Hong Kong Media and Asia’s Cold War by Po-Shek Fu

Hong Kong’s status as a port city has placed it between worlds, in a sense, since the dawn of globalization. It became a British colony in the mid-nineteenth century, thanks to its strategic value following the Opium Wars and an experiment in laissez-faire economic policy from a colonial administration that did not desire to extend democracy to subjects there. Yet, it also served as a refuge for victims of Maoism, and more recently, an experiment in whether the Chinese Communist Party can maintain one open door for the rest of the world even as it exercises the complete political control it insists on.

Amid the influx of mainland refugees escaping communism and the Cowperthwaite administration’s insistence on classical liberal governance, one story that may be overlooked is that Hong Kong has long been an ideological battleground, particularly during the Cold War. Long-time observers know of the 1956 and 1967 riots, which, unlike the 1966 variety, had an element of communist instigation. What we learn from Po-Shek Fu’s book, Hong Kong Media and Asia’s Cold War, is that competition had other, less violent dimensions, as both pro- and anti-communist forces took part in the production of media designed to promote their point of view. And, based on the book’s content, could do so rather openly, despite the presence of film censorship regulations. As Fu notes, British Hong Kong

… was a crossroads in the Cold War where the global, the regional, and the local intersected. It functioned as a nerve center of the contest for hegemony in the region between the Communists, the Nationalists, and the United States. Each took advantage of the colony’s political neutrality, convenient transportation and communication, established media environment, and huge concentration of émigré intellectuals and artists to launch propaganda and psychological warfare that targeted Chinese diasporic communities in Southeast Asia and around the globe.

(p. ix)

Chapter 1, “East Meets West,” notes the colony’s position as a hub of immigration after the Chinese Civil War, as the so-called White Chinese (a play on the “White Russians” who fled after the Russian Revolution) from cosmopolitan Shanghai sought refuge in the colony, along with poor laborers from neighboring Guangdong. As many of the new arrivals had experience with film, and existing censorship sought to tone down ideological content in general, this turned Hong Kong into a “cinematic battleground,” as filmmakers with both communist and anti-communist leanings sought to impart messages on a subtle basis.

In chapter 2, “Third Force in Exile,” revolves around the Chinese Student Weekly (CSW), considered “arguably the most influential youth magazine in the Sinophone world,” which had an ambivalent view of the Cold War conflict across the Taiwan Strait (p. 39). That said, it was at least indirectly funded by the United States, leading to questions about its leanings. This “third force” came about out of earlier U.S.-funded efforts to promote liberalization in Republican China and continued among noncommunists who did not feel welcome in Chiang Kai-shek’s Taiwan and coincided with U.S. efforts to frame the loss of Chiang’s forces as coming despite U.S. support and due to the Chiang government’s incompetence. Hong Kong was therefore useful to such efforts, which would be transmitted to the Chinese diaspora across Asia. The chapter, however, paints the CSW’s ultimate failure as its “aloofness” to contemporary politics of the communities that Chinese émigrés found themselves in, as well as a lack of broad support among Chinese communities (given its position outside the communist and KMT blocs).

Chapter 3, “American Cinematic Intervention,” discusses Asia Pictures, part of a “cultural enterprise” sponsored by the Asia Foundation to “extend US cultural warfare to the struggling Mandarin film business” beginning in the 1950s (p. 81). This came, ironically, after a sharp decline in Hong Kong’s movie industry and a surge in interest from Hollywood films. While Cantonese films had a homegrown advantage in Hong Kong, Mandarin-language films of all ideological origins struggled. Seeing an opportunity, Asia Pictures began, and the Asia Foundation’s support ultimately led to trailblazing in the Hong Kong market that “helped prepare the ground for British Hong Kong to become over the next two decades the regional hub of Chinese-language filmmaking and cultural production, when the Shaw Brothers took center stage” (p. 106).

Chapter 4, “Making ‘China’ in Hong Kong,” concerns those Shaw Brothers, especially cultural entrepreneur Run Run Shaw, who, along with his brother Runme, receives most of the credit for ushering in a “golden age” of Mandarin-language cinema in the 1960s. The chapter complicates this narrative, suggesting that the Shaws’ success had much to do with the Cold War context of the time and the way their films depoliticization fit the moment. Run Run Shaw’s knowledge of Chinese history and culture, but also American-style management and both Western and Japanese film technology, transformed the market, yet despite his determination to cross ideological divides, the book ultimately concludes Shaw’s “unabashed pursuit of money and luxurious lifestyle” ultimately made him a “paragon of ‘free-world’ capitalist excesses” (p. 146).

The book’s epilogue summarizes developments in the territory’s film industry through all the changes since the 1970s—economic modernization, the announcement that China would resume control of the territory, the handover, and (briefly) the suppression of the 2019 protests and post-COVID period. Near its end, the chapter centers on the film Song of Exile, produced by Taiwan’s Central Motion Corp. and released in 1990, involving a worldly and internationally educated Hongkonger journalist whose mother is Japanese but grandparents are traditionally minded residents of Guangzhou. Despite her grandfather’s declarations that China’s “future lies on you,” the author says the film, released in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Uprising, functions as a metaphor for “embittering relations between China and ‘our city’” (p. 173).

Studies of the four Asian tigers (South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore) note that, of all the small “miracle” economies to emerge in the early Cold War, Hong Kong’s economic plan (or lack thereof) set it apart. Rather than imposing a grand industrial policy on the territory as its contemporaries did, the colonial administration chose to take a lighter hand in fostering economic flourishing.

Reading Fu’s book may give readers an appreciation for the light hand the colonial administration displayed elsewhere. Whether due to a language barrier between the British colonial administrators and their Chinese-speaking subjects, or because Cowperthwaite’s spending restraint was inconsistent with a surveillance state, a pro-communist media market emerged, yet ultimately found itself crowded out of the public consciousness due to methods other than censorship. This is all but unthinkable in its contemporaries—South Korea and Taiwan during the same timeframe suppressed all manner of media under the anti-communist pretext. One wonders if the colonial nature of the territory’s administration—the fact that its governance took place at the hands of administrators who did not have to stand for election among Hongkongers—contributed to this less charged response. The eventual triumph of capitalist values under the Shaws could be framed more than one way—an example of how freedom and the invisible hand “work” for pro-capitalists or, for its critics, how capitalism ultimately commodifies everything.

For that reason alone, this book is worth reading for historians of Hong Kong, of Chinese communism and anti-communist movements, and for scholars of the media.