Louis Cha Novelist and Publisher Novelist, newspaper founder and sage China's Deng Xiaoping and Taiwan's President Chiang Ching-kuo could agree on very little, but they shared one thing - a taste for the martial-arts novels of Hong Kong's Louis Cha, under his pen name of Jin Yong. Written between 1955 and 1972, Cha's 15 works appeal to Chinese everywhere. They have sold in their tens of millions in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, not including translated versions in Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese, English and Bahasa - plus the millions of pirated copies read by Chinese mainlanders when Cha's works were banned there after he criticized the country's nuclear-weapons program in the 1960s. His novels remained officially blacklisted until 1984. In Taiwan, where his tales of good prevailing over social injustice were mistrusted, they were banned until 1979. Famous for their "Chineseness," as Cha himself has put it, the novels tell heroic stories against a backdrop of both real-life and fictional historical events. In 1959, Cha launched Hong Kong's much-respected Chinese-language daily Ming Pao (he sold it in 1993), where he shaped public opinion with his sharp-tongued editorials. His analysis of Hong Kong's future after its return to China in 1997 carried great weight in political circles. In 1985, Cha was appointed an executive member of China's Basic Law drafting committee, which drew up Hong Kong's mini-constitutiton. He resigned in protest against the Tiananmen crackdown in 1989, but was appointed in 1996 to the Preparatory Committee set up to supervise Hong Kong's transition. The 75-year-old remains a crucial figure in both Hong Kong and mainland politics. And his novels are still being read (and re-read) and adapted for television. Photo: Tony Yu