Introduction: on transnational Chinese cinema(s), hegemony and Huallywood(s)

ABSTRACT

China’s past status as a semi-colony and historical fragmentation into three main territorial entities has meant that defining what constitutes Chinese cinema(s), or indeed cinematic Chineseness, has always been at the forefront of heated debates surrounding transborder practice, production and conceptualisation. Such deliberations have intensified recently due to intensified efforts to render Chineseness a cultural signifier increasingly implicated with transborder cinematic products designed to compete with Hollywood on the global stage. The introduction to this special issue, entitled ‘Situating “Huallywood:” Histories, Trajectories, and Positionings’ opens up these debates to the field of transnational Chinese cinemas, setting out a range of new questions and perspectives that problematize established understandings of Chinese-Western cinematic relations.

KEYWORDS:

• Chinese Cinemas
• Transnational Cinema
• Huallywood

Chinese films have always spearhead vanguard approaches to transnational screen studies. Not least because considerations of what is, or counts as China and Chinese cinema, has forced scholars to be historically and politically attentive to, and critical of, any laissez faire deployment of ‘national’ and ‘transnational’ concepts and methodologies (see Lu 1997a, 1997b; Berry and Farquhar 2006). For similar reasons, in the inaugural issue of the journal Transnational Cinemas Will Higbee and Song Hwee Lim cemented Chinese and East Asian cinemas as a key front for testing and elucidating – in both the conceptual-abstract and concrete-specific – what an adequate picture of ‘critical transnationalism’ might be (Higbee and Lim 2010, 14). As among other things, when it comes to categorizing what ‘China’ is, debates surrounding ‘methodological nationalism’ loom large (Berry 1998, 131); particularly because the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the Republic of China (Taiwan) and Hong Kong have all been referred to as a national territories in their own right, at various historical junctures (albeit from an range of competing geopolitical perspectives). The result being that the notion of ‘Chinese cinema’ always already appears both ‘useful and problematic, liberating and limiting’ when applied to the heteromorphic geopolitical territory and imagined community of ‘China’ (2010, 10). Reflecting back a decade later in a refocused Transnational Screens journal, Lim grasped the opportunity to revisit today’s Chinese films and screen industry trends to illustrate how in a sort of global ‘winter of discontent’ (2019, 8) Chinese screen cultures remain key for thinking through developments in non-nation-based and transborder production and consumption trends. This special issue provides a broader canvas to dive into such issues, collaging different cases together that provoke us to further consider diverse histories, trajectories and positionings.

As contingency would have it, though, we find ourselves penning the editorial to this special issue between September and October of 2019, on the build-up to the 70th anniversary of the foundation of the PRC, while an ongoing cycle of anti-government protests – marked by mounting violence – unremittingly disrupt the streets and rhythms of Hong Kong. These latest waves of protests were ignited in June by a controversial draft extradition bill that would allow those living in Hong Kong under the so-called ‘one country, two systems’ rule, to be transported to the Mainland if charged with crimes against the PRC: to face that ‘other’ system’s justice. These protests, in turn, mutated into demands for an investigation into alleged police brutality against protestors, and calls for more general democratic reform.

It is of relevance to this special issue to note that under this tense atmosphere of violence and protest many Chinese celebrities and film stars felt compelled to make pleas – through heterogeneous screen media – for civility, peace, international support or intervention. In July, for example, Canto-pop star Denise Ho came out in political support of the protestors in an impassioned plea to the UN; while in August local Hong Konger Jackie Chan appeared in a controversial CCTV (China Central Television) interview pleading for an end to the fighting in Mandarin – a move that led to claims online of the kung-fu icon betraying a conciliatory nationalist stance. Shortly thereafter social media heat was ignited by the comments of ‘Crystal’ Liu Yifei, the Chinese born actress and naturalised US star of Disney’s forthcoming live-action remake of Mulan (Niki Caro, USA, 2020). Her Tweet ‘I support the Hong Kong police; you can beat me up now’ led to a #BoycottMulan movement that initially trended in HK and the US, before spreading to South Korea and Europe.¹ Liu’s involvement and interventions in particular unconceal a complex web of transborder filmmaking practices and politics that help to reframe many of the essays collected in this special issue, which were written and developed between 2016 and 2018 in an attempt to come to grips with the complex politics of methodological nationalism and transnationalism with regard to the study of transborder Chinese cinema(s) and trends.

Categorizing Chinese cinemas: or, what’s in a name?

