21

Transformations and Tactics

The Production Culture of the Hong Kong Film Industry

Sylvia J. Martin

Across the Pacific Ocean from Hollywood, which is sprawled across Los Angeles, lies another film industry that also boasts a century-long history of commercial films and famous movie stars. That film industry – based in Hong Kong – came to be known, to industry insiders and film scholars, as the “Hollywood of the East,” on account of its high output of films, both for domestic and for overseas audiences, and on account of its profit orientation (Dannen, 1997, p. 1; Fu, 2000, p. 200; Stokes & Hoover, 1999, p. 17). Drawing from anthropological fieldwork, this chapter examines the production culture of the “Hollywood of the East” – the film industry of Hong Kong – after reunification with China, focusing on key characteristics of its decline, its flexibility, and its marginal social status.

Unlike Hollywood, USA, the Hong Kong film industry is not a national film industry. A former colony of Britain, the city-state of Hong Kong is currently a special administrative region (SAR) of China. Following its capture by the British after the Opium Wars between 1839–1860, the colonial government used Hong Kong's harbor to turn the colony into an entrepôt and thus to further British imperial interests in shipping, banking, and trade. Government officials and economists have since declared Hong Kong to be a haven of free-market practices with minimal government interference, even after Hong Kong's return to mainland Chinese sovereignty in 1997.¹ Hence, for the past century the Hong Kong film industry has existed under a laissez-faire capitalism that has helped shape how the film community conducts its work.

The production culture of a media industry consists of the everyday practices and belief systems of media personnel, as its members engage in their work. John Caldwell – himself influenced by interpretive anthropology's analysis of “symbolic processes” within cultures and communities – calls for examining media production cultures as “social communities in their own right” comprised of diverse work practices and competing hierarchies of power (2008, p. 2). The communities of media personnel based in Hong Kong have developed their own work culture; yet, as I will illustrate here, these immediate dynamics are not separable from geopolitical currents such as postcolonial governance and diaspora.² Anthropological studies of other industries have similarly demonstrated ways in which production processes are not disconnected from broader cultural practices (Freeman, 2000; Kondo, 1990; Ong, 1987; Zaloom, 2005). Ruth Mandel's (2002) account of how members of the postsocialist Kazakh television personnel in the 1990s alternately embraced and resisted their BBC consultants' advice as they wrote scripts, developed characters, and designed the set of a Kazakh soap opera is one such example. Set during the transition to a free-market economy, Mandel's study illustrates that production is indeed a negotiation of what is culturally acceptable within the typical storylines for the genre. For media scholars across disciplines, it is important to see broader sociocultural practices, which shape media and can become articulated in the production process, and the ways in which they do so.

Anthropologists have studied the contexts and the culture of film production since the 1940s. In 1946 and 1947, Hortense Powdermaker (1951) conducted an ethnographic study of the socioeconomic relations in Hollywood studios. One of Powdermaker's most valuable contributions was to connect the practices of studio executives with discussions of democracy and totalitarianism that emerged in the aftermath of World War II. More than half a century later, more anthropological analyses of the socioeconomic relations between producers, actors, and crew on sets and in production offices have emerged (Dornfeld, 1998; Ganti, 2004; Martin, 2012; Wilkinson-Weber, 2004). To this canon, anthropologists have reflected on the epistemological and methodological challenges of acquiring access to production executives and to creative elites through the process known as “studying up” (Ginsburg, Abu-Lughod, & Larkin, 2002; Nader, 1972; Ortner, 2009).

During my anthropological fieldwork on the Hong Kong film industry, there were three recurring themes that I encountered – and I came across them in interviews; through participant observation of industry insiders as they worked on film sets and in production offices and shared exchanges at meetings; in trade and government materials; and in public discourse. These themes are integral to understanding production culture in Hong Kong over the past decade. The first discursive theme is decline: the downturn of the Hong Kong film industry, starting in the 1990s, is a challenge with which the film industry and its members still grapple in multiple ways. The second theme is flexibility. Many members of media personnel describe themselves as flexible and engage in flexible worker attitudes and business activities. Yet their narratives show that flexibility is not a neutral quality; it is instead influenced by cultural and ideological discourses about neoliberalism and self-entrepreneurship. The third theme is the socially marginal status of those involved in the film industry. While young people from upper-middle-class families overseas flock to work in the film industry, the industry's socially marginal status – a historical feature in Hong Kong – shapes its production culture, particularly the ways media workers strive to attain respectability. These discursive notions among members of media personnel – decline, flexibility, and marginal status – describe and drive the Hong Kong film industry and its place in the East Asian region of film production. At times, analysis of these three themes requires shifting the scale between the local, the regional, and the global, which entails a multi-sited ethnographic approach to studying relations and formations across complex capitalist world systems (Marcus, 1995; Strathern, 1995). Cross-media analysis is also valuable, since film/TV industries converge at various points; due to limited space, this chapter will focus primarily on the film industry.³

My discussion of media production in Hong Kong is based on 15 months of field-work conducted in Hong Kong over several fieldtrips: June to September 2004; July 2005 to March 2006; and December 2006 to February 2007. I tracked several local interlocutors across the Pacific Rim, observing them at various sites, both in Hollywood and in Hong Kong.⁴ I also interviewed 50 media workers in Hong Kong in structured, semi-structured, and unstructured formats. I conducted participant observation on film/TV sets, observed interior and exterior filming, attended production meetings and film screenings, and assisted in editing English-language scripts. I also engaged in archival research and textual analysis of films and in what Caldwell (2008, p.3, 5) calls “trade artifacts,” such as “behind-the-scenes” footage not intended for the general public.

I turn now to the first key theme that characterizes the post-1997 Hong Kong film industry, that of decline.

Table 21.1 Decline of Hong Kong film production

Year	Films produced
1990	247
1993	188
1999	94
2002	92
2006	51

Source: Hong Kong Trade Development Council, 2005.

Decline

For decades the Hong Kong film industry produced hundreds of films that served not only a local audience, but Chinese diasporic communities. Its highly commercial productivity and its transnational circuit helped the industry earn the title of “Hollywood of the East.” In examining the reasons why the Hong Kong film industry underwent a downturn (see Table 21.1), we must widen our scope so as to encompass the Pacific Rim – specifically, parts of East Asia and California. The reasons for the decline, particularly in production output, emerged in the 1990s. There are four main causes for this decline: the 1997 return of Hong Kong to China and the subsequent loss of talent; the 1997 Asian financial crisis; the increased presence of Hollywood films; and piracy.

