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

The western philosophy of existentialism seems well mixed with Taoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism in his novels. Jin Yong’s way of modernizing the Chinese native tradition, which makes the writing of the Chinese language an ambivalent process, has properly challenged our sense of the historical identity of culture as a unifying entity, authenticated by an original past. It is from this point that we would like to regard his writing as an attempt to interrupt or negotiate with the Western discourse of modernity rather than an essentialized form of anti-imperialist discourse. It is impossible, however, to talk about Jin Yong’s contra-modernity without first situating his writing within the postcolonial context of Hong Kong, where he chose the anti-Europeanized language to name the condition of his and his compatriots’ existence.

Cultural Space and Chinese Identity

Jin Yong’s writings responded to a specific and unprecedented historical situation in which the colonial and the global overlapped. Earning fast fame in the mid-1950s, Jin Yong’s writing, which became the best representative of the genre of “new Martial Arts novels,” attracted large audiences in Hong Kong. One may assume that this special genre emerged in Hong Kong simply in resistance to colonial discourse. The reason for this assumption is quite simple: first, in contrast to the colonizer’s language, English, Jin’s fiction is written in “non-Europeanized” modern Chinese language; second, the martial arts genre belongs to the Chinese native literary tradition, a tradition which inevitably appears as an authentic space for Chinese identity in the colonial context; third, the fictional imagination of a masculinized martial arts metaphorically satisfied Chinese readers’ dreams of a strong and independent nation. Yet this assumption fails to recognize the historical experience of the “native” who resides in a place where questions of exploitation, resistance, and survival are more complex than those described by the binary of hegemony and counter-hegemony.