Although a comprehensive review of the debates that have animated the national/transnational Chinese cinema(s) field goes beyond the scope of this introduction and special issue, we do wish to minimally engage with its major turning points to help contextualize the following invited contributions, while remaining cogent that others would likely frame or categorize the issues here examined differently. As many of the articles assembled here deal with, but do not resolve, problems of categorization, we might begin with this.

As today’s Hong Kong protests help draw into painful relief, interleaving and criss-crossing many considerations of what exactly constitutes Chinese cinema rubs up against the validity and legitimacy of competing attitudes toward national sovereignties, geopolitical territories, their historicities, and periodizations. A problem that has historically inspired certain scholars to employ larger supranational cultural formations as the object of their studies, with concepts such as ‘greater China’ or the ‘Greater Cultural Chinese Sphere’ being but the most common; the latter stretching out to enrobe distributed, diasporic or deterritorialised Chinese-peoples and Chinese-cinemas produced within the borders of non-Chinese nation-states such as Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia. However, for other scholars such as David Leiwei Li, this very ‘naming of “greater China” or “cultural China” has rendered untenable a taken-for-granted, transhistorical understanding of what is “Chinese”’ in the first place’ (2016, 5).

If similar issues have occasioned a sustained debate over the past century or so, they gained renewed vigour and intensity over the past twenty-years courtesy of, among others, scholars such as Sheldon Lu (1997a, 1997b, 2001, Lu 2014), Aihwa Ong and Donald Nonini (1997), Ong (1999) Lu and Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh (2005), Meghan Morris (2005), Chris Berry and Mary Farquhar (2006, 2010), Gina Marchetti and Tan Seen Kam (2007), Will Higbee and Song Hwee Lim (2010), Jeremy Taylor (2011), Peiren Shao (2014), and Zhang Zhen (2015). To offer a thumbnail sketch, 1997 marks a watershed moment courtesy of Sheldon Hsiao-Peng Lu’s edited collection Transnational Chinese Cinemas: Identity, Nationhood, Gender. There, Lu famously noted that even before the reconfiguration of China’s territory in multiple entities, the 1896 screening of Lumiere Brothers’ films ensured that Chinese cinema was ‘an event of transnational capital’ before it was ever national (1997, 4). If cinema in China was transnational first, it was not immediately ‘national’ thereafter, for in 1905 the first domestic territorial product, Dingjun shan/Dingjun Mountain, was fashioned under the auspices of the Qing dynasty (Fengliang 2010, 246): A fact that highlights ongoing issues surrounding the ideological operation of the term ‘national’ embedded within transnational concepts and methodologies. Thereafter, the formation of the Republic of China in 1912, through to the foundation of the PRC in 1949, saw producers, filmmakers, audiences and critics (particularly in Shanghai and Hong Kong) variously create, encounter and consume a varied diet of prescriptively (or what we might today call ‘branded’) ‘national’ and transborder’ cinemas. The splitting of China into two governments in 1949 – each of which laid claim to the single state of ‘China’ – predictably saw much grist cast into the Chinese national cinema debate. Heuristically, the PRC’s socialist cinema was centrally planned and national funded, and therefore predominantly hailed viewers as nationals in a nationalized audio language. However, claims that these films stand as exclusive examples of ‘Chinese national cinema’ betrays a geopolitical bias or situatedness that disavows cinematic traditions which developed coevally in Taiwan, colonial Hong Kong as well as among the many diasporic Chinese communities in Southeast Asia, Europe and the Americas. This is not to mention the influence that geo-political super-states such as the Soviet Union had upon the aesthetics, pacing, editing, themes, political agendas and projection methods employed in socialist PRC cinema.

Such debates have engendered a range of rich and conflicting political perspectives on what national/transnational Chinese cinemas is² as well as a plethora of equally competing paradigms attempting to foreground (or background) different aspects of cinematic Chineseness. In reflecting upon such a proliferation of theoretical models in the decade leading up to a 2010 interview, Lu noted that since the turn of the millennium:

There have appeared, […] in the English-language context a series of terms such as ‘Chinese cinema’, ‘Chinese national cinema’, ‘Chinese-language film’, ‘transnational Chinese cinemas’, ‘comparative Chinese cinemas’, ‘Sinophone cinema’, some used in plural forms. Accordingly, in the Chinese-language context, there appeared such terms as Zhongguo dianying [Chinese cinema), Zhongguo minzu dianying (Chinese-national cinema), huayu dianying (Chinese-language cinema), zhongwen dianying (Chinese-language cinema), hanyu dianying (Chinese ethnicity-language cinema), kuaguo huayu dianying (transnational Chinese-language cinema), etc. Most of these terms, however, had first appeared in foreign scholarship before reaching China. (Lu in Fengliang 2010, 248)

