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At a moment of renewed U.S.-China antagonism, this talk revisits a pivotal yet understudied Cold War juncture: the early 1970s, when ideological hostilities softened and alternative modes of global engagement emerged. Focusing on "The Other Half of the Sky: The China Memoir" (1975), a documentary co-directed by Shirley MacLaine and Claudia Weill during the first American Women’s Friendship Delegation to China in 1973, the talk argues that the film articulates a gendered reimagining of diplomacy grounded in everyday encounter. Centering on women’s voices and intimate exchanges, the documentary maps a form of “people’s diplomacy” that unsettles Cold War binaries and foregrounded socialist feminism, collective life, and transnational solidarity—including Sino-African American connections.

Ling Zhang is associate professor of Cinema Studies at the State University of New York, Purchase College. She received her Ph.D. in cinema and media studies from the University of Chicago. Her research explores film sound and acoustic culture, Chinese-language cinema and digital media, and the cultural Cold War. She co-edited Socializing Medicine: Health Humanities and East Asian Media (Hong Kong UP, 2025) and is developing two monographs, “Unruly Sounds: Chinese Cinema and Transnational Acoustic Culture, 1929–1949,” and “Sounding Wayward Journeys: Traveling Media in China and the World, 1949–1989.” Her work appears in Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, South Atlantic Quarterly, Journal of Popular Culture, and Film Quarterly.