Hong Kong/China/Hollywood: Colonial Censorship and the Cultural Politics of Cinema in the Cold War

The global politics of the Cold War and its impact on Hong Kong’s cinematic history have been seriously understudied. After 1949, Hong Kong cinema became a cultural battlefield for ideological combat between the Chinese Communists and the Kuomintang, the American-led “liberal camps” and Soviet-centered Communist blocs on cultural fronts. Realizing the strategic geopolitical position of the colony, the British government did not intend to let Hong Kong become the ‘Berlin of the East’ to engage itself in Cold War politics in Asia. It stealthily introduced and vigorously exercised stringent measures in film censorship to interfere with the production, distribution, and screening of undesirable images for the colony’s Chinese audiences. By nature, censorship has more to do with the will to interpret or misinterpret certain political messages hidden in a work, and henceforth the need to eradicate them through inhibition. Traces of Cold War politics, however, could hardly be detected in mainstream movie culture and daily life largely because of the government’s covert control. Delineating Britain’s clandestine film censorship operation in Hong Kong in 1950s–1970s, this paper probes how Cold War tactics and censorial practice affected the production, circulation, and reception of not only Hong Kong cinema but also Chinese and Hollywood films as long as they were engrossed in the Cold War cultural combat. The paper attempts to explore how censorship affected the aesthetics and identity of individual filmmaking produced under political and market constraints.