

her son and provide for him the future that his prostitute mother could not. The final title 

screen declares, “In the solitary and quiet life of the prison, she finds a new peace in 

imagining her child’s bright future.” In pulling herself out of the context of gaze and 

becoming an autonomous gazer, she has sacrificed her ability to freely exist in society as 

a multivalent being. In her “solitary and quiet” jail cell she is shot with two angled lights 

that cast two large shadows of her figure on the wall behind her – a visual representation 

of her deviant dual identity. However, these shadows do not remain in the jail cell – the 

final frame of the film transposes Ruan’s son over these shadows (Appendix E). In 

sacrificing herself, she has rendered her child as the embodiment of her dual identity, and 

begun the process of societal change. 

Shortly after wrapping The Goddess, Bu Wancang declared that “‘Ruan is like 

some sensitive photo paper…Sometimes my imagination and requirement of her roles are 

not as delicate and profound as what she experienced. During shooting, her emotion is so 

undisturbed by anything outside and her representation is always so lucid and real, just 

like a water tap – you want it on, it’s on…’” (Meyer 48). Certainly this high praise speaks 

to the professional success of a talented actress; yet it also reveals a common theme in 

Lianhua discussions of Ruan’s talent, namely, that her talent can be aligned with 

inanimate objects (photo paper, a water tap) and that her professional abilities are 

intimately tied to her personal life and “profound” past. Interestingly, the former 

categorization of Ruan’s talent-as-associated-with-commodity, pattern some of the 

advertisements that circulated in Lianhua’s own pictorial tabloid. Shortly after the release 

of the goddess, an image of Ruan with the caption “Ruan Ling-Yu acting in The


Goddess” is placed parallel to an advertisement for Kodak film (Kerlan). Such 

parallelism serves two ends for Lianhua; firstly, it asserts the professional ability of their 

star-commodity to attract audiences and educate them, secondly, it provides an 

aspirational commodity by which others can render themselves as sensitive as the “photo 

paper” of Ruan Ling-Yu – Kodak film (Meyer 48). Contemporaneous to this Lianhua 

self-promotion, Ruan Ling-Yu’s headshot appeared in the 129 th issue of the popular Ling 

long Woman’s Magazine. She appears on the first page of the movie-dedicated section of 

“this modern girl’s handbook” with a caption that introduces her with a parenthetical 

definition “(movie star) Ruan Ling-Yu’s charming clothes” [Appendix F] (Ling long, 

1934.129.255). In this non-Lianhua production the power of Ruan’s star-commodity is 

once more reinforced, but it less centered on her talent and more so on the appearance of 

a visually appealing photograph and the suggestion that one can become as appealing as a 

“(movie star)” by donning such “charming clothes” (Ling long). Yet, in Lianhua’s 

published works, the tragic aspects of Ruan’s acting and experience were exploited to 

justify her role as movie star and mass educator. This conflation of the film star’s talent 

to her personal life would become even more influential after the release of her 

penultimate film, Cai Chusheng’s 1934 masterpiece, New Women. 

More so than perhaps any other Lianhua film, New Women was publically touted 

as an expressly Leftist film. Curiously, it passed through the KMT censorship with 

complaints directed not towards its intensely socialist messages but toward it’s libeling of 

the press (Kwan, Center Stage). In fact, the movie’s premiere incited the KMT, in 

conjunction with the Shanghai Press Union, to require Lianhua to issue a public apology 

to the Shaghai Press Union and cut several scenes from the film reel (Kwan). Perhaps the


Leftist editing of the film was overshadowed by the scandal of scandalizing the mosquito 

press system in Shanghai. Whatever the case, New Women is a story about a modern, 

working woman (Wei Ming, played by Ruan Ling-Yu) who is haunted by the sins of her 

feudal-deviating past, her enslavement to the capitalist present, and her inability to escape 

to the Socialist alternative life. Though Wei Ming dies by her own hand, the film’s prop 

motifs, mise-en-scene, graphic match editing, and transpositions mark her not as a 

decadent victim of the modern city but as a sacrifice who opens the floodgates to new, 

leftist, ways of female existence. 

