Article No. 7

Hong Kong Cinema in the Global Market –
The Competitive Advantage of Network Civilizations

Shu Ching Chan
University of Texas

Introduction

The competitive advantage of Hong Kong cinema in the global market I’m proposing is the particular mix of Hong Kong hybrid culture.  Hong Kong culture is at the junction of two major network civilizations, namely the English-speaking culture and Chinese culture.  Such a cultural context helps facilitate Hong Kong cinema to go beyond local market and be accessible to a large population in the world who are profoundly influenced by these two civilizations.  Throughout history Hong Kong movie theaters were rarely dominated by Hollywood features and Hong King cinema has put up a keen competition with big Hollywood features in Asian market.  Furthermore, in the 1990s, its movies, styles, stars and filmmakers were exportable to Western market.  Along with various factors that might explain the success of Hong Kong cinema, I will do cultural explanation and look into the asymmetrical power structure embedded in the cultural text and reception of Hong Kong cinema.  Hong Kong was a British colony for more than one and a half century.  It has adopted English as the official language and various British systems.  But it remains a Chinese society in its everyday cultural practice and Chinese language is still the lingua franca.  At the junction of the Anglosphere and Chopstick culture, Hong Kong culture develops and builds upon cultural legacies of both the British Empire and the Chinese Empire.  English is the most spreading civilization and Chinese is one of the oldest.  At its peak in the 19^th century the British Empire ruled a quarter of the world’s population and left behind its language and social systems in its former colonies.  US, inheriting British’s language and systems, is now the world’s most powerful country and Hollywood features are the most dominant.  At present, the influence of Chinese culture goes beyond Chinese population.  In Asia, we can see its impact range from tangible things such as the use of chopsticks and linguistic root to abstract mores and cultural values informed by philosophies and religions like Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism.  Over a couple of centuries, a large portion of the world’s population are edified by these two empires’ languages and various forms of narrative such as histories, literatures, folktales, myths, legends and media.  The confluence of British and Chinese cultures made Hong Kong cinema comprehensible to audience who are already cultivated to cultural artifacts of these two civilizations.  The case of Hong Kong cinema demonstrates that even without Hollywood’s material power, it is possible to carve out a space for oneself with one’s cultural leverage.  Global localization, Glocalization, is to have the global practice adapted to local condition.  Hong Kong cinema’s unique local advantage in the global market is its unique mix of culture.  Hong Kong cinema alone is not able to challenge Hollywood’s hegemonic position.  But with more transnational cinemas available, we don’t have to see the other ethnic images via Hollywood deflection.

Integrative Approach

Neither political economy approach nor cultural studies approach can adequately explain the competitive edge of Hong Kong cinema.  Proponents of Cultural Imperialism theory, usually using political economy approach which privileges the production process, attribute the prowess of Hollywood in the world market to US’s material power.  The cultural homogenization thesis infers cultural consequence directly from structural domination and assumes the audience to be passive receptors.  This approach often overlooks the complexity of cultural dimension of globalization. Hong Kong cinema does not have the political might and economic clout like Hollywood, but its system is no less commercial.  Hong Kong was a colony and still does not have sovereignty of its own.  The colonial government cultural policy was laissez-faire.  There was neither a strong lobbying organization like Hollywood’s MPPA to flex its muscle in international trade bargain, nor a powerful government directly supporting and indirectly facilitating its media industry.  Globalization is a multifaceted phenomenon.  Film industry is a culture industry in which cultural factors matter and complicate matter.  In reconsidering globalization, we have to look beyond the material dimension and study globalization at grass root level that works from the bottom up as oppose to the trickle-down approach by mighty transnational corporation and powerful state government in penetrating or protecting national culture.  As a transnational cinema, the size of Hong Kong film is amazingly small.  Hong Kong cinema hardly operate on a global scale equal to Hollywood in terms of box office return or size and scope of its theatrical releases.  For example, in 1995 Hong Kong cinema earned about 130 million USD.  American film grosses over 5 billion aboard (Bordwell).  Hong Kong’s media firms do not compare to the multinational conglomerates.  Golden Harvest, a major in Hong Kong film industry, is not among the world’s top fifty media companies.  Each year about 5,200 people are directly or indirectly recruited.  The number of active members of the industry throughout the 1990s was estimated to be around 1,000.  The budget for marketing and publicity was seldom over 10% of the production cost.  The average production budget rarely went over a few million dollars.  All this is miniscule by Hollywood standard.  Material prowess per se cannot explain Hong Kong cinema’s strength. 

