In Jauwat zi dou (Youyu zhi dao in Mandarin or Blue Island, 2022), director Chan Tze-woon puts into dialogue four traumatic memories and experiences that were considered by many Hong Kongers as mutually incommensurable. In the initial screenings of the film, some viewers even found such comparison objectionable. This article is an outcome and an attempted 'continuation' of my conversation with Chan Tze-woon from 2023. Through a close reading of Blue Island, I argue that Chan Tze-woon uses the cinema to foster an opportunity for the dependent co-arising of individual subjectivities and a democratic sociality (a way in which a democratic society can be constituted). It does so through a process that has not been imaginable under Hong Kong's historical conditions. If being a Hong Konger is a process of becoming that requires constant negotiations among individuals who need to work through mutually contesting traumas, Blue Island enables spectators to try appreciating their differences as sites of conversation and connection.
This article offers a comparative examination of The Battle at Lake Changjin (China) and Taegukgi: Brotherhood of War (South Korea), two landmark blockbusters that exemplify a post-Cold War trend to reframe the Korean War for present national agendas, but pull in opposite aesthetic and ethical directions. Drawing on monumentality studies, this article argues that Lake Changjin re-monumentalizes Chinese war memory by revising China's war justification and reconstructing a heroic national narrative, whereas Taegukgi operates as a counter-monumental intervention that contests the war's ethical warrant and shifts attention from state purpose to personal trauma and human cost. These divergent commemorative strategies depart decisively from earlier Korean War films in their respective national traditions and establish distinct benchmarks for contemporary war filmmaking at home. Despite their differences, both productions are similarly conditioned by their respective sociopolitical contexts: Xi-era China's promotion of state nationalism and Sunshine Policy-era South Korea's embrace of ethnic nationalism. Combining historical inquiry with cinematic analysis, this study demonstrates how war cinema functions as a form of modern monumentality that, capable of rebuilding a nation's pantheon or dismantling it, actively reshapes collective memory and political consciousness while remapping the moral-affective terrain upon which national identities are forged, contested, and renewed.
Before its demolition in 1993, the Kowloon Walled City was a hyper-dense squatters' enclave within British Hong Kong that was de jure under Chinese sovereignty. Distinct from the dystopian, cyberpunk visions it has inspired internationally (e.g. Blade Runner [Ridley Scott, 1982] and Ghost in the Shell [Mamoru Oshii, 1995]), the Walled City has been depicted in more familiar terms in local film productions. This article examines the Walled City's significant and perennial role in Hong Kong's cinematic and cultural imaginaries as a site of locality, where ideas and feelings about the city as a home are explored, shaped, and questioned. Drawing on Arjun Appadurai's theorisations on the production of locality and applying them to two pre-handover films, Lam Nai-choi's Brothers from the Walled City (1982) and Johnny Mak's Long Arm of the Law (1984), it develops the concept of the 'Walled City imaginary', where the enclave serves as a spatial construct for negotiating Hong Kong's myriad sociopolitical contradictions and contestations, as well as ever-shifting ideas of what constitutes the 'local'. Far from historical obsolescence, the Walled City and its cinematic imaginings continue to resonate amidst contemporary debates about local identity formation-arguably more than ever in post-2019 Hong Kong.
Current scholarship on 1980s Chinese mainland cinema has concentrated predominantly on the films about Northwestern rural China, while the diversification of cinematic localities, particularly urban representations, remains underexplored. This article calls for a polylocal reconfiguration of Chinese film historiography by investigating South China Urban Cinema, a series of films focusing on the urban context of Lingnan, produced by the Pearl River Film Studio in Guangzhou since the mid-1980s. Drawing on archival research encompassing film journals, magazines, and symposium records, it first situates South China Urban Cinema within the broader proliferation of regionally specific cinematic concepts advanced by state-owned studios in this period. Through analysis of Yamaha Fish Stall (1984), the article further contextualizes these films within Guangzhou's urban and economic transformation, demonstrating how South China Urban Cinema and its street-level documentations functioned to shape new social norms and promote market reforms. Additionally, the article comparatively examines the presence of Hong Kong popular culture and characters in Yamaha Fish Stall and Swan Song (1985), to argue that South China Urban Cinema exemplifies what I term "satellite vernacular", a mode which mediates the sensory experiences and critical reflections of modernity drawing from a translocal mediascape between Guangzhou and Hong Kong.
This article examines the 1960s Taiwanese-language spy film genre, focusing on The Best Secret Agent (1964) and its sequels as a critical site where global genre conventions, Cold War politics, and local gender ideologies intersect. I introduce the concept of creative disidentification to describe a two-stage process: first, the strategic imitation of dominant cinematic forms to secure market visibility, and second, their transformation into distinctly local articulations of gender and political identity. Using this framework, I trace the evolution of the recurring 'female 007' figure, embodied in the heroine Cuiying, from a tragic nationalist sacrifice to a self-directed, cross-dressing agent who destabilizes Cold War masculinism. Drawing on archival reels, promotional booklets, and oral histories, the article situates Taiwanese spy cinema at the nexus of state propaganda and commercial imperatives, showing how its hybrid aesthetics were shaped as much by market demands as by ideological concerns. By reconfiguring global espionage tropes into new forms of female agency, these films demonstrate how small-nation cinemas can creatively negotiate transnational flows, challenging both Hollywood dominance and patriarchal state ideology.
