Kwai-cheung Lo
Bodyguards and Assassins (Teddy Chan, 2009) is an interesting example of how post-1997 Hong Kong cinema attempts to engage itself in the political history of modern China. Unlike pre-1997 productions that also deal with anti-Manchu revolution in old Hong Kong, such as Project A II (Jackie Chan, 1987) in which the male protagonist (played by Jackie Chan), a local cop in the British-run police force, insisted on his political neutrality towards Qing loyalists and anti-Qing activists, this twenty-first century movie produced by Peter Chan is eager to take sides and show its dedication to the “politically correct” nationalist revolution. In a way, it can be considered a blunt effort made by an outsider trying to become and be accepted as an insider in contemporary China. While the tone of Bodyguards and Assassins is deadly serious and tragic, with numerous characters dying for the revolutionary cause, the film can be considered a “playful,” if not naïve, re-creation of China’s revolutionary history: a group of volunteers from all parts of China is struggling to protect Sun Yat-sen, the founding father of modern Chinese nation state, in British-rule Hong Kong of 1906 against a troop of assassins sent by the Qing imperial court.
Reviews focus on how silly and desperate the film is by inventing an imaginative assassination plot and rescue mission on Sun Yat-sen in order to find a self-righteous historic-political role for Hong Kong to play in the Chinese revolution. But what has been generally neglected is the story’s ambitious endeavor to cope with China’s ethnic politics (zuqun zhengzhi 族群政治) by creating an alliance between the North and the South. The voluntary group which lost most of its members sacrificing their lives for the safety of Sun, and hence the cause of revolution, came from all walks of life, and were all Han Chinese from diverse geographical regions, including Hong Kong, Guangdong, Jiangsu, Henan, Tianjin, as well as Shanxi. The film picks Sun to open up a space for Hong Kong to participate in China’s politics not merely because Sun is a historical figure well accepted and recognized by both Taiwan and the mainland, but probably also because he was a Cantonese, and so someone with whom Cantonese majority of Hong Kong citizens can identify.1 Hong Kong filmmakers may have difficulty in grasping the histories and complexities of political struggles (in the sense of court politics, palace intrigues, mass politics, and ideological posturing) in the Chinese mainland, but they are very conscious of ethnic and regional differences from which potential conflicts may emerge in Chinese communities.
This is probably not the occasion to delineate the difference between the terms “nation” (minzu 民族) and “ethnic” since they have always been used with striking inconsistency. But if “nation” is understood as a socio-political category tightly connected with the sacred boundaries of a sovereign state and if the Hong Kong cinema I am going to discuss is not exactly included as part and parcel of a “national” cinema, the notion of “ethnic,” which is usually supposed to be a cultural term, can then be used to examine some groups that “are not normally linked in theory to state boundaries” (Wallerstein 1991: 77; original emphasis). Hong Kong, as an ex-colonial space, is historically sensitive to the implications of boundaries and the way in which a nation state relies upon territorial construction of a border to separate “us” from “them” in order to constitute its citizenship as a collective identity. But unlike a modern nation state that divinizes, sacralizes, and hence absolutizes its borders, (colonial) Hong Kong not only deprives border of its designated meaning, but also relativizes its function and detaches it from the idea of sovereignty by making border a midway zone and an object of constant transgression. Throughout history, Hong Kong, whether as an outpost of British imperialist force or as China’s channel to the world, serves more as a place of mediation and of border-crossing than a place of absolute sovereignty and border enforcement. After World War II, if Communist China wanted to take Hong Kong back, the borderland was basically indefensible from British point of view. The flagging British Empire, in the process of dismantling itself, thought of abandoning the colony not only because of its indefensibility but also of the huge potential burden of an influx of Chinese refugees. It was the US that succeeded in persuading Britain to retain the colony for its strategic function in the Cold War, and the British also found that Hong Kong might help them regain postwar influence in the new global order. While the US was using Hong Kong on China’s coast as a suitable ground for intelligence gathering, anti-communist propaganda works, and a recreation site for its naval fleets, the British government had to accommodate China’s reactions and feelings, though the Chinese communist regime tolerated Hong Kong’s colonial status since it derived considerable benefits from the colony and used it as an avenue to the outside world under Western containment. It was this edgy or on-the-brink position that characterized the postwar Hong Kong’s delicate status.
