Many Hong Kong filmmakers—and the cultural institutions that support them—remain psychologically anchored in a colonial-era hierarchy that positions Hong Kong as culturally, morally, and aesthetically superior to mainland China. This outdated mindset shapes creative choices, industry discourse, and market behavior, creating a structural obstacle to the revival of Hong Kong cinema. The problem is not merely political or related to censorship; it reflects a broader failure to adapt to a transformed cultural and economic landscape.
Lingering Colonial Mindsets and the Stagnation of Hong Kong Cinema
Hong Kong’s cinematic landscape remains shaped by a lingering colonial mentality that positions the city as culturally and morally superior to mainland China. Under British rule, Hong Kong occupied a privileged intermediary role between China and the West, fostering a perception of itself as more civilized, international, modern, and morally refined. In contrast, mainland China was often framed as backward, vulgar, and culturally inferior. At the time, these hierarchies were reinforced by tangible advantages—legal frameworks, global access, capital flows, and institutional support—that gave Hong Kong filmmakers a real edge.
However, this mental model has persisted long after the historical and economic context that justified it has vanished. Mainland China is now the dominant economic engine, cultural market, and center of talent and capital for Chinese-language cinema. Yet, many Hong Kong filmmakers continue to operate as if the mainland remains culturally subordinate, treating participation in its market as a reluctant concession rather than an opportunity for collaboration.
This refusal to update inherited hierarchies has practical consequences. By clinging to a colonial-era sense of superiority, Hong Kong’s film industry risks stagnation, losing touch with the broader Chinese-language audience and the evolving creative ecosystem. The persistence of this mindset illustrates how deeply embedded cultural assumptions can influence not only artistic choices but also market behavior, underscoring the urgent need to reconcile historical identity with contemporary realities.
When “Artistic Integrity” Masks Cultural Contempt
Public discourse surrounding the decline of Hong Kong cinema increasingly invokes “artistic integrity” as an explanation for commercial failure and diminishing influence. Box-office disappointments are attributed to censorship, shrinking audiences to a lack of freedom, and declining relevance is reframed as evidence of moral or artistic purity. This selective moral memory recasts structural and market failures as principled resistance, while conveniently ignoring the industry’s own history of accommodation and compromise.
Historically, Hong Kong filmmakers demonstrated a pragmatic willingness to submit to external constraints when those constraints came from authorities perceived as legitimate or superior. Taiwanese censorship—often harsher and explicitly political—was routinely accepted, as were restrictions imposed by British colonial administrators. Even interference from gangsters and triads who financed productions was treated as an unfortunate but manageable professional reality. Filmmakers adapted accordingly: actors were blacklisted, scenes were cut, films were reshot, and careers were reshaped without framing these concessions as betrayals of artistic principle.
What has changed, then, is not the presence of control, but the identity of those exercising it. Adaptation once understood as professionalism is now denounced as “selling out” when it involves engagement with the mainland market. This double standard exposes a deeper attitude: constraint was tolerable when imposed by those regarded as culturally or politically superior, but becomes morally intolerable when it comes from those viewed with condescension. The rhetoric of artistic integrity, in this context, functions less as a defense of creative freedom than as a vehicle for unacknowledged hierarchy.
Seen this way, appeals to principle obscure a more uncomfortable truth. What is presented as ethical steadfastness often reflects an inability—or refusal—to accept a reordered cultural landscape. The language of integrity thus disguises a persistent sense of superiority, transforming historical pragmatism into present-day moralism, and cultural prejudice into a claim of artistic virtue.
Hostile Imaginaries: Mainland China in Hong Kong Cinematic Narratives
Hong Kong cinema has long exhibited a persistent representational bias toward the mainland, embedding hostility within its narrative structures and character portrayals. Mainland figures are frequently depicted as criminals, prostitutes, buffoons, or sources of moral contamination, while Mandarin-speaking characters are coded as low-status, disruptive, or corrosive to Hong Kong’s social order. Even in films where the mainland does not appear directly, it often surfaces indirectly through dialogue, implication, or narrative blame, serving as a convenient repository for social anxiety and decline.
Alongside this pattern of denigration runs a compensatory fantasy. Many films imagine an exaggeratedly omnipotent Hong Kong police force, erase the mainland’s real political and economic presence, and construct a fictional city that exists in near-total isolation. This cinematic world rejects the mainland symbolically while quietly relying on it in material terms, producing a form of cognitive dissonance in which narrative hostility coexists with structural dependence. The result is not merely a creative trope, but a revealing symptom of unresolved tensions between identity, power, and reality in Hong Kong cinema.
Denial of Structural Transformation in Hong Kong Cinema
The contemporary landscape of Chinese-language cinema has undergone a decisive structural shift that many in Hong Kong’s film industry have failed to internalize. Mainland China now constitutes the largest audience, the primary source of capital, the fastest-growing pool of creative talent, and the core of industrial infrastructure. In this reordered system, Hong Kong no longer functions as China’s cultural gateway to the world, but as a regional contributor within a far larger and more complex cinematic economy.
Rather than adapting strategically to this reality, many filmmakers respond with regression. Nostalgia replaces innovation, and familiar genres—gangster films, undercover cop narratives, and gambling stories—are endlessly recycled. Success in the mainland market is dismissed as vulgar or artistically inferior, allowing structural marginalization to be reframed as aesthetic choice. This posture reveals a fundamental contradiction: a desire to access the benefits of a transformed market without extending it recognition or respect.
