Wicked Cities: Cyberculture and the Reimagining of Identity in the "Non-Western" Metropolis

Gregory B. Lee and Sunny S. K. Lam

Hard copy in a special science fiction issue of Futures

Science fiction like its more recent progeny Cyberpunk, has rarely been thought of as anything other than an American and European genre. It has only been with the advent of the Japanese manga and anime that there has been an awareness of non-"Western'" futuristic fantasy. But in fact the genre of science fiction in this part of Asia has some celebrated antecedents. The modern Chinese novelist Lao She, better known for his novel the Rickhsaw Boy, wrote a sci-fi novel in the 1930s entitled Maochengji (or Cat City), that had extra-terrestrial cat-like creatures displacing and dominating China's own citizens; an allegory of Chinese helplessness in the face of Western colonialism. Such works were not only attempts to critique Western domination. They were also attempts to negotiate the realities of modernity. While condemning Western, and Japanese, imperialist strategies, at the same time China's writers and filmmakers in the 1920s and 1930s saw in modernity the possibility of overturning feudalism and patriarchy, and constructing in their stead a modern nation state. Since then many parts of Asia have seen revolution, and counter-revolution, but increasingly over the past twenty years they have experienced urban modernity, even hyper-modernity. At least one generation has grown up in Hong Kong entirely alienated from the rural, and only experiencing this hyper-modern post-industrial society and its cultural formations.

Hong Kong, now China's most modern city, is in many ways the model for China's capitalist development, but as Richard Rogers has recently shown a faithful mimicry of Western capitalist urban modernity will ultimately prove disastrous for China's people. Unless Chinese regnant authority commits to "planning for sustainable cities, it will soon be faced with massive congestion, pollution and social dissatisfaction on an even larger scale than is endemic to the cities it is using as role models."

The questions addressed by Rogers are practical and materially real. The French writer and critic Serge Latouche is also concerned with the non-material condition of the non-West.. However, in his discussion of what non-Western societies have lost, "the loss of sense that afflicts them and gnaws at them like a cancer", there seems to be a nostalgia for an imagined past "authentic". For Latouche the non-Western world is under-developed, exploited, marginalized, left-behind. It is not, however, that Latouche does not take account of Japanese, South-East Asian and increasingly Chinese modernization, but that there is an erasure of the modern realities of Japan, Hong Kong, parts of South-east Asia and of China in modernization is seen entirely negatively, in terms of cultural loss, a nostalgia for some authentic local, without any place given to renewal, redeployment and the ingenuity of human creativity that can be forged of hybridity. Even there one might argue, there is loss, loss of "cultural identity". But in such arguments there is always the whiff of the Orientalizing tendency to valorize the East in terms of its past greatness.

The historical reality at the end of the twentieth century is that many parts of Asia are constituent agents, not simply exploited objects, of modernity. It is a modernity that is scored by the claws of colonialism, left full of contradictions, of half-finished processes, of confusions, of hybridities and liminalities. But is that so different to the rest of the modern world where women and working classes form the domestic colonized? In Asia these contradictions and consequences of capitalist development have simply been magnified and accelerated giving rise to a concomitant magnification of the human dilemmas and suffering involved in capitalist urban industrialization in general.

But if there is a "loss of sense" in the modern world, an alienation, its transcendence, its overcoming, the process of dealienation will not be simplistically achieved by a return to "nativist" traditions of "the East" any more than it will be by a "return" to Morris dancing in England. Like Said, we would advocate not a pseudo-universality, nor a slight-of-hand multiculturalism (that is not the hybridity we intend), but rather the encouragement of new and composite identities based on new material realities that give rise to new imaginaries. In his recent book, Ziauddin Sardar represents postmodernism as but a more subtle agent of Western cultural imperialism continuing and even expanding the dominance of the ideologies and projects of colonialism and modernity in which Other cultures "are simply being taken from one domain of oppression into another." His condemnation of the cynicism of postmodernism and his arguments for "non-western cultural resistance to postmodernism" are compelling, but the appeal to tradition as the instrument of transformation of non-western societies into "cultures of resistance" raises certain concerns for us. For while, understandably, Sardar is at pains to distance his conception of the "authentic" tradition from that of "traditionalism", there still seems to be a hint of a "sense of loss, of a longing for a cultural authenticity. Whence is this authenticity to be resurrected, or reinvented and would such a reinvention even be desirable? While Sardar sees the representation of tradition in pre-modern Islamic and Chinese painting as a "dynamic force ready to confront the problems of modernity and the nihilism of postmodernism", can we forget the economic and technological modes in which pre-modern Chinese painting, at least, was embedded, and the oppressions upon which the livelihood of its practitioners and appreciators depended? While we would not oppose the recuperation of pre-modern painting and other forms of cultural production from the often conservative grip of the Orientalists and sinologists, we should nevertheless be concerned at the prospect of privileging a supposedly cultural authenticity in the name of respecting "traditional physical, intellectual and spiritual environments".

