A large section of the Hong Kong press is rabidly pro-textile industry, and every American move toward textile controls is headlined as a thrust at the heart of the colony’s principal industry. Communist papers shoved their way into the act by crying that American restrictions would starve the refugee workers who left the People’s Republic of China to escape that very fate.
After the July 1961 International Textile Conference at Geneva, the Hong Kong government, following long bilateral discussions with the U.S., agreed to limit its exports according to the Geneva Textile Agreement, with July 1960-June 1961 as the base year, and dividing the affected export items into 64 different categories. Starting date of the agreement was October 1, 1961.
Meanwhile, the United States Tariff Commission began to study the 8½-cents-a-pound cotton export differential at the direction of President Kennedy. Genuinely alarmed, Hong Kong business groups hired Dean Acheson, lawyer and former American Secretary of State, to represent them before the Commission and help to retain the price differential.
The textile volcano erupted again in March, 1962, when the colony government, acting under the one-year agreement that went into effect the previous October, banned eight categories of textile exports to the United States. The Hong Kong Tiger Standard, clamorous advocate of the textile interests, excoriated the move as a prelude to economic ruin. Pandemonium ran through the industry. The government ban was lifted almost immediately. Prospects of a peaceful solution seemed as poor as ever.
On September 6, 1962, the U.S. Tariff Commission voted to retain the 8½-cent export differential and rejected a proposal to raise the duty on cotton imports. This action coaxed the Hong Kong manufacturers out of their sulks, but it sent the American textile-makers into a fresh tantrum.
Hong Kong’s motion picture industry is one of the world’s most prolific, and least-known, producers of feature films. More than 300 feature-length pictures were made in 1961 by its six major studios and scores of independent producers who rented working space from the big studios. All were in Cantonese or Mandarin, aimed at the Overseas Chinese market in Taiwan, the Philippines, Southeast Asia and elsewhere. Mandarin features are generally based on heroic or historical themes, with rich costuming and elaborate sets; each one takes 35 to 40 days of shooting and costs around $40,000. A few Mandarin films have contemporary stories. Cantonese films, usually drawing on time-tested plots from Cantonese opera, can be run off in 10 or 15 days for less than $20,000 and are more popular than Mandarin with the Hong Kong fans.
As might be guessed from their shooting schedule, many of these quickies are rubbish. But the quality of the Mandarin films has improved, and a few super-productions costing as much as $175,000 are made every year. Hong Kong films have won top honors at the East Asian Film Festival for the last four years.
The Shaw Brothers, Run Run Shaw and Run Me Shaw, bill themselves with typical cinematic restraint as The Greatest Purveyors of Entertainment in the Far East, and are the kings of the local industry. Late in 1961 they moved their Hong Kong organization into a modern and elaborate studio at Clearwater Bay in the New Territories. Its four sound stages were to be increased to six within a few months, and its employed force numbered several hundred, plus an equal number of low-paid extras.
Lin Dai, twenty-six-year-old beauty and box-office queen of the Shaw Brothers studio, took the 1961 best-actress Golden Harvest Award. As the highest-paid star, she earned $42,000 annually on a three-picture-a-year contract. A singer, actress and dancer, she is stunning by any standards, East or West, and the studio plans to release some of her best films in the American art-theater circuit. Thus far, their American audience has been restricted to Chinese-American viewers.
The Shaws, who also own studios in Malaya and a chain of 120 theaters in Southeast Asia, began operations in Hong Kong three years after Grandview Film Co. founded the local industry in 1933. After a slow start, the industry boomed in the early 1950s, overexpanded and crashed, leaving only four companies in the field by 1956. Pro-Nationalist studios such as Shaw Brothers have no market in Red China, but there are a number of Hong Kong film-makers who have a pro-Communist slant. Shaw’s new studio can produce wide-screen pictures, overcoming one of the handicaps that has limited the growth of the industry in the colony. Generally speaking, there is still plenty of room for technical and artistic improvement.