Download pdf - Hong Kong Undercover

Transcript

Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Volume 9, Number 4, 2008

ISSN 1464–9373 Print/ISSN 1469–8447 Online/08/040522–21 © 2008 Taylor & FrancisDOI: 10.1080/14649370802386412

Hong Kong undercover: an approach to ‘collaborative colonialism’

LAW Wing-sang

Taylor and FrancisRIAC_A_338808.sgm10.1080/14649370802386412Inter-Asia Cultural Studies1464-9373 (print)/1469-8447 (online)Original Article2008Taylor & Francis94000000December [email protected]

ABSTRACT

Early Hong Kong colonial history offers a distinct angle for understanding the excep-tional circumstances in which a place was colonized by both the British and their Chinese collabora-tors. The term ‘collaborative colonialism’ characterizes a political-cultural formation wheredescriptions of flows and trajectories of forces may be more helpful than history in illuminating thecolony’s murky pasts. Full of treacheries, conspiracies, betrayals and mistrust, such pasts can alsohelp to explain the popularity of ‘undercover’ figures in Hong Kong’s movies. At risk of losing histrue identity, the undercover figure was received as a social victim in the early 1980s’ ‘new wave’that followed the legacy of social realism. To feed the appetite for gang heroism, this ‘victim’ soontransformed into a tragic hero agonized by moral anxieties. Yet the frame imposed by the police-gangster genre did not stop it from being used as a vehicle to reflect on Hong Kong’s geo-politicalsituation: a place located in-between different political projects beyond the locals’ control, and grippedby the relentless march of policed-managerial modern order. A twist in the 1990s gave the undercoverfigure a cynicist and comedic turn. Postmodern celebrations of witty betrayal can be read as rewrit-ing the undercover story to reinscribe Hong Kong’s fate: released from narcissistic heroism, newundercover images responding to the 1997 transition took identity less as a matter of authenticitythan of performance. Unravelling this historically-embedded structure of feelings shows how the wayhad long been paved for the success of the award-winning series

Infernal Affairs

, extending a deeperreach into the local politics of memory and time.

K

EYWORDS

: gangster films, structure of feeling, undercover, genre, city, colonialism, collaboration, Hong Kong

Baudrillard writes in his book

America

, ‘The American city seems to have stepped right outof the movies. To grasp its secret, you should not, then, begin with the city and move

inwards towards

the screen; you should begin with the screen and move

outwards towards

thecity’ (Baudrillard 1988: 56, emphasis added). His suggested reverse movement unsettles theusual conception about relationship between cinema and city: namely, films are just amedium visually representing the material objective city. Baudrillard’s insight points, onthe contrary, to the fact that cities are never the sum of their physical parts but are alwayssaturated in the symbolic, increasingly couched in filmic images and filmic texts. The citiescan then be seen as possessing perceptible cinematic qualities. As John Orr writes, ‘a film isboth representation of that living tissue of the city [including both the humdrum activitiesand public spectacle] and an integral element within it. It not only records and documentsthe symbolic. It is itself symbolic’ (Orr 2003: 285).

The Baudrillardian conception of ‘cityscape as

screenscape

’, together with the notion ofthe cinematic city, has inspired many writers to research the relationships between cinemaand city (e.g. Davis 1990; Clarke 1997; Shiel and Fitzmaurice 2001, 2003). They are interestedin probing into how cinema has impacted upon the formation of cities as both physical andcultural constructs, and how the city has impacted upon cinema. In many important

Hong Kong undercover

523

aspects, the concept of ‘cinematic city’ is instrumental in efforts to understand HongKong—not only because Hong Kong once had a very spectacular film industry but alsobecause the city has made itself known to the world mainly through its screen images. The

kung fu

genre, Bruce Lee’s fist-fights, John Woo’s bullet-ballets, and Wong Kar-wai’s recent

cheongsham-

ed women (

In the Mood for Love

[2000]), constitute the screenscape, much moreso than the physical or human landscape, on which both the international images of HongKong and the local cultural identity are shaped, as witnessed by the prominence of JackieChan’s figure in the 2001 promotion campaign for Hong Kong’s tourism.

However, viewing the cityscape as screenscape would always run the risk of taking aspecific screenscape as the equivalent to the actual cityscape. Furthermore, such an exercisedoes not often question where and how the screen is viewed. One obvious example of thisdelusional universalism embedded in the drives to investigate the cinema-city relationshipcan be found in genre studies that are dominated by American framings. For example,before the phenomenal success in the 2007 Oscars of Martin Scorsese’s

The Departed

(2006)—a remake of the Hong Kong blockbuster

Infernal Affairs

(2002–3) by Andrew Lau and AlanMak—most American film critics say they are awed by the scenes of action and violence inHong Kong gangster movies but bemused by their ‘redundant’ or excessive sentimentality(Vesia 2002; Totaro 2000). In other words, what is particularly

cinematic

for them in HongKong movies is not any specific quality of the city other than its action and speed inscribedon the Hong Kong screen; or, the urban quality of Hong Kong is often captured throughcliché such as ‘cultural cosmopolitanism’, ‘confluences of the East and the West’, etc. It isagainst this backdrop that while

Infernal Affairs I

swept the box office in most Asian citiesand won overwhelming acclaim in Hong Kong when it was released in 2002, the filmgarnered very polarizing reviews among American critics: for example, one hostile criticwho rated it harshly for merely ‘duplicating

Heat

’s (1995) examination of the distinctionbetween cops and crooks’ concluded that the film ‘is ultimately quite tepid’ (Schager 2004);another American review, this time very positive, stated that the film, being ‘one of thetruest

American

gangster films of all time’, is ‘a solid genre exercise’ (Zacharek 2004, empha-sis added). In another review, which might have nicely underscored the drive for Scorseseto do a remake of

Infernal Affairs

, film critic Zacharek says ‘although Hollywood churns outa new cop thriller just about every other week, we’ve forgotten how to make true gangsterfilms, a genre we consider

quintessentially American

to the point where we feel we no longerhave to work at it’ (emphasis added). She goes on to complain that ‘even though many ofour cop thrillers feature gangsters of one sort or another (and even though they often makebig money, worldwide), so many of these pictures clump together into a generically dullball. It’s gotten to the point where we need Hong Kong to remind America who it is’(Zacharek 2004).

It is amazing that common to all these critics who presented divergent evaluations ofthe film is the shared assumption that within the global screenscape, the gangster genre isAmerican territory proper. Whereas

The Departed

is often credited for its nice depiction ofthe cops and mobsters of Boston (MacDonald 2006), its original from Hong Kong wasseldom viewed with much interest in seeing how well the series is emblematic of HongKong as a city, nor in which kind of cinematic qualities does Hong Kong excel that mighthave led to the success of

Infernal Affairs

that Zacharek (or Scorsese) admires. However, thispaper does not set out to compare

The Departed

with

Infernal Affairs

, nor do I wish to engagein debates about

Infernal Affairs

itself (but see Law 2006); rather, I would like to take thatlittle controversy as a point of my departure from the current (American) global-genreregime to prepare the ground for an alternative account for the

Infernal Affairs

series’success. This move necessitates a closer examination of the trajectories in which a vibrantsub-genre of undercover cops took shape in Hong Kong. It is certainly not an overstatementto argue that

Infernal Affairs

has a far closer lineage to this local generic formation in vogue

524

Law Wing-Sang

in Hong Kong action cinema for decades than to the American gangster genre in a verygeneral sense. It is more important to understand that instead of simply being a replica oran extension of the American gangster genre, such a locally-developed sub-genre of under-cover cop story has emerged as a product of a unique historical experience of colonialpowers that Hong Kong gained since its inception.

In the following, I will first explain how the peculiarities of colonial history of HongKong have set the scene for the identity crisis played out in its long colonial past, mostvividly in the post-war years in particular. This quick historical tour will end with a briefdiscussion of a concept of ‘collaborative colonialism’ which I think capable of capturing themain characteristics of a socio-cultural formation underpinning the (post)colonial subjectiv-ity of Hong Kong people. I will then turn to an elaboration of how this troubled subjectivityhas found its manifestations in variants of a specific cinematic figure: the undercover cop. Iwill then try to demonstrate how the undercover figure has been evolving throughout thelast few decades in Hong Kong cinema. I see the review of such trajectories, both of thesocial and the cinematic, as offering us an important mode of access to the historically-specific structure of feeling underlying the reception of gangster movies with an undercovermotif, as well as the socio-psychic-cultural history of Hong Kong.

How colonial is Hong Kong?

Until 1997, Hong Kong was a treaty-port composed of three different parts (Hong KongIsland, Kowloon Peninsula, and the New Territories) ceded or leased to the British insuccession from 1842; the legitimacy of these so-called unequal treaties, which the Chinesesigned ‘under threats’, has been a matter of contention for centuries. The relation betweenthis treaty-port and the history of contemporary imperialism or colonialism is even moreproblematic. In the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the present government’s officialstance has always been to disavow Hong Kong as a colony and to describe the 1997handover of Hong Kong sovereignty as a mere ‘resumption of China’s exercise of sovereignrights.’

