Wikipedia: Wu Song
Wu Song's one of the 108 legendary heroes of Liangshan Marsh, from Shui Hu Zhuan. That's considered one of the four greatest works of Chinese literature, so we're talking the highest level of status in Chinese culture. It's actually a collection of folktales and older stories, much like the famous works based on Arthurian stuff. The direct translation of that title is 'Water Margin', literally referring to the geography - the border of the marsh that the heroes hid out in. But a commonly used English title is "Outlaws of the Marsh".
It's a Robin Hood tale. With Wu Song and his buddies. If you've played the Japanese Suikoden RPG series, that's loosely based on these guys. There's historical evidence that indicates at least one of these guys actually did exist, and led a band of outlaws - that's noted in the Wikipedia article. So it's quite an easy grab for non-government (or even particularly puckish government) supers to take names from that story.
After all, any number of Western archer superheroes use the Robin Hood motif, and the King Arthur thing is equally common.
On Classical/Mythological Themes for Chinese Supers
Beyond that - it's likely at least someone would try to emulate Sun Wukong, the Monkey King, from Xi You Ji, Journey to the West, another of the four big classical novels. By nature, Sun Wukong is a rebel, but then for most of the narrative of Xi You Ji, he's got a slave control collar on his head and is forced to be the retainer for a Lawful Good monk. No, really. But he's a sufficient cultural icon that a character using his motif could well be a government super.
The most memorable superhero I personally recall based on Wukong was a short-lived independent thing distributed in Asia, but despite Asian origins, a Western-style comic book in colour. It wasn't brilliant, but I remember it for very specific reasons. If I remember right, the character was a thief that broke into a museum, during an exhibition of ancient Chinese artifacts. But something more serious ends up going down, something more violent - he's not the only late night visitor there, and these other guys are killing guards. So he grabs the nearest weapon-like thing, this old staff...
...and ends up with a costume, hairy hands and arms, permanent five-o'-clock shadow. Monkey King, yes?
With that said, Wukong's full powerset is something incredibly broken, since in the tales, he's immortal, nigh-invulnerable, can duplicate himself into hundreds or thousands of independently-acting clones, has perfect shapeshifting, super strength, size shifting...
As an aside, the other two great Chinese literary classics - again, these are all works based on legends in the style of the Arthurian chronicles - are Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Hong Lou Meng (Dream of Red Chamber). I'd wager everyone's at least passingly familiar with the gist of Romance of the Three Kingdoms, it's a historical epic in a time of warfare and empires. It's possible supers could draw inspiration from this, but it's rather more about clashing militaries and famous generals - hence the kind of video games and pop culture stuff it's inspired today. Hong Lou Meng is a somewhat slow-paced tale, it's effectively a soap opera about the lives of the nobility, so totally unsuitable for inspiration.
There are other famous bits of Chinese folklore from where supers could draw inspiration - people themed after the Eight Immortals, or perhaps a female shapeshifting mage that calls herself White Snake...though as in most mythology, shapeshifting is a ridiculously common power in Chinese myth.
Of note is Nezha, who appears - among other things - in the epic Fengshen Yanyi. There's a very good anime and manga based on this, Hoshin Engi. Their version of Nezha is a ridiculously heavily armed and destructive, yet child-innocent cyborg who keeps accumulating city-busting magitech weaponry throughout the story, whose first solution to a problem is always MOAR DAKKA. He's like Data from Star Trek. If Data was constructed by SkyNet. I described this version of Nezha to my dad and some of his friends, who were Chinese-educated and studied Chinese literature through all their school years. They thought about this for a while, and then agreed it was a perfectly accurate and faithful depiction of the legendary figure - because the guy in the legends totally is a one-man armory of magical artifacts and destructive attacks.
Other Themes
DC's used the theme of armoured Chinese heroes done up in the style of armour best publicised in the Western eye by the Terracotta Warriors - though I've always figured this is a bit of a copout, and clearly there has to be an earth-elemental or stone-themed guy who actually is a Terracotta Warrior. Admittedly, this may be a bit silly...
The Champions Worldwide sourcebook, from the Champions RPG, has a guy who wears a Lion dance mask, which also makes complete sense in cultural context - but it's been done. What may be possible is a super who wears a Chinese opera mask - you know the ones, the elaborately painted things, most commonly in red, white and black.
Naturally, it's to be expected that a great number, possibly most of China's supers wouldn't use classical themes and motifs. Obviously there's going to be ones pitched towards the secular-Communist nationalist image. I wouldn't be surprised to see a teleporter named Long March, for example, or a particular superteam named Five Stars (think the Chinese flag).
Then there'll just be ones with standard superhero, culturally-agnostic imagery. There's a 1990s Chinese comic that was made into a Jet Li film, about a Chinese superhero - who went AWOL from a government supersoldier unit. He's Black Mask. In mainstream comics, Marvel's Radioactive Man is an example of a character whose Chinese origins come up a fair bit in narrative, but his appearance and motif aren't culturally specific at all.