The year 1997 was very important for the Hong Kong film industry and its future. The lead-up to the city-state's return to China sparked nervousness among Hong Kong's top talent, especially after the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 in China. The 1997 return resulted in an overseas exodus of Hong Kong film workers seeking jobs, often as members of an elite class of new citizens (Ong, 1999). Many people were uncertain how the new “one country, two systems” form of governance would impact Hong Kong's liberalized economy, its “democratic” colonial government,⁵ and its political and cultural autonomy (Chow, 1998; So, 2004). The year 1997 was also critical in that it marked the Asian financial crisis. Triggered by the collapse of the Thai currency, a crisis spread throughout the Southeast Asian economies, causing film investors throughout the region to retract financing from possibly risky ventures (Curtin, 2007). Decreased investment was accompanied by smaller audiences for Hong Kong films – a phenomenon that added to aggressive Hollywood-film marketing and distribution throughout the 1990s. Finally, the late 1990s saw the intensification of piracy, which hurt the film industry through video cassette disc in particular. While the Hong Kong government subsequently reduced pirate production and distribution in Hong Kong, domestic and Chinese sales of the goods nevertheless hurt the legitimate film industry (Teo, 2008).

When one turns to the response to the film industry's decline, the flexibility of the industry and of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) government features prominently.

Flexibility

Flexibility – already a prominent element of production processes in Hong Kong (Fore, 1994) – has increasingly come to be understood and expressed as a work tactic for overcoming industrial decline. Flexibility here refers to workers' ability to swiftly adapt to changing media landscapes. This includes avoiding political uncertainty or embracing political shifts, such as Hong Kong's trade agreement with China. Whether workers commute across the border for jobs in Beijing or engage in foreign productions in Hong Kong, their adjustments require new languages, dialects, and increasingly itinerant lifestyles. Thus flexibility is not without risk, as it entails sudden geographic moves, ideological transitions, and new business and social practices. Risk-taking, as I will discuss later, is a component of flexibility that is also espoused by the Hong Kong SAR government for its citizen-subjects.

Media workers frequently proclaimed that flexibility is a quality and a mode of work that is crucial to their careers and to the survival of the industry. Flexibility, after all, is not merely an economic behavior; it has become a cultural attitude, an identity, indeed an ethos to be embraced. As is evident in other industries globally, flexible accumulation in industrial production has fragmented labor markets both geographically and within trades (Harvey, 1990). In many parts of the world, the threat of outsourcing and of casualization meant that workers within a labor segment had to “innovate” in order to perform multiple tasks that were previously outside the scope of their labor roles. Additionally, the term flexibility is not without historical and political baggage in the region, given the steady migrations of the Cantonese speaking population between Hong Kong and southern China.

Yet my research subjects almost always use the term with a positive connotation. They embrace geographic mobility and linguistic versatility as key components of what the film industry defines as being flexible. They replicate the entrepreneurial bent for which the Hong Kong film industry has come to be known (Rodriguez, 1999; Stokes & Hoover, 1999). Those who celebrate flexibility often invoke Hong Kong's reputation as a free-trade haven of hard-working entrepreneurs who have embraced the market (Friedman, 2006; Hong Kong Trade Development Council, 2005). These attitudes stem from the British colonial policy of positive non-intervention, which instituted minimal market regulation, low taxation and tariffs, and loose labor laws. During my fieldwork, many members of the Hong Kong film industry attributed the industry's success to the colonial economic policies of laissez-faire – and they did so especially now, when they had to contend with vague and restrictive stipulations imposed by mainland Chinese authorities and ministries. Yet the vaunted flexibility of the film industry and of its members is partly a result of and response to deliberate colonial policies that scourged leftist, anti colonial elements and promoted the interests of right-wing companies that hinged on laissez-faire economics. It should also be noted that the flexibility celebrated by some is partly a result of a colonial administration that did not foster local industrial development (Castells, 2000; Chiu, Ho, & Lui, 1997; England, 1989). Weak labor laws discouraged unionization, a clear division of labor, and consistent regulation of worker safety, impacting media workers negatively (Rodriguez, 1999; Stokes & Hoover, 1999). Workers lack the solid support of industry associations, such as guilds and unions, to provide networking and educational resources as well as professional identity status.

Flexibility is thus a general characteristic of global film labor and production with its own local and regional characteristics. These characteristics can be witnessed at different levels of scale in Hong Kong film production, encompassing a wide array of media workers, government administrators, and business personnel. These flexible characteristics have resulted in a production culture that touts mobility, adaptability, and multitasking labor.

Mobility

“Am working in S'pore for a few days, will call u when back in HK.” This short message service (SMS) message, sent from a Hong Kong actress working in Singapore to my mobile phone in Hong Kong, is a typical example of my communication with Hong Kong media workers. It expresses a geographic mobility in the era of global capital that is constitutive of the flexibility valorized by Hong Kong media personnel. It attests to the increasingly migratory and transborder nature of media production in East Asia, particularly for Hong Kong-based media workers who shuttle throughout Asia – mainland China, Taiwan, Thailand, Japan, South Korea, and Malaysia. A veteran Hong Kong stunt director whom I interviewed commutes regularly between his home in Hong Kong and various productions filming in Beijing. Several members of his stunt team resettled in Beijing, as there was more regular work for them across the border. Local talent must capitalize upon Hong Kong's transnational reputation as one of the savviest locales in East Asia (Davis & Yeh, 2008, p. 97), while utilizing opportunities and contacts elsewhere in order to keep working. Many Hong Kong film workers, from actors to fight choreographers, work on films across the border in China. Thus they navigate the dual, yet interconnected trajectories of local and transborder productions. Electronic hiring halls, such as alivenotdead.com and the Facebook site Hong Kong Performing Artists, allow transnational visibility and shared access to a variety of jobs in East Asia and reflect the increasingly deterritorialized nature of film production in East Asia.

