Chinese-language Films Research Articles

Crouching tiger, hidden dragon: Kung fu diplomacy and the dream of cultural China

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgments I would like to thank Arif Dirlik, Kam Louie and Nick Knight for their encouragement and support. Notes 1Scriptwriter and Columbia film professor James Schamus offers this description of the financing of the film: “Take the film's financing. Working with a partner in Hong Kong and a co-production in China, a Taiwanese company produced the film in conjunction with a subsidiary in the British Virgin Islands and a limited-liability corporation it created in New York. The deals were handled by our international sales and distribution company and Ang's lawyers in New York … with a bank in Paris providing the cash and a bond company in Los Angeles insuring the production. And New York-based Sony Pictures Classics, and its sister company in Los Angeles, Columbia Pictures, bought the rights to the rest of the world, allowing the picture to be made. Columbia Pictures Asia, a Hong Kong-based unit of Sony Pictures Entertainment with a brief to help make Chinese-language films, was also in the mix, it being understood that all of these entities are owned by Sony, which is based in Tokyo.” 2One has to imagine a US national imaginary composed of multiple Orientalisms. My comments here are only meant to apply to US relations with China, and East Asia in general, and not to those segments of the Islamic world that are being subjected to the United States’ violent empire for liberty.