Imagining the Fractured East Asian Modern: Commonality and Difference in Mass-Cultural Production

It has been said (rightly) that the "opposition of center and periphery goes a long way, since it stretches from the great capitals and world cities to the most miserable, so-called 'undeveloped' regions and countries," and that the "domination of centers . . . guarantees the homogeneous character of space [for i]t exercises control at all . . . points of view over peripheries that are both dominated and broken apart."¹ What happens, though, when areas produced as subordinate and subordinated capitalist spaces start to assert their increasing centrality in the ongoing formation of a world market—and not only produce "things in space"² but also start to be producers of their own space, culturally and economically?

We can see all of the aforementioned in the emergence of a zone called "East Asia" during the two decades of the so-called East Asian Miracle, the 1980s and the 1990s. We are perhaps more familiar with the political and economic agents of the production of that space, but there are cultural agents who have contributed, as well. In this regard, a major cultural development of those decades is the highly intensified cultural innovation in and circulation of the visual arts³ and—even more prominently—mass culture in the 1990s within East or Pacific Asia, here taken to include Southeast Asia. Mass-consumed culture took the form of televisual programs, film, and pop music from Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, and Hong Kong, plus Japanese anime. In toto, these phenomena broadly indicate the increasing economic centrality of a given area.

Using indicative Hong Kong cinema productions, I will argue that the post-1980s East Asia cultural production contributed to a shared vision of a "New" East Asia as a region predicated upon an interconnected capitalist modernization and modern culture, with intense urbanization as a major defining feature of the New East Asia. In general, such cultural productions do not evoke a primordial and exotic Asian-ness, or a pan-Asia drawn from cultural essentialisms formulated during the colonial era. To "spatialize," as the historian H. D. Harootunian has observed, is to side with modernization.⁴ Contemporary East Asia is located inside capitalist modernity and therefore shares the "homogeneous character of space" of the Western metropolitan centers, but the "points of view" that arise are also those of the semiperiphery and reflect their specific histories of the modern. There is an underlying totality here, but one that "unfurls violently," even if at a broad level modernity is "an incessant production of difference as the same."⁵

The presence of difference, though, does not mean that East Asia appears as a decentered, intercultural urban festival. The East Asian Modern that emerges, such as it is, is fractured. The historical and political divisions in the region make the recent cultural productivity, in some respects, unexpected. What can be called intra-Asia cinematic productions evocatively recognize both the shared contemporary desire for a First World East Asia and the historic ideational and militarily enforced formation of a Greater East Asia associated with Japan's past attempts to leave "backward" Asia and modernize—or risk coming under Western colonial domination. The regional contemporary is haunted by modernity's debilitating entry into the region, linked as it was with colonialism and the creation of the first modern Asian nation-state of Japan, which took on the characteristics of the Western nation-states' colonizing modernity.⁶

Specifically, this essay will examine the increased dimensions of a New Asian regional identity since the 1980s through thinking of how Hong Kong cinema at the start of the twenty-first century attempted to rework itself in terms of this fractured modern New Asia. I particularly examine two films indicative of the cultural productiveness at stake. The first is Jingle Ma's Tokyo Raiders (Dongjing Gonglue, 2000), a film consonant with what might be said to be the libidinization of market modernity in the region. The second is auteur director Johnnie To's Fulltime Killer (Quanzhi Shashou, 2001; codirector Wai Ka-fai). Ma's film was one of the most popular in Hong...