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7 - The “New” East Asia and Hong Kong Cinema
- Hong Kong University Press, HKU
- Chapter
- Additional Information
A notable cultural development during the 1980s and the 1990s, the decades of the so-called “East Asian Miracle”, has been the increased cultural production, innovation and circulation of both high culture and mass culture within East Asia. Mass culture includes films from Hong Kong, China, South Korea and Japan, and more recently transnational co-productions, as well as pop music from Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and Hong Kong. The historic political divisions in the region that led to the Greater East Asian War — or the Pacific War, although the former term is more revealing of the stakes in the conflict — make this dynamic regional cultural productivity somewhat unexpected. I will argue that post-1980s intra-Asia cultural production does not represent a common “culturalist condition”: there is often no assertion of (state-supported) “Asian values”, no superlatively exotic way of life and no idea of a pan-Asia taken as a unified or organic cultural category that draws upon “culturalisms, statisms, and theories of civilization” (Wang, 2007, p. 14). It can be argued that the “New” East Asia that has emerged is predicated upon an increased sense of a shared capitalist modernization and modern culture, manifested primarily through rapid urbanization prompted by a desire to foster premier world cities as assets in capitalist development, rather than upon essentialized and regionwide primordial values. Tokyo, Hong Kong, Seoul, Taipei and Singapore stand out in a network of aspiring modern Asian metropoles,1 now joined by Shanghai 7 The “New” East Asia and Hong Kong Cinema C. J. W.-L. Wee* * Thanks go to the following for their responses to the chapter: Petrus Liu, Brett de Bary, Elizabeth Helsinger, Joan Kee, Takahashi Yuichiro, Uchino Tadashi, Stephen Teo and Charles Kronengold. This chapter was completed during a 2007–08 Visiting Fellowship at the Society for the Humanities, Cornell University. ch07(113-130).indd 113 25/05/2010 3:02 PM 114 C. J. W.-L. Wee and Beijing. In other words, one common vision of the New EastAsia is an urbanmodern one. However, East Asia is not a decentred urban intercultural festival without hegemonic struggles or centres: there are divisive and competitive national and cultural differences, with historical resonances. The East Asian Modern that emerges, such as it is, is fractured, and any triumphalism needs to be interrogated for the (often not even) hidden dissensions within it. While regional cultural production does not compete at a global level as an effective counter-balance to American mass culture products, it does in toto offer the essentially cultural productivity required for economic development to continue to expand by producing a shared vision of everyday urban life — even as the tensions in the region are showcased in it.2 Specifically, this chapter will examine the increased dimensions of a New Asian regional identity since the 1980s by considering how Hong Kong cinema in the early twenty-first century has reworked itself in terms of this fractured NewAsia, as part of the ongoing creation of an intra-Asia mass culture. That is to say, Hong Kong and Hong Kong culture participate in the larger movements of modernity in the region. I will examine two films indicative of the particular cultural productiveness at stake: Jingle Ma’s Tokyo Raiders (Dongjing Gonglüe /《東京攻略》[2000]) — a Hong Kong film set almost entirely in a glossy Tokyo consonant with what might be said to be the libidinization of market modernity in the region — and Johnnie To’s Fulltime Killer (Quanzhi Shashou /《全職殺手》[2001], co-director Wai Ka-fai). Ma’s film was one of the most popular in Hong Kong in 2000, and is distinct both in being a Hong Kong film set mainly in Japan and having extensive Japanese dialogue. To’s even more multilingual film unavoidably becomes an allegory of the East Asian core states competing: two professional killers from Japan and China struggle to determine who will be recognized as the region’s best. These two films evocatively recognize both the shared contemporary desire for a First World East Asia and the historic ideational and militarily enforced formations of a Greater East Asia associated with Japan’s historic and disastrous attempts to leave Asia, as it were, with its “backwards nature”, and modernize — or risk coming under full Western colonial domination. The current versions of the “new” are haunted by the spectre of an earlier version of the new: the tense history of modernity’s debilitating “entry” into the region, intimately linked with colonialism and the first modern Asian...