What at first appears new is often something remembered.  The human mind has trouble categorizing and finding meaning in anything that is truly unique or alien.  Good storytellers know that originality is not always a virtue.  The construction of meaning is rooted primarily in what we feel to be familiar.

The symbolic building blocks of popular culture do not change so much as they are transposed, placed in a new setting, or revealed to a different segment of the audience.  It is precisely the memory of everything that came before which allows the “new” to be subversive, even when the images themselves are very familiar.  This is certainly the case with Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  It is equally true of the constantly evolving iterations of the martial arts which have appeared in global markets for the last five decades.

One would not necessarily guess this given the slew of articles that have been published over the last week celebrating the 20^th anniversary of the first airing of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  While the show (which was produced by the WB) never won the huge audiences reserved for programing on the major networks, Buffy managed to create both a devoted following and to capitalize on the early development of on-line fan communities.  The show became something of a cultural event.  It even spawned an entire cottage industry of academic books and articles as scholars in fields like cultural studies, sociology and philosophy sought to parse the show’s layered discourses or discern what it suggested about the nature of social change in the post-Cold War period.  Yes, “Buffy Studies” is a thing.

I should hasten to add that it is not necessarily my thing.  Which is not to say that I have not been a fan of the show.  I first became aware of Buffy the Vampire Slayer as a freshman in college.  While I have never loved the horror genre, I was captivated by the shows’ witty writing and the fearless ways in which it delved into social debates.  A single episode might introduce a theme being played out in the lives of the (human) cast, which would then find odd echoes in the main plotline.  That usually involved saving the world from some sort of demonic menace.  Then, just to provide a third layer of meta-commentary, the show’s more ancient heroes and villains could often be seen to discuss events like some sort of divine (or demonic) chorus in a Greek tragedy.

Combined with the evolution of characters and storylines that can occur during a seven-year run, the result was the creation of topical stories that defied the TV’s normal urge to underestimate its audience.  Given the self-conscious way Buffy dealt with themes cherished by cultural and media studies scholars, it is really no surprise that so many of them seem to have fallen in love with the series.  In fact, a study conducted by Slate in 2012 found that (as of that year) more academic literature (at least 20 books and 200 articles) had been produced on this show than any other popular culture property.

I will admit to being blissfully ignorant of most of this literature.  I was always attracted more to the show itself.  Every fan has their favorite episodes.  Hands down mine  would have to be “Hush,” a symbolically fought tale in which a group of traveling “Gentleman” (escaped from either a fairytale or a nightmare) have stolen the voices of an entire city’s inhabitants.  With their first task complete they then proceed to collect the hearts of seven residents in glass jars.  Of course, the only thing that can defeat the Gentleman is the sound of a human voice.  Every couple of years I break this episode out and watch it on Halloween.

Unfortunately, I won’t have time to delve into a narrative or social analysis of Hush in this post.  And even if I did, I am not sure that it would really tell us much about either Buffy or the place of the martial arts in modern society.  That story is scary precisely because its villains are so alien in nature as to be basically inscrutable.  They certainly feel like something that escaped from a fairytale, but it was clearly a story that the Brothers Grimm neglected to write down (possibly with good reason).

Instead I would like to ask what Martial Arts Studies might reveal about the shows popularity and its enduring legacy decades after its first release.  Joss Whedon deserves a huge amount of credit for his ability to tap into young adult interests and insecurities, and to draw from them universal stories about growing up and growing old, finding your place in the world, and then discovering that this is daily process rather than a singular glorious achievement.  He deftly wove together horror, comedy, adventure and drama in a way that few have.

Yet even the most casual visitor to the Buffyverse would quickly notice that the martial arts were one of the most important tools employed in telling these stories of victory and stoic defeat.  For a demonically empowered group of superhuman predators, the average vampire in these episodes expressed a notable interest in taekwondo.  One newly risen fiend even bragged about having studied taekwondo in college! (He did not last long, but I still found the reference fascinating).

The martial arts appeared throughout the series in many modes.  Even though Buffy’s calling as “the slayer” gave her access to superhuman strength and reflexes, it was very clear that diligent training and a killer instinct were the actual keys to her success.  Her on-screen martial arts were enhanced with gymnastic feats, wide telegraphed kicks and punches (similar in style to those used by Chuck Norris), and an abundance of weapons.  The show also made use of Hong Kong style wirework and often exaggerated throws.  The audience saw the martial arts not only in instances of pitch combat, but also in training sequences.  The ensouled vampire Angel even turned to Taijiquan as part of his physical and psychological rehabilitation program after a quick trip to hell.

This is not to say that the fight scenes in the show were always great.  Indeed, the action choreography in Buffy is one of the elements of the show that has not aged well.  I remember my Sifu using Buffy fights as an example how not to execute a throw.  While one can build great dramatic tension by throwing your opponent across the room (thus giving them a chance to get up and recover), it is much more efficient to simple drop them straight down and then stomp on their neck.  In short, I don’t think that anyone should be turning to this show for self-defense advice.  Yet it seems likely that it inspired many fans to take up self-defense or martial arts training.

The campy quality of many of the fights notwithstanding, it cannot be denied that there was something wonderfully subversive about the entire exercise.  Who is going to take a blond high school cheerleader seriously?  As so many other commentators have noted, such people are the fodder of horror films, not their heroes.  Indeed, there is some evidence that large parts of the potential TV audience refused to take the show seriously simply because the name “Buffy” was used in the title.  It seemed to signal a mixture of triviality and feminine values that society finds easy to ignore.   Yet if you tuned in, what you found was a very relatable and complex female character saving the world on a weekly basis with little more than her friends, a wooden stake and her trusty arsenal of taekwondo kicks.

Nor was Buffy (played by Sarah Michelle Gellar) forced to carry this burden alone.  The show advanced an entire set of female heroes and villains, each more interesting than the last.  Faith, a somewhat fallen Slayer, was every bit as kinetic as Buffy but suggested what she might have become without her family and support system.  Willow Rosenberg preferred to do combat with magic rather than her fists, yet she was also a complex individual with a dark side of her own.  The show’s villains also reinforced this same feminist discourse.  In the first episode a teenage boy, and seemingly nervous girl, can be seen breaking into a deserted high school at night.  The audience naturally assumes that the male has the upper hand in this fraught teenage situation. Yet the tables are quickly turned when it is revealed that the “girl” is actually the coquettish vampire Darla and the boy is lunch.

A common thread seems to run through the dozens of articles that have come out in the last few weeks celebrating the cultural impact of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  While a few raise critical notes (highlighting, for instance, the show’s lack of racial diversity, or its campy fight choreography), almost all of them locate its innovative genius in its portrayal of strong female heroes and villains.  Indeed, Buffy’s script writers went beyond duels with the powers of darkness to explore themes like consent, abusive relationships, systemic discrimination and intergenerational conflict.

Yet how original was this?  The 1960s and 1970s generated an entire legion of fearless female heroes and adventures.  They seem to have been mostly forgotten in the current crop of Buffy inspired think pieces.  It may be the case that Buffy appeared to be very novel to a new generation of fans who had grown up in the 1980s.  This was a decade in which the traumas of the Vietnam war ensured a turn towards increasingly masculine heroic figures.  It is easy to name the male martial arts and action stars from the period (Bruce Lee, Chuck Norris, Steven Seagal, Van Dam and Sylvester Stallone), but coming up with a list of their female counterparts is more difficult.  For a generation of teens in the 1990s, Buffy may have felt very new.

Yet Joss Whedon was tapping into a more fundamental shift in cultural currents rather than creating a trend on his own.  In terms of television shows, Buffy’s appearance was matched by other iconic hits like Xena Warrior Princess and La Femme Nikita.  Perhaps victory during the Cold War helped to heal the cultural neurosis left over from the loss of the Vietnam war.  It is thus helpful to remember that the original source material for the Buffy series was the less successful 1992 feature length film.  Or maybe it was something else altogether?

This is where a certain awareness of recent trends in the martial arts becomes especially helpful.  As I sit at my desk I can look across my study and see an entire bookshelf full of modern publications on Wing Chun and other forms of Chinese martial arts.  If you flip through these books it quickly becomes apparent that their production is not scattered evenly over the last 40 years.  Rather they have come in distinct waves.  The early and middle years of the 1970s saw the first big wave of Kung Fu books.  This was followed up by another wave in the early 1980s.

Yet the current era of martial arts discussions really seems to have begun in the late 1990s.  That is when I see the first wave of books, both Wing Chun manuals and even academic studies, that I personally identify as being truly “current” in feel.  Ip Chun helped to kick this era off in the Wing Chun literature with his co-authored volumes with Michael Tse and Donny Connor.  Rene Ritche’s Yuen Kay-San Wing Chun Kuen: History and Foundations, is also a classic.  And the list could easily go on.

What is interesting to note about these books is that they were published within a year or two of the debut of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  Each was practical in nature, yet they also showed an increased appreciation of history, attempting to draw on interviews and new theories to “set the story straight.”  In the context of Wing Chun, that meant a lot of discussion and debate of the legend of Yim Wing Chun.

Yim Wing Chun herself was not new to Western martial arts culture.  She had been discussed in magazines and books since the 1960s.  Knowledge of her story appeared at roughly the same time that the Southern Chinese martial arts gained popularity.  Yet while some individuals were certainly interested in her story during the 1960s and 1970s, she does not appear to have acquired the status of an easily recognizable “feminist icon” until the 1990s.  While a few women studied with Ip Man in Hong Kong, the vast majority of his students were male.  Their interests in the story (to the extent that they cared at all) were likely historical and philosophical in nature.

By the late 1990s much has changed.  Arts like Wing Chun have become much more accessible in the West, and an ever-increasing number of female students were deciding to train in these systems.  As the audience consuming these stories changed, so did their inflection and meaning.  Publishers in the late 1990s were producing a new generation of books only because there was already a new generation of students waiting to buy them.  And this social shift was underway prior to, but in the same basic era as, Buffy’s release on the small screen.

Spike and his vampiric friends out for a stroll during the middle of the Boxer Rebellion.

The Buffy-verse directly addresses the Chinese martial arts on a few occasions.  As was previously mentioned, the ensouled vampire Angel turns to Taijiquan as a healing practice during the series.  Perhaps the other significant exploration of the Chinese martial arts occurs in the episode “Fool for Love.”  After a close call with a local villain, Buffy turns to the relatively experienced (and at this point semi-domesticated) vampire Spike to learn how he had been able to defeat two previous slayers during his dissolute demonic “youth.”  By going through the exercise Buffy hoped was that she would learn something that would allow her to guard against a similar fate.

After revealing parts of his own backstory, Spike proceeds to narrate his first victory.  In 1900 he and a small group of fellow vampires had gone to Beijing to revel and feed in the then erupting Boxer Rebellion.  As the city burned around them Spike managed to corner a Chinese slayer (who was, as one would expect, a phenomenal martial artist) named Xin Rong, in a Buddhist Temple.  Xin Rong, played by the Wushu performer and stunt woman Ming Qiu, repeatedly advanced on Spike with elegant jian techniques, and managed to cut him above one eye.  But a random explosion in the street caused her to lose her weapon just as she was about to finish him.  Spike used the opening to kill the slayer as she reached for her fallen weapon.

Even though the audience knows that Spike is narrating the death of a previous slayer, Xin Rong’s death hits the viewer like a slap.  The entire premise of the series has been that seemingly weak, underestimated and female characters can come out on top.  Of course, this is the same promise that has drawn so many generations of Eastern and Western students to the martial arts.

Played by the talented Ming Qiu, the audience is left with no doubt about this slayer’s martial abilities.  Yet in this case both spells, the martial and the occult, are broken.  Predatory masculine strength wins the day.  One is also forced to ask if the English vampire’s murder of the teenage Chinese martial artist is meant to be read as a post-colonial commentary on the vast destruction of life that consumed Beijing as the Western forces faced off against (and ultimately defeat) the traditional Chinese boxers and the imperial army in the summer of 1900.

Adam Frank has noted that when imagining the ideal Chinese martial arts teacher, most individuals, in both China and the West, seem to conjure up nearly identical images of a “little old Chinese man”, wizened by age but driven by an unseen well of vitality.  That very idea, in pop culture garb, even makes an early appearance in Buffy when Spike, confronting his former vampiric mentor, shouts angrily “You were my Sire. You were my Yoda!”

Yet in Joss Whedon’s universe the frame of reference, while basically familiar, has subtly shifted.  He, like so many other Chinese martial arts students in the 1990s, seems to turn to a figure very much like Yim Wing Chun as the ideal Kung Fu hero.  Both Xin Rong and Wing Chun are young females, marginal members of rigidly patriarchal societies, staving off predatory male advances against the backdrop of Buddhist imagery and memory.

Yet Whedon reminds us that even the best training cannot always compensate for random chance.  The terrible truth of Buffy’s world is not that there are monsters who do bad things.  The reality that she is forced to confront (most notably with the death of her mother) is that often the worst events come to pass for no discernable reason at all.  Part of the warrior ethos, in both Buffy’s universe and the real martial arts, has always been learning to accept that much will always be beyond one’s control, but choosing to fight anyway.

A quick comparative study of the lore surrounding Yim Wing Chun and Buffy reveals both important parallels and differences.  Taken as a set these may help to shed light on the growing popularity of both figures at roughly the same time.  Both Buffy, the blond cheerleader, and Yim Wing Chun, an adolescent female refugee living in a province far from her birthplace, began their martial journeys as somewhat marginal figures.  Obviously, Buffy enjoys a degree of economic privilege that Wing Chun does not share.  Yet it is probably significant that both come from single parent homes in societies that values the nuclear family and heteronormativity above almost all else.

Indeed, the “call to adventure” (to borrow a phrase from Joseph Campbell) issued to both characters comes because each has been marked as a potential victim.  It is their struggle for safety and normalcy (Yim Wing Chun wished to go through with her childhood betrothal, fulfilling Confucian expectations, while Buffy just wants to live long enough to graduate from high school) that forces them to step out into the larger world.

Both Buffy and Yim Wing Chun are given a guide along the way, and in both cases these are bookish, quasi-monastic figures (the Shaolin Abbess Ng Moy vs. the aggressively English Watcher Rupert Giles).  Buffy has the benefit of super-human abilities that Wing Chun does not possess, but so do her enemies. Ultimately both figures become not just skilled warriors, but also “culture heroes” (meaning individuals who transmit a new set of values to a community of followers).

It is no coincidence that this happens at the moment of their transition between adolescence and adulthood.  Both seize the fertile potential inherent in the moment of liminality and grow into something more than what their parental figures and local social elites anticipated.  Both then vanish rather abruptly leaving the audience to contemplate their accomplishments but giving little indication as to what came next.

Who are the real villains both stories?  In one instance we have local gangsters, and in the other considerably more colorful demonic forces.  Yet both stories are broadly relatable because the immediate villains can be seen as stand ins for other types of systematic oppression that robs one of agency.  These were stories meant to empower.  But whom, and for what purpose?

Perhaps we can learn more by considering the endings of both stories in more detail.  In the seventh and final season, Buffy unleashes a generation of “slayerettes” by using magical means to empower all of the potential female slayers in the world to rise at once.  In so doing she created an army and assured that no one girl would ever have to fight the darkness alone again.  Yim Wing Chun, on the other hand, is both the first and last step in an esoteric, quasi-monastic, martial tradition that sees Wing Chun spread first (in legend) throughout the Rivers and Lakes of the Pearl River Delta, and then (in reality) throughout the entire globe in a remarkable 50 year period between the 1930s and the 1980s.

Yet there are also some important differences to consider when thinking about the villains of these two stories and how the protagonists responded.  It is hard not to read the legend of Yim Wing Chun, and many other Shaolin focused martial arts legends, as examples of late 19^th and early 20^th century nationalist mythmaking.  At the end of the tale Yim Wing Chun receives the commission to oppose the Qing (China’s foreign Manchu rulers who had come to be seen as oppressing the people) and to restore the Ming (which appears to have simply been a stand-in for Han ethnic rule).  Interestingly, some of the old secret society lore (explored in depth by ter Harr and others) sees the Qing as a fundamentally demonic force that must be fought as much through exorcism as on the battlefield.  Indeed, it’s a world view that Buffy would be comfortable with.  Yet the story of Yim Wing Chun itself (probably composed in the 1920s or 1930s) provides a more straight forward nationalist gloss on the issue.

Buffy, by comparison, is not concerned with questions of nationalism or imperialism.  Rather the main conflicts that drive the narrative are social and cultural in nature.  The vampires and monsters are as much a personification of our personal and social dark-side as anything else.  Buffy can be a feminist iconic, rather than just an action hero, because the show quite self-consciously enters this territory as it explores the nature of the monstrous realm.

In that sense, we would seem to have a clear distinction.  The Yim Wing Chun of the early 20^th century inspired a community to train to face an external enemy, and became a marker of local identity.  Buffy assembled her forces for what was ultimately a more introspective task.  Yet stories cannot travel through geographic and temporal space without being in some way transformed. As such, when Yim Wing Chun captured the imagination of a generation of Western students in the 1990s, she was no longer being read as a symbol of Chinese nationalism in the face of foreign (often Western) imperialism, or even local identity.  Instead she too was transformed into a figure promising social empowerment, and the creation of a different type of community.

Thus we find a deeply recursive relationship between the worlds of Buffy and the Asian martial arts.  Far from being unique, Buffy drew on images and stories of unassuming female martial artists defeating fearsome foes which had been circulating throughout Western popular culture since the late 19^th century.  Indeed, without the figures like Yim Wing Chun one wonders whether Buffy would have existed at all, and if so, how she would have been different.

On the other hand, Buffy revealed changes in how these stories came to be read in the post-Cold War period.  The massive popularity of this show provided a template by which a new generation of martial arts students would encounter traditional Asian figures as symbols of social, rather than national, empowerment.  Buffy the Vampire Slayer both illustrated and helped to popularize new trends in the Asian martial arts.  Yet to do so it drew on some of the most popular 20^th century images of these fighting systems, including China’s rich traditions of sword maidens.  If she could have seen the show, I suspect that Yim Wing Chun would have been a fan.

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If you enjoyed this you might also want to read:  Through a Lens Darkly (22): Heavy Knives and Stone Locks – Strength Training in the Traditional Chinese Martial Arts

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Introduction

Welcome to the tenth entry in our series of guest posts titled “Doing Research.”  If you missed the first essay by D. S. Farrer (which provides a global overview of the subject), the second by Daniel Mroz (how to select a school or teacher for research purposes), the third by  Jared Miracle (learning new martial arts systems while immersed in a foreign culture), the fourth by Thomas Green (who is only in it for the stories), the fifth by Daniel Amos (who discusses some lies he has told about martial artists), the sixth by Charles Russo (who has great advice on the fine art of hanging out), the seventh by Dale Spence (on ethnographic methods and dealing with radically unexpected events while in the field), the eighth by Kyle Green (why a choke is never just a choke), or the ninth by D. S. Farrer (who argues we should think a bit harder about the perils of performance ethnography), be sure to check them out!

Compared to other fields of scholarly inquiry, Martial Arts Studies has a distinctly democratic flavor.  Many individuals are introduced to these systems while students at a college or university and are interested in seeing a more intellectually rigorous treatment of their interests.  And certain practitioners want to go beyond reading studies produced by other writers and undertake research based on their own time in the training hall.   The emphasis on ethnographic description, oral and local history, as well as the methodological focus on community based collaborative research within Martial Arts Studies (itself a radically interdisciplinary area), makes participation in such efforts both relatively accessible and highly valuable.  It is our hope that this series will provide new students or researchers a few tips as they put together projects of their own.

In this post we will hear from Prof. Paul Bowman (Cardiff University), who has been closely following this series from its inception.  Yet rather than focusing on what scholars do once they enter the field (or the library), Bowman asks us to think more deeply about a prior stage in the research process.  Specifically, can we develop a personal method for formulating better research questions?  After all, the value of our data will never exceed the rigor of the questions we ask.  How do prolific writers and researchers find novel questions that will have a good chance of generating non-trivial findings while remaining tethered to a strong theoretical foundation?  Or to put it in slightly simpler terms, how do we avoid becoming the sort of author who rewrites the same paper year after year?  Can adopting a personal method, or intellectual discipline, force us to explore more of what the field has to offer?

Author’s Preface

What is my ‘method’? Do I even have one? I normally analyse and reflect on media texts and discourses, but how, and why? I wrote what follows when I realised that I was doing again something I had once done once before: applying a particular – perhaps unique – technique to structure and guide a piece of analysis. I wondered whether this might be a unique ‘method’ that others might try. So, what follows is an account of it. I currently refer to it as ‘trying to think inside the box’.

Two Conferences, one box

In 2013 I wanted to support a colleague’s conference, so I offered to give a paper. The conference title was ‘The Meaning of Migration’, and I thought it would be easy to come up with something on the ‘migration’ of martial arts around the world.

However, from the outset, I was clear on two things:

• The first was that I wanted to argue for the powerful role played by media representations in the spread of martial arts. (I thought this was an important argument to make, because not enough people seemed to be aware of it.)
• The second was that I did not want to offer an overview of the specific career of one or more martial artist migrant. (I thought such studies were all too common, and that they didn’t think hard enough about how culture and history ‘work’.)

So I decided to place a strict limitation on my paper: I would block out all reference to actual martial artists, and only discuss media fictions and the general movement of notions of ‘martial arts’ in Western/Anglophone film, TV and popular culture.

This exercise in imposing a deliberate and strategic limitation on the enquiry helped to generate new insights for me, and I have anecdotal evidence that it helped at least some people to think about martial arts history in a more sophisticated way than before.

In any case, the final version of this reflection appeared under the subheading ‘eclipsing the human’ in chapter two of my 2015 book, Martial Arts Studies: Disrupting Disciplinary Boundaries.

I recall all of this now because a similar situation has recently occurred, and a lot about it has given me pause for thought. Some elements are the same, but some are different.

In the current situation, once again, I wanted to support a colleague’s conference by giving a paper. However, to do so obliged me to work out a way to wrench the conference topic and my own interests into some kind of relationship. And once again, the solution I found took the form of imposing a deliberate limitation.

However, what strikes me as significant about this is that the ‘artificial’ limit I have found for my study now seems strategically valuable in that it may generate significant insight.

In the current situation, the conference in question is called “You talkin’ to me?” Dialogue and Communication in Film, which takes place in Cardiff on 5-6 June 2017.

Knowing that the organiser was specifically interested in papers that focus on film dialogue – i.e., studies of spoken/verbal communication in film – I initially speculated that maybe I could do something on dialogue about martial arts in martial arts films.

But the question was: what, specifically? And – more importantly – why? I always need to have an answer to the question of why: why this, why is this important, why now, why does it matter, to whom, with what significance, consequences, effects?

In order to answer such questions, I recalled my efforts in chapter two of Mythologies of Martial Arts (2017) to explore some of the discourse that surrounds martial arts ‘proper’, so to speak, in order to glean some insights into the status of martial arts in popular culture.

Specifically, in Mythologies of Martial Arts I asked questions about the kinds of jokes that are made about martial arts and martial artists, and explored them in order to reflect on what this might tell us about wider ideas circulating about martial arts today.

Consequently, I thought that the film dialogue conference might provide an opportunity to extend this kind of exploration. So, I came up with the following proposal:

Title:

‘Oh, no! That’s karate!’ Speaking of Martial Arts (in non-martial arts films)

Abstract:

Michael Molasky’s exploration of Japanese and Okinawan feelings about the American occupation proceeds by looking at the ways America and the occupation feature in a wide range of Japanese and Okinawan literature of the post-war period. Molasky’s focus is not literature specifically about the occupation or about Americans; rather it surveys Japanese and Okinawan literature in general, for clues, evidence, and interesting cases. In a similar spirit, and using a similar approach, this presentation (which is part of a larger inquiry into wider feelings and ideas about ‘martial arts’ in Western popular culture) will look at examples of dialogue about martial arts in non-martial arts films. In other words, for the purposes of this exercise, the focus is resolutely not on martial arts action itself, but only on dialogue about martial arts. Moreover, films that are widely regarded as ‘martial arts films’ will also be disallowed. The premise is that films, in various ways, record, register and deploy wider discursive sensibilities, configurations, structures of feeling, and so on; and the objective is to begin to glean some insights into the discursive status and conceptual, associative and connotative configurations of ‘martial arts’ in contemporary English language popular culture. (The reasons for wanting to do this are complex and perhaps beyond the scope of a short paper, but I will try to gesture to the wider value of such a project.)

As you can see, once again I am imposing a strategic limitation, or exclusion. In this case, I am not going to look at any dialogue about martial arts that takes place in anything that could be regarded as a martial arts film.

Drawing Lines, and Boxes

Of course, this is a tricky line to draw. When, for example, does an action film become a martial arts film? This is one hell of a question to begin to explore. But already, then, in obliging us to think about such questions (when does an action film become a martial arts film?), our self-imposed and ‘artificial’ limitation has prompted us to think a little more about categories that we might otherwise have merely accepted without thought. To this extent, in playing this game, we are already potentially sharpening our critical faculties.

In this instance, as I say, I am deliberately excluding all martial arts films. Furthermore, just to be sure, the ‘grey area’ exclusion zone will also extend to action films and also certain other difficult to classify films (say, Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai).

However, as deconstruction has taught us, in the act of drawing a line, of specifying what is ‘in’ and what is ‘out’, we always in some way and to some extent transgress that line, that limit. We have to pay some attention to what is on the other side of it.

Moreover, by drawing a ‘clearly artificial’ line, we may be provoked to think about what happens when any line is drawn. We may see that a lot of lines have been drawn that we have so far given little thought to. This might prompt us to reflect on the necessity or arbitrary character of the lines we use to structure our thought and actions more widely. So, we might see and possibly learn more about the boxes that we always think inside of.

