Commentary 1

BETWEEN NATIONALISM AND COLONIALISM: MAINLAND EMIGRES, MARGINAL CULTURE, AND HONG KONG CINEMA 1937-1941

Poshek Fu

Hong Kong has been marginal to twentieth-century Chinese culture. This marginality stems both from the fact that Hong Kong is situated at the fringe of China's geopolity and from a popular stereotype of the city as a "cultural desert." This imagery began to circulate around the 1920s among some mainland intellectuals seeking refuge in the British colony who, as the chil- dren of the May Fourth Enlightenment, were ill at ease not only with the "exotic" local dialect but with what they considered its hybridized culture: simultaneously Westernized, feudal, colonial, and provincial. Westernized as it appeared, Hong Kong had never experienced a cultural revolution compa- rable to the May Fourth Movement and its cultural discourse controlled by colonizers, taipans, compradors, and Confucian moralists. To many mainlan- ders it was a desert at the periphery of Chinese culture where no progressive, diverse modes of cultural practice could possibly exist. This stereotypical representation has until recently dominated both the popular and scholarly imagery of Hong Kong.1

The colony's cinema, its major mass cultural product, has also been largely ignored by China scholars.2 Movies "made in Hong Kong" were perceived as merely "made for money": box-office driven, frivolous, devoid of artistic and social meaning. One of the early critics was Shanghai modernist writer Mu Shiying, who, after a brief stint with the Cantonese cinema, ridiculed it as "the biggest joke in the world and the greatest humiliation of the human race."3 Coming from the center of new Chinese culture, Mu's smug sense of cultural superiority was all too evident.

This marginalization of Hong Kong is integral to what could be called a "Central Plains syndrome" (da Zhongyuan xintai) that has been embedded in a centralizing, antiimperialist state-building discourse underlying twentieth- century representation of Chinese culture. It comes as no surprise that a master film historian such as Cheng Jihua would block out Hong Kong's dynamic contribution to the birth of Chinese cinema altogether.4 Cheng does include Hong Kong in his authortative history text on Chinese cinema but privileges

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only the two periods (1930s and late 1940s) during which mainland intellec- tuals had allegedly policed and guided the local movie scene.5

In fact, since the beginning of the twentieth century, Hong Kong has been a dynamic site of disparate discourses and practices that centers particularly around the notion of mass culture. The colony was the largest center of dialect filmmaking in Republican China, and after the Communist takeover, it re- placed Shanghai as the ''Hollywood of the East." Although dominated from the outset by commercial concerns, Hong Kong cinema has a complex history of contestation between various political and ideological positions and aes- thetic orientations. It was in this way not so different qualitatively from the mainland cinema where, aside from the few cannonized leftist films, the dominant mode of the Republican screen was profit-driven, popular entertain- ment fare. Likewise, since its beginning around 1900, Hong Kong cinema has been a significant part of the Chinese cinema, connected as much by business rivalries as by artistic and financial interactions.6

This cinematic connection became particularly intricate during the first years of the Second World War, between 1937 and 1941, when Hong Kong was swarming with filmmakers, stars, and critics who fled the mainland to seek refuge in the colony or to stop over on their way to the unoccupied interior. Many of them brought a political intensity and sense of moral ur- gency, as well as a creeping Central Plains syndrome, to the ideological contestation in the local cinema between patriotism and profit and the collision of national demand with local interest. Wartime Hong Kong cinema provides us, therefore, a privileged vantage point from which to explore the marginali- zation of Hong Kong in the Chinese geocultural imagination.

At the same time, the war engendered an incipient sense of local identity among the people of Hong Kong. Identification, as broadly defined, is articu- lated in terms of the relation of self to other, subject to object: We define ourselves in relation to the other. In a colonial situation, it is common knowl- edge that the colonizer, in Sartre's words, "has been able to become a man through creating slaves and monsters" out of the natives - lazy, incompetent, and primitive.7 This situation was further complicated in the case of Hong Kong by its marginalization in the China-centered discourse of nationalism and modernization. Contaminated by British colonization, it was seen by the mainland cultural elites as a land of "slavishness," "decadence," and "back- wardness," obstructing the progress of the national project. The war drama- tized this double marginality. While the colonial government excluded the "Chinese," the racial Others, from the military defense of the colony, dias- pora from the mainland sought to mobilize the colonized to defend the ' 'moth- erland" against Japan. At the same time the mainland emigres continued to ascribe to them traits of the contaminating Others.

The war also dramatized Hong Kong's sociocultural difference with and geopolitical apartness from the mainland. I would argue that it was a combi-

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nation of this incipient sense of difference and this double marginality (in the nationalist and colonial discourses) that generated a construction, still tenta- tive, of an ambivalent, hybrid identity that continues to haunt Hong Kong natives today: They are caught in between identification with the past and the present, with the centralizing nationalism of the mainland and the hybrid tradition of Hong Kong. This ambivalent identity was subtly but powerfully projected in the local cinema. Based on some recently discovered films, this chapter discusses the industrial practices and production strategies of the wartime Hong Kong film industry, the ways in which the mainland emigres police and "otherize" the local cinema, and its representation of a collective sense of identity for the colonized subjects.8

I

The Second World War in China began on July 7, 1937, with the fighting at the Marco Polo Bridge. Four months later, the premier center of Chinese filmmaking, Shanghai, fell to Japan. Unlike the war-torn inland, the British colony of Hong Kong stayed outside the hostilities. As a result, there was a massive influx of wartime refugees into the colony seeking safety. Between July 1937 and July 1938, for example, according to official figures, a quarter of a million people crossed the border. In the next two years, another half a million mainland Chinese fled to the "haven of tranquility," sometimes at the rate of 5,000 a day, swelling the city's population from less than 1 million in mid-1937 to 1.7 million in 1939.9 Some of these refugees were social notables such as the underworld boss Du Yuesheng and the Beijing opera star Mei Lanfang, whose wealth and exuberant lifestyle provided an impetus to the consumer economy. But the bulk of refugees were destitute. They created an abundance of cheap labor, which coincided with a large demand for war materials from "Free China." As a result, there was an economic boom in the city. Thus, besides the great increase of foreign trade, the number of factories with more than twenty workers, which constituted the backbone of Hong Kong's small manufacturing economy, jumped from 689 in 1937 to 1,200 in 1941.10

The Hong Kong film industry thrived in this favorable environment. By 1939 the industry boasted more than forty film studios employing about 2,000 people. As an important center of Cantonese production since the late 1920s, the industry was dominated by Cantonese-speaking natives. But the war brought in many Mandarin-speaking film people from Shanghai, only a few of whom bothered to learn the local dialect. Thus, in general, film directors, cinematographers, and scriptwriters were better able to rebuild a career in local production than actors, whose performances were invariably affected by behind-the-scenes dubbing.

One major reason for the unwillingness of these Shanghai emigres to learn

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the local dialect was their sense of cultural superiority. In their eyes, the Hong Kong cinema, as a part of the colony's sociopolitical culture, was "back- ward." Compared to the prewar Shanghai cinema, it was small in capitaliza- tion, lacked artistic sophistication, and was undeveloped in technology. In fact, prewar Hong Kong was seen as a colonial backwater, in comparison with the thriving, glamorous Shanghai, which was the center of the regions's international trade.l ] Hong Kong cinema was also politically irrelevant. Unlike the mainland film industry, except for occupied Shanghai, which was since 1937 centralized under the Nationalist government in Chongqing to rally the nation for continued resistance, and unlike Hollywood, which was trans- formed by its alliance with Washington from "peacetime entertainment to wartime engagement," Hong Kong cinema remained aloof from politics.12

This political aloofness was in fact largely a result of colonialism. Typical of colonial situations, the Hong Kong government treated the colonized, in the words of Albert Memmi, as no more than an "anonymous collectivity," a "mark of the plural."13 They were suspicious and unworthy; they were the Other. Racism was rampant in the colony, where social life was racially segrated. For example, not only were the natives not allowed to live in certain residential areas like the Peak, which was "reserved" for Europeans, they were paid less than the Europeans for the same work on the grounds of race. Only in 1937 were Chinese allowed to become subinspectors in the police force, and even then they were placed under the orders of British junior to them. Sir Alexander Grantham, the first Governor of postwar Hong Kong, summed up the colonial attitude pointedly: "The basis of the [European] arrogance and [snobbery] is the assumption that the European is inherently superior to the Asian, taking such forms as the exclusion of Asians from clubs, downright rudeness or a patrionizing manner."14

On the other hand, Hong Kong had been a "relative haven of tranquility" compared to the political turmoil and social chaos of the mainland since the 1860s. Most Chinese came to the colony to seek refuge from wars and rebellions. Their objectives were to survive and, among the rich, to protect their wealth. Indeed, the small, close-knit local elite was "created by property- owning lineages," especially from south China.15 This created a strong tradi- tion of political conservatism in the colony. Exacerbated by colonial prejudice, this tradition bred, in the apt phrase of two Hong Kong scholars, " a fear of politics" within the local Chinese community.16 As a European professor at the elite University of Hong Kong exclaimed, "[the Chinese] asked only that they should be left alone, they asked for no shares in political control. . . . They have no spirit of willing sacrifice for the community."17

No wonder the British made no attempt to involve the locals when they prepared for the defense of Hong Kong in 1937. To begin with, partly because of its limited commercial importance, London saw little strategic importance in the colony. Instead, its naval defense in the region was centered in Singa-

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pore.18 In Hong Kong, only British of "European birth" were subject to conscription. The colonized were relegated to the racially segregated auxiliary forces (the "Chinese Company") and to "junior positions in civil defence." The colonial government exhibited no interest in mobilizing the city's media industry for war propaganda, except installing in 1939 a chief censor (concur- rently the University of Hong Kong's vice-chancellor) to police newspapers, pamphlets, and entertainment in Chinese.19 The film industry was thus "left alone" in the wilderness of market calculations.

