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

Does Jin Yong’s Chinese writing in the colonial context automatically constitute a site of resistance to the official language of the colonizer? Or on the contrary, have Jin Yong’s martial arts novels, which are closely related to the commercialization of cultural production, furtively helped the colonial discourse repress and control “the real humanity, cultural connotations, and national consciousness of Hong Kong people”?⁶ A “yes” to either of these questions would inevitably simplify the complicated cultural space that is Hong Kong, either fixing Jin Yong’s writing in the position of the repressed or reaffirming (and totalizing) the hegemonic power of the colonizer. What needs to be reconsidered here is Foucault’s notion of “hypothesis repression.” Against the Althusserian negativity of power, Foucault sees power as productive, ubiquitous, multiple, and never fixed but constantly subject to changing conditions.⁷ As he puts it, “the action of these power relations [was] modified by their very exercise … with effects of resistance and counterinvestments, so that there has never existed one type of stable subjugation, given once and for all.”⁸ Therefore, rather than reducing the question of Jin Yong’s writing to a binarism of native resistance and Western domination, we should see it as a site where complex processes of domination, resistance, and appropriation can be interpreted and where the problematic cultural space of Hong Kong can be perceived.

Many critics have noticed that Jin Yong’s novels mirror an extremely broad knowledge of Chinese tradition, from religion to philosophy, from the elegant tastes of the literati—musical instruments, chess, calligraphy, painting (qin, qi, shu, hua)—to the practice of medicine, from court politics to public life.⁹ The fact that Jin Yong’s writing prevailed in colonial Hong Kong demonstrates that he created a cultural space that the hegemony of the colonial authority could hardly permeate and monopolize. Identifying with this cultural space, Hong Kong people could somehow find a way to retrace traditional Chinese culture and release their nostalgic anxiety.¹⁰ However, can this cultural space produce “original” authentic Chinese knowledge? If not, what has been displaced in Jin Yong’s building of Chinese culture? What does this displacement mean to Hong Kong people as well as to other Chinese readers around the world?