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This wide-ranging intellectual and media history traces China's emergence as a modern state in which boundaries blur between art and design, education and psychological conditioning. Tracking the parallel development of set design and social engineering from the 1920s to the 1960s, Background Matters examines the concept of huanjing (environment), a neologism introduced at the turn of the twentieth century that evoked heated intellectual debates and inspired frenzied aesthetic experimentation. Weihong Bao shows how efforts to reshape the mind consolidated the idea and art of environment by advancing a new theoretical notion of set design: both as aesthetic organization across film, theater, radio, and television and as social experimentation in worldmaking across geopolitical and transnational contexts. Inventive and breathtaking in scope, this book radically rethinks environment not as an external object but as the nexus of mind, medium, and society.