I figure that such characters are easy to create, though - it's the mythological and classical context that I felt I could elaborate on here. You don't need to know your mythology and history to make Captain America, but you do need it to make Thor - and characters like Thor are an equally important part of the mythos.
I'd also like to see it done well. I like Grant Morrison, but Marvel's Great Ten manages to both amuse me and annoy the hell out of me at the same time. Mostly because of the names, actually - it's true that a lot of Chinese character names, titles and so on become these really long and flamboyantly convoluted things when translated into English. But that's translated into English - in Chinese, they're much shorter and make more sense. That's not the case for the supposed 'original' Chinese names for Grant Morrison's characters, as their names are still bombastic and ridiculous in Mandarin.
On National Superheroes
On Rob Kelk's note about national heroes - I've always felt it's really important to nail it right when trying to write about another country or culture, in these things. It doesn't pay to be too clever.
As an example, I actually really like the writeup on Silverwing in the Champions Worldwide sourcebook, Singapore's most powerful superhero. It's reasonable, they've got a number of contextual details right...
...except he's said to be ethnically Malay, but his real name is ethnically Chinese. Now, mind you, he has a very common Singaporean Chinese name, which isn't nearly as common in China. But either way, it's not a Malay name. There's nothing in the bio to suggest he's of mixed race. It's a small thing, and ultimately not an important thing - but it's the sort of thing people may notice.
Similarly, I remember reading an issue of Commando - that's a British war comic book, if you're not familiar with it. And I just cracked the hell up, because I could tell exactly which non-fiction book the author had used as a reference - Spencer Chapman's 'The Jungle is Neutral', about Chapman's experiences as a guerilla fighting the Japanese in WWII.
I enjoyed the comic, it was great. Because I loved Chapman's book, it's one of my favourite non-fiction books ever. But the comic was truly a case of doing the research just enough to get yourself into trouble.
I admit, I'm probably paranoid about this - it's probably why when I wrote up background stuff and created NPCs for my own superhero setting...well, there's a reason all the super NPCs I had coming out of South Africa and so on had generic themes - because I don't know enough about the area to create something more specific and convincing.
Hence why I'm rambling on here about Asian-specific stuff, because I figure it might come up in IST, and it would make it a lot more awesome for Bob's book if things were well-crafted.
I can probably do some noodling around with how supers might possibly be characterised for other Asian countries; whether included or not, it might be useful as a background thought exercise for contextualising conflict in Asia. A lot of Asian countries are also big real-world contributors to UN Peacekeeping missions, as a simple product of population size and professional militaries - Indonesia, for instance, and Thailand, so they probably have quite a few supers serving with IST.
-- Acyl
Wu Song's one of the 108 legendary heroes of Liangshan Marsh, from Shui Hu Zhuan. That's considered one of the four greatest works of Chinese literature, so we're talking the highest level of status in Chinese culture. It's actually a collection of folktales and older stories, much like the famous works based on Arthurian stuff. The direct translation of that title is 'Water Margin', literally referring to the geography - the border of the marsh that the heroes hid out in. But a commonly used English title is "Outlaws of the Marsh".
It's a Robin Hood tale. With Wu Song and his buddies. If you've played the Japanese Suikoden RPG series, that's loosely based on these guys. There's historical evidence that indicates at least one of these guys actually did exist, and led a band of outlaws - that's noted in the Wikipedia article. So it's quite an easy grab for non-government (or even particularly puckish government) supers to take names from that story.
After all, any number of Western archer superheroes use the Robin Hood motif, and the King Arthur thing is equally common.
On Classical/Mythological Themes for Chinese Supers
Beyond that - it's likely at least someone would try to emulate Sun Wukong, the Monkey King, from Xi You Ji, Journey to the West, another of the four big classical novels. By nature, Sun Wukong is a rebel, but then for most of the narrative of Xi You Ji, he's got a slave control collar on his head and is forced to be the retainer for a Lawful Good monk. No, really. But he's a sufficient cultural icon that a character using his motif could well be a government super.
The most memorable superhero I personally recall based on Wukong was a short-lived independent thing distributed in Asia, but despite Asian origins, a Western-style comic book in colour. It wasn't brilliant, but I remember it for very specific reasons. If I remember right, the character was a thief that broke into a museum, during an exhibition of ancient Chinese artifacts. But something more serious ends up going down, something more violent - he's not the only late night visitor there, and these other guys are killing guards. So he grabs the nearest weapon-like thing, this old staff...
...and ends up with a costume, hairy hands and arms, permanent five-o'-clock shadow. Monkey King, yes?
With that said, Wukong's full powerset is something incredibly broken, since in the tales, he's immortal, nigh-invulnerable, can duplicate himself into hundreds or thousands of independently-acting clones, has perfect shapeshifting, super strength, size shifting...
As an aside, the other two great Chinese literary classics - again, these are all works based on legends in the style of the Arthurian chronicles - are Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Hong Lou Meng (Dream of Red Chamber). I'd wager everyone's at least passingly familiar with the gist of Romance of the Three Kingdoms, it's a historical epic in a time of warfare and empires. It's possible supers could draw inspiration from this, but it's rather more about clashing militaries and famous generals - hence the kind of video games and pop culture stuff it's inspired today. Hong Lou Meng is a somewhat slow-paced tale, it's effectively a soap opera about the lives of the nobility, so totally unsuitable for inspiration.
