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This paper aims to challenge the longstanding cosmopolitan interpretation of Hong Kong, particularly why this global city fails to absorb China equally through its great inclusiveness and flexibility as before. On the contrary, rising tensions, conflicts and resistance could be founded between Hong Kong and China these days.

By using Hong Kong cinema as an analytical lens, this paper seeks to throw light on the cinematic landscape of post-1997 Hong Kong and, by implications, the overall destiny of postcolonial Hong Kong under Chinese rule.

The postcolonial Hong Kong, although lacking a symmetric status and equal weight, remains an active player with Chinese hegemony that appeals to the newfound market power to consolidate their systemic control on the city. By acting upon itself with the subjectivity and reflexivity from itself, postcolonial Hong Kong takes many actions to do justice that criticizes the political and ideological correctness and challenges the contemporary national authority from one-party rule.

This paper demonstrates a new in-betweenness in the relation to the making of postcolonial Hong Kong. This paper advances insights into a postcolonial reinvention of the politics of disappearance that remains underexplored.

Since the launch of the Mainland and Hong Kong Closer Economic Partnership Arrangement (CEPA) in 2003, Hong Kong cinema is believed to have confronted drastic changes. Hong Kong cinema is described to be dying, lacking creative space and losing local distinctiveness. A decade later, the rise of Hong Kong – China coproduction cinema under CEPA has been normalized and changed the once pessimism in the industry. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how Hong Kong cinema adjusted its production and creation in the first 10 years of CEPA.

Beginning with a review of the overall development, three paradigmatic cases are examined for reflecting upon what the major industrial and commercial concerns on the Hong Kong – China coproduction model are, and how such a coproduction model is not developed as smooth as what the Hong Kong filmmakers expected.

Collectively, this paper singles out the difficulties in operation and the limit of transnationality that occur in the Chinese context for the development of Hong Kong cinema under the Hong Kong – China coproduction model.

This is the author’s research in his five-year study of Hong Kong cinema and it contributes a lot to the field of cinema studies with relevant industrial and policy concern.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how a neo-liberal nationalist discourse of China imagines the spatial identity of the post-1997 Hong Kong with reference to Lost in Hong Kong, a new Chinese middle-class film in 2015 with successful box office sales.

Textual analysis with the aid of psychoanalysis, postcolonial studies and semiotics is used to interpret the meaning of the film in this study. The study also utilizes the previous literature reviews about the formation of the Chinese national identity to help analyze the distinct identity of the Chinese middle class today.

The discussion pinpoints how the new Chinese middle class as neo-liberal nationalists take Hong Kong as a “bizarre national redemptive space”. While Hong Kong is cinematically constructed as such a national other, this paper argues that the Hong Kong in question stands not for itself but in a form of “reverse hallucination” for pacifying the new Chinese middle class’ trauma under the rapid neo-liberalization of China in the 1990s.

This paper shows the new of formation of the Chinese nationalist’s discourse, especially the new Chinese middle-class discourse on Hong Kong after 1997.

Wonders whether, owing to severely restricted access, China’s government policy towards digital communications will remain in a constant state of flux – or will it gain economic benefits without a social penalty? Concludes that China has to link the forces of change to channel and deflect domestic resistance.

The goal of this article is to examine the current trends of political cinema in postcolonial Hong Kong. Many leaders of the Hong Kong mainstream cinema have accepted the Chinese authoritarian rule as a precondition for expanding into the ever-expanding Mainland film market, but a handful of conscientious filmmakers choose to make political cinema under the shadow of a wealthy and descendant industry, expressing their desire for democracy and justice and critiquing the unequal power relations between Hong Kong and China.

This paper consults relevant documentary materials and cinematic texts to contextualize the latest development of political cinema in Hong Kong. It presents an in-depth analysis of the works of two local independent filmmakers Herman Yau and Vincent Chui.

This study reveals a glimpse of hope in the current films of Herman Yau and Vincent Chui, which suggests that a reconfiguration of local identity and communal relationship may turn around the collective despair caused by the oppressive measures of the Chinese authoritarian state and the end of the Umbrella Movement in late 2014.

Despite the small sample size, this paper highlights the rise of cinematic localism through a closer look at the works of Hong Kong independent filmmakers.

This study reveals an ambivalent mentality in the Hong Kong film industry where critical filmmakers strive to assert their creativity and agency against the externally imposed Chinese hegemonic power.

This investigation is an original scholarly study of film and politics in postcolonial Hong Kong.

The Wanda Case offers an overview of Wanda Group’s transition from a real estate firm in China to a global leader in the movie industry. Wanda Group, a Chinese conglomerate headquartered in Beijing, caused a major commotion in the US movie industry when it acquired AMC Entertainment in 2012. The AMC acquisition was the largest acquisition by a Chinese firm in the USA up to that time, costing $2.6 billion. Following that, a series of acquisitions had made Wanda Group the largest movie theater company, respectively, in the USA, Europe, and the World by the end of 2016. In order to fully comprehend the transition of the Wanda Group, the case begins by introducing the group’s origins and its original business model. It then discusses the challenges in the Chinese real estate market and factors that played a role in Wanda Group’s shift toward the movie industry. The authors further introduce the trends in movie theaters/production, recognized on a global scale in China and the USA, including key competitors in the industry. Last, the authors discuss Wanda Group’s global expansion efforts through major acquisitions in the USA and Europe, and the challenges that Wanda Group faced.