But, that’s as maybe. For the purposes of this exercise, such possible gains in our propensity or likelihood to think critically ‘more widely’ are actually secondary. For, the primary purpose of the exercise in this case is to glean more insight into what we might call the ‘discursive status’ of martial arts in the wider circuits of culture. As my abstract puts it, my ‘premise is that films, in various ways, record, register and deploy wider discursive sensibilities, configurations, structures of feeling, and so on; and the objective is to begin to glean some insights into the discursive status and conceptual, associative and connotative configurations of “martial arts” in contemporary English language popular culture’.

So, that is what the paper will be about. But is this ‘my method’? It is not really a method – at least, not yet. What anyone could and would ‘bring’ to such an exercise will be determined by how they have been trained or learned to interpret films, and how they have been trained or learned to connect them to other areas of culture or consciousness or practice. But none of this is set in stone. None of it is certain. None of this is science.  My own efforts will be contingent connections that I make based on the contours and coordinates of boxes that my own thought processes have become accustomed to.

Of course, such boxes can be shaken up, disrupted, poked and prodded into movement. This is part of the value of imposing seemingly arbitrary limitations on the exercise from the outset. And there is much that might be said and thought and done about all of this.

However, I want to conclude by reflecting on some differences between the earlier occasion on which I undertook such an exercise (2013) and today (2017).

Then and Now

Some things are different. For me, the main differences relate to the development of my own experiences and thinking in martial arts studies. But another significant different relates to the growth of an online martial arts studies community. So now, unlike in 2013, I can easily put out a call or question or query on social media, and a community of people are present and listening and thinking and prepared to respond, to an extent that simply was not the case in 2013.

Accordingly, in a way that is very different from when I did this in 2013, as soon as my strategic limitation occurred to me in 2017, I put out a call online for ideas and suggestions. Specifically, I asked: ‘Can anyone suggest any films that are not martial arts films but people talk about martial arts in them?’

Maybe it has slightly convoluted syntax; but still I thought this concise question would be clear.

I got some predictable suggestions. I got some unique suggestions. I also got some recurring, repeated suggestions for films that I could look at. (The fact that several films immediately popped into the minds of quite a few different people from different countries suggests a lot: that such examples have some kind of special significance, and definitely deserve consideration, perhaps.)

But I also encountered some fascinating ‘resistance’, some surprise ‘results’, or at least peculiar responses. These took the form of a frequent inability to grasp exactly what it was I was asking for. Sometimes, when people did eventually ‘get’ what I was enquiring into, I was met with an inability to comprehend why I would be asking such a thing.

Of course, that’s fine. It is, after all, down to me to show why I would be asking such a thing – and to my mind there would be less point in undertaking an argument or analysis that is immediately transparent to anyone who hears about any aspect of its initiating question. In short, explaining why I would ask questions about martial arts dialogue in non-martial arts films is part of what my conference paper will do.

But one thing fascinated me. I asked the question (‘Can anyone suggest any films that are not martial arts films but people talk about martial arts in them?’) and many people came back with the titles of (… wait for it …) martial arts films.

When I reiterated that I was not going to look at martial arts films, people came back with suggestions about TV series.

When I reiterated that I was asking about films, not TV series, people suggested cartoons, action films, martial arts films; TV series, martial arts films, TV series – and moreover, and more specifically, people kept coming back to scenes with martial arts in, rather than scenes in non-martial arts films in which people talk about martial arts.

This happened so frequently that it really gave me pause for thought. What is going on here, when a question like ‘Can anyone suggest any films that are not martial arts films but people talk about martial arts in them’ is unintelligible?

One normally extremely lucid commentator even took the time to reflect on the question of why a film maker would take the time to have any kind of discussion of martial arts in their film if martial arts were not the theme of the film…

By way of a concise reply, I asked whether he had seen Napoleon Dynamite.

To this, he replied – as many had before, on the same discussion thread that we were currently on, as well as on several others – ‘Rex Kwon Do!’ So I duly clicked ‘like’, to confirm that we were still having fun, still ‘all in this together’, and so on.

And then – despite the fact that that this one conversation thread, prompted by one peculiar question, had already generated possibly thousands of words and quite a few interesting exchanges, and loads of examples, and loads to think about – someone commented, ‘I think this may be a refreshingly short presentation’.

The conversation thread stands at that, for now. But, to be clear: I beg to differ. On the contrary, I think that this may turn out to be a refreshingly and unexpectedly surprising and rewarding exploration – led not by ‘method’, as such, but rather by the generative potential of an apparently eccentric but fundamentally principled strategic research question.

 
oOo

About the Author:  About the Author: Paul Bowman is no stranger to Kung Fu Tea, where he has been a regular guest author.  He is Professor of Cultural Studies at Cardiff University, and has written multiple book on Bruce Lee and Martial Arts Studies.  Bowman is also the co-editor of the interdisciplinary journal Martial Arts Studies, the editor of Rowman & Littlefields’ Martial Arts Studies book series, and is one of the hardest working scholars you are likely to meet.  His practical resume includes decades of experience in Choy Li Fut, Yang style Taijiquan and Escrima (among other arts).  Lately he has been exploring the joys of Judo. Be sure to check out his most recent article. 

Kendo at Ina Middle School, probably late 1930s. Vintage postcard. Authors personal collection.

Introduction

Today’s post is the result of a happy coincidence.  As regular readers will be aware, I occasionally collect and share vintage images of the Chinese martial arts.  Many of these come from the sorts of ephemera (postcards, advertisements, old newspaper clippings, newsreels) that contain interesting data on the social place of the martial arts, but are too easily lost to history.

From time to time I also run across images of other sorts of martial artists.  While not directly related to the TCMA, these are important as they remind us that all of these practices, images and ideas existed as part of a complex web of global interaction.  That is true even of some images with solidly nationalistic pedigrees.

These other postcards and photographs come from a variety of sources.  French Savate proved to be a popular subject for a time.  The American occupation of the Philippines resulted in a many images of knives and other traditional weapons that are of interest to martial artists today.  I recently ran across a couple of older images of traditional boxers in Thailand that I hope to share at some point.

Yet most of the imported early 20^th century martial arts imagery originated in Japan.  Pictures of Chinese sword dancers, or Thai boxers, were occasionally captured by Western photographers seeking to capitalize on an interest in “Oriental” places and practices.  The martial images that they produced, while recording some interesting ethnographic data, tended to be only a small percentage of their total catalog.  They also seem to suggest more about the state of Western, rather than Chinese, culture.  That is probably to be expected when we remember that individuals within early 20^th century China did not send postcards to each other, and were never the intended audience of such images.

The Japanese did use postcards, and they produced them in large numbers for domestic consumption.  And because a great many Japanese reformers were interested in promoting the martial arts (both domestically and internationally), these fighting systems tended to find their way into all sorts of contemporary media.  Martial postcards from the 1920s-1930s usually focused on Kendo or Sumo, probably the most popular pursuits at the time.  But occasionally images of other practices (including Judo, archery or more traditional forms of swordsmanship) also turn up.

Such postcards also served a social purpose.  Some might commemorate an important moment in the history of the local branch of the Butokukai (such as the completion of a new training center), while others turned their gaze towards the reconstruction of Samurai practices from a previous era.  All of them seem to have aided and reinforced the creation of a specific vision of community.  And (as Benedict Anderson might suggest), this community was often imagined along specifically nationalist lines.

Budo in the Ina Middle School

This brings us back to the happy coincidence that reunited the two postcards discussed in this essay.  I ran across the first image about a year ago and did not think very much of it at the time.  The scene showed students practicing Kendo in a typical Japanese middle school during the pre-WWII era.  While always interesting, such images are not terribly rare.

Then, a few months ago, I had the good fortune to come across another image.  This example caught my eye as pre-WWII Japanese postcards showing Judo (or any form of unarmed combat) are harder to come by.  While students in the West came to see Judo as the preeminent Japanese martial, in truth Kendo was vastly more popular in Japan itself.

As I was placing the new find in an album it just so happened that there was an empty spot in the sleeve that also held the preceding image of the kendo class.  I caught my breath as I looked at the two images side by side for the first time.  Both pictures had clearly been taken in the same classroom.  Note for instance the details of the chalk board and door.  Its also interesting to see how the hardwood flood of the kendo class has been covered with movable matting before the commencement of Judo training.  And judging from the shadows on the floor both images were taken at approximately the same time of day.  Yet to my (admittedly fallible) eye, the Judo and Kendo instructors appear to be two different individuals.   I had inadvertently run across two images that may have been part of a larger set of postcards.

At this point I contacted my friend Jared Miracle (be sure to check out his new book).  Jared was kind enough to translate the captions of both cards.  He noted that both were written in a traditional character set and said “Ina Junior High School Kendo Club Practice” and “Ina Junior High School Judo Practice.”  Given the rather short length of the training uniforms seen in both photos (much shorter than those favored in the post WWII period), and the American GI inspired haircuts, Jared tentatively concluded that both images may have been taken in the late 1930, just as Japan’s nationalist fervor hit its peak.

Other scholars (such as Alexander Bennett, Denis Gainty and G. Cameron Hurst) have noted that the pedagogy of the Japanese martial arts underwent rapid reforms in the immediate pre-war period.  As conflict loomed on the horizon martial arts such as Kendo were reworked to move them away from a sporting basis and to emphasize basic battlefield skills.  Training was increasingly conducted outside so that students would be accustomed to charging across “live terrain” when they found themselves in China or on the islands of the Pacific.

Judo at Ina Middle School. Vintage postcard circa late 1930s. Source: Author’s personal collection.

Imagining the Community

One does not see a direct allusion to these more militant reforms in these postcards.  Perhaps this is not a surprise as the intended consumers of images of Ina’s students were probably their own parents and grandparents.  Yet why do we have these specific photographs at all?  What work did such images do?

Ina is not a large place.  Located in the mountains of Nagano Prefecture, Wikipedia lists its current population at around sixty-eight thousand individuals.  One suspects that its pre-WWII population was probably smaller.  Looking at the small city (really a town) on google earth reveals a population center hemmed in by a mountain valley and agricultural fields.  Today Ina is mostly known for its beautiful mountain landscapes.  My area of study is not Japanese martial history, but I can find no indication of a previously glorious martial heritage in this small city.

One imagines that Ina in the early 20^th century might have felt somewhat remote.  While Tokyo may not be far off as the crow flies, the Japanese Alps and winter snows would certainly be enough to create a sense of isolation in a small, primarily agricultural, community.  Certainly, rapid governmental reforms (and military conscription) in the late 19^th and early 20^th century would have created more of a sense of belonging within “the nation.”  But so would the martial arts.

When examining postcards such as these, it is worth noting how many images were produced in middle and high schools, and even occasionally at universities.  Pictures taken at educational institutions, all run by the government, are common.  Those produced by politically well-contented cultural institutions, like the Butokukai, are not far behind.  But I don’t think I have a single postcard (in my admittedly small collection) produced at a private dojo.

Obviously, such places existed.  Some even gained great popularity.  Morihei Ueshiba could not have created Aikido without dealing with the problem of finding real estate.  Yet such private endeavors remain under represented in this segment of the visual record, especially during the 1930s.

The great story of the Asian martial arts, in both China and Japan, from probably the 1880s-1950s was the effort to take that which had been particular and local, and make it unifying and national.  How better to accomplish these aims than to make the martial arts a standard part of the compulsory education program?  It is this effort (which finally bore fruit in 1911) that is being reflected in the ephemera of the period.

In addressing the origins of the notion that the globe should naturally be understood as a series of discrete “nations,” Benedict Anderson noted that this process had more to do with imagination and historical contingency than any sort of shared “primal essence.”  What was important was not so much a thousand years of commerce uniting two locations in Europe, but whether, with the spread of the printing press and the rise of markets for mass produced books, they shared the same vernacular language.

If so, then the inhabitants of these two towns might read the same newspapers.  To oversimplify an important argument, by taking part in a common conversation in which certain stories and items of news were related to one another, they would come to imagine themselves as being members of the same “nation.”  They would also come to imagine all of those reading other newspapers in languages that they could not understand as being members of other nations.

The spread of shared print vernacular markets allowed individuals to imagine that they were part of a broader community in which everyone one else was caught up in the same collective dream.  Of course, Japanese social elites in the early 20^th century did not have the benefit of Anderson’s social theory.  But they had the martial arts, and an extensive nationalist discourse surrounding them.

How much more powerful would it be to not just imagine the existence of the nation on a cognitive level, but to gain an embodied feel for it?  What if the existence of the nation could be imprinted on one’s physical habits and movements? What if “the nation” could be a somatic experience?

By including martial arts training in the national curriculum, a junior high student knew that when he rushed forward, shinai held high, he moved with hundreds of thousands of identically armed classmates at his back.  It would be hard to think of a more powerful vector for the inculcation of nationalist identity than the combination of somatic experience and discursive indoctrination that would result from making martial arts training compulsory in government run institutions like schools and the military.

Dennis Gainty, in his book Martial Arts and the Body Politic in Meiji Japan (Routledge 2013), notes that such concerns both complicated and drove efforts to create a set of universal Kendo kata to be practiced throughout Japan a generation before these photographs were taken.  Discussing one such effort, he notes:

 

“As we recall from Chapter 2, the Kata used a tripartite division under the designation of man, earth, and heaven (jin, chi, ten). By practicing the kata, the practitioner literally embodied and enacted the fluid relationship between earth, heaven and human; through it, he experienced the cosmos.  In this sense, the frameworks suggested by the Butokuai’s meticulous definition of bodies did not call up the atomomized individual theorized by Foucault; instead, they are more readily understood as serving exactly the opposite purpose, offering the individual a physical means by which to express and experience embodied unity with the imperial line, with the Japanese nation, and with the universe.” (p. 130)

Of course, this was a view of the universe seen from a very unique perspective.

We should be clear that this process was never restricted to just Japan.  While the Japanese state may have been the first to capitalize on modernized and standardized martial arts training, others looked on with great interest.  Various public and private reformers in China, noting Japan’s success, worked hard to integrate their own hand combat traditions into the national curriculum.  Unfortunately, these efforts have not left the same visual record.  As I mentioned at the start of this essay, the Chinese never really adopted postcards to the same degree as the Japanese during the early 20^th century.  But we have enough newspaper accounts of local school demonstrations being staged (often by Jingwu or Guoshu affiliated classes) during the 1920s and 1930s to know that substantial inroads were made.

One suspects that individuals in Japan bought, mailed and collected postcards such as these to further extend this aspect of the “imagined national community” beyond the physical bounds that a shared martial practice allowed.  A postcard’s most interesting attribute is precisely the fact that it was designed to travel in search of an audience.  As Gainty might argue, in collecting and mailing these images individuals became active participants in crafting their own view of what a modern strong Japanese nation would look like.  Yet as these postcards continued to circulate, both in China and then the West, their underlying meaning evolved to meet the needs of new audiences.  When examining photographs such as these we can almost recapture the moment when a primarily nationalist discourse became something else on a global stage.

oOo

If you enjoyed this you might also want to read:  Do the martial arts unite or divide us? Kung Fu and the production of “social capital”

oOo

Vintage postcard showing a “Young Boxer” with sword. Early 20th century. Source: Authors personal collection.

Confronting the Boxers

It is probably an irony that I have written so little on the Boxer Uprising during my casual and academic discussion of the martial arts.  It was a chance encounter with the Boxers some years ago as I was exploring the connection between religiously generated social capital and violence that first convinced me to take a closer look at the Chinese martial arts as a possible research area.  Still, it has been a slow return to a case that first inspired me.

There are multiple reasons for this.  As my research progressed I found myself more drawn to the Republic period.  The ill-fated Boxers of Shandong sit as a perpetual prologue to most of the questions that I ask.  Further, my practical interests in Wing Chun led me to focus on Guangdong, which was about as far away from the events of 1900 as one could get while remaining within China.

It may also be that I am somewhat uncomfortable with this historical event. That feeling is also multi-faceted.  The Boxers are often portrayed (even in historical sources that should know better) as an embodiment of “traditional” Chinese culture.  Yet their unique combination of martial arts, ritual, theater, invulnerability and sorcery was seen by their contemporaries as being dangerous precisely because it was an innovation.  Even that statement requires quick clarification.  There was nothing new about martial arts, war magic or theater.  And these things had always been mixed to one degree or another (much to the consternation of the Republic era nationalists and martial arts reformers).  Yet the way in which these forces came together in northern China during 1899 and 1900 hit the region, already weakened by drought and social upheaval, like a wildfire.

Though destructive, such fires also have a way of quickly burning out.  While Western discussions of the event tend to focus on suffering within the foreign military (David J. Silbey), or the diplomatic and missionary communities (Diana Preston), Paul A Cohen, in his groundbreaking History in Three Keys reminds us that these losses were dwarfed by the tens of thousands of deaths (most entirely senseless), and immense deprivations, experienced by the region’s civilian Chinese population.  It is entirely possible to read the entire conflict as a civil dispute between two marginal groups in local society (Christian converts and a certain class of loosely organized poor peasants with an interest in martial arts) that spun out of control before being co-opted by larger geo-political actors.

Dealing with these events in a historically responsible way means addressing the enormity of the suffering and human loss that they unleashed.  It also necessitates taking a closer look at the Boxers themselves and asking difficult questions.  Should we think of these individuals as martial artists? How must our (often narrow and modern) understanding of “martial arts” change to accommodate their magical practices and spiritual beliefs?  Under what circumstances do the martial arts, a set of practices that many of us are emotionally attached to, become a threat to social stability?  Are there lessons to be learned about the role of the martial arts in spreading violence like a contagion that we are turning away from?  If it is really true that the martial arts are fundamentally peaceful (a proposition that I find doubtful no matter how frequently it is repeated), what went wrong in this case?

It is easy for current practitioners of the Chinese hand combat systems to distance themselves from these issues precisely because reformers spent much of the 1910s-1940s systematically redefining, rationalizing and modernizing their (supposedly still traditional) practices precisely to insulate them from such accusations coming from modernizers within Chinese society.  In practice that meant distancing these practices from their roots in rural society, “superstitious beliefs” and any association with opera.  One suspects that it is not a coincidence that even dedicated historians find the subtle social relationships between the martial arts, opera and ritual practice difficult to reconstruct.  Even more telling is how few people ask the question at all.  Despite the almost subconscious habit of appending the term “traditional” to every written occurrence of the phrase “Chinese martial arts”, in practice most of us are comfortable reading a very modern view of these practices back through the centuries.

Given that my personal research interests have focused on later periods, and have been grounded in the distinct local culture of the Pearl River Delta region, it never seemed like the right time to delve into these questions.  Nevertheless, research programs evolve.

My current “Kung Fu Diplomacy” project begins with a discussion of how some in the West used the discussion of martial arts to establish an image of China that was advantageous to their cultural, economic and political agenda.  These discussions of the martial arts, while often framed in terms of popular culture, have sometimes had important implications for both how we understand our selves and interact with the wider world.  Nor can one fully understand how this process unfolds, or the foundation on which our current engagement with the Chinese martial arts rests, without coming to terms with the Boxer Uprising.

Leipzig Illustrierte Zeitung 1900, reproduction in Peking 1900, The Boxer Rebellion by Peter Harrington, p.24. Source: Wikimedia.

Boxers in the Popular Press

The first step in reconstructing the image of the Boxers in the Western imagination is to go back and examine the various ways in which they were discussed in the popular press during the violent and confusing summer of 1900.  For Western readers in London, New York, or even Shanghai, confusion as to what was happening in Northern China was probably the most memorable aspect of the period.  Paul Cohen dedicated an entire section of his study to the topic of “rumors.”  One imagines that by the autumn of 1900 any Western newspaper reader would have sympathized with his interest in the topic.

During the second half of July even reputable papers like the New York Times were reporting graphic accounts of the various ways in which crowds of Boxers had overrun the foreign legation, murdered its inhabitants, and paraded their mutilated corpses through the streets.  Obviously, no such thing ever happened.  The legation was successfully defended until reinforcement arrived and seized control of Beijing itself.  Yet in the final weeks of July newspaper readers would be treated to one independent account after another, each purporting to be the real story of the massacre of white men, women and children at the hands of a literal Boxer army.  I can think of no other group who died so many deaths, day after day, on the front pages of the world’s leading papers.  The irony of the situation is that not only did most of the legation residents survive, but that death in Beijing was disproportionately inflicted upon Chinese civilians who were neither soldiers nor Boxers.

Such failures of journalism notwithstanding, the Boxer Rebellion was one of the most important media events of the first decade of the 20^th century.  Newspapers carried countless harrowing accounts of attacks on outlying missions and the murder of Chinese Christian converts.  Later announcements that the armies of rival imperialist powers were combining forces to fight the rising tide of disorder captured the imaginations of those with more humanitarian passions.  Meanwhile diplomats and businessmen wondered what this meant for the balance of power in Asia, and how long the alliance could possibly hold.  At its height, the Chinese Boxers even managed to upstage a US presidential election.

It might be natural to assume that this volume of press coverage would lead to a growing curiosity about the Boxers themselves.  After all, if it was true that the Chinese martial arts were basically unknown in the West (a proposition I find dubious), one would think that newspapers would be obligated to fill their readers in on the emergence of a fearsome new threat to Western values and influence in China.  That is what I expected to find as I undertook a systematic survey of newspapers (including the New York Times and The Times (of London), and popular publications (The National Geographic, the Illustrated London News and The Sphere among others).

What I actually found (in addition to an astonishing tangle of rumors and false reports) was somewhat different.  During the spring of 1900 the lines of communication with Northern China were open and so the quality of information being reported was still good.  As the violence escalated in the countryside reports of Boxers attacks became more common.  Yet the general assumption seems to have been that anyone reading such accounts was already interested in China or Chinese culture, and thus needed no education as to what a “Boxer” was.  While the specifics of this situation were new, the general outline of Chinese boxing was already firmly established (for at least this segment of the audience) and required no further explanation.

Nor can we really fault editors in this regard.  While the claims of invulnerability being made by the Yihi Boxers were novel, the Chinese martial arts and traditional modes of hand combat had been discussed in some detail in the West for decades.  J. G. Wood, one of the most popular writers of the era (and someone cited by a variety of other novelists and authors) discussed the traditional Japanese, Chinese and Indian combat methods at length in his best-selling (but unfortunately titled) The Uncivilized Races of All Men in All Countries. Given the centrality of large and fearsome swords in almost all early Boxer accounts (indeed, their association with the “Big Sword Society” of richer areas of Shandong was sometimes asserted), Western students of China would no doubt recall these memorable passages from Wood:

 

“Of swords the Chinese have an abundant variety.  Some are single-handed swords, and there is one device by which two swords are carried in the same sheath and are used one in each hand.  I have seen the two sword exercise performed, and can understand that, when opposed to any person not acquainted with the weapon, the Chinese swordsman would seem irresistible.  But in spite of the two swords, which fly about the wielder’s head like the sails of a mill, and the agility with which the Chinese fencer leaps about and presents first one side and then the other to this antagonist, I cannot think but that any ordinary fencer would be able to keep himself out of reach, and also to get in his point, in spite of the whirling blades of the adversary.

Two-handed swords are much used.  One of these weapons in my collection is five feet six inches in length, and weighs rather more than four pounds and a quarter.  The blade is three feet in length and two inches in width.  The thickness of metal at the hilt is a quarter of an inch near the hilt, diminishing slightly towards the point.  The whole of the blade has a very slight curve.  The handle is beautifully wrapped with narrow braid, so as to form an intricate pattern.

There is another weapon, the blade of which exactly resembles that of the two handed sword, but it is set at the end of a long handle some six or seven feet in length, so that, although it will inflict a fatal wound when it does strike an enemy, it is a most unmanageable implement, and must take so long for the bearer to recover himself, in case he misses his blow, that he would be quite at the mercy of an active antagonist.

Should they be victorious in battle, the Chinese are cruel conquerors, and are apt to inflict horrible tortures, not only upon their prisoners of war, but even upon the unoffending inhabitants of the vanquished land.  They carry this love for torture even into civil life, and display a horrible ingenuity in producing the greatest suffering with the least apparent mean of inflicting it.  For example, one of the ordinary punishments in China is the compulsory kneeling bare-legged on a coiled chain.  This does not sound particularly dreadful but the agony that is caused in indescribably, especially as two officers stand by the sufferer and prevent him from seeking even a transient relief by shifting his posture.  Broken crockery is sometimes substituted for the chain……”

J. G. Wood. 1876. The Uncivilized Races of All Men in All Countries. Vol. II. Hartford: the J. B. Burr Publishing Co. Chapter, CLIV China—continued. Warfare.—Chinese Swords. pp. 1434-1435.

Wood’s discussion in this case was driven by the Western fascination with the collecting and display of all sorts of ethnographic Weapons.  Yet it is interesting to note the other ideas regarding the nature of Chinese martial arts that crept into Wood’s discussion.  On the one hand the efficacy of these methods is questioned.  Readers are assured that a western fencer, let alone a professional soldier, would be more than a match for any boxer, no matter how fascinating his armaments.

So why might a group cling to an ineffective combat system?  Perhaps their obsession with the martial arts masked a propensity for sadism and cruelty.  The fact that Wood’s discussion of traditional Chinese swords terminates in an extended discussion of torture (most of which has been omitted in the interests of brevity) would seem to indicate that he, and much of the reading public, saw these practices not so much as a set of skills to be mastered as a reflection of some sort of character defect on the part of the Chinese people.  The Chinese martial arts, to put it slightly differently, were not “arts” at all.  These were not rational and scientific practices (like Judo) that westerners might find interesting.  They were instead a reflection of everything that was seen to be threatening about the Chinese nation.