Frontier borderlands were once the (imaginary) arena for China’s national salvation, redemption, and revival in the 1930s and 1940s when the new republic was threatened by rapacious foreign invasions. In the eyes of Chinese people during the time of national crisis, it was at the periphery where the true spirit of China would be resurrected. The northwest frontier was then transformed from a marginal position in Chinese national discourse to a central place, as if it were the nation’s heartland. Hong Kong borderland might not capture nation’s attention on such a scale, but it is still seized upon in the imaginations of the Chinese nation even though it has already been claimed back as an integral part of the reconstitution of the Chinese state. It is an “interior” which includes elements of otherness or foreignness that lead to perception of it as “exterior” occasionally. The institutional design of “one country, two systems” offered by Beijing for the return of Hong Kong already reveals how the ex-colony is placed in the category of other peripheral ethnic “autonomous” regions like Tibet, Xinjiang, or Inner Mongolia. Back in the Qing era, the central government, instead of asserting a nationalist ideology at the empire’s fringes, had a special institutional structure – a mechanism of autonomous and indirect rule to govern non-Han ethnic areas in exchange for their adherence to build a multinational polity. While the “one country, two systems” model, like “autonomous rule” in China’s other peripheral regions, has not given Hong Kong any really great degree of autonomy, because of Beijing’s increasing intervention into the city’s internal affairs and its unwillingness to implement democratic reforms, mainland Chinese nowadays see the port city as a far-flung fantasy-land where they can buy consumer goods, gain an internationally-recognized passport and give birth in order to gain citizenship for their babies. Ironically, the present active and convenient cross-border flows make integration of Hong Kong with China even harder to bring about. In the old days, for instance the beginning of the 1950s, a Cantonese movie such as The Kid (Fung Fung, 1950) could tell how people easily went back to the mainland when they found it hard to make a living in Hong Kong. There was hardly any border patrol between the two places, and people had no identity issue at all. Both border and identity were fluid at that time. But in later decades, when the Hong Kong border was no longer opened to so many mainland Chinese and when China’s economy did not take off, Hong Kong was either condemned, with jealous undertones, as a “cultural desert” or fantasized as an outskirt place safeguarding traditional Chinese culture damaged by political turmoil on the mainland. Years after the handover, when the economic statuses of the mainland and Hong Kong have been gradually reversed in terms of a hierarchic position in the capitalist world order, and when it is mainland visitors who condescend to Hong Kong people, ethnic political contention as between center and periphery seems to come into play again. Precisely because the ambiguous Hong Kong borderland has not been entirely integrated into the state, it remains an alluring space to capture the gaze of a rapidly changing China.
Although Hong Kong’s cultural productions, including its cinema, may help to create and maintain a firm foothold in people’s psyche for the institutionalization of certain differentiating borders, the frontier in Hong Kong films is actually more a zone of transition between in-groups and out-groups than a stringent barrier separating the included from the excluded. After all, the film industry in Hong Kong, an epitome of the city’s delicate situation, is defined by its outward-looking nature and export orientation, since the local market can never sustain its survival and growth. Though there may be a certain sense of racial–cultural superiority underlying some of their productions, Hong Kong films always aim to push the boundaries outward in order to progressively expand and integrate with the others for the sake of economic interests. Indeed, all boundaries, whether they are territorial, political, linguistic, ethnic, or sheer cultural–conceptual, can be negotiated in Hong Kong cinema while performing the function of division. Favoring the hybrid and ambiguous over the glare of absolute sovereignty, it is more hankering for a truth that is provisional and corrigible, and alert to a variety of differences. Its ethnic borderland is a place where national, local, indigenous, and foreign cultures are mixed together, and multiple identities are traditionally constructed in contingent, hybrid, and fluid modes, though it may not go as far as to have no particular nationality nor to be an exterior border to the Eurocentric modern world-system.
Unlike the paradigms of Chinese-language cinema (huayu dianying) and Sinophone cinema that place major emphasis upon deconstructing the hegemonic ideology of sinocentric nation state and embracing hybrid-language, multidialectal, transnational, and diasporic productions set in a rather loose time frame (Lu and Yeh 2005; Shih 2007; Yue and Khoo 2014), the notion of ethnic borderland in relation to Hong Kong and its cinema aims at retrieving historicity; it primarily concerns the spatiality which is implicit in territorial practice of politics and geographical construction of identities and relations. But it is not easy to write a coherent history of the borderland that is not in constant dialogue with the core. The ambivalent meaning of “border” reveals how it both encloses and connects, being an obstacle and a site of passage, constituting a limit for further progress as well as a departing point for foreign exploration. In face of the asymmetrical interactions between core and periphery, the unremitting border experiences of Hong Kong and its filmic productions highlight the changing expressions of the state sovereignty and construct the city at the nation’s margin as an integral part of the global world. The borderland notion may configure a space alternative to the dominant model of the nation state by generalizing multiple citizenship status, including different languages in the linguistic map, and positing Hong Kong and its cinema inside and outside, within and beyond the border.
