Yiu Fai Chow

HOPE AGAINST HOPES: Diana Zhu and the Transnational Politics of Chinese Popular Music

Born and bred in the Netherlands, Diana Zhu, at 15 years of age, won a Chinese singing contest in Amsterdam in 2006. Subsequently, she got a contract first from Warner Music Hong Kong, then from Warner Taiwan. Relocated to Shanghai, her parents’ ‘home’ city, Diana was working on her hope for a future in the Chinese pop market. This essay is my inquiry on the problematic of hope engendered by and embedded in the intersubjectivity between Diana and me. Taking my cues from Lash and Lurys method of ‘following the object’, I followed one person. I followed Diana and started to see her entanglement – particularly over her language, music and body – not only with Warner Music, but more fundamentally with the wider dynamics that seeks to configure and maintain a sense of hopefulness in the same Chinese society where inequality, injustice and inhumanity are threatening the ‘harmonious society’ the political establishment has been campaigning for. Through this journey with Diana, I aim to do two things. First, I aim to show, if we are to understand the complex relationship between the diasporic, the popular and the political in contemporary China, one possibility is to recuperate two sets of narratives – migration and modernity – and read them side by side in connection with hope. Second, I take this metonymic account as part and parcel of a critical Cultural Studies project that has such inequality, injustice and inhumanity in the heart of its politics and practices. I am trying to underwrite this story about Dianas hope with my own hope, against other hopes, that are constructed, circulated and transformed to serve the interests of the state and the capital. Hope management, I will argue, is a key site of political struggle if we want to see a better China in the future.

Martial arts films and Dutch-Chinese masculinities: smaller is better

Starting with Bruce Lee in the 1960s, Chinese martial arts films have been gaining increasing importance in Hollywood. Amidst global fascination and the prevalence of male heroes in martial arts films, it is surprising to note that only a few studies engage the genre with issues of Chinese masculinity, and none by investigating how the audience makes sense or use of what they are seeing. Taking martial arts films as the research site, this study is about how Chinese men negotiate their masculinity in a context where their masculinity is marginal, that is, in a diasporic context. The findings of this research attest to the marginalization and subordination of diasporic Chinese men by two dominant and interlocking discourses in the West, namely that only certain White male characteristics would be considered masculine, and that certain Chinese male characteristics would be considered neutered or even effeminate. The male informants of this study, however, are never entirely marginalized, victimized, and oppressed; they are able to construct alternative, different versions of masculinities, by privileging what they can do with their “small bodies,” by downplaying the sexual and romantic dimensions of masculinity, and by emphasizing the importance of control and discipline. These Chinese men are garnering creative resources not necessarily by going into “indigenous” sources of historical or literary Chinese culture, as suggested by theorists on Chinese masculinity. Instead, contemporary transnational popular culture—in this case, Chinese martial arts films—opens up possibilities for them to articulate and construct different masculine ideals.

Blowing in the China Wind: Engagements with Chineseness in Hong Kong's Zhongguofeng Music Videos

While songs with distinct Chinese characteristics, whether musically or lyrically, have always been part of local pop history, “China Wind” (zhongguofeng) is a novel phenomenon. Above all, China Wind owes its production and circulation as a discursive formation to its endorsement by mainstream artists, notably from Taiwan, as much as to its popularity among audiences in Greater China. While China Wind pop is yet to be systematically documented, researched and analyzed, popular and media attention has generally focused on Taiwan-based artists and lyrics. In this essay, rather than focusing on what is considered the main source of China Wind songs, namely Taiwan, we have chosen China Wind songs that originated from Hong Kong and their music videos as the primary subject of enquiry. Our central concern is, how do Hong Kongs China Wind music videos engage with hegemonic versions of Chineseness? The choice of Hong Kong is informed by our empirical interest in the complex entanglement of cultural and political power in which the postcolonial city is presumably going through. At the same time it is, in theory and in praxis, a correspondence with the ongoing debates on Chineseness—debates on not only what but also who defines it. Our analyses show that while Hong Kongs China Wind pop evokes Chineseness, it also undermines it in two major ways: first, to render Chineseness as distant gaze, as ambiguous space and as ongoing struggles; and secondly, its feminization of Chineseness, opening up a space for questions on history and gender performance. In other words, the Hong Kong China Wind we have analyzed here articulates something quite different from a triumphalist celebration of Chinese tradition, value and culture. If China Wind as a whole is a culturalist project to rewrite Chineseness in an authentic, monolithic and indisputable way, Hong Kongs variant, we argue, is resisting.

