12 Mainlandization and Neoliberalism with Postcolonial and Chinese Characteristics
Challenges for the Hong Kong Film Industry
In face of intensifying neoliberal global economic crises and the antecedent imposition of structural adjustments, the commodification of culture into cultural industries and cultural capital has become a major policy tool for postindustrial city renaissance and global city competition. The recent transformations in the Hong Kong film industry is a part of this larger picture. This chapter tries to analyze the recent decline and seeming revival of the Hong Kong film industry as a unique process of transition and adaptation, from the conditions of colonial laissez-faire policy before the 1997 return to Chinese sovereignty, to the conditions of neoliberal governance today, albeit with postcolonial and Chinese characteristics. We will show how Hong Kong’s return to Chinese sovereignty in 1997 and its geo-cultural proximity to China complicate its postcolonial condition and its relation to the regional and global film industry, which is a unique situation difficult for the outside world to understand. Rather than celebrating the recent neoliberal “revival” of the Hong Kong film industry as an effect of the rise of China, with all its implications of nationalist euphoria, our fieldwork results caution about the human and cultural costs as well as longterm implications of this neoliberal structural adjustment.
The Hong Kong film industry, owing to a complex set of geo-historical conditions, had been able to dominate Chinese-speaking cinemas in the Asia-Pacific region up until the mid-1990s, when the rise of Chinese, Korean, Thai, and other Asian cinemas began to challenge its regional prominence.1 Hong Kong film production peaked in the early 1990s, producing over two hundred feature films per year (peaking at 242 in 1993), employing over fifteen thousand people, and taking up 79 percent of the gross local film market. However, with the end of the Cold War in 1989, the end of Martial Law (and thus the beginning of freedom of expression) in Taiwan in 1988, the transfer of Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty in 1997, and the entry of China into the WTO in 2001, the conditions protecting Hong Kong film from regional and global competition were eroded. In addition, competition from other forms of media entertainment and pandemic piracy on intellectual property further eroded the small but once reliable local market for Hong Kong cinema, making its sustainability suddenly precarious. By 2008, the local market share of Hong Kong films had plummeted to 25 percent. Its overseas revenue fell from an apex of HK$1.86 billion in 1992 to a mere HK$252 million in 1998, representing an 85 percent fall. In 2007, only fifty local films were released.2 The actual figure, as an experienced producer and director told us, was even worse.3
This seemingly drastic decline of the Hong Kong film industry has to be contextualized. Rather than relying simply on trade and profit figures from the perspective of investors who consider culture no more than a commodity, we wanted to consider this decline both from the perspective of local cultural identity and creativity as well as the experience of those who labor in the culture industry. In other words, we want to foreground the perspectives of industry practitioners about their artistic expression and working conditions.
The change in working conditions has, indeed, been rapid and drastic. In the early 1990s, Hong Kong produced nearly 250 films a year, a process that Michael Curtin has characterized as a virulent “hyperproduction” that led to declining production quality and overseas demand.4 Once the return of Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty was announced in 1984, the industry plunged into a frenzy of production, seeking to cash in domestic and regional capital before the return in 1997. The process was aided by an increased diversification of platforms (VHS, VCD, DVD, satellite and cable television), which allowed distributors to make a lot more money from video rights than before, thus pushing up the price for regional presale bids and increasing the demand for production (Curtin 2007, pp. 68–70). This frenzied opportunism encouraged producers and talents to hyperproduce at the expense of quality, and to tailor casting and production elements to formulaic distributor considerations rather than to audience satisfaction and artistic excellence. Profits attracted intensified triad involvement,5 leading to poor production conditions (ibid., pp. 70 –74). In 1993, 242 movies were screened as opposed to the usual 120 to 130. The shorter runs clogged the market, and the abundance of poor-quality films crowded out the good ones, making it hard for any film to build its reputation through word of mouth, and making it difficult for the audience to tell the good films from the bad ones. Frustrated theatergoers became reluctant. This was exacerbated by home distribution and rampant piracy, leading to box-office slumps both local and regional (ibid., pp. 74–75, 79). The Asian economic crisis of 1997 further decimated regional markets.6 As one producer-director noted, a “third of our labor were cut off, a third of our products gone.”7 The career of everyone in the industry seemed vulnerable, both in terms of the pressures against quality production and the disappearance of jobs.
Although Hong Kong film history can be read as a constant process of restructuring in face of regional and global cultural, political, and economic challenges, this does not alleviate the anxieties of the present “structural adjustment.” In face of this crisis, while making policy adjustments of its own, the pro-business Hong Kong government also interceded with the Chinese government to intervene and help with the crisis by formulating specific policies relevant to the Hong Kong film industry. What are the resulting policy interventions and in what sense are they neoliberal? How is the Hong Kong film industry restructuring in response to the changing local and national policies and the shifting cultural dynamics of diverse local and foreign audiences? In what sense is this restructuring a neoliberal process?
