School of Communication / Academy of Film

By critically incorporating the concept of erotic capital, this research, which is based on an ethnographic study of female white-collar employees, discloses the gendered and sexualized dynamics of guanxi in urban China. The research first examines the male-centred standardized routine of guanxi through a detailed analysis of yingchou, a practice consisting of banquets and post-banquet activities, which can involve the use of women as subordinate ‘erotic gifts’. Then, a four-type characterization of white-collar women is developed which demonstrates ways in which women can achieve more agentic, and potentially equal, guanxi status. The types identified in the study are: ‘pseudo-brothers’, ‘rational legal professionals’, ‘the unreachable desired’, and ‘the unspoken rules followers’. Each type has a specific way of navigating the patriarchal structure of guanxi, though boundaries between types are blurred and women may change their strategy, and therefore their type, over time.

Based on eight in-depth interviews, this article analyses the quandary faced by liberal mainland Chinese student migrants in Hong Kong. On the one hand, the liberal pro-democracy movements in Hong Kong are deeply intertwined with the rise of localism, which is based on a dichotomy between Hong Kong and mainland China. On the other hand, a rising, development-centric nationalism in mainland China reduces Hong Kong protesters to unemancipated British colonial subjects. However, in the context of this "double marginalisation," liberal Mainland students guard a form of liberalism that transcends both Hong Kong localism and Chinese nationalism. They debunk the stereotype of mainland Chinese students being apolitical and therefore provide an alternative definition of being Chinese. They challenge the view that mainland Chinese can only be emancipated outside mainland China to destabilise a Fukuyamian linear interpretation of history. They use four tactics to cope with double marginalisation: understanding localists, befriending expatriates, assuming professionalism, and becoming apolitical.

Based on a three-year digital ethnography as an educational consultant on the Chinese digital platform X, I use guanxi, enduring interpersonal relationships, to explain how people voluntarily work to the extent of burning out. Drawing on literature about emotion and work in precarious labour, and especially the discussion on emotional capitalism, I demonstrate that it is not because of the lack of social connections that people engage in auto-exploitation and burning out, as Han Byung-chul argues, but precisely because of shared values and the emotions people develop for each other that people commit more to work. Complementing research on digital economic tribes, I argue that guanxi could serve as an analytical framework to decipher the buyer-seller relationship on platforms. In particular, I use two guanxi-related concepts ganqing (emotional attachments) and renqing (norms of interpersonal relationship) to explain why I worked voluntarily and obligatorily for the students I met via X.

This essay focuses on Wong Kar-Wai's 2046. It points out, using the number "2046" as a sign and other metaphors, how this film has performed as a negotiator of Hong Kong's subjectivity after its return to China in 1997. But through the construction of an identifiable yet unfamiliar Hong Kong's space of locality of the 1960s, this film presents to us a questionable and doubtful locality of Hong Kong. And through this questionable locality, this film places the subjectivity and the ethnic consciousness of Hong Kong people into a continuing process of being deconstructed and reconstructed.

Malaysia new Prime Minister Najib A. Razak had spend a great amount of money and utilized great man power to promote his 1Malaysia concept, in order to construct a national identity for Malaysian and reduce the ethnics segregation problem facing by Malaysia. Mass media especially advertisements play an important role in the process of the construction of 1Malaysia. This essay focuses on several case studies of 1Malaysia advertisement, try to discuss how did these advertisements portrait and represent 1Malaysia and what kind of narrative strategy that used by these advertisements to generate the identification of Malaysian towards the nation. The first discussed Telekom Malaysia's Independent Day advertisements try to use the myth of "blood relationship" to build up a model of "one family" in order to unify the divided ethnics in Malaysia and generate Malaysian's identification towards the nation. Next, this essay will focus on the discussion on three other cultural and religious controversial advertisements in order to show that the construction of 1Malaysia is unable to reduce and settle the ethnics segregation issue that haunted Malaysia all these years. Under the Malay-centrism cultural environment of Malaysia, the construction of a national identity of 1Malaysia will be obstructed.