1

Yet, unofficially, the widely accepted notion that takes pre-1997 Hong Kong as acolony generates little dissension. It seems that the present PRC government is interestedfar more in a resumption of Hong Kong’s sovereignty under Chinese authorities than in anhonest characterization of Hong Kong’s colonial pasts, let alone either an initiation of anydecolonization movement or a cultivation of any anti-colonial sentiment in Hong Kong.

2

Yet, however widely the adjective ‘colonial’ is accepted in different discourses about thistreaty-port, in what sense Hong Kong history is a variety of colonial history (as it falls underthe category of the history of colonialism) is not a well-researched topic among eitherWestern or Chinese scholars.

3

Studies of various aspects of Hong Kong abound, but therehas never been a systematic and theoretical treatment of the nature of British colonial rule inHong Kong. Thus, Hong Kong studies have indeed been overwhelmed by the rather casualuse of the noun ‘exceptionalism’ (Lam 2007).

To fill in the gap between popular conception and theoretical inadequacy, one has to goback to the very early contemporary historical period of Hong Kong, when the area wasfirst founded as a treaty-port. Evidence reveals that the thesis concerning Hong Kong as anoutcome of colonialism should proceed cautiously: first, although the expansion of theBritish Empire was undoubtedly the over-determining factor causing the Qing (Manchu)Empire’s cession of Hong Kong, one might be surprised to find that there had never beenany consistent idea within the British government about how Hong Kong should be ‘colo-nized’ (Law forthcoming; see also Vickers 2005). Second, research on the relation betweenSoutheast Asian business and the opium trade has uncovered evidence that, favoring arevisionist view, challenges the conventional conception of uni-directional imperialist intru-sions. According to these studies, commercial contacts and cooperation among European

Hong Kong undercover

525

merchants and the Chinese dated back to the eighteenth century, well before the take-overof Hong Kong by the British (Chang 1991; Brown 1994). In those opium trade activities ledby the Europeans, the Chinese took a more active role than has usually been recognized;and the collaboration between the Chinese and the British persisted even after the Qinggovernment officially decreed that the opium trade was illegal. When the Opium Wars(1839–42; 1856–60) were underway, those Chinese who collaborated with the British forcescollected for the British military a good deal of information and arranged for them a numberof key material supplies. When the Qing navy was defeated, Captain Charles Elliot, theBritish superintendent of trade, persuaded the Royal authorities to make the cession ofHong Kong Island a part of the requested compensation package. He argued that the Britishcrown had an obligation to retain Hong Kong ‘as an act of justice and protection to thenative population upon whom we have been so long dependent for assistance and supply’(Carroll 1999).

4

Collaborators and secret societies

In contrast with the conventional view of imperialist domination, these revisionist studiesalso put in perspective how some Chinese had always been on collaborative terms withthe Europeans in their expansionist projects. Inhabiting the southeastern coastal regions ofChina was a sizable Chinese population that provided services of all kinds to the Britishwhenever they occupied new territories in Southeast Asia. These Chinese usually under-took contract work for the British, and as soon as Hong Kong was ceded to the Crown,Chinese workers and traders flocked to Southeast Asian regions, soon getting rich throughthe contract work. Among these seekers of wealth, the most active were boat people(Tanke) who were long treated as pirates and outcasts, having been expelled by Qing offi-cials and deprived of normal citizenship rights that were necessary for taking the CivilService Examination, buying landed property, and entering into marriage with landedpeople.

However, as soon as Hong Kong submitted to British occupation, the boat people andothers like them saw their fortunes reversed. It was indeed a situation in which Hong Kong,

after

its ‘colonial’ history got underway in 1842, became home to Chinese settlers comingfrom all the surrounding regions. Such a peculiarity has prompted some critics to say thatHong Kong was indeed ‘colonized’ by those immigrant Chinese for it was indeed these

Chinese

settlers, rather than the British, who overwhelmed the tiny indigenous populationon the island. The reciprocation policy by which the British gave these collaboratorsvaluable land enabled these Chinese collaborators to prosper through land speculations andto become the first local wealthy class.

In the years that followed, Hong Kong quickly developed through the opium trade andthe coolie trade and turned itself into an important hub for these international businesses,remaining so until the early twentieth century. As a result, the city was full of opiumbooths, gambling houses, and brothels; crime was unbridled and rampant; the British wereneither willing nor able to quash this criminality, as they did not intend to directly governthe Chinese. The British once tried but unsuccessfully, in the very early years, to establishtwo separate legal systems respectively for the Chinese and the Europeans. The main reasonfor the failure of this initiative was this pertinent difference: unlike other British colonies inSoutheast Asia, Hong Kong made it difficult for the British there to be consistent with theindirect-rule principle, that is, to find local tribal chieftains and to enlist their aid in estab-lishing a different legal system. Moreover, owing to the Chinese entrepreneurs who got richfrom different crimes and adventurous activities, the British indeed could not build up atrustworthy, reliable, uncorrupted police force that could actually enforce the law. For morethan a century to follow, the Hong Kong police force was composed of Englishmen together

526

Law Wing-Sang

with a large number of Indians, Nepalese, and others recruited from distant British coloniesuntil the localization policy started to be put in place in the 1970s (Munn 2000).

Therefore, for a long time in early ‘colonial’ Hong Kong, the new Chinese wealthy classand the British authorities maintained in political terms a mutual non-interference relation-ship. On the one hand, the British authorities in Hong Kong exercised centralized autocraticpower; on the other hand, this power had seldom been exercised in the actual administra-tion of Chinese affairs. The Chinese community was indeed governed by a kind of non-locally inherited custom that, as a rule, lacked official recognition. To fill the politicalvacuum, the wealthy Chinese tried to play the traditional role of the gentry class, whichthey had been forbidden to play in the past. As a result, these Chinese constituted a semi-legal community in which some Chinese informally administered other Chinese through aborrowed imaginary framework of custom. They lived collectively in places like Tai PingShan, ran Man-Mo Temple, oversaw different rituals and ceremonies, and arbitrated overcivic affairs and small conflicts among the Chinese.

Although the political status of those Chinese leaders had never been recognized, andalthough quite a few of them were indeed treated by the Qing government as traitors totheir own country, their political and economic clout never stopped expanding with thedevelopment of Hong Kong. The trend was more obvious after the establishment of Tung-wah Hospital 1872, which was the first autonomous Chinese institution of considerable size.It emerged initially as a charity institute despite its more variegated functions performed inits heyday. Although the British did not grant the institute an official or legal status, it actedmore like a municipal office administering to the city’s needs, and a court adjudicating civilconflicts and even, at one point in time, an unofficial Chinese Consulate representing theQing government in Hong Kong (Sinn 1989).

Lethbridge, a Hong Kong historian, has pointed out that although the Chinese elites ofTung-wah Hospital never acquired an official status that would have enabled them torepresent the Chinese, the hospital could practice different tactics that enabled those elitesto act as intermediaries in Hong Kong between the Qing government and the Britishgovernment and, thus, to seize any opportunity that might advance their political and socialstatus (Lethbridge 1978). According to records, the managers of Tung-wah Hospital likedvery much to invite the British to pay it visits (Lethbridge 1978: 61). On those occasions, thehospital’s directors were all dressed up in mandarin costumes with buttons and peacockfeathers signifying official rank; indeed, the hosts looked very much like officials appointedby the Qing government. These self-styled performances were carried out in a bid to elevatethe hospital directors’ own status in the eyes of both the British and the Chinese commu-nity.

5

Well versed in dealing with the Westerners, these bilingual self-appointed Chineserepresentatives increasingly emerged as a class of economic compradors (Chinese politicalmiddle-men) who, equipped with certain diplomatic skills, helped the Qing government todeal with

yangwu

(foreign business or political affairs). The reformist leader Zhang Zidongin the Qing government once tried to collect information through Tung-wah Hospital aboutthe foreigners and the overseas Chinese communities and, thus, elevated, for a certainperiod, the status of the hospital to a new height (Lethbridge 1978).

However, in the last years of the nineteenth century, the growing political influence ofTung-wah Hospital drew antipathy from the European communities in Hong Kong, whosuspected it of being a secret society pawned by the Qing government to subvert British-controlled Hong Kong. Although these bilingual elites suffered a certain setback in thismoment, they continued to benefit from lending support to the reformist bureaucrats.Shouldering double identities, they pledged allegiance both to the British Empire and to thereformist bureaucrats of the Qing government. In Hong Kong, they were sometimes namedofficial representatives of the Chinese and emerged gradually as a distinct class of ‘HigherChinese.’

