By 1925, China’s young movie industry was emerging as a major source of urban entertainment, and showing signs of maturing as a truly competitive industry. With bustling Shanghai having no lack of well-heeled entrepreneurs and investors eager to get into the game, film studios were beginning to proliferate:. While the Mingxing studio continued its numerical dominance, with 9 movies released that year, all full length features, others were getting into the game, with 14 more studios producing 2 or more films, and 15 “poverty row” studios jumping in with one each. Of the 62 films released and exhibited in Shanghai in 1925, 54 were features, the first time full length productions outnumbered shorts.
In addition to product statistics, the industry was showing other signs of healthy development, such as the opening of movie houses, theaters built specifically for showing movies, not adapted stage venues. The most opulent of these were large facilities intended to exhibit the Western motion pictures which still predominated, but there were countless smaller facilities set up to show Chinese productions. But perhaps the most outstanding sign of development was the infusion of new talent, both before and behind the camera, that the various film schools that emerged in the early 1920s were beginning to turn out in batches, removing the dependence on veteran stage and operatic artists that had been the standard in the earlier years.