The jiangshi

This chapter examines the peculiar form that the zombie takes in Chinese culture. Known as jiangshi, the Chinese zombie is a corpse that will not lie in rest. Most often, jiangshi is translated as vampire rather than zombie despite the fact that it shares little commonalities with its Western counterpart and its literal meaning is “corpse.” In this chapter, I explore the trajectory of the jiangshi in literature from strange stories, which are supposedly accounts of fact, through to its historical solidification during the Qing Dynasty. Following this, this chapter considers the representation of the jiangshi in Chinese language cinema as this is where its specific attributes were formalized and charts its shifts in meaning over time. While it explores its cinematic precursors in The Spiritual Boxer II (1979) and Encounters of the Spooky Kind (1980), the main focus is on the Mr. Vampire series (1985–1992) and its reboot as Mr. Zombie (2018–2021). In posthandover Hong Kong, now under the control of the Communist party, the jiangshi has no place; censorship policies forbid superstition and the supernatural as these are in direct conflict with the rationality of the dominant ideology. In the Mr. Zombie films, the jiangshi is no longer a preternatural creature but rather a weapon of revenge wielded by the human antagonist. In these terms, Rigor Mortis (2013) should be considered a love letter to the jiangshi films of the past which heralds the death knell of the genre. Neither does the jiangshi have a place in contemporary Taiwanese cinema, with the exception of the Little Master, Taiwan’s monsters are all too familiar. The chapter concludes by sketching out the jiangshi’s journey to the West in popular culture from unsuccessful attempts in film, The Legend of 7 Golden Vampires (1974) and The Jitters (1989), to successful appearances in videogames, including Darkstalkers (1994–2022) and Overwatch (2016–2022) and finally the tabletop RPG Jiangshi: Blood in the Banquet Hall (2022) which transposes the hopping vampires from China to North America in a game which is built around the Chinese immigrant experience. As such, in order to propagate, the jiangshi have had to abandon their homeland and travel to the West where they have not only been welcomed but integrated into the general lexicon of monstrosity.