Hong Kong undercover

527

Collaborative colonialism

The above review of Hong Kong’s early history illustrates a distinct socio-cultural forma-tion whose characteristics I capture in the notion of ‘collaborative colonialism’, by which Imean that a certain tacit collaborative contract between the British colonizers and theChinese elites in Hong Kong had underpinned the city’s colonial rule. Hence, Hong Kong’scolonial situation cannot be understood by a simplistic or stereotypical model of colonial-ism that describes a uni-directional domination of the natives imposed by the intrudingimperialist. In cultural terms, collaborative colonialism also refers to an ideological andaffective formation characterized by the dominance of a colonialist culture which is,however, maintained both by the imperialistic foreigners and the native collaborators.Amidst the rise of anti-colonial nationalistic discourses, which always try to set up aManichean binary framework to affirm an anti-colonial subjecthood, collaborative relationsare precarious and always vulnerable to criticisms and attacks. As a corollary, within theformation of collaborative colonialism, the colonized natives always fail to achieve forthemselves a politically effective collective identity in resistance to the dominating colonialpower because they are socially divided by mutual mistrust and suspicion. Also, the doubleidentity of a collaborator further entails a split subjectivity, which is always torn apart byendless interrogations (or self-interrogations) of loyalty, as the flipside of collaboration isbetrayal to one’s own brothers or intimate relatives.

Outlining a more detailed analysis, which I elaborate elsewhere (Law forthcoming; seealso Carroll 2005), my main argument is that collaborative colonialism is not just a modelthat describes Hong Kong in its past but a key concept that enables us to understand HongKong culture and political imaginaries now. Generated from a genealogy describing all thetwists and turns that Hong Kong has undergone, the concept is helpful in offering insightsinto the historical condition that has long been effectuating the (still)birth of Hong Kongpolitical subjectivity. As a matter of fact, ever since the early twentieth century, the basicpolitical structure of Hong Kong has never been substantially changed, despite the ever-growing immigrant population from China; the parties that have been sharing the power ofthis collaborative-colonial formation are always the government, which occupies a ‘colonial’position, and a group of collaborative ‘Higher Chinese’, which the government nurtures.

Because the western governments were supporting the anti-Qing Nationalist Revolu-tion of China, which successfully gave rise to a new republican government in 1911,Chinese nationalism in Hong Kong had never been wholly anti-colonialist. On the contrary,this revolution, which led to the rise of various local pro-Western regimes, indeed helpedthe extension of collaborative-colonial relationships for the opportunistic Chinese elites.

6

Civil wars among warlords in China, Japanese invasion as well as the inter-party battlesbetween the CCP and the KMT did not steer Hong Kong away from this dilemma-riddensituation. Instead, the local Chinese population, whether elites or not, was involved invicious identity politics which linked as much to the splitting of political loyalties betweentwo different nationalist parties as to resistances to different colonizers. Likewise, the ColdWar soon broke out after the Chinese civil war engulfed Hong Kong, turning it into a front-line zone replete with espionage and other secret dealings on behalf of antagonistic forces.The political bureau of the Hong Kong Police also took as its main task the collection ofintelligence from different political powers in Hong Kong as well as from the ordinarypopulation, and this intelligence-gathering resulted in heavy surveillance by the police ofthe Hong Kong population. An atmosphere of fear flourished, and the trial of politicalloyalty was indeed a gruesome experience for almost everybody during the Cold War(Mark 2004; Kwan 1999). To make matters worse, the turbulent political events and thefieriest cultural struggles to emerge in the Maoist era also, from time to time, turned eventhe most inconsequential things—such as some Mainlanders’ connections to Hong Kong,

528

Law Wing-Sang

records of correspondence with relatives in Hong Kong, number of past visits to HongKong, or their being found listening to radio broadcast from Hong Kong—into evidence toprove someone’s political disloyalty. Therefore, without bearing the direct effects of thisturmoil, the people of Hong Kong nevertheless experienced accusations from the Chinesestate authorities; the guilty charges were often based simply on their identity of being aHong Konger.

Many scholars see this highly problematic situation of being a Hongkonger—whichsurfaced so acutely in the turbulent years of Cultural Revolution (and its proxy in HongKong, the 1967 riots)—reached a crucial turning point in the 1970s. Since then, a drive toreflect upon the problem of Hong Kong identity has emerged among the young generation.To be sure, there have always been different forms of literary or filmic expression throughwhich experiences of vulnerability and of the (perhaps) permanent identity crisis of HongKong come to light from time to time. Early post-war Hong Kong Chinese literature hasmany examples depicting the cultural disorientation that migrants from Mainland Chinaexperienced. However, a Chinese cultural nationalism held sway in most of these migrantliteratures, regardless of whether they took left-wing or right-wing stances, and this alwaysasserted for the Hong Kongers a Chinese cultural unity. It was only in the late 1970s, whenChinese cultural nationalism (now dubbed ‘Mainland-centrism’) began to give way to amore self-reflexive local Hong Kong consciousness—found among the young (mostlylocally-born) intellectuals—that a fresh look into the identity problem of Hong Kongbecame possible. Instead of thinking within binary frames such as the East versus the West,or nationalism versus colonialism, the young generation started trying to establish a newlocal focus negotiating between these opposing poles. Such efforts appeared in a widevariety of cultural and artistic spheres. In the name of the so-called ‘New Wave’ cinema, anew sensitivity began to emerge in the 1970s to break from the yoke of the high-mindedChinese cultural nationalism dominant especially for the early post-war years. Therefore,although the 1970s political activisms were increasingly anti-colonial, it was no longer‘Chinese nationalistic’ at the expense of concerns about Hong Kong’s local situation. Acomplex view towards Hong Kong’s cultural identity and political belonging enhancedmore critical examination of the no-go situation of ‘collaborative colonialism’—a situationin which nationalism is not always the easy panacea or alternative to the wrongs of colonial-ism, if not a force indeed in complicity with the latter.

Such a new social sensitivity has been expressed through different tropes, images, iconsand narratives in various popular cultures. In the following section, I will map, in brief, thetrajectory along which Hong Kong movies worked on a peculiar theme: the undercover-copsub-genre and its later variants. I take that theme as a key enabling us to grasp the struc-tures of feeling embedded in Hong Kong’s cultural and ideological landscape. The under-cover figure is in a sense ‘paradigmatic’ here because it epitomizes acutely the core issueabout political loyalty and betrayal within the formation of ‘collaborative colonialism’. Yet,as I will show, the figure and motif of the undercover bear a much wider significance thanthat which is narrowly confined to national politics and ideology.

Undercover social tragedy

The undercover motif began to emerge and flourish in Hong Kong cinema with the brief‘New Wave’ in the early 1980s (Cheuk 2003). This motif is related to the ‘spy’ trope inspiredby the James Bond films; yet it functions in a totally different manner from the latter as itgradually takes root in Hong Kong cinema from the 1980s. Both the spy and the undercovercop are secret agents undertaking covert assignments. But a main difference between aBond-style spy story and an undercover-cop story is that the former is usually associatedwith clashes between adversarial states; as a result, a clear distinction between ally and

Hong Kong undercover

529

enemy is often indispensable in a spy story. A number of anti-Japanese espionage filmswere shot during the war for popular mobilization; yet films with the spy figure have nevergained widespread popularity in Hong Kong. The emergence of James Bond from Holly-wood brought about some imitations by Cantonese filmmakers (e.g., the

Spy with My Face

series, which was called the ‘Jane Bond’ films) (Ho 1996; Gomes 2005); yet their success didnot last beyond the 1980s, when it was eclipsed by the figure of the undercover cop (Cheuk2003; Teo 1997: ch. 10). Neither as smart nor as fearless as the James Bond type of gutsy spy,the undercover cop cannot even draw on endless reserves of fortitude in the execution oftop-secret tasks; instead, the undercover cop is a tragically bewildered figure driftingbetween the order of justice represented by the police and the evil underworld controlled bythe criminals.

Man on the Brink

(1981), directed by Alex Cheung, is perhaps

the

classic of the under-cover-cop sub-genre in Hong Kong. Although the film has all the basic elements of a formu-laic thriller such as fight scenes and car chases, the narrative structure of the film exhibits astriking degree of social realism. As pungent social criticism, the film shows the dire condi-tions of a society full of grievances. Attempting to escape the humble and unchallenging lifeof an ordinary cop, the protagonist Chiu (played by Eddie Chan) stepped into his unfortu-nate fate by accepting the assignment of an undercover cop. In his tragic endeavor toaccomplish something grand and spectacular, Chiu is misunderstood and brushed off byhis girlfriend; his wayward behaviors even strip him of support from his parents. Deeplydisturbed by the death of his dear colleague, Chiu cannot escape the more tragic fate thatlooms over his own existence. Setting a classic example for the sub-genre’s subsequent filmventures,

Man on the Brink

excels in capturing the no-go situation of an undercover cop bydetailing his family background and the changes of his psychological state. The film’s finalscenes are more allegorical, depicting a confrontation between the police and an angry mobat a shanty public housing estate. The robbers are caught red-handed with the help of theundercover cop’s wit; however, the uncontrolled mob, which is made up of local residents,mistakes the undercover cop for one of the gangsters and beats him to death under the eyesof the police. The police cannot come to his rescue because, tragically, the main gate hasbeen locked by Chiu’s negligent colleagues who try to contain the crowd.