As the summer wore on the frequency of Boxer discussions in the popular press escalated and editors became aware that what had been a niche story was now sitting on the front page and selling newspapers.  As the readership for these accounts grew, so did the need to retroactively describe and explain the Boxer to a non-specialist audience.  In a few cases papers like the New York Times printed frank admissions by American diplomats in China (or Chinese diplomats in the US) that the Yihi Boxers were a fundamentally new and not yet understood group.  China was full of Secret Societies and voluntary associations and so simply noting that a group engaged in boxing did not really tell one very much about their motives, origins or potential actions.

More common were reprints of accounts by missionaries who had witnessed the build-up of the Boxers in various small towns.  They tended to dwell on the “gymnastic exercises” and “military drill” practiced by the Boxers, as well as their belief in their own invulnerability to swords and rifle fire.  In other cases experts in Chinese culture were called upon to explain the sudden emergence of the Boxer threat.  Falling back on what was already known about Chinese martial artists and their association with secret societies, they tended to see the Boxers as simply another manifestation of the later. Chinese triads, and their revolutionary intentions, had been discussed in the Western press for at least two generations and were a popular topic. One could even read cheap novels on their exploits.

While it was acknowledged that the Boxer threat was new, the few explanations of the group that emerged tended to see it simply as an extension of what Westerners already believed about patterns of Chinese social violence.  This resulted in a paradox that called out for a solution.  If what was being seen related to well-known propensities in Chinese society, why did it emerge only in 1899-1900?  How could the crisis be unlike any event in living memory, yet at the same time be deeply traditional?

Missionaries noted the role of the drought in the emergence of the Boxer threat and offered their own prayers for rain.  Yet the role of the Western clergy in sparking the crisis did not go unnoticed in the West.  Indeed, the missionaries seem to have had something of an image problem in both America and China in 1900. More secular commentators on Chinese matters laid much of the blame directly at the feat of Catholic missionaries and their propensity to meddle in local court cases.  Protestants, while less egregious in their methods, were also seen as foolish as setting up missions that would be impossible to defend, or even evacuate, in case of trouble.

Later scholars such as Cohen and Esherick would discuss both factors at length.  Yet the most common explanation offered at the time was simply that the Boxers were pawns.  Rather than being independent actors with their own motivation, they had been set in motion by the Dowager Empress as part of a coordinated, multi-year, scheme to rid China of all foreign influence.  While this explanation enjoys no historical support, it seems to have satisfied the greatest number of readers at the time.

A still from Sagar Mitchell and James Kenyon’s “Boxer Attack on a Mission Outpost” (1900). Note the central actor holding the dadao.

Boxers and the Invention of the Martial Arts Film

Though the public showed less curiosity than one might have expected regarding the origins and motivations of the Boxers, they were fascinated by questions of their physical appearance and behavior.  The illustrated magazines of the period enjoyed a distinct advantage over the daily press since their engravings could illustrate this exotic threat, and therefore shape the image of the Chinese martial arts in the West.  Images of Chinese soldiers, archaic weapons and seemingly impregnable fortresses filled the pages of many of these publications.  These pictures were accompanied by vivid descriptions of the latest fighting outside of Beijing, or reports of Boxer massacres at remote missions.

Yet the emergence of new technologies ensured that magazines would not retain a monopoly on graphic depictions of Boxer violence.  Film was still in a state of relative infancy when fighting first broke out late in 1899.  The first public performance of a film had taken place in Paris in 1895, and most of the movies that were being produced between 1895 and 1899 were relatively simple set piece affairs featuring only one performer captured in a single static shot.  Yet by the turn of the century filmmakers were striking out in new directions which would affect how the Western public encountered the Boxer Rebellion.

There seems to have been some competition between early film makers attempting to satisfying the public’s interest in these events.  Perhaps the first of these films (though the timeline is a bit unclear) was Sagar Mitchell and James Kenyon’s “Boxer Attack on a Mission Outpost” in 1900.  This short film lasted just under a minute and was shot as a single scene.  It told a simple story in which a Western missionary greeted his wife and daughter as they head out.  A second later they can be seen running back while the mission falls under attack by a mob of colorfully (if not authentically) dressed “Boxers” employing a mix of traditional weapons (including a Dadao) and clubs.  The European missionary resists gamely with his cane (referencing turn of the century interest in the gentlemanly arts of self-defense), until a group of British soldiers appear and restore order through the use of superior firepower.

Mitchell and Kenyon’s film was following up on a previous hit which had focused on the (then ongoing) Boer War.  While audiences almost certainly understood that the footage was staged, there seems to have been a great deal of enthusiasm for “realistic” recreations of these events. The most interesting aspect of this film is probably the appearance of Western cane fighting and a Chinese dadao in the same scene.  This must have been the first time that Occidental and “Oriental” fighting skills were called upon to square off against one another on screen from the enjoyment of a paying audience.

Mitchell and Kenyon were not the only directors looking to capture the essence of the Boxer Rebellion on film.  Even more important, and certainly better known, is James Williamson’s “Attack on a China Mission”, also screened in 1900.  Williamson’s film is in many ways the more ambitious of the two.  Its original running time was probably close to two minutes, but in its current edited form we have only 1:15 worth of material.

A still from. James Williamson’s “Attack on a China Mission” (1900). The lead Boxer in this frame appears to be holding a Japanese katana.

The project was also notable for its technical complexity.  It employed a cast of over 20 individuals (most of which were either British sailors or a Boxer mob) and attempted to tell a complex story through the four discrete shots and (the first ever) reverse angle cut.  In this film Boxers break through a gate to assault a mission house.  They are better armed than the previous group and came at the settlement with rifles, swords and clubs, with the aim of slaughtering its inhabitants and burning the place down. The missionary and his wife whisk multiple children inside, and he then returns to the yard to defend the settlement with his own firearm.  The missionary is overwhelmed and killed by a Boxer armed with some sort of saber.  The wife can then be seen calling for help from the balcony as the house begins to issue smoke.  At that point a detachment of painfully well-ordered British sailors appear on the scene and begin to lay down fire, thereby preserving the honor of white womanhood in China.  This last point appears to be a none too subtle subtext in both films.

This film was a pioneer in a number of respects.  Employing a greater number of shots and camera angles to tell an engaging story was an innovation that helped to set the stage for a new era of plot-centric action films.  Williamson also put his background as chemist to good use as he attempted to replicate gunshots, smoke and explosions in a way that would capture the audience’s attention.  Yet he did not intend to tell a story about victory through technical superiority.  Simply firing a gun was not enough to save his missionary as the Boxers were also well armed.  It was the superior martial character and discipline of British troops, advancing in tight ranks (rather than the more “realistic” rush seen in Mitchell and Kenyon’s film) that won the day.

These two films were joined by at least one other, more mysterious, production titled “Beheading a Chinese Boxer.”  This was the shortest and simplest of any of the productions.  It showed a single Chinese captive being forced to kneel and then beheaded (again with what appears to be an authentic dadao).  Identical execution scenes had been described in popular publications since the 1850s and were even shown on Western postcards.  The actual staging of the execution is surprisingly realistic.  Additionally, most of the surrounding soldiers carry red tasseled spears that would be immediately recognizable to any Sinophile in the audience.  Special effects are again employed in the actual beheading, and the head itself is placed on a pike at the end of execution for good measure.

This shorter film is often attributed to Mitchell and Kenyon.  It should be noted that their other production ends with the British forces seizing a single live captive.  One wonders if we are witnessing his ultimate fate.  Yet the BFI Player webpage states that there are questions regarding the accuracy of this attribution. Contemporary catalogs note that something resembling this film, and possibly produced by Pathé or Walter Gibbons, was distributed by Warwick Trading Company.  Or this could indicate that there were at least four Boxer Rebellion films circulating in 1900 (that we know of), with three currently surviving.

Conclusion: The Boxers as a Familiar Foe

I recently had an opportunity to see a much more current documentary on the martial arts.  It was a BBC production that discussed the introduction of the martial arts to the UK. Given that most such discussions focus on the US, I was very interested to see more of the European side of this story.  Nor did it hurt that some friends and colleagues (including Stephen Chan and Paul Bowman) made appearances throughout.

The emphasis on the UK notwithstanding, I think that most American students of martial arts history would find the basic outline of story to be very recognizable.  The Japanese martial arts (beginning with Jujitsu, and hybridized as Bartitsu) are first “discovered” in the West at the turn of the century.  Judo is then popularized.  Next, American servicemen in the Pacific return after being introduced to Karate.  Finally, in the early 1970s the world hears (apparently for the first time) that there is thing called “Kung Fu.”

The outlines of the narrative are familiar, and in a certain sense they are true.  A whole generation of youth and teenagers who did not previously know about the Chinese martial arts did discover them in the late 1960s and early 1970s.  And Bruce Lee was absolutely instrumental in popularizing them (as well as all of the other Asian martial arts if we are being honest).

Yet as a historian I know that this simplified account leaves out quite a bit.  And the story that is excluded is just as interesting as the one we typically choose to emphasize.  For instance, when we focus on Bruce Lee introducing Kung Fu to rambunctious (mostly male) youth in the 1970s, we seem to conveniently forget about Sophia Delza and Gerda “Pytt” Geddes introducing a very different (and more female) demographic to Taijiquan in the 1950s.  What is at stake when we tell one story to the exclusion of the others?  When we discuss the absolute secrecy with which Chinatown residents in the US and the UK guarded their martial arts in the 1960s we forget the almost desperate attempts of China’s Republican government to promote their martial arts to the English speaking world (even showcasing them at the Olympics) during the 1930s and 1940s.  Indeed, as far back as the 1860s Wood could write with authority about the Chinese martial arts demonstrations that he had witnessed…in London.

The story of the Western discovery of the Chinese martial arts that we most frequently tell is not wrong, but it is a partial picture.  As students of martial arts studies, we need to ask not only whether this historical discourse is correct, but also what sort of social or cultural “work” it is currently doing.

When we remember the discovery of Bruce Lee, who specifically is the “we” in this equation?  And who is being forgotten?  When we put forward a narrative that privileges only a single aspect of the Chinese diaspora (supposedly secretive working class Chinatowns in London and San Francisco), what other elements of the Chinese community (often with very different, more nationalist, goals) are encouraged to fade into the background? Even if it is true that large numbers of people did not begin to practice to the Chinese martial arts until the 1970s or 1980s, might it be worth asking what previous generations thought about these practices?  Or why they might not have been interested in pursuing them in one decade, but found new meanings in almost identical symbols in the next?

The Boxer Rebellion is interesting as it reminds us that, contrary to the dominant narrative, the Western public did not first encounter Chinese martial artists in the 1970s.  Nor was Bruce Lee the first Chinese individual who appeared in Western popular culture who was physically dangerous and capable to defeating a white opponent.  What was new was that this was no longer viewed as being as fundamentally threatening or as dangerous as it once would have been.

We must acknowledge the fact that the image of the Chinese martial artist has long stalked the Western imagination.  Whether labeled a “sword dancer”, acrobat or boxer, the figure he or she has always been present.  While their multiple meanings might have been recast by the post-war counter-culture movements, their origins are deeper.  There might be no better evidence of this than the media explosion that accompanied the Boxer Rebellion.

Rather than agreeing that the portrayal of the traditional Chinese martial artists (however badly acted) on Western movie screens is a relatively new thing, imported from Hong Kong in the 1970s, what we instead see is that these images were instrumental in laying the groundwork for all modern action films.  Indeed, colonial adventures in Africa and Asia gave us the genres of adventure stories that we still enjoy today.  Rather than Asian identity becoming a foil against which Western notions of self and nationalism were shaped in the post-Vietnam War era, the same process can be seen at play in the 1850s, and again following the events of 1900.

A close examination of martial arts history shows that Chinese and Western identity have long been intertwined in a process that can only be described as mutually constitutive.  This is not to imply that things have always been harmonious.  The Boxer Rebellion was not only a paradigm defining moment in Chinese history, it is also critical for understanding questions of identity in the modern West as well.

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If you enjoyed this you might also want to read: David Palmer on writing better martial arts history and understanding the sources of “Qi Cultivation” in modern Chinese popular culture.

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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 may 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 way too long since our last update so there is a lot to be covered in today’s post.  Let’s get to the news!

Taijiquan in a Beijing Park with Master Zhang Jian. Source: New York Times

News From all Over

Our lead article this week comes from the New York Times.  It asks, “Tai Chi Encourages Calm.  So why are its Chinese fans stressing out?”  If your answer had anything to do with the UN and “intangible cultural heritage,” you are probably correct.

“Last year, Indian yoga made Unesco’s list. In 2011, South Korea’s taekkyeon became the first martial art so honoured.

So why does Chinese taiji not win similar international recognition?

That is the question on Mr Yan Shuangjun’s mind as the annual deadline approaches for nominations to Unesco’s Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity list, established by the United Nations agency to celebrate and protect the world’s cultural diversity.”

As we have seen in recent blog posts and news updates, questions of “intangible cultural heritage” have become a major focal point for the public discussion (if not the actual practice) of the Chinese martial arts.  Our first article is a fascinating case study in the lobbying efforts (so far unsuccessful) to earn this status for Taijiquan.  It also includes some background discussions of the sorts of headwinds (mostly competition from within China) that Taijiquan faces.

How have taijiquan’s advocates responded to recent setbacks?  By pointing to taijiquan’s “soft power” potential on the global stage and warning ominously that without immediate government action it might be “stolen” by the Japanese or Koreans.  Then they take some parting shots at Shaolin for good measure.  Honestly, you cannot make this stuff up.

Li Junfeng, the teacher of Jet Li and co-author of a recent book on Baguaquan. Source: Straits Times.

The Straits Times has had some decent martial arts coverage this last month including one piece that attempted to do a lot of things.  First, it introduced Li Junfeng (best known as Jet Li’s coach) and discussed his background.  Next it plugs a new English language book on Bagua that he co-authored with a student.  Then it rather abruptly cuts to an interview with Li. All in all, an informative read and worth taking a look at.

Wang Guan, a Chinese fighter who recently signed with the UFC.

Readers more interested in the modern combat sports will want to check out the following article in the Asian Times.  It profiles the RUFF champion Wang Guan, who is now the second Chinese fighter to sign with the UFC.  After discussing Wang’s prospects the article goes on to profile the UFC’s strategy and challenges when it comes to cracking the Chinese media market, a victory that has so far eluded them.  We have heard this basic story quite a few times in the last year, but it looks like the UFC has some mainland events scheduled for this summer.

Source: Consumer Reports

Do you suffer from back pain?  If so Consumer Reports has a few suggestions.  Specifically, they think you should take up Taijiquan.  They spell out why in a longer than expected article which you can find here.  None of this is terribly surprising as a number of studies in the last year have found that Taijiquan can be effective in the management of different types of chronic pain.

With my background I am more interested in the social aspects of Taijiquan practice than its medical applications.  As such I was intrigued to run across the same story in both the Salt Lake Tribune and SF Gate.  It profiles a current program being run in Salt Lake that uses free Taijiquan classes to help homeless individuals develop a sense of life stability.  Salt Lake has a large homeless population and these classes are currently being hosted in the basement of the downtown library (which is a great building.)  We hear a lot of about Taijiquan being used to treat physical problems in the West, but much less about its application to other social issues.  If I were still living in Salt Lake I would be heading to library to check this program out tomorrow.

Shaolin Flying Monks Temple.

For our next story we head to the Shaolin Temple and another visit to the “you could not make this stuff if you tried” file.  It seems that a new structure has been built that is modestly titled the “Shaolin Flying Monks Temple.”  Designed by an architect from Latvia the new “temple” is basically a huge vertical wind tunnel in the middle of an outdoor amphitheater.  The force generated by the turbines allow various martial monks to float and fight while flying through the air.  And supposedly all of this has been designed with the “beauty of the local environment” in mind.  You can see some nice architectural photography of the structure here.

A literal “iron palm.” Source: People’s Daily

No news update would be complete without a feat of Kung Fu prowess.  For this we can turn to The Daily Mail which profiles a student of “Iron Palm” skills.  There is some video footage of his demonstration.  None of that is particularly new, but I thought it was interesting that the article went to lengths to emphasize the degree to which he showed no emotion, and apparently felt no pain, while engaging in breaking, rather than recounting in graphic detail all of the stuff that got smashed.

Chinese Martial Arts on the Screen

Do you remember all of the discussion during the run-up to Ip Man 3 that this would be Donnie Yen’s last Kung Fu Film?  He was done, retiring, and committing himself to more dramatic roles.  Yeah, not so much.

A couple of months ago it was announced that Donnie Yen was set to reprise his role as Ip Man.  Recently a teaser poster was released and fans were informed by Yen himself that filming is set to begin next year.  It looks like this project is now set to become a reality.  No one has any clue what the story will be about, but (as usual) the fans are demanding that Bruce Lee make more than a cursory appearance.  I guess we will see what the Lee estate thinks about that idea.

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

Have you been following Into the Badlands?  I will admit that I gave up after the first couple of episodes. But it looks like the show is now back for season 2, and a lot of the advertising once again focuses on Daniel Wu’s notable martial arts chops.  This discussion includes dropping pop culture references to everything from “Ip Man” to “36 Chambers” along the way.  The show continues to try and stake a claim as being the definitive small screen treatment of the Chinese martial arts.  Maybe I will check out a couple of episodes and see how the show has evolved.  Also see here.

Marvel’s Iron Fist

The Observer recently ran an article titled “The Highs and Lows of ‘Iron Fist,’ Marvel’s Great Kung-Fu Failure.” In this case, the title says it all.  The political controversies that surround the project notwithstanding, this critic knows Iron Fist’s true weakness.  In a landscape already saturated with superheroes, he was saddled with a boring story.

A participant at a recent Saber Legion tournament. I love what this guy did with his fencing mask. Source: http://imgur.com/gallery/euBjd

This last story touches on my work with the Lightsaber Combat community.  I heard some people talking about it at class this last week, so when I got home I looked it up.  It seems that a man in South Carolina used a lightsaber replica of some type to fend off an attack by a step-daughter who was attempting to slash him with a pair of knives.  Despite my best efforts I have not been able to find out what color lightsaber he used.  Once again, if you tried to make this up no one would believe you.

Martial Arts Studies by Paul Bowman (2015)

Martial Arts Studies

As always, there is a lot going on in the realm of martial arts studies.  Lets start with upcoming conferences.

The first Annual St. Martin Conference, held at the German Blade Museum, has just released its formal call for papers.  The topic of this years gathering will be the comparative study of both traditional and modern fight books.  Sessions will be held in English.  This sounds like a fascinating event for anyone interested in the scholarly study of historic weapons and combat.

Also, we have an initial list of confirmed speakers for the 3^rd Annual Martial Arts Studies conference slated to be held this July at the University of Cardiff.  Make sure to send in your proposals and registrations soon!

Next we have a couple of papers that have recently been released.  The first is the draft of a public talk to be delivered by Paul Bowman at a Philosophy Festival in Europe.  It is titled “Trust in me: Mindfulness and Madness in Martial Arts Philosophy,” and is accessible to a fairly broad audience.

Next, Alex Channon, Ally Quinney, Anastasiya Khomutova and Christopher R. Mathews have released a draft of their forthcoming article “Sexualisation of the Fighter’s Body: Some Reflections on Women’s Mixed Martial Arts.” Anyone interested in gender issues in martial arts studies will want to check out this paper which can be read for free at academia.edu.

As far as primary sources go, Paul Brennan has just released a new translation of The Taiji Art by Song Shuming [1908].  This is fairly early as modern Taijiquan manuals go, and this piece has gotten a fair amount of discussion.  Check it out.

Kung Fu Tea on Facebook

A lot has happened on the Kung Fu Tea Facebook group over the last month.  We have discussed recent posts at the Zhongguo Wuxue blog, studied the Legend of the Zhanmadao and watched some great vintage savate films (thanks to Rodney Bennett). 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 Dance Studio in a Galaxy Far, Far Away

“You, put your phone down!”

I looked around, unsure about the sudden exclamation from the instructor who had just been summing up the essential concepts of the drills that the class had run for the last half hour.  This was my first evening with the Rebel Alliance,* the new incarnation of New York City’s best known Lightsaber group, and I was still getting a sense for the class.  The threat of a high-profile lawsuit late last year had forced the group to drop their old name and reorganize under a new banner. You could feel that some things were still in a state of flux.

“No, just put down the phone.  Put it down and get over here!”

I could now see that the instructor was motioning towards Maria, a petite brunette woman in her 20s who had made the trek from the Bronx to Manhattan.  She had been the first person to greet me when I showed up at the studio. She volunteered as the Rebel Alliance’s social media coordinator and was responsible for filming class discussions and drills that might end up on a webpage or Facebook update.

Tentatively, Maria headed towards the center of the floor and the instructor. The dozen or more people who sat along the back wall, watching the unfolding scene, became very quiet.  It was clear that something was about to happen, but it was also evident that few class members knew what.

“Since we are now this ‘new’ group and all, there were things that existed before and we didn’t really use them properly.  You may have heard about titles.  For instance, if you have been here six months you may consider yourself an “apprentice.” [….] You have been active for six months, you do stuff, that’s great!  You have some privileges within the group.”

“If you have been here for at least one year and performed in at least two conventions, that means you are eligible to be knighted.  That is a pat on the back.  It means that you have gone above and beyond.  Having been here a year and having done two cons, that is the absolute minimum.  But you must step up, that is the thing for every one of the titles.”

“Maria has stepped up.  Like last year at Eternal Con we needed someone else to help run tech.”  At this point the instructor made an exaggerated bow towards the apprentice.

“We needed someone at Immortal Con. ‘Hey Maria, you have a fight right…would you mind being the star of that show?”  Maria smiled in a chagrined way, remembering the conversation.

“And she has taken it upon herself to be your media admin.  Pretty much everything we are posting comes from her.”

Then, turning from the assembled class toward Maria he stated “So, you need to take a knee.”

As she knelt and bent her head a blue lightsaber touched one shoulder and then the other.

“You are officially the first dubbed knight of the Rebel Alliance.”

At a loss for words, and with tears starting to form in her eyes, Maria stood and turned towards the cheers, claps and saber taps coming from her classmates.

The knighting of Kanan Jarrus in the Star Wars Rebels cartoon series. This is the only onscreen knighting that I have seen in the Star Wars series. I have always considered that to be odd given the importance of the role of “knight” in the story’s mythos.

Making it Real

Later that night, as I transformed the quickly jotted ideas I had recorded on the train back to New Jersey into fully developed field notes, I found myself returning to this interlude.  Rather than occurring at the start or the end of a class (what one might think of as natural climax points) this ceremony had been staged right in the middle.  It marked the transition between the technical instruction that defined the first part of the class and the extended period of choreography practice and small group experimentation that took up the rest of the time.

I had been eager to visit the Rebel Alliance for many reasons.  Under a different name this group had been among the very first to organize, inaugurating the commencement of lightsaber combat in the United States.  And while there were a number of people in the room who were relatively new, others had been actively engaged with the lightsaber community for close to a decade.

In that respect the Rebel Alliance is quite different from the Central Lightsaber Academy, which is the main site for my current ethnographic research.  That organization is less than two years old, and is still in its active development stage.  Nor do the two groups share the same basic approach to the lightsaber.  The Rebel Alliance heavily emphasizes stage combat and live performances, often in front of large audiences.  It is organized as a charity and classes are taught by a rotating roster of regular and guest instructors.  While basic martial arts skills (and even some form work) is taught, this is usually understood in the context of public performance and theater.

The Central Lightsaber Academy (CLA), as I have explained before, has a different emphasis.  The group’s leader occasionally puts in appearances at local events, and a few students have started meeting outside of the regular class hours to put together their own performance team for cons.  Yet for the most part this is a traditional martial arts school.  It approaches lightsaber combat as a martial art or, more properly, as a new platform for exploring and testing ideas from a variety of existing martial systems.  It is run by a single professional instructor.  Tournaments and rank tests are the most important activities that students are expected to prepare for and regularly participate in.

Relations between the groups are hospitable.  My friend Craig Page invited me to drop by for a visit while I was in New York City earlier this year. I was only too happy to take him up on the offer.

At the same time, the visit showcased the growing diversity of goals and aspirations that can be seen in the Lightsaber community.  Somewhat apologetically Craig explained that while they had always done choreography, if I had visited five years earlier I would have seen more of an emphasis on martial arts training.  But recently the interests of the group had reconfirmed its theatrical commitments.  Likewise, it is not hard to find all sorts of videos of groups on Youtube touting the authenticity of their martial art (or combat sport) based vision of Lightsaber Combat, conspicuously noting that they have no interest in performance.

In one particularly telling moment during my visit I had an enthusiastic thespian explain to me that what happened on staged was “real” precisely because it demanded months of dedication, training and painstaking rehearsal.  You had to learn actual acting skills.  Drawing an unfavorable comparison to individuals who were interested in sparring she noted “It is not just a bunch of people running around and trying to whack each other with glow sticks!”

These are the sorts of comments that ethnographers love.  It occurred to me that this off-handed remark illustrated a fundamental truth about all of the various approaches within the lightsaber combat community.  Everyone is always just a little bit sensitive about the “reality” of their chosen hobby.  While other martial artists may point to history (Taijiquan, Kendo) or efficacy (Krav Maga, BJJ) to justify the reality of their pursuits (all of which, if we are being honest, are more “invented traditions” than most students care to admit), things are less straight forward for students of the hyper-real martial arts.  They cannot point to the hegemonic forces of nationalism or the self-defense discourse.  It is the shared effort and pain that goes into the practice itself that makes it “real” and grants the lightsaber community a sense of coherence.

Given the current obsession with “reality” in the modern martial arts subculture, it is not surprising that this would be a topic of discussion among lightsaber students.  The only real surprise would be if they somehow managed to avoid it all together.  So, on a more detailed level, how does a community deal with these questions?  And what role do initiation rituals, like the one described above, play in ameliorating these concerns?

