Radio Culture in Cold War Hong Kong

Abstract

Studies of Cold War broadcasting tend to focus on radio as a predominant medium of propaganda. This essay turns the attention to radio’s role in shaping new cultural identities across ethnic and social divisions in Hong Kong during the 1950s and 1960s, a time of mass migration and circulation of people, ideas, technologies, and cultural forms. Radio was the leading conduit of communication and information. The three radio stations – Radio Hong Kong, Radio Rediffusion, and Hong Kong Commercial Radio – produced diverse programmes broadcast in varied dialects and languages. From the communal listening of the 1950s to the introspective listener in the 1960s and its burgeoning city life, the vibrant radio programmes in Hong Kong contributed to its social rehabilitation and forged new cultural identities and sensibilities. The rapid development of radio culture also prompted a new round of innovation in other sectors of the arts and media, such as traditional-style storytelling, the newly migrated shidai qu, radio plays, and film. Dynamic intermedia experiments such as the incorporation of radio into film entail new forms of expression and representation, and explore the interaction of media, technology, and the human sensorium.

• Cold War
• film
• Hong Kong
• intermedia
• listening
• radio culture

Acknowledgements

I am particularly indebted to Andrea Riemenschnitter, Jerome Silbergeld, Jessica Imbach, Shuang Shen, and Zhu Ying for their invaluable expertise and feedback on this project. I also thank anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments. My special thanks to Rutgers University Research Council for the scholar grant, which supported the research undertaken for this project.

Notes

1 See Chow’s (2014) examination of how radio changed storytelling forms.

2 See Andrew F. Jones’s discussion on how Ge Lan (Grace Chang)’s songs featured in MP&GI musicals and joined the emergent transnational media networks of the 1960s (Radano and Olaniyan 2016, 66–94).

3 Yeh (2009) proposed replacing the term “melodrama” with wenyi, as it can “locate an intrinsic and perhaps more illuminating concept than melodrama to explain Chinese-language cinemas”.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Rutgers University Research Council.