The Shaw Brothers Studio has long been the stuff of legend. While a number of monographs and articles have focused on it in recent years, much about the studio—its films, its personnel, and its patriarchal head, Run Run Shaw—remains relatively untouched, undiscovered, or simply neglected. The Shaw Brothers legend is still intact given the lack of books seriously devoted to peeling the layers off the legend and filling it with historiographical fact, cultural criticism, and textual analysis. China Forever: The Shaw Brothers and Diasporic Cinema, edited by Poshek Fu, is a commendable effort at doing just that. The book collects a dozen essays by scholars dealing with various aspects of the studio's output. Its basic theme is the globalization of Chinese cinema, with the Shaw Brothers Studio being an early and highly effective model of this process. Shaw Brothers, nonetheless, was also “a complex cultural institution that has produced a wide range of multicultural entertainments across diverse historical periods and regional settings” (p. 133).

After reading essays tackling Shaw Brothers' Cantonese productions (produced in Hong Kong), its Malay films (produced in Singapore), and its Mandarin films in genres including martial arts (both the kung fu form and the chivalric knight-errant variety known as wuxia), melodramas (dubbed the wenyi film in Chinese), and musicals (of the traditional Chinese operatic kind as well as the modern song and dance form), one fully realizes the remarkable diversity of the studio. Siu-Leung Li's essay on the Shaws' musical films and Paul Pickowicz's analysis of Hong Kong Nocturne, the 1966 musical directed by the imported Japanese director Inoue Umetsugu, help establish Shaw Brothers as a cosmopolitan dream factory. On the other hand, Ramona Curry gives good insight into The Love Eterne (1962), a traditional musical of the huangmei diao (Yellow Plum Melody) type with which the studio established its pan-Chinese audience.

The image of Shaw Brothers as a studio churning out cheap martial arts “chop-sockies” is only one fragment of the whole, although this very fragment established the studio's reputation in the West. The book contains important essays (by Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua and Fanon Che Wilkins) devoted to discussing the kung fu films that Shaw became so famous for. The essays go further than the Hong Kong or Southeast Asian reception of these genre products and show how a supposedly local genre penetrated into the consciousness of black American audiences, illustrating the studio's outreach from the late 1950s to the 1970s. Cha-Jua's essay is particularly relevant in addressing the background of black nationalism that the kung fu genre aroused, and in appraising the blaxploitation films in the light of kung fu influence. His analysis asserts that Bruce Lee's nationalism as employed in his films “was not a reactionary nationalism” (p. 219) but was “anti-imperialist” and “imbricated with racial and class consciousness” (p. 217). This observation often goes unmentioned, and the kung fu genre as a whole still functions as a point of reference for reactions against expressions of nationalism in cinema.

The book offers a welcome comprehensive coverage. Timothy Barnard's essay on Shaw Brothers' Malay films and Sai-shing Yung's essay on the Shaws' expansion into Malaya reveal a side of Shaw Brothers that is relatively unexplored in academic analysis but nevertheless crucial in demonstrating the “cross-regional, cross-genre, and multiethnic” (p. 133) nature of the Shaws' enterprise. In this sense, the book's title, China Forever, misleads, as the Shaw brothers, Run Run and Runme, proved to be highly sensitive to the cultural needs and desires of the Malay and Indian communities in the territory (Malaysia and Singapore) where they founded their filmmaking empire.

Through its Malay films, Shaw Brothers eventually came to support a Malay cultural identity when it employed artists from the bangsawan (popular Malay opera) and nurtured the first important Malay cinematic figure in the person of the versatile P. Ramlee, who was an actor, director, singer, songwriter and all-round musician. China Forever will prove to be an indispensable volume for the inclusion of these essays. However, the book as a whole suffers from an insufficient attention to facts and dates (Cathay's MP and GI studio was founded in 1956, not in 1966; p. 67) as well as an inconsistent spelling of Chinese names: No explanation is offered as to why certain names are spelled in the Wade-Giles system when the Pinyin forms are usually given at the same time (and why the names of certain directors and stars are only given in Pinyin and others in Wade-Giles). Despite this oversight, the book remains an important contribution to the growing literature on the Hong Kong and Chinese cinemas.