Again, our central question would be: Where is this authentic to be found or rather how is it to be invented in Hong Kong? The fact that Hong Kong has been "returned" to China does not facilitate the recuperation of "tradition", especially now that mainland Chinese traditions, where they exist, are now constructed and re-invented so as to sustain nationalism and centralist state-market Capitalism. Moreover, the old, feudal China is, happily, no more, its cultural texts and practices are now merely redeployed in the construction of an officially coddled national imaginary. And if not from the array of official nationalized and centralized "traditions", from which part of the complex of cultural practices should these 'traditions' be re-imported or re-invented, and from when? So then where, when and what would constitute ‘tradition’ for Hong Kong? Hong Kong is an immigrant metropolis peopled by Chinese from every part of China, not just Cantonese-speaking Guangdong but also from Shanghai and Fujian, and Tanka boat-people, the Hakka (or 'Guest People") and by those whose ancestors came from even further afield , such as the now Cantonese-speaking third and fourth generation Indians. As for Chinese traditions in Hong Kong, these were invented or their invention nurtured by the post-1950s late colonialism of a British authority representing the interests of post World War Two neo-colonialism in Asia. That authority was anxious to construct an alternative Chineseness that separated Hong Kong from both mainland Communist and Taiwan nationalist appeals to the patriotic anti-colonialist imaginary. But in negotiation with that official and imposed alternative Chinese identity, or Hongkongness, other colonised-produced identities have been constructed and imagined. There are even minority cultural formations which have resisted both colonialist and national-patriotic constructed identities. However, none of the resultant cultural spaces and practices can be described as clear or pure or authentic. They represent groups and classes that are found in all modernised industrial societies. That is not to say that the various levels and enclaves of Hong Kong society have not developed peculiarities or that there are not traces of a pre-modern Chinese collective imaginaries, but the concerns of the majority of Hong Kong people today – the working class who are represented as, and intended to imagine themselves as, middle-class – are those of any urbanized, industrial society subject to the inevitable (as the financial events of the last few months of 1997 have once again clearly demonstrated) crises of Capitalism. Worries about the implications for Hong Kong’s autonomy or rather its multiple and multileveled identities were to the fore in the panoply of people's concerns, as the film that we shall discuss below, Wicked City, clearly shows, but the major event of 1997 for most Hong Kong people was constituted by the material economic reality brought about by the stock market Crash. Concerns over unemployment and economic survival in a market-driven yet heavily state interventionist, non-welfare state now dominate over concerns with local identity. The politics of local identity, or identities, can no longer be used simply to exercise the neuroses of postmodern alienation. If such identities are to be useful they must be deployed in a meta-politics that must now engage in a process of de-alienation that will imply challenging and transforming both the oppressions of colonialism and of the dominant economic system.

While agreeing with the need to encourage and bring about the de-alienation of modernity or "post"-modernity and to combat the oppressions of colonialism, we would also emphasise the importance of recognizing historical realities that have produced "non-authentic", hybrid lived realities. Over the past one hundred and fifty years not only social and cultural forces in Hong Kong but in China as a whole have been obliged to negotiate the realities of colonialism, semi-colonialism and neo-colonialism. New forms and practices have been produced, new identities have been invented or imposed. Emancipatory change, we believe, will not necessarily imply an épuration, or cleansing, of the non-authentic, but a redeployment and détournement of hybridized and local practices with the aim of imagining that future.

Hong Kong, a late capitalist, and uniquely a late colonialist, metropolis entered its new era of neo-colonialism after its "handover" from the colonial authority of Britain to the sovereignty of the People's Republic of China, under the regnant, yet vassal, authority of the government Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR). However, structurally, no great changes have occurred. The metropolis is still dominated by ideologies falling within the logic of Capitalism and culturally relies, to an incalculable extent, on the formula of mechanical reproduction in all sorts of productions.