The transnational or transborder nature of film scholarship is also worth articulating here to a broader historical trend. Indeed, in his Locating Chinese Film Theory, Victor Fan notes how in-between the Marxist (read Western) turns of the 1930s and 1950s within Chinese film criticism, 1942 saw the University of Nanking in Chengdu open a joint ‘film and radio studies’ program with its transborder partner the New York University; an enterprise that led to the publication of original and translated ‘meijie lilun (media theory)’ essays in Nanking’s journal, Dianying yu boyin [Film & Radio] (Fan 2015, 6–9). Since then, such trends have continued, with ever-changing terms and concepts emerging as a result of internal and external contact zones between intellectual cultures. Thus, we can now add to Lu’s list of terms new concepts such as ‘Mahua (or Malaysian overseas Chinese’ cultural production)’ (Raju 2008), ‘Sinophonic-phenotypical screen culture’ (Li 2016, 6) and Huallywood (the partial focus of this issue), which individually and collectively cast further intellectual grist to the transnational mill. Worth mentioning is how such explosion of terms coincided with the PRC joining the WTO in 2001 and subsequently hosting the World Expo in 2010, when the nation also overtook Japan to become the second largest economy in the world. As Chris Berry elsewhere notes (2013),³ such coincidence suggests that transnational production and transnationalisation can be framed as a practice propelled by the ideological embrace of ‘globalism’. For, the nature of globalisation (read market-driven global capitalism) might in and of itself help explain the spread of labels, and some of the seeming paradoxes and contradictions bound up in their coining and deployment.

Following others, we can here pick up on Lu’s observation regarding different preferences for employing the singular or plural form to speak of Chinese cinema(s) as an illustrative case in point. Indeed, in their introduction to a special ‘transnational’ issue of the Journal of Chinese Cinemas Chris Berry and Laikwan Pang specifically debate whether one should today properly ask: What is Chinese transnational cinema? Or, What are Chinese transnational cinemas? Far from being a pedantic issue, such questions highlight important historiographic concerns (208: 3ff).

Ruminate: In 1997 Lu adopted the plural form of transnational cinemas. A preference shared a decade later by Song Hwee Lim. There adopted to ‘problematize any monolithic concept of a Chinese national cinema’ (Lim in Berry and Pang 2008, 3). However, Berry and Pang remind us that for Lim, the preference for discussing Chinese ‘cinemas’ stemmed from the need to recognising the work of directors such as Tsai Ming-liang, whose films ‘demands an equally sophisticated and plural approach to […] the field of Chinese cinemas studies’ (Lim 2007, 3). Or put differently, for Berry and Pang, Lu and Lim’s preference for the plural form is driven by their consideration of political economy trends rather than film aesthetics. By adopting this other perspective in the aftermath of the PRC joining the WTO – when talents and capital began to circulate in an intensified trans-border fashion – Berry and Pang describe increasing difficulty in trying ‘to distinguish a Hong Kong film from a Chinese film or a Taiwan film’ (Berry and Pang 2008, 4). Indeed, as Berry elsewhere argues, outside of the politics of methodological nationalism films produced within these three territories have reached ‘a point where the ability to draw simple lines between them or talk about co-productions between otherwise distinct territories is no longer appropriate’ (2013, 458). Instead, this ever-evolving parliament of production, distribution and consumption now constitutes a ‘contingent ensemble of diverse practices’ that form into a heterogeneous totality, which thrives on ‘relations of exteriority’ and might (paradoxically) be thought in terms of ‘a new Chinese super nation-state’, that is ‘bigger, bolder and stronger than ever’ (Berry 2013, 467–8).

