Hong Kong Cinema as Ethnic Borderland

Bodyguards and Assassins is an interesting example of how post-1997 Hong Kong cinema attempts to engage itself in the political history of modern China. Looking back at the history of Hong Kong cinema, this chapter finds that the entertainment industry has a tradition of dramatizing but also alleviating North–South ethnic and cultural conflict in popular genre of comedy. The productions of the dialect films for diasporic Chinese ethnic groups reveals how the borderland characteristics of Hong Kong cinema pluralize the practice of cultural politics and subvert the (linguistic) monopoly of Chinese representation. Hong Kong cinema exceeded the bounds of the nation state and opened up to transnational capital beyond the confines of political borders. The transnational development of Hong Kong cinema may liberate it from the tutelage of state governance and the oppressiveness of nationalist ideology.