Hong Kong Literature - Development

Development

Many modern Chinese-language publications in Hong Kong have their origins in Chinese writers who fled from Communist and Nationalist fighting during the Chinese Civil War. A significant number of Chinese intellectuals and artists moved to Hong Kong between 1927 to 1937. Many of these people viewed themselves as outsiders in the Hong Kong community, and often wrote of the "barbaric" and "strange" practices of the southern Chinese people (a view evident even in the Tang Dynasty). A second wave of writers came to Hong Kong in 1949 after the Communist Party of China's victory in the Chinese Civil War. While some in this second wave expressed the intention to "Northernize" Hong Kong, many of them began to recognize the valuable traditions that existed in local Hong Kong culture, and their efforts to preserve these traditions helped shape Hong Kong's literary landscape.

Because Hong Kong was a British colony for nearly all of the 20th century, it was spared the harsh censorship that the People's Republic of China and Taiwan endured at the hands of their political leaders. Hong Kong's literature and arts developed quite freely throughout the 20th century. After 1950, two general literary trends took form: the first, dubbed the "Greenback Culture" (Chinese: 綠背文化) sought to make itself appealing to contemporary American culture and consumers; the second, called the "Left Wing" (Chinese: 左翼), opposed the "Greenback" style. Hong Kong literature flourished domestically under these two different styles.