“Actually Existing Neoliberalism”8 With Postcolonial and Chinese Characteristics
The Hong Kong government wants to intervene in support of the film industry not only because of pressure from industry leaders. This alone would not have worked to persuade this government to give up its “adherence to laissez-faire,” repackaged as “positive non-intervention” in the 1970s and “maximum support, minimum intervention” in the 1990s.9 In Hong Kong, governance was carried out without the people’s mandate through universal suffrage, whether before or after the change of sovereignty. Thus, the government has relied on the cornerstone laissez-faire policy to produce “acceptable boundaries between public and private interests within a political system that was based on a partnership between colonialism and capitalism” (Goodstadt 2005, p. 13). This policy allows the government to project a façade of impartiality while committing to low taxes, small government, market deregulation, and the continuation of monopolistic practices at the same time. Thus time and again, it has steadfastly allowed ailing “industries and entire sectors of the economy” “to wither unaided” and without “subsidies.”10 Why would this colonial-capitalist state start to positively intervene into the market in the postcolonial era?11
In fact, the preceding outline of Hong Kong’s “laissez-faire” policy already shows how colonial Hong Kong has long been operating on a logic similar to neoliberalism. Ironically, while Britain and “the rest of the world moved in the opposite direction” after WWII, the Hong Kong colonial administration embraced “laissez-faire” “with renewed fervor” as “the principle of non-intervention” (Goodstadt 2005, p. 119). Thus, unlike most Western democracies, neoliberalization in Hong Kong is less about the “rollback”12 of Keynesian policies than the intensification of already existing colonial policies. If “neoliberalism is not really a regime of unregulated capital but rather a form of state regulation that best facilitates the global movements and profit of capital,”13 then much of Hong Kong’s actually existing colonial policies that have survived into the postcolonial present could have been understood as neoliberalism. The actual policy practice has been the hands-on provision of minimal social welfare, like using public housing as a social wage to subsidize capital by keeping wages low, and hands-off market regulation whenever possible. Hong Kong has also avoided Western-style welfare state policies, intervening only minimally and mostly in labor reproduction–related policies such as public housing and health care, while ignoring production-related industrial policies.14 Together with the lack of developmental state protectionism practiced by other Asian economies, there is not much market regulation to “roll back” in the first place. Thus, neoliberalization in the postcolonial Hong Kong case means largely the conscious and intensified “rolling forward” of existing policies. The 1997 Asian economic crisis simply gave further impetus to the intensification of state divestment, devolution, downscaling, fiscal austerity, and market deregulation, leading to heightened social polarization, aggravated exploitation, and unbridled capital speculation and monopolization. Hong Kong now tops all Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries in terms of its rich–poor gap.
Hong Kong’s colonial form of governance, which trickily continues in large measure after the 1997 sovereignty change, has allowed a rather seamless transition from “colonial” to “global” neoliberal exploitation on both discursive and practical levels, and, thus, allows the conglomerate of institutional and business elite more clout to glocalize neoliberalism through already existing institutions, policies, and public discourses. Thus, ironically, it is easier to explain to Hong Kong people how “neoliberal” colonialism already was, because they know laissez-faire policy and free market orthodoxy so well, than to explain to them how “colonial” neoliberalism actually is, because the government has been so successful in persuading the community to endorse the commitment to laissezfaire, and, therefore, also neoliberalism, understood as a contemporary upgrade of the same, that the “community came to believe that Hong Kong owed its post-war prosperity to laissez-faire,” and, therefore, would be reluctant to see neoliberalism as exploitative and “colonial-like,” even “when used as an excuse for the government’s refusal to pursue social and economic goals that were major priorities for the general public” (Goodstadt 2005, p. 122). This explains why “colonial-like” neoliberal injustice can happen again and again to this once colonized population with mainstream consent. In fact, the laissez-faire policy in Hong Kong can be understood as a variegated form of neoliberalism in East Asia, albeit with decidedly colonial roots.
What is new in the postcolonial phase of neoliberalization in Hong Kong is the “rollout” (Peck and Tickell 2002, p. 15) of policies that actively assist in capital accumulation. The asymmetrical intervention of the colonial era leaves room for the present “rollout” phase of neoliberalization, which Mark Purcell candidly refers to as “aidez-faire” (2008, p. 15). This refers to the way the entrepreneurial state “rolls out” promarket policies such as indirect subsidies as well as industrial policies of clustering, upgrading and innovation to assist capital accumulation.15 The postcolonial government’s intervention on behalf of the film industry is simply part of this neoliberal “aidez-faire” policy in the recent round of global city competition. The exploitation of cultural capital has become the major policy tool to repackage urban redevelopment as postindustrial city renaissance. Film is taken as a leading creative industry in city branding efforts. The Hong Kong chief executive aspires to turn Hong Kong into a “cultural metropolis befitting the claim to Asia’s World City alongside London and New York” (Policy Address 1998).The government started investing in Disneyland Hong Kong, the West Kowloon Cultural District, and the revitalization of cultural heritage sites. It established a HK$100 million Film Development Fund (FDF) to support the industry, earmarking HK$50 million in 2003 as a Film Guarantee Fund (FGF) to help local film production companies obtain loans (Chan, Fung, and Ng 2010). “Prestigious new advisory bodies were created to devise fresh and more interventionist strategies,” (Goodstadt 2005, p. 135) like the Film Development Council (FDC) established in 2007 to advice the government on how to spend HK$300 million in revitalizing the film industry.16 However, our interviewees unanimously express that such funds require a punishing amount of bureaucratic paperwork and are much less useful than traditional trade fair platforms like FILMART (Hong Kong). Scholars have also observed a “lack of interest” for the FGF, and those who “successfully obtain” it “were mostly big film companies” with “no particular problem in financing” (Chan, Fung, and Ng 2010, p. 29).
