147 Films & TV Shows Set In China During The 1930s
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Center Stage
Shanghai The 1930sBased on the tragic true story of China's first prima donna of the silver screen, Ruan Lingyu, chronicling her rise to fame as a movie actress in Shanghai during the 1930s.
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The Raid
๐จ๐ณ China The 1930s The 1940sIn the 1930s, China was in a state of turmoil and flurry. The dethroned Emperor Pu-Yi had established the Puppet State of Manchukuo in Manchuria and was cooperating with the Japanese in the testing of poisonous gas. The revolutionary army headed by Lieutenant Mong is assigned to crush this vicious plot. During his mission, Mong comes across witty and valiant veteran Uncle Choy and his friends, who volunteer to help. Mong believes that Uncle Choy is too old to join them. How can Uncle Choy prove himself? And can they succeed in their mission?
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Shanghai Shanghai
Shanghai The 1930sLittle Tiger (Yuen Biao) ventures from the sticks to the big city in search of his cop brother Big Tiger (Chi-cheung Lam), an honest cop working in a corrupt system. Surmising that life in the police force was not his cup of tea, Little Tiger joins the Swallow Acrobatic Troop, which he excels in because of his kung-fu prowess. When a band of thugs from Chin Hung-yun's (Sammo Hung) group attacks the troop, Little Tiger not only handily fights them back but also infiltrates their organization to destroy them from the inside. Meanwhile, Big Tiger's old flame Mary (Anita Mui) returns from America to join the revolutionaries. Big Tiger soon finds himself torn between his love of this girl and his orders to arrest all revolutionaries.
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The Fortune Code
๐จ๐ณ China The 1940s The 1930sSet in China during the Japanese occupation. A young man breaks out of a POW camp to marry his sweetheart, but finds she is now a spy for the resistance, code-named "Number 3". With the help of "Number 2" he returns to the camp to find "Fortune", an agent who possesses the pass-code to a Swiss bank account with $500 billion intended for the Chinese army.
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Evening Bell
๐จ๐ณ China The 1930s The 1940sTaking place in the immediate aftermath of the Second Sino-Japanese War, Evening Bell follows a small platoon of five Chinese soldiers who must negotiate a devastated landscape, burying bodies, disarming mines, and eventually facing off against a starving band of Japanese soldiers who do not yet know that the war has ended.
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Men Behind the Sun
๐จ๐ณ China The 1940s The 1930sThe film is a graphic depiction of the war atrocities committed by the Japanese at Unit 731, the secret biological weapons experimentation unit of the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II. The film details the various cruel medical experiments Unit 731 inflicted upon the Chinese and Soviet prisoners at the tail-end of the war.
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Gunmen
Shanghai The 1930sFour war veterans join forces to wipe out an increasingly powerful drug cartel.
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The Last Emperor
Beijing Shanghai The 1980s The 1960s The 1950s The 1940s The 1930s The 1920s The 1910s The 1900s1500 slaves. 353,260,000 royal subjects. Warlords. Concubines. And 2 wives. He was the loneliest boy in the world. โ A dramatic history of Pu Yi, the last of the Emperors of China, from his lofty birth and brief reign in the Forbidden City, the object of worship by half a billion people; through his abdication, his decline and dissolute lifestyle; his exploitation by the invading Japanese, and finally to his obscure existence as just another peasant worker in the People's Republic.
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Empire of the Sun
Shanghai The 1940s The 1930sTo survive in a world at war, he must find a strength greater than all the events that surround him. โ Jamie Graham, a privileged English boy, is living in Shanghai when the Japanese invade and force all foreigners into prison camps. Jamie is captured with an American sailor, who looks out for him while they are in the camp together. Even though he is separated from his parents and in a hostile environment, Jamie maintains his dignity and youthful spirits, providing a beacon of hope for the others held captive with him.
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Red Sorghum
Shandong Province The 1930s The 1940sAn old leper who owned a remote sorghum winery dies. Jiu'er, the wife bought by the leper, and her lover, identified only as "my Grandpa" by the narrator, take over the winery and set up an idealized quasi-matriarchal community headed by Jiu'er. When the Japanese invaders subject the area to their rule and cut down the sorghum to make way for a road, the community rises up and resists as the sorghum grows anew.
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Fire on the Great Wall
Beijing The 1930s The 1940sHe who fights for freedom fears nothing! โ Ninja Over the Great Wall takes place in the early nineteen-thirties when China was occupied by the Japanese imperial forces. Wa Chi Keung is a peasant who escaped the mass murder of his village by the Japanese. He joins his master in Bejing shortly before the old man's assassination by ninjas.
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Shanghai Surprise
Shanghai The 1930s The 1940sA romantic adventure for the dangerous at heart. โ Glendon Wasey is a fortune hunter looking for a fast track out of China. Gloria Tatlock is a missionary nurse seeking the curing powers of opium for her patients. Fate sets them on a hectic, exotic, and even romantic quest for stolen drugs. But they are up against every thug and smuggler in Shangai.
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Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
Shanghai ๐ฎ๐ณ India The 1930sIf adventure has a name... it must be Indiana Jones. โ After arriving in India, Indiana Jones is asked by a desperate village to find a mystical stone. He agrees โ and stumbles upon a secret cult plotting a terrible plan in the catacombs of an ancient palace.
