This article demonstrates how the popular perception of Shanghai as a decadent city was heightened during the campaign for Emulating the Good Eighth Company of Nanjing Road and argues for the central role of cinema in shaping the symbolism of Shanghai’s locales. The campaign, which peaked in 1963, was linked to the Lei Feng campaign and was an important preamble to the Cultural Revolution. The Good Eighth Company campaign shifted the emphasis from Shanghai’s image as a revolutionary bastion to that of a reactionary stronghold, a “big dying vat” that might contaminate the revolutionary forces and that needed to be brought back into the socialist fold. Using internal Party documents, the author maps out the campaign; by examining films, culminating in Sentinels under the Neon Lights (1964), the author also traces the dynamics that made Nanjing Road into a metonym of Shanghai’s depravity and redefined the city’s revolutionary status.
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