Although proactive local neoliberal policies seem to have little effect, the government is prevented from exercising more effective protectionist policies on behalf of the film industry due to its free market ideology. The solution is to defer this role to the national government in Beijing, which has such policies in place and can extend their jurisdiction to Hong Kong businesses in the form of the Mainland and Hong Kong Closer Economic Partnership Arrangement (CEPA) effective since January 1, 2004. This is a spectrum of preferential market liberalization measures extended to the Special Administrative Regions of Hong Kong and Macao but not to foreign countries. Whereas China is liberating it markets, especially after entering WTO, censorship and protective measures are still applied to foreign businesses due to national interest and security concerns. This selective liberalization measure is part and parcel of a neoliberalism “with Chinese Characteristics.”17 Wang Hui has clearly captured the irony of this idea: whereas neoliberalism refers to the retreat of the state and the liberalization of the market, “China has promoted radical marketization … upon the premise of a continuity of its political system” and “under the guidance of state policy… . This continuity and discontinuity has lent a special character to Chinese neoliberalism.” Due to the heavily state-led character of this neoliberalization process, “using the existence of state interference in the economy to prove … that there is no neoliberalism in China is really beside the point.” In fact, the legitimacy of the Chinese state and of neoliberalism is interdependent. On the one hand, neoliberalism relies heavily on “the strength of transnational and national policies and economics”:
That is, in the absence of such a policy/state premise, neoliberalism would be incapable of concealing unemployment, the decline of social security, and the widening gap between rich and poor.18
Thus, in effect, neoliberalism relies on the state to absorb its negative effects and deflect criticism and responsibility from targeting it. In Peck and Tickell’s terms, neoliberalism requires a lot of “institutional fix.”19 On the other hand, the Chinese state relies heavily on its claim to successful neoliberal economic reforms to deal with its crisis of legitimacy, which is, ironically, a crisis that neoliberalist exploitation plays a large part in creating. It is according to this paradoxical logic of controlled market liberalization that certain neoliberal policies in China get extended to the Hong Kong film industry. We will show how the CEPA and correlated censorship policies applicable to Hong Kong demonstrate a kind of neoliberalism with Chinese characteristics: they selectively liberate the flow of capital and cultural capital but not the flow of labor and critical ideas; selectively liberate the economy but not the grip on culture and politics.
The market liberalization policy called CEPA privileges Hong Kong film against all foreign films.20
λ In terms of film distribution: Hong Kong companies are permitted to establish wholly owned film distribution companies in China whereas foreign companies are completely off-limits.
λ In terms of film exhibition: Although foreign companies are allowed to construct or renovate cinemas in China, they can only do so through minority-owned joint ventures with Chinese companies, with the exception of seven cities, which allow foreign firms up to 75 percent ownership. Hong Kong companies, however, can establish wholly owned companies in China to construct or renovate cinema chains in multiple locations.
λ In terms of access to the market: Foreign films face a twenty film per year import quota, but totally Hong Kong–produced films fare better, because their “import” quota restriction is waived. There is no limit to the number of Hong Kong films entering China each year. Hong Kong– China co-production films enjoy the most privilege, as they are considered “national” products and are not subject to “import” quota or import tax.
λ In terms of profit sharing: Foreign films must pay a 5 percent import tax and get a lower 13 percent to 15 percent box-office share. Hong Kong– China co-productions are regarded as local Chinese films allowing them a 30 percent to 40 percent box-office share and a waiver of import tax.
λ In terms of different kinds of co-productions: Qualification for Hong Kong– China co-production film is a major strategy to enjoy the status of local Chinese film.21 Hong Kong– China co-productions face no cap on the proportion of principal Hong Kong creative personnel, so long as there is at least one-third of the main cast from China. Foreign-China co-production films, however, must have a fifty-fifty ratio of foreign and mainland crews (mainland meaning excluding Hong Kong and Macao), at least one-third of main casts being mainlanders, and a story that takes place in specific Chinese mainland locations.22
These CEPA privileges lead to the accelerated restructuring of the Hong Kong film industry in terms of a mainlandization process (explanation in the following). The seeming rebound of the Hong Kong film industry with seventy feature releases in 2009 is often attributed to the success of this CEPA policy. This ethnographical study,23 however, draws on industry data and insider views of Hong Kong film practitioners to outline a more complicated and less flattering picture of neoliberal restructuring, focusing especially on the model of Hong Kong– China co-production films favored by most in the Hong Kong film industry, albeit with many misgivings. This, together with exhibition and distribution strategies adapted to CEPA policies, and strategies in face of the censorship system in China, form the basket of adaptive survival tactics the Hong Kong film industry is experimenting with. We will explore the human and cultural costs as well as long-term implications of this structural adjustment process. Our analysis shows that even with the seeming rebound of production volume since 2009, structural dangers are actually intensifying rather than receding. The Hong Kong film industry is facing some painful dilemmas.
Mainlandization and Bifurcation: Implications of Hong Kong-Chinese Co-Productions
Since the 2000s, there has been a surge in the number of cross-border “coproductions” by Hong Kong and mainland filmmakers, raising a hot debate on whether Hong Kong– China co-production is the panacea for “restructuring” the Hong Kong film industry. To evaluate the consequences of this trend we need to understand, from the point of view of those engaged in production, the conditions in and the processes by which these films are coproduced and distributed. The findings can be quite different from what policymakers imagine them to be.
There are two ways that Hong Kong films enter the Chinese market. The first is as an imported item, which benefits from CEPA waiver of import quota. Unlike the positive impression presented by communications scholars and the government quoted earlier (Hong Kong Census and Statistics Department [HKTDC] 2010; Chan, Fung, and Ng 2010; Hong Kong Motion Picture Industry Association [HKMPIA] 2010), our informants consider this policy item as “unpopular and not at all related to the increase of Hong Kong film distribution in China.” On the contrary, an industry titan explains:
Films that do not go through the co-production track can enter the China market as imported Hong Kong films through CEPA … but they still need to go through the extremely tedious import system and censorship.24
Another experienced regional producer adds that companies applying for import into China:
need to first register with the Trade and Industry Department as Hong Kong companies and get “qualified condition.” Paco Wong was the first to try. The tedious paperwork took too long. If you have relations with distributors in China, you can simply write a flat deal instead. It is not worth the trouble.25
In fact, the import track is a cumbersome last resort when co-production fails. For example:
Johnny To’s Sparrow (2008), with policemen committing theft and so on, would never qualify as a Hong Kong– China co-production film, which … must have its script passed through censorship before production. As co-production, it will never be made. Thus, they make it first and then try the CEPA import track.26
The second way for Hong Kong films to enter the China market is through Hong Kong–China co-production. Co-production also involves cofinancing and profit sharing and faces no cap on the proportion of principal creative personnel from Hong Kong, so long as there is at least one-third of the main cast from China. Since 2006, almost half of the fifty to sixty “Hong Kong” films made every year were coproduced and the proportion keeps increasing. However, “neoliberalism with Chinese characteristics” is defined by the coupling of tight ideological censorship and selective market liberalization. Thus, although CEPA co-production deregulates the film market to allow the flexible flow of capital between Hong Kong and China, it continues to regulate the flow of ideas and of labor.