To put the film in historical perspective, one has to re-examine Hong Kong during the1970s, when rampant corruption in the Hong Kong Police caused widespread social unrest,which led to an upsurge of anti-corruption campaigns directed by young social activists. Inresponse, the colonial government set up the Independent Commission Against Corruption(ICAC) to curb the waves of scandal; yet it failed to change people’s perception of the colo-nial establishment’s incompetence. In addition, in 1981, not long after China’s chaoticCultural Revolution had wound down, diplomatic negotiations over the future of HongKong got underway between the British and the Chinese states, and these negotiationstriggered once again the uncertainties and the anxieties that the Hong Kong people felt overtheir future.

Man on the Brink

depicted at that moment the imagined scenes of violentconfrontations between an agitated crowd and an incompetent police force. The tragic deathof the caged Chiu served as a satirical lament regarding the vulnerability of Hong Kong inface of the looming mob politics against anyone who possesses a suspicious identity.

Undercover heroism

Hong Kong movies in the 1980s are distinguished by the prominence of the gangster-herogenre, wherein the motif of the undercover cop has been deployed time and again.

7

However, a significant difference between the two film categories is noteworthy: thestraight gangster-hero stories always glorify male social bonds and personal loyalty,whereas the undercover-cop story, as a sub-genre, engages the moral dilemmas that emerge

530

Law Wing-Sang

when a protagonist must choose between personal loyalty and official duty. A classiccombination of these two motifs is

City on Fire

(1987) starring Chow Yun-fat and Danny Lee.Already tired of his undercover career, Ko Chow (Chow Yun-fat) has to make a final choicebetween loyalty to his official duty, as advised by his immediate boss, and loyalty to hisbuddy Fu (Danny Lee), with whom friendship and trust have been tested by ordeals. RingoLam, the director, meticulously portrays how the two come to be friends who swear to liveand die together—a friendship that, because Ko Chow has been unfaithful to Fu, challengesthe former’s conscience. Haunted by feelings of guilt for his having sold Fu out, Ko Chowembodies the figure of an undercover cop who breaks with the tradition of social didacti-cism that characterized old Hong Kong movies, in which the criminals always have to faceup to explicit moral condemnations.

City on Fire

unfolds another possibility, one in whichthe conflicts between the legal order of justice and the value of personal loyalty submit to adarker exploration.

The Chinese word

yichi

(personal loyalty or brotherhood) connotes an unofficial kindof morality, which is more concerned with ethical responsibility to strangers rather thanan obligation to follow regulations and codes. It is about building trust and makingfriendship with others in alien surroundings through acts of reciprocity. Therefore, theideal of brotherhood among gangsters as depicted in Hong Kong’s New Wave gangstermovies is not derivable from group membership, natural belongingness, or an enduringlyvalid social and moral order. It is better understood as a survival strategy that, constitutedcontingently in human encounters, provides a basis for cooperation among men, particu-larly for those under disadvantageous circumstances where fairness and justice are absentor rare.

An undercover cop is supposedly an instrument for the realization of lawfulness.However, whereas in our society interpersonal trust is rapidly giving way to utilitarianexploitation, this instrument paradoxically preys on the increasingly rare human virtue offidelity—because every undercover operation deliberately exploits loyalty among men andencourages betrayal. In order to undermine the solidarity of a gang, an undercover copneeds to win friendship and trust from other mobsters only to double-cross them later.Therefore, as soon as the undercover cop realizes the value of justice he is undermining thevery basis of social solidarity. This scenario renders both the undercover cop and the gang-ster the tragic victims of a legal and security apparatus. In this light, the structure of theundercover-cop tragedy does not derive from certain weaknesses of human nature thatcompel a man to deviate from either legal justice or the good in human nature. It has moreto do with how an undercover cop who lives in a mundane world resolves the ethicaldilemmas inherent in face-to-face encounters with others.

In the 1980s and 1990s in Hong Kong, institutions of modern governance and manage-ment developed rapidly in all areas of the society in response to, or regardless of, people’sanxieties about the future and people’s widespread feelings of dissatisfaction concerningthe immediate realities of living standards. Efforts to wipe out corruption and organizedcrime were loudly trumpeted as thorough and transformative reactions to unacceptableforms of personal interaction and business practices. The emergence of gangster heroism inpopular movies reflected people’s pessimism concerning the impending new order. Pluckyheroism and the morals of inter-personal trust generated social imaginaries with whichpeople could make sense of the changes that, in those confusing times, were going torefigure usual ways of life. It is in this light that we might notice the interesting evolution ofhow the undercover-cop figure, as a bearer of social criticism, targeted new themes andembodied new styles.

If we conclude that, in

Man on the Brink

, the tragic end of the undercover cop is due topolice slackness, it would be of interest to compare the film with

City on Fire

, where theterrible fate of the undercover cop is preordained by the police institution’s distrust of

Hong Kong undercover

531

undercover operatives. The story of

City on Fire

is driven by the antagonism between twogenerations of police officers—men who engage in ferocious disputes over whether thepolice should rely on undercover cops. The older cop (Uncle Kwong, played by Suen Yeuh)trusts the particular undercover cop (Ko Chow) because of personal confidence; yet the newcop (John, played by Roy Cheung) believes in nothing other than credentials, regulations,management, and physical means of coercion. In the latter’s eyes, unchecked undercoveroperatives would easily slide into criminality. With misgivings and suspicions, not onlydoes the police department withdraw support from the undercover cop, but also the newcop in charge tries to put the undercover in prison. In contrast, the relationship betweenUncle Kwong and Ko Chow is infused with father-son dynamics; what ties them together isnothing other than the Confucianist values of mutual respect, sincere personal integrity,and reciprocal loyalty to one’s dear others. Stripped of his power and influence under therapid pace of institutionalization and the emerging dominance of impersonal bureaucracy,Uncle Kwong confides his unease to Ko Chow: ‘For thirty years, I have held this rank,which I earned by risking my life, unlike those officers who are promoted up here throughexamination only.’ This passage from the script gives witness to the historical changes in themid-1980s when Hong Kong was beginning to end the initial phase of industrial take-off,which relied on small family businesses. The extension of bureaucratic control and anincreasingly formalized style of management could be found everywhere in the Hong Kongsociety that was ready to enter its financial and post-industrial era. The juxtapositionbetween two different approaches in dealing with the problem of how to oversee the oftenunruly operation of the undercover cop gives a vivid refraction of how a modern, institu-tionalized management philosophy was gradually and painfully replacing the moreinformal type of labor control.

The extent to which mutual trust and personal loyalty in Hong Kong have been indecline is given full play in the final sequences of

City on Fire

: besieged by the police, thewhole gang is still mired in their search for the traitor and in quarrels over who is the realboss. For Ringo Lam, blaming each other for betrayal will not rescue interpersonal trust butrather acts as a prelude to its final demise. Just as much as a gang, a society in crisis needstrust to be the basis of solidarity; the sad thing is that neither the police nor the gang worldcan give the unconditional brotherhood between Ko Chow and Fu a space to thrive. Theeventual death of Ko Chow might be read as redemption for Ko Chow’s indecision—for hisambivalent identity—when faced with honoring the pledge to go through thick and thintogether with his ‘brother’; the arrest of Fu, as a triumph of law, may be considered a clichédending. It may too conveniently resolve the ethical dilemmas that will nevertheless endure;but it also strongly condemns irredeemable modernization for its resulting greediness andimpersonality, which claim as their price the shattering of the moral basis of sociality—asociality that, outside civil society, has maintained its 150-year existence beyond the grip oflegal and bureaucratic machineries. The rapid mounting of modern surveillance systemsand managerial institutions in the 1970s and the 1980s (the post-’67 era) were indeed unre-lenting assaults on Hong Kong’s social solidarity, however fragile and transitory it hadbeen.

Undercover comedy

In the 1990s, Hong Kong was driving along at a rapid pace, braving the prospect of itsreturn to China. It was a new twist for Hong Kong history. However, despite all the hystericreactions to the possibly revolutionary impacts the impending handover to a communistregime had trumped up, the stock market craze and property-boom successfully broughtHong Kong into a new phase of speculative capitalism. It called for a new sense of pride forthe citizens; however, the imperative to ensure a smooth and stable transition did not allow

532

Law Wing-Sang

any politically idealistic pursuits to shake the foundation of collaborative colonialism. In asociety destined to be undergoing a process of switching its loyalty from one colonial rulerto an authoritarian regime—which looks sometimes quite indistinguishable from the previ-ous order—Hong Kong people saw their political fate as uncontrollable with the socialfabric melting in every aspect. Burying the can-do spirit which for a long time hadsupported the small family businesses, the success of get-rich-quick financial capital wasachieved with dire social and human cost. A general perceived threat about declining broth-erhood and faithfulness, which underpinned the grassroots social solidarity in the past, wasprojected onto the youth generation, which was seen by their parents as quickly discardingthe virtues of loyalty characteristic of the previous industrial take-off. Singularly marked forbeing shortsighted, cynically realistic and irresponsible, youth appeared in the 1990s’ HongKong cinema as figures bearing wider social anxiety in general and the loss of tragic hero-ism in particular. As heroic figures who could endure pain and hardship—with unshakablecommitment and devotion to brotherly love—increasingly aroused incredulity, a decon-structive turn of heroism in Hong Kong cinema was both inevitable and welcomed. It is inthis light that the

Young and Dangerous

series (in Chinese,

goowark tzai

) (1996–1998) byAndrew W.K. Lau gained notoriety for its inauguration of new-style youth-oriented gangfilms.

