Labour strikes in the dying light of Hong Kong left-wing cinema

Abstract

The Younger Generation (1971), made at the Hong Kong left-wing studio Great Wall, is a family melodrama that specifically outlines the accumulation imperative by which the industrialist capitalist implements exploitative practices to gain more and more value out of the workers at a factory. This film depicts female factory workers’ solidarity when they decide to pursue collective action and strike in protest against these inhumane working conditions. This essay focuses on how this film negotiates class relations in Hong Kong society, how it resists and critiques the dominant ideology of capitalism in 1970s Hong Kong, gives a voice to those whose voice is rarely heard in commercial cinema and in the power structures that define who has the right to be heard, and finally how it proffers, however mildly, a more positive and optimistic vision. By contextualising the historical conditions within which the film was made, this essay assesses how this film responds to Hong Kong’s colonial capitalist conditions and argues against the critical consensus that the Hong Kong left-wing cinema made during the Cultural Revolution period was all merely communist propaganda. Instead, it looks at how the film identifies the structural inequalities caused by capitalism and articulates the importance of labour struggle to help create a more just world, and as such contributes to global discourses on labour struggle.