The case was written with publicly available information, such as newspaper articles, databases and corporate websites. The authors did not disguise any details.

This case can fulfill various learning goals in international business and strategy courses. First, this case offers detailed information about the diversification process of Wanda Group. It first diversified from real estate development into the movie cinema and production business in China (i.e. product diversification). More recently, Wanda Group diversified into the USA and Europe (i.e. geographical diversification). With the information provided in the case, students will be able to evaluate the costs and benefits of diversification strategies. Second, students can examine pros and cons of available entry modes for international expansions. Particularly, students will be able to evaluate the costs and benefits of acquisitions to Wanda Group’s international expansion. The authors also believe that this case can be used for introducing a relatively less-known emerging-market conglomerate, especially from China. Last, considering the rich information this case contains, the authors may use it as an exam case to evaluate students’ comprehensive knowledge gained from the course.

The case discusses corporate strategy, particularly diversification, the resource-based view, and institutional theory.

With its worldwide fame for making action films, Hong Kong cinema has been defined as masculine. Action films, including the costumed martial arts films and the modern gangster films, have been a major genre in Hong Kong cinema from the 1960s on. Despite the dominant masculinity, women still play significant roles in some of these films. In fact, fighting women leave footprints in the history of Hong Kong cinema, which precede their counterparts in the West and even provide models for Hollywood after 2000.

This chapter focuses on the female characters portrayed by the acclaimed Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai, whose works have an ambiguous connection to mainstream genres. He modifies Hong Kong action films and creates unconventional female characters such as the drug dealer in Chungking Express (1994), the killer dispatcher in Fallen Angels (1995), the swordswoman in Ashes of Time (1994), and the kung fu master in The Grandmaster (2013). Wong's films have been mush discussed in academia, but the gender images therein are quite ignored. With high intertextuality, these characters are used to question mainstream action films and redefine women's roles in male's cinematic space. In addition, via the writing of these women, Wong constructs an open and ambivalent post-colonial Hong Kong identity. This paper contextualises the figures of sword-wielding and gun-shooting women and examines how Wong Kar-wai deploys these images to articulate the cultural identity of a post-colonial city.

This research outlines the Hong Kong film industry with examination of key actors, directors, films, and production companies within the martial arts genre of Hong Kong Action Cinema. Hong Kong Film Award winners and nominees, core films within genres, and core reference works both general and theoretical from experts in the field of Hong Kong martial arts film research have been highlighted. Web sites are suggested that provide reviews of Hong Kong martial arts films, biographical information on a variety of actors and actresses as well as comprehensive bibliographic information on select films. Also included are commercial Web sites that provide Hong Kong martial arts films.

This article explores recent changes in Hong Kong’s independent documentary filmmaking during a decade of escalating protests in the territory, focusing in particular on cinema's role in Hong Kong's “movement field.”

The article focuses on Ying E Chi, an important distributor and promoter of Hong Kong independent films; the annual Hong Kong Independent Film Festival it organizes; three recent documentaries it distributes that are relevant to the 2019–2020 protests. The findings in this article are based on interviews, the textual analysis of relevant films and participant observation at film screenings.

This study argues that independent documentaries function in Hong Kong's “movement field” in three main ways: by contributing to and providing a space for civic discourse, by facilitating international advocacy and by engaging in memory work. Its contributions to civic culture, it asserts, are reflected in the films' observational aesthetic, which invites reflection and discussion. Public screenings and lengthy post-screening discussions are important ways in which these functions are realized.

This article builds on existing literature to propose a new way of thinking about cinema's role in Hong Kong social movements. It also analyses three important recent films that have not yet been covered much in existing academic literature.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how to manage the pace of international expansion through acquisitions based on a case study of a Chinese conglomerate, Wanda Group.

The paper is a qualitative study based on the analyses of the series of international acquisitions made by Wanda Group in the global cinema and film studio markets from 2012 through the middle 2017. Comprehensive qualitative data have been collected from public sources, including company press releases, media reports and interviews, for each and every major acquisition made by Wanda during this period. The collected materials are then analyzed to reveal the patterns of Wanda’s serial acquisitions.

When expanding globally through acquisitions, firms need to carefully pace their different types of acquisitions; managing the speed of post-acquisition integration can be critical; and managing public relations and communications in host countries is also important.

The research is limited to one single case, so the generalizability of its findings needs further validation. The research contributes to cross-border acquisition studies by discussing the pacing of acquisitions and their affiliated activities.

The research offers an example of how firms pace their series of international acquisitions, whose lessons are potentially transferrable to other global acquirers.

The research takes a rarely used angle by studying serial acquisitions as a whole and focuses on the pacing of them. It is one of the very few in the acquisition literature to highlight the temporal patterns among serial acquisition moves.