Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Volume 9, Number 4, 2008

Hong Kong undercover: an approach to collaborative colonialism

LAW Wing-sang

Early Hong Kong colonial history offers a distinct angle for understanding the exceptional circumstances in which a place was colonized by both the British and their Chinese collaborators. The term collaborative colonialism characterizes a political-cultural formation where
descriptions of flows and trajectories of forces may be more helpful than history in illuminating the
colonys murky pasts. Full of treacheries, conspiracies, betrayals and mistrust, such pasts can also
help to explain the popularity of undercover figures in Hong Kongs movies. At risk of losing his
true identity, the undercover figure was received as a social victim in the early 1980s new wave
that followed the legacy of social realism. To feed the appetite for gang heroism, this victim soon
transformed into a tragic hero agonized by moral anxieties. Yet the frame imposed by the policegangster genre did not stop it from being used as a vehicle to reflect on Hong Kongs geo-political
situation: a place located in-between different political projects beyond the locals control, and gripped
by the relentless march of policed-managerial modern order. A twist in the 1990s gave the undercover
figure a cynicist and comedic turn. Postmodern celebrations of witty betrayal can be read as rewriting the undercover story to reinscribe Hong Kongs fate: released from narcissistic heroism, new
undercover images responding to the 1997 transition took identity less as a matter of authenticity
than of performance. Unravelling this historically-embedded structure of feelings shows how the way
had long been paved for the success of the award-winning series Infernal Affairs, extending a deeper
reach into the local politics of memory and time.
lawws@ln.edu.hk
Inter-Asia
10.1080/14649370802386412
RIAC_A_338808.sgm
1464-9373
Original
Taylor
9402008
Wing-sangLaw
00000December
and
&
Article
Francis
Cultural
(print)/1469-8447
Francis2008
Studies (online)

ABSTRACT

KEYWORDS: gangster films, structure of feeling, undercover, genre, city, colonialism,

collaboration, Hong Kong

Baudrillard writes in his book America, The American city seems to have stepped right out
of the movies. To grasp its secret, you should not, then, begin with the city and move
inwards towards the screen; you should begin with the screen and move outwards towards the
city (Baudrillard 1988: 56, emphasis added). His suggested reverse movement unsettles the
usual conception about relationship between cinema and city: namely, films are just a
medium visually representing the material objective city. Baudrillards insight points, on
the contrary, to the fact that cities are never the sum of their physical parts but are always
saturated in the symbolic, increasingly couched in filmic images and filmic texts. The cities
can then be seen as possessing perceptible cinematic qualities. As John Orr writes, a film is
both representation of that living tissue of the city [including both the humdrum activities
and public spectacle] and an integral element within it. It not only records and documents
the symbolic. It is itself symbolic (Orr 2003: 285).
The Baudrillardian conception of cityscape as screenscape, together with the notion of
the cinematic city, has inspired many writers to research the relationships between cinema
and city (e.g. Davis 1990; Clarke 1997; Shiel and Fitzmaurice 2001, 2003). They are interested
in probing into how cinema has impacted upon the formation of cities as both physical and
cultural constructs, and how the city has impacted upon cinema. In many important
ISSN 14649373 Print/ISSN 14698447 Online/08/04052221 2008 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/14649370802386412

Hong Kong undercover 523

aspects, the concept of cinematic city is instrumental in efforts to understand Hong
Kongnot only because Hong Kong once had a very spectacular film industry but also
because the city has made itself known to the world mainly through its screen images. The
kung fu genre, Bruce Lees fist-fights, John Woos bullet-ballets, and Wong Kar-wais recent
cheongsham-ed women (In the Mood for Love [2000]), constitute the screenscape, much more
so than the physical or human landscape, on which both the international images of Hong
Kong and the local cultural identity are shaped, as witnessed by the prominence of Jackie
Chans figure in the 2001 promotion campaign for Hong Kongs tourism.
However, viewing the cityscape as screenscape would always run the risk of taking a
specific screenscape as the equivalent to the actual cityscape. Furthermore, such an exercise
does not often question where and how the screen is viewed. One obvious example of this
delusional universalism embedded in the drives to investigate the cinema-city relationship
can be found in genre studies that are dominated by American framings. For example,
before the phenomenal success in the 2007 Oscars of Martin Scorseses The Departed (2006)
a remake of the Hong Kong blockbuster Infernal Affairs (20023) by Andrew Lau and Alan
Makmost American film critics say they are awed by the scenes of action and violence in
Hong Kong gangster movies but bemused by their redundant or excessive sentimentality
(Vesia 2002; Totaro 2000). In other words, what is particularly cinematic for them in Hong
Kong movies is not any specific quality of the city other than its action and speed inscribed
on the Hong Kong screen; or, the urban quality of Hong Kong is often captured through
clich such as cultural cosmopolitanism, confluences of the East and the West, etc. It is
against this backdrop that while Infernal Affairs I swept the box office in most Asian cities
and won overwhelming acclaim in Hong Kong when it was released in 2002, the film
garnered very polarizing reviews among American critics: for example, one hostile critic
who rated it harshly for merely duplicating Heats (1995) examination of the distinction
between cops and crooks concluded that the film is ultimately quite tepid (Schager 2004);
another American review, this time very positive, stated that the film, being one of the
truest American gangster films of all time, is a solid genre exercise (Zacharek 2004, emphasis added). In another review, which might have nicely underscored the drive for Scorsese
to do a remake of Infernal Affairs, film critic Zacharek says although Hollywood churns out
a new cop thriller just about every other week, weve forgotten how to make true gangster
films, a genre we consider quintessentially American to the point where we feel we no longer
have to work at it (emphasis added). She goes on to complain that even though many of
our cop thrillers feature gangsters of one sort or another (and even though they often make
big money, worldwide), so many of these pictures clump together into a generically dull
ball. Its gotten to the point where we need Hong Kong to remind America who it is
(Zacharek 2004).
It is amazing that common to all these critics who presented divergent evaluations of
the film is the shared assumption that within the global screenscape, the gangster genre is
American territory proper. Whereas The Departed is often credited for its nice depiction of
the cops and mobsters of Boston (MacDonald 2006), its original from Hong Kong was
seldom viewed with much interest in seeing how well the series is emblematic of Hong
Kong as a city, nor in which kind of cinematic qualities does Hong Kong excel that might
have led to the success of Infernal Affairs that Zacharek (or Scorsese) admires. However, this
paper does not set out to compare The Departed with Infernal Affairs, nor do I wish to engage
in debates about Infernal Affairs itself (but see Law 2006); rather, I would like to take that
little controversy as a point of my departure from the current (American) global-genre
regime to prepare the ground for an alternative account for the Infernal Affairs series
success. This move necessitates a closer examination of the trajectories in which a vibrant
sub-genre of undercover cops took shape in Hong Kong. It is certainly not an overstatement
to argue that Infernal Affairs has a far closer lineage to this local generic formation in vogue

