When Chinese directors, backed by funding from Hong Kong and Taiwan, picked up their cameras and shot films like Raise the Red Lantern and Farewell My Concubine, they created an image of China framed in gaudy reds that, as Peking University film professor Huang Shixian has written, "unconsciously produced new folk customs and an oriental spectacle."
連後續中國導演自己掌鏡、港台合資的《大紅燈籠高高掛》和《霸王別姬》，畫面呈現出來的中國意象，都常定格在厚重俗艷的大紅色上，「不自覺扮演起製造中國新民俗和東方奇觀的角色，」北京電影學院教授黃式憲曾如此評論。