Announcement: a broader scope

     The Chinese Mirror (CM) began in October, 2006 as an outlet for the editor to share his research findings with others who might share his film interest but lack the language skills which would allow them to access Chinese primary sources.  The number of readers accessing the site has been growing daily, and although Chinese movies are admittedly a niche interest, it has been very gratifying to discover how many others share that interest, and to find CM has a global readership, with readers on every continent.  The focus of CM has been (and will continue to be) on the history of Chinese cinema, but we are making a few changes; specifically, we are broadening the scope a bit.
     In February, 2007, we added a sister site, The Chinese Mirror Newsblog (CMN), to publish items reporting current movie news, translated from the Chinese entertainment press.  Some of these were straight translations, while others were summaries of news reports.  Unfortunately, this venture has been less successful:  for one thing, laboriously translated news items often show up (in abridged form) in other Western language news sources, a few of which are listed in the sidebar to the left.  So a complete translation effort would appear to be in vain.  In addition, many of the articles were ephemera:  something may be today's hot news but would anyone care tomorrow?
     However, one category of CMN post seems to have more permanence:  interviews with contemporary filmmakers. As an experiment, one of these articles was posted at both sites, and the number of users accessing that article was far greater at CM than at CMN, although the interview was not as strictly "historical" as the other articles at CM.  So we have made a decision to post future interviews at The Chinese Mirror, in the belief that interviews with today's filmmakers are a contribution to the overall body of cinematic literature, especially their recollections and experiences making a particular motion picture, working with specific other filmmakers, etc.  Previously published interviews have been moved from The CM Newsblog and are now archived at The Chinese Mirror in the category "Interviews--Modern Era."
     So while The Chinese Mirror will continue to be a historical journal, we have widened our conception of history to include the modern era as a part of China's rich cinematic history, but restricted to those items which in the editor's opinion constitute a less transient, and more permanent, part of that history.