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Hong Kong: East and West Hong Kong is often seen as representing a crossroads between Eastern and Western culture due to its history as both a Chinese and a British colony. Britain invaded Hong Kong in 1842 during the war with China (known as the Opium Wars) over the free movement and trade of opium.
It remained under British rule - which oversaw a liberal economy - until 1997, when Hong Kong was ‘handed back’ to China.This influence of different - often contrasting - cultures is evident throughout Chungking Express in the setting, costume, dialogue and musical soundtrack.
The appearance of Brigitte Lin in her trench coat and blonde wig, the corporate logos and the use of American pop songs on the soundtrack are just a few examples of this.This representation of Hong Kong as - part British, part Chinese - also infects the characters.
In Chungking Express, Hong Kong is a city which lacks an identity and is a place of anxiety in the buildup to the handover to a communist state.This is also evident in the characters. In both stories the policemen are filled with longing for something which has gone, they are unable to think or act rationally, they are in state of complete self-absorption and isolation - perhaps Wong is using the characters as a metaphor for Hong Kong at the end of the twentieth century.
This theme of the the conflicted state of Hong Kong as it faces an uncertain future is also found in other films of this period: Made in Hong Kong (Fruit Chan, Hong Kong, 1997); The River (Ming Liang-Tsai, Taiwan, 1997); and Suzhou River (Ye Lou, China, 2000).
Defining a new wave: Chungking Express and Hong Kong Cinema As is evident in Chungking Express, Hong Kong Cinema is characterized by its mixture of references from Eastern and Western culture. These include the kung fu, gangster and thriller genres as well as influences from Chinese folklore and ghost stories.
Chungking Express has to be studied in the wider context of the Hong Kong film industry in the 1980s and 1990s which is unique in East Asian cinema.Hong Kong was one of the ‘economic dragons’ of the 1980s, along with South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore. These countries experienced a rapid economic - and in some cases social - development throughout the period.
However, of this group only Hong Kong developed a successful film industry (which has also been affected by the economic recession in the late 1990s; Wong Kar-wai has difficulties getting funding for his films now) and there are various possible reasons for this.
In Hong Kong, filmmakers have been free to express themselves with little interference from the state and censorship is very relaxed. This marks them out from other East Asian cinemas - particularly Singapore and China, where directors work within state-controlled, heavily-censored industries.
Another reason for the continued popularity of cinema-going in Hong Kong is that it is a small city with a high-density population where the social experience of the cinema has meant that it has remained dominant in the face of competition from TV and video.
