The Nanyang Ethos and Engendering the Chinese Overseas Experience

2019 ◽  
pp. 127-149
Author(s):  
Jing Jing Chang
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Film Industry ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
Border Crossing ◽  
Chinese Woman ◽  
Industrial Community ◽  
Chinese Overseas ◽  
Industrial Modernity

Chapter 5 argues that Chinese overseas is a privileged narrative focus providing a vantage point from which to explore the importance of Southeast Asia or Nanyang as ethos and imaginary in 1950s and 1960s Hong Kong films. As a border-crossing process and imaginary, Nanyang not only contributed to the survival of Hong Kong’s film industry between the 1950s and 1960s, but it also fuelled the transformation and construction of the colony as a nodal site amid 1960s industrialization. In order to explore Nanyang’s role in Hong Kong’s narrative path toward industrial modernity, this chapter first examines the shifting colonial, statist and cinematic conceptions of Cold War citizenship, allegiance, nationality, and gendered labor. Second, this chapter discusses two politically-driven filmic projections of the Nanyang ethos, arguing that both films continue to conceal contentious ideological and bipolarized conceptions of Chinese national subjectivity. The chapter ends with an analysis on The Story between Hong Kong and Macau (Yishui ge tianya, dir. Cho Kei, 1966), which moves beyond a paternalistic studio-centered approach to reveal how narratives about the travelling Chinese woman and the Nanyang continue to negotiate with narratives of gendered work and gendered economy in the process of screening Hong Kong’s modern industrial community.

Hong Kong, Hollywood, and the End of the Network

2020 ◽  
pp. 171-195
Author(s):  
Sangjoon Lee
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Economic Policy ◽  
Hong Kong ◽  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Film Industry ◽  
Chinese Societies ◽  
East And Southeast Asia ◽  
Financial Center ◽  
Laissez Faire ◽  
The 1960S

This chapter focuses on the Hong Kong film industry, which has been guided by the principle of positive non-interventionism. It describes the Shaw Brothers, which was built under the Hong Kong version of laissez-faire economic policy in the 1960s. It also discusses the flexibility and relaxed atmosphere that led studios to experiment with the Hong Kong film industry's unique need to satisfy transnational Chinese communities in East and Southeast Asia, which helped it quickly gain global currency. The chapter emphasizes Hong Kong as one of the competing media capitals due to its status as a nexus for economic and cultural flows within and between Chinese societies through the twentieth century. It explores how the unprecedented growth of the Shaw Brothers in the 1960s paralleled Hong Kong's rising status as a financial center in the region.

A Displaced City and Postmemory

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Weijie Song
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Martial Arts ◽  
Border Crossing ◽  
South Side ◽  
Liang Shiqiu ◽  
Jin Yong ◽  
Literary Topography ◽  
The City

This chapter examines how Sinophone writers from PRC, Taiwan, and Hong Kong compose their Beijing narratives to articulate their anxiety and desire, frustrated and fluid subjectivities. Liang Shiqiu a Beijing native, Taipei dweller, literary guru, and sophisticated connoisseur of fine cuisine, writes about Beijing cuisine to evoke emotional affiliation, gastronomic nostalgia, and imagined reunion. Both originally from Taiwan, Lin Haiyin romanticizes her memory of the south side of Beijing from an innocent girl’s perspective, while Zhong Lihe sharply criticizes the inferior and filthy life of Beijing’s social underclass and paints a bleak urban picture in his disillusioning discovery of the old capital during the Chinese Civil War. Hong Kong émigré writer Jin Yong intertwines literary topography and martial-arts fantasy, inscribes post-loyalist attachments and detachments onto the city, and suggests a hybrid and flexible identity, formed in the chivalric gestures of intervening in core political urban settings and fleeing to the margins and frontiers. In the shadow of World Wars and Cold War, a dislocated and relocated Beijing appears in the border-crossing diasporic writing and Sinophone postmemory.

