By Po-Shek Fu
Reviewed by Man-Fung Yip
MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright July, 2024)
Po-Shek Fu, Hong Kong Media and Asia’s Cold War Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023. 256pp. ISBN: 9780190073770 (paperback); 9780190073763 (hardcover)
Over the decades, Po-Shek Fu has established himself as one of the most respected scholars in the field of Chinese-language cinema. His latest book on the cultural Cold War in Hong Kong of the 1950s and 1960s, with a focus on film and print media, offers the first systematic English-language study of this important but little-examined subject.
Divided into four main chapters, plus a preface and an epilogue, the book covers the period—from the late 1940s to the late 1960s—to which the cultural Cold War in Hong Kong was most germane. The first chapter offers a comprehensive mapping of the cinematic Cold War in Hong Kong and makes a convincing case for what Fu calls the “cinematic containment” of leftist or pro-communist “patriotic” cinema on the part of pro-Taiwan forces and the United States. Each of the following three chapters focuses on a case study to further explore the complex dynamics and meanings of the cultural Cold War in Hong Kong: the US-sponsored Chinese Student Weekly and its ties with the liberal “third force” movement in Republican China in chapter 2; Asia Pictures, a film studio founded by Chang Kuo-sin 張國興 with support from the Asia Foundation (a CIA-funded nongovernmental organization), in chapter 3; and the Shaw Brothers studio in chapter 4. The epilogue concludes the book by focusing on the period of the late 1960s and 1970s, when the rise of a new, local-born generation challenged and reshaped the Cold War networks of émigré cultural production, which in turn led to a gradual winding down of Hong Kong’s status as a battlefield of Asia’s cultural Cold War.
The conceptual approach of the book is very much in line with the growing trend of cultural Cold War studies, which moves beyond a restrictive understanding of the Cold War conflict from a mere diplomatic or military perspective and shifts its focus to the cultural realm. This recalibration of focus allows for a rethinking of Hong Kong’s role in the Cold War. As Fu rightly points out, Hong Kong as a Cold War subject is a “historical anomaly” in that it “experienced no ‘hot war’ or organized movement for independence” (x), but given its unique position as a British colony right next to communist China and as a hub of mass entertainment and publications in the region, nonetheless constituted an important front of Asia’s cultural Cold War. Throughout the book, Fu sheds light on the political and strategic tug-of-war among China, Taiwan, and the United States as they sought to use Hong Kong’s cinema and print media—with their wide circulation networks that extended to Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, and other Southeast Asian nations—as a means to win the hearts and minds of ethnic Chinese in the region. In this sense, the description of Hong Kong as “a crossroads in the Cold War where the global, the regional, and the local intersected” (x) is spot on.
Despite Hong Kong’s centrality in the cultural Cold War, the book eschews a facile understanding of Hong Kong media in mere ideological—that is, anti-communist or anti-capitalist—terms, showing instead that overt ideological warfare was rather rare in a milieu where the British colonial authorities strove hard to rein in excessive politicization. It was local processes and experiences, Fu contests, that strongly mediated global ideological antagonism. For instance, considering that Hong Kong in the 1950s and 1960s was a rapidly modernizing society with an increasingly profit-driven media sector, the latter sought to establish a strong market presence by appealing to the largest number of consumers. This explains why, as Fu shows in chapter 3, Chang Kuo-sin sought to build Asia Pictures into a giant, transnational Hollywood-style film enterprise and paid more attention to the films’ production values than to their ideological content. Although Chang’s effort failed due to his inexperience in the film business, the goal, according to chapter 4, was in many ways achieved by Shaw Brothers, which established itself as one of Asia’s largest and most efficient studios modelled on Hollywood’s assembly-line model of production, and consistently turned out immensely popular films combining modern technologies/techniques with traditional Chinese subjects and imageries.
Another example of such localized responses can be observed in the ideological ambivalence in Chinese Student Weekly. As Fu perceptively points out in chapter 2, the popular magazine, despite receiving covert US funding, did not simply embrace an anti-communist position; rather, influenced in part by the liberal tradition of twentieth-century China, it advocated a discourse of enlightenment based on ideas of democratic representation and cultural nationalism, and was often critical of the authoritarian one-party rules of both Chinese regimes across the Taiwan Strait. In this connection, it is worth mentioning that its editorial stance greatly differed from that of Asia Pictorial, another magazine funded by the Asia Foundation and one closely associated with Asia Pictures, the primary object of study in chapter 3. With its stridently politicized and polemical language—at least in its coverage of current affairs and social issues, albeit less so in its film and entertainment news reports—Asia Pictorial differs sharply not only from the liberal leaning of Chinese Student Weekly but also from the ideological moderation in the films of Asia Pictures. What this suggests are the diverse ways in which the cultural Cold War was fought in the cinema and print media of Hong Kong. While the “hard” approach of Asia Pictorial epitomized more clearly the goal of communist containment, the “softer,” less extreme stance of Chinese Student Weekly and other examples of émigré cultural production that Fu’s book focuses on, represented a more subtle (but arguably no less effective) way of winning the hearts and minds of audiences in the cultural Cold War contest.
In addition to its conceptual rigor, another strength of the book lies in its empirically grounded historical scholarship. Fu has done extensive research in various archives, including the Public Records Office of Hong Kong, the Hong Kong Film Archive, the Shanghai Municipal Archives, as well as the Asia Foundation collections at the Hoover Institution. The use of archival material from these wide-ranging sources, much of which have been unstudied or have only become recently available, has broadened our perspectives on the complex Cold War dynamics in Hong Kong media, not least the crucial but covert role played by the US in countering leftist influence in the region. Also worth pointing out are the interviews the author conducted with filmmakers, magazine editors, student activists, and audiences who contributed to the cultural Cold War’s living archive. In Fu’s own words, these oral histories serve as a “cross-referencing tool” (xiii) that balances the archival documents and further enriches the perspectives of the book.
Given the scope and complexity of the subject, it is understandable that the book does not try to be exhaustive in its coverage. For instance, apart from a major section in the first chapter and the epilogue that discuss the pro-communist studios and post-Cold-War media, respectively, most of the book focuses on films (Air Hostess, Long Lane, Love Eterne), print publications (Chinese Student Weekly), and organizations (Asia Foundation, Asia Pictures, and, more ambivalently, Shaw Brothers) affiliated or strategically associated with Taiwan and the United States. This, I hasten to add, is more an observation than a criticism; after all, an author has every right to limit the scope of his or her work. Besides, more has arguably been written about Hong Kong’s leftist cinema and print media, and the emphasis of Fu’s book on the other side of the ideological divide serves as a timely complement and enriches the field in important ways.
The literature on the cultural Cold War in Hong Kong, though growing in recent years, is still relatively small and mostly written in the Chinese language. Combining a vigorous conceptual framework and careful archival research, this book offers an informative and illuminating study on this important subject and makes a major contribution to constructing a cultural and popular cinema history of the global Cold War.
Man-Fung Yip
University of Oklahoma