Despite the success of claims by the new postmodern ideology that history, ideology, and modernity are all dead, ideologies interpreted in terms of metanarratives of binary opposition (Communism and Capitalism, Modernism and Postmodernism, Realism and Surrealism) are still central to popular imaginaries. Yet emphatic dichotomies leave unaddressed all sorts of meanings of ideologies within our communities. The politics of Capitalism, occlude unspoken, marginal cultures, from the silent majorities to mask reality. Ideologies of minorities are thoroughly suppressed in Hong Kong. Thus, the Hong Kong imaginary tends to be constituted by the practices, beliefs, and dominant ideology which uphold the regnant authority. So, the emulation and redeployment of the decentering manifested in the literature and media productions such as science-fiction novels, comics and films in "postmodern" America and Japan has been useful in the elaboration of a wide range of alternative ideologies. This process has been negotiated by the Hong Kong media and culture industry itself constituted by ideologically distinct and competing ambitions unified, apart from economic interest, by its apparent distance from official and elite culture. The industry has nevertheless been capable of contesting and reconfiguring the Hong Kong collective imaginary or imaginaries. Science fiction inspired technoculture filmic production in particular has been of central importance in this process.

Facilitated by technological advances, particularly the development of computer technology, techno-culture has become a central constituent of literature and media productions, and science-fiction films have, recently, dominated the box offices in both Hollywood and Hong Kong. However, their cultural impact on the production, rather than consumption, in Hong Kong is minor when compared to the United States. Certainly, imitation of Hollywood science-fiction movies is not facilitated by the high production costs required by special effects which are unaffordable to local filmmakers. If anything, local media producers are affected by the cultural imaginaries in these movies that are a function of science-fiction novels and comics.

Emerging in unison with the new imaginary of cyberspace, is the term "cyberpunk" employed to indicate a genre of science-fiction novels in the mould of William Gibson's 1984 science-fiction novel Neuromancer which projects disembodied consciousness of human beings into the matrix of consensual hallucination. Despite fears of a new kind of computer-generated alienation linked to an already existent human technophobia the 1990s have witnessed an increasing propagation of the ideology if not the materiality of the virtual reality of postmodern computer-dominated environment. Gibson "cyberspace", is now a commonly accepted figure within the spectacle of post-industrial societies. All participants in virtual reality (cyberspace) become members of the electronic virtual communities who live in the borderlands of both physical and virtual culture. Like Benedict Anderson's imagined communities, the members of virtual communities will never know all of their fellow-members of the same or similar field of interest. However, a cyberspace such as the internet still manages to represent itself as a friendly, open community, while non-participants see it as anarchic, in a negative sense, and in need of regulation. The concept of "nationality" is irrelevant to the identities of virtual communities. But virtual communities also seem transgressive of other cultural and canonical borders, the boundaries between genres, between media, between "high" and "low" and between major and minor cultures being no longer applicable. Thus we see the development of terminal identity, an unmistakably doubled articulation in which we find both the end of the subject and a new subjectivity constructed at the human-computer interface. It pervades all areas of cultural production, such as visual genres like comics and cinema, as well as the electronic: video, computer graphics and computer games. It should not be forgotten, however, that economics and ideology still largely dictate the possibilities of participation in virtual communities. Certainly, large enterprises which produce the games and graphics still control the reproduction of ideology in society. Moreover, for several years now critics have been pointing to possible sinister deployment of the Internet and other technocultural media:

The ultimate emancipatory potential of such technologies and the new communities they have made possible may be in doubt, but these new media as well as the means of media production have indeed gradually become more open to wider social use in industrialized and industrializing societies both because of the user-friendly multimedia tools such as personal computers and handycams, and higher standards of cultural as well as technological education

While it may prove to be yet another temporary moment of technological promise whose democratic and de-alienatory possibilities were missed, we can imagine this decentered and boundless space as similar to the virtual space, the "raptor vacuum", created by the monsters of the film The Wicked City. Cyberpunk culture constitutes a warning system, a set of cautionary moral tales, alerting us to the dangers of future developments in technology. Therefore, like the theory and culture of postmodernism, cyberpunk may be seen as a response, rather than a resolutory strategy, to the explosive proliferation of modern technology and implosive collapse of cultural boundaries. Cyberpunk culture, however, is not anti-technology, rather it maps out a matrix of the potential, negative and positive, of technology and the technological future. It constitutes a vision that is neither technophobic nor technophilic. Moreover, we should add, that while whatever the validity for East Asia of the criticisms of cyberpunk culture, in terms of recuperations and commodification, that have been made in the United States and Europe, the criticism of cyberpunk as "the vanguard white male art of the age" ("Neuromanticism"), made by Istvan Csicsery-Ronay's, would be incommensurate either with Japanese or Hong Kong readings and practices of Cyberpunk culture.

