A documentary titled Havana Divas/Guba Huadan ć€ć·Žè±æŠ (2018) made headlines in various film review outlets. The film unmasks intriguing life stories of two Cuban ladies who acquired Cantonese opera singing skills from their Guangdong-origin parentsâmembers of the non-ceasing and massive migrant flow in the late nineteenth century who departed from South China to North and South American countries. Brought to the land full of waving palm trees and sugarcanes from across the Pacific were thousands of cheap laborers and their folk culture originating in the South China cultural circle. Cantonese opera was the most popular leisure activity. Following the advancement of filming technology, Cantonese opera sing-song film became a dominant genre and, interestingly, this distinctive film genre turned out to be one of the earliest cultural products that generated border-crossing impact.
Hong Kong film is the one and only genre that takes its name from a city instead of a state (e.g. French film) or an industrial region (e.g. Hollywood film). Even though a subject of dispute and even called by the Hong Kong International Film Festival Society , âThe Controversial Centenary of Hong Kong Cinemaâ, the 100-year Hong Kong Cinema exhibition received a grand opening at the breathtaking Carlton Beach during the 2009 Cannes International Film Festival . While the so-called centenary anniversary in 2009, which was endorsed by the government-funded Hong Kong Film Development Council , was under criticism and deserves more scrupulous scrutiny, there is already plenty to be celebrated as Hong Kong cinema represents one of the oldest shops in the global industry.
In 2007, Hollywood blockbuster The Departed (2007) won the best director award in the 79th Oscar Academy Awards . The Departed is a remake of the Hong Kong crime-thriller movie Infernal Affairs/Wu Jian Dao çĄéé (2006).
Equally appealing to foreign audiences yet on a lesser scale, Hong Kongâs popular music, aka Cantopop , is another Hong Kong trademark. On April Foolsâ Day, since 2003, Hong Kong welcomes folks from Japan and South Korea, mostly middle-aged ladies, to a special concert. The singer is only seen on a huge screen, and his smile and eye contact always seems so close to the screaming audience. Flowers are placed in front of the screen instead of being handed to the virtuoso singer. Befuddling yet heartbreaking, this virtual concert annually entices fans, home and abroad, to share deep remembrances of their beloved deceased super starâLeslie Cheung (ćŒ”ćæŠź) , who leapt to his death from a height on April Foolsâ Day in 2003 as a result of depression.
Similarly but in a different way, a landmark song also achieved great success. A pro-democracy social movement (aka Umbrella Movement ) drew the global spotlight in 2014. Records show that over one million people took part in the cityâs largest activism event, among who were a number of household names: lyrist Albert Leung (æć€) , singer Denise Ho (äœé»è©©) , singer Anthony Wong (é»èæ) , actress Deanie Ip (èćŸ·ć«») and a lot more. Hoist the Umbrella/Chengqi Yusan æè”·éšć, a pop song was collectively composed and performed as a token to this uprising. A popular cultural and social influencer, this song was awarded the Most Popular Song (ææćæææČ) in the 2014 Ultimate Song Chart Awards Presentation.
Collective action is not new to this city, which, as shown in the above case, actually makes an alternative stage for popular culture. âI want to watch TVâ, âGive me back the HKTVâ, over a 100,000 protesters chanted in front of the government headquarters, as a movement that supported licensing to Hong Kong TV Network (HKTV) corporation reached its zenith. Living in a city populated by 7 million residents, Hong Kong people finally got the chance to enjoy their third free-to-air television network in 2013. When the perceived mostly well-prepared corporation HKTV failed to be granted the free television license, for the first time, Hong Kong citizens took to the streets for the sake of âTV watchingâ, which, ironically, represents one of the most well-established popular cultural activities that is said to have epitomized a Hong Kong taste throughout the last half century.
Outcry from the public, more often than not, is mingled with popular cultural products. âThis city is dyingâ, a thunderous line from a legacy-like Television Broadcasts Limited (TVB) television drama When Heaven Burns/Tian yu Di 怩èć° (2011) which eventually became talk of the town due to the bold steps taken by the script writers in touching various local political issues, embodying the public discourse at the time which was largely overshadowed by unfinished demands of a democratic election system.
