The early martial arts films of Shanghai were audience favorites and guaranteed money-makers for the studios, but trouble was looming. The genre of wuxia shenguai pian, or magic swordplay/spirit monster films, built an enormous fan base by using the new cinematic technology to bring adventure stories of China’s past to life with an unprecedented level of realism. Wuxia fans of the late 1920s were looked down on by the reforming classes as superstitious or sensation-seeking. They were the “petty urbanites,” the uneducated rural masses, and the overseas Chinese immigrant communities. Intellectuals sneered that movies about martial arts and ghosts typified everything that China must leave behind on its march into the modern world.
From THE SPIDER QUEEN (1927).
It didn’t help that the films were cheaply and quickly made by small studios looking to make the bulk of their profit through distribution channels to the farthest reaches of the Chinese diaspora. Many production and distribution networks were organized along regional affiliations. The late 19th century boom in Shanghai’s economy drew traders from all parts of the country, and these entrepreneurs had naturally banded together, forming trade associations based on shared dialect and home territory. The Cantonese-speaking merchants from Guangdong province invested heavily in the film industry, founding small independent studios and financing branches of established production houses in Guangzhou (Canton) and Hong Kong. As the Nanjing-based Nationalist government under Chiang Kai-shek attempted to consolidate its hold on the entire country, movies were increasingly seen as a propaganda tool. Regional control and regional distribution of films unsettled the central government.
For a short time, wuxia filmmakers continued on their merry way, mashing up sex, violence, and special effects onscreen in a way still familiar to genre fans eighty years later. The absence of censorship in the 1920s, combined with a fashionably modern approach to female sexuality in cosmopolitan urban centers, meant that scenes of rape and sexual slavery could be inserted to illustrate the depravity of the villains. In the blockbuster BURNING OF RED LOTUS TEMPLE, the evil monk keeps a harem. In RED HEROINE (1929), the protagonist is rescued from a rape by her teacher, and later avenges her best friend’s assault. THE SPIDER QUEEN (1927), probably based on an episode of the epic “Journey to the West,” was notorious for early scenes of nudity. The fact that the wuxia hero or heroine punished the transgressors in the end did nothing to pacify the critics.
Both the Communist intellectuals and the Nationalist government condemned wuxia films for their superstitions and feudal attitudes. At the peak of the craze, rumors spread that young people were leaving their homes to search for a martial arts master. Taoists burned incense to the spiritual beings onscreen. The Nationalists had launched an Anti-Superstition Campaign, and set up a film censorship bureau which moved to revoke or deny exhibition licenses for wuxia films, starting around 1931. Influential critics joined the attack, accusing the genre of promoting immorality and anarchy. Given the fairly recent history of the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, where some of the spirit boxers claimed to be possessed by heroes of Peking Opera, the authorities were not wrong in their belief that martial arts films could trigger strong passions in viewers. One contemporary description of a wuxia audience has been translated into English: “As cheering and applauding are not prohibited in those theaters, you are from beginning to end surrounded by the fanatic crowd. Whenever the swordsmen in the film begin to fight with their flying swords, the mad shouting of the spectators is almost warlike. They cheer at the appearance of the flying Hong Gu, not so much because she is played by the female star Hu Die, as because she is a swordswoman and the protagonist in the film…*”
Fan Xuepeng as the flying swordswoman in RED HEROINE (1929).
A further blow to the wuxia shenguai genre fell with the introduction of sound technology to the Shanghai film industry, also around 1931. Initial attempts at adding a soundtrack pretty much consisted of distributing phonograph records to be played during musical interludes in the otherwise silent film. But the very possibility of a soundtrack raised another controversy. The Nationalists were promoting Mandarin Chinese as the new “national language” (guoyu), while a significant portion of the wuxia audience spoke Cantonese. The small regional producers either went out of business or relocated beyond the reach of the Chinese government, in Hong Kong, Singapore, and even San Francisco.
In the end, it wasn’t really the government that finally crushed the wuxia film industry in Shanghai. Early in 1932, parts of Shanghai were bombed by the Japanese. The dominant Mingxing studio, producer of the RED LOTUS TEMPLE series, was badly damaged in the shelling. Suddenly, the Nationalists and Communists had a more pressing issue than kung fu movies to deal with. Audiences also lost their taste for fantasy. The boom was over.
*Shen Yanbing, quoted in An Amorous History of the Silver Screen, by Zhang Zhen. University of Chicago Press, 2005.
This entry was originally posted on July 1 2007.
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