Transnational Screens

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Introduction: on transnational Chinese cinema(s),

hegemony and Huallywood(s)

David H. Fleming & Maria Elena Indelicato

To cite this article: David H. Fleming & Maria Elena Indelicato (2019) Introduction: on
transnational Chinese cinema(s), hegemony and Huallywood(s), Transnational Screens, 10:3,
137-147, DOI: 10.1080/25785273.2019.1681650

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TRANSNATIONAL SCREENS
2019, VOL. 10, NO. 3, 137–147
https://doi.org/10.1080/25785273.2019.1681650

Introduction: on transnational Chinese cinema(s), hegemony

and Huallywood(s)
a b
David H. Fleming and Maria Elena Indelicato *
a
University of Stirling, Stirling, Scotland; bNingbo Institute of Technology, Zhejiang University, Ningbo, China

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
China’s past status as a semi-colony and historical fragmentation Chinese Cinemas;
into three main territorial entities has meant that defining what Transnational Cinema;
constitutes Chinese cinema(s), or indeed cinematic Chineseness, Huallywood
has always been at the forefront of heated debates surrounding
transborder practice, production and conceptualisation. Such delib-
erations have intensified recently due to intensified efforts to ren-
der Chineseness a cultural signifier increasingly implicated with
transborder cinematic products designed to compete with
Hollywood on the global stage. The introduction to this special
issue, entitled ‘Situating “Huallywood:” Histories, Trajectories, and
Positionings’ opens up these debates to the field of transnational
Chinese cinemas, setting out a range of new questions and per-
spectives that problematize established understandings of Chinese-
Western cinematic relations.

Chinese films have always spearhead vanguard approaches to transnational screen

studies. Not least because considerations of what is, or counts as China and Chinese
cinema, has forced scholars to be historically and politically attentive to, and critical of,
any laissez faire deployment of ‘national’ and ‘transnational’ concepts and methodologies
(see Lu 1997a, 1997b; Berry and Farquhar 2006). For similar reasons, in the inaugural
issue of the journal Transnational Cinemas Will Higbee and Song Hwee Lim cemented
Chinese and East Asian cinemas as a key front for testing and elucidating – in both the
conceptual-abstract and concrete-specific – what an adequate picture of ‘critical trans-
nationalism’ might be (Higbee and Lim 2010, 14). As among other things, when it comes
to categorizing what ‘China’ is, debates surrounding ‘methodological nationalism’ loom
large (Berry 1998, 131); particularly because the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the
Republic of China (Taiwan) and Hong Kong have all been referred to as a national
territories in their own right, at various historical junctures (albeit from an range of
competing geopolitical perspectives). The result being that the notion of ‘Chinese
cinema’ always already appears both ‘useful and problematic, liberating and limiting’
when applied to the heteromorphic geopolitical territory and imagined community of
‘China’ (2010, 10). Reflecting back a decade later in a refocused Transnational Screens

CONTACT Maria Elena Indelicato [email protected] Ningbo Institute of Technology, Zhejiang

University, Ningbo, China
*The author current affiliation is the Centre of Social Studies (CES), University of Coimbra.
© 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
138 D. H. FLEMING AND M. E. INDELICATO

