Filmmakers should know kung fu isn't that superior
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Maybe this reflects fantasies of the movie directors themselves. In reality, Hollywood still thoroughly thrashes Chinese movies in the international market. In China, Western movies frequently beat out local products to top box office lists, such as Avatar's triumph in 2009.
This comes despite the fact that only a limited number of Western films are allowed into the country each year, and domestic regulations heavily favor the screening of favored local movies.
If the Chinese audience had a free choice, I'm afraid they'd prefer the weighty blockbusters of the West to the nimble but repetitive martial arts films of China.
Xenophobic stereotypes aren't a problem that's unique to China, naturally. Western movies of the 1980s often featured massive Russian villains, such as the huge boxer Ivan Drago in Rocky IV. Japanese movies of the 1960s have many of the same prejudices. The villain was usually a brutish American, brought low by a Japanese hero.
At the 1964 Tokyo Olympic Games, the Japanese public was expecting to see this played out in real life. The final of the judo open championships was between hefty Dutchman Anton Geesink, who was 1.98 meters tall, and the much lighter Japanese fighter Akio Kaminaga. The audience held their breath, expecting to see Kaminaga's skill defeat the massive foreigner.
It didn't happen. Geesink thrashed Kaminaga. And while Geesink's grace in victory was some compensation, some Japanese began to realize that dreams of martial arts superiority might be just that.
It's time for China to learn that lesson too. In modern Hollywood action movies, fighters from other cultures are now more likely to be the ally or the mentor of the hero, as in The Karate Kid, than his opponent.
Perhaps it's time for a movie about a young Chinese boy, cruelly bullied by local kung fu students, who learns the ancient Western martial art of boxing from an aged American teacher?
The author is a Nanjing-based broadcast journalist. lxchong@hotmail.com
