Once Upon a time in Hong Kong: the construction of community as collective agency

Tsui Hark's Once Upon a Time in China series. (e. G.; Tsui, 1998, 2001) reconstructs a pivotal period from China's past in order to cultivate a sense of community. This rhetorical costruction of an imagined community served to allay concerns over the prospective unification of Hong Kong with mailand China, but the film endures as an influential evocation of collective agency. China's territorial dismemberment by colonial powers provides an important subtext of the film. The protagonist of the series, Wong Feihung, struggles to balance Confucian traditions, national authority, and Western technological advances. Wong personifies important communal values, and studying the film as a political allegory reveals how Tsui Hark disrupts nationalism in the process of reconstructing a sense of communuty that can serve both Hong Kong and China