Hong Kong Films

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

199

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200 POSHEK FU

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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BETWEEN NATIONALISM AND COLONIALISM 201

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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202 POSHEK FU

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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BETWEEN NATIONALISM AND COLONIALISM 203

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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204 POSHEK FU

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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BETWEEN NATIONALISM AND COLONIALISM 205

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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206 POSHEK FU

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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BETWEEN NATIONALISM AND COLONIALISM 207

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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208 POSHEK FU

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 …