On the other extreme, cultural populists, privileging the cultural text and reception end, are too soon to celebrate the audience active reading and resistance.  They overlook the structural constraint which sets the parameter for the production of cultural artifacts.  The system of Hong Kong cinema is very commercial and heavily dependent on overseas market.  There was no government support or independent funding source.  As a commercial film system like Hollywood, genre and star system are the two most developed aspects.  In the 1990s, the two major genres of Hong Kong cinema were action and comedy.  Genre films and stars system are essential part of their filmmaking for box office hit directors like Wong Jing and Tsui Hark.  Even an international art film director like Wong Kar-wai has to rely on bankable stars for financing and marketing.  The system circumscribed the producers’ options.  The distribution and marketing practice further restrict the consumer choice.  What is made available in the reception end is very limited despite the look of abundance in a capitalist market. 

Simple logic of ethnic affinity, linguistic network or regional economic integration cannot explain either.  The target markets of Hong Kong cinema constantly shift regardless of the consumer’s will and common characteristic.  In the 1930s when the talkies started, the target markets of Hong Kong cinema were overseas Diaspora communities migrated from Southern China who were mostly Cantonese and dialect speaking.  In the 1960s’ studio era, Hong Kong cinema was Mandarin speaking and the target audience was ethnic Chinese group.  The rise to stardom of the American-born Bruce Lee catapulted Hong Kong cinema into the international market, reaching over 90 countries, going beyond racial and linguistic connection.  The 1990s saw the target markets and source of financing shifted to East Asia, including territories like Taiwan, South Korea and Japan.  Market researches that categorize audience mechanically by quantifiable demographic features such as ethnicity, language, age, income range etc cannot predict movie trend or mark out market segments precisely.  This is especially so when filmmaker actively exploring an uncharted market.  For example, quantitative approach cannot explain why Hong Kong movies could sell in Africa, an area whose ethnic, linguistic and economic connection with Hong Kong is so remote.  To better understand Hong Kong cinema a more integrative approach is needed.  This approach should neither exaggerate the determinant role of material power nor overstate the power of consumer’s sovereignty.  I’ll do a culturalist explanation.  But I’ll also address the issue of asymmetrical power structure. 

Hybrid Culture and Narrative Transparency

Scott Robert Olson (199?) puts forth a culturalist explanation for Hollywood’s global power.  His theory of narrative transparency borrows from Porter’s method in international trade to evaluate American competitive advantage in the film and television industry.  Porter observed that certain societies are better at producing certain products.  Olson reasons that America is capable of producing exportable media because of the connection between American media’s store of textual formulae and the diversified nature of American culture.  American domestic audiences are diversified and thus the products catered for them can also be exported to diversified foreign audiences.   Olson’s definition of transparent is “diaphanous, luminous and lucid, penetrating and clear, both in its literal sense of enabling something to be seen through and its figurative sense of the understandable manifestation of meaning.”(Olson, p.18)  Since the American domestic audience is diversified, American media catering to them is intrinsically polysemic.  The audience reads personal meanings into the text and transforms the texts into something indigenous.  “Transparency is the capability of certain texts to seem familiar regardless of their origin, to seem a part of one’s own culture, even though they have been crafted elsewhere.” (Olson, p.18)  Inferring from Olson’s argument, the transparent narrative is merely an impartial device. “…Although those images are American, they are not shaping recipients into Americans.  They are merely the icons of more complex hybridization.”(Olson p.168)