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Shanghai 13
Shanghai The 1930s The 1940sA patriot finds evidence that the government is collaborating with a foreign power. If the people knew about the deception, they would revolt and overthrow the corrupt government. One patriot in office steals the proof and must make it out of the country. He gets assistance from a local rebel leader who is in charge of a motley group of fighters called the Shanghai 13. Not all of them can be trusted, as some of them will turn in the government official. Our weak protagonist must run a gauntlet of the who's who already mentioned.
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Yellow Earth
Shaanxi Province The 1930s The 1940sYellow earth focuses on the story of a Communist soldier who is sent to the countryside to collect folk songs for the Communist Revolution. There he stays with a peasant family and learns that the happy songs he was sent to collect do not exist; the songs he finds are about hardship and suffering. He returns to the Army, but promises to come back for the young girl, Cuiqiao, who has been spellbound by his talk of the freedom women have under Communist rule and who wants to join the Communist Army.
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Hong Kong 1941
๐ญ๐ฐ Hong Kong ๐จ๐ณ China The 1930s The 1940sYears later, a woman narrates her personal story of the Japanese takeover of Hong Kong in 1941. She's Nam, young, attractive, daughter of a wealthy rice merchant, and prey to painful, disabling seizures. Her boyhood friend is Coolie Keung, whose family used to have wealth; he's now impoverished, a tough kid, a leader, in love with her. Into the mix steps Fay, cool and resourceful, an actor from the north, intent on getting to Gold Mountain in the US or Australia. They form a threesome, but the day they are to leave Hong Kong, the invasion stops them. Fay must rescue Keung from collaborators, Nam falls in love with Fay, and danger awaits their next attempt to escape. Written by
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Shanghai Blues
๐จ๐ณ China The 1930s The 1940sIn 1937 Shanghai, a soon-to-depart soldier meets a young woman under a bridge during a Japanese air raid. They vow to meet after the war ends, but they don't know each other's name or face. Ten years later, the young woman, a nightclub singer, takes in a naive girl fresh from the country. The country girl falls in love with the would-be song-writer upstairs who, unbeknownst to the singer, is none other than the soldier from the bridge.
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Shanghai Vance King
Shanghai The 1930sSwinginโ & Jazz Musical Show โ Set in the 1930s in the international city of Shanghai, the film follows the extravagant life and times of a group of jazz musicians, living from one advance paycheck to the next, as the country teeters over the brink into the Second Sino-Japanese War.
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One And Eight
๐จ๐ณ China The 1930s The 1940sDirector Zhang Junzhao's superbly tense revisionist war film (featuring striking cinematography from future Fifth Generation standard bearer Zhang Yimou) is widely considered to be the first work of Mainland Fifth Generation cinema.
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Portrait of a Fanatic
๐จ๐ณ China The 1970s The 1960s The 1940s The 1930sIn 1949 when the Communist regime was established in China, the world-famed painter Ling Chen-kuang, believing his conviction for a new-born society had come true on his motherland, returned anxiously from the U.S., whither he had fled apprehension by lawmen when cracking down on rebellious activities he had actively engaged in out of cynicism and hostility โ the feelings evolved from constant haunting by the memories of his childhood miserableness โ to the then existing institutions in China. Alas, to his disillusion, the land he had so deeply loved, the society of which he had expected so much, should have turned out to be the hell on earth. Why? The enigma kept obsessing and puzzling him even to his dying moment.
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The Xi'an Incident
๐จ๐ณ China The 1930s The 1940sMarshal Zhang Xueliang, Commander of the North Eastern Army, grows progressively disillusioned by Kuomintang leader Chiang Kai-shek's policy to engage the Chinese Communist Party rather than fight the Japanese invaders which are occupying Manchuria. Despite numerous pleas, Chiang does not budge. After discussing with fellow general Yang Hucheng, the two take events into their own hands and place Chiang Kai-shek under arrest on December 12, 1936, forcing Chiang into a coalition with the CCP.
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Heroes of the East
๐จ๐ณ China The 1930s The 1940sGordon Liu stars as a Chinese martial arts student struggling to relate to his new Japanese wife. When a series of martial misunderstandings spirals into an international incident, he's forced to take on seven of Japan's most powerful martial arts masters, each an expert in a different discipline, ranging from karate to samurai to ninjitsu.
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Heroes of the Eastern Skies
๐จ๐ณ China The 1930s The 1940sThe true story of a small group of Chinese flying aces in 1937 at the beginning of the Second Sino-Japanese War, specifically the Battle of Shanghai and the Battle of Nanking.
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7-Man Army
Beijing The 1930s The 1940sIn 1933, 20,000 Japanese soldiers and 50 tanks invaded the Pa Tou Lou Tzu, a strategic key point of the Great Wall. With only seven men stationing, these heroes took on the entire army for five days before succumbing. Director Chang Cheh recreated this epic battle with his favorite cast including Ti Lung, David Chiang, Alexander Fu Sheng and Chen Kuan-tai, as a celluloid tribute to these nameless souls.
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The Everlasting Glory
๐จ๐ณ China The 1930s The 1940sA most touching and consistently heart-gripping war drama depicts the heroic deeds of General Chang Tsu-chung who was even held in high esteem and dubbed as โMars of Chinaโ by his Japanese counterpart, General Itagaki during Sino-Japanese war.
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