The Rebel Alliance is not the only lightsaber group tinkering with its progression system.  Unlike the colored belts (originally developed for Judo) that have come to dominate the Asian martial arts, most lightsaber groups turn to the Star Wars ethos for at least the outward trappings of their advancement systems.  The mythological progression from “youngling” to “padawan” to “knight” to “master” seems to have enough steps to keep students motivated while promising a fulfilling sense of completion at some point in the future.

Alternatively, groups who use the “Seven Forms of Lightsaber Combat” also have a natural progression system, which can easily be mapped onto the supposed career trajectory of a Jedi Knight.  Sith hierarchies, based on murdering one’s own teacher, are always a bit harder to define or replicate in the classroom.

The CLA combines the two to create both a smooth pedagogical pathway and a more complex system of achievements.  Following the TPLA system, Younglings begin by studying a basic form of Shii-cho, the first dulon anyone is introduced to at the Jedi Temple.  Once more advanced variants of the form have been mastered, students are tested and accepted as padawans.  At that point they must go on to learn forms 2, 3 and 4 before being tested again and accepted as “knights.”  I would hazard a guess that the whole process would probably take most active students 3-4 years.

The remaining forms are reserved for the more senior students.  Once students reach the level of knight they can generally teach classes and take on padawans of their own.  As such “knighthood” might be thought of as the Star Wars equivalent of gaining your first or second dan black belt.

Or is it?  In my system, the progression to knighthood is explicitly linked to one’s technical mastery of form.  This is very much the theory of progression seen within the traditional martial arts today.  Yet the Rebel Alliance system is quite different.  There is no test that one can take to qualify for knighthood.  In fact, the rank appears to have been explicitly delinked from technical attainment.  Rather, the title comes as an acknowledgement of service to the group.

At first blush the two institutions would seem to have nothing to do with each other.  And in a narrow sense that is probably true.  Yet on another level both systems of progression seem to be designed as ways of dealing with questions about the reality of lightsaber combat and, by extension, the community that supports it.

Your father’s lightsaber.

A World in Which the Black Brazilian Man is King

Astute readers might wonder what lightsaber combat has to do with race, gender and Brazilian nationalism.  Each of these variables proves central to Lauren Miller Griffith’s recently published ethnography In Search of Legitimacy: How Outsider’s Become Insider’s in Afro-Brazilian Capoeira Tradition (Berghahn, 2016). Her study contains no mention of lightsabers, yet the basic questions that it addresses regarding how individuals become members of hand combat communities will be of great interest to all students of Martial Arts Studies.

The Capoeira pilgrims that Griffith studied faced a particularly daunting task.  Most of them were Caucasians or Asians from the global North (North America, Western Europe or Japan).  Several of her fellow travelers were also female.  None were native Portuguese speakers.  Further, Capoeira has been deeply implicated in both post-colonial and nationalist struggles.  Both the discourse of the art, and even the songs that are sung in the roda, tend to extol identity traits (such as African heritage and masculinity) that many of these students lacked.  And given the cultural and national distances between the USA and Brazil, it was openly wondered as to whether such students could ever really understand, let alone achieve, the highest aspects of the art.

Given this situation Griffith (unsurprisingly) reports a great deal of anxiety of the part of foreign students undertaking training pilgrimages to major schools in Brazil.  Had they been taught “real capoeira” at their home schools in Europe or Canada?  Would they be accepted as fellow martial artists by local students?  Would they ultimately be able to form meaningful relationships with their new Brazilian masters?

Griffith’s work has much to recommend it.  Graduate students will find it to be a great model of clear and concise ethnographic work focused on a tightly defined research question.  Perhaps one of her more important arguments emerges in chapter 2.  Noting the persistent anxiety about the “reality” of an individuals practice, Griffith proposed that we should further disaggregate these into the complimentary categories of “authenticity” and “legitimacy.”

Authenticity, at its most basic level, is a problem of classification.  Does a certain practice really belong in a given category? Unfortunately, those who are most frequently called upon to evaluate the authenticity of a new type of performance (e.g., new prospective students) are often the least equipped to do so.

As novices, we usually do not understand either a given practice, or the even the category in which it is supposed to fit.  Very few of the individuals who wonder whether lightsaber combat is a “real” martial art have ever trained in the discipline.  Fewer still have an interest in the humanities or social sciences or have spent much time thinking about how (and whether) we should define the martial arts.

In other words, most of us are asked to make decisions about the authenticity of a performance at a point when we are still “outsiders.”  As such, decisions about the authenticity of other people’s practices tend to be very subjective, and they rely heavily on our prior experiences in related (but never identical) areas.  Questions of authenticity tend to be fundamentally contested, and such conversations are usually outward facing.

A white Capoeira teacher who immigrates to the United States from Brazil may have to spend a lot of time bolstering their perceived authenticity among potential students who simply assume that all Capoeira teachers will naturally be black. Such external markers become an important means by which outsiders are forced to make “snap” judgements.

Yet as Griffith points out, they can also become an important informal barrier in the learning of Capoeira itself.  While Brazilian teachers may host foreign students in their schools, gaining the sort of “insider knowledge” necessary to master the art requires forming a more personal apprenticeship relationship with a teacher.  And one’s personal characteristics (gender, race, nationality, linguistic fluency) can make that a more or less difficult process.

These obstacles, while real, are not insurmountable, particularly for charismatic students.  This is were Griffith turns from questions of authenticity to “legitimacy.”  Legitimacy basically denotes how closely one sits to the center of a community.  As students deploy various behavioral strategies they may be able to move themselves into a closer relationship with key members of the community, guaranteeing access to more personalized instruction, social capital and the agreement of all of they are in fact “legitimate” students of the master, creating authentic performances.

In a later chapter Griffith goes on and identifies four basic strategies, all of which appear repeatedly within her field notes, by which students gain legitimacy.  Very quickly, these are having the proper attitude.  Ideally Capoeira students should be perceived as warm, outgoing, good natured individuals.  This is vitally important as foreign students are often stereotyped as being either frigid or self-centered or greedy.  They are perceived as “only taking” and not interested in “contributing to the community.”

Second, one must learn to speak the language.  The musical aspects of this art, accompanied by the singing of folk songs, indicate that there is greater pressure to become linguistically fluent than most students of Karate or Kung Fu might experience.  Learning the language is also a powerful sign of dedication and respect.  To the degree that it grants musical fluency it is a marker of one’s respect for tradition.

A number of students also became involved in volunteer activities.  These ranged from helping around the school, to volunteering in children’s classes, to working with anti-poverty programs in other parts of the city.  Such efforts served multiple purposes.  In addition to the humanitarian good they accomplished, they also provided an “outside” venue in which Capoeira pilgrims could build social bonds with more senior students and instructors in the school.

Lastly, Griffith discussed the matter of romantic relationships and marriage.  Dating a member of an established group could be an effective way to gain a much deeper level of membership in the local community.  In fact, one suspects that there are several other sorts of close personal relationships (becoming a business partner, etc…) that might have a similar effect.

What all of these strategies had in common was they allowed for the development of what Griffith called “legitimate peripheral participation.” By engaging in such activities foreign students, who might otherwise be one face in a crowded class, had increased opportunities to spend time with their instructors, build social capital, and develop the sort of personalized relationship that would allow more traditional Capoeira instruction to happen.  As this process was observed by the group, and new skills were developed, the legitimacy of an individual’s place in the community was cemented.

Authenticity and Legitimacy/Schools and Students

Griffith’s observations have wide applications.  One could easily apply this basic framework to the efforts (some more successful than others) of Western students to establish meaningful relationships with Wing Chun or Hung Gar masters in Hong Kong.  And in some ways it seems particularly helpful in disentangling the quest for reality in the Lightsaber Combat Community.

Both Western Capoeira and Lightsaber students face a fundamental challenge.  One group studies an Afro-Brazilian art with strong post-colonial undertones, and yet they are not Brazilians or citizens of the global south.  The other studies a Jedi art, yet they do not have “the Force.”  No amount of training will ever change these essential facts for either group of students.  Outsiders will always wonder whether white kids “can really” play Capoeira, and pretty much everyone will wonder whether lightsaber combat “can really” be a martial art.  We all feel this external gaze and, on some level, we all internalize these questions about the authenticity of our own performance.

The first step in solving this dilemma for many of Griffith’s subjects was that they put their lives on hold and undertook an expensive pilgrimage to Brazil where they hoped to find legitimacy.  Indeed, this basic impulse is sending growing numbers of martial arts students to destinations like Okinawa, Israel, Thailand and the Shaolin temple.  One of the problems that Lightsaber Combat students face in defining their identity is that no such pilgrimage, with the attendant promises of legitimatization by proximity, is really possible.

As a global post-modern phenomenon, Lightsaber Combat has no center.  The fact that it is usually treated as a “supplement” to other interests exacerbates the situation. Both the Central Lightsaber Academy and the Rebel Alliance only meet once a week.  That is not a lot of time to develop skills, stabilize an identity or build networks of trust and reciprocity.  And it is far less time than most serious martial artists devote to their training.  When I was still living in Salt Lake City I spent about three hours a night at my Sifu’s school, 5 days a week.  The Central Lightsaber Academy cannot meet more frequently because all the other nights of the week are taken up by the instructors busy Kung Fu teaching schedule.

Given this combination of factors, existential concern about the authenticity of one’s practice, combined with limited opportunities for formal training and socialization, perhaps we should not be surprised to find that many Lightsaber Combat students pursue opportunities for “Legitimate Peripheral Participation” with a vigor that Griffith would probably appreciate.   At the CLA daily personal practice becomes an important mechanism for demonstrating one’s commitment between classes, which in turn allows more new material to be introduced within a class.  Cultivating a public attitude of dedication, and a friendly openness to other students (even in stressful situations such as sparring practice), becomes an important means of moving from the periphery to the center of the group.

Also critical are volunteer efforts, such as the efforts to assist with public appearances, or the creation of the choreography team.  These put students near their instructors and create opportunities for the sorts of detailed personal instruction that is a prerequisite for success in any sort of martial arts.   Such additional training opportunities lead to quicker mastery of the essential forms needed to move through the schools progression system towards knighthood.

The process in the Rebel Alliance is similar.  Here knighthood is not something that can be “earned.”  Rather, as the scene at the top of this essay explicit notes, it is a combined process of the apprentice making efforts to “step up,” and the more senior members of the group accepting these gestures as legitimate.  The technical aspects of advancement that mark the CLA are no longer present, but in both cases knighthood is explicitly understood as a marker that one has achieved a degree of “insider status.”

To be a knight is to have your efforts publicly legitimated, thus answering, to a degree, questions about the authenticity of one’s status.  And as Maria’s reaction indicate, this can be a very powerful personal experience.  Indeed, that speaks directly to the importance of these identities in the lives of students.

Nor should we neglect to ask what such rituals of completion accomplish for the group that bestows them.  Classic anthropological theory (see Victor Turner on liminality) suggests that formal rites of advancement transform the group in such a way that it will be willing to accept the new status of their members.  Yet in a modern social space in which the survival of any martial arts group is based on its economic success in a competitive marketplace, it is vitally important to demonstrate to outside observers (and potential students) that apprentices do advance and become masters (however that is defined) within a given art.  Indeed, people join all sorts of martial arts precisely because they are looking for self-transformation, and any system that denied or failed to deliver on that promise would be perceived as “inauthentic.”

Martial arts organizations, especially those that are seeking to establish themselves, need their students to succeed.  In critical ways that Griffith never explored in her book, the flow of credibility between students and organizations is circular, rather than running in a single direction.  Only when a martial art is publicly seen to produce better people and legitimate students will the community at large accept it as authentic and worth investing in.  Coming to terms with knighthood, itself a fictional title, is central to the real developmental challenges facing Lightsaber Combat. That in turn may suggest something important about the way that all martial arts group function in modern society.

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*Following standard ethnographic procedure, the names of groups and individuals who assisted my fieldwork have been changed to protect the privacy of everyone involved.  The names of public figures in the Lightsaber community, and other organizations that were not fieldwork locations, have been preserved.  The knighting at the start of this essay was captured in a video recording that I made.  However, the transcript of the event has been lightly edited for both length and clarity.

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If you enjoyed this you might want to also see: Lightsaber Combat and Wing Chun: The Search for Meaning in the Modern Martial Arts.

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Chinese post card from the PRC showing a young girl studying a sword routine as her teacher looks on.

Introduction

I am interested in the frequent, seemingly unconscious, way in which the word “traditional” is appended to the name “martial arts” in modern speech and writing.  One does not simply study “Japanese wrestling” or “Chinese physical culture.”  From about the 1970s onward everyone became a student of the “traditional martial arts.”  Like so many habits of language, this one requires interrogation and additional thought.

The use of the term “tradition” appears to obscure, often in strikingly ironic ways, the actual relationship between the development of many of these practices and the forces of modernity.  Tradition is more of an aspirational category than a descriptive one.  For Chinese or Japanese practitioners, such a term likely reinforces the idea of continual transmission in the service of some “national essence.”  Students in the West are less likely to internalize the nationalist undertones associated with many of these arts, but instead derive other Orientalist fantasies from coming into contact with the “ancient” and “unchanging” East.

All of this is problematic on the descriptive level.  Rather than a pure transmission from the “unknowable past,” what we actually see are stochastic leaps in both technical performance and somatic meaning as hand combat systems jump from one generation to the next.  Yet even that observation tend to understate the actual nature of the situation.

It was not just that the martial arts evolved in time with the changes around them.  In a variety of countries both reformers and practitioners seized upon these institutions as tools to systematically promote their vision of the ideal modernized and reformed nation state.  Rather than preserving social traditions, the martial arts were often employed to attack vast fields of local practice in the hopes of preserving a few aspects of culture that reformers felt were particularly suited to success in the arena of global competition between nations that would define the 20^th century.

The fact that we today so easily accept the term “traditional” testifies to the startling success of these efforts.  As Ernest Renan taught us, the nation is defined by what we collectively agree to forget as well as what we remember.  Nowhere is more clear than in an examination of the “traditional” martial arts.

Newspapers were an ideal medium for cultivating and spreading modernist discourses.  Of course, they did not just circulate within a nation, a topic discussed by Benedict Anderson and others.  At times the process of identity construction also required one to strategically reach out to a more global audience.

Consider the following article from the North China Herald, and English language newspaper published in Shanghai.  This paper enjoyed a wide circulation within China and its articles were occasionally picked up by foreign newswire services as well.  It is interesting to ask what it had to say about the Chinese martial arts as they reemerged as a topic of social and political conversations during the 1920s.

The following article is particularly instructive in this regard.  Morris, Henning, Kennedy and Gao, among others, have all commented on the importance the Jingwu (Pure Martial) Association in the promotion of women’s martial arts in China.   And in 1920 the Pure Martial organization broke new ground by creating a Women’s Department to systematically promote these efforts.  Indeed, much of Jingwu’s success was rooted in the fact that it reached groups of individuals (such as middle class women) who were previously excluded from any sort of martial arts or athletic training.

Two facts about the creation of this department are less well remembered.  First, the promotion of female martial artists was not a continuation of any aspect of “traditional” Chinese social life.  While there had certainly been female martial artists in the past (and I have written about a number of them on this blog), it must be remembered that such figures were relatively rare.  Looking at their specific circumstances hints at the ways in which they were the exceptions that proved the rule.  Jingwu’s enthusiastic embrace of female martial artists was just one part of its support of a larger feminist agenda which sought (with notable success) to fundamentally reshape critical elements of Chinese home and social life.  This is a classic case of the martial arts used as an agent of social and political change rather than preservation.

Also lost in much of the current discussion is the fact that Jingwu went to notable lengths to make sure that their efforts were reported in both the foreign language and domestic press.  As we read the following account a few points are worth noting.  First, the event was staged at the Shanghai YMCA, a hub of progressive change. Second, it was hosted by the organization’s officer who had been tasked with the dissemination of English language material.  Third, the organization went out of its way to make sure that reporters from English language newspapers, which catered to a global readership, would be present at the launch of the new department.  Lastly, Jingwu specifically made its young female performers available for interviews.

This final point is particularly interesting.  While period foreign language discussions of the Chinese martial arts are more common than is often thought, most of these (such as Alfred Lister’s efforts) were written from the perspective of the Western observer. Reports that include extensive interview material in which the martial artists themselves reflected on their own training and experience are rare.  This fact makes the following article an important historical account.

Still, readers might note that the various answers provided by these girls stick close to Jingwu’s “talking points.”  We may be tempted to wonder to what degree they reflect the speakers actual thoughts.  Such an objection, while entirely reasonable, may miss a slightly larger point.  Not only was Jingwu willing to promote training opportunities for female martial artists, they went a step further and used these individuals as the global face of the institution.  Any foreign reader who doubted the modernity of “Chinese boxing” need look no further than Jingwu’s spokeswomen for a definitive answer.

Indeed, modernism, nationalism and global awareness suffuse this article.  Conscious efforts are made to re-brand the martial arts and to place them among Western pursuits such as football and gymnastics.  And while the grim military competition of the 1930s is still far off, young female students gush enthusiastically about how Chinese boxing has allowed them to work 15 hours a day, thus preparing the body politic for a new era of economic reform and market based struggle.  Much of this same rhetoric would reemerge in the “Qigong Fever” of the 1990s as Chinese society again sought to accommodate itself to growing neo-liberalism.

“Tradition” is not the only idea that is taken for granted in current popular discussions of the Chinese martial arts.  Another such category is “secrecy.”  We are often sagely informed that prior to the coming of Bruce Lee (or some other pioneering teacher), the Chinese martial arts were a great secret.  They were never discussed, demonstrated or taught to Westerners.

This article (and its many cousins) are useful in that they also help us to reframe such assertions.  As Paul Bowman has noted, this statement has always been problematic as it tends to absolve whites in North America of any taint of racism while shifting such sentiments onto the Chinese community.  But leaving aside the question of motivation, it is clear that on a purely descriptive level a great deal of qualification is needed.  While it may have been the case that certain communities in the US (e.g., members of the New York or San Francisco Chinatowns) had little interest in publicly discussing the martial arts, it is equally true that some of the most important martial reform movements in the Republic period were devoting resources to this effort.  The article below is a remnant of a concerted and savvy public relations campaign.

How better to burnish the modernist and scientific credentials of China’s newly reformed boxing systems than to win supporters in the West?  Such a move would both improve China’s image abroad (allowing it to stand more evenly with Japan), while at the same time winning legitimacy for these efforts at home.  Why they failed to catch on is an interesting question that will be explored in future posts.  Yet frequently repeated assertions of the “traditional” and “secret” nature of these arts neglect the much of what was going on in China itself during this critical period.

A group of female students demonstrating the jian at Fukien Christian University sometime in the 1920s. Source: http://findit.library.yale.edu

CHINESE GIRL ATHLETES

Form and Fascination

“During the first month we girls took to physical culture, we felt as if we were as stiff as dried bamboos and could not move.”

Such was the opinion of a young member of the Ladies’ Department of the Chin Woo Athletic Association.

The formal inauguration of this Department was held at the Young Men’s Christian Association on Saturday afternoon and a very enjoyable programme was performed.  About 80 girls took part in the exhibitions.  Mr. S. S. Chow, English Secretary of the Club, presided over the gathering.  More than 800 visitors were present.

It was extraordinarily fascinating to see these young girls come out and deliver addresses and give exhibitions of boxing.  It showed that the girls of to-day are indeed different from the girls of twenty years ago.  In those days few girls dared to show their faces in public.  But nowadays….!  The united dancing drill by three entire schools was excellent.  The girls were thoroughly trained and the instructors deserve all the praise for the smart work the girls showed.  One learns that the girls met on two occasions only to go through their practice together.  To show that foreign drill and calisthenics are not neglected, there were also exhibitions of both these, to the great credit of the girls.

Some Boxing

The Chinese boxing, however, was the feature of the day.  Girls whose ages ranged from six to 30 took part in the display.  With fists, feet, knives, swords, chains, clubs staves, and what-not, they attacked each other with the fury of men in actual battle.  As in all exhibitions of Chinese boxing, the girls showed that they knew how to use their feet—and use them well.  They kicked their dainty little feet over their heads in such a manner as would put foreign dancers to shame.  They did somersaults on the floor and in the air quite as well as any of the menfolk.  “Turning the wind” jump and the “double kick” were exhibited with much grace and neatness.  When two of the girls got together in a wrestling match, they went at it heart and soul.  They were in some respects superior to the men.  They fought in the same manner as the men and chopped “with the strength of nine.”

Stronger and Prettier

“What methods of physical culture do you use most?” a representative of the “North-China Daily News” asked a member of the Club.  “We put Chinese Kung-fu or boxing first,” was the immediate reply.

“How did you feel after taking exercise?”—“During the first month we girls took to physical culture we felt as if we were as stiff as bamboos and could not move.  Instead of remaining stiff and weak as we were before taking exercise we gradually began to grow strong, muscular, less fat, more active, and in all we found that we were more efficient.  We could eat more and sleep more soundly.  We can study harder, and can work for 15 or 16 hours a day without feeling the least tired. Don’t you think that proves that the exercise in beneficial to use?

“And another thing,” the speaker added rather shyly, “we find that we are prettier and our beauty increases as time goes on.  We do not have to suffer growing old.  Our bodily form and our style of walking or sitting are much improved.

“As I have just said we emphasize Chinese boxing, from the smallest to the oldest and strongest.  We can play football as well as any of you men.

“Yes, it is stiff in the beginning and no real progress can actually be made until after a year or so.”

“Why do you like Chinese boxing?”—“Because we find that in using the Chinese methods of boxing and the old-fashioned Chinese swords and other implements of warfare, every one of our muscles is brought into force.”

“Do you have any forms of foreign exercise?”—“Yes. We play tennis, volley ball, basket ball, rings, and other sorts of foreign gymnastics and games.  OF course, you must understand that while we put Chinese boxing first, we do not preclude others from playing just as they please.  If a girl wishes to play a certain game, she is at liberty to do so.  However, we do not have calisthenics in our Club.”

A Flourishing Club

The Club has a membership of about 250, and members age range from four years to 40,  Half of the membership are schoolgirls while the other half are ladies from various families.

The Chin Woo Club was established a little more than ten years ago I a very modest building.  Today it owns some 30 mow of land, some of which was presented to the Club.  On this land are two buildings at present but it is hoped to build 20 more later on.  There is a large football field, a Chinese park which has not yet been completed, and a “model village” will be erected some time next year, where there will be a public library.  At present some Tls. 90,000 has been put into the Club.

Modern Sanitary appliances and baths have been installed, and it is hoped to make the Club as complete in every particular as possible within the next five years.

“CHINESE GIRL ATHLETES.” 1920.The North – China Herald, May 08, page. 342.

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Interesting in the Republic era reform of the Chinese Martial Arts?  Check out: The YMCA Concensus.

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A Duandao. The blade is about 18 inches long, and the original sword was probably 25 inches when originally mounted. Collected in China, 1900. Author’s personal collection.

What is it?

The first question seems straight forward.  This sword was purchased at auction a few years ago.  It is a short saber, often called a duandao by martial artists. Its blade is just under 18 inches (46 cm) long, and its tang (broken at the end where the peened pommel was removed) is about 5 and 1/2 inches (14 cm).  The blade itself is a hair over one and half inches in width (close to 4 cm).  The sword tapers notably along the spine from the base (4 mm) to the tip (1mm).  The tip has been lightened with a false edge.

The sword itself is in poor condition.  The blade, with double fullers, is structurally in good shape, though it needs a careful cleaning.  Some of the original file marks are still present from its final shaping leading me to suspect that the sword never enjoyed a detailed polish.

The handle is totally missing, leaving us to speculate as to the nature of its original furniture.  Some hints can be derived from the existing scabbard.  It is covered in ray skin (still in decent shape), and appears to have shrunk over the years (which is not uncommon in scabbards of this age.)  Both the fixtures from the throat and tip are missing.  However, the hangers are in place and show a floral pattern.  One suspects that this would have been repeated on the missing hilt.

Blades of this length were common in the late 19^th century.  It seems that as the security situation degenerated, and firearms became the primary arm, there was still a demand for short side arms.  Of course, stout hatchet tipped sabers had been used in conjunction with heavy rattan shields for quite a long time.  One of my favorite pictures from the Boxer Uprising period shows a unit armed with shields and seemingly quite similar sabers.  This same pairing of weapons was also seen in southern China, and I have occasionally wondered if the late-Qing explosion of the Hudiedao in Guangdong was a regional expression of this growing interest in Duandao.  But that is a topic for another day.

Things get complicated when we more closely examine of the details of the scabbard.  Swords with identical fittings, in very similar ray skin scabbards, show up from time to time on the antique market.  This example (sold by Peter Dekker), while more nicely finished than my blade, probably gives us a very good idea of how it originally looked.

As Dekker points out, martial artists were not the only one’s interested in portable weapons.  He notes that tourists visiting China in the closing years of the 19^th century may have been looking for souvenirs to take home.  And a 25-inch sword would fit very nicely in a steamer trunk.  Such blades needed to be visually impressive, but they did not require proper heat treatment or functional blades.

This last point raises some interesting questions.  I am not sure that it always follows that the blades of “tourist weapons” from this period were of inferior quality.  One of my other areas of collecting is the Nepalese Kukri.  While the market has been flooded by lots of bad tourist blades in the post-1960s period, many of the knives made for foreign consumers in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries are absolute marvels.  It seems that quite a few of the gentlemen frequenting bazaars in India and China during the late 19^th century were soldiers (or had served in the military in the past) and tended to be fairly good judges of steel.