Mobility necessitates that media workers learn or improve their skills in various languages. It also allows them to draw upon far-flung familial ties. For instance, many Hong Kong media workers make efforts to learn Putonghua (Modern Standard Chinese, or Mandarin), since many job offers are in China, Taiwan, or Singapore. My interviews with a Hong Kong film executive were arranged between sessions with her Putonghua tutor, who schools her in business-oriented language as well as in the vernacular. A Hong Kong Chinese actress whom I spent time with lost a feature-film role in Taiwan because the director did not feel that she had a strong enough grasp of spoken Putonghua. For set decorators and fight choreographers who work across the border in China, some knowledge of Putonghua is helpful, if not essential. English is also considered important for media workers, especially producers and directors, who are increasingly turning towards Anglo-Euro-Americans as investors and distributors. To work with overseas companies, treatments, scripts, and budget-line items need to be accessible in English. Even though directors or cinematographers can rely upon translators, some knowledge of English facilitates relations between Hong Kong Chinese media personnel and the English-speaking crew in US-based productions.

Diasporic Chinese communities around the world are also tapped for the optimization of media career trajectories. Such mobility involves what Aihwa Ong refers to as “flexible citizenship,” in which individuals, “through a variety of familial and economic practices, seek to evade, deflect, and take advantage of political and economic conditions in different parts of the world” (1999, p. 113). Family relations strung across Asia and the Pacific Rim can assist Hong Kong-based media personnel in activating its members' careers. For instance, a Hong Kong Chinese woman I met joined her husband in the US nearly 20 years ago, when he emigrated from Hong Kong for work. Over time they both became US citizens, but she returned to become a film worker in Hong Kong. Using her elderly parents in Hong Kong and her college-age daughters in Los Angeles as excuses to travel, the aspiring actress was able to leave her husband for periods of up to six months, accelerating her career on both sides of the Pacific Rim. She managed in the process to utilize her traditionally gendered familial connections and obligations (p. 127) as a flexible springboard in order to launch her own transnational career. National differences and racial dynamics shape mobility beyond the Hong Kong film-production culture. Drawing on the example above, the reception of the actress has been uneven in Hong Kong and in the US. Although her command of spoken English is excellent (she received an anglicized education at an elite school in Hong Kong), her ethnicity and what casters have called her “accent” have limited her opportunities in Hollywood. Thus, while some members of the media personnel have been able to optimize their opportunities by capitalizing on linguistic competencies and on dispersed family relations as well as by acquiring the proper documents for travel (passports and visas), racial discrimination remains entrenched in production cultures. For Hong Kong media workers, this means that there are considerable stakes to produce media in East Asia – and particularly in China, where their Hong Kong identities are constructed in different ways.

Adaptability

In the post-1997 era, film co-productions between mainland China and Hong Kong have become the emerging standard (Curtin, 2010; Pang, 2010), resulting from the Closer Economic Partnership Arrangement (CEPA) (Davis & Yeh, 2008; Pang, 2007; Teo, 2008). A cross-border free-trade agreement between mainland China and Hong Kong, CEPA promised to raise the Hong Kong film industry out of its depression while liberalizing the mainland film industry and popularizing mainland film beyond the scope of socialist propaganda films and art-house fare (Davis & Yeh, 2008, p. 102). Undoubtedly China also sought to galvanize a “Greater China,” in which it would be united with Hong Kong and Taiwan. Hong Kong expected CEPA to boost the Hong Kong film industry by allowing its filmmakers access to mainland investment and to distribution markets that would expand under the quota exemptions for the co-produced films.⁶ While this formal state–industry alliance between the two polities has multiple ramifications for their political economies, workers on both sides of the border have had to adapt to dual production cultures.

CEPA illustrates the complexity of cultural identities and differences that emerge in a regional film-production culture. Talent from Hong Kong, mainland China, and Taiwan play leading roles in films that construct “Greater China.” CEPA has also served as a conduit for the transfer of technical skills and stylistic knowledge from a commercially mature market, such as Hong Kong, to a newly liberalizing one, such as China. This has required some adaptive learning on both sides of the borders.

CEPA is viewed by many Hong Kong film workers as both helping and hampering their filmmaking careers in ways that reveal perceived cultural differences – some of which emanate from differing political economic histories. The profit potential of China's vast market beckons to Hong Kong media workers, who see their commercial experience and glamour as enticing Chinese funding sources and audiences. Many Hong Kong film workers consider building fan bases and social networks in China as a tactic to expand and intensify their career options as production within Hong Kong has dried up. Yet the censorship imposed by Chinese authorities for CEPA projects has been decried by Hong Kong media workers as oppressive and inconvenient. Some Hong Kong filmmakers adjust to mainland censorship by staging mystical stories in the mythical past, for instance, or by producing an alternate and politically appropriate ending of a film for mainland Chinese audiences. Many others, such as the numerous directors, producers, and writers I interviewed, complained of constraints on filmmakers' “freedom of expression” to churn out what has become standard fare.

Hong Kong's film industry must contend with the complexity that mainland China generates, as it “supplies not only money and market but also a new Chinese identity and a new global position” (Pang, 2007, p. 419). Many of these pan-Chinese co productions have been blockbusters, or what is referred to as dapian (literally, “big movies”) – such as the historical – martial arts epics. As Stephen Teo (2008) claims, Hong Kong audiences are not really drawn to the dapian that Hong Kong producers feel they must co-produce in order to keep the industry and their careers afloat. The relief with which many Hong Kong media personnel members first greeted CEPA shifted to reluctant participation by 2007. Many of them expressed the view that Hong Kong's fate is tied to that of the mainland, so the film industry and its personnel must adapt to the environment, or it would risk obsolescence. CEPA represents the latest iteration of the encounters and blurred cultural relations between Hong Kong and mainland China that characterize the production culture.

Multitasking Labor

Like actors in Hollywood, Hong Kong actors must be able to display various skills in multiple venues. Actors, or “artists” as they refer to themselves in English, are expected to act and sing across media platforms that include films, commercials, and TV variety shows and, when necessary, to work as models or disc jockeys (DJs). A variety of media personnel may act, produce, write, direct, and sing in various projects.