This article reinterprets Spring in a Small Town through the lens of neurasthenia, a once-prevalent but now largely forgotten diagnostic category in modern China. It argues that neurasthenia should not be understood merely as a thematic element or medical condition within the film, but as a historically specific discourse that structures its narrative, interpersonal relations, and cinematic form. By reconstructing the medical and cultural context of neurasthenia and offering a re-diagnosis of the protagonist Dai Liyan, the article shows how illness reorganizes affective expression and social relations. More importantly, it shows that neurasthenia embodies a temporal paradox: as both a product of modernity and a sign of weakness, it disrupts the linear temporal logic through which modernity promises recovery and progress. This disrupted temporality is central not only to the film's narrative structure but also to its historical reception. The rejection of Spring in a Small Town by leftist critics is thus understood not simply in ideological terms, but as a response to a form of temporal experience that resists a progressive vision of history. In recovering this forgotten discourse, the article contributes to broader debates in health humanities and film studies on the relationship between illness, temporality, and modernity.
Prior scholarship has long debated whether The Love of Susan (Xin Yutangchun, the Grandview Film Company, 1954) was Hong Kong's first widescreen production, as well as the widescreen process that the film used. This paper presents new evidence from Grandview's obscure in-house journal, Grandview Movieland, to argue that the film was indeed Hong Kong's first widescreen feature, but it was not shot in an anamorphic process like CinemaScope, rather was projected in ersatz widescreen. I further theorize how the 'ersatz' was collectively used by Hong Kong producers and exhibitors as a creative response and a survival strategy to combat technological disparities with Hollywood in the early widescreen era, when producers did not have access to anamorphic equipment due to Hollywood's firm monopoly of the technology, and exhibitors did not have CinemaScope films to put on their screens because Hong Kong was at the end of the global distribution line. Through contextualizing Grandview's The Love of Susan in local industrial practices and within global widescreen history, I theorize how Hong Kong's case presents an alternative genealogy of widescreen cinema, one that celebrates the creative and political possibilities of the ersatz.
This article examines the rise of aural stardom in early reform-era China through the case of Qiu Yuefeng, the celebrated dubbing actor of the Shanghai Translated and Dubbed Film Studio. Moving beyond the image-centered paradigm of star studies, it argues that Qiu's celebrity exemplifies a form of disembodied aural stardom in which the dubbed voice, rather than the screen image, became the primary object of audience recognition and attachment. Tracing Qiu's career from the institutional formation of socialist dubbing in the 1950s, through the covert production of internal reference films during the Cultural Revolution, to the public circulation of dubbed foreign films in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the article reconstructs the changing listening regime that made his stardom possible. It shows that Qiu's voice acquired exceptional affective force through the convergence of three conditions: the institutional prestige of dubbing as a socialist art, the remediation of dubbed films across radio, television, and cassette culture, and audiences' desire for new emotional and imaginative worlds at a moment of political and cultural transition. Qiu's disembodied voice thus became a privileged medium through which listeners apprehended psychological individuality, intimacy, and previously marginalized forms of subjectivity.
During the Great Leap Forward (1958-1960), Chinese cinema found itself trapped between heightened political pressures and a fervent pursuit of shortened production cycles, using exaggerated numerical information within its cinematographic language to represent extreme labor intensity and the dreamlike speed of historical development. Bridging sensory history and media discourse analysis, this study examines the "artistic documentary"(yishu xing jilupian), a hybrid genre weaponized to navigate this crisis. Through two foundational case studies, The Caprice of the Ming Tombs Reservoir (Shisanling Shuiku Changxiangqu, 1958) and Huang Baomei (1958), this article argues that cinema weaponized sensory stimulation to achieve the following functions: manufacturing political identification and mass subjectivity; simulating utopian futures to compel popular endurance of present bodily exhaustion and material scarcity; juxtaposing individual heroism with collective narratives to facilitate ideological integration, a synthesis that ultimately fractured as model workers were physically detached from the labor process; and projecting a socialist teleology wherein hyper-acceleration would paradoxically deliver human emancipation, an end to bodily alienation, and a "decelerated" future capable of mastering time itself."
