Beyond nationhood: Border and coming of age in Hong Kong cinema

Abstract

<jats:p> The 1950s of Hong Kong manifests the initiation of a communal imagination oscillating in between the sovereignty of a British colony and the reality of a Chinese territory. The influx of immigrants from the north and, as a result, the establishment of a border during the 1950s not only restructured the demographic composition of the city but also brought along new momentum for mass cultural productions. Along the contestations and reconciliations between different ethnicities, languages, and identities, Hong Kong cultural configuration has since then embarked on a trajectory of its own, including the conceptualizations of childhood, border, and national ambiguity. Whether this piece of land was once desecrated by colonialism or this reclaimed territory is now alienated by renationalization, the formation of childhood serves as a critical lens to examine the meaning of border and nation from the colonial to the postcolonial eras of Hong Kong. Capitalizing on two titles produced in the early 1950s and in the late 1990s of Hong Kong cinema, namely, Fung Fung’s The Kid (1950) and Fruit Chan’s Little Cheung (1999), this article aims to explore the correlation between border, community, and nationality through the life adventures of the child protagonists, whose transitions and explorations are entangled with a political and territorial border that polarizes our sinophonic imagination in the ongoing present of China–Hong Kong division. In this context, the cultural configuration of Bildungsroman, apart from manifesting Franco Moretti’s “the symbolic form of modernity” or Marc Redfield’s “acculturation of the self,” should embody the struggles with an obscure nationality, as here exemplified from the footprints of childhood tiptoeing on and off the borders of Hong Kong. </jats:p>

‘They don’t need us’: affective precarity and critique in transnational media work from the margins of ‘Cultural China’

“…Media globalization, however, raises questions about how the increasing transnationalization of production impacts on creative labour. With particular reference to the rise of the PRC as producer of popular culture, the implications of the influx of media labour into the Mainland Chinese media industry for Taiwan and Hong Kong are well-documented, whether in terms of producers' navigation of geopolitics ideologically (Lai 2020;Yang 2018;Zhao 2016;Liew 2012;Chan 2020); stylistic negotiations in media aesthetics (Chu 2015;Bettinson 2020); or mobilities of labour and cultural know-how in collaborative media work with China (Keane et al 2018;Keane 2016). While being a shared witness -alongside Taiwan and Hong Kong -to the rapid rise of China in recent years, Singaporean producers' experiences also add to the literature in two ways.…”