Between 1938 and 1940, the heyday of wartime cinema, there were more than forty movie companies in the colony, most of them small independents making about one film each year. Only six major producers boasted their own movie studios and stars on contract. They included the Daguan Film Company (Chiu Shu-sum/Zhao Shushen), Nanyang Productions (Shao Zuiweng), and Nanyue Studio (Zhu Qingxian). The latter two were founded by Shanghai businessmen in 1932-1933.20 In general, these studios were poorly equipped, rarely employing more than two cameras on a shot. For example, the industry was shocked in 1938 when Nanyue imported several high-voltage projection lights from Shanghai.21 Independents had to rent film stars and studio spaces, as well as postproduction facilities from the six majors. Thus production scheduling was tight and control over filming equipment and stars' shooting schedule led often to nasty fights.

The market for wartime Hong Kong cinema was limited. As the major center of Cantonese productions, Hong Kong had marketed its products throughout south and southwest China prior to the war. After 1938, when south China was under Japanese rule, its outlet was limited to Hong Kong, Macao, and the Cantonese communities in Southeast Asia (mainly Singapore, Malaysia and Philippines) and the Americas.22 After an economic boom be- tween 1937 and 1938, the industry increasingly contracted as a result of the inflationary spiral in 1939, when food prices began to rise quickly and export- import trade flattened due to the Japanese hold on the Pearl Estuary and the onset of the European war.23 This change of fortune was demonstrated clearly in the drop of the industry's gross profits from more than HK$900,000 in 1938 to much less than HK$500,000 in 1939.24

This sensivity to market conditions and backward technology during the war exacerbated the industry's prewar problems of low budget production and "sloppy craftsmanship." The average cost of a Cantonese feature-length picture in 1937-1939 was about HK$7,000 to $8,000 (contemporary Shanghai films cost an average HK$30,000).25 To beat the market meant to cut costs. Production companies paid little budgetary attention to scriptwriting or cine- matography, investing only in the proven box-office records of movie stars. Restrained by the scheduling problems of studio space and stars' filming time, these companies were under tremendous pressure to finish their projects fast. Seven to ten days per film became the industry norm during the war.26 Actors

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were compelled to work hard and fast. The majority of them signed on with one of the six majors on a one- to three-year basis; during that period they were required, on paper, to make nine or ten films each year. Except for a few superstars like Sit Gok-sin (Xue Juexian), who commanded about HK$3,000 a film, most actors got a basic salary of somewhere between HK$80 and HK$300 a month, which barely stayed abreast of the rising cost of living in post-1939 Hong Kong. To survive, most actors had to find extra work from other independents, which would in turn pay a charge to their home compa- nies. Movie businessmen could make huge profits by loaning out their con- tracted stars. For example, the standard charge for "borrowing" the leading man Ng Chor-fan (Wu Chufan, Fig. 32) from Nanyang in 1940 was a hefty HK$ 1,200 per film. That was why all the majors required their stars, whether they needed extra income or not, to work for other studios. As a consequence, each star would end up making more than thirty movies a year, usually

Figure 32. Film star Ng Chor-fan (Wu Chufan). Courtesy Hong Kong International Film Festival.

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working on several projects at the same time. Indeed, Cantonese opera idols- cum-movie superstars such as Sit Gok-sin had to be literally dragged, still wearing stage makeup, to movie studios right after finishing their stage per- formances at midnight. It was hard to expect them to perform at a high artistic level under these conditions. Thus "sloppy craftsmanship" (cuzhi lanzao) came to be the standard criticism of wartime Hong Kong cinema. This "slop- piness" accentuated, as will be shown, the projected image of Hong Kong cinema as frivolous and "feudal."

II

Between 1937 and 1941, the film industry turned out an average of more than eighty features each year. Most pictures were various modes of popular genres like folk drama, tragic romances, and period pieces that were adapted directly from Cantonese operas, folk tales, and popular novels as well as Hollywood fantasy.27 Just as in wartime Hollywood, where no new "project of cultural creation" was involved in its filmic expressions in spite of the war mobiliza- tion, Cantonese genres were built on a foundation of generic elements devel- oped in prewar films: simple and bipolar narratives, melodramatic aesthetics, emotional identification, and stereotypical characters. Consciously invoking and appropriating past forms, as Leo Braudy notes, genre films derived their power from an affinity with the "existing audience." In fact, all of these filmic elements became generic because they seemed to "answer well to the experience, intelligence, and feelings of the audience."28

Who was the audience for Cantonese movies in the war years? The lack of business statistics or company archives has presented a formidable challenge to Chinese film historians trying to reconstruct the demographic and class make-up of the film audience. Judging from the number and location of venues, however, it seems that Hollywood and Mandarin productions attracted the colony's small, close-knit community of economic and cultural elites who were cosmopolitan, bilingual, and conservative (supporting, if not necessarily serving in, the colonial parliament, the Legislative Council) and yet racially ambivalent.29 Of the thirty-one theatres in Hong Kong, eighteen showed Hol- lywood films, and two showed Mandarin. There were four first-run venues in town, including the plush Queen's Theatre in the Central District and the Lee Theatre in Causeway Bay, which had since 1940 showed Mandarin films from Shanghai. The Cantonese pictures were mostly shown in second- and third- run venues like Jiurufang, Chongqing, and Guomin, which were located in lower-middle and working class neighborhoods, and which staged Cantonese operas alternatively. Fares ranged from HK$1.2 to HK$3 for Hollywood premiers and HK$0.4 to HK$1 for Cantonese pictures, and HK$0.05 to HK$0.2 for second- and third-runs.30 Thus the averge moviegoer to whom Cantonese filmmakers appealed was an illiterate or semiliterate urbanite who

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was economically disadvantaged, steeped in the moral universe of local per- forming arts, and unexposed to the May Fourth discourse of modernity and enlightenment. To most of the Cantonese audience, motion pictures repre- sented a less expensive and more regular alternative to opera performances. Thus the popularity of opera-related films and the immense drawing power of opera-cum-screen stars in Cantonese cinema both before and during the war.31

For modernizing intellectuals from the mainland, Cantonese movies were without exception "frivolous," "superstitious," "escapist," and "racy," serving only to perpetuate the "evils" of feudal mentality. The famous leftist emigre Cai Chusheng, a Shanghai-born Cantonese film director, expressed his contempt unreservedly: "Owing to the backwardness of Hong Kong culture as a whole, it inevitably has a proportional effect on its cinema. Thus, al- though Hong Kong has produced many, many movies, and although 'artists' here claim that Hong Kong has replaced Shanghai after its fall to Japan to be the center of Chinese cinema, all of these movies are frivolous and vulgar commodities. It is impossible . . . to find any title that would make Hong Kong deserving the claim of a cinematic center - national defence films."32 Obvi- ously, this critique stemmed from an anxiety over the decentering of Chinese cinema33 and the insistence that Hong Kong, for its political irrelevance and lack of authenticity, remained on its periphery. Yet I have found no documen- tary evidence so far to justify Cai's claim that Hong Kong was trying to project itself as the new center of Chinese cinema. His anxiety might have reflected rather a projected superiority of the mainland filmmaking commu- nity.

From 1938 until 1941, most of the filmmakers and intellectuals among the mainland emigres were from Shanghai, the foremost center of Chinese mo- dernity before the war. It is interesting to note that Shanghai, for its Western- ization and semicoloniality, was itself the object of nationalist outcry and conservative attacks. It was "the other China." But when Shanghai intellec- tuals and artists came to the colony, they became the "Chinese" by imposing a slavish otherness on the Hong Kong natives. This happened both because of their perception of Hong Kong as "inferior" and "alien" to Shanghai, owing to its total contamination by the British colonization,34 and as Leo Ou-fan Lee points out, Chinese intellectuals had always imagined themselves as the voice of the nation, at the center of national discourses.35

Many of these intellectuals and artists found the colony a charming yet souless city, and its men of culture dull and slavish. They were nostalgic for the excitement and cultural vitality of the war-torn homeland and constantly chastised the city for its "indifference to the national resistance."36 As the leftist writer Lou Shiyi complained: "When I know that I have to stay here for a while and to live together with all these listless, rotten (meilan) people, I become melancholic."37 They justified their melancholic exile in Hong Kong

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as a "necessary sacrifice" to enlighten as well as to mobilize the colony to China's defense. As one critic wrote with a biting tone, "Three or four years ago Hong Kong people had no culture to speak of. Only most recently have us mainlanders (waijiang lad) come and brought culture here."38 That smug sense of cultural superiority was all too evident.