The incentive is high for the Hong Kong film investors and above-the-line talents to pursue Hong Kong– China co-production as a way out for the crumbling industry. The statistical growth is clear to the Asian regional corporate executive.
Hong Kong’s maximum aggregate box office is saturated. It will not grow. In 2002, the profit distribution was 8.9 percent from Hong Kong, 8.9 percent China, both around ninety million to one billion. In 2004, Hong Kong is still grossing ninety million, but China is grossing 1.5 billion. It was two billion in 2005, 2.6 in 2006, 3.3 in 2007. In comparison, the U.S. grossed an aggregate of 8.9 billion U.S. in 2002. China has a much larger population and room for growth. Any foreign film can easily do twenty million. Imagine that.27
Before CEPA, Hong Kong companies “must go through the state assigned distributors” and “cannot choose our own distributor.” Now with Hong Kong– China co-production status, a film gets “local treatment” and “has the rights to distribute ourselves or choose our own local distribution partners.” This allows a company room to negotiate between a 30 percent to 40 percent profits share, and the 10 percent difference can be extremely significant for big-budget films like Peter Chan’s Warlords, which took in “twenty million box office in China” as well as “Lau Wai-Keung, Mak Siu-Fai’s Initial D and Confession of Pain” that numerically pulled in close to twenty million. Compared to the 13 percent to 15 percent profit share of imported films, industry leaders are increasingly moving toward co-productions. The increasing significance of the China market for Hong Kong film is crystal clear.28 Moreover, China offers cheap locations and labor, along with a diverse geography for the selection of scenes and sites, as well as a formidable market. Thus, big budgets get poured into filmmaking in China and major talents all start exploring the mainlandization possibility. Capturing the China market suddenly becomes imperative to Hong Kong investors and filmmakers. Figures 12.1 and 12.2 illustrate the drastic consequence of this mainlandization trend on the market share of Hong Kong films in both Hong Kong and China.
Figure 12.1 Top ten box-office films in the China Market (1995–2009).
Figure 12.2 Top ten films in the Hong Kong market (1995–2009).
Figure 12.1 traces the distribution of the top ten box-office films in China. The domination of Hollywood in the 1990s was accompanied by a sizable portion of Chinese films and token Hong Kong films until 2001. In the new millennium however, the Chinese film market started to liberalize (2002) and then developed into the CEPA policy for Hong Kong in 2004, causing the dominance of Hong Kong films to gradually disappear. Thus, since 2002, local Chinese and Hong Kong films disappeared from the top ten list, and can only come back as a revenant component of Hong Kong– China co-productions, i.e., they are replaced by an increasing proportion of Hong Kong– China co-production films, which were capable of challenging the dominance of Hollywood films. The year 2009 marks the beginning of a bifurcated trend: the facing off of Mainlandization and Hollywoodization. Hong Kong film as a category is facing an ontological crisis.
Figure 12.2 traces the distribution of the top ten box-office films in Hong Kong. The change in the Hong Kong market is even more dramatic. Hong Kong films, which were as prominent as Hollywood before the year 2002, completely disappeared when the new Hong Kong– China co-production policy began. With capital and talents being drained by co-production in China, very few local Hong Kong films actually made it to theaters, and Hollywood quickly filled in the vacuum to capture the Hong Kong market share. It is also significant to note that Hong Kong– China co-production films are not particularly popular in Hong Kong, and over the years, very few of them actually rose to be top box-office releases.
This pressure to mainlandize threatens not only Hong Kong film but also national films in the Asian region. An acclaimed director-producer thinks that the mainlandization imperative is true not only for Hong Kong but for all of Asia: “Pan-Asian films will eventually gravitate to China … and even Chinese tastes… . China has enough money enough talent and enough people to watch Chinese films, and with that three ‘enough,’”29 the “mainlandization” imperative is very hard to resist.
Mainlandization and Bifurcation in Production and Labor
Our first observation about the mainlandization of film production is that Hong Kong’s preferential access to the opening and growing China market has allowed extremely large-budget Hong Kong– China co-production films to become more dominant. However, whereas this co-production model allows experienced and above-the-line creative Hong Kong talents and crew members as well as established film production and distribution investors to make it big beyond Hong Kong, their survival and success depends on the sacrifice of Hong Kong junior and entrance-level practitioners and technicians as the jobs migrate to mainland China. This bifurcation has exacerbated the “winner-take-all” phenomenon in the Hong Kong film industry. The gradual hollowing-out effect results in the shrinking of the local labor markets and the tarnished dream of upward mobility for young film graduates.