Complicating such matters, several scholars have also begun examining the production of what we might here call outlandish Chinese Cinemas, which although found trading in certain ‘Chinese elements’ or promulgating approved Beijing ideology (and ethico-aesthetics), are ultimately produced outside the geographical site of China (see, e.g. Wang 2009, 171–4; Adbi 2016; Homewood 2018, 175–7; Griffith 2019). In the Kung Fu Panda series (2008, 2011, 2016, 2020), for example, prototypical Chinese cinematic elements have been made to move within a transborder circuit wherein they become ‘weightless’ signifiers hardly traceable to any origin (Wang 2009, 170). Or stated differently, by means of syncretic appropriation in an era of global semiocapitalism and transnational funding, many modern films that appear to trade in signs of ‘Chineseness’ no longer denote ‘a national or regional identity’ at all, and instead constitute free-floating ‘elements’ or de-essentialized signifiers ‘that can be combined with other attractions to create an audiovisual “recipe” that may maximise a film’s marketability’ (Wang 2009, 173). All things considered, then, thinking through what is in a ‘s’ (to repose Berry and Pang’s essay question) drives us toward the very heart of a complex web of debates surrounding what exactly Chinese cinema(s) are, and the politics surrounding why we would even want to categorise them as such in the first place.⁴

Huallywood and cinematic hegemony

It is in this chiasmic political economy and the transnational nexus of contemporary transborder filmmaking that the term ‘Huallywood’ has emerged as an attempt to both name Mainland China’s home-grown industry (hua liawu) and make room for its overgrowing ramifications. However, while the term superficially suggests an aspirational attempt to emulate (and detour) the ‘Hollywood’ model of film production, distribution, consumption and profiteering, Emily Yeuh-Yu Yeh and Darrell William Davis stress that the term remains suffused with the forms of ‘intra-national or hyper-national tender’ that Berry elsewhere links to the new super-Chinese assemblage (Davis and Yeh 2008, 37–44; see also Berry 2014, 467). First and foremost, then, Huallywood owes its minting to two concomitant film-industry-related phenomena: The PRC’s rise to become the world’s second largest film market, and, the economic ascendance to global film producer by means of transborder co-productions with South Korea, Japan and the USA (to name but a few). Overlapping phenomena that have often suggested that China’s film industry might be entering into a new golden era (see, e.g. Zhang Zhen 2015). With a significant point along this road being the opening of the National Digital Film Industrial Park in Wuxi, near Shanghai, which has been nicknamed Huallywood since 2012. And, as David H. Fleming notes in his contribution to this special issue, Taiwan’s own ‘Huallywood’ industrial hub (which was commissioned in Hualien County in Taiwan during 2016), highlighting a shared super-state desire for a hyper-Chinese Hollywood simulation.

Interspersed with these industrial movements, the term Huallywood concomitantly surfaced as an academic neologism, coined by Peiren Shao, Professor of Media and Communication at Zhejiang University, with the ambition of establishing a new theoretical paradigm in the field of transnational Chinese cinemas studies (Peiren 2014; see also Lim 2016, 2). But what is exactly Huallywood as a scholarly paradigm? And what does it have to offer to the already label saturated field of Chinese cinema(s)? Is it simply a term affirming the rise of China’s film market and industry in the world stage? Or, is it a serious conceptual attempt to grapple with the multifarious cultural, political and economic shifts underpinning such a rise? While few of these questions have been posed in the English-speaking academy to date, in ‘Research notes towards a definition of Huallywood’, Yongchun Fu, Maria Elena Indelicato and Zitong Qiu offer an introduction to, and contextualisation of, this latest concept (2016). In their view, Shao’s neologism embodies the ambition to supersede the aforementioned scholarly efforts to define what is, and counts, as China and Chinese but in a fashion that is more global than transnational. Mostly due to the overt reference to Hollywood as a hegemonic ‘dream factory’, Shao’s model is in fact additionally pursuing the objective of making of Chinese a cultural signifier and/or imaginary of global reach while critically attending to the tensions arising from the fragmentation of the nation into three main territories as well as Chinese diasporic’ contestation of Mainland China self-referentiality (54). From this double perspective, Fu, Indelicato and Qiu point to Huallywood as a theoretical insertion that seeks to address both objectives by adopting the prefix Hua (broadly meaning Chinese ethnic) as semantic matrix to hold people living in PRC, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau as well as Chinese migrants and descendants together in one loose yet singular filmic discourse (56).

