Remixing Chineseness: Censorship, disembodiment and the voice in Hong Kong digital media

Abstract

There is no official censorship in Hong Kong, but the need to consider the structure of co-production with China and the PRC audience’s buying power has forced filmmakers to be cautious about the content of mainstream cinema. Ultimately such considerations and its ties to censorship have dramatic effects on film production in Hong Kong. As an alternative space for cultural industries, videos on online social networking platforms, such as YouTube, have become more popular as creative outlets for those living in Hong Kong to critique the increasing presence of the PRC. By examining the work of GVA Creative, a group of Hong Kong-based video producers, this article sheds light on how cultural icons, such as Guan Yu and Lei Feng among others, are mobilized as a rhetoric of Chineseness. In other words, Chineseness in the digital age must be considered a form of rhetoric that can be deployed for various purposes, such as a form of resistance to mainstream censorship among others. Furthermore, the visual citation of familiar figures in Sinophone communities is one that is remixed in the YouTube videos rather than images that simply reinforce state ideology. This process of remixing Chineseness is a participatory practice that contributes to the formation of a visual language that gives voice to marginalized groups in the face of state hegemony and other forms of censorship in the Sinophone world.