Between Idealism and Pragmatism

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.

Hong Kong and the Cold War in the 1950s

Hong Kong in the Cold War ◽

10.5790/hongkong/9789888208005.003.0005 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Tracy Steele

Keyword(s):

Hong Kong ◽

Cold War ◽

Southeast Asia ◽

Policy Makers ◽

Competing Interests ◽

British Policy ◽

East And Southeast Asia ◽

The 1950S ◽

Anglo American ◽

Despite periods of internal agitation and international tension, in the 1950s the British did not fear the imminent loss of Hong Kong, which they believed was of value to the Chinese Communists as it stood. Still, the British were never complacent. During times of tension in East and Southeast Asia, British defense planning for Hong Kong went into high gear, but the inescapable reality was that Hong Kong could not be held without American air cover. The divergent British and American approaches to recognition of the PRC and ROC made matters murkier. Actions by both Chinese governments caused multifarious problems that threatened to divide the British and Americans. Despite entreaties from Colonial officials in Hong Kong to rein in the Americans and their Nationalist allies, throughout the 1950s British policy makers usually placed greater emphasis on preserving harmonious Anglo-American relations. As the British balanced competing interests, while always bearing in mind the goal of retaining Hong Kong, the course they steered to accomplish this often appeared more contradictory and vague than it did clear and decisive. However confusing the tactics, the objective remained the same.

MANAGING PLURALITY: THE POLITICS OF THE PERIPHERY IN EARLY COLD WAR SINGAPORE

International Journal of Asian Studies ◽

10.1017/s1479591410000057 ◽

2010 ◽

Vol 7 (2) ◽

pp. 159-177 ◽

Author(s):

Leong Yew

Keyword(s):

Cold War ◽

University Students ◽

Ethnic Groups ◽

Southeast Asian ◽

Local Elites ◽

British Colonial ◽

The 1950S ◽

Dominant Narratives ◽

The Cold War ◽

Political Persuasion

Mainstream histories of the Cold War have tended to reduce the events surrounding Southeast Asian decolonization and nationalism to the universal notions of ideological confrontation, bipolarity, and the global division between a capitalist and communist camp. This obscures how multiple entities – the former colonial powers, different classes and ethnic groups, and local elites of different ideological and political persuasion – come into contention as they negotiate for a place in postcolonial society. Thus this article examines the case of Singapore in the 1950s and 1960s and argues that these forms of contention provincialize experiences with nationalism, communalism, and communism and by so doing disconnect them from the dominant narratives of the Cold War. I examine various texts by British colonial officials, communist and non-communist political figures, and university students that show how British attempts at managing a decolonizing entity were offset by the local intelligentsia's ambivalence in coming to terms with nationalism and communism.

Screening Communities

10.5790/hongkong/9789888455768.001.0001 ◽

2019 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Jing Jing Chang

Keyword(s):

Hong Kong ◽

Cold War ◽

Cultural Work ◽

Film Culture ◽

The Social ◽

Hong Kong Cinema ◽

Close Study ◽

A Site ◽

The Cold War ◽

Political Turmoil

Screening Communities uses multi-media archival sources, including government archives, memoirs, fan magazines, newspaper reports, and films to narrate the complexity of social change and political turmoil, both screened and lived, in postwar Hong Kong. In particular, Screening Communities explores the political, ideological, and cultural work of Hong Kong film culture and its role in the building of a postwar Hong Kong community during the 1950s and 1960s, which was as much defined by lived experiences as by a cinematic construction, forged through negotiations between narratives of empire, nation, and the Cold War in and beyond Hong Kong. As such, in order to appreciate the complex formation of colonial Hong Kong society, Screening Communities situates the analysis of the “poetics” of postwar Hong Kong film culture within the larger global processes of colonialism, nationalism, industrialization, and Cold War. It argues that postwar Hong Kong cinema is a three-pronged process of “screening community” that takes into account the factors of colonial governance, filmic expression of left-leaning Cantonese filmmakers, and the social makeup of audiences as discursive agents. Through a close study of genre conventions, characterization, and modes of filmic narration across select Cantonese films and government documentaries, I contend that 1950s and 1960s Hong Kong cinema, broadly construed, became a site par excellence for the construction and translation (on the ground and onscreen) of a postwar Hong Kong community, whose context was continually shifting—at once indigenous and hybrid, postcolonial and global.

