We’ll always have Beijing: How political necessity changes the cultural representation of Chinese

Anna's new website: ANNA CHEN

Hong Kong thespian and martial artist Bruce Lee. Image: YouTube

Anna Chen’s debut column for Asia Times, 14 August 2023

In the half-century since Bruce Lee’s early death in July 1973, the image of Chinese in western culture and business has come full circle with an added twist of spite. Prior to the martial arts deity’s explosion onto cinema screens in the 1960s, Chinese men were barely seen except as anonymous hordes reminiscent of the wave warfare that kept America at bay in Korea. Their ultimate sacrifice was presented in the west as an antlike lack of humanity rather than the collective courage we recognise from the allied storming of Normandy beaches.

Chinese characters who emerged from this primordial stew were instantly vilified as Yellow Peril, attributed with every hateful human trait. This malicious template returns periodically as Fu Manchu, Dr No, Emperor Ming the Merciless and other evil Chinese who step out of line. It was “balanced” by lovable creatures like Charlie Chan (played by Swedish actor Warner Oland in eye tape); The Pink Panther’s comical Kato (Burt Kwouk, an actual East Asian) as a sidekick even more useless than his boss Inspector Clouseau, the most useless man on the planet. And also another Kato, sidekick this time to The Green Hornet in the TV series, played by an underused Bruce Lee. So much for American original thought and innovation.

The cycle for Chinese cultural representation through the geopolitical eras goes something like this: Opium Wars – bad; gold mining in California – weak; building the Central Pacific Railroad Road for low wages – good; going on strike for better wages and conditions on the CPRR – bad!; 1870s economic downturn in the US – really bad; 1882 Exclusion Act – GTFOH!; Boxer Revolution to the Republic of China – Yellow Peril; War lord Thirties – well, ding, dong, Anna May Wong!; World War 2 – welcome, bro; 1949 – Wut?; Cold War Korea – here comes that ant wave; 1960s – the Blessed Bruce be upon us.

The swinging sixties was a great decade in which to be alive if you were a member of the post-war (preferably white) working and middle-class in America, Britain or parts of Western Europe. Not so great if you were living in China and trying to rebuild your wrecked country while staring down the barrel of foreign embargoes and a messy Cultural Revolution.

Bruce Lee was born and raised in San Francisco. He was beautiful and graceful with a body sculpted like Roman marble but most impressively, instead of submissiveness to the master race, he exuded pride in his Chinese origins. And, true to the cultural aspirations of the time, he stuck up for the little people rather than sticking it to them.

His divinity was felt keenly in the UK when his Hong Kong-made Kung Fu films came out in the 1970s, Enter the Dragon being their stunning apogee. Even my dad raised his head out of his books for long enough to praise this popular hero. For the first time, young males in the West wanted be like Lee, an Asian male, instead of wanting to kick him. Tough working-class lads of every hue sought out martial arts kwoons and dojos and stuck his posters on their walls. He was an inspiration to men of colour and they loved him for it.

If he hadn’t died on the cusp of the Nixon-Kissinger agreement with Mao that would propel China, ever so slowly, into a Golden Age, he’d probably have had his own movie empire on a par with Jackie Chan: JC to Lee’s John the Baptist.

In the glory years since China proved itself to be the rising superpower, Mandarin has been taught in schools and Beijing represented supreme cool. Ten Cent movies made mega bucks. Marvel gave us Shang-Chi, the first superhero movie to star an Asian lead, and TWO Asian main characters in the Agents of Shield TV series, played by Ming-Na Wen and Chloe Bennet. Benedict Wong and Gemma Chan escaped limited prospects in the UK and built solid careers in the Marvel universe and beyond, while Sandra Oh made the sole reverse journey across the Atlantic and busted out with Killing Eve. Michelle Yeoh was Everything, Everywhere All At Once from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon to Star Trek. Asians were being normalised.

