China Perspective Issues

ABSTRACT: Current scholarship shows that the 1960s and 1970s, during the Cold War era, were pivotal to Hong Kong’s development. The Tsim Sha Tsui waterfront, a famous tourist destination since the 1960s at the southern tip of the Kowloon Peninsula, presented an attractive Hong Kong to win global foreign visitors. To examine how Hong Kong culturally encompassed both East and West during the Cold War, this paper examines Star House, a unique liminal space in Tsim Sha Tsui. First, it explores the reasons and methods behind Hong Kong’s adoption of Orientalisation in the 1960s as a publicity and tourism strategy. Second, it analyses how Star House, a shopping centre located next to Ocean Terminal, presented alluring images of China to attract the attention of visitors. Built by the pro-PRC tycoon Henry Fok and later sold to Hongkong Land, Star House was geographically within the “Westerner’s stronghold” and primarily aimed at selling Oriental images of China. I therefore argue that businesspeople in Star House consciously engaged in self-Orientalism, catering to the gaze of Westerners who saw China as the other.

KEYWORDS: authenticity, the Orient, self-Orientalism, Star House, tourism, tourist gaze.

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ABSTRACT: Today, neon signs have mostly disappeared in Hong Kong. Yet, throughout the second half of the twentieth century, Hong Kong’s neon signs were powerful representations of the city’s blended history and multilingual encounters after World War II. In splendid colours and various shapes, neon signs negotiated different cultural streams, promoted cultural diversity, and fostered local identities. From 1949 to 1978, when the borders between the Eastern and Western Blocs were heavily fortified, Hong Kong served as a gateway to China, where significant China–Western convergences took place within the city. Using digital archives to examine the hybridity and fluidity of neon signs in 1960s and 1970s Hong Kong, this article argues that neon signs serve as a platform where diverse cultural trends are combined and reinvented. First, I provide a chronological narrative of neon signs and show how they reflect the sociocultural tensions of Cold War Hong Kong. Second, by contextualising the neon signs against the unique historical period, I explore the interplay of languages, colours, and designs of neon signs that shaped Hong Kong as a liminal space in the bipolar system. I argue that, in linguistic and aesthetic terms, neon signs are symbols of Hong Kong as a Cold War city. Linguistic, aesthetic, and cross-cultural spaces constituted Hong Kong’s translational spaces, which witnessed the city’s gradual evolution from a culturally hybridised city into a cosmopolitan one.

KEYWORDS: Hong Kong, neon signs, Cold War, linguistic/semiotic landscape, translation.

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ABSTRACT: This paper explores the rise of the Wong Fei-hung film franchise, which has produced more than 100 films since 1949, and its role in articulating and mediating modern experiences for audiences in 1950s Hong Kong and the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia and beyond. Utilising rare sources and the theoretical framework of vernacular modernism, the paper situates the franchise within the Cold War context. It highlights how these Cantonese-language films about the heroic deeds of a late-Qing martial artist provided nuanced interpretations of modernism that contrasted with modernist narratives of ideologically driven films produced by pro-CCP and KMT studios in Hong Kong. Set in Guangdong, the hometown of many Overseas Chinese, the Wong Fei-hung films employed cinematic elements that resonated with the rise of mass consumerism and modernism in diasporic Chinese communities during the 1950s. Although early Wong Fei-hung films were viewed as outdated by the 1970s, they expressed a modern sensibility from a vernacular perspective that transcended Cold War ideological binaries.

KEYWORDS: Wong Fei-hung, martial arts cinema, kung fu movies, Cantonese-language films, vernacular modernism, Cold War, global film markets, cultural hybridisation, 1950s Hong Kong.

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