Mitt Ni Kwang: Hong Kong’s leading screenwriter was 87

Ni Kwang, one of Hong Kong’s most distinguished screenwriters and novelists, has passed away. He was 87 years old.

He died on Sunday in Hong Kong, where local media reported melanoma as the cause of death.

Nee has written about 300 scripts, many in the martial arts genre and many in the Shaw Brothers studio with co-writer Chang Chen. He wrote the screenplays for the classic films “The 36th Chamber of Shaolin” and “One Armed Swordsman” and had a hand in two of Bruce Lee’s six films “The Big Boss” and “Fist of Fury” although credit for writing went to Wei Lo.

As a novelist, Nee wrote “The New Wesley Adventures” a series of detective stories that often featured aliens and extraterrestrial creatures. It was serialized initially in the Ming Pao newspaper since the 1960s and has spawned numerous films and TV series (some written as “Wisdom”).

“For those of you who are older, they all know that the three greatest talents in the literary world are Jin Young (popularly known as Louis Cha), Goo Long and Nei Kwang. Tinky Ten, a spokesperson for the Hong Kong Filmmakers Association, said in quotes sent to a newspaper South China Morning Post, “After that, such iconic people did not appear and made the era.” “I wonder if this is the end of an era.” Jo passed away in 1985. Cha died recently in 2018.

Ni story background is equally colorful. He was born in 1935 in the then Republic of China, with differing reports on where, either Ningbo or Shanghai. As a young man in early communist China, he worked as a security official in Inner Mongolia writing death sentences. She was defeated by authoritarian rule and fled to Hong Kong in 1957.

After that time, he quickly established himself as a novelist and in the 1960s as a screenwriter.

He remained fiercely anti-communist throughout his life and never again set foot in mainland China. He said that individual freedom and freedom of expression were of paramount importance. “After leaving the mainland, I am free without any restrictions and able to speak and think freely,” he told a 2019 interviewer.

Ni left Hong Kong in 1992, before the territory was handed over in 1997 from British rule to China, moved to the United States and returned to live in Hong Kong in 2006 because his wife could not adjust to life in the United States. But he remained skeptical about the way the city was being controlled. The Communist Party decides everything. There is no such thing as one country, two systems,” referring to the promise to preserve Hong Kong’s way of life until 2047.

Ni was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Hong Kong Film Awards in 2012. He won the Jubilee Honor from the Hong Kong Screenwriters Guild in 2018.



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