Welcome to Chollywoodthis new assemblage is the latest in a history of transborder configurations of Chinese-language
cinema that have intersected with the national in a mutually determining manner over the
history of Chinese-language cinema. Three major configurations can be traced: the Shanghai
era, the period from the 1920s until the late 1940s when Shanghai was the primary production
center supplying a transnational Chinese-language film market; the Cold War era, when a net-
work of PRC studios supplied the PRC market, and Hong Kong and Taiwan functioned as the
primary centers supplying the rest of the Chinese-language market; and the contemporary era
of globalization, which is spawning Chollywood, an increasingly integrated transborder market
with feature film production stretching across borders but centered in Beijing and attracting
talent from across the Chinese-speaking world.
Before tracing those three configurations and the factors generating their transformation, it
helps to ask: what is at stake in using the term “transborder assemblage”? Three elements are in
play here: “trans,” “border,” and “assemblage.” Together, they capture the geopolitical economic
condition of Chinese-language cinema since its inception, caught between the transnational and
indeed global span of the Chinese-speaking film market and the various national policies that
regulate access to it. In regard to “trans,” Sheldon Lu has famously argued in the introduction to
his anthology, Transnational Chinese Cinemas, that Chinese cinema has always been transnational.
He begins his account “in 1896 because that was the year of the beginning of film consumption
and distribution,” as opposed to “an account of Chinese national cinema [that] could start with the
first Chinese film production in 1905.” On the basis of this stance, he also argues that “Chinese
national cinema can only be understood in its properly transnational context” (Lu 1997, 2–3).
With the term “border,” I acknowledge that, although Chinese cinema production, distri-
bution, and consumption have always been transnational, they have also always been shaped by
borders of various kinds. To be more specific, the primary potential markets for Chinese cinema
are established in complex ways by the unique characteristics of Chinese languages. One of
the distinctive characteristics of Chinese languages is that they possess a shared written form
(the characters) and multiple spoken forms that are often mutually unintelligible. Therefore, in
the silent film era, intertitles would have made films of potential interest to minimally literate
populations across the Chinese-speaking world. This era extended until the late 1930s, because,
for a number of years, many Chinese films were semi-sound, with dialogue still appearing in
intertitles. Once sound dialogue was established in Chinese cinema, industries using the differ-
ent spoken Chinese languages carved out smaller primary sub-markets according to the trans-
national spread of populations that were the primary speakers of those languages. Via subtitles
or dubbing into other Chinese spoken languages, they also reached the larger Chinese-language
market. However, throughout the history of Chinese-language cinema, these language borders
have been complicated by policies pursued in different polities.
Finally, the term “assemblage” acknowledges the unstable, contingent, and frequently
changing nature of the configurations of population and policy determining the patterns of
Chinese-language cinema over its history. Aihwa Ong draws on her understanding of Deleuze
and Guattari’s Thousand Plateaus to produce the following very useful definition of “assemblage”:
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari use the term “assemblage” to denote a contingent
ensemble of diverse practices and things that is divided along the axes of territoriality
and deterritorialization. Furthermore, particular alignments of technical and adminis-
trative practices extract and give intelligibility to new spaces by encoding and decod-
ing milieus.
(Ong 2005, 338)