Of the few important studios in Shanghai operating in the 1920s and 1930s, perhaps the most famous was the Mingxing , whose films were generally of a left-leaning, anti-imperialist nature quite at odds with the general tenor of Hollywood. The film Sister Flower (1933) tells the story of twin sisters separated at birth, one of whom ends up a city girl living in Shanghai, while the other remains a poor villager. During the course of reuniting the sisters, the film contrasts in some detail the lives of ordinary city-dwellers and peasants. Another film from the same year, Spring Silk Worm, an adaptation of a short story written by the well-known contemporary writer Mao Dun, portrays economic decline and hardship in Zhejiang Province outside Shanghai, and implicitly levels the finger of accusation at Japanese imperialism. Finally, The Goddess (1934), from the Lianhua studio, shows the struggle of a prostitute to have her son educated, against all the prejudices of the age. The improbably glamorous prostitute was played by the woman often referred to as China's own Garbo, the languorous Ruan Lingyu. Despite the liberal pretensions of these films, it was inevitable - given that audiences comprised just a tiny elite of China's total population - that they would later be derided by the Communists as excessively bourgeois.

After the Japanese occupation of Shanghai along with other large tracts of China in 1937, "subversive" studios such as the Mingxing and Lianhua were immediately closed, though some of the film-making talent managed to flee into the interior, where work continued. The experience of war undoubtedly put film-makers in closer touch with their potential future audiences, the Chinese masses. China's great wartime epic, Spring River Flows East (1947-8) was the cinematic result of this experience. The story spans the whole duration of the anti-Japanese war - and the ensuing civil war - through the lives of a single family, who are themselves torn apart by the conflict. The heroine, living in simple poverty, contrasts with her husband, who has long since abandoned his wife for a decadent urban existence in Shanghai. Traumatized by a decade of war, the Chinese who saw this film appreciated it as an authentic and representative account of the sufferings through which the entire nation had lived. Over three quarters of a million people saw the film at the time of its release, which was a remarkable figure given that the country was still at war.

Chinese film-making under the Communists is a story which really dates back to 1938, when Mao Zedong and his fellow Long Marchers finally set up their base in Yan'an deep in Shaanxi Province and began to prepare for the seizure of power. There could have been no world farther removed from the glamour of Shanghai than dusty, poverty-stricken Yan'an, full of peasants and simple farmers. This was the ideal location for the film-makers of the future People's Republic to practise their skills. Talent escaping through Japanese lines was soon trickling through in search of employment, among them an obscure actress of high ambitions, one Jiang Qing , later to become Mao's wife and self-appointed empress of Chinese culture. One thing that all the leading Communists in Yan'an agreed on was the importance of film as a centralizing medium , which could and should be used to unify the culture of the nation after the war had been won.

The immediate consequence of the Communist victory in 1949 was that the showing of foreign films was severely curtailed. Days were numbered for the private Shanghai studios, too, though they still managed to produce a few films in the years immediately after 1949. In 1950, a Film Guidance committee was set up, comprising 32 members whose task would be to set standards and, effectively, decide upon all film output for the entire nation. In addition to Mao's wife, Jiang Qing, the members of the committee included Yan'an film-makers as well as May Fourth intellectuals, and the established prewar film-makers drew some confidence from the range of voices represented. By 1953 a unified national system for film production was in place and the first major socialist epic, Bridge , appeared in 1949, depicting mass mobilization of workers and peasantry rushing enthusiastically to construct a bridge in record time. Although predictably dull in terms of character and plot, the cast still contained a number of prewar Shanghai actors to divert audiences. The end of the film is marked, for the first time in Chinese cinema, by the entire cast gathering to shout "Long live Chairman Mao!", a scene that was to be re-enacted time and again over the coming years.

