Chinese Martial Arts and Media Culture

Global Perspectives

Tim Trausch

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781786609038
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

Signs and images of Chinese martial arts increasingly circulate through global media cultures. As tropes of martial arts are not restricted to what is considered one medium, one region, or one (sub)genre, the essays in this collection are looking across and beyond these alleged borders. From 1920s wuxia cinema to the computer game cultures of the information age, they trace the continuities and transformations of martial arts and media culture across time, space, and multiple media platforms.

Chapter 1

The Demise of the Wuxia Film?

The Mutation of a Genre from Manifestation of Crisis to Postmodern Pastiche and Reaffirmation of Centralized Power

Clemens von Haselberg

Beginning with the phenomenal international success of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000; CTHD henceforth) and Hero (2002), the tradition-steeped Chinese wuxia film genre seemed to embark on another glorious boom, following the craze in late 1920s Shanghai, the Cantonese and Mandarin renewals in Hong Kong in the 1960s, and the resurgence associated with Hong Kong New Wave cinema in the early 1990s, roughly paralleled by its new awakening on the Chinese mainland.¹ However, there seems to be a certain lack of clarity in the definition of this supposed new boom. Teo (172) has maintained that the wuxia film has in its latest incarnation merged with the history epic. Of the films he names as examples, however, Curse of the Golden Flower (2006), The Banquet (2006), A Battle of Wits (2006), The Warlords (2007), An Empress and the Warriors (2008), and Red Cliff (two parts, 2008/2009) render any definition of wuxia film problematic. If we draw on the simplest possible definition of the wuxia film—namely, the combination of wu 武 (military or martial themes) with xia 侠, a culturally specific term denoting a chivalrous and righteous fighting character not in employment to any one liege lord—we will find that most of these films feature the former more or less prominently while completely lacking the latter.² While Teo speaks of the wuxia film as “having been grafted onto the period epic” (172), it is hard to see why these films are more than just period epics.

Two questions result from these observations: Where does the wuxia film of the new millennium actually stand, and does it really experience a new boom? And if the cited examples are not wuxia films, what makes Teo and others consider them to be so? I suggest that we can not only answer these questions but also understand what is at the heart of them and of the wuxiafilm as a whole if we consider it as a genre of crisis. In order to understand the meaning of crisis in the genre’s development, a closer look at two central motifs of the wuxia film and its literary precedents, as well as a short overview of the wuxia film’s history are necessary. Subsequently, I will delineate how with CTHD and Hero, the wuxia film lost its momentum as a genre of crisis and back this up with examples from films appearing in the wake of these two. Finally, I will come back to the history epic and the question of similarities or fusions with the wuxia film.

Xia and Jianghu as Symbolic Manifestations of Crisis

To approach the wuxia film as a genre, further explication of the figure of the xia and an adjacent term, jianghu 江湖, are needed. The xia has been likened to the European knight-errant in previous works in English, most notably James J. Y. Liu’s The Chinese Knight-Errant, which first used this translation for the term and thus set a precedent for others to follow (Ma; Teo). Such mentions usually go along with notes on where the two concepts culturally diverge, for example, the lack of importance of religion and romantic love for the xia (Liu 196–97). While the importance of constant travel attached to both figures constitutes an apparent parallel, the world the xia roams carries a culturally specific term, jianghu. It has existed long before it found its way into first xia-themed literature³ and then film and appears as early as the Zhuangzi (Yu J., 159). While it is far beyond the scope of the argument pursued here to elaborate on the meanings and development of the term, suffice it to say that it carries an array of complex and changing meanings varying according to the context of usage.⁴ In xia-themed literature and films, while it still resonates with the complexity of the term, it can be somewhat broken down to being an opposite of chaoting 朝廷 or miaotang 庙堂. These roughly interchangeable terms denote the imperial court, but when they are used to describe a specific fictional world, this denotative meaning can be extended to include all of its institutions, including military, courts of law, and the like, in other words, the world of official communication and power relations. Jianghu, in contrast, is their unofficial counterpart, a space these institutions often do not reach and which is consequently ruled by armed conflict, power struggles, and vigilantism. It is a world in constant flux, populated by traveling figures like xia, bandits, monks, and the like, in which law and order can only be upheld by the selfless efforts of the righteous to battle the corrupted. Good and evil are usually clearly demarcated, not least because they are not inhibited in their actions by functioning social control mechanisms. In many cases, the world of jianghu in xia-themed representations can be considered as a complexity-reducing parallel construct to the more complicated moral and social constellations of the official (i.e., “real”) world.