Although techno-cultures comprised of computer hardware and software, Internet on-line services and so on are unavoidably commodified in capitalist metropolises like Hong Kong, cyberpunk culture which embraces technology may serve to awaken the consciousness of its participants within commodified cyberspace and open up a channel through which the technological politics of the regnant class may be discerned. It may seem to offer to cybernauts a way to confirm the existence of individual identities within social groups or virtual communities in the process of techno-cultural development. Cyberpunk culture stands as a reminder to discern all the harmful and beneficial effects of technology on our cultural development, and not to delve into cyberspace so as to be once again dominated and colonised. The Wicked City, a film replete with an array of lavish and exquisitely produced special effects, self-referentially foregrounds the illusions producible by cyberculture, and the likelihood of its recuperation by Capitalism and militarism.

The Wicked City, Yaoshou dushi in Chinese (literally "demon beat metropolis") is a cinematic transcription of a Japanese comic of the same title (itself based on a novel by Hideyuki Kikuchi) transliterated in Japanese as Yoju toshi, and sometimes billed as Supernatural Beast City;. The film differs considerably from the 1989 Japanese anime film of the same title. The 1992 Hong Kong-produced Wicked City was directed by Peter Mak (Mak Tai Kit), and produced by Tsui Hark. It starred Leon Lai, Tatsuya Nakadai, and the Hong Kong megastar Jacky Cheung. Wicked City is a futuristic science fiction film , set however in Hong Kong's immediate pre-handover moment. Humans are combating the "raptors" a race of demons with a variety of supernatural powers that include the ability to conjure up illusory representations of reality, powers of elastic and liquid metamorphosis, and the capacity to transform themselves into human form. The aliens or demons (there is no indication that they are extraterrestrial) also enjoy the benefit of longevity; the "good" demon played by Tatsuya Nakadai, is 150 years old, which in 1997 would make himself exactly as old as the colony of Hong Kong itself. The film is shot in both Tokyo and Hong Kong, but Hong Kong's ultramodern skyscape, in particular the futuristic Bank of China, constitutes not only the central physical setting but also a major character. Some of the demon-monsters, or raptors, have taken the road of legitimacy, and attempt to dominate human society via economics. For instance the character played by Tatsuya Nakadai, Yuan Daizong (identified in the English subtitles as Daishu, using Japanese transliteration, as are several major characters) is represented as attempting to play the role of a respectable businessman. Others, like the son and would-be usurper of Daishu, are attempting to take over by means of violence and addiction; the highly addictive and fatal drug, "happiness" is being imported and administered to all humans. All raptors are suspect and hunted by the humans' special police. Jacky Cheung plays a police agent, Ken/A Ying who is half human, and half raptor. His superior officer constantly suspects him of betrayal, and cannot accommodate the possibility of positive raptor qualities, or the impurity of the hybrid. At the end of the film as Ken lies dying, the superior officer's reconciliation comes in the form of an ideologically conservative affirmation that Ken is human after all. There is ultimately no acceptance of his raptor qualities, Ken's goodness must be entirely due to his "humanity". In contrast, and in line with the unusual polyphonically rich dialogue of this film, Daishu, representing the raptor wisdom, has already declared: "Being different isn't the same as betrayal."

