Chinese Rush to Hong Kong to Pay Tribute to Bruce Lee 0 17

Xiangan – this is how Hong Kong is referred to in China – welcomed nearly one and a half million tourists from the mainland during the recently concluded holidays. According to local administration forecasts, the average daily flow is expected to increase by about 6 percent compared to last year.

However, today visitors are attracted not so much by the displays of shopping malls. The city is betting on its own pop culture – primarily cinema and television series.

Last year, the total inbound flow to Xiangan increased by 12 percent. Nevertheless, it still has not reached the level it was at before the pandemic. About three-quarters of all visitors are residents of the interior regions of China. At the same time, the city remains a more expensive destination compared to the mainland, and economists note that tourists are now spending more cautiously here.

The driver of tourist interest is the cinema of Hong Kong – one of the three historically established branches of Chinese-language cinema, alongside the cinema of the PRC and Taiwan (not counting the less significant "branches" of cinema from Chinese-speaking diasporas in Singapore, Malaysia, the USA, and other countries). As a British colony, Hong Kong was politically and economically freer and more integrated into the outside world than mainland China and Taiwan, which allowed it to become a center for Chinese-language cinema for Southeast Asian countries and the world at large. For decades, Hong Kong was the third largest film industry in the world (after Indian cinema and Hollywood) and the second in terms of film exports. Despite the industry crisis that erupted in the mid-1990s and Hong Kong's return to Chinese sovereignty in July 1997, Hong Kong continues to hold a significant place in world cinema.

Over time, the boundaries between the film production of Hong Kong and Mainland China are becoming increasingly blurred, partly due to the decline in ideological rigidity and the growing focus on producing mass entertainment films in the PRC itself. The branches of cinema in the Chinese-speaking region are converging with the likely outcome of their merger into "common Chinese" cinema. So it is necessary to hurry to see the departing nature.