However, Olson’s theory cannot be transferred and applied to explain why Hong Kong cinema is exportable beyond its homogenous ethnic and linguistic community. America’s unique advantage should be the other’s disadvantage.  In Hong Kong, the total population is only around 6 million. 98% of the population is Chinese and 95% is Cantonese speaking.  It is much less diversified than most of its neighboring Asian countries.  Yet, Hong Kong cinema was one of the most dominant among Asian cinemas.  If one notes the frequent use of the word “familiarity” throughout Olson’s book, one might suspect that what Olson passes for transparency is in fact a function of conventional rules.  Transparency is in fact a function of the audience’s familiarity with those rules.  A text does not have meaning until it is read by an audience.  Transparency is not inherent in the text until it is comprehended by an audience over times.  Besides, however diversified American population (the reception end) is, one cannot deny that Hollywood studios (the production end) are still Anglo-European dominant.  What I am proposing here is to modify Olson’s culturalist theory and acknowledge the embedded asymmetrical power structure.  In the case of Hong Kong cinema a diversified domestic audience is neither a necessary nor a sufficient factor for films to be exportable.  Narrative transparency is a function of the constant interaction between the text and audience, domestic as well as overseas.  Over the years Hong Kong cinema’s audience is acculturated with certain narrative forms.  The civilizations which the Hong Kong cinema narrative forms derive mostly from are the Anglosphere and Chopstick cultures.    

Like many major Asian cities, Hong Kong is an East meets West society.  But the East refers specifically to Chinese and the West to English-speaking culture.

Anglosphere is “the set of English-speaking, Common Law nations, implies far more than merely the sum of all persons who employ English as a first or second language.  To be part of the Anglosphere requires adherence to the fundamental customs and values that form the core of English-speaking cultures.  These include individualism, rule of law, honoring contracts and convenants, and the elevation of freedom to the first rank of political and cultural values.”(   ) In the 19^th century, the British Empire was the largest empire ever known, governing roughly a quarter of the world’s population.  And now, US, inheriting British’s language and systems, is the superpower in the world.  Hollywood features are most dominant in English-speaking countries like Britain, Canada and Australia.  Hong Kong was British’s colony for 156 years and as late as 1997.  Various systems in Hong Kong such as the legal, education, economic, transportation, mailing and communication systems are modeled after the British.  The official language was English.  Over the years Hong Kong’s cultural values have been influenced and molded by these systems of the historical English-speaking civilization.  In addition to that is the impact of external forces such as constant massive migration to and returning from as well as overseas education in English-speaking countries (Skeldon, 1994).  In the 1960s studio directors of the 1960s were fed with massive Hollywood and foreign movies.  There was no import restriction in Hong Kong as in other Asian countries then.

Directors of Hong Kong New Wave in the late 1970s like Tsui Hark, Ann Hui, Allen Fong and Yim Ho were trained in film schools in US and Britain.  A director like Tsui Hark was from Vietnam, moved to Hong Kong, educated in US film school and worked there, then moved back to Hong Kong.  He’s among one of those invited to work in Hollywood.   His movies are popular in Asia and accessible in the West.  In his filmmaking process, he would add “redundant” lines and dialogue to make sure that Western audience who didn’t get the message from non-verbal cultural specific gesture or the Chinese dialogue can still catch it in the bilingual subtitles (Chan, 2002).  This anecdote illustrates that it’s from the production end that the directors have the cultural capital and sensibility to make the movies accessible to foreign target audience.  