The film is very much concerned with identity, multiple identities, and confused identities. Several characters, bother raptor and police, have retained their Japaneseness from the comic book origins of the filmic production. This is indicated not simply by the English subtitles usage of Japanese names, but also by the use of several Japanese actors and the deployment of heavily Japanese-accented Cantonese by characters like the police inspector. And yet this is very consciously a film about Hong Kong. But even Hong Kong is represented as multiply valenced. Hong Kong is Hong Kong as foregrounded by the references to 1997, as when the police inspector states that the handover year presents the raptors with an opportunity to take over. But Hong Kong is also metonymically elsewhere, the ultra-modern metropolis of late Capitalism. Unlike the average Hong Kong film, Hong Kong's economism is critiqued throughout Wicked City. The peaceful raptors take-over plan is based on "money…man's greatest weakness", and noble raptor Daishu proclaims early in the film: "Our influence has penetrated their economic system. Economics is humankind's weakness." Even the police inspector joins in the collective critique: "When influenced by money we all become short-sighted." Daishu's final comment on the economism of modernity are : "Human beings place possessions ahead of emotions." In a lightly veiled allusion to Hong Kong triad gangs and the complicity of venal Hong Kong police officers, one of the human police officers in Wicked City, Orchid, is corrupt and co-operates with the drug trafficking raptors. Her justification, a direct allusion to the acceptable and respectable officially propagated Hong Kong capitalist ideology, is: " I just want to make the most money in the shortest time."

Time is not only a capitalist concern, time is typically a classic concern of the science fiction movie. Wicked City meets that agenda. Part of the wicked raptor plan is to turn humans back into beasts by making human time go backwards. But the passage of time is seen in a more global sense, and several references to time can be read on the level of the plot, or at a metalevel in reference to Capitalism's effects on the global environment: "Since this planet's days are numbered our common enemy is time." But time in the countdown to the handover of Hong Kong to the People's Republic of China has yet another level of meaning. Time is not just running out for humanity, the clocks are not just turning backwards in terms of global history, time in the film and in its context, the shadow of the handover, has a very specific valence. Ken represents a common, everyday sentiment of the early 1990s, when he says curtly: "Time is a real pain."

The exhaustion of Hong Kong's time is also alluded to in the closing shots of the old raptor Daishu, as old as Hong Kong itself. His energies depleted after the struggle with his evil son, he rapidly starts to show his one hundred and fifty years. It is left to him to complete the basic critique of late Capitalism when being driven out of Hong Kong along its ultra-modern highways, he says: "This city is so lonely. I hope they'll never need the raptors' happiness." Money, time, and alienation. And even more urgently and specifically for Hong Kong in the 1990s, an uncertain future.

Wicked City is an unusual Hong Kong film in the ways it re-uses and alters the cultural imaginaries of Hollywood movies, Japanese comics, and Hong Kong's own ideology. Film and comics are generally considered to be straightforward entertainment in Hong Kong and thus ideology is rarely consciously foregrounded in local films and comics. In everyday life in Hong Kong, the unconscious ambition of the majority is the avoidance of official ideologies. With a view to escaping domination by the ideology of the regnant power, the hegemonic narrator, we must attempt to achieve a space for the survival of other narratives and ideologies in our cultural imaginaries. The imaginary of The Wicked City- Hong Kong, is an attempt to do that. Tetsuo Najita has noted that a culture controlled by technology does not merely remove the principles of certainty but will result in the possibility of mechanical reproduction, or the continuous reconstitution of things as they are, only more or less. It reminds us that the hyper-modern condition, the condition of what is now commonly but often unthinkingly called 'postmodernity', may be a curse or a space of opportunity depending on our own navigation of it. While conceding the indispensable status of technology in modern society, we need to bear in mind the monolithic cultural domination by particular stereotypical interpretation of techno-culture.

While many may be willing to immerse themselves in cyberspace in order to achieve the terminal identity of virtual communities, it is important to remember that virtual communities originate in and must return to the physical. The technology that plays a vital role in navigating cultural development in postmodern society results from the knowledge of historical traditions and cultures. In the acceptance of the techno-cultural changes in the process of modernisation, there is also room to redeploy the surplus values of traditions and cultures with a view to developing a new form of culture that may be defined temporarily as "post-cyberpunk culture". Cyberpunk culture reflects how technology can enhance human life and how it can also be a destructive force, but it does not address the current cultural needs of human beings and does not deal with such alienating social problems as poverty, racism, disintegration of families, addiction to drugs and sex, and so on.

Idealistically, the development of film culture would involve a historical review of human traditions and a forecast of our technological as well as cultural development in the future.

