General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20267 min read

Crows and Sparrows (乌鸦与麻雀)

Crows and Sparrows (乌鸦与麻雀; Crow and Sparrow) is a 1949 Chinese black-and-white satirical comedy directed by Zheng Junli and produced by the Kunlun Film Company in Shanghai, in which the tenants of a single Shanghai row house resist the Nationalist official who has seized their building on the eve of the Communist victory in the Chinese Civil War.¹ It was made across the boundary between the Republican and People's Republic eras: shooting began under Nationalist rule, was halted by the authorities, resumed after Shanghai's liberation in May 1949, and the finished film reached audiences as one of the first features of the new state.²

Key fact	Detail
Production	Kunlun Film Company (昆仑影业公司), Shanghai, 1949; black-and-white feature¹
Director and screenplay	Directed by Zheng Junli; collective screenplay with Chen Baichen as lead writer, joined by Shen Fu, Wang Lingu, Xu Tao, Zhao Dan, and Zheng Junli³
Principal cast	Zhao Dan, Wei Heling, Sun Daolin, Huang Zongying, Wu Yin, Shangguan Yunzhu, Li Tianji⁴
Length and format	106 minutes in 12 reels (some catalogs list 112 or 113 minutes)⁵
Release	Completed in November 1949; one account gives a November 1, 1949 premiere, while Chinese film catalogs date the mainland release to January 1950²^•⁵
Award	First prize, story film, Ministry of Culture 1949–1955 Outstanding Films awards (1957), after an initial second-prize rating was revised²
Later versions	Restored for the 2013 Shanghai International Film Festival; 2K restoration with a new Shanghainese dub premiered at the 2024 festival⁶^•⁷

Spoilers

Plot

The story is set in winter 1948 in one shikumen (traditional Shanghai townhouse combining courtyard and Western terrace styles) row house in a Shanghai lane. Kong Youwen, the owner, is an elderly proofreader at a newspaper; because his only son joined the New Fourth Army, Hou Yibo, a section chief of the Nationalist Ministry of Defense in Nanjing, accuses him of communist sympathies and seizes the house by force.⁴ Hou visits Shanghai on Saturdays to speculate for his superiors; his mistress Yu Xiaoying lives on the second floor, renting the garret to the schoolteacher Hua Jiezhi and his wife and the front parlor to the peddler Xiao, nicknamed "Little Broadcast," and his wife, while Kong is pushed into the cramped back parlor.⁴

As the regime crumbles, Hou decides to sell the house and flee, giving the tenants an eviction deadline. Each household first tries to save itself: Mrs. Xiao pawns her jewelry and penicillin to speculate in gold and is beaten; Teacher Hua refuses a school principal's bribe of housing and is arrested on charges of encouraging student unrest; Mrs. Hua, seeking help for her arrested husband and sick daughter, is instead molested by Hou.¹¹ These failures teach the tenants that only collective action can work. When news of the government's disintegration arrives, Hou flees, and on New Year's Eve Kong recovers his house and the households gather for a shared dinner.¹¹

Origins of the project

The film grew out of conversations among left-wing film people at Kunlun in 1948, a year in which the civil war's decisive campaigns were underway and Shanghai was under what the sources describe as white terror. According to a 1905.com account, the actor Zhao Dan, avoiding surveillance by Nationalist agents, joined Huang Zongying, Chen Baichen, Shen Fu, and Zheng Junli in pretending to play mahjong at the home of studio manager Ren Zongde; over six days and nights they discussed the script behind the cover of the game, and Chen Baichen wrote it down.⁸ A history of Chinese cinema records the group's stated motive: as witnesses of the collapse of the Chiang regime, they wanted to record its final crimes and greet liberation with the result.⁹

The title sets the film's allegory. The Nationalist official Hou Yibo and his mistress are the "crows" perched above; the original owner and the tenant households are the "sparrows" below.⁸ A scholarly study notes that the pairing also evokes the idiom jiuzhanquechao (鸠占鹊巢), "the turtledove occupies the magpie's nest," in which one bird takes over another's home, while a flock of sparrows can drive off a larger crow by acting together.¹⁰

