Stephen Chow’s Kung Fu Hustle, A Sort-of Review – Or One Movie, Three Chinas, And The Politics Of Martial Arts

Stephen Chow’s 2004 classic comedy Kung Fu Hustle is one of my absolute favourite movies of all time. It has almost everything – a great cast, a script of rapid jokes and fun little characters, some really good non-CGI action and some creative if slightly creaky CGI fights, some striking and stylized visuals both comedic and serious, and as well it’s extremely watchable in the original Cantonese, the Mandarin dub, and the absurd, deliberately cheesy English dub. It serves both as a neat little introduction to the greatest strengths of Hong Kong kung fu cinema for a newcomer and a kind of victory lap as well, with references to works from the history of kung fu and wuxia fiction peppered throughout. I’ve rewatched it too many times to count. It’s a movie that really has it all except one thing that, on my latest rewatch (this time the Mandarin dub for a change) I finally noticed. Kung Fu Hustle is the movie that has everything – except politics.

Now: whoa! What do you mean by that? Does a goofy Stephen Chow movie need politics, Yoshimi? No, no. Of course not. I already said Kung Fu Hustle is one of my favourites. This is not a criticism. But it is an investigation into why this ultra-homage movie to a genre of film steeped in politics omits entirely any references to anything political, and what that means.

Kung fu cinema in its classic form owes much to the literary genre of wuxia, which prospered in China first after the iconoclastic May 4^th movement of 1919 and during a period of much national soul-searching over the meaning of the collapse of imperial rule in 1911 and of China’s then-current state of weakness and poverty and how/why this had come about. The themes of twentieth century wuxia fiction – the corruption of local officials and tyrannical emperors and kings, opposed by youxia, knight-errant martial artists who wander the historical-fictional world of the Jianghu as participants in a secretive, fantastic underworld of heroes and villains who have mastered the techniques of wushu, qigong and other traditional disciplines and use them to do battle – are part and parcel of Chinese fiction going all the way back through history, but in the specific modern form epitomised in the novels of writers like Louis Cha (Jin Yong) and Liang Yusheng (Chen Wentong) these themes took on a new meaning in the light of the chaos of China’s early modernity and the traumatic “loss” of the mainland to the supposedly ahistorical Communist Party in 1949.

This “new school” wuxia fiction, prominent in Hong Kong in the 1950s and beyond, is notable in both the agency and lack of agency it affords its characters: enormous and cataclysmic events unfold in the stories’ historical or pseudo-historical settings, like the Mongol conquest of China or the fall of the Ming dynasty, but individuals who cultivate power can slip into the hidden world of martial arts and use that power to survive, confront and even influence these events. Similar to the bandit outcasts of the 14^th century classic Water Margin who oppose the government and later work to save it from nomadic invaders, wuxia heroes are cast in contrast to inefficient, effeminate, corrupt emperors, officials, and dynasties, who mistreat the people, engage in endless politicking, and prove when danger comes to be inept at resisting foreign intrusion. In Louis Cha’s Legend of the Condor Heroes, the Mongols and Jurchen who are assailing late-Song China are the overall antagonists, but they are treated with respect and awe in contrast to the incompetence of the decaying Song themselves, or as well the Han traitors who assist them. The authentic China is not these weaklings who fold before foreign invaders but that of the secret world of martial artists, who have cast aside in disgust the formal world of imperial society and politics and achieved if only within their community a kind of national rejuvenation.

This ‘new school’ wuxia served as a fantasy of empowerment in the face of a world that rendered the Chinese individual powerless, whether under British rule in Hong Kong or under the Chiang regime on Taiwan or within the changing chaos of the socialist revolution on the mainland. As such it proved wildly popular and remains so today (find a single person on the mainland who doesn’t know the novels of Jin Yong, even if they haven’t read them). But in terms of cinema wuxia has always been constrained somewhat by the massive scale of its ambitions, and in the 1950s the special effects and budgets of Hong Kong couldn’t quite manage to portray accurately the genre’s fantastical martial arts and grand scale, let alone have the length to fully depict all the twists and turns of a wuxia plot, which TV would eventually prove capable of. Partially because of this in the movie theatre the early wuxia movies gave way to what would be known worldwide only as “kung fu movies”. These pictures, which existed beforehand but really came to prominence in the 1970s, were shorter in scope and simpler in story, allowing narratives to be told that were designed for studio backlots dressed up like Qing or Ming streets, that forsook the high-flying fantasy martial arts of the wuxia genre for a more grounded style of choreography rooted in actual martial arts practice – in particular, not beginning with but largely because of the superstar success of American-Chinese Hong Kong star Bruce Lee with The Big Boss in 1971, kung fu movies actually cast practitioners of the martial arts depicted.

