03/04/2026
"The Rise of China and the Chinese Migrant Woman in Singapore Cinema".
- A public lecture by Dr. Ng How Wee (University of Westminster)
Date: 23 April 2026 (Thursday)
Time: 7pm – 9pm (Registration starts at 6.30pm)
Venue: SUSS Block C Level 1, C.1.05, Fish Tank (Beside Starbucks)
The talk will be conducted in English.
This event is co-organised by the Chinese Studies programme, Singapore University of Social Sciences, and the Singapore Society of Asian Studies.
Vacancies are limited and will be on a first-come, first-serve basis. Reserve a seat via this link before 19 April: https://suss.au1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_5vWLWBVhrn0q5VA
Abstract
This talk traces how Singapore cinema has represented mainland Chinese migrant women over nearly three decades, and why those portrayals matter to audiences, policymakers and filmmakers alike. Working on a corpus of ten feature films (1997–2025), the study shows that the mainland Chinese migrant woman functions as a performative foil whose on-screen meanings shift as politics, industry and markets change.
The corpus is categorised into three groups. The first are locally financed and domestically oriented films, tends to treat PRC women as antagonistic outsiders and caricatures. The second group, aligned with social-realist aesthetics, grants migrant women more sympathetic visibility but often instrumentalizes them as vehicles for broader social critique rather than as full characters. The third group reflects transnational market dynamics and institutional ties to the People’s Republic of China: here migrant women are depicted with more nuance and market-ready appeal, shaped by co-production incentives, platform investment and the broader project of telling China-facing stories for regional audiences.
By connecting representational shifts to industrial forces, including co-production networks, Chinese market expansion, platform influence, and to geopolitical discourses about China’s global voice, the study offers the first systematic stocktake of this recurring cinematic figure in Singapore film. The findings matter beyond film studies: they reveal how cinema contributes to everyday understandings of belonging, gender and regional power, and how cultural production negotiates between critique, empathy and commercial circulation in the age of the Sinosphere.
Speaker
Ng How Wee 黄浩威 is senior lecturer at University of Westminster, specialising in cultural production in the Sinosphere and co-founding director of the Association for Curators and Programmers of Asian Cinemas (ACPAC). Selected publications include monographs The Chinese Censorship Discourse on Television Dramas: Worrying about the Audience in Postsocialist China (2026), and Drama Box and the Social Theatre of Singapore: Cultural Intervention and Artistic Autonomy 1990-2006 (2024); and essays “Decolonising China: Decolonising China on screen: curating cinemas of the Sinosphere for the university classroom” (2025) and “Taipei Golden Horse film awards and Singapore cinema: Prestige, privilege and disarticulation” (2020).
