This essay examines China’s reception of Japanese films Sandakan No. 8 and Arrest in order to analyze the historical context which enabled Asia’s cultural communication during the Cold War era. The New China pursued a people’s diplomacy policy that separated the Japanese government from the Japanese people in order to promote relationships between the two countries. Japanese Movie Week, which was held to celebrate the Treaty of Peace and Friendship between Japan and the People's Republic of China signed in 1978, was an outcome made possible through the People’s Solidarity between the two countries. Despite Japan’s colonial and imperialist war and the animosity created by the Cold War, the Chinese audience accepted Japanese movies without any resistance because of the people’s diplomacy policy. Sandakan No. 8 and Arrest were fervently consumed as cultural icons that symbolized the Chinese society in the 1980s. However, the controversies over the profanity and sexual descriptions in Sandakan No. 8 led individuals to assert their own sexuality. The popular imitation of the main characters of Arrest in the daily lives of the Chinese overthrew the existing socialist gender norms and reconstructed a new femininity and masculinity that acted as a fight against the state. This fight was indirectly expressed through sexuality and gender but later developed into a criticique of the socialist regime, forming another Cold War logic that was different from that of the Cold War. It was also transformed into a fervent nationalism that returned to such issues as Japan’s historical responsibility and war reparations. The success of the People’s Solidarity seemed to have transcended nation-states but ultimately led people to negate its own logic. In this regard, the reception of Sandakan No. 8 and Arrest revealed the impossibility of the state in accurately representing the people and the contradiction between the state and the people under the Cold War logic. The essay also urges a contemplation of the complex structures of the Cold War and the post-Cold War that were created by their entangling forces in Asia.