Worlding Hong Kong Popular Culture
A brief scanning of the above popular culture anecdotes suggests compelling allegorical reflections of historical, political-economic, social and cultural developments locally, regionally and globally. Hong Kong popular culture, namely film, television drama and popular music, is a mirror of socio-historical trends and more importantly, a world-traveling vessel. Once overlooked by the colonial government and ordinary population, popular culture derived from Hong Kong has generated, aside from economic profits alone, far-reaching cultural and political influences. These influences have sprawled beyond nation-state borders and ethnic-cultural barriers. Chapter by chapter, this book will unveil how Hong Kongâs popular cultural products and virtuoso cultural icons have branded the city and promoted the Hong Kong brand name to overseas audience. This is the premise from which the cultural journey depicted in this book sails off.
While extended studies derived from different disciplines, especially in the realm of film studies, have established the foundation based on which this book takes a step forward, existing resources fall short in positioning Hong Kong popular culture within a wider spectrumâHong Kong popular culture in a global scale. Although works from film studies have touched upon this subject, a void remains in studies of Hong Kong television culture and popular music: two cultural genres that actually have shaped and transformed regional and even global popular cultural landscapes.
Equally important is how we re-assess âHong Kong in the worldâ. It is only in recent decades that scholars (e.g. Elizabeth Sinn, Lui Tai-lok, Priscilla Roberts, John Carroll, Mark Chi-kwan) have paid special attention to the role of this tiny city in centennial world trading development, maritime history and wartime geo-politics. Intriguingly, Hong Kong is marginal and yet nodal, as is its popular culture. This seemingly self-contradictory claim will be presented in the book with a theme that stretches along anecdote, milestone and serial industrial transformation about how Hong Kong popular culture has mirrored the vibrant port city character with commoners of multi-backgrounds living or passing through the land. The focal point that embroils this theme is the connection between Hong Kong and other parts of the world. Connecting to the world provides a striking outlook of Hong Kong being a polyglot city. As popular culture is rooted in peopleâs everyday life, which seldom exists in a social vacuum, we therefore can never treat popular culture as merely mass entertainment or profit-making merchandise, but instead must view it as an integral part that crafts and is usurped by the place, time, people and zeitgeist. By corollary, situating Hong Kong popular culture in a temporally and territorially wider angle refreshes our conceptual and pedagogical assumption of the writing and reading of the histography of Hong Kong, Sinophone community and the global cultural landscape.
This book presents a chronology, if not a histography, taking readers on a riveting adventure through Hong Kong popular culture development in the home region and around the globe, from the turn of the twentieth century into the new millennium. Standing on giantâs shoulders, this book not only heavily relies on existing research findings but also delves into corporation documents, government archives, organization archives and industrial and media reports to rethink the role played by popular culture in Hong Kong and beyond. Conceptual tools from different disciplines such as history, literature and cultural studies are employed to make this expedition possible.
The goal of this book is less to tout the monumental greatness of centennial Hong Kong popular culture, to lament over the bygone gilded age that marks the culmination of production and sales record, or to present a complete account on the cityâs cultural history, but more to embark on an eye-opening tour in this luxuriant jungle and, to a certain extent, a treasure-hunting journey into the understudied while enthralling âglobal-nessâ of Hong Kong popular cultureâworlding of Hong Kong popular culture. By using this term, I am greatly enlightened by literature scholar and a leading figure in Sinophone (Huayu Yuxi èŻèȘèȘçł») studies, David Der-wei Wang. He edited the latest literary history of modern Chinaâa challenge to traditional orthodox comprehension and a leap forward to re-read Chinese literature under a global canvas. Transforming the word âworldâ into a verb was pioneered by Heidegger, who called attention to the way âin which the world is constructed and exists eternally in a constantly shifting state of becomingâ (cited in Wang 2017, p. 13), a condition that foregrounds and evolves being-in-the-world, while the world itself is a flux of ever-renewing reality. Wang casts light on the âdynamics of the travelling and transculturationâ of modern Chinese literature in terms of not only physical mobility but also conceptual, affective and technological transmutation through space and time.