The

Young and Dangerous

series has indeed initiated a change in social vocabularies.Ever since the release of the movies, joining a mafia group is called ‘walking

goowark

.’ InCantonese,

goowark

means unreliability and trickery. The designation of the young mafiamembers as

goowark tzai

(the young tricksters) is premised upon the younger generation’sgeneral misgivings concerning devotion and reliability. As a story about multiple treach-eries,

Young and Dangerous II

(1996) tells how the young Hong Kong hooligans get entan-gled in a Taiwan mafia that, while contending with internal power struggles, tries toannex Hong Kong’s and Macau’s casino businesses. Films that are set against cross-regional backgrounds not only attract international audiences but also open up a compar-ative perspective toward mafia cultures in different places. The main protagonist,Chicken (Jordan Chan), speaks probably the worst kind of Mandarin; he representsindeed a whole generation of Hong Kong youngsters who could not care less about thesurvival of traditional Chinese cultures and mannerisms in Taiwan. Having not even aclue of how mafia and politics can join together, Chicken seeks refuge in a big mafiaorganization that is run by a politician. Feeling totally dislocated, Chicken seems to bedriven by an impending force urging him to speak proper Mandarin, as well as tounderstand how wider, more nuanced games—as opposed to small-time tricks—make

politics

and

crime

interchangeable terms. Successfully portraying the actual cultural disori-entations that characterized most youngsters in Hong Kong at the time, the film never-theless proceeds as a fantasy inasmuch as, for example, the ringleader’s mistress finds aHong Kong rascal sexually attractive. However, the fantasy soon turns into a nightmarefor the sexually and politically naïve Chicken, who is easily exploited as part of a biggerconspiracy.

For Hong Kong audiences, most of whom have experienced a sense of exclusion andof impotence relative to secret, far-off conspiracies and projects, an aggrandized depictionof naivety has a comic effect that, as self-parody, hits home. Lies that are doled out arereturned as betrayals; a trick is paid back with another ploy; and a film that incorporatesthis cycle of duplicity is no longer a cop story but a carnivalesque caricature of under-cover activities. It is very much a daydream fancying a joyful comeback when the younghooligans outwit the powerful criminal syndicate’s conspiracy of intrusion. With territo-rial predation becoming the new logic of global capitalism, late-colonial Hong Kongsought to position itself in a new round of competition among Asian cities.

Young andDangerous

, therefore, paints the syndicate in international colors suggesting that, in

Hong Kong undercover

533

general, power is concentrated and regionally arranged as a mafia and, in particular, howHong Kong, self-imagined as a group of young hooligans, can still fancy a final victory inthe rat race.

However, whereas blurring the distinction between politics and mafia activities hitshome by calling back the old memory of Hong Kong’s collaborative-colonial past, the

Young and Dangerous

series is making an analogy between the mafia’s territorial expan-sion and an imperialistic invasion effected with the help of traitors and turncoats. If theanxiety and anguish attributable to older figures in the undercover-cop genre wasclassical, director Andrew W.K. Lau has managed to give the undercover cop a timelyfacelift in the 1990s by endowing him with now ordinary characteristics of Hong Kongyouth—shrewdness, candidness, and humor—as a response to worries about fadingvirtues. On the eve of Hong Kong’s 1997 transition of power, the

Young and Dangerous

series gave a kind of optimism to the annoyed people of Hong Kong. Reacting to theclichéd talk about identity and political loyalty, the film makes a forceful point that HongKong’s new generation will be capable of flexibly managing the game of identity perfor-mance. Submerged in an outpouring of nationalistic banalities, the caricatured portrayalof the much more ‘cultured’ but also much more fraudulent Taiwanese mafia is tanta-mount to a break with those grand nationalist discourses, which the Hong Kong rascalsdecry as mendacities that far overshadow and outweigh the small-time tricks, lies, andfeats of deception characteristic of the rascals’ daily life. Against the developmentalhistory of how the undercover-cop figure evolved,

Young and Dangerous II

has been ableto submit this history to a jovial deconstruction, turning the accepted past away from thetragedy of its traditional themes and toward a tongue-in-cheek treatment of double-dealing performances.

As a matter of fact, Stephen Chow should be honored for making the first attempt todeconstruct the tragic character associated with the undercover-cop figure. In the screwballcomedy

Fight Back to School

(1991), the clown is an undercover cop sent to a school toinvestigate an illegal arms deal. Years later, in

King of Comedy

(1999), a frustrated part-timeactor who daydreams all the time of being a star is fortuitously recruited as a temporaryundercover cop who by luck breaks a criminal plot. A line parodying all the pastundercover figures says, ‘The undercover cop is the best actor worthy to be awarded anOscar—for if his show fails he will die’. Stephen Chow’s satirical remark subverts the pasttragic manifestations of undercover cop’s identity crisis. Stephen Chow’s point is that anundercover cop is no more than an actor who knows very well the inherently performativenature of every identity. Based on the understanding that identity is nothing more thanperformativity, a trend of ‘de-tragification’ has given a new edge to the undercover-copfigure in recent Hong Kong movies. One may make sense of this re-interpretation of theundercover-cop figure by noticing the emergence of a new sensibility concerning the condi-tions of Hong Kong subjectivity: if, because all identities are just performances, there is nosuch thing as an authentic identity, one can nevertheless rightly conclude that life is, insteadof an impasse, a game played out in the everyday.

Undercover adventure

The attempt to free the undercover-cop figure from the old tragedy-steeped frame emergesin another film,

Theft under the Sun

(1997), which treats the undercover cop as a figure foridentity adventure. The protagonist Ka-ho (Julian Cheung) is sent by the police to infiltratean international syndicate that smuggles arms. Against expectations, he is increasinglymesmerized by the inexorable charm of the ringleader, a ‘foreigner’ with a hybrid ethnicbackground. The film in many different ways describes the confused state in which evenKa-ho himself cannot tell, first, whether he is indeed a police officer or a criminal and,

534

Law Wing-Sang

second, how much he wants to end his career as an undercover cop so that he can pursuehis ‘authentic’ identity.

The undercover cop and the ringleader start smuggling a missile from China acrossthe Russian and the Mongolian borders. Ka-ho’s superior, growing suspicious that Ka-hohas broken his obligations as a police officer, insists on issuing a warrant for his arrest.The psychologist Dr Mo (Francis Ng) defends Ka-ho by having him diagnosed with Stock-holm syndrome (by which one identifies with one’s enemies if one is put in long-termcontact with them). Agonizing in a faraway place, Ka-ho finds, however, that his fate isdetermined by the debate over his loyalty between two schools of thought within thepolice. On one side is the state apparatus, represented by the supervising officer; on theother is the medical disciplinary power, represented by the psychologist. In the case ofthe bookish psychologist, the rather exaggerated style of performance and the almosttheatrical lines of dialogue turn his explanation into an academic speech replete with post-colonial theories and references to the problem of Hong Kong identity. The crux of theexplanation is this: one’s agency, sense of responsibility, and even moral consciousnesscan be weakened after one is cut off for a long time from one’s ‘mother-body’; and such isthe case in which Ka-ho has found himself detached from Hong Kong, his mother-body.But the supervising officer is hardly impressed and tauntingly accuses the psychologist ofbeing pedantic and self-contradictory; the officer’s verdict is that Ka-ho’s confusions overhis true identity constitute grounds for the conclusion that Ka-ho is no longer faithful tothe police force.

Michael Wong plays the role of the charismatic ringleader Dan Peterson, who can turna thief-catcher into a thief. Close observers of local Hong Kong politics before 1997 willimmediately associate such an image with Hong Kong’s last governor, Chris Patten, whowas widely acclaimed by some Hong Kong people as a charismatic leader and as an inspira-tion to supporters of democracy. To Patten’s enemies, with whom he wrestled over the paceof democratic development in Hong Kong, the governor’s charm was the most formidableobstacle in his arsenal. Similarly, in the film, it is exactly this kind of charm that transforms athief-catcher into a thief. The parable never fails to trigger understanding grins amongHong Kong filmgoers. However, the complex image of such a ‘foreigner,’ and his attempt tosmuggle a missile across distant Chinese borders deserves more intricate readings. Danspeaks with far-from-fluent Cantonese, mixed very often with English and other foreignlanguages. Rather than a professional smuggler, he is more like a nomadic knight-errantdrifting around with more than one exact aim. He believes in unconventional learning suchas ‘intuition’ and ‘reverse thinking’; he says that his imprisonment in the Middle Easttaught him much more than did his school days; he untiringly explains to Ka-ho that thewidespread misconception according to which all arms smugglers in the Middle East arebad guys stems from CNN.