This essay is a detail analysis of Bodyguards and Assassins regarding how this movie portrait the history and the past Hong Kong, and its relationship with Hong Kong post-1997 identity. This essay stated that, Hong Kong in Bodyguards and Assassins cannot totally isolate itself from the discourse of China’s nationalism. All sort of common people from Hong Kong directly and indirectly devote to success of the Chinese 1991 revolution. The emphasis on “Hong Kong is the cradle of this revolution” in this movie can be considered as the effort to forge a place for Hong Kong in the China nationalism after it returned to China. But the Hong Kong people in this movie had been constructed as not totally fight for their nation. Their different and sophisticated motives of joining the revolution and attitudes toward the revolution actually disturb the loftiness and the sacredness of the discourse of the national revolution. This movie as the same time portrait the cruelness and the complexity side of the revolution which can arouse the audiences think about the purpose of the revolution. This identification yet keep some distance from China actually is an active strategy to find the cultural orientation of Hong Kong after it return to China in 1997.

This essay focused on the discussion on the texts written by Chinese participants of the "Coalition for Clean and Fair Elections," that published by the Chinese edition of two internet media organizations of Malaysia Malaysiakini and Merdeka Review. This essay pointed out, these texts emphasis on the important of the harmony relationship between different ethnics in Malaysia, and it was also crucial to rebuild the relationship with the ethnic Malay in order to construct a unity "Malaysian" national identity. This essay concluded that this constructed national identity is a form of contestation to the national discourse of the ruling regime that based on ethnics' differences. This was also a way of Chinese Malaysian seeking for national identification which they had been marginalized all these years as a result of ethnic politics in Malaysia. Internet and online media was a better platform for the construction and discussions of this contested identity, as they were likely to escape from the intervention and censorship of the ruling regime.

From British colonization era to independence nation building, Malaysia’s political atmosphere has swamped by the shadow of ethnic politics. After the violence ethnic clash in 1969, the state controlled by the Malay nationalist began to institutionalize several political-economic and cultural policy in order to ensure the Malays dominancy in all sectors in the country. This discriminative political logic has extended to the discourse of Malaysia’s national cinema and the nation film policy. Under this discriminative national cinema and discourse and the implementation of the film policy, the local film industry is basically centered on the Malay talents and artists. Almost all the represented content of the films are regarding Malays’ life, culture and language. The multiethnic and multicultural sides of Malaysia nearly disappear in the mainstream cinema screen. The evolution of digital technology in the late 1990s has ‘democratized’ the film production environment in Malaysia. The availability of cheap and affordable digital filmmaking gadgets opened up opportunities for the ethnic minorities like Chinese to make their own films. But a decade after the millennium, more and more mainstream commercial films directed and produced by Chinese Malaysian were on the screening list of the local and foreign mainstream commercial cinemas. These films successfully attracted local audiences and achieved good box-office. This recent development change the filmic scene of Chinese Malaysian cinema where alternative independent films and mainstream commercial films both play their roles in shaping the cultural appearance of this cinema scenario. This paper tried to argue that the availability and the development of these Chinese Malaysian films beside triggered by the advancement of technology and the availability of film market, they also related to the recent changes of Malaysia’s national cinema discourse and its film policy. The fracture and the shrinking of Barisan Nasional’s political hegemony have forced them to adjust their policies (include film policy) in order to win back the support of non-Malay Malaysians. Nevertheless, the changes of the nation’s discriminative cinema culture are rather slow. The Malay-centric sentiment has deep-rooted in this nation and it is rather difficult to deracinate from the soil of this nation. The building of a truly tolerance multi-cultural and multi-ethnic national cinema culture still has a long way to go.

This study examines how Sinophone Malaysian films have engaged with China-centrism to advocate for local identity. Following the Sinophone concept, it specifically discusses the efforts of emerging Chinese Malaysian filmmakers, and how they promote local Sinophone identity in their films. The Sinophone concept, proposed by Shih Shu-mei, highlights a very important ideological intention: anti-China-centrism. Thus, this study further investigates these filmmakers' level of resistance to China-centrism in constructing their local identities. Based on analysis of a few films, such as South of South, Nasi Lemak 2.0, Petaling Street Warrior, Woohoo!, and Ice Kacang Puppy Love, a narrative was found, proclaiming a "from China to local" identity. These films have maintained a distance from Chinese nationalism, and revealed the creole language of Chinese Malaysians used to create their local identities.

