ABSTRACT
In 1996, people across the Asia-Pacific watched the Olympics in Atlanta. In 2000, they will tune into Sydney. On the outskirts of Beijing, during mid-autumn festival, guests left a concert of stars after a lavish banquet to sing karaoke in a series of upstairs rooms, styled after famous cities: New York, Tokyo, London and Paris. In Auckland and San Francisco, Shanghai and Osaka, movie-goers see films from Hong Kong as well as Hollywood. Indeed, it was Hong Kong, not mainland, audiences who pronounced the birth of New Wave Chinese cinema with the screening of Yellow Earth in 1985. It was Americans, like Jack Nicholson and Andy Warhol, who defended Oshima’s In the Realm of the Senses from New York police in 1976.