Rather than trigger an identity crisis, the chivalrous bandit brings to the undercover copKa-ho alternative perspectives from which he can re-examine the existing order of things.Therefore, although it is true that the undercover cop encounters difficulties in his job, thesedifficulties concern not so much a return to an original, authentic identity but a realizationthat the world is composed of different aspects, each of which can affect how one chooses anidentity for oneself. Therefore, the adventure in the Chinese border zone serves principallyas a spiritual journey that opens Ka-ho’s eyes. What is most intriguing about this film is thatit ends by having the arms smuggler and the undercover cop smuggle the missile back toHong Kong, a return journey that brings Ka-ho back into the arms of his own mother-body(rather than China, as the 1997 cliché goes). The play of multiple, sliding spatial referencesand of allegorical sarcasm points to something much more substantial than what a thrillernormally offers. Apparently, Ka-ho will have his true cop identity restored when he, withthe help of the bandit, returns to Hong Kong, his mother-body. Yet the film maintains

Hong Kong undercover

535

suspense so that it is anybody’s guess whether Dan dies in the final big blasts or escapeswith the help of Ka-ho. But either of these outcomes sufficiently gives the film an open end,turning it away from the tragic-hero tradition.

Undercover hell

The long tradition of ‘undercover’ stories told in Hong Kong cinema, exemplified by thefilms I have reviewed above, is further developed after 1997. The astonishing success of the

Infernal Affairs

trilogy (2002–3) is a vivid example of how captivating the question of ‘whoam I?’ is to Hong Kong audiences even after an answer has been officially declared to endthe perplexing state of Hong Kong people’s national identity. Having given a much moredetailed analysis of this elsewhere (Law 2006), I would only add here that although Scors-ese’s success in the Academy Awards for

The Departed

(2006) has drawn some internationalattention to its Hong Kong original—and perhaps mostly to the ingenuous screenplay ofAlan Mak—it is still a remote prospect for the international (or, in particular, the American)audience to understand where the originality springs from. As a matter of fact, the rivetingplay of

Infernal Affairs

about the control over the undercover cop’s identity establishes a farstronger continuity with the past Hong Kong undercover-cop stories than many might havethought. For one thing, the trilogy is indeed a re-invigoration of the 1980s undercover tragicheroism inaugurated by

Man on the Brink

; the innovativeness of the

Infernal Affairs

produc-tion lies precisely in its capacity to elevate the previously disliked ‘sentimentalism’ to a seri-ous psycho-drama, making it a cross-over with a gangster-cop thriller. Therefore, instead ofbeing a ‘well-executed genre work’ (Schager 2004) of a gangster thriller,

Infernal Affairs

actually dramatizes the play of one’s authentic identity and takes its politics to a new limitas far as the genre of gangster thriller is concerned. Moreover, a psycho-drama of this kindis also about how the local audience may be offered a way to re-conceive or to re-imaginetheir own social and historical situation after 1997.

As I have argued,

Infernal Affairs

is about time and memory as much as it is about copsand mobs (Law 2006). The issues of time and memory have been an integral part of HongKong culture given its peculiar political status of being a colony on leased terms with a defi-nite time frame forced upon the citizens from above. Yet every passage of time leaves itsmemory, the preservation or forgetting of which defines one’s identity. However, the fate ofan ever-haunting—’continuous’, so to speak—colonialism (under the Chinese flag) makes ita baffling issue for the Hong Kong people to adopt a linear progressive conception of timeaccording to which the official version of nationalist history can claim legitimacy. Instead,the

de facto

endurance of colonialism in face of a supposedly historic moment (1997) said toend it renders the narrative about the epochal break of time meaningless. Yet the scenario ofeternal recurrence is equally horrible: as the Buddhist sutra, shown just before the endingcredits of the first installment of

Infernal Affairs

, says, ‘Those who live in the continuous hellwill never die. Longevity is the most disastrous in the continuous hell.’

With the order of temporality in trouble, the underground world of mafia and the offi-cial world of politics and the state also appear to be increasingly mutually interpenetrated,if not utterly indistinct. In this light, contrary to Ringo Lam’s

City on Fire

(1987), whichgrieves for the march of modernization trampling upon the virtues of brotherhood andpaternal love,

Infernal Affairs

makes a cynical criticism of any moralistic outlook that is pred-icated on the rigid dualistic vision of good and evil. For the mutual infiltrations between thecop’s world and the mob’s world have already made the two undifferentiable. Lamentingthe difficult situation that Hong Kong people are caught in, the films delve into the culturaland psychic tensions of the people who dwell in an even more confused world.

However, lying behind the individual psycho-drama is also a social critique. Symbol-ized by the contrast between those sunny rooftops and the descending elevator—shot from

536

Law Wing-Sang

the dark hoistway, without letting the audience know who has been killed—the films alsomake a subtle and reflective comment on a city in which the high-modern architecturalwonders are built only to hide all the conspiracies, treacheries and secret deals. Therefore,while film critics such as Leary are taking

Infernal Affairs

as just another example of howmuch high concept star-image advertising is built into the Hong Kong blockbuster formula,turning a feature film into something like a commercial, he is perhaps overstretching ageneralized notion of ‘postmodernist’ stylistic features at the expense of the cultural vari-ability against which the genre’s ideological and iconographic operations are played out(Leary 2003).

Last but not least,

Infernal Affairs

is also a distinctly post-colonial

Hong Kong

film for itseizes upon the misplaced/displaced father–son relationships that perhaps uniquely definethe core issues of the Hong Kong historical experience of being handed over from one pater-nal-colonial ruler to the next. The political-psychic complex hereby evolved is neitherentirely Oedipal (and thus Greek), nor anything like Abraham and Isaac in the Bible; it is alsofar more complex and dreadful than Bertolt Brecht’s

The Caucasian Chalk Circle

(1944),

8

whichwas widely invoked in every possible metaphorical way to talk about Hong Kong before1997 (e.g., Xi Xi 1988). Now the ownership of the child is undisputed; yet it is no less tragicfor the elders’ trust and the son’s loyalty is still debated almost everyday.

9

Affirming theimage of a good cop may be read as nostalgically retrieving an ‘ideal ego’ of the Hong Kongpeople in the colonial days; however, the flashing back of such images of a

sacrificed

under-cover cop against the evil mafia family is indeed animating a more dynamic formation of anego-ideal sustaining hope and aspiration to progress for the post-colonial Hong Kong.

Infernal Affairs has indeed established itself as a post-1997 undercover cop classic inHong Kong cinema because it mobilizes the unspoken memory of Hong Kong’s messycollaborative-colonial past, and asks questions that no one in Hong Kong can evade: howare we going to treat our colonial past in order to re-invent our self-identity for the future? IfYan (the undercover cop who insists on recovering his true identity) ends up being killedand Ming (the implanted mole in the police force) turns out to be schizophrenic in hispathetic attempt to wipe out past memories, is there a future for us to sort out this endoweddouble-identity, which renders us continuously bordering on the dividing line betweenheaven and hell? If Yan and Ming are both untenable answers, is Wing (the smart andshrewd police officer who shuttles effortlessly between the ‘white way’ and the ‘black way’)our future? Or, is it the case, as one local film critic puts it: when Yan (in Infernal Affairs I) ismurdered, our past is killed for us to embrace the future; but when Wing (in Infernal AffairsIII) is killed, our future is decimated too? (Long Tin 2004)

Undercover (or hell) continues

Since Infernal Affairs, the undercover trope has gained another round of popularity in recentHong Kong cinema. There have been quite a number of movies taking ‘undercover’ eitheras their main theme or as a minor plot device. For example, more conventional gangster-copthrillers such as Jing Wang’s Color of the Truth (2003) continue to feed on the theme of thehazy dividing line between the cops and the mobs—only to return to the conventionalending featured by the triumph of the good cop. In addition, the fantasy about mutual infil-tration between the police and the gang syndicate has reached its most exaggerated versionto date in Marco Mak’s Wo Hu (2006), which describes a police operation sending out athousand undercover cops to subvert the mafias. Besides these quite conventional gangsterthriller ‘genre works’, we have a large variety of other undercover stories, including, atone end of the spectrum, an undercover sex comedy such as Men Suddenly in Black (2003) byHo-Cheung Pang, which merely makes funny use of the undercover motif to tell how agroup of sex-hungry men covertly trail their suspicious wives seeking an escape to sexual

Hong Kong undercover 537

adventures. At the other end of the spectrum, we have a solemn moral tale such as HeavenlyMission (2006) by James Yuen, who revives the tradition of social didacticism by criticizingthose undercover operations over-driven by mistrust, concluding that it might jeopardizethe genuine effort of a bad guy to go straight. Along similar lines, social realism also makesa comeback in Herman Yau’s On the Edge (2006) depicting how a retired undercover copfails to get back to his ‘normal’ life—an obvious tribute paid to the classical undercovertragedy of Man on the Brink (1981). All these films can be viewed as echoing or mimickingthe exploits of Infernal Affairs in different ways.

