Through historical writing, Hong investigated Taiwan under Japan colonial rule before 1945. He believes that the history of Taiwanese film should consider the perspectives of the colonial era, the postcolonial era, modernization, and globalization, rather than that of the 1980s, which is recognized by the Western perspective.
The colonization and recolonization parts of this paper can be divided into two parts: “Cross-National Consciousness” and “After Counterbalances: National Identity of the Taiwanese.” Cross-National Consciousness discusses the colonial legacy of Japan and the prevailing Greater China consciousness; after Counterbalances discusses the effects of political factors and commercial markets. Finally, “post-new cinema” and the recent development of Taiwanese film are introduced in the Future of Taiwanese Film to compensate for the lack of historical discourse on Taiwan, which is absent from current mainstream history books on world film.