journal, Lim grasped the opportunity to revisit today’s Chinese films and screen industry
trends to illustrate how in a sort of global ‘winter of discontent’ (2019, 8) Chinese screen
cultures remain key for thinking through developments in non-nation-based and trans-
border production and consumption trends. This special issue provides a broader canvas
to dive into such issues, collaging different cases together that provoke us to further
consider diverse histories, trajectories and positionings.
As contingency would have it, though, we find ourselves penning the editorial to this
special issue between September and October of 2019, on the build-up to the 70th
anniversary of the foundation of the PRC, while an ongoing cycle of anti-government
protests – marked by mounting violence – unremittingly disrupt the streets and rhythms
of Hong Kong. These latest waves of protests were ignited in June by a controversial draft
extradition bill that would allow those living in Hong Kong under the so-called ‘one
country, two systems’ rule, to be transported to the Mainland if charged with crimes
against the PRC: to face that ‘other’ system’s justice. These protests, in turn, mutated into
demands for an investigation into alleged police brutality against protestors, and calls for
more general democratic reform.
It is of relevance to this special issue to note that under this tense atmosphere of
violence and protest many Chinese celebrities and film stars felt compelled to make pleas
– through heterogeneous screen media – for civility, peace, international support or
intervention. In July, for example, Canto-pop star Denise Ho came out in political
support of the protestors in an impassioned plea to the UN; while in August local
Hong Konger Jackie Chan appeared in a controversial CCTV (China Central
Television) interview pleading for an end to the fighting in Mandarin – a move that
led to claims online of the kung-fu icon betraying a conciliatory nationalist stance.
Shortly thereafter social media heat was ignited by the comments of ‘Crystal’ Liu Yifei,
the Chinese born actress and naturalised US star of Disney’s forthcoming live-action
remake of Mulan (Niki Caro, USA, 2020). Her Tweet ‘I support the Hong Kong police;
you can beat me up now’ led to a #BoycottMulan movement that initially trended in HK
and the US, before spreading to South Korea and Europe.1 Liu’s involvement and
interventions in particular unconceal a complex web of transborder filmmaking practices
and politics that help to reframe many of the essays collected in this special issue, which
were written and developed between 2016 and 2018 in an attempt to come to grips with
the complex politics of methodological nationalism and transnationalism with regard to
the study of transborder Chinese cinema(s) and trends.

Categorizing Chinese cinemas: or, what’s in a name?

Although a comprehensive review of the debates that have animated the national/transna-
tional Chinese cinema(s) field goes beyond the scope of this introduction and special issue, we
do wish to minimally engage with its major turning points to help contextualize the following
invited contributions, while remaining cogent that others would likely frame or categorize the
issues here examined differently. As many of the articles assembled here deal with, but do not
resolve, problems of categorization, we might begin with this.
As today’s Hong Kong protests help draw into painful relief, interleaving and criss-
crossing many considerations of what exactly constitutes Chinese cinema rubs up against
the validity and legitimacy of competing attitudes toward national sovereignties,
 TRANSNATIONAL SCREENS 139

geopolitical territories, their historicities, and periodizations. A problem that has histori-
cally inspired certain scholars to employ larger supranational cultural formations as the
object of their studies, with concepts such as ‘greater China’ or the ‘Greater Cultural
Chinese Sphere’ being but the most common; the latter stretching out to enrobe
distributed, diasporic or deterritorialised Chinese-peoples and Chinese-cinemas pro-
duced within the borders of non-Chinese nation-states such as Singapore, Malaysia
and Indonesia. However, for other scholars such as David Leiwei Li, this very ‘naming
of “greater China” or “cultural China” has rendered untenable a taken-for-granted,
transhistorical understanding of what is “Chinese”’ in the first place’ (2016, 5).
If similar issues have occasioned a sustained debate over the past century or so, they
gained renewed vigour and intensity over the past twenty-years courtesy of, among
others, scholars such as Sheldon Lu (1997a, 1997b, 2001, Lu 2014), Aihwa Ong and
Donald Nonini (1997), Ong (1999) Lu and Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh (2005), Meghan Morris
(2005), Chris Berry and Mary Farquhar (2006, 2010), Gina Marchetti and Tan Seen Kam
(2007), Will Higbee and Song Hwee Lim (2010), Jeremy Taylor (2011), Peiren Shao
(2014), and Zhang Zhen (2015). To offer a thumbnail sketch, 1997 marks a watershed
moment courtesy of Sheldon Hsiao-Peng Lu’s edited collection Transnational Chinese
Cinemas: Identity, Nationhood, Gender. There, Lu famously noted that even before the
reconfiguration of China’s territory in multiple entities, the 1896 screening of Lumiere
Brothers’ films ensured that Chinese cinema was ‘an event of transnational capital’ before
it was ever national (1997, 4). If cinema in China was transnational first, it was not
immediately ‘national’ thereafter, for in 1905 the first domestic territorial product,
Dingjun shan/Dingjun Mountain, was fashioned under the auspices of the Qing dynasty
(Fengliang 2010, 246): A fact that highlights ongoing issues surrounding the ideological
operation of the term ‘national’ embedded within transnational concepts and methodol-
ogies. Thereafter, the formation of the Republic of China in 1912, through to the
foundation of the PRC in 1949, saw producers, filmmakers, audiences and critics
(particularly in Shanghai and Hong Kong) variously create, encounter and consume a
varied diet of prescriptively (or what we might today call ‘branded’) ‘national’ and
transborder’ cinemas. The splitting of China into two governments in 1949 – each of
which laid claim to the single state of ‘China’ – predictably saw much grist cast into the
Chinese national cinema debate. Heuristically, the PRC’s socialist cinema was centrally
planned and national funded, and therefore predominantly hailed viewers as nationals in
a nationalized audio language. However, claims that these films stand as exclusive
examples of ‘Chinese national cinema’ betrays a geopolitical bias or situatedness that
disavows cinematic traditions which developed coevally in Taiwan, colonial Hong Kong
as well as among the many diasporic Chinese communities in Southeast Asia, Europe and
the Americas. This is not to mention the influence that geo-political super-states such as
the Soviet Union had upon the aesthetics, pacing, editing, themes, political agendas and
projection methods employed in socialist PRC cinema.
Such debates have engendered a range of rich and conflicting political perspectives on
what national/transnational Chinese cinemas is2 as well as a plethora of equally compet-
ing paradigms attempting to foreground (or background) different aspects of cinematic
Chineseness. In reflecting upon such a proliferation of theoretical models in the decade
leading up to a 2010 interview, Lu noted that since the turn of the millennium:
140 D. H. FLEMING AND M. E. INDELICATO