There is a lot about the commercial production of these weapons in 19^th century China that I am still trying to figure out.  Nevertheless, I just came across a fascinating account which mentioned that as the Boxers started to stream into Beijing in the Spring of 1900, shops throughout the city put up signs advertising that they had swords for sale.  Unsurprisingly, residents of the Foreign Legation took this is as a bad sign.  Yet it does suggest that however these weapons were being produced, the supply could be increased on short notice.

I have no idea whether my example would show lamination if polished.  But in looking carefully at the edge there are suggestions that a previous owner attempted to test the sword’s cutting ability.  Gladly it survived the owner’s curiosity better than the subsequent years of neglect.

A detailed shot of the furniture on a “curio saber” (circa 1900) sold by Peter Dekker. While the blade of my example is about 1/2 inch longer than this sword’s, I suspect that it would have looked very similar when originally mounted. Source: mandarinmansion.com/late-qing-curio-saber

Where did it come from?

I will admit to not caring very much about this question when I first purchased this piece.  As a martial artist, I am interested in China’s shorter sabers and thought that this piece might make a good study blade or a possible restoration project at some point in the future.  And the price was right.

Things got more complicated when the saber showed up.  There is one final detail of note about the scabbard.  It bore a scalloped paper label with the following (severely faded, nearly illegible) inscription.

“Chinaman Sword Pekin, China N.H. Hall USMC”

Captain Newt Hall was a Marine who took part in the defense of the Foreign Legation in Beijing during the Boxer Uprising.  He saw heavy fighting and was later awarded the Marine Corps Brevet Medal for “distinguished conduct in the face of the enemy.”  This would normally be enough to make any arms collector extremely suspicious as unscrupulous dealers are only too happy to increase the value of a common item by attaching it to the memory of a military hero.

Nevertheless, if one were to attribute a random sword to a survivor of the Boxer siege, Captain Hall might not be at the top of the list.  People are swayed by the romance of a weapon that has seen action (or at least been captured there in).  While Hall’s men saw a good deal of action, he had an uncanny habit of remembering there was someplace else he needed to be just when the fighting broke out.

This pattern was noted by other residents of the ligation.  No less a figure than Sir Claude MacDonald, the British minister to Beijing, wanted to see Captain Hall court-martialed for cowardice.  After the siege, Hall requested a Naval Court of Inquiry to clear his name.  His subsequent commendation demonstrates that his reputation was restored.

Yet history has looked at him with some ambivalence.  Popular books, such as David J. Silbey’s The Boxer Rebellion and the Great Game in China (Hill and Wang, 2012) and The Boxer Rebellion, by Dian Preston (Walker, 1999), probably provide a decent snapshot of his personality.  They remember him as much for his boorish behavior as his absence under fire.  Often noted was the occasion when he left Private Dan Daily to defend the Tartar Wall while it was under heavy fire.  Hall supposedly left to find reinforcements, but never returned with any.  Daily held the position by himself, fighting on through the night, and was eventually awarded the Medal of Honor.  If an antique dealer were to attach the name of a war hero to a Chinese weapon, one suspects that Daily would serve their purposes much better than Hall.

Setting thorny issues of provenance aside, let us assume that the label is correct.  How would Hall have come across the weapon.  This is where stories of taking a weapon from the body of a fallen enemy (probably one of the fanatical Boxers trying to kill Private Daily) typically emerge.  Or given that swords like this were finding their way back to the West in steamer trunks even before the Boxer Rebellion, Hall might simply have purchased it in a curio shop of the type that were common in the “Tartar City.”

We will never know for certain.  But there is a third possibility that is more likely than either of those.  It may be the case that what we are looking at is a relic not of the fighting that engulfed the region, but the large-scale looting by the Western military forces that happened afterward.

This looting was one of the most prominent features of the entire period.  Soon after liberating the ligation soldiers from all the allied states turned their attention to systematically stripping the palaces, mansion and common homes of the city of anything of value.  The most sought after items were (unsurprisingly) gems, precious metals and furs.  Close behind were silks, ceramics and art objects.

In the newspaper accounts of the period the officers of each army criticize their brothers in arms for the rapaciousness of their looting.  Americans stood in wonder of the daily “prize auctions” hosted by the British in which the treasures accumulated by common soldiers were auctioned to more wealthy officers, diplomats and missionaries.  Yet American soldiers could often be found taking part in these affairs, and were flagrantly disregarding the US Armies own orders against the practice. Everyone feigned horror at Russian and German soldiers kicking down the doors of curio shops.  The Japanese officer corps, ever disciplined, distributed specific lists to their soldiers telling them what sorts of cultural artifacts and artistic treasures were most needed by museums and schools back in Japan.  As word of this prolonged “carnival of loot” spread, enterprising Chinese merchants from Hong Kong and Shanghai even headed to Beijing to take part in the buying and selling.

While the Japanese and European diplomats assembled collections of immense cultural value, American soldiers were noted to be more interested in weapons and swords.  It should be remembered that many of these individuals were campaign hardened veterans who left the battlefields of the Philippines for China’s hot and dusty plains.  Hall’s sword seems to fit the overall patterns nicely.  One suspects that it was purchased at a roadside stall being run by an enterprising soldier, or possibly at one of the daily auctions run by the British. That is how most officers acquired their loot.

Chinese Soldiers and Officer in Beijing. Source: Illustrated London News, July 14th, 1900.

What does it mean?

It may be the case that the broad forces behind this weapons’ murky back story are more interesting than its actual history as an artifact.  For instance, if this blade was plucked from a battlefield in 1900, why not just say so?  Readers may recall that the Opium Wars (1839-1860) resulted in huge amounts of looted weapons and artifacts being shipped back to Europe where they were prominently displayed in both private and public collections. The display of these material objects seems to have been a major event in the creation of the popular image of China in the West.

Yet, as James L. Hevia (2007) reports in “Looting and Its Discontents: Moral Discourse and the Plunder of Beijing, 1900-1901” (in Bickers and Tiedemann eds. The Boxers, China and the World), there were no major public displays of looted goods in the West following the Boxer conflict as there had been earlier in the 19^th century.  It is useful to consider why.

First, the public knew about the scale of looting, and it became something of a social controversy.  Reporters for major newspapers and magazines ran accounts of auctions, markets, robberies and “punitive expeditions” into the countryside that seemed more interested in seizing property than finding Boxers.  In fact, the public hungered for any news about events or the conduct of the War in China.

The Boxer Rebellion emerged as a media spectacle just as interest in the concluding Boer War began to wane.  Early film makers created some of the first narrative “action films” to bring the sights of these battles to Western consumers. [Link] Publishers produced young adult fiction about boys who fought the dreaded Boxers to save their families (and earn a place in the imperial machinery). The 1901 “Grand Military Spectacle” in Earl’s Park staged a twice daily theatrical pageant telling the story of these events in which white actors in yellow face put on Chinese costumes and took up swords and spears to recreate for audiences the occult gymnastic practices of these enemies of civilization before staging an abbreviated siege of the Foreign Legation. (see page 42).

Yet the widespread reports of looting seem to have touched a nerve.  The practice had its defenders.  Looting was often framed in purely punitive terms, as the righteous retribution for the death of foreign missionaries and the destruction of Christian churches.  In fact, many missionaries were at the forefront of looting activities, seeing them as a quick way to raise the funds necessary to rebuild their communities.

Nor can one discount the connection between the psychological and the political meaning of these acts.  As Hevia notes, if the fighting was a type of violence inflicted on the bodies of combatants, looting was very much seen as violence inflicted on the property of the losers, and by extension the Chinese state at large.  Looting carried clearly legible meanings.  It was not just economic retribution.  It was also seen as the just humiliation of a backwards people who refused to prostate themselves before the superior West.

Public opinion at home quickly shifted against these arguments, in both their explicit and implicit formulations.  No less a cultural figure than Mark Twain took up his pen to decry looting being carried out by Christian missionaries.  The Western intervention in Northern China had never been justified in purely political, economic or imperialist terms.  That would have been impossible as the fierce competition between the Western powers would have ensured the almost immediate collapse of cooperation the moment that one country seemed to be gaining an upper hand in the “Great Game.”  Indeed, Japan and Russia would come to blows within a few years of these events.

Rather, the conflict had been framed in normative terms.  The West was forced to act to avert a massacre and defend both its fundamental values and vision of proper social order.  It was the lawless murder of Christian converts and Western missionaries, and then the systematic looting of their property, that started the crisis.  Newspaper stories of punitive expeditions into the countryside (which managed to kill many more innocent Chinese civilians than Boxers), and accounts of the “carnival of loot” in Beijing and Tianjin exasperated the public in both the West and Japan.

All of this was interpreted through an overtly racialized lens. Throughout the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, Chinese hand combat practices were seen not so much as a set of skills to be mastered, practices with a history and cultural value, as a racial manifestation of Chinese cruelty, violence and indolence. For much of the 19^th century what was emphasized in this mixture was the “indolence” and backwards superstition.  I haven’t run across any Western account that viewed Chinese martial artists as particularly dangerous individuals at that time, though some were grudgingly willing to admit that they could be stronger and faster than one might guess.

All that background remained present after 1900, but now the threat of actual danger and violence came to the fore.  Yes, these individuals were backwards and superstitious, but they were also fanatics who could kill with exotic weapons.  And that was critical.  Killing always comes with a level of grudging respect.  In standing up to this manifestation of racialized violence the West found yet another justification for its imperialist zeal.

On some level, there was a desire for the danger that the Boxers promised.  This was the reason why they were recreated with such painstaking care in the yellow face performances at Earl’s Court or in the various early films romanticizing the action in China.  While interested Westerners had known about Chinese martial arts for much of the 19^th century, only now did they become interesting.  Only now did they appear on the front covers of magazines, or become something that one might want to “possess” (perhaps in the guise of a curio sword).  Chinese boxing gained an emotional power during these years as it was reimagined as a totemic messenger of the racialized forces of disorder and violence.

Every text or event carries multiple meanings, and there is often a tension between them.  This is where we will find the roots of the public aversion to the looting of 1900.  It is also probably why Hall’s sword, and so many others like it, sat languishing in closets rather than having someone pick them up and start asking serious questions about how to use them.

To see western soldiers, supposedly the epitome of discipline and honor, acting out the same “uncivilized” vices that were attributed to the Chinese Boxer, raised serious questions that went well beyond hypocrisy.  For the West, empire always carried with it the threat of racial pollution.  How does one structure a system where the metropole can exploit the periphery, without the periphery somehow finding a foothold in the metropole?

Had these troops been infected by their time in China?  Could “racial degeneration” occur simply through contact with Chinese individuals, or by prolonged exposure to the violence of Chinese society? The various treasures that were hauled back to the West were quietly laundered into the antique and curio market as the public backlash against looting was simply too strong to do otherwise. Yet in that rigidly hierarchic era, questions intensified about those who served at the edges of the empire. (Hevia, 106-107)

While produced before the outbreak of the Boxer rebellion, one would be hard put to come up with a more appropriate cartoon.The original caption read “It’s all a matter of perspective. When a Chinese coolie strikes a French soldier the result is a public cry of ‘Barbarity!’ But when a French soldier strikes a coolie, it’s a necessary blow for civilization.”
Le Cri de Paris, July 10, 1899
Artist: René Georges Hermann-Paul

Conclusion

How should a looted sword be read?  In the year 1901 did it represent the victory of the rational West over the forces of superstition and uncivilized barbarism?  Or was there a more sinister undertone.  Did it remind one too much of the violence that had been done, of the individual and social damage that could not be undone.  Had the West been infected by its contact with China, even though it sought to contain it?  Clearly such thoughts would help to inspire the prolific and popular Yellow Peril literature that would mushroom in the coming decades.

Swords such as this one would make frequent appearances in these novels.  In Western story-telling the line between a sacred treasure, a stolen treasure and a cursed treasure is often quite thin.  That anxiety might be helpful in thinking about the very slow spread of the Chinese martial arts. We often assume that because Westerners did not seek to practice the Chinese martial arts in the early 20th century that they must not have known about them.  Or that these practices did not shape China in the public imagination.

This discussion, inspired by a single sword’s rather murky backstory, should remind us that neither of these assertions are necessarily true.  The racialized nature of national identity in the 19^th and early 20^th century might explain why, even after the Chinese martial arts had gained a level of dark glamour previously been denied them, few Caucasians would be interested in such practices.  While authors, actors, artists and film producers had discovered that one could make a great deal of money by appropriating the image of these fighting systems and repurposing them for the enjoyment of Western audiences, there was not much to be gained by reimagining them in a more heroic mode.

That task would await a future generation of reformers.  They would begin with efforts to deal with the still festering memory of the Boxer debacle, on both the domestic and international stage.  Still, if the Boxer had not demonstrated a willingness to stand up to the forces of imperialism, and occasionally give them a run for their money, one wonders whether later Chinese nationalists would even have bothered.  While certainly a mixed and contested legacy (see for instance Paul Cohen), the dark glamour that arose through myths of the Boxer’s may have been more valuable to the emergence and eventual popularization of the modern Chinese martial arts than is generally realized. Who wants to study a martial art (or own a sword) that isn’t a little bit dangerous?

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If you enjoyed this essay you might also want to read: Zhang Sanfeng: Political Ideology, Myth Making and the Great Taijiquan Debate

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A Girl Who Lived with Monkeys

No text can be read in isolation.  Each is connected to other works through a network of invisible threads.  These are the product of suggestion, desire, memory and meaning.

The job of a historian is to tell us what happened. Often such stories are resolved through chains of causality. Yet when we come to questions of interpretation, the significance that something held for an audience, we are faced with entire fields of meaning that emerge from these more complex webs of association.  As such, there is a very strong tendency to make our understanding of new events conform to a socially significant preexisting pattern.

Nor is this characteristic of human thought something that is confined to the remote past.  Recently it was reported that a young girl had been discovered deep in a forest in India.  After being spotted by travelers a police officer was sent to collect the girl.  She was found living with a group of monkeys who had raised her.  She could not talk or walk on two legs.  Her nails had grown long and claw like.  When the police officer grabbed her, the girl’s simian family screamed and chased his car down the road.  The press quickly dubbed her “girl Mowgli” after another animal raised child made famous by Rudyard Kipling and Walt Disney.

Very little of this story was actually true.  There was a girl, and there was a police officer, but that was about the extent of it.  In reality an abandoned child was found sleeping by the side of the road in a part of the jungle that did contain monkeys, but also enough traffic to make it highly unlikely that the girl had been in the area for very long.  Rather than having been “raised by monkeys” the girl suffered from some sort of developmental disability, which was likely the reason that she had been abandoned by her parents and left to die.  The last article I read suggested that girl’s condition was starting to improve, but I doubt that this story will ever supplant the first one in the public imagination.  It was the very fact that she seemed to fit an archetypal myth of a human being raised in a “state of nature” that gave her plight meaning.  It was impossible to hear about a child found among monkeys and not read these events in terms of the preexisting folklore.  If that was not the way her life happened, perhaps it should have.

The Boxer Uprising has a very similar quality to it.  As these events unfolded there was a very strong tendency to read them in terms of other dominant patterns in Western thought and history.  Perhaps the strongest and most defined parallels were drawn with British colonialism in India and the Sepoy Mutiny.  Period journals and letters inform us that foreigners living in the legation were acutely aware of these parallels.  The weight of history informed their decision not to accept the Chinese government’s offer of safe passage to the coast as a similar offer in India had resulted in a massacre.  This degree of self-conscious identification with the events of the Sepoy Mutiny as a means of making legible the unfolding crisis has been explored by Robert Bickers in the Introduction to Bickers and Tiedmann’s edited volume, The Boxers, China and the World (Rowman and Littlefield, 2007).

A similar pattern emerged in popular literature, especially mass market novels aimed at boys.  In China and the Victorian Imagination (Cambridge UP, 2013) Ross G. Forman asks what these tales of the Boxer Uprising suggest about China’s role in turn of the century popular culture.  One of the most striking elements of his discussion is how quickly these stories began to be produced.  Indeed, they could come to market with such speed only because authors and publishers took preexisting tales of adolescent adventure set in India or South Africa, and transposed them directly to a Chinese context.  While certain elements of the Chinese landscape were introduced, at heart these stories remained a vehicle for exploring and promoting the logic of empire.

When reviewing the primary sources surrounding the Boxer Uprising it is vitally important to remember that newspaper readers in June or July of 1900 did not know how these events would end.  Lacking the foreknowledge that we bring to the event, period actors and the wider public attempted to make sense of these events through the geo-political lens of their day.  These had been shaped by events in South Africa, the Philippines, and most importantly, India.

Yet there was another source that readers drew from.  That was the popular image of Chinese martial artists that had developed over the course of the 19^th century.  It was the image of Chinese sword dancers, gymnasts, boxers and secret society members, inherited from countless newspaper and magazine articles which shaped the image of the turn of the century “Boxers” in the public imagination.  Again, additional information was processed in light of one’s existing understanding.

A Banner from the Boxer Uprising. Source: Prof. Douglas Wile.

Who Are the Boxers?

Nowhere is this more evident than in the way that Boxers were discussed in period media accounts.   As I reviewed the New York Time’s coverage of these events during the summer of 1900 I noticed that name “Boxers” always appeared in quotes.  The editorial board of the times knew the proper Chinese name of the group.  They had even published imperial edicts commenting on Boxers, as well as translated copies of Boxer posters and placards.  Experts on Chinese culture had been interviewed.  They were not “boxers” due to a lack of knowledge.  This was the product of an editorial decision.

Yet the dutiful reliance on scare quotes suggests a level of discomfort with this moniker.  These were not the sorts of boxers that Western sportsmen would be most familiar with.  Nor, truth be told, were they identical to the types of Chinese boxers who had occasionally made appearances in the pages of English speaking newspapers and missionary journals throughout the 19^th century.  While those individuals might entertain (or disappoint) with their sword dances and gymnastic contortions, no one had viewed them as particularly dangerous. And yet they were a ready-made image.  Their shared interest in martial practices made the Yi Hi Society more like China’s other boxers than anything else in the West’s lexicon.

Given the importance of the Boxer Uprising as a media event, one would think that the very first thing that newspapers would have been forced to do was to define and describe these “Boxers” for their readers.  That was not the case.  In looking at the early reports of violence that began to emerge in the spring of 1900 the “Chinese Boxer” construction is clearly present.  Yet no effort is made to expand upon what a boxer might be.

Given that the full scope of the crisis was not yet clear, updates in May and early June tended to be small news items.  There was likely an expectation that the only people who would find them interesting would be individuals who already followed Chinese events and culture.  Such individuals (as I have argued in other places) didn’t need a basic discussion of Chinese Boxing. That had become more or less common knowledge.

All of this changed as Boxers entered Beijing and the scale of the violence escalated in June and July of 1900.  Suddenly the crisis in China was front page material.  All readers began to take an active interest in these events, which, even if one was not concerned with China, were seen to have critical geo-political ramifications.  It was only in June and July, as the violence escalated, that articles began to appear attempting to explain who the Boxers were and to describe their unique modes of violence.

Perhaps the most important examples of these discussions can be found in the weekly and monthly magazines of the period.  These publications offered readers a more detailed and sustained discussion of the events of the day.  And if that was not sufficient to entice them, they also published lavish illustrations, engravings and photographs which promised readers a glimpse into the reality of world events.

Readers hoping to get a glimpse of the boxers would certainly have been disappointed by what they found.  The Boer War in South Africa had exhausted the art department of most of these magazines.  Given how few professional artists were located in the Beijing area, most magazines made due with stock photos relabeled in ominous, and sometimes outrageous, ways.

Perhaps my favorite example of this is the June 9^th edition of the The Sphere.  In it we find a photograph of a supposed “Boxer.”  Only the picture shows nothing of the sort.  Rather it’s an image of a random man walking down a flooded street carrying an umbrella.  Given the role of persistent drought in setting the stage for the Boxer Uprising, one suspects that the picture in question was not particularly recent.  Another photo from the same article purports to show a boxer exercise ground.  Yet the scene looks suspiciously like a city street, and the presence of a European gentleman walking through the frame (complete with one of the 19th centuries finest beards) makes one doubt the competence of these supposed “Boxers.”

Such visual enthusiasm notwithstanding, these articles did a somewhat better job of introducing readers to the suddenly globally important Boxer movement.  This was accomplished by  introducing the group, describing its origins and training methods, and then theorizing about its possible motivations and place in the large scheme of things.  Consider, for instance, the following excerpt taken from the previously mentioned article in The Sphere.

A group photograph of an archery class or society. Ogden Cigarette Card, circa 1901.

The Sphere. June 9^th, 1900, p. 619

THE CRISIS IN CHINA—The “Boxers,” and who they are. by Alfred Edmonds

A society with so militant a title as the “Righteous Harmony Fists” could hardly be expected to be other than belligerent in its character.  This is the society which has caused so much perturbation in the foreign settlements in North China during the past week.  The jocular students of the legations have converted the high sounding designations which the Chinese gave the rebels into the more blunt and expressive of “Boxers.”

The movement had its origins some years ago in Shantung, the province in which Germany has secured so firm a foothold, and its aims were to drive everything of foreign origin out of the country.  The society quickly spread to the neighboring province of Pechili, where it found fruitful soil in the Manchu or northern portion of Pekin, the capital of the empire.  Here, under the guise of indulging in gymnastic exercises, such as throwing of stones and shooting with bows and arrows, it scattered the seeds of an anti-foreign agitation which had its first serious outbreak in 1898, when the Legations had to be guarded by troops sent up from Taku.

Foiled in their attempts to frighten the foreigners from the city, they redoubled their efforts at organization, and the society soon had ramification throughout the whole of the metropolitan province.  The reactionary policy adopted by the wily Dowager-Empress has tended to foster rather than discourage the movement, and unless prompt and vigorous action is taken by the Powers much mischief may be done.

It goes without saying that the term “Boxing” predated the effort of any translation students involved in the siege of the foreign Legation.  Yet this article demonstrates that the group’s real name was well known to at least some Western readers by June, and the term “Boxer” was adopted a conscious shorthand.

This article is interesting in that it describes archery as one of the major boxing activities, though most contemporary accounts instead emphasize sword and unarmed forms.  It is also important to note that rather than being the new phenomenon the Boxers are here seen as being “some years old.”  In strictly historical terms, this is not correct.  Eshrick has detailed the forces and timeline behind the rise of the Yi Hi Boxers. While this region of China had a rich tradition of banditry and disorder, this particular movement was actually both innovative and new.  Yet as we will see in the following accounts, there was a strong tendency to see the Boxers as a much older movement that only recently emerged as a threat.  Consider the following treatment from the Harpers Weekly.

Harpers Weekly, June 16^th 1900, p. 556

“The Boxers” By Isaac Taylor Headland, Professor in Peking University

 

The present condition of affairs in China is the logical outcome of conditions which began more than a year ago.  The provinces of Shantung and Honan have always been the centre not only of learning and of great men (Confucius and Menicus have been born there), but also of secret societies, and consequently of such uprisings as that which is at present disturbing China, and especially Peking.

The society called Boxers originated many years ago and is of a twofold or perhaps manifold character.  It is a partly athletic, and partly moral and religious.  As an athletic association it goes under the name of the Big Knife Society (Ta Tao Hui), and as a moral or religious society under the name of Righteous and Peaceful Fist.  It is organized for the most part in the rural and village districts, and, it is said by the officials, is for the mutual help and protection of the country people—help in times of famine, and protection from their enemies, and in case of necessity against oppression of avaricious officials.

During the governorship of Yu Hsien there was constant trouble arising from thieves and robbers, who were made such by the famine caused by the annual overflow of the Yellow River.  This society was organized in its present form with the consent and protection of the Governor, and, it is said, with his own son as a member.  The Governor gave them swords and constituted them a sort of rural police, who were to protect the people against famine brigands….

About one year ago the Society of Boxers transformed themselves from keepers of the peace to a band of marauders, robbing, murdering, pillaging, and looting all of the Christian villages in Shantung….

Isaac Headland was both a missionary and college professor living in Beijing.  Again, I have included only the most relevant section of his article here, but the whole thing is worth reading.  While much of the missionary community was in a state of panic by June, Headland was unusually calm.  His explanation of the sudden uproar over the Boxers noted that it could not be explained by secret societies, xenophobia or drought.  These things were constants in China, and the Boxer panic in the foreign community was new.  He attributed the uproar to the arrival of a Times correspondent in the capital rather than novel events on the ground.   In short, he goes on to argue that the initial reports of the Boxer Uprising are overblown and “fake news” (to use a modern phrase).

Headland turned out to be wrong on many accounts.  Six days before this article was finally published the telegraph cables connecting Beijing to the outside world were cut.  The situation in the Foreign Legation had become tense, and the Japanese Chancellor had just been murdered.  Only a day after Headland’s assurances reached the public, the bombardment of the Taku Forts by the combined allied fleet would commence.

The accuracy of his description of the Boxers is also mixed.  Rather than identifying them as a new and fundamentally destabilizing presence in local politics, he too argues that they are one of the regions secret societies that had been present for many years.  Headland reveals a bit of his thinking on this when he notes that secret societies tend to have an outer and inner aspect.  In this case the outer/athletic group is the “Big Sword Society,” and the inner group (which no one in Beijing had heard of before) was the “Yi Hi Society.”

Eshrick investigated the connection between the Big Sword Society and the Yi Hi Boxers at some length and concluded that ultimately theories like Headland’s are wrong.  The Big Sword Society was a local militia organized by rich landholders.  While it also practiced invulnerability rights and feuded with local Christians, it was a much more conservative force in local society.

