Chong Ch’ang-hwa in Hong Kong: a redemptive action cinema of Confucian Virtue

Abstract

Hong Kong cinema’s kung fu films attained international success when Chong Ch’ang-hwa’s King Boxer: Five Fingers of Death (Tian xia di yi quan, 1972) spearheaded the launch of what David Desser identifies as the “kung fu craze.” While this secured the Shaw Brothers Studio’s international marketing strategy with its cross-over appeal, it did so due in large part to the participation of a South Korean film director working in a Chinese film genre for the Hong Kong film industry. Many of the historical accounts of Chong Ch’ang-hwa’s prominence in the success of this film, the kung fu craze that followed, and his transformative input of Hong Kong cinema’s action aesthetics for both Shaw Brothers and Golden Harvest remain tangential since he is not an ethnic Han Chinese. Law Kar takes this fact to label Chong as a “mercenary director.” Despite the ethnic divide separating the Han Korean Chong from his Han Chinese peers, he remains glued to the shared promotion of Confucianism that has long linked the two people together throughout history. This paper undertakes an ideological analysis centered on Confucian notions of martial virtue to reposition Chong as an integral contributor to the reassertion of Confucian values as a continuing “civilizing mission” of its own for a Cold War Asia facing the Communist rejection of the Confucian past.