As in other industries in Hong Kong, the shift of parts of the production process up north to China, which is part of the trend in production outsourcing in search of lower production costs, means that the investment going north will bring with it only the irreplaceable chief creative talents and labor functions that they cannot find in China. As a result, Hong Kong jobs that can find cheaper and comparable labor in China will be lost. Thus, below-the-line workers will need to take pay cuts and travel north to compete, or they have to leave the industry altogether. A very prominent director-producer who has moved the company headquarters to China estimates that “a third of our labor were cut off” in this restructuring.30 It is now harder to find work in Hong Kong as large-budget co-productions have moved north and small-budget productions are infrequent and badly paid. A young production assistant remarks that many people left the industry because companies began to cut overtime pay, hire less people to do the same work, and cut the daily per diem for jobs outside Hong Kong.31 A boom operator describes the predicament of subcontracted labor. They are paid a flat amount for a unit of work, salary, equipment rental, equipment maintenance, and insurance inclusive. Due to the “contract manufacturing” nature of their work, they have to bear all the risks of production. Sometimes companies refuse to wait for proper import of equipment into China and would like them to smuggle the gear. These technicians would rather not take such risks of equipment confiscation, where in the subcontractor role they need to absorb the loss. Moreover, their unit pay has been declining from HK$5,000 per nine hours to per fourteen hours.32 Most below-the-line interviewees know of or have experienced labor exploitation and most agree that their unions are not doing much to protect their rights. An assistant director complains that their profession fails even to form a union due to their transitional status and frequent change of employment. Neither has affiliation with the directors’ guild ever proved helpful in industrial bargaining.33 An industry leader who has been active in championing film-worker rights concur that although the Federation of Hong Kong Filmmakers is already trying to encourage the ten member unions to act up, film investors have many ways to deflect the pressure of their mediation and collective bargaining. Investors can offer job conditions in a “take-it-or-leave-it manner” because they can hire people outside Hong Kong and cut costs in all sorts of ways.34 Experienced workers all express preference for work with Hollywood or Canadian companies, for they have better work conventions and better labor terms. Moreover, those workers with families are reluctant to work in China. Working abroad is difficult in general, requiring strong motivation and adaptation to cultural differences. To put it bluntly, the job has to be worth the pain. As most young graduates prefer to work in Hong Kong and choose relatively stable jobs, many have moved to advertising, television, or other media-related work. Bifurcation in production organization is clearly disadvantageous for the below-the-line crew and is making such careers unsustainable.
However, for above-the-line creative talents and investors, the move to China is perceived as a way to keep “Hong Kong film” alive. Some of them have even fared better in China than in Hong Kong. Producers, distributors, and investors all sound enthusiastic about their situation. Bifurcation in production organization is leading to a “winner-take-all” phenomenon. An owner of a cinema chain is building sixty to seventy cinemas in 2010, eighty to one hundred in 2011, and the company decision is to build up to eight hundred.35 However, behind the glitter is a more disturbing cultural implication.
Mainlandization or Hongkongization? From Made in Hong Kong to Made by Hong Kong
An experienced producer and entertainment corporate CEO from Hong Kong now based in China tellingly reveals an ironic and surprising phenomenon that official figures about co-production profitability cannot tell. The question is: what do insiders think constitutes Hong Kong film in this era of Hong Kong– China co-production, and what cultural identity politics could they be harboring in the process?
Confucius (2010), a co-production film, is in fact 100 percent conceived, led, and made by Hong Kong companies and talents, except the director Mei Hu, a few acting staff and some below-the-line crew. The demo version was made by Peter Pau, the producer is Bo Chu Chui … Chung-Man Hai was on-hands [sic] and the [Hong Kong] investor was actually the one who made the final cut… . Since this film has national symbolic meaning, a token Chinese company must be there. This company however, does not share the profit nor shoulder any of the work… . Believe it or not, even Alex Law’s Echoes of the Rainbow36 is technically a co-production film. More outrageously, Derek Yee Tung-Shing’s Triple Tap, a quintessential Hong Kong film with fund-managers, police officers, and lots of shooting and armed robbery, is a co-production as well, because there was Chinese actress Li Bingbing.
He further challenges anyone to name a:
big Chinese blockbuster without Hong Kong people in significant roles. … Curse of the Golden Flower is Bill Kong’s. Except Zhang Yimou, everyone else, Chow Yun-fat, Chung-Man Hai … are from Hong Kong. [In general,] 70 percent to 80 percent of the important crew members are Hong Kong people. [They are] made by Hong Kong films [in terms of the] creative control and financial control… . Peter Chan’s Bodyguards and Assassins [2010] is a co-production film, but what element in it is Chinese, after all, except the set?37
This perception is echoed almost verbatim by a prominent producer-director, who thinks that films were “made in Hong Kong” in the past but will “definitely be made by Hong Kong” in the future. “Most scripts are developed in Hong Kong, and even if the films are not made for Hong Kong, they are developed by Hong Kong people at different stages, and then taken to China for feedback” to ensure cultural relevance and accuracy.38
Other above-the-line informants also confirm that the major creative talents not only in production but also in preproduction, postproduction, marketing, and distribution are mainly from Hong Kong, whereas the below-the-line crew is easier to come by and cheaper from China.
This makes us ponder whether it is Hong Kong film production going through a process of mainlandization or Chinese film production going through a kind of Hongkongization. The spatial shift of production to China and the emphasis on cultural content catering to the Chinese market is posed against the influx of Hong Kong above-the-line people calling the shots, setting up the industry conventions, transferring the know-how, and building the industry infrastructure.
The Hongkongization idiom sounds slightly disturbing. The language in which this transnational creative class paints the picture of their investments makes China sound like a flat space for capitalist ventures and a virgin frontier for the Hong Kong film industry. The way they describe their discovery of new Chinese talents and mentoring of Chinese crew and the pride they show in building the first cinema in a small town make the whole venture sound almost like a benevolent civilizing mission.39 The first author has analyzed this familiar cultural imaginary in mainstream Hong Kong before and has called it “petit-grandiose Hong Kongism,” which is a kind of colonial inferiority–superiority complex expressed in terms of an economic chauvinism against economically less developed people and places in China. It also contains a “Northbound Cultural Imaginary” about China (on its north), which posits its cosmopolitanism and capitalist expertise as a justification for an implied economic and cultural expansion towards China. Ironically, places in China that mainstream Hong Kong has been imagining as cultural and economic colonies have in fact outdone Hong Kong in the capitalist upstart game.40 Meanwhile, Hong Kong is trying to restart its crumbling industries by building a second spring in China. Like many a Hong Konger, these Hong Kong film titans seem to be savoring a bit of compensatory colonial imagining.
Mainlandization: China’s Integration of the Rest
What then are the cultural implications of the mainlandization take? In what sense is Hong Kong film mainlandizing?