Cultural Education as Containment of Communism: The Ambivalent Position of American NGOs in Hong Kong in the 1950s

Journal of Cold War Studies ◽

10.1162/jcws.2010.12.2.3 ◽

2010 ◽

Vol 12 (2) ◽

pp. 3-28 ◽

Cited By ~ 4

Author(s):

Grace Ai-Ling Chou

Keyword(s):

Hong Kong ◽

Cold War ◽

Cultural Significance ◽

Educational Work ◽

Governmental Organizations ◽

Non Governmental Organizations ◽

Strategic Value ◽

The 1950S ◽

A Site ◽

This article discusses the ambivalent role of U.S. non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in shaping Hong Kong's institutions of higher education in the 1950s. Cold War concerns about Communist expansion induced the NGOs to pursue ideological goals that were not part of their main mission, even as they continued policy directions that superseded and sometimes unintentionally counteracted Cold War thinking and strategies. Hong Kong, as a site important but marginal to both China and Britain, had strategic value in the Cold War and as such impelled many different forces to contest it. By examining how U.S. NGO educational work in Hong Kong both reinforced and destabilized Cold War ideology, one gains a clearer picture not only of Hong Kong's cultural significance in Cold War politics but also the ambiguity of Cold War intellectual paradigms of culture and education.

Saints on Stage: Popular Hagiography in Post-WWII Italy

Religions ◽

10.3390/rel12030216 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 12 (3) ◽

pp. 216

Author(s):

Daniela Cavallaro

Keyword(s):

Cold War ◽

Young People ◽

Educational Goal ◽

The 1950S ◽

The Cold War ◽

Lives Of The Saints

This article brings to light several examples of the hagiographic plays staged in Italy during the 1950s and early 1960s in parishes, schools, and oratories. The article begins with a brief introduction to the continued tradition of staging the lives of the saints for educational purposes, which focuses on the origins, aims, and main characteristics of theatre for young people of the Salesians, the order founded by Don Bosco in 1859. Next, it offers a brief panorama of the pervasive presence of the lives of the saints in post-WWII Italy. The main discussion of the article concerns the hagiographic plays created for the Salesian educational stages in the years between 1950 and 1965, especially those regarding the lives of young saints Agnes and Domenico Savio. The article concludes that the Salesian plays on the lives of the saints, far from constituting a mere exercise in hagiography, had a definite educational goal which applied to both performers and audiences in the specific times of Italy’s reconstruction and the cold war.

“There'll Always Be an England”: Representations of Colonial Wars and Immigration, 1948–1968

Journal of British Studies ◽

10.1086/386267 ◽

2001 ◽

Vol 40 (4) ◽

pp. 557-584 ◽

Cited By ~ 13

Author(s):

Wendy Webster

Keyword(s):

National Identity ◽

Racial Difference ◽

Media Representations ◽

Colonial Rule ◽

Common Theme ◽

National Belonging ◽

Daily Mail ◽

National Community ◽

British Colonial ◽

The 1950S

“In Malaya,” theDaily Mailnoted in 1953, “three and a half years of danger have given the planters time to convert their previously pleasant homes into miniature fortresses, with sandbag parapets, wire entanglements, and searchlights.” The image of the home as fortress and a juxtaposition of the domestic with menace and terror were central to British media representations of colonial wars in Malaya and Kenya in the 1950s. The repertoire of imagery deployed in theDaily Mailfor the “miniature fortress” in Malaya was extended to Kenya, where the newspaper noted wire over domestic windows, guns beside wine glasses, the charming hostess in her black silk dress with “an automatic pistol hanging at her hip.” Such images of English domesticity threatened by an alien other were also central to immigration discourse in the 1950s and 1960s. In the context of the decline of British colonial rule after 1945, representations of the empire and its legacy—resistance to colonial rule in empire and “immigrants” in the metropolis—increasingly converged on a common theme: the violation of domestic sanctuaries.Colonial wars of the late 1940s and 1950s have received little attention in literatures on national identity in early postwar Britain, but the articulation of racial difference through immigration discourse, and its significance in redefining the postimperial British national community has been widely recognized. As Chris Waters has suggested in his work on discourses of race and nation between 1947 and 1963, these years saw questions of race become central to questions of national belonging.