It was thus only natural that another diasporic filmmaker Yan Meng would castigate the local films as inferior to those of the mainland cinema: "Edu- cated Chinese are invariably scornful of Cantonese cinema. [Hong Kong filmmakers with social conscience are therefore] full of pain and anguish on the one hand, and deeply humiliated on the other. What we need to do instead is to change our approach to filmmaking."39 This critique obviously grounded itself in the nationalism and enlightenment values that constituted the May Fourth discourse of modernity. Thus, for its politically irrelevant, "frivolous and vulgar" culture, Cantonese cinema in Hong Kong continued to be the suspicious, illegitmate Other to this enshrining national tradition.40

The marginalization of Cantonese production did not begin with the war. Since around 1931, the Nationalist government had been trying to outlaw dialect (i.e., Cantonese) production in its effort to create a new national guoyu (Mandarin) cinema as part of its centralizing, state-building project. The Nanjing government framed its prohibition in the nationalist discourse of antiimperialism and modernization. The Cantonese screen was represented as projecting a "feudalistic" and "superstitious" mentality, which allegedly impeded China's progress to modernity and needed to be swept away. This drive enjoyed widespread support among Chinese intellectuals espousing the May Fourth goals of nationalism and enlightenment as well as Shanghai studio heads who had been competing with their Hong Kong counterparts for market share in south China, the Americas, and Southeast Asia. To kill off Cantonese production would assure a larger profit and market control for the Shanghai industry.41

Underneath this virulent representation of Cantonese film was the Nation- alist government's attempt to reunify the country by strengthening its hold on Guangdong province (formerly headquarters of the anti-Nanjing separatist regime of Hu Hanmin and the militarist Chen Jitang) with which Hong Kong had close geocultural connections based on kinship, language, and ethnicity.42 The modernizing Chinese intelligentsia rallied behind this state-building drive. Under the "centralizing nationalist ideology" that pervaded the intellecual discourse of twentieth-century China, they saw an unpoliced perpetuation of a south-centered cultural discourse as a politico-linguistic weapon against their "hegemonic imaginary" of an independent nation.43 Cantonese cinema, in this vein, was represented as promoting both a local dialect as well as an alternative imagination of collective identity based on regional ties, which, in their minds, impeded the modernizing project of state-building, linguistic unity, and antiimperialist autonomy. Underlying this anxiety was the Chinese

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intellectuals' creeping consciousness of da Zhongyuan xintai, which, by priv- ileging the "Chineseness" of the north plain, held in contempt all cultures in the periphery of the mainland. By the 1930s, the Nationalist government and the Communists, in pursuing their antiimperialist agenda, had reformulated and celebrated the "old idea" of a primodial identity for all Han Chinese of a shared origin in the north China plain. This Central Plains syndrome repre- sented a hierarchy of cultural differentiation derived from geographic, territo- rial, and cultural boundaries between the mainland core and the outlying periphery. Hong Kong was on the margin, and the colonization accentuated its marginality in the Chinese geopolitical imagination.44 Thus the mainland intellectuals could readily dismiss its lack of an articulated nationalism and elite culture as a "cultural desert" and ridiculed and condemned its cinema as the inferior Other.

In response, the Hong Kong motion picture industry took the lead in 1936 in lobbying the National Government and succeeded in postponing the prohi- bition for three years on the condition that it would pay for the expense of setting up a Central Censorship Bureau in Guangzhou to expedite the review of dialect movies.45 The bureau had to approve all Hong Kong products before public release. By redirecting the Nanjing government's strategic attention, the war saved the industry from dissolution. However, a sense of uncertainty and bitterness was prevalent among local filmmakers who wondered aloud why the Cantonese cinema was singled out for such an unfair attack and how long this suspension would last.46 This demoralization, combined with the problems of small capitalization and primitive technology, aggravated the sloppy tendencies of the local film industry. Most studio heads saw filmmak- ing as a short-term money-making venture, a vehicle of speculation to be quickly exploited when the market looked lucrative.

Although the prohibition was postponed, the framing rhetoric of the cine- matic critique remained in the early years of the war only to be transformed from a discourse of modernity to one of patriotism. During the war, Hong Kong cinema was condemned for its narcotic lure, blunting the patriotic spirit of the people. Peng Yangnong, editor of the pro-Nationalist emigre magazine Yilin {The Arts), expressed this rankled vox populi: "[Hong Kong films] are full of sex and ghosts and monsters. They coincide with the demands of the Fascists."47 Another critic concurred: "Filmmaking has been known [in China] as a harbinger of cultural changes (wenhua xianqu). But it is now divorced from our times, betraying the War of Anti-Japanese Resistance, as if it has forgotten that there is a gap between [Hong Kong filmmakers] and the homeland. It makes us wonder why there would be people living in a dream world, ignoring everything: our homeland, our hometown, justice, and even their own existence. The only thing they really care about is money." (my emphasis).48 This equation of entertainment film with dreamy escapism was typical of the May Fourth tradition of privileging bourgeois realism as the

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artistic medium of social engagement, unifying the discursive positions of both the leftists and rightists. Indeed, in terms of cultural politics, there was little contention between the Nationalists and their nemesis, the Communists.49 It also brought to fore the elitism of modernizing Chinese intelligentsia who viewed the predominately mass-appeal Cantonese production as polluting the people and thereby carrying an odor of treason.

In fact, the marginalization of Hong Kong became the emigre community's structuring theme for its institutional and cinematic discourses. To rally the colony to China's defense, mainland filmmakers sought to create an alterna- tive hegemony to cleanse the local entertainment industry of vices. This space was embedded in the mainland politics of Nationalist-Communist relations. Under the wartime United Front, both parties had branches and various open or semi-overt agencies in Hong Kong aimed mainly at taking advantage of the city's willingness to reach out to and police the Chinese diaspora com- munities. For example, in the late 1937 the Communists had established an office of the Eighth Route Army to raise funds from and distribute propaganda to the Chinese diaspora as well as to gather military intelligence.50

The inland filmmakers involved in creating the alternative hegemony in- cluded former Lianhua Studio boss Luo Mingyou, young director Yan Meng, leftist filmmakers Situ Huimin and Cai Chusheng, and Nationalist film critic Peng Yannong, all of whom had recently fled Shanghai. They frequently invoked the authority of the Nationalist government to legitimize their polic- ing power. Indeed, they were the nation. For example, in addition to their involvement in various kinds of patriotic activities organized by the Nation- alist or the Communist cells, they also sponsored the annual Guomindang All- Nation Spiritual Mobilization Campaign for the local cinema in which all participants were required to sit through a long series of patriotic speeches by prominent artists (e.g., Hong Shen and Cai Chusheng) and political dignitaries (e.g., Madam Sun Yat-sen) before swearing unswerving loyalty to Chong- qing.51 They also worked with the Nationalist Overseas Chinese Commission to introduce visiting officials to local studio heads and filmmakers. At a welcoming party for the Film Censorship Chief Xu Hao, who came to bring the local cinema in line with the official propaganda policy, Cai Chusheng reported that Japan was targeting HK$2 million to "buy over" Cantonese cinema. In other words, any studio executive who continued to make "frivo- lous" and "trashy" films must have been bought by the enemy. According to one report, all the guests "fell silent."52

These mainland diasporas articulated and circulated their nationalist dis- course in such publications as the Nationalist-sponsored Yilin and Huashang bao {Chinese Business News), which was financed by the Office of the Eighth Route Army, and/or set up networks of elite mobilization through patriotic organizations like Zhongguo dianying jiaoyu xiehui Xianggang fenhui (Fed- eration of Chinese Film Education, headed by Luo Mingyou) and Xianggang

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Zhongguo dianying bihui (Chinese Cinema PEN, [International Association of Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists, and Novelists], headed by Peng Yannong), both local chapters of national film organizations based in Chong- qing. Probably to highlight the "backwardness" of the local film world, these groups were open only to those locals who were "patriotic" and led a "clean life" free of such vices as opium addiction and prostitution (although there was no mention of how to test the applicants). Chinese film personnel, as everywhere in the world, were publicly conceived as extravagant, self- indulgent, promiscuous, and scandalous.53 Yet none of these organizations excluded people from the mainland on the basis of "cleanliness." To single out the Hong Kong industry was to underscore its inauthenticity and margin- ality. Parallel to this institutional discourse was a discursive boundary between "patriots" and "traitors." The former group included some local filmmakers like the opera idols Sit Gok-sin and Ma Shih-tsan (Ma Shizheng) and stars Bak Yin (Bai Yan), Lo Tun (Lu Dun), and Ng Chor-fan, who either identified with the mainland cause or did not want to offend the northerners. All the rest were excluded as, presumably, the unclean, unworthy others.