524 Law Wing-Sang

in Hong Kong action cinema for decades than to the American gangster genre in a very
general sense. It is more important to understand that instead of simply being a replica or
an extension of the American gangster genre, such a locally-developed sub-genre of undercover cop story has emerged as a product of a unique historical experience of colonial
powers that Hong Kong gained since its inception.
In the following, I will first explain how the peculiarities of colonial history of Hong
Kong have set the scene for the identity crisis played out in its long colonial past, most
vividly in the post-war years in particular. This quick historical tour will end with a brief
discussion of a concept of collaborative colonialism which I think capable of capturing the
main characteristics of a socio-cultural formation underpinning the (post)colonial subjectivity of Hong Kong people. I will then turn to an elaboration of how this troubled subjectivity
has found its manifestations in variants of a specific cinematic figure: the undercover cop. I
will then try to demonstrate how the undercover figure has been evolving throughout the
last few decades in Hong Kong cinema. I see the review of such trajectories, both of the
social and the cinematic, as offering us an important mode of access to the historicallyspecific structure of feeling underlying the reception of gangster movies with an undercover
motif, as well as the socio-psychic-cultural history of Hong Kong.
How colonial is Hong Kong?
Until 1997, Hong Kong was a treaty-port composed of three different parts (Hong Kong
Island, Kowloon Peninsula, and the New Territories) ceded or leased to the British in
succession from 1842; the legitimacy of these so-called unequal treaties, which the Chinese
signed under threats, has been a matter of contention for centuries. The relation between
this treaty-port and the history of contemporary imperialism or colonialism is even more
problematic. In the Peoples Republic of China (PRC), the present governments official
stance has always been to disavow Hong Kong as a colony and to describe the 1997
handover of Hong Kong sovereignty as a mere resumption of Chinas exercise of sovereign
rights.1 Yet, unofficially, the widely accepted notion that takes pre-1997 Hong Kong as a
colony generates little dissension. It seems that the present PRC government is interested
far more in a resumption of Hong Kongs sovereignty under Chinese authorities than in an
honest characterization of Hong Kongs colonial pasts, let alone either an initiation of any
decolonization movement or a cultivation of any anti-colonial sentiment in Hong Kong.2
Yet, however widely the adjective colonial is accepted in different discourses about this
treaty-port, in what sense Hong Kong history is a variety of colonial history (as it falls under
the category of the history of colonialism) is not a well-researched topic among either
Western or Chinese scholars.3 Studies of various aspects of Hong Kong abound, but there
has never been a systematic and theoretical treatment of the nature of British colonial rule in
Hong Kong. Thus, Hong Kong studies have indeed been overwhelmed by the rather casual
use of the noun exceptionalism (Lam 2007).
To fill in the gap between popular conception and theoretical inadequacy, one has to go
back to the very early contemporary historical period of Hong Kong, when the area was
first founded as a treaty-port. Evidence reveals that the thesis concerning Hong Kong as an
outcome of colonialism should proceed cautiously: first, although the expansion of the
British Empire was undoubtedly the over-determining factor causing the Qing (Manchu)
Empires cession of Hong Kong, one might be surprised to find that there had never been
any consistent idea within the British government about how Hong Kong should be colonized (Law forthcoming; see also Vickers 2005). Second, research on the relation between
Southeast Asian business and the opium trade has uncovered evidence that, favoring a
revisionist view, challenges the conventional conception of uni-directional imperialist intrusions. According to these studies, commercial contacts and cooperation among European

Hong Kong undercover 525

merchants and the Chinese dated back to the eighteenth century, well before the take-over
of Hong Kong by the British (Chang 1991; Brown 1994). In those opium trade activities led
by the Europeans, the Chinese took a more active role than has usually been recognized;
and the collaboration between the Chinese and the British persisted even after the Qing
government officially decreed that the opium trade was illegal. When the Opium Wars
(183942; 185660) were underway, those Chinese who collaborated with the British forces
collected for the British military a good deal of information and arranged for them a number
of key material supplies. When the Qing navy was defeated, Captain Charles Elliot, the
British superintendent of trade, persuaded the Royal authorities to make the cession of
Hong Kong Island a part of the requested compensation package. He argued that the British
crown had an obligation to retain Hong Kong as an act of justice and protection to the
native population upon whom we have been so long dependent for assistance and supply
(Carroll 1999).4
Collaborators and secret societies
In contrast with the conventional view of imperialist domination, these revisionist studies
also put in perspective how some Chinese had always been on collaborative terms with
the Europeans in their expansionist projects. Inhabiting the southeastern coastal regions of
China was a sizable Chinese population that provided services of all kinds to the British
whenever they occupied new territories in Southeast Asia. These Chinese usually undertook contract work for the British, and as soon as Hong Kong was ceded to the Crown,
Chinese workers and traders flocked to Southeast Asian regions, soon getting rich through
the contract work. Among these seekers of wealth, the most active were boat people
(Tanke) who were long treated as pirates and outcasts, having been expelled by Qing officials and deprived of normal citizenship rights that were necessary for taking the Civil
Service Examination, buying landed property, and entering into marriage with landed
people.
However, as soon as Hong Kong submitted to British occupation, the boat people and
others like them saw their fortunes reversed. It was indeed a situation in which Hong Kong,
after its colonial history got underway in 1842, became home to Chinese settlers coming
from all the surrounding regions. Such a peculiarity has prompted some critics to say that
Hong Kong was indeed colonized by those immigrant Chinese for it was indeed these
Chinese settlers, rather than the British, who overwhelmed the tiny indigenous population
on the island. The reciprocation policy by which the British gave these collaborators
valuable land enabled these Chinese collaborators to prosper through land speculations and
to become the first local wealthy class.
In the years that followed, Hong Kong quickly developed through the opium trade and
the coolie trade and turned itself into an important hub for these international businesses,
remaining so until the early twentieth century. As a result, the city was full of opium
booths, gambling houses, and brothels; crime was unbridled and rampant; the British were
neither willing nor able to quash this criminality, as they did not intend to directly govern
the Chinese. The British once tried but unsuccessfully, in the very early years, to establish
two separate legal systems respectively for the Chinese and the Europeans. The main reason
for the failure of this initiative was this pertinent difference: unlike other British colonies in
Southeast Asia, Hong Kong made it difficult for the British there to be consistent with the
indirect-rule principle, that is, to find local tribal chieftains and to enlist their aid in establishing a different legal system. Moreover, owing to the Chinese entrepreneurs who got rich
from different crimes and adventurous activities, the British indeed could not build up a
trustworthy, reliable, uncorrupted police force that could actually enforce the law. For more
than a century to follow, the Hong Kong police force was composed of Englishmen together

526 Law Wing-Sang

with a large number of Indians, Nepalese, and others recruited from distant British colonies
until the localization policy started to be put in place in the 1970s (Munn 2000).
Therefore, for a long time in early colonial Hong Kong, the new Chinese wealthy class
and the British authorities maintained in political terms a mutual non-interference relationship. On the one hand, the British authorities in Hong Kong exercised centralized autocratic
power; on the other hand, this power had seldom been exercised in the actual administration of Chinese affairs. The Chinese community was indeed governed by a kind of nonlocally inherited custom that, as a rule, lacked official recognition. To fill the political
vacuum, the wealthy Chinese tried to play the traditional role of the gentry class, which
they had been forbidden to play in the past. As a result, these Chinese constituted a semilegal community in which some Chinese informally administered other Chinese through a
borrowed imaginary framework of custom. They lived collectively in places like Tai Ping
Shan, ran Man-Mo Temple, oversaw different rituals and ceremonies, and arbitrated over
civic affairs and small conflicts among the Chinese.
Although the political status of those Chinese leaders had never been recognized, and
although quite a few of them were indeed treated by the Qing government as traitors to
their own country, their political and economic clout never stopped expanding with the
development of Hong Kong. The trend was more obvious after the establishment of Tungwah Hospital 1872, which was the first autonomous Chinese institution of considerable size.
It emerged initially as a charity institute despite its more variegated functions performed in
its heyday. Although the British did not grant the institute an official or legal status, it acted
more like a municipal office administering to the citys needs, and a court adjudicating civil
conflicts and even, at one point in time, an unofficial Chinese Consulate representing the
Qing government in Hong Kong (Sinn 1989).
Lethbridge, a Hong Kong historian, has pointed out that although the Chinese elites of
Tung-wah Hospital never acquired an official status that would have enabled them to
represent the Chinese, the hospital could practice different tactics that enabled those elites
to act as intermediaries in Hong Kong between the Qing government and the British
government and, thus, to seize any opportunity that might advance their political and social
status (Lethbridge 1978). According to records, the managers of Tung-wah Hospital liked
very much to invite the British to pay it visits (Lethbridge 1978: 61). On those occasions, the
hospitals directors were all dressed up in mandarin costumes with buttons and peacock
feathers signifying official rank; indeed, the hosts looked very much like officials appointed
by the Qing government. These self-styled performances were carried out in a bid to elevate
the hospital directors own status in the eyes of both the British and the Chinese community.5 Well versed in dealing with the Westerners, these bilingual self-appointed Chinese
representatives increasingly emerged as a class of economic compradors (Chinese political
middle-men) who, equipped with certain diplomatic skills, helped the Qing government to
deal with yangwu (foreign business or political affairs). The reformist leader Zhang Zidong
in the Qing government once tried to collect information through Tung-wah Hospital about
the foreigners and the overseas Chinese communities and, thus, elevated, for a certain
period, the status of the hospital to a new height (Lethbridge 1978).
However, in the last years of the nineteenth century, the growing political influence of
Tung-wah Hospital drew antipathy from the European communities in Hong Kong, who
suspected it of being a secret society pawned by the Qing government to subvert Britishcontrolled Hong Kong. Although these bilingual elites suffered a certain setback in this
moment, they continued to benefit from lending support to the reformist bureaucrats.
Shouldering double identities, they pledged allegiance both to the British Empire and to the
reformist bureaucrats of the Qing government. In Hong Kong, they were sometimes named
official representatives of the Chinese and emerged gradually as a distinct class of Higher
Chinese.

