Chinese Connections: Critical Perspectives on Film, Identity, and Diaspora (review)

The discourse on Chinese cinema in recent years has been one of questioning and contesting the identity of the beast, so to speak. With Chinese-language films produced not just in mainland China but in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore, many critics and scholars have expended time and intellectual effort on how to come to terms with this polyvalent face of Chinese film and its reception. Emphasis has fallen on the idea of language as a signifier if not a unifier of Chinese films, as in the 2004 anthology Chinese-Language Film: Historiography, Poetics, Politics, edited by Sheldon Lu and Emilie Yeh Yueh-yu, and in Shih-mei Shu’s Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations across the Pacific, published in 2007. Both volumes make important contributions to assessing the underlying identity of Chinese cinema. This new volume entitled Chinese Connections: Critical Perspectives on Film, Identity, and Diaspora, edited by Tan See Kam, Peter X. Feng, and Gina Marchetti, collects essays from distinguished scholars that examine Chinese film through a triangular prism of global connections, gender identity, and the diaspora to explore further and mark out the character and identity of Chinese cinema. Published in 2009, the book presents various perspectives of Chinese films, showing a multiplicity of approaches in studying Chinese cinema in general. The essays are insightful and well written and they all go a long way in helping the reader to understand the many facets of Chinese cinema. However, the volume may be criticized for being much too engaged with the idea of difference and affirming the Other’s perspective on Chinese cinema, as it were. At its heart, the book lacks a certain sense of direction pointing the reader toward the knowledge of how Chinese-language films may develop as a more entrenched and identifiable entity.

Chinese Connections places Chinese cinema in the context of globalization, which is still largely driven by the West. On the other hand, it seems keenly aware of Chinese cinema’s own rise as an industry in correspondence with China’s dramatic rise as an economic power. While the book is not primarily about the mainland Chinese cinema, it does perhaps betray a subconscious desire to offer divergent perspectives of Chinese-language films against the backdrop of an emergent, powerful China and its integration into the world economy. This can be detected in the book’s many chapters concerning the Hong Kong cinema (indeed, the majority of the chapters are devoted to discussing this very cinema, as I will demonstrate below). One of the strongest impressions that I get from reading these articles is an almost nostalgic, retrospective sense of this particular industry wherein the authors are actually discussing Hong Kong films from a perspective of past (or, more accurately, pre-1997) achievement. It then becomes imperative to note that the volume was published in 2009, twelve years after 1997, and that in these twelve years of the post-1997 era, the stakes concerning Hong Kong cinema have changed. Whereas Hong Kong cinema in the pre-1997 era (particularly in the Golden Age of the 1980s) was seen as the predominant industry producing Chinese films, the mainland film industry now is likely to dominate Chinese-language filmmaking in the coming years if it has not already done so. Chinese cinema as an entity may be increasingly identified as an instrument of Chinese soft power in the foreseeable future as China makes its mark in the geopolitical arena, and Hong Kong cinema has now basically tied its fortunes together with the Chinese industry.

Chinese Connections (the title thus has an ironic implication for Hong Kong cinema) can be seen as making a valuable contribution in exploring the broader connotations and dimensions of Chinese cinema from the angle of an increasingly powerful and overbearing China, not just as a political power but an economic one (and one, moreover, that has already absorbed...