One of the greatest popular writers of serialized martial arts tales,
wuxia, is Jin Yong [Louis Cha] ( 1924 – ). Jin Yong’s tales of superhuman
martial artists in imperial China were fully consistent with traditional
Chinese stories likeThe Water Margin, and like traditional martial arts
tales they took many liberties with historical events and people. He wrote
fourteen novels or novellas and one short story between 1955 and 1972 ,
virtually all of which have been adapted for movies, television, or comics.
What truly distinguishes Jin Yong’s work from earlier Chinese martial arts
tales is its exposure and acceptance outside the Chinese language com-
munity. Jin Yong took full advantage of the misconceptions about Chinese
martial arts and elaborated on them for dramatic effect. Just as in the West,
the historicalfiction version of the past is far more widespread in the
general population than any accurate, but dry, academic account. Jin
Yong, born in China and living in Hong Kong from 1947 ,reflected
many of the issues of nationalism, Chinese identity, and the clash between
modern values and traditional Chinese ones (thought he is, for the most
part, a strong proponent of traditional values). Together with other writers
in this genre, Jin Yong created afictional martial arts world that has
profoundly influenced the current understanding of these arts.^3
At the same time, however, the martial arts, even in the narrow sense of
unarmed combat, retained its combat value. The ability of a martial artist
to resist state power had political consequences, particularly in a country
wherefirearms were not widely available. Successive modern Chinese
governments were concerned, as their imperial predecessors had been,
with who practiced martial arts and what kinds of martial arts they
practiced. One of the main reasons that arts like Taiji were able toflourish
in the twentieth century is because they were not perceived to be combat
arts. A noncombat art was no threat to the state. Here we must keep in
mind that Chinese government officials were also part of Chinese society,
and their understanding of what the martial arts were relied just as heavily
onfiction as did the perceptions of any ordinary citizen. Over time, many
martial artists similarly came to believe the national or cultural discourse
of martial arts that late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century modern-
izers had pushed on the public. In short, the modern discourse of the
martial arts produced a new intellectual and linguistic framework for
discussing and understanding Chinese martial arts. This discourse clashed
directly with the use of Chinese martial arts for combat.
The progression and history of the Chinese martial arts in the post-
imperial period can be usefully divided into three phases. Thefirst phase
was the period from after the fall of the Qing Dynasty up until the
216 Post-Imperial China