The Bill Einreinhofer China Archive comprises approximately 1000 digital video, image, audio, and text files that Einreinhofer used to produce a series of public television documentaries covering modern China and Japan from 1910 to 2022. The collection includes the finished television programs, as well as unedited interviews and historic and scenic footage that were used in the documentaries. The collection also holds transcripts, footage logs, and documentary overviews. Einreinhofer organized the collection into ten digital folders, which correspond to this finding aid's ten series. Seven of the series correspond to specific television programs that Einreinhofer produced: China Now (1997); So Very Far From Home (2006); Beyond Beijing (2008), Shanghai 1937: Where World War II Began (2018); Century Masters (2019); Unsettled History: America, China and the Doolittle Tokyo Raid (2022); and China: Frame by Frame (2023). The last three series contain thematically grouped source material that Einreinhofer collected during the production of the documentaries: "Wartime Newsreels & Propaganda Films" (38 files), "Japanese Wartime Feature Films" (17 files), and "Post-War Japan" (8 files). See the series-level records for further details.

Bill Einreinhofer is an Emmy Award winning documentary producer/director. For more than 30 years he has been creating films and stories in and about China. This includes China: Frame by Frame, a retrospective on what he saw, learned and witnessed over the course of three decades; Unsettled History: America, China and the Doolittle Tokyo Raid; and Shanghai 1937: Where World War II Began. All were broadcast nationally on Public Television. He was Senior Director and Host for the international version of Century Masters, a 15-episode Chinese cultural history series, as well as Series Producer of Beyond Beijing, a four-part documentary series, broadcast in 43 countries and seen by 250+ million viewers, tied to 2008 Summer Olympics. He has developed and produced programming for ABC, CBS, Discovery, HBO, and PBS, including Spacewalkers: The Ultimate High-Wire Act, which was seen worldwide on Discovery. He conceived and was Executive Producer of People in Motion, the first primetime documentary series in U.S. television history to deal with disability and technology. He produced/shot/wrote/edited/voiced Five Points of Life, a multipart web-doc that followed a team of nine amateur cyclists on an 1,800-mile international journey. He has also participated in co-productions with leading international broadcasters including the ABC (Australia), Globo (Brazil), NHK (Japan), SMG (China), SVT (Sweden) and ZDF (Germany). He holds a Masters degree in Communications Arts from the University of Wisconsin (Madison), and a Bachelor's degree in History from Saint Peter's University (Jersey City, NJ). He is Chair Emeritus of the Broadcast Journalism department at the New York Film Academy.

2.1 Terabytes 988 digital files stored in 123 digital folders

All requests for permission to publish or quote from manuscripts must be submitted in writing to the Department of the East Asian Library at eal@usc.edu. Permission for publication is given on behalf of the East Asian Library as the owner of the physical items and is not intended to include or imply permission of the copyright holder, which must also be obtained.

The majority of the digital files in this collection are publicly accessible via the USC Digital Library. Each folder- and file-level record in this finding aid includes a link to the corresponding USC Digital Library asset. However, the files relating to the China Now (1997) documentary series are available for individual research purposes only and cannot be published via the USC Digital Library. Please contact the East Asian Library at eal@usc.edu to request access to the China Now files. Access to the external hard drive, on which the files were delivered to USC, is also restricted.