Hong Kong undercover 527

Collaborative colonialism
The above review of Hong Kongs early history illustrates a distinct socio-cultural formation whose characteristics I capture in the notion of collaborative colonialism, by which I
mean that a certain tacit collaborative contract between the British colonizers and the
Chinese elites in Hong Kong had underpinned the citys colonial rule. Hence, Hong Kongs
colonial situation cannot be understood by a simplistic or stereotypical model of colonialism that describes a uni-directional domination of the natives imposed by the intruding
imperialist. In cultural terms, collaborative colonialism also refers to an ideological and
affective formation characterized by the dominance of a colonialist culture which is,
however, maintained both by the imperialistic foreigners and the native collaborators.
Amidst the rise of anti-colonial nationalistic discourses, which always try to set up a
Manichean binary framework to affirm an anti-colonial subjecthood, collaborative relations
are precarious and always vulnerable to criticisms and attacks. As a corollary, within the
formation of collaborative colonialism, the colonized natives always fail to achieve for
themselves a politically effective collective identity in resistance to the dominating colonial
power because they are socially divided by mutual mistrust and suspicion. Also, the double
identity of a collaborator further entails a split subjectivity, which is always torn apart by
endless interrogations (or self-interrogations) of loyalty, as the flipside of collaboration is
betrayal to ones own brothers or intimate relatives.
Outlining a more detailed analysis, which I elaborate elsewhere (Law forthcoming; see
also Carroll 2005), my main argument is that collaborative colonialism is not just a model
that describes Hong Kong in its past but a key concept that enables us to understand Hong
Kong culture and political imaginaries now. Generated from a genealogy describing all the
twists and turns that Hong Kong has undergone, the concept is helpful in offering insights
into the historical condition that has long been effectuating the (still)birth of Hong Kong
political subjectivity. As a matter of fact, ever since the early twentieth century, the basic
political structure of Hong Kong has never been substantially changed, despite the evergrowing immigrant population from China; the parties that have been sharing the power of
this collaborative-colonial formation are always the government, which occupies a colonial
position, and a group of collaborative Higher Chinese, which the government nurtures.
Because the western governments were supporting the anti-Qing Nationalist Revolution of China, which successfully gave rise to a new republican government in 1911,
Chinese nationalism in Hong Kong had never been wholly anti-colonialist. On the contrary,
this revolution, which led to the rise of various local pro-Western regimes, indeed helped
the extension of collaborative-colonial relationships for the opportunistic Chinese elites.6
Civil wars among warlords in China, Japanese invasion as well as the inter-party battles
between the CCP and the KMT did not steer Hong Kong away from this dilemma-ridden
situation. Instead, the local Chinese population, whether elites or not, was involved in
vicious identity politics which linked as much to the splitting of political loyalties between
two different nationalist parties as to resistances to different colonizers. Likewise, the Cold
War soon broke out after the Chinese civil war engulfed Hong Kong, turning it into a frontline zone replete with espionage and other secret dealings on behalf of antagonistic forces.
The political bureau of the Hong Kong Police also took as its main task the collection of
intelligence from different political powers in Hong Kong as well as from the ordinary
population, and this intelligence-gathering resulted in heavy surveillance by the police of
the Hong Kong population. An atmosphere of fear flourished, and the trial of political
loyalty was indeed a gruesome experience for almost everybody during the Cold War
(Mark 2004; Kwan 1999). To make matters worse, the turbulent political events and the
fieriest cultural struggles to emerge in the Maoist era also, from time to time, turned even
the most inconsequential thingssuch as some Mainlanders connections to Hong Kong,

528 Law Wing-Sang

records of correspondence with relatives in Hong Kong, number of past visits to Hong
Kong, or their being found listening to radio broadcast from Hong Konginto evidence to
prove someones political disloyalty. Therefore, without bearing the direct effects of this
turmoil, the people of Hong Kong nevertheless experienced accusations from the Chinese
state authorities; the guilty charges were often based simply on their identity of being a
Hong Konger.
Many scholars see this highly problematic situation of being a Hongkongerwhich
surfaced so acutely in the turbulent years of Cultural Revolution (and its proxy in Hong
Kong, the 1967 riots)reached a crucial turning point in the 1970s. Since then, a drive to
reflect upon the problem of Hong Kong identity has emerged among the young generation.
To be sure, there have always been different forms of literary or filmic expression through
which experiences of vulnerability and of the (perhaps) permanent identity crisis of Hong
Kong come to light from time to time. Early post-war Hong Kong Chinese literature has
many examples depicting the cultural disorientation that migrants from Mainland China
experienced. However, a Chinese cultural nationalism held sway in most of these migrant
literatures, regardless of whether they took left-wing or right-wing stances, and this always
asserted for the Hong Kongers a Chinese cultural unity. It was only in the late 1970s, when
Chinese cultural nationalism (now dubbed Mainland-centrism) began to give way to a
more self-reflexive local Hong Kong consciousnessfound among the young (mostly
locally-born) intellectualsthat a fresh look into the identity problem of Hong Kong
became possible. Instead of thinking within binary frames such as the East versus the West,
or nationalism versus colonialism, the young generation started trying to establish a new
local focus negotiating between these opposing poles. Such efforts appeared in a wide
variety of cultural and artistic spheres. In the name of the so-called New Wave cinema, a
new sensitivity began to emerge in the 1970s to break from the yoke of the high-minded
Chinese cultural nationalism dominant especially for the early post-war years. Therefore,
although the 1970s political activisms were increasingly anti-colonial, it was no longer
Chinese nationalistic at the expense of concerns about Hong Kongs local situation. A
complex view towards Hong Kongs cultural identity and political belonging enhanced
more critical examination of the no-go situation of collaborative colonialisma situation
in which nationalism is not always the easy panacea or alternative to the wrongs of colonialism, if not a force indeed in complicity with the latter.
Such a new social sensitivity has been expressed through different tropes, images, icons
and narratives in various popular cultures. In the following section, I will map, in brief, the
trajectory along which Hong Kong movies worked on a peculiar theme: the undercover-cop
sub-genre and its later variants. I take that theme as a key enabling us to grasp the structures of feeling embedded in Hong Kongs cultural and ideological landscape. The undercover figure is in a sense paradigmatic here because it epitomizes acutely the core issue
about political loyalty and betrayal within the formation of collaborative colonialism. Yet,
as I will show, the figure and motif of the undercover bear a much wider significance than
that which is narrowly confined to national politics and ideology.
Undercover social tragedy
The undercover motif began to emerge and flourish in Hong Kong cinema with the brief
New Wave in the early 1980s (Cheuk 2003). This motif is related to the spy trope inspired
by the James Bond films; yet it functions in a totally different manner from the latter as it
gradually takes root in Hong Kong cinema from the 1980s. Both the spy and the undercover
cop are secret agents undertaking covert assignments. But a main difference between a
Bond-style spy story and an undercover-cop story is that the former is usually associated
with clashes between adversarial states; as a result, a clear distinction between ally and

