Kung Fu Tea

A group of Japanese pilgrims circa 1925. Source: Wikimedia.

Introduction: Pilgrimage in the Martial Arts

My friends can attest that I keep threatening to write a paper on the growth of “pilgrimage” in the modern martial arts community. In the current era this often takes the form of individuals traveling to the “homeland” (real or imagined) of their respective styles to experience a more “authentic” version of their art. Sometimes these martial arts tourists are looking for more, an experience that will test or transform them.

I am suspicious that earlier in the 20th century individuals flocked to the Asian martial arts precisely because they were viewed as a form of “virtual travel” which allowed one to explore what it meant to be Chinese or Japanese without undertaking the expense of actually leaving home. Extended travel abroad seems to be universally desired, but it is something that relatively few can actually afford. That was even more true before the advent of cheap trans-oceanic flights.

In point of fact it is likely to be a while before I actually undertake the sort of project that I am envisioning. It seems that I am always too preoccupied with other projects a little closer to home. But someday I am going to get that big research grant and take a closer look at these questions. Or maybe I will just reread J. Z. Smith’s works on pilgrimage and go from there. Who knows?

I have just returned from a different sort of trip, but one that also had the flavor of a pilgrimage. While on it I encountered a surprising number of fellow travelers all of whom shared the common goal of locating and mapping the various corners, questions and methods of the growing field of martial arts studies.

On June 10th-12th the first annual Martial Arts Studies Conference was held at the University of Cardiff in the UK. The event was a great success and it certainly exceeded my expectation in terms of the quality, number and enthusiasm of presentations. About fifty papers, addresses and special sessions were given over the course of two and half days. While most of the individuals at the conference were from Europe (the UK and Germany were both very well represented) individuals flew in from as far away as Hong Kong, Guam and Australia. I was actually pretty surprised by the number of Americans (both presenters and observers) that I encountered at the conference.

During the main sessions three panels were run concurrently which necessitated some hard choices. The topics covered were diverse, including titles such as “Women’s Martial Arts,” “The Historical Western Martial Arts,” “Bruce Lee” and “Historical Encounters” (which turned out to be Chinese martial arts history.) Conferences such as these are also a great way to catch up on current developments. At least three new or forthcoming books were discussed at the conference including Paul Bowman’s Martial Arts Studies, Alex Channon and Christopher R. Matthews (eds) Global Perspectives on Women in Combat Sports: Women Warriors around the World, and my own forthcoming book, The Creation of Wing Chun: A Social History of the Southern Chinese Martial Arts.

While this conference was still small enough to feel intimate, the number of graduate students and junior faculty presenting their research suggested an impending explosion in both the scope and popularity of martial arts studies. Everyone was enthusiastic about both their own work and getting the opportunity to meet so many other scholars interested in similar topics.

This was a pleasant change. I cannot recount the number of times that I have presented papers at the meetings of national associations within my field only to discover a panel facing a room full of empty chairs, devoid of any trace of an audience. Increasingly it seems that these sorts of meetings are professional obligation where everyone is interesting in talking, but no one bothers to listen.

The audience participation and engagement at the Martial Arts Studies conference stood in stark contrast to what I have seen in so many other venues. It suggested to me that the formation of an actual community of fellow travelers is well under way.

Nor should we neglect to mention the conference venue itself. The School of Journalism was kind enough to offer their rooms for the meetings and the Park Plaza Hotel was very comfortable and modern. Cardiff is an extremely walkable city with a lot to explore in its downtown core. The Welsh countryside is also beautiful. Perhaps my only real regret about this year’s conference is that I did not book some extra days to explore the area. That is something that I will be sure to rectify next year.

While it is possible to convey something of the size and energy of a conference with such a description, inevitably it misses both the texture and substance of what were three very intense days of constant discussion and exploration. After all, the transformative work of a pilgrimage happens in each of the individuals steps along the way.

It is also a fact that no two visitors will ever experience the same conference in exactly the same way. Even if you went to every session that was offered, it wasn’t possible to see more than a fraction of the totals papers that were presented. Nor were all of us coming to the gathering with the same research interests or theoretical commitments. So while the “substance” of the conference might be the most interesting topic for readers, it is simultaneously the hardest thing to generalize about.

In an attempt to capture a sense of the gathering this post will concentrate on the keynotes and special presentations that were seen by most of the conference participants. In addition to summarizing the basic presentations I will attempt to pull out a few strands shared by each of the presenters. Obviously this is a subjective rendering. While this report strives to share some of the “theoretical meat” that was provided at the conference, it is still a description of my own pilgrimage into martial arts studies. Your mileage may vary. I offer my apologies in advance for any discussions that seem unnecessarily truncated or taken in a different direction from how you may have heard them.

Stephen Chan delivering the conferences opening keynote. Source: http://martialartsstudies.blogspot.com/2015/06/conference-2015-and-2016.html

Is Martial Arts Studies a Discipline?
The basic tone for this conference was set by Professor Stephen Chan (prolific author, professor and sometimes Dean of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London). His excellent talk was whimsically titled “Martial Arts: The Imposture of an Impersonation of an Improvisation of Infidelities (amidst some few residual fidelities).” Interestingly, once one sorts through the various alliterations, the title actually conveys a fair sense of his understanding of the nature of the contemporary martial arts.

A highly experienced master of traditional Okinawan Karate, Chan drew on three distinct phases from his personal background to illustrate his theoretical assertions about how we should understand and discuss these practices. Yet this conversation did not actually start with Chan’s engaging presentation. Rather, it was Paul Bowman, who gave a brief welcoming statement before introducing Professor Chan, who first laid out one of the central lines of discussion which would repeatedly reemerge throughout the remainder of the conference.

Following the argument laid out in his recent book Martial Arts Studies Bowman noted the complex relationship that this new field of inquiry has with the traditional disciplines of the social sciences and humanities. In his view martial arts studies is inescapably “interdisciplinary” meaning that it not only crosses boundaries but challenges the project of creating and promoting discrete “walled gardens” within academia.

This is not to say that we can simply reject the disciplines out of hand. Martial arts studies has the ability to make contributions to many disciplinary discussions and could certainly benefit from their diverse research methods. But rather than seeing this simply as the creation of yet another discipline, with its own hegemonic logic, theoretical commitments and methods, Bowman suggested that we instead see martial arts studies as an “academic intervention.” [Again, readers who want to further explore these arguments should check out his most recent volume].

In his introductory statement Chan declared, at the risk of disappointing his host, that those of us interested in martial arts studies probably had a front row seat to the birth of a new discipline, one that would develop its own conventions and questions. He would return to this topic only at the end of his talk, but it seems that it is his understanding of the nature of the martial arts themselves which suggested to Chan both the inevitability of a disciplinary turn in their study as well as some thoughts about what sort of approach would be necessary.

Before tackling the question of what martial arts studies should become, Chan was first forced to explore what sort of practices the contemporary martial arts actually are. Given the diversity of martial arts in the modern world, how should we as scholars approach and understand these supposedly traditional institutions?

To suggest some answers to this question Chan drew on three episodes of his own (extremely extensive) background within the martial arts. The first of these (and for me the most fascinating) revolved around the memory of his Grandmother who was a swordswoman and militia leader in Guangdong province during the 1920s. This woman’s skills were more practical than theoretical in nature and she led a platoon of troops for one political faction against another. Her oldest son was kidnapped and murdered in retaliation for her actions forcing the family to flee into exile. Thus Chan’s first introduction to these practices was hearing stories of the horrors of being a martial artist caught up in the cycle of political violence during the warlord era.

Yet this experience was quite different from that enjoyed by his father (a student of Mantis Kung Fu) who studied the martial arts abroad, or Chan’s own background in the rough and tumble (and highly eclectic) Karate schools of his adopted home. So the question immediately arises, are the martial arts best thought of as a uniform event, essentially the same for everyone, or is this something that is always multi-stranded with many interpretations and inventions of its own history, even within a single style or lineage?

These same themes were further explored in two other eras of Chan’s martial arts career. The first of these involved his time teaching Karate as a young foreign service officer while stationed in Africa. The second focused on his personal study during repeated trips (dare we say pilgrimages?) to Japan and Okinawa to research the higher levels of his art.

While in Okinawa Chan was forced to confront the belief that Karate’s written history had been lost with the American destruction of much of the island’s infrastructure and records during the Second World War. He asked, if traditional Karate now exists only as a type of folklore and folk practice, how do you know that you can trust the stories? And trust them to do what? Further, when one considers the fact that the individuals who initially developed and practiced Karate were probably only marginally literate peasants or villagers, should we really be assuming that extensive documentation of this system ever existed in the first place?

Of course Okinawa has never existed in pristine isolation. It is part of a larger geographically and socially defined chain of islands connecting, and often contested by, the Japanese and Chinese empires. Nor would the American destruction of the royal palace in Okinawa have had much of an impact on records discussing this area and its martial traditions kept in other places, such as southern China and Taiwan.

After undertaking a study of the martial practices of this larger region while living in Taiwan, Chan was struck by the role of ships and the transient pirate/mercenary communities in the establishment of the region’s martial arts. He concluded that much of what we now think of as the “traditional roots” of “Okinawan” Karate were transported there and influenced by well-armed pirate groups coming out of China.

So what conclusions can we draw about the martial arts in general? Simply that there is no linear genealogy, at least of the sort that is so commonly celebrated, within the martial arts. When looking at each of the episodes Chan discovered that when you dig deep into specific instances of martial practice what you quickly discover is a combination of traditions picked up from various sources augmented with material that has simply been improvised in the current generation.

In his view this necessitates the development of martial arts studies as a distinct discipline. Why? Because our first step needs to be to strip the oddly persistent element of “faith” out of the discussion.

Rather than clinging to narratives about simple linear history we need to go where the facts dictate, and that necessitates a method of investigation. What should it be? Something that is concerned with broader theoretical questions and firmly grounded in the disciplines of sociology, language and geography. These are the skills necessary to tease apart and make meaning of the layers of inheritance and improvisation that seem to define every martial school. In short, one wonders whether Chan’s approach to martial arts studies is basically Asian Studies augmented with sociology or some other combination of social sciences?

Sixt Wetzler at the German Blade Museum. Source: https://www.facebook.com/SwordExhibition/photos/a.309241532607580.1073741829.302837669914633/381039702094429/?type=1&theater

Defining the Martial Arts
Sixt Wetzler picked up many of these same threads in his presentation titled “Comparative Martial Arts Studies as a Cultural-Historical Discipline.” Currently finishing his PhD and working with the German Blade Museum, Wetzler has had the opportunity to watch the evolution of Martial Arts Studies within Germany. His observations of this growing literature has convinced him that we need a better conceptual framework for discussing and defining the martial arts before we can engage in more detailed comparative or theoretical work.

Throughout the course of his talk Wetzler seemed to take it for granted that martial arts studies was developing not just as a research area but as a more cohesive discipline. He noted that this sort of conceptual clarity was necessary for defining the shared objectives, sources and methods of martial arts studies.

At the moment scholars are having trouble unifying their discussions because of various “language gaps.” The most obvious of these are the many literatures where work is currently being done (in English, German, French, Chinese, Japanese etc….). Yet beyond simple questions of translation, other critical gaps also exist. Some of these are inherited from the unique vocabulary, concepts and concerns that students of the martial arts encounter within the various styles that they dedicate themselves too. Others originate in more academic and theoretical discussions as scholars from various disciplines sometimes find themselves talking past each other.

To address these gaps in communication Wetzler proposes his own discussion of the martial arts. Rather than accept the trend of proliferating sub-categories (martial arts vs. self-defense systems vs. combat sports vs. moving meditation…..) he suggests the adoption of a single more expansive category simply called “martial arts.”

Rather than being designed to exclude practices (seemingly the purpose of most definitions) this category should be understood as expansively as possible. Wetlzer proposes that most martial arts exhibit some unique balance of at least five (possibly more) core qualities and are implicated in a list of eight phenomenon.

Rather than breaking two practices (say professional MMA and Taijiquan instruction) into separate categories, he suggests that these practices might both be understood as “martial arts” which rank differently on the scales which define the five core characteristics. By conceptualizing the activities in this way researchers are naturally led to compare both points of difference and similarity. So while Wetzler’s method would lump many different types of activities into the same conceptual category, it would do so in such a way as to encourage comparative case studies and theoretical analysis.

Wetzler concluded his discussion by noting that the very nature of the martial arts defies simple definitions. This in turn requires the adoption of a method (in his cases poly systems theory) to make sense of it. Martial Arts Studies can indeed become a cohesive project, but as in the case of Religious Studies, that can only exist through a careful integration of the other preexisting disciplines. In a memorable line Wetzler suggests that we take up MMA, or “mixed methodological approaches” if we wished to advance as a field.

Left to Right: Doug Farrer, Scott Phillips, Paul Bowman. Source: http://martialartsstudies.blogspot.com/2015/06/conference-2015-and-2016.html

Martial Arts Studies: An Anthropological Perspective

D. S. Farrer’s presentation showcased the strength of Anthropology as a discipline for students of martial arts studies. This is particularly helpful as ethnographers were some of the first students to fully grasp the theoretical potential of martial arts communities and have made a number of contributions through their work.

Professor Farrer (Anthropology, University of Guam) began his lecture by reviewing his own background in the martial arts and the multiple papers and manuscripts that emerged from each of these encounters. As someone who has been a fan of his work I was particularly interested in hearing a bit of the “inside story” on a number of my favorite articles.

When discussing his current research interests Farrer (whose slides can be found here) begins by noting that every martial art has an aspect based in “efficacy” (understood as a utility defined through the effective use of violence) and “entertainment” (the social or performative element.) Interestingly this also emerged as a broader theme in a number of papers that I heard in various panels. Various students of the Chinese martial arts were interested in the role of opera, or other types of performance, in both giving rise and meaning to these institutions.

I think that Farrer’s point is meant to be far more basic than this. We can say as a historical matter that certain arts, such as Choy Li Fut, are grounded in ritual and performance (in this case opera). Yet Farrer’s assertion is that even the most “reality based” self-defense system, because it exists as an institution within a social system, must by necessity have a performative aspect embedded within it.

Given that successful martial artists will need to master both of these realms, what happens if they become confused? Where do we see the potential for “false consciousness” arising within in the martial arts?

Farrer theorizes that such errors can result in “captivation” or the creation of “cognitive traps” for practitioners (who come to misunderstand their own art in self-reinforcing ways) and false correlations or historical connections within the work of academic commentators.

Still, such seemingly blind alleys may be useful. Consider the possibility of “occulturation.” This is the process by which slightly esoteric skills come to be reimagined as mystical or magical powers. Of course the existence of such occult forces (such as the reemergence of Qigong in China during the 1990s) is often useful in upholding broader cultural, social or metaphysical systems. Farrer also sees the logic of captivation may be behind the rise of the modern state (particularly in relation to Singapore).

While discussing the rapidly changing nature of the anthropological and ethnographic literature Farrer expressed his reservations about the concept of embodiment (particularly as popularized by Wacquant) and his “carnal sociology” project. He noted that much of this literature is now dated, even though it seems to be finding increasing favor among students of martial arts studies. He instead advised that it is critical to stay theoretically up to date, and that this is one of the advantages that a literature like martial arts studies has over the larger and more slowly evolving disciplines.

So what sort of discipline does Farrer imagine martial arts studies to be? It is clear that he views the project mostly through the lens of anthropology and (unsurprisingly) favors participant observation and other types of ethnography as his main research tools. His view of anthropology is social scientific in its orientation and highly grounded in the idea of collaborative research with members of the community (or as he put it, “studies with” rather than “studies of.”).

At the same time Farrer also called for a renewed emphasis on etic theory and a move away from the endless discussion of subjective categories such as embodiment, agency and habitus. He wishes to see a renewed emphasis on efficacy and entertainment as central concepts illustrating cultural praxis.

The most interesting (and unique) aspect of this conclusion was a call for greater practicality and participation within the community for students of martial arts studies. As this area develops he noted that it must have some actual practical benefit. Douglas Wile has previously suggested that students of martial arts studies might use their university backing to ensure the survival of certain traditional styles or practices. Farrer takes this logic a step further noting that researchers might through their contacts gain access to the Anthropology of the Police and become involved in either the solving of cold cases or as members of community oversight boards. This call for practical engagement between students of martial arts studies and the broader community was perhaps the most thought provoking aspect of Farrer’s discussion.

Paul Bowman and Meaghan Morris having a frank exchange of ideas. Source: http://martialartsstudies.blogspot.com/2015/06/conference-2015-and-2016.html

What is the Use of Kung Fu?

The final keynote address that I will be discussing in this post was the concluding talk given by the very distinguished professor of Cultural Studies Meaghan Morris. Her presentation was titled “What is the Use of Kung Fu?” but she quickly clarified that of all of the possible readings of that phrase, perhaps the most interesting is actually, “what is the GOOD of kung fu?” Or, as one Chinese professor put the question to her after presenting a paper a conference, “Why are you interested in that feudal crap?”

Professor Morris’ quick answers to these questions seems to be that Kung Fu can help one to identify, and then act as a lens to understand, some of the most important traits that one finds in “ordinary culture” within Hong Kong.

Even if people are actually doing less traditional Kung Fu these days, the stories that they tell about the martial arts, and their frequent appearance in current youth parody and comedy skits being produced in Hong Kong (mostly in the wake of the failed umbrella movement), suggests much about the nature of current popular culture.

For Professor Morris, one of the most interesting aspects of the symbolic language of Kung Fu (particularly as it appears in visual mediums such as film) is the inherent contradictions in the stories that we see and the social and political flexibility that this bestows on the practices as a whole. More specifically, throughout the 20th century, there has always been a public role for Kung Fu stories, but they have never actually been just one thing. Their enduring cultural relevance comes from their flexibility along three separate scales.

First is the issue of pedagogy. Who is the ideal Kung Fu teacher? Someone who represents Confucian rectitude (such as Wong Fei Hung in the 1950s) or a trickster and vagabond teacher such as those who inhabit the world of Jackie Chan’s Drunken Master? Again, Morris notes that both of these ideal types are always present but the balance between them changes over time. This is an expression of flexibility in the face of changing political or social events.

Second is the question of aesthetics. What do audiences want to see, gritty realistic violence or the fantasy of flying swordsmen? Again, both of these movements have a long and established history in Hong Kong. Morris went to some lengths to point out that Cantonese Opera actually had a well established flying swordsmen tradition that was imported more or less directly to film.

The third (and unfortunately least explored of these dyads due to the constraints of time) was the debate between the value of “inheritance” within the martial arts (pure lineage) versus the creative improvisation (Bruce Lee’s JKD to name a single example). Again, both types of transmission are held up as ideal types in different films, and the balance between these stories shifts over time seemingly reflecting social change.

So what is the use of Kung Fu in the current era? Morris turned to the recent run of Ip Man films (particularly Herman Yau’s Ip Man: the Final Fight) as self-consciously crafted answers to that very question. In The Final Fight we see Ip Man struggling not with modernity in the abstract, but with the collapse of the social fabric of Hong Kong under the weight of massive immigration from the north. From this more crowded environment and fragile economic circumstance, Kung Fu allowed him (and others) to find creative ways of expressing both their values and offering resistance to their circumstances.

Morris goes on to claim that recently this same influence can be seen in the political satire of the many youth parody groups from Hong Kong making their presence felt on Youtube and other similar platforms. Comedy and performance have always been preferred modes of protest by those who feel that they have been stripped of any meaningful influence on the state. So it is fascinating to note how often these social and political critics turn to the language of the martial arts to make their points (even if they have nothing to do with the actual practice of these systems).

What then is the use of Kung Fu? Resistance. It has long been a tool of self-creation and resistance in crowded areas of southern China, buffeted by shifting systemic forces, which demand a creative response. Far from being “feudal,” the vitality of Kung Fu springs from its endless ability to re-imagine itself in the face of one challenge after another.

Conclusion: Terra Incognita

What are the martial arts and how does this condition our understanding of martial arts studies? Are we witnessing the birth of a new discipline, or something else entirely? Finally, what is the use of this type of research, and how will it relate to the social communities that ultimately gave rise to it?

These were some of the central questions that ran though the keynote addresses. They were even picked up in a number of the paper presentations. The discussion of these issues was both productive and exciting. Yet it would be wrong to claim that we have all of the answers. Indeed, by their very nature these are the sorts of questions that demand careful elaboration and periodic revaluation. While this conference did an admirable job of laying out the central issues, I think that much of the discussion still lies ahead.

What is martial arts studies? At this point we remain pilgrims in an undiscovered country, one that we are still struggling to come to terms with. Of course the journey itself is transformative, and the strength of the community engaged with these questions is coming into sharper relief. It is defined by its youth, disciplinary diversity and enthusiasm. Perhaps the most important thing that I observed at this conference was the degree to which people were willing to engage with both questions and methods that crossed disciplinary lines. Indeed, Sixt Wetzler’s call for more MMA (mixed methodological approaches) within martial arts studies seems to have been enthusiastically answered.

Observant readers may have noticed that one keynote is missing from this review. For reasons of time I omitted my own address even though it also touched on these same questions. Still, I think that the foregoing discussion provides a nice overview of the central questions that arose over the course of the conference. Hopefully I will get to my own thoughts on these topics (many of which regular readers will already be somewhat familiar with) in the next week or two. After that it will be time to start thinking about my paper for next year!

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If you enjoyed this you might also want to read: Will Universities Save the Traditional Asian Martial Arts?

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Liu Xio Yang. Source: Yahoo Sports.

Introduction

Welcome to “Chinese Martial Arts in the News.” This is a semi-regular feature here at Kung Fu Tea in which we review media stories that mention or affect the traditional fighting arts. In addition to discussing important events, this column also considers how the Asian hand combat systems are portrayed in the mainstream media.

While we try to summarize the major stories over the last month, there is always a chance that we have missed something. If you are aware of an important news event relating to the TCMA, drop a link in the comments section below. If you know of a developing story that should be covered in the future feel free to send me an email.

Its been a while since our last update so there is a lot to be covered in today’s post. Lets get to the news!

Jian found by farmer in Chongqing. Source: shanghaiist.com

Chinese Martial Arts in the News
Readers of Kung Fu Tea will probably have noticed my interest in traditional Asian weaponry. As such I am happy to start this round-up of events with an account of a recent “archeological” discovery. It seems that a farmer in Chogqing found the remains of what was probably a (pretty nice) Qing era Jian while working on his property. The blade had already lost its handle and tip. Undisturbed the man polished and sharpened it (revealing both some carving and an inscription) and proceeded to use it as a vegetable knife in his kitchen for a couple of years. You can read more about the case (and see a picture of the blade) here. A slightly more extensive article that compares this case to another recent find (this time of a much older bronze blade) can be found here.

Over the last month a number of stories looking at the more competitive aspects of the Chinese martial arts have been published. A few of these have focused on the effort to get Wushu adopted as an Olympic sport for the 2020 Tokyo games. This article in Yibada is pretty typical of the preliminary sorts of discussions that are being reported. Given that Judo, the first Asian martial art to be adopted as an Olympic event, was first introduced during the 1964 Tokyo games, such a development would be poetic.

Cung Le, whose knockout victory in Macau made him a favorite of Chinese MMA fans. Source: http://www.sanjose.com/news/2012/11/07/cung_le_returns_to_the_octogon

Nevertheless, most of the recent discussion of the traditional Chinese arts and modern combat sports has instead focused on the mixed martial arts. The Yahoo Sports Blog recently ran a piece titled “5 MMA Fighters with Backgrounds in the Chinese Martial Arts.” Another article playing to similar themes promised readers “Three Reasons Mixed Martial Artists Should Study Gongfu.” Given the number of people who see Bruce Lee as a forefather of the MMA movement, its probably not a coincidence that this article adopted his preferred spelling of the term “Kung Fu.” Readers might also want to take note of this short catalog of “Bruce Lee’s 5 Contributions to Modern MMA.” And while we are on the subject, what is up with all of these lists posing as articles?

An image from the southern Chinese martial arts manuscript collection known in Japan and Okinawa as the Bubishi.

In more substantive terms, Jack Slack (who writes on MMA and occasionally martial arts history for the Fightland blog) wrote an article looking at the Bubishi. He gives an overview of the text for readers who may be unfamiliar with it and then delves into reconstructions of a few specific techniques. Better yet, he promises to return to the discussion of this late Qing southern Chinese martial arts manual in future posts. Again, its always fascinating to see these more historically informed discussions working their way into contemporary treatments of the martial arts and combat sports.

A group of African disciples study the traditional arts at Shaolin.

Over the last couple of years we have seen a number of discussions of the ways in which the Chinese government has integrated the promotion and display of the traditional martial arts as one aspect of its larger public diplomacy strategy. In a sense this is not surprising. While China has faced some challenges in this area, its martial arts enjoy an immense amount of public recognition and popularity around the world. Various government backed institutions have promoted demonstrations of traditional crafts, arts and performance disciplines (including both the martial arts and opera) in an effort to educate the public about Chinese culture and to promote the state’s “soft power.” In fact, this recent reports (with some nice video) of a Beijing Opera performance that was hosted in South Africa as part of the ‘Year of China’ observance is a nice illustration of this trend.

Readers who are interested in the question of ‘Soft Power’ and how all of this relates to the state’s promotion of traditional practices, will probably want to check out a story titled “China’s Soft-Power: The Search for Respect” which recently ran in Foreign Affairs. This article (like most of those published in Foreign Affairs) tends to be more of a policy piece than a theoretical exploration. At the same time it does a nice job of introducing a basic discussion of the idea of “Soft-Power,” points readers to a couple of important theorists (hint: read Joseph Nye) and offers some conclusions about why Chinese public diplomacy efforts have struggled in the past. More importantly, it provides one possible context for thinking about the many sorts of reports (such as the South African account above) that we are currently seeing in the news. While not directly about the traditional martial arts (though they do get mentioned), its one of the more important things that seems to have come out in the last month for those of us interested in the international relations aspect of martial arts studies.

Also interesting is the following account of the growing popularity of martial arts among Hazara youth (a Persian speaking Shia minority community) in Quetta (Pakistan). This article is a little more detailed than most of the pieces that we see on subjects like this. It also delves a little bit deeper into the question of personal motivations and community impact. Anyone interested in the role of the martial arts in the Middle East or South Asia may want to have a look at this one.

Kung Fu and Popular Culture

Dream Works has just released the trailer for the much anticipated third installment of the Kung Fu Panda franchise. I have always enjoyed these films and the next installment promises to reveal important truths about Po’s past (specifically the identity of his biological father). You can see the trailer here. We have also seen an uptick in reporting on this project, including this article from the La Times exploring the implications of the film for Dream Works and some of the details of the joint partnership which is supporting its release directly into the Chinese film market. Click to read more.

There are also some interesting developments afoot on the small screen. The buzz surrounding AMC’s new series “Into the Badlands” sounds good with the network promising that their project is going to “bring the martial arts back to TV.”

And no discussion of the place of the Chinese martial arts in popular culture would be complete without taking a look at the viral videos making their way around the internet. My particular favorite as been the music video by Gener8ion + M.I.A. for “The New International Sound Pt. II.” It is basically a three minute remix of footage taken from Inigo Westmeier’s (excellent) 2012 documentary “Dragon Girls.” If you haven’t seen this one yet be sure to check it out.

The Collected Works of Sun Lutang.

Martial Arts Studies

Earlier this month (June 10-12th) the first annual martial arts studies conference was held at the University of Cardiff. I was very happy to have been able to attend this event and even had the opportunity to discuss some of my own research in a keynote address. The quality of the work that I saw in the various panels was matched only by enthusiasm of the presenters. In short, the conference exceeded my expectations and suggested that martial arts studies has a bright future ahead of it. You can read some of my more detailed thoughts on the event and its significance here. Also be sure to watch Academia.edu where a number of papers, abstracts and slide presentations from the conference are currently being posted.

The event was so successful that plans are already being made for next year! As part of this initial planning process the conference organizers have announced something new. In order to help offset the costs for students to attend the 2016 meetings, a short film contest is in the works. Interested parties are being encouraged to make a five minute film on any aspect of the martial arts or martial arts studies. These should be submitted to the conference organizers who will broadcast the entries on their various media channels and reward selected winners with free conference registrations, meals and possibly accommodations. Head on over and take a look at the announcement for the details.

Are you interested in getting some of your research out there but you need to stick a little closer to home? Don’t forget about the call for papers for inclusion in the upcoming volume the Invention of the Martial Arts. You find the details on this project here.

Two new books have also been announced that may be of interest to students of martial arts studies. First, Oxford University Press has just released Lethal Spots, Vital Secrets: Medicine and Martial Arts in South India by Roman Sieler. This work will discuss both esoteric medical and martial practices . Sieler is an Assistant Professor of anthropology at the South Asia Institute and runs their Masters Degree program on “Health and Society in South Asia.” This looks like an important text for anyone interested in the Indian martial arts. Here is the publisher’s note:

Lethal Spots, Vital Secrets provides an ethnographic study of varmakkalai, or “the art of the vital spots,” a South Indian esoteric tradition that combines medical practice and martial arts. Although siddha medicine is officially part of the Indian Government’s medically pluralistic health-care system, very little of a reliable nature has been written about it.

Drawing on a diverse array of materials, including Tamil manuscripts, interviews with practitioners, and his own personal experience as an apprentice, Sieler traces the practices of varmakkalai both in different religious traditions–such as Yoga and Ayurveda–and within various combat practices. His argument is based on in-depth ethnographic research in the southernmost region of India, where hereditary medico-martial practitioners learn their occupation from relatives or skilled gurus through an esoteric, spiritual education system. Rituals of secrecy and apprenticeship in varmakkalai are among the important focal points of Sieler’s study. Practitioners protect their esoteric knowledge, but they also engage in a kind of “lure and withdrawal”—a performance of secrecy—because secrecy functions as what might be called “symbolic capital.” Sieler argues that varmakkalai is, above all, a matter of texts in practice; knowledge transmission between teacher and student conveys tacit, non-verbal knowledge, and constitutes a “moral economy.” It is not merely plain facts that are communicated, but also moral obligations, ethical conduct and tacit, bodily knowledge.

Lethal Spots, Vital Secrets is an insightful analysis of practices rarely discussed in scholarly circles. It will be a valuable resource to students of religion, medical anthropologists, historians of medicine, Indologists, and martial arts and performance studies.

Second, Lauren Miller Griffith has a forthcoming volume titled In Search of Legitimacy: How Outsiders Become Part of the Afro-brazilian Capoeira Tradition. Obviously this book will be important for those who follow Capoeria, but beyond that it appears to touch on a number of questions that are central to current discussions martial arts studies. Unfortunately we will have to wait to until January of 2016 to get our hands on a copy. Lauren Miller Griffith is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Hanover College. She studies performance, tourism, and education in Latin America.

Its facebook time!

Kung Fu Tea on Facebook

As always there is a lot going on at the Kung Fu Tea Facebook group and this last month has been no exception. We explored Xingyi Quan, discussed the links between opera training and the wooden dummy, and looked at some cool swords. Joining the Facebook group is also a great way of keeping up with everything that is happening here at Kung Fu Tea.

If its been a while since your last visit, head on over and see what you have been missing!

A Japanese private holding a captured Dadao sometime between 1931 and 1936. Source: Author’s Personal Collection.

Introduction

This post is the third and final installment of our short series reviewing Denis Gainty’ 2013 book Martial Arts and the Body Politic in Meiji Japan (Routledge). Readers new to this work may want to review Parts 1 and Parts 2 here.

In my own field most authors tend to place their theoretical discussions in the first few chapters of their books and then fill their later half with case studies and empirical discussions. Gainty’s writing strategy is exactly the opposite of this. His major historical discussions happen in the first few chapters of the book. After that a few special cases are discussed with reference to the broader literature. Finally in Chapter 5 he lays out his complete theoretical argument and attempts to contextualize all of the data that has been presented to date.

In writing, as in life, one cannot serve two masters. The tight constraints of this manuscript (which is less than 150 pages in length including the introduction) frames these choices in a particularly harsh light. Yet by the end of this volume readers may still have questions about what sort of book they have just read. Was this an attempt to paint a detailed and textured portrait of an important institution in Japanese martial arts history, one that has often been misunderstood in the west, and to do so in ways that is sensitive to well established trends in current scholarship? Or is this really a book about how we should write modern history? Is it a critique that is designed to force a major rethink of how we conceptualize key ideas such as “embodiment,” “agency” and even “the nation?”

Gainty’s work is fascinating precisely because of its ambition. While a study of a specific Japanese martial arts institution, it attempts to speak to a number of more critical issues. In one sense this is precisely the sort of scholarship that we need to demonstrate that martial arts studies matters. Yet how much can any author really accomplish in 150 short pages? Readers will need to decide for themselves whether this could have been a stronger book had Gainty decided to throw his resources in one direction or another.

Still, some of the ideas presented in Chapter 5 are worthy of careful consideration, and at least one of them might have fundamental implications for our understanding of the relationship between martial artists and the state across Asia. In theoretical terms the arguments offered by the author are neither as novel as he supposes and (as I mentioned in my previous posts) they have a habit of stopping at exactly the point where things are just starting to get interesting. Yet some of the more historical, cultural and empirical insights that he offers may have exactly the sorts of far reaching implications that he hoped for.

Students of martial arts studies may certainly benefit from a careful reading and review of this material. As such, the following essay proceeds in three parts. In the first section we will quickly review the actual structure of Gainty’s chapter and the goals that he sets for himself. Next we will review some of the major theoretical shortcomings of this discussion. I will try to limit this discussion to the most critical points as many of my objections mirror prior criticisms that I noted in our review of Chapter 3 (Capture the Flag).

More interesting are some patterns that Gainty noted in how the kokutai or “national body” was discussed by various government organs and individual martial artists during the late Meiji period. These discussions, while seemingly abstract, actually signal policy areas that were subject to direct contestation between various modernizers and traditionalists as the emerging nature of the nation-state was coming into focus.

It is particularly important to consider how more traditional martial artists turned to Confucian concepts in advancing their beliefs about the role of martial arts in society and how the government responded to them. Much of this is directly relevant to conversations which would also happen in China. Indeed, much as already been written on the notion that the Chinese were somehow the “sick men” of East Asia and the response of the martial arts community to this collective taunt. Gainty’s discussion of the Confucian roots of the Japanese notion of the “vital state” may provide us with some additional tools to understand this discussion and follow the ways in which it played itself out.

Picture of the Great Victory at Fenghuangcheng (Sino Japanese War) by Ogata Gekko.

