Wuxia novelist Jin Yong’s legacy minus the Hong Kong factor

In July 1981, Jin Yong (金庸) visited mainland China on Beijing’s invitation. He was said to be the first non-communist Hongkonger to meet Deng Xiaoping, the de facto supreme leader. Deng began his welcome with an enthusiastic admission to being a fan: “We’re already old friends. I’ve read your novels.” At that time, Jin Yong’s works were still banned in China.

Fast forward to November 2018 — practically a who’s who of notable political, business and arts figures paid respects at Jin Yong’s funerary wake. Among the numerous flower wreaths adorning the funeral parlour were those from Chinese President Xi Jinping, Premier Li Keqiang and former Premier Zhu Rongji. Condolences from the highest leaders of the Chinese government had also been conveyed by proxy to the bereaved family.

Such honours enjoyed by a writer of wuxia (武侠, “martial arts and chivalry”) fiction were unimaginable before Jin Yong, and remain unshared by any confrere.

To be sure, Jin Yong (the pen name of Louis Cha Leung-yung (查良镛, 1924 – 2018) was more than a weaver of wuxia stories. As co-founder of the influential Hong Kong newspaper Ming Pao (《明报》), Jin Yong was a dedicated editor and a political commentator with a strong sense of mission. He participated in Hong Kong politics.

Nevertheless, he is most famous for his canon of 15 wuxia titles, so widely read that for a long time, his works could allegedly be found “wherever ethnic Chinese exist”. Over 100 million copies — or 300 million “sets” or “volumes”, according to Jin Yong himself in 2005 — have been sold, not considering the rampancy of pirated copies throughout the sinophone world. The novels have been translated into English, French, Finnish, Korean, Japanese, Thai, Vietnamese and other languages.

Beyond the printed page, the Jin Yong canon, originally written from the 1950s up to 1972, found expanded life in a remarkably prolific array of TV and film adaptations, which supposedly number close to 130 over a period of six decades. They include mainland Chinese, Taiwanese, Hong Kong and Singaporean productions, and even a Japanese anime series based on The Return of the Condor Heroes (《神雕侠侣》).

Through what Paul B. Foster calls the “kungfu industrial complex”, the Jin Yong canon has contributed significantly to the success of illustrious Hong Kong actors, directors and action choreographers, such as the “Five Tigers of TVB” and Wong Kar-wai. Its presence was extended into comics, computer games, mobile games as well as other forms for mass consumption.

Flooding so many channels as one of the strongest consolidating and defining forces of wuxia culture, Jin Yong shaped the common memory of multiple generations across Greater China and Southeast Asia, providing widely understood tropes and other semiotic material.

Much ink has been spilled over the merits and attraction of Jin Yong’s stories. Analysts highlight, among other things, their grand, learned synthesis of Chinese culture; the masterful fusion of the highbrow and the lowbrow; the forging of a new refined vernacular language; the infusion of relatable and compelling humanity in Jin Yong’s characters; the powerful examples of courage, devotion and righteousness; a continually boundary-transcending vision of heroism and of its interpenetration with “nationalism”. The broad spectrum of heroes, loved for various qualities, terminates somewhat paradoxically in Wei Xiaobao the cunning fake eunuch and anti-hero of The Deer and the Cauldron (《鹿鼎记》).

On the flip side, there had also been a resounding wave of harsh criticisms in mainland China from the 1990s to the early 2000s. Jin Yong’s works were disparaged by some as vulgar, outmoded, solely commercially driven and/or painting an undesirable and misleading picture of the Chinese people. Powered by loathing on a palpably visceral level, this was part of a pushback against the deep-reaching influx of Hong Kong’s popular culture after China’s reform and opening up began.

In any case, the towering stature of Jin Yong on the cultural horizon is well-established today. He had truly elevated and transformed wuxia fiction forever. For writers and readers alike, no one — if we may mimic what German mathematician David Hilbert said of fellow mathematician Georg Cantor’s set theory — shall expel us from the paradise that Jin Yong had created.

Even so, this paradise is a dying one. Make no mistake, the sinophone kungfu industrial complex is still churning out manifold manifestations of the same core set of intellectual property. But beneath the veneer of continued media hype, the winds of change blow hard.

If the Baidu Index is any indication, the online search volume for the Chinese word “wuxia” has dropped sharply since 2012, while “wuxia fiction” (武侠小说) has seen a sure and steady decrease since 2014. The whole wuxia genre as it is traditionally known is stuck in gradual demise.

More specifically, the Jin Yong canon is increasingly becoming the cherished “classic” for generations growing old and passing on, and yet more distant to the post-millennials. Even when the young sometimes seem attracted to superficially wuxia-esque RPGs, the gameworlds they are “into” tend to be far more fantastical in nature.

