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The violence of time and memory

undercover: Hong Kongs Infernal
Affairs
Law WingSang
Published online: 21 Nov 2006.
To cite this article: Law WingSang (2006) The violence of time and memory undercover: Hong
Kongs Infernal Affairs , Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 7:3, 383-402, DOI: 10.1080/14649370600849264
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14649370600849264
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Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Volume 7, Number 3, 2006
The violence of time and memory undercover: Hong Kongs

Infernal Affairs
LAW Wing-Sang
1997 as a global media spectacle about Hong Kongs handover of its sovereignty from
lawws@ln.edu.hk
Inter-Asia
10.1080/14649370600849264
RIAC_A_184859.sgm
1464-9373
Original
Taylor
7302006
LAWWing-sang
00000September
and
&Article
Francis
Cultural
(print)/1469-8447
Francis2006
Ltd
Studies: Movements
(online)
ABSTRACT
Britain to China is now almost forgotten; yet Hong Kong is still caught between the politics of time
Downloaded by [Lingnan University Library] at 20:29 29 August 2013
and memory too complex to be captured under simple post-colonialist notion such as hybridity. This
paper tries to put in perspective a (post-)colonial cultural politics of counter-memory in Hong Kong
cinema by investigating its decades-long investment in a sub-genre built around the motif of
undercover-cop. Specifically, the example of the blockbuster Infernal Affairs series is analyzed in
details, with particular attention to its innovative plot, to show how the structure of feeling about
Hong Kongs political fate is embedded in the films underpinning their local box-office success. The
allegorical reading of the film series attempted in this paper also connects the discussion about the
political unconscious of Hong Kong, now and in the past, with the wider problem of how the future
political subjectivity of Hong Kong will take shape.
KEYWORDS: Memory, gangster films, time, structure of feeling, undercover, allegory,

Hong Kong
Continuous hell embodies three components: uninterrupted time, unlimited space, bound-
less suffering; transgressions of the Five Deadly Sins fall into this hell forever, condemned to
the ultimate incessant suffering. (Quoted from a Buddhist Sutra, Infernal Affairs I)
1997 and the politics of temporality

Over the past two decades, the most important issue perplexing Hong Kong has undoubt-
edly been the handover of its sovereignty from Britain to China. The world watched in 1997
the end of this supposedly last colony. Whereas most eyes focus on the political aspects
of such change, the complexity of 1997 as an enduring cultural issue for Hong Kong has
often been casually treated, if not neglected. With the handover now actualized, people
outside Hong Kong often take easy comfort in hearing a Hong Konger tell them that there
is nothing much changed. Of course, the unexpressed intricacies in such an expression
might unsettle that comfort. To say the least, what does it mean for a person coming from a
supposed colony to characterize themselves as having undergone a date with epochal
significance yet with nothing much changed?
As a matter of fact, Hong Kong has never prevented itself from changing; the difficulty
of recounting how much has changed matches the difficulty of describing what Hong Kong
originally was. But there has never been much room for those soulful searches for its origin
ever since the fate of the eventual handover of its sovereign power from Britain to China
was sealed two decades ago. On the one hand, we have one line of remarks celebrating the
contributions the past British colonial rule made in bringing about prosperity Hong Kong
now enjoys; on the other hand, we have been identified as the icon marking the recovery of
ISSN 14649373 Print/ISSN 14698447 Online/06/03038320 2006 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/14649370600849264
384 Law Wing-Sang
the Chinese national pride for we could, eventually (in 1997), rid ourselves of the historical
miseries and plight of subordination under colonial rule. Both schemes of historical articula-
tion try to give, respectively, their clean statements of what Hong Kong originally was. As a
reaction to the above all-too-neat historical accounts, insisting on the ambiguities of Hong
Kongs past as well as its hybrid cultural characteristics has almost become a heroic act to
defend or define its valuable distinctiveness or essences. For example, Leo Lee Ou-fan
describes Hong Kong culture as featured by its hybrid characteristics resulting from its
being situated simultaneously across various marginal positions with respect to the
Chinese, American, Japanese and Indian cultures yet remaining free from domination by
any of these centers (Lee 1995: 80, my translation); magazine editor Chan Kwun Chung
celebrates the mixed and dense built environment of Hong Kong where the hybrid architec-
tural styles has its own beauty and method (Chan 2005); video worker Quentin Lee
suggests that the local critical intellectual culture springs much more from the mixed-code
hybridized vernacular and avant-garde popular culture than from the academies (Lee
1994).1 Before 1997, quite some effort was spent in affirming Hong Kongs so-called hybrid
identity. In terms of zealotry, these affirmations were not unlike a crusade to defend Hong
Kong against (political) nationalists and (their methodological correlate) primordialists.
Yet the abrupt waning of interest in these hybridity talks, especially after 1997, demon-
strates that the characterizations, failing to strengthen peoples exploration of themselves
and their surroundings, indeed undermined peoples strife-ridden desire for a collective
subjectivity of their own. In the worst case, unreflective invocation of hybridity is no more
than repetition of the clich about Hong Kong being the place of confluence of the East and
the West. The pitfall of hybridity talks, in terms of methodology, is that although they put in
focus the multiple sources of Hong Kong culture, they share with the primordialist the
starting point of describing Hong Kongs cultural belonging a belonging, theoretically,
traceable into the distant past. But the fact remains that 1997 has never been a problem that
emerged from a colonized peoples desire to retrieve their lost cultural belongingness in a
colonial past. The implicit retrospective approach (which feasts its eyes on origins that,
although multiple, are temporal) places the hybridist in unwitting collusion with the nation-
alistic discourse on the return/home-coming (huigui) of Hong Kong to its national origin.
Thereby, hybridists evade the real cultural politics of 1997, which stresses above all else the
tangible daily politics of political positioning, of political affiliation, of side-taking, of
friend- and foe-making, and so on. Hybridists also overlook the fact that the 1997 issue is
primarily one about time. I would, therefore, argue that the problem of cultural and politi-
cal subjectivity of Hong Kong can only be fully understood by considering the politics of
temporality for it always pre-configures the very terms in which the politics of identity or
belongingness plays out.
In concrete terms, while half-a-million strong demonstrators took twice to the street in
20032004 protesting against the new HKSAR government, for it yielded too much to the
political pressure from the Mainland authority to push through a National Security Bill,
they were celebrating the dawn of a new active civil society, shrugging off the political
passivity inherited from the colonial past. Yet it is precisely for this celebration of the
coming of the new that rendered them being accused by their enemies (the pro-China
circles) as being nostalgic of the old colonial days. The political cleavages in Hong Kong are
more often than not the result of clashes between different temporalities according to which
the experiences of the colonial era should be mapped. Therefore, a failure to extract from
1997 the complex politics of temporality would undermine any serious examination of the
configuration and dynamic of such a regime of time.2 In this context, I find Raymond
Williams concept structure of feeling, i.e. the felt sense of the quality of life at a particular
place and time, immensely inspiring as it provides a theoretical construct as well as a
methodological key to understand the delicate and often paradoxically lived experience in
The violence of time and memory undercover 385
Hong Kong. Against the fixed concepts of ideology or world-view with their often formal-
ized scheme about time handed down from the official colonialist-cum-nationalist
discourses the concept structure of feeling enables me to capture a more nuanced interac-
tion between the actively lived and felt meanings of the current period and those official
discourses.
Admittedly, structure of feelings is a problematic concept itself. For one thing, it is
never easy to define it in a single formulation. OConnor considers it a contradictory and ad
hoc formulation that Williams later replaced with the notion of hegemony (OConnor 1989:
408); both Eagleton and Hall also criticize it for being unable to provide theoretically strong
categories for a materialist criticism, leaning too much toward the uninspected notion of
experience (Eagleton 1976, Hall 1986), conceding too much to the Leavisite liberal bour-
geoisie humanism. However, this essay aligns with writers such as Filmer, Milner and
Eldridge and Eldridge in seeing the merit of the concept lies precisely in integrating the
analysis of social formation with the emphasis on a strong sense of the experiential specific-
ity excluded from most conceptions of structural analysis (Filmer 2003; Milner 2002;
Eldridge and Eldridge 1994). The concept is created, for Williams, to provide a cultural
hypothesis distinguishing practical, evolving, lived experiences, within the hegemonic
process, from the more formal fixed concept of ideology or world-view. Whereas a cultures
structure of feeling is often generated through the tension felt between experience and
expectation i.e. as the still-being-shaped experience of experiences it is often manifest as
some emergent or pre-emergent formations, hardly to be addressed even by its members in
schematic terms. In Williams words,
The peculiar location of a structure of feeling is the endless comparison that must occur in the
process of consciousness between the articulated and the lived[the zone is comprised of]
whats not fully articulated, all that comes through as disturbance, tension, blockage,
emotional trouble. (Williams 1961: 47)
However, one can discern how a particular structure of feeling is to be carried in cultural
artifacts such as literature, film and drama. For structure of feeling is a structure in the sense
that you could perceive it operating in one work after another which werent otherwise
connected.yet it was one of feeling much more than of thought a pattern of impulses,
restraints, tones, for which the best evidence was often the actual conventions of literary or
dramatic writing (Williams 1979: 159) For Williams sees that in those cultural forms, imagi-
nation always transforms the dominant as well as the emergent ideologies and produces an
understanding that can be more real than ordinarily observable. He sees the creative process
always involves utilizing a structure of feeling that is strongly felt from the beginning and is
similar to the way actual relationships are felt. In Williams words,
this process is not distillations or novel association: it is a formation, an active formation, that
you feel your way into, feel informing you, so that in general and in detail it is not very like
the usual idea of imaginationbut seems more like a kind of recognition, a connection with
something fully knowable but not yet known. (Williams, 1983: 264265)
It is this emergent character of the structure of feelings, being attentive to the uncodified
and the difficulty of articulating that which is not yet articulatable that proves itself, I think,
to be a credible alternative approach in understanding the often murky historical and
cultural situation of Hong Kong a situation with ambiguities and ambivalences where
even the hybridist conceptions seem to be too neat and tight.
In my recently finished historical analysis of collaborative colonialism, I have unset-
tled the spurious but often-assumed colonialism-nationalist opposition commonly found in
Hong Kong historiography (Law 2002). Drawing upon the results of the previous project, I
attempt in this paper to further ask how film would energize and facilitate a recounting of
386 Law Wing-Sang
historical experience beyond the official clich of historical narration concerning 1997 such
a clich is considered as a product of complicity between the colonialists and the national-
ists. I consider that an account for such a possible allegorical recounting of historical experi-
ence in different popular cultural forms, such as film, essential for my project to displace the
often hackneyed invocation of post-colonial situation about Hong Kong. Not being a film
scholar, my line of interest in historical cultural studies, however, adheres to trace, albeit
experimentally and speculatively, a line of allegorical thinking embedded in film texts that
can illuminate the inarticulatables of living in Hong Kong. Taking clues from Deleuzes idea
of treating film more as events than texts as such, I am more interested in (self-)examining
those experiences of disturbance, tension, blockage, emotional trouble that watching Hong
Kong movies had from time to time offered their local audiences over the past decades.3 At
stake, for me, is not just a conventional film analysis taking films as simply my object but
by engaging in a double-hermeneutics about my encounter with the films to understand
how the localized cinematic spaces bear a vital role in their connections to the formation of
cultural and political experiences in contemporary Hong Kong.
Memory movies and the June 4th trauma

