Film and the Chinese Medical Humanities

Vivienne Lo, Chris Berry, Guo Liping, Vivienne Lo, Chris Berry, Guo Liping

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429017391
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Medical Theory, Practice & Reference

Film and the Chinese Medical Humanities is the first book to reflect on the power of film in representing medical and health discourse in China in both the past and the present, as well as in shaping its future.

Drawing on both feature and documentary films from mainland China, the chapters each engage with the field of medicine through the visual arts. They cover themes such as the history of doctors and their concepts of disease and therapies, understanding the patient experience of illness and death, and establishing empathy and compassion in medical practice, as well as the HIV/AIDs epidemic during the 1980s and 90s and changing attitudes towards disability. Inherently interdisciplinary in nature, the contributors therefore provide different perspectives from the fields of history, psychiatry, film studies, anthropology, linguistics, public health and occupational therapy, as they relate to China and people who identify as Chinese. Their combined approaches are united by a passion for improving the cross-cultural understanding of the body and ultimately healthcare itself.

A key resource for educators in the Medical Humanities, this book will be useful to students and scholars of Chinese Studies and Film Studies as well as global health, medical anthropology and medical history.

Part 1

Cross-cultural histories of the body and its care

1 Dead or alive?

Martial arts and the forensic gaze

Vivienne Lo

The contemporary worldwide addiction to the forensic-medical gaze, the power to see both the patterns of brutality inscribed on a body and the moral truths about whodunit, how and why they did it, and sometimes with whom, took a fascinating turn in Peter Chan’s (Chen Kexin 陳可辛) Chinese martial arts film Dragon (2011), hereafter referred to by its Chinese title Wuxia 武侠, ‘Martial Chivalry’. In a brilliant twenty-first century appropriation of both ancient Chinese medical traditions and the much-loved forensic detective genre, Wuxia pushes the martial arts epic in a new direction with a minute visual analysis of the anatomy and physiology of the martial arts body. Throughout the film a series of slow-motion replays and fast-paced montages juxtapose martial arts action with stills that draw on images from China’s medical past, and footage generated by modern medical imaging technologies. With this collage of perspectives, Chan participates in a twenty-first-century zeitgeist which disrupts the binary conventions that pit West against East; modernity against tradition; reductionism against holism; science against religion; objective anatomy against the subjective subtle body; and mind against body. In today’s world, the global balance of power is changing and new forms of cross-cultural scientific knowledge and natural philosophy are required to keep up.

The critical value of this film for the Medical Humanities lies in the way it both reflects and delivers these larger cultural ‘truths’ about the nature of science and medicine for a general audience. Recent transcultural histories of anatomy and forensic science also undermine the pervasive politics of conventional medical histories. It is no longer tenable to situate the rise of anatomical science entirely in a modern Europe with all its attendant assumptions about Western progress and processions of great white men of superior learning and insight. As Peter Chan’s film delivers its cinematic riposte to an unreconstructed Western narrative of scientific modernity, and instead outlines for us a unified and transcendent body of Chinese cultural genius, we are drawn in to a multi-faceted and compelling political vision, at once transnational in its production and intended audiences, and national in its powerful representation of an ethnically diverse one-China (Berry and Farquhar 2006: 195).

Chan’s film draws on elements of both of the two main sub-genres of the martial arts film genre, the fast-action choreographed bare-fist fight of the kungfu film, and the romance, chivalry, and running-up-walls, flying-through-the-air fantasy tales of martial errantry characteristic of the genre from which the film takes its Chinese name, wuxia. While the film draws on the aesthetics of both these cinematic traditions, the themes of honour and chivalry characteristic of the wuxia sub-genre are uniquely developed into an analysis of how martial arts moral philosophy is encoded in the living body itself (Teo 2009: 17–37).

The relationship that develops between the two main protagonists of this film, Xu Baijiu徐百九and Liu Jinxi 劉金喜 (formerly known as Tang Long), highlights a persistent modern Chinese dilemma about the nature of truth and individual responsibility, here revealed in anatomical expertise about living and dead bodies. On the one hand Xu Baijiu, the forensic detective, played by Taiwanese-Japanese superstar Takeshi Kaneshiro金城武, subtly references the largely unacknowledged Japanese contribution to Chinese modernity, and particularly medicine, during the early twentieth century (Elman 2005: 396–8; Andrews 2014: 69–88). In his dogged determination to get to the bottom of the crimes Xu suspects Liu Jinxi (Donnie Yen) to have committed in an earlier phase of his life and under a different identity, we find in Xu’s character the Chinese awakening to theories and practices of universal law, modern science and rationality, and concomitant notions of citizenship. For Xu, evidence is dispassionate and objective and there is only one, scientific version of the truth: ‘only physiology and the law don’t lie’ (c.f. Elman 2005: 372–432).

On the other hand, we have Donnie Yen (Yan Zidan 甄子丹), famous for his portrayal of Ip Man (Ye Men 葉問 2008; sequels 2010, 2016), the gentle-mannered, educated originator of Wing Chun style kungfu. Xu Baijiu’s forensic examination of Liu Jinxi’s living body exalts and almost eroticises the martial arts body, its combination of suppleness and muscularity, calm acuity of the senses and glowing skin, but also clandestinely celebrates the way in which it embraces the lawless honour and justice code of the jianghu 江湖 (literally, ‘rivers and lakes’), a Chinese equivalent of the Wild West (Teo 2009: 18–19). Liu Jinxi represents a traditional Buddhist understanding of the martial arts. For him, individual actions have multiple external causes (Wright 1959: 108–27). Personal redemption lies in transcending the karma of one’s birth, in this case as heir to the chief of an exceptionally violent Xixia 西夏 (Tangut) clan known as the 72 Demons. But ultimately this can only be achieved through tremendous personal sacrifice in order to counter ‘the fabric of existence [which] is controlled by a myriad of karmic threads, [in which] everything is connected, no one truly has free will, we are all accomplices’. In juxtaposing these various natural-philosophical and religious perspectives visually, as contrasting body cultures, the film challenges the singular Western anatomical ‘gaze’ and its claim to universal truth with a fascinating and uniquely Chinese relativism.

