The Jin Yong Phenomenon: Chinese Martial Arts Fiction and Modern Chinese Literary History
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The Jin Yong Phenomenon: Chinese Martial Arts Fiction and Modern ...

Chapter :  Introduction
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A closer look at the wuxia project of this seasoned politician, businessman, and master of the literary jianghu, will lead us toward a greater understanding of the comp­lexity of the concepts of nation, globalization, and diaspora.

An Anti-Europeanized Chinese Writing

Emerging in the postwar Hong Kong Chinese community in the 1950s, Jin Yong’s writing traveled beyond its given place and greatly influenced Chinese around the world. By basing his works on the genre of martial arts novels, Jin has successfully inherited the native literary tradition, long ago expelled by mainstream literature in modern China. Ever since the May Fourth new literature movement, the native literary tradition has been labeled as backward, obsolete, and reactionary because of its inability to keep up with rapid modernization and its reluctance to acknowledge the new vernacular, baihua. However, increasingly scholars have begun to notice the intricate relationship between the native literary tradition and Chinese modernity. In his book Fin-de-Siècle Splendor: Repressed Modernities of Late Qing Fiction, 1848 - 1911, David Der-wei Wang draws our attention to the native literary tradition in late Qing novels, which in his opinion has the capacity to generate its own literary modernity in response to foreign influence, but was repressed or downgraded by modern literary history. He argues:

Repressed modernities point to a genealogy of Chinese fiction since the late nineteenth century that has been wittingly or unwittingly excluded from the canon of literary history, a genealogy that recognizes genres such as science fantasy, depravity fiction, grotesque expose, Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies fiction, neo-impressionism, critical lyricism, and the chivalric novel. These genres are of no less interest to us when we try to imagine what modernity would be like in a Chinese context, although they never made it their goal to define the modern or even to define themselves as modern, as did high-brow literature.