Now that the imperative of the China market has make Hong Kong– China co-production film an inexorable trend, everyone agrees that the next biggest hurdle is the need for such films to pass through Chinese censorship twice, like all mainland productions. The script must be approved by the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) before shooting, and the final cut must pass censorship again before screening permission is issued. State censorship encourages preemptive self-censorship from the beginning to the end of the creative process as a way to avoid last-minute cuts and release uncertainties. Informants ascribe the predominance of historical sagas set in vaguely defined time and place to SARFT taboos on history and politics. The nearer you get to present time and place, the more politically sensitive you potentially become. For example, to set a story of corruption, crime, and violence any time after the 1949 Communist revolution would run the risk of delayed or cancelled distribution (Klein 2007, p. 202). Thus, the profusion of films about vaguely defined legends with outlandishly armored warriors fighting in oddly Baroque-oriental sets is the result not of the lack of research but the collective attempt to avoid historical precision. Clifton Ko Chi-sum’s professed “armor-phobia” is an industry-wide malady.41
Well-connected Chinese production houses like Huayi Brothers and state-owned distributors like China Film Group become influential co-production partners, coaching Hong Kong filmmakers through intricate censorship processes (Klein 2007, p. 202). Thus, although the Chinese market seems to give Hong Kong film a comeback opportunity, censorship forces the industry to tailor cultural content to official SARFT parameters. This is what we mean by the mainlandization of Hong Kong filmmaking. By mainlandization, we are not referring to the tailoring of content based on essentialist assumptions about the cultural preferences and differences of Chinese audiences, but to the tailoring of cultural content to what SARFT perceives as acceptable or not acceptable in mainland China.42 What then are the cultural identity implications?
Experienced film professionals concur on one worrying trend in Hong Kong co-productions that manage to get past Chinese censorship: these films tend to have skirted ideological taboos by compromising genre possibilities and deodorizing cultural sensitivities.43 A producer at large for the Asian region laments that such “mainlandized” works tend to find the more liberal Hong Kong and Southeast Asian markets harder to penetrate.44 Others agree that less censored versions of their films are often made for markets outside China. Conversely, films made for the Hong Kong and Southeast Asian markets may contain content or genres excluded by SARFT. Many a genre that Hong Kong is famous for could imply the promotion of superstition or crime, and thus a ghost film popular all over Asia, for example, cannot be released in China. Thus, irrespective of the potential diversity of the Chinese audience, state censorship imposes an artificial cultural divide, forcing the Hong Kong film industry to choose between the China market and the rest. If we compare Figures 12.1 and 12.2, the phenomenon becomes clear. Co-production films that are top ten box-office winners in China are not popular at all in Hong Kong, showing how these censored films are hard to sell beyond the Chinese border. However, seeing double-digit box-office expansion in China, Hong Kong filmmakers are often willing to compromise content and concentrate on the Chinese market rather than making films for the rest of the market and risk exclusion from China.
This mainlandization and market bifurcation also contain another layer of implications. A film corporate executive notes:
For example, Chen Kaige’s The Promise appealed to the Chinese audience, garnering one hundred to two hundred million in China, but got only five million in Hong Kong. The tastes of the two audiences are totally different. The glossy spectacles and slapsticks that please Chinese audiences do not get the Hong Kong audience anymore, although this used to be the staple of Hong Kong production for local and Southeast Asian markets. Likewise, Confucius and Curse of the Golden Flower got China but lost Hong Kong.45
Chinese director Feng Xiaogang is another frustrating example. His top blockbusters (or Leitmotif films) that are phenomenally successful in China consistently fail to work for Hong Kong and Southeast Asia. His recent World without Thieves falls into the same predicament, even with top Hong Kong star Andy Lau as the lead.46 Perhaps the impression of censorship has reinvoked Cold War “prejudices” against anything from “mainland China” among Hong Kong and Southeast Asian audiences. It is very likely that cultural prejudice dies hard, and even Feng’s wonderful brand of perceptive humor, his ability to “be critical without criticizing,” is lost among nonmainland audiences.
If one takes a step back to question this “China or the rest binary,” one could perhaps trace an increasingly bifurcated market not only between China and the rest of Asia, but on the larger global scale as well, in terms of a bifurcation between global lowest-common-denominator fare and increasingly localist tastes and concerns.47 For example, nonverbal jokes, slapstick, and physical cultural spectacles that have been highly com-modified globally, like kung fu and stuntsmanship are more easily accepted across cultures, whereas verbal puns and culturally specific issues and concerns catch only the local audience and the culturally curious or highly informed connoisseurs. A famous director-producer sees an increasingly inward-looking and nationalizing tendency among audiences, making:
genuinely bicultural co-production films very difficult to sell. Everyone’s tolerance for cultural difference is becoming lower… . The whole world is less curious about other nations, especially culturally… . Even during the heyday of Hong Kong film in the eighties, there used to be a steady market for French, British, German films. This is no longer the case everywhere. Japanese film is enjoying a comeback but they are very Japanese.48
In this context of global bifurcation of audiences, what is left possible for local or national cinemas with local audiences significantly smaller than China, India, and the U.S.? Hong Kong is in this category, and the possibilities left are, first of all, smallto medium-budget films catered to local concerns and sensibilities, targeting the small local market and foreign niches. The other possibility is the globalization of an increasingly monotonous blockbuster culture. Such films target the lowest cultural and genre common denominators of large global and national markets. In other words, they culturally deodorize, globalize, Hollywoodize, Bollywoodize, or Mainlandize.
Films targeting the small local audience can only survive as independent, low-budget or subsidized productions. They tend to alienate the global and large foreign markets due to their flavorful cultural odor. Many filmmakers of this category will find it very difficult to access mainstream film screens, even with much academic, critical, and festival acclaim. Paradoxically, this trend of small national cinemas turning local and inward-looking also caused the collapse of the art-house cinemas they rely on to export to each other. The same director-producer laments that:
Art-house cinemas are dead not just in Hong Kong, but in New York. A lot of megaplexes have all six halls showing the same blockbuster all the time. An independent film can be cut to a showtime that nobody sees. In the past, some theaters still focused on niche and art-house films, and a film can take over a theater for a period of time. But this is now over. The marketing cost of art films in the 1990s was pushed so high the films become no longer commercially viable.49
However, whereas other Asian national cinemas, like Korea, India, and China, can rely simply on the nationalization of cultural sensibilities and tastes to survive, Hong Kong’s small population prevents the local industry from relying on the local audience to survive. Thus, over the years, it has made films with wider regional appeal and more diverse tastes.