In contrast to what Bodyguards and Assassins projected onto modern Chinese political struggle, the revolution led by Sun and the United League (Tongmenghui 同盟會, which was previously known as the Revive China Society, Xingzhonghui 興中會) was largely considered an uprising from the South not only because of the active participants’ place of origin but also because of the traditional sinocentric mechanism under which the South or the coastal area was considered a politically marginal space. Any driving force for major socio-political changes from there cannot be taken too seriously in such a traditional perspective and hierarchical system. Thus, it is no surprise that a Northern general, Zhang Zuolin 張作霖, who was in control of Manchuria, made a despicable comment on the 1911 Revolution to a Japanese ambassador: “I prefer to concede Manchuria to foreigners than to the Southerners… As a Northerner, I would prefer death to making humiliating subordination to the republic of the Southerners” (Zou 1980: 72, 74). The great North–South divide2 that designates the fictiveness of Han Chinese homogeneity myth and almost tears the Revolution of 1911 apart seems to be overcome imaginatively by the Hong Kong film. While the movie is probably a deliberate effort by the Hong Kong film industry to ingratiate itself with the Chinese authorities, the possibility of eliminating ethnic-regional rift perhaps can only be realized either in some phantasmal form or in an undetermined future.
Looking back at the history of Hong Kong cinema, we find that the entertainment industry has a tradition of dramatizing but also alleviating North–South ethnic and cultural conflict in popular genre of comedy. In the early sixties, the MP&GI Company (Motion Picture and General Investment Company, generally known as Dian Mou 電懋 but later renamed as Cathay) produced a series of farcical comedies about tensions and reconciliations between Chinese Northerners and Southerners in colonial Hong Kong. Voted as one of the ten most popular Cantonese and Mandarin films of 1961, its popularity helped generate two more sequels in next few years, The Greatest Civil War on Earth (Wong Tin-lam, 1961) was probably the first Hong Kong feature with equal amounts of Cantonese and Mandarin dialogues in one film.3 Since then, “Nan–Bei” (North–South) persistently becomes a popular and recurring theme and crops up in the titles of numerous Hong Kong movies released afterwards. The film exemplified the inflow of northern Chinese to Cantonese-dominated Hong Kong from the 1950s and depicted in a comic way the ways in which the two major ethnic groups came to reconcile their differences. On the other hand, the film can also be seen as an allegory of the dichotomy and rivalry between Mandarin cinema and Cantonese cinema in postwar Hong Kong. Given the conventional notion of the South in Chinese history, referring to regions south of the Yangtze River, that The Greatest Civil War on Earth portrays a Shanghainese character and his offspring as representatives of Northerner is historically inaccurate. Perhaps what the film targets is less the traditional North–South split than immediate competitions and economic threats brought by capitalists and filmmakers from Shanghai to colonial Hong Kong of that period.4 The North–South divide is a substitute for discriminatory class difference between Mandarin cinema and Cantonese cinema. In such view, the former, mostly made by emigrants from Shanghai, is considered modernized, arty, high-budgeted, and prestigious, whereas the dialect-oriented latter is local, cheap, backward, and provincial-looking. Cantonese filmmakers complained about how their works were prejudiced and not allowed to enter some Asian film contests in which Mandarin films won awards (Wong 2003).5 As I. C. Jarvie writes, Mandarin cinema “stem(s) from the emerging modern national consciousness; tend(s) to be produced in sophisticated urban surroundings … by culturally cosmopolitan Chinese; and to treat stories and use the movie medium in a way that comes to some kind of terms with progress and the modern world” (Jarvie 1977: 87). It is Mandarin cinema that has been regarded as the most advanced symbol of modernity.
The ethnic borderland character of Hong Kong cinema, however, does not really embody and uphold the North–South division. It only appropriates the North–South dichotomy as a means to deal with the modernity issue: how the modern dimensions of Shanghai life brought by upper-middle class emigrants to Hong Kong can be absorbed by the Cantonese-dominated city while national and Sinocentric consciousness can be sieved and screened out in the colonial setting. The film series aspire towards a new kind of community that is based not so much on geographical and biological determinants of blood and ethnicity as on the liberty to move beyond and cross boundaries. Though the Northern and Southern patriarchs fight over almost everything and are unable to find any real resolution, the second generations initiate mixing, merging, and even marrying in order to construct a new hybrid society with a different epistemological horizon. While teasing North–South differences but promoting equal status of Northerners and Southerners with a balance of Mandarin and Cantonese cast and dialogues, The Greatest Civil War on Earth was however produced by the Mandarin production crew of MP&GI. Cinema was an integral and essential piece of the modernization process in colonial Hong Kong. Even though the “North–South” films were not exactly a genuine self-reflection of Cantonese cinema, they represented a moment of symbolism – showing how the Cantonese film industry (as well as the Cantonese-dominated society at large) could learn and assimilate its Mandarin counterpart that had attained the knowledge of and access to modernity. This model of the backward learning from the more advanced (though Mandarin cinema that imitates the Western exemplar is by no means the most advanced) undoubtedly repeats and reinforces the world-system structure that obliges the periphery to imitate the core in order to tread its modernization path. Under the colonial order of British governance, such local craving for (Western) modernity via visual media was endorsed and promoted – through subtle censorship mechanisms – in order to justify British legitimacy.
