Edinburgh Napier University

  The political, historical, and cultural complexities across Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan have made terms like "Chinese cinema" or "Chinese-language cinema" highly contested within film studies. Andrew Higson’s The Concept of National Cinema highlights the relationship between national cinema and the construction of national cultural identity. However, this theory, grounded in traditional notions of nation and state, reveals clear limitations when applied to the cross-strait and Greater China contexts. Building on recent developments in auteur theory, this paper proposes a new auteur-based theoretical framework to address the shortcomings of traditional national cinema theory, offering a fresh perspective for examining the construction of national cultural identity in Chinese-language cinema across Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.