Beginning in the early 1930s, a variety of Soviet montage theories entered China through left-leaning intellectual circles and other cultural intermediaries, often mediated by Japanese translations. Among these theories were Vsevolod Pudovkin’s essays Kinorezhisser i kinomaterial (The Film Director and Film Material) and Kinostsenarii (The Film Script), Semyon Timoshenko’s Iskusstvo kino i montazh fil’ma (The Art of Cinema and the Montage of Film), Sergei Eisenstein’s concept of montage as conflict and dialectical form, and ideas derived from Dziga Vertov’s Kino-Eye. After an initial period of conceptual confusion, filmmakers began to explore the meaning of montage through practical experimentation. While existing scholarship has noted the use of contrast and parallel montage in early Chinese cinema, it often overlooks the local reinterpretation of dialectical montage and its intersections with indigenous aesthetic traditions. This paper argues that, on both theoretical and practical levels, 1930s Chinese filmmakers engaged in a creative process of translation and innovation that both absorbed and transformed the Soviet dialectical principle through culturally and socially specific frameworks. The Chinese translation of “dialectic” as xiangke (inter-regulating), I suggest, resonates with the cosmological system of wuxing (the five agents). In film practice, directors such as Yuan Muzhi explored dialectical dynamics between temporality and spatiality, sound and image as in Dushi fengguang (Scenes of City Life, 1935), and Fei Mu developed an aesthetic dialectics between the “plain (pingdan)” narrative dramaturgy and affective atmosphere as in Chungui duanmeng (Spring Chamber, Fragmentary Dreams, 1937). Together, these examples reveal how montage became a site of cross-cultural negotiation and aesthetic innovation in the Chinese cinema of interwar period.