Ling Zhang is an Assistant Professor of Cinema Studies at State University of New York, Purchase College. She is currently completing a book manuscript entitled Unruly Sounds: Chinese Cinema and Transnational Acoustic Culture, 1929-1949. Zhang received her PhD from the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago and specializes in film sound, Chinese-language cinema, documentary, women and cinema, Third World cultural exchange, and the cultural Cold War. She has published in both English and Chinese in journals and anthologies including Film Quarterly, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Comparative Cinema, Yearbook for Traditional Music, and Asian Cinema, among others.
After twelve years of operation in a village in Hunan Province, China, “Voice of Malayan Revolution (Suara Revolusi Malaya),” the clandestine radio station of the Malayan Communist Party in exile, was closed down on June 30, 1981. Its termination was ordered by Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese leader who pushed for the neoliberal “economic reform and open up” policy under the pressure of Lee Kuan Yew, Prime Minister of Singapore, who requested that “China stop supporting communist armed struggles in Southeast Asia.” While it was still active, “Voice of Malayan Revolution” was broadcast widely in four languages: Mandarin, Malay, English, and Tamil. Various Chinese dialects were also added, for instance Hokkien, Hakka, and Teochew. The station’s multilingual programs were translated, edited and aired by a staff of 100 members, multi-ethnic Malayan revolutionaries including Chinese, Malay and Indians, who collaborated with Chinese technicians. VMR broadcasts not only invigorated guerilla fighters in the jungle, but also appealed to innumerable communities in Southeast Asia and idealistic youths in mainland China. Taking VMR as an example, this paper examines how radio as an auditory technology and a medium for “disembodied voices” facilitated an “acoustic revolutionary internationalism” that defied linguistic, ethnic and national boundaries and established intimate emotional and intellectual connections with spatially distant and dispersed listeners. Furthermore, it explores the ways in which the history and practices of VMR epitomize key shifts in geopolitical and historical relations between China, Southeast Asian nations, and old and new colonial powers during and after the Cold War period.