Genre and Censorship: The Crime Film in Late Colonial Hong Kong

Taking its cue from recent developments in genre theory, this chapter treats genre as a process and as a cultural category constructed through discourse. Specifically, it looks at one neglected field in which the Hong Kong crime film was constituted as a genre: government censorship in the period before the 1997 Handover. The chapter argues that in Cold War Hong Kong, there existed a somewhat paradoxical interconnection between the colonial government’s censorship of politics and its censorship of violence, crime and sex in films. The censorship regime negotiated between the competing goals and demands from the Hong Kong film industry, the general public, and the government and had a profound influence on the evolution of the territory’s most well-known crime films during this time.