Defining the National Body

One of my enduring frustrations with this work is that while the author takes “embodiment” as one of his central concepts, and repeatedly asserts that the martial arts are an ideal lens to understand how embodied citizens utilize their agency to construct their own understandings of society, he does not seem overly interested in anyone’s bodily experience in particular. Rather than actually looking at what real martial artists had to say about their own embodied understandings of the martial arts, or engaging in Wacquant’s “carnal sociology,” Gainty seems more or less content to focus on embodiment as a linguistic metaphor while at the same time assigning it all sorts of essential priority. Nowhere are the limitations and possibilities of this approach made clearer than in Chapter 5.

The chapter begins with a reference to an event noted much earlier in his manuscript. In 1899, facing increasing pressure from the national membership to actually do something to promote the national arts rather than continuing to run endless fundraising drives, the Butokukai issued a pamphlet which might be thought of as an internal “white paper” for its members.

This document outlined a more expansive (and community) oriented agenda for the organization as well as announcing plans for the completion of the Butokuden (the group’s headquarters in Kyoto).

What likely attracted less attention at the time-though it is central to Gainty’s work-was a short discussion that outlined the Butokukai’s understanding of citizen/state interactions. Readers were reminded that the Butokukai served as the guardians of an essentially Japanese type of knowledge and practice, the traditional martial arts. These practices were the appropriate offering to placate the Imperial Soul, which represented nothing less than the governing faculties of the state. Through the martial arts the spirit was trained, honor was cultivated, and citizens were taught the skills necessary to lay down their lives as an offering to the Emperor. “Thus, the vitality of the state is promoted.”

The specific word translated as vitality is “genki.” This term will already be familiar to students of Japanese language or culture for its many uses, including in basic daily greetings. “Genki” can be thought of as referring to healthy energy or, as Gainty translated it, life giving vitality. Unlike the more universal Qi, “Genki” energy is typically defined as an attribute of an actual physical body. Thus in a not so subtle way the Butokukai, in attempting to carve out a place for the martial arts in modern Japan, was directly referencing another critical idea from the period, the kokutai, or “national body.”

Gainty notes that this metaphor for an embodied state, one that necessarily implicated its equally carnal citizens, was a critical image during this period and was often used by the state to explain the functions of various groups such as soldier or students. For instance, the imperial household was seen as the “head” of the body, which in turn depended on soldiers and martial artists to act as its “hands” and “legs,” carrying out its bidding. They in turn relied on the “head” for guidance.

Given the importance of this metaphor to understanding both debates about the nature of the Japanese state, as well as the Butokukai thoughts on the relationship between martial artists and the government, Gainty launches into a detailed historical review of the origin and evolution of this term. That is then followed by a debate about the various ways in which the concept of the kokutai has been used by academics to erase the agency of the Japanese people and misunderstand the ways in which they were active participants in crafting their own multiplicities of modernity.

Of course it is worth noting that many actors within the Japanese government itself seemed content to use the idea of the “national body” in exactly this way. As even Gainty admits, they tended to focus on informing citizens of their functions rather than emphasizing their responsibilities and agency.

Still, all of this raises a critical question that is not easily ignored. If the idea of the national body was simply about coercively extracting resources from citizens in the face of efforts at rapid modernization, why did so many groups within society seem to actively embrace the label and coopt it in attempts to advance their own agendas? Specifically, why would so many martial artists engaged in conscious acts of self-creation adopt this same verbiage? How did they understand it, and how did the Butokukai modify this more traditional understanding in the pursuit of its own policy goals?

In the second section of the chapter Gainty focuses on these questions. He begins by returning to the educational reformer Seki (introduced in a previous chapter) who unsuccessfully lobbied to have the martial arts included in the national school curriculum. Seki made abundant use of embodied metaphors in his policy pitch.

Interestingly enough, so did the Ministry of Education and various health officials who also turned to the idea of the kokutai in resisting Seki’s proposals about martial arts instruction. Yet as Gainty demonstrates, their understanding of this common term diverged in seemingly important ways.

Seki began the conversation by noting that an over-emphasis on western methods of education and physical training was leading to the weakening and the sickness of the national body. Specifically “The waning of military power [in the nation] was like a dying pulse in a body [the state].” (Clarifications are my own.) Gainty interprets this to mean that military power is the lifeblood of the national body and that only martial arts training could keep it pumping. So how was this to be accomplished?

At this point Seki turns to the Confucian classics. This is interesting for a number of reasons. As China’s position in the global community deteriorated reformers in Japan increasingly removed Confucian ideas from the educational system and national discourse. Yet Seki may have turned to these same (unfashionable) notions to signal both his traditional attitudes towards the martial arts and need to turn away from western models.

Paraphrasing a section of the “Great Learning” he noted that training in the martial arts would first allow individuals to protect their bodies. Once they were secure they could ensure the safety of their home and family. As the home and family were made safe one could then protect the nation. Lastly, once these other goals had been accomplished, one could “restore the health of those who are enfeebled or depressed, encouraging bravery and loyalty, and developing vigorous spirits.” Obviously this mirrors the more commonly seen four part progression of where a man should first cultivate himself, then ensure harmony in the family, govern his country and finally bring peace in the world.

In his argument Seki not only presented an alternative to western views of bodily training, but he outlined a simple Confucian theory explaining how the efforts of individual martial artists were linked to the goals of the state through the mechanism of the kokutai or national body.

At this point Gainty stops to once again note the question of agency. In adopting this particular formula Seki is clearly placing the concerns of the state above those of the citizens. Yet the decision to seek these goals resides with individual martial artists. It is their moral responsibility and privilege to seek to invigorate the state, but it is not their simple function, or the thing that they were created for. In both Gainty and Seki’s reading of the Great Learning, agency rests clearly with the individual decision maker.

Unsurprisingly the various ministries of the Japanese government tended to see things differently. They instead invested their own office and the imperial household with the aura of agency. Yet they also turned to foreign sources to explain and develop their own understanding of the kokutai.

If we assume the Emperor is the head of the “national body,” what then are individual citizens? Turning to western notions of biology and medical science they seem to imply that students and other individuals were best thought of as cells within the body. They had a vital function to perform, and it was the body’s job to protect them from unnecessary damage (such as the injuries that could be incurred in martial arts training) precisely because of their interconnected relationship with the state. In reviewing these arguments Gainty notes the ways in which seemingly scientific and rational medical discourse (much of which focused on the very real problem of repeated head injuries in children) were used to shut down an otherwise problematic conversation about the state-society relations.

And what of the Butokukai? Readers may recall that Seki’s efforts were independent of this later organization. What was its understanding of the kokutai and the links between martial artists and the state? Upon reviewing their literature Gainty sees the emergence of a hybrid ideology. On the one hand this group adopted some of the Confucian discussion, which was used to emphasize how the choice to train individual bodies could impact the collective state body as a whole. Yet they also went to lengths to note the degree to which the state and the imperial household preceded the people. Thus one’s “participation” in these institutions was preordained.

Upon reading these passages it is tempting to see to see the Butokukai as a sort of field where the ideas of more traditional martial artists and government officials were contested, eventually yielding the compromise position noted above. Unfortunately Gainty’s empirical review of the period literature leaves readers with critical questions. Was Seki’s interpretation of the “Great Learning” and his application of it to understanding the social function of traditional combat methods a standard belief among Japanese martial artists of the period? Or was this instead a one-off effort to explain a seemingly obvious truth to a group of government officials uninterested in the martial arts?

Likewise, did other reformers in Japanese society share the Ministry of Education’s view of the kokutai, or was this very top-heavy reading of the national body something that was confined to a handful of government employees? In short, has Gainty just used a public debate about the martial arts in late Meiji Japan to reveal a major fault line in the public construction of one of the era’s key political and social concepts, or is this simply a set of individual rhetorical moves in a single debate on education policy? Unfortunately readers are left to puzzle this one out for themselves.

Gainty closes his chapter with a discussion of “The Body as Agent.” Here he once again takes issue with Foucault and other sorts of systemic theories (be they philosophical or sociological in nature) that would attempt to construct a single narrative of modern Japanese history. Much of this debate comes to focus on his anxieties about agency, a concern that he (somewhat oddly) sees as unimportant in Foucault’s writing (or at least he claims that Foucault dismisses it too easily). To rectify the problem he then turns to a brief (two page) discussion of Lakoff and Johnson’s work on language and experience. This is an immense research area with a lot to say, yet Gainty’s argument basically collapses down to an assertion that “meanings” are multiple and that responsible historians have an obligation to highlight this complexity.

This is the point at which the possible theoretical criticisms of this work wrap back around and begin to once again touch on empirical questions. Surely it is the job of a historian to show significant complexities in understanding, agency and meaning. Yet has his work actually accomplished this?

As I stated in my post on Chapter 3, for a book that focuses so much on agency, choice and the freedom to engage in self-construction, its remarkable how few examples of this we actually see in the text. In his most recent discussion Gainty demonstrates some very interesting, but ultimately minor, differences in how a single martial artist and cabinet committee employed a concept that was being heavily promoted by the government as a metaphor for state/society relations. Disturbingly, when the Butokukai entered the playing field they did not so much advance a third alternative as attempt to bring Seki’s more Confucian reading of the concept in line with a more statist view.

Yet if this is all that an emphasis on agency can reveal, is it really bringing forth the multiplicity of visions of Japanese modernity that Gainty has worked so hard to evoke? Where are those martial artists who rejected the notion of kokutai? Were there any thinkers in the world of jujitsu or Kendo who questioned the centrality of the Imperial Household or the trend towards state backed militarism? If so, why were they not a part of this discussion? And if not, then all of this discussion of “individual experience” needs to be redefined as agency only to choose from a very limited and preselected pallet of options, carefully vetted by powerful actors in both society and the state. Many readers will need to be forgiven for not finding the choice to militarize society from below rather than above a horribly compelling one.

Gainty structured his study around an attempt to bring the masses back onto the stage on history, at least in the ways in which we write about them. Yet one suspects that it would not be too challenging to take exactly the same empirical facts that he lays out here and read them instead as a case study in psychological entrapment by the state and the various mechanisms by which false consciousness (meaning the conviction of agency without real choice) is constructed.

I think on the most basic level his problem is actually an empirical rather than a theoretical one. This study focuses on too few actors and it fails to plumb the depths of their actual lived experience within the martial arts. For the most part, none of the central individuals discussed in this work really dissented from the broad outlines of policy supported by critical players in the Japanese government. This is a study that offers us descriptive richness, but not a lot of actual variation on the big issues.

Someone sends Bruce Lee a message…I think we all know what happens next.

Conclusion: The Problem of Choice

As Gainty would probably assert, the central problem that we all face in our writing and research is choice. Most of us lack generous research budgets. Publishers sometimes impose unrealistic page limits, and time is always the most precious resource of all. As I think back on this work I really believe that Gainty’s vision of the direction that martial arts studies needs to go is pretty much perfect. But is this the sort of thing that can ever be accomplished in a single volume? I would suggest not one of 150 pages. Hence my frustration that Gainty is constantly forced to move on just as he suggests a problem that is really worth digging into.

There are basically two directions that this work could have gone in. Both are predicated on a prior choice of what is really at stake in a study of the relationship between the martial arts and the body politic in Meiji Japan. On the one hand 150 pages is enough room to write a very fine, textured description of a specific institution and how it found its expression at the personal, local and national level. But to really do this it would be necessary to delve more deeply into the embodied experience of actual martial artists, rather than simply approaching approximations of the issue through linguistic or political metaphor. Such an approach would also give the author an opportunity to actually show the variety of meanings and choices found in the construction of modern Japan through the practice of the martial arts rather than simply asserting that these were out there. Of course doing so would require that the theoretical discussion (much of which turned out to be somewhat shallow) be rolled back.

Alternatively, one could take Gainty’s theoretical project much more seriously. I believe that a work like this actually could make a real contribution to the way in which we write history and think about core concepts. Yet developing truly novel approaches to these questions requires a more nuanced and sustained engagement with both the classic theorists, as well as a treatment of more recent authors including those who have already tackled a number of these issues within martial arts studies. One wonders how Gainty’s thoughts on embodiment and agency would evolve after a sustained discussion with Wacquant, who is never cited in this text?

Of course doing this would once again require a massive redistribution of resources. Rather than writing an empirically grounded book, Gainty would be forced to spend most of his effort (perhaps 100 pages) on these more theoretical discussions. A single shorter case study might be given in the first chapter of such a book or dispersed throughout.

Still, if it were up to me I think that I would have gone the empirical route and saved the heavy duty theory for my follow up volume. There are just too many interesting points that come up throughout Gainty’s writing which he never had the time to investigate. I doubt that I would have exercised the same self-control.

In other places I mentioned the need for case studies of the actual embodied experience of martial artists in their daily practice. I think that a richer exploration of the lives and experiences of actual practitioners would need to underpin any expansion of this research program. But on a more intellectual level this last chapter has really gotten me thinking about the role of Confucianism in conditioning how early 20th century martial artists understood their relationship with the state.

Perhaps a word of explanation is in order. Most of my research focuses on the hand combat teachers of southern China during the Republic period. During this era a huge number of reformers emerged and started to publish books and articles all of which advanced their own agendas for how the martial arts might aid the modernization process and lead to “national salvation” (a phrase particularly favored by the Jingwu (Pure Martial) Association).

In a sense the problem that I face is the opposite of Gainty’s. He is constantly challenged to find heterogeneity within a society that most people assume was already totalitarian in nature and under strong government domination. Thus one might not expect to see a lot of variety within how the average Japanese high school student in 1920 understood his Kendo class. Chances are there was a lesson module for that (thanks to the Butokukai) and it was coordinated at the national level.

During the same period in China one does not have to search long to find of variety of perspectives, experiences and an almost shocking degree of “agency.” To read the debates surrounding the martial arts in that period is to practically be hit upside the head with a cacophony of voices, each proclaiming its own path to “national salvation.” The challenge that I face (exacerbated by my historical and cultural remove) is to locate certain points of discussion that were broadly shared or contested, even if martial artists in various styles or parts of the country may have spoken about these things somewhat differently.

For instance, one of the trends that we see in the Republic era is an attempt to ground the Chinese martial arts within Buddhist or Daoist traditions to better reinforce and accentuate their connection to “traditional” Chinese culture. While discussing the desire to find ancient Buddhist roots within Wing Chun, Ip Chun (the old son of Ip Man) has noted that in reality there is no Buddhism or Daoism in the system, other than that which has simply been absorbed into the background of Chinese culture.

Yet for those who wished to delve deeper he did note that his father studied Confucian philosophy as a youth and understood Wing Chun, and its relationship with society, largely in terms of the Confucian Classics including the “Doctrine of the Mean” and the “Great Learning.” Of course these are the same traditions that Seki drew on in his attempt to explain the ideal relationship between martial artists and the modern nation state.

One suspects that a quick survey of period publications would probably reveal that Ip Man was not alone in this (any more than I expect Seki was in Japan). Indeed, while both the reforming Japanese and Chinese states had officially moved on from such ideas, it seems likely that such “image maps” would have continued to inform the way individual martial artists understood both their own responsibilities and relationship with the larger national body.

It is also fascinating to note that idea of the “national body” was not simply limited to Japan. A very similar concept was also quite widespread in China. Chinese martial artists were also very concerned with the “vitality” of this body. Many of them saw their social function as strengthening individual bodies and spirits to rejuvenate and “save” the nation as a whole.

Readers will perhaps be most familiar with this conversation as it took shape in the “Sick Man of East Asia” debate. I have written a little bit about this concept elsewhere, but have yet to devote the resources to this question that it deserves. This phrase was actually developed by the European press and first applied to discussions of western countries. Yet nowhere has the idea gained such traction and emotional power as in China during the first half of the 20th century. In fact, it is not hard to find period martial arts publications advancing the claim that the Chinese national body was sick or weak (probably a self-evident point given the pain and national humiliation of imperialism) precisely so that they could offer a cure. Again, the parallels with the Japanese case outlined by Gainty are fascinating.

In short, I suspect that Seki’s theory of the martial arts within society could have broad implications for any state or locality with a Confucian heritage. Again, I am not asserting that this is the only way that martial artists in those areas would have viewed the question. Gainty’s point about the need to bring forth the complexity of individual experience is well taken (and in the case of Republican China, very hard to ignore). Still, one suspects that this could have been an important axis of debate and contestation. As Ip Chun has suggested, the “Great Learning” (and other related Confucian concepts) may have colored the ways in which many Asian individuals understood what it meant to be martial artists in the modern world.

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If you enjoyed this post you might also want to read: Zheng Manqing and the “Sick Man of Asia”: Strengthening Chinese Bodies and the Nation through the Martial Arts

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Introduction

In a recent post I discussed some of the major themes and ideas to emerge from the keynote addresses delivered at the recent Martial Arts Studies held at the University of Cardiff. Astute readers may have noticed that something was missing. Due to the constraints of time I omitted any mention of my own presentation from that first report. Now that a few weeks have passed and I have had a chance to get settled, its time to rectify this omission.

This task was made even easier when I received an email from the conference organizer letting me know that a recording of my talk was going to be made available on Youtube. A number of presentations were taped (with permission) and some of the graduate students at Cardiff have been editing and compiling footage so that this can be shared with the public. Rather than simply reading my account of my paper, you can go and watch the original presentation here. The total running time on this video is just over an hour. Special thanks go to Ester Hu and Ning Wu for their hard work in preparing this and the other recordings.

I am also happy announce that two of the other keynote addresses have also been uploaded and are made available to viewers. These are the conferences opener by Stephen Chan (“Martial Arts: The Imposture of an Impersonation of an Improvisation of Infidelities (amidst some few residual fidelities”) and D. S. Farrer (“Efficiency and Entertainment in Martial Arts Studies: Anthropological Perspectives”). While by no means exhaustive, I think that together these three presentations do convey a sense of the work being done in this newly emerging interdisciplinary field.

Of course not everyone loves video. I for one would always prefer to read a paper. For those of you who share my inclination I am also posting the text of the remarks that I prepared below.

Before launching into the substance of this discussion a few words of explanation may be in order. This paper summarizes some of the final arguments made in my forthcoming volume (with Jon Nielson) The Creation of Wing Chun: A Social History of the Southern Chinese Martial Arts (State University of New York Press, 2015). It can almost be thought of as a public reading of the volume’s concluding chapter. Except that it isn’t. The conclusion would have been too long and it presupposes that one has just read the preceding book. So this talk combined discussions from both the books introduction and conclusion, as well as some other material bringing it all together. Still, one might think of this as a “reading” from the upcoming volume. Enjoy!

Imagining Ip Man: Globalization and Growth of Wing Chun Kung Fu

In April of 2011 Hong Kong Airlines did something seemingly out of character. Most airlines seeking a share of the lucrative business class market attempt to impress the public with photos of their genteel and sumptuous cabins. Some seem to be engaged in an arms race to find ever more attractive and demure flight attendants. Instead Hong Kong Airlines announced that their flight crews would be taking mandatory training in a southern Chinese form of hand combat called Wing Chun. Having earned a reputation as a street fighting art on the rooftops of Hong Kong in the 1950s, this move appears paradoxical. It is one thing to quietly train cabin crews in rudimentary self-defense skills. It is quite another to offer press releases, give interviews, and post internet videos of how an unruly customer might be restrained.

It would be wrong to suggest that there is no glamour attached to Wing Chun. This was the only martial art that the iconic Bruce Lee ever studied. Nevertheless, when one juxtaposes the image of a bloody Lee (straight from the promotional material for Enter the Dragon) with a petite flight attendant from any competitor’s television commercial, one must ask what the advertising executives of Hong Kong Airlines know about their regional markets that we do not.

On purely historical grounds, it is rather odd that anyone seeking the past should “remember” Wing Chun, or any other traditional martial art, at all. The blunt truth is that for most of China’s history, the martial arts have not been very popular. While there has always been a subset of people who took up these pursuits, they were something that the better elements of society studiously avoided.

In the mid-1950s, when Bruce Lee was learning Wing Chun from his teacher Ip Man, there were probably less than a 1000 practitioners of the art in all of Hong Kong. When Ip Man learned the style from his teacher (or Sifu) in Foshan at the turn of the 20th century, it seems likely that there were less than two dozen students of his version of the art in total. The first realization that we need to wrap our minds around is that in many ways studying the “traditional” Chinese martial arts is actually a quintessentially modern activity.

Given this disconnect, much of my research over the last couple of years has sought to understand how exactly these arts have come to be such effective symbols of local identity and continuity with the past in southern China. But in today’s address I would instead like to shift my focus slightly and ask why some arts, like Wing Chun, have succeeded in the global system while others slipped quietly into obscurity.

What does this success indicate about the nature of the martial arts in general? And what does it suggest about the challenges that individuals perceive in the face of rapid economic, social and cultural dislocation?

The techniques of the traditional Chinese martial arts have a history that stretches back hundreds if not thousands of years. Yet the story of Ip Man, Bruce Lee, and the success of Wing Chun nicely illustrates the degree to which these arts have succeeded precisely because they are modern and global practices. Of course this is not how we generally think about or discuss the “traditional” martial arts.

While Ip Man and his student Bruce Lee are headlining today’s address, in many ways it is “globalization” that actually provides the terrain that we will explore. Originally rooted in the birth of European modernity this system of rapid social, economic and cultural change has since expanded to mark every corner of the globe.

Like much of the world China was first touched by globalization during the rush to construct a free trade system based on open markets during the 19th century. One simply cannot dismiss the influence of larger systemic forces when thinking about critical events in recent Chinese history like the Taiping Rebellion, the growth of regional imperialism or the Opium Wars.

It is also fascinating to note that so many of the martial arts that are popular today, including practices like Taijiquan or Wing Chun, were actually either created or reformulated and disseminated during this late period. Authors like Douglas Wile have suggested some reasons as to why this should not be a surprise. And then we see these same practices explode onto the global scene in during the 1960s-1970s as globalization hit another peak.

Yet just as the martial arts are a complex subject that must be examined from multiple perspectives, there is more than one way of thinking about the challenges posed by globalization. A more conventional, empirically driven, reading of the phenomenon claims that globalization is present when we see three things: the increased flow of goods (meaning trade), capital (or money) and labor (people) crossing state boundaries.

This rather simple conceptualization of globalization is the sort of thing that I was introduced to in my graduate economics training. It’s a very materialist approach to the problem. But it does direct our attention to some factors that are absolutely critical in understanding the challenges that an art like Wing Chun faced as it has sought to expand its presence throughout international markets.

Yet this isn’t the only way to think about globalization or the obstacles and opportunities that it has presented the Asian martial arts. Peter Beyer, in his work on the survival and evolution of religion in a modern era, suggests that we can also conceptualize globalization as the increased flow of ideas or “modes of communication” between previously isolated communities.

Beyer goes on to note that this sort of transformation can have important implications for any social institution responsible for transmitting fundamental social values, and during the late 19th and early 20th century, that is exactly how the Chinese martial arts came to be understood.

Modernization theorists long suspected that traditional types of identity such as ethnicity and religion would vanish in the modern era, and for the most part China’s May 4th intellectuals agreed. They also claimed that the traditional martial arts with their feudal and backwards values could not survive in the current era. Needless to say this hasn’t actually happened. Regional identity is strong, religions still exist in the world today, and more people are currently practicing Wing Chun than at any other time in its past.

So how do practices survive in a hanged world? By evolving. More specifically, while rapid modernization may resolve one set of dilemmas, it often creates a whole host of secondary problems.

This presents the guardians of more traditional ways of defining social meaning with an opportunity. On the one hand they can either find a new problem to offer a solution for, in essence turn themselves into a purveyor of a specialized skill and conform to the demands of modernization. Or they can double down on the more basic question of identity and meaning in a world where these things have become somewhat scarce commodities. But the critical thing to realize is that both of these strategies represent a transformation to accommodate modernity, even if one continues to market your brand based on its long history.

This is where the debates about Ip Man, who he was, what he taught, what sort of art Wing Chun really is, enters the picture. As we look at discussions within the Wing Chun community and other traditions we see exactly this discussion taking place. Do the martial arts need to evolve in order to survive, or does their value come from the timeless message of who we really are? Note also that this dynamic can help us to make sense of the powerful drive to find the supposedly “ancient” and “authentic” roots of these practices that currently dominates so many discussions of the martial arts including, once again, Wing Chun.

Bruce Lee. Detailed portrait.

Wing Chun as a Commodity in the Global Marketplace

Ip Man did much to increase Wing Chun’s profile as a regional martial art after 1949 and he set the stage for its eventual rise to prominence within the larger hand combat community. Still, one cannot understand the global growth of this system, or any of the Asian fighting arts, without appreciating the role of his better known student, Bruce Lee.

Lee is the axiomatic figure in any discussion of the late 20th century internationalization of the martial arts. While some individuals in both North America and Europe had been exposed to these systems during the tumultuous middle decades of the 20th century, often as a result of military service in the Second World War, the Korean War or Vietnam, the appeal of the traditional Asian hand combat systems had remained limited.

These limitations manifest themselves in different ways. Fewer individuals in the west practiced these arts in the 1950s and 1960s than is the case today. Nor did they enjoy the almost constant exposure in the popular media that we have become accustomed to.

A survey of the pages of Black Belt magazine, then the largest American periodical dedicated to the martial arts, shows that most of the articles published in the early to middle years of the 1960s focused on Japanese hand combat systems. Karate and Aikido were probably the best known alternatives to Judo. Indeed, much ink was spilled during the decade debating the relative merits of these different systems.

Bruce Lee’s initial appearances on television, where he played the role of Kato on the Green Hornet (1966-1967), and then on the big screen in the 1973 sensation Enter the Dragon, had a profound effect on the place of the Asian martial arts in western popular culture. Given their current popularity we often forget that prior to the 1970s very few individuals were familiar with the term “kung fu” or even knew that the Chinese had also produced hand combat systems of their own.

Bruce Lee’s appearance on the Green Hornet had an immediate impact on the North American martial arts community. What was not evident at the time was that the boundaries of this still relatively small community were about to be fundamentally redrawn. 1973 saw the release of both Enter the Dragon and the news of Lee’s death at the shockingly young age of 32. The film captivated western audiences with its innovative fight choreography, nods to Asian philosophy (something else which had been growing in popularity with western consumers since WWII) and unabashed violence.

Concerned that the public might not identify with a single leading Asian actor, the film featured a diverse cast which gave important roles to both John Saxon and Jim Kelly. These fears proved to be unfounded as audiences around the globe were drawn to Lee’s charismatic performance. Still, the self-conscious decision to feature an ensemble cast of martial artists from a variety of racial, national, economic and social backgrounds had a powerful impact on viewers. It broadcast once and for all that the potential for both self-realization and group empowerment promised by the martial arts lay within every human being regardless of their personal circumstances or nation of origin.

Lee’s untimely death in 1973 crystallized his image at a single moment in time. He became a prophet to his followers, snatched away at the very moment of revelation. Rather than looking forward to what Lee would have done next, those who struggled to understand the promise of this message were instead forced to look back to his previous films, television appearances, interviews and assorted writings. All of these things could be easily commoditized.

Martial arts instruction could also be commoditized and distributed to the public. The wave of enthusiasm unleashed by Lee’s sudden eruption into the popular consciousness filled martial arts classes of seemingly every style with new students. As one might expect, the previously obscure Chinese martial arts were major beneficiaries of this new attention. Wing Chun’s development was forever shaped by its association with Bruce Lee.

While Lee had been involved with the film industry since his youth (when he starred in a number of movies as a child actor), he was also a dedicated martial artist. Lee had first been introduced to Wing Chun in Hong Kong in the 1950s when he became a student of Ip Man.

After coming to the United States he continued to teach and promote the Chinese martial arts. His skills, personable nature and TV roles led to appearances in Black Belt magazine where he mentioned his background in Wing Chun and his teacher. Multiple articles published in this period actually featured images of Ip Man sitting beside, or practicing chi sao with, his increasingly famous student.

Given how little western media exposure the Chinese arts as a whole received, this was an unprecedented amount of publicity. Even before the advent of the “Kung Fu Craze” in 1973, Bruce Lee had assured that his Sifu would be among the best known Chinese martial artists in the west.

The Bruce Lee phenomenon boosted the ranks of many different Asian martial arts styles. In truth Karate schools, because of their popularity, probably benefited more from his appearance than anyone else. Yet this transformation in the way that the global public perceived these fighting systems was not enough to preserve every fighting style that had been practiced earlier in the 20th century. At the same time that arts like Wing Chun, Taijiquan and the various schools of Karate were reaping the benefits of this unexpected windfall, other traditional Chinese systems were slipping into obscurity.

What are some of the other more material factors that may have facilitated Wing Chun’s spread throughout the international system?

The first, and possibly most critical variable to consider, is geography. Exporting any good, whether physical or cultural, is expensive. All forms of trade are ultimately limited by the size of the “transaction costs” associated with the exchange. These costs include factors such as the expenses of adapting, translating and shipping goods for sale in other markets.

Ip Man’s flight to Hong Kong late in 1949 was, without a doubt, the single most important factor in explaining the subsequent success of his art. Why? This city occupied a unique place in the post-WWII economic order. It had traditionally been a major transit port for trade between western markets and China. As a result residents of Hong Kong were connected to global markets in ways that most individuals on the mainland were not.

These links were manifest in many areas, all of which served to reduce Wing Chun’s transaction costs. Hong Kong itself was one of the most urban and modernized sections of southern China. It had a highly efficient educational system which actually produced more students than the local universities could absorb. Some of these individuals were fluent in English and had either family or business connections abroad. In fact, a number of Ip Man’s younger students in the 1950s and 1960s came from relatively affluent middle class families and traveled to North America, Europe or Australia to pursue additional educational opportunities.

Ip Ching, the son of Ip Man, has noted that this pattern of out-migration was one of the main ways in which the socioeconomic status of his father’s students contributed to the spread of the Wing Chun system. When the Bruce Lee phenomenon hit in the early 1970s, there were already a number of individuals studying and working in various western cities who were able to take on students and begin to teach the Wing Chun system. More soon followed. The transnational flow of labor, in this case students and young adults, was critical to Wing Chun’s eventual success.

Other arts, even ones that had been very popular, had fewer opportunities to take advantage of this outpouring of enthusiasm if they were located in areas less connected to the global transfer of capital, ideas and individuals. The various martial systems of south-west China struggled to gain a foothold within the global market as comparatively few individuals from this region had emigrated to the west prior to the 1970s. Likewise, not all of Hong Kong’s arts were blessed with a relatively affluent group of students who had access to international employment and educational opportunities.

It is also important to consider the general attitude of these students and how that may have interacted with their socio-economic status. It seems to me that in the current era there seems to be a push to reimagine the Wing Chun of the 1960s as something more “traditional” than it actually was. This can be seen in a number of areas, from the re-emergence of the “discipleship” system in a number of schools to the enthusiasm with which some students have greeted the rediscovery of “lost lineages” claiming direct descent from either the Shaolin Temple or late Qing revolutionary groups.

While discussing the Wu Taijiquan community from Shanghai Adam Frank has argued that the shifting economic opportunities presented by global expansion will not always lead to more openness within a fighting style. At times the pressures and potential profits of international markets may actually lead to a renewed emphasis on secrecy and exclusion as organizations attempt to differentiate their product and control the flow of financially valuable teaching opportunities. We should not assume that the process of globalization will necessarily lead to more open or liberal styles.

So how did Wing Chun, and its various students, appear to observers prior to the explosion of interest that would make it a leading Chinese art? Did it give the impression of a forward looking system, or one that was basically reactionary, seeking to preserve tradition?

In 1969 a Wing Chun student named Rolf Clausnitzer and his teacher Greco Wong published a book titled Wing-Chun Kung-Fu: Chinese Self-Defence Methods. Clausnitzer had lived in Hong Kong as a youth and was one of the first westerners to practice and closely observe the Wing Chun system. He had initially interviewed Ip Man in 1960 and later studied with his student Wong Shun Leung. After moving to the UK he continued his studies with Greco Wong, who was a student of Moy Yat.

Readers should carefully consider the timing of this publication. In 1969 the general explosion of interest in the martial arts (and Wing Chun in particular) that would be unleashed with Enter the Dragon was still a few years off. So this early work offers us a suggestion of how Ip Man’s Wing Chun system might have appeared to western martial artists prior to the launch of the “Kung Fu Craze” and the orientalist urges that it seems to have embodied.

Originally from Kwangtung province he migrated to Hong Kong where he still resides. An outspoken man, Yip Man regards Wing Chun as a modern form of Kung Fu, i.e. as a style of boxing highly relevant to modern fighting conditions. Although not decrying the undoubted abilities of gifted individuals in other systems he nevertheless feels that many of their techniques are beyond the capabilities of ordinary students. Their very complexity requires years if not decades to master and hence greatly reduced their practical value in the context of our fast-moving society where time is such a vital factor. Wing Chun on the other hand is an art of which an effective working knowledge can be picked up in a much shorter time than is possible in other systems. It is highly realistic, highly logical and economical, and able to hold its own against any other style or system of unarmed combat.

Even more thought-provoking is Clausnitzer and Wong’s description of Ip Man’s students and how they compared to other groups in Hong Kong’s hand combat marketplace.

An interesting characteristic common to most practitioners of Wing Chun lies in their relatively liberal attitude to the question of teaching the art to foreigners. They are still very selective when it comes to accepting individual students, but compared with the traditional Kung Fu men they are remarkably open and frank about the art. If any one Chinese style of boxing is destined to become the first to gain popularity among foreigners, more likely than not it will be Wing Chun.

Bruce Lee’s rise to superstardom ushered Wing Chun onto a wider stage than Clausnitzer and Wong could have imagined in 1969. Yet, as we have seen, the system did possess certain characteristics that allowed it to capitalize on this windfall during a time when other traditional Chinese styles were falling into obscurity. Perhaps the most important of these were Ip Man’s decision to streamline the art following his move to Hong Kong and the nature of the students that his school attracted. Clausnitzer and Wong’s early observations appear almost prophetic in light of the system’s subsequent emergence as one of the most popular fighting arts within the global arena.

Ip Man visiting Ho Ka Ming's School in Macau.

Ip Man visiting Ho Kam Ming’s School in Macau.

Two Visions of the Wing Chun Community

Some accounts (such as those left by Chu Shong Tin) suggest that Ip Man liked to play the role of the Confucian gentleman. This embodiment of traditional cultural values attracted a certain type of student during the Hong Kong period. Yet, as the previous quotes remind us, Wing Chun succeeded in large part because Ip Man understood it as a modern fighting system.

Even Lee’s films, while examples of visual fantasy, retained a veneer of gritty social reality. His protagonists stood up to racial, social, national and economic oppression in an era when those problems were acutely felt. And Lee’s fame has done much to facilitate the subsequent success of Ip Man as a media figure.