For the Hong Kong people, 1997 is about an end of an era. This era, however is more than a
legacy of British colonial rule; it accounts for a long period during which Hong Kong served
as a place where sojourners from all other places could make their livings, dream their
futures, earn their fortunes, learn their new knowledge, organize their revolutions, run
away from famines, and escape or embrace so many other dreaded or desired outcomes. In
this sense, 150 years of British rule in Hong Kong has brought to people from all around the
planet variegated and complex pasts pasts so complex and intertwined that they have
constituted layers upon layers of living experiences weaved into knotty webs of temporali-
ties, represented through told or untold plural histories. There are historical moments in
which Hong Kong is overwhelmed by Chinese nationalistic passions; there are also other
periods when Hong Kong Chinese strongly refuse to be identified with the Mainlanders.
Positioning themselves more as diasporic in cultural rather than in geographical terms
Chinese, they would offer their allegiance to an imaginary entity of greater cultural China
to the same extent as they are alien to the Chinese regime run by the Communist Party.
However, in terms of its cultural implications, the deadline of the 1997 handover has
compelled everyone to accept a monolithic and unified version of history according to
which events form a linear progression. With the help of such a sweeping conception of
time, Chinese nationalist narratives have turned 1997 not so much into an expiry date for
the New Territories Lease as into an injunction compelling every one of us to respond to a
sacrosanct request: Make up your mind choosing who you will be! Regardless of whether
you will stay or leave, tidy up your own pasts, straighten out your memories, square up
your old debts, and shape yourselves up! As though the people of Hong Kong, after
passing through the gates of heaven or hell, shall, each, have to undergo a rebirth.
But the process of rebirth involves the daunting question of how ones new self is
related to ones previous life, and thus arises the question of memory. Therefore, the
epochal changes of 1997 should be measured phenomenologically; for example, by account-
ing for how existential challenges concerning identity and memory are met. Film critic Long
Tin explores the many ways in which, during the years before and after 1997, Hong Kongs
movies have dealt with anxieties about 1997. Long Tin notes, in particular, that these films
give prominence to memory themes such as nostalgia and amnesia (Long 2003: Ch. 4). They
proliferate in diverse genres ranging from martial arts action flicks and psycho-thrillers to
science-fiction films. Of these films, some of the most prominent are Once Upon a Time in
China and America (Tsui Hark 1997), Who Am I? (Jackie Chan 1998), Hot War (Jingle Ma
1998), City of Glass (Mabel Cheung 1998), Ordinary Heroes (Ann Hui 1999), Inner Senses (Law
Chi-leung 2002). These memory-themed films feature characters who desperately strive to
uncover lost memories that promise rewards, and characters who desperately try to forget
persistent memories that bring only pain. Some of the characters try to refashion their iden-
tity from which, they believe, their memories have parted; other characters attempt to
rescue the present that, they realize, will soon be lost to the past. Still other characters
consider what they are lacking at the moment to be what they have lost in the past, laying
claim to and requesting compensation for, all that they might have had a right to. One can
argue with rigor that Hong Kong cinemas booming interest in time and memory derives
from a widespread reflexive awareness about time relative to the nature of the 1997
problem. This body of films belongs to a category of what Long Tin calls 1997 films. In
other words, these films resist a temporality that is set in 1997 and that could, if unreflex-
ively imposed, serve as a universal regulator of all things.
However, let us not be mistaken from the outset that Hong Kong filmmakers conspicuous
interest in memory is tantamount to a nostalgic re-examination of Hong Kongs British colonial