The cyberpunk Japanese comic and animation Wicked City were transposed to the film The Wicked City in Hong Kong. The monsters of both the manga and the film possess dual identities, which reveal the ambiguity of postmodern metropolises such as Tokyo and Hong Kong, as well as that of their residents' identities. In local comics, dual identities are rare and most local comic characters are either Chinese kung-fu-fighting heroes whose social status and social roles are similar to those of American-style superheroes, or gangsters or anti-social heroes constructed as oppositional to the monolithic anti-social bureaucracy, and thus constituting a totally "deviant" concept of heroism. These subjective identities result from the homogeneous ideologies of Capitalism and are derived from the ideas of binary opposition in accordance with the concepts of commercialisation, the politics of subjectivity that determine the commercial nature of characters. Such stereotypical subjective identities are believed to guarantee commercial success.

On the contrary, this subjectivity that excludes the possibility of dual or multiple identities of characters in local media productions is detrimental to alternative procedures of socialisation and simply serves to ensure media and cultural development's investment in the reproduction of conservative stereotypes.. Many Hong Kong films which feed into the narratives of local comics reproduce similar dominative identities. So, genres of local film and comics are limited to irrational heroisms such as super-heroism, anti-social heroism, mock-heroism and so on. Thus, the ideology transmitted to their consumers offers only escapism from reality and promulgates no strategy by which to resolve individual and social alienation. Thus the alternative cultural imaginaries to be found in foreign cyberpunk comics and films are rare and difficult to cultivate in Hong Kong.

The dual identities in cyberpunk comics and films are both windows and mirrors through which the ambiguities of our metropolises and the survival of marginalities are represented. Dual identities, of course, are actually existent in Hong Kong society, but the "id", is highly suppressed and usually hidden. Many individuals are marginalized by the moralities of the dominant class. Thus in filmic production, either the "ego" or the "id" is, therefore, expressed in terms of binary oppositional identities of characters in order to fulfil the desires of media producers and silent majorities. For instance, Jackie Chan acts as a rigid, patient, brave policeman, a superhero, in the film Police Story. He represents the "ego" or the subject of the narrative, a moral hero, to represent a desired subjectivity of particular media producers and spectators. In John Wu's films such as A Better Tomorrow, The Killer, and Full Contact, the anti-heroes are the "ego" or the "id" of human beings in society. They are inevitably killed or converted into moral subjects at the end of the films. Their identities may be transformed from the "ego" to the "id" or vice versa but hybrid coexistence is not permitted.

Thus, the dual identities of the monster special police represented in The Wicked City are extremely unusual in Hong Kong cinema. The marginal and marginalized identities of particular Hong Kong people such as gays and lesbians have little space in which to express themselves, and are almost literally forced to hide themselves from the mainstream on the limits of social life. Like Hollywood movies, many Hong Kong films are dreams for audiences that celebrate the successes of Capitalism in the dominant culture, and marginal identities have no place in that narrative.

Japanese popular cultural production, on the other hand, in particular Japanese comics, abounds with characters representing or constituting alternative selves, " alien identities". As Susan Napier recently wrote:

The alien identities in such texts are delineated through fantasy to reveal the variety of alternative selves that are useful to the processes of self-identification of their readers The alien popularly presented in the fantastic in post-war, as well as more recent, "postmodern", Japanese comics and animated films is used not simply to shock readers, but to awaken them to the smug comfort of the mainstream capitalist spectacle. The fantastic in this variety of comics and animated films can be construed as constituting a subversion of modernity and so, these genres of Japanese comics and animated films with a limited number of exceptions such as Akira, are generally defined as deviant and occluded by the dominating mediators.

The unlimited cyberspace constructed as a utopian space supplying the opportunity to re-evaluate as well as reinvigorate cultures and cultural imaginaries, is the space explored in cyberpunk films of which The Wicked City is a prime example. The virtual reality of the film foregrounds the alternative identities of the protagonists, in particular those of the monster special police, as well as the subjectivities of real Hong Kong people. In doing so it exposes the actual persona dilemmas and uncertainties of Hong Kong inhabitants like the Inspector in the film who is reluctant to accept the possibility of dual identity in this neo-colonial period. Indeed, the Inspector embodies the denial common to many Hong Kong people incapable or unwilling to locate their dual identity as the colonised of both the West (Britain) and of the People's Republic of China, but who willingly recognise the identity in the stereotype of, global yet local, capitalism.