The emigre filmmakers' nationalist discourse centered around two structur- ing notions: Hong Kong was a part of the mainland but also marginal. To be truly patriotic, then, was not only to mobilize the city to China's defense but also, ultimately, to subvert Hong Kong, that is, to leave and discard the colony for the authenticity of China. This theme came off forcefully in several patriotic films made by the emigres. Between 1937 and 1941, the China Film Studio of Chongqing set up an office in Hong Kong to acquire film equipment from overseas and to recruit personnel from the mainland community. To take further advantage of the colony's openness, in 1939 it founded Dadi (Good Earth) Studio to make Mandarin films. Its staff included all the famous Shanghai filmmakers like directors Cai Chusheng, Situ Huimin, Fei Mu, and female leads Li Lili and Li Zhuozhuo. A year later Dadi closed. Cai and Situ then founded Xinsheng (New Life) Film Company, which lasted long enough to finish one Mandarin picture. All four of the releases of Dadi and Xinsheng - The March of Guerrilla (Youji jingxinqu, Situ Huimin, 1938), The Paradise of the Solitary Island (Gudao tiantang, Cai Chusheng, 1939), and Homeland (Baiyun guxiang, Situ Huimin, 1940) - were apparently targeted for the China markets as well as the elite sector of Hong Kong. Their principal roles were played by actors mostly unknown to local audiences and their settings were mostly framed on the imagined mainland. Particularly significant was the ideological subtext of da Zhongyuan xintai. All of these films were either about resistance heroism inside China or about local resisters leaving the colony's decadence and inauthenticity to "return" to the mainland. They invariably represented Hong Kong as an allegorical site of evil and backward- ness. Moreover, while all the heroes and heroines in these films were mainland stars, collaborator roles were mostly given to minor Cantonese comedians

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whose Mandarin was awkward, easily evoking the much-denounced image of Wang Jingwei, the Cantonese-speaking head of the collaborationist regime, among the (mainland) film audience!

The narrative structure of The March of Guerrilla, the best known of the four Mandarin films, was typical of this strategy of marginalization. Directed and written by Cai Chusheng, the film follows two lovers in a Lake Tai town who are separated by the Japanese occupation. The enemy destroys their homes and kills their parents. Here private and public emotions merge into a strong determination to fight for the nation. The man (played by the Shanghai star Li Qing) goes off to join a guerrilla group. His fiancee (Rong Xiaoyi, also from Shanghai) has to stay behind to care for the family. She is arrested and later raped by the Japanese.

Recent scholarship demonstrates that national imagery is suffused with gender politics. In the modernizing discourse of the Chinese state, which represented a male-defined order, woman was the "inessential" other, whose body and agency were subsumed under the nationalist agenda. It denied woman both her identity and subject-position in the public sphere.54 The traditional allegorization of female chastity with national purity was rein- scribed within the nationalist discourse. The violation of the female body by foreign invaders symbolized the ultimate victimization of the Chinese state and the need to valorize the nation by way of mobilizing national loyalties.55

Thus, this imaginative coupling of raped woman and foreign invaders served to reduce "female" to a signifier of marginalization and sacrifice.

This trope of raped woman was the focus of the narrative structure of The March of Guerrilla. To stay behind to care for the domestic order rather than joining the local guerrilla, which, significantly, was an all-male force, the Rong Xiaoyi character was peripheral to the Chinese resistance. It evokes a parallel with the Crown colony's marginality to nationalist politics. Her vio- lation by the Japanese in the climax sequence, a powerful symbol of intimi- dation and humiliation, dramatizes the need and, even desire, for complete sacrifice of the marginal to serve the collective interests.

In the rape scene, which crosscuts with a surprise attack on the Japanese by Li Qing's guerrillas set to a soundtrack of Wagner and Beethoven' there is none of the erotic allure typical of most rape fantasies in Chinese or Holly- wood cinema. Instead, the director avoids any on-screen sexuality (probably for fear of being criticized as frivolous and racy) by allowing only the sexual desires expressed in the erotic gaze and lascivious and intimidating laughter of the rapist. Framed in medium shots, rather than low-angle shots, which create a sense of paralyzing intimidation on the victim's part, the sequence projects a confrontational mood, further accentuated by the strutting caricature of the Japanese colonel, who appears on the screen more a figure for ripe ridicule than a superhuman Fascist, embodying all the Chinese racial stereo- types about the enemy: womanizing, alcoholic, and dimwitted. Indeed, after a

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series of shots and reverse-shots of the victim and the victimizer, the camera stops at a medium close-up that commands respect. Recovering her courage, Rong Xiaoyi picks up a knife and kills the marauder.

Transforming herself into a woman warrior, Rong Xiaoyi puts up a Na- tional flag outside the Japanese compound to direct the guerrilla attack (Fig. 33). She is then shot by a malicious collaborator (Hong Kong comedian Chow Chi-shing/Zhou Zhicheng) who is trying to run away from the attack. When the guerrillas discover her death, they angrily throw Zhou down the hill in a climax of moral revenge and nationalist passion. The movie ends with Li Qing leading a horse carrying the rape victim's body covered by the blue-sky white-sun flag, and marching triumphantly with the all-male troop to the patriotic tune "Unity Brings Victory." Symbolically, then, the marginal other is now accepted into the national body after making the ultimate sacrifice; Rong Xiaoyi becomes an emblem of patriotic devotion. Although there is no direct reference to Hong Kong, the marginality and violation of Rong Xiaoyi and the denial of her subject-position in the form of complete sacrifice would invoke in some viewers' minds a symbolic parallel to the need to subjugate the colony to the national cause.56

The March of Guerrilla shows skillful camera control, but it lacked a realistic and credible appreciation of the Japanese. Trying to rally resistance,

Figure 33. Rong Xiaoyi puts up a national flag to direct guerrilla attacks against the Japanese in The March of Guerrilla, 1938. Courtesy Hong Kong International Film Festival.

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the movie was full of cliches, exaggerations, and bigotry. The acerbic remark of RKO producer David Hemstead on cheap Hollywood anti-Fascist farces was equally pertinent about these Mandarin films: "No Nazi or Japs will be portrayed as a comic figure for . . . that would only provide a hero or heroine with windmills against which to battle, and would kill dramatic impact."57 With its lack of such "dramatic impact" and its Mandarin dialogue, The March of Guerrilla, like other Dadi products, did poorly at the local box office.

The emigre filmmakers also worked with local artists to make a few Cantonese films. Among them Situ Huimin's Baoshhan in Bloodshed {Xuejian Baoshan cheng, 1938) and Tan Xiaodan's Little Cantonese (Xiao Guangdong, 1940) were most well-known. Like all the Dadi's Mandarin films, both were set in the inland, one in Baoshan near Shanghai and another in Canton, and both projected China-centered patriotic heroism to instill nationalist ideology in the locals. Xiao Guangdong was particularly emblematic of the Central Plains syndrome. The title phrase remains today a demeaning, derogatory ethnic slur against the Cantonese by their northern neighbors, especially the Shanghainese, making offensive fun of their physical smallness and "slick- ness." Both films got rave reviews in emigre publications but were medicore in box-office returns. In 1940 when Little Cantonese got the honor of the few Hong Kong films to be released in Chongqing, only a handful of homesick Cantonese showed up.58

Ill

While mainland filmmakers and critics tried to project and disseminate a hegemonic nationalist discourse in Hong Kong, the local film industry was struggling to negotiate the changing politics of wartime cinema. Unlike what some recent postcolonial scholars have theorized in other contexts, local filmmakers produced no counternarratives of alternative identification and cultural opposition with respect to the colonizer or to the core culture, but rather an uneasy ambivalence accompanying a limited contest against the emigre discourse of centralizing nationalism.59

Between 1937 and 1941, while Hong Kong stayed out of a war that brought to China horrendous causalities and calamity, most local studio heads and filmmakers seemed to be of two minds regarding the role and function of cinema. This division was a result of the colonial history of Hong Kong. Since the end of the Opium War in 1842, Hong Kong had been a part of the global system of colonization. Classified as Huaren (Chinese), the colonized, who were mainly immigrants from southern China, had been racialized and infer- iorized in the colonialist discourse and excluded from the colony's public sphere. They were socially marginalized and systematically depoliticized. The colonialist apparatus had accordingly inscribed itself on the colonized by

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exaggerating their conservatism and "fear of politics." Thus the prevalence of popular entertainment cinema in prewar Hong Kong. This apathy fed into the "sojourner mentality" of many of the locals who, under the colonial gaze, continued to identify with the mainland, particularly Canton, as their home- land from which they traced their male ancestries, historic memories, and cultural practices. Yet at the same time, with the increase of local-born from 26 percent in 1921 to 32.5 percent in 1931 among the native population, Hong Kong became a distinct geopolitical space with its specificity of historical and social formations. Peripheralized by the mainland, this difference marked out a possible site for the articulation of a local identity.