Still, the Ip Man that seems to be the most popular with audiences today is a different sort of hero than his later student. Whereas Bruce Lee’s early films appeared to carry a politically radical subtext, Ip Man as he is imagined on-screen has been a much more conservative figure. Portrayed as a local and national hero, he fights to retain the values and hierarchies of the past rather than to overturn them.

There are a number of ways to approach this disjoint. When reimagining Ip Man for the big screen it is no longer enough to see him only as a local kung fu teacher. For these movies to be a commercial success they had to be embraced by wide audiences in both Hong Kong, on the mainland and in the west. As such a dual discourse was adopted where Ip Man found expression as both a local and a national figure. Wilson Ip’s 2008 effort succeeded precisely because it managed to strike a masterful balance between these various audiences.

So what is the significance of the current reimagining of Ip Man’s legacy for those of us in martial arts studies? Peter Beyer might remind us that there is more than one way to think about the process of globalization. While ultimately a continuation of the drive towards modernity that was launched in 19th century Europe, we can also understand it as a transformation of the ways in which meaning is communicated between society and individuals. This more conceptual understanding of globalization may shine a different light on the sorts of roles that the martial arts, and Wing Chun in particular, are being called on to perform in the current era.

According to Beyer, the process of globalization has resulted in traditional means of value creation being displaced by schools of thought that privilege efficiency and professionalism. Religious modes of communication have been one of the great losers in this process. Indeed, Beyer’s work is centrally concerned with the fate of organized religion in an increasingly global world.

To create systems of meaning (which can then be used to support a variety of administrative and political functions) Beyer argues that religions, and other “generalized” modes of communication, begin by positing the existence of two realms, a “transcendent” and an “imminent.”

Given that the imminent defines the totality of our daily existence, we actually have trouble talking about it as we have no exterior points of reference from which to define abstract values and concepts. This problem is overcome by postulating the existence of a “transcendent” state in which none of the basic conditions that define daily life are said to exist. Through their monopoly on socially meaningful communication, religions (and other ritual systems) were traditionally able to make themselves essential in all sorts of social spheres.

This balance was upset by the rise of more professionalized modes of action during the modern era. Why? Highly focused types of communication are more efficient than those based on general cultural ideas. Modern societies value this increase in efficiency. As a result the priests and nuns that had overseen so many elements of western life were replaced with doctors, nurses, teachers, counselors, lawyers and bureaucrats.

This same process of increased specialization and professionalization has now found expression all over the globe. Nor are religious institutions the only ones to be challenged by these fundamental shifts in social values. Any “generalist” mode of communication can potentially find its social influence threatened by the rise of professionalism and increased rationalization. In fact, when individuals talk about the declining popularity of many martial arts in mainland China today, it is often this sort of narrative that they turn to. The traditional martial arts are seen as incompatible with the demands of modernity.

This is a very brief summary of Beyer’s complex argument as presented in his volume Religion and Globalization (2000). Yet contrary to the expectations of the early modernization and secularization theorists, religion, ethnicity and the like has not simply vanished. Instead the disruptions created by globalization have presented new opportunities for these institutions to retain some degree of social relevance.

On the one hand, they can focus on new aspects of “public performance” by addressing the secondary problems caused by this massive economic and social transformation. This more liberal strategy proved to be popular and can be seen in places as diverse as the rise of “liberation theology” in Latin American or the increased concern with environmental protection by a number of different types of churches in the more affluent west.

Other organizations have instead adopted a more conservative approach by refocusing their energies on the question of “fundamental communication” about the transcendent.
This second strategy is especially useful if one wishes to address questions of identity, and hence the definition and boundaries of the community, in the face of increased global pressures and dislocation. Such approaches have proved to be popular and their influence can be seen in the rise of fundamentalist communities in many world religions.

Nor is there any reason to think that these two adaptive strategies are restricted to discussions of religion. Douglas Wile has noted that the disruptions which imperiled the Chinese empire in the middle of the 19th century (including the Taiping Rebellion and the Opium Wars) badly shook society’s self-confidence. This, in turn, became a critical moment in the formation of modern Taijiquan.

He argues that the Wu brother’s subsequent research and development of the Taiji Classics can be understood as an attempt to find, reevaluate and reassemble what was valuable in Chinese culture in the face of a rapidly evolving existential challenge from the modern west. While Taijiquan clearly has technical roots which stretch back for centuries, it is this late 19th century social agenda, expanded and reimagined in explicitly nationalist terms during the 20th century, which defines how many people experience the system today.

Still, there are debates as to what Taiji should become. On the one hand there are groups who see in the art a cultural repository of what is essentially “Chinese.” While foreign students might learn the techniques, it is doubtful that they could even gain the deep cultural knowledge necessary to correlate and perfect this mass of material. For some practitioners what lies at the root of the system is an essentialist ideal of racial or national identity.

Other reformers have claimed that for Taiji to survive in the modern world it must adapt. Specifically, it must evolve to meet the needs of its changing student. An aging population can benefit from the increased feelings of health, balance and well-being that come with daily forms practice. Busy corporate executives can turn to simplified versions of the art for stress relief and lifestyle advice. I think that the idea of Sifu as life coach is something that many of us are probably familiar with.

Here we see the two adaptive strategies that Beyer suggested were open to all traditional modes of communication threatened by globalization. The first camp has focused on the question of primary communication, which in the modern era so often finds its expression in the exploration of cultural and national identity. The second group has instead sought to adapt the art to deal with the ancillary problems created by life in an increasingly fast paced and interconnected modern society.

This same process can also be seen in the Wing Chun community. Certain schools continue to focus on the “solutions” (be they self-defense, health or psychological well-being) that Wing Chun can provide. Yet not every discussion of the art trends in this utilitarian direction. The endless debates of the deep (and basically unknowable) origins of this style signal an ongoing interest in the idea that a hidden and somehow more “real” identity is out there. It is interesting to note how often that search leads back to nationally motivated myths of resistance grounded in either the Shaolin Temple or legendary rebel groups.

Indeed, the impulse to see Ip Man as something more than a martial arts teacher is not confined to recent films. It also reflects a fundamental current within the Wing Chun community. What defines the heart of this system, and what should it become in the future? Is this a style built around the solutions to pressing technical and social problems? Or is it instead one that attempts to imagine a space in which its members have a better, and more empowered, understanding of who they are?

Conclusion

In conclusion I would like to turn to a few lines of dialogue from a more recent reimagining of Ip Man, one that seems almost self-reflective about what he is becoming not just in Chinese popular culture but on the world stage. In an early scene of Wong Kar-wai’s 2013 film The Grandmaster we find Ip Man accepting a challenge from a northern master looking to pass on the mantle of leadership. When mentioning the divide between the Southern and Northern styles of the martial arts Ip Man asserts:

“The world is a big place. Why limit it to “North” and “South?” It holds you back. To you this cake is the country, to me it is so much more. Break from what you know, and you will know more. The southern [martial] arts are bigger than just the North and South.”

This scene is fascinating as it seems to contemplate the rise of Ip Man as a cultural icon and then goes on to address this debate in almost explicit terms. What is the value of the Southern Chinese martial arts? Are they an expression of local identity? Are they subservient to nationalist dreams? Or do they somehow transcend this? Can they become more? Nor, if Beyer is correct, should we expect to see this debate resolved in the near future. A dispute between positions representing such fundamentally different sets of possibilities simply cannot be resolved.

The dialectic tension between these two competing visions generates much of the emotional power that drives the Chinese martial arts today. While these fighting systems may appear to be “traditional,” in their present form they are inescapably the product of a modern global world. Ip Man’s actual genius lay in his perception and embrace of this fundamental truth.

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If you enjoyed this presentation you might also want to see the Keynote addresses by Stephen Chan (“Martial Arts: The Imposture of an Impersonation of an Improvisation of Infidelities (amidst some few residual fidelities”) and D. S. Farrer (“Efficiency and Entertainment in Martial Arts Studies: Anthropological Perspectives”), which have also been uploaded to Youtube!

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Late 19th century performers with a large planted wooden dummy.

Warning: Speculation Ahead

No topic surrounding Wing Chun elicits more interest than its deep historical origins. Did the art really originate at the southern Shaolin Temple? Was it connected to late Qing revolutionary groups? Did Leung Jan actually learn the system from a pair of retired Cantonese opera performers? And if so, what was this style doing on the Red Boats, whose performances were better known for their elaborate costumes and entertaining acrobatics than actual fighting efficiency?

At the same time the Mook Yan Jong, or “wooden dummy,” has come to define Wing Chun’s image in the public imagination. For actual students of the system, dummies are an aid in refining everything from footwork to the geometry of the perfect punch. But to the public they seem to have become the ultimate symbol of esoteric martial prowess. Increasingly they are showing up in all sorts of unlikely places in popular entertainment (including in a recent episode of Star vs. the Forces of Evil titled “Monster Arm”).

It is probably no coincidence that Wilson Ip opened his 2008 hit film Ip Man with a scene of his eponymous protagonist working away on his jong. How better to advertise his esoteric skills than by showing his mastery of a training tool that recalls the memory of the sinister room of “wooden dummy men” featured in so many Shaolin temple myths and kung fu movies?

Wing Chun is far from the only Chinese art that employs dummies. These training tools come in a variety of shapes and sizes and can be seen across the history of that country’s fighting styles. Yet there can be no denying the rapid rise in popularity of the type of dummy favored by Ip Man and Bruce Lee. Given that this particular training tool has become a ubiquitous symbol of Southern China’s martial heritage and culture, it might be worthwhile to consider the question of its actual origins.

How might the sorts of dummies currently used in Wing Chun have evolved? Where do they fit into the mythic and more historically grounded genesis of the style? Given that even the most romantic accounts of this art place its genesis only in the late Qing dynasty (18^th or 19^th century), and the fact that we don’t have any evidence of this type of dummy being used in earlier periods (say the Ming dynasty), it might be possible to make some headway on these questions.

Still, caution is required. We have few concrete sources on the origins of Wing Chun, and even less on the evolution of its particular style of wooden dummy. This lack of evidence makes it difficult to conclusively falsify theories, and arguments “made from silence” can never be considered wholly reliable. Barring some unforeseen discovery in the next couple of years, this is a subject that must remain speculative. The best we can do is to try out some reasonable theories and see how well they stack up against our understanding of other areas of Chinese history. On the other hand, a blog like this might be a great place to explore some of these “thought experiments.”

Photograph of the bow of a model of an “Earth Boat” at the Foshan Museum included by Yeung in her thesis. Source: Yeung p. 26.

Red Boats and Wooden Dummies

So where does popular mythology locate the origin of the wooden dummy? For the most part this has not been a major topic of speculation. But many Wing Chun practitioners are certain that dummies were in active use during the era of the Red Boat Opera companies. Scholars of southern Chinese popular culture know that these groups plied the waters of the Pearl River Delta in specially built river junks between about 1870 and 1938.

Some accounts place the ultimate origins of the Red Boat system as far back as the 1850s, but given the strictly enforced vernacular opera ban that was put in place after the failed Red Turban Revolt, Barbara Ward (who has probably done more work on the subject in the English language literature than anyone else) concluded that they did not actually become a common sight until the early 1870s. Nor does the Red Boat tradition seem to have survived into the post-WWII era. During these prosperous years opera performances became a big enough business to be housed in permanent theaters and the older nautical traditions were abandoned.

Wing Chun students who look back to Cantonese Opera as a critical link in the transmission of their system often assert that dummies were either part of the ships rigging or were actually mounted on the specially built (and highly uniform) fleet of Red Boats. Opera students are said to have used them in both their basic training of performance skills as well as in their pursuits of the higher reaches of Wing Chun system. In fact, the Red Boats are often imagined as floating martial arts schools.

Nor are martial artists alone in perpetuating these images. The Cantonese Opera Museum in Foshan contains multiple references to the traditional role of the Mook Yan Jong in performance training. The museum even displays (a somewhat historically inaccurate) “scale model” of a classic Red Boat that clearly has a training dummy mounted on the rear deck.

It also has in its collection a vintage “buried dummy” (the more traditional type used prior to the 1950s). The museum’s description of this particular jong notes that “beating the wooden instrument” was a standard part of the training for all beginning opera students. So was the classic Wing Chun dummy simply inherited from the Red Boats and or other operatic traditions?

Possibly, but there are a few problems with this theory that need to be carefully considered. First off, this story doesn’t really explain the ultimate origins of these training tools. It just moves the problem one step back. Secondly, there are actually a number of practical questions that arise when we try to place wooden dummies in the context of what we actually know about these vessels.

To begin with, most of the accounts that “remember” the use of dummies on the Red Boats were recorded after the 1980s, in the post-Bruce Lee era, when Wing Chun was already growing in popularity. However, when one looks back at Barbara Ward’s work interviewing hundreds of opera performers and fans in the post WWII-era, no one seemed to remember the presence of wooden dummies on these vessels at all. Ward did not include them in her reconstructions of these vessels, which are probably the most detailed and reliable that we currently have.

Even more basic problems arise when we consider what life on these vessels was really like. The conditions for the both the opera troop as well as the vessel’s sailing crew were appalling cramped. The situation was even worse when one remembers to account for all of the costumes and other material that had to be carried from one performance venue to the next. In fact, the surviving members of the Red Boats that Ward interviewed all claimed that no training of any kind happened on these vessels. There was not enough room to move.

Then again, it would also have been basically unnecessary. The Red Boats were never intended to be blue water vessels undertaking long voyages. These river barges were somewhat akin to a large tour bus that would move from one town to the next as they worked their way up-stream during the performance seasons. Voyages might take a day or two, and then they would dock for three days or more. Any actual training or practice happened on dry land.

In my opinion deck mounted dummies seem unlikely. They would have been in the way of the crew when the ship was underway, while also being in the wrong place for actual martial arts and performance training when it actually happened on land.

A windlass on the deck of a Vietnamese Junk loaded with rope.

Looking Further into the Nautical Origins of the Jong

I have always been a bit skeptical of the typical story linking the Wing Chun dummy to the style’s supposed origins on the Red Boats. While it seems entirely likely that Cantonese Opera performers used jongs, something has never really added up for me about the sorts of reconstructions that are imagined. Does this mean that we can dismiss the nautical origins of the Wing Chun dummy? Probably not.

I was recently part of a discussion regarding a southern kung fu style that also claimed an operatic origin and used dummies. One of the individuals mentioned that while he was a northern stylist, he had grown up around sailing vessels, and it would not be hard for him to imagine that these dummies might be descended from some of the deck machinery that he had seen.

This struck me as an interesting comment but having no familiarity with sailing vessels myself I didn’t know what to do with it. While thinking about this comment a few days later it occurred to me that I knew someone who could speak directly to this issue. Dr. Hans K. Van Tilburg, the maritime heritage coordinator for NOAA, is one of the foremost authorities on the naval architecture of 19^th century Chinese sailing vessels. He also offered some generous advice on a couple of posts dealing with the martial arts and maritime culture posted here at Kung Fu Tea last year.

I gathered a number of pictures of various Wing Chun dummies (including the image at the top of this post) and emailed them out to him asking what he thought they were. His response was both immediate and fascinating. In his opinion the dummy in this often reproduced (but really somewhat mysterious) image is clearly a ships windlass which had been taken out of its mounting and propped up vertically. He also noted that the modern dummies bore an uncanny resemblance to the same sorts of windlasses.

These simple pieces of deck machinery were common on all traditional Chinese sailing vessels in the late imperial period. They might vary in size and configuration depending on the job that they were expected to do. Generally they consisted of a horizontal barrel or trunk that rope was loaded onto in order to hoist sails, anchors or the rudder (many Chinese junks of the period could raise their rudders when sailing into shallow waters). These trunks were fitted with a progressive series of holes or slots that held detachable wooden arms. These could be either long or short and were used by the sailors to hoist and hold the load.

Sometimes the holes were arranged so that if two arms were inserted at one time they would make an acute angle (much like a modern Wing Chun dummy). This was important as not every Chinese windlass had a gearing or locking mechanism. Instead an individual arm could be wedged against the deck to hold the load in place.

Above one can find a photograph of a relatively small and simple example of such a machine on a Vietnamese fishing junk. This image is particularly useful as you can actually see how rope was loaded onto the barrel to lift a load. The trunk of this windlass is octagonal, whereas all of the pictures I have seen of Chinese examples are round. [This leads me to wonder what an octagonal dummy would be like to work with?] Readers should also note that it seems to have three sets of “arms” which, if one were to set the trunk up vertically, would correspond to the high and low arms plus the leg. In fact, the individual employing the windlass as a dummy in the first picture is actually using the lower most “arm” as though it were a “leg.”

A Windlass on the deck of the famous Chinese junk Keying during its tour of the UK.

Another 19th century European engraving showing a Windlass on the deck of a Chinese ship.

Another important image comes from a 19^th century engraving of the aft deck of the Keying. We already encountered the Keying in a previous post. Used as a floating cultural exhibit it was responsible for the first public Kung Fu demonstrations to Europe in the 1850s.

In this image we can see an individual sitting on the windlass used to lift the sail. In this instance the arms have been removed and no rope is loaded on the barrel. As a result we can see the large diameter circular trunk with a configuration of slots or holes not totally unlike the inverted triangle still seen on the modern Wing Chun dummy.

Still, the Chinese windlass was always installed and used in the horizontal position. After the introduction of European sailing vessels into the water of southern China some vertically mounted machinery, referred to as a “capstan,” began to be produced. This type of arrangement was much more common on European vessels.

Needless to say, a vertically mounted Chinese-style windlass would bear an uncanny resemblance to a modern Wing Chun dummy. In the 1867 volume Notes on Japan and China, Vol. 1-2 (edited by N. B. Denneys, Hong Kong: Charles A. Saint) we read:

“Where a mechanical contrivance for raising an anchor is necessary, the old fashioned principal of the winch is usually seen in force: but the foreign capstan is gradually gaining ground in this respect.” P. 170.

While the vertical capstan may have gained ground in some quarters I was unable to locate a single image of one in all of the pictures and postcards of Chinese junks which I saw. Indeed, it seems that the windlass remained the machine of choice throughout the period of traditional boat building and even into the post-WWII period.

Note both the mast support and the horizontal windlass on this contemporary Chinese ship. Source: special thanks to Hans Van Tilburg for providing this photo from his own collection.

There are a few other bits of Chinese naval architecture that also seem suggestive of the structure of a wooden dummy. The long curved “leg” of a jong is one of its most striking visual features, yet there is nothing like that on any image of a windlass that I have located. However, the masts of Chinese vessels were often reinforced and braced with “legs” of very similar shape. The size of this appendage could vary tremendously depending on the scale of the vessel and the mast that was being supported, but the basic resemblance to a more traditional planted dummy is notable.

What of the Red Boats of the Cantonese Operas? All of the images that we have seen so far have come from either very large blue water vessels or fishing junks. Did the sorts of junks and barges that plied the Pearl River also have these sorts of deck machines?

Logically one would expect that the answer to this would have to be yes. Any ship which needed mechanical help in raising the anchor or hoisting sales could have used the services of a windlass or two. Unfortunately finding period picture of these machines on river vessels has proved to be more difficult than I expected, possibly because of their more extensive cabins and enclosed decks. At the same time it is useful to remember that we do not have a single confirmed photograph of a Red Boat. Given their popularity and social importance this is really surprising. Yet it is also a valuable reminder of exactly how spotty the historical record of popular culture can be.

While we lack actual images of the machines in question, Barbara Ward’s reconstruction do suggest that each Red Boat came outfitted with a number of windlasses. One of the really interesting things about the Red Boats is that the entire fleet used by the Guangdong opera guild was built to identical specifications. Further, every specific cabin location in any ship shared the same name. As a result any opera company could set foot on every ship and be instantly at home. These vessels were designed to be perfectly interchangeable.

The names of the various cabins occupied by the performers are often quite evocative with the very best cabins being given soaring titles (‘The Prince’s Palace’). Less desirable spots tended to carry distressingly literal names (‘Rubbish Dump’ or ‘Mosquito Den’). One of these less preferred cabins was referred to as “hoist sales place,” and Ward’s plans of the vessels indicate that it sat by (or on top of) one of the windlasses used in conjunction with the ships retractable mast.

A view of the interior layout of a Red Boat. Source: Barbara Ward, 1981. pp. 255, Figure 2.8

Conclusion

Wing Chun students occasionally point to the image at the top of this post as an example of a wooden dummy being used on one of the Red Boats of the Cantonese opera. Indeed, the ship in question does appear to be some sort of river barge, and the martial artist’s actions look like modern dummy usage. Unfortunately I have never been able to confirm the actual province of that particular photograph (though I have now heard a number of theories on its origin). But in more technical terms, what is this actually a picture of?

After my conversation with Dr. Van Tilberg and a little research I think that we can be fairly certain that the “dummy” in question is actually a windlass of the type that was used as deck machinery on Chinese vessels in the Late Imperial and Republic periods. To do work such a device would have to be mounted horizontally, but in this case it has either been mounted vertically, or possibly just propped upright. The fact that the individuals in question are using it to demonstrate what appears to be movements from a dummy form suggests that they also noted a correspondence between this particular bit of naval machinery and the sort of training tools that would later become common in Wing Chun.

I remain skeptical that very many sailors had something like this permanently installed on the decks of their ships. All of the photographs I have seen indicate that the decks of smaller vessels were pretty busy and complicated places, and such machines would have been more useful for doing actual work. Nor did Ward find any evidence of ship board dummies in her investigating of life on the Red Boats (though admittedly that was not the focus of her work).

Still, boats were a ubiquitous part of life in Southern China. All sorts of individuals traveled on these vessels to visit other villages or conduct mundane business. Given the constant use that machinery like this endured, one suspects that there must have been a small army of carpenters who made their living rebuilding and repairing these windlasses. We may never know if the origins of the modern Mook Yan Jong can be found in a spare windlass propped up on a deck (as in the opening image), or in the creativity of an individual boxing master re-purposing or commissioning a custom model from a local carpenter. Yet it is an important possibility to consider.

A simple striking dummy employed in some Bagua schools.

Of course there are other possibilities. While we are on the topic of machinery there are some other devices that one might want to take into account. Chinese engineers developed all sorts of simple machines for moving water, and nowhere was this technology more vital than in the shifting sands and flooded rice fields of the Pearl River Delta. One such device can be seen above. Again, note the arrangement of multiple spokes of “arms” along a circular trunk. Any farmer would have been familiar with similar devices used to raise water into elevated rice patties. Indeed, it is not possible to rule out these sorts of machines as another source of inspiration for the wooden dummy.

Still, the naval windlass seems to have a number of correspondences that are hard to ignore. These can be seen in the size and the shape of the trunk, the need for easily detachable arms and even the sorts of hole configurations that were commonly encountered. Clearly the Mook Yan Jong has undergone an extensive evolution and specialization to become the training tool that we know today. Yet the iconic Wing Chun’s dummy may be a tangible link to southern Chinese culture’s nautical past.

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If you enjoyed this post you might also want to read: The 19th Century Hudiedao (Butterfly Sword) on Land and Sea

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Originally posted on Martial Arts Studies:

Cardiff University. Source: Wikimedia (CC).

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Meir Shahar. “Diamond Body: The Origins of Invulnerability in the Chinese Martial Arts” in Perfect Bodies: Sports Medicine and Immortality, Edited by Vivienne Lo. London: British Museum, 2012.

Introduction: The Significance of Invulnerability in the Chinese Martial Arts

I can think of few topics that the Chinese martial artists I regularly associate with want to discuss less than invulnerability magic or spirit possession. Granted, this has a lot to do with selection bias and the sorts of individuals who are drawn to the more “practical” and “modern” aspects of the Southern Chinese martial arts. These are the communities that my personal and academic study focus on.

Yet as I watch other discussions unfold, “serious” martial artists seem to be pretty uninterested in hard Qigong. Even at a time when these time-honored displays are being banished from the Chinese military, no one is calling for urgent efforts to “document” or “preserve” them. This is actually somewhat remarkable as a concern for the fading of tradition seems to be one of the critical social markers of the modern Chinese martial arts community. Yet when it comes to the practice of “hard Qigong,” the “Iron-Cloth Shirt” or “Golden Bell,” many commentators seem uncharacteristically silent.

Nor is this indifference entirely new. On the one hand a great many schools and manuals still teach these techniques and demonstrations are not hard to find. Yet since the early 20th century there seems to have been a marked tendency to recast all of this as mere “showmanship” and to downplay its association with the “real” martial arts.

At least two forces are at play here, both of which have their origin in the “respectability politics” of the Republic period. Martial arts reformers, eager to sell their systems to the newly emerging urban middle class, wished to cultivate a more refined and nationally aware brand. Needless to say, ubiquitous displays by economically and socially marginal street performers undercut these efforts.

And then there was the Boxer Uprising. As I have noted before, the traditional Chinese fighting arts probably came closer to actual extinction in the decade following the Boxer Rising than at any time before or since. Reformers who wished to save the martial arts needed to expunge any hint of the national humiliation that followed the rebellion. For progressives and the May 4th Intellectuals, the martial arts became emblematic of everything that was too backwards, superstitious or feudal to be part of the modern nation. As a result, practices that were deemed to be too esoteric or problematic had to be jettisoned from the system.

Even though some of these more marginal traditions have survived, students of Chinese Martial Studies may be reluctant to engage with them. Perhaps it is because we rely too much on the written sources that were produced by various sorts of reformers (Jingwu, Guoshu…etc) when deciding what defines “real” kung fu. Or maybe (as in my case) it is simply a reflection of the communities that we happen to be most familiar with. Whatever the reasons, Meir Shahar’s chapter “Diamond Body: The Origins of Invulnerability in the Chinese Martial Arts” invites us to take a closer look at these practices.

I suspect that many readers will be unfamiliar with this particular essay as it only appears in an edited volume that focuses on sports and medicine rather than the martial arts. Some of this material will be familiar to those who have already read Shahar’s 2008 volume The Shaolin Monastery (Hawaii University Press). Yet this important essay stands on its own merit and deserves careful consideration.

It is hard to overstate the importance of Shahar’s 2008 volume for those of us interested in Chinese martial studies. In addition to providing a fantastic treatment of the Shaolin Temple this work also guided readers through an exploration of many of the extant textual sources on the Ming and Qing era martial arts. Better yet, it signaled to academic publishers that there was an untapped demand for similar projects in other areas of Martial Arts Studies.

Shahar’s volume has helped to inspire a large number of conversations and become one of the most frequently referenced works on the Chinese martial arts. Yet sometimes I get the feeling that there is not a lot of agreement on what he actually suggested. Given the various perspectives that his work is read from, and the complexity of the subject matter, perhaps this is to be expected.

It is also the reason why students of Martial Arts Studies will want to pay close attention to his more focused essay on the origins of the Chinese invulnerability techniques. Published four years after his volume on Shaolin, this paper allows Shahar to both demonstrate the centrality of these practices to the evolution of modern Chinese martial culture, as well as to clarify his previous arguments on two important (and controversial) points. These have to do with the role of religious practices in the development of the Chinese martial arts as well as the centrality of Indian influence in the development of some aspects of Kung Fu.

“Sword Dancer.” Image circa 1910, distributed circa 1930. Source” Vintage Postcard.

“Diamond Bodies” to “Iron-Cloth Shirts:” Reviewing the Evidence

In some respects these points are surprising. Both have been mainstays of popular discussions, and both have been widely (and deservedly) debunked. The standard form of these arguments generally goes something like this. All Chinese martial arts derive ultimately from Shaolin (or possibly Shaolin and Wudang) and are therefore rooted in China’s great spiritual traditions. Further, Chan Buddhism was brought to Shaolin by Bodhidharma. He was an Indian missionary who introduced both meditation and Kung Fu to the monastery. We can then conclude that the roots of China’s fighting traditions lay in the Indian martial arts.

Shahar’s 2008 volume provides ample evidence of why both of these commonly heard arguments are mistaken. I would say that one of his book’s most important contributions has been to help move the popular discussion away from a facile search for Chan Buddhism within martial practices. So why does he return (in a way) to these same issues in his 2012 paper?

The answer to that question is rooted in the paradoxical relationship that exists between invulnerability practices and the broader world of the Chinese martial arts. His argument throughout this paper is that a better understanding of the technical origins of the former will help to add a needed dose of nuance to our understanding of the later. And this nuance may be particularly helpful in guiding those working their way through his longer study on Shaolin.

Shahar begins his essay by pointing out two important facts. First, the late imperial and modern invulnerability techniques that have gone under names such as “Golden-Bell Armor” and “Iron-Cloth Shirt” are not representative of the Chinese martial arts at large. Many practitioner and teachers have (and want) nothing to do with such techniques.

Nor would it be correct to assume that these things were always common in the past. As we already saw with our discussion of invulnerability magic among the Red Spear militias of the 1920s, when these teachings appeared in the countryside of Shandong and Henan province, most of the preexisting martial artists viewed them as something new (and heterodox) rather than the restoration of a “traditional” practice.

It is probably best to view such practices as a minor sub-current that flows throughout the Chinese martial arts. Yet at the same time we must acknowledge that this is a remarkably persistent stream of belief and technique that has a habit of popping up in the most unexpected places after long periods of silence.

While the beliefs and practices that underlay these techniques are the easiest to observe with militarized groups such as the Boxer and Red Spears, the basic techniques that they employed were also shared by a wide variety of teachers and practitioners. Many of these individuals made their living in busy markets where they demonstrated feats of hard Qigong while selling patent medicine and charms. Their “hardened physiques” (which could withstand blows from hammers, spears or swords) were used as a testimony to the efficacy of their wares. So while these beliefs may not have been part of the orthodox course of study in all schools, they were widely disseminated among China’s highly mobile population of martial artists.

Nor was this fascination confined to illiterate village masters or marketplace performers. Shahar points out that literate and educated individuals were also fascinated with the image of the “diamond body” of the perfect martial artists. These were the people who left the surviving accounts of marketplace demonstrations (some going back to the Ming dynasty), who wrote wuxia novels and operas that featured the frequent use of invulnerability magic, and who attempted to understand and explain the invulnerability magic of the vulgar masses as a variant of their own more erudite theories on the “circulation and concentration of Qi.” In fact, it was the literary works produced by these individuals that helped to shape the cultural milieu that all Chinese martial artists operated within. Thus even if most individuals did not claim any expertise in these areas, the techniques of invulnerability were always out there “somewhere.”

Shahar wastes little time and declares to his readers within the first few paragraphs that the ultimate origins of these invulnerability techniques lay in the ancient Daoist gymnastic system known as daoyin, premised on the idea that it is possible for an individual to control their internal flow of “energy.” In fact, the quest for invincibility is related in substantive ways to the more famous questions of immortality.

He then asserts that the specific details of these techniques suggest that they are not ultimately of Chinese origin. Rather, they are directly dependent on the idea of the ‘Diamond Body’ and the techniques of Tantric Buddhism imported from India to China between the 5th and the 8th century CE. While the martial legend of Bodhidharma remains a myth, a closer examination of late-imperial invulnerability techniques may demonstrate the long-term impact of Indian thought on both the martial arts and Chinese culture.

After reviewing a number of textual and empirical sources in the first half of this article, Shahar asks how it is possible that these medieval beliefs (originating in esoteric Buddhism) were able to reemerge in the late-imperial world of practicing martial artists? Interestingly he finds that some of the baser marketplace performers of the late Ming were pretty open about their sources. They found the inspiration for their hard Qigong feats in “The Sinew-Transformation Classic.”

The forged preface of this work did much to introduce the ancient sage Bodhidharma to the world of the Chinese martial arts, yet Shahar dates the actual compilation of the current version of the text to about 1,000 years later (roughly 1624). The work exhibits a marked interest in “hardening the physique” through a combination of meditation, exercise and progressive beatings so that one could withstand both illness and physical threats.

Shahar points out that various versions of this text were widely disseminated and it is hard to understate its effect on late imperial martial artists. A number of the invulnerability manuals produced in the Qing and Republic periods mirror it on either a textual or technical level. Indeed, the Sinews-Transformation Classic is the oldest such manual still extent, and seems to have directly inspired much of the genera that followed in its wake.

Some interesting semantic issues begin to emerge when one closely considers the vocabulary of this work. Most of the translations of the Sinews-Changing Classic make no reference to “Golden-Bell Armor” or “Iron-Cloth Shirts,” the most common generic names for invulnerability practices in the Qing dynasty. Rather it speaks of the quest for the “Diamond Body.”

Other novels produced during the late Ming also tend to use similar terms. Even Monkey in “Journey to the West” is said to exhibit a “Diamond Body.” How then can we explain both the symbolic significance of these terms in the late Ming, and their subsequent absence in the Qing, while continuing to assert the centrality of the Sinews Changing Classic?

Readers should note that one of the more important aspects of Shahar’s argument is actually tucked into the footnotes. Specifically, in footnote 24 he observes that other experts in the transmission and dating of this particular text have found that in later and more corrupt copies there is a tendency for the idea of the “Diamond Body” to be replaced with more general metaphors about bodies that have become as hard as metal. This would seem to be ultimate origin of the popular imagery which emerged by the end of the Qing dynasty. Shahar implies that the move from a “Diamond Body” to a metal one actually happened within the evolution of the Sinews Changing Classic textual tradition.

Still, this corruption is not without a certain degree of significance. Shahar goes on to argue in the final pages of his article that the specific imagery of the “Diamond Body” did not emerge in the Sinews Transformation Classic by accident. Instead it was a reflection (and a memory) of the prior importance of Tantric or Esoteric Buddhism much earlier in Chinese history and the unique (mostly magical) contributions that it made to Chinese martial culture.

The author provides readers with a basic introduction to this school of Buddhism and its history in China which concludes with examples of 8th century Tantra masters employing both mudra and spells to invoke the “Diamond Armor” which was a central part of many of that school’s religious rites. These masters explicitly noted that once invoked this Diamond barrier not only protects one from spiritual but also physical threats.

The greatest mythical teacher of such secrets was Vajrapani, often portrayed as the Buddha’s over-muscled guard and the titular deity of the Shaolin Temple. Tang storytellers in the 12th century forever linked Vajrapani to the temple’s reputation for producing martial monks when Zhang Zhou published a fictional account of the young meditation master Sengchou’s encounter with the martial deity.

As Shahar notes, it might be simple to dismiss this story as an isolated fiction except that nearly contemporaneous inscriptions at the temple describe the magical methods by which monks were invoking the same deity hoping to gain both spiritual and very physical strength. This story and the inscription seem to indicate that while we have very few sources on this period, Shaolin may have been known for a unique martial monk tradition prior to the Ming dynasty. Yet the special “martial arts” that its monks practiced were essentially esoteric or magical in nature.