Hong Kong undercover 529

enemy is often indispensable in a spy story. A number of anti-Japanese espionage films
were shot during the war for popular mobilization; yet films with the spy figure have never
gained widespread popularity in Hong Kong. The emergence of James Bond from Hollywood brought about some imitations by Cantonese filmmakers (e.g., the Spy with My Face
series, which was called the Jane Bond films) (Ho 1996; Gomes 2005); yet their success did
not last beyond the 1980s, when it was eclipsed by the figure of the undercover cop (Cheuk
2003; Teo 1997: ch. 10). Neither as smart nor as fearless as the James Bond type of gutsy spy,
the undercover cop cannot even draw on endless reserves of fortitude in the execution of
top-secret tasks; instead, the undercover cop is a tragically bewildered figure drifting
between the order of justice represented by the police and the evil underworld controlled by
the criminals.
Man on the Brink (1981), directed by Alex Cheung, is perhaps the classic of the undercover-cop sub-genre in Hong Kong. Although the film has all the basic elements of a formulaic thriller such as fight scenes and car chases, the narrative structure of the film exhibits a
striking degree of social realism. As pungent social criticism, the film shows the dire conditions of a society full of grievances. Attempting to escape the humble and unchallenging life
of an ordinary cop, the protagonist Chiu (played by Eddie Chan) stepped into his unfortunate fate by accepting the assignment of an undercover cop. In his tragic endeavor to
accomplish something grand and spectacular, Chiu is misunderstood and brushed off by
his girlfriend; his wayward behaviors even strip him of support from his parents. Deeply
disturbed by the death of his dear colleague, Chiu cannot escape the more tragic fate that
looms over his own existence. Setting a classic example for the sub-genres subsequent film
ventures, Man on the Brink excels in capturing the no-go situation of an undercover cop by
detailing his family background and the changes of his psychological state. The films final
scenes are more allegorical, depicting a confrontation between the police and an angry mob
at a shanty public housing estate. The robbers are caught red-handed with the help of the
undercover cops wit; however, the uncontrolled mob, which is made up of local residents,
mistakes the undercover cop for one of the gangsters and beats him to death under the eyes
of the police. The police cannot come to his rescue because, tragically, the main gate has
been locked by Chius negligent colleagues who try to contain the crowd.
To put the film in historical perspective, one has to re-examine Hong Kong during the
1970s, when rampant corruption in the Hong Kong Police caused widespread social unrest,
which led to an upsurge of anti-corruption campaigns directed by young social activists. In
response, the colonial government set up the Independent Commission Against Corruption
(ICAC) to curb the waves of scandal; yet it failed to change peoples perception of the colonial establishments incompetence. In addition, in 1981, not long after Chinas chaotic
Cultural Revolution had wound down, diplomatic negotiations over the future of Hong
Kong got underway between the British and the Chinese states, and these negotiations
triggered once again the uncertainties and the anxieties that the Hong Kong people felt over
their future. Man on the Brink depicted at that moment the imagined scenes of violent
confrontations between an agitated crowd and an incompetent police force. The tragic death
of the caged Chiu served as a satirical lament regarding the vulnerability of Hong Kong in
face of the looming mob politics against anyone who possesses a suspicious identity.
Undercover heroism
Hong Kong movies in the 1980s are distinguished by the prominence of the gangster-hero
genre, wherein the motif of the undercover cop has been deployed time and again.7
However, a significant difference between the two film categories is noteworthy: the
straight gangster-hero stories always glorify male social bonds and personal loyalty,
whereas the undercover-cop story, as a sub-genre, engages the moral dilemmas that emerge

530 Law Wing-Sang

when a protagonist must choose between personal loyalty and official duty. A classic
combination of these two motifs is City on Fire (1987) starring Chow Yun-fat and Danny Lee.
Already tired of his undercover career, Ko Chow (Chow Yun-fat) has to make a final choice
between loyalty to his official duty, as advised by his immediate boss, and loyalty to his
buddy Fu (Danny Lee), with whom friendship and trust have been tested by ordeals. Ringo
Lam, the director, meticulously portrays how the two come to be friends who swear to live
and die togethera friendship that, because Ko Chow has been unfaithful to Fu, challenges
the formers conscience. Haunted by feelings of guilt for his having sold Fu out, Ko Chow
embodies the figure of an undercover cop who breaks with the tradition of social didacticism that characterized old Hong Kong movies, in which the criminals always have to face
up to explicit moral condemnations. City on Fire unfolds another possibility, one in which
the conflicts between the legal order of justice and the value of personal loyalty submit to a
darker exploration.
The Chinese word yichi (personal loyalty or brotherhood) connotes an unofficial kind
of morality, which is more concerned with ethical responsibility to strangers rather than
an obligation to follow regulations and codes. It is about building trust and making
friendship with others in alien surroundings through acts of reciprocity. Therefore, the
ideal of brotherhood among gangsters as depicted in Hong Kongs New Wave gangster
movies is not derivable from group membership, natural belongingness, or an enduringly
valid social and moral order. It is better understood as a survival strategy that, constituted
contingently in human encounters, provides a basis for cooperation among men, particularly for those under disadvantageous circumstances where fairness and justice are absent
or rare.
An undercover cop is supposedly an instrument for the realization of lawfulness.
However, whereas in our society interpersonal trust is rapidly giving way to utilitarian
exploitation, this instrument paradoxically preys on the increasingly rare human virtue of
fidelitybecause every undercover operation deliberately exploits loyalty among men and
encourages betrayal. In order to undermine the solidarity of a gang, an undercover cop
needs to win friendship and trust from other mobsters only to double-cross them later.
Therefore, as soon as the undercover cop realizes the value of justice he is undermining the
very basis of social solidarity. This scenario renders both the undercover cop and the gangster the tragic victims of a legal and security apparatus. In this light, the structure of the
undercover-cop tragedy does not derive from certain weaknesses of human nature that
compel a man to deviate from either legal justice or the good in human nature. It has more
to do with how an undercover cop who lives in a mundane world resolves the ethical
dilemmas inherent in face-to-face encounters with others.
In the 1980s and 1990s in Hong Kong, institutions of modern governance and management developed rapidly in all areas of the society in response to, or regardless of, peoples
anxieties about the future and peoples widespread feelings of dissatisfaction concerning
the immediate realities of living standards. Efforts to wipe out corruption and organized
crime were loudly trumpeted as thorough and transformative reactions to unacceptable
forms of personal interaction and business practices. The emergence of gangster heroism in
popular movies reflected peoples pessimism concerning the impending new order. Plucky
heroism and the morals of inter-personal trust generated social imaginaries with which
people could make sense of the changes that, in those confusing times, were going to
refigure usual ways of life. It is in this light that we might notice the interesting evolution of
how the undercover-cop figure, as a bearer of social criticism, targeted new themes and
embodied new styles.
If we conclude that, in Man on the Brink, the tragic end of the undercover cop is due to
police slackness, it would be of interest to compare the film with City on Fire, where the
terrible fate of the undercover cop is preordained by the police institutions distrust of

