Publicizing peeping: Infrastructure, Milieu, and media culture in modern China, 1942–1949

This article examines the transformation of peepshows (yangpian) into ‘new peepshows’ (xin yangpian) by Chinese Communist propaganda artists from 1942 to 1949, revealing how this understudied medium challenges conventional understandings of propaganda as unidirectional communication. Through archival research, I trace how propaganda artists led by Shi Lu removed the peepholes and lenses characteristic of traditional peepshows, creating public exhibition environments and mobile distribution methods that fostered communal viewing experiences. Rather than viewing this transformation, or gaizao, as a linear progression from ‘old’ to ‘new’, I argue that the new peepshow embodied a dynamic process of constant adaptation—what Shi Lu theorized as ‘compounding’ (huahe)—where heterogeneous elements ranging from local dialects to meteorological conditions were continuously incorporated into the medium. Drawing on theorizations of milieu, I demonstrate how the new peepshow functioned as both medium and milieu, transforming audiences into socialist subjects while reconceptualizing borders through its distribution networks. The medium’s malleability enabled it to operate across diverse environments while transforming these spaces into pedagogical infrastructures. This study contributes to scholarship on medium/environment relationships and Chinese media archaeology, revealing how new peepshows generated productive rethinking of transformation, borders, and propaganda in late Republican China.