However, the screech of brakes and smell of burning rubber as the West performs a doughnut spin threatening to send positive images of Chinese crashing through the windscreen, means all change. How do you persuade the public that it’s okay to have a war with people they’ve been encouraged to identify with if you keep humanising them? Are buddy movies with Chinese as equal partners doomed to history before we’ve finished our popcorn? Is whitewashed Doctor Strange about to morph into Dr Strangelove or be eclipsed by Fu Manchu redux?

The tension between an industry making bank in the two leading economies and the demand by China hawks to slaughter the Golden Goose has to be resolved somehow.

A promiscuous use of backfiring tariffs and sanctions may provide the very catalyst that transforms the greenback signs in oligarchal eyes into yuan, as dumping the global reserve currency accelerates and everyone stampedes for the exit.

One advantage China will always have in this wholly unnecessary contest is the USA’s example of a modern Ozymandias: behold my works, ye mighty, and dedollarise. Never has America needed its original eastern hero as much as now to explain the art of the martial to politicians who keep pristine copies of Sun Tzu’s The Art Of War on display but never crack the spine. You’re supposed to use the weight of your opponent AGAINST him, grasshopper. And Be Like Water doesn’t mean running into the berg that sinks the USS Titanic just becuz we can.

In 2018, the International Monetary Fund’s Christine Lagarde side-eyed President Donald Trump’s imposition of tariffs on Chinese goods, loudly announcing that we were finally emerging from a Certain Someone’s Great Crash of 2008 with Another Certain Someone’s help.

Wall Street had a conniption. Gary Cohn, Trump’s Chief Economic Advisor, fumed, “Peter Navarro ratfucked us into a trade war with China by taking advantage of Trump’s very small brain.”

We watched aghast as, in the words of the British PM whose backbone hadn’t yet crumbled, Trump “let all the air out of the tyres of the global economy”. (Including, presumably, Boris Johnson’s own family’s investments. We sincerely hope he was personally reimbursed after ripping out our Huawei 5G infrastructure at the behest of the First Certain Someone with maybe a loan or sumthin’.)

And now President Joe Biden triples down on the madness.

Ironic that the Kung Fu concept of your own actions rebounding and hurting you when you point a loaded finger and find three fingers pointing back, has taken place in real time in front of our eyes. Every poisonous character assassination, every fusillade of hurt ends up damaging the perp as the target slips further out of reach.

My blu-ray of The Great Wall, perhaps the last of the Hollywood/China blockbuster lash-ups, arrived in 2018, two years after its 2016 release. Tainted by all the ensuing unpleasantness, it sits forlornly on a shelf, still in its shrink wrapper.

I may never find out how Matt Damon saved Chinese civilisation. But we’ll always have Beijing.

We'll always have Paris

Anna's website: ANNA CHEN

Bruce Lee died 40 years ago: new exhibition celebrates Chinese actor's life

When I was growing up in the far east ... of London, the only representations of east Asian women available to this little half-Chinese kid were supine sex-doll lotus blossoms like Suzy Wong and Juicy Lucy, or dragon lady real-life horrors like Imelda Marcos and Madam Mao. Male examples were no better. Screen Chinese were largely consigned to quivering cowards or fiendish villains. Poor Bert Kwouk had to play an assortment of buffoons and bogey men such as Kato in The Pink Panther and the Japanese officer in the TV series, Tenko, but at least he was in work.

Bruce Lee's arrival on the scene altered perceptions and challenged stereotypes. A wing chun kung fu-trained martial artist and actor born in San Francisco to parents from Hong Kong, he was admired by people of all races, becoming an icon for minority ethnic groups who had a beautiful Asian hero to look up to at last. Not only men of Chinese and east Asian heritage, but also south Asian and African Caribbean men were inspired by this handsome super-talented Chinese American. His screen success gave rise to the mega-hit single "Kung-fu Fighting" and even my dad raised his head out of his political tomes for long enough to appreciate that a legend had landed.

To mark forty years since Bruce Lee's death on 20th July and to celebrate and honour his life, an exhibition has just opened in Hong Kong.