The lack of a unionized labor force supports flexible multitasking. Hong Kong features loose and informal guild-like associations for various segments of media labor. As a result, the film industry lacks some of the formal and organized opportunities for professionalization that many of the Hollywood unions and guilds provide. Professionalization happens on the job.⁷ Labor contracts and legal enforcements tend to be less codified, less pervasive, and less formally applied in the Hong Kong film/TV industries than in Hollywood. As a result, salaries for principal actors and creative personnel in Hong Kong are generally much lower than their counter-parts in Hollywood. Hong Kong's film industry also does not rigidly enforce job segmentation and fixed pay scales. It resembles independent film production in Hollywood: it is not uncommon for a crew member to spontaneously play a role on camera, or for an actor to double as a camera operator. What several Hong Kong filmmakers described as “guerilla filmmaking” resembles Hollywood indie filmmaking, or on-location productions, which film with reduced executive scrutiny and make rather fluid filming arrangements and social relations.⁸

While the budgets and resources of Hollywood productions – that is, their financing, marketing, distribution, and international cachet – are desirable for many Hong Kong media personnel, many people I interviewed and observed dismissed Hollywood unions as inflexible, divisive, and counterproductive. Divisions between tasks are not generally upheld as a way to protect job specialization and longevity, as is commonly found in Hollywood union productions (Martin, 2009). Instead, many media personnel members point to the lack of unions in Hong Kong as the reason why they are more flexible and therefore more collaborative than Hollywood workers. When the Hollywood writers' guild went on strike in November 2007, in the middle of the production season, many members of Hong Kong media personnel viewed the act as ludicrous and as a luxury permitted by a bloated system. On the basis of their personal experience of working in Hollywood, or just from industry hearsay, they further complained that union media labor was not in the interest of the film itself, since strikes slowed production and the accruement of quick returns. One of the reasons why so many members of Hong Kong media personnel dismiss Hollywood unions may be that they overlook the fact that such unions provide healthcare: this is a crucial benefit for US media workers, whereas in Hong Kong all residents enjoy universal healthcare.

Filmmaking is generally a more creatively collective and faster paced enterprise in Hong Kong. In some films, people who are formally considered lower in the production hierarchy are welcome to contribute suggestions regarding dialogue or visual imagery in the course of filming. Improvisation is also quite common during filming in Hong Kong. Writers and directors may hurriedly rewrite dialogue and plot details between scenes or during lunch breaks. Action films and other genres that feature live action are also open to changes and modifications on the spot, requiring a collective flexibility in terms of location, personnel and equipment. These fluid work practices are understood as quickening the pace of production. A two-hour feature film may require 40 to 70 shots a day. The “gritty look” that many Hong Kong films are known for is often the result of fewer lights, which require less time, personnel, and money to set up. As a Hong Kong director commented: “In Hong Kong, the crew moves quickly or they won't be hired again.” When I observed a Hong Kong filmmaker directing a feature film in Hollywood, he complained about the slow pace of Hollywood union productions, likening the camera crew's and the grips' relaxed and jovial manner of working to a party atmosphere.⁹ Numerous Hong Kong media personnel – from directors to producers to cinematographers to fight choreographers – echoed his view. Other forms of collective action may occur among sectors outside of specific productions (for instance, an annual dinner for stunt workers) or in casual circumstances on the set of film productions. Members of a film production typically eat meals together on set, most actors preferring to mix with the rest of the crew, and few productions can afford trailers for their stars. To many members of Hong Kong media personnel, this mix indicates the “flexibility” in status and socializing that Hollywood union productions lack. In these kinds of interactions there occur friendly exchanges and information about future jobs and business dealings.

Paradoxically, even though many members of Hong Kong media personnel dismiss Hollywood unions as promoting the interests of the individual over those of the film, they are themselves forced to be entrepreneurial, as local-production work dwindles and openings arise overseas. Stunt workers who received limited formal schooling seek English-language instruction later in life in order to maximize their employment options, extending them to jobs with European and Anglo-American production companies. Online language instruction or language exchange programs in English and Putonghua offer free or cheap ways of increasing these workers' marketability. One Hong Kong producer paid to take a local course with an American agent and Hollywood-film professional, to learn not only how to pitch projects to European and Anglo-American financiers and producers, but also how to do so using English language Hollywood jargon.¹⁰ Multitasking oriented toward acquiring computer skills and using film-production software is also gaining momentum among media personnel such as stunt workers and screenwriters. All of these forms of professionalization are the responsibility of individual media workers and are rarely subsidized or organized by any organization. Thus the mild impatience that some Hong Kong media personnel members harbor toward Hollywood unions may also disguise a small measure of envy for their models of labor organization, support, and cohesion.

Contextualizing Flexibility

It is necessary to read critically the flexible attitudes and practices that are so highly vaunted in Hong Kong's cultural economy as having neither a neutral nor a natural quality through which hard-working people (such as media personnel members) are automatically rewarded. Instead, flexibility signifies a set of practices and attitudes that have fragmented the collective power of media labor against managerial forces, even though these practices also foster an environment of creative collectivity on film sets. The former effect of flexible work practices is well documented in David Harvey's (1990) discussion of postindustrial capitalism in the West. They fit in the scope of the wave of neoliberal policies that helped the wealthiest citizens profit by taking away the social benefits that workers could expect (Harvey, 2005). The latter, however, demonstrates the ways in which Hong Kong's production culture is different from Western production cultures.

For our purposes, it is relevant to point out that the HKSAR government has championed a labor force of workers who have self-enterprising subjectivities – that is, a willingness for risk-taking and attitudes that require flexibility (Ku and Pun, 2004, p. 1; Ong, 2006, p. 173; Rose, 1996, p. 58). As Ku and Pun write, with the uneven integration of Hong Kong and China, the SAR government tries to promote both a global city and a Chinese city.

The “enterprising individual” who espouses the qualities of flexibility described above is thus a product of government policies that make the individual worker absorb uncertainty.

According to Saskia Sassen (2000, 2001), Hong Kong is among the many global cities that espouse neoliberal policies that entail privatizing social services, reducing welfare spending, and decreasing regulation. In other words, the Hong Kong government has shifted its efforts from providing social services and welfare to assisting citizen-subjects to optimize their competitiveness and to become calculative and self enterprising, thus easing the financial responsibility of the state onto its citizens (see Chan, 2004; Ku & Pun, 2004; Ong, 2006). Individuals who try to address uncertainty by taking risks are not guaranteed to be more competitive. Further, workers are largely expected to pay for their own flexibility training. HKSAR's first chief executive, Tung Chee-hwa, iterated the government's push for life-long learning and self-improvement for its residents, while only partially funding such options for improvement (Tung, 2001). While the rhetoric of neoliberalism gives a rationale for empowering all people, neoliberal policies implemented in the 1990s have actually entrenched social divisions by shrinking the middle class and empowering the rich (Ku & Pun, 2004, p. 7).