Though the Heideggerian philosophical claim yields a far larger epistemological paradigm shift, here, I borrow this overarching concept to separate what this book attempts to envisage: the mutually influential forces between popular culture and serial historical and geo-political contingencies. The traveling and transculturation is vividly embodied in the development of Hong Kong popular culture. Not only do various political-social conditions lead to a trans-regional distribution network and affective impact of Hong Kong popular cultural products, it is also noteworthy that Hong Kong culture itself becomes a meeting place of multi-cultures: exchange of talents, adaptation of cultural elements and border-crossing imaginatory allegory. Thus, the âworldingâ of Hong Kong popular culture at the same time echoes features that characterize the society itself: located at the edge of mainland Chinese territory, a former British colony under the laissez-faire rule and a conjunction criss-crossing different political, economic and social powers. These in-motion crescendos are thus reflected through the seemingly ambivalent yet arresting relation of the Cold War and Hong Kong filmâs prevalence in Southeast Asia and Taiwan, the penetration of Hong Kong popular culture in the Greater China region under the contexts of Chinaâs slowly unveiled door-opening policy and Taiwanâs dawn of lifting martial law, the rising of national cultural industries in former underdeveloped countries and the ceasing pace of Hong Kong popular cultureâs border-crossing influence and a long list to depict the âbeing-in-the-worldâ.
In the following discussion, the worlding of Hong Kong popular culture will be elaborated through a number of perspectives. First, Hong Kong as well as its popular culture embodies a meeting place of people, culture and capital from a wide array of backgrounds, and, second, it is due to this enthralling geo-political and socio-cultural nature that Hong Kong popular culture plays a special role in the Sinophone-language circle, namely and conceptually, Sinophone studies. Moreover, beyond language and cultural habitual barriers, Hong Kong popular culture in the age that witnessed the âAsian Four Tigersâ taking off became a role model for the East Asian region by envisaging modernity and urbanity, values that symbolized âprogressionâ. This was the moment during which, after Cantonese opera films, Kung Fu mania and wartime broadcasting, Hong Kong turned to a border-crossing landmark cultural trendsetter once again.
In a word, what sets Hong Kong apart from the rest of China and the world is the âworldingâ of Hong Kong popular culture. This remarkable signature could never be isolated from other social institutions, namely, Hong Kongâs former colonial status, port city character and its incomparable geo-political locus at the crux of warsâa series of historical contingencies that later configure the manifestation, vision and networking system of Hong Kongâs film, television and popular music industries.
Studying Hong Kong
A Meeting Place
Before we delve into a discussion on popular culture, a lofty question arises: how does one describe Hong Kong?
Hong Kong was once regarded a desert of culture, when compared to the so-called 5000-year-old Chinese culture. Hong Kong was once characterized by its remarkable raison dâĂȘtre profit-making philosophy. A recently unearthed intriguing case of the exiled Chinese pedantic literati Wang Tao (Sinn 2017), who drastically revised his perception of Hong Kong from condemnation to admiration as time went by, vividly portrays the inferior status of Hong Kong in the eyes of the orthodox central-plain (Zhong yuan äžć) intelligentsia. Orthodox Chinese culture, in this sense, was anchored in the vast central plain along the Yellow River and the Southeast-end region along the Yangtze River. Wang was spirited to Hong Kong at the turn of the twentieth century. In the eyes of Wang, Hong Kongâs once exasperating business-oriented social state of mind and locus as an international port city turned into a buttress of rule of law and a scrupulous trading system, which added enormously to Wangâs growing sense of belonging and endeavoring self-contribution. Even though popular culture, instead of the dominant commercial culture, was barely a focus for Wang, in Sinnâs depiction, Wang found an alternative cultural taste that characterized the cityscapeââwith little pretension to high cultureâ (means Yangtze River region literary culture from Wangâs hometown) (Sinn 2017, p. 3). Thus, a double marginality of Hong Kong is revealed geographically and culturally according to the central-plain point of view. ...