The opening shot of New Women is shot at a low angle, privileging the cable car 

that rushes into the scene – bifurcating the urban setting. It is on this vehicle of division 

that the camera first introduces Wei Ming, cradling a veiled, phallic-looking object as she 

gazes screen-right. At first glance, she is an autonomous figure, a truly modern woman 

(not girl), in possession of the gaze and a phallic symbol. However as the camera pans 

across the cable car, an eerie repetition of her image occurs on the advertisements 

plastering the walls of the vehicle. This image repetition suggests both a capitalist massproduction 

of images and a feudal subservience into image conformity – Wei Ming is no 

more an independent figure than the images plastered on the walls of the public sphere. 

Later, as Wei Ming brings her publishing-friend Mr. Yu and her now-married 

schoolmate, Mrs. Wang, back to her boarding-house room, the viewer discovers that Wei 

Ming’s conformity to images in enforced upon her not just in the public sphere but even 

within the private space of her home. As Mr. Yu reveals that Wei Ming is, indeed, the 

rising young author who Mrs. Wang has read about in the paper, she stands to praise Wei 

Ming and the image of the haughty, wealthy Mrs. Wang is a graphic match for the


headshots of Wei Ming with paper the walls. Wei Ming shifts uncomfortably under the 

gaze of the higher-class woman and her own publicly formed, commercial image. Time 

and time again, each of the capitalist-oriented figures who enter Wei Ming’s private 

realm with the hope of exploiting her (the lecherous Dr. Wang, Mrs. Wang’s philandering 

husband; the prostitute-madame; and the editor in chief of the Shanghai newspaper, Mr. 

Qi) are shot in such a way that aligns them with the gaze of Wei Ming’s headshots. A 

pattern is established wherein the figure gazes at an off-camera Wei Ming, a close-up 

shot reveals their comically euphoric face, and a medium shot aligns them with the massproduced 

image of Wei Ming. In a particularly fascinating sequence, the villainous editor 

Mr. Qi catches sight of himself in Wei’s mirror [Appendix G]. His own image and Wei 

Ming’s repeated image are reflected back to him – Wei Ming is a commodity who will 

provide the aspirational and capitalist benefits of aligning him with sexuality, fame, and 

success in the public sphere. Enamored with this image of himself, he proceeds to attempt 

to sexually impose himself on Wei Ming – it is her refusal that later impels him to shame 

her in public, rendering her a commodity that no one else can possess. 

The tragedy of Wei Ming’s headshot is that it is the only means of her getting her 

voice into the public sphere. She wishes to be an author, not bound by traditional gender 

definitions and capable of expounding her message to a mass-audience – but her didactic 

message is only introduced into the public sphere via an alignment to her glamorous 

image and the addition of the traditional title 女士 (lady) to her text. Just as Lianhua 

utilized the commodity of Ruan’s image to deliver its Leftist films to a willing audience, 

Wei Ming must use the commodity of her own image to attempt to propagate her gender 

deviant-text to the public. Sadly, because of the commodity-allure of her image, she is


unable to publish as the multi-valent identity of modern woman, and is totalized into a 

glamorous commodity. As the publishing house editor discovers her picture and declares 

“Why didn’t you say earlier that the author was a young lady who looked like this? If we 

advertise this as a book by a woman author, it’ll stir up some publicity—I’m sure it’ll sell 

well!,” he is also rapaciously encoding her text with the traditional, unthreatening 女士 

signifier [Appendix H]. 

Yet Wei Ming’s image is not just an object of capitalism, but a gateway to a 

feudal past. As Wei Ming’s secret daughter from a past, failed marriage questions her 

Aunt about her mother, the Aunt appeases the girl’s questions with a picture of her 

mother. “Wow – mom is really good looking!” the young girl exclaims, impelling the 

aunt to stare at the image which, portal-like, dissolves into a flashback of Wei Ming’s 

feudal-deviant past. Becoming pregnant out of wedlock, she was cast out of the feudal 

realm when her father threw the tools of traditional shame-suicide (a knife and a rope) at 

her feet. These death tools fade into a shot of Wei Ming eloping with her boyfriend and 

being subsequently abandoned by him after the birth of their daughter. She has not 

escaped feudal suicide, indeed the path she has chosen is linked to feudal shame-suicide: 

she hides the fact that she has a daughter and refuses to enter the public sphere as a 

deviant female entity. 

