Between Hong Kong and San Francisco: A Transnational Approach to Early Chinese Diasporic Cinema
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In recent years the terms “Chinese-language film” or “Sinophone” are often used to refer to a pan-Chinese cinematic culture to reconcile the differences and conflicts in the mainland, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the Chinese diaspora. Unlike the other three areas that are easily recognized by geo-political borders, Chinese diasporic cinema is of a more conceptual and de-territorialized nature and has been inadequately examined. As early as the mid-1930s, Chinese filmmakers had formed a cross-border, Pacific Rim network for cinematic and cultural exchanges among Chinese diasporic communities. Focusing on Esther Eng 伍錦霞 (1914–1970), a San Francisco-born Chinese female director who produced Cantonese-language films in both the US and Hong Kong from the mid-1930s to the late 1940s, this article revisits a piece of forgotten history of Chinese diasporic cinema. It argues that through Chinese diasporic films, particularly during the height of World War II patriotism, filmmakers like Esther Eng expressed their cultural belonging and fueled cultural intimacy between members of the Chinese diaspora. By observing the flows of talents, ideas, and resources within China and beyond, this article delves into the essence of diasporic film as a “contact zone” for Chinese descendants in and out of the country.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".