So was this linking of Tantric and martial culture unique to Shaolin, or even China? In the final paragraphs of the paper Shahar leaves the reader with a single source suggesting that an exploration of the Indian Yogic literature would likely conclude that it too shared the quest for spiritual and physical benefits through the forging of a “Diamond Body.” The legend of Allama’s magical contest with Siddha Goraksa (where the latter’s Diamond Body is bested by the former’s “emptiness”) can even be read as an explicit criticism of the popularity of these practices.

Shahar’s succinct conclusion is worth restating:

“The 17th century Sinews Transformation Classic furnishes a direct link between medieval Tantric Buddhism and the emergence of the late-imperial martial arts. The manual’s adamantine vocabulary derives from the concept of the ‘Diamond Body’, which was introduced to China by the Buddhist Diamond Vehicle (Vajrayana). The esoteric search for an everlasting diamond physique served as the ultimate source for such invulnerability methods as the Golden-Bell Armor and Iron-Cloth Shirt. The cult of the Diamond God Vajrapani, coupled with the forging of magic diamond armor inspired the hardening techniques that are currently practiced in China. The obsession with the imperishable body illustrates the inseparability of military and religious goals in the Chinese martial arts, no less than their indebtedness to Indian Esoteric Buddhism. In this respect, the hardened body demonstrates the long-term impact of Indian religion on Chinese culture.”

A display of strength using a Wukedao, or heavy exam knife. Source: http://steelandcotton.tumblr.com/post/79458102847/i-dont-oppose-playing-ball-in-the-least-but-i#notes

Conclusion

One of the most critical debates within Chinese martial studies has focused on the role of religion in the evolution, transmission or understanding of these fighting systems. Tang Hao first debunked much of the popular lore on this subject in the 1930s, and more recently authors like Stanley Henning and Brian Kennedy (among others) have made important contributions to our understanding of this subject. Indeed, Shahar’s own work from 2008 served to once again demonstrate the many ways in which these popular theories fundamentally misunderstood both Chinese religious and martial history.

Yet the conclusions of this more recent paper may introduce a greater degree of nuance into our discussion. China’s medieval contact with India had a profound effect on many areas of life, so it is not clear why we should not expect to see some of these in the realm of the martial arts. Likewise, scholars are only now beginning to appreciate the impact that Tantric Buddhism had on medieval Chinese culture. Rather than ascribing everything to Chan (or Zen), as popular discussions of the martial arts often do, a greater appreciation of the literary and spiritual symbolism of this school might help to enrich our understanding of some aspects of the martial arts. The critical contribution of this paper is the realization that a detailed examination of late imperial invulnerability practices, often neglected in modern discussions, might open some exciting areas of investigation.

Still, no paper is without its weaknesses. Ironically one of these is simultaneously a strength. Shahar is always a clear writer, but this chapter stands out as something that is really easy to read. It is relatively short (only about 8 double-column pages of text), and assumes no prior knowledge of esoteric Buddhism and only a minimal understanding of the Chinese martial arts. One strongly suspects that Shahar wrote the piece for an audience of generalists, rather than specialists. And given the venue in which it was published, that was clearly the right choice.

The fact that this article keeps jargon to a minimum, includes lots of illustrations and employs minimal footnotes makes it a great choice for use in a course syllabus or reading list, even at the undergraduate level. Yet at times I did find myself wanting more. Rather than simply being assured of the great number of later manuals that followed the lead of the Sinews Transformation Classic, I would have appreciated a more detailed survey. Likewise, the question of how the “Diamond Body” evolved into the “Iron-Cloth Shirt” of the later Qing struck me as a fundamental issue that deserved more extensive treatment than a single footnote could provide.

This is especially important as a seemingly simple switch in vocabulary effectively deprived the late-imperial invulnerability techniques of one of their last solid symbolic links to Tantric culture. Given the centrality of this transmission to Shahar’s argument I would have liked to see the individual steps spelled out in greater detail. Of course the textual record is spotty enough that this may not be possible.

One could say much the same thing about the prior transition between the world of the 12th century Tantra master and their quest for the “Diamond Armor” to the 17th century environment that gave rise to the Sinews Transformation Classic. How exactly was this symbolic tradition transmitted for over five centuries? Granted, this late imperial work is the oldest complete hardening manual that currently exists, but are there any clues in the literature that might be suggestive? Do its exercises imply a dependence on prior religious texts, literary works, or something else entirely?

Even if the existing textual record does not allow for a full exploration of these critical linkages, a more developed theoretical model might also be helpful. One of the most striking things about the invulnerability tradition that Shahar identifies is its ability to exist as a submerged thread within China’s martial culture, only emerging in certain times and places, yet always eluding eradication by wary political and social elites.

Unfortunately this sociological aspect of the story is never developed. Why do such practices survive, even to the current day? How do they survive setbacks such as their very public failure during the Boxer Uprising? Who turns to them? Have these mechanisms changed over time, or has the sociological appeal of this sub-current within the Chinese martial arts always been similar to what we see now? And what role has popular culture (novels, plays and other media) assumed in this process?

Shahar’s work provides a lucid and clear introduction to some of the major historical questions surrounding the origins of invulnerability practices in the Chinese martial arts. Yet much of the story remains to be explored. What we discover may have important implications for our understanding of the larger world of the Chinese martial arts.

If you enjoyed this post you might also want to read: From Battle Magic to Self Actualization: Understanding the Traditional Chinese Martial Arts

Yu Chenghui, 1939-2015.

Introduction

Welcome to “Chinese Martial Arts in the News.” This is a semi-regular feature here at Kung Fu Tea in which we review media stories that mention or affect the traditional fighting arts. In addition to discussing important events, this column also considers how the Asian hand combat systems are portrayed in the mainstream media.

Its been a while since our last update so there is a lot to be covered in today’s post. Lets get to the news!

News from All Over

Our first story this week is a sad one. The recent passing of the martial artists and noted film star Yu Chenghui has been widely reported and discussed in the last week, both in Chinese and English language outlets. The Yahoo entertainment news ran a short piece on his life and career. Chinatopix went with a different sort of article that focused on his early training in the martial arts and introduction to film. As always, those sorts of biographical accounts are fascinating. Gene Ching, the editor of Kung Fu Tai Chi Magazine offered the most detailed and heartfelt discussion of Yu which I saw. His story included personal reminisces and some of his Yu Chenghui’s more memorable magazine cover appearances. Be sure to check that one out. It is clear that Yu’s many contributions to the Chinese martial arts and film will not soon be forgotten.

International Students Fall in Love With Wushu. Source: ECNS.CN

ECNS.CN recently ran a piece titled “International students fall in love with Wushu.” Human interest articles in this genera are pretty common, but this one was certainly a cut above average. It profiled three different international students at Chinese institutions of higher learning who had taken up Wushu training and briefly explored their motivations and experiences. After reviewing their experiences the author concluded:

“Unfortunately few international students can endure the hard work and patience to really learn Wushu well, but their solitary accomplishments still make them feel connected to Chinese culture.”

One suspects that there is a lot to unpack in this sentence.

The same theme of identity moving (and even traveling) through the martial arts was also the subject of our next article. The Global Post ran a piece looking at a public performance of Shaolin Kung Fu in Milan Italy. Apparently the display was one aspect of a larger event attempting to promote Italian tourism within Henan province. This is an interesting article as it points to a trend (seen in other places as well) of individual cities and provinces using the martial arts to promote their local image abroad separately from other state centered campaigns of public diplomacy. This is an interesting issue for me as it brings to the surface certain tensions in how the martial arts will be understood in the future, as a national project or a product of local culture and history.

A Chinese martial arts and dragon dance display in Qatar. Source: http://www.gulf-times.com

The compliment of the previous story can be found here. This short note discusses a “Chinese Kung Fu Show” held at “Dragon Mart” on Barwa Commercial Avenue in Doha, Qatar. This display of traditional martial arts and dancing was part of the lead-up to the larger “Qatar-China, Year of Culture 2016″ event. This event was one of many organized by the Chinese Embassy in Qatar. In it various performers displayed unique styles from China’s many martial arts schools and regions. The goal of the year long event is to “strengthen the cultural ties” between Qatar and China.

Along similar lines I saw the following note in the Shanghai Daily. Directors of “Confucius Institutes” from around the world recently arrived at East China Normal University for a nine day conference on the sharing of Chinese culture. These Institutes are often involved with the promotion of events like martial arts demonstrations and traditional opera performances in local communities around the globe as part of their mission of promoting cultural exchange and understanding.

The Chinese community of Liverpool was also getting more press over the last few weeks than one might expect. Much of this focused on the declining fortunes of the city’s Chinatown (one of the oldest in Europe.) But the following story was more upbeat. It profiled the career of Kwong Ngan (known locally as Kenny Tam) for his years of public service to the Liverpool Chinatown community. In reconnection of his contributions he has been awarded the British Citizen Award. It turns out that Kenny Tam is also responsible for the introduction and promotion of Taijiquan within his local community, and its interesting to think about how these two sides of career (community organizer and martial artists) may have intersected over the years. Congratulations!

Donnie Yen, who is reported to have beat out Jet Li for the opportunity to appear in the new Star Wars franchise. Source: http://www.ibtimes.com.au

Chinese Martial Arts in the Entertainment Industry

It looks like Donnie Yen has finally found a way to avoid being forever typecast as “Ip Man” in the minds of Western viewers. Multiple sources are reporting that the well known actor beat out Jet Li in a competitive audition process to play the role of a Jedi who would befriend and appear with Han Solo in the upcoming Star Wars Episode VIII.

The Apple Daily is reporting that Yen’s price of a paltry $4 million USD per film (compared to Jet Li’s $10 million) may have helped to sway studio executives in his direction. None of this has been confirmed by Disney or Lucasfilm, but casting an actor like either Li or Yen would certainly help to expand the films appeal in the lucrative Chinese market. It should also be noted that fans have been actively discussing the lack of Asian characters (and Jedi) in the Star Wars Universe for at least the last decade. Given the debt that this franchise owes to both the Asian martial arts and cinema, this seems like a remarkable oversight. Even NPR got in on the act attempting to discover the fate of the first Asian actor in the series to have an (uncredited) speaking part.

I for one would very much like to see a lightsaber master who fights with a “Chinese accent,” so you can be sure that we will be following this story as it develops. Maybe it will even inspire me to work on a couple of those Star Wars posts I have been kicking around…..

A still from the trailer for AMC's Into the Badlands presented at the 2015 Comicon.

A still from the trailer for AMC’s Into the Badlands presented at the 2015 San Diego Comicon.

AMC’s new martial arts/action series Into the Badlands has been getting a lot of press. This series, based very loosely on the Chinese classic “Journey to the West” has been promising to bring martial arts excitement back to the small screen. Yet until recently we had very few visual clues about what to expect. All of that changed with the show’s recent Comicon presentation where fans got a lot of information and a lengthy, high detailed, trailer. The aesthetic of the film appears to be based on a feudal post-apocalyptic world placed somewhere in the deep south. And there are opium poppies. Lots of opium poppies.

Check out this article for more, including links to both the trailer and another (to me more interesting) short film proving an inside look at the martial arts training camp that has been set up for the show’s cast and various stunt teams.

Are you more interested in Hong Kong Cinema? Have you ever wondered about the evolution of the industry? Do you only have five minutes to find answers to all of your questions? If so, Timeout Hong Kong has an info-graphic for you. This easy to follow chart will walk you through the evolution of the industry. With these facts you are sure to amaze your friends at the next cocktail party where Kung Fu films come up (because don’t they always?)

Jim Kelly on the set of “Enter the Dragon.”

While on the subject of nostalgia, Black Belt Magazine recently published piece providing some personal reminisces of Jim Kelly. Best known for his supporting role in Enter the Dragon opposite Bruce Lee, Kelly proved to be a highly charismatic and popular actor who went on to star in a number of martial arts films. A nice piece for fans of the 1970s Kung Fu films.

Of course the entertainment industry’s fascination with the Chinese martial arts goes well beyond the world of film. Many of my more historical posts have touched on the role of Wuxia novels in supporting and transmitting “martial culture.” Nor is this all in the past. These stories are still highly popular and exist in an reciprocal relationship with both the world of practicing martial artists as well as more visual mediums of story telling such as film and tv.

Beijing Today recently ran a piece that picks up on some of these themes. It introduces a collection of Wuxia stories authored by Xu Haofeng. At the moment Xu is probably best known as the screen writer for the Ip Man biopic “The Grandmaster,” but he is also a martial artist and writer in other genres. But if you are in the market for summer reading, this might be it.

“Chinese Stage Shows” Cigarette Card. Source: Digital Collections of the NY Public Library.

Opera has always had an important relationship with the Chinese martial arts. Indeed, one suspects that prior to WWII most individuals received their first exposure to these skills and the cultural complex that surrounds them through opera performances. Unfortunately the popularity of traditional opera declined rapidly in recently years as fewer young people have taken up an interest in the art form. But the Shanghai Daily recently ran an article detailing successful efforts to counter this trend. A group of Beijing Opera performers have been holding workshops to introduce younger people to the traditional arts of singing, acting, and martial performance which comprise these shows. Head on over to read more about these efforts to cultivate a more educated and enthusiastic audience.

Yuen Woo Ping’s 1994 movie “Wing Chun” is notable for its comical, yet nuanced, discussion of the role of gender and social expectations in the Chinese martial arts.

Martial Arts Studies

First off, we are happy to announce that the interdisciplinary Journal Martial Arts Studies is now an imprint of Cardiff University Press. Check out this post to learn more about this partnership.
At the recent martial arts studies conference held at Cardiff University I had an opportunity to see dozens of papers. But perhaps the single most entertaining (and intriguing) presentation I personally witnessed was given by Luke White and Susan Pui San Lok. Their paper, titled “Exiting Through the Window: Wing Chun as Woman Warrior,” provided a finely grained examination of Yuen Woo Ping’s 1994 comedic masterpiece “Wing Chun.” For my money this is still the best film that has ever been filmed on the system. While over at Academia.edu I noticed that they had posted an abstract of their paper. Head on over and check it out. Hopefully the full version will be out soon.

Also new at Academia.edu is Steven Trenson’s article “Cutting Serpents: Esoteric Buddhist Dimensions of the Classical Martial Art of Drawing the Sword.” This paper on the history of Japanese swordsmanship was first published in a Polish journal in 2014, so I suspect that most of us are just becoming aware of it now (the piece itself is in English).

On a related note readers should remember that we are only weeks away from the release of Alexander C. Bennett’s new book Kendo: Culture of the Sword. Published by the University of California Press this new addition to the Martial Arts Studies literature should hit the shelves on July 31st. The publisher’s note reads as follows:

Kendo is the first in-depth historical, cultural, and political account in English of the Japanese martial art of swordsmanship, from its beginnings in military training and arcane medieval schools to its widespread practice as a global sport today. Alexander Bennett shows how kendo evolved through a recurring process of “inventing tradition,” which served the changing ideologies and needs of Japanese warriors and governments over the course of history. Kendo follows the development of Japanese swordsmanship from the aristocratic-aesthetic pretensions of medieval warriors in the Muromachi period, to the samurai elitism of the Edo regime, and then to the nostalgic patriotism of the Meiji state. Kendo was later influenced in the 1930s and 1940s by ultranationalist militarists and ultimately by the postwar government, which sought a gentler form of nationalism to rekindle appreciation of traditional culture among Japan’s youth and to garner international prestige as an instrument of “soft power.” Today kendo is becoming increasingly popular internationally. But even as new organizations and clubs form around the world, cultural exclusiveness continues to play a role in kendo’s ongoing evolution, as the sport remains closely linked to Japan’s sense of collective identity.

Military Accomplishments of Japan, slide 2. Photo by Tamamura. Source: Author's Personal Collection.

Military Accomplishments of Japan, slide 2. Source: Author’s Personal Collection.

Readers may also recall our extensive three part discussion of Denis Gainty’s book Martial Arts and the Body Politic in Meiji Japan. While making an important contribution to the Martial Arts Studies literature, the heft price tag of this book (originally over a hundred dollars) probably restricted it sales to university libraries. But it looks like it is now due for a paper back release! That should knock about $50 off the price tag and get this work some of the discussion that it deserves.

If you are looking for a more popular (though still informative) bit of “beach reading?” If so why not try Tuttle’s new release Samurai and Ninja: The Real Story Behind the Japanese Warrior Myth that Shatters the Bushido Mystique.

The Creation of Wing Chun: A Social History of the Southern Chinese Martial Arts by Benjamin Judkins and Jon Nielson. State University of New York Press, 2015. August 1.

Recently I have been working on a couple of projects to prepare for the August 1st release of my own book The Creation of Wing Chun: A Social History of the Southern Chinese Martial Arts (State University of New York Press). One of these was an interview with the University of Rochester’s magazine, the Rochester Review. It proved to be an interesting discussion as I was given an opportunity to frame my project and explain its theoretical significance to a much more general audience than the one that I normally write for. I like the way the interview came out, and now that it has been released you can read it here.

An assortment of Chinese teas. Source: Wikimedia.

Kung Fu Tea on Facebook

As always there is a lot going on at the Kung Fu Tea Facebook group and this last month has been no exception. We explored the martial arts of various Chinese ethnic minorities, saw a 19th century military training manual, and learned about upcoming Martial Arts Studies conferences. Joining the Facebook group is also a great way of keeping up with everything that is happening here at Kung Fu Tea.

If its been a while since your last visit, head on over and see what you have been missing!

Heibi Guoshu School, located in Tianjin (1927). Source: Taiping Institute

Introduction

Consider the following, seemingly unrelated, incidents:

While conducting field work in Sioux City Iowa in 1862 the lawyer and self-trained ethnographer Lewis Henry Morgan received a telegraph informing him that his two daughters, ages two and six, had just died of scarlet fever. Left emotionally broken and despondent the early anthropologist abandoned the field project that he had been working on since 1859. His diary entry for the day reads in part “Thus ends my last expedition. I go home to my stricken and mourning wife, a miserable and destroyed man.”

Following this unexpected blow Morgan must have doubted that his partially completed (but incredibly complex and expensive) project would ever see the light of day. Luckily for us and the field of anthropology it did. But for now we must leave him to his grief and check in with a more recent project.

Early last year I sat down with an informant of my own. Unlike Morgan, who was studying the terminology of kinship systems across a wide range of cultures and languages (e.g., “What do you call your fathers sister?” “What do you call you mother’s system?”), my research interest were more “kinetic” in nature. I was just beginning a period of participant-observation in a local kickboxing community.

From a martial studies standpoint I like kickboxing as it provides a nice contrast with the traditional schools of Chinese hand combat I normally focus on. In more practical terms it also gives me a way of interacting with the modern combat sports community without having to dedicate myself to jujitsu (it seems that I am a striker at heart). Nor does it hurt that the workouts are great.

No one would consider me to be an experienced ethnographer. Most of my writing is social scientific and historical in nature. Still, the very nature of martial arts studies makes it difficult to ignore the anthropological angle. At some point those of us who discuss the value of “interdisciplinary work” must move beyond the comfort zone of forever replicating what we did in graduate school and go do something about it. Luckily I had a little experience with ethnographic fieldwork to call on.

One afternoon I got together with my trainer James (who was preparing for an important fight) for an additional workout (unending rounds on the heavy bag followed by some combinations and defense drills). After a grueling workout I steered the conversation towards his own trainer (a well-known figure in local circles who had competed at all levels as a younger man before opening his own gym.) As we discussed his background and career, I started to ask a line of questions that Lewis Henry Morgan would have found quite familiar.

So who was your teacher’s trainer? How is he discussed back at the home gym in Rochester? [Locations and names have been scrubbed of identifying information following the normal protocol]. What kinds of disciplines was he trained in? Are there pictures of those guys in his gym? What was it like to be a kickboxer back in the 1970a-1980s? And where did this style of kickboxing come from anyway? In short, I started to ask all of the very basic questions that would give any martial artist a chance to talk about their “lineage.”

What happened next surprised us both. James, who understood and shared my interest in martial arts studies, found that he did not have much to say. He could tell me about his relationship with his trainer, but he didn’t know that much about how he had gotten into the fight game or where his specific skills came from. He could talk about some of his teacher’s better known fights, but he didn’t really know that much about the environment that he came out of. Nor had he ever thought to ask about the deep history of kickboxing.

Ip Man and an early group of students in the 1950s.

Lineages in the Traditional Chinese Martial Arts

I say that this surprised us both because James was familiar with some aspects of the Chinese martial arts. He wanted to cross-train in Wing Chun, was a huge Bruce Lee fan and had a deep interest in Jeet Kune Do. James knew about lineages as they existed in the Chinese martial arts and he understood what I was driving at. He knew specific lineage narratives for Wing Chun, Taiji and the Gospel according to Bruce. But it had never occurred to him that these sorts of modes of social organization could (or should) apply to the world of Kickboxing.

In Wing Chun we both knew that you called your teacher’s (Sifu) teacher “Sigung.” Lineages have a specific kinship terminology that defines everyone’s relationship with regards to both the speaker and the creator of the system. In Kickboxing things weren’t as clear. It wasn’t simply a matter of substituting “Coach” for “Sifu.” James couldn’t tell me who his trainer’s coaches had been because it really didn’t matter. It had just never come up. He followed his trainer (with almost filial devotion) because he had been a champion as a younger man and his teaching methods got results. That was it. The more I listened to the conversations that arose organically, the more I realized that I had been asking the wrong questions to really understand the nature of this community.

As I spent more time with this group I quickly learned that all of my questions had straight forward answers. The information was out there. In fact, Jame’s trainer turned out to be full of fascinating historical reminisces and could explain the evolution of the local Kickboxing community in excruciating detail. Yet while everyone involved agreed that this sort of stuff was fascinating, it wasn’t what you indoctrinated new students into.

Of course that is exactly what we tend to do in the Chinese martial arts. We don’t just teach you basic punching, kicking and footwork skills in the first few months of class. We also set aside time to tell the lineage creation stories, to fill you in on proper modes of address, and explain in some detail who those guys in the pictures are that you bow to at the start and end of every class. This is a critical part of becoming a member of a Kung Fu “family” or “clan.”

Most Kung Fu students learn two bodies of information in addition to physical skills. First they hear a global set of stories (usually historical in nature) explaining the nature of their art, and then they are introduced to a local set of narratives explaining how they personally are connected to all of this. All of this information is also passed on and understood through the short hand of a “lineage chart” which can be seen on the school’s webpage and as well as its physical walls. This simple genealogical argument (and I have selected that word very carefully) allows any student to see at a glance their connection to both the luminaries of the art and its “sacred history.” I suspect that on a personal level this is what it all comes down to. In the TCMA the lineage chart is critical to one’s new identity because it makes “real” the connection to something larger and more wonderful than the self.

The ideas behind the lineage system are so simple and elegant that it is easy to assume that these structures are universal. We do see lineages in a wide variety of martial arts, from the Japanese to the Chinese and the South East Asian. Even in western traditions we see things that appear to be similar, whether it’s the fencing schools of the Italian renaissance or the training camps of professional kickboxing and MMA.

David Brown, a Reader in the Sociology of Sports at Cardiff Metropolitan University, is one scholar who has attempted to uncover the seemingly universal nature of lineages in the martial arts and combat sports. As he argues in his chapter “Body-experience Lineages in Martial Arts Culture” in Keith Gilbert’s (ed.) Fighting: Intellectualising Combat Sports (Common Ground, 2014) that the embodied nature of the martial arts basically mandates the creation of lineages.

Drawing on a specific body of social theory, Brown argues that in the martial arts as in life the central problem is death. Society has created all sorts of mechanisms by which economic and social capital can be passed intergenerationally. But the unique skills and types of embodied knowledge that are gained through the practice of these combat systems are held only by highly transient bodies.

The fragility of this sort of bodily capital becomes a real problem when society decides that these skills are important for its survival. While a martial art may best been imagined as an intergenerational project, the bodies that actually express, and are constructed by, this knowledge have at best a fleeting association with it. So how do martial institutions bridge this biologically given gap?

Drawing on Bourdieu’s writings on the sociology of sport, Brown concludes that lineages allow individual skills to be transformed into “incorporated capital.” Through direct contact with a teacher these movements, pressures, energies and feelings can be passed from teacher to student. But their transformation into a source of personal capital does something even more important. It creates an incentive to promote the process of dissemination. As both Brown and Bourdieu note, the creation of specific lineages creates a specific social mechanism by which incorporated capital can be transformed into social capital (webs of relationships), economic capital (money) and even symbolic capital (identity, social status and power.)

In short, engaging in lineage creation not only allows the traditional martial arts to overcome the limits of human mortality, but it provides the masters of these systems a platform from which to launch their own arguments about the true nature of the body, the uses it is best put to, the legitimacy of embodied social conflict, and the relationship between these factors and larger social questions. In short, multiple social theorists have been interested in sports and bodily practices precisely because such technologies relate to a number of theoretically and politically important questions.

Brown’s arguments are theoretically well supported and succinct. In fact, anyone who is interested in the social functions of lineages within the Japanese or Chinese martial arts will want to add this chapter to their reading list. But functional theories of outcomes should not be confused with organic explanations of why they are (re)created by certain individuals in specific times and places.

Brown’s readings of lineages seem to be closely tied to the sorts of social organizations that arose in the Japanese and Chinese martial arts in the Qing Dynasty and the 20th century. If one wishes to understand these institutions across a wider stretch of geography or time, we must ask some basic questions. First, are his fundamental assumptions correct? Are lineages primarily a way of preserving the technical transmission of an art in the face of limited human mortality? The second, and closely related assumption, is that martial arts systems themselves are the correct level of analysis for students interested in the origin and functional significance of lineages as social institutions. And lastly, is the existence of Chinese style lineages, drawing on stylized Confucian kinship models, really as universal as Brown suggests?

A vintage French Postcard. Source: Author’s Personal Collection.

Rethinking the Function of Lineage in the Martial Arts

I suspect that the last of these questions is the easiest to deal with so we will begin there. One of my professors used to say that there were two types of people in the social sciences. You have “lumpers,” who by nature tend to group similar things together and “splitters,” more concerned with pointing out differences. Both impulses are critical to constructing good sociological theories. Yet in this case I must give the “splitters” the edge.

While Brown lays out an argument as to why one should expect to see lineages, and argues for their existence across a wide range of arts, problems begin to emerge when one looks closely at any of these examples. Yes, there are lineages in both traditional Chinese and Japanese arts, but the rules of transmission in a Tokugawa era fencing school are not necessarily all that similar to a Hong Kong Wing Chun school today.

Yes, Bruce Lee’s Jeet Kune Do movement does seem to be (somewhat ironically) interested in constructing its own lineages of legitimate authority. Yet one suspects that the motivations behind this impulse are very different from the sorts of functions that lineage might have served in cementing a village militia which actually expected to fight together on the battlefield. Likewise, as my starting example demonstrated, nods to MMA training camps not-withstanding, the modern western combat sports have very different form of social organization than traditional Kung Fu Schools. Conflating the two does nothing to help us understand either.

That lineages exist to transmit embodied capital between generations seems trivially true. What is actually much more interesting is the differences, some subtle, others major, that arise between even historically related arts as they start to cross temporal, social or national boundaries.

It is now time to return to Lewis Henry Morgan. D. S. Farrer recently noted that the field of Anthropology is both a rich and confusing place for students of Martial Arts Studies as it seems to theoretically reinvent itself once every 15 years. New research tools are always being generated, but a lot is constantly going out fashion.

Luckily Farrer suggested that his field has an inbuilt mechanism to deal with this. In the early 20th century the eminent anthropologist Franz Boaz suggested that the native and “primitive” peoples of the world were on the verge of extinction. Their societies simply could not survive the onslaught of modernity. As such anthropologists were needed for “salvage” and “preservation” work. It was their job to go and record the languages, stories, technologies and cultures of these groups before they were lost forever.

Of course the first peoples of the world did not disappear, and “salvage anthropology” is not much discussed today. But Farrer notes that such an approach is still very useful when dealing with the history of anthropological theory itself. In addition to keeping up with the latest work, the astute anthropologist would also be mindful of previous attempts to deal with similar problems. Anthropology can advance by selectively “salvaging” needed concepts from its own past.

Morgan’s essential problem was that at the start of his ethnographic research he only knew a single kinship system, derived from western cultural history. But when he sat down to talk with various sorts of Native Americans he quickly discovered that this model of family and descent did not fit their understanding of their own society. In fact, these peoples had highly developed kinship systems that bore only a passing resemblance to what Morgan was familiar with.

Nor did the variation in kinship systems seem to be random. Instead there were a few major types that seemed to be most common (often with minor variations). Morgan further noted that specific kinship systems also tended to be associated with other variables describing a group’s social organization and mode of economic production (e.g., horticulture versus agriculture).

In order to test his theory that kinship system and modes of social organization were related (like any good 19th century theorist he guessed in evolutionary terms) Morgan gathered data from groups all over the world. He discovered that in general the patterns that he identified held. His theory, published in the massive Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family (Smithsonian, 1871) became a cornerstone of the modern field of anthropology. While modern anthropology rejects his evolutionary explanations of the correlations that he found, his discovery that kinship systems and their terminology offers a window onto social organization still holds today.

While the death of his daughters was tragic, it did spur Morgan on to recording and systematizing his ideas. And I suspect that he has some lessons for students of martial arts lineages. Yes it is significant that the imagery of family lineages is so often seen in seemingly unrelated systems. But more important is the variations that we see in how lineages are defined, the specific functions that they perform and even the terminology that they adopt. And as we think more carefully and systematically about these differences we might learn something important about the underlying social structures that actually support and uphold martial arts institutions.

This then brings us to our second point. When thinking about lineages, what should researchers take as their object of study? Brown’s article never explicitly addresses this point, but his basic assumptions are highly relevant here. He begins by assuming that lineages are fundamentally a way for martial arts institutions to transmit themselves intergenerationally. This is the reason that they were created. As such the institutional body of the martial arts system becomes the natural focus of study.

But is this really the case? Are lineages actually necessary to pass on an art, and is this the actual function that they perform?

Its interesting to note that during the Ming dynasty many individuals dedicated themselves to the martial arts, yet the sort of continuous and stable lineages that we have today are generally lacking in period accounts. The heroes of books like Water Margin have colorful back-stories, yet none of them gained their martial prowess in anything like a modern martial arts school or even a family lineage. Even accounts of military training at the Shaolin Temple during the late Ming describe something much more akin to a professional martial university, where students took classes on a variety of subjects from multiple teachers, than a modern Chinese lineage system of direct transmission from (and loyalty to) a single master.

The sorts of lineages that one sees in the Chinese martial arts now are in reality a reflection of more fundamental social changes that arose in Chinese families during the early and middle years of the Qing dynasty, and only became universal at its end. As the economic historian David Faure has demonstrated in exquisite detail, the sorts of kinship organization that we tend to take for granted as being “typically Chinese” arose out of ritual and economic reforms that took place in the late Ming and Qing which encouraged new types of corporate landholding as a means of passing wealth intergenerationally.

Thus the specific type of kinship organization that we see in the Chinese martial arts do not really reflect anything essential about the nature of these arts themselves. Rather, as Morgan would suggest, the terminology is a reflection of more basic economic and cultural changes that were happening in society at large. And there is really no reason to expect to see them in other societies or at other points in time. It is this element of variability which actually makes them valuable to social observers.

Nor is it actually clear to me that lineages do a good job of preserving knowledge from one generation to the next. Its not hard to take any art (Taiji, Wing Chun, Bagua) and note the vast differences that arise in practice between one generation and the next as you move laterally across lineage groups. One could argue that lineages are more often used as sites for the production of innovation and competition within the martial arts marketplace than they are mechanisms for conservation. I have actually explored this point extensively elsewhere.

This was at least part of Bourdieu’s point. The sociology of sports is relevant because of what it reveals about society and the struggles surrounding the pressing issues of the day. The ultimate unit of analysis then is not the football team, the swimming league or the martial arts lineage. Rather it is the team, the league or the lineage in relation to society. What do these units reveal about more fundamental social processes?

A still from The New Masters, filmed at an MMA training camp in China.

Conclusion: The Martial Arts, Lineage and Social Violence

In some ways these questions are the most pressing when applied to martial arts lineages. Seemingly any sporting event can become a site for social competition. But whereas hooliganism may arise in certain circumstances in some football leagues, violence is at the ontological heart of martial arts training.

No matter the degree to which one attempts to ritualize, medicalize or modernize a martial arts system, each one carries within it the memory that it was once a means of individual defense, collective violence or social conflict. That memory is deeply implicated (sometimes in complex or paradoxical ways) in the identities that these systems construct.

Lineages are interesting as these are institutions that allow for specific types of embodied capital to be spread and simultaneously transformed into sources of economic and social power for their leaders. They provide them with a platform to contest basic ideas about the true nature of the body and the proper use of conflict and resistance.

There are certainly other types of groups that do this. Criminal gangs, revolutionary causes, long running protest movements and paramilitary organizations all come to mind. Indeed, at one point or another martial arts lineages in China seem to have been associated with each of these things.

In general society and the government are quite good at suppressing potentially violent groups that are deemed as undesirable. This was even the fate of much of the Chinese hand combat world during the middle years of the Qing dynasty.

Yet one of the really interesting things to me is that while the martial arts are occasionally viewed with suspicion, they are often tolerated to a greater degree than one might expect. Why? What does society hope to gain from promoting (or at least tolerating) these movements?

Again, one suspects that the answer to this question will vary quite a bit from case to case. It seems unlikely to me that politicians in China in the 1930s, and their counterparts in the Netherlands in the 2000s, both of whom were supporting martial arts organizations, actually wanted the same thing from them. Yet what this suggests is that we should take society (or some aspect of it) as our basic unit of analysis. Not only does it determine the specific form that the lineage will take, but even the most basic functions that it will provide. The lineage is analytically useful precisely because of what it might reveal about the nature and scope of social contests.

While some might object that such an emphasis takes us away for the “real martial arts,” I suspect that opening a pathway for such studies is ultimately a good thing for martial arts studies. If Morgan had focused only on the philology of kinship terms his work would have long since been forgotten. But by connecting kinship to social structure he helped to lay the foundations for the modern field of anthropology. Likewise, when we demonstrate how variations within the martial arts reveals new insights about the sources of social conflict, we will set the cornerstone for a revolution of our own.

oOo

If you enjoyed this you might also want to read: Yim Wing Chun and the “Primitive Passions” of Southern Kung Fu

oOo

Chinese fighters with spears. Northern China, 1930s. Original photographer unkown. Source: The private album of a Japanese soldier.