past. In Hong Kong, old British icons are, as objects of memory, seldom held up for anything
other than ridicule; also, coloniality in Hong Kong is never a simple category referring to the
British in a simple sense.4 For example, preservation of the British heritage, including its
colonial-age buildings, has constituted only a very minor part of this memory frenzy, which
has to be understood in some other terms.
The core issue of the politics of memory for Hong Kong stems from 1989, when the
Tiananmen Massacre garnered worldwide attention and when, just before that, the Beijing
students democratic movement compelled millions of Hong Kong people to take to the
streets in protest. For Hong Kong, the events of that year culminated in the June 4th
trauma and the resulting painful memories. Without appreciating the varied roles that the
June 4th trauma has played, one cannot get at the core of either the 1997 issue or, for that
matter, the paradoxical formation of Hong Kongs subjectivity. For in that year, the
mayhem and the subsequent extensive mobilization triggered an unprecedented outburst
of patriotic feeling for China in Hong Kong; also at this time, Hong Kong was in its later
transitional period relative to the 1997 handover. The massacre revealed the fiercest face of
China under Communist dictatorship in its recent history at the same moment that many
people in Hong Kong felt a strong Chinese national identity an identity that is full of
paradoxes and contradictions.
Initially signified as the beacon for a democratic movement soon subdued by
suppression, June 4th quickly transformed itself into an icon of Hong Kong popular
memory, which the people of Hong Kong are, in many ways, obliged to forget so as to be
in line with other Chinese living on the Mainland. Yet the years-long resistance to such
pressure to forget has turned that trauma into a defining characteristic of Hong Kong
identity. Whereas even people in the mainland are now becoming oblivious to the event
owing to brutal state suppression, Hong Kong is still the only city under PRC sovereignty
to carry on its annual June 4th commemoration activities, attended by tens of thousand. In
a sense, the localization of June 4th has evolved over the years, turning it into a Hong
Kong home issue, which is out of sync with what happened thereafter in Mainland China.
In the later stages of the 1997 transition period, a political tug-of-war between local demo-
crats and pro-PRC circles boiled down not only to the pace of local democratic reforms
but also to the question of how, or whether we need, to go beyond the so-called June 4th
pathological complex. Never has a week passed since 1989 that a June 4th memory did
not go up for debate in Hong Kongs various channels for public discourse; the topic
constitutes the core moral support underlying the Democratic Party, the major opposi-
tional force; it also testifies to Beijings promise that the PRC shall recognize Hong Kongs
autonomous rule.
388 Law Wing-Sang
Double identity and the undercover-cop genre
Another cluster of Hong Kong films bearing out the structure of feeling concerning the
places uncertain future and its murky past can be found from the sub-genre of undercover-
cop. From Man on the Brink (Alex Cheung 1981), City on Fire (Ringo Lam 1987), A Better
Tomorrow (John Woo 1987), Hard-boiled (John Woo 1992), Police Story 3: Super Cop (Stanley
Tong 1992), Return to a Better Tomorrow (Wong Jing 1994) and others, an array of genres
feature the undercover cop; most prominent among these genres is that of the tragic hero,
which, in the case of undercover cops, tells how their confusion over identity drags them
down.5 Tragic heroism was in decline in the late 1990s as more flexible genres or thematic
crossbreeds grew in popularity. These films include Young and Dangerous II (Andrew Lau
1996), a film about young hooligans; Theft under the Sun (Cha Chuen-yee 1997), an adven-
ture story; and King of Comedy (Stephen Chow and Lik-chi Lee 1999), a screwball comedy.
As I have analyzed in another place (Law forthcoming), the figure of undercover cop in
those films has evolved into a local sub-genre, moving further away from the Hollywood
gangster thriller genre featuring spy stories with their usual Cold War undertone. Instead,
the repeated exploitation of the motif of undercover cop in those films, as I have argued,
carries a structure of feeling about the lived experience of Hong Kong people as being
caught between a series of identity crisis. In the following, I will focus on the Infernal Affairs
series by director Andrew Lau (20022003), the recent hit in that tradition. It is singled out
to help further substantiate my analysis about this locally-specific undercover sub-genre,
which in turn illuminates the structure of feeling about Hong Kong, because it embraces a
broad scope of issues never attempted by others before. I focus more on its innovative plot
structure and characters not only for the fact that its intriguing plot features as one of its
most celebrated aspects among local critics (and the enthusiasm of the story extends from
the film to the play-scripts and novels published after the films release), but also because
my interest is the structure of feeling the series invokes. Such a structure of feeling is
concerned more with the difficulty of Hong Kongs self-narration.6 Arguably, it is more
literary in nature than purely visual.
The first installment of the three-part Infernal Affairs series opens with two men caught
in a deadly battle: Yan (Tony Leung/Shawn Yue) (the cop) and Ming (Andy TW Lau/
Edison Chan) (the mole lurking in the police force). Each of the two characters finds that
his initial identity is drastically incompatible with the identity that, as an undercover cop
or as a mole, he is required to assume. However, it is not the case that, in a struggle for
supremacy, one character represents good and the other, evil; rather, the characters, both
individually and in relation to each other, act out the contestations to which memories and
evidence of their original identities give rise. The story depicts how the protracted dura-
tion of their undercover lives renders the two men weary and anxious. Early in the story,
Yan is preparing to retire from the undercover program and to recover his true identity as
a cop when both he and his supervisor SP Wong (Anthony Wong) realize that there must
be a mole within the police force. In parallel, Ming is equally tired of his mole career and is
preparing to marry and go straight; yet he also is alerted to the possibility that the
syndicate he secretly serves might be infiltrated. The two men are thrown into a typical
cat-and-mouse chase as they track each other down. Events suddenly turn explosive as
Wong, the only character who knows of Yans true identity, is unexpectedly murdered.
Ming, who now inherits from the deceased SP Wong the exclusive right to the code that
unlocks Yans files, prepares to discover, or perhaps recover, Yans cop identity. And as
this unveiling occurs, Mings true identity as a mole comes to Yans attention. In the iconic
rooftop showdown, Ming fails to turn Yan around to agree on a secret deal that would
preserve each others life and freedom; Yans principled refusal triggers a series of
unexpected killings in which Yan dies.
The difficulties that underscore a persons efforts to uncover his or her authentic
identity constitute the common storyline in Hong Kong undercover-cop tragedies. Yet the
clashes between Yan and Ming compel viewers not so much to honor the tragic hero once
again as to ponder a profound question: namely, what will one do if one is tired of ones
present life and is set to give ones self a rebirth? Such a difficult process tantamount to a
complete reinvention of the self involves a unique set of issues that includes the plausibil-
ity or the necessity underlying ones erasure of ones original identity; at the very least, the
issues revolve around ones efforts to straighten out ones pasts. These pasts have been
preserved as documents, public records, or even an individuals memories, for they may
prevent one from securing a newly acquired position and identity. Implied is also the ques-
tion about ownership of both memories and records, for they decisively bear upon ones
entitlement to a new life.
Milan Kunderas The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1983) has been a much quoted
classic in its caricature of individuals willful forgetting of their respective pasts; Robert
Ludlums The Bourne Identity (1981) and its sequels are also masterpieces that portray a cast-
away spys heroic struggle against the forced erasure of his memories; yet Infernal Affairs
has set itself apart from the latters paranoiac criticism of secret state-ordered operations by
focusing on the collision between Yan and Ming, each of whom embodies principles that are
diametrically opposed to those of the other: one character tries to restore his so-called
authentic self, and the other tries to permanently forget his own pasts. For the sake of preci-
sion, it should be noted that Yan can stop being adrift on his confused life only if he
achieves an authentic return to authenticity; that is, in order to regain his cop identity as a
license to live normally, he must recover all pertinent records and memories. In contrast, for
the lurking mole Ming, who wants to turn over a new leaf and place himself on a decent
track, self-reinvention requires him to enter onto a far different path: he must clear for and
from himself all his pasts, erasing all official and private memories, deleting all records, and
eliminating all witnesses who would possibly reveal his disreputable identity. Indeed, for
Ming, one extreme measure, whose implications are both terrible and logical, is to wipe out
physically anyone who may be in possession of this information.
Unlimited space: rooftop dialectic

Hong Kong gangster thrillers are famous for their over-the-top gunfights and fistfights, yet
visible blood-spilling violence in Infernal Affairs is kept to a minimum; the felt violence in the
film, however, is never less menacing, for one can realize how both time and space can kill.
The Chinese title of the film Wujiandao/Mo-Gaan-Dos literally refers to the deepest hell, with-
out temporal or spatial difference. The vibrant and breathtaking drug-bust sequences
demonstrate how cellphones may be more effective as killing tools than guns; the sudden
appearance of Wongs falling body, which smashes into the top of a car, reminds people that
pushing a body off a skyscraper is the easiest way to kill in a city. All these observations may
be read as a dystopic critique of time-space compression that all major global metropolises
are experiencing. The interrogation of spatial categorization in Hong Kong a place striving
to portray itself as a world-class city goes right into the opening scene in which the Triad
boss Sam is invited by SP Wong for a quick lunch in the most unlikely place: the basement of
a police precinct located in an old colonial building, where they casually and amicably
exchange their philosophies and opinions on morality. The enclosed crypt-like settings not
only connote a conventional claustrophobic hell but also enter into an intriguing visual
dialogue with the iconic skyscrapers rooftop.
Always shot as awash with bright sunlight, the rooftop is set up as the place where
most of the secret contacts between Yan and SP Wong are made; the rooftop is also the
arena where the final showdown between Ming and Yan is staged. On those pinnacles of
390 Law Wing-Sang
shimmering modern buildings, which represent the powers of financial capitalism,