Nevertheless, Hong Kong cinema does not appeal to foreign audience at the expense of local audience.  Hong Kong cinema remains popular among Chinese and Asian.  And despite Hong Kong’s petit size (total area is only 1,062 sq. km, not even a dot on a world map) and more than a century of British colonization, Hong Kong remains a Chinese society.  Hong Kong was described by the British as a barren rock and annexed simply as a convenient treaty port and outpost in the Far East.  Due to various historical contingencies, there was no wholesale cultural policy to transform Hong Kong society.  This is especially so after the 1967 riots which was instigated by the Leftist against the colonial government.  British Hong Kong government was cautious not to provoke anti-colonial government sentiment in this small city which is only next to its motherland and was scheduled to return.  British’s live and let live approach in Hong Kong from 1967 to 1997 was so “softy” that Robert E. Mitchell(1998) coins it “Velvet Colonialism.”  The principle of cultural policy was laissez-faire.  There was generally no proactive policy by Hong Kong government as in other neighboring national cinemas such as China and Taiwan.  English was commonly used in official settings like school, business and legal institution.  But Cantonese/Chinese is the lingua franca in popular culture.  Insertion of English words in Chinese sentence is common in daily language and media.  Hong Kong filmmakers refer to the culture of the Asian target markets as “chopstick culture”, cultural legacy of the Chinese Empire.  Peter Chan, one of the founders of the pan-Asian production company Applause, stated that he was targeting Asian cities because these are the places influenced by Chinese culture and at the same time the people are already accustomed to Hollywood narrative (Chan, 2000).  Peter Chan himself is an overseas Chinese growing up in Hong Kong and Thailand and went to film school in US.  His father is a Cantonese cinema director.  Peter Chan was the only non-action cinema director invited to work in Hollywood.  He is at least fluent in Chinese, Thai and English.

Chinese and English are the two most dominant languages in the world.  According to National Geographic Society’s statistics (1999) 60.8% of the world population is in Asia.  In the chart it shows that while there is a shrinking number of languages in the world, a handful of “official languages” dominate large area of the world: 

In statistic, Hong Kong is a modern city like those in the West.  In his research Chan, Kwok Leung (1989) describes Hong Kong’s transformation.  “Within a short span of two or three decades the Hong Kong population has changed from a primarily pre-modern population to a characteristically modern one.  The transition has been so thorough that by the 1980s Hong Kong has become almost indistinguishable from the developed countries in demographic features.”(Chan, 1989, p.13)  On Hong Kong screen Hong Kong society is urbanized like Western countries with Western legal system, consumer culture, low fertility rate, nuclear family, high per capita income, high education level etc.  Yet the cultural values such as moral and family relationship remains Chinese.  The narrative form and social structure may be Western or hybridized, but the content, the issues and concerns are local/regional.  One of the longest sequels in the 1990s is Tsui Hark’s Once Upon A Time In China.  It has 5 film sequels and multiple TV series.  The core and recurrent issue of the series is about modernization of China in the last century.  The leading characters are an ensemble cast living together like a modified Chinese extended family.  In every episode the narrative structure is close to Hollywood classic narrative with one mission plot and a romance plot.  This series is popular in Asia and accessible in Western market.  John Woo, despite his lack of overseas education like other Hong Kong New Wave directors, has successfully cross over to Hollywood.  He admitted that he was heavily influenced by Hollywood action films and his mentor Chang Cheh who is a big fan of Hollywood western.  The confluence of the two cultures made Hong Kong cinema accessible to many people.

Autonomous Culture

The confluence of two major network civilizations in Hong Kong was not engineered by a prescient government.  Many of Hong Kong’s neighboring Asian countries went through multiple invasion, colonization and marginalization.  In the name of de-colonization, nationalization and liberation, one regime replaced another and imposed strict and debilitative cultural and media policy.  As a result, people were denied the freedom to work out in popular media their common concerns and anxiety over colonial past or current alien cultural influence.  Despite its status as a colony, Hong Kong managed to carve out a space for itself.  Since its inception, Hong Kong film industry witnessed KMT’s nationalization, British colonization, Japanese occupation and Americanization of the Pacific region in the post-war containment policy.