The war experience presented a moment of this identity construction, and the film industry found itself unknowingly at the center of this historical uncertainty. Consistent with its policy of racial-political exclusion, the Hong Kong government had made no effort to mobilize the local motion picture industry for war preparation. Similarly, the Nationalist government and the Communists, aside from rehashing their familiar antiimperialist rhetoric of national resistance, offered no practical advice, guidance or funding to the studios. This, however, did not stop the mainland intellectuals and filmmakers from policing and censuring the Cantonese cinema in the name of a central- izing nationalist ideology. With no experience in political cinema, the film industry found itself alone in unfamiliar waters, caught between the conflict- ing demands of the nation-state and the local-colonial condition.

Although some local film businessmen were interested only in a quick return from low-budget, small-cast escapist fare, the major studios, whatever their ideological orientation, could not afford to ignore the nationalist de- mands. The future of Cantonese production as well as their own reputations were at stake. There were also some filmmakers and artists, notably the famous actors Ng Chor-fan, Bak Yin, and Lo Dun and the directors Lee Fa (Li Hua) and Kwan Man-ching (Guan Wenqing), who were close to the emigre community. Praised in the emigre press as "serious," "patriotic," and "committed" artists, they shared the nationalist vision of a political cinema devoted to modernization and national autonomy.

Right after the Marco Polo Bridge incident, all the major studio employees contributed money and volunteered time to make The Critical Juncture (Zuihou guantou). Its production crew included everybody who was anybody in the film world and was intended to drum up support for China's defense. Screen celebrities also became involved in various kinds of fund-raising activities.60 Between 1937 and 1938, the industry brought out a large number of war-theme movies. Their titles were revealing: Forward (Qianjin qu, Dag- uan Studio), In Defence of South China (Baowei Huanan, Da Zhonghua Company), and Return to the Homeland (Hui zuguo qu, Nanyang Pro- ductions), which won praise from the Central Commission of Film Censor-

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ship. After the fall of Canton in December 1938, however, the number of resistance-related films declined notably.

Judging from available synopses and movie stills, all of these patriotic films were suffused with commercial elements of scholar-beauty romances, operatic interlude, and free-for-all farces. In the critical eyes of the Nationalist government and mainland intelligentsia, they were, with few exceptions, in the words of the Nationalist film censor Xu Hao, "racy" and "vulgar" and by and large misrepresented the military-political situation in the mainland.61 In other words, the Cantonese productions remained "backward" amid the rise of patriotic fervor.

What was absent in this diatribe was an emphatic recognition of the Hong Kong film industry's lack of experience in handling propaganda and political themes and the geopolitical differences of the colony. Without any funding or specific guidance from either the central or the colonial governments, studio heads were uncertain about the audiences' reception and unable to come up with a coherent production strategy to deal with the tensely ambivalent situa- tion: China was at war, but Hong Kong remained outside of the conflict. How to prioritize production planning? How to reckon with the geopolitical speci- ficity of Hong Kong?

The overwhelming majority of Hong Kong Chinese identified themselves as Huaren or Guangdong ren (Cantonese) or Huaqiao (Chinese diaspora), depending probably on the level of collective identification that demanded their commitment at a given time and situation. They were, in effect, an overseas Chinese community in a colonial situation. Although they supported the territorized state of Republican China as a matter of course, they lived in a Westernized, colonial, and highly commercialized city that was distinct from the mainland. This became especially obvious during wartime. Most of the mainland intelligentsia chose to deny the difference by instead marginalizing Hong Kong culture as an unseemly hybridity of "new and old, redolent of colonial flavor and suffused with feudal morality and obscene, degenerate (shangfeng baishu) literature."62 They renounced the young generation of Hong Kong natives, many of whom were born in Hong Kong, as "slavish," "forgetting that they were in fact Chinese," and "being ignorant of Chinese history and proud of knowing no Chinese."63 These harangues were too moralistic and impractical for local filmmakers.

At a safe distance from the war, life in Hong Kong rapidly returned to normal after the reopening of horse-racing in early 1938. There was indeed a widespread illusion before 1941 that the Japanese would not attack Hong Kong for fear of provoking the British, whose priggish complacency and racist underestimation of Japanese prowess led the Colonial government to claim itself as the "fortress of Asia."64 This illusionary sense of security, what some mainland intellectuals smeared as an "ostrich mentality," was

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reinforced by the continual influx of refugees from across the border.65 Hong Kong was a paradise in a war-torn world. On the eve of the Japanese invasion on December 8, 1941, the race track and movie theatres were packed.66 Few people of Hong Kong had the same moral burden or emotional urgency as the mainland emigre about the war. Indeed, the city's patriotic fervor began to drain away in 1938, after the fall of Canton late that year.

Patriotic movies sold well as long as popular enthusiasm for the war remained in force. The return to normalcy in Hong Kong corresponded to the film audiences' demand for entertainment fare. After 1938, many critically acclaimed resistance-theme films turned out to be financial disasters. For example, Ng Chor-fan closed his new film company in frustration after a very poor opening of its first project, the political satire Two Lovers in a Silver World (Yinhai yuanyang, 1938).67 Daguan Studio's 1938 big-budget release Behind the Shanghai Front (Shanghai huoxian hou) was a disappointment, despite the drawing power of the female lead, Bak Yin. At the same time, Bak Yin's romantic tragedy, Madame Butterfly (Hudie furen, based on the 1922 Hollywood film Toll of the Sea), which exploited her on-screen trade- mark of tears and feminine passivity and misery, sold well,68 as did superstar Sit Gok-sin's smashes Thief Prince (Zei wangzi, 1939) and Gone was the Love (Hu bu gui), both adapted from his prewar Cantonese opera hits. Un- doubtedly, there were several popular patriotic movies, like Lau Fong (Liu Fang)'s Song of Exile (Liuwang zhe zhi ge, 1941), a moving tale of love and endurance about a Cantonese refugee music troupe's patriotic commitment. But even these exceptions were spiced up with familiar romance and farcial elements.

Along with the changing market was the Colonial government's censor- ship. Trying to maintain its neturality, it prohibited anti-Japanese expressions in the public sphere. In 1939, for example, the Secretary of Chinese Affairs who doubled as Chief Censor met with local movie businessmen several times to warn them against screening "explicit anti-Japanese sentiments."69 In response to the Japanese consuler's protest, the Hong Kong government in 1940 banned the Chongqing-produced victory short The Battle of Changsha (Changsha huizhan, 1939) and Marches of Guerrilla, which was released in 1941 only after making big cuts and with the new title Zhengqi ge (Song of Righteousness).10

At the same time pressures from the mainland officials and intelligentsia persisted. In addition to the discursive attack on Hong Kong cinema, there were also death threats and political assaults. Several famous film producers and directors received letters from a group called Patriotic Youth Corps containing "pictures of pistols and bullets" warning them to stop making "racy and feudalistic" pictures.71 Many studio heads and filmmakers found the pressures both unproductive and unfair. Daguan Studio producer Chiu Shu-tai (Zhao Shutai) aptly expressed the dilemma confronting the film indus-

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try: "As a commercial cinema, we certainly have to be concerned with the educational/inspirational values of filmmaking, serving the interests of our country and people on the one hand . . . but we cannot, however, ignore market needs, making movies that suit the audience's entertainment taste . . . in order to stay afloat."72 The veteran Cantonese film director Hou Yiu (Hou Yao), who had been bitterly attacked by the emigre press for his "senseless" films, was even more blunt and bitter in his dissent. Meeting with Central Censor Xu Hao and other local Guomindang leaders, Hou urged the National government either to nationalize the Cantonese cinema as the Soviets had the Russian film industry or to give it free rein as in the United States. In other words, he wanted the National government to back up its rhetoric with deeds or back out. As soon as he finished his speech, he was bitterly renounced by the participants.73

While Chiu and Hou used the China-centered nationalist idiom to enunciate their dissent, some young filmmakers appropriated familiar language of na- tionalism to conjure an ambivalent, hybrid local identity. This hybridity came out powerfully in a popular Cantonese film Two Southern Sisters (Nanguo jiemei hua, 1940). Directed by two young, Hong Kong-born directors, Leung Bun (Liang Bin) and Leung Sum (Liang Shen), it was produced by a small independent company founded by the female lead Wu Dip-ying (Hu Dieying). Originally a minor Cantonese opera singer, Wu became a major Hong Kong star after playing the lead in the first Cantonese talkie, Genu qingcao (Ro- mance of Opera Stars, 1932), produced by Daguan in San Francisco.74 The company folded after making this film, which was billed as the last screen appearance of Wu before her retirement.

