Rebuilding the Shaolin Monastery: Cold War Chinese Networks, Martial Arts, and the Reimagining of the Chinese Nation

During the high tides of the Cold War, a modern representation of traditional Chinese martial arts, wuxia (knight-errant), emerged as the epicenter of a cultural industrial complex, spanning from fiction, to visual culture, to tourism. Originally a product of Hong Kong, this new avatar of Chinese martial arts attained immense popularity in Cold War Southeast Asia and post-Cultural Revolution mainland China. From the 1950s to the 1980s, politically savvy émigré cultural entrepreneurs like Louis Cha (fiction), Run Run Shaw (films) and Deacon Chiu (amusement parks) created the wuxia cultural industry by tapping state-of-the-art media technologies, harnessing mainland China’s mythical landscapes, and evoking a sense of nostalgia among the Chinese diaspora. As Chinese martial arts became a popular genre for cultural consumption among global audiences and a principal source for imitation among Chinese entrepreneurs, this process contributed to Communist China’s re-imagining of its history and culture in the wake of the Cultural Revolution. Focusing on the rebuilding of the Shaolin monastery as the Mecca in the sacred geography of the martial arts, this paper explores the emergence and development of the wuxia as politically de-sensitizing and commercially successful Chinese cultural forms from the 1950s to the 1980s. Drawing on archives, memoirs, magazines, as well as literary and visual sources, I argue that the contemporary cultural industry around the Shaolin Monastery originated in the powerful interplay of political, cultural, and commercial dynamics in the Cold War. By leveraging these transnational dynamics against the strategic position of Hong Kong, émigré Chinese cultural entrepreneurs constructed a potent symbol for the Chinese nation and helped the reintegration of Communist mainland China into the family of nations in the post-colonial age.