‘The law has no conscience’: The cultural construction of justice and the reception of Awara in China

In 1955 members of the Indian People’s Theater Association, a group closely associated with the Communist Party of India, travelled to China as part of a cultural exchange between the two countries following the state level meeting between Zhou Enlai and Jawaharlal Nehru in 1954. Their visit saw an ‘Indian film week’ in which Hindi films were screened throughout China, most notably the 1951 Raj Kapoor film Awara, remembered fondly by many Chinese growing up in the later 1970s–early 1980s Reform period as Liulangzhe. This article situates Awara in the history of Chinese cinema, as a leftist text that depicted a fellow third world nation also engaged in constructing an alternative to the western experience of modernity.