In spite of the global aspiration, Huallywood’s object of study is thus not limited to contemporary home-groomed diapan (blockbuster films). Rather, Hua is deployed to cover as much ground as possible – culturally, linguistically, historically, geographically and linguistically. In Shao’s elaboration, Huallywood, in fact, encompasses all those films or cinematic traditions which regard (1) Huaren (ethnic Chinese people) as the main subject in, and/or of, film production (2) Huayu (Chinese languages) as the basic film language (3) Huashì (affairs concerning Chinese people or China) as major film topics (4) Huashǐ (Chinese history) as a prominent film resource (5) and Huadi (locations including Mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macao and Chinese communities living outside China) as the production space and living environment (Shao 2014 as cited in Fu, Indelicato and Qiu 2016, 55). Yet so derived, the authors note, Huallywood still runs the risk of reinstating Mainland China as the imagined yet ineluctable centre due to its implicit conceptualization of transnationalism as a ‘higher level of unit and coherence’ and Chinese identity as a ‘cultural order that is transnational’ (Berry and Farquhar as cited in Yonghun, Indelicato, and Qiu 2016, 56). As Fu, Indelicato and Qiu noted, this latent tendency is made manifest by the lack of a critical engagement with Tu Weiming’s Cultural China thesis, whose metaphor of Chinese culture as a ‘living tree’ (1994) is often deployed in the literature produced so far under the umbrella of Huallywood (2016, 56). From this perspective, similar references to supranational and/or regional cultural formations as a ‘greater China’ or the ‘Greater Cultural Chinese Sphere’ are likewise susceptible of evoking the spectre of a trans-border cultural order that sees Mainland China as the core emitting coherence and unity.

Such risk, in turn, unravels another important contradiction imposed by the field of Huallywood studies. Namely, while the prefix Hua is mobilised as a semantic matrix to insert Mainland China as just one cultural signifier among the many constellating the contemporary transnational panorama of Chinese cinematic productions, studies conducted so far under this umbrella have pursued the agenda of promoting Mainland China’s culture and image overseas and therefore reduced the entire field to a mere state’s instrument of cultural soft power (57). Moreover, the semantic articulation of the prefix Hua with the suffix – llywood has, rather predictably, lent Huallywood to be criticised as an act of self-alignment with an industrial and economic model synonymous with ‘Western cultural hegemony’ (57). However, there is still the possibility that Huallywood can be conceptually reframed; not so much as an unintended or uncritical reproduction of the cultural hegemony of the ‘West’ on the ‘East’, but rather as a challenge to re-think entirely the relationship between Chinese and Western cinematic productions while departing from the ‘idealist insistence on a separate, self-sufficient “Chinese tradition” that should be lined up against the Western one because it is as great if not greater’ (Chow as cited by Yonghun, Indelicato, and Qiu 2016, 58).

Informed by such critiques, several articles constituting this special issue aim to map the ways in which different approaches to, and commentaries on Huallywood potentially open the field of transnational Chinese cinemas studies to new questions, perceptions and patterns of cinematic production and exhibition, while bringing to the fore previously marginalized perspectives.

The essays

Fittingly, Hong Kong and its complex history becomes the focus of this issue’s first article. Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh’s ‘Colonial Dispositif and the Early Hong Kong Screen Culture (1897–1907)’ begins the special issue by situating the coming of age of the field of Chinese cinemas studies within the history of European colonization of China. Yeh charts the unexplored terrain of early screen culture to unravel how the multifarious functions that film exhibitions exerted in treaty ports such as Hong Kong played a pivotal role in cohering a localized colonial subjectivity for both European and Chinese populations. Due to her engagement with the legacy of European colonization, Yeh’s contribution constitutes a response to Fu, Indelicato and Qiu’s call to trouble the presumed existence of a distinct and independent ‘Chinese tradition’, while questioning the presumption of an overarching and homogenous Chinese cultural identity uncontaminated with Western cultural and aesthetic values.

The following two papers approach the most advanced expression of the same logic of planetary expansion underpinning colonialism: the globalization of capitalism. Defining it as a force that has invariably shaped cinematic re-articulations of national identities, these contributions problematize the current understanding of China as a hegemonic actor in the field of transnational co-production and exhibition by tracing the trajectories that film texts have temporally and/or spatially endured. In ‘Another Day at The Office: Huallywood Co-productions, Verticality, and the Project of a Comparative Film Studies’, Olivia Khoo ambitiously advances co-productions with China as a form of ‘technology’ engendering an open-ended reconfiguration of networked relations in the Asia-Pacific region. By taking the use of verticality in The Office as a metaphor of China’s encounter with capitalism, Khoo effectively responds to recent calls to employ a comparative film studies perspective to the analysis of movies co-produced with China.

