Disillusioned, Shang-Chi swears eternal opposition to his father's ambitions and fights him as an agent of British intelligence, under the orders of Sir Denis Nayland Smith.

Comics historian Les Daniels observed that "ingenious writing by Doug Moench and energetic art by Paul Gulacy brought Master of Kung Fu new life".

I learned many things from my father: That my name means 'The Rising and Advancing of a Spirit', that my body could be forged into a living weapon through the discipline of kung fu, and that it might be used for the murder of a man called Dr. Petrie.

Gulacy was a film buff, and modeled many characters after film stars: Shang-Chi on Bruce Lee,[4] Juliette on Marlene Dietrich, James Larner on Marlon Brando, Clive Reston (often broadly hinted at as being the son of James Bond, as well as the grand-nephew of Sherlock Holmes) occasionally looking like a combination of Basil Rathbone and Sean Connery, and a minor character, Ward Sarsfield (after Arthur Henry Sarsfield Ward, the real-life name of Dr. Fu Manchu's creator Sax Rohmer), resembling David Niven.

The character's long-running battle with his father ended with #118 and with the main storyline resolved, the book was cancelled with issue #125, as Shang-Chi retired to a passive life as a fisherman in a Chinese village.

In 2010, Comics Bulletin ranked Moench's work on Master of Kung-Fu with artists Gulacy, Mike Zeck, and Day sixth on its list of the "Top 10 1970s Marvels".

[11] In 2009, the black and white one-shot Shang-Chi: Master of Kung Fu was released, with stories written by Jonathan Hickman, Mike Benson, Charlie Huston and Robin Furth and illustrated by Tomm Coker, C. P. Smith, Enrique Romero and Paul Gulacy.

Written by Haden Blackman and illustrated by Dalibor Talajic, the four-issue miniseries is a wuxia-inspired story that takes place in the Battleworld domain of K'un-Lun and centers around Shang-Chi in his fight to overthrow his despotic father, Emperor Zheng Zu.