Towards a local community: Colonial politics and postwar Hong Kong cinema

My dissertation uses film to shed new light on our understanding of postwar Hong Kong and the colonial history of community building. The 1950s and 1960s was a period of social turmoil and enormous uncertainty for the colony; it is however, also a period little understood in relation to Hong Kong's development from a remote British colony into a hypermodern global city in the 1980s and 1990s. Ideological struggles in Cold War Hong Kong were waged in the realm of an increasingly politicized local society, as Hong Kong became a battleground for the ideological struggles between pro-Communist and pro-Nationalist sympathizers, both vying for the allegiance of the Hong Kong public. Using film as archival evidence, I aim to explore the relationship between British colonial rule and Hong Kong's grassroots population, on the one hand, and on the other hand, to foster an alternative understanding of being Chinese in the Cold War.