Taiwan as a Historical Counterexample to the “Censorship Killed Cinema” Narrative
From the 1970s through the early 1990s, Taiwan enforced one of the most restrictive censorship regimes faced by Hong Kong cinema. During this period, Taiwan was Hong Kong cinema’s largest export market, yet its controls were ideological, arbitrary, and personally punitive. Filmmakers and actors were directly targeted, and censorship extended beyond general content guidelines to bans, blacklists, forced recasting, and massive scene deletions. Despite these severe constraints, Hong Kong cinema thrived in Taiwan, demonstrating that political censorship alone did not stifle creativity.
The severity of Taiwan’s censorship is evident in several historical examples. Tony Leung Ka-fai was blacklisted for appearing in PRC-related films, rendering him temporarily unemployable in Taiwan. Leung Siu-lung lost opportunities simply for visiting mainland China. God of Gamblers II had to be re-shot with a different actress to satisfy Taiwanese authorities, and Ringo Lam’s School on Fire underwent more than thirty scene cuts. These measures went far beyond market-driven regulation, representing overt political control that was often harsher and more arbitrary than contemporary mainland Chinese co-production requirements.
Yet Hong Kong filmmakers adapted strategically. They pragmatically accepted constraints, shot alternate versions, re-edited films, recast roles, and reframed stories to comply with censorship while preserving their commercial and artistic goals. Adaptation was treated as a practical problem to solve, not a moral compromise. Historically, Hong Kong filmmakers had displayed similar flexibility when negotiating with British colonial authorities, local financiers, or even the Triads. Their success in Taiwan illustrates that resilience under censorship relies on creativity and resourcefulness rather than the absence of regulatory restrictions.
Taiwan’s history challenges the assumption that censorship inherently kills cinema. Even under overtly punitive and arbitrary controls, Hong Kong filmmakers continued to produce popular, influential films for decades. The cases of Tony Leung Ka-fai, Leung Siu-lung, God of Gamblers II, and School on Fire highlight how adaptation, not defiance, enabled cinematic flourishing. This historical record demonstrates that the real determinant of creative survival is attitude and ingenuity, not simply the strictness of political control.
Cathay Pacific as a Parallel Case of Colonial Hierarchy in Practice
The 2023 “blanket incident” involving Cathay Pacific offers a revealing parallel to the cultural hierarchies discussed in Hong Kong cinema. On a flight from Chengdu to Hong Kong, flight attendants openly mocked passengers for their inability to speak English, using remarks such as “If you cannot speak blanket, you cannot have it” and “Carpet is on the floor.” The ridicule reportedly continued for hours, transforming what might have been dismissed as an isolated lapse in professionalism into a public display of linguistic and cultural contempt.
The airline’s initial institutional response did little to mitigate the damage. Apologies were widely perceived as perfunctory, and meaningful action followed only after audio recordings circulated publicly, triggering widespread outrage. It was only then that senior management intervened, resulting in the dismissal of three flight attendants. The sequence of denial, minimization, and delayed accountability suggested not merely individual misconduct, but a deeper tolerance for hierarchical attitudes embedded within corporate culture.
Public reaction to the incident quickly identified a familiar language-based civilizational hierarchy at work. English occupied the highest symbolic status, followed by Cantonese, with Mandarin—especially mainland Mandarin—ranked significantly lower. Even within Mandarin and Cantonese, accents were implicitly graded, with Taiwanese or Singaporean Mandarin often treated as superior to mainland speech, and Hong Kong Cantonese privileged over other regional variants. Service staff appeared trained, implicitly if not explicitly, to infer passenger “status” through accent, documentation, names, and demeanor, reproducing social ranking through everyday interaction.
This pattern cannot be understood apart from Cathay Pacific’s historical and institutional position. As Hong Kong’s flagship carrier, long associated with British ownership through the Swire Group and shaped by colonial-era leadership traditions, the airline has preserved a comprador-style worldview. In this structure, local elites are positioned beneath Western authority yet above mainland Chinese, mediating power while internalizing hierarchy. The “blanket incident” thus functions not as an aberration, but as a moment when an inherited colonial order surfaced visibly in practice—exposing how deeply such hierarchies continue to operate within Hong Kong’s institutions.
Why an Entrenched Mindset Prevents Cultural Renewal
No cultural industry can renew itself while remaining hostile to the conditions that sustain it. When filmmakers resent their largest audience, disdain their primary sources of capital, and treat adaptation as a form of betrayal rather than a professional necessity, creative renewal becomes structurally impossible. Curiosity gives way to moral posturing, and engagement is replaced by withdrawal.
Under such conditions, stagnation presents itself as integrity. Nostalgia substitutes for innovation, identity politics displace market intelligence, and strategic failure is reframed as ethical choice. The resulting decline is not imposed from outside but generated internally—a self-inflicted consequence of refusing to reconcile inherited attitudes with contemporary realities.
Summary & Implications
Hong Kong cinema’s decline cannot be explained solely by censorship or external pressure. It stems more fundamentally from the refusal of too many cultural gatekeepers to accept historical adulthood: the end of inherited privilege and the necessity of competing on equal terms within a transformed cultural and economic order. This is not a story of tragedy or victimhood, but of terminal stagnation produced by an obsolete hierarchy. Colonial nostalgia offers no path to renewal; it is not a cultural strategy, but a dead end.