Diving in the same historical moment, or what Li refers to as the ‘mise-en-scène of Capitalism’s Second Coming’ to China, David H Fleming’s ‘Third-culture Hàullywood: or, “Chimerica” the cinematic return’ takes Huallywood on its word, but not its tone, to posit an alternative ‘third culture’ model for understanding the making and marketing of mega-budget and mega-revenue transborder productions produced in-between global Hollywood and transnational Huallywood. Describing a cinematic return of the transnational behemoth that the historian Niall Ferguson’s and economist Moritz Schularick christened Chimerica back in 2007, Fleming harnesses the mythical conceptual figure of the chimera to reframe films such as The Great Wall (Zhang Yimou, 2016) and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (Gareth Edwards, 2016) as illustrative examples of Hàullywood cinema (neither Hollywood or Huallywood, but a cinema composed of bits and pieces of each).

The last two articles move from examining mega-budget transnational productions to observing the self-representations of those subjects who are, at the level of nationalistic imaginaries, relegated to inhabit, discursively and materially, the margins of nationally bounded territories. In ‘The “Queer Generation:” Queer Community Documentary in Contemporary China,’ Hongwei Bao focuses on the documentary practices of the ‘queer generation’ – a loose group of filmmakers inspired by the professor, curator and activist film director Cui Zi’en – to highlight the activist dimension of their voices in the polyphony of transnational queer cultures while moreover centring local aesthetics, politics, modes of production and circulation. Conversely, the last contribution ‘Childhood, Animality and Emotions in Indonesian Film Director Edwin’s Film Blind Pig Who Wants to Fly’ concludes this issue by questioning Huallywood’s implicit projection of a homogenous and coherent diasporic Chinese cultural identity. In this article, through their analysis of Edwin’s employment of childhood and animality as allegories of the positioning of the Chinese as an object of national disgust, Maria Elena Indelicato, Ivana Pražić and Zitong Qiu offer a unique perspective on the complex configuration of emotions Chinese Indonesians continue experiencing because of racism in contemporary Indonesia.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the editors of Transnational Screens for their productive feedback and suggestions alongside the contributors and anonymous reviewers who kindly accepted to be part of this project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Notes on contributors

David H. Fleming

David H. Fleming is a Senior Lecturer in the Communication, Media and Culture division at the University of Stirling, Scotland. His research interests surround the intersectionalities of cinema, philosophy and technology, He is the author of Unbecoming Cinema (Intellect/Chicago University Press, 2017), and co-author of The Squid Cinema from Hell: Kinoteuthis Infernalis and the Emergence of Chthulhumedia with William Brown (Edinburgh University Press, 2020), and Chinese Urban Shi-nema: Cinematicity, Society, and Millennial China with Simon Harrison (Palgrave MacMillan, forthcoming). He has also published widely in interdisciplinary journals including SubStance, Film-Philosophy, Deleuze Studies, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Journal of Urban Cultural Studies, Social Semiotics, Science Fiction Film and Television, and edited collections such as Posthumanisms Through Deleuze (Indiana University Press, forthcoming) and Deleuze and Film (Edinburgh University Press, 2012).

Maria Elena Indelicato

Maria Elena Indelicato is a lecturer at the Ningbo Institute of Technology, Zhejiang University. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies, University of Sydney. Besides her monograph Australia’s New Migrants, she has published in race feminist and cultural studies journals such as Outskirts, Critical Race and Whiteness Studies, Chinese Cinemas, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, and Feminist Review.

Notes

1. A typical Twitter response reposted by CNN read ‘Liu is a naturalized American citizen. It must be nice. Meanwhile she pisses on people fighting for democracy (Yeung 2019),’ while the BBC quoted another that read: ‘how tone deaf do you have to be to support police brutality when you just filmed a character who is supposed to stand against oppression in its raw form? Pound sand.’

2. We must also forego on this outing opening up debates concerning what counts as ‘cinema’, in our discussion of Chinese transnational cinema or even ‘What is not cinema?’ to use Fan’s enigmatic reworking of Andre Bazin’s ontological question in Cinema Approaching Reality (2015, 222).

3. Berry here follows Anna Tsing’s suggestion to ‘use ‘globalisation’ as part of the ideological rhetoric of globalism, whereas we use ‘transnational’ to refer to the specific ‘transborder projects’ that actually constitute the growth of the transnational on the ground, so to speak’ (Berry 2013: 464).

4. As Berry and Pang render it: ‘In other words, with “Chinese cinemas” and “Chinese cinema” Lim and we both want to invoke the “transnational,” albeit for different reasons’ (Berry and Pang 2008, 4).