There have appeared, [. . .] in the English-language context a series of terms such as ‘Chinese
cinema’, ‘Chinese national cinema’, ‘Chinese-language film’, ‘transnational Chinese cine-
mas’, ‘comparative Chinese cinemas’, ‘Sinophone cinema’, some used in plural forms.
Accordingly, in the Chinese-language context, there appeared such terms as Zhongguo
dianying [Chinese cinema), Zhongguo minzu dianying (Chinese-national cinema), huayu
dianying (Chinese-language cinema), zhongwen dianying (Chinese-language cinema),
hanyu dianying (Chinese ethnicity-language cinema), kuaguo huayu dianying (transnational
Chinese-language cinema), etc. Most of these terms, however, had first appeared in foreign
scholarship before reaching China. (Lu in Fengliang 2010, 248)

The transnational or transborder nature of film scholarship is also worth articulating here
to a broader historical trend. Indeed, in his Locating Chinese Film Theory, Victor Fan notes
how in-between the Marxist (read Western) turns of the 1930s and 1950s within Chinese
film criticism, 1942 saw the University of Nanking in Chengdu open a joint ‘film and radio
studies’ program with its transborder partner the New York University; an enterprise that
led to the publication of original and translated ‘meijie lilun (media theory)’ essays in
Nanking’s journal, Dianying yu boyin [Film & Radio] (Fan 2015, 6–9). Since then, such
trends have continued, with ever-changing terms and concepts emerging as a result of
internal and external contact zones between intellectual cultures. Thus, we can now add to
Lu’s list of terms new concepts such as ‘Mahua (or Malaysian overseas Chinese’ cultural
production)’ (Raju 2008), ‘Sinophonic-phenotypical screen culture’ (Li 2016, 6) and
Huallywood (the partial focus of this issue), which individually and collectively cast further
intellectual grist to the transnational mill. Worth mentioning is how such explosion of
terms coincided with the PRC joining the WTO in 2001 and subsequently hosting the
World Expo in 2010, when the nation also overtook Japan to become the second largest
economy in the world. As Chris Berry elsewhere notes (2013),3 such coincidence suggests
that transnational production and transnationalisation can be framed as a practice pro-
pelled by the ideological embrace of ‘globalism’. For, the nature of globalisation (read
market-driven global capitalism) might in and of itself help explain the spread of labels, and
some of the seeming paradoxes and contradictions bound up in their coining and
deployment.
Following others, we can here pick up on Lu’s observation regarding different pre-
ferences for employing the singular or plural form to speak of Chinese cinema(s) as an
illustrative case in point. Indeed, in their introduction to a special ‘transnational’ issue of
the Journal of Chinese Cinemas Chris Berry and Laikwan Pang specifically debate whether
one should today properly ask: What is Chinese transnational cinema? Or, What are
Chinese transnational cinemas? Far from being a pedantic issue, such questions highlight
important historiographic concerns (208: 3ff).
Ruminate: In 1997 Lu adopted the plural form of transnational cinemas. A preference
shared a decade later by Song Hwee Lim. There adopted to ‘problematize any monolithic
concept of a Chinese national cinema’ (Lim in Berry and Pang 2008, 3). However, Berry
and Pang remind us that for Lim, the preference for discussing Chinese ‘cinemas’
stemmed from the need to recognising the work of directors such as Tsai Ming-liang,
whose films ‘demands an equally sophisticated and plural approach to [. . .] the field of
Chinese cinemas studies’ (Lim 2007, 3). Or put differently, for Berry and Pang, Lu and
Lim’s preference for the plural form is driven by their consideration of political economy
trends rather than film aesthetics. By adopting this other perspective in the aftermath of
 TRANSNATIONAL SCREENS 141