Through a Lens Darkly

In this occasional series I turn to photographs, postcards, slides or other forms of ephemera both as a source of information about the Chinese martial arts and as a witness to the many functions that they have served in popular culture over the decades. These sources, rarely preserved in official collections and often ignored by students of the historical record, can yield fascinating insights into both past practices and the evolution of current beliefs and identities. In fact, some of my more interesting discoveries have come from delving deeply into this material. Yet almost by definition these images are fragmented, difficult to interpret and present only a single dimension of the moment in time which they capture. When properly understood these shards of culture lead us to ask better questions rather than providing simple answers.

This is what I was attempting to capture when I first titled this series “Through a Lens Darkly.” Within them we see an image of the past, but it is always fuzzy and distorted. And sometimes the nature of these distortions are even more revealing than the ostensible subject of the image.

However, in the case of today’s post the title can also be read more literally. Each of these pictures really is a bit distorted, both by watermarks and the quality of the scans. For the most part this series has focused on widely disseminated images, those that are already in the public domain, or photographs and postcards drawn from my own personal collection.

Each of today’s images is a little different. They are all examples of photos that I have bid on in auctions over the years and not won. As such I only have the modified copies of the images made publicly available by the original sellers, and I cannot provide higher quality scans. Still, the subject matter in each of these is rare enough to be worth sharing anyway. I suspect that students of the Republic era martial arts, or those interested in the growth of various sorts of militia movements seen in northern China, will find these to be quite educational.

Japanese soldiers with captured Chinese spears and other weapons. Original photographer unkown. Source: Photo album of a Japanese soldier.

Japanese soldiers with captured Chinese spears and other weapons. Original photographer unknown. Source: Photo album of a Japanese soldier.

Spears, Spears and more Spears
One of the challenges that I have faced when researching the spread of the Red Spear movement (see here, here and here) is that we don’t have many contemporary images of these groups. Given the hundreds of thousands of individuals caught up in these movements, and how important they were to the social organization of rural northern China for more than a decade, this has always struck me as somewhat surprising. Then again, even the number of contemporary press reports in major newspapers (e.g., the sorts that you might find in a university library collection), are less than one might think.

When you do happen across spear wielding militia members is also quite hard to say which organization they belong to with much certainty. The Chinese historian Tai Hsuan-chih (whose father helped to sponsor one of these groups back in the 1920s) reminds us that the term “Red Spear” itself became something of a catch all for the many small movements and chapters (including the “Yellow Spears,” the “Big Swords,” the “Iron Gate” and the “Spirit Soldiers”) all sharing a similar spiritual/martial technology and all spreading across northern China at roughly the same time. So while we are referring to these individuals as “Red Spears” in the current post, we should remember that they may have represented a variety of groups often bound together through complex alliances, tensions and open feuds.

In general these groups seem to have been organized and supported by local landlords. In many ways they can be thought of as a new type of local militia (drawn strictly from the ranks of landowning peasants) that coalesced as a reaction to the fall of the Qing dynasty and the generalized social disorder of the Warlord era. Most of these groups were founded with the express purpose of fighting and deterring the ever growing armies of local bandits that were starting to threaten the very fabric of agricultural life in northern China.

Over time the political entanglements of these groups became more complex. After the Northern Campaign they fought to keep tax collectors from both the Republic and the remaining Warlords at bay. Later they would be used by local elites in settling inter-village feuds over limited resources, and even resisting the Japanese invasion in the late 1930s and 1940s. More than anything else these groups became a focal point of violent resistance against the various outside forces attempting to penetrate northern China’s countryside in the middle years of the 20th century.

In fact, we owe each of the images in this post to the Japanese. It was not uncommon for Japanese soldiers to collect albums comprised of postcards, commercially produced photos, and snap-shots taken in the field. Given the martial arts training that many of these individuals had received during their secondary education, it seems that at least some developed a certain level of interest in Chinese hand combat traditions and avidly collected images of boxers, dadaos and other traditional weapons that were encountered over the course of their occupation. We have already seen a few such examples of this genera here and here.

It goes without saying that these images are far from neutral records and that they record as much about the underlying beliefs of the Japanese soldiers as they do the practices of the Chinese people. Still, some of the images from the following collection seem to be particularly helpful for those of us trying to get a sense of what the Red Spears might actually have looked like when the Japanese began to encounter them in the late 1930s.

The first image is probably the most valuable as it actually shows a Chinese unit armed with traditional spears. Again, we don’t really know which exact force this group represents but their youth, mismatched clothing and the rough nature of their weapons was probably pretty typical for what one might have encountered in most village militias across the region.

The second image in this series focuses instead on a group of Japanese soldiers. They are seen posing with what appears to be a few dozen weapons confiscated from Chinese militias or irregular troops. This image in particular is a valuable reminder of the fact that the “Red Spears” carried more than just spears.

The spear has always held a special place within the Chinese martial arts. Given its deadly deficiency, and the ease with which it can be mass produced, its hardly surprising that so many of these village militia organizations would have chosen the spear as their primary weapon. Yet the bandits in the hills were often armed with modern rifles, and the troops of the Warlord and Republic armies carried both box magazine rifles and machine guns. Nor did the Red Spears have any compunction about adopting and fighting with these more contemporary weapons when they became available.

I like this image because it probably represents a pretty decent cross-section of what sorts of weapons were seen in inter-community violence from the 1920s-1940s. On the one hand we have a large group of exceptionally sturdy spears. Most of the poles appear to be natural trunks that have had minimal work. The blades of these weapons are heavy and feature long cutting surfaces.

In addition to the spears we see a large number of rifles. Some are caplock models form the 1860s (possibly British Sniders?). But others appear to be modern box-magazine rifles roughly equivalent to what the Japanese soldiers themselves were carrying. In front of all of this is a notably small pile of rifle cartridges on stripper clips (certainly less ammunition than you would want if you were about to take on the Japanese Army) and a couple of sub-machine guns.

Readers will want to pay special attention to the large spear head featured on the far left of the image. This point is exceptionally long and elegantly shaped. I think that it would occupy pride of place in any collection of 20th century Chinese traditional weapons.

A Japanese postcard showing captured Chinese spears, a hat and battle flag. Source: Vintage postcard circa 1940s.

Conclusion
The Red Spears represent a fascinating and under-studied chapter in the history of the modern Chinese martial arts. While we do not have as many images of this movement as we may want from their earlier period of activity in the 1920s, Japanese soldiers, for their own reasons, seemed intent on documenting and sending home photographs of some of the civilian forces that they met in Northern China. Undoubtedly these images were selected because they played into (and reinforced) preexisting beliefs about the nature of their opposition and the dangers of their assignment in Northern China.

Yet how did these encounters appear from the perspective of the Red Spear militia members themselves? While a topic too broad for a single blog post, I would like to close with a single account revealing a different side of these encounters. Consider the following story related by a Nationalist soldier who witnessed Red Spear maneuvers against the invading Japanese in northern Anhui Province during 1938.

“As one of their teachers was in the middle of his talk, suddenly the sound of enemy planes could be heard overhead. Hearing the noise the peasants showed signs of discomfort. However one of their chiefs immediately jumped on the speaker’s platform yelling “Holy Water! Holy Water!” Someone who had already been stationed in front of the platform with a bucket of drinking water now knelt down and offered a bowl of water to the chief. Simultaneously, a representative from each of the dozen or so chapters rushed forward to take a bowl back to his respective group. Under instruction from the chief, each person drank a sip of “Holy Water.” Then all three to four thousand of them knelt, closed their eyes, and began to mumble their magical phrases. When the incantation was over, thy jumped up as if awakening from a dream. Their breathing was forced, their eyes bloodshot, their gaze unswerving, and their muscles tense—as though gripped by madness.

The silence was deafening. Each member grasped his red-tasseled spear planted firmly like a tree. The light breeze set the tassels to fluttering, creating an even more awesome spectacle.

Fortunately the enemy planes seem to have had some other destination in mind. Nine in a row, they flew off towards the northeast in apparent oblivion to the red glow beneath. The danger over, one of the teachers happily explained that they had been chanting a “block hole charm” which had worked to stop up the barrels of the Japanese guns, ensuring that no bullets could shoot forth.” (Perry 192-193).

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If you enjoyed these images you might also want to see: Through a Lens Darkly (8): Butterfly Swords, Dadaos and the Local Militias of Guangdong, 1840 vs. 1940.

oOo

***For today’s post we are headed back to the archives. I am becoming more interested in the ways that the traditional martial arts have been promoted by the Chinese government as a means of generating “soft power” within the realm of public diplomacy and “national branding.” Even more interesting is the leading (and sometimes competing) roles played by provincial and municipal bodies (as well as NGOs) in these efforts. I have been reviewing the theoretical literature on these topics and its something that we will be exploring in greater detail in the future. But for now it might be helpful to review some of our initial efforts in understanding the growing prominence and nature of “Kung Fu Diplomacy.”***

Introduction: Hong Kong, Regionalism and the Martial Arts

It is hard to think of any state with such robust and diverse group of regional identities as China’s. Much of my research is focused on the development of the martial arts as part of Southern China’s popular culture and its response to the pressures of imperialism and globalization. I am always interested in coming across older accounts of the Pearl River Delta region and have often been struck by the consistency that can be seen in these descriptions going back at least as far as the end of Ming dynasty.

Prior to that things look notably different. Who knew that Guangzhou had both an Arab quarter and Christian churches in the middle ages? Yet by the start of the Qing many of the region’s most notable modern characteristics have already cemented themselves in the public consciousness. These include the centrality of vigorous regional trade to the local economy, the social power of the area’s larger (quasi-corporate) lineage associations, many of the unique aspects of both Cantonese language and theater, and of course a certain regional reputation for the love of the martial arts and gangsterism.

Of course it would be a mistake to assume that these characteristics are set in stone and nothing changes from one decade to the next. The very nature of local identity guarantees that it will need to be reinvented in each new generation. For one thing the context that shapes the relationship between these different practices is constantly evolving. Some elements will stay the same, others will be discarded. Just as importantly, those elements that remain will be subject to pressures from multiple interest groups, each intent on capturing these powerful public symbols as they seek to expand their influence in the region. Some of these players may represent broadly based social forces, but more often it is social elites to take the lead in promoting certain visions of identity while others are allowed (or even encouraged) to fall by the wayside.

Nowhere in modern China are these conversations about the nature and value of local identity being heard more loudly than in Hong Kong. That in itself is somewhat surprising as regional and provincial identity has been a hot topic throughout China as a whole for at least a decade. Starting in the late 1990s all sorts of local municipalities began to actively promote efforts to build their local, regional or provincial identity.

At the same time similar conversations dominated the public square in Hong Kong. Most commentators pointed to the quickly approaching hand over of the territory to the People’s Republic of China as the proximate cause for this sudden interest in the question of local history and identity. After all, the residents of Hong Kong had been notoriously unsentimental about their own history for much of the Cold War and had steadfastly refused to build anything like a shared civic identity for most of this period. Anxiety about the coming handover certainly shaped much of this conversation, and fears about the city’s future continue to drive public discussions to this day. Yet what is often forgotten is that Hong Kong’s rediscovery of their local heritage was in reality just one aspect of a much broader trend that was sweeping across literally every province in China. It seems that everyone was suddenly been overtaken with the same urgent need to discover their own local identity.

The traditional Chinese martial arts have benefited from this revived interest in local history. Given the nature of hand combat instruction, these arts were traditionally highly localized. Even styles like Taijiquan, which managed to develop a following around the nation during the Republic period, still have a tendency to develop geographically centered “lineages” rather than remaining truly “national” in scope. As provincial governments looked for elements of local culture that could be popularized, marketed and might attract tourists from other areas, the traditional martial arts found themselves on the front lines of a commercial war. A city’s favorite style could claim to be unique and quintessentially Chinese at the same time.

The Shaolin Temple is currently the largest tourist attraction in Henan province and accounts for a substantial chunk for the capital that the local government has managed to attract. In the southern part of China a number of provinces and counties have attempted to replicate this success by “discovering” the ruins of the southern Shaolin Temple within their own jurisdictions. And who could forget Douglas Wile’s ascorbic account of the discovery of “Wudang Taiji” just as the province decided that it needed an additional tourist attraction and source of local pride.

These comparatively well-known examples all revolved around attempts to create (or repurpose) highly visible localities for the promotion of both local identity and tourism. More frequently local elites have found themselves attempting to cultivate and promote “intangible elements” of an area’s culture or history in an attempt to argue that they too are the guardians of a local identity that is worth investing in.

This focus on elements of “intangible local heritage” has been especially important in Hong Kong and the highly urbanized areas of coastal China. Most the area’s architectural heritage has long since been plowed under to make way for vast expanses of factories, shopping malls, highways and apartment blocks. Flat land has always been a scarce commodity in the highly populated regions of southern China. As such we should not be surprised to see the areas residents have turned instead to local practices and institutions to act as the embodiment of “local identity.”

The city of Hong Kong recently took some steps towards codifying this trend when they released a list of 480 elements of its “intangible local heritage” that the government wished to acknowledge and preserve. The entire list can be viewed here and it makes for fascinating reading. Linguistic, cultural and religious practices are well accounted for. Specialized local forms of knowledge and skills (such as regional cooking styles) are also a mainstay of this discussion of regional culture.

Interestingly the martial arts are also well represented in this discussion. In fact, no fewer than 35 slots on the list were dedicated to hand combat practices. These arts ranged from the nationally popular and well known, such as Taijiquan, to the much more regional, including Hung Gar and Choy Li Fut. I was also struck by the fact that multiple styles, including both Wing Chun and Hung Gar, were also represented by a number of competing lineages. Other arts, such as White Crane and Taijiquan, who have very well-known sub-styles or lineages, only received a single more global notice.

360 Tai Shing Pek Kwar Moon Style (Monkey and Axe Hammer Style) – wushu
361 Tai Chi Chuan
366 Northern Shaolin Tay Tong Pak Kar
367 Weng Chun Fist [Note to readers: this is not the same style as Wing Chun, but its probably related.]
370 Pak Hok Pai (White Crane) Fist
371 Southern Shaolin Ng Cho Kun (Five Ancestors Fist) Tiebigong (Iron Arm Skill)
372 Hung Gar Kuen Style
373-377 Lam Family Hung Kyun; Kung Chi Fuk Fu Fist; Fu Hok Seung Ying Fist; Dan Tau Kwan; Tit Sin Fist
378 Fu Style Bagua Quan (Fu Style Eight Trigrams Fist)
379 Hua Yue Xin Yi Liu He Ba Fa Chuan (Six Harmonies Eight Methods Boxing)
380 Wing Chun Fist
381- 383 Pao Fa Lien Wing Chun; Snake Crane Wing Chun; Yip Man Wing Chun
384 Cangzhou Wushu
387 Choi Lee Fat Fist
390 Lung Ying Fist (Dragon Sign Fist)
391 Tanglangquan (Northern Praying Mantis)
392 – 395 Its [Northern Mantis’] variations

Students interested in Hong Kong and Southern Chinese identity will have no trouble adapting this list to all sorts of ongoing discussions. Yet I would argue that it might also make some critical contributions to our understanding of the nature and development of current Chinese regionalism as a whole. Even a cursory examination of the preceding list will present us with a number of paradoxes. These in turn suggest some of the ways that Chinese martial studies might contribute to larger debates on globalization and regional identity.

One of the first things that we might want to note about the foregoing list is its sheer length. It would certainly have been possible to create a list of martial arts styles or lineages that originated in or around Hong Kong, but that collection of styles would have been much shorter and more esoteric. Instead it is interesting to note that most of the styles of this list were not only developed outside of the borders of the city, but many were not even created in Guangdong province. For instance White Crane originated, and remains most popular within, Fujian province. I suspect that Northern Mantis was first brought to the area by the instructors of the Jingwu Association in the 1920s. And it goes without saying that the roots of modern Taijiquan lay very firmly in the northern half of the country.

Nor is the martial arts section of this list the only area that exhibits these same puzzles. Indian and Nepalese cultural elements are honored along with Chinese ones. Further, many of the local Chinese practices that are honored are seen throughout the southern China geographic region and not just in the immediate area around Hong Kong? How does this sort of radically contingent view of local identity, based very much in the city’s history of regional trade, colonialism and an ongoing debate about the nature of its Chinese identity, fit with what we see being discussed in other parts of the literature?

The short answer is not very well. In fact, the ways in which local identity is being constructed in Hong Kong challenges many of the basic assumptions about what is driving the process of regionalism that are seen throughout the social scientific literature. This disjoint becomes especially apparent when we consider the martial arts styles included on the recent list, and the use of hand combat schools in establishing local identity more generally.

The Rise of China’s New Regionalism

The disciplines of Political Science, International Political Economy, Sociology, Economics, Cultural Geography, History and Anthropology have all devoted substantial resources to the growing importance of regional identity in the previous decades. This ascent is all the more interesting as students of nationalism and sociologists of the “modernization hypothesis” school had long expected that these sorts of identities would wane and disappear in the current era. Given the centrality of the state in creating the institutions that structure most elements of daily life in the modern world, it was simply assumed that citizens would increasingly turn their loyalty towards the nation while regional ties, languages and religious communities were allowed to atrophy.

One must state at the outset that not all regional or local identities have prospered under the current round of globalization. Yet by in large these intermediary institutions and identities have defied their critics and actually grown more powerful and relevant in a number of areas of the world including both Europe and China. How then can we explain this marked resurgence in regional identity?

When considering the case of China there is an additional factor to consider. Not all of the local identities that have been growing in relevance are equally “organic.” Individual cities such as Hong Kong, Shanghai and even Foshan have certainly seen a strengthening of local identity. Yet much of this process has been going on at the provincial level.

This actually presents us with something of a paradox as many of China’s provinces are actually very diverse administrative units. They have not always shared a single culture, social history or even language. Yet increasingly we are hearing discussions of “Shanxi’s local culture,” or “Shandong’s unique identity.”

What are we to make of these claims? When Joseph Esherick wrote his pioneering history on the Boxer Uprising in Shandong he found the province to be so heterogeneous that it was necessary to split it into three separate units each with its own social, economic and geographic realities. When addressing the events of the end of the 19th century he found it impossible to speak intelligibly about “Shandong’s provincial identity.” Such a thing did not actually exist in the singular tense. How then should we understand the more recent conversation about provincial identities?

Tim Oakes, a cultural geographer, attempted to tackle this question in an article titled “China’s Provincial Identities: Reviving Regionalism and Reinventing “Chineseness”,” published in the Journal of Asian Studies Vol. 59, No. 3 (August). 2000. : 667-692. Oaks began by asserting that while China has a long and rich history of producing regional identities, these were usually not centered at the level of the provincial administrative units. Instead it was smaller economic subsystems and even individual municipalities that tended to be viewed as the appropriate unit for identity formation.

Oakes ultimately sees the rise of the new Chinese regionalism as being a product of two forces. The first of these was the move towards increased decentralization within the PRC during the 1990s. This forced local leaders to adopt a level of autonomy, and competition between provinces, that would not have been tolerated during the Maoist era. Secondly, the opening of China to global capital markets presented many of these leaders with both a challenge and an opportunity. They quickly realized that in order to get promoted they needed to demonstrate that they could encourage economic growth and development. This in turn required making their administrative units an inviting destination for international capital hoping to form domestic partnerships with Chinese firms to gain access to the state’s vast consumer markets.

For the coastal region this was not all that difficult. The nation’s manufacturing infrastructure was already located in these areas, as were large numbers of low wage workers. The fact that the region also had many deep ports and was situated on historically important trans-pacific shipping routes only helped. With the creation of numerous special trade zones throughout the decade the area quickly established itself as the premier destination for global FDI (foreign direct investment dollars).

Not all of China’s provincial leaders were so geographically blessed, and yet their own career advancement depended upon them encouraging the same sort of economic miracle. They too create special economic zones. Yet how do you encourage any sort of investment in China’s interior provinces? These areas are far from global transportation hubs and were better known for their grinding poverty and underdevelopment than anything else.

In his article Oakes demonstrates how a number of these leaders attempted to promote specific regional identities in an attempt to both boost the morale of their citizens while making themselves more attractive targets for global financial investment. Often this meant adopting a single city’s historical reputation for “frugality” or “entrepreneurial spirit,” and then attempting to write that onto the province as a whole.

In other cases local leaders attempted to reframe their lack of development as an “unspoiled environment” to attract tourists fleeing the polluted and congested cities further to the East. Minority communities were often reimagined as “living fossils” which preserved archaic elements of a once great Chinese cultural tradition that had been lost in the more developed areas.

The great paradox of these provincial identities is that they had to latch onto to marketable elements that were simultaneously perceived as being unique, available nowhere else, and yet at the same time were somehow “quintessentially Chinese,” and so of general interest. These commoditized elements of local culture thus provide a tool that individual populations can use to assert their value (arguing for a greater share of the collective resources) within the larger state.

Whether the “capital investments” that they hope to attract are electronics factories or newly enriched tourists from Beijing and Shanghai, Oakes argues that the rise of local identities is driven forward almost totally by the demands of global capital. In the past political economists often assumed that globalization would lead to a flattening of local culture as each successive area was turned into an identical unit for the production and consumption of some universally desirable set of goods. In large part that has not happened. Instead global businesses have learned that is much easier and more profitable to use the contours of local society to promote their sales. Rather than creating a demand for their product from the ground up, it is more profitable to exploit preexisting regional institutions and practices.

Alternatively, having a “local identity” that is favorable to business and investment (perhaps because of the stability of society, the disciplined and educated workforce or social norms that create a marketplace of mythic “Confucian merchants”) can be a deciding factor when attracting FDI. Thus the great advantage of the provinces as a locus for identity creation was that most of them were basically empty administrative units to begin with. Local leaders are free to look within their borders for those elements that will be the most advantageous in the current situation and to cultivate them. Of course this same process will deemphasize and obscure many of the other much more authentic local markers of identity that typically occur at the municipal level which were not selected for promotion to a global audience.

This trend is particularly noticeable in the world of martial arts tourism. Foshan has recently rebuilt much of its urban core to increase the residential standard of living and make the area a more desirable destination for martial arts tourists. Many of the individuals coming to the city today are Wing Chun students, so that is what has received the most attention and development dollars. Yet Wing Chun was a relatively small style in the 1930s and many of the other regionally important styles that actually defined the area’s martial identity are being forgotten. Last I heard the city’s truly unique and historic Jinwu Association hall had fallen into serious disrepair with no plans on the book to preserve it. Oakes paper is helpful as it reminds us that this is not an isolated problem. Ironically it is the rush to promote and preserve one vision of an area’s regional culture and identity that often fundamentally imperils and transforms it.

Oakes concludes by noting that the current process of elite led identity formation is often highly strategic. We have already seen how this can suppress elements of local culture that are not seen as being useful to their goals. Yet it can also be a threat to the idea of “regional identities.” Indeed, historically regional identities that followed certain linguistic, geographic or economic zones were often much more important than the purely administrative identities that bisected them. For instance, coastal southern China was held together by a dense network of ports and regional trade relationships that stretched from Vietnam to the coast of Taiwan, and at times even included Okinawa. It would not be an exaggeration to say that merchant sailors in Guangdong and Fujian probably had more in common with each other than farmers living much closer together along the east and west branch of the Pearl River in Guangdong.

These sorts of regional relationships are critical to understanding the historical development of Chinese popular culture. Yet in the current era they do not serve the purposes of political elites who are trying to attract investment in their province while deterring it from going to neighbors. Oakes concludes that the new identities that Chinese elites are creating all share three common characteristics. First, they enclose provinces treating them as a unique world with very little acknowledgement of their interaction with historically important regional networks. Second, they attempt to establish a sense of stable and authentic “Chineseness” both to erase the memory of the country’s chaotic past and as a way for reinforcing identity in a rapidly changing economy. Lastly they promote certain elements of local folk culture to the provincial level in an attempt to attract capital or to develop commercial opportunities.

Oakes claims that this wholesale creation of basically artificial provincial identities is a result of Beijing’s attempts to decentralize the process of governance as a way to deal with the classic pitfall’s of a socialist command economy. This has forced local leaders to marshal what cultural and social resources they have at their disposal to solve the problems of fiscal solvency and the promotion of economic growth. Further, the zero-sum nature of FDI diversion ensured that when this strategy proved to be successful in a few area’s it would quickly be adopted across China’s competitive landscape.

Just as seemingly every province has now set aside a group of “special economic zones” to help promote growth, they have also constructed a vision of regional identity to both attract capital and to strengthen their negotiating position with the state center by emphasizing their “Chineseness.” Rather than China’s local identities being a product of the historic state building process, they are instead a decontextualized accumulation of strategically and commercially useful signs.

Conclusion: Hong Kong’s Intangible Cultural Heritage Reconsidered

Given China’s vast size Oakes confined his investigation of the emergence of provincial identities within the state’s interior region. He did not consider how the same process might function in the more developed coastal areas or in the “greater Chinese” cultural sphere including Hong Kong and Taiwan. This is precisely what makes the recent statement by Hong Kong’s government so interesting. Many of the propositions about the interplay between global economic pressure and the formation of local identity seen in this article are basically accepted as “common sense” in the social scientific literature. And as Oakes illustrates, it is not hard to find a number of cases and fit this understanding of the process fairly well. Thus the recent study by Hong Kong provides us with a new observation to test Oakes’ theory of regional identity formation that is separate from the body of historical insight that he drew on in the formulation on his hypothesis.

When we attempt to apply his strategic understanding of regional identity formation to events in Hong Kong, problems quickly begin to appear. To begin with it is worth noting that Hong Kong is just as dependent as every other region in China on FDI flows to insure the growth and proper functioning of its economy. In fact, the liberalization and rapid development of other areas on the mainland have diverted global capital flows away from Hong Kong raising long-term questions about what the financial future of this city will be. One would expect that the area’s administration would be totally committed to making themselves as attractive to global capital flows as possible, and Oakes suggests that this would lead them to cultivate and advertise a certain type of “local identity.”

Unfortunately there is little correspondence between this most recent construction of local identity and the set of predictions that Oakes gave us. You can see this clearly in the selection of martial arts included in the report. Yes some very local favorites including Wing Chun and Choy Li Fut make the list. But so do broader regional arts originally hailing from Fujian province such as White Crane and Hung Gar. As a matter of fact, Hong Kong’s historic connection to the south China regional trade route is memorialized not just here but in multiple places throughout the list. Many elements of Fujianese language and culture are remembered for the contributions to Hong Kong’s development.

Far from being decontextualized and ahistorical, one cannot help but feel that this list was written with a keen eye towards the historical processes that helped shape the region, even if that meant acknowledging cultural elements from other regions or even the Indian subcontinent. In this list we see a different vision of how regional identity forms. One suspects that many elements were included specifically to represent (or in response to lobbying efforts by) the many diverse constituencies that comprise the modern city of Hong Kong.

This reminds us of a critical truth. Elite action can only take one so far. Actual identity only arises when it is enacted by local communities as such, and they will also have their own vision of themselves. It seems to me that most local identities are not as strategic as Oakes claims. His results are skewed as he only considered a subset of mostly previously empty provincial identities. Yet when one starts to look at other levels of analysis, such as leading cities, or regions of the country (including the coastal south), things start to become more complicated. Indeed, one of the really interesting things about China right now is the mix of different levels and types of identity that seem to be in play.

In these other arena’s political leaders do not have the only voice. In the current era there is also a rich history of media representation that one must contend with. In fact, much of the martial arts contribution to regional identity formation is actually derived from media representations of these arts rather than their actual practice. Relatively few people actually practice the martial arts, yet everyone sees TV programs, novels, operas or films glorifying them.

Bowman has pointed out, the logic that drives this sort of discourse is often quite distinct from the political and economic concerns that Oakes addresses. As such it is not clear that we can automatically expect that the media’s representations of these arts will conform to the expectations of either political economists or post-colonial theorists. To paraphrase Karl Marx, political leaders may be able to shift this discourse, but they cannot do so just as they please. The historical path dependencies which created the modern state continue to constrain the creativity of modern elites in ways that are not always obvious. This is just as true in the realm of popular culture as high politics.

Chinese martial studies has much to contribute to our ongoing investigations of the ways in which regional and local identities form in the current global era. These practices have traditionally flourished at the local level, yet increasingly they are being called upon to help to ensure the cultural purity of their students and as well as to negotiate their value with the center.

One of the most valuable aspects of this discussion has been the reminder that like the martial arts, regional identities never exist in isolation. In the modern era they emerged as a response to the rise of the national identity. By seeking to create a local identity individuals created for themselves a space to negotiate their relationship both with the state and the demands of the global system. Far from being a throwback to an ideal and Orientalized past, the invocation of the martial arts in these discussions demonstrates their ongoing value as vehicles for both individual and community expression in modern global world.

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If you enjoyed this post you might also want to read: Imagining the Martial Arts: Hand Combat Training as a Tool of the Nation.

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Knife vs. Magazine fight from the Bourne Supremacy (2004).

“[…] In contemporary martial arts discourse, the most important distinction to be negotiated is not between the screen and street, but rather between the dojo and the street.

Increasingly, in martial arts discourse, it is not the screen that is held to be unreal or suspect or accused of being fantasy. It is the dojo—the training practices in training halls, that stand accused of being dream factories.”

Paul Bowman. “Mediatized Movements: Martial Artistry & Media Culture.” A Keynote presented at the Martial Arts & Media Culture Conference in Cologne (Germany), 17th of July 2015. As always, you should read the article under discussion before moving on to today’s post. Seriously, it will be worth it!

Introduction: Beware the DVD Special Feature!

If Peter Jackson made one strategic mistake with his release of the “Fellowship of the Rings” DVD (2002), it was to include so many special features. I enjoyed his adaptations of Tolkien’s novels, and I greatly appreciated the attention that he generated for them. But I never actually watched any of his movies more than a few times. Maybe once in the theater, and another time or two on DVD or TV. It was not that I failed to find his vision of Middle Earth enthralling. Rather it was just the opposite.

While I spent dozens of hours with each of the DVDs, almost all of my attention was dedicated to the “special features” included with each film. It was clear that producing these mini-documentaries, which covered various aspects of the making of these films, must have consumed considerable resources. I loved hearing Tom Shippy (one of my favorite Tolkien scholars) discussing the good professor’s life and literary works. But as a martial artist I spent even more time pouring over the “behind the scenes” glimpses into the workshops where the prop weapons were made and the training halls in which Orc and Elvin fighting methods were imagined by teams of very talented (and very human) martial arts choreographers.

All of this begins to raise questions. When a group of professional martial artists dedicate thousands of hours to developing a detailed combat system for creatures that do not exist, employing weapons that while realistic are not identical to historic arms, what exactly have they created? A fantasy martial art system? Certainly. Yet how different is that from the historic martial arts systems of our era, endlessly reinvented and reconstructed from personal transmission, faded 8 mm video tapes, poorly illustrated Ming era manuals and a driving dedication to make it work? Whether anyone cares to admit it or not, the transmission of “tradition” depends on both a good measure of hard work and creativity.

While watching these professionals I began to suspect that they were so successful in creating a martial art for Orcs because they were doing basically the same thing that martial artists had always done. Understand the strategic environment, ask basic questions, look at the tools that you have to work with, and apply every bit of your knowledge to solving the problem at hand.

Recently I had another, slightly uncomfortable, moment. This time I was confronted with a dystopian, but equally martial, vision of the future. Once again, it all started with delving a little too deeply into the “special features.” As I reported in this news update, the AMC series Into the Badlands is creeping ever closer to a TV set near you. There has been a huge amount of buzz about this series, but until recently there was very little information about how this creative reimagining of a classic Chinese tale would actually look.

The shows creative vision came into focus recently when AMC released both an extended trailer and a “behind the scenes” special feature looking at the martial arts training and choreography that was going into this series. It is not surprising that these two products were released at the same time. AMC has been carefully crafting the message that they are going to bring “serious martial arts action” back to the small screen, and the videos were meant to be a down-payment on their promise.

I have to admit that the stunt team and fight choreography (provided by Daniel Wu and Stephen Fung) appeared to be excellent. Not only that, the basic martial arts instruction that they were putting the talent through looked tight. I found myself wishing that I could sit in on some of their sessions. And then I caught myself. After all, I am (or should be) a “real” martial artist. Right? I should not care about choreography or film angles.

In truth I do not remember much from the actual trailer (which I only watched once) except for a sense of emotional confusion brought on the perverse beauty of seemingly unending hills of opium poppies. I can take or leave dystopian futures; they are getting to be a little over done. Yet like any martial arts aficionado the invitation to visit another school really stuck with me. Still, this was tinged with emotional confusion. The output of this dream factory was only an image of the martial arts. It was undeniably an illusion, a masterpiece of visual fantasy. Yet the basic training that went into the production of this simulation looked all too familiar and real. In fact, it looked good.

The climatic final scene from the Karate Kid (1984).

Reality: A Two Sided Mirror

The typical response to all of this seems to be to double down and reassert the fundamental boundaries between the worlds of “performance” and those of “reality.” Of course this formulation of the problem will automatically begin to raise red flags for lots of academics. After all, many of the most basic categories that structure our lives, things like gender, nationality, race and economic class, all involve a healthy dose of performance and social construction.

Are the martial arts, structured as they are by the constraints of violence, immune to this? Put another way (one that might be most familiar to other political scientists) should we insist on the “realist,” as opposed to socially or institutionally constructed, nature of the martial realm.

This is the default position for many. The idea that what we do is brutally real while what we see on the screen is a “fiction” is widespread. And no matter how realistic one’s fight choreography attempts to be, I don’t think that anyone would assume that these visual images are actually attempting to pose as reality. After all, fights in the movies can be many things. They might be dramatic, heroic or even funny. In short, they are always (striving to be) entertaining. Violence in real life tends to lack this essential quality of good TV.

And yet we all tend to be drawn to those images on the small screen. More fundamentally, they can even structure the world of “real” martial artist to a surprising degree. In the West the Chinese martial arts, and Wing Chun in particular, were obscure topics in the West prior to the rise of Bruce Lee. And the Karate Kid probably sold more square feet of strip-mall real estate than any other Hollywood film before or since. If we are honest, many of us will admit that it was these flickering images, or more importantly the ideas behind them, that first brought us into the realm of the “real martial arts.”

So would it then be correct to say that the movies made Wing Chun? Absolutely, but maybe not in the way that one might expect. After all, Bruce Lee did very little actual Wing Chun in his films. He probably filled more Tae Kwon Do schools with kids trying to learn his trademark flying sidekick than anything else. And when Wing Chun really did make it big, it was not alone. Rather it was accompanied by a number of other arts, all of which were reputed to emphasize midrange fighting.