quarrels, negotiations, murders, and other confrontations take place, showing the utter
nakedness of human anxieties, hesitation, and moral dilemmas. Hong Kong movies that
center on swordplay always set swordsmen duels atop roofs and often stage the endgame
as a struggle between good and evil; yet the confrontation between Yan and Ming makes a
mockery of such convention by blurring the distinction between good and evil; the place is
located at the edge of hell, if not hell itself. The stunning panoramic view of the city land-
scape seems to suggest a bright future; but the baking sun keeps grilling Yan, who despon-
dently complains to his supervisor SP Wong about the sufferings that he endures as an
undercover cop. What is ingenious about such visual themes is the question they prompt
the audience to ask: will the shining sun eventually drive out the darkness of the undercover
world the clandestine operation, the guarded under-the-table deals, the dark corners of a
young mans soul, and so on? Or will the indifferent solar fire keep on observing such a
living hell apathetically?
We may often come across images that depict hell as dark, wet, and filthy; but the worst
hell is like Dantes inferno, which is hot and bright to the extent that everything is too
blurred to be discernable. The opening credits of the film are accompanied by glimpses of
such an inferno, screened with irregularly moving close-up images of an unrecognizable
Buddha statue: the camera is placed so close to the statues bronze-like surface that the
images become patchy and unstable, punctuated by dark murky shades. As they come
together, the visual impressions become indistinguishable from fiery pits. According to
Buddhist teachings, just as the differences that give physical objects their definite shapes
and identities are very fragile, so too are the differences that set one persons personality
apart from another persons. In Infernal Affairs, we see characters who struggle to find for
their own selves their own identity and moral personality. However, the difficulty hinges
on the fragility of memory. We see the tragic figure of Yan, who firmly and decisively holds
onto moral and legal principles and who, thus, refuses to let Ming, the mole, walk away; as
a result, Yan squanders his opportunity to recover his own cop identity; eventually, his
rejection of Mings proposed secret collaboration costs the former character his life.
However, and most tragic of all, Yans heroic deed will never be known or remembered, for
moral heroism within the undercover world, rather than automatically become legend,
hinges on the delicate controlling power of memory. Therefore, it is precisely Mings exclu-
sive access to all official files about Yans identity that sustains Mings countenance as he
defies the gun pointed at his head. When Yan asserts his true identity with heroic pride
and says, I am a cop, Ming caustically remarks, Who knows?
If the normal/surface world and the undercover world are mediated by memory,
which is precariously textured in a flimsy manner that easily blurs the differences between
spaces, Infernal Affairs dialectic of space bears out how unstable the belief is that a clear
distinction separates the two worlds from each other. However, the more compelling thrust
of Infernal Affairs cinematic engagement lies in the issue of time: the allegorical world of
continuous suffering that the film portrays defies head-on the assumption of temporal
difference between the present and the past, an assumption on which the expectation for an
epochal change across 1997 has been grounded.
Uninterrupted time: reinvention of the self

For most Hong Kong people, the whole point of 1997 is about how to straighten out the
citys colonial pasts and to reinvent for everybody a new (national) self in order to face
political changes. These changes are so imposing on Hong Kongs time-consciousness that
they render 1997 the only defining temporality. Experienced by Hong Kong citizens as an
inexorable temporal injunction, or an injunction of time, 1997 is not only a calendar year on
an empty and homogeneous timeline but a kind of violence, as well. Such violence exerts
itself as a particular temporality that issues imperative requests to everyone, encouraging
one and all to straighten out their own pasts; or, couched in a Chinese expression, the
message might be settle old scores (suanqing jiuzhang). Yet, the pasts of Hong Kong are
messy and were so right from its earliest days under British colonial rule. British colonial
rule has never been a case in which local Chinese natives were subjugated by the British
intruders; nor one in which the cultural and political institutions there worked solely for
enhancing the British benefits at the expense of the Chinese. Rather, it is what I call, else-
where, a case of collaborative colonialism in which the Chinese collaborators have always
been playing a much bigger role than it is usually recognized in colonializing Hong
Kong a place susceptible to different political or economic projects working to the benefit
of different Chinese forces concerned (Law 2002). In this light, the Hong Kong colonial
pasts are indeed full of ambiguities, embarrassing misplacements of identity, and cagey
deeds of collaboration. Effectuating the wiping out of those muddles and cacophony, which
would embarrass any nationalistic historical narrative, 1997 can be taken as a violence of
time or, to be more exact, as a violence of historicist temporalization.
The parable of Infernal Affairs makes a mockery of legally defined identity and legally
established time. In this regard, the films violence in the last sequences warrants further
analysis: both Yan and Ming are fans of hi-fi stereo music, which symbolizes the normal
middle-class stylish life; yet, like contemporary Hong Kongs middle class, whose split
political inclinations are commonplaces, neither character can converge on a number of
ethical and political issues. Yan, committed to the order of justice as well as to his sanctified
cop identity, rejects Mings proposed deal: according to which Ming can undergo a self-
rebirth, with a clean identity that allows him to forget his own past, to hold on to his
present career of a dutiful and honest policeman and to become a loving husband. Yans
principled refusal to collaborate on Mings deal upholds the principle of legality but also
prompts Ming to strengthen his evil career.7 Ming never hesitates to kill when the act prom-
ises to situate himself in a successful middle-class life; his resolve, however, is as much a
desire to be good as it is another evil act. The last scene, in which Ming chillingly kills his
fellow brother (another Triad mole in the police), who had just come to Mings aid by
gunning Yan down, reveals the brutality and the contradictory morals that guide Mings
actions: for this fellow brother is, after Yan dies, the only person who could possibly
threaten Mings concealment of his past identity. The final sequences depict Ming proudly
holding in his hand a police ID card as he emerges from the lift the place where a murder
has just occurred, where good and evil are indifferently conflated. The terrifying self-conceit
that is expressed on his face derives from his successful execution of his necessarily violent
self-reinvention process.
Boundless suffering: the undercover cop in his own family