In consequence, the xia figure is principally good, but unruly. As David Der-wei Wang has pointed out in his study of nineteenth-century xiayi 侠义 literature,⁵ the topic of jianghu and the xia figure opens up fissures in judicial discourse, since any necessity of the xia figure’s vigilantism to bring evildoers to justice automatically implies a weakness of official institutions responsible for upholding law and order (118). This is the reason why xia-themed literature over the course of many different forms of representation has been used (and read) as a critique of the ruling regime. Yet, however critical xia-themed literature may be, it is still basically concerned with justice and the reinstallation of order, and thus a wish fulfillment fantasy. A fundamental dilemma results from this fact: The xia figure’s triumph over evil must almost always end in a reinstallation of functioning rule, which in turn cannot have tolerance for the existence of the xia figure with its disrespect for universal and fixed rules and its refusal to accept these to be of higher value than its own moral judgment. Different solutions to this dilemma have been found over the course of literary history. The xia figure can be reintegrated into social order, as is the case in the classic novel The Water Margin; it can be killed; it can be transformed into a ruler, as in some chuanqi 传奇 and huaben 话本 tales; it can disappear mysteriously, as in many of the chuanqi tales featuring xia figures male and female (nüxia 女侠)⁶; in some cases, female xia figures are domesticated, as in the nineteenth-century novel A Tale of Heroes and Lovers.

It is this relation between the xia figure and the jianghu world with the official world of miaotang which constitutes the xia tale in its different incarnations through the centuries as a literary genre of crisis—a crisis in relation to the ruling power which in one way or another has lost some of its legitimacy. In the more directly political xia narratives, this becomes immediately apparent. Song Jiang and his band of outlaws in The Water Margin, for example, challenge the Song court with the slogan “to carry out the way on behalf of heaven” (ti tian xing dao 替天行道). The ways in which justice and order are returned in the end can be quite sophisticated. In the famous chuanqi tale The Curly-Bearded Stranger, the titular character refrains from his plan to conquer the empire after meeting Li Shimin 李世民, the future founder of the Tang dynasty. Instead, he usurps the throne of a faraway fantastical realm beyond the sea. In a later variation of this motif, the huaben tale The Song Founder Escorts Jingniang recounts the fictionalized exploits of the founder of the Song dynasty, Zhao Kuangyin 赵匡胤. His vigilante personality is legitimized by the fact that he restored order and peace in China when he became emperor. In both cases, idealization of a glorious past translates into veiled (possibly even subconscious) critique of the present regime. In the xiayi literature of the nineteenth century, the xia figure is teamed up with the legendary officials of gong’an literature in the service of the court—again, in a subtle way, the incapability of the officials to protect the realm without enlisting extralegal support tells of an erosion of trust in governmental authority.

The Transition to Film and the Transformation of Crisis Consciousness

These are the precepts under which the xia figure and its jianghu habitat entered the twentieth century, and with it, film. With this change, which for reasons of convenience we might call the entry of the xia figure into modernity, many things stayed more or less the same in the basic narrative and character setup, but there were some significant changes. These result predominantly from the fact that the xia figure all of a sudden had become an anachronism, its sword-wielding, supernatural fighting techniques without any direct connection to the lifeworld of its audience. The symbolic communication of wuxia literature and film consequently became somewhat more indirect. New entities, particularly those connected to the nation, like the nation-state, the nation-people, national sovereignty, and national identity, had to be negotiated in a form that could not address them directly. Instead, these foreign concepts merged with broader indigenous ideas of collective identity and belonging. Still, it is my contention that within this framework, the wuxia film continued the tradition of enunciation of crisis and became a genre of crisis within the tradition of Chinese cinema(s).

