Imagined immunities and politics of incorporation : mutating borders and interiors in recent Hong Kong cinema

Abstract

This thesis offers a two-pronged critique of the problematic communal imaginaries within, but also beyond, recent Hong Kong cinema. The year 1979 – which marks the beginning of Deng Xiaoping’s economic reform, and the first discussion on Hong Kong’s collective future between Deng and Murray MacLehose – orients the two proposed trajectories. On the one hand, the thesis offers a critique of the internal fractures and inhibitive logic of the Hong Kong community. Through a re-appraisal of the Trench/MacLehose administration, the fantasies of migration in the 1980s and 90s, and issues of citizenship and belonging, the thesis traces the “imagined immunities” – i.e. acts of inhibition, exclusion and policing – which have shaped the communal imaginary of Hong Kong. On the other hand, the thesis offers a politico-economic critique of the mutating borders along Hong Kong-China. Through a study of the economic flows and asymmetries of power from Deng’s economic opening, the signing of CEPA, to a China enmeshed in the global circuit of capital, the thesis locates the “politics of incorporation” – i.e. the asymmetric flows, collaborations and resistances – that has re-drawn the city’s interior. Ultimately, it is argued that much of the social and communal anxieties of recent Hong Kong can be understood with the concepts of immunity and incorporation.

The thesis adopts a comparative approach and understands cinematic production and the social milieu as coextensive materials of study. In particular, selected realist, fantasy-goengsi and triad films are read as symptomatic texts that process, embody and overwrite the mutating borders and interiors of Hong Kong. Section II of the thesis begins with a reading of Ann Hui’s Bridge (1978) and Allen Fong’s Just Like Weather (1986), and map the films’ critique of a community splintered by vested interests, colonial administration, and a fantasized notion of emigration. The section then shifts to an economic-regional reading with Fruit Chan’s Little Cheung (1999), Durian Durian (2000) and Flora Lau’s Bends (2013). The inter-local realisms of Chan and Lau approximate the increased capital and human flows across the Hong Kong-China border, where economic integration is achieved at the cost of exacerbating political antagonisms.

Section III offers an overarching study of the life and death of the fantasygoengsi sub-genre. By reading Ricky Lau’s Mr. Vampire series alongside the city’s diasporic history of bone repatriation and subsequent border politics, it is argued that the goengsi sub-genre bespeaks a retroactive desire for acts of border policing. The chapter concludes with a reading of Juno Mak’s Rigor Mortis (2013), a post-genre film which critiques the indigenization of Hong Kong’s diasporic and migratory histories. Section IV reads into the spatial-temporal contradictions in Johnnie To’s Drug War (2012). The section offers a comparative reading between To’s depiction of a regional landscape splintered by local, provincial and statist agents with Aihwa Ong’s state-oriented analysis of “zoning technologies”. Ultimately, Drug War is read as a symptomatic text of the concurrent trends of accommodation and marginalization under Hong Kong’s politics of incorporation.