Chinese-Language Cinema

Three Cinemas, One Language

The phrase Chinese-language cinema names three distinct industries that have rarely agreed on much. Mainland China built its film culture through the state studio system, shaped by ideology and then by the market shock of the 1990s reform era. Hong Kong ran a parallel universe: a colony of pulp, invention, and relentless genre productivity that peaked in the late 1980s and early 1990s as the handover loomed, producing action choreography, heroic bloodshed, and crime melodrama at a volume no other industry has matched. Taiwan, smaller and quieter, nurtured the most formally rigorous directors in the Chinese-speaking world: Hou Hsiao-hsien and Edward Yang turned the island's history of colonisation and displacement into films of extraordinary patience and precision.

The Fifth Generation of mainland directors, trained at the Beijing Film Academy after the Cultural Revolution ended, used cinema to excavate what the revolution had buried. Zhang Yimou's colour-saturated peasant epics, Chen Kaige's operatic historical tragedies, Tian Zhuangzhuang's ethnographic margins: this was a generation processing collective trauma through allegory. The Sixth Generation that followed, led by Jia Zhangke, turned the camera on the post-Mao present, on factory towns, migrant workers, and a country being demolished and rebuilt in real time.

Hong Kong existed on its own terms. John Woo's balletic violence, Tsui Hark's genre maximalism, Wong Kar-wai's impressionist mood-films, Johnnie To's procedural crime pictures: these directors worked within a commercial system while pushing it somewhere it had never been. The wuxia martial arts genre stretches back decades further, to the Shaw Brothers productions of the 1960s and 1970s that defined a visual vocabulary still in use today.

These three cinemas do not form a unified tradition. They borrow from each other, share funding structures, and sometimes make films in the same dialect. But they are shaped by different political climates, different audience expectations, and fundamentally different relationships between the filmmaker and the state. What connects them is the language, and a quality of seriousness about the image that has produced, over the last sixty years, some of the greatest films made anywhere.

The Handover and Its Shadow

For Hong Kong cinema, everything changed in 1997, and everything had been changing since the Handover was announced in 1984. The most interesting films of the transitional decade are saturated with it: Wong Kar-wai's obsession with memory and locked apartments, Johnnie To's cops navigating institutional loyalty in Election, the elegiac quality in even the most commercially driven action films. After 1997 the industry fragmented. Directors emigrated to Hollywood, to mainland co-productions, to streaming. The genre energy relocated. Johnnie To kept working, and in films like The Mission and Infernal Affairs made some of the best crime cinema anywhere. But the collective creative pressure that had produced a film a week of genuine quality was gone.

Mainland China went the other direction: the box office exploded. A generation of spectacle directors (Zhang Yimou with Hero and House of Flying Daggers, then blockbusters at still larger scale) built a global audience for Chinese-language cinema that had never existed before. The cost was that the films most interesting to international critics, the slow observational work of the Sixth Generation, became harder to fund domestically. Jia Zhangke has found his financing partly in European co-productions. The tension between the cinema that sells tickets and the cinema shown at Cannes has never been resolved.

What to Watch First

If you have seen nothing: start with Chungking Express (fast, funny, heartbreaking, accessible) and Raise the Red Lantern (visually overwhelming, unforgettable). Then In the Mood for Love and Farewell My Concubine. Then slow down and make time for A Brighter Summer Day (four hours; worth every minute). The TV entry point is The Bad Kids, a 2020 Chinese streaming thriller that announced the potential of the new mainland drama industry to anyone still dismissing it.