the PRC joining the WTO – when talents and capital began to circulate in an intensified
trans-border fashion – Berry and Pang describe increasing difficulty in trying ‘to distin-
guish a Hong Kong film from a Chinese film or a Taiwan film’ (Berry and Pang 2008, 4).
Indeed, as Berry elsewhere argues, outside of the politics of methodological nationalism
films produced within these three territories have reached ‘a point where the ability to
draw simple lines between them or talk about co-productions between otherwise distinct
territories is no longer appropriate’ (2013, 458). Instead, this ever-evolving parliament of
production, distribution and consumption now constitutes a ‘contingent ensemble of
diverse practices’ that form into a heterogeneous totality, which thrives on ‘relations of
exteriority’ and might (paradoxically) be thought in terms of ‘a new Chinese super
nation-state’, that is ‘bigger, bolder and stronger than ever’ (Berry 2013, 467–8).
Complicating such matters, several scholars have also begun examining the production
of what we might here call outlandish Chinese Cinemas, which although found trading in
certain ‘Chinese elements’ or promulgating approved Beijing ideology (and ethico-aes-
thetics), are ultimately produced outside the geographical site of China (see, e.g. Wang 2009,
171–4; Adbi 2016; Homewood 2018, 175–7; Griffith 2019). In the Kung Fu Panda series
(2008, 2011, 2016, 2020), for example, prototypical Chinese cinematic elements have been
made to move within a transborder circuit wherein they become ‘weightless’ signifiers
hardly traceable to any origin (Wang 2009, 170). Or stated differently, by means of syncretic
appropriation in an era of global semiocapitalism and transnational funding, many modern
films that appear to trade in signs of ‘Chineseness’ no longer denote ‘a national or regional
identity’ at all, and instead constitute free-floating ‘elements’ or de-essentialized signifiers
‘that can be combined with other attractions to create an audiovisual “recipe” that may
maximise a film’s marketability’ (Wang 2009, 173). All things considered, then, thinking
through what is in a ‘s’ (to repose Berry and Pang’s essay question) drives us toward the very
heart of a complex web of debates surrounding what exactly Chinese cinema(s) are, and the
politics surrounding why we would even want to categorise them as such in the first place.4

Huallywood and cinematic hegemony

It is in this chiasmic political economy and the transnational nexus of contemporary
transborder filmmaking that the term ‘Huallywood’ has emerged as an attempt to both
name Mainland China’s home-grown industry (hua liawu) and make room for its
overgrowing ramifications. However, while the term superficially suggests an aspirational
attempt to emulate (and detour) the ‘Hollywood’ model of film production, distribution,
consumption and profiteering, Emily Yeuh-Yu Yeh and Darrell William Davis stress that
the term remains suffused with the forms of ‘intra-national or hyper-national tender’ that
Berry elsewhere links to the new super-Chinese assemblage (Davis and Yeh 2008, 37–44;
see also Berry 2014, 467). First and foremost, then, Huallywood owes its minting to two
concomitant film-industry-related phenomena: The PRC’s rise to become the world’s
second largest film market, and, the economic ascendance to global film producer by
means of transborder co-productions with South Korea, Japan and the USA (to name but
a few). Overlapping phenomena that have often suggested that China’s film industry
might be entering into a new golden era (see, e.g. Zhang Zhen 2015). With a significant
point along this road being the opening of the National Digital Film Industrial Park in
Wuxi, near Shanghai, which has been nicknamed Huallywood since 2012. And, as David
142 D. H. FLEMING AND M. E. INDELICATO

