Radio Culture in Cold War Hong Kong Films

• In Event: More than a Mouthpiece: Media Culture in Cold War China

Abstract

Studies of Cold War broadcasting tend to focus on radio as a predominant medium of propaganda, a mouthpiece of the state. This paper examines the role of radio in shaping the everyday life across ethnic and social divisions of Hong Kong society during the 1950s and 60s. Radio broadcasting flourished in postwar Hong Kong. To keep local listeners tuning away from the broadcasting of the neighboring Guangdong province, now under control of the Communists, the colonial government expanded and enriched the programmes of its official station Radio Hong Kong. The wired Radio Rediffusion in Hong Kong brought a more diverse programming—news, current affairs, “sky fiction” (airwaves novels), drama, and music—broadcast in English, Cantonese, Mandarin, Shanghainese, Hakka, and other dialects. Listening to radio constructed an integral part of local daily lives. A particular focus of this paper is how mainland émigré filmmakers used the medium of radio as a narrative device in their films reflecting on social and cultural problems caused by recent national divide and migration. Radio on screen was portrayed as a means of building closer ties across cultural and ethnic differences, as well as fostering a new sense of community identity. Listening to radio created a specific form of communal space, in which people dealt with a traumatic situation of family separation and loss, migration and displacement, assimilation and identity crisis in Cold War Hong Kong.

Author

• Xiaojue Wang, Rutgers University