ABSTRACT
As a complex organization, commercial television produces televisual history, heritage and memories in organizational processes which inevitably involve commercial and political calculations. Television's capacity for local, regional and global articulation invites contextual retouches of the collective memories that television produces. This paper uses the specific case of Hong Kong Legend (HKL) to interrogate the roles that popular television is playing in resituating Hong Kong inhabitants as members of the Chinese nation-state. It charts the complex contour of collective memory as produced by commercial television in the particular socio-political context of Hong Kong in the 1990s. Specifically, I ask, first, how does popular television represent Hong Kong identity during the transition period? Does it represent the past by selective remembering and forgetting? Second, what are the political, economic and institutional practices that are shaping the remapping of Sino-Hong Kong identity through televisual construction of memory and amnesia? Thus this paper comprises two parts which deal respectively with the textual ideologies and the production processes of the television program HKL.
