An Open Letter to Marvel Studios: How I’d handle the racist legacy of ‘Fu Manchu’ and Shang-Chi, Master of Kung Fu …

Fred Chong Rutherford
6 min readDec 18, 2018
Jet Li as Chen Zhen from Fist of Legend. Jet Li also made for a great Huo Yuanjia in Fearless.

Recently, Marvel Studios announced that they’re working on “Shang-Chi, Master of Kung Fu” as a new superhero tentpole franchise. From Deadline.com …

EXCLUSIVE: Marvel Studios is fast-tracking Shang-Chi to be its first superhero movie tentpole franchise with an Asian protagonist. The studio has set Chinese-American scribe Dave Callaham to write the screenplay, and Deadline hears Marvel is already looking at a number of Asian and Asian-American directors who want to do something as potentially monumental as was accomplished in Marvel’s first viable Best Picture candidate, Black Panther.

A little bit of background. Shang-Chi is a martial arts character created by writer Steve Englehart and artist Jim Starlin for Marvel Comics in the 1970s. He was, essentially, Marvel’s version of Bruce Lee, designed to cash in on the same Martial Arts pop culture frenzy that produced ‘Iron Fist’ and numerous other characters of the era.

Shang-Chi’s hook, though, was that while he was a hero, his father was none other than the villainous Fu Manchu, a property Marvel licensed from the estate of Sax Rohmer (the penname of ‘Arthur Henry Sarsfield Ward’).

Fu Manchu is a racist stereotype. Full stop. There’s no ifs, ands, or buts about it. The character is racist. His character design is racist. His behavior is racist. His very name is racist; according to Sax Rohmer, Fu Manchu means ‘The Warlike Manchu.’ For the record, Sax Rohmer didn’t speak Mandarin, Cantonese, or any Chinese dialects. He just made up a name and the meaning of the name. Rohmer told people that he got the idea for the character when he asked his ouija board, “What is the most dangerous competition to the white man?” and the board spelled out C-H-I-N-A-M-A-N. Sax Rohmer was a racist, who asked a racist question of a ouija board, and fully believed in the dangerous, destructive stereotypes of the Yellow Peril.

Sax Rohmer’s books, which played on these stereotypes and sold people in Britain, Europe and North America on the hysteria of foreign drug runners destroying white men sold 20 million copies in his lifetime.

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