While mechanical and electronic reproduction may conventionally be seen as a curse of modernity facilitating the economic and cultural domination by Capitalism through commodification, the space and time of "hyperreality", may be perceived by elements within the new generations of urban, industrial modernity, as a frame out of which to challenge the economic realities of Capitalism, and to emancipate cultural development from the bind of a binary opposition no longer capable of making sense of a society in which the ideology and spectacle of modernity has been exposed as "the visible negation of life, as a negation of life which has become visible The trend of cyberpunk development in Hong Kong is similar to that of telecommunications in its early stage. We are assigned a number for identification, an e-mail address "cybersun@hkstar.com" for approaching the cyberspace of Internet, a (or a number of) telephone/ mobile phone number and/ or a pager number for calling anybody or being called at home, in office or in any location. In 1998-99, the University of Hong Kong plans to supply every student on campus with a notebook computer and saturate the physical campus of Internet/Intranet connection sockets. In this headlong rush to place Hong Kong at the forefront of IT literacy and functionality, the worst problem is that many youngsters are duped by the commodified images such as the romantic heroes of advertisements, the wealthy businessmen, the superstars, and the topdog gangsters of movies and comics whose pagers and mobile phones are symbolic of authority in the imaginary of the global capitalistic metropolis.

Cyberspace is gaining ground, cyberpunk cultures and the so far unlimited fields of interests in cyberspace, ensure the possibility of different means and directions of identification and cultural development for those who have the necessary knowledge, desire, and economic means to detour cyberspace. The terms "cyberpunk", "cyberspace" and "cybernetics" come from the Greek word "kybernetes" or pilot, "cyber" cultures hint at Greek traditions of autonomy and agency foregrounded so eloquently by Castoriadis in his re-reading of pre-modern Greek democracy. No formulaic domination can be permanently in control of cultural preferences of the new generations in which we may find the new pilots navigating to achieve towards their desired cultural identities, and constructing their ideal cultural imaginaries.

Local television's loss of young audiences, even if only to the anaesthetising cocoons of the karaoke lounges such as downtown Hong Kong's "California Red", stands as a reminder that mass-produced cultural stereotypes cannot endlessly, and comprehensively attract and anencephalize new generations.

In Wicked City, the cyberspace, the virtual reality made by monsters, reminds audiences of the centrality of their original physical state; the dual identity of the monster special police representing the marginality of Hong Kong people's cultural identity, an angst not over the loss of nativist tradition, but rather over the fear of the disappearance of a particular identititarian certainty in neo-colonial Hong Kong. Japanese comic culture still has many particular, alternative ideas created by their authors in terms of their cultural tradition and globalized world vision that can enliven cultural development for film and comic productions. Although Hong Kong is also a hybrid metropolis like Tokyo, the spaces for the development of alternative cultures are insufficient and the cultural ecosystem is heavily commodified. Stereotyped Hollywood-style film productions cannot change the hegemony of commodity culture but favour its extension. Cultural imaginaries of cyberpunk films, comics as well as novels in America and Japan have not, to the same extent, developed in postmodern Hong Kong where people's thoughts is highly depersonalised and stereotyped by commodity culture under the logic of Capitalism.

Like the virtual space and the dual identity of the monster special police inside the film The Wicked City, Japanese comic culture is highly revelatory of the cultural imaginary of Hong Kong. The cyberspace of the film that is full of ambiguous images and allegories reflects, to a certain degree, the decadent atmosphere of the "Judgement Day", the return of Hong Kong to China in 1997, makes, in a particular sense, a linkage with the cyberpunk culture of the Japanese manga and certainly deconstructs a vital part of local cultural phenomenon and dual identity. The signified of the China Bank Building as the wicked headquarters and the duelling with the clock transformed by the monster interprets common anxieties and fears of the Hong Kong people concerning the return in 1997. The dual identity of the monster special police as well as his marginality that he is occluded by both the monster community and the human society are coincidental to the identity and situation of Hong Kong people. However, the film betrays a lack of intensive and sophisticated investigation of the "postmodern", as well as the neo-colonial, Hong Kong cityscape. Moreover, the film does not depart from the dominant masculinist ideology common to most Hong Kong movies. Thus, the Lee Ka-yan character, a good female monster, is represented as a sex object within the film, and in terms of power relations is treated as an appendix of man. It is one of the traits of dominant gender ideology that a woman who is "feminine" must be highly submissive; while a man who is really "masculine" must exercise a high degree of agency. The ideologically emancipator representations of many Japanese comics, especially girls' comics, that show men and women enjoying equal social status and agency, often integrated into an androgynous body has not yet been deployed by the Hong Kong filmmaker. After Thatcher's visit to China and after the Tiananmen massacre, Hong Kong people were impelled to define their own culture as a unique cultural entity. Hong Kong as a specific cultural identity is recognised, and lived, by many of the younger generation; nonetheless, this kind of hybrid identity without the backup of any nationhood is lacking something of the nature of bargaining power from the standpoint of capitalists. Specific hybrid cultural identities, especially alternative identities, of Hong Kong people are, therefore, deformed, or totally repressed in most local film production. Cultural identity is expressed monovocally and hence, new Hong Kong generations are unable to locate representations of their multiple identities in the mass media.

