Censorship, Regulations, and the Cinematic Cold War in Hong Kong (1947–1971)

Based primarily on archives from Hong Kong, the United Kingdom, and the United States Information Service (USIS), this article uncovers the trajectory of the Hong Kong film political censorship system from 1947 to 1971 through interrogating interactions between the configuration of a series of regulations and misgivings about and treatments of imported PRC, USIS, and Taiwan films that had political references. I examine colonial political censorship of imported films as a local response to both Chinese politics (the CCP vs. the KMT) and Cold War politics (the PRC vs. the United States-plus-Taiwan, the PRC vs. the United Kingdom-plus-Hong Kong), on the one hand; and as a strategy of cultural governance vis-à-vis the vulnerability of Hong Kong and the control of the internal stability during the 1950s and 1960s, on the other. I argue that the censorship system helped the colonial authorities maintain a degree of cultural autonomy vis-à-vis both UK imperial policy and the cinematic propaganda war between the PRC and the United States-plus-Taiwan in Hong Kong during this turbulent period.