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...

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