Abstract Note
Cyber Wars (2004) is Singapore's first science fiction feature film and one of the very few science fiction films to emerge from Southeast Asia. Set in Sintawan, a dystopic Asian city-state, the film showcases humans who have access to a range of technologies that can alter identity, restructure the organic body, or produce a virtual body. In twenty-first century Sintawan, all communication and financial data transactions are recorded by the Cyberlink, a virtual system that also serves as a repository for the identities of all legalized citizens. I argue that Cyber Wars, through its shifting cyborg bodies and its Chinese-infused Cyberlink, examines a key socio-cultural dilemma confronting contemporary Singapore. Namely, that the rise of China within the global marketplace raises uncomfortable questions of Singapore's own, very ambivalent, transnational Chinese identity in Southeast Asia.
