Abstract
The organization known as the United States Information Service (USIS) came into existence in China in December of 1941, when the Foreign Information Service (FIS) under the Office of the Coordinator of Information (COI) appointed the journalist F. McCracken Fisher to head an office in Chongqing, the Nationalist (Guomindang) capital in the War of Resistance Against Japan (1937-1945). Entrusted with the task of communicating the U.S. view of the world war, Fisher’s office and those in several other Chinese cities built a sizable infrastructure for news distribution, radio broadcasts, film projection, and educational programming by war’s end.1 Known in Mandarin as the meiguo xinwenchu, these offices comprised a local front for a shapeshifting array of Washington bureaucracies. Between 1941 and 1953, they answered to the COI, the Office of War Information (OWI), and the State Department’s Office of International Information and Cultural Affairs (OIICA) before it was absorbed into the U.S. Information Agency (USIA).2 The victory of the Chinese Communist Party in the Chinese civil war (1945-1949) and the subsequent U.S.-China conflict in the Korean war (1950-1953) pushed the USIS’s China-branches to British-controlled Hong Kong and Guomindang-controlled Taiwan, occasioning further displacements of institutional continuity.
Recommended Citation
Chen, Thorn
(2022)
"The USIS, China, and the Postwar Order: The Film Catalog as Archive Map,"
The Journal of e-Media Studies: Vol. 6:
Iss.
1, Article 10.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1349/PS1.1938-6060.A.483
Available at:
https://digitalcommons.dartmouth.edu/joems/vol6/iss1/10
Figure 1: Front and Back Covers, "Film Catalogue of the U.S. Information Service China" circa 1947 (Publication data unavailable)
Chen Image 2 (for Scalar).jpg (425 kB)
Figure 2: Appendix with titles and classifications "Film Catalogue of the U.S. Information Service China," circa 1947 (Publication data unavailable)