Thus I contend that the entrepreneurial environment of filmmaking in Hong Kong is not a byproduct of Hong Kong Chinese peoples' “natural” propensity toward hard work and freewheeling business skills, as many colonial, scholarly, and governmental sources have claimed. Rather, the entrepreneurial and “flexible” ethos is actually the result of a nexus of ideological interests deployed to benefit the managerial forces, privatization, and free-market principles of a postcolonial government that buttresses global capital. In other words, “flexibility” represents a careful construction, created by political and economic forces that cleverly articulate cultural notions of “adaptability” (Ku & Pun, 2004, p. 1); members of the Hong Kong media personnel themselves cite many of these forces as “very Chinese,” in what can be perceived as an instance of cultural essentialism.

The ideological influences of colonialism have also left a legacy that contextualizes media personnel's distaste for labor unions as detrimental to the Hong Kong film industry and its entrepreneurialism. Hector Rodriguez (1999) has carefully illustrated that the absence of unionized film labor in Hong Kong resulted from various actions the British colonial authorities exerted on the left-leaning members of the film community over the past century. These efforts included a clampdown on collectivizing film practices such as Marxist study groups, cooperative screenwriting, and educational film contents, which were brought over from the mainland. Over decades, waves of labor strikes in Hong Kong had been sparked by key periods of anti-imperialism in mainland China. During one active phase of anti-colonial and pro-China activities in 1952, leftist Hong-Kong film workers agitated for back payments by striking against a privately owned film company. In response, the British deported over 20 of the film workers on strike, who were suspected of abetting the People's Republic. The British colonial authorities “wanted to promote an apolitical public culture hostile to the formation of oppositional organizations” (ibid., p. 111). They encouraged the growth of“right-wing” private film companies that disregarded trade unions, such as the Association of Cantonese Film Workers, and they established ties with Taiwan's anti-communist Guamindang (Chinese Nationalist Party) (ibid., p. 115). Taiwan's ministries offered funding, film distribution licenses, and tax deductions for Hong Kong films that were anti-mainland China. They also induced the famed Fordist Shaw Bros. and Cathay Studios film producers to sign pledges to cease distributing or exhibiting movies in mainland China: the ensuing period was known as the “Red Movie Ban.” Rodriguez concludes: “Despite their claim to political neutrality, colonial authorities had actually worked to enhance the power of capitalist management” and of private film entrepreneurs (ibid., p. 111). The repercussions of these actions continue to be felt in the production culture today.

Socially Marginal Status of the Film Industry

“My parents and family are not happy that I work in the film industry, that I'm an actress. To them, it's not respectable,” said Tammy, a Hong Kong actress in her fifties who still has to defend, periodically, her decision to pursue a film-acting career – to her parents, her husband, and her children. According to her, for a long time they saw her job, and the industry as a whole, as unsavory. They fear that her sense of responsibility and the performance of her familial duties are weakened by the long schedules that frequently put her in remote locations, making her work late hours – particularly for horror films and thrillers – and mostly in the company of male film personnel. The unease that Tammy's family feels about her participation in the film industry is not an exception. While many young people consider working in the film industry glamorous, some conservative or upper-middle-class families eschew this type of employment and its working conditions for the women in the households. Their fears reflect the marginal status of the film industry, especially among some of the older generation and more conservative members of Hong Kong society.

In this section I explore aspects of the sociocultural character of the Hong Kong film industry that are enmeshed in its discursive themes of decline and flexibility. The characterization of the film industry as lo pin moon still lingers to some degree; this is a Cantonese expression that translates as “mix with slanted-door business” – as opposed to involvement with a “straight-door” business such as law or medicine. In other words, the film industry (like the commercial film industries of Bollywood and Hollywood) is a dubious environment (Ganti, 2004; Horne, 2001). Some members of the media personnel articulated the illicit and socially marginal perception and practices of the film industry as something they want to change, for the overall benefit of the industry as well as for themselves.

After discussing some of the reasons for, and some of the manifestations of, the socially marginal status of the film industry, I will outline ways in which media personnel members have addressed this problem.

One of the reasons for the societal perception of the film industry as lo pin moon is that, in the past several decades, Hong Kong's film industry acquired a history of illicit financing, and even of gangster managerialism (Curtin, 1999, 2010; Stokes & Hoover 1999). Numerous interlocutors in my fieldwork recalled that, in the 1970s and 1980s, gangsters could assist location filmmaking in certain neighborhoods through their social influence over shopowners. They could also rob or harass film crews, sometimes harming or stealing equipment. Seeing the profit potential of film production, some of the more entrepreneurial gangsters then transitioned to financing and managerial activities by offering loans to cash-starved producers during the 1980s and 1990s. The hak seh wui, “black societies” or “triads,” frequently cycled the cash through production, simultaneously laundering the money they had acquired from other illicit activities. Some triads became more involved in financing film projects and eventually set up production companies, becoming creatively as well as financially invested in production (Curtin, 1999, pp. 37–38). The stature of Hong Kong as a legitimate destination for overseas film crews was shaken, which resulted in on-set violence and in a shooting incident that led to protests in the streets.¹¹

Prominent members of the film industry have commented that some members of Hong Kong society do not think the film industry is a respectable trade. A producer remarked to me: “This is a dirty business, with dirty people. You have to be very, very careful.” Another Hong Kong director, Peter Chan, explained to Michael Curtin:

Children from “good families” are expected to become scholars or government officials, not performers. Producer Nansun Shi observed that working in the film industry is “not the sort of business that gets respect from the government or from investors” (p. 75). The reasons for this state of affairs are complex. The Hong Kong government's distance from the film industry may be attributable to Hong Kong's geopolitical status, first as a colony of Great Britain and then as a region of China. Its cinema lacked the potential to become an instrument in nation-building, unlike what happened in other Asian countries, which have backed their national film industries in the past decade (Davis & Yeh, 2008; and cf. Jin in this volume). There are also gender and class dimensions to these perceptions. The work on set may involve physically intimate encounters in the course of undressing and grooming, and these can put women in an uncomfortable position. Working on film sets also requires the public performance of sentiments that may be socially regarded as private.¹² Unlike some traditional Cantonese opera troupes that traveled throughout the region with family members who would perform, contemporary media workers lack the oversight and protection of their kin.