Two nationalistic impulses are held in dynamic tension throughout the film. The first is the drive to regenerate China as a modern, scientific nation that gained pace among nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Chinese reformers and revolutionaries, for whom the image and objective investigation of the anatomical and forensic body were emblematic, just as they were in Europe and North America at the time (Asen 2009; Elman 2005: 388–96, 400–3). The second is the persistent claim of Chinese particularity regarding the superhuman potential of the living body, epitomized by a subjective, traditional understanding of the body in movement: a kind of cultural genius that is embodied in the spectacular visual culture of martial arts performances and Chinese opera alike.

Wuxia offers a further opportunity to interrogate a new style of patriotic masculinity as expressed through the martial arts body. In the 1980s the iconic martial arts hero Bruce Lee embodied the transnational tensions of his time, ‘Lee as Hong Kong; Lee as cultural and/or diasporic China; Lee as Third World anti-imperialist; Lee as Asian American Champion’ (Berry and Farquhar 2006: 197–204). Thirty years on, China is in a much stronger and less equivocal position. After the economic miracle, the 1997 return of Hong Kong, and the inexorable growth of China’s power and international standing, Wuxia looks back to China’s earlier internal struggles and extols the power and beneficence of political unity for a multi-ethnic state. This political message is intertwined with notions of Chinese cultural superiority and is conveyed in the narrative of Liu Jinxi’s renunciation of his minority roots. Redeeming himself from a violent past among the Xixia people, he rejects the lawless autonomy of the nomads. Separatism, we are given to understand, is best transcended through peaceful elective membership of the majority by enlightened individuals (Berry and Farquhar 2006: 197–204).

Xixia was a medieval term for the kingdom or empire of the Buddhist Tangut people, who are not now included among China’s officially recognised ethnic minorities. The negative representation of this pre-modern group in the film does not, therefore, run the risk of offending any living community, but obliquely illustrates contemporary China’s ideal relationship with its 55 recognised ethnic minorities (the concept of the Han Chinese as a 56th category, self-identifying as a majority ethnicity). The historic Buddhism of the Xixia people (Gaowa 2007) is in fact a vehicle for one of the film’s dénouements, as the main character Liu Jinxi undergoes a radical lifestyle transformation in order to achieve a separation from his brutal father, foregoing a violent inheritance and professing a new, more enlightened form of Buddhism among the submissive ‘ethnic minority’ of the villagers (the men and boys of the village still wear their hair in the pigtails that signify submission to the old Manchu dynasty, and also by implication to the new Chinese Republic represented in the film by Xu Baijiu and his police superior, and, by inference for the viewer, to Communist China itself).

There is also broader cultural significance to be found in the film through the multiple transnational processes at work at all levels of production. Peter Chan Ho-sun is himself a truly transnational director: born in Hong Kong and raised in Bangkok, he studied cinema in the United States at the UCLA film school before returning to Asia in the early 1980s. He began work in the Hong Kong film industry as second assistant director to John Woo in Heroes Shed No Tears (Yingxiong wulei 英雄無淚, 1986), and as a location manager to Jackie Chan in Project A II (A jihua xuji A 計劃續集, 1987) and Armour of God (Longxiong hudi 龍兄虎弟, 1986), before moving on to producing and directing his own films in the late 1980s. Twenty movies later, he eventually joined Steven Spielberg at Dreamworks. Wuxia marks the first film appearance in seventeen years of veteran wuxia film idol Jimmy Wang Yu (One Armed Swordsman – Dubi dao 獨臂刀, 1967, and The Chinese Boxer (Longhu dou 龍虎斗, 1970), who is widely regarded as the first authentic kungfu star. As we will see, in its final scenes, Wuxia pays direct homage to the One Armed Swordsman, whose loss of one arm has been linked not only to male castration anxieties and the homoerotic nature of the martial arts, but also to the theme of severing links with patriarchal obligation, a choice which is highlighted in the final scenes of this film (Zhang 2004: 178).

The interlinking transnationalities of the director and of the various genres of martial arts and forensic detective films that play out in Wuxia have produced a remarkable visual demonstration of cross-cultural body consciousness, which challenges many long-standing orientalist assumptions. The film calls into question Eurocentric biases about the history of the body and its care, and embodies a distinctively Chinese ethic of modernity and citizenship. For these reasons it is an excellent subject for the Medical and Health Humanities. It is important for its expression of Asian body and health-related beliefs and practices that have gone global in recent times. But it is even more significant in the context of this volume as a contemporary commentary on an old set of prejudices in the practice of medical history which for centuries have shaped perspectives on global power dynamics according to the now outdated binary opposition of East and West (Figure 1.1).

Set six years after the Xinhai revolution (1911), when imperial China has already come to a violent end, the action of the film takes place in the context of the troubled beginnings of the modern Chinese state. The authority of the new Republican government and the peace of communities in the hinterland of China are challenged by roaming bandits and local warlords on horseback. In a rural village in the far south-west of China (Yunnan), the plot of Wuxia unfolds as we discover that Liu Jinxi, a seemingly meek and law-abid...