In our fast-changing world with ever-emerging concerns and distractions, people’s consumption habits, cultural literacies and sensibilities are shifting. Overlooking a constantly proliferating sea of new literature (especially online literature), one can see that the neo-wuxia brought to global prominence by Jin Yong is ceding ground to, among other things, a handful of Doctor-Strangesque variants or separate genres that have inherited just a nebulous, evolving sense of wuxia-ness. Xuanhuan (玄幻, “mystical fantasy”) and contemporary xianxia (仙侠, “transcendent heroes”) novels, for example, show little to no interest in martial arts and the pugilistic world (江湖 jianghu / 武林 wulin) as traditionally imagined.

Instead, they dive into the magical, the thaumaturgical, transcendence with a much more transhumanistic flavour, as well as a more mind-boggling cosmology. In the pursuits of personal transcendence and the rivalries or unions of fantastical beings portrayed in such works, the penumbra of jianghu/wulin as pictured by Jin Yong, along with the associated human drama, may be discerned only to some degree. (Notably, even wuxia-inspired Kung Fu Panda turned xuanhuan by its third instalment.)

The supersession is perhaps not so surprising. Commentators have noted since decades ago that Jin Yong had effectively brought the wuxia genre to its natural culmination and end. Like the giants and superhuman corpses of archaic Chinese mythology that had metamorphosed into geographical features, Jin Yong is, as scholars of Icelandic culture would put it, “dying into the landscape”.

His wuxia masterpieces are destined to be great literature that must be more than mere entertainment in the age of the over-entertained. They are settling under their own weight into a deep cultural source and prima materia, becoming less of something painstakingly read and enjoyed on its own.

That Jin Yong will thus live on in redacted blurriness is also unwittingly mirrored in the way Chinese Communist officials (and those who toe their line) promote and exalt him in various cultural or tourism-related events or initiatives. Especially in the era of Xi Jinping’s tightening control over the Chinese people’s hearts, minds and behaviour, they do so through a selective prism.

Certain aspects tend to be emphasised — mostly, passion for one’s country and people, heroism with a magnified outlook, and the richness or charms of Chinese culture, all sometimes said in the same breath to project the “soft power” of the Chinese nation. Sometimes it seems as if Jin Yong’s stories were expressly written to fit and support the discourse of Xi Jinping Thought.

Necessarily downplayed are the themes of personal freedom and uncondemned unconventionality. Think Linghu Chong of The Smiling, Proud Wanderer (《笑傲江湖》) and Yang Guo of The Return of the Condor Heroes. Largely passed over too are the “Hong Kong characteristics”, if you will.

There can be no zoom-in on the specifics of Hong Kong’s historical environment that had empowered Jin Yong’s writings and made them possible. By these we mean the enablement afforded by sociopolitical liberalism on one hand, and conditioned by the shaping forces of full-blown capitalism on the other. All these had been absent and officially abhorred on the other side of the Bamboo Curtain during the time the novels were written.

More recent hailers of Jin Yong seem to forget that, as Chip Tsao (or To Kit) once put it, from the standpoint of leftist theory not a single one of the master’s novels could have been OK to write. In these times when Chinese netizens bristle over the doubly faithful portrayal (i.e., faithful to both history and Liu Cixin’s original sci-fi novel) of the Cultural Revolution’s horrors in the recent Netflix adaptation of The Three-Body Problem, just what are the mainland-based promoters to do with The Smiling, Proud Wanderer, for example? What are they to do with the fact that this timeless classic by Jin Yong is such a through-and-through satire of the Cultural Revolution and an allegorical denunciation of the perceived grotesqueries of Maoist China?

Understandably, the Chinese Communist Party and those ensconced in its shadow may not prefer to be reminded that Hong Kong used to be very different, and that the wonders of Jin Yong are an iconic part of the pre-1997 Hong Kong successes. After all, what was that anti-Jin Yong barrage some two decades ago if not the repulsed expression of a pre-reform mindset painfully aware of the fundamental divide between the SAR and its hinterland?

Considering that Jin Yong spent many years and much effort after 1972 to revise his entire wuxia canon, we can be sure that he cared a lot about leaving behind a proper legacy. One wonders how he would feel to see the way China squeezes all it can from that legacy minus the Hong Kong factor, subsuming him into its fold of glorified Chinese greatness.

We cannot help but recall a memorable part in Jin Yong’s Heaven Sword and Dragon Sabre (《倚天屠龙记》), where the hero Zhang Wuji learns Taiji swordplay from the grandmaster Zhang Sanfeng through a progressive forgetting of the moves shown to him. What the protagonist experiences is really a profound apprehension of the swordplay’s essence through reduction. Something of an ironic opposite of that may be happening in China today: people seem to think they are “getting” Jin Yong as they forget inconvenient realities in plain sight.

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