Intersecting Anglicization and Sinicization: Hong Kong cinema and the modernized colonial

Abstract

Since the early 1980s, Hong Kong cinema has been serving as a critical platform in articulating the deep seated cultural uncertainties arising from the formalization of the timeline for the handover of the British colonial outpost to the People's Republic of China. Although not being able to hold off the inevitability of transfer between empires, Hong Kong films have carefully resisted from enthusiastically sharing Beijing's nationalistic symbolization of the reclamation of the prosperous financial centre an humiliating era of Western imperialism and the beginning of an re-emerging unified China. Instead of following the linear and heroic trajectories of decolonization, the city's filmmakers have given more sympathetic identifications with British colonial governance that have provided a liberal and progressive seeding ground for the modernization and democratization of Chinese culture and society. Nonetheless, it is in the treatment of traditional martial arts through the highly skilled, righteous and patriotic pugilist who kinaesthetically evade modern guns that symbolizes the preservation of the Chinese soul from complete westernization. Unlike the West, it would be argued that the Middle Kingdom cast a longer shadow over the hearts of Hong Kong filmmakers. From the various analogies of reactionary Qing Mandarins, Kalashnikov wielding former People's Liberation Army armed robbers to the shadowy manipulation by the Chinese state in the elections of triad chairpersons, the city's films have been cinematically visualizing the scenarios arising from the superseding of London's colonial rule with that of Beijing. As this article would show from the individualised and quieter anxieties of two ideological cold warriors in the city, a Maoist romantic and a staunchly anti-communist police officer on the changing political status, the apprehension of the territory over Chinese rule becomes louder as its presence gets more pervasive and assimilation more complete. Hong Kong cinema helps in illuminating the concept of colonial modernity not just as a past historical legacy, but a tense ongoing process of formation and re-formation as the city residents shift from the colonial subjects of the Queen to that of the People's Republic. © 2012 Copyright Taylor and Francis Group, LLC.