H. Fleming notes in his contribution to this special issue, Taiwan’s own ‘Huallywood’
industrial hub (which was commissioned in Hualien County in Taiwan during 2016),
highlighting a shared super-state desire for a hyper-Chinese Hollywood simulation.
Interspersed with these industrial movements, the term Huallywood concomitantly
surfaced as an academic neologism, coined by Peiren Shao, Professor of Media and
Communication at Zhejiang University, with the ambition of establishing a new theoretical
paradigm in the field of transnational Chinese cinemas studies (Peiren 2014; see also Lim
2016, 2). But what is exactly Huallywood as a scholarly paradigm? And what does it have to
offer to the already label saturated field of Chinese cinema(s)? Is it simply a term affirming
the rise of China’s film market and industry in the world stage? Or, is it a serious conceptual
attempt to grapple with the multifarious cultural, political and economic shifts under-
pinning such a rise? While few of these questions have been posed in the English-speaking
academy to date, in ‘Research notes towards a definition of Huallywood’, Yongchun Fu,
Maria Elena Indelicato and Zitong Qiu offer an introduction to, and contextualisation of,
this latest concept (2016). In their view, Shao’s neologism embodies the ambition to
supersede the aforementioned scholarly efforts to define what is, and counts, as China
and Chinese but in a fashion that is more global than transnational. Mostly due to the overt
reference to Hollywood as a hegemonic ‘dream factory’, Shao’s model is in fact additionally
pursuing the objective of making of Chinese a cultural signifier and/or imaginary of global
reach while critically attending to the tensions arising from the fragmentation of the nation
into three main territories as well as Chinese diasporic’ contestation of Mainland China
self-referentiality (54). From this double perspective, Fu, Indelicato and Qiu point to
Huallywood as a theoretical insertion that seeks to address both objectives by adopting
the prefix Hua (broadly meaning Chinese ethnic) as semantic matrix to hold people living
in PRC, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau as well as Chinese migrants and descendants together
in one loose yet singular filmic discourse (56).
In spite of the global aspiration, Huallywood’s object of study is thus not limited to
contemporary home-groomed diapan (blockbuster films). Rather, Hua is deployed to
cover as much ground as possible – culturally, linguistically, historically, geographically
and linguistically. In Shao’s elaboration, Huallywood, in fact, encompasses all those films
or cinematic traditions which regard (1) Huaren (ethnic Chinese people) as the main
subject in, and/or of, film production (2) Huayu (Chinese languages) as the basic film
language (3) Huashì (affairs concerning Chinese people or China) as major film topics (4)
Huashǐ (Chinese history) as a prominent film resource (5) and Huadi (locations includ-
ing Mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macao and Chinese communities living
outside China) as the production space and living environment (Shao 2014 as cited in
Fu, Indelicato and Qiu 2016, 55). Yet so derived, the authors note, Huallywood still runs
the risk of reinstating Mainland China as the imagined yet ineluctable centre due to its
implicit conceptualization of transnationalism as a ‘higher level of unit and coherence’
and Chinese identity as a ‘cultural order that is transnational’ (Berry and Farquhar as
cited in Yonghun, Indelicato, and Qiu 2016, 56). As Fu, Indelicato and Qiu noted, this
latent tendency is made manifest by the lack of a critical engagement with Tu Weiming’s
Cultural China thesis, whose metaphor of Chinese culture as a ‘living tree’ (1994) is often
deployed in the literature produced so far under the umbrella of Huallywood (2016, 56).
From this perspective, similar references to supranational and/or regional cultural for-
mations as a ‘greater China’ or the ‘Greater Cultural Chinese Sphere’ are likewise
 TRANSNATIONAL SCREENS 143

