As the first half of the book detailed, the prefigurative materials surrounding Chow's Hong Kong television and film career and screen images have established his star image as an urban citizen of modern Hong Kong. Although Chow rarely appeared in a pre-modern film before he moved to Hollywood, many scholars have noted that the traditional Chinese cultural code yi (altruism and horizontal loyalty between brothers and friends) significantly shaped Chow's pre-1997 star persona (Louie 2002; Williams 1997). The distinctive combination of modern urban citizenship and the traditional Chinese cultural code of yi consolidated Chow's star image as a symbol of Hong Kongers’ hybrid identity that simultaneously relates to and deviates from the West and China historically, socially and culturally. Signifying Hong Kong's pride, Chow was awarded an honorary doctorate by the City University of Hong Kong in 2001. In 2003, Chow also became the first and only contemporary celebrity to date whose life story had been published in a school textbook in Hong Kong. In a sense, Chow established a star persona as a Hong Konger per se.

In this chapter, I will continue to examine how Chow's star image mediates with the social perception of the Hong Kong identity by focusing on the publicity surrounding his Hollywood films and the recent huayu dianying (Chinese-language cinema). Since the beginning of the new millennium, commercial cinema in mainland China has expanded on an unprecedented scale. Annual production increased from thirty-eight films in 2002 to 618 in 2014 (Entgroup 2010: 16; Entgroup 2015: 13). The rapid growth of the mainland Chinese film market and the development of transnational Chinese cinema are currently demanding a large number of film talents, either in front of or behind the camera.

At the same time, however, the production of Hong Kong films has continued to drop. In 2011, the Hong Kong film industry produced only fifty-six films (Zhong 2012: 2), less than half the figure produced in 2000. Subsequently, many Hong Kong stars and filmmakers, whether they remained in or left Hong Kong in the 1990s, started to work in and even migrated to mainland China from the early 2000s.