However, at the start of the film, Wei Ming has not lost all autonomous ability. 

Though she is exploited as a sex-object by Dr. Wang, her interactions with him are rife 

with her own individual projections, which define the capitalist luxuries of the modern 

world in terms of the feudal tragedy of her past. As they drive to a night club and Dr. 

Wang’s gaze fragments Wei Ming into close-up shots of her qipao-revealed legs and


various other body parts, Wei Ming projects the story of how she became associated with 

this modern boy onto the window of the forward-moving modern vehicle. Her projection 

reveals that she was effectively sold to him by her school as a means of securing a 

generous donation – once more complicating education with image-exploitation. Once 

they arrive at the club, a Western dancer appears in chains to dance to the tune of “Peach 

Blossom River.” A sequence of shot-reverse shot images between the woman-in-chains 

and the audience reveals the enraptured faces of the modern subjects and, finally, the 

horrified visage of Wei Ming. As the dancer falls to the ground and gazes up screen-right, 

the image briefly dissolves into an image of Wei Ming in the dancer’s costume gazing 

down screen-left – she is rendered feudal prisoner by taking in the modern commodity of 

female-on-display. 

At the start of the film, Wei Ming demonstrates outward gazing autonomy by 

projecting onto others; however, because she has predicated her autonomy on fiscal 

wealth and hiding her feudal past, the moment that she loses money she loses the ability 

to project onto others. Instead she projects commodities onto her own image. For 

example, desperate for money to buy medicine for her deathly-ill daughter Wei Ming 

refuses to reveal to anyone her dire situation and instead chooses to find other means of 

securing the money to buy medication. Dr. Wang, already married, proposes to her. At 

this moment of gazing at the commodity of the wedding ring, Wei Ming transposes the 

image of a pawn shop sign onto herself, which promptly dissolves into the transposed 

image of a hotel sign. Her ability to define the self in terms of social-status defining 

commodity projects onto the site of her own body. By participating in pawn-shop 

pimping she herself becomes hotel-convenience prostitute/concubine.


There is one figure that enters Wei Ming’s residence without ever being placed in 

the same frame-position as the mass-produced image of Wei Ming: her socialist friend, 

Ah Ying. Throughout the film Wei Ming and Ah Ying are presented as parallel, 

antithetical foils, a narrative choice which is underscored by the fact that, when the two 

women appear in the same frame, they are shown at similar heights, both wearing qipaocollared 

tops (though Ah Ying wears a shirt and pants), and both have short hair. Ah 

Ying’s walls, too, are plastered with signifiers: her ever growing shadow and her “selfimprovement” 

schedule that includes her volunteer teaching factory girls. Her bobbed 

hair is unkempt, she physically dominates nearly every frame she appears in, and she has 

eschewed utilizing her modern girl free-time to go to dance halls and instead uses it to 

uplift the repressed social classes of Shanghai. She is the socialist ideal – yet when she 

appears in frames with Wei Ming, they are the same height [Appendix I]. 

Though Ah Ying is a graphic parallel for the fore-grounded “Woman Who Never 

Falls Down” doll and Wei Ming is paralleled with the back-grounded headshot, Ah Ying 

looks toward Wei Ming as a superior and a source of knowledge. Ah Ying declares, “I 

wrote a song called ‘New Woman.’ I hope you can set it to music. Right now I’ve been 

taking the currently popular, but meaningless songs, and rewriting them to teach our 

workers; but this is not a permanent solution. We still need to write our own songs… 

This is my revision of ‘Peach Blossom River.’” As important as her didactic social 

message may be, she has patterned it after the very same song that caused Wei Ming to 

be a transposed prisoner. She needs the expertise of Wei Ming to transform the song into 

something original, something that will truly reach the masses.


Wei Ming’s tragic plot worsens when she decides to fully render herself a 

commodity, a prostitute to a wealthy client, in a last-ditch effort to obtain the money she 

needs to provide for her dying child. The client turns out to be the previously jilted Dr. 

