ABSTRACT
An investigation of China’s industrial approach to its American counterpart in the early twentieth century naturally leads to questions such as, what are the results, and how can one evaluate China’s response? This chapter employs a method named POPSTAT (popularity statistics) to probe film popularity in the early Chinese film industry. It analyses the exhibition records from 38 cinemas which advertised in the daily newspapers Xinwen Bao, North China Daily News, and Shen Bao in Shanghai in the year 1934. The chapter demonstrates that the American industry’s dominance was not monolithic, and that from some perspectives it was outranked by the Chinese domestic film industry.