In the minds of a number of practitioners the rise of systems like Krav Maga, Kali, Escrima and Wing Chun might appear to be a simple reflection of “reality.” These systems have gained in popularity because they all address a certain set of strategic problems in a realistic (and highly efficient) way. So maybe Bruce Lee and media trends are more peripheral to all of this than you might expect. Perhaps he was simply a messenger of something more fundamental rather than the message itself?

Luckily we have a new resource to aid us in sorting this out. One of my very few regrets about the June 2015 Martial Arts studies conference in Cardiff was that its gracious organizer, Paul Bowman, was too busy organizing and facilitating the event to present his own thoughts on these questions. Luckily for us he was recently invited to present a keynote address at a conference on “Martial Arts & Media Culture” in Germany.

In his paper Bowman argues that it is no coincidence that close range combat systems rose to popularity on both the big screen and the training hall at roughly the same time. Yet to understand exactly how these two events are linked we must begin by rethinking the supposed dichotomy between martial arts “fantasy” in film or TV and “reality” on the street or in the dojo.

He begins by informing his readers in the first few paragraphs of his paper that he intends to discover the “connections between film choreography and martial arts practice – even a kind of two way street of suggestions, inspiration, copying and cross-fertilizations…” but to do so we must first accept that we are not “dealing with a situation of truth on the one hand and falsity on the other, but rather a general test of force and signification.” Or to put things in the simplest possible terms, martial artists (whether they work for a movie studio or a police department) are always looking for inspiration to creatively solve their problems, and those may come from a screen just as easily as a session in a training hall.

All of this is premised on a more basic debate about how individuals interact with the media that they consume. Are they essentially passive recipients of ideas and images, who are simply entertained (or possibly indoctrinated) by their consumption of media? Or, following the Use and Gratification Theory (Blumler & Katz, 1974), should we assume that individuals consciously seek out certain types of images, and then creatively reconfigure them for their own purposes?

A quick tour through the many playlists of Youtube would seem to leave very little question as to how engaged individuals are with their media choices. Not only is the platform (and its advertising strategy) literally built around the assumption that consumers will select certain images rather than others, it seems that most of the videos that one runs across are edited, modified, curated or commented upon by users in quite creative ways. Nowhere is this more clear than within the genera of martial arts “how to” videos.

It is not all that difficult to locate videos offering to teach techniques seen in a recent MMA fight, a movie scene or to bequeath the secrets of improving upon them. Of course the UFC isn’t the only area where Youtube viewers turn for reality. One can also find CCTV footage of various sorts of fights, muggings, stabbings and attacks. Unsurprisingly these are a popular topic of conversation among martial artists. I have even used a few of these with more students as jumping off points for various training discussions.

Bowman notes that some groups take this trend further than others. Practitioners of KFM, or the Keysi Fighting Method, have a complex relationship with the concept of “reality.” Their style has always focused on simple brutal efficiency, but it was selected for use in Batman Begins (and it subsequently enjoyed a period of popularity) precisely because it appeared to be “dramatic” and “violent” when filmed. Something like Jujitsu, while just as “real” and quite effective in practical terms, is not highly visual and can be difficult for audience to follow. So it was the fantasy images of Hollywood that popularized the KFM system as a point when it was attempting to be the most “real” of martial arts.

Bowman notes that this same tension between image and practice can be found in other registers as well. The “Winchester Virginia KFM” studio released a promotional video onto Youtube in which they spliced together ‘real fight’ clips taken from CCTV film with school demonstrations. All of this was constructed to promote the following argument: “reality is like this; our training equips us to master this reality.”

And yet “reality” proves to be a hard nut to crack. There are hard limits to how “real” any training session can be made. Others have already explored these boundaries in excruciating detail so I will not belabor the point. At the same time, is what we see in the CCTV footage “reality?”

In some ways, yes. These are images of events that actually happened. Of course it is not always clear what was said in these incidents, or how they escalated. Thus the vital element verbal confrontation is often left out. Nor can we expect that any two muggings, stabbings or random attacks to play out in exactly the same ways as the one that we have just studies. Of course the instructors who ran the KFM schools were well aware of this.

Nor should such limitations be taken as an argument that these sorts of images are useless. Rather, they need to be understood with caveats. Yet once the caveats have been introduced, it quickly becomes obvious that what we are interested in is not the limited, grainy, out of focus CCTV footage itself, but the concepts, images and ideas that we see illustrated within them. Yes they are limited, but they are useful.

According to the group who spliced them together as part of an advertisement, they are more useful than much of what has been passed on under the guise of traditional martial arts instruction. As Bowman so aptly observed in our introductory quote, the real debate in the martial arts world today is not between the screen and the street, but between the dojo and the street. Increasingly it is the training hall that is under attack as a fiction while “reality” can be found in the octagon or on Youtube.

Bruce Lee executes a spectacular flying kick while filming “Game of Death.”

The Logic of the Dream Factory

Something interesting happens once we take these reproduced images of real attacks to be a legitimate way of thinking about violence. As noted above, these images are always in some way partial, and everyone understands that for them to be useful as training tools we must focus on what they suggest (conceptually or strategically) about the nature of violence rather than seeing them as a definitive catalog of everything that could possibly happen. If we take these exact same caveats and apply them to wide range of other images, what we quickly discover is that they too are making symbolic arguments about the nature of violence, some of which may be more or less meaningful to our own training.

This insight brings us back to Bowman’s central argument, that there has been a critical reciprocal relationship between the development of martial arts on the soundstage and in the training hall. To understand how these spheres might relate Bowman asks us to consider the rise of “close range” fighting in action films following the release of the Bourne Identity.

Imagine the challenges facing a fight choreographer at this point in time. Action audiences identify with fight scenes, but following the rise of the UFC they have become aware of the critique that flashy kicks and long-range fights as “unrealistic.” Indeed, even at the height of the popularity of these techniques, many of films seem to have contained their own internal critique of such high profile kicks. Daniel in the Karate Kid wins his fight with a spectacular “crane style” kick, but only after another his kicks was caught and exploited leading to his leg injury.

Likewise, everyone remembers Bruce Lee’s visually powerful flying sidekick from Fists of Fury (1971). What is often forgotten is that the same kicks are shown to be ineffective in the hands of the Japanese karate students during the Dojo fight sequence. Only Lee can perform the technique in a way that is meaningful to the audience. And even then, was it technically effective in the face of machine guns? Like so much else about the martial arts, the spectacular kicks of the 1970s and 1980s seem to have been embedded within a self-dismantling discourse which foresaw their own obsolesce.

By the 1990s audiences were demanding something fresh and “realistic.” Jujitsu would be the obvious choice given its dominance in the octagon. Yet as Bowman notes, the highly nuanced nature of ground fighting makes it difficult for non-specialists to follow. It is more of a tactile than a visual art.

Close range fighting seemed to present choreographers with a much needed answer. The physical proximity of the two characters allowed for a greater degree of inter-personal drama in the shot, but the conflict would remain open enough that audience members could see (and hear) distinct blows, grabs, elbows or throws.

Better yet, the very nature of short range fight choreography, with its linear strikes and frequent use of fast takes, meant that it was possible for a fight choreographer to train actors who were neither athletes nor professional martial artists in the rudiments of fighting as quickly as possible. Scenes could be spliced together with footage from multiple mediocre takes into an action sequence that was both fast paced and convincingly realistic.

The logic that Bowman articulates here is important. As a Wing Chun instructor I too deal with students who are neither athletes nor experienced martial artists. And it is also my job to teach them some solid self-defense skills knowing full well that most of them will never go on to become dedicated fighters. In a sense we all face the perennial problem posed by General Qi Jiguang back in the 16th century when he first contemplated the role of unarmed boxing in military training. How can we take the weak and make them strong? More importantly, how do we do it facing restricted budgets and tight timelines?

Wing Chun (and a variety of other arts that also focus on “close range fighting”) has found that strength and skill can be augmented with a focus on structure. I don’t know that it’s the only, or even the best, solution to General Qi’s question. But it is interesting to me precisely because it is such a parsimonious one. Note how similar the logic of the problems facing fight choreographers and the martial arts instructors actually is.

Bowman argues that once this new approach to “realism” in the martial arts was put on film, it quickly gained prominence in the training hall. Yes Wing Chun grew in popularity (and it is interesting to note how many films it has appeared in since about 2000), but so did an entire host of other short range systems. He argues that trends within these two environments tend to be linked because they are both part of a single larger cultural discourse in which martial artists are talking with one another, and exchanging ideas, in an attempt to work out solutions to their problems and attract new groups of students.

Where then are the dream factories? In this view we might think of both the dojo and the sound stage as likely candidates. One cannot effectively solve a problem before imagining a solution and coming up with a way of communicating it. This is a fundamentally creative act. What happens in these two spaces is undeniably different, and no good is likely to come from naively or haphazardly mixing the two. Yet it is undeniable that the broader social discourse on the martial arts does evolve over time, and it is unlikely that we can fully grasp how this happens without examining the complex and reciprocal relationship between these two dream factories.

A great example of a close range fight scene from the 2009 Sherlock Holmes. This scene has always fascinated me as it attempts seems to both educate the viewer about technical aspects of the fight that is unfolding through a discussion of Holmes' personality.

A great example of a close range fight scene from the film 2009 Sherlock Holmes. This scene has always fascinated me as it attempts to educate the viewer about technical aspects of the fight while simultaneously exploring Holmes’ inner dialogue.

Conclusion: The Problem of Change

Bowman’s argument is both straightforward and powerful. I suspect that much of its impact comes from the seemingly counterfactual nature of his conclusions. Indeed, this is the aspect of his argument that does the most work, opening a window onto the evolution of fight choreography as well as the rise of a certain group of hand combat systems within the marketplace for martial arts instruction.

Yet conference talks are a limited medium. And as Bowman states in his introduction he is offering these remarks “in the hopes that you will join in the conversation and we can take them further together.” In that spirit I would like to use this conclusion to consider a possible omission in this framework.

The evolution of a discourse, like anything else, is predicated on a process of change. Certain sorts of meanings, arguments and images that were once powerful must fade away for a new set of identities and symbols to take the stage. Indeed, Bowman discusses this very process in some detail as he leads us on a tour of the historical evolution of fight choreography.

At one point in time the flashy flying kick was a powerful symbol that resonated with audiences. Bruce Lee, a student of a close-range fighting system, focused on these techniques in his fight choreography, essentially forsaking his more down to earth mother-art. But by the late 1990s audiences were demanding something new. What they wanted was “gritty” and “realistic.”

Bowman notes this change in taste and moves on. In essence he treats it as an exogenous variable. It remains external to the essential logic of his argument.

Still, he is clearly aware that this is a tricky and potentially important issue. He notes at one point that a “cinematic style or gimmick can remain striking for only so long.” But given that the change in audience tastes is part of the larger martial arts discourse, and that this is what he ultimately wants to understand, I suspect that we may need some way of bringing this aspect of the process into the discussion. Potentially significant events cannot be left as mere “fads,” meaning that their existence is assumed at the outset of the discussion rather than being explored.

After all, some types of symbols are remarkably resilient. There seems to be something about the image of a lone hero with a sword that just won’t die. One can draw a pretty straight line connecting the swashbuckling tales of the 1950s, Star Wars in the 1980s and more recent fare including Pirates of the Caribbean. The image of a fledgling knight errant and his trusty blade setting out on the “hero’s quest” may not be as universal as Joseph Campbell imagined, but it does seem to be remarkably stable. Yet as Bowman observed, flying sidekicks come and go. Why?

As I read his paper I took an hour or so to assemble a timeline of important fight sequences from films released in the early 1970s to the present. Bruce Lee’s 1971 Fists of Fury was interesting to me as the flying sidekick was so important to the plot of the movie. But what role did this technique really play in the film?

Given that the final scene is meant to suggest his death, I don’t think that audience was supposed to be convinced of the absolute military superiority of the technique in the face of superior fire power. Rather than being seen as “realistic” I suspect that this highly acrobat kick was introduced to tell us something about the character Chen Zhen and his use of the martial arts to create a new persona, one that was capable of both fighting and dying for the nation. His seemingly superhuman kick was critical as it marked the reality of his inner transformation in the personal and spiritual realms, something that is less easily observed.

Indeed, as I worked my way through my timeline of fights it seemed to me that during the 1970s and 1980s highly athletic, long distance, fights were used in stories of questing heroes, where the protagonist fought for a certain type of glory or honor. They often appeared in situations that might best be characterized as “duals” rather than instances of true “self-defense.”

Put another way, the use of these techniques might not be confined simply to certain trends within fight choreography. Rather they may have also reflected the sorts of heroes that audiences responded to at a specific moment in history.

The Bourne Identity is interesting not only as it introduces a different sort of hand combat, but because its protagonist seems to be a different sort of hero (or possibly anti-hero). Jason Bourne is not walking into the middle of Japanese Dojos in occupied Shanghai to issue a public challenge. For the most part he goes to great lengths to keep a low profile and project an “every man” image. His unarmed fight sequences usually begin when an antagonist approaches or ambushes him (the assassin crashing through the apartment window being the quintessential example of that). In this case a close range action sequence is not only visually gripping, but it makes a good deal of tactical sense as well. The fact that this is Bourne’s “preferred mode” of combat seems to suggest something about nature as a character and the values that he embodies.

Audience reaction to Bourne suggests that at such a moment in history, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, this figure was deeply appealing to a large segment of the public. It might be possible to give other examples of the same general trend but this post has already run long. I originally wanted to discuss the evolution of Neo’s fighting style in the first Matrix movie, between his initial dual (long range) with Morpheus in the training simulation and his later desperate fight (short range) with the sinister Agent Smith within the matrix itself. It might be the case that this transition smoothed the way for what we saw in a number of subsequent films and discussions of the martial arts. But those thoughts will have to wait for another day. While my own limited additions move this discussion another level back rather than definitively resolving the question, I hope that it suggests an area for further consideration.

In conclusion, Bowman makes a number of important observations in this paper linking trends in both the training hall and soundstage to create a more cohesive understanding of the way in which society’s martial arts discourse has evolved. I greatly look forward to reading future versions of this paper. Yet rather than taking the initial moment of change as exogenous to the model, we might want to bring this variable more clearly into the discussion. This could be accomplished by asking why the social demand for one sort of martial arts product, rather than another, evolves at a specific moment in time, and how this is reciprocally linked to (and find expression in) the protagonists created by dream factories of the silver screen. As Seraph reminded Neo, “You do not truly know someone until you fight them.” And it is through these evolving fight sequences that audiences come to identify with the values of their new heroes.

oOo

If you enjoyed this post you might also want to read: Telling Stories about Wong Fei Hung and Ip Man: The Evolution of a Heroic Type

oOo

Birthday Cake. Source: Wikimedia (CC).

Happy Birthday!

Earlier this week (on July 27th) I got a prompt from WordPress reminding me that it was a special day. Kung Fu Tea first said “Hello World” three years ago to the day. This anniversary is something of a milestone for me. When I first started this project I was not sure how successful it would be. I knew that I wanted to build a community of like minded researchers, scholars and martial artists, and I suspected that this would not be a quick or easy process. So I promised myself I would give it three years and try to post regularly. At that point I would sit back and see whether it had been worth it.

Needless to say the last three years have exceeded my expectations, and I owe all of that to you, the readers. I have ended up dedicating vastly more time and energy to this blog than I thought I would. But I now have the distinct privilege of spending part of each day emailing and talking with students of various aspects of the martial arts who I never would have had an opportunity to meet otherwise. It has also been exciting to have a front row seat to the birth and development of Martial Arts Studies as an area of scholarly study. More material keeps coming out every month and I cannot wait to see what the next few years will bring.

Birthdays are also an ideal time for reflection, to consider the nature of the road that we have been on. Readers who prefer a more quantitative approach to the past may want to stop by the “My Top Picks” tab at the top of the screen (or just follow the link). Here you can find a list of those posts that have been the most popular with reader over the last three years as well as some of my favorites organized by subject matter. Given that this blog has now hosted well over 300 unique posts and essays, this may be a good way to see what you have been missing.

If you instead favor a more qualitative mode of reflection simply read on. As I looked back through my stats I was curious to see which of my posts had received the fewest page views. Unsurprisingly it turned out to be the very first one that I wrote. In retrospect this seems obvious as the blog had no readers at that point. Still, its an interesting exercise as in it I outlined my goals for Kung Fu Tea as I understood them at the inception of this blog. So lets take a moment to look back and see how well we have done, and the various ways that this project has evolved. If the last three years have demonstrated anything, its that there is still a lot to say to Chinese Martial Studies. But for now I am going to eat some cake.

Hello World!

Welcome to the Kung Fu Teahouse. I hope that this will become a place where we can meet to reflect on and discuss the growing field of martial studies. While most of my writing and thinking focuses on the area of Chinese Martial Studies in the late Qing and Republic periods, I have always believed in the power of the comparative case study to illuminate new and interesting facts. As such I will also publish posts dealing with Japanese, Middle Eastern and traditional European martial arts and culture.

What is Martial Studies?

So, for non-specialists, what is “martial studies”? Basically this blog focuses on the academic study of the martial arts. More specifically, martial studies include the social, cultural, economic and historical study of a society’s fighting and military traditions at all levels of social organization. By tradition “martial studies” seems to focus more on how society upholds these structures than a strict military historian might.

Martial studies is also radically interdisciplinary. In its ranks you will find historians, hoplologists, political scientist, psychologists, anthropologists, economists and literature and film studies students. It asks questions as diverse as “When was Taiji created?”, “How has globalization effected the development of southern Chinese martial arts?” and “How has Bruce Lee changed what it means to be a Chinese American?” If you are interested in any of these questions than this blog is the place for you.

Who am I and why am I writing about this?

My name is Benjamin Judkins. I have a Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University in New York City where I studied international relations and comparative Asian politics. I taught international relations and international political economy (globalization) at the University of Utah and have recently moved back to you NY. My research interests include international political economy, religion and politics, and of course Chinese Martial Studies.

This last subject really grew out of my interest in late 19^th century globalization, Asia and religion and politics. It occurred to me that southern China was understudied and a great test bed for many of our theories about social groups, civil society and globalization. To that end I started educating myself about the development of southern Chinese martial culture more generally.

I should also note that I draw on my own background as a practicing martial artists when writing and thinking about the field of martial studies. I practiced Tae Kwon Do on and off through college. Later I discovered Wing Chun, a southern Chinese form of boxing propagated by Ip Man in Hong Kong in the 1950s and popularized in the west through Bruce Lee, his most famous student. I study with Sifu Jon Nielson (a student of Ip Ching, son of Ip Man) and do a little teaching myself.

I say all of this not to display my credentials so much as to explain my unique research interests. Most of the posts on this blog will focus on Chinese martial culture. I am especially interested in Guangdong and Fujian provinces from about 1850 until today. Wing Chun is my major case study so it is probably going to be a little over represented, but I will also post on a number of other local folk styles and even more modern topics regarding Chinese martial arts.

Of course not all of the posts will be equally weighty and academic. Hopefully we will also have a chance to discuss martial arts in the news and popular culture.

oOo

Want to see the very first academically focused post here at Kung Fu Tea? If so check this out: A Really Short Reading List on Chinese Martial Studies

oOo

Source: http://www.swordsantiqueweapons.com

Introduction

Within the field of International Relations Stephen Chan (OBE) needs no introduction. He is a Professor of Global Politics in the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London. He also served as a diplomat and was involved with several important initiatives in Africa, helping to pioneer modern electoral observation. Prof. Chan has twice been Dean at SOAS, has published 29 books and supervised many successful PhD theses. He won the 2010 International Studies Association prize and was named an “Eminent Scholar in Global Development.”

Less well known in academic circles is his lifelong involvement with the martial arts. Chan has been awarded many senior grades and titles in various styles of Karate. He has taught on multiple continents including while posted as a diplomat in Africa. In 2012 he established his own martial arts organization which currently boasts thousands of students in many countries.

I first had an opportunity to meet Prof. Chan at the recent Martial Arts Studies conference in Cardiff where he offered the opening keynote address. I was struck both with the importance of his remarks and how closely his own family history mirrored the development of the Asian martial arts in the 20th century.

We are very fortunate that Prof. Chan has agreed to take a few moment from his busy schedule to delve a little deeper into a couple of topics which he touched on in his keynote. In this interview he shares some family history surrounding his Grandmother, Chan Wong Wah Yue, a swordswoman and member of a village militia, who saw action in Guangdong during the turbulent years of the Warlord Era. While martial arts fiction is full of images of female boxers, relatively few women actually took up these pursuits. Prof. Chan’s genealogy is fascinating precisely because it allows us to identify one such individual by name, to contextualize her involvement with this aspect of the martial arts, and to trace her subsequent life history.

Since this interview builds on the account already provided in his keynote, readers who have not yet had a chance to review the recording of this address should start here. Prof. Chan’s presentation is full of interesting observations and stories. Your efforts will be well rewarded! Following that he offers some additional discussion below. Enjoy!

Prof. Stephen Chan, scholar, diplomat and martial artist.

Kung Fu Tea (KFT): Can you begin by giving us some information on your Grandmother? What was her name? Where (and when) was she born?

Prof. Stephen Chan: My grandmother’s name was Wong Wah Yue, and she married Chan Hong Ling of Sungai village, then outside metropolitan Canton. No birth dates were recorded for her or her first child but she died at age 78 [circa 1906 – 30th April 1982].

I know nothing of her ancestry, although her husband’s ancestry can still be traced in records back some 800 years.

KFT: What can you tell me about her husband’s background and occupation? And what did he think of her martial arts activities?

Chan: Her husband was a greengrocer/fruiterer. I think that he admired her fighting youth. He was a placid man and it was she who was the aggressive person in the relationship.

KFT: How did you come to hear her life story?

Chan: She would tell me her stories when I was a child, before I went to school. Shortly after starting school, my parents moved into their own house and my contacts with my grandmother decreased.

KFT: Can you tell us a little bit about her introduction to the martial arts?

Chan: This is the stuff of grandmotherly legend. The entire community was caught up in the warlord and brigands era of the early 20th century. Sungai had outer fortifications of two watchtowers, with two more planned, mounted with machine guns financed by remittances from the diaspora in the foreign gold rushes of the period. These were built in 1902. As late as 1920, the village was attacked by an ‘army’ of 300 brigands. Guns were everywhere, but so were swords. My grandmother studied the sword.

KFT: Did she identify with any particular style or teacher?

Chan: If she did, I didn’t understand as a child. But I gather a lot of her sword work was inspired by necessity. As a foundation, there would almost certainly have been the rudiments of what we today call ‘Peking Opera’ basics.

KFT: What do you think motivated your grandmother to take up the sword, both in a personal and more political sense?

Chan: As I said, it was a heavily securitized environment. There was no ‘official’ law and order, so citizens had to defend themselves. It was like the Chinese version of the Wild West.

KFT: Did she ever mention any literary works, stories, radio programs or movies associated with the martial arts that she particularly liked or disliked?

Chan: She would take me to the only Chinese cinema in Auckland, New Zealand, the State Theater, which was hired by the Chinese community on Sunday nights. It was a pretty seedy and desperate place, and the Chinese films shown were also pretty badly made as the post-war Hong Kong cinema industry spluttered into existence. The sword work in them was also pretty awful, a very early and primitive form of what the Chinese state has now officialized and standardized into the Wushu syllabus. I hated them. And she didn’t seem overly impressed either.

There was, however, a Chinese comic, with very fine inking in something like traditional style, of a one-legged hero who was a swordsman. Miraculously, when he needed to do a high side kick, a supporting leg would appear! I thought this was ridiculous, but I liked the inking. And I liked the idea of a high side kick.

KFT: You mentioned in your keynote address that your Grandmother led followers in the field. What sorts of people supported her, and what types of goals did they have?

Chan: They were members of her village – the local militia. She was sufficiently prominent so that, as a rather young mother, her eldest son was kidnapped and tortured to death (and his totally mutilated body returned – crushed and jellied, apart from the head, so he could be recognized) as a warning to her.

KFT: What sorts of weapons (swords, sabers, spears, handguns, rifles, knives, grenades….etc) did her group carry in the field? What sort of opposition did they encounter?

Chan: She used a sword (gim or jian). Guns, as I said, were everywhere. She gave up fighting, and the sword, when her militia unit was strafed from the air. She realized then, she told me, that modernity had overtaken them.

A rare period snap shot showing Chinese swords captured by Japanese during WWII. Source: Author’s personal collection.

KFT: Historians have noted that a number of martial arts militias in China during the 1920s practiced invulnerability techniques as part of their training (Golden Bell, Iron Cloth Shirt, other forms of spirit possession…..). Did your Grandmother ever mention any of this?

Chan: She believed in magic and in forms of Chinese medicine. I had to swallow from time to time all manner of obnoxious potions. But I don’t think she practiced magical techniques. As I said, being attacked by aircraft pretty much knocked the stuffing of traditional methods out of her.

KFT: Did your Grandmother teach the individuals that fought with her, or did they get their training somewhere else?

Chan: I don’t think so. I sort of gather she was like a female village ‘rowdy.’ My grandfather loved her very much. And she was certainly a VERY strong and independently-minded person.

KFT: Did she ever describe/talk about the larger world of Chinese martial artists at the point in time at which she was active?

Chan: No. She did talk about how terrible war was, and our family was a refugee family from war. Neither the brigand armies nor the Nationalists could stand against the Japanese.

KFT: At what point did your Grandmother “retire” from the martial arts?

Chan: She had given them up by the time she got off the refugee boat and set foot in New Zealand in 1941.

KFT: Did your grandparents ever discuss their journey from the Pearl River Delta to New Zealand during WWII?

Chan: Yes. The privations were extreme. This was particularly note-worthy in the separate flight of my mother’s family, which was described graphically to me. But none of my ancestors on her side were, as far as I know, martial artists. I do have as heirlooms the child’s suitcase my father carried, not much bigger than a satchel; and one of the remaining gold coins my mother’s mother stitched into her coat to use as bribes whenever they came across marauding soldiers or bandits on their flight. By the time of their flight, there were dead bodies pretty much everywhere lining the route to Hong Kong, which they did on foot from the village neighboring my father’s.

KFT: What was life like for her in her new home country after leaving China?

Chan: She refused to learn English and set up a Chinese gambling syndicate and circuit. We called her the Dragon Lady. She sort of remained an outlaw for the rest of her New Zealand life.

KFT: I am curious about your Grandmother’s turn to professional gambling in New Zealand. As I have been looking at the social history of the southern Chinese martial arts I have been struck by how closely connected these professions often were. Even small town gambling houses would hire crews of martial artist. One of the few female boxers I have been able to identify by name from the early 19th century had a very similar career trajectory.

Chan: Auckland, New Zealand, was not big enough then for Triads or other well-articulated criminal organizations. They came later. Gambling groups were just small time, small scale, businesses and social enterprises. Some, like the one my Grandfather frequented (different from Grandmother’s) were also opium dens. But these were all male affairs. Grandmother’s were all female. As a toddler I went to both from time to time. I’m sure I enjoyed the secondary inhaling…it would probably explain a lot…

KFT: How did your Grandmother’s example or stories influence you either as a martial artist or as a person?

Chan: Oh she influenced me alright – along the lines of “I am not going to do it like that!”

KFT: I understand that your father was also a martial artist. Can you tell me a little bit about his practice? What did your Grandmother think of his decision to take up Southern Mantis Kung Fu in the 1950s?

Chan: Dad just found a good (Chinese) teacher. Similarly, his younger brother found a good (Chinese) Wing Chun teacher. Grandmother could not have cared less. This sort of thing was just normal.

KFT: Many discussions of martial arts history focus on continuity with the past, but I have always found the breaks and disjoints to be even more interesting. Given your family’s multi-generation background in the southern Chinese martial art, why did you choose to dedicate yourself to Karate as a youth? How did your family (and Grandmother) react to that decision?

Chan: Everyone hated it, but I just went to the best martial arts teacher in town, Karl Sargent, and it was a wonderful and very tough dojo with a structured and modernized syllabus. I also, of course, wanted to be tougher than my father. Typical youthful rebellion.

Karl was a very young Sensei, so we got on very well personally, and he attracted weird and wonderful students. One was John Dixon, who had fought with Mao in the Communist victory.

Most of my classmates were Maoris, Polynesians, truckers, bikies and the like. Karl called it an ‘experimental’ class. For a young intellectual like me, it was wonderful. But the style did have Chinese Malaysian influences. It was a JKA Shotokan style overlaid with quite a large number of Chinese principles.

KFT: In your opinion as a scholar, when telling the story of the Asian martial arts should we continue to focus on “lineage” and “system,” or are there other critical concepts that we should be paying more attention to?

Chan: I don’t pay overmuch reverence to lineage. I know from my many visits to Asia how things change, miscegenate, and cross-cut. Systems change all the time. These ‘traditional’ arts came to us by the most ‘postmodern’ routes. The one thing about being Asian, achieving some rank, AND building social rank and capital OUTSIDE the arts (in my case in the diplomatic and scholarly worlds), is that the old teachers will treat you as an equal. That’s a very rare privilege. They also tell you the truth. The number of times I got the answer ‘I just made it up’ in response to queries about how a technique originated and developed was wonderful and just honest.

KFT: Thanks so much for taking the time to drop by Kung Fu Tea! Clearly your family history is a great case study in the development of the traditional martial arts. We look forward to your future research and writing with great enthusiasm.

oOo

If you enjoyed this interview you might also want to read: Dr. Daniel Amos Discusses Marginality, Martial Arts Studies and the Modern Development of Southern Chinese Kung Fu

oOo

James Cagney – Oscar-winning Judoka (ca. 1943)

Introduction

Upon the gracious invitation from Dr. Judkins, I thought about what I could add to a historical perspective on the martial arts. After considering various topic ideas, I settled on the topic of martial arts in the context of American cinema, in particular the classical Hollywood cinema. In academic film studies, classical Hollywood cinema refers to the period of time from the late-1920s/early-1930s (when synchronized sound replaced the practices of silent filmmaking) to the late-1950s/early-1960s (when the fallout from the infamous 1948 Supreme Court case known as the “Paramount Decree” led to changes in the way films were produced, distributed, and exhibited). At this time Hollywood studios controlled all aspects of the filmmaking process and these efforts were conducted in accordance with a standardized “mode of production” (the standard academic text on this period remains The Classical Hollywood Cinema by David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson).

This was the era of Gone with the Wind, Casablanca, It’s a Wonderful Life, Singin’ in the Rain, and 12 Angry Men. It was also the era of ‘G’ Men, Behind the Rising Sun, Blood on the Sun, Tokyo Joe, and Pat and Mike. If most people haven’t heard of the films on the second list, that’s to be expected. They haven’t been canonized in the academic literature nor have they managed to secure a place in the popular cultural imagination. The history of cinema has for the most part lost track of these films, while the history of martial arts cinema has yet to even recognize them, but thanks to TV, DVDs, and the Internet, history is always a mouse click or channel change away from being (re)discovered.

In typical historical accounts of martial arts cinema, Hollywood tends to be either ignored or denunciated on the basis of a confirmation bias which precludes the possibility of there being an American inheritance of cinematic martial arts. In the first issue of the Martial Arts Studies journal, I will attempt to counter a number of theoretical claims against American cinematic representations of the martial arts throughout Hollywood history, but here, I would like to show on historical grounds that there is, indeed, an American inheritance of cinematic martial arts with a lineage that can be traced back nearly a century through a number of intriguing and ambitious films.

James Cagney. G-Men

‘G’ Men

The first film I want to discuss in this post is ‘G’ Men. Made in 1935 at Warner Brothers studios, the star of ‘G’ Men is James Cagney, the unique and iconic Hollywood figure who was part song-and-dance man, part gangster tough guy, and part martial artist (though the third part is the aspect that often gets overlooked). Following his star turn a few years earlier in the gangster classic, The Public Enemy, Cagney was one of the most in-demand stars in Hollywood. He also ended up being something of a savior for the Hollywood studios following the institution of the Motion Picture Production Code and the moratorium on gangster films (for information on the history of and the consequences stemming from the censorship battles fought in the early-1930s over gangster films, see Fran Mason’s American Gangster Cinema, Jonathan Munby’s Public Enemies, Public Heroes, and Kendall R. Phillips’ Controversial Cinema).

Amidst this controversy, Hollywood studios were scrambling to figure out a way to continue to produce stories involving the violent and seductive criminal underworld without offending the sensibilities of groups such as the Catholic Legion of Decency, the Protestant League, the Daughters of the American Revolution, and the Police Benevolence Association, just a few of the many groups that had started protesting the continued production of such “dangerous” films. Their solution: Give the most popular and recognizable cinematic gangster a badge and let him use his gangster tactics in the name of law and order.

I have discussed elsewhere the ideological implications of this transitional period in gangster films for the formation of the contemporary American action movie, but for the sake of historical context, this was the turbulent climate in which ‘G’ Men was produced, and it ended up being one of the biggest financial successes for Warner Brothers in the 1930s and a huge turning point in cinematic depictions of law enforcement and criminality. For my purposes here, however, the importance of ‘G’ Men has less to do with its depiction of cops and criminals and more to do with its depiction of the martial arts. In the film, Cagney’s character (a lawyer who grew up on the wrong side of the tracks but who fought to make an honest living for himself) trades his law books for an FBI badge to avenge the death of his childhood friend at the hands of a notorious gangster. In an early scene upon Cagney’s acceptance into the FBI, he receives instruction in self-defense, first with a boxing lesson and second with a Jujitsu lesson.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTBozSkd9So

I consider it quite significant that the very first lines spoken during the Jujitsu scene involve the agent teaching Cagney (played by Lloyd Nolan) talking about how the utilization of leverage in Jujitsu is “practically the same as in wrestling.” This idea of relating wrestling to Jujitsu speaks to the neglected historical legacy of grappling in the Western (especially American) context. While there is one historical (but not necessarily teleological) trajectory for striking that proceeds from the UK/US boxing heritage to the incorporation of kicking-inclusive styles such as Karate and Taekwondo, there is also a historical (and again not necessarily teleological) trajectory for grappling that proceeds from the UK catch-wrestling tradition and the UK/US professional wrestling tradition (not to mention the illustrious histories of US high school, collegiate, and Olympic wrestling) to the incorporation of the throws, trips, joint-locks, and chokes from the more elaborate groundfighting arts of Judo and Jujitsu (both the Japanese or, as is more prevalent today thanks to MMA, the Brazilian variety).