The reactions to film workers from family members are neither simple nor straightforward. Several female interlocutors spoke of the ambivalence that family members, particularly parents, felt towards these women's on-camera work. They disapproved of the women's physical and emotional exposure as a form of spectacle, and yet they took pride in the same women's ability to find work in a competitive industry. Respectability was less of an issue for females who worked in wardrobe or production coordinating. Many of them received training in film or art and were seen by their peers and families as artistic, media-savvy, hip, and – importantly – not part of the spectacle itself. Actresses were, in some ways, the most vulnerable sector of the film industry – the object of the (mostly male) on-set gaze, sometimes subjected to more complicated managerial relations.

Responses to the Industry's Socially Marginal Status

One of the most visible efforts to minimize the lo pin moon association of the film industry has been the professionalization of certain companies through the transparency and standardization of business practices. Instead of the “casual accounting practices” of many small production companies (Curtin, 2007, p. 74), including verbal deal-making and minimal paper trails, some companies have become more corporate by devoting more time to developing and planning production. One such company is Media Asia, a production company with origins in film distribution. Media Asia has been a prominent company for regional co-productions, distribution, and exhibition in China (Davis & Yeh, 2008, pp. 106–107). It has collaborated with Singaporean and Japanese companies, as well as with the “state-run” conglomerate China Film Corp. The company is known for “meticulous calculating [. . .] a rarity in impetuous Hong Kong film culture” (ibid., p. 106). It primed itself for external investment by adhering to the strictures of transparency and standardization found in other corporate structures. Such strictures required complete scripts and “signed formal contracts with personnel, got completion bonds, relied on insurance, marketing campaigns and other legal apparatus to present a professional, polished package” (ibid.). Not only has this kind of standardization and corporate organization helped keep Hong Kong-based production companies competitive in the global market and up to the task of co-producing with Hollywood, it has also granted them greater socioeconomic respectability. Legal and financial disclosures may not make the social and financial relations of production truly “transparent,” but such steps have marked a shift from some of the more secretive practices of family-run and triad-related production companies. More importantly, standardization and transparency in accounting and in script development, together with the rationalization of production labor, cohere more closely with the business practices of the regional offices of Anglo-American and European legal, financial, and accounting firms in Hong Kong, versus the triad-production companies of the 1980s and early 1990s.

There are more dispersed, yet salient ways in which media personnel members have attempted to recast the film industry – and themselves – as more respectable. The growing popularity of evangelical Christianity among media personnel in Hong Kong has become evident in the form of Christian faith-based support groups for media personnel, loosely clustered prayer groups, and membership in Christian groups on social-network sites such as Facebook.¹³ The Christian networking and support for the self-styled “born-again” Christian media personnel provides what some have described as a “moral compass” and a sense of legitimacy in an industry that is still attempting to shake off its history of dubious business practices. At numerous production meetings I attended and in several interviews, media personnel incorporated prayer, born-again testimonials, and biblical quotations and references into conversations about their career aspirations and their production practices. Evangelical practice and protection has been particularly important for female workers who film late at night in rural areas, far from the city. Susan, a “born-again” actress who had appeared in sexually provocative material years before, has been able to reinvent her image and her reputation among film personnel, so that she can more easily maintain a distinction between her on-screen and her off-screen persona. Wearing a necklace with a cross, invoking the name of Jesus in production meetings, and praying aloud before meals shared with other media personnel are among the socially recognizable Christian practices that Susan engages in in order to identify as born-again Christian. Through religious practices of prayer and through participation in faith-based networks, Susan feels spiritually protected by what I consider to be a mantle of Christianity, a protective shield that buffers her while she is filming provocative material. Susan also networks and affiliates herself with similarly Christian film personnel, joining Christian groups on Facebook and seeking occasional film projects that hold a Christian, albeit also a commercial, appeal. A female producer-director whom I observed on set and in production meetings remarked to me that her robust brand of Christianity is what reassures her family members that she is safe working in what they had considered a lo pin moon industry. She describes her Christianity as protecting her from unsavory business practices and unwholesome behaviors, particularly with men. Evangelical Christianity was described by these workers as emphasizing a “take-charge” approach similar to that of the entrepreneurialism propagated by the SAR government, but this time with the aim of producing cultural, not economic, capital. These examples show how sociocultural practices are selectively incorporated into industrial activities and work practices as tactics designed to provide protection in an industry whose personnel faces multiple forms of risk.

Conclusion

This chapter has provided an overview of the production culture of the Hong Kong film industry in order to show how the interrelated themes of decline, flexibility, and marginal social status have constituted definitive elements over the past decade. The decline of the film industry has followed from multiple causes and has generated a productive reflexivity on the part of media workers, who have engaged in flexible practices to revive the industry and their own careers within the East Asian market. These flexible practices include individuals' increased geographic mobility, as well as industrial co-productions. While Hong Kong film productions have for decades been partly filmed or financed from overseas, Hong Kong film after reunification has evolved into a broad enterprise dispersed across East Asia. Lastly, in examining the socially marginal character of the film industry – and various responses to it – we see how media production draws from and reassembles facets of business practice and religion.

Further analysis of media production in non-Western and Western production sites can explicate the conditions in which such powerful cultural forms as film are produced. These conditions eventually form the ways in which the media are received and potentially transform peoples' lives (Appadurai, 1996, pp. 40–41). In examining the production culture of the Hong Kong film industry we see in what instances the cultural and political history of the territory shape and shade the meanings that arise within the social communities of media personnel. An issue such as that of mainland Chinese censorship, which requires new tactics on the part of those Hong Kong media personnel members who exchange a degree of cinematic autonomy for mainland financing, is just one example of how negotiation and discord within the industry are impacted by geopolitics. Indeed, a production culture cannot be separated from the larger cultural practices and social formations in which it occurs.

NOTES

1 A salient feature of Hong Kong's economy was “positive non-interventionism,” a colonial policy pursued by Hong Kong in the 1960s to maintain an open and “free” economy without government intervention (Castells, 2000; Ngo, 1999; So, 2004).