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undercover operatives. The story of City on Fire is driven by the antagonism between two
generations of police officersmen who engage in ferocious disputes over whether the
police should rely on undercover cops. The older cop (Uncle Kwong, played by Suen Yeuh)
trusts the particular undercover cop (Ko Chow) because of personal confidence; yet the new
cop (John, played by Roy Cheung) believes in nothing other than credentials, regulations,
management, and physical means of coercion. In the latters eyes, unchecked undercover
operatives would easily slide into criminality. With misgivings and suspicions, not only
does the police department withdraw support from the undercover cop, but also the new
cop in charge tries to put the undercover in prison. In contrast, the relationship between
Uncle Kwong and Ko Chow is infused with father-son dynamics; what ties them together is
nothing other than the Confucianist values of mutual respect, sincere personal integrity,
and reciprocal loyalty to ones dear others. Stripped of his power and influence under the
rapid pace of institutionalization and the emerging dominance of impersonal bureaucracy,
Uncle Kwong confides his unease to Ko Chow: For thirty years, I have held this rank,
which I earned by risking my life, unlike those officers who are promoted up here through
examination only. This passage from the script gives witness to the historical changes in the
mid-1980s when Hong Kong was beginning to end the initial phase of industrial take-off,
which relied on small family businesses. The extension of bureaucratic control and an
increasingly formalized style of management could be found everywhere in the Hong Kong
society that was ready to enter its financial and post-industrial era. The juxtaposition
between two different approaches in dealing with the problem of how to oversee the often
unruly operation of the undercover cop gives a vivid refraction of how a modern, institutionalized management philosophy was gradually and painfully replacing the more
informal type of labor control.
The extent to which mutual trust and personal loyalty in Hong Kong have been in
decline is given full play in the final sequences of City on Fire: besieged by the police, the
whole gang is still mired in their search for the traitor and in quarrels over who is the real
boss. For Ringo Lam, blaming each other for betrayal will not rescue interpersonal trust but
rather acts as a prelude to its final demise. Just as much as a gang, a society in crisis needs
trust to be the basis of solidarity; the sad thing is that neither the police nor the gang world
can give the unconditional brotherhood between Ko Chow and Fu a space to thrive. The
eventual death of Ko Chow might be read as redemption for Ko Chows indecisionfor his
ambivalent identitywhen faced with honoring the pledge to go through thick and thin
together with his brother; the arrest of Fu, as a triumph of law, may be considered a clichd
ending. It may too conveniently resolve the ethical dilemmas that will nevertheless endure;
but it also strongly condemns irredeemable modernization for its resulting greediness and
impersonality, which claim as their price the shattering of the moral basis of socialitya
sociality that, outside civil society, has maintained its 150-year existence beyond the grip of
legal and bureaucratic machineries. The rapid mounting of modern surveillance systems
and managerial institutions in the 1970s and the 1980s (the post-67 era) were indeed unrelenting assaults on Hong Kongs social solidarity, however fragile and transitory it had
been.
Undercover comedy
In the 1990s, Hong Kong was driving along at a rapid pace, braving the prospect of its
return to China. It was a new twist for Hong Kong history. However, despite all the hysteric
reactions to the possibly revolutionary impacts the impending handover to a communist
regime had trumped up, the stock market craze and property-boom successfully brought
Hong Kong into a new phase of speculative capitalism. It called for a new sense of pride for
the citizens; however, the imperative to ensure a smooth and stable transition did not allow

532 Law Wing-Sang

any politically idealistic pursuits to shake the foundation of collaborative colonialism. In a
society destined to be undergoing a process of switching its loyalty from one colonial ruler
to an authoritarian regimewhich looks sometimes quite indistinguishable from the previous orderHong Kong people saw their political fate as uncontrollable with the social
fabric melting in every aspect. Burying the can-do spirit which for a long time had
supported the small family businesses, the success of get-rich-quick financial capital was
achieved with dire social and human cost. A general perceived threat about declining brotherhood and faithfulness, which underpinned the grassroots social solidarity in the past, was
projected onto the youth generation, which was seen by their parents as quickly discarding
the virtues of loyalty characteristic of the previous industrial take-off. Singularly marked for
being shortsighted, cynically realistic and irresponsible, youth appeared in the 1990s Hong
Kong cinema as figures bearing wider social anxiety in general and the loss of tragic heroism in particular. As heroic figures who could endure pain and hardshipwith unshakable
commitment and devotion to brotherly loveincreasingly aroused incredulity, a deconstructive turn of heroism in Hong Kong cinema was both inevitable and welcomed. It is in
this light that the Young and Dangerous series (in Chinese, goowark tzai) (19961998) by
Andrew W.K. Lau gained notoriety for its inauguration of new-style youth-oriented gang
films.
The Young and Dangerous series has indeed initiated a change in social vocabularies.
Ever since the release of the movies, joining a mafia group is called walking goowark. In
Cantonese, goowark means unreliability and trickery. The designation of the young mafia
members as goowark tzai (the young tricksters) is premised upon the younger generations
general misgivings concerning devotion and reliability. As a story about multiple treacheries, Young and Dangerous II (1996) tells how the young Hong Kong hooligans get entangled in a Taiwan mafia that, while contending with internal power struggles, tries to
annex Hong Kongs and Macaus casino businesses. Films that are set against crossregional backgrounds not only attract international audiences but also open up a comparative perspective toward mafia cultures in different places. The main protagonist,
Chicken (Jordan Chan), speaks probably the worst kind of Mandarin; he represents
indeed a whole generation of Hong Kong youngsters who could not care less about the
survival of traditional Chinese cultures and mannerisms in Taiwan. Having not even a
clue of how mafia and politics can join together, Chicken seeks refuge in a big mafia
organization that is run by a politician. Feeling totally dislocated, Chicken seems to be
driven by an impending force urging him to speak proper Mandarin, as well as to
understand how wider, more nuanced gamesas opposed to small-time tricksmake
politics and crime interchangeable terms. Successfully portraying the actual cultural disorientations that characterized most youngsters in Hong Kong at the time, the film nevertheless proceeds as a fantasy inasmuch as, for example, the ringleaders mistress finds a
Hong Kong rascal sexually attractive. However, the fantasy soon turns into a nightmare
for the sexually and politically nave Chicken, who is easily exploited as part of a bigger
conspiracy.
For Hong Kong audiences, most of whom have experienced a sense of exclusion and
of impotence relative to secret, far-off conspiracies and projects, an aggrandized depiction
of naivety has a comic effect that, as self-parody, hits home. Lies that are doled out are
returned as betrayals; a trick is paid back with another ploy; and a film that incorporates
this cycle of duplicity is no longer a cop story but a carnivalesque caricature of undercover activities. It is very much a daydream fancying a joyful comeback when the young
hooligans outwit the powerful criminal syndicates conspiracy of intrusion. With territorial predation becoming the new logic of global capitalism, late-colonial Hong Kong
sought to position itself in a new round of competition among Asian cities. Young and
Dangerous, therefore, paints the syndicate in international colors suggesting that, in

Hong Kong undercover 533

general, power is concentrated and regionally arranged as a mafia and, in particular, how
Hong Kong, self-imagined as a group of young hooligans, can still fancy a final victory in
the rat race.
However, whereas blurring the distinction between politics and mafia activities hits
home by calling back the old memory of Hong Kongs collaborative-colonial past, the
Young and Dangerous series is making an analogy between the mafias territorial expansion and an imperialistic invasion effected with the help of traitors and turncoats. If the
anxiety and anguish attributable to older figures in the undercover-cop genre was
classical, director Andrew W.K. Lau has managed to give the undercover cop a timely
facelift in the 1990s by endowing him with now ordinary characteristics of Hong Kong
youthshrewdness, candidness, and humoras a response to worries about fading
virtues. On the eve of Hong Kongs 1997 transition of power, the Young and Dangerous
series gave a kind of optimism to the annoyed people of Hong Kong. Reacting to the
clichd talk about identity and political loyalty, the film makes a forceful point that Hong
Kongs new generation will be capable of flexibly managing the game of identity performance. Submerged in an outpouring of nationalistic banalities, the caricatured portrayal
of the much more cultured but also much more fraudulent Taiwanese mafia is tantamount to a break with those grand nationalist discourses, which the Hong Kong rascals
decry as mendacities that far overshadow and outweigh the small-time tricks, lies, and
feats of deception characteristic of the rascals daily life. Against the developmental
history of how the undercover-cop figure evolved, Young and Dangerous II has been able
to submit this history to a jovial deconstruction, turning the accepted past away from the
tragedy of its traditional themes and toward a tongue-in-cheek treatment of doubledealing performances.
As a matter of fact, Stephen Chow should be honored for making the first attempt to
deconstruct the tragic character associated with the undercover-cop figure. In the screwball
comedy Fight Back to School (1991), the clown is an undercover cop sent to a school to
investigate an illegal arms deal. Years later, in King of Comedy (1999), a frustrated part-time
actor who daydreams all the time of being a star is fortuitously recruited as a temporary
undercover cop who by luck breaks a criminal plot. A line parodying all the past
undercover figures says, The undercover cop is the best actor worthy to be awarded an
Oscarfor if his show fails he will die. Stephen Chows satirical remark subverts the past
tragic manifestations of undercover cops identity crisis. Stephen Chows point is that an
undercover cop is no more than an actor who knows very well the inherently performative
nature of every identity. Based on the understanding that identity is nothing more than
performativity, a trend of de-tragification has given a new edge to the undercover-cop
figure in recent Hong Kong movies. One may make sense of this re-interpretation of the
undercover-cop figure by noticing the emergence of a new sensibility concerning the conditions of Hong Kong subjectivity: if, because all identities are just performances, there is no
such thing as an authentic identity, one can nevertheless rightly conclude that life is, instead
of an impasse, a game played out in the everyday.
Undercover adventure
The attempt to free the undercover-cop figure from the old tragedy-steeped frame emerges
in another film, Theft under the Sun (1997), which treats the undercover cop as a figure for
identity adventure. The protagonist Ka-ho (Julian Cheung) is sent by the police to infiltrate
an international syndicate that smuggles arms. Against expectations, he is increasingly
mesmerized by the inexorable charm of the ringleader, a foreigner with a hybrid ethnic
background. The film in many different ways describes the confused state in which even
Ka-ho himself cannot tell, first, whether he is indeed a police officer or a criminal and,

