Everybody's kung fu fighting

The Chinese are here, and everybody I speak to about this is a little freaked out.

They eat dogs. They’ve bought a majority stake in Standard Bank. They own Zimbabwe. They’re big in Namibia. Don’t you remember Tiananmen Square? Look at what they’ve done in Tibet. Like shame hey, the Dalai Lama and all…

The thing about fear is that it contracts. Closes up possibility. Feeds off ignorance. Binary thinking is so limiting. I am not saying we should blindly welcome the Chinese re-colonization of Africa with open arms. But surely there’s an upside?

For me it’s the culture. China is one of the world’s oldest people. They date back some six millenia. They have the oldest, most continuously used written language system. They gave the world paper, Confucius, printing, Jet Li, sweet and sour pork, Sun Tzu and Jackie Chan.

Besides, colonization is a fact of life. It’s as old as humanity. Ask the Romans. The British Empire. The Nazis. South African companies moving into Africa. The Americans whose sun is setting, and who have been this century’s great military and economic colonialists.

The reason I’m glad the Chinese are talking over from the US in the world domination stakes, is the culture. For me it’s about the movies. I was chomping popcorn and watching Rob Minkoff‘s The Forbidden Kingdom when I thought: “Thank goodness someone’s showing Hollywood how to real make movies.”

Hollywood has gotten fat, tired and boring. like an obese, over-ripe ego feeding off itself. Thankfully this year’s Oscars showed that the foreigners have landed. Minkoff’s movie underscores this trend by paying homage to Chinese cinema with a story-rich script by John Fusco, the same guy who wrote Hidalgo. The movie features cinematography by Hong Kong film guru, Peter Pau who also did Ang Lee‘s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon alongside a slew of legendary Chinese movies including the multi award winning Ru guo.Ai (Perhaps Love). This shows in the movie’s luxurious views of a beautiful and panoramic rural China.

The choreography is sublime. The same effortless grace that was evident in Kung Fu Hustle, House of Fury and Jet Li’s Fearless. This thanks to Woo-ping Yuen, an industry legend who worked on all those movies as well as the Kill Bill and Matrix franchises, alongside the reams of award winning Chinese movies he’s choreographed.

Look, The Forbidden Kingdom doesn’t remake the Kung Fu genre or won’t go down in the great book of Hong Kong classics. It was made by Hollywood, that’s its first flaw. But it does star Jet Li, which is a good start. Alongside Jackie Chan, the fact that heavyweight Chinese film greats helped craft this movie makes it a good gateway to the old Chinese classics.

Watching my son block, dodge and duck throughout The Forbidden Kingdom took me back to the good old days when my younger brother had a friend whose family owned a video shop. The shop’s dungeon was filled with Kung Fu classics. We could take as many of these as we wanted for free, and so began our love affair with lip flap and badly dubbed cult classics. Those were the days of Crazy guy with super Kung Fu

; Ten Shaolin Disciples; and Bruce Lee‘s Fists of Fury. Movies that became a trapdoor through which we fell into a mysterious culture that changed our heads and hearts by giving us a completely different lens through which we could look at life.

Yes, the Chinese have landed.

Like most things what this will mean to you will be dictated by whether you see your bowl of chop suey half full, or half empty.