The first installment of the Infernal Affairs series is set six years after the 1997 handover. Its
sequel is indeed a prequel, retelling the whole story by going back to the early 1980s, when
the long-term plans concerning the placement of moles one among gangsters, the other
among police officers got underway. In this prequel, the moral character of the main
protagonists is open to re-examination; constant flashbacks persistently subvert the storys
linear temporality and infuse the stock characters with added dimension. The most intrigu-
ing reversal is found in SP Wong whose complex personality stands in contrast to the
simple upright cop. It is revealed that Wong had participated in the murder of Ngai Kwun
(the crime syndicates founder), which was plotted by a renegade from among Kwuns
circle. After Kwuns death, the separatist tendencies of all five of Kwuns enforcers
unleashed fierce power struggles. In the present, Kwuns successor, his son Hao (Francis
392 Law Wing-Sang
Ng), finds himself unable to curb the usurpers ambitions and conspires then to slay them
one by one. Only Sam (Eric Tsang) manages to escape and takes refuge in Thailand. Sam
feels great bitterness and remorse over the murder of his beloved wife, which resulted not
from disloyalty but, ironically, from her refusal to engage in an illicit love affair initiated by
Ming. As payback for her death, Sam resolves to return to Hong Kong, collaborating with
SP Wong to indict Hao. All the while, Sam fosters a private plan to seek revenge. Loyalty,
love, and faithfulness undergo harsh trials among brothers, friends, and husband and wife.
Such subplots in this mafia family saga recall some of The Godfathers (Coppolla 1972) attrac-
tions. Yet the most important twist that sets Infernal Affairs apart from other films in its
genre is the films implausible but intriguing family relations. The most striking from
among these relations is filial: although born by a different mother, the undercover cop Yan
(Tony Leung/Shawn Yue) is indeed a son of Ngai Kwun. It is such implausible family rela-
tions that make Infernal Affairs not only an ordinary thriller but also a political allegory of
Hong Kong. For the presence of the foreign/British rule in Hong Kong has always been put
in a fable which tells how an orphan is raised up by his foster parent. In such a fable, the
cultural ambiguity of Hong Kong Chinese is metaphorically compared to the difficult
negotiation between the orphans indebtedness to his/her foster parent and real parent.
Implicitly alluding to such a set of metaphors, Infernal Affairs works to subvert the nave
sentimentality of this fable by bringing in the political and moral dilemma of a figure who
not only needs to face up to the confrontation between the real and foster parents but also to
make the stark choice between working to subvert his own lineal family or not (see the
analysis below). It is no longer a story about a helpless orphan but a grown-up man and,
by extension, Hong Konger whose shaky configuration of political and moral subjectivity
is in stake.
The climax of the film is set against the 1997 handover of sovereignty. As in the preced-
ing installment, each character is busy reinventing him- or herself. Hao is becoming a busi-
nessman by developing decent businesses; he even has himself refashioned as a reputable
tycoon, joining in politics, cozying up with the ascending pro-China circles, and vowing
privately to soon quit illegal ventures. Wong strives to recapture his courage so that he
might overcome the tortures of his conscience, which stem from both his involvement in the
murder case of Kwun and the sudden death of a partner. Likewise, Yan has given himself a
new sense of mission for his undercover operation, although SP Wongs complicity in the
killing of his father is disclosed. Yan reaffirms his commitment to justice and law for it is
also the only path that enables him to make a complete break with his mafia family and his
own pasts.
However, Sams raging desire to enact a private revenge against Hao creates an obsta-
cle to this widespread longing for a new beginning a longing typical of the years marking
the twilight of the old British colonial rule in Hong Kong. An insidious plan in which SP
Wongs own gun is the mechanism whereby Hao is legally killed stands in juxtaposition
with the failed plan to bring the Triad family to justice by legal means; also ending in failure
are Yans painstaking efforts to compile evidence of the familys criminal endeavors. The
message is this: Sams vengeful heart speaks louder than Yans dedication to legality; good
and evil are once again mixed up. Yans commitment to legal temporality (he once warned
SP Wong, Dont mess up all those dates; otherwise, I will kill you!) is impressive but too
nave in comparison to the ease with which the apparatus of justice can be manipulated.
For Sam, his attempt to reinvent himself so that he might enter onto the straight and
narrow is also thwarted both by his unforgiving heart and by the logic of greed and desire,
which easily stretches a small wish for private revenge beyond the limits of practicability.
Eventually swayed by the Thai thug he teamed up with in taking Haos family hostage, Sam
accepts the murder of all Haos family members an excessive measure at which he once
would have balked. The viewer can hardly tell from Sams agonized look in the very last
sequence whether he indeed retains a bit of mercy or not; in spite of this ambiguous
depiction, perpetuating evils overpower him, as though by fate. Presumably, private
revenge is a primitive form of justice; yet in the age of globalization, the unbounded greed
of cross-regional mafia organizations preys only on those private enmities grown out of
local vengeful hearts. There is no space for individuals to balance their gratitude against
resentment, let alone to impose idealism on modern legal justice. What has driven charac-
ters towards ever-greater evils is like a structurally determined logic of practice that looms
over individuals like fate.
The prequel to Infernal Affairs is a story about a mafia boss Ngai Kwuns family whose
decline is traceable to endless internal struggles for power among ambitious usurpers: some
strive for secession; others want to reign over an empire. Traditional values of fidelity enter
into endless contestations with unruly desires and greed. If we may read from such a
screenplay a caricature of contemporary Chinese history (or that of any Chinese society at
large), then we may yet decipher still subtler symbolic representations for the character of
Yan.
As a son of Ngai Kwun, Yan experiences tragedy that lies in a predicament: he can
become a genuine good guy (whose goodness is greater than that of a professional cop),
steadfastly dedicated to the modern ideals of legal justice, if and only if he can completely
break all ties with the criminality of his family lineage; the ultimate and thorough means by
which to accomplish this goal centers on the simple destruction of the family, itself. This
point explains why he finally takes the undercover operation as a private mission. Yet it is
almost his destiny that the only chance for Yan to bring the family to justice, which amounts
to a paradoxical expression of Yans care for this family lies in the success of his under-
cover operation at the heart of his own family. Yan risks disclosure of his treachery by
pledging loyalty to forces that stand in opposition to those he was born with.
However, this risk and its background constitute only one aspect of the double tragedy
of Yans undercover identity; another aspect that Infernal Affairs metaphorically depicts
concerns the peculiar love-and-hate relationship that exists between Yan and SP Wong: SP
Wong is Yans respected supervisor but he is also complicit in the murder of Yans own
father years ago.8 To some filmgoers, this state-of-affairs might seem overly melodramatic
and, therefore, overly fabricated or, simply an insignificant emulation of the plot of
Godfathers saga yet it is no more implausible than the real historical trajectory of Hong
Kong. The Chinese nationalist narrative often likens the defeat of China in the Opium War
to a familys blood debts to all Chinese as if it was the murder of the father; to extend the
same set of imaginaries, the prosperous development of Hong Kong under the British
governance is always compared to a situation where a son being raised in happiness by the
fathers murderer. Viewers can easily draw the love-and-hate relationship between SP
Wong and Yan a parallel to that between Britain and Hong Kong. Today, the return of
Hong Kong to China is complete. At the same time, Hong Kong remains committed to a set
of social values that differs dramatically from that of its parent country, its wider family.
And rather than adopt its heritage, the youthful Hong Kong seeks, perhaps naively, to
extract from this wider family a greater recognition of the importance of lawfulness and
justice. Hong Kong persistently demonstrates its objective in this matter by, for instance,
supporting the Beijing student movement and by commemorating the 1989 massacre every
year. We can thus ask whether Hong Kongs sly precociousness is not akin to an undercover
commission that may be lethally dangerous.9
During the two decades that led up to the 1997 handover, Hong Kong Chinese lived
amidst the tug-of-war that pits the so-called pro-China forces against the pro-British forces.
The pro-China forces prevailed by endlessly feeding on, and thus revitalizing, the argument
that Hong Kongs status as a colony imposed great shame on China; the pro-British forces,
who got the label in the final years of British rule for rallying under Chris Pattens
394 Law Wing-Sang
democratic reform, asserted and still do now that Hong Kong possesses its own lifestyles
and values. After 1997, the former reject the oppositions criticisms against the Tung Chee-
wahs government as pursuing de facto independence (towards a separate Hong Kong state)
rather than autonomy (under Chinese sovereignty); the latter keep warning against Sinici-
zation which will jeopardize the core values of Hong Kong such as legality and fairness
inherited from the citys past. It is on the basis of this confrontation that Hong Kong audi-
ences notice the strong parallelism between Yans story and their collective experiences.
When Yan resolves to transform himself into a good guy and pledges to carry on with his
undercover operation, he has to find an even deeper hiding place for his value-based
commitment to his past tutelage under the police academy. To honor his cadet instructor,
Yan can only sneakily pay him a salute in the funeral march passing by the street (scene
from Infernal Affairs I). Scenes such as this one reveal much about the ambivalent intertwin-
ing of coloniality and modernity as they are felt by Hong Kong audiences. In a bid to realize
the ideals of a modern legal justice, Yan dreams of compiling the criminal evidence needed
for a successful and fair prosecution of his enemies. Yans dream, though opposed by
vengeful hearts and fatal deceptions, might be preordained because his wish to regain
truthful memories of the pasts by collecting truthful historical evidence for the prosecu-
tions just case may simply reflect his naivety, which is dangerous, as well as ludicrous.
Likewise, how is it possible for Hong Kong Chinese to participate in a fair trial concerning
the citys historical pasts and, at the same time, to avoid the overwhelming vengefulness of
the motherland?
Psychotherapy for the undercover cop: colonial and post-colonial

