This article addresses the understudied relationship between modern printmaking and photography in Republican-era China, focusing on the role of globally circulating propagandistic photography as source material, and how the resulting artworks reflect ongoing tensions surrounding truthful representation in media imagery. Jiang Feng’s woodblock print Soldiers in the Northeast (1936), which drew directly from Baba Yashio’s photograph Over the Wilderness (1934), printed in Manchuria Graph, and Chen Yanqiao’s print In the Factory (1935), which recombined photographic fragments from two issues of USSR in Construction (1933), demonstrate the transnational and intermedial movement of emotionally effective, propagandistic imagery. Crucially, it is the translational aspect of these artists’ work – the series of formal choices by which they recreated one media in another form – along with the contexts of their artistic production, that give these intermedial relationships their meaning and provide us with clues as to why these artists chose these photographs to reproduce. More broadly, this project hopes to further illuminate overlooked aspects of global artistic modernism – specifically the transnational exchange of images through print publications and the resulting circulation of what Sonal Khullar calls ‘worldly affiliations’ – outside the Euro-American metropoles.