A year after Bridge one of the very last non-government Shanghai studio films appeared, The Life of Wu Xun . This was a huge project that had started years earlier, well before 1949, and, surprisingly, had been allowed to run through to completion despite the change of regime. The subject of the film is the famous nineteenth-century entrepreneur, Wu Xun, who started out life as a beggar and eventually rose to enormous riches, whereupon he set out on his lifetime's ambition to educate the peasantry. Despite the addition of a narrator's voice at the end of the film, pointing out that it was revolution and not education that peasants really needed, the film turned out a disaster for the Shanghai film industry. Mao himself wrote a damning critique of it for idolizing a "Qing landlord", and a full-scale campaign was launched against the legacy of the entire Shanghai film world, studios, actors, critics and audiences alike.

The remains of the May Fourth Movement struggled on. New Year's Sacrifice, a film based on a short story from the great prewar intellectual Lu Xun, was released in 1956, though with most of the intelligence and all of the irony taken out. The consolation for the old guard was that newer generations of Chinese film-makers had not yet solved the problem of how to portray life in the contemporary era either. The 1952 screen adaptation of Lao She's short story Dragon's Beard Ditch, for example, was supposed to contrast the miserable pre-1949 life of a poor district of Beijing with the happy, prosperous life that was being lived under the Communists. The only problem, as any audience could immediately see, was that the supposedly miserable pre-1949 scenes actually looked a good deal more human and heart-warming than the later ones.

Nevertheless, the Communists did achieve some of their original targets during the 1950s . The promotion of a universal culture and language was one of them. All characters in all films - from Tibetans to Mongolians to Cantonese - were depicted as speaking in flawless Mandarin Chinese . Film production, too, fanned out across China, and was no longer confined to the eastern coastal cities. Above all, there was an explosion in audiences, from around 47 million tickets sold in 1949, to 600 million in 1956, to over 4 billion in 1959. The latter figure should be understood in the context of the madness surrounding the Great Leap Forward, a time of crazed overproduction in all fields, film included. Film studios began sprouting in every town in China, though with a catastrophic loss of quality - a typical studio in Jiangxi Province comprised one man, his bicycle and an antique stills camera. The colossal output of that year included uninspiring titles such as Loving the Factory as One's Home.

The conspicuous failure of the Great Leap Forward did, however, bring some short-lived advantages to the film industry. While Mao was forced temporarily into the political sidelines in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the cultural bureaucrats signalled that in addition to "revolutionary realism", a certain degree of "revolutionary romanticism" was also to be encouraged. Chinese themes and subjects, as opposed to pure Marxism, were looked upon with more favour. A slight blossoming occurred, with improbable films such as Lin Zexu (1959), which covered the life of the great Qing-dynasty official who stood up to the British at the time of the Opium Wars. There was even a tentative branching out into comedy, with the film What's Eating You ? based on the relatively un-socialist antics of a Suzhou waiter. Unusually, the film featured local dialects, as well as a faintly detectable parody of the "Learn from Lei Feng" campaign, by which the government was seeking to encourage greater sacrifices from individuals by promoting the mythical heroic worker Lei Feng. Generally, films from these years took to depicting so-called "middle" characters, who were neither class heroes nor class villains.

In 1984 the Chinese film industry was suddenly brought to international attention for the first time by the arrival of the so-called "Fifth Generation" of Chinese film-makers. This was the year that director Chen Kaige and his cameraman Zhang Yimou , both graduates from the first post-Cultural Revolution class (1982) of the Beijing Film School, made the superb art film Yellow Earth . The story of Yellow Earth is a minor feature; the interest is in the images and the colours. Still shots predominate, recalling traditional Chinese scroll painting, with giant landscapes framed by hills and the distant Yellow River. The film was not particularly well received in China, either by audiences, who expected something more modern, or by the authorities who expected something more optimistic. Nevertheless, the pattern was now set for a series of increasingly foreign-funded (and foreign-watched) films comprising stunning images of a "traditional" China, irritating the censors at home and delighting audiences abroad.