This article focuses on the analysis of two Sinophone films made by Chinese Malaysian filmmakers, which are Flower in the Pocket (Liew Seng Tat 2007) and Nasi Lemak 2.0 (Namewee/Wee 2011), and discusses how these films engage Malaysian ethnocracy by interrogating the ever-problematic Malay-Chinese relationship. Both filmmakers belong to the new generation of Chinese Malaysians who feel the need to question the political system and long for a more inclusive national identity. Flower in the Pocket depicts the uncomfortable relationship between Malays and Chinese by examining the stories of two families from both ethnic backgrounds while questioning how Malays have taken their privilege position and economic protection for granted. Nasi Lemak 2.0 instead parodies the mainstream Malay-centric ideology by deconstructing the image Malay heroism while satirizing UMNO's manipulation of ethnic politics.

In its self-conscious transformation into a global city with a national culture that strains to include post-industrial values, contemporary Singapore has had to struggle with the repressed anxieties that threaten to return and disrupt its entry into the advanced stages of global capitalism. This article argues that such struggles are ritually performed in a selection of contemporary Singapore films that feature female monstrosity. By adopting the psychoanalytic theory of the monstrous-feminine developed by Barbara Creed (1993), this article analyses the pontianak of Malay folklore in Return to Pontianak (2001), the vengeful ghost of a murdered Filipina domestic worker in The Maid (2005), and the beautiful female psychologist possessed by the spirit of a tiger in Tiger's Whip (1998). The three Singapore films are modern rituals that serve to bring Singapore's national anxieties under control by subjecting female monstrosity-their grotesque embodiment-to patriarchal discipline.

Merlion Center, Singapore. The Singapore government's expressed "liberalism" and "openness" to sexual diversity is "meant mostly for foreign talent to see, so that they will believe that Singapore is an open-minded society and a stimulating place in which to live, work, and play." (Credit: Alex Au)

The concept of meritocracy is unstable as its constituent ideas are potentially contradictory. The egalitarian aspects of meritocracy, for example, can come into conflict with its focus on talent allocation, competition, and reward. In practice, meritocracy is often transformed into an ideology of inequality and elitism. In Singapore, meritocracy has been the main ideological resource for justifying authoritarian government and its pro-capitalist orientations. Through competitive scholarships, stringent selection criteria for party candidacy, and high ministerial salaries, the ruling People's Action Party has been able to co-opt talent to form a “technocratic” government for an “administrative state.” However, as Singapore becomes more embedded in the processes of globalization, it will experience new forms of national crisis, alternative worldviews through global communications technology, and a widening income gap, all of which will force its ideology of meritocracy to unravel.

This article surveys the approach of two important film-makers to the experience of redevelopment projects and the spatial reconfigurations of the urban landscape in Singapore. Tan Pin Pin's documentary Moving House depicts the violent collision of modern development with traditional rituals, showing the mass exhumation and transfer of graves to apartment-like style blocks to accommodate public housing construction. The ghosts of the dead return to such public housing estates in Eric Khoo's fiction film 12 Storeys (1997) to pass through the claustrophobic spaces of alienation containing the struggles of upward mobility. In such examples, the supernatural and fantastic provide a violent reconstruction of the social memory of postcolonial Singapore.

Forum theater is a radical technique of political theater originating within totalitarian societies of Latin America as a revolutionary device for the oppressed classes but increasingly transposed into techniques for dealing with internalized oppressions (or repressions) that afflict the bourgeois classes within advanced capitalist-industrial societies. In this article, I will treat forum theater as performative events in which complex and contingent negotiations interpret and activate the form in varied ways, according to varied commitments. In this regard, I will explore the difference the Singapore situation makes to an understanding of the global circulation and local appropriation of forum theater. Specifically, I will critically analyze the birth, death, and rebirth of forum theater as a situated practice in Singapore. That forum theater reemerged as a legitimate part of the global city's state-led and economically motivated artistic and cultural positions 21:1