2 These themes of cultural identity have been explored by Hong Kong filmmakers such as Wong Kar Wai, Ann Hui, Johnnie To, Fruit Chan, Stanley Kwan, and Peter Chan.

3 For a thorough treatment of the TV industry in Hong Kong and its relationship to film, see Curtin (2007); Ma (1999); and Keane, Fung, and Moran (2007).

4 Due to institutional review board regulations (IRB) for this project, the confidentiality of all research participants must be maintained.

5 For a postcolonial analysis of this transition, see Rey Chow's critique of the British colonial government's push to introduce and accelerate “democratic” measures through the Hong Kong government only after Hong Kong's return to China was mandated in 1984, as a tactic to contrast favorably the benevolence of British colonial rule and its legacy of “democracy” with the ostensibly oppressive regime of the People's Republic of China (Chow, 1998). As Alvin Y. So explicates, when Hong Kong was a colony of Britain, “[t]he British Parliament directly appointed the Governor of Hong Kong, and British expatriates ran the colonial state. The Hong Kong Chinese had no voting rights and no power to select their own governor. Although the colonial state is often labeled a liberal state, it had many repressive laws to restrict the civil rights of the Hong Kong Chinese, such as a Society Ordinance to control the kind of organization allowed to operate in the colony, and it banned publications that criticized the colonial state” (So, 2004, p. 237).

6 CEPA has been implemented in various phases; currently, under phase III, as long as Hong Kong film and television scripts receive approval from mainland censors, Hong Kong films and television shows are not subject to import quotas and are distributed in mainland China. Hong Kong production companies may own more than 50% of the copyright of films co-produced, and Hong Kong residents comprise more than 50% of the total number of principal personnel in the motion pictures concerned (such as director, screenwriter, leading actor, leading actress, supporting actor, supporting actress, producer, cinematographer, editor, art director, costume designer, action choreographer, and composer of the original film score) (Davis & Yeh, 2008, p. 103).

7 This is beginning to change: in 2009 the Hong Kong Film Development Council stated on its website that one of its goals is to provide educational seminars for its personnel (Hong Kong Film Development Council, 2009).

8 This statement is based on participant observation of Hollywood production practices, conducted over several years at studio lots and on location sites.

9 While interviewing this Hong Kong filmmaker on his Hollywood film set, we observed the grips taking time to stop and joke around as they rigged the dolly track. One of the grips lit up a cigar and smoked it while working. Although it is very common for media workers on production sites all over the world to smoke a cigarette while they work (and especially in Hong Kong), a cigar conveys a tone of luxury, more appropriate to a salon than to a set. The director nodded at the cigar-smoking grip, sighed, and complained quietly to his Hong Kong cinematographer and to me: “It's like they are standing around at a party, so social. Hong Kong crews work much quicker.” His cinematographer nodded his agreement.

10 For example, this producer was taught that, when she is out of work, as can commonly be the case when the film industry takes a downturn, she should say “I am overseeing several projects in various stages of development” – a phrase not likely to be taught in a regular English-language course in Hong Kong.

11 In the late 1990s many of the triads pulled out of film production, partly on account of their mismanagement of funds and lack of filmmaking savvy (Curtin, 1999, p. 37). Some of these groups turned to video compact disc (VCD) piracy.

12 For analogous examples among the Hindi film community and Tamil stage performers, see Ganti (2002) and Seizer (2000).

13 These practices are not to be confused with The Media Evangelism Ltd. of Hong Kong, which is a charitable Christian media organization.

REFERENCES

Appadurai, A. (1996). Modernity at large: Cultural dimensions of globalization. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Caldwell, J. T. (2008). Production culture: Industrial reflexivity and critical practice in film and television. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Castells, M. (2000). The information age: Economy, society and culture. Vol. 1: End of millennium. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.

Chan, S. Y. (1993). The offering to the white tiger in Cantonese opera. Journal of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, 30, 169–179.

Chan, A. K. (2004). The making of the “ideal citizen” in schooling processes: Gender, differences, and inequalities. In A. S. Ku & N. Pun (Eds.), Remaking citizenship in Hong Kong: Community, nation, and the global city (pp. 74–94). London, UK: RoutledgeCurzon.

Chiu, S., Ho, K.C. & Lui, T.-L. (Eds.). (1997). City-states in the global economy. Boulder, CO: Westview.

Chow, R. (1998). King Kong in Hong Kong: Watching the “handover” from the USA. Social Text, 55, 93–108.

Curtin, M. (1999). Industry on fire: The cultural economy of Hong Kong media. Post Script, 19(1), 28–51.

Curtin, M. (2007). Playing to the world's biggest audience: The globalization of Chinese film and TV. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Curtin, M. (2010). In focus: China's Rise. Cinema Journal, 49(3), 117–20.

Dannen, F. (1997). Hong Kong Babylon: An insider's guide to the Hollywood of the East. New York, NY: Hyperion.

Davis, D. & Yeh, E. Y. (2008). East Asian screen industries. London, UK: British Film Institute.

Dornfeld, B. (1998). Producing public television. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

England, J. (1989). Industrial relations and law in Hong Kong. Hong Kong: Oxford University Press.

Fore, S. (1994). Golden harvest films and the Hong Kong movie industry in the realm of globalization. The Velvet Light Trap, 34, 40–58.

Freeman, C. (2000). High tech and high heels in the global economy: Women, work, and pink collar identities in the Caribbean. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Friedman, M. (2006, October 6). Hong Kong wrong. Wall Street Journal. Retrieved August 15, 2009, from http://online.wsj.com

Fu, P. (2000). Between nationalism and colonialism: Mainland émigrés, marginal culture, and Hong Kong cinema 1937–1941. In P. Fu & D. Desser (Eds.), The cinema of Hong Kong: History, arts, identity (pp. 199–226). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Ganti, T. (2000). Casting culture: The social life of Hindi film production in contemporary India. (Unpublished doctoral dissertation.) Department of Anthropology, New York University.

Ganti, T. (2002). “And yet my heart is still Indian”: The Bombay film industry and the (H)indianization of Hollywood. In F. Ginsburg, L. Abu-Lughod, & B. Larkin (Eds.), Media worlds: Anthropology on new terrain (pp. 281–300). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Ganti, T. (2004). Bollywood: A guidebook to popular Hindi cinema. New York, NY: Routledge.