Lee led the way in this, pioneering the “kung fu movie” as we know it; and by the time of his early death in 1973 the term kung fu was known around the world. In Hong Kong itself a recession that began around the time of Lee’s death led to a relative decline in the international reach of these movies that would be reversed only with the rise of the comedy style of stuntman Jackie Chan in 1978 with The Drunken Master. But by then the “kung fu movie”, fuelled in part by the rivalry between Hong Kong studios Shaw Brothers and Golden Harvest, had grown out of Bruce Lee’s shadow and become a fully-fledged genre of its own.

This genre owed a lot to the wuxia that came before it in prose and onscreen, and shared many of its preoccupations with national identity and the struggle against oppression both foreign and internal. In Lo Wei’s Fists of Fury, the second of Bruce Lee’s movies, Lee’s character is a young man fighting against Japanese martial artists to defend China’s honour in 1910 Shanghai, who famously tears up a colonially-imposed sign forbidding “dogs and Chinese” from entering a Shanghai park. In Lau Kar-leung’s 1978 The Thirty-Six Chambers of Shaolin a man radicalised by the brutality of Qing retribution against anti-Qing rebels spends years training in Shaolin kung fu in order to achieve the strength to seek revenge against the Manchu general who killed all his schoolmates. Meng Hua-ho’s Flying Guillotine, released in 1975, revolves around a paranoid emperor creating a weapon – the titular guillotine – that can decapitate his political enemies from afar, and follows a guilt-stricken defector from the emperor’s Guillotine Squad who ends up fighting for his life against his former comrades. Ching Siu-teng’s 1983 Duel to the Death tells the story of a duel between Japan and China’s greatest swordsmen, in which the real villain is revealed to be a Chinese master who is manipulating the duellists – in league with the Japanese – for the benefit of his own martial arts school. 1994’s Drunken Master 2, another Lau Kar-leung movie, features Jackie Chan fighting against British officials who are smuggling artifacts out of China through the consulate – again, aided by local gangsters.

These movies are often called “anti-imperialist” and in a sense they are, but they’re not only that; they often have some focus upon not only just foreign adversaries but with the supposed weaknesses of the Chinese character that was wrestled with in other forms in the twentieth century, from Lu Xun’s iconoclastic fiction to Taiwanese dissident Bo Yang’s tract The Ugly Chinaman to Chiang Kai-shek’s 1930s New Life Movement to even in a sense Mao’s Cultural Revolution. All of these were attempts to draw attention to, rewrite or repair perceived deficits in the Chinese character that – so it went – must have led to the great fall of the century of humiliation. “We must ask why,” Bo Yang says in The Ugly Chinaman, “over the last century, have we so often failed to free ourselves from suffering?” And he concludes after listing all of the supposed negative traits of the Chinese character, that “plagued with some many loathsome qualities, only the Chinese can reform themselves.” The kung fu genre and the Communist Party and many others all agreed with him. Bo Yang’s solution was to cast aside tradition and embrace western democracy as long ago the Nationalist Party had promised it would. The Communist Party found the source of Chinese weakness in a similar direction, centuries of cloying tradition, but saw revolution as that which could repair the Chinese character. Kung fu cinema and wuxia and the Hong Kong communities that pioneered them, the great losers of China’s twentieth century who had no state to call their own and no ideology to hold fast to, the real-life unrepresented world of Chinese identity which existed, as the martial artists of a wuxia story did, outside of the mainstream; these were the pioneers of a kind of a morality story about this question. In kung fu fiction through training and cultivation excellent individuals were created, heroes that could serve to keep foreign aggressors at bay and punish traitors and criminals through martial strength and moral justice.