Among this deluge of ‘undercover’ films, some try to make allusion to the InfernalAffairs classic, staging implicit dialogue with it in a more serious manner. For example, onthe one hand, Invisible Target (2007) by Benny Chan tries to rescue the failed masculinitysymbolized by a soon-forgotten sacrificed undercover cop. The film turns the death of thisunsung hero into a martyrdom around which a story is staged about the robust revenge ofmen (a category here including even the most boyish Junior Police Call [JPC] kids). On theother hand, Protégé (2007) by Tung-shing Yee interestingly continues to pursue the cop sonand mob father relationship left by Infernal Affairs, telling how the former has to ultimatelybetray the latter by draining all the fatherly love a drug dealer has offered him. The firstcase, in a rather naïve and desperate way, tries to restore the ideal masculine (self-)images ofgood and potent cops in a conspicuously violent and perhaps chauvinistic way. The secondcase, however, proceeds with the soul-searching journey towards the truth of one’s identity.It is, once again, about making an existential choice, like Yan in Infernal Affairs, choosing tobe good by bringing his corrupt father to justice; it is also a recurrent ethical dilemma withwhich Hong Kong people are faced, for they are painfully negotiating on a daily basis withthe paternal mainland power overwhelming Hong Kong in every aspect nowadays.

Mistrust and duplicity are the recurring motifs on the post-1997 Hong Kong screen.They are, however, everyday political vocabularies as much as they are thematic elementsof different generic movies. (To say so is not to disregard a still wider array of televisiondramas—including the recent prime time TVB family soap Heart of Greed [2007], which alsoends with an undercover twist to make an all-too-obvious political commentary.) In certainways, the figure of the undercover cop, or that of a mole implanted by a gangster syndicateinto the police, is indeed rewriting and redefining the local genre of gangster-cop thriller bydrawing forth the screenwriter’s obsession with the relationships between the ‘black(gangster) way’ (heidao) and the ‘white (police) way’ (baidao). Such films draw increasinglymore upon the contemporary Chinese martial art (wuxia) tradition than from the conven-tional generic American gangster thrillers. Informed by non-metaphysical traditions such asBuddhist and Taoist thought (e.g. the notion of interaction and interchange between yin andyan), the wuxia-repackaged undercover motif can always bring heidao and baidao together inantagonism as well as blur the distinction between the two. Nevertheless, the crossoverexercises are not always simply postmodernist pastiche, or flirtation with New Age Orientalthought—i.e. works done without addressing local circumstances or by disabling the audi-ence’s capacity to derive from them local and urgent relevance. If a Hegelian dialecticbetween master and slave sets in motion the drive toward attaining self-consciousness andsubjectivity, calling forth historical agency, the cop-mob interplay on Hong Kong screen isindeed part of a universe of local urban imaginaries by means of which Hong Kong movie-goers can ponder on problems involving their existence and identity—political or not. Theseimaginaries are what constitute the cinematic of this city.

Coda

The global proliferation of films produced according to Hollywood genres has always beentreated as evidence attesting the domination of American film industry. As the argument

538 Law Wing-Sang

goes, the Hollywood system exerts its overwhelming power not only through the enormousproduction industry that sells its products in every nation but also through the genericforms it imposes upon other national cinemas, thwarting any distinctive national featuresexpressible in films. However, in the wake of the rapid globalization occurring in recentdecades, nationalistic criticism of Hollywood is subsiding fast. Filmmakers and critics beginto look more positively at an affirmed ‘lack’ of national authenticity—to the extent that suchunspecificity or imitation has now become something to be celebrated. Treating filmmakingas an intrinsically international medium, they greet such ‘positive unoriginality’ cheerfully(Morris 1988: 245; O’Regan 1996: 226). Such a worldwide debate over the future of nationalcinema can also find its correlate in China and Hong Kong. There is no shortage of localChinese film critics to join the critical chorus condemning cultural imperialism from time totime; yet there are still many others congratulating themselves for reading acclaim fromwesterners such as Zacharek—who praises Infernal Affairs’ world-class achievement not forany other reasons but for the fact that it re-awakens even the Americans about how to makea good gangster film.10 Repeating the endless debates over whether Hong Kong filmmakersshould take Hollywood as the sole measure of Hong Kong films’ international success isbeside the point here. What needs to be pointed out is the fact that the binary oppositionunderlying these arguments cannot assist us to appreciate intelligently a film such as Infer-nal Affairs. Nor can it help us to understand the more general cultural issues facing a citysuch as Hong Kong—which is located at neither of the poles of the Hollywood-nation axisbut rather in the interstices between different vectors of power: namely, the national, thecolonial and the global, and so on. The analysis of the undercover motif in Hong Kongcinema undertaken in this paper traces the path of a city’s problematic self-assertion, onethat has negotiated all the way with both the colonial and the national—through constantrewriting, reworking and recoding of an Hollywood genre. Those are the efforts that makethe undercover sub-genre in Hong Kong movies both local and more than local.

Thanks to postcolonialism, there is now an abundance of critiques of localism andnativism as well as those leveled against globalism. However, the city is still inadequatelytheorized in these works because the complex cultural formation of a city, as well as itschanging urban imaginaries, is often too easily treated as coterminous with cosmopolitan-ism or universalism. The consequence of such a narrow perspective is dire, in particular, fora (post-)colonial city since such a simplified image of the cosmopolitan city leaves the city’s‘coloniality’ effaced and the problem of the city-local (vis-à-vis the state-national) ignored.Whereas in Hong Kong it is now a commonplace to note that the city’s local, especially thatafter the 1980s, can hardly be couched in terms of cultural authenticity or ethnic tradition, itis not equally easy to raise a counter claim that the global (or the international, transna-tional) is, in fact, always a ready stand-in for the local.11 Moreover, it would be even morechallenging to assess the implications entailed by the effacement, or indeed the virtualiza-tion, of the city-local. What this (quasi-)globalist rendition of Hong Kong experience easilyloses sight of is precisely the mutuality of the local and the non-local as well as the longprocesses in which borrowing, copying, plundering, parodying the non-local elements areall necessary steps towards breeding local characteristics. It is in this regard that I readBaudrillard’s brilliant suggestion to begin with the screen and move outwards towards thecity as not simply another verse of his theory about the simulacrum somehow magicallyturning itself into reality produced in its own image. Rather, I consider it more fruitful totake Baudrillard’s suggestion as making a metaphorical invitation for us to reveal andrevisit the complex relations between cinema and the city’s reality which has yet to be thor-oughly problematized. As a site for the dynamic recodings of a city’s self-imaginary to takeplace, the cinematic is also a reservoir of people’s historical living experiences. It functionsin that way for cinephiles in all other cities as much as it does for the citizens of Hong Kong.To re-animate the sedimented passions and energies of this site one has to begin with an

Hong Kong undercover 539

adequate cinematic-historical account of localized cinematic spaces (understood as variouslocally-specific structures of feeling crystallized in various cinematic devices). Hong Kongmay be a Calvino’s ‘city of signs’ par excellence (Calvino 1979); however, this double surveyof the history of Hong Kong and its cinematic past is not just meant to do a decodingexercise in order to attain a reality beyond signs. Rather, the stake is about how we can‘read’ them (which means to produce further signs) in ways through which we can reclaimour memory as well as our living spaces as our city.

Filmography (selected Hong Kong movies with the undercover-cop theme)

1966 Spy with My Face 1981 Man on the Brink 1983 Aces go Places II 1987 City on Fire 1987 Long Arm of the Law II 1987 A Better Tomorrow II 1989 They Came to Rob Hong Kong 1991 Fight Back to School 1992 Hard-boiled 1992 Police Story 3: Super Cop 1993 Fight Back to School 3 1994 The Most Wanted 1994 Return to a Better Tomorrow 1994 To Live and Die in Tsimshatsui 1995 The Adventurers 1995 My Father Is a Hero 1996 Young and Dangerous 1997 Downtown Torpedoes 1997 Theft under the Sun 1999 Purple Storm 1999 Century of Dragon 1999 King of Comedy 1999 Immortal Spirit 2000 Time and Tide 2001 Partners 2001 Hero of City 2001 Cop on a Mission 2002 Infernal Affairs I I2002 Infernal Affairs II II2003 Infernal Affairs III III2003 Men Suddenly in Black 2003 Color of the Truth 2005 Election 2005 Color of the Loyalty 2006 Wo Hu 2006 On the Edge 2006 Heavenly Mission 2006 Election 2 2006 Exiled 2007 Protégé 2007 Invisible Target

540 Law Wing-Sang

Notes

1. As a solution to the untenable age of colonialism, the United Nations’ consensus was to extend toEurope’s former colonies the status of independence. The PRC’s persistent objection to Hong Kong’splacement on the UN’s list of colonies has always been an attempt to bar Hong Kong from realizing thisindependent status. No Hong Kong representative joined the Sino-British negotiations over Hong Kong’sfuture. The Chinese side labeled any suggestion advocating that there be a representative from HongKong as running a ‘three-legged stool’ conspiracy.