While by no means a comprehensive history of grappling, this rough sketch does shed light on the conditions of possibility for the American fascination in the first half of the 20^th Century with grappling. In addition to introducing the existence of Jujitsu, though, ‘G’ Men also attempts to introduce the techniques of Jujitsu, and the method for shooting and editing grappling devised by the filmmaking team on ‘G’ Men showcases a uniquely American action aesthetic I have previously termed (in an essay entitled “Action Aesthetics: Realism and Martial Arts Cinema”) martial suture. As a way to explain the importance of ‘G’ Men for my conceptualization of martial suture, we can look at Cagney and Nolan’s “live drills” from near the end of the scene.

We enter the Jujitsu scene after Nolan has already had Cagney drill a couple of techniques, at which point he encourages Cagney to try employing them while facing active resistance. The two grappling sequences that follow establish the aesthetic blueprint of martial suture in relation to cinematic grappling. On the basis of what, in my “Action Aesthetics” essay, I call the attack-defense-counterattack pattern, grappling sequences in film typically follow a pattern where the first step is an attacker trying to grab, throw a punch or kick, or strike with an object; second, the grab is neutralized, the punch or kick is blocked or caught, or the strike is slipped or blocked; and third, having committed to and missed an offensive attack, the attacker is thwarted with a counter grappling technique.

We can see the attack-defense-counterattack pattern at work here in ‘G’ Men. Consider the first grappling sequence:

http://i1028.photobucket.com/albums/y344/MichaelAnthonyHunt/Bullitt/G-Men-Ba1_zpsd073328f.gif

In Shot A, Cagney attacks with a wristlock but Nolan successfully defends himself, after which, in Shot B, he flips Cagney with a counterattack (in the interest of increasing the visceral impact of the scene, a third shot is added to cap the sequence to emphasize Cagney’s rough landing on the mat). Utilizing a two-shot AB dyad, the attack-defense-counterattack pattern is rendered clearly and expressively via martial suture. The second sequence follows a similar pattern:

http://i1028.photobucket.com/albums/y344/MichaelAnthonyHunt/Bullitt/G-Men-Ba2_zps10b2f10e.gif

Once again, in Shot A, Cagney attacks with a wristlock but Nolan successfully defends himself, after which, in Shot B, he throws Cagney across the mat with a counterattack, the impact of which is registered once again in a third shot as Cagney comes to rest on the other side of the mat.

As I maintain, martial suture is a conceptually rigorous yet aesthetically flexible method for shooting and editing sequences of grappling action in martial arts cinema, and these two examples by no means exhaust the aesthetic variety of martial suture. They do, however, provide a solid foundation for the concept and highlight the intuitive visual schema for cinematic grappling still in use today, from the films of Steven Seagal (e.g. Above the Law, Marked for Death, and On Deadly Ground) to the Bourne trilogy and Donnie Yen’s Flash Point among innumerable others (see my “Action Aesthetics” essay for a more detailed discussion). ‘G’ Men thus exemplifies an element of martial arts cinema history lost to the passage of time but available to us today to be restored to its rightful place.

James Cagney. Blood on the Sun

Blood on the Sun

Ten years after Cagney first showed off his martial arts prowess in ‘G’ Men, he would once again incorporate the martial arts into one of his films, this time in a political thriller entitled Blood on the Sun. For years prior to (and for years after) this film, Cagney practiced Judo in his day-to-day life. His instructor was a former LAPD officer named John Halloran, who also appears in the film as the villainous Captain Oshima with whom Cagney battles in a climactic fight scene near the end of the film (Halloran appears in yellowface the offensiveness of which is hopefully mitigated by Cagney’s pragmatic decision to cast a known Judo expert and someone with whom he was very familiar for the sake of the integrity of the fight scene similar to the decisions made by Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan to cast real martial artists like Bob Wall, Chuck Norris, and Benny the Jet in their films).

Even though ‘G’ Men includes sequences of martial arts action, Blood on the Sun is the film with the best case (although, if anybody knows of other candidates, I would love to hear about them) for claiming the distinction of being the first American martial arts film (with Cagney thus having the best case for claiming the distinction of being the first American martial arts star). The plot of this film involves Cagney (here playing an American newspaperman in 1920s Japan) stumbling upon an evil plot by the Japanese military to take over the world (the story was inspired by the infamous Tanaka Memorial).

Blood on the Sun was one of a number of films (including, among many others, Dragon Seed, The Purple Heart, and the film I will be discussing next, Behind the Rising Sun) made in Hollywood during World War II which encouraged a pro-American sentiment against the evil machinations of the Japanese. However, despite its reactionary politics, Cagney strove to be pro-America without being too anti-Japan, and his disciplined practice of Judo gives his character in the film sympathy for and insights into Japanese culture distinct from most treatments of Japanese characters and culture from that era. I feel I should also call attention to the fact that the trope of an American mastering a martial art and, by extension, learning about and appreciating the culture responsible for the art has, of course, since become a hallmark of American martial arts movies, which is yet another plus for Blood on the Sun and its heraldic position in the history of martial arts cinema.

In any case, while I believe the politics in this film and the cultural representation of the Japanese are far from indefensible, my interest here is not to defend the film on political grounds. Rather, I am more interested in Cagney’s continued efforts to push American cinematic representations of the martial arts forward. It is interesting to note that (in a move that points towards the way Seagal would introduce himself in Above the Law) Cagney’s character is first introduced while he attends a Judo class.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAvuYnFhUkM

This introductory scene serves a number of different functions. First, it introduces us to Cagney; second, it introduces us to Cagney as a Judoka; and third, it introduces us to Cagney as someone familiar with and respectful of Japanese culture and customs. Despite being an American, Cagney is by no means an outsider in this country/culture, and the key to his survival over the course of the film is his reliance on both his cultural and martial savvy. A good example of this is in a scene where members of the Japanese police (led by Captain Oshima) have entered his home in search of the film’s version of the Tanaka Memorial and intend to take him in for questioning. Aware of the fact that the police will not hesitate to turn his place upside down and inside out looking for the document, Cagney hides it behind a picture of the Emperor, which he knows is the one thing the police would dare not disturb in their search.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1J9tdjDm_U

Added to which, when Cagney realizes the seriousness of the situation, he is prepared to fight and takes on a number of police officers in a fight scene that anticipates many later scenes from the likes of Chuck Norris, Steven Seagal, and their martial arts movie peers. Half a century before Austin Powers, the all-powerful “Judo Chop” also appears as the technique that ultimately brings Cagney down, with the dastardly Captain Oshima showing his masterful skill by virtue of his ability to incapacitate Cagney with a single strike. Cagney would get his revenge, though, in the climactic one-on-one showdown

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlejMy9zLdI

Today, this fight scene appears rather crude, but the ambition is commendable. Firstly, there are a number of skillfully sutured sequences of grappling, in particular the early sequence of Oshima countering an attempted punch from Cagney with a throw. Also of note beyond the standing throws and the martial suture is the choreography of the groundfighting. A lot of films even up to the present day have struggled to depict groundfighting in a manner both realistic and exciting (a dilemma discussed by Paul Bowman in his recent excursus on groundfighting), but Blood on the Sun is remarkable for its willingness to experiment with an aspect of cinematic martial arts still troubling to contemporary filmmakers.

Early in the fight, Cagney scores a big hip toss on Oshima and lands in kesa gatame (an alternative side mount position also known as the scarf hold). This sequence of action may be familiar to MMA fans who witnessed Ronda Rousey defeat Alexis Davis at UFC 175:

http://oi58.tinypic.com/sqgjtk.jpg

Cagney is able to keep Oshima pinned while the latter struggles to strike Cagney with his free arm, but eventually, Oshima hits an escape by bringing his hips in tight to Cagney’s body, grabbing him around the waist (sometimes referred to as a “seatbelt grip,” although this is not quite the grip used by Oshima here), and rolling him over in the opposite direction with the added leverage and momentum created.

Back on the feet, Cagney hits another takedown and then goes for a straight armbar. Oshima’s ability to kick Cagney in the face to escape the armbar is questionable at best, but lazy counter aside, the presence of an armbar attempt in the first place highlights once again the sophistication of the grappling choreography on display here. They continue to struggle, and in a scramble, Cagney dives for Oshima on the ground and manages to take his back. Cagney is only able to get one hook in, though, and while Oshima is fighting to escape the position, Cagney is struggling to secure a one-arm lapel choke from the back.

With reference to MMA again, this submission attempt on Cagney’s part calls to mind Royce Gracie’s victory over Remco Pardoel at UFC 2.

http://oi62.tinypic.com/4lm78y.jpg

All of the throws and groundfighting, despite a certain aesthetic crudeness, speak to a choreographic sophistication decades ahead of its time. Added to which, Cagney’s ability to mix punches and kicks in with his takedowns and submissions is what enables him to ultimately overcome Oshima, who is unable to deal with Cagney’s combination of striking and grappling. Not only was Cagney a movie martial artist before Hollywood knew of such a thing, he was a mixed martial artist, at that. Still known as one of the great actors and icons of the classical Hollywood cinema, Cagney deserves far more credit than he has received for his pioneering efforts in the realm of movie martial arts.

Behind the Rising Sun

Behind the Rising Sun

Shortly before the release of Blood on the Sun, famed filmmaker Edward Dmytryk (at the time an unknown B-movie director who would go on to achieve fame for his low-budget film noir classic Detour as well as more prestigious films such as The Caine Mutiny and Raintree County) released a film entitled Behind the Rising Sun. Compared to Blood on the Sun, Behind the Rising Sun is decidedly more ambitious with its politics; whereas the former was content to focus primarily on the crime and thriller elements of its plot, the latter by contrast focuses entirely on the political atmosphere in Japan immediately before and then during World War II. Like Blood on the Sun, though, my interest in this film is less to do with its politics and more to do with its inclusion of the martial arts. In fact, Behind the Rising Sun is one of the most remarkable films I’ve ever seen in terms of American representations of the martial arts in classical Hollywood, as it features a bona fide “style-versus-style” match-up between a Japanese representative of Judo and an American representative of boxing.

Of course, the style-versus-style conceit is familiar to anyone who knows the history of the UFC, but even before the first UFC in 1993, style-versus-style match-ups had been fought by the likes of Benny the Jet, Gene LeBell, Helio Gracie, and innumerable others. Indeed, martial artists have for ages pitted their styles against the styles of others. Behind the Rising Sun warrants attention due to the new visibility it gave this martial tradition, and although the context of this propagandistic narrative not surprisingly allows the American boxer to vanquish the Japanese Judoka, there is still an abundance of combative salience throughout the scene.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6R70m0JRAI

Upon entering the gym where the fight is to take place, the Americans are told of the proposed rules for the fight where it is suggested they either fight to one fall or best two out of three. To this, the boxer (played by film noir legend Robert Ryan) exclaims, “I’m no wrestler. I’ll fight any man hand-to-hand, but I’m no grunt-and-grapple guy.” Contrary to ‘G’ Men, where wrestling is used as a positive point of comparison with Jujitsu, in Behind the Rising Sun, both wrestling and Judo are equated with an inferior, less “manly” form of pseudo-fighting. The combative distortion in the name of patriotism was hardly unfamiliar at the time; however, as Joseph R. Svinth noted in an essay entitled “Judo Battles Wrestling”, such nationalized martial arts matches, while based on real events during the war between Americans and Japanese, actually led to the incorporation of Judo into U.S. Navy and Marine training as early as 1944.

A different narrative trajectory is seen in the fight in Behind the Rising Sun, however. After expressing his disdain for the “grunt-and-grapple guy,” the American boxer receives a rude awakening to the strength and skill of the Japanese Judoka. The actual choreography leaves much to be desired, and the Judoka’s strategy of engaging in a slug fest (or, more accurately, a chop fest) with the boxer rather than just moving in for clinches and easily taking him down (which he does on several occasions) raises a few eyebrows, but it’s easy to forgive these aspects of the fight considering how ahead-of-its-time the sequence is in other respects, in particular with the various grappling techniques. At one point, the Judoka hits a scissor leg takedown which Dmytryk visualizes with a skillful editing pattern in line with martial suture, while at another point, the Judoka attacks the boxer with a proper rear-naked choke (even going so far as to sneak the far hand behind the head to keep the opponent from pulling down on the hand and alleviating pressure on the choke).

In the end, the boxer emerges victorious, and unlike Blood on the Sun, it is entirely due to his boxing prowess as opposed to the fluidity of his attacks between striking and grappling (though it’s worth noting that, right before he delivers the knockout blow, he traps one of the Judoka’s arms to allow the administration of a flurry of punches, perhaps highlighting a certain in-fight adaptability). Even so, this fight is remarkably prescient vis-à-vis the boxer showing up to a mixed-style fight wearing his gloves (though it must be stated that the boxer in this film fared much better than Art Jimmerson did when he showed up to fight Royce Gracie at UFC 1) completely ignorant to his opponent’s style as well as the frequency with which the combatants hit the ground and are forced to scramble for positions rather than contesting a straight-up brawl.

While the late-20^th/early-21^st Century explosion of MMA into the popular consciousness would change the texture of movie fight scenes and see the incorporation of far more groundfighting, Behind the Rising Sun is yet another example from the era of classical Hollywood where styles like Judo had already started to change the way Americans conceptualized and experienced hand-to-hand combat.

Humphrey Bogart. Tokyo Joe

Tokyo Joe

Like other Hollywood stars such as Cagney, Cary Grant, and Spencer Tracy, Humphrey Bogart did not serve his country in World War II in military combat (it was reported at the time that he tried to enlist but was turned down because of his age, although he did still go to Africa with the USO) and instead served in cinematic combat by using his star power to fight celluloid bad guys in such films as Across the Pacific, Action in the North Atlantic, Sahara, and, of course, Casablanca. In my opinion, the most interesting film of Bogart’s that deals with World War II is the post-war occupation film Tokyo Joe. Set during the American occupation of Japan in the immediate post-war years, Tokyo Joe is an astonishingly blunt treatment of American involvement in the reconstruction of Japan.

Bogart’s character in the film is the former proprietor of “Tokyo Joe’s,” a famous nightclub (similar to the immortal “Rick’s” from Casablanca) that operated in the heart of Tokyo prior to the outbreak of World War II. Similar to Cagney’s character from Blood on the Sun, Bogart’s character was completely at home with the Japanese culture and customs, but returning after the war, he finds that American-Japanese relations have been transformed. Early in the film, he meets up with his old friend and business partner (played by Teru Shimada) in what used to be Tokyo Joe’s. They are thrilled to see each other after so many years, and in their interactions, there does not appear to be any cultural divide much less a cultural hierarchy. Yet, when Shimada realizes he is being observed with Bogart by other Japanese, he reverts to a stock deferential disposition. Bogart is confused by the change in attitude, and in an effort to break through the cultural barrier that seems to have been erected in his absence, he reminds his old friend about the bond forged over his teaching Shimada “the best Brooklyn English” while Shimada taught him Judo.

https://vimeo.com/135176758

The sparring session that follows is vastly inferior to Cagney’s efforts (indeed, Bogart’s health would not permit him to do much of the Judo, so much of the sequence features a horrendously obvious stunt man doing the lion’s share of the work) but its role within the narrative is salutary nonetheless. Pushing things even further than Cagney’s participation in the Judo class at the beginning of Blood on the Sun, Bogart’s horseplay with Shimada (during which they also have a conversation where they get caught up with what they have each been up to in the intervening years) transcends combat itself and becomes the means by which they reinstate their friendship.

By learning Judo, Bogart came to know another person; beyond the nationalistic pride to be felt by witnessing American representatives like Cagney and Ryan defeating Japanese Judoka in Blood on the Sun and Behind the Rising Sun, there are no propagandistic stakes in Bogart’s and Shimada’s encounter. The stakes are entirely interpersonal and the emotional tenor is friendly rather than competitive. Rather than a means by which to assert American supremacy over the Japanese, Judo is used in Tokyo Joe to counter precisely that kind of cultural logic. Similar to the bonds that would be forged in the student-teacher relationships depicted in, among innumerable other films, The Karate Kid, Kickboxer, and Only the Strong, the relationship between Bogart and Shimada points towards the possibility of mutual acknowledgment and friendship between America and Japan, a possibility that necessarily begins on the personal level in interactions with those who are different but not necessarily evil.

Pat and Mike

Pat and Mike

The final film I would like to discuss is one of the famed pairings of the real-life couple and super-acting duo Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. Made in 1952, Pat and Mike (the seventh of an eventual nine pairings between Tracy and Hepburn) is a romantic comedy set in the world of female athletics. In the film, Hepburn plays Pat Pemberton, an exceptionally skilled athlete who, at the start of the film, is working as a physical education instructor at Pacific Tech in California. Engaged to a man who serves as the embodiment of old-style patriarchal rule, Hepburn is struggling to find avenues to express herself athletically. In an effort to get out from under her fiancé’s thumb, she impulsively enters a women’s golf tournament. She nearly wins, and were it not for her fiancé being in attendance, she would have won. Even in losing, she has the good fortune to meet up with Tracy’s character, Mike Conovan, athletic manager and promoter extraordinaire and the man with the potential to foster Hepburn’s athletic expression.

Over the course of the film, Hepburn’s character shows off her talents in golf and tennis while also boasting expertise in skeet shooting, archery, basketball, baseball, and even boxing (strictly 16 oz. gloves, though, as she specifies to the astonished Tracy). In fact, during one scene where two of Tracy’s less scrupulous business partners are trying to “convince” him to fix a golf tournament by having Hepburn lose (the first of whom is played by George Mathews and the second of whom is played by a young Charles Bronson, here credited under his real name, Charles Buchinski), Hepburn even shows off her martial arts prowess.

https://vimeo.com/135174189

The two scenes in the above clip, first with the fight and then with the reenactment at the police station, offer a different take on the martial arts compared to most of the previous films I’ve discussed (in fact, Pat and Mike connects back to ‘G’ Men in an interesting way). Here, the martial arts have taken the form of athletic exercise and self-defense. Indeed, Pat and Mike actually anticipates the cultural status of the martial arts in America today where they’re predominantly culture-less. If, for example, someone in the U.S. wants to study Aikido, they can learn from anyone who has a gym, and instructors are not only frequently not from Japan, their “lineage” also frequently has nothing to do with any Japanese “roots.”

Furthermore, the connection between the martial arts and American athletics and self-defense anticipates the myriad cardio kickboxing and women’s self-defense classes that became such a huge industry in American martial arts, combat sport, and fitness circles. Indeed, it’s rather telling that, when asked where she learned to fight, Hepburn doesn’t respond with a story about how she visited the mysterious Orient and learned the secrets of the Shaolin monks or about how some old-school master taught her his deadly stuff in a Pai Mei scenario. Rather, she simply replies that she’d “been around physical ed. for years.” No Asian masters or cross-cultural literacy are required here. Just homebred American athletics.

As for the choreography, Hepburn eschews any flashy kicks or big throws. Instead, she is very direct and pragmatic with her attacks. She initially moves in behind Bronson, who is taken by surprise as Hepburn lifts him up by his pant legs and sends him crashing to the ground. She then strikes Mathews in the back of the neck with a backhanded Karate chop, grabs his collar and chokes him with a modified lapel choke, and then takes his glasses off and throws them away. Lastly, when the recovered Bronson comes in with a blackjack, Hepburn uses a forearm block to deflect the incoming strike – a defensive technique also favored by Seagal:

http://i.minus.com/ioLjtokUsYiQK.gif

After blocking Bronson’s incoming strike with her forearm, Hepburn proceeds to secure his wrist, disarm him, and then strike him with his own weapon. As it happens, Seagal is also fond of disarming people and then using their own weapons against them:

http://i1028.photobucket.com/albums/y344/MichaelAnthonyHunt/Bullitt/Marked-for-Death-Ba-st1_zps3dacf751.gif

http://i.imgur.com/T1lZc74.gif

The fighting in Pat and Mike may seem decidedly unspectacular even when compared to some of the other fight scenes I’ve discussed in this post (to say nothing of the more recognizable fight scenes of the Bruce Lee and Steven Seagal variety) but it’s precisely the quotidian nature of the combat as just another element of American sports and fitness that confers upon the scene its interest in light of subsequent developments in the American reception of the martial arts.

Conclusion

It goes without saying that my remarks over the course of this post by no means exhaust what can be said about these films and their depictions of the martial arts. Far more can be said about the aesthetics of ‘G’ Men and Blood on the Sun, about the cultural implications of the scenes in Behind the Rising Sun and Tokyo Joe, and about the gendered nature of the scenes from Pat and Mike. My efforts here have been solely to introduce these films to fans and scholars of martial arts cinema and to put them on the table to be opened up to further, more detailed discussion. In the interest of providing accurate historical assessments of the American reception and mediatization of the martial arts throughout history, I believe classical Hollywood cinema has much to offer historically-inclined fans/scholars interested in the history of American media representations of the martial arts, and the films that I’ve discussed here provide merely an introduction to previously uncharted territory in the vast and complex transnational history of martial arts cinema.

Putin watches a Kung Fu exhibition with the Abbot at the Shaolin Temple in Henan. Shaolin has become an important stop for visiting VIPs. Source: People's Daily.

Vladimir Putin watches a Kung Fu exhibition with the Abbot Shi Yongxin at the Shaolin Temple in Henan. Shaolin has become an important stop for visiting VIPs. Source: People’s Daily.

Introduction

Its been a while since our last update so there is a lot to be covered in today’s post. Let’s get to the news!

News on the Chinese Martial Arts

A single story has dominated the news coverage of the Chinese martial arts over the last few weeks. Shi Yongxin, the Abbot of the Shaolin Temple in Henan (regarded by many as the spiritual home of the Chinese martial arts) has been no stranger to criticism. Sometimes called the ‘CEO Monk,’ is both admired and faulted for his emphasis on modern methods and aggressive business strategy in building the Shaolin Temple’s brand. Under his leadership the organization has expanded, built daughter temples and promoted its martial arts heritage through a variety of media projects and traveling shows. Yet critics have questioned this emphasis on expansion at the expense of more traditional Buddhist values.

Some of the controversies that have swirled around Shi Yongxin have been of a decidedly more personal nature. In addition to questions of financial impropriety he was accused of soliciting prostitutes in 2011. In the last few weeks many of these same issues have erupted back into the public consciousness following the publication of a number of anonymous reports linking Shi Yongxin to the misappropriation of large sums of money, accusations that he was previously expelled from the temple and the revelation that he may have been living a double life which included the fathering of at least one child.

Whereas previous controversies had largely been tolerated, these new accusations come at a more sensitive time. On the one hand the Chinese government is currently conducting a high profile anti-corruption campaign. At the same time various religious organizations are coming under increased scrutiny. Shi Yongxi has been questioned by state authorities about these charges and was recently forced to cancel a public appearance in Thailand because of the controversy. At the same time there have been calls in the press for these charges to be dealt with seriously.

Chinese language social media services have provided the most detailed discussion and debate on this unfolding issue. But it has been fascinating to note the number of major Western media outlets (including CNN, Fortune, the Guardian, the Economic Times and the New York Times) who have decided that this story has legs. Given the amount of media attention these anonymous accusations have now garnered it will be interesting to watch both how the investigation progresses, and whether this has any long term impact on the image of the Shaolin temple in the West.

Wang Lin

The charges against Shi Yongxin were not the only story competing for reader interest in China over the last month. Even more sensational was the accusation that Wang Lin (a Qigong master who had built an extensive movement of followers) had murdered one of his own disciples on the heels of a falling out. Zou Yong, a wealthy businessman, provincial legislator and associate of Wang had vanished earlier in the month. The New York Times has an account of this case which you can see here, as well as this article by Sky News. Sascha Matuszak has attempted to contextualize the story over at the Fightland blog.

Bruce Lee statue in Hong Kong. Source: Wikimedia.

On a more positive note, the South China Morning Post has run a large number of stories relating to the martial arts over the last month. Two of these focused on Bruce Lee’s place in global culture and his special significance as a son of Hong Kong. The first (inspired by a collection of memorabilia) asked “How Bruce Lee made it ‘cool’ to be Chinese growing up in America.” This was followed by a somewhat hyperbolically titled editorial asking “Why does Hong Kong treat Bruce Lee like an outcast and refuse to honour its greatest son?” Bruce Lee fans will want to take a look at both of these pieces.

More interesting to me was this video profile of a Toyama-ryu Iaido (Japanese swordsmanship) school in Hong Kong. You can read more about this group on their webpage. It seems like an interesting group, and I was surprised to discover that the Toyama-ryu had such a well-organized presence in Hong Kong. Their style is something that I have been meaning to check out for years but have never quite managed to get around to.

Yasuaki Kurata, in Hong Kong for a Kendo seminar. Source: SCMP.

Lastly, the SCMP had a very interesting piece on Yasuaki Kurata, a Japanese martial artist and actor who became an important fixture in the Hong Kong martial arts and cinema scene during the 1970s. The article contains some nice reminisces as well the following quote which I think that every martial arts school should have hanging up somewhere:

“There are 24 hours in a day. Two should be used to train your willpower.”

A scene from Teddy Chen’s Killer Kung Fu. Source: Business World.

Stories from all Over

First up, CCTV ran a short piece on a Taijiquan themed martial arts show which recently opened in Dalian (Liaoning Province). As always the production values of performance looked great. Equally interesting for those us following the issue of “Kung Fu Diplomacy” was the fact that this show is eventually slated to perform internationally with the stated aim of “promote[ing] public awareness of Chinese martial arts and to maintain traditional culture.”

Is kung fu dying? Its a provocative question and one that we are forced to think about every so often. The following editorial on the Business World webpage recently decided to take a stab at the topic. Their answer? Things are not looking great for kung fu (at least not in film) and we can probably blame “kids these days….” But on the bright side things are looking good for the Filipino martial arts and Jay Ignacio’s documentary “The Bladed Hand” got a nod.

Jackie Chan. Source: Wikimedia.

I f kung fu is dying Jackie Chan does not seem to have gotten the memo. Forbes magazine recently released their list of the highest paid actors which has now been updated to include those working outside of the US film industry. Chan surprised many by appearing in second place with a total take last year of approximately $50 million USD. The only actor to make more than Chan was Robert Downey Jr. (also a student of the Chinese martial arts) who brought in a stunning $80 million. Here is the money quote:

“Jackie Chan is basically the Mickey Mouse of Chinese culture, a celebrity who is so omnipresent that his name has become shorthand,” says Grady Hendrix, cofounder of the New York Asian Film Festival.

Finally, students of Karate (or fans of the Karate Kid) will want to check out the article titled “The Real Mr. Miyagi” over at the Daily Beast. This piece discusses Kevin Derek’s documentary on Fumio Demura and his contributions to the Japanese martial arts in America. It is a well done piece, and it even has the seemingly mandatory Bruce Lee tie-in.

The Creation of Wing Chun by Judkins and Nielson.

Martial Arts Studies

First off, I am happy to announce that my book (with Sifu Jon Nielson) The Creation of Wing Chun: A Social History of the Southern Chinese Martial Arts, is now shipping from amazon and available to the public. Here is the publisher’s statement on the book:

This book explores the social history of southern Chinese martial arts and their contemporary importance to local identity and narratives of resistance. Hong Kong’s Bruce Lee ushered the Chinese martial arts onto an international stage in the 1970s. Lee’s teacher, Ip Man, master of Wing Chun Kung Fu, has recently emerged as a highly visible symbol of southern Chinese identity and pride. Benjamin N. Judkins and Jon Nielson examine the emergence of Wing Chun to reveal how this body of social practices developed and why individuals continue to turn to the martial arts as they navigate the challenges of a rapidly evolving environment. After surveying the development of hand combat traditions in Guangdong Province from roughly the start of the nineteenth century until 1949, the authors turn to Wing Chun, noting its development, the changing social attitudes towards this practice over time, and its ultimate emergence as a global art form.

Striking Beauty by Barry Allen

Students of martial arts studies should also note the release of Prof. Barry Allen’s (McMaster University, Hamilton Ontario) most recent volume, Striking Beauty: A Philosophical Look at the Asian Martial Arts (Columbia UP). I noticed that Stanley Henning contributed a blurb for the back of this book as well.

The first book to focus on the intersection of Western philosophy and the Asian martial arts, Striking Beauty collapses the boundaries between Eastern and Western thought, comparatively studying the historical and philosophical traditions of martial arts practice and their ethical value in the modern world. Expanding Western philosophy’s global outlook, the book forces a theoretical reckoning with the concerns of Chinese philosophy and the aesthetic and technical dimensions of martial arts practice.

Striking Beauty explains the relationship between Asian martial arts and the Chinese philosophical traditions of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism in addition to the strategic wisdom of Sunzi’s Art of War. It connects martial arts practice to the Western concepts of mind-body dualism and materialism, sports aesthetics, and the ethics of violence. Incorporating innovations in body phenomenology, somaesthetics, and embodied cognition, the work ameliorates Western philosophy’s hostility toward the body, emphasizing the pleasure of watching and engaging in martial arts, along with their beauty and the ethical problem of their violence.

Global Perspectives on Women in Combat Sports

Readers will also want to remember that Global Perspectives on Women in Combat Sports: Women Warriors around the World (Palgrave Macmillan) by Alex Channon (Editor), Christopher R. Matthews (Editor) is due to drop on August 26^th

This volume presents a wide-reaching overview of contemporary research and scholarship on women’s engagement in a range of combat sports across the world. Including chapters on boxing, wrestling, mixed martial arts, and various other fighting disciplines, the collection provides readers with a comprehensive analysis of the current significance of women’s involvement in these sports, as well as charting many of the problems and opportunities they face in establishing and developing careers within them.

With contributions drawing from anthropology, phenomenology, philosophy, sociology, and sport psychology, this book will appeal to readers interested in the development of women’s sport; the relationship between sport and gender; and the wider, contemporary social significance of combat sports around the world.

Grappling with History – Martial Arts in Classical Hollywood Cinema by Kyle Barrowman

A number of shorter works have recently been posted online. First, Wayne Wong has contributed an extensive and probing review of Sabrina Qiong Yu’s monograph Jet Li – Chinese Masculinity and Transnational Film Stardom (Edinburgh University Press) to the Martial Arts Studies webpage. You can read an advance copy of his discussion here. This discussion will be important for both students of film and cultural studies as well as Jet Li fans.

Bianca Miarka recently posted a copy of her paper “Reinterpreting the History of Women’s Judo in Japan” to Academia.edu. Anyone interested in the role of gender in the modern martial arts will probably want to be familiar with this. Likewise, Paul Bowman asks some provocative questions about the practice and portrayal of the martial arts in his latest essay titled “Mediatized Movements: Martial Artistry and Media Culture.” Finally, film studies students and lovers of classic Hollywood movies will probably want to check out Kyle Barrowman’s guest post here at Kung Fu Tea examining the portrayal of the Asian martial arts in golden age American cinema.

Chinese Swords: An Ancient Tradition and Modern Training.

On a more practical note there are two other recent publications that readers of Kung Fu Tea may find interesting. The first is an electronic collection of articles from the Journal of Asian Martial Arts titled Chinese Swords: An Ancient Tradition and Modern Training. While this is not new material it might be nice to have it all in one place. Secondly, Chineselongsword.com has just released their latest translation. This is a new edition of General Qi Jiguang’s “Essentials of the Fist.” Obviously this is a work that has had a profound affect on the subsequent development of the Chinese martial arts. Head on over and check it out.

Kung Fu Tea on Facebook

As always there is a lot going on at the Kung Fu Tea Facebook group and this last month has been no exception. We looked at vintage photographs of Chinese soldiers, discussed Tongbeiquan training techniques, and even celebrated a birthday! Joining the Facebook group is also a great way of keeping up with everything that is happening here at Kung Fu Tea.

If its been a while since your last visit, head on over and see what you have been missing.

benjudkins:

Here is the latest essay from the Martial Arts Studies journal homepage. Jet Li fans may find this to be especially interesting!

Originally posted on Martial Arts Studies:

Sabrina Qiong Yu. 2015. Jet Li: Chinese Masculinity and Transnational Film Stardom. Edinburgh University Press. 224 pages.

Reviewed by Wayne Wong

Chinese audiences may find it difficult to abide Jet Li’s latest characterization in Sylvester Stallone’s The Expendables 3 (2014), where Arnold Schwarzenegger in the final scene cuddles up to Li as the two are nuzzling into each other, suggesting (as confirmed by the director) a homosexual relationship rarely portrayed by the protagonists of the “hard-core” action genre. Embodied by his name (Yinyang) in the film, Li’s diverse, often conflicting transnational star image – a constant oscillation between masculinity and femininity, hero and villain, and even national and transnational – is a central motif of Jet Li: Chinese Masculinity and Transnational Film Stardom, Sabrina Yu’s multifaceted examination of Li’s complicated start text. Li’s gender transgressive screen persona, as Yu illustrates, started two decades earlier in Swordsman…

View original 5,825 more words

“The 18th (Royal Irish) Regiment of Foot, At the Storming of the Fortress of Amoy, August 26th 1841.” This print shows a highly imaginative recreation of events. While Tiger Soldiers were located in Amoy, the fortress actually fell with little resistance after a prolonged naval bombardment.

Introduction

Tigers have long been a symbol of martial values in Chinese culture. Many martial arts styles make use of tiger-based symbolism. This symbolism may reflect the tiger’s long association with the imperial military. Warrior figures wearing tiger skins or hoods are attested in Chinese art from at least the time of the Sui Dynasty (AD581-618) if not earlier. [Link] More recently, various troops of the Qing dynasty made symbolic use of tiger imagery, both in their uniforms and weapons.

Nor was this bit of zoomorphic trivia lost on China’s western observers during the 19th and early 20th century. While China remained a closed country through the middle of the 19th century, and relatively few individuals had the opportunity to actually travel to its ports, images of “Tiger Soldiers” enjoyed a prominent place in the western images of the mythic land of the Celestial Empire from the final years of the 18th century until roughly the era of the Boxer Uprising.

Why? How did a small set of images of a single class of soldier come to so dominate the western imagination of China and her military?

Recently I have been thinking about the history and nature of “Kung Fu Diplomacy.” By this I mean the various ways in which the government has attempted to deploy the image of the traditional martial arts as an active intervention in the way that the global public views the rising prominence of the Chinese state. This is only one small aspect of China’s overarching public diplomacy strategy, and we would do well to remember that in the current era all governments engage in this sort of “national brand building.” To the extent that it creates genuine cultural understanding and dissipates irrational fears, such efforts probably have a stabilizing effect on the global political discourse.

All of which is to say, we should not be surprised by the number of martial arts demonstrations that are hosted every year by “Confucius Institutes” around the world. Given my academic background in International Relations I find this (somewhat paradoxical) use of the traditional fighting arts in the constructing a “peaceful” image of a rising super power to be fascinating.