Hong Kong’s own capitalist, transient and individualist character, forged in the height of those Cold War boom years, informed this, transforming the fleshed-out heroes of wuxia into the simple kung fu protagonists whose superhuman strength led them to right wrongs that couldn’t be righted in real life, much as the original 1930s Superman served as the incarnation of justice painted onto a world and America incapable of realising it. The wuxia hero has a community of allies, enemies, and mentors, all fraught with politics and history – the kung fu hero might come from the monastery or be trained in Wing Chun but just as often his martial prowess might as well be innate, and anyway the question of its origin is immaterial. He is the superman, the Chinese man who is not ugly, who can stand up and say no.

In other words, the kung fu hero and his attendant film genre came into existence out of necessity. America needed the western to mythologize its guilty past and Britain’s bruised post-colonial ego needed James Bond and Japan’s post-war dislocation needed Kurosawa: the kung fu movie’s clash of righteous heroes standing almost alone versus corrupt and brutal enemies is the grand struggle of Chinese nationalism in the twentieth century in microcosm. And that’s my main point here today. Bo Yang’s The Ugly Chinaman is no longer published in either Taiwan or the mainland, at his widow’s request, for he said that when China no longer needed his work it would cease publication. While by official metrics China’s great rejuvenation isn’t yet complete, the fragmented, humiliated, isolated Chinas of 1971, when Bruce Lee tore up that sign, are unrecognisable compared to the almost-singular great power straddling continents today. So maybe that’s why 2004’s Kung Fu Hustle, for all its kung fu, doesn’t actually feel much like a real kung fu movie.

Kung Fu Hustle, if you don’t know it, revolves around the residents of Pigsty Alley, a neighbourhood in a pastiche 1940s Shanghai of neon lights, sexy qipao and fierce gangsters that is impoverished and populated by a cast of oddball characters and ruled over by a fiendish landlady and her rascal husband. Thanks to the ill-conceived grift of a wannabe-gangster named Sing, a group of gangsters named the Axe Gang get brought to Pigsty Alley and clash with its residents, many of whom are freakishly strong, and a comedy of errors unfolds in which lots of fights happen, absurd setpieces abound, and Sing – played by Chow himself – learns to become a true kung fu hero and with the help of the landlady and her husband, who are also martial artists, unlocks his own potential as a warrior and saves the day.

What it is first and foremost is a movie that loves kung fu, which after all is the original Chinese title: Kung Fu. But one thing that’s always jarring to me, and that highlights what it deliberately avoids, is the opening scene, where in a stylish and fun sequence the Axe Gang begin their takeover of Shanghai’s underworld by hacking to death the head of the rival Crocodile Gang in the street. Before that happens we see the Crocodile Gang terrorising the head of a police station by kicking the officers around and literally spitting on the chief of police. And this is the only scene in the whole movie where any kind of authority figure appears in any context. Sure, the Axe Gang are supposed to run the city and Nationalist Shanghai was infamously stitched up by organized crime and come on, you say, this is a comedy movie – but isn’t it strange, to see a kung fu movie without any authority for the heroes to clash with? This is a genre which is defined largely by its individualist power-fantasy, where the underdog is empowered to triumph against authority (a key part of its enduring appeal globally). And other comedy kung fu movies, like Drunken Master 2 or Mr. Vampire, still fit in the meddling foreigners and corrupt officials so key to the genre’s character dynamics. Where are the police in Kung Fu Hustle? Where are the bumbling Nationalist officers, the rotten old masters who fleece their students, the yellow-bellied gentry who collaborate with the enemy – or the enemy themselves, for that matter? It might be the only movie set in 1940s Shanghai where the Japanese don’t even warrant a mention. Is it set in the 1940s, even? The setting is vague enough to be nowhere at all, aesthetics aside. The whole movie feels divorced from any kind of reality, from politics and from rebellion and struggle. From wuxia to kung fu these are stories of fighting against authority, and yet this movie that pays homage in so many other ways seems when you examine it to be strangely reticent to touch upon the key themes of the genre even in jest.

Well, there could be many reasons for this. Stephen Chow, who wrote and directed the movie, is known for his movies basically being (as my girlfriend said scathingly) “nonsense”, light fun that doesn’t go anywhere but is always a good time (maybe). It could be that the Big Bad Mainland made Hong Kong filmmakers nervous of getting too political after 1997 and that the anti-authority themes of a kung fu movie were suddenly verboten (unlikely, but probably some Hong Kong people believe it). It could just be that hey, they didn’t want to make a movie about that stuff (probably). But if we accept that then there’s no article, so I won’t.