Ginsburg, F., Abu-Lughod, L., & Larkin, B. (2002). Introduction. In F. Ginsburg, L. Abu Lughod, & B. Larkin (Eds.), Media worlds: Anthropology on new terrain (pp. 1–38). Berkeley CA: University of California Press.

Harvey, D. (1990). The condition of postmodernity. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.

Harvey, D. (2005). A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Hong Kong Film Development Council. (2009). Summary of projects financed by “Hong Kong Film Development Fund.” Retrieved March 10, 2010, from http://www.fdc.gov.hk/en/press/press20090630.htm

Hong Kong Trade Development Council. (2005). Hong Kong's media entertainment industry: Prospects and challenges. Hong Kong: Hong Kong Trade Development Council Research Department.

Horne, G. (2001). Class struggle in Hollywood, 1930–1950: Moguls, mobsters, stars, reds, and trade unionists. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.

Keane, M., Fung, A., & Moran, A. (2007). New television, globalization and the East Asian cultural imagination. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.

Kondo, D. (1990). Crafting selves: Power, gender, and discourses of identity in a Japanese workplace. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Ku, A. S., & Pun, N. (2004). Introduction: Remaking citizenship in Hong Kong. In A. S. Ku & N. Pun (Eds.), Remaking citizenship in Hong Kong: Community, nation, and the global city (pp. 1–16). London, UK: RoutledgeCurzon.

Ma, E. K. (1999). Culture, politics, and television in Hong Kong. London, UK: Routledge.

Mandel, R. (2002). A Marshall plan of the mind: The political economy of a Kazakh soap opera. In F. Ginsburg, L. Abu-Lughod, & B. Larkin (Eds.), Media worlds: Anthropology on new terrain (pp. 211–228). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Marcus, G. (1995). Ethnography in/of the world system. The emergence of multi-sited ethnography. Annual Review of Anthropology, 24, 95–117.

Martin, S. J. (2012). Of ghosts and gangsters: Capitalist cultural production and the Hong Kong film industry. Visual Anthropology Review, 281, 32–49.

Nader, L. (1972). Up the anthropologist: Perspectives gained from studying up. In D. Hymes (Ed.), Reinventing anthropology (pp. 284–311). New York, NY: Pantheon Books.

Ngo, T.-K. (1999). Colonialism in Hong Kong revisited. In T.-K. Ngo (Ed.), Hong Kong's history: State and society under colonial rule (pp. 1–12). London, UK: Routledge.

Ong, A. (1987). Spirits of resistance and capitalist discipline: Factory women in Malaysia. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Ong, A. (1999). Flexible citizenship: The cultural logics of transnationality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Ong, A. (2006). Neoliberalism as exception: Mutations in citizenship and sovereignty. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Ortner, S. (2009). Studying sideways: Ethnographic access in Hollywood. In V. Mayer, M. Banks, & J. T. Caldwell (Eds.), Production studies: Cultural studies of media industries (pp. 175–189). New York, NY: Routledge.

Pang, L. (2007). Postcolonial Hong Kong cinema: Utilitarianism and (trans)local. Postcolonial Studies, 10(4), 413–430.

Pang, L. (2010). Hong Kong cinema as a dialect cinema? Cinema Journal, 49(3), 140–143.

Powdermaker, H. (1951). Hollywood the dream factory: An anthropologist looks at the movie makers. Boston, MA: Little, Brown.

Rodriguez, H. (1999). Organizational hegemony in the Hong Kong cinema. Post Script, 19(1), 107–119.

Rose, N. (1996). Governing “advanced” liberal democracies. In A. Barry T. Osborne, & N. Rose (Eds.), Foucault and political reason: Liberalism, neo-liberalism and rationalities of government (pp. 37–64). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Sassen, S. (2000). Cities in a world economy. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press.

Sassen, S. (2001). The global city: New York, London, Tokyo (2nd ed.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Seizer, S. (2000). Roadwork: Offstage with special drama actresses in Tamilnadu, south India. Cultural Anthropology, 15(2), 225–238.

So, A. Y. (2004). Hong Kong's pathways to becoming a global city: A regional analysis. In J. Gugler (Ed.), World cities beyond the West: Globalization, development, and inequality (pp. 212–239). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Stokes, L. O., & Hoover, M. (1999). City on fire: Hong Kong cinema. London, UK: Verso.

Strathern, M. (1995). The relation: Issues in complexity and scale. Prickly Pear Pamphlet No. 6. Cambridge, UK: Prickly Pear Press.

Teo, S. (2008). Promise and perhaps love: Pan-Asian production and the Hong Kong – China interrelationship. Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 9(3), 341–358.

Tung, C. H. (2001, October 10). Building on our strengths, investing in our future. 2001 Policy Address. Retrieved August 15, 2009, from http://www.info.gov.hk/gia/general/200110/10/1010132.htm

Ward, B. E. (1979). Not merely players: Drama, art, and ritual in traditional China. Man, 14(1), 18–39.

Wilkinson-Weber, C. (2004). Behind the seams: Designers and tailors in the Hindi film industry. Visual Anthropology Review, 20(2), 3–21.

Zaloom, C. (2005). The discipline of speculators. In A. Ong & S. J. Collier (Eds.), Global assemblages: Technology, politics, and ethics as anthropological problems (pp. 253–269). Oxford, UK: Blackwell.

FURTHER READING

Bordwell, D. (2000). Planet Hong Kong: Popular cinema and the art of entertainment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Chow, R. (1993). Writing diaspora: Tactics of intervention in contemporary cultural studies. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Leyda, J. (1972). Dianying: An account of films and the film audience in China. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Mackenzie, K. (1842) Narrative of the second campaign in China. London, UK: Richard Bentley.

Ong, A. (2005). Ecologies of expertise: Assembling flows, managing citizenship. In A. Ong & S. J. Collier (Eds.), Global assemblages: Technology, politics, and ethics as anthropological problems (pp. 337–353). Oxford, UK: Blackwell.

Wang, S. (2003). Framing piracy: Globalization and film distribution in Greater China. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Yeh, Y., & Davis, D. W. (2002). Japan Hongscreen: Pan-Asian cinemas and flexible accumulation. Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television, 22(1), 62–82.