| Summary/Abstract |
Based primarily on archives from Hong Kong, the United Kingdom,
and the United States Information Service (USIS), this article uncovers
the trajectory of the Hong Kong fi lm political censorship system from
1947 to 1971 through interrogating interactions between the confi guration
of a series of regulations and misgivings about and treatments of
imported PRC, USIS, and Taiwan fi lms that had political references. I
examine colonial political censorship of imported films as a local
response to both Chinese politics (the CCP vs. the KMT) and Cold War
politics (the PRC vs. the United States-plus-Taiwan, the PRC vs. the
United Kingdom-plus-Hong Kong), on the one hand; and as a strategy
of cultural governance vis-à-vis the vulnerability of Hong Kong and the
control of the internal stability during the 1950s and 1960s, on the
other. I argue that the censorship system helped the colonial authorities
maintain a degree of cultural autonomy vis-à-vis both UK imperial
policy and the cinematic propaganda war between the PRC and the
United States-plus-Taiwan in Hong Kong during this turbulent period.
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