What I’m going to say is that we can call this the Bo Yang explanation – that the old style of kung fu movie which Kung Fu Hustle is paying homage to was in fact no longer needed. Once we discard for a moment the universal themes of kung fu cinema and regard it as a product of a uniquely chaotic and uncertain time in Chinese history, where “Chinese” as a very concept was in doubt in the face of the failed 1911 revolution, the resulting communist-nationalist split and the country’s enduring inferiority complex rooted in the late Qing and onward, we can assume that with the near-reunification and newfound prosperity and international clout of 2000s China the need for the unique escapist appeal of the traditional kung fu movie was lessened. ‘Kung fu’ as artform and narrative window-dressing remained and remains popular, but the specific form it took in the movies of the 1970s on was somewhat redundant.

By 2004 Hong Kong was reasonably happy with one country two systems and part of China again, a China that foreigners were already beginning to talk about as ‘the new superpower’, and Taiwan still thought of itself as reasonably Chinese and on all fronts it might have begun to seem that the Asian Century™ was looming. Kung Fu Hustle is a love letter to a certain type of power fantasy, and in that – in Sing’s triumphant mastering of the Buddha’s Palm technique and glorious ass-kicking of the Axe Gang to a stirring rendition of the folk song Fisherman’s Song of the East China Sea – it revels in its roots. As for that other side of kung fu cinema’s origins, the dark and tragic history of powerlessness and struggle that formed it, the movie isn’t interested.

But this is where we come to the significance of Kung Fu Hustle in China’s history. Kung fu movies came not from Nationalist Taiwan – committed to western democracy and capitalism – or from the Communist PRC – committed to the long quest to find an exclusively Chinese form of political modernity – but from the third China of disparate overseas communities, oddballs and exiles that came to be centred around the awkward British colony of Hong Kong. Modern attempts to reclaim Bruce Lee, kung fu’s spiritual father, as a figure not of Chinese but Hong Kong patriotism, as witnessed in 2019, fail because Lee was not a ‘Hongkonger’. He was Chinese and American, identifying with neither of the two official Chinas on offer in the 1970s, anti-communist by default to some extent to be sure but pissing off Chinese elders too much to be wholly some neutral emblem of static Chineseness as Chiang had developed in Taiwan, a kind of outsider who at once remained a Chinese patriot. He was the ‘third China’, that formless thing which found its only real expression in art and commerce, its memory tied to the neon-lit signage of interwar Shanghai and post-war Hong Kong, linked in with the southern character of Guangdong but not exclusively of it, the side that had been the real loser of the Chinese civil war and poured its dispossession into hustle, into getting rich and playing fast and loose with the rules. While the ROC was “free China” and achieved international recognition until the 1970s, and the PRC had done the actual political work of liberating the country and raising it up into a great power, for the longest time neither represented China in the popular imagination – that was this third China which belonged only to itself and had no political voice of its own. The divisions of the post-1911 world, in other words, reduced in number from the absolute disintegration of the warlord era but even after 1949 were never wholly healed. Three Chinas persisted, legal, factual and (we might take this with a pinch of salt) cultural, and not one of them really acknowledged the others as authentic.

Of course this discombobulated status quo was dependent on one thing, and that was the political form of the actual geographical China – the PRC, which had the strongest claim to being China because you know, it was – remaining enmeshed in an ideological and political world that the other two Chinas could claim as being foreign-imposed or un-Chinese. Although in reality the development of China in the Maoist era owed much to Chinese tradition and until the Cultural Revolution made use of and developed various forms of Chinese traditional culture (and the Cultural Revolution’s iconoclasm, as others have pointed out, is itself rooted in the thought of May 4^th and has parallels in countless similar tumults in imperial history), from outside it was often seen as simply a Marxist corruption, fundamentally untrue whether from Chiang Kai-shek’s tedious legalistic perspective or in the more intangible sense of culture and history felt in Hong Kong.

