ABSTRACT
This chapter concerns itself with Hong Kong cinema from its postwar recovery in 1945 to the eve of the Hong Kong new wave in 1978. Two waves of massive migration occurred in 1945-6 and 1949-50, as Hong Kong residents who had left for the hinterland during the Japanese occupation returned home and new immigrants and refugees poured into the territory to escape political and economic problems resulting from the intensifying civil war in the mainland. The founding of the PRC signaled the advent of a new era of the cold war between the CCP and the KMT, the latter now with its headquarters in Taiwan. Although the British colonial government attempted to maintain political neutrality, Hong Kong studios and artists were inevitably classified as ‘left wing’ and ‘right wing’ as they struggled in the postwar market. The colony’s moderate diplomacy and relative insulation had shielded Hong Kong from major international events, such as the Vietnam War and the normalization of the US-China relationships. As time went by, the pursuit of affluence and amusement in the 1960s and 1970s replaced the memory of poverty and separation in the 1940s and 1950s. Hong Kong became one of the world’s largest movie production sites in the 1960s; by the late 1970s, after two decades of over or near double-digit growth, the territory consolidated its position as an economic power in Asia.1