This article examines three Taiwanese splatter and horror films-Mon Mon Mon Monsters (2017), The Sadness (2021), and Get the Hell Out (2020)-as a cinematic trilogy of national calamity emerging under the geopolitical conditions of the New Cold War. Drawing on psychoanalysis, phenomenology, monster theory, and political anthropology, it proposes the concept of calamity-aberration, an analytical framework rooted in Sinographic traditions of omen-reading and aligned with contemporary theories of democratic crisis and collective anxiety.Rather than treating disaster as a purely accidental or physical event, calamity-aberration designates a symbolic configuration in which ethical collapse, institutional dysfunction, and political deformation become legible through monsters, viral contagion, and zombies. The article argues that these films function as allegories of Taiwan's internal crises while occupying a frontline position in U.S.-China confrontation.Specifically, Mon Mon Mon Monsters figures the abused monster as an internalized national Other, exposing unresolved historical betrayal and moral disintegration. The Sadness constructs a viral allegory in which democracy appears as a pathological experiment that unleashes violence and abjection. Get the Hell Out satirizes parliamentary zombification to reveal institutional paralysis and internal erosion. Together, these films diagnose Taiwan's contemporary condition while prefiguring future democratic crises.
A City of Sadness (1989) has long attracted Western scholarly attention for its linguistic diversity and aural politics, with many analyses repeating the inaccurate claim that City was the first Taiwanese film to use sync sound rather than post-production dubbing. Such an overinvestment in linguistic and sonic fidelity as a means of deriving knowledge of Taiwan can delimit Taiwanese film historiography. This article develops the concept of 'sonolingual composition' to deconstruct the shifting relationship among body, language, and voice in Taiwan cinema, with two films as case studies. First comes a discursive analysis of attitudes toward dubbing in 1970s guoyupian. Anxiety over the tension between realism and linguistic orthodoxy was most acute when top-billed stars opened their mouths, with the half-dubbed, half-sync sound A Journey of Love (1978) a provocative example. Second comes a look at localized Hong Kong cinema in the 80s and 90s, with a particular focus on Shi Banyu's dubbing work for Stephen Chow. Shi's bravura turn in the parallel Mandarin and Taigi dubs of Flirting Scholar (1993) illustrate how even as there was a space for linguistic pluralism in the post-marital law era, demand for a particular star affect could constrain vocal performance.
Released toward the end of the Cultural Revolution, Boulder Bay (1976) is unique for its extensive on-location representation of the seascape. By closely analyzing the film's treatment of the sea, this article rethinks the ostensible dichotomy of opera and cinema through the dynamic tension between set and location-forces that do not simply oppose, but overlap, conflict, and reinforce one another. The article unpacks this dynamic by examining three distinct modes of spatial construction: the match cuts in transitional empty shots; the montage and special effects that transform the sea into an affective landscape; and the political reconstruction of the actual location into an open-air studio. Overall, this article challenges the linear historiography that typically frames the transition from socialist to post-socialist cinema as a simple shift from "operatic formalism" to "cinematic realism." By revealing how the "real" seascape is meticulously reconstructed, Boulder Bay destabilizes the boundary between the theatrical and the cinematic, offering a new perspective on the aesthetics of the late Cultural Revolution cultural works.
This introductory article proposes 'caring Chinese cinemas' as a conceptual and methodological framework for rethinking the relations between cinema, ethics, aesthetics, ecology, politics, and criticism. Starting from recent debates on care, we emphasise both the productivity and the ambivalence of the concept: care can sustain, protect, and repair, but it can also control, exclude, or reproduce unequal relations of power. Bringing this discussion into the study of Chinese cinemas, the article approaches cinema in two interconnected ways: as a medium through which care is represented, performed, and felt, and as an object that itself requires care through criticism, institutional support, and scholarly engagement. The article identifies four axes that organise the contributions to this special issue: ethical filmmaking, ecological care, aesthetics of slowness and opacity, and the political tensions between care, censorship, and control. Finally, taken together, the contributions suggest that caring for Chinese cinemas also requires a recalibration of criticism itself, moving beyond detached critique towards more affirmative, reparative, and situated modes of reading.
In the early years of the People's Republic of China, following the retreat of the Nationalist Government to Taiwan and the outbreak of the Korean War, a vigorous campaign against spies and internal saboteurs gained momentum, prompting the production of films known as fante pian (counter-espionage films) between 1949 and 1965. In this article, I challenge conventional interpretations of these films as bound by the generic codifications of spy films. Drawing on a diverse corpus of primary sources, including historical archives, newspaper reports, and film magazines, I unveil the rigorous and critical energies embedded within counter-espionage cinematic experiences of that era. I contend that counter-espionage films not only reflected the impact of political campaigns, as other critics have suggested, but also functioned as a highly-publicized national defense campaign in their own right. To do so, I show how the production, exhibition, and reception of counter-espionage films in socialist China built an embodied network of mass surveillance that monitored and disrupted the secret network of spies. In particular, the multimedia practices-including pre-screening exhibitions, interstitial commentaries, and post-screening forums-fostered a mode of participatory spectatorship, thereby re-enacting the unmasking of hidden enemy bodies and the mobilization of socialist subjects both on and off the screen. This paper aims to enrich our understanding the interplay between socialist subject bodies, media practices, and political movements. It reveals how media practices seamlessly blended every day experiences with the nation's warfare against spies, thereby contributing to the actualization of these campaigns.