Perhaps the “North–South” film series can be understood in this light: a fantasy staged by the emigrating, culturally hegemonic Northern minority to imagine how the Cantonese in the British-ruled colony ultimately embrace the values and vision brought by Northerners, though not without some disgruntled reactions. But the fantasy of the Northern Other also becomes the very desire of local Cantonese at a time that allowed transborder movements of capital, people, and ideas. In other words, the local history of the Hong Kong borderland is in a position to implement the global design of the Euro-American development and modernization through the agency of cosmopolitan and westernized Shanghainese. The modernization process of Hong Kong colony in the 1950s was already revealing the pattern of what we today call the divide of Global North and Global South. However, the modernity of Hong Kong cinema conveys double consciousness that moves beyond the categories, such as nation-state, created and imposed by hegemonic Western conceptualization. It is a cinema that attempts to catch up with modernity pulses but also to move along and beyond the unsurpassable and sacred borders of sovereign nation state which is part of Eurocentric modernity.
Meanwhile, after the Chinese revolutionaries established their government and attained central power, North-centrism (or Central Plains syndrome) became dominant in state cultural policy. In 1936–37, the Central Film Review Commission of the Guomindang (or Kuomintang – KMT) banned any filmmaking in Cantonese dialect in China and did not allow imports of Cantonese films from Hong Kong, all in the name of standardizing the Chinese national language (Fu 2003: 58–9). Although the policy did not last long, probably because the central government under the KMT was relatively weak in asserting its power and the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese war obliged the government to reprioritize its agenda (Teo 1997: 6), it demonstrated that the modern nation state strongly identifies its political border with a linguistic border by imposing a single dominant language within its territorial boundaries. Under the emergence of nationalism in twentieth-century China, linguistic difference constitutes one of the most distinguishable marks of collective identity. It is no surprise that a new regime like the KMT had to enforce the coincidence of language and territories as a political and juridical norm.6
Hong Kong cinema at China’s territorial edge is fundamentally Cantonese-dialect oriented, though at some historical moments it declined, and even virtually ceased, to produce any Cantonese film.7 The prevailing status of Cantonese dialect in Hong Kong cinematic productions does not necessarily mean that the port city intends to defy and challenge the linguistic universality promoted by the Chinese nation state; the flourishing of Cantonese in Hong Kong has a lot to do with the legacy of the tolerance characterizing British colonial policy. The film industry is flexible enough to implement its dubbing strategy for different linguistic markets, although Hong Kong film’s borderland characteristics do not always resonate in a harmonious manner with state-sponsored nationalist ideology. Instead, it is economic interest or commercial inclination (to be more precise, cross-border economy) that leads the way, promoting and perpetuating greater autonomy for entrepreneurs, stronger reluctance to exercise central state control, more mobility of people and commodities, increased plurality of ethnic and cultural identification, and multiple cross-cutting networks of interaction. Hong Kong as China’s maritime frontier is never simply a metaphor. Its coastal peripheral position ties it to external forces travelling by sea, including the regions of Southeast Asia, the so-called “Nanyang 南洋” (South Seas). Not only is Nanyang a major overseas market for Hong Kong films, it was also a significant source of capital and energy that contributes to its magnificent development and growth: many filmmakers, producers, and financers were Nanyang Chinese elites. The most prominent examples from the 1950s onward, of course, are Run Run Shaw (Shao Yifu 邵逸夫) of the Shaw Brothers Studio and Loke Wan Tho (Lu Yuntao 陸運濤) of the Cathay Organization.