susceptible of evoking the spectre of a trans-border cultural order that sees Mainland
China as the core emitting coherence and unity.
Such risk, in turn, unravels another important contradiction imposed by the field of
Huallywood studies. Namely, while the prefix Hua is mobilised as a semantic matrix to
insert Mainland China as just one cultural signifier among the many constellating the
contemporary transnational panorama of Chinese cinematic productions, studies con-
ducted so far under this umbrella have pursued the agenda of promoting Mainland
China’s culture and image overseas and therefore reduced the entire field to a mere state’s
instrument of cultural soft power (57). Moreover, the semantic articulation of the prefix
Hua with the suffix – llywood has, rather predictably, lent Huallywood to be criticised as
an act of self-alignment with an industrial and economic model synonymous with
‘Western cultural hegemony’ (57). However, there is still the possibility that
Huallywood can be conceptually reframed; not so much as an unintended or uncritical
reproduction of the cultural hegemony of the ‘West’ on the ‘East’, but rather as a
challenge to re-think entirely the relationship between Chinese and Western cinematic
productions while departing from the ‘idealist insistence on a separate, self-sufficient
“Chinese tradition” that should be lined up against the Western one because it is as great
if not greater’ (Chow as cited by Yonghun, Indelicato, and Qiu 2016, 58).
Informed by such critiques, several articles constituting this special issue aim to map
the ways in which different approaches to, and commentaries on Huallywood potentially
open the field of transnational Chinese cinemas studies to new questions, perceptions
and patterns of cinematic production and exhibition, while bringing to the fore pre-
viously marginalized perspectives.

The essays
Fittingly, Hong Kong and its complex history becomes the focus of this issue’s first
article. Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh’s ‘Colonial Dispositif and the Early Hong Kong Screen
Culture (1897–1907)’ begins the special issue by situating the coming of age of the field
of Chinese cinemas studies within the history of European colonization of China. Yeh
charts the unexplored terrain of early screen culture to unravel how the multifarious
functions that film exhibitions exerted in treaty ports such as Hong Kong played a pivotal
role in cohering a localized colonial subjectivity for both European and Chinese popula-
tions. Due to her engagement with the legacy of European colonization, Yeh’s contribu-
tion constitutes a response to Fu, Indelicato and Qiu’s call to trouble the presumed
existence of a distinct and independent ‘Chinese tradition’, while questioning the pre-
sumption of an overarching and homogenous Chinese cultural identity uncontaminated
with Western cultural and aesthetic values.
The following two papers approach the most advanced expression of the same logic of
planetary expansion underpinning colonialism: the globalization of capitalism. Defining
it as a force that has invariably shaped cinematic re-articulations of national identities,
these contributions problematize the current understanding of China as a hegemonic
actor in the field of transnational co-production and exhibition by tracing the trajectories
that film texts have temporally and/or spatially endured. In ‘Another Day at The Office:
Huallywood Co-productions, Verticality, and the Project of a Comparative Film Studies’,
Olivia Khoo ambitiously advances co-productions with China as a form of ‘technology’
144 D. H. FLEMING AND M. E. INDELICATO

engendering an open-ended reconfiguration of networked relations in the Asia-Pacific

