The last few decades have seen a dramatic turnaround in the Chinese-speaking film world.
Toward the end of the twentieth century, Hong Kong had the second-largest feature film export
industry in the world after Hollywood (Bordwell 2000, 1), and, by reputation, the third-largest
production industry after Hollywood and India. Taiwan, which had been a major producer in
the 1960s and 1970s, was in decline as a commercial production industry, although its artistic
reputation was flying high with auteurs like Hou Hsiao-hsien, Edward Yang, and Tsai Ming-liang
winning many awards at international film festivals. The cinema industry of the People’s Repub-
lic of China (PRC) was also in the doldrums in the 1990s, and local filmmakers were deeply
pessimistic about its prospects (Rosen 2002).
However, to everyone’s surprise, today Hong Kong has joined Taiwan in experiencing a
feature film production slump, with film production largely confined to low-budget features
whose content is too locally specific to find significant export markets. In contrast, the PRC
is booming, both in terms of feature film production and the value at the box office. As the
PRC film market accelerates towards overtaking the United States and becoming the world’s
largest, people are talking about the emergence of a new Chinese film behemoth. Some call it
“Huallywood,” punning on the meaning of “Hua” (华) as “ethnic Chinese” (for example, Zhu
2015). But non-Chinese speakers more often speak about the appearance of “Chollywood” (for
example, Moore 2013). What is Chollywood? How new is it?
This short chapter on cinema in the Chinese-speaking world places the emergence of
Chollywood as the transborder and commercial Chinese-language film industry of today in this
history of the changing fortunes of filmmaking in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the PRC. At first
sight, this might seem to be a tale about competing national or quasi-national cinemas, with
the PRC Goliath beating out its David-sized rivals. Indeed, some analysts have seen the rise of
Chollywood as a story of PRC national power, with close ties between the global ambitions of
the PRC film industry, the PRC government, and the Communist Party of China (for example,
Yeh and Davis 2008).
However, without denying those PRC global ambitions and their role in shaping the PRC
film industry, this chapter traces the reconfigurations of Chinese-language cinema through the
framework of transnational rather than national cinema. It argues that Chollywood is a manifes-
tation of transnational as much as national cinema and a transborder assemblage. Furthermore,
rick simeone
(Rick Simeone)
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