Taipei’s Golden Horse Awards Ceremony – popularly known as the ‘Chinese Oscars’ – is a glamorous, high-profile annual industry event that follows the film festival of the same name. Its goal is to recognise excellence in Chinese language cinema but in 2016 an unscripted moment stole the show, shining a harsh light not just on the divide between the ‘first’ and ‘second’ waves in Taiwan New Cinema but also on the fraught colonial and postcolonial histories of Taiwan. During the award ceremony, a recap video was shown in honour of Myanmar-born film director Midi Z (Zhao Deyin in Mandarin), part of the ‘second’ wave, who was named Outstanding Taiwanese Filmmaker of the Year. In the video clip, the celebrated Taiwan New Cinema auteur Hou Hsiao-hsien (part of the ‘first’) was asked by someone off screen to comment on Midi (‘What makes him stand out from the crowd?’). Hou quipped: ‘The difference is that … he [Midi] probably came here as an illegal immigrant!’ Hou’s punchline – a reference to the plot of Midi’s 2012 film Poor Folk (and the original title also carries the word for illegal immigrant) – gave Midi no other choice but to defend himself on the podium. ‘In response to director Hou’s earlier comment,’ said Midi, ‘I want to clarify that I did not smuggle into the country. I came here legally in 1998 when I was sixteen years old’ (53rd Golden Horse Awards 2016). Audiences laughed, but what was supposed to be benign humour was also poorly masked bias.

In his teasing, Hou failed to remember the diverse, pan-Chinese background marking so many Taiwanese directors: Wang Tong, Edward Yang, Tsai Ming-liang, and even Hou himself. The seemingly harmless joke exposes the settler/Han Chinese superiority hidden beneath liberal democracy and multiculturalism, a position that ‘obscures the socio-historical contexts of the rise of a transnational migrant filmmaker’ (Shen 2018, 3). The implicit racial and ethnic bias is also structural, written into the very awards ceremony itself, as is evidenced by the treatment Tsai Ming-liang had received there fifteen years earlier. In 2001, instead of being named Outstanding Taiwanese Filmmaker of the Year (as the award was renamed the following year), Tsai received, horrifically, a ‘Special Jury Prize for an Individual’.