Eileen Chang, Hong Kong, and the Cold War

2017 ◽  
pp. 255-296
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Eileen Chang ◽  
The Cold War

Between Idealism and Pragmatism

2019 ◽  
pp. 46-72
Author(s):  
Jing Jing Chang
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Documentary Film ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Film Culture ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Integral Component ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
The Cold War

Chapter 2 traces the development of Hong Kong’s official film culture during the 1950s and 1960s within the contexts of the documentary film movement, the imperial legacy of the British Colonial Film Unit, and the colonial rhetoric of film literacy. In particular, it uses such Hong Kong Film Unit-produced short features as Report to the Gods (Dir. Brian Salt, 1967), starring local opera talent Leung Sing-por, as archival sources to argue that the colonial regime’s relationship with Hong Kong’s population was not a static vertical imposition of the “culture of depoliticization,” but one that was shifting and characterized by manipulation, misunderstanding, and negotiation amid bipolarized Cold War tension. I argue here that British Hong Kong’s involvement in filmmaking activities expose the top-down imposition of a colonial regime as well as the transformative nature of colonial rule during the Cold War period of the 1950s through 1960s. Official film culture should not be seen merely as tools of colonial governance or a means of indoctrinating subject audiences, but rather was part of an overall “strategy for survival” as well as an integral component in the process of screening the local Hong Kong “colonial” citizenry during the Cold War.

Cold War Hong Kong

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Priscilla Roberts
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Internal Dynamics ◽  
Major Powers ◽  
Growing Body ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Global Cold War

In Hong Kong the rules of the global Cold War were often suspended. Or perhaps it is fairer to say that the territory epitomized to the ultimate degree many of the ambiguities and contradictions of the Cold War, a confrontation that, however fierce its rhetoric, was usually characterized by pragmatic caution, at least where the major powers were concerned. The story of Hong Kong during the Cold War reinforces a growing body of scholarship on the period that suggests that, while situating the history of post-1945 Asia in “a globalized Cold War context,” one must also remember that Asia “had its own internal dynamics and trajectories, and it evolved in ways that were not entirely the making of the big powers.”

Thirty years from Tiananmen: China, Hong Kong, and the ongoing experiment to preserve liberal values in an authoritarian state

2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 439-452 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cora Chan
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Liberal Democracy ◽  
World History ◽  
Tiananmen Square ◽  
Authoritarian State ◽  
The Past ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
The World ◽  
The Cold War

Abstract The 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre marked China out as an exception in the chapter of world history that saw the fall of international communism. The massacre crystalized the mistrust between China and Hong Kong into an open ideological conflict—Leninist authoritarianism versus liberal democracy—that has colored relations between the two since then. This article tracks the hold that authoritarianism has gained over liberal values in Hong Kong in the past thirty years and reflects on what needs to be done in the next thirty years for the balance to be re-tilted and sustained beyond 2047, when China’s fifty-year commitment to preserving Hong Kong’s autonomy expires. Still surviving (just) as a largely liberal (though by no means fully democratic) jurisdiction after two decades of Chinese rule, Hong Kong is a testing ground for whether China can respect liberal values, how resilient such values are to the alternative authoritarian vision offered by an economic superpower, and the potential for establishing a liberal-democratic pocket within an authoritarian state. The territory’s everyday wrestle with Chinese pressures speaks to the liberal struggles against authoritarian challenges (in their various guises) that continue to plague the world thirty years after the end of the Cold War.​

Freedom Over Seas: Eileen Chang, Ernest Hemingway, and the Translation of Truth in the Cold War

2019 ◽  
Vol 71 (3) ◽  
pp. 252-271
Author(s):  
L. Maria Bo
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Political Ideology ◽  
Information Service ◽  
The United States ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
Eileen Chang ◽  
Political Ideologies ◽  
Communist China ◽  
War Propaganda ◽  
The Cold War

Abstract This article examines Eileen Chang’s 1953 translation of Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea into Chinese as Cold War propaganda for the United States Information Service (USIS). It argues that this translation, meant to show the truth of democracy through its high modernist form, directly influenced the writing and translating of The Rice-Sprout Song (1955), the novel Chang wrote next for the USIS to expose the truth of famine in Communist China. I show that Chang’s translation practices connect US and Chinese literary modernisms in a showdown of literary forms and their disparate claims to the truth. Chang navigates political ideologies by eschewing linguistic equivalence to favor equivocation instead, ultimately transforming Hemingway’s modernist form via her own. It thus adds to transpacific studies and Cold War historiography by revealing the intimate relationship between political ideology and literary form, and their cross-fertilization in the process of translation.

Destination Hong Kong: The Geopolitics of South Korean Espionage Films in the 1960s

2017 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 343-364
Author(s):  
Sangjoon Lee
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
Cold War ◽  
South Korea ◽  
Market Potential ◽  
James Bond ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
South Korean ◽  
Developmental States ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War

Abstract As the apparent progeny of Cold War politics in the West, espionage films witnessed unprecedented popularity around the globe in the 1960s. With the success of Dr. No (1962) and Goldfinger (1964)—along with French, Italian, and German copycats—in Asia, film industries in Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and South Korea recognized the market potential and embarked on churning out their own James Bond-mimetic espionage films in the late 1960s. Since the regional political sphere has always been multifaceted, however, each country approached genre conventions with its own interpretation. In the US-driven Cold War political, ideological, and economic sphere, developmental states in the region, particularly South Korea and Taiwan, vigorously adopted anti-communist doctrine to guard and uphold their militant dictatorships. Under this political atmosphere in the regional sphere, cultural sectors in each nation-state, including cinema, voluntarily or compulsorily served as an apparatus to strengthen the state’s ideological principles. While the Cold War politics that drive the narrative in the American and European films is conspicuously absent in Hong Kong espionage films, South Korea and Taiwan, on the other hand, explicitly promulgated the ideological principles of their apparent enemies, North Korea and the People’s Republic of China (PRC), in their representative espionage films. This article casts a critical eye over South Korea–initiated inter-Asian coproduction of espionage films produced during the time, with particular reference to South Korea–Hong Kong coproduction of SOS Hong Kong (SOS Hongk’ong) and Special Agent X-7 (Sun’gan ŭn yŏngwŏnhi), both produced and released in 1966.

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