The Yi Hi Boxers, in contrast, emerged later and tended to spread in a rhizomic and leaderless fashion among displaced and out of work peasants.   While the memory of the Big Sword Society may have inspired members of the later group, that organization had been put down by the Chinese government prior to the eruption of the Boxer crisis.  Still, the superficial resemblance between these two groups might help to explain why so many commentators mistook a disruptive new actor for yet another manifestation of a “timeless tradition.”  Ultimately such confusion would prove costly.  But it is another example of how prior knowledge about Chinese martial artists conditioned the Western understanding of the Boxers.

It is also interesting to note the fuller development of an idea that was only hinted at in the Sphere.  Namely, any group as successful and as deeply entrenched as the Boxers could not be a mere popular movement.  It could only succeed with elite backing.  Rather than being a peasant revolt, the Boxers, like all good secret societies, were a bit more like a conspiracy.  The note about the provincial governor providing arms to the group advances this narrative.  Yet it will find a fuller expression in our next article.

This picture, published in the July 7th edition of Harpers is one of the few images from the early phase of the conflict with actual martial content. In this case a group of imperial soldiers.

 

The National Geographic Magazine, July 1900, p. 281

The Chinese “Boxers” by Llewellyn James Davies

 

The society or league which is now turning China upside down and forcing the attention of the whole world is known by various names.  The most commonly seen in the American papers is the “Boxers” or “Spirit Boxers.”  The origin of this name is to be found in the gymnastic exercise which constitute the drill of the society and in the mysterious incantations used.  In the Shan-tung Province the society is commonly called the “Ta Tao Hui,” or “Great Sword Society.” This is one of the names used by the society itself, and is a general name.  On the cards and posters issued by the society other names occur, which I understand to be of local use.

The “Boxer” society is one of the many secret societies of China, and, as is usual with such societies, has both a political and a religious significance.  It is said to be of ancient origin.  One Chinese tells me that it had its origins in the opposition to the “Manchu dynasty”, which has ruled China for the past two hundred and fifty years.

Whatever may have been its past history, the society has now collected its forces against the foreigners within the Chinese Empire.  It has been preparing for this present outbreak for several years.  About three and a half years ago I learned from Chinese friends that such a society was organized, and that it was growing rapidly.  Its anti-foreign purpose was known distinctly from that time.  It was said to be spreading from south to north….

In organizing this movement the leaders established at convenient centers what were called “ying,” or “encampments.” The members of the society living in the neighborhood met to drill and recite their incantations at these places, and here new members were initiated. Each encampment had, of course, a leader who was responsible to the higher officers.  A card sent to each of these encampments, naming the place of the proposed attack and stating the number of men required from each, called out a party of such size as the leader enjoyed….

They have confidently stated that those properly initiated into the mysteries of the cult, and whose “Kung Fu” or exercise of its rules was perfect, would by virtue of this practice become invulnerable, and thus be protected against all bullets or knives.  This was not left to future tests entirely.  Several intelligent Chinese have told me that they had themselves seen advanced members of the society strike different parts of their bodies with sharp knives and swords with no more effect upon the skin than is produced by wind.  The members of the society believe that the claim is well founded.  No difficulty is found in explaining the death of society members in battle.  In one instance, occurring early last fall, 30 or 40 miles from Tsi-nan-fu, 10 or 12 “Boxers” were killed by Catholics whom they had attacked.  It was then discovered that on the evening before or on the morning of the battle these men had broken the rules of the society by eating certain proscribed articles of food.  In this way their deaths but strengthened the faith of those remaining.

It was proposed at first to use no firearms in the extermination of foreigners, but to trust to the sword alone.  Great reliance was placed on certain callisthenic exercises and posturings which were expected to hypnotize or terrify the enemy.

Given the nature and mission of the National Geographic, one can assume that this was a source American readers looked to for detailed answers.  Once again, the magazine turned to a member of the missionary community for their regional expertise.

This is one of the more detailed early descriptions of the Boxers, and it contains many interesting points.  Attentive readers may have noticed the use of the term “Kung Fu” in reference to the diligence with which a Boxer took to his exercises and maintained the group’s many taboos.  The role of these taboos in building the faith of new members in the invulnerability rites is also explored in some detail.

Yet any descriptive progress that is made is quickly lost when the author turns to speculation on the group’s origins.  The memory of the late “Big Sword Society” is again invoked.  Yet in a fascinating twist we are also informed that this was an old society that was originally dedicated to the overthrow, rather than the defense, of the Qing.  The author goes on to relate that this group does not have its origins on Northern China’s drought afflicted plains.  Rather, his informants tell him that the group originated in southern China.

One suspects that these informants had no knowledge of what was going on in China as this is incorrect.  Instead they were simply describing the sorts of secret societies (all tied to the myth of the burning of the Shaolin temple) that were common in Guangdong and Fujian provinces.  Indeed, such societies had even managed to plant seeds in the new world, and were occasionally discussed in magazines like the Harpers Weekly.  Period readers who followed China would have been familiar with them.

Conclusion

A few common threads runs through all of these articles and sheds important light on how the martial arts (and Chinese social violence more generally) were imagined in America at the turn of the century.  Rather than accepting the fundamentally new and disruptive nature of the Boxer Uprising, in the popular imagination it was seen as simply the latest incarnation of something very ancient.  It quickly became just one more element of the type of “secret societies,” “superstitions” and “boxing” that had been a part of popular conscious for decades.

This reading of the situation leads to a paradox.  If the fundamental impulses and organizations were ancient, why did the crisis erupt only recently?  Rather than accepting the Boxers as a genuine popular (or even proto-national) movement ,Western readers tended to look to geo-political machinations for their answers.  In a few cases the Russians were blamed for inspiring the uprising.  Yet most commentators perceived instead a carefully planned ploy by the Dowager Empress to remove all foreign influence from China.  While the court did, after much debate, support the Boxer cause, this was certainly not a conspiracy that had been years in the making.  The alliance between the Boxers and China’s political elites in the summer of 1900 was much more opportunistic and fragile than that.

This intrusion of geopolitical logic into the Boxer crisis serves to bring our attention back to this essay’s main argument.  It was difficult for both elites and the reading public to make sense of the Boxer Rebellion in large part because they did not perceive the rapidly unfolding events clearly.  The ghosts of India, South Africa and the Philippines haunted their efforts.  It was precisely these parallels (whether real or imagined) that allowed the crisis in China to be integrated into the preexisting mental map of imperialism.  All of this is important to remember when thinking about the meaning of these events in popular culture.

Yet we too frequently forget the importance of China’s recent past in shaping this narrative.  Authors were just as able to draw parallels with events of the Opium Wars as they were the Sepoy Mutiny.  Further, the West’s image of both Chinese boxing and secret societies, topics explored in newspapers and magazines throughout the 19^th century, had perhaps the largest impact in shaping how the Yi Hi Boxers were imagined.  In the early phases of the crisis the nature of Chinese boxing was so taken for granted that explanations were thought to be unnecessary.  The language adopted in the more explicit treatments of the subjects that arose in the summer of 1900 again reinforced, rather than undercut, these mental models.

The result was the creation of a paradox, one in which the Boxers were at the same time ancient and a new disruptive force.  Students of martial arts studies might note the irony that more than a century later we still debate whether the latest incarnation of the Chinese martial arts are fundamentally timeless or something much more modern.  Some debates, it seems, are just too interesting to let go.

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Are you interested in delving further into the martial arts of the Boxer Uprising Period?  If so see:  Lives of Chinese Martial Artists (13): Zhao San-duo—19th Century Plum Flower Master and Reluctant Rebel

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Ip Man practices Chi Sao With Moy Yat.

***Over the next couple of weeks I will be devoting time to some non-blog writing projects.  So, from time to time, we will be dipping into the Kung Fu Tea’s (rather extensive) archives.  I particularly enjoyed writing this post and its a topic that I still think about.  This essay is also a nice example of how a historical familiarity with the development of the Chinese martial arts can help us to frame current trends.  Enjoy***

Introduction

Rather than delving into a deeply historical discussion, today’s post is intended to be a personal reflection on the role of Chi Sao, or sticky hands training, in the modern Ip Man lineage Wing Chun. That is not to imply that there will be no history. There will, but I will try to keep it topical.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the practice, Chi Sao is one member of a larger family of “sensitivity training” drills that are seen in some (though not all) Chinese martial arts. Probably the best known example of this sort of training would be “Push Hands” in Taijiquan. Yet even that simple equation exposes the first of two problems that must be dealt with before we can proceed.

While in some ways similar, Chi Sao is not Push Hands. Both exercises represent an abstraction away from free sparring and seek to educate their practitioners about the proper responses to certain types of contact and pressures.  Yet they proceed with different assumptions and a logic of their own. There are a great many sensitivity games out there, and each one is unique. Worse than that, I suspect that even within the Wing Chun community there is sufficient variation in our understanding of what the goals of Chi Sao are, and how the game is most productively played, that it might actually be counterproductive to lump it all under a single label.

All of which is to say, it is difficult to speak in overly broad terms about Chi Sao. It is something that most Wing Chun practitioners spend a lot of time on, and so naturally everyone feels a sense of ownership over this distinctive training process. While the following reflections will try to be as general as possible, at the end of the day my remarks will inevitably reflect the lineage and philosophy that I have trained in. Your mileage may vary.

The second problem that arises when we attempt to speak of the place of Chi Sao in Wing Chun training is more historical in nature. I just said that this was going to be a personal reflection, but historical curiosity is an important part of who I am and how I approach my training. Simply put, while Chi Sao practice is at the heart of Wing Chun today (at least within my lineage and most of the schools that I am personally familiar with), this was not always the case.

A Social History of Chi Sao

What was traditional Wing Chun training like in the generation of Leung Jan? To be totally honest we have no idea, and I personally would be suspicious of anyone claiming hard and fast answers to that question. We have very few written sources from that period and most of the oral traditions that exist in the Wing Chun world today seem to have been massively overhauled in more recent decades.

But we can speak more reliably about the era of Chan Wah Shun. Accounts indicate that when individuals from Foshan (such as Jiu Wan as well as Ip Chun and Ip Ching) arrived in Hong Kong they were surprised by how Ip Man (Chan’s student) was presenting his art.

With all of the talk of “lost lineages” it is not uncommon to hear individuals questioning whether Ip Man “changed his art” in the Hong Kong period. Was he still teaching the sort of Wing Chun that he had learned earlier in the century? The various eye-witness accounts that we have from the 1950s and 1960s would seem to indicate that what he was doing was very clearly identifiable as Wing Chun. The biggest changes seemed to be in the process that he was using to present his art to a new generation of younger, urbanized and more modern students.

As many accounts indicate, Ip Man streamlined the presentation of material and adopted something like an informal curriculum. He jettisoned many of the cultural trappings of Wing Chun such as the rhymed couplets that had been used in Chinese martial arts training for hundreds of years, as well as traditional concepts including the eight trigrams and the five elements. And while Ip Man had some background in the traditional medical systems of his teachers, this does not appear to be something that he ever stressed in his Wing Chun training. Like many residents of Hong Kong at the time, he turned to western medicine when seriously ill.

Another change has less to do with what he taught than how he introduced material. As with other fighting systems, the sorts of Wing Chun instruction seen in Foshan during the 1920s seem to have featured long periods of stance and movement training prior to the introduction of more combative techniques. Realizing that his younger and highly mobile students in Hong Kong would not put up with this, Ip Man’s children have asserted that he introduced both single and double armed sticky hands training much earlier in his curriculum to help increase student retention.

This move makes sense on multiple levels. To begin with, sticky hands training can be a lot of fun. It is more of a game than a type of sparring, but it’s a game where someone can get smacked in the head quite hard if they aren’t paying attention to what is going on. While it teaches sensitivity, Chi Sao can also be a fast paced and competitive practice. Many schools today go to lengths to keep things calm, yet as more advanced techniques are brought into play, and more open (non-bridged) structures are introduced, what started out as a simple game can come to approach something that looks a lot more like sparring. It was hoped that these elements of Chi Sao would aid in students retention, and judging by the raw numbers, the plan worked.

Of course by introducing Chi Sao earlier Ip Man was also forced to teach basic offensive and defensive techniques right at the beginning of the instructional process. Gone were the weeks or months of stance training. Instead students could be equipped with a passable kit of self-defense skills in a few months.

A number of commentators (chief among them Leung Ting) have speculated that this change in the way that information was introduced was responsible for much of Wing Chun’s early success in Hong Kong’s marketplace. Relatively new students were given fighting techniques, a venue to hone these skills in a semi-competitive setting, and then plenty of chances to try them out in the unsanctioned rooftop matches that were so common in Hong Kong at that point in time. As they gained experience in both arenas they became noted as skilled fighters compared to other students of equal age. This reputation then attracted more athletic talent to Ip Man’s doorstep.

Thus the strong emphasis on Chi Sao training seen in much of Wing Chun today (certainly within the Hong Kong branch) appears to be an artifact of Ip Man’s desire to build a certain sort of school in a specific time and place. It might be too strong to say that Chi Sao made Wing Chun what it is, but it certainly gave it a push in that direction

In my (admittedly partial) reading of these events, Chi Sao probably functioned as an effective training tool for two reasons. After the first couple of years Ip Man’s efforts to build a school were pretty successful, so there were a large number of enthusiastic students to take up the practice. This is one of those activities where you definitely benefit from touching arms with a more diverse group of practitioners.

Secondly, a pretty high percentage of these students were actually involved in the bemio, or youth challenge fight, subculture that so vexed Hong Kong’s parents and civil authorities in the 1950s and 1960. Thus they had some actual fighting experience, and probably expected to receive more in the near future. I suspect that individuals with this sort of background might be better able to absorb the skills that Chi Sao is attempting to convey while not confusing the abstraction of the training exercise with the reality of a fight (at least as they experienced it).

So does that mean that Chi Sao always functions as an effective training tool? Probably not. As the previous discussion suggests, there are a number of factors at play.

Hong Kong in the post-WWII era was something of a special case for martial arts instruction. The sheer number of styles that were present in the city, the social tensions that resulted from the influx of refugees and other economic problems, and the area’s unique cultural history all helped to encourage the growth of a variety of martial arts traditions.

Yet this highly concentrated mode of development, in which we see many students flocking to established schools and styles, was not always the case in southern China. Consider once again the story of the Phoenix Village Boxing society, which I reviewed in a post earlier this year.

Ip Man and his best known student, Bruce Lee.

A Short Visit to Phoenix Village

An ethnographic account of Phoenix Village in Guangdong Province, completed during the 1920s, included a short but interesting discussion of the role of traditional boxing in the area’s social structure. What we saw in this case was an oscillation between two different modes of martial arts organization.

Most of the time, relatively few people seemed to be interested in boxing. Some of the aficionados likely found specialized employment as bouncers in the town’s two full-time gambling houses. The others were basically hobbyists who maintained a personal interest in some aspect of the martial arts, but lacked any larger collective institution or school to advance their practice.

Then, every so often, a social alignment would occur. One of the two clans that ran the village would decide, for whatever reason, to either tolerate or encourage the resurrection of the village Boxing Society. When this happened an outside instructor from a neighboring village was hired, regular classes were organized, and for a period of time a very large proportion of Phoenix Village’s young men would take up martial arts training.

Unfortunately the authors of this particular study were highly focused on the internal structure of this single village and so they did not have much to say on what might have sparked these developments. We know from other accounts that rumors or the actual appearance of bandits in the countryside could lead to calls for martial arts training. Periodic feuding with neighboring villages could also have the same effect. Both of these catalysts might negatively impact the wealth of major landlords, and this would probably explain their sudden enthusiasm for the martial arts. After all, one must protect your investments.

Then, after a period of time, the outside teacher would leave for a new job. His local students would continue on for a while, but inevitably disputes would break out. These were deemed to be socially disruptive to the village, and the entire Boxing Society would be disbanded and put into stasis until the next time that the local elites decided to support its rejuvenation. Anyone who maintained their interest in the martial arts did so as an individual with no institutional support within the village (though the authors hint at the possible importance of larger regional networks).

This account struck me as interesting as it showed two different modes of social organization that Phoenix Village’s boxers seemed to swing back and forth between with a fair degree of regularity. Most of the time they maintained their interests (and any studies) as either individuals or within very small groups. We will call this the “dispersed” model of social organization. In these cases personal efforts combined with some reference to wider (but relatively weak) social networks supported the existence of the martial arts.

At other times everything shifted. Suddenly the pool of potential martial artists expanded and became geographically concentrated in a single school or training ground. This all coincided with wider shifts in village priorities. The previously marginal interest in boxing now received the community’s full attention. We will call this the “concentrated” phase of social organization.

Two things struck me about this account. The first was the regularity of this change. The boxers of Phoenix Village could expect to live through multiple iterations of this cycle which was taken as the normal (if regrettable) state of affairs. Secondly, I noted how similar this was to accounts that I had previously pieced together of other martial arts associations in late 19th or early 20th century Guangdong.

When I was doing research for my recent book, I realized that a lot of the area’s martial arts organizations seemed to go through periods of intense activity followed by a prolonged hiatus. The account from Phoenix Village helped to make sense of this pattern and its underlying causes. While school and association lineage histories tend to tell a fairly consistent tale, the accounts given by outside observers have been, at times, markedly more cyclic.

It is interesting to think of what all of this might have meant for Chi Sao and its place in Wing Chun. Admittedly, what follows is purely speculative. Yet it may help to make sense of why Chi Sao played much less of a role in the practice of Chan Wah Shun’s students in Foshan than it did in Ip Man’s pupils in Hong Kong. Clearly the exercise was present and a part of the Wing Chun system in both places. Yet the martial arts were not particularly popular in Foshan between 1900-1910s.

We know, for instance, that Chan Wah Shun only taught about 16 students during his career. Further, when Ip Man returned from his time as a student in Hong Kong he discovered that very little Wing Chun was being practiced in his home town except in Ng Chung So’s school. And even this was a somewhat elite and small scale affair. With relatively few other people to practice with, the gains from devoting all of one’s time to Chi Sao would be limited. Thus more of an emphasis on forms practice, weapons training, the wooden dummy, basic strength, movement and conditioning drills might make a lot of sense. That is where one might reap the highest return in a relatively “dispersed” training environment.

Eventually things would change. Later in the 1920s, and during the first half of the 1930s, Wing Chun, like all of Foshan’s martial arts, seems to have grown in popularity. More students from a wide variety of backgrounds began to enter the style. This trend was accompanied by a more pronounced debate on the relative merits of different schools of Kung Fu.

All of this came to a head in Hong Kong during the early 1950s. After another period of “dispersed organization” between 1937-1945 (thanks to the Japanese), huge numbers of martial arts masters and students found themselves tightly packed into a new space, competing for recognition while at the same time looking for a better way to organize their schools in a new commercial environment. The geography of Kowloon alone probably made the shift to a “concentrated” mode of social organization inevitable. Ip Man’s increased emphasis on Chi Sao was not so much an invention, as it may simply have been a realization of the changing utility of different training strategies in this new environment.

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

Conclusion: The Situation Today

It is always a dangerous thing to take a model (even a “back of a napkin” exercise such as this) that was developed in one area and apply it to a totally different time and place. Nevertheless, I wonder if the idea of “dispersed” and “centralized” modes of organization might not have some value for us, at least as a metaphor. It might also suggest something important for how we think about the place of Chi Sao in Wing Chun today.

When I was first introduced to Wing Chun about a decade ago I had the good fortune to study at a large and thriving school in an urban environment. My teacher (Sifu Jon Nielson) approaches Wing Chun as a self-defense practice and introduces his students to movement, punching and defensive structures on literally the first day of class. Chi Sao was a big part of what I did and, if I may be permitted to say so, I got pretty good at it.

Like so many others before, I found the game to be addictive. I was a serious student and so I ended up practicing my Chi Sao (and other related skills) multiple hours a day, five (sometimes six) days a week. Better yet, there were a lot of advanced (and very tough) students at this school who were perfectly happy to hand out thrashings.

In my personal experience that is the key to becoming really good at Chi Sao. It is not magic. I don’t think it takes any special genetic predisposition. You simply spend lots of hours a week practicing these skills with a really large pool of people, some of whom are a great deal better than you and few of whom are actually kind of scary. Under those conditions, it is amazing how fast you pick this stuff up. But is being good at Chi Sao the same thing as being good at Wing Chun? Or even being a good martial artist?

Those are somewhat abstract questions, but they are ones that I have found myself forced to confront after moving from Salt Lake City to a small town in rural Western NY. Unsurprisingly, there are no large Wing Chun schools with the same combative approach to Chi Sao within driving distance of where I live.

This is not to say that it is impossible to do Wing Chun. Taking my years of experience I opened my own, much smaller school. While it is nothing on the scale of what my teacher has back in Salt Lake, I have been able to find a handful of people to work with, and that has allowed me to stay involved in Wing Chun community.

Yet Chi Sao is a problem. It is not that I no longer do it. I still spend some time on Chi Sao.  Yet working with a very small number of people, all junior to you, is not the same. Whatever it is, Chi Sao is not like riding a bike. The sorts of skills taught in sensitivity drills absolutely can be forgotten and will go dormant very fast if not continually used.

Compared to a lot of former Wing Chun students in a similar position I am really lucky. Even in a rural environment I have been able to keep my hand in the game. But am I growing as a Wing Chun practitioner?

On some level I want to say yes, but doing so might require us to de-center Chi Sao from its traditional place in the Wing Chun universe. As I suggested above, I am starting to wonder whether the actual utility of certain skills is tied to the environment that they are practiced in. The situation in my Sifu’s school was just about ideal for developing varied and nuanced skills in Chi Sao. (Parenthetically I should note that we did practice a full range of other skills, from forms to free sparring to combative weapons as well).

My students in rural western New York can certainly still gain some critical insights from the Chi Sao that we do. But given the limited number of partners any of them will ever be able to touch arms with, one quickly comes up against the problem of diminishing marginal returns. At what point would an additional hour of Chi Sao be better replaced with an hour of ground work, the heavy bag or basic conditioning? What mix of skills will actually make me a better martial artist and student of Wing Chun where I am today?

I suspect that there may not be a single answer to this question. Instead the mix of things that work best in a densely concentrated training area might be different than those in a dispersed environment. Students studying in small groups or on their own may need to think creatively about how to interpret and apply Wing Chun in their situation, rather than just becoming discouraged that they cannot replicate the “ideal” seen in Hong Kong in the 1960s or the West in the 1990s.

For a variety of reasons, mostly social and economic in nature, I think that we are entering a period of dispersed social organization more general (and not just in the martial arts). Certainly in large urban environments we will continue to see healthy schools, yet increasingly students of a wide variety of combat arts will find themselves in less connected places without a ready-made support system. In some senses we are better positioned to ride out this cyclic change than past generations. The internet provides the opportunities to construct new kinds of communities while recording and dispersing all sorts of training information. And certainly the organization of small local study groups, combined with the occasional workshop, can be very helpful.

Yet making the most of these new resources will require a careful reconsideration of our goals and even what it means to be a student of Wing Chun. This is one area where a more detailed understanding of our history can be particularly helpful. The southern Chinese martial arts have always been very flexible and they have survived many swings between concentrated and dispersed modes of social organization.

Nor has Chi Sao always enjoyed the pride of place that it is currently afforded within Wing Chun. I suspect that all of the traditional arts contain a variety of training tools precisely because they were practiced in a wide variety of environments. When properly understood, and combined with all of the information that we now have at our finger tips, there is no reason why our practices cannot continue to thrive under relatively dispersed models of social organizations.

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If you enjoyed this you might also want to read:   Spiritual Kung Fu: Can Wing Chun be a Secular Religion?

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Twin Chinese Pagodas in Singapore. Source: Wikimedia.

***I am happy to report that I am making good progress on my current writing project.  But it is still an ongoing task, and one that consumed much of my weekend.  As such our post for this Monday is another essay pulled for the archives.  This essay asks what Ip Man’s “rules of conduct” suggest about the origins and social place of Wing Chun within the larger community of the Southern Chinese martial arts.  Enjoy!***

Introduction: Defining Community in the Traditional Chinese Martial Arts

How does one define a social community? How are boundaries drawn between those who are within the group and those who fall outside of it? This is an important question for students of martial studies. Given that the various hand combat systems, both in the East and the West, invariably revolve around fighting, one might be forgiven for assuming the martial artists would be rather sullen and solitary creatures.

Yet just the opposite is true. Studying and teaching hand combat is an inescapably social behavior. As much as we love the myth of the lone hermit on a misty mountain top, the truth is, you cannot really learn to box, wrestle or fence by yourself. These skills must be demonstrated by one or more teachers and they need to be sharpened on a variety of opponents if they are to be of any actual use. We spend a lot of time discussing “self-creation,” but the type of knowledge that is conveyed in the martial arts is inescapably social.

The definition of “community” is particularly complex in the Chinese martial arts. There are a variety of different markers that are used to define those who are “like us.” To begin with, we have the style names. But these can only take us so far. It appears that many (most) fighting traditions did not even have names until sometime in the Qing dynasty. Style names are also notoriously slippery things. Homophones and puzzling variations in characters are common encountered. And it is all too easy for small arts to re-position themselves in the martial marketplace simply by modifying their name.

Creation narratives and a shared mythology is also a common marker of community. The story of the burning of the Shaolin temple unites all of the Hung Mun styles of Guangdong province. Likewise, many different Wing Chun lineages make use of the Red Boat Opera as a device to explain their origins. While the performance of individual sets may vary from one lineage to another, a sense of shared community is preserved by the fact that we revere the same “martial ancestors.”

Of course these myths are often borrowed and modified. Hung Gar traditions also discuss figures like Jee Shim and the Red Boat Opera companies. It seems likely that Wing Chun borrowed elements of these traditions, as well as the White Crane creation legend, when compiling its own mythic identity. Still, the creations myths are helpful because they can suggest both relationships and differences between various groups.