region. By taking the use of verticality in The Office as a metaphor of China’s encounter
with capitalism, Khoo effectively responds to recent calls to employ a comparative film
studies perspective to the analysis of movies co-produced with China.
Diving in the same historical moment, or what Li refers to as the ‘mise-en-scène of
Capitalism’s Second Coming’ to China, David H Fleming’s ‘Third-culture Hàullywood: or,
“Chimerica” the cinematic return’ takes Huallywood on its word, but not its tone, to posit
an alternative ‘third culture’ model for understanding the making and marketing of mega-
budget and mega-revenue transborder productions produced in-between global
Hollywood and transnational Huallywood. Describing a cinematic return of the transna-
tional behemoth that the historian Niall Ferguson’s and economist Moritz Schularick
christened Chimerica back in 2007, Fleming harnesses the mythical conceptual figure of
the chimera to reframe films such as The Great Wall (Zhang Yimou, 2016) and Rogue One:
A Star Wars Story (Gareth Edwards, 2016) as illustrative examples of Hàullywood cinema
(neither Hollywood or Huallywood, but a cinema composed of bits and pieces of each).
The last two articles move from examining mega-budget transnational productions to
observing the self-representations of those subjects who are, at the level of nationalistic
imaginaries, relegated to inhabit, discursively and materially, the margins of nationally
bounded territories. In ‘The “Queer Generation:” Queer Community Documentary in
Contemporary China,’ Hongwei Bao focuses on the documentary practices of the ‘queer
generation’ – a loose group of filmmakers inspired by the professor, curator and activist
film director Cui Zi’en – to highlight the activist dimension of their voices in the polyphony
of transnational queer cultures while moreover centring local aesthetics, politics, modes of
production and circulation. Conversely, the last contribution ‘Childhood, Animality and
Emotions in Indonesian Film Director Edwin’s Film Blind Pig Who Wants to Fly’ concludes
this issue by questioning Huallywood’s implicit projection of a homogenous and coherent
diasporic Chinese cultural identity. In this article, through their analysis of Edwin’s employ-
ment of childhood and animality as allegories of the positioning of the Chinese as an object
of national disgust, Maria Elena Indelicato, Ivana Pražić and Zitong Qiu offer a unique
perspective on the complex configuration of emotions Chinese Indonesians continue
experiencing because of racism in contemporary Indonesia.

Notes
1. A typical Twitter response reposted by CNN read ‘Liu is a naturalized American citizen. It
must be nice. Meanwhile she pisses on people fighting for democracy (Yeung 2019),’ while
the BBC quoted another that read: ‘how tone deaf do you have to be to support police
brutality when you just filmed a character who is supposed to stand against oppression in its
raw form? Pound sand.’
2. We must also forego on this outing opening up debates concerning what counts as ‘cinema’,
in our discussion of Chinese transnational cinema or even ‘What is not cinema?’ to use Fan’s
enigmatic reworking of Andre Bazin’s ontological question in Cinema Approaching Reality
(2015, 222).
3. Berry here follows Anna Tsing’s suggestion to ‘use ‘globalisation’ as part of the ideological
rhetoric of globalism, whereas we use ‘transnational’ to refer to the specific ‘transborder
projects’ that actually constitute the growth of the transnational on the ground, so to speak’
(Berry 2013: 464).
 TRANSNATIONAL SCREENS 145

4. As Berry and Pang render it: ‘In other words, with “Chinese cinemas” and “Chinese cinema”
Lim and we both want to invoke the “transnational,” albeit for different reasons’ (Berry and
Pang 2008, 4).

Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank the editors of Transnational Screens for their productive feedback
and suggestions alongside the contributors and anonymous reviewers who kindly accepted to be
part of this project.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this
article.

Notes on contributors
David H. Fleming is a Senior Lecturer in the Communication, Media and Culture division at the
University of Stirling, Scotland. His research interests surround the intersectionalities of cinema,
philosophy and technology, He is the author of Unbecoming Cinema (Intellect/Chicago University
Press, 2017), and co-author of The Squid Cinema from Hell: Kinoteuthis Infernalis and the
Emergence of Chthulhumedia with William Brown (Edinburgh University Press, 2020), and
Chinese Urban Shi-nema: Cinematicity, Society, and Millennial China with Simon Harrison
(Palgrave MacMillan, forthcoming). He has also published widely in interdisciplinary journals
including SubStance, Film-Philosophy, Deleuze Studies, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Journal of
Urban Cultural Studies, Social Semiotics, Science Fiction Film and Television, and edited collections
such as Posthumanisms Through Deleuze (Indiana University Press, forthcoming) and Deleuze and
Film (Edinburgh University Press, 2012).
Maria Elena Indelicato is a lecturer at the Ningbo Institute of Technology, Zhejiang University.
She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies, University of Sydney.
Besides her monograph Australia’s New Migrants, she has published in race feminist and cultural
studies journals such as Outskirts, Critical Race and Whiteness Studies, Chinese Cinemas, Inter-
Asia Cultural Studies, and Feminist Review.

ORCID
David H. Fleming http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3176-0745
Maria Elena Indelicato http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4935-4745

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