Conclusion
At the end of the day, neoliberalization of the Hong Kong and China film markets liberates the flow of capital and cultural capital but not labor and critical ideas. With the hold of censorship not likely to “liberalize” soon, and the prospects of entry into the industry in Hong Kong getting slimmer and slimmer, Hong Kong– China co-production is not a way out for everyone in the Hong Kong film industry. Only experienced directors, producers, distributors, and stars will benefit the most in this bifurcated winner-take-all situation, whereas the future of below-the-line new talents looks more and more dismal. Co-production is highly speculative at this stage as the film market is expanding rapidly in China. The honeymoon period might just stop abruptly and this neoliberal alternative might prove to be unsustainable. Co-production is highly censored by the Chinese government, limiting the freedom of creation for Hong Kong filmmakers, whereas the Hong Kong and international audiences continue to be hard to please. This is a real dilemma and challenge to creative thinking.
Looking back in comparison, it seems that Hong Kong films of the previous era, before the blossoming of the China market and the growth of other Asian films, had the scope to experiment with more diverse cultural tastes and assumptions, and in so doing, were paradoxically more able to cultivate and develop their diverse local cultural identity and sensitivities than Hong Kong films can nowadays, despite the present access to a wider and larger market. Thus, all in all, the increasing “mainlandization” of Hong Kong film ironically limits rather than encourages the development of diverse cultural sensitivities. What would Hong Kong be without that?
1 The Sino-Japanese War, the Chinese civil war dividing Communist China and capitalist Taiwan, the Cold War, and the trade embargo against China since the Korean War, as well as the severity of censorship in both China and Taiwan, led to waves of Chinese capital, cultural talents, and industrial know-how flooding to Hong Kong since the 1930s to 1950s. With relative freedom of expression, where ideological censorship operated within the rule of law, the British colonial enclave became where the Chinese film industry could flourish in all its diversity. The loss of the mainland China market helped to propel the Hong Kong film industry towards the local and regional markets; see Ain-ling Wong and Pui-tak Lee, 2009; Ain-ling Wong, 2003.
2 See Hong Kong Motion Picture Industry Association (HKMPIA), 2010; Chan, Fung, and Ng, 2010; Hong Kong Census and Statistics Department (HKCSD), 2010; Hong Kong Trade Development Council (HKTDC), 2010.
3 “It should be less than thirty-five. Some films were publicly released for only one to two days, just in order to push up the price of DVD rights… . These cannot be counted as real releases.” Interview with the authors on December 10, 2009. This informant has been in the Hong Kong film industry for over thirty-five years and is a prominent director and producer working across different media and performance-exhibition channels. In this research, interviewee anonymity is maintained throughout unless permission is obtained for the disclosure of identity.
4 Michael Curtin, 2007.
5 Triad involvement is not unique to Hong Kong film. Typical triad activities include money laundering, forcing famous stars and artists to play major roles in their films, or, as one informant noted, after being paid their due fees, stars find themselves harassed by “crew” members constantly borrowing money from them that they never pay back, etc. Interview with the authors on December 10, 2009. See note 3.
6 Curtin, 1999.
7 Interview with the authors, October 22, 2008. This Hong Kong director-producer who has moved headquarters to China echoes our outline of the decline: “Our market used to be 20 percent Korea, 40 percent Taiwan, the seven million people in Malaysia a steady base, and Singapore too. Now Taiwan does not watch Hong Kong films anymore. It is our fault. We became too sloppy and rushed. The other markets are also dwindling, except Malaysia. A third of our labor were cut off, a third of our products gone. Places like Japan and Korea are beginning to revive. All of a sudden, we have competitions from many different places, but meanwhile, because we tried to make everything before 1997, the whole Hong Kong was doing the same boring thing… . We were left with a very vulnerable industry.”
8 We are borrowing the term from Neil Brenner and Nik Theodore, 2002, pp. 349–379. They argue that neoliberalization as an institution-building process can be called “creative destruction” that destructs (partially) the existing Fordist-Keynesian institutional arrangements and creates a new infrastructure for market-oriented economic growth, commodification, and the rule of capital (ibid., p. 362).
9 Leo F. Goodstadt, 2005, pp. 118–121. Leo F. Goodstadt is the first and last head of Hong Kong’s Central Policy Unit during the colonial era under the last governor Chris Patton.
10 See Goodstadt, 2005, pp. 118–122; Tak-Wing Ngo, 2000, pp. 31–33; Stanislaw Wellisz and Ronald Findlay, 1993; Shiu-hing Lo, 2002.
11 In post-1997 Hong Kong, the head of state and the heads of government bureaus are not produced by party politics and the cabinet system. Instead, an electoral college of eight hundred people handpicked by Beijing in collusion with the pro-growth coalition elects the chief executive (the head of the Hong Kong government). The chief executive then chooses his heads of bureaus and departments, and such choices are effective only with approval from Beijing. This ruling elite is supported by a civil service that has by and largely continued from the colonial system.
12 Jamie Peck and Adam Tickell, 2002; Mark Purcell, 2008, p. 15.
13 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, 2004, p. 280.
