Promise and perhaps love: Pan‐Asian production and the Hong Kong–China interrelationship

Abstract

The paper discusses the phenomenon of Pan-Asian production from the perspectives of the Hong Kong and Mainland Chinese cinemas, two historically separate cinemas increasingly being integrated through economic cooperation and co-production, a process also facilitated by political imperatives. As Hong Kong's film industry has declined over the past ten years and more, apparently with no hope of recovering its 'golden age' of dominance, it has turned to Pan-Asian production and distribution methods to shore up its markets while trying to gain a Promise (2005) and Peter Chan's Perhaps Love (2005), analyzing the interrelationships between the Hong Kong cinema and its Mainland Chinese counterpart and considering the extent to which Pan-Asian production is or is not able to realize the ideal of an Asian cinematic identity. foothold in the vast China market. What is China's role in the phenomenon of Pan-Asian production? This paper examines the phenomenon and its characteristics through the specific examples of Chen Kaige's The

Releasing Masculinity for a More Just World: Lessons on How to “Be Water” in Hong Kong

“…The artistic flow between Cantonese-speaking and Mandarin-speaking filmmaking contributed to an “ethnic borderland” that “serve[d] more as a place of mediation and of border-crossing than a place of absolute sovereignty and border enforcement” (Lo 2015, 72). When the Chinese economy embarked on rapid development after the state fully embraced neoliberalism as a governing rationale, establishing the market as the major mechanism for managing and organizing Chinese society in the early 1990s (Ong 2006; Rofel 2007), Hong Kong cinema shifted its focus to the mainland market, especially after the financial crisis in 1998 and China's entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001 (Teo 2008). As stipulated by the WTO deal, China increased “the number of imported films from ten titles per year at the outset to 34 titles in 2012” (Yau 2015, 24).…”

Chinese Stardom in Participatory Cyberculture

“…Th ese fi lms epitomise the potency of the notion of Asian cinema, which transcends the boundaries of national cinemas. According to Stephen Teo (2008), Perhaps Love is a statement that the concept of Asian cinema off ers the possibility of making fi lms that share the same sort of universal ideal as Hollywood, insofar as it circulates the message that one should stay in Asia to make fi lms (355). Recall the following line spoken by the heroine, Sun Na (Zhou Xun), in diegesis: 'To make fi lms, you must go to Hollywood. '…”