It is nearly thirty years since Linda Jaivin and I translated that material for New Ghosts, Old Dreams: Chinese Rebel Voices (New York: Times Books, 1992).

In 1988, Ni Kuang made an astute observation on the past of Tibet and the future of Hong Kong (see the box below). The following interview was published on 13 August 2019 as the heroic protesters of the city - 遲暮英雄 - were nearing a tragic Götterdämmerung.

At the age of eighty-four, and despite encroaching infirmity, he continues to be an enthusiastic, if sardonic, commentator on the political life of his adopted home. Ni has long been a trenchant critic of the Chinese Communist Party and its surrogate local rulers. He emigrated to the United States in 1992 but returned to live in Hong Kong in 2006 as his wife found it difficult to adjust to life in North America. In a city of refugees, he would become renowned as a prolific and commercially successful writer churning out science fiction, martial arts novels, romances, adventure stories, thrillers and newspaper columns at the astounding rate of more than 10,000 Chinese characters a day. Following rejection by his fearful family in Shanghai, and after a torturous journey south, Ni snuck across the border to Hong Kong in 1957. As a soldier in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in Inner Mongolia he found himself under suspicion and persecuted. A journalist from Apple Daily 蘋果日報, a leading independent media outlet in Hong Kong and Taiwan, uses the ancient expression 英雄遲暮 yīng xióng chí mù ‘heroic twilight’ to describe the celebrated and prolific novelist, screen writer essayist and commentator Ni Kuang ( 倪匡, 1935-), who is also known as Ngai Hong.īorn in Shanghai Ni remained on the Mainland after 1949 to seek an education and to contribute to the building of New China.

The Nobility of Failure by Ivan Morris