Because of this overseas connection, Hong Kong cinema constitutes a platform where the representations of diasporic and nomadic subjects are able to compete with those of the rooted and locally embedded subjects. Other than almost ceaselessly making Cantonese movies, the industry produced hundreds of other “ethnic films” (zuqun dianying 族群電影) or “dialect films” (fangyan dianying 方言電影) to target different ethnic groups in diaspora. In the late 1950s and early 1960s while Mandarin and Cantonese productions were at their peaks in Hong Kong film production, hundreds of Amoy-dialect films (xiayupian 廈語片) and Chaozhou (Teochow)-dialect ones (chaoyupian 潮語片) (Yu 2000: 19; 2001: 40),8 were made in the immigrant-dominated city of that era with financial support from diasporic Chinese communities in Nanyang. Although these movies were mainly released and widely circulated in Southeast Asia for overseas Fujianese and Chaozhouese populations (Chaozhou-dialect films mainly went after the Chinese communities in Thailand and Singapore, whereas Amoy-dialect movies covered a larger area including Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Taiwan), and Hong Kong local audiences rarely had the chance to see them in a theater, these Amoy- or Chaozhou-dialect films were primarily shot in Hong Kong and their casts and crews were mostly based there. There is, as yet, no clearly designated place or specific cultural position for these dialect movies in the studies of Hong Kong film history (Taylor 2011; Ng 2012; Ng 2014).9 But the productions of these dialect films for diasporic Chinese ethnic groups reveals how the borderland characteristics of Hong Kong cinema pluralize the practice of cultural politics and subvert the (linguistic) monopoly of Chinese representation.
In terms of the Amoy-dialect films’ contribution to the development of Hong Kong cinema, the nearly forgotten sector of the film industry was a training ground for a number of directors who succeeded in their filmmaking careers for Mandarin and Cantonese cinemas decades later (outstanding examples are Wong Tin-lam 王天林, Zhou Shilu 周詩祿, Zhao Shushen 趙樹燊). There were also famous Mandarin directors like Ma Xu Weibang 馬徐維邦 who ended up making Amoy-dialect productions. Ivy Ling Po 凌波, the queen of Huangmei Diao 黃梅調 opera films in the 1960s, starred in more than seventy Amoy-dialect films at the time when she was known as Seow Kuan 小娟.
These Amoy-dialect or Chaozhou-dialect films produced in Hong Kong do not just point to heterogeneous issues of cultural or linguistic differences in modern Chinese context. Lingering with a sense of belonging to Southeast Asian Chinese, Thai Chinese, or Peranakan (mixed-race descendants of Chinese immigrants and Indonesian / Malay), or Tsinoy (Chinese-Filipino) communities, these ethnic productions also provide rich resources for the understanding of and reflection on what a modern Chinese identity might mean in its complex ambiguity. These ambiguous identities produced by the borderland may not be easily incorporated and subsumed by the nationalism embodied in a party or a state. While, in the early stage of their existence, many of these dialect films were costume dramas some of them were also modeled on successful Mandarin films in contemporary cosmopolitan settings, generating less a nostalgic feeling toward a bygone imperial China than an intimate link between the film’s diegetic world and the current conditions of modern life in the Asian host countries. Perhaps, unlike state nationalism that expresses hegemony and consolidates domination, diasporic Chinese conceive of the dialect films as a metaphor of national or cultural identification (rather than a given identity) that simultaneously calls for fictive cohesiveness and fights against oppressive uniformity. These Amoy-dialect movies also inspired the Taiwanese to produce their own Hokkien-dialect (or Minnanese) films (taiyupian 台語片), breeding the pride of expressing oneself in one’s own idiom and also the potential separatist idea against not only the Mandarin-speaking KMT government in Taiwan but also mainland China.10 It is said that Amoy dialect from Fujian province is slightly different from Hokkien in Taiwan, and also that, because the Amoy-dialect films were regarded as Hong Kong imports, they could never really represent the voice of Taiwan. However, the relationship between Hong Kong-based Amoy-dialect films and Taiwan’s own Hokkien productions was much intertwined than what some critical discourses later tried to demarcate and differentiate them. Actually, the development of Hong Kong Mandarin cinema was closely tied with that of Taiwan cinema under the economic incentives offered by the KMT for decades, leading to the development that the identity of Hong Kong Mandarin films were mixed and conflated with that of Taiwan Mandarin movies. The Hong Kong-produced Amoy-dialect films also benefited from the policy of the Nationalist government in Taipei.
