STEVE FORE

HOW DO WE MAKE SENSE OF THE MOVEMENT
of culture in the world today? Until the last decade
or two, the response to this question (by economists,
political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists,
etc.) usually involved conceiving of the world most
generally as an intertwined but in the last analysis
relatively autonomous network of nation-states and
markets marked by a distinct asymmetry in the dis-
tribution of financial resources, management exper-
tise, and cultural capital. The "core/periphery"
distinction among nations drawn by sociologist Cees
Hamelink and others, for example, presented a picture
of powerful "core" nations (the United States, Japan,
some of Western Europe) achieving and sustaining a
position of domination over "peripheral" nations
(mainly what used to be termed the "Third World" but
in some scenarios also including smaller European
countries) on the basis of exponentially superior eco-
nomic and political resources and clout.¹ This setting
in turn fostered the processes of "cultural imperial-
ism," whereby core nations inundated the periphery
with manufactured goods, cultural products (such as
educational systems and movies), and ways of seeing
that eventually overwhelmed indigenous products and
forms of expression.

Increasingly, however, it has dawned on academics
from various disciplines that the notion of compara-
tively autonomous, freestanding states, markets, and
cultures does not accurately describe the current situ-
ation of a world in which the demographic composi-
tion of national populations has become more and
more heterogeneous, the spatial location of corpora-
tions has become ever more diffuse, and Nigerian juju
music may be heard on a regular basis on radio stations
in Dallas, Texas.² That is, to think of the world in
terms of clearly defined boundaries -- whether geo-
graphic, linguistic, economic, or cultural -- is to look
in the mirror and see Pat Buchanan, to find yourself ut-
terly unable to comprehend, much less account for, a
world in which traditional boundaries of all kinds have
become more fluid and pragmatic than ever before. As
Anthony King has written,

It is not just that, increasingly, many people have no
roots; it's also that they have no soil. Culture is in-
creasingly deterritorialized. . . . A knowledge para-
digm based primarily on a nationally organized
society, or at least, without a larger transnational
frame, can also not cope with cultural phenomena
which, while closely related to those of that society,
nonetheless circulate in, outside and around it. (6)

Also, while it would be foolish to deny the asymme-
try of the relationship between core and periphery in
terms of relative economic and cultural weight, this
model lacks a clear picture of just what people living
in the periphery are doing with all this stuff and
these ideas imported from the core:

To be more completely persuasive, arguments about
the impact of the transnational cultural flow would
have to say something about how people respond to
it. The mere fact that Third World television stations
buy a lot of imported programs, for example, often
has more to do with the fact that they are cheap, in-
stances of cultural dumping, than that audiences are
necessarily enthralled with them. (Hannerz 243)

In what follows I will attempt to explore some of the
implications of these transformations in the actual
and conceptual frameworks within which economic
and cultural exchange occurs in the world today by
means of a circumscribed but arguably symptomatic
case study. I will describe in a relatively straightfor-
ward fashion some aspects of the business environ-
ment of Hong Kong and the place of the local movie
industry in that environment, focusing especially on
the practices of Golden Harvest Films, the largest film
production, distribution, and exhibition company in
Hong Kong. There are severe limits on the scope of my
analysis -- Hong Kong-based companies are required
to reveal few specifics concerning corporate structure
and financial matters, and while I see Golden Harvest

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