Stateless Subjects: Chinese Martial Arts Literature and Postcolonial History

272 Pages·2011·3.285 MB·English

by  Petrus Liu

Stateless Subjects
Chinese Martial Arts Literature
and
Postcolonial History
PETRUS LIU

East Asia Program
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York 14853

For my parents,
Shyi-Huei Liu and Mei-Fang Lee
The Cornell East Asia Series is published by the Cornell University East Asia Program
(distinct from Cornell University Press). We publish books on a variety of scholarly
topics relating to East Asia as a service to the academic community and the general
public. Standing Orders, which provide for automatic notification and invoicing of
each title in the series upon publication, are accepted.
Address submission inquiries to CEAS Editorial Board, East Asia Program, Cornell
University, 140 Uris Hall, Ithaca, New York 14853-7601.
This publication is supported by a generous grant from the Hull Memorial
Publication Fund of Cornell University.
Cover design by Brian Y. Lin.
Number 162 in the Cornell East Asia Series
Copyright ©2011 by Petrus Liu. All rights reserved.
ISSN: 1050-2955
ISBN: 978-1-933947-82-2 hardcover
ISBN: 978-1-933947-62-4 paperback
Library of Congress Control Number: 2011935436
Printed in the United States of America
The paper in this book meets the requirements for permanence of ISO 9706:1994.
Caution: Except for brief quotations in a review, no part of this book may be reproduced
or utilized in any form without permission in writing from the author. Please address
all inquiries to Petrus Liu in care of the East Asia Program, Cornell University, 140
Uris Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853-7601.
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction Stateless Subjects 1
Chapter 1 The Vicissitudes of Anticolonial 21
Nationalism
Chapter 2 Women and Martial Arts 65
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’s
Marital, Martial, and Marxian Problems
Chapter 3 The Permanent Arms Economy 107
Jin Yong’s Historical Fiction and the
Cold War in Asia
Chapter 4 Jin Yong’s Islam in the Chinese Cultural 153
Revolution
Chapter 5 A Tale of Two Chinas 201
Gu Long and Anomalous Colonies
Bibliography 239
Index 261
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Much of the pleasure I have derived from writing this book came
from the conversations I have had with the extraordinary scholars
I have met. I am deeply grateful to my dissertation advisors, Judith
Butler, Lydia Liu, Andrew Jones, and Colleen Lye. I would like to thank
Anindita Banerjee, Dan Boucher, Calum Carmichael, Debra Castillo,
Samuel Cheung, Walter Cohen, Chris Connery, Jonathan Culler,
Brett de Bary, David Eng, Ed Gunn, TJ Hinrichs, Peter Hohendahl,
Christine Hong, Wengqing Kang, Bill Kennedy, Dominick LaCapra,
Barry Maxwell, Kathleen McCarthy, Natalie Melas, Jonathan Monroe,
Timothy Murray, Lisa Rofel, Nancy Ruttenburg, Neil Saccamano,
Naoki Sakai, Paul Stasi, Amy Villarejo, Sophie Volpp, Andy Chih-ming
Wang, Ding Xiang Warner, and Kenneth Wu for their encouragement
and advice throughout the writing process.
I would like to thank Anne Allison, Leo Ching, and Hank Okazaki
for inviting me to present an early version of Chapter Four at the 2005
“Martial Arts/Global Flows” conference at Duke University. Chapter
Two was presented as an invitational lecture in Berkeley in 2007.
Completion of this manuscript was made possible by grants
provided by the Berkeley Institute for East Asian Studies, Cornell
Society for the Humanities, the Telluride Association, and Cornell
University Hull Memorial Publication Fund.
Various friends and colleagues have assisted me in my research
at the Center for the Study of Sexualities, the Center for the Study of
Martial Arts Fiction, Academia Sinica, the National Central Library,
and the Shanghai Municipal Library. I would also like to thank Chiu-
Hua Chiang, Chu Yu-Li, Cui Zi’en, Kuan-Hsing Chen, Naifei Ding,
Josephine Ho, Ruhong Lin, Huang Fushan, Hans Tao-Ming Huang,
ix
x STATELESS SUBJECTS
Lin Bao-chun, Wah-Guan Lim, Liu Jen-peng, Jiazhen Ni, Amie Parry,
and Wang Ping for their assistance.
I am grateful to my research assistants, Sue Besemer, Han Xin,
Enajite Onos, Wu Xian, Aaron Hodges, Sean Connolly, Sheri Englund,
and Shao Wenteng. Anthony Reed and Madeleine Casad read the
entire manuscript and provided invaluable comments and editorial
suggestions. I would like to thank the anonymous referees and my
marvelous editor at Cornell East Asia Series, Mai Shaikhanuar-Cota,
for their critical comments and guidance in the preparation of the final