Although Infernal Affairs excels in reviving the tragic tradition of the undercover-cop genre,
it does not end with a replay of the standard pathos-inducing death of the hero. Re-telling
the same story from a different angle in each installment effectively reveals the intricacies of
the double-identity problem, more so than would a single-angle linear narrative. In Infernal
Affairs II, both SP Wong and the triad kingpin Sam are given respectively a different image
from the ways they appear in the first: Wong is neither perfectly straight nor perfectly firm
and has stained records and guilty feelings; Sam is not incurably malicious, agonizing as he
does over issues concerning fidelity and love, just like any ordinary man.
In Infernal Affairs III, the final sequel, we encounter the different faces of Ming and Yan
too. Instead of coolness and confidence, with which he appears previously, Ming is given a
psychotic edge. To prevent the disclosure of his true identity, he would go to any means
possible; yet his ruthlessness cannot help him hide his anxieties, which lead him to a soul-
searching journey with the help of a police-authorized psychiatrist Dr Lee (Kelly Chen).
However, after perusing the stolen psychiatric files of Yan, Ming realizes that he shares with
Yan the same wish to be good to the disastrous extent that he fantasizes himself to be Yan
and goes to arrest Yeung (Leon Lai) (another of Sams suspected underlings) for his mole
activities; in his confused state, Ming shoots Yeung to death. As a record of Mings attempt
to be reborn once more, this fantasy is also a testament to his own true identity. But for this
exposure of true identity, he also ruins his career and ends up in the psychiatric hospital for
the rest of his life. In contrast, Yan reappears in this final sequel not entirely as a pathetic
victim of double-identity. His apparent disposition to violence, explainable previously in
terms of his split identity, turns out to be merely the outcome of a cruel trial of allegiance
ordered by Sam. Yan reveals himself to be a tough and pragmatic personality who rejects,
all the way, the police institutions tendency to pathologize him.10
The scenes in which both Ming and Yan seek psychiatric treatments might have turned
some viewers off, for the sentimentality involved departs from the expected action and
excitement a gangster thriller usually promises. The scenes are crucial, however, if the entire
trilogy is to form a coherent political allegory because the scenes face squarely the problem
of Hong Kongs colonial psychology. As a medical practice and an academic discipline,
psychiatry claims to have privileged access to ones innermost but repressed memories and,
thus, the ability to decode the secret of ones subjectivity. However, psychiatric language is
also the foundation on which pathological rhetoric is exploited for political purposes.
In Infernal Affairs III, the hypnotherapy conducted by Dr Lee is characterized as a
method that identifies a persons sincere will to disclose the truth about him- or herself. It is
such sincerity that Yan fails to have, since he keeps on telling Dr Lee lies. From a different,
broader perspective, the entire therapy regime submits to its own exaggeration, which
parodies therapeutic discourses for their absurd presumption that a person should have
one single healthy original identity and that other possible combinations are abnormal. In
this regard, Yans resilience to hypnotherapy embodies, as well, a professional vigilance
against the disclosure of secrets. This vigilance can be seen as a kind of resistance that the
undercover cop and the colonial subject would employ in reaction to such a regime of
psychological truth. At one point during the hypnotherapy, Dr Lee complains about Yans
lies, which even concern trifling matters, and Yan replies succinctly: My job is to betray
people around me. In general, a psychiatrist might interpret such a case as a failure to
establish transferential relations between the patient and the analyst, entailing a frustrated
good-wish to help; if so, Yan is truly pathological as although he can sleep well only in the
therapists clinic after treatment, his habitual lies suppresses his ability to be loved. Yet,
from the perspective of the undercover cop and the colonial subject, whose existences are
premised on a constant self-denial, their recalcitrance against pathologization is a matter of,
as Ming puts it in the inter-cut shot, survival.
The total failure of Dr Lees hypnotherapy of Yan symbolizes one of the trilogys major
departures from the tradition of tragic heroism, to which the Hong Kong undercover-cop
movies are indebted. In Hong Kongs undercover genre, the confused psychological state of
the undercover cop and his tense relationship with the police institution always constitute
the films core interest, as with, for example, City on Fire (Ringo Lam 1987) and Theft
Under the Sun (Cha Chuen-yee 1997). Over the years, the images of the police force in under-
cover-cop movies evolved; so too did the ways in which police would handle their poten-
tially wayward undercover cops. In sharp contrast to the cranky, incompetent, but
modernizing police force that we see in City on Fire, in which the duplicity of the under-
cover cop is treated strictly as a moral crime, the psychologist (played by Francis Ng) in
Theft Under the Sun gives voice to the undercover cop indirectly through the discourse of
psychology. In Infernal Affairs, we see a police administration that is highly institutionalized,
hi-tech, and well-managed; coming to its aide is a pervasive and efficient psychotherapeutic
apparatus that keeps the potentially wayward undercover cops under surveillance. The
development shows the growing trend of medicalization, which interprets double-identity
as an illness more than as a crime; yet it also turns a former victim into a patient.
In the context of post-handover cultural politics, such a medicalization discourse
evolving from the previous victimization discourse stands in dangerously complicit rela-
tion with the efforts to turn Hong Kongs distinct cultural experiences into targets of
treatments or re-education programs. A strong tendency is prevalent in Hong Kong now, one
that, by means of pathologizing rhetoric, neutralizes political differences between Hong
Kong and the PRCs central authorities; for example, vocal activists persistent concern for
democracy and human rights in the mainland is diagnostically labeled the June 4th complex;
in order to stigmatize people and organizations that propose unofficial visions about Chinas
current situation and future, PRC supporters accusingly assert that the dissenters are unpa-
triotic or ignorant of the Basic Law. To heal the absent sense of the dissenters supposedly
real national identity, Chinese authorities are instituting new measures that facilitate the re-
education of the Hong Kong people. These measures include a primetime nightly television
396 Law Wing-Sang
broadcast of the PRCs national anthem and suggested compulsory national-flag hoisting in
schools. In this regard, Yans playful resistance to the therapist and thus his refusal to submit
to hypnosis never fail to draw from local Hong Kong audiences understanding grins.
Duplicity: one country, two systems

In Hong Kong cinemas further departure from the pathos of the undercover-cop tragedy,
two new figures emblematic of post-97 Hong Kong joined in the fray, and their presence
offers a novel angle for a rigorous exploration of double identity. Appearing in the final
sequel, Yeung (Leon Lai) and Shen (Chen Dao Ming) have mysterious identities that remain
unresolved, even at the very end of the film. At one level, perhaps the official level, the
audiences recognizes Shen as a Mainland police officer sent to Hong Kong for an under-
cover mission; Yeung is the high-ranking Hong Kong cop who helps Shen to crush cross-
border crimes. Throughout the film, however, there are many hints and unresolved riddles
that support Mings suspicion that Yeung is, in truth, another of Sams underlings planted
in the Hong Kong police force. Ming further suspects that the plant is not the result solely of
Sams plan but also of a wider plan conducted by Shen, the enforcer of a powerful Mainland
Chinese syndicate run by political big shots. Whatever the truth is, Shen has a multiple
identity that enables him to shuttle between the police force and the criminal syndicates,
both in Hong Kong and in China; in parallel, Yeung can act as an intermediary between a
sort of heaven and hell, enjoying both clear passage all the way from Beijing to Hong Kong
and the power to issue incontestable orders. He works openly as the Chief Superintendent
in the Security Wing, which is described by SP Wong as a very mysterious department
whose staffers are interested more in politics than security issues.11 He is ruthless in his
confidence and overbearing in his demeanor, never tiring of instructing his subordinates
that the appeasement of prominent mainlanders is the departments first priority. Yeungs
outlook exemplifies many emergent political high-flyers in post-handover Hong Kong.
The ambiguity and the vagueness of both Shens and Yeungs identities differ from the
ambiguity and the vagueness of Yans or Mings. Displaying no agony over his true identity
or what the truth is, Yeung is cool and hardnosed in achieving his political goal. Neither
guilt nor shame attach themselves to his conscience after he openly doctors evidence against
a Taiwanese gang in an attempt to drive them away from Hong Kong. Implicating the
establishment in his unprofessionalism, he notes that the cadet academy taught him the art
of writing a convincing report. Therefore, equipped with the power to cook up truths
insofar as they correspond to official expectations, Yeung is a figure par excellence who can
back-stab or tell tall tales, particularly in a bureaucratic institution, Chinese or not. He can
exempt himself from self-directed quests for authentic identity because he is effectively the
history-writer, for whom identity-switching will always act as an advantage. In parallel,
Shens ambiguous identity reinforces the perception of the rising Chinas power in Hong
Kong, which is overbearing, immensely powerful, keeping everybody under surveillance
but corruptible in essence. Shen is an icon for the state power of Mainland China which is
always interchangeable with that of a big mafia; his mysterious appearance symbolizes a
kind of menace that alludes to the omnipresence of infiltrating power of the Mainland in
every corner of Hong Kong. However, the pervasiveness of surveillance power represented
by Shen cannot do without Yeungs active collaboration.
For some movigoers, it remains a point of suspense as to whether Yeung and Shen are
good guys or not. The film cannot do without the possibility of good-cop-wins-at-last
reading for it has a huge Mainland market regulated by a strict production code. Yet the
ambiguous riddles left unsolved are enough for it to serve as a critique. Its negative critique
of the power of representation (in the form of report-writing skills) and surveillance
restricts its condemnation neither to the character of Yeung and Shen nor, in a moment of
self-reflection, to filmmaking itself: the films critique on these issues covers both the charac-
ters and filmmaking and then manages to encompass both the narratives of history and the
politics of memory that underpin post-colonial Hong Kong. After all, history, like filmmak-
ing, is another type of reporting; similarly, identity, like performativity, is the process and
the outcome of types of reporting. From this angle, the characteristics that distinguish the
tormented Yan and the gloating Yeung from each other might be summed up as a maxim:
to collect evidence is one thing; to write about it in a report is another.
The justice of history?