Chen Kaige's protégé Zhang Yimou was soon stealing a march on his former boss, with his first film Red Sorghum in 1987, set in a remote wine-producing village of northern China at the time of the Japanese invasion. This film was not only beautiful, and reassuringly patriotic, but it also introduced the world to Gong Li , the actress who was to become China's first international heart-throb. The fact that Gong Li and Zhang Yimou were soon to be lovers added to the general media interest in their work, both in China and abroad. They worked together on a string of hits, including Judou, The Story of Qiu Ju, Raise the Red Lantern, Shanghai Triads and To Live. None of these could be described as art films in the way that Yellow Earth had been, and the potent mix of Gong Li's sexuality with exotic, mysterious locations in 1930s China was clearly targeted at Western rather than Chinese audiences. Chinese like to point out that the figure-hugging Chinese dresses regularly worn by Gong Li are entirely unlike the period costume they purport to represent. For such reasons, "moral" as well as political, Zhang's work continued, until recenly, to suffer censorship in his native country.

One of Zhang's most powerful and - from the point of view of the Chinese authorities - controversial films is To Live (1994) which follows the fortunes of a single family from the final, decadent years of the old regime, right through the Communist era to the present day. The various stages of Mao's Communist experiment, from "liberation" to the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, are depicted in terms of the disasters they bring upon the family, including the traumatic deaths of both children in needless accidents for which the regime seems to be responsible. The essence of the story is that life cannot be lived to prescription. Its power lies in the fact that it is a very real reflection of the experience of millions of Chinese people. Similarly, Chen Kaige's superb Farewell My Concubine (1994) incorporates the whole span of modern Chinese history, and although the main protagonist - a homosexual Chinese opera singer - is hardly typical of modern China, the tears aroused by the film are wept for the country as a whole. Zhang's most recent film, Not One Less (1998), re-creates the true story of a country teacher who travels to the city to track down a pupil who has run away. All the characters are portrayed by themselves and give magnificent performances, but ultimately the film is sentimental, suggesting that Zhang is losing his progressive edge.

It is interesting that while the authorities still regard Fifth Generation film-makers as subversive ( To Live has never been screened in China, and Farewell My Concubine is shown with cuts), a new, younger Chinese generation, based mainly in Beijing and inevitably dubbed the "Sixth Generation", is criticizing Zhang and Chen for being too bland, for selling out to commercial interests and giving the West a false image of China. They have started producing underground movies, generally shot in black and white, depicting what they consider to be the true story of contemporary China - ugly cities, cold flats, broke and depressed people. One of these, Beijing Bastards , has a role for the famous rock singer and rebel Cui Jian , who is depicted drinking, swearing and playing the guitar. Unsurprisingly, the Sixth Generation is faring even worse than the Fifth in terms of getting its work screened in China, and is once again having to rely on foreign funds for production.

In recent years, most Chinese directors, sadly, have concentrated on trying to mimic Hollywood slickness. Appalling propaganda films are still being made and are actually quite entertaining if approached in the spirit of irony. Opium War shows the British employing all kinds of underhand tactics to secure Hong Kong. The Brits are at it again in Red Valley , this time invading Tibet. Fortunately, there are also plenty of genuinely good films still being made. Notable is In the Heat of the Sun , which chronicles the antics of a Beijing street gang in the 1970s. It's written by Wang Shuo, the bad boy of contemporary Chinese literature, and displays his characteristic irreverence and earthy humour. Lei Feng is Gone is based on the true story of the man who accidentally killed the iconic hero of Maoist China, the soldier Lei Feng. The potent personal story also works as a metaphor for the state of the nation, and as such was highly controversial when it was released. A Tree in the House is a moving and often hilarious family saga set in a poor district of Tianjin. Two other worthwhile films are The Sun Has Ears and Cello in a Cab , which again deal with contemporary city life in a gritty but humourous way. Even if you don't speak Chinese, the above are all well worth seeking out - they share a sophisticated visual humour and are beautifully shot.