Since the mid-1980s, the West has been “discovering” Chinese cinema. At the same time, more frequent multinational cooperation in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Mainland China has reconfigured the regional landscape of mass media. From pre-production and funding to distribution and exhibition, Chinese cinema crosses the geopolitical boundaries of traditional nationstates. As cinematic interaction between the “three Chinas” increases, the changing mediascape has prompted some to rethink what “China” is, and what the potential meaning of “Chinese cinema” is. Originally introduced by Taiwan- and Hong Kong-based scholars in the early 1990s, the phrase “Chinese-language film” (huayu dianying) has broadened to designate “any film produced in a Chinese-speaking society.” A linguistic description, so to speak, has been used “to unify and supersede older geographical divisions and political discriminations” amid the changing geopolitics and mediascapes in post-Cold War Chinese-speaking societies.

Since the late 1980s and early 1990s, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and subsequently Mainland China have also seen the rise of tongzhi/queer movements and the emergence of tongzhi/queer cultures, studies, and communal consciousness. The term tongzhi first translated the Soviet concept of “comrade” (or cadre), and was initially adopted by the Communist and Nationalist Parties alike. After 1949, tongzhi became the preferred non-hierarchical term to address everyone under the communist regime in People's Republic of China. While it is still used in present-day China for formal introductions, especially in public ceremonies, its popularity as an everyday appellation has waned in China's postsocialist era (from the 1980s onward).

In the meantime, tongzhi was appropriated by queer communities and officially introduced to the public by Hong Kong gay critics Michael Lam (a.k.a. Maike) and Edward Lam (a.k.a. Lin Yihua), at first casually, in some of Michael Lam's writings in around 1985,7 and then formally by Edward Lam for the first Lesbian and Gay Film Festival in Hong Kong in December 1988. Within a few years, tongzhi became the most common term in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and (by the new millennium) metropolitan areas in Mainland China, to refer to those who are characterized by samesex attractions.