Two Southern Sisters was a high-budget and carefully crafted film. Unlike the Dadi Mandarin productions, its cast was composed entirely of local stars, including Ng Chor-fan and buff on Lau Kuai-hong (Liu Guikang). Unlike Mandarin films, the opening sequence of sampan, fishing boats, subtropical landscape, and Cantonese folk songs firmly establishes the localness of the film. In fact, like most Cantonese films, it was melodramatically didactic, and its narrative centered around family relations. Typical of the hybridism of local cinema, it combines within the framework of a family drama various genric elements (e.g., romance, thriller, and social satire) and popular themes (e.g., national defense, step-mother syndrome, and a love triangle), spiced up with a long episode of Cantonese opera, all of which were familiar to the local audience.

The film was centered on a romantic triangle involving a struggling artist (Ng Chor-fan) and two twin sisters (both played by Wu Dip-ying). The sisters do not know of each other because they have been separated since childbirth. The elder (Chow Wen-ying) was adopted by a rich businessman, while the younger one (Hsiu Dip) was raised by her own fisherman father and step- mother on an outlying island. Significantly, there is no romanticization of

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rural Hong Kong's idyllic purity, which is typical of mainland leftist cinema. Instead, we see the rich sister, well-educated and assertive, devoting herself to a wide variety of fund-raising activities (including opera singing) to support the Chinese resistance, and leaving home when her father forces her to marry the son of a business partner. The poor sister tearfully and helplessly suffers the constant abuse of her step-mother (her father looks on with pain but is too meek to intervene). Old-fashioned and passive, she has little exposure to modern life and cares little about nationalism or the war. The artist falls in love with Hsiu Dip when he moves to the fishing village in search of a peaceful life. He teaches her such modern values as independence and the struggle. One day Hsiu Dip disappears and the artist goes into the city to look for her. Instead, in a melodramatic twist, he brings back Wen-ying whom he has mistaken as Hsiu Dip. The well-educated sister admires the artist's talents and quickly develops a romantic relationship with him. The step-mother is threatened by this newly found independent-minded daughter and tries to kill her but ends up killing herself. At this juncture, in another melodramtic turn, Hsiu Dip reappears. The twin sisters happily rejoin, but they also have to make an agonizing choice: Who will marry the artist? The artist, like the twins' father, is an emasculated male, weak and indecisive. He is not sure what to do with the two girls he loves. The decision thus has to be made by the twins.

It is significant to note that Wu Dip-ying, Ng Chor-fan, and most of the cast (including the famous character actors Ng Wui/Wu Hui and Lau Kuei- hong) were closely associated with mainland filmmakers and had been critical of the political apathy of local cinema. They were aware of the contestation within wartime Hong Kong cinema. In this context, it is interesting to see that the film ends with Wen-ying, sadly but determinedly, leaving for the mainland to join the resistance so that her sister can stay to marry the artist and care for their aged father. Not knowing this, in a climactic sequence, Hsiu Dip wants to sacrifice her love so that her sister can marry the artist. She runs up a hill yelling fanatically, " I have to struggle! I have to struggle!" until the artist finds her and tells her that Wen-ying has left.

The twin sisters' choice became an allegorized site where the identity of Hong Kong was constructed. Interestingly, unlike the strong male figure (the guerrilla leader) who defines the heroic spectacle and serves as the object of woman's sacrifices in The March of Guerrilla, both the father and artist in Two Southern Sisters are irrelevant to the choice the twin sisters are making except that they create a difficult situation for them. The two sisters have to make the choice by themselves, and each chooses to make a sacrifice for the happiness of each other, not for the men. They are thus endowed with the subject-position that was usually denied to women who were marginalized in the patriarchal order. This valorization of the weak and marginal is, I would argue, in effect an ideological subversion of the Central Plains syndrome and,

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allegorically, a construction of an identity about Hong Kong, which was marginal within the China-centered discourse of nationalism.

Indeed, the melodramatic and dichotomous ending of Two Southern Sisters dramatized a vision of local identity that was marked by a double marginality. Marginalized by British colonialism and Chinese nationalism in a wartime situation, Hong Kong was unsure and tentative in defining (and thereby asserting) itself. Thus, unlike Hong Kong Cantonese films from the 1960s on (like Lung Kong's Feinu zhengzhuan, or Teddy Girls, Allen Fong's Father and Son, or Fuzi qing, or Ann Hui's The Song of Exile, or Ketu qiuheng, or Stanley Kwan's Rouge, or Yanzhi kou),75 this film did not consciously engage in evoking a collective memory of Hong Kong or mapping an alternative discourse surrounding its colonial situation. Rather, just as Wen-ying returned to the mainland and Hsiu Dip stayed on to marry her lover, the film projected an ambivalent hybridity in the imagery of Hong Kong, highlighting the double marginality that framed it. Unable to identify fully with either British coloni- alism or with Chinese nationalism, both of which shunned it as inferior and suspicious, Hong Kong appeared to be positioned uncomfortably in between Chinese tradition and Western lifestyle, moral commitment to the "home- land" that was China and emotional attachment to the home that was Hong Kong. As symbolized in the two different mental worlds the two sisters lived in, the cultural identity of Hong Kong consisted of an ambivalent mixture of tradition and modernity, nationalism and local consciousness. This colonial hybridity was threatened under the nationalistic pressures of Chinese diaspora who imposed their wartime "us and them" vision on the locals: either patri- otic or slavish, Chinese or traitorous. At the same time, the colonial govern- ment excluded the locals from the defense of the their own city because of their racial otherness. Doubly marginalized, the identification of Hong Kong, as Two Southern Sisters articulated, took on an ambiguous, almost schizo- phrenic, turn: It was torn between centralizing nationalism and local con- sciousness. Thus Wen-ying was made to leave for the mainland while Hsiu Dip stayed in Hong Kong. This happy ending was, however, marked by an uneasy compromise, wishful thinking.

On Christmas Day 1941, after three weeks of brutal shelling and bombing, Japan took over Hong Kong. The colony became a part of occupied China in the Great East Asian Coprosperity Sphere, no longer the wartime paradise it once was. Privation and oppression reigned. The entertainment business fell under Japanese control. Unwilling to cooperate, many filmmakers and major stars fled to the safety of southwest China, effectively closing the cinema until the end of the war in August 1945.76

Thus, by the 1930s there was an incipient sense of Hong Kong identity shaped by its hybridized culture and colonization. The sense that Hong Kong was linked to China in race, lineage, and language and yet different in its cultural practices and geopolitical situation was now highlighted by the war.

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However, in the shadow of the China-centered discourse of nationalism en- gendered by the modern Chinese state and cultural elite, with their chauvinis- tic undertones, wartime was also an ambivalent moment to construct a local identity. Hong Kong's marginalization in the Chinese national imagery gener- eated contempt and attacks on Cantonese film culture, thereby disempowering and suppressing all the local voices. In fact, Two Southern Sisters was railed by the emigre press as a "frivolous, escapist" fare77 and has been excluded from the standard historical accounts of Chinese cinema, which includes only films made by the mainland exiles.78

Trinh Minh-ha once remarked that there is margin in the center and center in the margin.79 China's marginalization in twentieth-century global politics is well known, but much less known is the Chinese marginalization of other places and cultures inside and/or outside its territorial boundaries. Hong Kong has been one of these Others. In fact, it has been doubly marginalized in the official discourses of Chinese nationalism and British colonialism. As evi- denced in the 1997 crisis, the Chinese state and cultural elites continues to marginalize Hong Kong by seeing it as merely an "economic city" of finan- cial prowess but cultural decadence, " a cultural desert," and, together with the colonial government, by denying its people, many of whom identified with neither discourses, their right to self-determination. Also, the Central Plains syndrome has contributed to a widespread belief in both scholarly and popular worlds that had they not been confronted with the "crisis of legit- macy" of 1997, the colonized would not have had the collective desire and discursive energy to construct a cultural identity of their own. Yet, this chapter demonstrates that this view is wrong. The war was an important moment in the imagination and projection of Hong Kong's identity, tentative and hybrid as it was, on the local screen. There must have been many comparable moments of imagining an alternative vision of Hong Kong in its colonial history, whether in cinema or other cultural forms. We need to bring to the fore the cultural politics surrounding the many stereotypes about Hong Kong and, in the process, to reconstruct the complexity of its (post) colonial history.

NOTES

1. The desert stereotype has been an underlying trope in almost every major academic study and literary representation of Hong Kong culture. For example, see the various essays by Chinese writers collected in Lu Weiluan, ed., Xianggang de youyu, 1925- 1941 {The Melancholy of Hong Kong), Hong Kong: Huafeng shuju, 1983; and Frank Walsh, A History of Hong Kong (London: HarperCollins, 1993). Until most recently, however, no writers have ever questioned the semantic origin or discursive meaning of this cultural construct. It is now time to deconstruct it. For a pioneering popular work on reevaluating the cultrual scene of Hong Kong, see Luo Fu, Xiang- gang wenhua mangyou {Wandering Through Hong Kong Culture) (Hong Kong: Zhonghua shuju, 1993).