manuscript.
My family and friends supported me through the years in ways
that no words of gratitude can describe: Jean Liu, Kevin Huang, San-
dy Liu, Itzik Giat, Rebecca Giat, Sharon Giat, Mario Choi, Loan Dao,
Bobby Diep, Alvin Hung, Stephen Lau, Brian Lin, Helen Lin, Manuel
Gonzales, Amy Hsiao, Yenling Tsai, Pearl Tseng, and Tony Wu. My
parents, Shyi-Huei Liu and Mei-Fang Lee, have been my first and best
teachers of literature. This book is dedicated to them.
INTRODUCTION
STATELESS SUBJECTS
“If once upon a time a good harvest was the mark of a
good king, now it is the sustained raising of industrial
productivity which signified a sound regime.”
—Gopal Balakrishnan, Mapping the Nation
The past decades have seen a broad transformation of China
studies into the new Sovietology.1 In the international sphere, this
change has involved, in equal measure, frenzied media denunciations
of China’s human rights violations, pollution, and military buildup—
and at the same time, popular, sensationalist images of mummies,
angels, and kung fu–fighting pandas. A culture of martial arts has
come to play a surprisingly important role in shaping China’s global
identity, delineating the contours of its cultural influence, helping to
predict its political transformations, and suggesting ways to interpret
its historical formation as a nation-state. Far from being a trivial matter
of popular culture, Chinese martial arts are persistently linked—in the
imagination of academic critics, political gurus, business entrepre-
neurs, and social activists—to the master narratives of the twentieth
century: capitalism, colonialism, and globalization.
Above all, nationalism has emerged as the most common
explanatory paradigm for the study of Chinese martial arts film and
literature. Virtually every currently available scholarly work on martial
arts fiction connects the genre’s historical rise, aesthetic conventions,
and popular appeal to the emotional freight of representing the
Chinese nation. For example, the first English-language monograph
on a twentieth-century Chinese martial arts novelist, Chris Hamm’s
1
2 STATELESS SUBJECTS
Paper Swordsmen: Jin Yong and the Modern Chinese Martial Arts
Novel (2005), uses the status of Hong Kong as a British colony to
explain the author’s popular appeal to the masses, characterizing
his martial arts novels as the embodiment of “a heroic and erotic
nationalism.” According to Hamm, Jin Yong’s writings signify the
increasing dominance of “an essentialized and celebratory Chinese
cultural identity” over a “consciousness of loss and displacement,”
which serves as “a point of reference and token of continuity amidst
the uncertainties of existence” for the citizens of Hong Kong.2 Hamm
points out that all of Jin Yong’s novels were originally serialized in
Hong Kong’s newspapers before appearing in book form, and he
argues on this basis that Jin Yong’s martial arts fiction exemplifies
Benedict Anderson’s theory of “print-capitalism”—the ability of
serialized fiction to create sentiments of diasporic nationalism by
allowing readers who have never met each other to imagine them-
selves as members of a coherent national community: cultural China.
In the final analysis, Hamm’s explanation is a psychologizing one.
His argument suggests that martial arts literature is a result of the
colonial inferiority complex of the citizens of the British Crown
Colony. The popularity of the genre is explained by its ideological
persuasive-ness rather than its intellectual depth.
This common explanation of martial arts fiction as the ideologi-
cal instrument of Chinese nationalism, however, has generated a
bewildering array of contradictory conclusions. Recent martial arts
films such as Hero (2002), Kung Fu Hustle (2004), House of Flying
Daggers (2004), and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) have led
critics to characterize the genre as a paean to Chinese authoritarian-
ism, a representation of diasporic consciousness, an apologia for
Chinese unification, cultural resistance to Sinocentrism from the
margins, an instrument of China’s “kung fu diplomacy,” an index
of the exploitation of third-world labor by a Hollywood-centered,
capitalist regime of “flexible production,” or the reverse cultural
colonization of America by Asia—an “Asian invasion of Hollywood.”3
While these interpretations contradict one another in their assess-
ment of particular texts’ relation to Chinese nationalism, they share
one thing in common: the assumption that martial arts fiction is a