Wang and Wei Ming refuses to debase herself any further – she attempts to run from this 

fatal commoditization, but it is too late. Her daughter dies, and her scandal is leaked to 

the paper. In a fit of sorrow, Wei Ming takes a full bottle of sleeping pills and as her state 

deteriorates she cries to her sister “I really can’t go on living . . . this society, which we 

have no power to change . . . As for your future, please talk to Ah Ying . . .” On her 

deathbed, Wei Ming’s startled face is shown in an extreme close-up. This shot is echoed 

by a subsequent extreme close-up shot of Ah Yings’ factory girl pupils. The dying Wei 

Ming appears first as student and then, shown in a medium shot with her arm raised in a 

defensive fist, her image dissolves into a shot of Ah Ying in the exact same posture. It is 

then that she dies and Ah Ying’s students begin to sing her song. At last, even if briefly, 

the multi-valent identity of Wei Ming finds identification with both socialist student and 

teacher. Her sacrifice has paved the road for the socialist girls (who may include her 

sister) who literally flood the streets of Shanghai, growing as large as the skyline. 

Ruan Ling-Yu herself was not so lucky. Soon after New Women was released into 

cinemas and was gaining public popularity, Damin threatened Ruan with increased bad 

publicity unless she increased his allowance. Ruan’s lover, Tang, refused this and 

encouraged Ruan to make a statement to newspapers that she and Damin had never been 

properly married. Damin subsequently (and very publically) sued Ruan and Tang for 

adultery – which was legally considered a crime on the part of the woman adulteress, but 

not the man (Meyer 53-54). Tang hoped to flee to America with Ruan until after the


scandal had settled down but Ruan, according to Stanley Kwan’s research, felt that 

Lianhua was “having enough bad press” and that fleeing Shanghai would damage the 

success of her studio and of New Women. As Kwan claims, “the problem was that she 

was a movie star. [T]o an ordinary girl a love triangle was commonplace…it wouldn’t 

have created a ripple. But it was different for Ruan because she was a public figure.” 

On the evening of March 7, 1935, Ruan Ling-Yu attended a celebratory dinner 

with the employees of Lianhua – she was two days away from publically going to court 

for adultery. Upon returning home, she and Tang evidently got into a violent altercation 

and, after he went to bed, Ruan got out three bottles of sleeping pills, wrote two suicide 

notes, and proceed to consume all of the barbiturates (55-56). She died on March 18, 

1935. Current research has called into question the provenance of Ruan Ling-Yu’s two 

suicide notes – it is now clear that the original texts she intended to leave behind are 

nowhere in existence (xvi), and I will not do her the injustice of reprinting the words she 

did not speak. The only message that remains from Ruan’s choice of death is that it so 

closely mirrored her onscreen death in New Women. 

Ruan’s funeral was a lavish affair; after over 25,000 individuals had gazed on the 

corpse of the star while it was on display from March 11-14, the day of her funeral would 

bring even more viewers, “over 100,000 people…lined the ten-mile route from the 

funeral home to Luen Yee Sayzoong Cemetery,” where she was interred (61). Even in 

death, Ruan served as a commodity to manipulate and wield messages. The pictures 

which adorned her funerary procession and were scattered across her bier where 

primarily copies of her famous headshot as Wei Ming in New Women (Kerlan). Even in 

death, her talent (and indeed her entire life) was aligned with the characters she played on


screen. With this use of portraiture, Ruan was rendered a permanent Wei Ming as Luo 

Mingyou publically declared “[Ruan] did not die of suicide; she sacrificed herself to 

society and all women” and, implicitly, to Lianhua’s continued cinematic goals (Pang 

125). 

Ruan Ligyu’s death proved to be the media sensation of the century – in the 

months after her death nearly every tabloid and newspaper capitalized on it. Special 

edition Ruan retrospectives were produced by every major pictorial (including Lianhua’s 

own Lianhua Pictorial) (Kerlan). Lianhua was not silent on the opportunity to capitalize 

on this death, as Richard Meyer’s research indicates, “Fei Mu blamed the feudal ideology 

which he said was still in society for her death. Li Minwei said Ruan had ‘seen all the 

brutalities of social injustice, particularly those related to the inferiority of 

women…Protesting with her dead body she demands justice form us all’” (Meyer 62). 