The nuanced mechanics of physical practice is another way in which the community is defined and regulated. Much of the unspoken knowledge and culture of the Chinese martial arts is passed directly from teacher to student as they “correct forms” and engage in either sparring or “sensitivity training.” This creation of a shared culture (and a set of expectations) through an unbroken line of physical contact going back to the founder is probably the single most important way in which the group is defined. This sort of physical transmission is essential in certain Taijiquan lineages that emphasize “push hands” training. Likewise, many other schools have similar exercises that convey their core culture in a direct, non-verbal, way.

As a Wing Chun student I do not really care how another practitioner spells the name of their art, or what stories they tell about the origins of their lineage. What I really want to know is “Do they chi sao?” and “How do they chi sao?” If the ways in which we train are mutually intelligible, and we can improve together, then on a very concrete level we are in the same community.

A traditional garden with a modern created within a modern city. Source: Wikimedia.

The Wing Chun Jo Fen and the Definition of Community

There is another way in which communities are defined and expectations are cultivated. Rather than relying only on the intuitive and unspoken norms that arise in the course of training, most martial arts communities also propagate explicit rules. These codes of conduct, usually written, are supposed to govern life in the community. The number of rules and their content can vary immensely from one tradition to the next, but the basic impulse is widely shared.

Such formal lists are quite common in the martial arts of southern China. However, in my limited experience, they are often observed in the breech. Students know that they exist, but they don’t generally get discussed all that often. This seems to be particularly true in Wing Chun. Early in his teaching career in Hong Kong Ip Man propagated a set of nine rules, collectively referred to as the “Ving Tsun Jo Fen.” In the case of Ip Man’s list, they tended to be suggestions of what proper behavior should be rather than overly detailed admonitions or prohibitions. Nor, when reading the historical accounts from the 1950s and 1960s, is it always clear how the behavior of his young and unruly students related to these rules.

Still, the fact that the Jo Fen were given, and that they are now commonly reproduced and displayed in Wing Chun schools around the world, seems to indicates that we should give some thought to how these guidelines have been read and helped to shape the Wing Chun community. After all, these statements come as close to a formal philosophy of personal behavior as anything in the Ip Man lineage. And it is interesting to note that the Jo Fen describe not just proper behavior in the school, but within society as a whole. By explaining how a student should comport themselves in relation to the broader community, they offer valuable hints as to the social milieu that gave rise to the early Wing Chun community.

Before we delve into a discussion of the Jo Fen there are a couple of puzzles that need to be addressed. The first is their ultimate date of origin. It is known that Ip Man wrote down and displayed the basic set of rules that are used today in his school in Hong Kong during the 1950s. However, it is not clear if these rules were entirely his own creation or if some of them were inherited from an earlier instructor (Chan Wah Shun and Ng Chung So would both be good candidates). For reasons that we will discuss later I suspect that these rules are really a response to trends and pressures from the 1920s-1930s. Even if Ip Man first wrote them down in the 1950s, the Jo Fen appear to be a thoughtful response to a conversations that had been happening decades earlier.

The second paradox is how one should read the Jo Fen. This is a critical issue for Western Wing Chun students looking for guidance in living their art. For instance, when we are commanded to “Keep sacred the Martial Morality” (Wu De; Cantonese: Ma Dak) are we being sworn to uphold the marginal and criminal behavioral codes of the “Rivers and Lakes”? The individuals who inhabit these marginal social zones often have quite strong opinions on proper behavior under “Wu De,” and have even created an entire subaltern set of cultural values. Boretz does a great job of illustrating this worldview in his carefully crafted ethnography, Gods, Ghosts and Gangsters: Ritual Violence, Martial Arts, and Masculinity on the Margins of Chinese Society (University of Hawaii Press, 2010).

Yet Ip Man was a highly educated individual who clearly held Confucian values. During his younger life he was in no way a marginal figure. The circles that he moved in were quite different from those that Boretz described, and so were his cultural values. He had both a classical Chinese and Western education. He owned land and businesses. His personal values tended to be somewhat conservative and influenced by his Confucian education. So what exactly does such an individual really mean when he exhorts his students to remember “martial virtue?” This is probably not the martial morality of the Triads.

Nor does it seem to be the same as the revivalist ideals promoted by Jin Yong in his novels. These novels have dominated the popular discussion of Chinese martial values from the 1950s to the present. In fact, Jin Yong is probably the most widely read Chinese language author of the entire 20^th century. While it seems likely that these books had an impact on the expectations of many of Ip Man’s younger students, the old master’s views on these matters were probably already set well before he started teaching in 1950.

In the west we tend to read these suggestions through our own cultural lens. Ron Heimberger, in my own lineage, once produced a small volume titled Ving Tsun Jo Fen: Expectations and Guidance from the Ving Tsun Tradition (Ving Tsun Ip Ching Athletic Foundation, 2006). It’s an interesting book to think about. The author makes a conscious attempt to bridge the two, at times very different, cultural traditions that are at play. Yet in the end his interpretations of the Jo Fen always seem to reflect a home-spun American ethical perspective rather than traditional Chinese culture. The author actually warns us that this will be the case in the introduction to his book. The central problem, as he saw it, was to make the Jo Fen meaningful to modern, English speaking students.

It is an interesting project, and on some level I suspect that this is the direction that we must go. Translation is always as much a cultural as a linguistic issue. But I suspect that such exercises are still missing something.

This suspicion brings us back to the central question of the post. How should we, as informed students, read the Jo Fen of Wing Chun, or any other southern martial art? How would these rules have been read by a student in either the 1930s or 1950s? What sorts of unstated frames and contexts, familiar to his own students but alien to modern western ones, was Ip Man relying on when he put these guidelines for living to paper?

To answer that question we are going to need compare this document to other (much better known) contemporaneous texts. This exercise will suggest some ways in which we might want to read the Wing Chun Jo Fen. It will also shed some light on how Ip Man understood the community he was trying to create, and the norms of behavior that he wished to codify.

A rainy day at the Ancestral Temple in Foshan. In the distance the old neighborhood behind the temple is being demolished to make way for a new urban development project. Ironically the new neighborhood is being designed to “look traditional” and capitalize on the area’s important “history.” Source: Whitney Clayton.

A rainy day at the Ancestral Temple in Foshan. In the distance the old neighborhood behind the temple is being demolished to make way for a new urban development project. Ironically the new neighborhood is being designed to “look traditional” and capitalize on the area’s important “history.” Source: Whitney Clayton.

Translating the Wing Chun Jo Fen

The original text of the Wing Chun Jo Fen still hangs at the Hong Kong Ving Tsun Athletic Association (VTAA). As such it is well attested. More difficult is settling on a suitable English translation. For our purposes I am providing two translations of the text below. I think it is useful to compare and contrast at least two different versions of the Jo Fen to get a better sense of what points the original is driving at. Neither translation attempts to be a pure mechanical rendering. Both translators made some editorial decisions in how they rendered the Jo Fen corresponding to their understanding of the meaning of the text.

The top line of text (marked SK) is a translation by Samuel Kwok, originally published in his book Mastering Wing Chun: the Keys to Ip Man’s Kung Fu published with Tony Massengill in 2007. Generally speaking this is my preferred translation. The second translation (marked RH) is taken from Ip Ching, Ron Heimberger and Eric Myers, Ving Tsun Jo Fen: Expectations and Guidance from the Ving Tsun Tradition published in 2006. This is also a clear translation with some interesting readings of the text. Together these two different approaches provide a comprehensive look at the original.

Figure 1: Ip Man’s Wing Chun Jo Fen

1. (SK) Remain disciplined – uphold yourself ethically as a martial artist
   1. (RH) Discipline yourself to the Rules: Keep Sacred the Martial Morality
2. (SK) Practice courtesy and righteousness – serve the community and honor your family
   2. (RH) Understand Propriety and Righteousness: Love your Country and Respect Your Parents
3. (SK) Love your fellow students or classmates – be united and avoid conflicts
   3. (RH) Love Your Classmates: Enjoy Working Together as a Group
4. (SK) Limit your desires and pursuit of bodily pleasures – preserve the proper spirit
   4. (RH) Control Your Desire: Stay Healthy
5. (SK) Train diligently and make it a habit – never let the skill leave your body
   5. (RH) Work Hard and Keep Practicing: Never Let the Skill Leave Your Body
6. (SK) Learn to develop spiritual tranquility – abstain from arguments and fights
   6. (RH) Learn How to Keep the Energy: Quit Inciting a Fighting Attitude.
7. (SK) Participate in society – be conservative, cultured and gentle in your manners
   7. (RH) Always Deal with World Matters with a Kind Attitude that is Calm and Gentle.
8. (SK) Help the weak and the very young – use your martial skill for the good of humanity
   8. (RH) Help the Elderly and the Children: Use the Martial Mind to Achieve “Yan”
9. (SK) Pass on the tradition – preserve the Chinese arts and its Rules of Conduct
   9. (RH) Follow the Former Eight Rules: Hold to the Ancestors’ Rules Sincerely.

The Hung Sing Association: Three Exclusions and Ten Rules for Behavior

From the turn of the century to the late 1920s the single most important martial arts association in Foshan (the home of Wing Chun before Ip Man brought it to Hong Kong in 1949) was the Hung Sing Association. This school, originally established in the middle of the 19^thcentury, taught Choy Li Fut, then the most popular and widespread martial art in the region.

By the 1920s the Hung Sing Association literally boasted dozens of branch locations and claimed thousands of members between its many schools and Lion Dance Associations. Foshan was a hot bed for martial arts development, and the local area boasted many competing styles. Yet in terms of sheer size, none of them could come close to competing with the Hung Sing Association.

Size was not Hung Sing’s only advantage. It was also the first (more or less) public martial arts school in the region. Established in the second half of the 19^th century, many of the later schools modeled their public face and business plans on the successful example established by Choy Li Fut. As a result some of the specific norms of the Choy Li Fut school became quite widespread in the local marketplace. Other instructors either adopted these expectation, or they were forced to react against them. Wing Chun (which really started to expand in the 1920s and 1930s) was no exception. It emerged out of a dialogue that was dominated by these larger and more successful styles.

One can debate whether Hung Sing was really a “public” school. Late in the 19^th century Chan Ngau Sing (an important leader in the history of the institution) established two doctrines. The first was the famous “Three Exclusions Policy” and the second was a ten point code of conduct.

The three exclusions appears to have been an attempt to bridge the symbolic world of secret societies with the more profitable aspects of commercial boxing instruction. Chan claimed that there were three classes of individuals he would not teach. These were high government officials, gangsters or local bullies and individuals without respectable employment. If one wished to join the school they had to be sponsored by an existing member, and their application had to be approved by the organization’s chairman (Chan himself). These exclusions were promoted as a way of ensuring the moral righteousness of the school.

The end result of this policy is that even though Hung Sing became a very large institution, it maintained the feel and appearance of an exclusive club. This was sheer marketing brilliance. But how “exclusive” were they?

It seems unlikely that any “high government officials” from Beijing would travel to Foshan only to petition a distinctly working-class martial arts school for admittance. While the first exclusion played to anti-government and anti-Manchu sentiment, it never really cost the school any students. One could tell a similar story about the second exclusion. The Triads already had their own much more exclusive secret societies and martial arts teachers. Aside from the Lion Dance Associations, it is not clear they ever actually had any interest in Hung Sing.

Lastly, Chan Ngau Sing was running a commercial school. Students had to pay for their tuition either in cash or in bags of rice. Of course not all of southern China’s economy was fully monetized at this point. The only individuals who would be able to pay these fees would be the semi-skilled artisans who worked in Foshan’s workshops. The Hung Sing Association acted as a place where workers could network, find out about new jobs and create a rudimentary social safety net.

This was the real genius of the “Three Exclusions” policy. While outwardly elitist, all the policy actually did was make the association more appealing to its primary market demographic, young semi-skilled workers in Foshan. For that reason I have always treated Hung Sing as the areas first true public martial arts school. It showed that public commercial teaching was possible and in that way Hung Sing really altered the development of the southern Chinese martial arts. It is not hard to understand how this school was able to create expectations of what a “real” martial art should look like which later teachers would have to deal with.

Where do we find authenticity? In the city or the garden? Source: Wikimedia.

Figure 2: Chan Ngau Sing’s Ten point code of behavior for the Foshan Hung Sing Association

Three Exclusions

• Refusal to teach government officials.
• Refusal to teach local bullies (gangsters?)
• Must have respectable employment.

Ten Points

1. Seek the approval of your master in all things relative to the school.
2. Practice hard daily.
3. Fight to win (but do not fight by choice).
4. Be moderate in sexual behavior.
5. Eat healthily.
6. Develop strength through endurance (to build a foundation and the ability to jump).
7. Never back down from an enemy.
8. Practice breathing exercises.
9. Make the sounds (“Yik” for punches, “Wah” for tiger claws, “Tik” for kicks).
10. Through practice you cannot be bullied.

Chan also introduced a ten point list of rules that became standard in the local branches of the Hung Sing Association. My translation of this list (and the Three Exclusions) comes from Ma Zineng’s Foshan Wu Shu Wen Hua (2001). Comparing this set of rules to Ip Man’s Jo Fen reveals some interesting parallels.

It quickly becomes apparent that the Wing Chun Jo Fen are modeled directly on Chan’s Ten Rules. Note for instance that a number of Ip Man’s rules not only appear to be based on Hung Sing, but are in a similar place in the list. For instance, the admonition against sexual excess (seen as damaging to one’s martial virtue) appears in the fourth slot on both lists. Likewise both lists begin with an appeal to authority and obedience.

The creation of these written behavioral codes is yet another area where Hung Sing was able to exercise its first mover advantage and shape the development of other regional styles. I suspect that Hung Sing’s code was a reflection of earlier Qing era guild practice, but that is a topic for a different post. It seems entirely likely that arts like Wing Chun adopted explicit sets of behavioral guidelines (separate from the amorphous concept of Wu De) precisely because Hung Sing had already done so. This is what martial consumers had come to expect.

However, there are also some equally interesting differences between our two different codes of behavior. Ip Man was not just copying the Ten Rules. He was responding to them. This can be seen as an attempt to differentiate Wing Chun students from the martial environment around them, and more carefully define how they should deal with society as whole. As such the Jo Fen are an important witness to the creation of the early Wing Chun community.

The first major point of difference is that the facade of the “Three Exclusions” has been done away with. Ip Man basically taught whoever showed up to his classes and put forward no pretense that his was anything but a public commercial school. He did not exclude government officials or ethnic Manchus. In fact, later in his career Ip Man went out of his way to introduce Wing Chun to ranking civil servants and police officials.

It is often said with great certainty that Ip Man never taught foreigners, and so that could be treated as his own “exclusion.” Still, I have a hard time knowing what to make of this statement. Foreigners were not exactly knocking down his door demanding to be taught in the early 1950s, so it is unlikely that he actually turned anyone away for strictly racial reasons. Further, we know that Ip Man had no trouble working with individuals of mixed descent, such as Leung Ting or Bruce Lee. Rumors to the contrary, he does not appear to have been a racial purist.

Instead we see that Ip Man took on and encouraged a very wide range of students. He taught men and women, experienced martial artists and teens. Nor did he ever promote the idea that the Wing Chun clan operated as some sort of secret society. One of the remarkable things about his Hong Kong career was how truly open it was.

Comparing Ip Man’s list to Chan’s earlier effort also reveals his attitude toward excess or ornamentation. For instance, Ip Man simply drops “rule ten” all together. Looking back at the original list its clear that this “rule” is not really a point of ethical behavior so much as it’s a promise of the reward that one might expect from hard work. Of course life has a way of being unfair, and ignoring such promises.

A number of Ip Man’s other points appear to be direct responses to the more popular and widely known rules of the Hung Sing Association. Where they mandate strength training in the sixth entry (“Develop strength through endurance-to build a foundation and the ability to jump”) he characteristically emphasizes the importance of softness and internal training (“Learn How to Keep the Energy: Quit Inciting a Fighting Attitude “). While Chan’s list seems bellicose and is geared towards maintaining the reputation of the school (“Never back down from an enemy”) Ip Man insists that his students engage constructively with the community as a whole, and not just other martial artists (“Participate in society – be conservative, cultured and gentle in your manners”). Both lists end with a charge to pass on the unique norms and codes of recognition that define their respective communities (“Yik” for punches, “Wah” for tiger claws, “Tik” for kicks” vs. “Pass on the tradition – preserve the Chinese arts and its Rules of Conduct”).

I suspect that Ip Man was intimately familiar with Chan Ngau Sing code of conduct, made famous in the region by the Hung Sing Association. Looking at the both the structure and the content of the Jo Fen it appears to have been a topic that he had given some thought to. His definition of the ideal martial community is in many ways different from that advanced Chan, but it also appears to be a response to it.

Chan’s list is mostly concerned with questions of behavior and recognition within the world of martial artists. It reflects the pugnacious attitudes that are typically associated with southern Chinese martial artists. In contrast Ip Man’s is outward looking. His main concern is how the martial artist finds his place in society. A return to traditional Confucian values is seen as the key to maintaining harmony not just within the clan, but with the broader community as a whole.

The historic Tin Hua (Mazu) Temple is Xuwen County, Guangdong.

Reading the Wing Chun Jo Fen as a Philosophical and Ethical Statement

The creation of the Jo Fen may have been a creative exercise undertaken by Ip Man sometime in the 1950s. While some of these rules or perspectives may have been inherited from previous teachers, the list as it exists now is probably Ip Man’s project. Yet that vision of community did not emerge in a vacuum. No vision of society ever does.

Instead the Jo Fen emerged out of a dialogue with other groups and norms. The strength and popularity of the Hung Sing Association in the early 20^th century forced other local martial artists to follow its lead in terms of business practices and probably to conform to certain expectations.  Yet it also created a set of structures that they could react against in an attempt to claim their own vision of martial virtue. The very existence of the Jo Fen shows that both of these tendencies were alive and well in the Wing Chun community, and that they continued to be an important force up through at least the 1950s.

Our review has also revealed that Ip Man thought deeply on the question of social identity and was quite concerned with the question of how a martial artist (or a group of them) should interact with society. Rather than simply reverting to the ideas of “martial virtue” seen in contemporary fiction or in the subaltern world of “rivers and lakes,” he turned to his Confucian education. There he found core values that could support the type of community he was attempting to build.

It is not uncommon to find Wing Chun students searching for the “deep philosophy” that underlies their art. Some people do this in an attempt to build a better synthesis of the fighting system. Other individuals are more interested in building a secure foundation for their ethical or spiritual lives. The myth of the Shaolin temple, as well as the claim that Wing Chun is somehow a “Buddhist art” leads some people to investigate the Dharma. Others seem drawn more to Daoism after encountering ideas like the “five elements” or the “eight directions” in a Wing Chun class.

Clearly there is much to be gained from a deep study of either Buddhism or Daoism. Nevertheless, I suspect that this might be over-thinking the problem. If one feels called to study the Dharma, by all means, go and do it. Yet this is not necessary to understand Wing Chun, its origins or the nature of its social community.

Instead I would propose that individuals looking for the deeper meaning in the art start by seriously studying the Jo Fen. This short document was the only formal statement that Ip Man ever gave us on his beliefs about the philosophical basis of his art. It lays out in some detail a code of behavior that regulates not just the internal life of the school, but also how a “hero” can relate to society as a whole in such a way that their actions promotes peace and harmony rather than violence and disorder. This is probably the great motivating question of martial ethics.

Reading the Jo Fen it is clear that Ip Man’s vision of the art was influenced much more by Confucianism than either Buddhism or Daoism. Further, each of the short rules in his list can be unpacked and examined in some detail once you have an appropriate body of thought to situate it within. When discussing his father’s beliefs Ip Chun has argued that the Confucian classic titled “The Doctrine of the Mean” would probably be a great place to start. After studying and thinking about the Jo Fen I am inclined to agree with him. If we start by reading it as a response to texts and ideas that were in circulation at the time (rather than seeing it simply as a nine point list) the true depth of his arguments become apparent.

oOo

If you found this post interesting you might also want to read: “Ip Man and the Roots of Wing Chun’s “Multiple Attacker” Principle.”

oOo

Introduction

Welcome to “Chinese Martial Arts in the News!”  Its great to be back at my keyboard after spending the last week and half on other projects.  I managed to finish the draft of my chapter and am looking forward to posting some new material and guest posts over the next few weeks before the academic conference season clicks into high gear and things get a bit crazy again.  But right now its time to get caught up on current events.

As regular readers know, 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 may 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 way too long since our last update so there is a lot to be covered in today’s post.  Let’s get to the news!

News from all Over

One of the first things that I came across when researching this news update was a pair of photo-essays that had been republished on a number of Chinese tabloid and magazine webpages.  Better yet, both of them profiled important styles of Southern Kung Fu that do not get enough press coverage.

The first of these was titled (somewhat awkwardly) “A Russian Kungfu lover’s Bruce Lee style.” It discussed one student’s “Kung Fu pilgrimage” to Yong Chun County in Fujian to study White Crane Kung Fu.  Apparently he was inspired by the art’s (very tangential) connection to Bruce Lee.  But its always great to see White Crane getting profiled.

I have taken the liberty of lightly editing the title of the next photo essay. It should read:  “A Couple from the Netherlands introduce [one specific type of] Chinese martial art to [some people in] their country.”

Here is what you need to know: “Arend, 39, was from the Netherlands. He and his wife Khingeeva Tatyana came to China in October 2013. Besides doing research and teaching as a professor at a laboratory in School of Life Sciences in Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University, Arend was a fan of Chinese martial arts. As students of Kung Fu master Lin Zaipei, Arend and his wife learned the Dishuquan, which is also known as the Dog Kung Fu, one of the most popular martial arts styles in Fujian Province and a national intangible cultural heritage. They went to the martial art club every week to practice with Dog Kung Fu lovers from all over the world.”

This one was a little short of description, but its great to see Dog Boxing in the news.  And who doesn’t love the traditional training uniform of slacks and a t-shirt.  Now that is old school!

A Chinese teen uses her cell phone during militia training. This photo engendered some controversy on the internet and seemed to embody much of what was wrong with the current generation to older Chinese citizens. (Source: China Smack).

Is learning Kung Fu from a local Sifu just “too 1970s” for you?  Or maybe you cannot find one in your area?  A recent report on CCTV profiles a master who has you covered.  The heart of this piece is a five minute video discussing the on-line teaching platform that he has created and interviews with both him and his students.  Its an interesting discussion of one instructor’s attempts to both drag traditional kung fu instruction into the modern era, while at the same time vastly expanding his student base.  This sort of thing always strikes me as pretty problematic, but its a nicely produced report.

The Christian Science Monitor ran a piece looking at Chen Village’s recent attempts to lobby for UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage protection for Taijiquan.  We looked at this issue in our last news update as well.  But the added wrinkle in this article is the narrative of a growing rivalry between Taijiquan and Yoga, and the suggestion that Taiji might be losing the image battle in China.

“But there are other issues at stake here, too. For one, yoga, which won UNESCO designation in India last year, has emerged as a trendy alternative. Then there’s the simple fact that the ancient martial art isn’t as popular among young Chinese, many of whom think of it as a low-intensity exercise better suited for their grandparents. 

“The first impression I have of tai chi is that it’s something old people do in parks,” says Yin Haolong, a 29-year-old freelance graphic designer and photographer in Beijing.”

In contrast, the modern combat sports (particularly Muay Thai and MMA) seem to be growing pretty quickly in China.  This article provides a profile and long form discussion of the emergence of a distinctive brand of Chinese Fight Clubs.

“Unlike the U.S. or U.K., where boxing has strong historic links to working-class communities (most famously Gleason’s Gym in the Bronx, where Jake LaMotta trained, and London’s Repton Club), its popularity often rising with economic downturn and unemployment, there’s no equivalent blue-collar boxing history in China, nor much infrastructure for training aspirants. Instead, there is a small but burgeoning interest in grassroots fight clubs. Like most, the Monster Fight Club uses Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) rules, a full-contact blend of fighting styles, although it is obliged to play by slightly looser ones when it comes to the law. As far as Shi Jian, one of the co-owners, is concerned, Monster is a “cultural sporting company” that promotes “positive energy,” propagandist language that reassures the authorities—who can close grey operations like Monster at the drop of a brown envelope—and allows them to promote low-key events that would normally require a complex series of permits.”

A Jeet Kune Do class in Harlem. Source: vice. com, Photo by Adam Krause

“‘Kung Fu Kenny’ Is Just the Latest Example of Hip-Hop’s Fascination With Martial Arts.” So says the next article.  I think that this piece will be particularly helpful for anyone interested in the roots of the relationship between the Chinese martial arts and the emergence of hip hop.  This article touches on some thought provoking arguments about cultural borrowing and methods of pedagogy.  Here was one of the points that was a big take-away for me:

“On a very direct and literal level, kung fu films also gave young black and brown kids heroes who were not white (“it’s hard to understand looking back on it how revolutionary that was,” Schloss says). But there was also a new model of learning—crucial for children who, like kids everywhere and at all times, mostly hated school. People in kung fu movies learned from a master, practiced their skills obsessively, and developed new styles, all practices that made their way into hip-hop culture. 

“What martial arts really did for hip-hop was to provide a model for an apprenticeship system that showed how you could respect a teacher or a mentor without diminishing your own self-respect,” says Schloss. “It was a model where you could be like, ‘I’m going to learn to be humble and disciplined, and let this guy tell me what to do, but that doesn’t mean that I’m letting him disrespect me.’ That’s a big part of what allowed the art form to develop, because when people put themselves in that situation, they were able to learn a lot of important things and push the art form forward by being open to that instruction.”

Bruce Lee fighting a room full of Japanese martial arts students in “Fists of Fury.” This scene later inspired the “Dojo Fight” in Wilson Ip’s 2008 Ip Man biopic.

