What a Desirable Woman Is Like: Hsia Moon and the Cultural Agenda of Leftist Film Companies in Hong Kong, 1951–1966

Abstract

Hsia Moon (Xia Meng) was a famous leftist film star in postwar Hong Kong, whose social persona was tailored for specific cultural purposes under the prevailing star system. Her early cinematic roles generally portrayed exemplars of women’s empowerment, as derived from the programmatic ideas of the New Culture Movement in the early decades of the twentieth century. But from 1958 onward, Hsia Moon’s characters began to transform in a more traditional and family-oriented direction. In her film Garden of Repose (1964), for example, the female protagonist voluntarily retreats into the family space, offering a quite different answer to the question of women’s liberation. While this story, one among many, threatened to undermine Chinese women’s painstaking struggle for individual freedom that had been in train for many decades, Hsia Moon’s well-maintained social persona justified the harmonious landscape of family life and conjugal relations, redefining women’s family-oriented position as a kind of “Chineseness.” This Chineseness was not limited to the artistic level. Rather, it was a sociocultural representation of leftist filmmakers’ nostalgic memory of their distant homeland, that is, Mainland China itself. And at another level, Chineseness also embodied the Chinese Communist Party’s desire to maintain cultural ties with British-controlled Hong Kong through the political metaphor of a “big family,” which in China’s prescribed hierarchical order alluded to the state. In this sense, Hsia Moon and her characters provided an alternative option to women’s empowerment within the master narrative of the nation-state and the cinematic star system helped shape that narrative.

Keywords:

• Feng Huang (Phoenix) Motion Picture Co.
• Garden of Repose
• Great Wall Movie Enterprises
• Hong Kong
• Hsia Moon
• star system

Notes

1 After the defeat of Japan in the Second-Sino Japanese War/Pacific War in 1945, the Chinese Civil War broke out. In 1949, the CCP finally triumphed over the KMT and founded the PRC in the mainland, while the latter fled to and ruled Taiwan. Then governed by Britain, Hong Kong became a terrain of cultural contestation between the CCP and the KMT (behind which was the United States). The leftist film companies in Hong Kong were led by the CCP. They stressed an educational function and socialist values in their productions in order to compete for audiences that were reckoned to be under the “cultural infiltration” of the KMT and the United States. The anti-communist forces in Hong Kong cinema included the Hong Kong-Kowloon Film Freedom Association (Gangjiu dianying congye renyuan ziyou zong hui), the Free Asia Association (Ziyou Yazhou xiehui), and the Ford Foundation (Zhang Yan, Zai jiafeng zhong 31–33).

2 Current scholarship on Hsia Moon is relatively fragmented, mainly in the form of biographies such as Yang Ziyu’s Dreaming Back to the Midsummer (Menghui zhongxia, 2015) and Bai Zhihan’s Audrey Hepburn of the East (Dongfang de Heben, 2017). Sha Dan’s Taste of the Screen (Mu wei, 2016), while not a work specifically devoted to Hsia Moon, also presents some material. More broadly, Ian C. Jarvie published an early study, Window on Hong Kong: A Sociological Study of the Hong Kong Film Industry and Its Audience (1977). Poshek Fu also furnishes a comparative perspective in Between Shanghai and Hong Kong (2003). Zhang Yan’s Surviving in the Gap (Zai jiafeng zhong qiu shengchun), originally a PhD dissertation produced as a book in 2010, profiles three major leftist film companies in Hong Kong. Paul Fonoroff’s Silver Light: A Pictorial History of Hong Kong Cinema 1920–1970 (1997) and Zhongguo dianying tushi bianji weiyuanhui’s Chinese Film: An Illustrated History (Zhongguo dianying tushi, 2007) also contain useful resources. However, existing scholarship focuses on companies, patrons, filmmakers, directors, and audiences, and none specifically examines the role of actresses in the star system and their power in the process of cultural (re)construction.

3 A river in Shaoxing, Zhejiang province, also known as Pingshui River (Pingshui jiang).

4 The New Culture Movement was launched in 1915 by intellectuals such as Chen Duxiu (1879–1942), Lu Xun (pseudonym of Zhou Shuren, 1881–1936), Zhou Zuoren (1885–1967), and Hu Shi (1891–1962). Under the two banners of “democracy” and “science,” they exerted their efforts to reconstruct modern culture through the enlightenment of the Chinese people.

5 The original name was Youth Magazine (Qingnian zazhi); the name New Youth (Xin qingnian) was used from the second volume onwards.

6 His original name was He Zhangping, an early participant in the CCP, famous journalist and author. Others deported leftist filmmakers included Liu Qiong, Shu Shi, Qi Wenshao, Yang Hua, Ma Guoliang, Shen Ji, Di Fan, Bai Chen, and Jiang Wei (Zhang Yan 63).

7 This was commonly referred to as the New Great Wall, which distinguished it from its predecessor, the Old Great Wall, founded by Zhang Shankun (1905–1957) in 1949.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jing Zhao

Jing Zhao is an associate professor at University of International Business and Economics, China. Her research interests include cultural studies and modern and contemporary Chinese literature. Her articles can be seen in journals such as Social Sciences of Beijing and Modern Chinese Culture and Literature.

Chao Guo

Chao Guo is an associate professor at Sun Yat-sen University, China. He is the author of Chinese Traditional Theatre and Male Dan: Social Power, Cultural Change, and Gender Relations (Routledge, 2022), and publishes extensively in Chinese theater, performance, and gender politics. His works can be found in journals such as Asian Studies Review, Asian Theatre Journal, Cambridge Opera Journal, Critical Asian Studies, Journal of Gender Studies, and Religions.