However, not all of the Lianhua press was so optimistic about Ruan’s suicide. In a 1935 

essay remembering Ruan Ling-Yu’s death, Cai Chusheng provided the following 

synopsis for his own film, “In New Women, Ruan plays a woman writer…[s]uccumbing 

to the pressure of living and oppression by the old-fashioned society, however, she 

attempts suicide. By the time she realizes that to be an erroneous action, it is already too 

late” (Hong, 556). His stern condemnation of suicide as an “erroneous action,” refuses to 

conflate Ruan with her character and he emphasizes that she “played” a woman writer – 

that she was not the character herself. However, he would later confess that Ruan had 

exhibited a strong interest in the role of Wei Ming and had exerted her authority within 

the studio to convince Cai that she could play such a taxing role (Kwan). Despite others 

attempts to shape Ruan’s death into an example of how dangerous it was for a woman to


think and work in such emotionally dark realms, to capitalize on her death as a signal of 

their own personal political alignment, or simply to view it as a spectacle, one thing 

remains fully in Ruan’s agency – it was her choice, both to play Wei Ming and to die like 

her. 

In his famous eulogy to Ruan Lingyu, Lu Xun blamed Ruan’s death on both the 

media that profited from her scandal and the public that gorged themselves on the meat of 

her commoditized misfortune. 

“‘Since everyone knew Ruan Lingyu from the films, she was good copy 

for the papers wanting sensational news and could increase their sales. 

Readers seeing items about her would think: ‘Though I am not so beautiful 

as Ruan Lingyu, I have higher standards.’ …Even after her suicide, people 

might think: ‘Though I am not so talented, I am braver – I have not 

committed suicide.’ It is certainly worth spending a few coppers to 

discover your own superiority” (Lu Xun, 187-188). 

As Lu Xun elegantly states, Ruan Lingyu’s tragedy lies in the fact that she was “good 

copy,” available to those hoping to make a profit of a few coppers by exploiting the star 

and those willing to spend to buy an aspirational commodity to align themselves with the 

cinema star, however tenuously. Even Lu Xun himself is not free from this exploitative 

cycle, after all he is using Ruan as a means of illustrating his personal views about the 

Shanghai public and press. 

Perhaps the greatest tragedy in the chronicle of Ruan Lingyu is that there is no 

record of her authentic voice: her biographies are fueled by the memories of others, she 

and her Cantonese accent are kept silent onscreen, no diaries were left behind, and her 

suicide notes are forgeries. Yet she has left behind the legacy of her body as a language 

and her films as an immortal record of her reign of influence. It is arguable that Lianhua


would not have been the success that it was in interwar Shanghai without the star power 

and allure of Ruan Lingyu. At the mercy of the capitalist machine of mainstream (though 

subversive) cinema, the star serves as a discursive and sacrificial site for the film. 

Ultimately, though, Ruan’s sacrificial suicide was an act of autonomy, a choice enacted 

in the solitary hours of midnight, a choice unbound by the gaze of anyone else, and 

perhaps there is something to be said for her having left no voice behind with her death. 

Her reasons remain hers and hers alone, locked up in that famous body perpetuated in her 

spectral shadow on the silver screen and belonging to no one else. As Lingu, Wei Ming, 

and, in a sense, the Goddess “died” before her, she too has rendered herself free from an 

essentializing gestalt. In her lack of narrative closure she enacts the ultimate autonomy: 

she renders herself the deviant, immortal, femme fractale.


Appendix A (The Goddess) 

Appendix B (The Goddess)


Appendix C (The Goddess) 

Appendix D (The Goddess)


Appendix E (The Goddess) 

Appendix F (Ling long Women’s Magazine)


Appendix G (New Women) 

Appendix H (New Women)


Appendix I (New Women)


Works Cited 

Baskett, Michael. “Peach Girl (Taohua Qi Xue Ji) (1931), and: The Goddess (Shennü) 

(1934), and: Ruan Ling-Yu: The Goddess of Shanghai (2005) (review).” The 

Moving Image 7.2 (2008): 109-112. Print. 

Barlow, Tani E. "Buying In: Advertising and the Sexy Modern Girl Icon in Shanghai in 

the 1920s and 1930s." The Modern Girl Around the World. Durham: Duke UP, 

2008. 288-316. Print. 

阮玲玉 (Center Stage). Dir. Stanley Kwan. Perf. Maggie Cheung, Tony Leung, and 

Carina Lau. Golden Harvest, 1992. DVD. 

