We are Not Sick Men! Bruce Lee and the Restoration of China's Pre-Confucian Martial Virtue

Abstract

This paper proposes to revisit the global impact of Bruce Lee by returning him to a Sinocentric cultural sphere. The revolutionary act that Bruce Lee accomplished is that he not only made being Chinese globally popular by way of his kung fu films but more importantly he shattered the long reign of Confucianism that valorized wen 文 (the cultural) at the expense of wu 武 (the martial). At heart are two factors. First, Bruce Lee was the rare Chinese individual who could combine both wen and wu but because he did this by way of kung fu, orthodox Confucianism denigrates his achievement. The second is that Confucius, while he sought to valorize the Zhou dynasty as the ideal past perfection of Chinese civilization, suppressed the martial core that defined the Zhou dynasty’s militarized aristocracy. Under this light, it is Bruce Lee that completed Confucius’ project by creating a modern day personification of the Zhou dynasty’s balanced masculinity where wen and wu were equally valorized and pursued.