Ni Kuang

Ni Cong (30 May 1935 – 3 July 2022), courtesy name Yiming, better known by his pen name Ni Kuang (also romanised Ngai Hong, I Kuang and Yi Kuang), was a Hong Kong-American novelist and screenwriter. He wrote over 300 Chinese-language wuxia and science fiction novels, and more than 400 film scripts. Life Ni was born on 30 May 1935, in Shanghai, to a family of intellectuals. He was the fourth child out of seven, and one of his younger siblings is novelist Yi Shu. His parents, who worked as insurance agents, left Shanghai for British Hong Kong in 1950 with his three younger siblings, although Ni and his three older siblings remained in Mainland China. In 1951, at the age of 16, he joined the People's Liberation Army, and was employed as a security officer by Jiangsu provincial public security department in 1952 after receiving training at East China People's Revolution University. In 1955, he volunteered to be assigned to Jalaid Banner, a region in Hulun Buir, Inner Mongolia, as a guard of a local laogai camp. In 1956, Ni was sentenced to ten years' imprisonment as a counter-revolutionary after he was charged for destruction of public property. Ni claims that he removed wooden planks off a bridge with other soldiers and burned them to keep warm in the winter, and he escaped because he thought he would receive a death sentence after his dog bit the commanding officer who frequently targeted him because of his outspokenness against the political system. In mid-May 1956, Ni fled Inner Mongolia and first went to Anshan to stay with his older brother Ni Yifang, an engineer and a member of the Chinese Communist Party. He left a month later and returned to Shanghai, where his remaining family members paid a human smuggler for him to travel to Hong Kong. Ni arrived in Kowloon on 5 July 1957, having passed through Guangzhou and Portuguese Macau. Since then, Ni had never set foot in Mainland China. Ni's science fiction novels usually take the form of detective/mystery stories featuring extraterrestrial life as a deus ex machina to explain the impossible and implausible. His best known works are the Wisely Series (Wai See-lei 衛斯理) and Dr Yuen (Yuen Chun-hap 原振俠) novel series, both of which have been adapted into films and television series. His criticism of communism is evident in some of these works.