Hong Kong Media and Asia’s Cold War

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Friday, April 12, 2024 | 5:30pm to 7pm
 

Hong Kong was a key battlefield in Asia’s cultural cold war. After 1948-1949, an influx of filmmakers, writers, and intellectuals from mainland China transformed British Hong Kong into a hub for mass entertainment and popular publications. Hong Kong Media and Asia’s Cold War discusses how Communist China, Nationalist Taiwan, and the U.S. fought to mobilize Hong Kong cinema and print media to sway ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia and across the world. Central to this propaganda and psychological warfare was the emigre media industry. This period was the “golden age” of Mandarin cinema and popular culture. Throughout the 1967 Riots and the 1970s, the emergence of a new, local-born generation challenged and reshaped the Cold War networks of émigré cultural production, contributing to the gradual decline of Hong Kong’s cultural Cold War. Through untapped archival materials, contemporary sources, and numerous interviews with filmmakers, magazine editors, and student activists, Dr. Po-Shek Fu explores how global conflicts were localized and intertwined with myriad local historical experiences and cultural formation.
 

Author Bio

Po-Shek Fu is a historian of film and popular culture, and Professor Emeritus at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Born in Hong Kong, Dr. Fu received his B.A. from the University of Toronto, spent several years in China at the beginning of the "Reforms and Open Up," before getting his Ph.D. from Stanford University. He has been Fulbright Scholar, Member of the Institute for Advanced Study, and Zijiang Professor of Humanities at East China Normal University. Dr. Fu's publications include Passivity, Resistance, and Collaboration: Intellectual Choices in Occupied Shanghai, 1937-1945 (Stanford University Press, 1997), Between Shanghai and Hong Kong: The Politics of Chinese Cinemas (Stanford University Press, 2003), China Forever: The Shaw Brothers and Diasporic Cinema (University of Illinois Press, 2008), and, most recently, Hong Kong Media and Asia's Cold War (Oxford University Press, 2023).