Stereotypes - Ziauddin Sardar on the transformation of the Chinese from baddies to goodies
Sammo Hung is not a conventional hero. He is short, fat and chronologically over the hill. But as the leading man of the hit action-comedy show Marshall Law, he is in a class of his own. He can turn any ordinary object - dustbin, toothbrush, a pair of shoes - into a lethal weapon. He can backflip, high-kick and land a karate chop with unearthly ease.
The plot has our hero move from Shanghai to Los Angeles to join forces with the LA Police Department. But the fictional move mirrors reality. The director/actor Sammo Hung, an icon of Hong Kong action cinema, has himself shifted to Hollywood. The transfer also represents a shift in the conventional representation of the Chinese in American cinema.
Conventionally, the Chinese have been portrayed in the west as untrustworthy, stupid, greedy, superstitious, lustful towards white women, irrationally attached to rather conservative notions of honour and family loyalty, and prone to narcotic addictions. In sharp contrast, the Chinese hero of Marshall Law is wise, humorous and wholly trustworthy. His integrity and values become a commentary on American culture. He emerges as deeply humane, complex and a rather well-rounded person.
Representation is a function of power. The arrival of a genuine Chinese Hollywood hero on our television screens signals the arrival of China as a superpower in global politics. It is also an acknowledgement that Chinese consumers, both inside China and outside in the Pacific Rim, and across the world, now constitute almost half of the global market. Clearly, they are unlikely to take someone like the evil Fu Manchu to heart. Sammo, on the other hand, is recognisably one of "us".
But within western culture itself, the Chinese are also becoming "us" rather than "them". Increasingly, they are seen less as objects of fear and subjects of loathing, and more as an integral part of western civilisation. A running gag in Marshall Law plays ostensibly on the penetration of America in China, only to emphasise how China itself has been internalised by America: Chinese products are everywhere, and Chinese food is often better than in China; Buddhism is the chosen philosophy of all fashion-conscious individuals; kids are addicted to video games such as Street Fighter II, in which players assume the personality of racially marked characters such as the Kung Fu master, Chun Li. Chinese martial arts are now a standard feature of Hollywood action films. American and European business no longer fears Confucianism. Indeed, Sun Tzu's The Art of War is essential reading for all self-respecting corporate leaders.
The increasing acceptance of the Chinese as a part of western culture has involved overwriting a long string of negative stereotypes. Western representations of China go back to the 16th century and depend on the imagery of the Mongol hordes. The stock embodiment of Chinese cruelty and malign intent is Fu Manchu, whose name spells the Yellow Peril. Hammer Fu Manchu films gave this depiction of the evil Chinese an enduring and international form. By convention from Arthur Conan Doyle to Sax Rohmer, Chinatown became a den of iniquity and lurking menace.
The American representation of the Chinese draws on two seminal works - D W Griffith's 1919 film, Broken Blossoms, and Pearl S Buck's novel, and its 1937 film version, The Good Earth.
Griffith's film, based on the short story The Chink and the Child by Thomas Burke, is a cautionary tale about miscegenation. Its protagonist, Cheng Huan, settles in London with the intention of becoming a Buddhist missionary. Instead, he becomes a recluse and an opium addict. He offers refuge to a young girl violently abused by her drunken father. In scenes of subtle codes, he dresses her in Chinese finery from the curio shop where he works, until she is fit to be a concubine. When the drunken father discovers her whereabouts, he breaks in, drags out his daughter and beats her to death, before being shot by Cheng, who then kills himself.
Broken Blossoms was seen as a sympathetic portrayal of the Chinese. But the intended sympathy only reconfirms the prejudice it seeks to expose.
The Good Earth, as film and book, piles stereotype on stereotype of orientalist imagery. The story is the life cycle of the peasant farmer Wang Lung and the former indentured domestic slave he marries, O Lan. The peasants are universalised to some extent, but there is a remoteness about them that is impenetrable. Even more noticeable in the book than the film is the coldness and personal distance that is innate to the characters. The pride at having a first-born son does not translate into fatherly affection; the children are forgotten appendages once born. The heroic noble wife is cast aside for a concubine; Wang Lung is betrayed by his nephew; his sons scheme against him in his old age. There is a strong accent on bestiality. China has no redeeming features and is portrayed as timeless, without any sense of history.