It's justly deserved. Lee was not only an outstanding practitioner of kung-fu — famous for his speed, power and grace — he was also majorly intelligent and a deep thinker. While teaching his art to Hollywood movie actors such as James Garner, James Coburn and Steve McQueen (already an expert in the Korean art of Tang Soo Do), he was developing his own martial art style, Jeet Kune Do (the way of the intercepting fist), which took the best from a range of forms from across the globe including western boxing. He backed it up with an interest in philosophy which he'd studied at the University of Washington, so it was much more than just about the best way to hit people: it was about discovery and growth of the self.

He co-starred in the television series The Green Hornet (1966-7) as the masked chauffeur, biding his time, working on his big break. George Takei who played Sulu in Star Trek recalls in his autobiography, To the Stars, how in a break between takes while making the pilot episode, he, James Doohan and Lloyd James were captivated by a young Asian man who was limbering up.

"Suddenly, he exploded in a burst of kicks and leaps and twirls that was a symphony of speed. Our chatting ceased. We stood there, stunned. Then he repeated the ballet. His movements had grace; his body, control and elegance. We were mesmsrized. Then the flash detonation of energy astounded us a second time.

Just then, an assistant poked his head out from his soundstage and called. "We're ready for you on the set, now, Bruce." As we stood open-mouthed, he quietly slipped back in. It had been an incredible demonstration of what incredible feats the human body is capable of. And we had just chanced upon this extraordinary spectacle.

We later learned that the martial artist was a young actor named Bruce Lee and that he was working on a new television series that had just sold called Green Hornet.

When the role that Lee helped devise finally came up — Kwai Chang Kane in the television series Kung Fu (1972-5) — he was considered too Chinese (some say his accent was considered too thick) and the part was given to David Carradine acting in yellowface. While Carradine's diction may have been pristine, he lacked Lee's awesome martial arts abilities. One Kung Fu studio vice president said, "If we put a yellow man up on the tube, the audience will turn the switch off in less than five minutes." This was ultimately the producers' loss — think how much that franchise would be worth now had Lee starred in it.

The rejection was reminiscent of what happened to Anna May Wong in the 1930s when she lost out on what would have been the pinnacle of her career when the starring role of Olan in Pearl S Buck's Pulitzer Prize-winning blockbuster, The Good Earth (1937), was given to Louise Rainer.

Lee made a handful of legendary martial arts films, chiefly for Golden Harvest in Hong Kong: Enter the Dragon, Way of the Dragon, Game of Death, Fist of Fury, and Big Boss.

When he died in Hong Kong aged 32, on 20th July 1973, it sparked a storm of conspiracy theories. So great was the shock of his early death that many claimed he'd been murdered: that's when I learnt from my martial arts father about the existence of something called dim mak, a technique for killing with only one or two fingers applied to the right spot. (My half-brother once described seeing dad use the softened technique, where the use of three fingers dissipates the energy and only stuns, when he was in his 70s and fending off a racist assault by several thugs on the tube.) Dad said there was also a technique that resulted in major organ failure after days or weeks and that he thought this might have been used on Lee.

However, various investigatons including one by Scotland Yard concluded that he'd had an allergic reaction to a painkiller containing Equagesic, which had swollen his brain.

To double the Lee tragedy, his son, Brandon Lee, followed him into the movies, only to be shot and killed in 1993 while filming his big break in The Crow. There was no union firearms safety officer on set; the actor aimed directly at Brandon when he should have been instructed not to, and a small fragment of a bullet had remained in the gun and been overlooked. This event has spawned its own conspiracy theories and Brandon has become something of a legend himself.

No matter how some malign forces still resist, Bruce Lee broke the spell of Chinese presented as dehumanised beings unworthy of respect, love, honour and inclusion. A poet and a scholar, actor and martial artist with emphasis on the artist", he exemplified the best in humanity. Rest in peace, Bruce.