In Cold War Asia, these Chinese dialect movies were used as a weapon to contain Communist China. The KMT government allowed and supported these dialect films to be released in Taiwan as a useful apparatus for its political agenda to spread anti-communist messages and preserve strongholds against infiltration of socialist ideas into Chinese communities in Southeast Asia, given the fact that the dialect film people fled China to escape communism and their film plot was mainly confined to some seemingly apolitical or classical folk tales. Many Hong Kong films in the Cold War era did take advantage of the divided world of communist and capitalist blocs by taking the Nationalist, “free world” side in order to enjoy favorable economic treatment and market access. From the perspective of the Nationalist state, the establishment of the Hong Kong and Kowloon Cinema and Theatrical Enterprise Free General Association (usually known as ziyou zonghui 自由總會) by Hong Kong right-wing pro-KMT filmmakers in 1956 might help the government in Taiwan to exert better control over the film industry in the British-ruled city. On the other hand, the Chinese communists also wielded ideological influences on diasporic communities through the movies made by their attached studios under the direction of the Hong Kong Macau Work Committee (gangao gongwei 港澳工委) in colonial Hong Kong and Macau. But what the CCP and the KMT authorities wanted to believe was not necessarily what Hong Kong filmmakers actually thought and did. Filmmakers accepted their dependent position not from sheer ideological commitment but mainly for economic goals and personal reasons. It strains credulity to consider Hong Kong cinema as carrying any principled political conviction. Its borderland attributes implied the acceptance of objective realities that so-called democracy as well as socialism were nothing but utopias. The film industry accepted the necessarily compromised character of all action that arises from its dependence upon some morally suspicious or even dangerous ends. But it also revealed that people in this borderland were not captured by ideas and political categories created by states. As if practicing the tributary system in imperial times, an intermediary area like Hong Kong had no choice but to pay tribute in both directions and accept its dependent position in return for other supports. Following the practice of playing the role of middleman during the expansion of European powers in Asia since the nineteenth century, Hong Kong film industry under (overseas) Chinese entrepreneurs continued to function as compradors not just between Western colonizers and native consumers (or between Hollywood and the ongoing project of commercialization of mainland productions at present) but also between Chinese leftist and right wing groups in the 1950s.
However, as well as competing, pro-Communist and pro-Nationalist film companies sometimes collaborated in order to expand their market share and seek box-office returns. Co-operation could help conflicting ideological camps to gain mutual benefits in economic terms. For example, left-wing studios including Great Wall, Feng Huang, and Union would sell their productions to pro-Taiwan Shaw Brothers and Cathay who exhibited those films in their Southeast Asian theaters so as to fill out the demanding show times. It was also not uncommon for filmmakers or stars belonging to one ideological camp to switch side to make movies for the opposing camp (Lee 2009). Ideological ambivalence prevailed in those nationalism- or nostalgia-themed works toward which both left and right had no strong objection. The economic orientation of the film industry also urged all political sides to produce works that would not take too much risk of political censorship in the markets. In British colonial borderland of Hong Kong, political ideology was “contaminated,” if not dominated, by economic interest. Any ideological camp that endeavored to go extreme, as with the riots of 1967 provoked by the left, would be curbed and oppressed by the British colonial force that tried hard to construct its neutral role in Chinese political struggle and to build its benevolent image of helping Hong Kong to modernize and prosper. Political stability of the colony was the condition that British colonizers desperately needed to legitimize its rule in the postwar period of national self-determination and global decolonization movements. However, the success of Hong Kong colonial modernity especially in the 1980s cannot be unreservedly credited to British benevolent rule.
The Cold War also brought in racial Others to Hong Kong silver screens and its production teams. Given the historical fact that the colony was racially segregated under British administration, other races tended to be more imagined through media than interacted with and experienced in the daily life of the Chinese populace. From the 1950s onwards, when the market in mainland China was gradually closed to their productions, many Hong Kong film companies (such as Shaw Brothers, Cathay, and Kong Ngee) initiated cooperative schemes with their counterparts in other Asian countries, including Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Thailand, in order to search for new markets and to build distribution networks. Through these collaborations, they gained superior technology from more developed Asian countries like Japan and, by means of exotic settings and foreign casts, made their productions more appealing to their audiences. The Cold War Hong Kong co-productions with other Asian states were primarily organized along the line of the political–ideological camp of the US’s allies and clients. However, the Hong Kong film industry did not simply play a passive role in Cold War politics. To an extent, Hong Kong cinema, through actively working with other places, constituted a political site away from those ideological arenas unequivocally organized by the states.
Japan was the first Asian nation that promulgated its imperialist idea of Asia through its film production. Though defeated in World War II, Japan continued, in association with US Cold War strategies, its Asianist film ambitions, organizing Asian film festivals and working with other Asian film industries in order to advance its influence and improve its negative war image. Meanwhile, the Hong Kong film industry, under the myths of British laissez-faire policy and apolitical stance, also aggressively sought to take a leading share in the Asian film market. For this reason, the collaboration and interaction between Hong Kong film industry and its Japanese counterpart was a productive and thriving one.
In mid-1950s, Shaw Brothers collaborated with Japan’s Daiei Company to produce the costume drama The Princess Yang (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1955) with an entirely Japanese cast playing Chinese historical figures of the Tang dynasty, while Shaw sent Tao Qin to co-write the script and contributed 30 percent of the production costs. In the following year Shaw Brothers worked with another Japanese company, Toho, to produce Madame White Snake (Shiro Toyoda, 1956) also with an entirely Japanese cast playing Chinese characters. The practice of Japanese performing other Asians began in Japan’s wartime cinema in order to construct an idealized pan-Asian subject for promoting the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. These postwar co-operations were actually initiated by the Japanese side. From the perspective of Japanese film history,
[i]n both films the directors – Mizoguchi in the former, Toyoda in the latter – were largely wasted, though each was given his first chance to work in color. The box-office returns were not impressive, but at least Daiei and Toho each received the dubious prestige of having made yet another foreign co-production(Anderson and Richie 1959: 248–249).