Buck was a missionary, born into a missionary family, and lived and worked in China, where he wrote The Good Earth. Hollywood has had a strong relationship with missionary China. It won an Oscar for Gregory Peck as the dedicated Catholic priest who made no impact on the otherness of China in Keys of the Kingdom (1944). There were more Oscars for Inn of the Sixth Happiness (1958), in which Ingrid Bergman played the missionary Gladys Aylward. In all these films, China is cruel, despotic, wrapped in tradition, chaotic, a corrupt "ruin on the edge of the world" and perennially resistant to change and to the west.
To these stock representations, Bret Harte and Mark Twain added the image of the buffoonish Chinaman who speaks only pidgin. Their creation, Hop Sing, has been recycled in numerous films and television shows. In the long- running series Bonanza, Hop Sing is also the name of the comic cook who serves the Cartwright family. Many episodes of Bonanza were devoted to improving representations of blacks and Native Americans. But Hop Sing always remained Hop Sing.
The principal Chinese characters in all these films are played by Caucasian actors who gave us, appropriately enough, a representation of a representation. Not even Charlie Chan, the inscrutable oriental detective, was played by a Chinese actor. His most famous screen persona was provided by Walter Oland. He was also played in a number of films by John Carradine, whose son David Carradine has made a career out of recycling orientalist imagery in the television series Kung Fu and Kung Fu: the legend continues.
As Marshall Law testifies, the legend doesn't actually continue. The Chinese are now increasingly representing themselves. In Hollywood, they can be found both behind and in front of the camera. This shift is a product of two related developments. The first is the emergence of a number of Chinese film-makers, such as Ang Lee and Wayne Wang, who have made it big in Hollywood. In Ang Lee's first three films (Pushing Hands, The Wedding Banquet, Eat Drink Man Woman), for example, the characters are complex figures coming to terms with tradition. There is always a wise, dignified father figure embodying traditional values, who brings out the strengths and weaknesses of modernity and tradition. Similarly, Wayne Wang portrays the Chinese (Eat a Bowl of Tea, The Joy Luck Club, Chinese Box) as composite characters with intact humanity.
The second is the transfer of Hong Kong action cinema to Hollywood. John Woo led the way by directing action vehicles for the likes of John Travolta (Broken Arrow) and Jean Claude van Damme (Hard Target). Then, after the Hong Kong handover in 1997, the floodgates opened allowing a mass exodus of the island's film-makers. Today, high-octane stars, such as Chow Yun Fat, Jackie Chan and Jet Li, are fast becoming the staple fare of Hollywood. They still speak pidgin, but who cares if you can shoot and fight like Chow Yun Fat?
We can now detect the assimilation of the style of Hong Kong film-making, with its "poetry of violence", in Hollywood. American film-makers are increasingly turning to Hong Kong for training actors in the physical and mental skills of martial arts film-making. For example, the legendary Chinese fight choreographer Yuen Wo Ping trained the actors and choreographed all the action sequences in The Matrix. The poses that Keanu Reeves adopts throughout these sequences are patterned on the style of Jet Li, whose Black Mask was Yuen Wo Ping's last film in Hong Kong.
The Matrix also provides us with an example of how deeply China has penetrated the American subconscious. Tank, the character that defines humanity in the film, is clearly Chinese - played by Marcus Chong, an actor of mixed African and Chinese ancestry. As well as embodying the hope for a future of humanity born and not harvested by machines, Tank is also crucial to resistance. He operates the computers that allow the rebels to fight the machines of "the Matrix".
In a subconscious slip, the two characters who save humanity in the final frames of The Matrix, Tank and Neo (played by Reeves), turn out to be Chinese. As most film aficionados know, Reeves has an English mother and a Chinese-Hawaiian father. So, it seems, the American psyche is being transformed from within. Clearly, there is more than one way to colonise the world.
Ziauddin Sardar's Orientalism is published by Open University Press (£10.99). The new series of Marshall Law starts on Channel 5 on 28 May
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