This thesis is a three-faceted examination of the subject, a study of the cultural representations of Chineseness, the cinematic apparatus in Hollywood cinema that accounts for such representations, and an academic interrogation of such representations from 1980-1999. By reviewing Chineseness as the ’exoticism’, the ’minority discourse’, the ’marginal’, the ’Other’, in the American mainstream society, I seek to achieve a certain knowledge about the ’clashes’, ’conflicts’ as well as ’confrontations’ between the two cultures in the cinematic world, thus providing us with the necessity and foundation for the ’dialogue’ between the two different cultures.Making use of different schools of thoughts and discourses such as postcolonial theories, feminist perspectives, Said’s Orientalism, Stam and Shohat’s ’Eurocentrism’, Metz’s cine-semiology, Foucault’s ’power’, Bhabha’s ’Otherness’, Mulvey’s ’spectacle’, and Kaplan’s ’looking relations’, this study is an inter-disciplinary critique of some representations of Chineseness in contemporary Hollywood cinema. I tend to argue that a fairly great portion of the images of the Chinese, as one part of the ’unspeakable’ minorities in the American mainstream culture, can be read as the representations of Other to the Anglo Americans, and such Otherness can to a great extent be interpreted in relation to the issue of identity politics and power imbalance especially. The portrayals of the Chinese males in films such as Rob Cohen’s 1993 Dragon: the Bruce Lee Story, Brett Ratner’s 1998 Rush Hour, Michael Cimino’s 1985 Year of the Dragon, Richard Donner’s 1998 The Lethal Weapon 4, and Antoine Fuqua’s 1997 The Replacement Killers, are often manipulated by the Hollywood hegemonic discourse into stereotypical imagery charged with mysticism, exoticism, irrationality, primitivism, fancifulness and/or malevolence, into the demonized, alienated,IVand marginalized Other. For the part of the Chinese females in Hollywood films, such as Daryle Duke’s 1986 Taipan, Michael Cimino’s 1985 Year of the Dragon, and David Cronenberg’s 1993 M. Butterfly, one can see that they are positioned as the ’Other of the Other’, as they are not only the racial and ethnic other, but also the sexual other in the imperial and patriarchal contexts. While exploring how Chineseness has been perceived, manipulated and represented in relation to power, racial politics, identity politics, occidental and oriental relations, visual spectacle and imperial gaze, centrality and marginality, this thesis constantly refers to the Otherized Chineseness in its reading of theoretical texts and cinematic works in order to understand how Chineseness has been reproduced and exploited, for historical, ideological, commercial and cultural reasons, by the Hollywood narratives. A major objective is to conduct fresh interrogations about the construction of Chineseness as the mysterious, heathen and alien Other in Hollywood cinema. Representations of Chineseness as the object of spectacle and gaze, of exotic pleasure and alien threat in the Hollywood ’Dream Factory’, are fabricated with colonial discourse and power constellations, reiterating a need for a genuine understanding of Chineseness and its own identity politics as an affirmed Otherness, an empowered minority discourse, for ideological, political, and cultural progress.