British Raj to China's Hong Kong: The rise of madrasas for ethnic Muslim youth

Modern Asian Studies ◽

10.1017/s0026749x13000668 ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 48 (2) ◽

pp. 399-432 ◽

Author(s):

WAI-YIP HO

Keyword(s):

Hong Kong ◽

South Asian ◽

Religious Tradition ◽

Day School ◽

Colonial Rule ◽

Muslim Community ◽

Religious Knowledge ◽

British Raj ◽

Muslim Youth ◽

British Colonial

AbstractThe madrasa, the Islamic institution of learning, has for centuries occupied a central role in the transmission of religious knowledge and the shaping of the identity of the global Muslim community (umma). This paper explores the sharp rise in the number of madrasas in contemporary Hong Kong. It examines, in particular, how South Asian Muslim youth, after receiving a modern education in a conventional day school, remain faithful to their religious tradition by spending their evenings at a madrasa studying and memorizing the Qur'an. Engaging with the stereotypical bias of Islamophobia and national security concerns regarding the ties of madrasas to Islamic terrorist movements over the last decade, this paper argues that the burgeoning South Asian madrasa networks have to be understood in the context of Hong Kong's tripartite Islamic traditions—South Asian Muslim, Chinese Hui Muslims, and Indonesian Muslims—and within each Muslim community's unique expression of Islamic piety. Furthermore, the paper also identifies factors contributing to the increase in madrasas in Hong Kong after the transition from British colonial rule to China's resumption of sovereign power in 1997.

Onopvallend turen naar de Russen

Tijdschrift voor Historische Geografie ◽

10.5117/thg2019.1.002.vanl ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 4 (1) ◽

pp. 15-31

Author(s):

SANDRA VAN LOCHEM-VAN DER WEL ◽

HENK VAN LOCHEM

Keyword(s):

Cold War ◽

The Netherlands ◽

Observation System ◽

Existing Buildings ◽

Aircraft Observation ◽

The Future ◽

The 1950S ◽

Secretly watching the Russians. Cold War aircraft observation posts on existing buildings During the 1950s a network of aircraft observation post was built in The Netherlands, as a detection/observation system against low-flying hostile aircraft during the Cold War. Preferably, these were placed on highrise buildings. 134 of these 276 observation posts were built on existing buildings, on factories, mills, water towers, monasteries, government buildings and bunkers. Since their decommissioning in 1964-1968, many posts have been demolished. Approximately 37 posts on existing buildings remain, but mostly go unnoticed and many risk demolition in the future. These remaining aircraft observation posts are remarkable relics of our military heritage from the Cold War.

Eileen Chang, Hong Kong, and the Cold War

Modernity with a Cold War Face ◽

10.1163/9781684175352_008 ◽

2013 ◽

pp. 255-296

Keyword(s):

Hong Kong ◽

Cold War ◽

Eileen Chang ◽

Trumpeting through the iron curtain: The breakthrough of jazz in socialist Yugoslavia

Muzikologija ◽

10.2298/muz120229012v ◽

2012 ◽

pp. 53-77 ◽

Author(s):

Radina Vucetic

Keyword(s):

Cold War ◽

The West ◽

Voice Of America ◽

Record Industry ◽

Socialist Government ◽

Specific Position ◽

The 1950S ◽

The Cold War ◽

Hearts And Minds ◽

The Voice

During the Cold War, jazz became a powerful propaganda weapon in the battle for ?hearts and minds?. As early as the 1950s, the American administration began its Cold War ?jazz campaign?, by broadcasting the popular jazz radio show Music USA over the Voice of America, and by sending its top jazz artists on world tours. In this specific cultural Cold War, Yugoslavia was, as in its overall politics, in a specific position between the East and the West. The postwar period in Yugoslavia, following the establishment of the new (socialist) government, was characterized by strong resistance towards jazz as ?decadent? music, until 1948 when ?no? to Stalin became ?yes? to jazz. From the 1950s, jazz entered Yugoslav institutions and media, and during the following two decades, completely conquered the radio, TV, and record industry, as well as the manifestations such as the Youth Day. On account of the openness of the regime during the 1950s and 1960s, Yugoslavia was frequently visited by the greatest jazz stars, such as Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald. In the context of the Cold War, the promotion of jazz in Yugoslavia proved to be beneficial for both sides - by exporting jazz, America also exported its freedom, culture and system of values, while Yugoslavia showed the West to what extent its political system was open and liberal, at least concerning this type of music.