https://www.scmp.com/rss/525840/feed Hu Chao is a Guangzhou-based art historian and curator. An associate research professor at Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, his research and curatorial practice examine the arts of China, Southeast Asia, and developing nations to contextualise Global South discourses. He is the author of Constructing National Identity: National Museums and Galleries in Singapore (in Chinese). en https://assets-v2.i-scmp.com/production/static/img/icons/scmp-meta-1200x630.png https://www.scmp.com Hu Chao Hu Chao It was only in my 20s, when I moved to Singapore for work, that I began hearing Hokkien, Teochew and Hainanese in everyday life. I understood nothing, nor could I distinguish between them. That was also where I first tried tieguanyin tea from Fujian, Teochew-style crab porridge and Hainanese chicken rice. I grew up in a mountainous county in Hubei province, central China. The provincial capital, Wuhan, is known as the “thoroughfare to nine provinces”. Yet in my home county I had never knowingly... https://www.scmp.com/opinion/china-opinion/article/3371501/my-generation-first-see-and-hear-china-never https://www.scmp.com/opinion/china-opinion/article/3371501/my-generation-first-see-and-hear-china-never Sat, 31 Oct 2026 01:30:05 +0000 Hu Chao Hu Chao In late August, I took my parents to see Once Upon a Time in the Middle East in their small-town cinema on the mainland. Built around an unnamed conflict widely understood to be the US-led Iraq war, the film has become the kind of phenomenon no marketing budget could buy, projected to reach 2.5 billion yuan (US$372.5 million) largely through word of mouth. Its Hong Kong and overseas release will revive geopolitical arguments over a Chinese commercial film entering a narrative world long... https://www.scmp.com/opinion/hong-kong-opinion/article/3367565/what-hong-kong-cinema-can-take-away-popular-chinese-war-film https://www.scmp.com/opinion/hong-kong-opinion/article/3367565/what-hong-kong-cinema-can-take-away-popular-chinese-war-film Sun, 20 Sep 2026 01:30:05 +0000 Hu Chao Hu Chao The much-anticipated revamped Huanggang Port, expected to open later this year, should be seen as more than a story about faster clearance. Its deeper significance lies in a question that deserves wider discussion: if border functions can be redesigned, where should border control actually operate? Living in the Greater Bay Area, where people and businesses move across administrative boundaries every day, I have watched the meaning of borders change. A border is no longer simply a line... https://www.scmp.com/opinion/hong-kong-opinion/article/3363923/huanggang-port-points-future-greater-bay-area-travel https://www.scmp.com/opinion/hong-kong-opinion/article/3363923/huanggang-port-points-future-greater-bay-area-travel Tue, 18 Aug 2026 01:30:07 +0000 Hu Chao Hu Chao Last week, while preparing a lecture on the visual culture of the Global South, I caught Google’s Gemini in a double hallucination. Cross-referencing a historical event between English and Chinese data sets, I found the English AI to be authoritative but inventing citations. In Chinese, the fabrications vanished but so did global context, replaced by an insular perspective. Disturbingly, the system cloaked Chinese content in English citations, creating a deceptive authenticity that made the... https://www.scmp.com/opinion/article/3358042/why-hong-kongs-bilingualism-uniquely-indispensable-ai-era https://www.scmp.com/opinion/article/3358042/why-hong-kongs-bilingualism-uniquely-indispensable-ai-era Thu, 25 Jun 2026 21:30:09 +0000