In the globalized information civilisation of the twenty-first century, cultural development may be more dynamic, complex and diversified. But what is certain is that right now, the hybridity of now neo-colonial and late capitalist Hong Kong is both real and potentially recuperable to the cultural reimagining of new generations. In the project of maximizing the surplus-value of hybrid cultures, which are limited to Hong Kong but everywhere now surround us, the utopian and dystopian spaces constructed in cyberpunk e science-fictional films, comics and novels may prove a useful catalyst for the reimagining of urban cultures.

We started this essay with a discussion of recent theses on postmodernity and the Other. We noted Latouche's concerns, and his doubts about the "pseudo-universality" of Western late modernity. There is no doubting Latouche's historical revulsion with the savagery of modernity and "postmodernity". But again in Latouche's work there seems to be an over-valorisation of difference as a positive force. While he condemns the "nostalgia for the universal", there is the suspicion that he opposes it with a hidden nostalgia for the lost difference of the Other. But there can be no dereification, the desire to live differently is legitimate, the ambition to unveil the dupery of progress is similarly understandable, but while there may be a redeployment and recuperation of past elements, there can be no material return to the past. There is no going back. For Hong Kong, a real return to China, would entail a return to a moment of Chinese imperial feudalism and despotism of a hundred and fifty years ago. Such a return would require a realization of the raptor plot to turn back humanity's clock; a possibility that thankfully is still in the space and time of fantasy.

  "Ne renonçons pas à la coexistence avec les Juifs", interview in the Nouvel Observateur, 16 January 1997 [translation:GBL].

Richard Rogers, Cities for a Small Planet (London: Faber and Faber, 1997) 53.

Serge Latouche, L'occidentalisation du monde (Paris: La Découverte, 1992) 69.

Ziauddin Sardar, Postmodernism and the Other: The New Imperialism of Western Culture (London: Pluto Press, 1998).

Sardar 273.

William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York: The Berkley Publishing Group, 1984), 5.

Michael Benedict, Cyberspace: First Steps (London: The MIT Press, 1991), 112.

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London & New York: Verso, 1991), 6.

Mary Ann Pike, Special Edition: Using the Internet, 2nd ed. (U.S.A.: Que Corporation, 1995), 17.

Scott Bukatman, Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction (Durham N. C.: Duke University Press, 1993), 9.

Ken Hollings, "Tokyo Must Be Destroyed: Dreams of Tall Buildings and Monsters: Images of Cities and Monuments" in CTheory [online] (1995) http://www.ctheory.com/a27-destroy_tokyo.html [accessed 28 February 1998] New URL : http://www.ctheory.net/text_file.asp?pick=69

Douglas Kellner, Media Culture: Cultural Studies, Identity and Politics between the Modern and the Postmodern (London & New York: Routledge, 1995), 302-303.

Masao Miyoshi and H. D. Harootunian, eds., Postmodernism and Japan (Durham N. C.: Duke University Press, 1989), xiv.

Benedict, Cyberspace, 113.

Kellner, Media Culture, 325-326.

Susan J. Napier, The Fantastic in Modern Japanese Literature: The Subversion of Modernity (London: Routledge, 1996), 91-102.

Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black and Red, 1983); La societé du spectacle (Paris: Buchet-Chastel, 1967) 10.

Leonore Loeb Adler and Florence L. Denmark, eds., Violence and the Prevention of Violence (London: Praeger Publishers, 1995) 151-152.

Leung Ping-kwan, City at the End of Time (Hong Kong: Twilight Books Company, 1992) 3-4.

McCaffery, Storming the Reality Studio, (Durham N. C.: Duke University Press, 1992) 246.