Clothes Make the Woman: Cheongsam and Chinese Identity in Hong Kong

2018 ◽  
pp. 357-378 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sandy Ng
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
Chinese Identity

Setting the Scene

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tan See Kam
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
Modern China ◽  
Social Transformations ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
Chinese Identity ◽  
Peking Opera ◽  
Imperial China ◽  
The Many

The Introduction contextualizes Tsui Hark’s Peking Opera Blues both in the light of the many struggles for democracy in modern China since Republican times, and in the light of his own filmmaking career. It suggests that politically committed youth, and so-called revolutionaries, seeking social transformations in the post-imperial China depicted in this film, may well have parallels in contemporary Hong Kong especially post 1997. In addition to highlighting Tsui’s specific, and well-received, contributions in cinema, some social, political and cultural contexts, particularly related to questions of Chinese identity, culturation, citizenship and colonialism, together with some of the issues specific to contemporary Hong Kong and Sinophonic filmmaking, are raised in order to prepare the ground for situating five different acts of reading film (through multiple theoretical and analytical lenses) in the chapters to follow.

use of Putonghua subject as a vehicle for a pan-Chinese identity

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Scott Clark
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
Education Policy ◽  
Chinese Language ◽  
Han Chinese ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Primary Reason ◽  
Chinese Identity ◽  
Legislative Council ◽  
Chinese Ethnicity

In April 2015, a meeting of a Hong Kong Legislative Council Panel discussed the potential for using Putonghua, as opposed to Cantonese, to teach the ‘Chinese Language Subject’ within the Hong Kong curriculum. Their primary reason for making this suggestion was based on the idea that Putonghua and the Han Chinese ethnicity are somehow inherently linked – if you are Han Chinese, you should be able to speak Putonghua. This paper discusses the validity of this assertion and examines language-in-education policy related to Putonghua in Hong Kong from the late-colonial period and the contemporary period to establish whether Putonghua is used by the Hong Kong Legislative Council to encourage Hong Kong pupils to identify with a pan-Chinese ethnicity and by dint, a pan-Chinese language, Putonghua.

Tsui Hark's Peking Opera Blues

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tan See Kam
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
Film Studies ◽  
Historical Background ◽  
General Context ◽  
New Wave ◽  
Chinese Identity ◽  
The Past ◽  
Contemporary Politics ◽  
Peking Opera ◽  
Significant Resonance

Tsui Hark’s Hong Kong New Wave film Peking Opera Blues (1986) is set in a China marked by contestations between Republican democrats and monarchist revivalists (circa 1913). Through various acts of reading film in different (though intertextually connected) ways along a formalist-historical-postmodernist continuum this book offers various reading strategies which reveal the film’s richness in terms of textual contours, textual affects, and ideological influences. Five acts of reading are explored which variously and collectively deconstruct the film’s playful intertextual and hypertextual configurations. Tsui Hark’s filmmaking career is summarized, and a polysemous analysis of the film’s story and form; its historical background; a companion film Shanghai Blues; Peking opera; Canto-pop and Mandarin songs; mandarin ducks and butterfly fiction; and the “three-women” film in Chinese-language cinema, are all explored within the general context of Hong Kong New Wave filmmaking and the issues of Chinese identity, culture, power in the contemporary politics of Hong Kong as they pertain to the Sinophone realms of articulations. Overall, the book asks a central question for film studies: does the film as a cultural and social artifact merely tell stories about the past or does it seek to reclaim lost territory in metafictional ways, with significant resonance for reading contemporary situations?

Wang Tao in Hong Kong and the Chinese “Other”

Meeting Place ◽  
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Sinn
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
Chinese Language ◽  
Political Influence ◽  
Chinese Identity ◽  
Southern Chinese ◽  
Chinese Overseas ◽  
Colonial Government ◽  
Inferior Class

Wang Tao, a prominent member of the Chinese literati, arrived in Hong Kong in 1862 and found it a baffling place, inhabited not only by foreigners but also by southern Chinese, who were (in his view) uncivilized, unable to speak his dialect and possessing weird tastes in food. Merchants, who belonged to an inferior class in China, played a prominent role in society, flaunting their wealth and status with little restraint, funding charitable works, claiming political influence over the colonial government and earning respect from officials in China and Chinese overseas. During his 20 or more years in Hong Kong Wang Tao came to terms with the colony. He made history by founding the first Chinese-language newspaper, the Xunhuan ribao. He came to appreciate the different versions of Chineseness that had at first bewildered him, and molded new versions of Chineseness out of this jumbled assortment of Chinese identity.

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