Modern Asian Studies 33, 4 (1999), pp. 835–859.  1999 Cambridge University Press Printed in the United Kingdom Sexuality, Masculinity and Politics in Chinese Culture: The Case of the ‘Sanguo’ Hero Guan Yu KAM LOUIE The University of Queensland This paper examines the sexual composition of the hero (yingxiong) in traditional China and how this sexuality is projected onto the political plane. Existing scholarship on the Chinese hero has pro- vided Sinology with excellent material on a number of issues, from those which link the hero with Chinese concepts of chivalry, 1 to those which discuss the hero as ‘revolutionary’ and ‘mass-based’. 2 One of the major lacunae in all of these studies, however, has been an ana- lysis of the importance of sexuality to the successful construction of a ‘hero’. Before Chinese studies drew on more recent methodologies, such as those developed by feminist criticism, the yingxiong’s sexual- ity was often casually dismissed. It was asserted that, in contrast to Western chivalric romances, where love is often the most important inspiration for heroic deeds, love (and by implication sex) in tradi- tional Chinese chivalric tales ‘plays no such important part’. 3 The de-sexualization of the Chinese hero continued up to and right through the 1980s, when, through the careful selection and processing of images, producers of both Western and Chinese pop- ular icons have succeeded in making Chinese men appear asexual. 4 The failure of literary critics to emphasize the erotic when discussing Chinese heroes meant they had contributed to this process of neg- 1 For example James J. Y. Liu, The Chinese Knight-Errant (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967); Cui Fengyuan, Zhongguo gudian duanpian xiayi xiaoshuo yanjiu (A Study of Classical Chinese Short Stories on Knight-Errantry) (Taipei: Lianjing chuban shiye gongsi, 1986). 2 Zhou Zhongming, Zhongguo de xiaoshuo yishu (The Art of Chinese Fiction) (reprinted Taipei: Guanya wenhua, 1990), pp. 25–37. 3 Liu, p. 204. Neither Liu nor Cui, for example, mention sex in their books. 4 In the West, recent images are those such as Grass Hopper in the Television series Kung Fu and in China, the most enduring models are those such as the sexless Lei Feng. Such interpretations of the Chinese male hero seem to have direct equiva- lents in literary criticism. 0026–749X/99/$7.50+ $0.10 835 https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X99003558 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Hong Kong Libraries, on 22 May 2020 at 04:35:55, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at