2. Such anti-colonial sentiment once exploded in the mid-1960s, when a labor dispute elicited a series ofprotests, strikes, and bomb attacks, which were organized by the local Hong Kong pro-China leftists.Those days were perhaps the bloodiest in post-war Hong Kong, when the call for terminating the Britishrule there reached its loudest pitch.

3. For an exception, see Ngo (1999).4. CO 129/1, Elliot to Auckland, 21/6/1841, quoted in Carroll (1999).5. In the late Qing Dynasty, purchasing a degree and a mandarin costume from the Qing authority was

officially endorsed, and many overseas Chinese spent huge amounts of money for such honors.6. Nationalist revolutionaries such as Sun Yat-sen tried to gain support from the British colonial

government in Hong Kong during the 1911 uprising and, before the unification wars (1926–1928), thegovernments of Southern China were often on good terms with the Hong Kong colonial authorities. SeeSchiffrin (1968); Chung (1998).

7. For the involvement of triad societies in the film industry and how such an involvement can help explainthe rise of gang heroism, please see Liu (2001). For a criticism of the later gang heroism as an uncondi-tional celebration of gang culture, please see Li (1993: 49–51, 105–108, 155–156).

8. The play is indeed based on a fourteenth-century Chinese drama piece Hui Lan Ji.9. Daily political discourses in Hong Kong are increasingly couched in paternalistic terms, as the Beijing

authority is widely nicknamed as ‘grandpa’. As is repeated time and again by the pro-Beijing circles, solong as ‘grandpa’ has not gained enough trust and confidence in Hongkongers’ patriotism, universalsuffrage will not be allowed.

10. The case is comparable to the Australian-produced Mad Max (1997, 1981) cycle which is celebrated bymany Australians as outdoing Hollywood’s road movies genre (Cunningham 1985: 237).

11. But see Lo (2005: 112).

References

Baudrillard, Jean (1988) America, London: Verso.Brown, Rajeswary Ampalavanar (1994) Capital and Entrepreneur in South-East Asia, New York: St. Martin’s Press.Calvino, Ivan (1979) Invisible Cities, London: Pan Books.Carroll, John M. (1999) ‘Chinese collaboration in the making of British Hong Kong’. In Ngo Tak-Wing (ed.)

Hong Kong’s History: State and Society Under Colonial Rule, London: Routledge, 13–29.Carroll, John M. (2005) Edge of Empires: Chinese Elites and British Colonials in Hong Kong, Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press.Chang, Pin-tsun (1991) ‘The first Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia in the fifteenth century’. In Roderich

Ptak and Dietmar Rothermund (eds) Emporia, Commodities and Entrepreneurs in Asian Maritime Trade, C.1400-1750, Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 23–4l.

Cheuk, Pak-tong (2003) Hong Kong new wave cinema (Xianggang xin lang chao dian ying), HongKong: Tian di Book.

Chung, Stephanie Po-yin (1998) Chinese Business Groups in Hong Kong and Political Change in South China,1900-25, Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan Press in association with St Anthony’s College.

Clarke, David (ed.) (1997) The Cinematic City, London: Routledge.Cunningham, Stuart (1985) ‘Hollywood genres, Australian movies’. In A. Moran and T. O’Regan (eds) An

Australian Film Reader, 235–41.Davis, Mick (1990) City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles, London: Verso.Gomes, Catherine (2005) ‘Coping with modernity: Hong Kong Cinema’s Jane Bond’. In Kwai-Cheung Lo

(ed.) Hong Kong Cinema in the 1970s, Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 65–73.Ho, Sam (1996) ‘Licensed to kick men: the Jane Bond films’, The Restless Breed: Cantonese Stars of the Sixties,

Hong Kong: The 20th Hong Kong International Film Festival.Kwan, Stanley Shih-kuang (1999) My Home and my Country: Memoirs of an old Hongkongan

, Toronto: Joint Centre for Asia Pacific Studies, University of Toronto.

Hong Kong undercover 541

Lam, Perry (2007) Hong Kong: How much have you left? The Death of Hong Kong Exceptionalism ,, Hong Kong: Ci Wen Hua Tong (in Chinese).

Law, Wing-sang (2006) ‘The violence of time and memory undercover: Hong Kong’s Infernal Affairs’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 7(3): 383–402.

Law, Wing-sang (forthcoming) Collaborative Colonial Power: The Making of the Hong Kong Chinese, Hong Kong:Hong Kong University Press.

Leary, Charles (2003) ‘Infernal Affairs: high concept in Hong Kong’, Senses of Cinema, http://www.sensesof-cinema.com/contents/03/26/internal_affairs.html, 26.

Lethbridge, H. J. (1978) Hong Kong: Stability and Change: A Collection of Essays, Hong Kong: Oxford UniversityPress.

Li, Cheuk-to (1993) Essays on Hong Kong Cinema . (Guan ni ji. Xianggang dian ying bian),Hong Kong: Ci wen hua.

Liu, Benjamin T.M. (2001) Hong Kong Triad Societies Before and After the 1997 Change-Over, Hong Kong: Net e-Pub.

Lo, Kwai-cheung (2005) Chinese Face/off: The Transnational Popular Culture of Hong Kong, Illinois: University ofIllinois Press.

Long Tin (2004) ‘The end of Hong Kong consciousness: Infernal Affair III’. In Long Tin (ed.) 2003 Reviews ofHong Kong Films 2003 , Hong Kong: Hong Kong Film Critics Society.

MacDonald, Michael Patrick (2006) ‘Revisiting Southie’s culture of death’, The Boston Globe, 11 October.Mark, Chi-kwan (2004) Hong Kong and the Cold War: Anglo-American Relations 1949-1957, Oxford: Clarendon.Morris, Meaghan (1988) ‘Tooth and claw: tales of survival, and Crocodile Dundee’, The Pirate’s Fiancée:

Feminism, Reading, Postmodernism, London: Verso, 241–269.Munn, Christopher (2000) ‘The Hong Kong opium revenue, 1845–1885’. In T. Brook and T. Wakabayashi

(eds) Opium Regimes: China, Britain, and Japan, 1839–1952, Berkeley: University of California Press.Ngo, Tak-Wing (ed.) (1999) Hong Kong’s History: State and Society under Colonial Rule, London: Routledge.O’Regan, Tom (1996) Australian National Cinema, New York: Routledge.Orr, John (2003) ‘The city reborn: cinema at the turn of the century’. In Mark Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice

(eds) Screening the City, London: Verso.Schager, Nick (2004) ‘Infernal Affairs’, http://www.nickschager.com/nsfp/2004/12/infernal_affair.html.Schiffrin, Harold Z. (1968) Sun Yat-sen and the Origins of the Chinese Revolution, Berkeley, CA: University of

California Press.Shiel, Mark and Fitzmaurice, Tony (eds) (2001) Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Societies in a Global Context,

Oxford: Blackwell.Shiel, Mark and Fitzmaurice, Tony (eds) (2003) Screening the City, London: Verso.Sinn, Elizabeth (1989) Power and Charity: The Early History of the Tung Wah Hospital, Hong Kong: Oxford

University Press.Teo, Stephen (1997) Hong Kong: The Extra Dimensions, London: British Film Institute, chapter 10.Totaro, Donato (2000) ‘Hong Kong meets Hollywood: pros and cons’, Off Screen, http://www.hors-

champ.qc.ca/new_offscreen/HKvs.US.html.Vesia, Michael (2002) ‘The gangster as hero in Hong Kong cinema’, http://www.horschamp.qc.ca/

new_offscreen/hkgangster.html.Vickers, Edward (2005) In Search of an Identity: The Politics of History as a School Subject in Hong Kong, 1960s-

2005, Hong Kong: Comparative Education Research Centre, Hong Kong University.Xi Xi (1988) Shou Juan , Taipei: Hong Fan.Zacharek, Stephanie (2004) ‘Infernal Affairs’, http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/review/2004/09/24/

infernal_affairs/index_np.html.

Special terms

Hui Lan Ji

Author’s biography

Dr Law Wing-sang is Assistant Professor at Department of Cultural Studies, Lingnan University. He earnedhis PhD degree at University of Technology, Sydney in 2002. His doctoral dissertation was published byHong Kong University Press under the title Collaborative Colonial Power: The Making of the Hong Kong Chinese(2008). He has also published articles in journals such as Positions. East Asian Culture Critique, Traces: A

542 Law Wing-Sang

Multilingual Series of Cultural Theory and Translation and Dushu. He is also the editor of a number of Chinesecultural studies collection and translation works.

Contact address: Department of Cultural Studies, Lingnan University, 8 Castle Peak Rd., Fu Tei, Tuen Mun,New Territories, Hong Kong.


Recommended