Hong Kong and the Cold War in the 1950s

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 ◽  
The Cold War

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.

scholarly journals Disseminating and Containing Communist Propaganda to Overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia through Hong Kong, the Cold War Pivot, 1949–1960

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Florence Mok
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Southeast Asia ◽  
The United States ◽  
Regulatory Regime ◽  
Overseas Chinese ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Regional Markets ◽  
Printed Materials ◽  
The Cold War

Abstract This article explores an understudied aspect in Asia's Cold War history: how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) used Hong Kong as a Cold War pivot to produce and disseminate left-wing literature for overseas Chinese living in Southeast Asia. It argues that the CCP's expanding cultural influence can be attributed to the Party's commercial acumen. Operating within a permissive colonial regulatory regime, the CCP expanded its control of local and regional markets for left-wing printed materials. The content of CCP literature was inevitably propagandistic – that is, shaped by the changing demands of the Chinese government's foreign policy and by a need to attract foreign remittances and accommodate socialist transformation at home. Hong Kong's emergence as a pivot in propaganda wars that were global in scope created tensions between the United States and Britain, and led governments in Southeast Asia to strengthen state controls on imported communist media. As such, this article makes an original contribution to Hong Kong colonial history and deepens our understanding of transnational dynamics within Southeast Asia.

scholarly journals Acoustically Embodied

Prism ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 114-137
Author(s):  
Hazel Shu Chen
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Film Adaptations ◽  
Female Agency ◽  
The Voice ◽  
Shed Light

Abstract In 1950s and early 1960s Hong Kong, radio permeated in everyday life as a major source of entertainment and information. It subsequently gave rise to a peculiar genre in Cantonese cinema, film adaptations of “airwave novels” (tiankong xiaoshuo dianying 天空小說電影), which flourished in Hong Kong and Southeast Asia. According to the records of the Hong Kong Film Archive, from 1949 to 1968 there were ninety-three film adaptations of radio novels and dramas. Besides drawing the historical contours of the radio-film network in the postwar colonial city, this article studies two exemplary radio stories-turned-films, Niehai chihun 孽海痴魂 (A Devoted Soul; 1949) and Cimu lei 慈母淚 (A Mother's Tears; 1953), and scrutinizes their transmedial/transnational adaptation trajectories to shed light on intermedia aesthetic criticisms. This article describes how film technology reconstituted the oral and spoken in audiovisual space, in particular the embodiment and representation of the radio acoustic. The voice-over, indicative of the radio unconscious in the film, registers the existence of a consciousness already programmed by radio sounds that reconfigures the economy of filmic diegesis. This article further investigates how such medium self-reflexivity in the form of voice-overs destabilized the Manichean structure of melodrama as an established genre in Cantonese cinema, thus making space for forms of female agency amidst contending ideologies in early Cold War.

scholarly journals The efficacy of live and inactivated vaccines of Hong Kong influenza virus in an industrial community: A report to the Medical Research Council Committee on Influenza and other respiratory virus vaccines

1973 ◽  
Vol 71 (4) ◽  
pp. 641-647 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. Hobson ◽  
F. A. Baker ◽  
R. L. Curry ◽  
A. S. Beare ◽  
P. M. O. Massey
Keyword(s):  
Influenza Virus ◽  
Hong Kong ◽  
Medical Research ◽  
Research Council ◽  
Respiratory Virus ◽  
Medical Research Council ◽  
Influenza Viruses ◽  
Protective Efficiency ◽  
Industrial Community ◽  
Inactivated Vaccines

Intranasal vaccines of inactivated or living attentuated A2/Hong Kong influenza viruses were compared for clinical acceptability, serological effects and protective efficiency against natural epidemic influenza in a large industrial and clerical population.

In the Service of World Revolution: Vietnamese Communists’ Radical Ambitions through the Three Indochina Wars

2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 4-30
Author(s):  
Tuong Vu
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Local Politics ◽  
International System ◽  
The North ◽  
Local Actors ◽  
The 1950S

The terms “decolonization” and “Cold War” refer to specific processes and periods in the international system, but they do not capture the full agency of local actors such as Vietnamese Communists. Based on recently available archival materials from Hanoi, this article maps those terms onto Vietnamese Communist thinking through four specific cases. The declassified materials underscore the North Vietnamese leaders’ deep commitment to a radical worldview and their occasional willingness to challenge Moscow and Beijing for leadership of world revolution. The article illuminates the connections (or lack thereof) between global, regional, and local politics and offers a more nuanced picture of how decolonization in Southeast Asia in the 1950s–1980s sparked not only a Cold War confrontation but also a regional war.

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