Production under censorship

The film's production history is inseparable from its politics. In late April 1949 the Shanghai garrison command ordered filming stopped; after Shanghai's liberation the crew resumed in September 1949 and finished in November.⁵ To get past the Nationalist film censors, the crew prepared two scripts, a sanitized version for submission and the real one, which was hidden in a straw-filled burlap sack on the studio roof and moved only at night.⁸ A Wenhui Daily account adds that the crew also shot a cover version of another film and hid the real footage in a chandelier to evade searches.¹²

The film bears the marks of this split history. Production began before and ended after the People's Liberation Army entered Shanghai in May 1949, and the celebratory ending, in which the tenants welcome the new society, was added after the change of power.¹³ According to Jay Leyda, the film historian and author of Dianying, everything the censors had removed from the dialogue was restored with interest in the final recording, so that audiences heard from the screen the antigovernment slang familiar in the streets of 1948 and 1949.¹⁴

Style and reception

The film concentrates its action in one building, a structure the 1905.com appreciation describes as "one building, one story, one stretch of time," using the upstairs-downstairs layout to map social hierarchy onto domestic space.⁸ The scholar writing the University of Minnesota volume Chinese Film identifies the tenants as representatives of distinct urban classes, intellectuals, petty merchants, and the propertyless, so that the house becomes a microcosm of the revolution, and notes that the film's comedy goes beyond satire into punning, slapstick, and exaggerated caricature.¹⁰ The same study measures its classical Hollywood-inflected technique: an average shot length of about 11.5 seconds, matching Hollywood practice of 1947–1960, and a count of 45 dissolves, 12 wipes, and 13 fades driving the fast-paced story.¹⁰

Critical standing has been durable. Leyda called it "a milestone in Chinese film history, worthy to be shown alongside the best of international cinema produced in the postwar years," and compared it with Italian neorealism.¹⁴ Chinese official film history, in Cheng Jihua's account, treats it as a "true portrayal of social life on the eve of the collapse" of the Nationalist regime.¹⁰ Time Out's review calls it the best of the Kunlun (Peak Film Industries) productions of the late 1940s and notes how different it is from the propaganda films its makers were producing a few years later.¹⁵

The 1957 award episode became part of its legend. In the Ministry of Culture's first Outstanding Films awards covering 1949–1955, the film was initially rated a second-prize story film, while first prizes went to films made after liberation, such as Reconnaissance Across the Yangtze. Premier Zhou Enlai objected that a film made at such risk deserved more, and the rating was revised to first prize; Mao Zedong later remarked to the honorees that Zhou had taken up their cause.²

Restorations and adaptations

The film has been repeatedly renewed for new audiences. A restoration premiered at the 16th Shanghai International Film Festival in 2013, where it was chosen for its significance as Zheng Junli's first independently directed feature and its continuing popularity.⁶ For the 75th anniversaries of the People's Republic and Shanghai's liberation, the festival's 2024 "City · Light and Shadow" program presented a 2K restoration with a newly recorded Shanghainese soundtrack, voiced by actors including Hu Ge, Zhou Yemang, Han Xue, and Ni Hongjie; the original dialogue already mixed in Shanghainese expressions such as "biesan," and the dub replaced the original's practice of repeating dialect lines in Mandarin.⁷ A 4K restoration by the China Film Archive premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2025.¹⁶

The story has also moved between media. The National Centre for the Performing Arts staged a drama adaptation from September 29 to October 4, 2024, rebuilding the shikumen apartment on stage; its director Huang Ying argued that the film answers, in artistic practice, the question of who are our enemies and who are our friends posed in Mao's 1925 "Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society."² Earlier stage versions in Shanghai had already reworked the ending for contemporary audiences.¹⁷

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Black comedy and satire films › Released 1939 to 1997

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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