 However, due to various historical contingencies, Hong Kong film industry was left untouched.  Hong Kong filmmakers were free to make commercial films without ideological guidance from above.  In the 1920s, KMT enforced the “language unification movement” and established Mandarin as the national language.  Dialect was banned in textbook and as language of instruction in school.  When talkies were introduced in China, production of dialect films was not allowed.  But Hong Kong film industry was free to continue to make dialect films since Hong Kong was already a British colony not under China’s jurisdiction.  As mentioned before, the British Hong Kong government left Hong Kong film industry alone and had no proactive cultural policy.  During Japanese invasion in Hong Kong in the 1940s, Hong Kong filmmakers simply fled and totally shut down the film industry.  In China and Taiwan, the film industries were centralized by the Japanese and the filmmakers were recruited to make propaganda films.  In the post war year certain filmmakers were accused of collaboration.  Hong Kong cinema benefited from the migration of capital and Shanghai filmmakers and revived quickly.  While the film industries in China and Taiwan went through decolonization and nationalization, Hong Kong film industry was the only place in the world free to make Chinese entertainment films.  Despite of US prominent influence in the Pacific region to contain Communist China especially in the Cold War period, Hong Kong was not on the radar of American foreign policy until as late as 1992 (Committee on Foreign Relations US Senate, 1992).  In neighboring countries like Taiwan, Japan and South Korea, American foreign policy played a major role in influencing their media policy.  In Hong Kong there was no import restriction or state guidance in film production.

The greatest advantage of Hong Kong film industry was Hong Kong’s freedom of speech.  Freedom of speech is one of the essential foundations for a vibrant film industry, but the competitive advantage of Hong Kong film industry is still its jumbo of Anglo and Chinese cultures and social systems.

Conclusion

It is the meeting point of two major network civilizations, the English and the Chinese, that facilitates Hong Kong cinema to be accessible to a large number of audiences in the world.  The implication of the case of Hong Kong film industry is it is possible to carve out a space for oneself even without the material power like Hollywood.  As big Hollywood features continue to dominate the box office around the world, we need to find a viable way to deal with the asymmetrical power structure.  We don’t have to westernize ourselves and blindly imitate Hollywood.  In a city like Hong Kong, we cannot count on a colonial government to protect and promote local culture.  Without Hollywood’s material power, this can only make us an inferior and defective imitator.  Nor do we have to de-westernize ourselves, putting ourselves into a passive and narrow position trying to be whatever Hollywood is not while Hollywood has been free to appropriate and nourish from foreign cultures and revitalize itself.  The cultural dimension of globalization is much more complex than the one-way homogenization that cultural imperial theory assumes.  More attention should be paid to the grass-root aspect of this process especially in popular culture where people do have agency, albeit not an unlimited one.  No film industry can flourish without the support of a free and open society.  To provide a material base to support a culture, we need to translate one’s cultural capital into a material one.  To sustain a film industry we need an autonomous system that can run by itself.  The system of Hong Kong cinema is one that balances various political, economic and cultural forces and operates without government provision.  The prosperity of Hong Kong film industry has its roots in the conjunction of global cultural fusion and the freedom necessary for it to figure out its unique competitive advantage and grow.

This paper is only a theoretical exploration.  There is no extensive content/textual analysis to illustrate the narrative pattern of Hong Kong cinema in a particular time period.  A research scale like that of Bordwell, Thompson and Staiger (1985) in their book The classical Hollywood cinema – film style and mode of production to 1960 would be ideal to proof the consistence or evolution of narrative style.  By casual observation we can obviously see the influence of Hollywood narrative when we compare contemporary Hong Kong movies with older Hong Kong movies targeting only Chinese community.  For Hong Kong movies that are not widely exported to Western market, the logic of the plot often requires more than suspension of disbelief for Westerner audience who are not familiar with Chinese narrative convention.  For example, in Wong Jing’s God of Gamblers(1989), top one box office hit of that year, the male lead (played by Chow Yun Fat) suffers from amnesia.  But in the story he is depicted as retarded and regress to childish behavior.  One man’s narrative conventin is another man’s absurdity.  In Jackie Chan’s early movies, romance plot is obviously absent.  The convention of realism and plot logic of older Hong Kong movies are further away from that of classical Hollywood narrative.  It will be interesting to systematically study how the narrative pattern of Hong Kong cinema evolves at different decades as the target markets shift.  What was once popular movie and its narrative supposed to be transparent becomes opaque to later generation.  Hong Kong culture is situated at the junction of two major network civilizations which facilitates Hong Kong cinema to be accessible to a large number of people in the world.  It happens in the era of global fusion when English and Chinese languages and civilizations are the most dominant and Hong Kong cinema is free to explore its unique competitive advantage.

Bibliography

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