Chinese Cinema at the Millennium (Part One)

A spectre is haunting the new millennium — the spectre of ….China. Have the powers of old entered an alliance to exorcise this spectre? It’s been referred to as a “gigantic sucking noise” — sucking jobs from nations both poor and rich.This is the background to the contemporary interest in Chinese cinema. The genealogy of the impact exerted by the three Chinese cinemas — Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Peoples’ Republic of China — on the global consciousness is subtle, complex, and intertwined, beginning probably with the low-end transmission of Hong Kong’s Bruce Lee movies in the 1970s. This is part one of an essay titled, “Chinese Cinema at the Millennium,” which will appear in its entirety in an anthology titled, Chinese Connections: Critical Perspectives on Film, Identity and Diaspora, co-edited by Peter X.Feng, Gina Marchetti, and Tan See-Kam, to be published by Temple University Press in Spring 2004. My special thanks to Marina Heung for her critique and to Gina Marchetti for her invitation to write this essay.