But for the Shaw Brothers, their collaboration with Japan had just begun. From 1966 to 1972, a total of six Japanese directors, including Umetsugu Inoue, were hired by Shaw Brothers to produce thirty-one Mandarin features. Recruitment of these Japanese directors not only elevated the standards of Hong Kong cinema but also brought in some exterior elements that constitute the very conditions of borderland cultural productions that the concept of national cinema cannot fully encompass.
“Transnational,” a concept from the 1990s that is still structured around the notion of nation state, may not be the most appropriate term to describe Hong Kong cinema in the 1950s and 60s, especially if we endeavor to use film productions of the colony as a means of subversion of the hegemony of nation centrality. But as discussed earlier, while Hong Kong cinema does not necessarily conform to the ideological construct of nation state, it rarely challenges it in any intentional manner. Cross-border movements of the Hong Kong film industry starting from the 1950s were actually triggered off by the nation states that were engaged in antagonistic relations and even conflicts. The Cold War factor prolonged Hong Kong’s colonial status that paradoxically contributed to its mobility and flexibility from the constricting logics of the state. Hong Kong cinema exceeded the bounds of the nation state and opened up to transnational capital beyond the confines of political borders (although some transnational capital was injected very much within rigid political lines, such as the American-funded Asia Film Company in the early 1950s). The transnational development of Hong Kong cinema may liberate it from the tutelage of state governance and the oppressiveness of nationalist ideology. But its achievement of expansiveness and fluidity also designates a smooth articulation into global capitalist mechanism within which Euro-American overarching systems are still prevailing.
The industry’s desire to get into the mainstream Western market (not just Chinese diasporic markets in the West) was initially manifested through its first entirely English-dialogue film Mandarin Bowl (Tu Guangqi) in 1956. Given the facts that Chinese American actress Anna May Wong was able to achieve international stardom, and Pearl S. Buck’s novels about China and Chinese characters were made into major Hollywood films, including The Good Earth (Sidney Franklin, 1937) and Dragon Seed (Harold S. Bucquet and Jack Conway, 1944) which were well received by Western audiences, veteran director Tu Guangqi’s English debut cannot be considered as something out of the box. While Hollywood had its Caucasian cast to play slanted-eye Chinese characters, Tu was able to find Chinese performers who spoke fluent English. The production company Hualong told the press that they made this English-language film to promote the virtues of Chinese culture through the global lingua franca. The story is about
a Canadian Chinese Zheng Ailin who came to Hong Kong to collect data about a pirate a hundred years ago for her masters dissertation. Being helped by Professor Paul, a refugee from the mainland, and enlightened by a Taoist, Zheng was able to find an ancient copper bowl over which hints were inscribed to reveal the whereabouts of a treasure trove. A group of bandits also discovered the secret of the treasure and chased after Zheng and Paul to the off-shore island Cheung Chau. The police finally arrested the bandits. Following the instructions of the Taoist, Zheng and Paul made good use of the treasure and participated in the refugee relief works(Kwok 2003: 169).
Although a copy of Mandarin Bowl cannot be retrieved nowadays and there were hardly any reviews of the film, we can understand that this crime movie by prolific director Tu who made hundreds of commercial flicks after the “orphan island” period (1937–1941) in Shanghai is possibly more than just a sheer commercial attempt to break into Western market. What underlies it is a century-long desire to catch up with the West and an effort to present an image of how one wants oneself to be seen in a world is shaped by Western influences. Repeating the Chinese path of modernization (or Westernization) in the early twentieth century, Mandarin Bowl soon discovered that English-language production was actually an exclusive club dominated by Caucasians, and linguistic anglicization alone could not win recognition or gain any support in both domestic and international markets. Mandarin Bowl was the first and the last production of the Hualong company. But a Chinese movie filmed fully in English could appear only in borderland Hong Kong especially when the mainland and Taiwan under special political circumstances were becoming fervently nationalistic and more subject to racial prejudice, and when China was reduced to one state or even to one political party.
