ABSTRACT
This chapter brings us up to date with the development of Chinese cinema from 1990, when the PRC attempted to get over a political crisis by speeding up economic reforms nationwide, to 2002, when this narrative film history comes to a closure. At first sight, the military crackdown in Tiananmen of 1989 did not leave any direct impact on mainland filmmaking, but the subsequent CCP investment in leitmotif films has constituted an intensified, prolonged ideological drive to instill patriotism and nationalism in the population, especially the younger generation. The return of Hong Kong to China’s sovereignty on 1 July 1997, covered live by the Western media with as much enthusiasm as Tiananmen, proved largely uneventful. This is mainly because Hong Kong cinema had prepared for the worst after 1989 and the Asian financial crisis of 1997-8, together with Hollywood’s imperial advance in the region, threatened the very foundation of the territory’s film industry. At the turn of the millennium, Chinese cinema accelerated its reinvention as transnational cinemas (S. Lu 1997: 3). Now that China and Taiwan have both joined the World Trade Organization (WTO), the era of globalization has dawned on all three Chinas, and Chinese filmmakers cannot but confront all its positive, negative and as-yet-uncertain consequences. As the current discussions on the WTO indicate, no one seems able to predict exactly what will happen to Chinese cinema in the near future.
