Posthistoricity

This chapter examines Hong Kong-Mainland co-productions made under the Closer Economic Partnership Arrangement (CEPA). CEPA facilitated the collaboration between Mainland Chinese investors and Hong Kong filmmakers to produce films that are supposed to cater to audiences in both regions. This triggered a renewed effort to individuate, subjectivise, and autonomise Hong Kong’s sociopolitical voice and position in these co-productions, which requires an active rewriting and re-understanding of extraterritoriality in the aftermath of the 1997 handover as a form of posthistoricity: (1) as a continual performance of a civic society that had already failed under global neoliberalism; (2) as an invocation of a new assembly of biopolitical lives that are eager to form a new civic society. This chapter first explicates the sociopolitical conditions and affects in Hong Kong after 1997. It then expounds how CEPA emerged out of a complex process of industrial transformation under neoliberalism between the 1990s and the early 2000s and how scholars evaluate the first ten years of Hong Kong-Mainland co-productions after CEPA. With such a background in mind, it scrutinises how Hong Kong filmmakers confront the crisis of authorship under CEPA in three registers––industrial, creative, and sociopolitical––with close attention to Johnnie To as a case study.