Moving, sensing intersectionality: A case study of Miss China Europe

Every year, Miss China Europe, a transnational beauty pageant organized for the Chinese diaspora, is held in the Netherlands. The hypervisuality of Chinese diasporic women at the event stands in painful contrast to their everyday invisibility, whether in the Netherlands, China, or elsewhere in the world. Informed by intersectional and transnational feminist scholarship, this empirical study zooms in on one group of women, ethnic Chinese born and/or growing up in the Netherlands, to identify and recuperate their neglected lived experience in a particular historical‐cultural context. It takes their own voices as central, hopefully to contribute to their visibility. It aims to provide an understanding of diasporic Chinese women as living in the dynamics not only of their multiple subordinations but also of their subjective consciousness, experienced autonomy, and agency. Drawing insights from the subjective accounts of both contestants and audiences of Miss China Europe, I suggest that one way to foreground marginalized women’s agency is to understand their intersectionality in terms of movements and sensory experiences. On the one hand, while the contestants articulated a readiness to perform their modern and yet Chinese selves, they were making movements along two intersecting axes of inequality and power relations—Chineseness and Dutchness—precisely to negotiate their sense of inequality and power relations. On the other hand, among the audiences, two major topics—the blood issue (or whether Chineseness should be defined by ancestry) and the language problem (or whether Chineseness should be defined by the ability to speak Chinese)—were raised regularly, underscoring a complex viewing experience of seeing and hearing, of the tension between visual and audio identifications.

The spectre of Europe: Knowledge, cultural studies and the ‘rise of Asia’

This introduction starts with an exploration of the ambiguity of the idea of Europe. In particular, two tropes – Europe-as-theory and Europe-as-power – continue to haunt knowledge production and cultural studies in Asia. How to proceed? What should cultural studies do if it is to embrace this historical conjuncture of shifting modes of knowledge and power production, how to deal with its Anglocentrism and Eurocentrism? While this special issue allies itself with attempts to unsettle Eurocentrism in knowledge production, it is not making any plea for regionally-rooted practices or theories. It argues for better understanding, dialogue and cross-fertilisation between cultural studies and area studies. The former needs the latter’s sensibility to spatial and cultural context as much as the latter needs the former’s theorisations. This introduction is an opening. It opens up not only to the ensuing articles but, more importantly, an occasion for the inevitable encounter argued for in this special issue.

Introduction: At home in Asia? Place-making, belonging and citizenship in the Asian century

For the authors of this introduction, home is not always or only sweet home. For us, it is constructed with contradictions, ruptures and anxieties. Indeed, the world never fails to present us with ‘real’ people with ‘real’ issues of home. After ‘rescuing’ the idea of home from its two assumed arch-enemies ‘mobility’ and ‘urbanization’, we will proceed to formulate our appeal to reconceptualize ‘home’ and explicate why and how to do so. We have cited instances from Hong Kong, Beijing and Asia at large, not only because the empirical core of this special issue is on Asia, but, more fundamentally, also because we want to take issue with the Eurocentric bias in the debates on home hitherto. We conclude by making a modest plea – or more accurately, to configure various trajectories of thinking on ‘home’ into a plea – to bracket home as (making) place, (not) belonging and (flexible) citizenship.

Flânerie and acrophilia in the postmetropolis: rooftops in hong Kong cinema

ABSTRACT Living in the spectacle of Hong Kongs skyscape, how often do its dwellers actually see, not to mention reach, its rooftops? Intriguingly, despite their apparent ephemerality and inaccessibility, the vertical fringes of the city feature frequently in Hong Kong cinema: the rooftop. In this article, we connect the cinematic trope of the rooftop to the anxiety of living in a postmetropolitan city like Hong Kong. We do so by walking with Georg Simmels blasé attitude and Benjamins flânerie in the metropolitan city, to meet Christoph Lindners more (self-)destructive blasé individual trying to grapple with his postmetropolitan anxiety. Finally, we posit to understand the deployment of rooftops in Hong Kong cinema — in the crime thriller Infernal Affairs, the coming-of-age drama High Noon and the psychological horror Inner Senses — as a way out, literally and figuratively, a space where one negotiates and perhaps overcomes a blasé postmetropolitan individuality with moments of radical reconnection.

Descendants of the dragon, sing!

This essay draws on the author’s experience as a cultural consumer and cultural producer in the field of popular music in Hong Kong. Inspired by the author’s earlier exposure to minzu gequ, the essay explores the complex relations between such nationalistic pop songs and the performances of identity, particularly in the context of the political hand-over of Hong Kong to Beijing. The author continues to reflect on his own entanglement with constructions of Chineseness when he, as a professional lyric writer, was asked to reproduce on similar nationalistic themes.