There are other famous bits of Chinese folklore from where supers could draw inspiration - people themed after the Eight Immortals, or perhaps a female shapeshifting mage that calls herself White Snake...though as in most mythology, shapeshifting is a ridiculously common power in Chinese myth.
Of note is Nezha, who appears - among other things - in the epic Fengshen Yanyi. There's a very good anime and manga based on this, Hoshin Engi. Their version of Nezha is a ridiculously heavily armed and destructive, yet child-innocent cyborg who keeps accumulating city-busting magitech weaponry throughout the story, whose first solution to a problem is always MOAR DAKKA. He's like Data from Star Trek. If Data was constructed by SkyNet. I described this version of Nezha to my dad and some of his friends, who were Chinese-educated and studied Chinese literature through all their school years. They thought about this for a while, and then agreed it was a perfectly accurate and faithful depiction of the legendary figure - because the guy in the legends totally is a one-man armory of magical artifacts and destructive attacks.
Other Themes
DC's used the theme of armoured Chinese heroes done up in the style of armour best publicised in the Western eye by the Terracotta Warriors - though I've always figured this is a bit of a copout, and clearly there has to be an earth-elemental or stone-themed guy who actually is a Terracotta Warrior. Admittedly, this may be a bit silly...
The Champions Worldwide sourcebook, from the Champions RPG, has a guy who wears a Lion dance mask, which also makes complete sense in cultural context - but it's been done. What may be possible is a super who wears a Chinese opera mask - you know the ones, the elaborately painted things, most commonly in red, white and black.
Naturally, it's to be expected that a great number, possibly most of China's supers wouldn't use classical themes and motifs. Obviously there's going to be ones pitched towards the secular-Communist nationalist image. I wouldn't be surprised to see a teleporter named Long March, for example, or a particular superteam named Five Stars (think the Chinese flag).
Then there'll just be ones with standard superhero, culturally-agnostic imagery. There's a 1990s Chinese comic that was made into a Jet Li film, about a Chinese superhero - who went AWOL from a government supersoldier unit. He's Black Mask. In mainstream comics, Marvel's Radioactive Man is an example of a character whose Chinese origins come up a fair bit in narrative, but his appearance and motif aren't culturally specific at all.
I figure that such characters are easy to create, though - it's the mythological and classical context that I felt I could elaborate on here. You don't need to know your mythology and history to make Captain America, but you do need it to make Thor - and characters like Thor are an equally important part of the mythos.
I'd also like to see it done well. I like Grant Morrison, but Marvel's Great Ten manages to both amuse me and annoy the hell out of me at the same time. Mostly because of the names, actually - it's true that a lot of Chinese character names, titles and so on become these really long and flamboyantly convoluted things when translated into English. But that's translated into English - in Chinese, they're much shorter and make more sense. That's not the case for the supposed 'original' Chinese names for Grant Morrison's characters, as their names are still bombastic and ridiculous in Mandarin.
On National Superheroes
On Rob Kelk's note about national heroes - I've always felt it's really important to nail it right when trying to write about another country or culture, in these things. It doesn't pay to be too clever.
As an example, I actually really like the writeup on Silverwing in the Champions Worldwide sourcebook, Singapore's most powerful superhero. It's reasonable, they've got a number of contextual details right...
...except he's said to be ethnically Malay, but his real name is ethnically Chinese. Now, mind you, he has a very common Singaporean Chinese name, which isn't nearly as common in China. But either way, it's not a Malay name. There's nothing in the bio to suggest he's of mixed race. It's a small thing, and ultimately not an important thing - but it's the sort of thing people may notice.
Similarly, I remember reading an issue of Commando - that's a British war comic book, if you're not familiar with it. And I just cracked the hell up, because I could tell exactly which non-fiction book the author had used as a reference - Spencer Chapman's 'The Jungle is Neutral', about Chapman's experiences as a guerilla fighting the Japanese in WWII.
I enjoyed the comic, it was great. Because I loved Chapman's book, it's one of my favourite non-fiction books ever. But the comic was truly a case of doing the research just enough to get yourself into trouble.
I admit, I'm probably paranoid about this - it's probably why when I wrote up background stuff and created NPCs for my own superhero setting...well, there's a reason all the super NPCs I had coming out of South Africa and so on had generic themes - because I don't know enough about the area to create something more specific and convincing.
Hence why I'm rambling on here about Asian-specific stuff, because I figure it might come up in IST, and it would make it a lot more awesome for Bob's book if things were well-crafted.
I can probably do some noodling around with how supers might possibly be characterised for other Asian countries; whether included or not, it might be useful as a background thought exercise for contextualising conflict in Asia. A lot of Asian countries are also big real-world contributors to UN Peacekeeping missions, as a simple product of population size and professional militaries - Indonesia, for instance, and Thailand, so they probably have quite a few supers serving with IST.
-- Acyl