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This article examines the intersecting roles of the face with reference to the popularisation of the smile in Republican China. Research on emotional labour presupposes the potency of the open, beautiful and polite smile without delving into its underlying emotional, aesthetic and sociocultural fabric. The article argues that the modern invincible smile not only conveys emotions, facial ideals and etiquette but, at a deeper level, reproduces expressive, aesthetic and cultural order. Through the qualitative analysis of Republican discourses about the smile and its visual representations in calendar posters, pictorials, portrait photographs and films, the article demonstrates how the broad, tooth-exposing smile was dynamically constructed as a charming, cheerful and civilised face. The popularity of the smiling face in this era reveals a dramatic transformation in China’s emotional regime and expressive convention, one that is interwoven with the rise of consumerism, the spread of hedonism and the wider social process of modernisation. By exploring this complex interplay, the article evinces the multiple social lines that construct and constitute the face.
