Hong Kong Media and Asia's Cold War

Hong Kong Media and Asia's Cold War is the first systematic study of cultural Cold War in Hong Kong. It draws from untapped materials from multiple archives, contemporary sources, and numerous interviews with filmmakers, magazine editors, and student activists. Focusing on the legendary Shaw Brothers Studio, the Asia Foundation-sponsord Asia Pictures, and the widely influential Chinese Students Weekly, it brings to light how Hong Kong became the key battlefield in Asia's cultural Cold War.

Since 1946-1949, with its convenient worldwide transportation and communication networks and huge concentration of emigre intellecuals and film professionals, Hong Kong became a center of fierce competition between Communist China, Nationalist Taiwan, and the United States for the hearts and minds of Chinese diaspora in Souitheast Asia and around the globe. Central to their propaganda and psychological warfares were the Mandarin cinema and emigre-dominated print media. It was no surprise that this period was known as the "golden age" of Mandarin popular culture. The dividing lines among the opposing forces were never clear cut and fraught with ambivalence, in part because of colonial censorship and the complexity pf emigre politics. In the 1970s, coincidented with the normalization of US-China relations, the emergence of a new, local-born generation, who, unlike their parents, saw the British colony as "My City," challenged and reshaped the transnational networks of emigre cultural production into platform for identity construction, contributed to the winding down of the cultural Cold War in Hong Kong.
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