Many questions remain as to how and when different public diplomacy strategies are likely to be most successful. For instance, are these efforts most likely to yield fruit when they are tightly coordinated by a single government agency (allow one to stay on message)? Or do they stand the best chance of success when individual actors in civil society (who may have a better sense of what domestic and foreign audiences want) are allowed to take the lead? And what happens when you find yourself attempting to counteract a powerful and much less complimentary set of narratives that are already popular abroad? How does the new narrative edit, augment or replace the old one?

This last question should be of particular interest to students of martial arts studies. Long before the Chinese government began to officially promote Wushu abroad, individual actors within both Chinese society and the diaspora had taken up this task. Likewise, some foreign observers, writers, artists and activists had also seized on certain key symbols to argue that Chinese culture was both simultaneously backwards and threatening. Its predilection towards violence, in addition to the problem of low-cost labor, required its active exclusion from western political and social life.

When Bruce Lee and the various pioneers of the Chinese martial arts began to appear in the middle of the 20th century they were not working with a blank canvas. Instead they were forced to confront, transform and co-opt a number of images that were already firmly planted in the public imagination. The architects of “Kung Fu Diplomacy” face a similar task to today. On the one hand they seek to use the traditional martial arts to create a favorable and non-threatening image. Yet the symbols that they employ already have a long and complex genealogy. For instance, every child who has ever watched Saturday morning cartoons already knows that in Kung Fu there is a “Tiger style.” And it turns out that impressionable western youth have “known” this (or something similar) for a very long time…

A Soldier of the Chinese Infintry. Costumes of China, 1805 by William Alexander.

“A Soldier of the Chinese Infantry.” Costumes of China, 1805 by William Alexander.

The Emergence of the Tiger Soldier

Who first introduced the image of the Chinese martial tiger to the West? Chinese soldiers and martial artists had been painting tiger faces on wicker shields (often carried on their ships) for a very long time. Early missionary accounts and dictionary entries indicate that European visitors to Guangzhou and the Pearl River Delta had been familiar with this imagery since their first arrival. Yet it does not appear that these early explorers were responsible to importing this image onto the western popular imagination.

For that we must turn to William Alexander (10 April 1767 – 23 July 1816). A British artist and noted watercolorist, Alexander supported himself for more than a decade by selling engravings of daily life in China. His works (which range in date from the final decade of the 18th century to the first of the 19th) emerged at a time when the western public still held a highly romantic and positive view of China.

This feeling of good will would sour with the Opium Wars. It then turned to mocking derision following China many military defeats in the second half of the 19th century. Yet Alexander’s images of Chinese life had a profound impact prior to this major realignment in public opinion. They set the foundation for how China would be visualized for much of the 19th century, and some of his illustrations (especially those of soldiers holding traditional and outdated weapons) were reprinted for decades.

Alexander’s images are interesting to historians for another reason as well. Unlike most commercial illustrators in Europe during the early 19th century, he was one of the few westerners to have traveled extensively throughout the interior of China. In 1792 he was appointed as the junior artist to accompany the Earl of Macartney’s diplomatic mission to China. While this embassy ultimately failed to establish permanent diplomatic relations or a more open trade system, it did provide a small number of western diplomats with invaluable insights into Chinese life and government.

Alexander made extensive sketches throughout the trip and he also recorded his observations in detailed journals. He was fascinated by the sights, textures and details of daily of life. His work has provided historians with a rich record of the sorts of details that more official histories generally omit.

After returning to the UK Alexander began to turn his sketches and water colors into engravings for various publications and direct sales to the public. These were often augmented with notes from his journals helping to contextualize the scenes. Many of his early works feature richly illustrated backgrounds.

As time progressed Alexander began to cut and paste figures from sketches into new scenes. The illustrated backgrounds began to disappear and (perhaps under the influence of the increasingly popular export painting coming out of Guangzhou and Foshan) his illustrations increasingly stood isolated in a decontextualized space. While still aesthetically pleasing (he was after all an artist), historians are most likely to find Alexander’s earlier works to be the most interesting.

Perhaps his masterpiece was the 1805 bound volume Costumes of China. His first five illustrations appealed directly his audience’s curiosity (and orientalist fantasies) about the mysterious Middle Kingdom. Here we see pictures of a prosperous peasant family, a pagoda (a very popular symbol due to its appearance on Willow Ware porcelain) and a picturesque sailing vessel.

This initial set of illustrations is surrounded by two more martial images. The first is of a military official carrying both a bow and a sword. The latter is a now iconic picture of a Tiger Soldier, one that was reproduced literally dozens of times over the coming decades. Alexander included the following description with his illustration:

A CHINESE SOLDIER OF INFANTRY,

Or Tiger of War.

THE dress of the Chinese is generally loose; the soldiers of this part of the army, with few exceptions, are the only natives whose close habit discovers the formation of the limbs.

The general uniform of the Chinese troops is cumbrous and inconvenient; this of the Tiger of War, is much better adapted for military action.

The Missionaries have denominated them TIGERS OF WAR, from their dress, which has some resemblance to that animal; being striped, and having ears on the cap.

They are armed with a scimitar of rude workmanship, and a shield of wicker or basket-work, so well manufactured, as to resist the heaviest blow from a sword. On it is painted the face of an imaginary monster, which (like that of Medusa) is supposed to possess the power of petrifying the beholder.

At a distance is seen a Military Post, with the Imperial flag, which is yellow, hoisted near it.

William Alexander. 1805. The Costumes of China: Illustrated in 48 Coloured Engravings. London: William Miller, Albemarle Street. page 6.

This soldier’s costume is brightly colored and stripped. His hood has the ears that were noted by so many western observers. The uniform lacks a tail, which is sometimes described, but its presence is almost suggested by the sword’s scabbard. Of special interest in the highly detailed image of the wicker shield which also shares the tiger motif. Alexander’s account, which received mass circulation in its various reprints, also introduces the western reading public to the theory that the “Tigers of War” were (among other things) an exercise in psychological warfare.

“A Chinese Military Post.” 1796. An earlier view of Tiger Soldiers by William Alexander.

While this is by far William Alexander’s best known image of a Tiger Soldier, it was not his first. In an earlier 1796 illustration titled “A Chinese Military Post” he illustrated a (possibly composite) scene of military training in Qing dynasty. Five soldiers and a standard bearer occupy the piece’s foreground. But if the viewer looks off to the left two Tiger Soldiers sparring with sabers and wicker shields can clearly be seen. In the same year Alexander also published a more detailed technical study of common Chinese weapons which included a tiger shield.

It is interesting to note what Alexander does not say about these soldiers. There is no hint of the ridicule that would come to dominate later accounts. Of course in 1792 sabers were still a critical element of the European battlefield. Instead his only comment was that the Tiger uniforms were actually better fitting and more practical than the garb that many other soldiers received.

A comprehensive discussion of every subsequent appearance of Tiger Soldiers in the western press over the next century would be a substantial undertaking, though it might make for a fascinating book chapter. What is important to note is that following Alexander, these figures became an increasingly common theme in the western imagination of the Chinese military. While their symbolic meaning would take on a variety of connotations over the years, the basic visual image continued to follow the pattern first laid down by Alexander in the opening years of the 19th century. One wonders if, on some psychological level, the subsequent scorn directed at accounts of the Tiger Soldiers was not overcompensation for the earlier habit of romanticizing every aspect of Chinese life?

One can begin to see this process unfold in the following quote. William Alexander can be classified as an early pioneer of the travelogue literature that dominated so much of the reading public’s taste in the 19th century. By contrast the Scottish writer Charles Macfarlane (1799–1858) exemplified important trends in the maturing genera.

Known both for his novels and non-fiction descriptions of far off lands, Macfarlane spent much of his life away from the United Kingdom. Like other gentlemen of his generation he toured Europe. Being of a more adventurous mindset he also traveled to Turkey at multiple points in his life. I can find no evidence that Macfarlane ever made the trip to Asia, but that did not stop the now well established writer from producing books on life in both Japan and China. Once again, Tiger Soldiers were a topic of conversation.

“The soldiers are commonly called the imperial tigers or the celestial tigers. They bear on their shields, caps, or in the front of their dress, representations of all sorts of ferocious animals; but the figure of the tiger is the one most generally in use; and hence the nickname. All this appears ridiculous enough, and yet absurdities of the same sort are still allowed to exist among us. In our military uniforms we see tigers, lions, and other animals; and all that foppery of fur chaps, schabraques, and man-millinery, which disfigures our grenadiers and hussars, seems to deprive us of the right of laughing at the Chinese tigers.

Some European troops have even borrowed another military detail from the Chinese; at least the Spaniards pretend that in former times the Portuguese inserted into their general orders this laughable injunction, “Present a fierce face to the enemy!” and that the Portuguese soldiers always went into battle with a savage countenance, making warlike gesticulations, and showing their teeth to the foe. At the present day, the poor, tame, spiritless tigers of the Middle Kingdom, when they can be made to face an enemy at all, put on a fearful expression, make terrible gestures and grimaces, and set up a yell like that of the monsters of the forest and jungle.”
Charles Macfarlane. 1853. The Chinese Revolution: with details of the habits, manners, and customs of China and the Chinese. London: George Routledge and Co. pp. 55-56.

The first thing that should become evident after reviewing these passages is the extent to which 19th century travel writing was a self-reflective process. The outbreak of the Taping Rebellion had spurred a new round of popular interest in Chinese life. Indeed, one can detect some interesting resonances with Thomas Taylor Meadows’s 1856 work The Chinese and their Rebellions, in these passages. Of course Meadows had extensive on the ground experience in China as he had worked there for a number of years and even developed his own intelligence operation.

Still, one suspects that Macfarlane’s lack of first-hand information may not have been as much of an impediment as it first appears. Rather than finding the “truth” about the Chinese state or society, passages such as this one appear to be exercises in the construction of British nationalism through the lens of national comparison. Thus the rising tide of nationalism, and the demand for comparisons that it always seems to generate, might be another reason for the 19th century’s disillusionment with China.

In these passages Macfarlane picks up on the fact that tigers were sometimes used as a more general metaphor for Chinese troops. Indeed, missionary dictionaries published in the early 19th century note this same fact. Yet the reference to tiger inspired shields, caps and uniforms suggest that the following passages may also be seen as including the “Tiger Soldiers.” Indeed, that is likely how Macfarlane’s readers would have taken them.

While such animal imagery is held out for ridicule, the author makes it clear that European military forces were in no way immune to these same charges. More interesting to me is the description of various sorts of pantomime being employed in battle in an attempt to scare the enemy. Both Meadows and other British officers involved in the Opium Wars reported this same sort of behavior. One wonders to what extent it shares a common root with animal forms in the modern martial arts.

“Advance of the Tigers” (Part 1) from Harper’s Weekly, 1876. Source: Author’s personal collection.

“Advance of the Tigers” (Part 2) from Harper’s Weekly, 1876. Source: Author’s personal collection.

Macfarlane’s exploration of comparative-animal symbolism in no way exhausted the public’s curiosity on the subject. I recently ran across a pair of engravings from the November 11, 1876 issue of Harper’s Weekly (p. 923) that nicely illustrated the evolving western attitude towards China and its perceived military weakness during the era of the “Unequal Treaties.” Any respect that had been present in earlier treatments had now given way to loud derision. It should be noted that this article was published six years after the 1870 Naturalization Act (barring Chinese individuals from obtaining US citizenship) and six years prior to the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act.

The article which accompanies the two part illustration reads in part:

“…though a very simple sword exercise, keeping time to a melancholy sounding bugle, and at each note uttering a most horrible yell. Then follows the most extraordinary sight represented in the second drawing. At the sound of a drum the whole body of tigers puts their heads on the ground, and, with another terrific yell, roll over like acrobats, retaining in their hands both sword and shield. In a second they are on their legs again, and the acrobatic performance is repeated. Just what the object of this most astonishing maneuver may be our artist declares himself unable to ascertain, but the amazement of an enemy on beholding it may easily be imagined.

The testimony already given in regard to the inefficiency of the Chinese army is corroborated by the Marquis de Moges, who says that ‘two regiments of Zouaves and two of chasseurs would suffice to conquer all of China. There is not’ he continues, ‘a corps in the empire that could stand fast under a bayonet charge. The sight of a body of men marching coolly and resolutely up to them is so alien to their nature, so utterly incomprehensible and terrible, that all courage deserts them, and it is ten to one if they do not immediately take to their heels.”
Obviously the “before and after” illustration of the Chinese unit’s “acrobatic” performance is the most interesting aspect of this particular report. I do not think that I have ever run across anything quite like this before, and it must have made a powerful (and less than positive) effect on the readers. Once again, Chinese soldiers are referred to as Tigers in the metaphorical sense. Whatever meaning this appellation may have originally carried has now been replaced with irony as this report suggest that these men actually represent everything that tigers are NOT. Their shields are shown to be decorated, but no details are identifiable. This training is once again being brought to the reader for the explicit purpose of contrasting it with the simple utility of a western bayonet charge.”

“A ride to Little Tibet: Chinese military exercise at Durbuljin, near Chuguchak.–Manchu soldiers at sword drill.” Daily Graphic. October 15, 1891. Source: Author’s personal collection.

In 1899 Mrs. Archibald Little (1838–1908) opened another front again China’s Tiger Soldiers. On the one hand her account indicates that infantry dressed in the Tiger uniform was still very much present in the military’s organizational flow chart. On the other hand she goes on to deny that they actually exist at all, except perhaps as an accounting expediency in China’s notoriously corrupt military.

Mrs. Little, the wife of merchant, lived and wrote in China for most of her adult life. She was probably best known for her novels (including A Marriage in China, 1899), journalism and activism. Recounting an episode from her own travels in 1899 she writes:

“At Ichang, a thousand miles up the river Yangtse, there is a regiment of soldiers dressed as tigers; but I never could persuade any of the foreign officials to escort me to see them maneuver, the European opinion being that not even the presence of an inspecting general would awe the Tiger Soldiers sufficiently to make it safe to take a foreign lady to see them.

I was told that the Tigers were not really soldiers at all, but that some officers drew pay for them as if they existed; and then when the General came to inspect, all the beggars and riff-raff of the city put on the Tiger uniform over their rags, turned out in so disorderly a condition that even their officers were afraid of them. And so it turned out that, except from a passing steamer, I never saw Chinese soldiers drill till I did so at Woosung, the new Treaty Port, and the junction of the Whangpoo, on which Shanghai is situated, with the Great River Yangtse.”

Archibald Little. 1899. Intimate China: The Chinese as I have seen them. London: Hutchinson & Co. pp. 269-270

What follows is a page long description of Mrs. Little’s observation of military drills near Shanghai. In sharp contrast to the previous paragraph, she observed that these soldiers were well armed, skilled with both rifle and lance, well disciplined and very professional. Aside from some leaping about with lances in the middle of their drill she reported nothing off-putting about their performance. Unfortunately for us they apparently had no tigers in their ranks.

This then returns our attention to her earlier account of the phantom tiger unit. Numerous other sources attest to corrupt officers pocketing the paychecks of ghost soldiers. Indeed, the Chinese government itself was well aware of the problem and this was one of the reasons why it was reluctant to hire militia units. They (or more properly their commanders) tended to be particularly prone to this sort of corruption.

The other very interesting thing about this account is the realization that the individuals who manned this unit (to the extent that it existed) were thought to be locally recruited civilians. Of course to do an even passable job one strongly suspects that many of these Tiger Soldiers would have been martial artists recruited as “braves” to stiffen the unit on an “as needed” basis. Of course swords and shields would have been weapons well suited to local martial artists, though Mrs. Archibald’s report suggests that the unit’s discipline left something to be desired.

Our final account of “Tiger Soldiers” is provided by Wilbur J. Chamberlin (1866-1901) a reporter best known for his work on the Boxer Uprising, who died at the tragically young age of 35. Chamberlin was a career journalist and who spent the last decade of his life working for the New York Sun. In a period not generally remembered for its nuanced public discussion of Chinese politics, his reporting was unique as it argued that aggressive missionary work and the actions of foreign soldiers (among other factors) had set the stage for the tragic events which followed. Most modern readings of the Boxer Uprising now share this same basic conclusion.

Of course the Boxer Uprising was also a watershed event in the development of the Chinese martial arts. As I have argued elsewhere, it was the moment when most Chinese reformers turned their backs on the traditional fighting arts (which they blamed for the crushing reparations that the country was forced to bear). Increasingly they viewed these practices as too superstitious, backwards and inefficient to have any place in the new China. Put slightly differently, China’s martial arts reformers would spend much of the first half of the 20th century attempting to overcome the legacy of the Boxer Uprising.

So how did the legacy of the Tiger Soldiers fare in this post-Boxer environment?

“This morning I was going through the Imperial City when I saw a Chinaman dressed in a garment that looked like a tiger-skin, and thereby hangs a tale—a tail, by the way, hung from the garment. The fellow was sufficiently interesting for me to inquire about, and I found he was one the Imperial Army. He belonged to the Tiger Brigade. Now don’t laugh and I’ll tell you about it.

It seems that the Chinese have an idea that noise is a frightful thing. You really wouldn’t think that this was true if you were in Peking a moment and listened to the din, or spent a minute or two watching the progress of a conversation between two Chinamen, or, particularly, two Chinese women. But it is a fact. And if noise can be associated with an object of which the ordinary man is afraid, so much the better. The ordinary man, of course, is afraid of a tiger, so what could be better than brigade of tigers to strike terror to the hearts of your enemies. Now tigers are plentiful in this benighted country, but they are not so easily caught nor are they easily trained, so handling as many as a thousand of them would be exceedingly interesting, if not dangerous. Real tigers are really not necessary. If you can make your enemy believe you have thousand trained tigers coming to devour him, that is just as good as if you had the tigers, and that is the secret of the Tiger Brigade.

The Chinese have not a thousand, but several thousand, of these tiger soldiers. They make uniforms for them of bright yellow cloth and on this they paint the black stripes in imitation of the tiger’s skin. They sew on a striped tail and the tiger soldier is ready to go forth to battle. In war times the brigade is put right to the front of the army. When the army gets near to the enemy—near enough to see plainly—the tiger soldiers drop on their hands and knees and begin to roar as loudly as their lungs will let them. If the imagination of the enemy is good and strong, like that of a Journal reporter, he immediately sees several thousand ferocious tigers advancing upon him to devour him and he runs as if Old Nick himself were after him. Now what do you think of that for an idea in the year of our Lord 1900? It is not much wonder, is it, that anybody who wants to can step in and whip China, or that she is almost powerless to resist any attack that can be made on her. Yet there are people living who talk about the “the yellow peril” and the invasion and over-running of Europe by it—the peril being the Chinese who use Tiger Brigades! The longer we live the more we learn.”

“Peking, China, Friday, December 14th 1900.” Wilbur J. Chamberlin. 1904. Ordered to China: Letters of Wilbur J. Chamberlin. London: Methuen & Co. 195-196.

As should be evident from the preceding passages, the author is not writing here strictly in his role as a journalist. While Chamberlin aspired to write serious books, his short life foreclosed that possibility. The one work that was published before his death was a book of letters. One suspects that this account of the “Tiger Soldiers” may have been included as an elaborate pretext for making a jab at the reporters of the Journal. Still, it indicates a continuing interest in the appearance and behavior of Tiger Soldiers more than 100 years after their first appearance in the popular literature.

Unfortunately in the aftermath of the Boxer Uprising these troops with their acrobat skills and culturally specific imagery seem more antiquated than ever. As Chamberlin illustrates, in the western mind they have come to represent everything that is wrong with China’s approach to global competition.

A vintage french postcard showing military uniforms from various Asian countries. Source: Author’s personal collection.

Conclusion

This essay began with the observation that the traditional martial arts have become an element of China’s public diplomacy strategy. Yet no attempt at fashioning a “national brand” happens in a vacuum. Many players have a hand in this game. Nor are the basic signs and symbols of cultural diplomacy blank pages upon which any meaning can be written.

While animal symbolism is a beloved aspect of the modern Chinese martial arts, some of these associations (particularly those linking tigers to Chinese martial values) have been under discussion in the west for literally hundreds of years. By the first decade of the 19th century tigers were already linked to an increasingly antiquated symbolic complex of traditional weapons, psychological warfare, acrobatic combat and animal pantomime within the western imagination.

It is worth stating, for the record, that the one thing that we have not learned much about in this essay is the reality of the “Tiger Soldiers.” Who were they? What unique functions did they perform? How were they trained? What were their lives actually like?

These are questions that must be left to actual military historians. Instead the quotes and images provided here demonstrated both the ongoing presence and subtle evolution of these symbols within western popular culture over the course of a century. Indeed, the public’s judgement of the Tiger Soldier seems to closely track the military fortunes of the Chinese empire as a whole.

This suggests a simple answer to an important question. Why were western individuals so keen to pick up the Japanese martial arts (Jujitsu and Judo were already known in the west by the time of Chamberlin’s concluding observation) while the Chinese martial arts had to wait for the 1970s to begin to gain any serious recognition? There seems to be no thought in these reports that the strange acrobatic maneuvers reported by various observers might constitute a distinct body of worthwhile martial practice. Yet at roughly the same time western newspapers were reporting on Judo its links to the successes of the Japanese military.

It seems that for the reading public conquest on the battlefield revealed a nation’s true “character.” The victory of the Japanese over the Chinese and Russians exposed traits worth emulating. This, in turn, led to the hope that the techniques and values of Japanese hand combat could be taught and commercially appropriated.

China’s long string of defeats instead suggested that its traditional combat methods were more akin to a vice to be overcome, rather than something to be emulated. To the extent that they were seen as an extension of the country’s national character, they were not even something that could be taught. With the exception of a handful of police and military personal who had worked in China, I suspect that it didn’t really occur to most Western observers that China even possessed a system of “martial arts” until the second half of the 20th century. Despite persistent efforts by some individuals to promote or publicize this fact, “the eye cannot see what the mind does not know.”

All of this suggests two important conclusions which must be accounted for in our future explorations of “Kung Fu Diplomacy.” First, the role of social and media actors (basically non-governmental agents) cannot be ignored in understanding the formation of cultural capital. Some of the most important of these agents may even be located with the target’s society.

Secondly, exogenous shocks or events on the international stage (such as the Opium War and the Boxer Uprising) will always impact how these symbols are perceived. The good news is that through hard work a more positive public image of the Chinese martial arts and its use of animal imagery could be constructed. Yet since each of these symbols contains many layers of historically and psychologically accumulated meaning, the potential for unpredictability remains ever present. Cultural meaning is never as stable or predictable as the architects of public diplomacy campaigns might like.

oOo

If you enjoyed this essay you might also want to read: 1928: The Danger of Telling a Single Story about the Chinese Martial Arts

oOo

A close up of Donnie Yen in a cast photo for Rogue One. Source: Starwars.com

1977 vs. 1978: A Banner Year for Martial Arts Films

Like all good blog posts dealing with popular culture and kung fu, this one starts by assuming the existence of time travel.

In a sense this is what the martial arts have always been about. It can be seen in your average kung fu school on any given Tuesday night as individuals turn to their practice in an attempt to feel what it would have been like to be a different kind of person in a very different place. This promise has always been part of the appeal of the traditional martial arts in the West. They are seen as an embodied avenue to a far off place.

But for now let us imagine that our newly gained powers over time and space are less metaphorical. And the subject of today’s research will be the effect of cinema on the modern appeal of the Asian martial arts in the West. Or put another way, what was the process by which we came to accept these images and stories as a normal part of western consumer culture?

The real dilemma arises when we try to decide on a year. My theory is that there are basically two sorts of martial arts studies scholars. Some would opt to visit the year 1978, and then there are those who would grab the control panel and launch us back to 1977 instead.

1978 would be an obvious choice for students interested in the history of the cultural appropriation of the martial arts in the West. Actually it would be a great year for anyone who just loves classic kung fu films. What will we find in the theaters? Perhaps the biggest titles of the year were The Five Deadly Venoms, The 36th Chamber of Shaolin, and the first installment of Jackie Chan’s iconic Drunken Master (my personal favorite). For those with more specific tastes there was also Heroes of the East and Warriors Two (a must for Wing Chun students). Even Bruce Lee makes his own time traveling appearance with the 1978 debut of Game of Death.

By comparison the pickings in 1977 appear to be slim. Executioners from Shaolin is certainly a “must see” film. But I suspect that most of us would skip Snake-Crane Secret or the 18 Weapons of Kung Fu.

Still, a number of Japanese titles debuted in 1977. This is somewhat ironic as the sword wielding monastic warriors, escaped from the wreckage of a burning temple, that the year is best remembered for are the now iconic Jedi Knights of the Star Wars franchise, not the samurai who inspired them. Indeed, it was George Lucas’ highly creative vision for a space opera combining elements of western serials and samurai theater that would ultimately introduce me, and most of my friends, to the outlines of the Shaolin mythos.

I have always found this to be a little surprising given the popularity of all of those kung fu films throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Still, nothing succeeds quite like success. And Star Wars proved to be an incredible vehicle for appropriating certain key elements of Japanese and Chinese martial arts culture (as well as the imagery of Western knighthood) and feeding it back to audiences in ways that were deemed to be inspirational rather than “highbrow” (e.g., a Kurosawa film) or sketchy and dangerous (let us remember for a moment the sorts of theaters that actually played kung fu films back in the day).

1978 was a year with some fantastic films, but I think that I would still choose to visit 1977. Star Wars hit exactly the right notes for its cultural moment, and in so doing it made critical aspects of the Asian martial arts (including cryptic masters, the nobility of the sword, Qi based mysticism and the promise of martial excellence through the quest for “lost lineages”) desirable to western consumers.

One might object that the original Star Wars films themselves did not feature “proper martial arts,” and instead focused only on fencing and mysticism rather than the kicks and acrobatics that were seen in other films. Of course China and Japan produced their own genres of “swordsmen” films. And if one were to make an argument in the same vein as Krug (2001), it was Star Wars that did the heavy lifting of making these once esoteric aspects of the world of the Asian martial arts culturally and commercially available to suburban kids across the country.

From there it was an easy transition to the closest Tae Kwon Do, Karate or Kung Fu school. In that sense Star Wars functioned almost as a cultural enzyme driving forward a process of social transformation that was larger than anything that its creators envisioned.

And while “proper martial arts” may have been missing from the big screen, they would go on to play a prominent role in the “Expanded Universe” of comic books, video games and novels that were to follow. The Seven Lightsaber Forms of the Jedi Order, with their excruciatingly detailed in-universe history, would be only one of the many fictional and hyper-real martial arts systems to emerge from that far distant galaxy. Even the Wookies received their own, species specific, martial arts system.

Fans seem to be fully aware of the foundational role of the historic fighting systems in the creation of the mythic Jedi order. It is something that many embrace. In fact, more than one commentator has noted the irony that there are no leading Asian characters in a movie franchise which succeeded through its cultural appropriation of Eastern symbols and images. Of course Krug would remind us that this is exactly what successful instances of cultural appropriation usually look like.

Rogue One: Donnie Yen

The many intersections between the development of the Star Wars mythos and the spread of the traditional Asian hand combat systems in the West is a fascinating topic and one that deserves a much more careful investigation. Unfortunately this is not the place for such an undertaking. The aim of the current post is more limited in scope.

In July of 2015 a number of Chinese tabloids began to publish rumors that Donnie Yen had been cast as a character to appear in two new Star Wars films. These were Episode VIII, in which it was reported that he might play a Chinese Jedi opposite Han Solo, and the standalone film Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (originally titled Star Wars Anthology: Rogue One). These reports were briefly discussed at Kung Fu Tea here, and were widely republished by various media outlets around the web.

The significance of this move was not lost on commentators. Reporters immediately noted that this choice was designed to broaden the appeal of this film within China’s huge cinema market. In fact, the film’s producers seem to have been determined to feature top shelf Chinese talent and Donnie Yen is rumored to have beat out six other possible contenders (including the noted martial artist Jet Li) for the spot.

Certain fans happily noted that the franchise would be correcting what many saw as an increasingly serious oversight in the exclusion of Asian actors from the world of the quasi-oriental Jedi. Better yet, they were turning to a noted martial arts performer to do so. One can almost sense the moment at which speculation erupted as to what color his lightsaber would be.

Much of this reporting was speculative and premature. Disney has been remarkably tight lipped about these projects, even managing to prevent the leak of the concept art for Rogue One that they presented to their investors or a teaser trailer that was shown at conferences. There was no immediate confirmation of Yen’s casting or what role, if any, he would play in the Star Wars universe.

The only formal confirmation of Yen’s involvement with this franchise that I am currently aware of happened rather recently at D23 where he was included in a cast list and photo that was released to the public.

It might be interesting to pause for a moment to speculate on what this all means. [Fair warning, things are about to get very speculative]. Rogue One is set just prior to the opening of Episode III (A New Hope, 1977) and is said to follow a group intent on stealing the plans for the Death Star (thus setting the stage for Luke Skywalker’s first adventure). As the cast picture indicates, this movie is meant to have a different feel from other installments in the Star Wars franchise.

Rogue One has been described as a heist film set in the “gritty reality” of a protracted ground war against the Empire. Nor will the Force will play much of a role in this storyline. When describing his film director Gareth Edwards stated “It comes down to a group of individuals that don’t have magic powers, that have to bring hope to the galaxy.”

It is hard to say that “magical powers” will play no role in any film in which Darth Vader is rumored to make an appearance. Still, Edward’s point seems obvious enough. This is not a storyline that will feature a Jedi. Donnie Yen’s character is almost certainly neither a Force user nor a Jedi. This seems to make it pretty unlikely that he would be tapped to play one in Episode VIII.

The theory that Yen was hired to broaden the international appeal of the project does have some support when we look at the other casting choices that were made. It is a pretty geographically diverse group and it even includes a second draw for Chinese audiences in the form of Jiang Wen. I suppose what all of this means is that I can now shelve my fantasies of seeing a lightsaber wielding Ip Man.

Probably not going to happen anytime soon. Source: http://www.nothinguncut.com

Midi-chlorians vs. The Martial Arts

I must admit that I was pretty disappointed to realize that the first Chinese actor to play a major role in this series (and a noted martial artist at that) would not be cast as a Jedi. After all, that has always been the part of the Star Wars franchise that owed the greatest debt of gratitude to Wuxia novels and the myth of the burning of the Shaolin temple. It just seems like a circle that needs to be closed.

If Donnie Yen is not going to be a Jedi, what sort of hero will he be? All we have to go on at this point is a single picture. Still, it is very suggestive.

The first thing to notice about his character’s design are the white and opaque eyes. It seems unlikely that Disney would have released a publicity photo in which one of their more expensive stars was blinking. As such it is interesting to speculate whether Yen is supposed to blind or visually impaired.

While he has a rifle of some sort slung across his back, our eyes are immediately drawn to the composite wood and metal staff that he holds in his hands. Featuring both free flowing organic lines and technical augmentation we are forced to wonder about its function. Is it a simple aid, or something more? A weapon befitting a renowned martial artist perhaps?

Of course the image of a blind warrior conjures the memory of the iconic figure Zatoichi (who was featured in 26 films from the early 1960s to the late 1980s and had his own hit television show in Japan between 1974 and 1979). China too had its tales of disabled swordsmen, and similar figures continue to be a stock character in popular culture treatments of the martial arts today.

The Star Wars universe already has a rich history of staff wielding warriors, from the Force Pikes of the Imperial Guard to the pole fighting Jedi Master and librarian extraordinaire Vodo-Siosk Baas. While the overall look of Rogue One is intended to be a departure from the expected, Donnie Yen’s character seems to retain a number of important points of connection with both the martial arts and Star Wars mythos.

After thinking more about this photo and the director’s various statements I am starting to become more excited about Yen’s involvement in this storyline. It is no doubt true that his involvement with the film (as well as that of Jiang Wen) will increase box office returns across China. Yet I think that there are a fair number of Western fans who will be just as excited to see Donnie Yen in this role. I for one cannot wait to see what contributions his background in the visual representation of the Chinese martial arts will make to the Star Wars universe.

It is also interesting to consider the more positive aspect of Yen appearing on screen as a martial artist rather than as a Jedi. While elements of martial arts culture (such as the Japanese cult of the sword and Daoist Qi mysticism) have certainly contributed to the creation of the Jedi ethos, they remain distinct concepts.

In the Star Wars Universe certain individuals are born strong in the Force, and others are not. The effect has been to create a caste system. Indeed, certain lines of storytelling in various novels and comic books have explicitly built off of this. While the controversial introduction of Midi-chlorians into the storyline in Episode I made this situation explicit, it is always something that seems to have hovered in the background of the mythos.

In contrast the martial arts also promise their students an avenue from which to step out onto the stage of history. They grant their own abilities and have their own philosophies. And even in the Star Wars universe they are seen as skills that are available to people as a result of their effort and hard work rather than as a fluke of their birth. Yen’s character design promises to deliver an interesting hero, but one who is self-made rather than the product of wizardry.

I find this deeply appealing, and I suspect that many martial artists of various styles will agree with me. The driving engine behind the remarkable growth of the martial arts in the post-WWII period has been the promise that through dedication and hard work anyone, regardless of their nationality, gender or social background, can forge a “new self.” This is a profoundly democratic and empowering vision.

I will be the first to admit that it is one which we often fall short of. There are still many factors which skew who will get access to quality training and whether they will have the basic resources that they need to succeed. Still, what an incredible aspiration! What a vision of human potential. This is a project worth dedicating a life to.

The story of Luke Skywalker, a young farm boy from nowhere in particular, had a profound impact on audiences precisely because it touched on these themes. Unencumbered by a galactic bureaucracy, fate-warping Midi-chlorians and the crushing weight of a universe worth of back-story, his journey to adulthood seemed universal. Indeed, it was the promise of self-actualization that made Star Wars a natural ally in the spread of the martial arts. Luke Skywalker and the characters of Bruce Lee were clearly distinct and they appealed to different audiences (those who would choose 1978 vs. 1977). Yet there were also distinct parallels in the promises that they offered. Together they opened the separate doors necessary to make the martial arts appealing to so many diverse groups in such a short period of time.

Bruce Lee has never lost his cool. Yet the constant embroidery of the Star Wars story, while creating a richer universe, has also served to distance us form some of these key promises. The Jedi no longer appear as an ideal to be aspired to, but as a privileged caste to be looked upon with awe and a little bit of distrust.

In being given an opportunity to refocus the narrative on the less mystical aspects of the martial arts, and by once more demonstrating self-actualization without magic, Donnie Yen has been put in a fascinating position. Rather than simply being a token casting choice to attract Chinese viewers, he may have a chance to renew the essential promise of one of the central stories of modern popular culture. Who better to do so than a Chinese martial artist?

oOo

If you enjoyed this you might also want to read: Spreading the Gospel of Kung Fu: Print Media and the Popularization of Wing Chun (Part I)

oOo

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