The wuxia film genre had first developed in the mid- to late 1920s in Shanghai. While it is a matter of perspective and contention which films can be considered progenitors of the genre, it is consensus that The Burning of Red Lotus Monastery (1928; Burning henceforth) was its first massive success and that it kick-started a first wave of wuxia films, lasting from 1928 to 1931.⁷ The only surviving films from the entire period are Red Heroine (1929) and the sixth episode of Swordswoman of Huangjiang (1931), as well as shorter fragments of The Hero Gan Fengchi (1928) and Valiant Girl White Rose (1929). These, as well as existent summaries of other films’ content, give us an impression of the dominant themes, elements, and stylistics employed at the time. The typical example would be films like Burning or Swordswoman of Huangjiang, the first episode loosely based on wuxia literature from just a few years before and the following episodes making up new adventures of the same characters, departing from the original source material, to capitalize on the success of the first film. There is a conspicuous mass of films which tell stories of the uprooting of xia figures, or, more precisely, of the development of ordinary people into xia. The protagonists of Burning, Swordswoman of Huangjiang, and Red Heroine are sent to, taken in, or rescued by mysterious master fighters, respectively, and consequently trained in the martial arts by them.⁸ In the further proceedings of the story, the protagonists return from their training as fully developed xia figures with supernatural abilities ranging from extraordinary body strength to the ability to fly and shoot knives or energy balls from the palm. In their new capacity as “avenger[s] on behalf of society” (Altenburger, 31), they set out to battle the dangers threatening the rightful order in their respective environments. The titular protagonist in Red Heroine frees her friends from an evil general’s hands and in the process incidentally helps defeat his ominous “western army” (xi jun 西军) which has usurped her homeland. Lu Xiaoqing 陆小青, the main character in Burning, defeats the evil monks in the Red Lotus Monastery and frees the good governor they have imprisoned there with the help of a company of other xia characters. Fang Yuqin 方玉琴 in Swordswoman of Huangjiang is driven by her desire to avenge her father’s death, but in the process also frees her native village from the terror of a gang led by his killer.

All three conspicuously share narratives of a lost or threatened order which in the end is reinstated with the help of the xia protagonists. The allusive power of this constellation in the context of a Chinese empire disgraced by foreign powers and transformed into a dysfunctional republic, carved up by various warlords, is obvious and is here channeled into a wishful conclusion of reinstating desirable order. More recent events are reflected, as well: The May 30th Incident of 1925, in which the shooting of Chinese protesters by British police officers in Shanghai caused severe strikes and riots, gave existent anti-imperialist and nationalist sentiments the better of the admiration of the Western powers. The Northern Expedition, on the other hand, reached an end in 1928, the same year Burning started the wuxia film craze. The resulting end of the Warlord Era and the unification...

Table of contents

• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Martial Arts and Media Culture in the Information Era: Glocalization, Heterotopia, Hyperculture
• 1 The Demise of the Wuxia Film? The Mutation of a Genre from Manifestation of Crisis to Postmodern Pastiche and Reaffirmation of Centralized Power
• 2 Transposing Jianghu in Chinese Martial Arts Cinema from the Twentieth to the Twenty-First Centuries
• 3 A Touch of Sin, Translation, and Transmedial Imagination
• 4 The Effortless Lightness of Action: Hong Kong Martial Arts Films in the Age of Immediacy
• 5 Imagining Transcultural Mediascapes: Martial Arts, African Appropriation, and the Deterritorializing Flows of Globalization
• 6 From the Boxers to Kung Fu Panda: The Chinese Martial Arts in Global Entertainment
• 7 Bruce Lee, Bruceploitation, and Beyond: Renegotiating Discourses of Original and Copy
• 8 David Henry Hwang’s Kung Fu in Cross-Cultural Perspectives
• 9 In Search of the 36th Virtual Chamber: Martial Arts in Video Games from Screen Fighting to Wuxia Worldbuilding
• 10 The Multiuser Dungeon Era: The Origins of Chinese Martial Arts Online Games
• Afterword: Martial Arts and Media Supplements
• Index
• About the Contributors