It took another twenty years for the Hong Kong film industry to fulfill its desire of opening up mainstream markets in America and Europe. In early 1970s, Bruce Lee’s Enter the Dragon (Robert Clouse, 1973) and a few other Hong Kong-made martial arts films were able to enter the US blockbuster list and set off the kung fu craze in the West. But this time the Chinese characters did not need to speak their lines in English (their dialogues were dubbed). It was their body language, not the verbal one, which appealed to Western audiences. And, perhaps, such language is even more universal than the strictly English one. The larger exodus of Hong Kong filmmakers and stars to Hollywood, leading to the production of dozens of English-language films in the 1990s, may blur the borders between nations and cultures and even exacerbate the difficulties of classifying individuals or groups within simple denominations of national identities, a phenomenon which resonates with the cultural characteristics of the borderland. From today’s perspective, these Western adventures (or Westward expansive forces) of Hong Kong cinema might become frontier dynamic vehicles (or a model with global reach) for Chinese national cinema, which is rapidly absorbing the Hong Kong film industry into its system as part of the statist economic integration project of the border zones, intending to rebuild its global enterprise networks in the twenty-first century.
Although Hong Kong filmmakers are actively participating in mainland China’s efforts to create popular nationalist narratives through the production of high-budget costume dramas as a means of mobilizing a unified community, Hong Kong’s marginality in the nationalist community in terms of its geographical frontier and position on the socio-political periphery will continue to be a significant factor for its intractability and mobility beyond China’s controlled state boundaries. Even though state censorship has driven some Hong Kong filmmakers who do not want to entirely comply with the strict policy to re-focus on the local market with the emphasis on crime, horror and soft porn genres which cannot be released in mainland China, co-productions do not necessarily mean a process of thorough mainlandization (state control, to be more precise). Films like The Silent War (Alan Mak and Felix Chong, 2012), Drug War (Johnnie To, 2012), The Grandmaster (Wong Kar-wai, 2013), and American Dreams in China (Peter Chan, 2013) featuring mainland Chinese settings, mainland Chinese themes and even entire mainland Chinese cast no longer center on the idea of resistance but on that of deliberate adaptation or feats of plastic identity shape-shifting, and may use duplicitous discourses to get around censorship. Because of the changes in circumstance, those who have disengaged themselves from the state may seek to affiliate themselves the same state. Having few permanent allegiances, the film industry is liable to shift its linguistic practice and ethnic identity. Indeed, resistance to, or dodging, mainlandization is not presumably equivalent to localization.
Hong Kong’s localization process, which was not confined to cinema, began in the late 1960s and early 1970s. But it was probably a practice to keep fundamental issues like colonialism and borderland nature of the place out of public debate and out of Hong Kong people’s mind. Localization, which was by no means equivalent to decolonization, gradually made Hong Kong people develop the illusory thought that they had become the master of their land. Such “misrecognition,” however, is never accompanied with any (political) confidence in being on one’s own or being one’s own judge in understanding or governing of one’s own society. Deep inside the colonial mentality of Hong Kong subject, there is an uncertain feeling of its so-called master position. Even though Hong Kong films dominated Asian markets in the 1980s and early 1990s and was charged as being “imperialist,” the Hong Kong media invasion was considered as a “marginal imperialism” (Lii 1998: 125) which was different from the core one practiced by the West. Instead of incorporating or swallowing up others as many empires did, Hong Kong cinema only yielded to or blended into others, precisely because of its historical and structural marginality. Such cultural practice could be seen as a strategy to avoid incorporation in state structures. Although margins usually denote the subjugated, the silenced, and the excluded, the marginal borderland can also be understood as bustling and noisy zone of interactions and crossings, where hybrid cultures emerge to subvert the imaginaries of the dominant and allow new identities and alternatives to come into being. To understand Hong Kong and its cinema as ethnic borderland is not to shift attention from China’s other ethnic margins which are usually identified as rural, upland, or hinterland places where backwardness, superstition, and lack of modernity rule. Rather, it is a way to reveal how centers and peripheries are open to contestations and radical displacement.
Movies can be a channel to represent the voices of the underprivileged though they also work as state apparatus. With empowerment of digital video technology, more independent filmmakers have become engaged in the new politics of marginality and concerned with the struggles of ethnic peoples in Hong Kong. More documentaries and short films are being made with Southeast Asian people as the leading characters. Workshops have been organized to help younger ethnic groups to make their films.11 This ethnic consciousness of Hong Kong filmmakers may lead us to other spaces of power and knowledge and urge us to reflect ethnic subjects in the new theorization of post-1997 cinema in the way that internal borders may be removed and external borders be democratized. Unlike China’s “minority nationality film” (shaosu minzu dianying) genre that embraces the ethnic Other as a symbol of territorial security concern and a marketable icon to display multicultural diversity, the ethnic border of Hong Kong cinema may offer a chance to re-think ethnicity issues in moments outside state control. Its history can only be represented in terms of constructed identities, not of pure national identity, dependent on a series of encounters with different civilizations.