Yans innocent death, Mings schizophrenia, and Yeungs self-conceit are all parts of a
bigger picture that characterizes the manipulation of cultural power at the dawn of a new
era. Put more concretely, this picture depicts the rapid transformations of the power game
across 1997. To ascertain who stands on the good side and who on the other is a task that
relies less on evidence that can support the final verdict than on the reflexive power to write
and re-write, to play and re-play, to view and re-view. And as difficult as this task is, the
task of transforming Hong Kongs complex pasts into a coherent history of colonialism is no
less daunting, whatever meaning one ascribes to the term colonial.
The crux of the 1997 issue for Hong Kong hinges on two matters: first, how one judges
the legality of the Nanjing Treaty (for Hong Kong Island) and the Beijing Treaty (for
Kowloon Peninsula), both of which the imperial Chinese government signed; and, second,
how one judges the expiry date of the lease concerning the New Territories. The whole
controversy is premised on a conception of the linear progression of historical time, which
underpins the modern world system and its nation-states. The official statement of the
Chinese government takes Hong Kong to be a problem inherited from the historical past,
whose solution, i.e. the resumption of exercise of sovereign rights by PRC, is that it would
right a historical wrong that would realize the principle of historical justice. However,
there has never really been one single Hong Kong issue to be solved; nor has Hong Kong
witnessed the mitigation, much less the settlement, of any of its cultural and political
problems now that the 1997 time marker has been passed.
To put events in chronological order (as Yan did when he serialized the data according
to their exact dates) is not a necessary condition for justice to be done; it would only further
mess up the original messiness, i.e. the intertwining temporalities of everyday complexity.
In the same vein, a new beginning of time is never a simple return to the past, never a digital
re-boot back to the primordial state. Instead, the activation of memories (in this case,
memories about the Chinese nations shame in its ceding of Hong Kong to the British
Crown) and, thus, the imagination of a new era (in this case, a new era for Hong Kong after
1997) are only part of a national subjects fantasy in which the primal scene of national
suffering pre-figures the national subjects temporality.
However, the national subjects temporality is debunked in Infernal Affairs as chiefly
the commencement of another performance or masquerade. Faced with the charge of
murder, SP Wong becomes so despondent that he wants to plead guilty; however, the
panel for the police departments internal affairs division is more eager than Wong himself
to invalidate the charges against him because, as they explain it the war against crime has
to be continued. The subsequent crosscut to the scene in which a panel of superiors
considers Mings candidacy for promotion shows how Ming, the mole, answers the ques-
tion of whether he has confidence in the post-1997 future, when Hong Kong will be under
Chinese rule. Radiant, and with absolute self-assurance, Ming replies in fluent spoken
English: The law will back me up! The ironic contrast of such back-to-back sequences
works to demonstrate the power of representation and the logic of performance under all
things new.
398 Law Wing-Sang
Likewise, the climatic final scene of Infernal Affairs II opens with a sonic barrage of
gunshots, suggesting that Haos entire family has been killed; displaying pictures of the
corpses of the brutally murdered victims, the screen soon cuts across to newsreels of the
sovereignty handover: a British regiment marching up to, and taking down, the Union Jack;
the Peoples Liberation Army hoisting the Five Stars and the new HKSAR flag. The scene
shortly thereafter is of Hong Kong policemen who are busy replacing emblems, such as
their button-on badges. And then there is a shot of Wong, who frowns over the pictures of
the dead. Speaking to the incongruity between legal time and historical time, all these
images come together to deconstruct the nationalist narrative, which asserts that the
handover date coincides with a moment of justice in history.
Conclusion: undercover Hong Kong