Clark, Paul. Chinese Cinema: Culture and Politics since 1949. Cambridge, 

Cambridgeshire: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Print. 

Denton, Kirk A. "A Brief History of Chinese Film." ASC Comm Web Workflow. Ohio 

State University, n.d. Web. 14 Mar. 2013. http://people.cohums.ohiostate.edu/denton2/courses/c505/temp/history/chapter1.html 

Duus, Peter. The Cambridge History of Japan: Volume 6, the Twentieth Century. 

Cambridge, England: Cambridge UP, 1988. Print. 

Ebrey, Patricia Buckley. The Cambridge Illustrated History of China. Cambridge: 

Cambridge UP, 2010. Print. 

神女 (The Goddess). Dir. Yonggang Wu. Perf. Ling-Yu Ruan, Zhizhi Zhang, Tian Jian, 

and Keng Li. Lianhua Film Company, 1934. DVD. 

Hong, Guo-jin. "Framing Time: New Women and the Cinematic Representation of 

Colonial Modernity in 1930s Shanghai." Project Muse 15.3 (2007): 553-79. Web. 

Kerlan, Anne. "Ruan Ling-Yu's Picture Persona (Ruan Ling-Yu 1910-1935)." Ruan Ling- 

Yu's Picture Persona (Ruan Ling-Yu 1910-1935). TGE-Adonis, 9 June 2010. 

Web. 26 Mar. 2013. . 

Lai Man-Wai: The Father of Hong Kong Cinema. Dir. Kai-Kwong Choi. Dragon Ray 

Motion Pictures, Ltd., 2001. DVD. 

"Ling long Women's Magazine." Ling long Women's Magazine. Columbia University 

Libraries, 2005. Web. 20 Apr. 2013. 

.


Lu Xun, “Gossip is a Fearful Thing,” in Selected Works of Lu Xun, Vol. 4, translated by 

Yang Hsien-Yi and Gladys Yang. Peking Foreign Language Press, 1960. 

Meyer, Richard J. Ruan Ling-yu: The Goddess of Shanghai. Hong Kong: Hong Kong UP, 

2005. Print. 

新女性 (New Women). Dir. Chusheng Cai. Perf. Ling-Yu Ruan, Naidong Wang, Xu 

Ying, Moqiu Wang, and Junli Zheng. Lianhua Film Company, 1935. DVD. 

Pang, Laikwan. Building a New China in Cinema: The Chinese Left-wing Cinema 

Movement, 1932-1937. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002. Print. 

桃花泣血记 (Peach Blossom Weeps Tears of Blood). Dir. Wancang Bu. Perf. Ling-Yu 

Ruan and Yan Jin. Lianhua Film Company, 1931. DVD. 

Pickowicz, Paul G. China on Film: A Century of Exploration, Confrontation, and 

Controversy. [S.l.]: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013. Print. 

一剪梅 (A Spray of Plum Blossoms). Dir. Wangcang Bu. Perf. Ling-Yu Ruan, Cilong 

Wang, and Yan Jin. Lianhua Film Company, 1931. DVD. 

Zhang, Yingjin. "Transnationalism and Translocality in Chinese Cinema." Cinema 

Journal 49.3 (2010). 

Zhang, Yingjin. Chinese National Cinema. New York: Routledge, 2004. Print. 

Zhang, Zhen. "An Amorous History of the Silver Screen: The Actress As Vernacular 

Embodiment in Early Chinese Film Culture." Project Muse 16.3 (2001). 

i Note: I have chosen this quote from Lu Xun’s essay on the public response to the April 1928 seizure of 

the Hunan Communist Party by governmental authorities and subsequent executions of these political 

prisoners (three of whom where female) because it is a powerful statement about the fragmenting gaze the 

public holds on the female body-rendered-spectacle, but also can speak volumes about how the “presentday 

Chinese” who “do not care about political parties” can be drawn into political discussion through the 

utilization of the female figure as a politically sacrificial spectacle. It is with this mindset that I begin my 

exploration of Ruan Ling-Yu as a “spectral” figure who aided in the dispersal of Leftist sentiments through 

the subversive use of her body (both that of her public persona and her filmic personae).

"Ruan Ling-Yu, Shanghai's Femme Fractale: Actress as Educator ...

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