But once the grand upheaval died down and the People’s Republic, in the reform era, settled into accepting and even embracing Chinese tradition, the triple-China situation had no reason to continue. Instead of talking of capitalists and imperialists and traitors the mainland was suddenly trying to make friends, and over time came to seek to convince the other two Chinas that all was well, and that regardless of what differences between them existed and would exist in the future all were part of China and would not be annexed or converted to communism or brainwashed or etc. It sought to merge the Nationalist legacy and the Hong Kong/diaspora legacy into itself while respecting all three as different, and not wholly cynically – after all, in the 1980s while the mainland was officially still on guard against “spiritual pollution” the role of Hong Kong and overseas and Taiwanese capitalists in reform and opening up was vital, and anyone who grew up in 1980s China has fond memories of all kinds of cultural products from these other two Chinas – including kung fu movies – that still touch them today. Reunification was and remains a seriously heartfelt cause on the mainland, even if it isn’t only that.

Kung Fu Hustle is in a way a product of this. Co-produced by the mainland’s Beijing Film Studio, it was released in the early years of One Country, Two Systems, in a time when Hong Kong really was glad to be back with the mainland even despite their many disagreements and quarrels and the mass protests over the National Security Law a year earlier – the Hong Kong Democrats were not secessionists and despite their disdain for the Communist Party still identified by and large as Chinese. In Taiwan, the Nationalists had weathered the transition to democracy and despite losing in 2000 were holding their own against the independence-seeking Democratic Progressive Party, whose first middling tenure in office would end poorly in 2008 with the routing of first non-Nationalist president Chen Shui-bian and his arrest on corruption charges a year later. In the 2000s there really did seem to be – loosely and uneasily – something that could have been called a single China, for the first time since 1911. The decades of insecurity and strife and uncertainty that had led to the rise of Hong Kong’s kung fu cinema boom were over, and Kung Fu Hustle reflected that by giving us a happy kung fu movie, an optimistic celebration of itself. Celebrations are rarely historically accurate, after all. “Welcome back!” was the mood of much of this high-publicity mainland-Hong Kong-Taiwan-diaspora cultural collaboration in the 2000s. A Chinese version of 1991 – the end of (Chinese) history, if only for a moment.

History however isn’t that easy to vanquish. It’s premature and overly simplistic – not to mention insulting to all sides – to talk of China having “lost” Hong Kong/Taiwan/diaspora communities as if Xi Jinping did this all himself, although I wouldn’t be enough of a fool to pretend to be an expert on the internal dynamics of such matters to give a detailed explanation to substitute for this flimsy narrative. But we can speculate a little from afar. We can speculate that the paranoia and mistrust seeded by the Cold War might have sprouted all across this pan-China at once in an unfortunate but maybe inevitable confluence of changes. There was the PRC’s shift into emergency-surgery mode under Xi Jinping pricking all the old ROC/HK fears about Maoism, Hong Kong’s many failures of governance under the PRC-backed Democratic Alliance for the Betterment of Hong Kong spawning the grassroots reactionary anger of the localist movement, and lastly Taiwan’s Maidan moment with the Sunflower Movement of 2014 dislodging the Nationalists and allowing a canny DPP to ride its harmless non-revolutionary energy back into office. And beyond those immediate causes, for both of these other Chinas the rise of the PRC has resulted in their loss in many spheres – cultural, economic, social – of the superiority that had once made up a large part of their self-perception as successful China versus that vast dysfunctional Qing/Chiang/communist other. Faced with the myriad challenges and realities of trying to manage all this, political problems and identity-based headaches, a simpler solution has been found for now, which is simply to not be China at all.

To put it another way, Bruce Lee’s vision of China was the vision of an actor, thinker and showman; a vague fantasy of universal Chinese cultural revival. The kung fu movie championed an abstract nationalism freed from the messy realities of the real post-1911 revolution, and with the receding from memory of that time so too has the kung fu fantasy lost its power. The messy realities of being Chinese in the age of socialism with Chinese characteristics, of reconciling so many conflicting narratives and understandings of everything before and after 1911 did eventually come home. Opting out of them in favour of elevating that mysterious “Lion Rock spirit” of Hong Kong so it enjoys precedence over any relation to the corrupted mainland, or changing all the labels on every bit of culture you have from “Chinese” to “Taiwanese” and holding up the 2.42% of your population that’s indigenous as proof of this creates very large historical plotholes, but still evidently for now remains easier than the kind of compromises contained within the PRC’s vision of “one country, two systems”. The PRC I think does believe in “one country, however many systems”, and while its own compromises haven’t been enough we can see that it did attempt – in its paranoid, stiff-limbed way – to make them, to really give Hong Kong its autonomy and let Taiwan do what it wanted as long as these were squared with its own extensive security concerns.  It has been this part that has proven impossible, since beneath all the family love and shared cultural feelings the remnants of those other two Chinas didn’t trust the communists and the communists didn’t trust back either. And thusly did the end of (Chinese) history prove as elusive as ever.