534 Law Wing-Sang

second, how much he wants to end his career as an undercover cop so that he can pursue
his authentic identity.
The undercover cop and the ringleader start smuggling a missile from China across
the Russian and the Mongolian borders. Ka-hos superior, growing suspicious that Ka-ho
has broken his obligations as a police officer, insists on issuing a warrant for his arrest.
The psychologist Dr Mo (Francis Ng) defends Ka-ho by having him diagnosed with Stockholm syndrome (by which one identifies with ones enemies if one is put in long-term
contact with them). Agonizing in a faraway place, Ka-ho finds, however, that his fate is
determined by the debate over his loyalty between two schools of thought within the
police. On one side is the state apparatus, represented by the supervising officer; on the
other is the medical disciplinary power, represented by the psychologist. In the case of
the bookish psychologist, the rather exaggerated style of performance and the almost
theatrical lines of dialogue turn his explanation into an academic speech replete with postcolonial theories and references to the problem of Hong Kong identity. The crux of the
explanation is this: ones agency, sense of responsibility, and even moral consciousness
can be weakened after one is cut off for a long time from ones mother-body; and such is
the case in which Ka-ho has found himself detached from Hong Kong, his mother-body.
But the supervising officer is hardly impressed and tauntingly accuses the psychologist of
being pedantic and self-contradictory; the officers verdict is that Ka-hos confusions over
his true identity constitute grounds for the conclusion that Ka-ho is no longer faithful to
the police force.
Michael Wong plays the role of the charismatic ringleader Dan Peterson, who can turn
a thief-catcher into a thief. Close observers of local Hong Kong politics before 1997 will
immediately associate such an image with Hong Kongs last governor, Chris Patten, who
was widely acclaimed by some Hong Kong people as a charismatic leader and as an inspiration to supporters of democracy. To Pattens enemies, with whom he wrestled over the pace
of democratic development in Hong Kong, the governors charm was the most formidable
obstacle in his arsenal. Similarly, in the film, it is exactly this kind of charm that transforms a
thief-catcher into a thief. The parable never fails to trigger understanding grins among
Hong Kong filmgoers. However, the complex image of such a foreigner, and his attempt to
smuggle a missile across distant Chinese borders deserves more intricate readings. Dan
speaks with far-from-fluent Cantonese, mixed very often with English and other foreign
languages. Rather than a professional smuggler, he is more like a nomadic knight-errant
drifting around with more than one exact aim. He believes in unconventional learning such
as intuition and reverse thinking; he says that his imprisonment in the Middle East
taught him much more than did his school days; he untiringly explains to Ka-ho that the
widespread misconception according to which all arms smugglers in the Middle East are
bad guys stems from CNN.
Rather than trigger an identity crisis, the chivalrous bandit brings to the undercover cop
Ka-ho alternative perspectives from which he can re-examine the existing order of things.
Therefore, although it is true that the undercover cop encounters difficulties in his job, these
difficulties concern not so much a return to an original, authentic identity but a realization
that the world is composed of different aspects, each of which can affect how one chooses an
identity for oneself. Therefore, the adventure in the Chinese border zone serves principally
as a spiritual journey that opens Ka-hos eyes. What is most intriguing about this film is that
it ends by having the arms smuggler and the undercover cop smuggle the missile back to
Hong Kong, a return journey that brings Ka-ho back into the arms of his own mother-body
(rather than China, as the 1997 clich goes). The play of multiple, sliding spatial references
and of allegorical sarcasm points to something much more substantial than what a thriller
normally offers. Apparently, Ka-ho will have his true cop identity restored when he, with
the help of the bandit, returns to Hong Kong, his mother-body. Yet the film maintains

Hong Kong undercover 535

suspense so that it is anybodys guess whether Dan dies in the final big blasts or escapes
with the help of Ka-ho. But either of these outcomes sufficiently gives the film an open end,
turning it away from the tragic-hero tradition.
Undercover hell
The long tradition of undercover stories told in Hong Kong cinema, exemplified by the
films I have reviewed above, is further developed after 1997. The astonishing success of the
Infernal Affairs trilogy (20023) is a vivid example of how captivating the question of who
am I? is to Hong Kong audiences even after an answer has been officially declared to end
the perplexing state of Hong Kong peoples national identity. Having given a much more
detailed analysis of this elsewhere (Law 2006), I would only add here that although Scorseses success in the Academy Awards for The Departed (2006) has drawn some international
attention to its Hong Kong originaland perhaps mostly to the ingenuous screenplay of
Alan Makit is still a remote prospect for the international (or, in particular, the American)
audience to understand where the originality springs from. As a matter of fact, the riveting
play of Infernal Affairs about the control over the undercover cops identity establishes a far
stronger continuity with the past Hong Kong undercover-cop stories than many might have
thought. For one thing, the trilogy is indeed a re-invigoration of the 1980s undercover tragic
heroism inaugurated by Man on the Brink; the innovativeness of the Infernal Affairs production lies precisely in its capacity to elevate the previously disliked sentimentalism to a serious psycho-drama, making it a cross-over with a gangster-cop thriller. Therefore, instead of
being a well-executed genre work (Schager 2004) of a gangster thriller, Infernal Affairs
actually dramatizes the play of ones authentic identity and takes its politics to a new limit
as far as the genre of gangster thriller is concerned. Moreover, a psycho-drama of this kind
is also about how the local audience may be offered a way to re-conceive or to re-imagine
their own social and historical situation after 1997.
As I have argued, Infernal Affairs is about time and memory as much as it is about cops
and mobs (Law 2006). The issues of time and memory have been an integral part of Hong
Kong culture given its peculiar political status of being a colony on leased terms with a definite time frame forced upon the citizens from above. Yet every passage of time leaves its
memory, the preservation or forgetting of which defines ones identity. However, the fate of
an ever-hauntingcontinuous, so to speakcolonialism (under the Chinese flag) makes it
a baffling issue for the Hong Kong people to adopt a linear progressive conception of time
according to which the official version of nationalist history can claim legitimacy. Instead,
the de facto endurance of colonialism in face of a supposedly historic moment (1997) said to
end it renders the narrative about the epochal break of time meaningless. Yet the scenario of
eternal recurrence is equally horrible: as the Buddhist sutra, shown just before the ending
credits of the first installment of Infernal Affairs, says, Those who live in the continuous hell
will never die. Longevity is the most disastrous in the continuous hell.
With the order of temporality in trouble, the underground world of mafia and the official world of politics and the state also appear to be increasingly mutually interpenetrated,
if not utterly indistinct. In this light, contrary to Ringo Lams City on Fire (1987), which
grieves for the march of modernization trampling upon the virtues of brotherhood and
paternal love, Infernal Affairs makes a cynical criticism of any moralistic outlook that is predicated on the rigid dualistic vision of good and evil. For the mutual infiltrations between the
cops world and the mobs world have already made the two undifferentiable. Lamenting
the difficult situation that Hong Kong people are caught in, the films delve into the cultural
and psychic tensions of the people who dwell in an even more confused world.
However, lying behind the individual psycho-drama is also a social critique. Symbolized by the contrast between those sunny rooftops and the descending elevatorshot from