2. Recently, as a result of the critical and immensely popular reception in film circles

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of such innovative filmmakers as Jackie Chan, Chow Yun-fat, and Wang Ka-wei, film scholars have begun to look seriously at the cultural-political significance of Hong Kong cinema. But this pioneering trend has focused on the filmic representa- tion of the heavily contested issues of identity politics of the 1980s and 1990s. No systematic study has been devoted to earlier periods. For two fine examples, see Rey Chow, "A Souvenir of Love," Modern Chinese Literature 7, 2 (Fall 1993): 59-78; and Leo Ou-fan Lee, "Two Films from Hong Kong: Parody and Allegory," in Nick Browne et al. eds., New Chinese Cinemas: Forms, Identities, Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 202-15.

3. My Shiying "Cinematique" [Original], Dianying quan (Hong Kong), 2 (February 1937).

4. For a discussion, see Law Kar, "Xianggang zaoqi de dianying guiji, 1909-1915" {Early Impressions of the Early Hong Kong Cinema), in Early Images of Hong Kong and China (Hong Kong: Urban Council, 1995), 27.

5. Cheng Jihua, Zhongguo dianying fazhan shi (A History of Chinese Cinema) (Bei- jing: Zhongguo dianying chubanshe, 1980).

6. See Paul Pickowicz, "The Theme of Spiritual Pollution in Chinese Films of the 1930s," Modern China 17. 1 (January 1991), 38-75; Guan Wenqing, Zhongguo yingtan waishi (An Unofficial History of Chinese Screen) (Hong Kong: Guangjiao- jing chubanshe, 1976), 128-96.

7. Jean-Paul Sartre, "Preface," Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 26.

8. Recently an increasing amount of exciting research has been devoted to decentering China and reconstructing a Hong Kong identity, principally through film and litera- ture but this research has focused only on the period after the 1980s. See, for example, Rey Chow, "Between Colonizers: Hong Kong's Postcolonial Self-Writing in the 1990s," Diaspora 2. 2 (1992): 151-70; Leo Ou-fan Lee, "Tales from the 'Floating City'," Harvard Asia Pacific Review (Winter 1996-97) 43-9; Leung Ping- kwan, ed., "Xianggang wenhua zhuanji" (Special Issue on Hong Kong Culture), Today 28 (1995): 71-257; Luo Feng, Shiji mo chengshi (Fin-de-siecle City) (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1995); Daisy Ng, "Back to the Future: Imaginary Nostalgia and the Consumer Culture of Hong Kong," unpublished paper, 1996.

9. See G. B. Endacott, Hong Kong Eclipse (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1978) 11; Frank Walsh, A History of Hong Kong, 404; Lin Youlan, Xianggang shihua (An Informal History of Hong Kong) (Hong Kong: Bajiao shufang, 1975): 148-56.

10. Endacott, Eclipse, 23-5; Lu Yan, Xianggang zhanggu (Ancedotes of Hong Kong) (Hong Kong: Guangjiaojin chubanshe, 1981), 4.

11. For a vivid discussion of prewar Shanghai, see Harriet Sergeant, Shanghai: Collision Point of Cultures 1918/1939 (New York: Crown Publishers, 1990); for wartime Shanghai, see Poshek Fu, Passivity, Resistance, and Collaboration: Intellectual Choices under Japanese Occupation, 1937-1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993). The term colonial backwater is adapted from Walsh, A History of Hong Kong, 390.

12. See Du Yunzhi, Zhongguo dianyin qishi nian (Seventy Years of Chinese Cinema), Taipei: Zhonghua minguo dianyin tushuguan, 1976, 226-47; and Thomas Doherty, Projections of War: Hollywood, American Culture, and World War II (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 4-39.

13. Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized, Susan Miller trans., New York: Beacon Press, 1991.

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14. See Walsh, A History of Hong Kong, 386. 15. For a discussion of the social and political conservatism of the Hong Kong elites,

see Lynn White and Li Cheng, "China Coastal Identities: Regional, National, and Global," in Lowell Dittmer and Samuel Kim Eds., China's Quest for National Identity (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993), 154-93.

16. Lau Siu-kai and Kuan Hsin-chi, The Ethos of the Hong Kong Chinese (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 1988), 1-4.

17. Endacott, Hong Kong Eclipse, 26-27'. 18. For two solid discussions of the much understudied British strategy in Hong Kong,

see G. B. Endacott, Hong Kong Eclipse, and Benjamin Proulx, Underground from Hongkong (New York: E. P. Dutton and Company, 1943).

19. Endacott, Hong Kong Eclipse, 2 9 ^ 5 . 20. See Xianggang nianjian (Hong Kong Annual Report), 1941, n.p.; for the founding

and business strategies of these major studios, see Guan Wenqig, Zhongguo yintan waishi.

21. Yilin (The Arts), 43 (December 1938). 22. Yilin, 62 (November 1939). 23. See Lin Youlan, Xianggang shihua, 154-56; G. B. Endacott, Hong Kong Eclipse,

22-26; Nigel Cameron, An Illustrated History of Hong Kong (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1991) 251-56.

24. Xianggang nianjian. 1941, n.p. 25. Yilin, 63 (December 1939) and 75 (June 1940); see also Bai Yan, Yige nu yanyuan

de zishu (An Actress's Autobiography) (Hong Kong, 1955), 15. 26. See Yilin, 50 (March 1939) and 72 (April 1940). 27. See Yilin 52 (April 1939) and 53 (May 1939), Dianyin yu xiju 1, (January 1941). 28. Leo Braudy, The World in a Frame: What We See in Films (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1976), 104-114. 29. The best examples of this conservatism and ambivalence are Sir Robert Ho Tung

and Sir Lo Man-kam. An Eurasian billionaire of his time, Sir Ho had served in various major advisory positions with the Colonial government and had made countless financial contributions to London, but he was allowed to move into the exclusive midlevel neighborhood only after his family went through many racist attacks. Perhaps as a psychological reaction, he wore only Chinese gowns despite his Caucasian look and was well known as a "patriotic businessman" for sending his only son to serve in the Nationalist Army and was the chief financier of the Lianhua Studio. Son-in-law of Sir Ho, Sir Lo was a prominent London-trained attorney and sat on many government committees. Known as an outspoken member at the Legislative Council, he often criticized the racist policy of segration (which did not change until 1946), yet he was convinced that "Chinese did not expect to receive the same salaries as Europeans." See Frank Walsh, A History of Hong Kong, 380-86. For biographical backgrounds of them as well as other elites of Hong Kong, a total of 87, almost all of them were in business, see Wu Xingluan, Xiang- gang (1937) Huaren mingren shilue (Who's Who in Hong Kong), Hong Kong, n.p., 1937.

30. For fares and location of movie theatres, see Yilin 75 (June 1940); and Wu Hao, Xianggang dianying minzuxue (An Ethnography of Hong Kong Cinema) Hong Kong: Ciwenhua tang chubanshe, 1993, 3-21. For two samples of films shown throughout Hong Kong, see Huashang bao (Hong Kong), August 20 and 21, 1941.

31. See Yilin, 84 (October 1940) and 96 (April 1941). The biggest Cantonese box-office

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smashes in the war years were Zei wangzi (Thief Prince, 1939) and Hu bu gui (Gone Was the Love, 1940), both tragic romances based on prewar Cantonese opera hits of the same names, starring Sit Gok-sin, who had also starred in the stage original. The Colonial government seemed to be aware of the socioeconomic hierarchy of the film spectator ship. Thus, in 1940, it decided to impose entertainment tax for all fares higher than HK$0.2, which was indeed what most Catonese moviegoers were pay- ing. Yilin, 75 (June 1940).

32. Cai Chusheng, ' 'Zhanhou de Zhongguo dianying dongtai ji muqian de gaijin yun- dong" (Chinese Cinema after the Outbreak of the War and the Present Reform Movement), Wenxian 4 (January 1939), 12-3.

33. There was in fact a widespread anxiety in the emigre cultural community about the decentering of new Chinese culture by the war in general. See Liao Liao (Sha Kongliao), "Jianli xin wenhua zhongxin" (Establish a New Cultural Center), Li bao (April 1938) in Lu Weiluan, Xianggang de youyu, Hong Kong: Huafeng shuju, 1983, 101-2.

34. See, for example, Tu Yangci, "Jihuai Shanghai" (Nostalgic of Shanghai), Yuzhou feng, May 1939, in Lu, Xianggang de youyou, 157-60. He wrote: "Shanghai is still very much like a place of Chinese. But in Hong Kong, although everywhere is Chinese . . . it has no Chinese flavor, it lacks a Chinese soul."

35. Leo Ou-fan Lee, "Xianggang wenhua de bianyuan xing chutan" (A Prelimiary Study of the Marginality of Hong Kong Culture), Today 28 (1995): 75-80.

36. All these quotes are from Lu, Xianggang de youyu, 107, 157-9, 178, 207-9. 37. Lou Shiyi, "Xianggang de youyu," Xingdao ribao (November 17, 1938) in Xiang-

gang de youyu, 125-26. 38. Yang Yanqi, "Xianggang bannian" (Half a Year in Hong Kong), Yuzhou feng (May

1941), collected in Xianggang de youyu, 207-12; Liao Liao, "Jianli." p. 102 39. Yilin, 84 (October 1940). 40. For a fine study of the represented Chinese filmic tradition, see Paul Pickowicz,

"Melodramatic Representation and the May Fourth Tradition of Chinese Cinema," in Ellen Widemer and David Dar-wei Wang, Eds. From May Fourth to June Fourth: Fiction and Film in Twentieth-Century China, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univer- sity Press), 1993.