And this I guess is why the kung fu movie, the 1970s thing which Kung Fu Hustle was not really an example of, remains elusive. Now, there’s plenty of movies with kung fu action, plenty of literature and stories and TV shows rooted in the tapestry of tropes and cliches laid out from those old serial wuxia books to today. But the last time I saw a martial arts movie with the raw anger, artful violence and anti-authoritarian tension of a classic Hong Kong Shaw Brothers/Golden Harvest joint was in 2011’s The Raid and its 2014 sequel The Raid 2, both directed by Welshman Gareth Evans but with Indonesian actors, language and setting – perhaps an indication of how the ethos of kung fu has taken flight and become transnational and now goes where it’s needed, which in any case is no longer China.

The country is by and large reunified but for that one troublesome island, and it is no longer bullied by foreign powers and whatever misdeeds the officials of today get up don’t compare to the injustices of the stereotypical Qing gentry or Nationalist thugs. Today’s patriotic movies focus on military victory and historical triumph, the romantic and sentimental national community-building comfort food of Wolf Warrior or Battle at Lake Changjin – today’s martial arts novels are this new-fangled thing called xianxia or cultivation stories, where power-levelled heroes ascend to Dragonball Z levels of strength in fantasy worlds wholly removed from the nitty-gritty of real history. Both are the art of a generation of Chinese whose priorities are very different to those of the troubled and drifting kung fu generation, and for the heirs of that generation in Hong Kong and elsewhere, those who lived on the margins before the great rejuvenation, ‘China’ has become something complex and difficult to hide from, not a faded image of the mythical motherland to be safely mourned from afar. The heroes have nothing to save. That famous line from the national anthem, “the Chinese nation is at its greatest peril”, despite the manifold problems and crises and messes and etc. on all fronts, is no longer quite true. Perhaps there’s something happy to be found, then, in the lack of politics in Kung Fu Hustle.

Perhaps also all of that movie’s boundless optimism and puppy-dog energy looks a little tragic now, a little Beijing 2008 – the pan-China enthusiasm for the country that peaked there but in hindsight we can see couldn’t overcome the decline of Hong Kong and Taiwan, the tensions between they and the mainland that would lead to the mess visible today. I’m not mourning what might have been exactly – we’re better on this blog, folks, than China Watcher “why did Xi destroy all of the nice things?” rhetoric – but what was never going to last. There’s still much more history to come on the road from 1911 to tomorrow, whatever tomorrow will be. But just like so many Chinese found refuge from imperialism and racism in the sight of Bruce Lee tearing up that sign and beating up those Japanese back then, I can take a little refuge from all the troubles swirling around China today, in a world where inside the contradictions are sharpening and outside the very name ‘China’ itself seems to be becoming a dirty word as Yellow Peril 2.0 rolls into town. I, a foreigner who like most foreigners originally fell in love with these silly superficial power fantasies as my first taste of Chinese culture, can watch Kung Fu Hustle for the hundredth time and still love every ahistorical, absurd, nonsensical minute of it. It might not have everything. But it has enough to make me smile every time I watch it. It reminds me of what I love about China – not the PRC, not Hong Kong or Taiwan or anywhere else, but that thing that hovers over everything, that still remains unsettled and impossible to touch. It’s not as well-choreographed as Police Story and not as ground-breaking as Enter the Dragon and it doesn’t have all the dumb shit I love in The Five Deadly Venoms or Five Elements Ninja or Duel To The Death. There are, it’s true, no politics to this meaningless kung fu comedy. But it’s a movie full of love for that China that isn’t quite, that China in your imagination. And that’s just as much a part of kung fu cinema as anything else, isn’t it?