This technique (also known as dye-transfer and dye-imbibition) was operational at the Beijing Film Laboratory between 1978 and 1993. It was identical to the Technicolor V process used at Technicolor’s laboratories in Hollywood, London, Paris and Rome throughout the 1950s, 60s and 70s, and was installed by employees of Technicolor Ltd.—the British wing of the firm. However, the Beijing Film Laboratory was not part of Technicolor’s official laboratory network, and films printed using this process do not carry Technicolor credits.

In 1973 the Chinese government contracted Technicolor Ltd. to install IB machinery at the Beijing Film Laboratory that was identical to the equipment used in London (Yang and Feng). This contract was signed during China’s Cultural Revolution (1966-76) when Chairman Mao Zedong required a technology to mass produce color prints of propaganda films. During this period film production was largely, though not entirely, restricted to cinematic versions of the Yangbanxi, or ‘revolutionary model stage works’ (both ideological ‘models’ to be imitated by audiences, and ‘models’ that could be replicated by local performance groups). These ballets and operas were designed to spread Maoist ideology across China. All Yangbanxi featured vibrant color design and were most likely filmed using a combination of Agfacolor imported from East Germany, illicitly imported American Eastmancolor and Chinese daidaihong negative stock manufactured by the Baoding Film Stock plant from 1971 (Pang; Dootson and Zhu). From 1975 the Yangbanxi were printed using dye-transfer equipment that had been installed in Shanghai and Beijing based on Soviet models (Yang and Feng). However, Jiang Qing (Mao’s wife, in charge of cultural production) who oversaw the production of Yangbanxi, was a great admirer of Technicolor and it seems that, in combination with the improved efficiency and quality of Technicolor’s system, aesthetic concerns may have motivated the purchase of equipment from London (Dootson and Zhu). This coincided with Technicolor’s decision to cease dye-transfer printing at its various plants in the 1970s due to declining print runs. The installation of the machinery was overseen by Bernard Happé, the Technical Director of Technicolor Ltd. (Happé) and Wang Peifang, the director of the Beijing laboratory. 

Technicolor IB equipment was never used to print any Yangbanxi however, as it was not operational until 1978, with a second machine installed in 1981 (Chen), by which point Mao had died and the Cultural Revolution had concluded (both in 1976). Furthermore, China’s new Chairman Deng Xiaoping was about to implement economic reforms in 1979 that would transform the landscape of filmmaking in China (Zhu and Nakajima; Yeh and Davis). 

From the late 1970s to mid-1980s studios made films according to quotas set by the government-run China Film Corporation. Studios were not financially rewarded according to the number of people who saw their films (box office was an irrelevant metric for measuring viewership at a time when screenings were usually un-ticketed or free), but according to the number of prints they manufactured. This incentivized large print runs irrespective of audience demand. Technicolor’s IB process, capable of cheaply mass-producing large quantities of release prints, was perfectly suited to these conditions, producing an average print run of 250 per title by the early 1980s (Samuelson). By the 1980s and 1990s Beijing’s IB plant was manufacturing release prints of popular genre films, including comedies like Make Ten Million, historical epics like The Burning of Yuan Ming Yuan and fantasies like The Peacock Princess. Contrary to popular belief, it is unlikely the process was used to print films made by fifth generation filmmakers like Zhang Yimou. It seems the plant initially used a mix of blank and matrix materials supplied by Kodak and 3M before developing these materials domestically at the Baoding Film Stock plant. By 1979 all dye-transfer printing in China used domestically made blank and matrix stock (Di, 1980). 

By 1993 however, the Beijing Film Laboratory saw a fifty percent drop in print runs and decided to discontinue the use of its IB system (Wang). This was due to the film industry’s gradual shift towards a more marketized system that had begun in the mid-1980s. As the Chinese film industry moved increasingly towards performance-related pay, local distributors began to choose the titles they wanted to screen instead of having them dictated by the government, disincentivizing the inflated print runs that had characterized the industry in previous years. Furthermore, the increasing import of international films, combined with a greater take-up of television, caused a severe decline in Chinese print runs that made the costly IB process uneconomical. Although Technicolor’s Hollywood plant negotiated to purchase back this equipment, it was only pin-belt related machinery that was acquired and shipped back to California for use in their IB revival of the 1990s (Anon, 1996).