536 Law Wing-Sang

the dark hoistway, without letting the audience know who has been killedthe films also
make a subtle and reflective comment on a city in which the high-modern architectural
wonders are built only to hide all the conspiracies, treacheries and secret deals. Therefore,
while film critics such as Leary are taking Infernal Affairs as just another example of how
much high concept star-image advertising is built into the Hong Kong blockbuster formula,
turning a feature film into something like a commercial, he is perhaps overstretching a
generalized notion of postmodernist stylistic features at the expense of the cultural variability against which the genres ideological and iconographic operations are played out
(Leary 2003).
Last but not least, Infernal Affairs is also a distinctly post-colonial Hong Kong film for it
seizes upon the misplaced/displaced fatherson relationships that perhaps uniquely define
the core issues of the Hong Kong historical experience of being handed over from one paternal-colonial ruler to the next. The political-psychic complex hereby evolved is neither
entirely Oedipal (and thus Greek), nor anything like Abraham and Isaac in the Bible; it is also
far more complex and dreadful than Bertolt Brechts The Caucasian Chalk Circle (1944),8 which
was widely invoked in every possible metaphorical way to talk about Hong Kong before
1997 (e.g., Xi Xi 1988). Now the ownership of the child is undisputed; yet it is no less tragic
for the elders trust and the sons loyalty is still debated almost everyday.9 Affirming the
image of a good cop may be read as nostalgically retrieving an ideal ego of the Hong Kong
people in the colonial days; however, the flashing back of such images of a sacrificed undercover cop against the evil mafia family is indeed animating a more dynamic formation of an
ego-ideal sustaining hope and aspiration to progress for the post-colonial Hong Kong.
Infernal Affairs has indeed established itself as a post-1997 undercover cop classic in
Hong Kong cinema because it mobilizes the unspoken memory of Hong Kongs messy
collaborative-colonial past, and asks questions that no one in Hong Kong can evade: how
are we going to treat our colonial past in order to re-invent our self-identity for the future? If
Yan (the undercover cop who insists on recovering his true identity) ends up being killed
and Ming (the implanted mole in the police force) turns out to be schizophrenic in his
pathetic attempt to wipe out past memories, is there a future for us to sort out this endowed
double-identity, which renders us continuously bordering on the dividing line between
heaven and hell? If Yan and Ming are both untenable answers, is Wing (the smart and
shrewd police officer who shuttles effortlessly between the white way and the black way)
our future? Or, is it the case, as one local film critic puts it: when Yan (in Infernal Affairs I) is
murdered, our past is killed for us to embrace the future; but when Wing (in Infernal Affairs
III) is killed, our future is decimated too? (Long Tin 2004)
Undercover (or hell) continues
Since Infernal Affairs, the undercover trope has gained another round of popularity in recent
Hong Kong cinema. There have been quite a number of movies taking undercover either
as their main theme or as a minor plot device. For example, more conventional gangster-cop
thrillers such as Jing Wangs Color of the Truth (2003) continue to feed on the theme of the
hazy dividing line between the cops and the mobsonly to return to the conventional
ending featured by the triumph of the good cop. In addition, the fantasy about mutual infiltration between the police and the gang syndicate has reached its most exaggerated version
to date in Marco Maks Wo Hu (2006), which describes a police operation sending out a
thousand undercover cops to subvert the mafias. Besides these quite conventional gangster
thriller genre works, we have a large variety of other undercover stories, including, at
one end of the spectrum, an undercover sex comedy such as Men Suddenly in Black (2003) by
Ho-Cheung Pang, which merely makes funny use of the undercover motif to tell how a
group of sex-hungry men covertly trail their suspicious wives seeking an escape to sexual

Hong Kong undercover 537

adventures. At the other end of the spectrum, we have a solemn moral tale such as Heavenly
Mission (2006) by James Yuen, who revives the tradition of social didacticism by criticizing
those undercover operations over-driven by mistrust, concluding that it might jeopardize
the genuine effort of a bad guy to go straight. Along similar lines, social realism also makes
a comeback in Herman Yaus On the Edge (2006) depicting how a retired undercover cop
fails to get back to his normal lifean obvious tribute paid to the classical undercover
tragedy of Man on the Brink (1981). All these films can be viewed as echoing or mimicking
the exploits of Infernal Affairs in different ways.
Among this deluge of undercover films, some try to make allusion to the Infernal
Affairs classic, staging implicit dialogue with it in a more serious manner. For example, on
the one hand, Invisible Target (2007) by Benny Chan tries to rescue the failed masculinity
symbolized by a soon-forgotten sacrificed undercover cop. The film turns the death of this
unsung hero into a martyrdom around which a story is staged about the robust revenge of
men (a category here including even the most boyish Junior Police Call [JPC] kids). On the
other hand, Protg (2007) by Tung-shing Yee interestingly continues to pursue the cop son
and mob father relationship left by Infernal Affairs, telling how the former has to ultimately
betray the latter by draining all the fatherly love a drug dealer has offered him. The first
case, in a rather nave and desperate way, tries to restore the ideal masculine (self-)images of
good and potent cops in a conspicuously violent and perhaps chauvinistic way. The second
case, however, proceeds with the soul-searching journey towards the truth of ones identity.
It is, once again, about making an existential choice, like Yan in Infernal Affairs, choosing to
be good by bringing his corrupt father to justice; it is also a recurrent ethical dilemma with
which Hong Kong people are faced, for they are painfully negotiating on a daily basis with
the paternal mainland power overwhelming Hong Kong in every aspect nowadays.
Mistrust and duplicity are the recurring motifs on the post-1997 Hong Kong screen.
They are, however, everyday political vocabularies as much as they are thematic elements
of different generic movies. (To say so is not to disregard a still wider array of television
dramasincluding the recent prime time TVB family soap Heart of Greed [2007], which also
ends with an undercover twist to make an all-too-obvious political commentary.) In certain
ways, the figure of the undercover cop, or that of a mole implanted by a gangster syndicate
into the police, is indeed rewriting and redefining the local genre of gangster-cop thriller by
drawing forth the screenwriters obsession with the relationships between the black
(gangster) way (heidao) and the white (police) way (baidao). Such films draw increasingly
more upon the contemporary Chinese martial art (wuxia) tradition than from the conventional generic American gangster thrillers. Informed by non-metaphysical traditions such as
Buddhist and Taoist thought (e.g. the notion of interaction and interchange between yin and
yan), the wuxia-repackaged undercover motif can always bring heidao and baidao together in
antagonism as well as blur the distinction between the two. Nevertheless, the crossover
exercises are not always simply postmodernist pastiche, or flirtation with New Age Oriental
thoughti.e. works done without addressing local circumstances or by disabling the audiences capacity to derive from them local and urgent relevance. If a Hegelian dialectic
between master and slave sets in motion the drive toward attaining self-consciousness and
subjectivity, calling forth historical agency, the cop-mob interplay on Hong Kong screen is
indeed part of a universe of local urban imaginaries by means of which Hong Kong moviegoers can ponder on problems involving their existence and identitypolitical or not. These
imaginaries are what constitute the cinematic of this city.
Coda
The global proliferation of films produced according to Hollywood genres has always been
treated as evidence attesting the domination of American film industry. As the argument