The Infernal Affairs series is an epic-scale parody of the nationalist historical narrative about
Hong Kong; at the same time, it defies the narrative structure of the historical epic by
progressing along a non-linear path. Indeed, the films non-linear approach to the subject
matter opens interpretations of the film to revision and rewriting. The trilogys compelling
ambience of a looming hell is embodied by a structurally determined logic of practice,
which dictates the characters choices, pushing them time and again toward greater evils
and crimes. As they act out more and more crimes, the trilogys actors nullify differences
not only among themselves but also between pre-1997 Hong Kong and post-1997 Hong
Kong. The year 1997 came to signify a judgment day, whose approach grew more dazzling
and breathtaking the closer it appeared on the horizon. Indeed, the force of its approach
compelled everyone to reinvent themselves, to invent a new self, to welcome the future.
However, as the three films stylistically argue, successful participation in this grand parade
of reincarnations came not from principled and honest men, as Yan proved to be in the
moment of his death, but from those mafia elements whose alleged patriotism even Beijing
officials once praised. The vindication of historical justice is supposed to be about a return
to ones true national identity; but, ironically, as 1997 approaches, it is those triad bosses
and those power usurpers who make big strides: Hao gets into politics (nearly selected as
the Peoples Consultative Committee Member); after Haos death, Sam resurrects his
former powers. Through a rebirth, Sam escapes his downtrodden life in exile and enters
into celebrity status. In the final scene of Infernal Affairs II, images of Sams tearful eyes
gazing on a photo he took with his wife soon cede to images of Sam toasting his guests
attending his Handover celebration party. Overcast by the fickle neon light, the multiple
impressions of Sams visage consummate the portrayal of both a confused soul and a messy
historical reality.
For people like Sam, nothing really changes from the old colonial days to the rule under
the PRC. They remain versatile in double-crossings and illicit collaboration; in any case,
they will shift their political allegiances whenever a situation warrants such a move. As for
those filmgoers who are still guessing whether Yeung and Shen are cop or mobster, it
should be noted that the two characters indeed exemplify a new type of power player
players who can always make the best use of their double-identity. They constantly charm
both sides in and out, north and south of the power structure, convincing them that
black is white and vice versa. But Yeung and Shen and their fellow adepts never burden
themselves with compromised moral principles or fractured identities, for they illustrate
only too well the essence of political identity as performativity. In this sense, the possible
answers to the question of whether Yeung and Shen are indeed undercover cop or mobster
might mean amount to the same thing.
Enthusiasm for the Infernal Affairs series in Hong Kong is not simply a result of hype. In
Hong Kong cinema, the figure of the undercover cop has never been an ordinary stock
character; instead, it has long given figurative expression to a unique collective experience.
The Infernal Affairs series is part fabricated film story and part socio-political commentary.
Before the rise of the new Chief Executive Donald Tsang, who was an old colonial civil
servant himself, the post-handover Hong Kong power bloc tried their best to exclude capable
personalities with old British affiliations because these experienced administrators were
widely suspected of being undercover hangers-on. In 2004, a round of patriotism
campaigns in pro-China media aroused some of the fieriest debates since the transfer of
sovereignty; it also elicited among Hong Kongs social notables numerous pledges of loyalty
to the PRCs central government and accusations against those who did not participate in the
organized events. The espionage case uncovered in the Liaison Office (the central govern-
ments representative in Hong Kong), together with the charge of espionage leveled against
Mr Ching Cheung, a locally born veteran journalist, illustrate that hunts for undercover oper-
atives are much more than either fantastic elements of screenplays or cultural metaphors.12
The political blunders of the now replaced Tung Chee-wah government brought out
twice (in both 2003 and 2004) 500,000 demonstrators who took to the streets on Handover
Day. In Hong Kong, a joke is circulating that derides him as an undercover operative. This
joke never fails to generate chuckles because although Tung has been an archetypal conser-
vative, his unimaginable ineptitude is, ironically, the only theme that could compel the public
to cry out in anger for democracy. This act, carried out in unison, is impressive for the Hong
Kong people, who are famous for their political apathy. Therefore, Tung is caricatured as the
Father of Hong Kong Democracy of a system yet to be born. However, it was indeed the
last governor, Chris Patten, who, on the eve of the 1997 handover, resurrected Tungs status
and appointed him to be an Executive councilor. Later, the now retired Chinese president
Jiang Zemin handpicked Tung for the position of Chief Executive. As for the joke, its punch
line goes like this: given all this mess, who sent the undercover operative Tung anyway?
Notes
1. Quentin Lees article aroused a debate in Hong Kong after its publication (Lee 1994). His position was
taken as representative of the hybridists although there has never been a coherent perspective among
the authors I sample here. Ip characterizes the pervasive but unsystematic discourse of hybridity exists in
Hong Kong like a phantom (Ip 1997). For details of the relevant debates, see Ip (1997) and a special
supplement Hong Kong Culture of The Tabloid City Magazine, July 1995.
2. Although a nave and deceptive vision of the 1997 handover, which was recently in vogue, characterizes
the 1997 sovereignty handover as simply the hoisting of a different flag; the singing of a new national
anthem, the lingering notion of 1997 in public discourses bears out the fact that for the local populace,
1997 has never gone far away. From 2002 to 2004, a number of issues most notably, the National Security
Laws (Article No. 23), the controversies over patriotism, and the Peoples Congress interpretation of the
Basic Law (which throws out the widely-supported calls for universal suffrage and direct elections) indi-
cated clearly that 1997 was still an emotional issue among the people of Hong Kong. The motto The year
2004 is the time when the real 1997 arrives (Lui 2004) is more than a play of words; it is a manifestation of
how 1997 continues to haunt Hong Kong.
3. For reading film as events more than texts in order to locate the social and historical energies, one may
refer to Morris (1988, 1998).
4. The Hong Kong colonial experience is complicated by the fact that there were not many native Hong
Kong people to be colonized by the British. Early Hong Kong historical records show that Chinese collab-
orators played a very significant role in the colonial development of Hong Kong. Chinese settlers
flocking to the area helped build a colonial system, which I name Collaborative Colonialism. See Law,
Wing-sang (2002); also Carroll (2005).
5. For a review of the development of the figures of undercover agents in Hong Kong cinema, please see
Law (forthcoming). It is useful to point out here that although the undercover cop is the prototype of the
undercover icon, the figures of undercover encompass far more than policeman; likewise, a story
about a tragic hero is the classic but by no mean the only type of undercover narrative on Hong
Kong screen.
400 Law Wing-Sang
6. I have in another paper discussed the phenomenon of polarized comments of the trilogy among critics
from outside Hong Kong (Law, forthcoming). For example, Leary treat the first Infernal Affairs as just
another ordinary gangster thriller packaged with the high concept blockbuster formula that allows star-
image advertising to dominate, thereby, turning a feature film into something more like a commercial
(Leary 2003). While I can see the points of this general analysis, it, nevertheless, tends to gloss over the
complex formation of image consumption as well as the development of sub-genre, especially at local and
regional levels, by privileging a generalized notion of postmodernist stylistic features at the expense of
the cultural variability against which the genres ideological and iconographic operations are played out.
7. The films parody of lawfulness and legality can be further understood against the backdrop of the 1997
handover, because the 1997 issue is also a paradigmatic case of refusing to live by ambivalence. The
transfer of Hong Kongs sovereignty in 1997 derives from the expiry date of the Lease of the New Territo-
ries. According to the Nanjing and Beijing Treaties, Hong Kong Island and Kowloon Peninsula are
supposed to be permanently ceded. But because the New Territories was only a piece of leased land, the
UK had no right, according to British law, to rule the New Territories without either the leases being
extended or other measures that would confer on its rule a legitimate status. However, it is to a certain
extent only a British problem, since the PRC has never recognized the legitimacy of all three so-called
unequal treaties. Therefore, in theory, there is no such problem concerning the expiry date of the lease.
It was indeed the Hong Kong property tycoons who raised the issue of Hong Kongs future in Beijing in
1981, when they paid a visit to the then Chinese leader Deng Xiao-ping in an attempt to persuade the
Chinese leaders to agree for the sake of Hong Kongs own stability and prosperity on the continua-
tion of the Lease of the New Territories. Ironically, such a move forced Deng to face up to the issue
concerning the lawful status of Hong Kong, and eventually resulted in Dengs astonishing decision to
terminate the previous policy of ambivalence; consequently, the PRC in 1982 declared that all three
indissociable parts of Hong Kong would resume under Chinese sovereignty in 1997. But the irony is
also that all those who argued in those years for the indispensability of British rule for Hong Kong nowa-
days justify their support for the resumption of sovereignty on the basis of patriotism and nationalism.
8. In another classic Hong Kong undercover cop story City on Fire (1987), Ko Chow (Chow Yun-fat) and his
immediate superior have a strong father-and-son relationship. Yet in Infernal Affairs, the relationship has
evolved into a commitment to police work and to the whole idea of legal justice. See Law (forthcoming).
9. One of the major problems getting in between Hong Kong and the PRC Central government is the likeli-
hood of Hong Kong being used as a base for anti-China subversion activities like Sun Yat-sen did in 1911
Republican Revolution. The massive turnout in 1989 in support of the Beijing student movement has
always been quoted by the pro-China power bloc as a proof of subversive elements in Hong Kong using
Hong Kong as a base to threaten China. The National Security Bill (Article 23) issue is about further
restricting civil rights in Hong Kong; it caused huge protest demonstration in 2003 which led, eventually
in 2005, to the replacement of Tung Chee-wah, the first Chief Executive of HKSAR.
10. The audience may find in Yans and Mings therapeutic treatment a homage to the similar scene from
Theft Under the Sun (1997).
11. The allegorical remark here on the role that the Security Bureau played in the 2003 National Security Bill
(Article 23) is also remarkable. In the so-called anti-Article 23 protests, the Secretary of Security, Virginia
Ip, and the Security Bureau she leads was, because of their political dispositions, a magnet for the
targeted criticisms of the Bill.
12. Mr Ching Cheungs espionage case, which emerged after Infernal Affairs release, sent shock waves
throughout Hong Kong because the case mirrors plot devices from Infernal Affairs. Mr Ching is a Hong
Kong-born, 1970s-generation, Maoist-inspired political figure. He was recruited by the pro-PRC leftist
establishment and served loyally there for a long period. After June 4th, he resigned from the patriotic
newspaper Wenhuibao and has since become critical of the Chinese authorities. His resignation was seen
as a defection by the patriotic-leftist camp but as a genuine patriotic act in the eyes of the democratic
movement. As for the recent charge of espionage, some press comments contend that it is due to his over-
the-top patriotism. According to the ironic moral, which is so commonly repeated in Hong Kong, Being
a Hong Kong Chinese, you have to love your country [China]but you must not love her too much.
I would like to thank Meaghan Morvis and Laleen Jayamanne for their careful reading of
and constructive comments on the drafts of this essay at different stages. I would also like to
extend my gratitude to the Humanities Research Centre of the Australian National Univer-
sity for the support I received during the Visiting Fellowship in 2005 when this essay was
being written up.
References
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402 Law Wing-Sang
Special terms
huigui
suanqing jiuzhang
Authors biography
Dr Law Wing-Sang is Assistant Professor at Department of Cultural Studies, Lingnan University. He earned
his PhD degree at University of Technology, Sydney in 2002. His doctoral dissertation Collaborative Colonial-
ism: A Genealogy of Competing Chineseness in Hong Kong will be published by Hong Kong University Press. He
has also published articles in journals such as Positions. East Asian Culture Critique, Traces: A Multilingual
Series of Cultural Theory and Translation and Dushu. He is also the editor of a number of Chinese cultural
studies collection and translation works.
Contact address: Department of Cultural Studies, Lingnan University, Tuen Mun, Hong Kong

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This article was downloaded by: [Lingnan University Library]

On: 29 August 2013, At: 20:29

Inter-Asia Cultural Studies

The violence of time and memory

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14649370600849264

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

The violence of time and memory undercover: Hong Kongs

KEYWORDS: Memory, gangster films, time, structure of feeling, undercover, allegory,

1997 and the politics of temporality

ISSN 14649373 Print/ISSN 14698447 Online/06/03038320 2006 Taylor & Francis

cultural and political experiences in contemporary Hong Kong.

Memory movies and the June 4th trauma

interest in memory is tantamount to a nostalgic re-examination of Hong Kongs British colonial

Double identity and the undercover-cop genre

Unlimited space: rooftop dialectic

shimmering modern buildings, which represent the powers of financial capitalism,

Uninterrupted time: reinvention of the self

Boundless suffering: the undercover cop in his own family

Psychotherapy for the undercover cop: colonial and post-colonial

Duplicity: one country, two systems

The justice of history?

Conclusion: undercover Hong Kong

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