The Figure of the Father in Jin Yong

Filial piety, which was rejected as the archetype of archaic feudal oppression by the reformers of the New Culture Movement (for example, Ba Jin's novel entitled Family), never quite disappeared from the Chinese landscape, even in the most iconoclastic contexts of the Cultural Revolution. Today, it is very much present in novels about the martial arts, whether in Hong Kong in the work of Jin Yong or in the renewal of that literary genre in China today. It is also present in diverse forms in other popular novels. This paper focuses on this literature in order to identify a link between the rehabilitation of Confucianism and attempts at reconciling it with modernity in recent discourse, especially in the People's Republic of China.