538 Law Wing-Sang

goes, the Hollywood system exerts its overwhelming power not only through the enormous
production industry that sells its products in every nation but also through the generic
forms it imposes upon other national cinemas, thwarting any distinctive national features
expressible in films. However, in the wake of the rapid globalization occurring in recent
decades, nationalistic criticism of Hollywood is subsiding fast. Filmmakers and critics begin
to look more positively at an affirmed lack of national authenticityto the extent that such
unspecificity or imitation has now become something to be celebrated. Treating filmmaking
as an intrinsically international medium, they greet such positive unoriginality cheerfully
(Morris 1988: 245; ORegan 1996: 226). Such a worldwide debate over the future of national
cinema can also find its correlate in China and Hong Kong. There is no shortage of local
Chinese film critics to join the critical chorus condemning cultural imperialism from time to
time; yet there are still many others congratulating themselves for reading acclaim from
westerners such as Zacharekwho praises Infernal Affairs world-class achievement not for
any other reasons but for the fact that it re-awakens even the Americans about how to make
a good gangster film.10 Repeating the endless debates over whether Hong Kong filmmakers
should take Hollywood as the sole measure of Hong Kong films international success is
beside the point here. What needs to be pointed out is the fact that the binary opposition
underlying these arguments cannot assist us to appreciate intelligently a film such as Infernal Affairs. Nor can it help us to understand the more general cultural issues facing a city
such as Hong Kongwhich is located at neither of the poles of the Hollywood-nation axis
but rather in the interstices between different vectors of power: namely, the national, the
colonial and the global, and so on. The analysis of the undercover motif in Hong Kong
cinema undertaken in this paper traces the path of a citys problematic self-assertion, one
that has negotiated all the way with both the colonial and the nationalthrough constant
rewriting, reworking and recoding of an Hollywood genre. Those are the efforts that make
the undercover sub-genre in Hong Kong movies both local and more than local.
Thanks to postcolonialism, there is now an abundance of critiques of localism and
nativism as well as those leveled against globalism. However, the city is still inadequately
theorized in these works because the complex cultural formation of a city, as well as its
changing urban imaginaries, is often too easily treated as coterminous with cosmopolitanism or universalism. The consequence of such a narrow perspective is dire, in particular, for
a (post-)colonial city since such a simplified image of the cosmopolitan city leaves the citys
coloniality effaced and the problem of the city-local (vis--vis the state-national) ignored.
Whereas in Hong Kong it is now a commonplace to note that the citys local, especially that
after the 1980s, can hardly be couched in terms of cultural authenticity or ethnic tradition, it
is not equally easy to raise a counter claim that the global (or the international, transnational) is, in fact, always a ready stand-in for the local.11 Moreover, it would be even more
challenging to assess the implications entailed by the effacement, or indeed the virtualization, of the city-local. What this (quasi-)globalist rendition of Hong Kong experience easily
loses sight of is precisely the mutuality of the local and the non-local as well as the long
processes in which borrowing, copying, plundering, parodying the non-local elements are
all necessary steps towards breeding local characteristics. It is in this regard that I read
Baudrillards brilliant suggestion to begin with the screen and move outwards towards the
city as not simply another verse of his theory about the simulacrum somehow magically
turning itself into reality produced in its own image. Rather, I consider it more fruitful to
take Baudrillards suggestion as making a metaphorical invitation for us to reveal and
revisit the complex relations between cinema and the citys reality which has yet to be thoroughly problematized. As a site for the dynamic recodings of a citys self-imaginary to take
place, the cinematic is also a reservoir of peoples historical living experiences. It functions
in that way for cinephiles in all other cities as much as it does for the citizens of Hong Kong.
To re-animate the sedimented passions and energies of this site one has to begin with an

Hong Kong undercover 539

adequate cinematic-historical account of localized cinematic spaces (understood as various
locally-specific structures of feeling crystallized in various cinematic devices). Hong Kong
may be a Calvinos city of signs par excellence (Calvino 1979); however, this double survey
of the history of Hong Kong and its cinematic past is not just meant to do a decoding
exercise in order to attain a reality beyond signs. Rather, the stake is about how we can
read them (which means to produce further signs) in ways through which we can reclaim
our memory as well as our living spaces as our city.
Filmography (selected Hong Kong movies with the undercover-cop theme)
1966 Spy with My Face
1981 Man on the Brink
1983 Aces go Places II
1987 City on Fire
1987 Long Arm of the Law II
1987 A Better Tomorrow II
1989 They Came to Rob Hong Kong
1991 Fight Back to School
1992 Hard-boiled
1992 Police Story 3: Super Cop
1993 Fight Back to School 3
1994 The Most Wanted
1994 Return to a Better Tomorrow
1994 To Live and Die in Tsimshatsui
1995 The Adventurers
1995 My Father Is a Hero
1996 Young and Dangerous
1997 Downtown Torpedoes
1997 Theft under the Sun
1999 Purple Storm
1999 Century of Dragon
1999 King of Comedy
1999 Immortal Spirit
2000 Time and Tide
2001 Partners
2001 Hero of City
2001 Cop on a Mission
2002 Infernal Affairs I
I
2002 Infernal Affairs II
II
2003 Infernal Affairs III
III
2003 Men Suddenly in Black
2003 Color of the Truth
2005 Election
2005 Color of the Loyalty
2006 Wo Hu
2006 On the Edge
2006 Heavenly Mission
2006 Election 2
2006 Exiled
2007 Protg
2007 Invisible Target

540 Law Wing-Sang

Notes
1. As a solution to the untenable age of colonialism, the United Nations consensus was to extend to
Europes former colonies the status of independence. The PRCs persistent objection to Hong Kongs
placement on the UNs list of colonies has always been an attempt to bar Hong Kong from realizing this
independent status. No Hong Kong representative joined the Sino-British negotiations over Hong Kongs
future. The Chinese side labeled any suggestion advocating that there be a representative from Hong
Kong as running a three-legged stool conspiracy.
2. Such anti-colonial sentiment once exploded in the mid-1960s, when a labor dispute elicited a series of
protests, strikes, and bomb attacks, which were organized by the local Hong Kong pro-China leftists.
Those days were perhaps the bloodiest in post-war Hong Kong, when the call for terminating the British
rule there reached its loudest pitch.
3. For an exception, see Ngo (1999).
4. CO 129/1, Elliot to Auckland, 21/6/1841, quoted in Carroll (1999).
5. In the late Qing Dynasty, purchasing a degree and a mandarin costume from the Qing authority was
officially endorsed, and many overseas Chinese spent huge amounts of money for such honors.
6. Nationalist revolutionaries such as Sun Yat-sen tried to gain support from the British colonial
government in Hong Kong during the 1911 uprising and, before the unification wars (19261928), the
governments of Southern China were often on good terms with the Hong Kong colonial authorities. See
Schiffrin (1968); Chung (1998).
7. For the involvement of triad societies in the film industry and how such an involvement can help explain
the rise of gang heroism, please see Liu (2001). For a criticism of the later gang heroism as an unconditional celebration of gang culture, please see Li (1993: 4951, 105108, 155156).
8. The play is indeed based on a fourteenth-century Chinese drama piece Hui Lan Ji.
9. Daily political discourses in Hong Kong are increasingly couched in paternalistic terms, as the Beijing
authority is widely nicknamed as grandpa. As is repeated time and again by the pro-Beijing circles, so
long as grandpa has not gained enough trust and confidence in Hongkongers patriotism, universal
suffrage will not be allowed.
10. The case is comparable to the Australian-produced Mad Max (1997, 1981) cycle which is celebrated by
many Australians as outdoing Hollywoods road movies genre (Cunningham 1985: 237).
11. But see Lo (2005: 112).

References
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Special terms
Hui Lan Ji
Authors biography
Dr Law Wing-sang is Assistant Professor at Department of Cultural Studies, Lingnan University. He earned
his PhD degree at University of Technology, Sydney in 2002. His doctoral dissertation was published by
Hong Kong University Press under the title Collaborative Colonial Power: The Making of the Hong Kong Chinese
(2008). He has also published articles in journals such as Positions. East Asian Culture Critique, Traces: A

542 Law Wing-Sang

Multilingual Series of Cultural Theory and Translation and Dushu. He is also the editor of a number of Chinese
cultural studies collection and translation works.
Contact address: Department of Cultural Studies, Lingnan University, 8 Castle Peak Rd., Fu Tei, Tuen Mun,
New Territories, Hong Kong.