41. For the National government's suppression of the Cantonese cinema, see Zhiwei Xiao, "Film Censorship in China, 1927-1937," Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, San Diego, 1994, 212-57.

42. For the Nationalist regime's political and military relations with various provincial authorities, see L. Eastman, "Nationalist China during the Nanking Decade, 1927- 1937," in Lloyd Eastman et al., The Nationalist Era in China, 1912-1949 (Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), particularly 32-40. For a historical survery of Guangdong-Hong Kong relations, see also Ming Chan, ed., Precarious Balance: Hong Kong between China and Britain, 1842-1992 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1993).

43. See Prasenjit Duara, "Provincial Narratives of the Nation: Centralism and Federal- ism in Republican China," in Harumi Befu, ed., Cultural Nationalism in East Asia (Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, 1994) 9-35. See also his Rescuing History from Nation: Questioning Narrative of Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

44. Edward Friedman sums up the political-cultural meaning of da Zhonyuan xintai cogently: "The People's Republic of China in the Mao era presented itself as the

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heir of a Han people who had come together millennia earlier in the north China plain of the Yellow River valley, built a great civilization, fought to preserve it, and expanded over the centuries by civilizing barbarian invaders. Mao's anti-imperialist revolution was the culmination of this Chinese national history." See "Reconstruct- ing China's National Identity: A Southern Alternative to Mao-Era Anti-Imperialist Natioanlism," Journal of Asian Studies, 53. 1 (February 1994), 67-91.

45. Wu Chufan, Wu Chufan zizhuan {Autobiography of Wu Chufan) (Hong Kong: Weiqing shudian, 1956), 74-9.

46. See Guan Wenqing, Zhongguo yingtan waishi, pp. 214-16; Wu Chufan, Wu Chufan zizhuan, 1, 78-80.

47. Yilin, 51 (April 1939). 48. Yilin, 53 (May 1939), my italics. 49. See Paul Pickowicz, "The Theme of Spiritual Pollution in Chinese Cinema";

Edward Friedman, "Reconstructing China's National Identity." For a sensitive study of Chinese Realism, see David Der-wei Wang, Fictional Realism in Twentieth- Century China: Mao Dun, Lao She, Shen Congwen (New York: Columbia Univerity Press, 1992).

50. After an agreement between Zhou Enlai and Sir Archibald Clark-Kerr, the British Ambassador to China, the office was established in the winter of 1937. Liao Cheng- zhi, the son of former Nationalist leader and martyr Liao Zhongkai, headed the Office until its close in December 1941. With his extensive family and political connections with the business elites in Hong Kong and overseas, he was able to establish an account in the Sino-Belgium Bank to which overseas Chinese could make direct contributions to the Communist army. For the Communist activi- ties, see the memoir of one of the activist, Liang Shangwan, Zhonggong zai Xiang- gang (Chinese Communists in Hong Kong) (Hong Kong: Guangjiaojin chubanshe, 1989).

51. For an example of this political ritual, see Yilin, 58 (July 1939). 52. See Wenxian, 1 (October 1938). 53. Dianying shenhuo (Hong Kong) 4 (April 1940); Yilin, 67 (March 1940). For discus-

sions of popular stereotypes of Chinese and Hollywood stars, see Paul Pickowicz, "The Theme of Spiritual Pollution," and Thomas Doherty, Projecting the War, 180-91.

54. See Rey Chow, Woman and Chinese Modernity: The Politics of Reading between West and East (Minneapolis: University of Minnesto Press, 1990); Lydia Liu, ' 'Invention and Intervention: The Making of A Female Tradition in Modern Chinese Literature," in Ellen Widemer and David Der-wei Wang, eds., From May Fourth to June Fourth, 194-220; Elizabeth Spelman, Inesssential Woman: Problem of Exclu- sion in Feminist Thought (Boston: Beacon Press, 1988).

55. For a study of wartime literary appropriation of women for nationalist purposes, see Poshek Fu, Passivity, Resistance, and Collaboration, chapter 2.

56. See for example, Ye Ming, ' 'Zhengqi ge'' (Song of Virtues), Huashang bao, June 14, 1941.

57. Quoted from Thomas Doherty, Projecting the War, 132. 58. See Yilin, 83 (October 1940). 59. The important postcolonial studies, which influence much of my thinking here, are

inspired by the Subaltern School and the works of Franz Fanon. Recently, its argument has become more nuanced and less totalizing as more scholars and theo- rists are contesting its relevance in different national and regional contexts and

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working to prevent it from slipping into a mere badge of academic privilege. For some fine examples, see Iain Chambers and Lidia Curtia, eds., The Post-Colonial Question: Common Skies and Divided Horizons, London: Routledge, 1996; Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993; Henry Louis Gates, Jr., "Critical Fa- nonism," Critical Inquiry 17 (Spring 1991): 457-70.

60. See Guan Wenqing, Zhongguo yingtan waishi, 216-17; Wu Chufan, Wu Chufan zizhuan, 1, 50-62. See also Yu Mo-wen, "Xianggang dianying de aiguo zhuyi chuantong" (The Patriotic Tradition in Hong Kong Cinema), in Law Kar, ed., Early Images of Hong Kong and China, 53-68.

61. Lingxing (Macao), 8. 6 (March 1938). 62. An Ping and Lin Guangtong, Gang Jiu jianying (A Sketch of Hong Kong and

Kowloon) (Hong Kong: Gangjiu wenhua chuban gongsi, 1949) 8. 63. See Xu Dishan, "Yinian lai de Xianggang jiaoyu ji qi zhanwang," (Hong Kong

Education in One Year and Its Prospect), Wenyi, 487 (January 1939); Yang Yanqi, "Xianggang bannian," both collected in Lu Weilian, ed., Xianggang de youyu, 133— 42, 207-12.

64. See Endacott, Eclipse, 43-111; Jan Morris, Hong Kong (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 265-92.

65. Tang Hai, Xianggang lunxian ji (The Fall of Hong Kong) Shanghai: Xin shenhuo chubanshe, 1946.

66. Tang Hai, Xianggang lunxian ji, 1-6; Ye Dehui, Xianggang lunxian shi (A History of the Occupation of Hong Kong) (Hong Kong: Guangjiaojin chubanshe, 1982), 1-18.

67. Wu Chufan, Wu Chufan zizhuan, 1, 65-73. 68. Bai Yan, Yige nu yanyuan de zhuanzhi, 26-27'. 69. Yilin, 44 (December 1939). 70. Dianying shenhuo, 10 (May 1940); Yilin, 74 (May 1940) and 75 (June 1940). 71. Yilin, 58 (July 1939). 72. Zhao Shutai, "Jianshe jinbu dianying de renwu" (The Responsibility to Create A

Progressive Cinema), Huashang bao, August 1, 1941. 73. Wenxian, 1. 74. Guan Wenqing, Zhongguo yingtan waishi, 137-9. 75. For discussions of these films and the contexts of their production, see Poshek Fu,

"The Turbulent Sixties: Modernity, Youth Culture, and Cantonese Films in Hong Kong," in Law Kar, ed., Fifty Years of Electric Shandows (Hong Kong: Urban Council, 1997) 34-46; Law Kar, "H. K. Film Market and Trends in the Eighties, in Hong Kong Cinema in the Eighties (Hong Kong: Urban Council 1991), 70-7; Leung Ping-kwan, "Minzu dianying yu Xianggang wenhua shenfen" (National Cinema and Hong Kong Identity), Today, 1994, Li Chuek-to, "Postscript," in A Study of Hong Kong Films in the Seventies (Hong Kong: Urban Council, 1984), 123-31; Luo Fung, Shiji mo chengshi, 8-75; Stephen Teo, "The Squint-eyed Gaze" in The Chinese Factor in Hong Kong Cinema (Hong Kong: Urban Council, 1990), 86-94; Esther Yau, "Border Crossing: Mainland China's Presence in Hong Kong Cinema," in Nick Browne et al., eds., New Chinese Cinemas, 180-201.

76. See Wu Chufan, Wu Chufan zizhuan, 2: 1-50; Poshek Fu, "Patriotism or Profit: Hong Kong Cinema during the Second World War," in Law Kar, ed., Early Images of Hong Kong and China (Hong Kong: Urban Council, 1995) 69-79.

77. See Yilin, 74 (May 1940).

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78. Cheng Jihua, Zhongguo dianying fazhan shi, and Du Yunzhi, Zhongguo dianying qishi nian.

79. Trinh Minh-ha, "Who Is Speaking: Of Nation, Community, and First Person Inter- view," in Laura Pietropado and Ada Testaferri, eds., Feminisms in the Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995).

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