14 Yun-chung Chen and Ngai Pun, 2007, p. 71.
15 David Harvey, 1989.
16 Joseph M. Chan, Anthony Y.H. Fung, and Chun Hung Ng, 2010, pp. 26–27.
17 Harvey, 2005, pp. 120 –151.
18 Hui Wang, 2004, pp. 7–8.
19 Peck and Tickell, 2000.
20 As Hong Kong is a special administrative region of China, there is an immigration and quasi border separating it from China, and its trade relations with mainland China retain some elements of international trade, although such trading procedures, barriers, and monitoring are gradually being “liberated.” Thus, Hong Kong films are not automatically considered national products and are comparable to imported foreign films in several ways. CEPA policies aim to “liberate” exactly such “import” restrictions on films from Hong Kong.
21 Hong Kong film production companies must own over 50 percent of the copyright and contribute at least 50 percent of the invested budget of a film to qualify for Hong Kong– China co-production status.
22 The data can be found in HKTDC, 2010; Lixing Liu, 2008; Christina Klein, 2007, p. 202.
23 So far, we have interviewed over sixty practitioners in the Hong Kong film industry, from regional corporate heads, above-the-line creative talents, to below-the-line talents and workers in this ongoing research on the restructuring of the Hong Kong film industry. Echoing Jeroen de Kloet, 2007, p. 66, and Klein, 2007, p. 190, calling for actual material contextualization in film studies, we anchor the changing cultural and identity politics of Hong Kong films into the detailed context of production, distribution, and exhibition.
24 Interview with the authors on May 26, 2010. This CEO of an entertainment corporation based in China has been in the Hong Kong film industry for over thirty-two years, is an experienced producer-distributor, a versatile creative talent with a full range of production experience, an industry leader in film production, exhibition, distribution, investment, and executive operations, as well as an active volunteer in labor union platforms.
25 Interview with the authors on April 9, 2010. This experienced CEO of a pan-Asian production house has been in the industry for over thirty years with wide local, regional, and global experience in film production, distribution, and marketing, has worked in local and regional television corporations, and is a chief corporate executive and partner of regional companies in the industry.
26 Interview with the authors on May 26, 2010. See note 24.
27 Interview with the first author on October 1, 2008. This is a top corporate executive of one of the most powerful Asian regional film investment companies whose businesses cover the entire range of media production, distribution, and marketing and whose company owns a formidable library of titles.
28 Ibid.
29 Peter Chan, speech at Rayson Huang Theatre, University of Hong Kong, October 22, 2008.
30 Interview with the authors October 22, 2008. See note 7.
31 Interview with the authors, August 26, 2009. This informant is a production assistant who joined the film industry in 2000 and has an associate degree in Film and Television Production from Australia.
32 Interview with the authors, October 29, 2009. This informant joined the industry in 2001 and is a boom operator and part of a sound recording crew.
33 Interview with the authors on October 2, 2008. This informant is an assistant director with over ten years of experience, who has kept track of industry conditions over the years.
34 Interview with the authors on May 26, 2010. See note 24.
35 Ibid.
36 Echoes of the Rainbow (Alex Law, director, Hong Kong: Mei Ah Entertainment Group Ltd.; Beijing: Beijing, Beijing Dadi Century Ltd., 2010), winner of Crystal Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, is a film about quintessential Hong Kong quotidian life in the 1960s set in a familiar Hong Kong tenement community, Wing Lee Street, now designated a protected heritage site by the Hong Kong government. The entire film was made in Hong Kong by local crew and talents and much was shot on location. It was, however, presented by a “mainland” company, Dadi Entertainment Limited, which is registered in China but whose chief partners and executives are Hong Kong people.
37 Interview with the authors on May 26, 2010. See note 24.
38 Interview with the authors October 22, 2008. See note 7.
39 Interview with the authors on May 26, 2010; interview with the authors on April 9, 2010. A similar mentality has been criticized in Craig Calhoun, 2003.
40 Mirana M. Szeto, 2006.
41 Imagine being overwhelmed and bored by the succession of films like Zhang Yimou’s Curse of the Golden Flower (2006), Feng Xiaogang’s The Banquet (2006), Peter Chan’s Warlords (2007), and John Woo’s Red Cliff: Part I (2008) and Red Cliff: Part II (2009).
42 Although filmmakers do calculate market potential according to cultural assumptions about different audiences, the potential tolerance and diversity of the mainland Chinese audience cannot be registered in the official reception of the film as challenging contents have already been edited out for them. It is in the “hidden transcript” (Scott 1990), the quotidian level of audience sharing about pirated full versions of Hong Kong films, that the full cultural potential of the Chinese audience can be deciphered and where subaltern audience perceptions can be measured against official discourses and hegemonic mainstream culture. The term “hidden transcript” is coined by anthropologist James Scott to refer to the offstage shared discourse and culture of subordinated people, the speech, ideas, gestures, and practices in which they communicate while they are beyond the surveillance of the power-holders. The “hidden transcript” is where critical and subversive content can be shared and accumulated in relative safety. This is contrasted with the “official transcript,” which is the shorthand for the open interaction between subordinates and superiors, which can be officially documented and registered, but in which the subordinates often stage their responses according to the expectations of the dominant. If the “hidden transcript” ever surfaces in the official one, it is the moment of direct resistance and even rebellion, often resulting in punishment and suppression.
43 A term borrowed from Klein, 2007, p. 195, which was in turn adopted from Iwabuchi, 2002. Cultural deodorization is as much a strategy to ease the taint of excessive cultural and ideological foreignness (Klein 2007, p. 195) in foreign films trying to enter the dominant U.S. market, as it is a strategy to ease the passage of Hong Kong and foreign films through the Chinese state censorship system.
44 Interview with the authors on June 3, 2010. This informant is a producer from a Southeast Asian cultural background, now a producer at large for Asian filmmakers from various national origins with expertise in pitching Asian films of medium to smaller budgets for the local, regional, and global markets.
45 Interview with the first author on October 1, 2008. See note 27.
46 Interview with the authors on June 3, 2010. See note 44.
47 Zhang Yingjin has done a lot of work on bifurcation in relation to the three China syndrome among China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. See Zhang, 2002, 2004.
48 Interview with the authors on October 22, 2008. See note 7.
49 Ibid.
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