Stateless Subjects: Chinese Martial Arts Literature and Postcolonial History by Petrus Liu (review)

Petrus Liu’s book Stateless Subjects is among the first studies on twentieth-century Chinese “martial arts fiction.” This term, often abbreviated by Liu to “martial arts,” is the conventional, though somewhat infelicitous, translation for the modern genre of wuxia xiaoshuo 武俠小說. I prefer holding on to the transcribed genre term wuxia (“martial knight”). One of Liu’s premises is the Western audience’s certain degree of familiarity with “martial arts films,” especially of Hong Kong provenience, in which the performance of martial arts indeed occupies center stage. However, the author emphasizes the historical precedence of martial arts fiction over martial arts cinema. He outlines something like a history of twentiethcentury martial arts fiction, in which movies clearly play a subsidiary role. Petrus Liu also argues against the wuxia genre’s low standing in literary history, where it continues to be perceived as escapist fantasy and hence as trivial reading matter for popular entertainment and as staple products for mass consumption. Yet, he is interested less in defending the wuxia genre’s literary qualities and particular aesthetics than in claiming a place for it in Chinese intellectual history, as the representation of “a radically different political philosophy of the state” (p. 5) and “as a progressive intellectual critique of modernization theory” (p. 7). This aim is very high, indeed.

The main body of Liu’s study is divided into five chapters, three of which are dedicated to one individual author each—Pingjiang Buxiaosheng 平江不肖生 (chap. 1), Wang Dulu 王度盧 (chap. 2), and Gu Long 古龍 (chap. 5). A fourth author, Jin Yong 金庸, is treated in two chapters (3 and 4). This program is actually well arranged: While Buxiaosheng was the pioneering wuxia author of the 1920s,¹ Wang Dulu may serve as an apt representative of the wuxia novelists of the 1930s and 1940s; Jin Yong, the epitome of the genre’s further development in Hong Kong, wrote from the 1950s through the 1970s and receives more attention in Liu’s study, partly due to the quasi-canonical status his oeuvre has been credited with since the late twentieth century. Finally, with Gu Long, the Taiwanese lineage of wuxia fiction is also included in the picture.

The place of wuxia fiction in literary history is an important starting point for this study, and it is appropriate that Petrus Liu takes the effort to consider it at some length. He argues that the image of wuxia fiction was distorted due to a “systematic attack” (p. 34) by the exponents of May Fourth literature who misconstrued it as a residue of tradition that needed to be overcome on the way to modernity. Part of this construction of traditionalizing the wuxia genre, according to Liu, was to group it with the “mandarin-ducks-and-butterflies-school” (yuanyang-hudiepai 鴛鴦蝴蝶派) literature, which was invented by leftist critics as a depreciating label polemically attached to the entire range of contemporary urban popular fiction. When Liu argues that the wuxia fiction of the 1920s through 1940s was misplaced under this category and needs to be recognized as a distinct cultural form and as a discourse in its own right, he tends to ignore the genre’s publication context. Bibliographical data indicate that wuxia fiction was being published alongside other genres of popular fiction, such as the social novel, historical fiction, and romance. In fact, authors like Wang Dulu were also writing in other genres of popular fiction, such as romance (cf. p. 82), and, in fact, he developed his particular style of wuxia fiction from a hybridization of generic elements of wuxia and romance. Therefore, the claim for any autonomous status of the wuxia novel in the literary field of its time is hard to maintain. Buxiaosheng, on the other hand, mainly wrote wuxia fiction, but also shorter narrative forms in classical style. What makes him...