The Asian Times recently ran a review of a Bruce Lee film festival that ran in the MoMA in New York.  This will be an interesting read for Bruce Lee fans.

When Bruce Lee was making martial arts movies in the early 1970s, it would never have occurred to him that his films would be screened at New York’s prestigious Museum of Modern Art 45 years later. 

But that’s just what happened with Eternal Bruce Lee, a five-film retrospective of Lee’s work that screened at the museum in January and February. The show reflected Lee’s gradual metamorphosis from martial arts legend to bona fide cultural icon in the US.

Those who prefer their martial arts fiction in written form may have heard about the recent passing of the Hong Kong novelist Huang Yi.  The South China Morning Post has been covering this story and had some interesting discussion of his work and career.

Tributes have been paid to Hong Kong wuxia novelist Huang Yi, who has died aged 65 after suffering a stroke…. 

Professor Ma Kwai-min, from Chu Hai College’s department of Chinese literature, told the Post that Huang had originally started off as a science fiction writer.

“He later switched to writing xuanhuan novels such as Xun Qin Ji, which combines historical backgrounds with a protagonist who travels through time,” Ma said, in reference to a genre of wuxia. 

“Such fictions and novels are still being written and published on the internet, and they are popular, but Huang did it 20 years ago.”

This last story goes out to my fellow travelers on the path of the Lightsaber.  Apparently the word “lightsaber” has recently been added to “the” dictionary.  But this same dictionary also added the term “man-bun” to its pages…so take that news for what its worth. But hey, what about that Star Wars: The Last Jedi trailer.

Martial Arts Studies

Are you looking for a good read?  The Martial Arts Studies literature just keeps growing.  Here are two titles that have caught my eye, both of which have been added to my summer reading list.

Now Available for pre-order:

Her Own Hero: The Origins of the Women’s Self-Defense Movement Hardcover – NYU Press August 8, 2017  by Wendy L. Rouse 

At the turn of the twentieth century, women famously organized to demand greater social and political freedoms like gaining the right to vote. However, few realize that the Progressive Era also witnessed the birth of the women’s self-defense movement. 

It is nearly impossible in today’s day and age to imagine a world without the concept of women’s self defense. Some women were inspired to take up boxing and jiu-jitsu for very personal reasons that ranged from protecting themselves from attacks by strangers on the street to rejecting gendered notions about feminine weakness and empowering themselves as their own protectors. Women’s training in self defense was both a reflection of and a response to the broader cultural issues of the time, including the women’s rights movement and the campaign for the vote.   

Perhaps more importantly, the discussion surrounding women’s self-defense revealed powerful myths about the source of violence against women and opened up conversations about the less visible violence that many women faced in their own homes. Through self-defense training, women debunked patriarchal myths about inherent feminine weakness, creating a new image of women as powerful and self-reliant. Whether or not women consciously pursued self-defense for these reasons, their actions embodied feminist politics. Although their individual motivations may have varied, their collective action echoed through the twentieth century, demanding emancipation from the constrictions that prevented women from exercising their full rights as citizens and human beings. This book is a fascinating and comprehensive introduction to one of the most important women’s issues of all time.

Wendy L. Rouse teaches United States History and social science teacher preparation at San Jose State University. Her research interests include childhood, family, and gender history during the Progressive Era. 

Out Now:

Embodying Brazil: An ethnography of diasporic capoeira (Routledge Research in Sport, Culture and Society) (Routledge, 2017) by Sara Delamont, Neil Stephens, Claudio Campos 

The practice of capoeira, the Brazilian dance-fight-game, has grown rapidly in recent years. It has become a popular leisure activity in many cultures, as well as a career for Brazilians in countries across the world including the US, the UK, Canada and Australia. This original ethnographic study draws on the latest research conducted on capoeira in the UK to understand this global phenomenon. It not only presents an in-depth investigation of the martial art, but also provides a wealth of data on masculinities, performativity, embodiment, globalisation and rites of passage.

Centred in cultural sociology, while drawing on anthropology and the sociology of sport and dance, the book explores the experiences of those learning and teaching capoeira at a variety of levels. From the beginners’ first encounters with this martial art to the perspectives of more advanced students, it also sheds light on how teachers experience their own re-enculturation as they embody the exotic ‘other’.

Embodying Brazil: An Ethnography of Diasporic Capoeira is fascinating reading for all capoeira enthusiasts, as well as for anyone interested in the sociology of sport, sport and social theory, sport, race and ethnicity, or Latin-American Studies.

***I am very excited to introduce the following guest post by my friend Scott Phillips.  In this essay Scott draws on his extensive study of modern Chinese religious and social history in an attempt to develop a powerful new concept for describing and theorizing the massive reforms of the Chinese martial arts that occurred during the Republic period.  I thought that his idea was intriguing when he first told me about it a few months ago, and I am very happy that he agreed to compose a guest post that could be shared with the readers of Kung Fu Tea.  Hopefully this essay gets people thinking, debating and talking about how we should understand the trajectory of the Chinese martial arts during these critical decades.  Enjoy!***

The YMCA Consensus

by Scott Park Phillips

The Need for a Proper Name

Sometimes for an intellectual project to move forward a whole body of study has to be given a proper name. In this post I intend to coin a new term, The YMCA Consensus. The major cultural shift that happened at the beginning of the 20th Century has been a difficult obstacle to discussions about the cultural history of Chinese martial arts. Thus I’m proposing we give this cultural shift a name so that we can move the discussion forward.

For instance, when I explain to people that in China theater was subject to various forms of suppression, they naturally want to know why. And generally they want to configure an orderly victim-oppressor framework with which to understand this assertion. Generally in the West we understand the suppression of theater for two reasons, obscenity and subversion. And because of that bias we tend to see the problem as a discourse between a puritanical movement and resistance to it, or between a social order and an attempt to disrupt it. But the actual reason for suppressing theater in China was to break the connection between martial skills, public performance, and religious institutions, as part of a cultural movement to establish a new order. The main public justification offered for ongoing acts of suppression was that the combination of theater, martial skills, and religion kept the Chinese nation weak, vulnerable, ignorant, backward, and superstitious.

I wrote the book Possible Origins, A Cultural History of Chinese Martial Arts, Theater, and Religion (2016) because my interest in performance skills, martial skills, and religious experience gave me unique insights into the history of Chinese martial arts that were mostly absent from either popular or scholarly discussions of the subject.

1919 Shanghai YMCA basketball team. Source: Kautz family archives, University of Minnesota Libraries.

Religion

Until quite recently, scholars of Chinese religion were averse to discussing or investigating martial arts or martial skills. (Avron Boretz, Douglas Farrer, and Meir Shahar are recent exceptions.) Informally, it was considered career suicide. This has been justified in all sorts of ways, mainly that it is difficult to escape personal biases and that the subject is politically charged, but frankly, it requires very specific skill sets that few Chinese religious scholars have acquired.

It is largely agreed among Chinese religious scholars who look at the early 20th Century, that there was a massive shift in practice and perspective that coincided with government restrictions and forced codifications of doctrine, practice and institutional frameworks (Goossaert, 2011; Palmer, 2011; Liu, 2009).

These ideas about what religion should be came from many sources. Sun Yet-sen and Chang Kai-shek were Protestants and both married to the daughters of Charlie Soong, a wealthy and influential Christian missionary trained in the United States. Towards the end of the Qing Dynasty, it was common for Chinese elites to voice the view that traditional society was crippling innovations in technology, commerce, the emancipation of women, education, science, and medicine. These voices were amplified after the Boxer Rebellion and culminated in the May 4th Movement which, after gaining the support of the new government, became a powerful voice for radical changes in society.

Under the new Republic (1911), the fate of religion was debated, and the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) became the model of acceptable religious institutions. I am making this statement in hindsight, they did not name the YMCA specifically, but it is accurate. All religious organizations had to have outreach, charity, a membership, a regular constituency, a popular moral code for upright living, and many other elements of Evangelical Protestantism. Most importantly ritual was repressed and ridiculed if not outright banned. Theater which put gods and demons on the stage as sources of divine power was soundly rejected along with exorcisms of any kind (Paper, 1995). Martial skills which had been integrated with theater and religion had to be purified of superstitious and backwards elements, so that what had been a storehouse of chaotic forces and cosmos-rectifying intentions could be taught at the YMCA.

To describe this change, religious scholars sometimes use the term Protestant, or Protestantization (Palmer, 2011). They also use Scientization to refer to the project of adopting scientific sounding language to describe inner alchemy, meditation, qigong, or martial arts in an attempt to confer authority under the new consensus (Liu, 2009). While we could easily see suppression, especially as it escalated to mass murder during the Communist era, as ALL BAD—modern anthropologists have tended to emphasize the incredible resilience, innovation, creativity, and cooperation that the Chinese people have shown in continuing to practice these traditions (Lagerwey, 2010).

Cantonese Opera Performers in San Francisco, circa 1900. This picture came out of the same milieu as the one above it. Notice the wide rounded blades used by these performers. Such weapons had a lot visual impact but were relatively safe to use on stage.

Theater

Theater, defined broadly to include stage performance, masked processions, exorcistic puppet shows, home entertainments, spirit mediums, and street performers, has been given too little attention by scholars. In China theater was a profoundly physical art form with almost no documentation of method prior to the 20th Century. The most elaborate forms (opera) were performed by a permanently degraded caste, called mean people (jianmin) (Johnson, 2009). Some of the best studies make use of a play or a festival schedule and attempt to contextualize it with other supporting materials written by elite observers (Volpp, 2011; Johnson, 2009). There is a consensus among anthropologists of Chinese culture that religious ritual and theater are inseparable (Chan 2006; Lagerwey, 2010). Most of the informants who have studied Chinese theater report being required to learn some martial arts as part, if not the core, of their basic training (Riley,1997). The first Chinese films grew out of this theater tradition, but by 1930 the Shanghai film industry was shut down as theatrical martial arts displays were banned. The consensus against the integration of theater, martial skills, and religion had the force of government to back it up.

It should be noted that the YMCA and other Christian Evangelical organizations were profoundly anti-theater. They saw it as the source of Chinese resistance to “the Good News” Modern Western institutions were bringing. Chinese theater put unruly gods and demons on the stage as sources of history, social organization, moral order, and inspiration; the YMCA saw theater as the enemy.

From the beginning of the Republic, the YMCA Consensus was the official policy of both the Nationalist and the Communist factions; it was somewhat weaker in Hong Kong, which under exceptional British protection, became a refuge for those fleeing Communism (Judkins, 2015). Hong Kong movies which were banned in the PRC, unselfconsciously employed pure martial artists alongside Beijing opera trained performers, thus violating the consensus in a myriad of creative ways.

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

Martial Arts

Under the YMCA Consensus, martial arts which were fully integrated with theater and religion had to be purified of superstitious and backwards elements. At first this movement was called Jingwu, pure martial arts, and Tiyu, physical culture (Morris, 2004). Later, as it took a role in the establishment of nationalist body discipline it was called Guoshu (national arts). After the Communist revolution in 1949 it was called Wushu.

Among scholars of Martial Arts in the first half of the 20th Century there was little dissent. While it is difficult to determine what is propaganda and what is serious scholarship, there is little doubt that the two most well known scholars Tang Hao and Xu Zhen were fully indoctrinated into the YMCA Consensus. This is a particular problem for a few Western scholars who have repeated their “findings” uncritically; Peter Lorge and Stanley Henning come to mind. For example the 16th Century general Qi Jiguang, whose writing has rightly been pointed to as an early source for Tai Chi and other martial arts, is presented as a “pure martial artist” with no religious or theatrical connections. This is really a sin of omission. He was in fact a deeply religious man, who practiced the golden elixir (jindan) in nine stages, healing by exorcism, and was involved in rituals for transforming the battlefield dead into ghost soldiers (guibing)(Berling, 1980; Meulenbeld, 2015). He also had a profound connection to the immortal Zhang Sanfeng through his meditation teacher who was a direct disciple of the immortal (Dean, 1998). As a military leader encamped for many years fighting pirates on the coast he worked closely with the local gentry and almost certainly sponsored theatrical festivals as part of the local liturgical calendar. Such things would have been expected of a man in his position (Dean 1998; Berling 1980). Lorge, Henning, and many others, frame Tang Hao’s work as debunking myths, when in fact he was attempting to impose the YMCA Consensus on those who still dared to hint at the theatrical and religious synthesis of martial arts (Lorge 2011, 219; Henning, 1994,1995).

The Chinese Boxing Club of Fukien Christian University. Source: http://findit.library.yale.edu

Why Call it a Consensus?

The inspiration for naming this change in Chinese culture the YMCA Consensus comes from a 2011 blog post by David Chapman. In the post titled “The Crumbling Buddhist Consensus,” Chapman summarizes many of the conflicts in modern Buddhism. He coined the term Consensus Buddhism to describe the coordinated response of Buddhist teachers in the West to suppress the more chaotic and ungainly aspects of Buddhist practice. This coordination happened toward the end of the 1980s as Buddhist lineages, initially populated by sex-positive and consciousness-expanding Hippies, were coming into conflict with the puritanical values of the larger culture. There were numerous scandals surrounding promiscuous, and otherwise badly behaved, teachers. That consensus lasted more than 25 years. But, in short, as second generation teachers became experts in language and history, they looked in vain for Buddhist teachings on peace, love, and understanding, much less “social justice” or “social engagement.” This new breed of Buddhist teachers realized these concepts are not authentically Buddhist, and since then, edgier practices like tantra have grown in popularity.

Besides being an inspiration for the YMCA Consensus, Chapman’s work is a powerful investigation of the way religion and culture interact, and how East meets West. I recommend it to everyone interested in the history, dissemination, and evolution of martial arts.

The YMCA Consensus was not a discourse between two competing social movements, tradition and modernity for instance. It was a conscious decision to re-center Chinese culture. That new center controlled many Chinese institutions, including military and educational. A discourse suggests a back and forth. The YMCA Consensus was a very strong political movement that swept up the majority of the population. Over forty years it expanded and contracted as institutions and individuals reacted or adapted to it. When the Communist took over in 1949, they made it absolute.

Previous scholars who have peeked in around the edges of this subject have most often referred to the YMCA Consensus as Nationalism, by which they usually mean Fascism. Understandably scholars wish to use the same terminology when discussing both China’s and Japan’s transitions to Modernity, but the parallels do not justify it, they are simply too different. Discussions of Communism sometimes get mixed in also–Communism broke the records for mass torture and intentional starvation of the Chinese people–but Communism did not change people’s understanding of martial arts, it simply continued and amplified the YMCA Consensus established earlier. Studies of theater also use the term Nationalism, but use the term Modernity to refer specifically to the process of aesthetic purification. Referring to the same cultural movement, religious scholars use the awkward terms Protestantization or Scientization.

Building on Chapman’s work I would like to coin the term the YMCA Consensus to describe the transition to Modernity that happened in China between 1890 and 1940. Specifically it refers to the process by which people came to see theater, religion and martial arts as separate subjects.

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Scott Park Phillips lives in Bolder Colorado, where he integrates the teaching of Chinese martial arts, dance, improvisational theater, and Daoist cultivation. He writes the blog “Weakness with a Twist,” and is the author of Possible Origins, A Cultural History of Chinese Martial Arts, Theater, and Religion, published by Angry Baby Books (2016). He is currently working on two separate monograms which are alternate histories of Taijiquan and Baguazhang incorporating their theatrical and religious origins.

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References

Berling, Judith A. The Syncretic Religion of Lin Chao-en, Columbia University Press, 1980.

Boretz, Avron Albert. Gods, ghosts, and gangsters: Ritual violence, martial arts, and masculinity on the margins of Chinese Society. University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2011.

Chan, Margaret. Ritual is theatre, theatre is ritual: Tang-ki Chinese spirit medium worship. Singapore Management University, 2006.

Chapman, David. https://vividness.live/2011/06/07/the-crumbling-buddhist-consensus-overview

Dean, Kenneth. Lord of the three in one: The spread of a cult in southeast China. Princeton University Press, 1998.

Farrer, D. S. “Becoming-animal in the Chinese martial arts.” Living Beings: Perspectives on Interspecies Engagements (2013): 215-246.

Goossaert, Vincent, and David A. Palmer. The religious question in modern China. University of Chicago Press, 2011.

Henning, Stanley. “General Qi Jiguang’s Approach To Martial Arts Training”

Journal of the Chen Style Taijiquan Research Association Of Hawaii, Vol. 3, No. 2, Summer 1995, 1-3 (minor editorial changes/clarifications, July 2006).

Henning, Stanley. “Ignorance, Legend and Taijiquan” Journal of the Chen Style Taijiquan Research Association Of Hawaii, Vol. 2, No. 3, Autumn/Winter 1994, 1-7.

Johnson, David George. Spectacle and Sacrifice: The Ritual Foundations of Village Life in North China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2009.

Judkins, Benjamin N., and Jon Nielson. The Creation of Wing Chun: A Social History of the Southern Chinese Martial Arts. SUNY Press, 2015.

Lagerwey, John. China: A religious state. Vol. 1. Hong Kong University Press, 2010.

Liu, Xun. Daoist modern: Innovation, lay practice, and the community of inner alchemy in republican Shanghai. Vol. 313. Harvard University Council on East Asian, 2009.

Lorge, Peter Allan. A History of Chinese Martial Arts. Cambridge University Press, 2011.

Morris, Andrew D. Marrow of the nation: A history of sport and physical culture in Republican China. Vol. 10. Univ of California Press, 2004.

Meulenbeld, Mark. Demonic Warfare: Daoism, Territorial Networks, and the History of a Ming Novel. University of Hawaii, 2015.

Palmer, David A., Glenn Shive, and Philip L. Wickeri, editors, Chinese religious life. Oxford University Press, 2011.

Palmer, David A., and Xun Liu, editors. Daoism in the Twentieth century: between eternity and modernity. UC Berkeley Press, 2012.

Paper, Jordan D. The spirits are drunk: comparative approaches to Chinese religion. State University of New York Press, 1995.

Phillips, Scott Park. Possible Origins, A Cultural History of Chinese Martial Arts, Theater, and Religion, Angry Baby Books, 2016.

Riley, Jo. Chinese theatre and the actor in performance. Vol. 3. Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Shahar, Meir. The Shaolin monastery: history, religion, and the chinese martial arts. University of Hawaii Press, 2008.

Volpp, Sophie. Worldly stage: theatricality in seventeenth-century China. Harvard University Asia Center, 2011.

Taijiquan practitioners in a park. Source: http://english.cntv.cn

***On May 11th and 12th I will be participating in a Political Science workshop at Brigham Young University (BYU) in Utah.  While there I will discuss my Kung Fu Diplomacy project.  The actual paper that I am submitting for review is one of my draft chapters from the manuscript.  But I am also supposed to give a short presentation to the assembled group, and I anticipate that this will be everyone’s first exposure to Martial Arts Studies.  As such I decided that a more basic overview of the topic, geared towards political scientists, might be in order.  This is just a first draft, and I anticipate that things will change over the next couple of days.  But I thought that I would share it here as a “work in progress.”****

Martial Arts Studies: An Interdisciplinary Approach

After starting her new job as an Assistant for the Indonesian Ambassador, a close friend from graduate school was faced with a dilemma.  Rather than only focusing only on politics, she decided that she needed to learn more about Indonesian culture.  Of course, the embassy offered many educational programs as part of its public diplomacy outreach to help people do just that.  It hosted free classes on language, music and cooking in addition to many other demonstrations and exhibitions.  But the embassy also advertised classes in self-defense.  Which, if you think about it, is an odd thing given the astronomical cost of Washington DC real estate.  The Indonesian government was willing to pay a lot of money to subsidize a relatively small martial arts class.

Yet as my friend quickly discovered, this was not just any self-defense class.  The embassy had brought in an instructor who taught Pencak Silat, a set of combative practices (including knife and stick fighting techniques) that is widely seen as an important aspect of the country’s intangible cultural heritage.[1]  Despite my emphatic pleas, my friend opted for the free language classes, and that was probably the wiser path.

Yet the choice always stood out in her mind.  Why Silat?  What message was the embassy attempting to send the American public by promoting this, seemingly dangerous, martial art?  How had this situation come about?  And was it likely to succeed?

The short answer to her question is that the Indonesian embassy probably decided to promote Pencak Silat because quite a few other countries had done something similar first, often with striking success.  It was following, rather than leading, a trend in which all of the leading Asian states had crafted a global discourse around their “national arts.”

Since the 1960s Korea has promoted “Taekwondo diplomacy” as part of its official image building campaign, and even succeeded in getting its national sport included in the Olympics.[2]  Chinese diplomatic missions and educational outreach programs are currently providing free or low cost martial arts lessons and coordinating tournaments and festivals around the globe. No country has done more to promote the mystique of its fighting systems than Japan, which has been mixing the martial arts and diplomacy since at least the 1880s.[3]  By 1905, people across the Western world were taking up Jujitsu to better understand Japanese culture and the dual miracles of the country’s rapid modernization and its stunning defeat of Russia.

If “soft power” is a state’s ability to employ its institutions and traditional culture to attract others to its preferred norms and identities, the martial arts have become an effective instrument in the public diplomacy tool kit.  Nor are these developments restricted to Asia.  Brazil actively promotes capoeira as a celebration of the nation’s racial diversity and African heritage.  Small farmers in Haiti are asking earnest questions as to why their symbolically and historically rich forms of machete fighting should not be taken just as seriously.  Nor can we forget the uniquely American phenomenon of Mixed Martial Arts that is currently being broadcast around the world, often in ways that explicitly challenge the efficacy and legitimacy of other traditional martial arts.

Sports have always been a lens through which people imagine competition within modern global society.  That is precisely why nations have been willing to pour scarce resources into entirely symbolic Olympic victories.  As we know, in global politics, signals have consequences.  The martial arts are no different.  Yet in the current era of rising populism and nationalist sentiments, such issues take on an increased sense of urgency.

These are some of the basic questions that structure my current book project, tentatively titled “Kung Fu Diplomacy: Soft Power, Martial Arts and the Development of China’s Global Brand.”  While questions of public diplomacy and soft power animate this project, its execution is deeply interdisciplinary.  As I argue, it is impossible to understand the genesis of these diplomatic efforts, let alone why some succeed or fail, by looking only at the actions of states or consular officers in the current era.

We must also carefully consider how private individuals and cultural entrepreneurs have promoted the martial arts, as well as the ways that foreign actors and audiences have understood and framed these practices.  The complex interaction of these three sets of actors (private actors, government officers and the targeted public) often takes on a path dependent aspect.  As such, this project draws from, and expand upon, the growing literature on Martial Arts Studies.

By way of introduction, Martial Arts Studies is a newly emerging research area that has the potential to speak to critical problems in fields as diverse as anthropology, sociology, history, media studies and of course political science.  This literature, which has seen sustained growth over the last decade, is both interdisciplinary in character and global in scope.  In addition to many university press monographs and edited collections, it has seen the start of multiple annual conferences, journals, the awarding of research grants and even the creation of a book series.

There are many areas where the interest of political scientists and the expertise of martial arts studies researcher may overlap.  For instance, the domestic regulation of these practices may reveal much about the way government intervention effects the development of actors within civil society.[4]  The detailed history of some arts illustrates how some groups in civil society have advanced competing narratives of modernity and national identity.[5]  The evolution of the martial arts can aid our understanding of shifting gender norms and the global spread of traditional practices, to name just a few possibilities.[6]  Rather than approaching each of these questions in disciplinary and geographic isolation, the development of Martial Arts Studies as a research area allows for the creation of a body of descriptive concepts and theoretical insights that makes both comparative and interdisciplinary work possible.

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

Kung Fu Diplomacy

Now that we know a bit about what Martial Arts Studies is, let us return to China’s various efforts to promote its own brand of “Kung Fu diplomacy.”  In the current era symbols of “traditional culture” have become important political resources, both within states and the global system.  Nowhere is this better illustrated than in an examination of the People’s Republic of China’s evolving strategy of public diplomacy and the current scramble (seen in China and elsewhere) to have as many martial practices as possible awarded UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage status.

Since the events of 9/11 both scholars and policy makers have developed a renewed interest in “public diplomacy” as an essential tool of statecraft.[7]  These strategies, designed to communicate an identity and even spread specific norms and expectations directly to the citizens of other states, are critical to addressing many challenges in global politics today.  Yet the academic literature on public diplomacy is still developing, and key questions remain about when, and under what circumstances, such strategies are most likely to be successful.

Much of this literature has focused exclusively on a few super powers, or a handful of rich developed nations, in the modern era.  Less attention has been focused on the ability of rising powers to employ these strategies or whether we can accurately use concepts like public diplomacy and soft power to describe the functioning of global politics in prior periods.

The current project attempts to address these questions by investigating the role of cultural influence, or “soft power,” in the development of China’s public relations efforts from roughly 1800 to the present.  More specifically, it examines the ways in which ideas and images of the traditional martial arts have been cultivated by individuals both within and outside of the state as master symbols related to the strength, identity, goals and nature of the Chinese body politic.

In the current era, practices such as taijiquan and “kung fu” are synonymous with traditional Chinese culture in the global public imagination.  These martial arts are viewed in strikingly positive terms and are often associated with core values that members of Western societies aspire too.  As such, the Chinese government has sought to promote these fighting systems throughout the global system as a means of promoting good will and a deeper level of engagement with their preferred values and identities.

Yet this was not always the case.  The Chinese state has not always been so supportive of their indigenous fighting arts, nor have they always enjoyed cultural recognition and respect in the West.  How and why did the current situation develop?  And in what ways have ideas about the traditional martial arts tempered fears of China’s rapid rise?

To answer these questions my research for this volume proceeds in three parts.  Chapters 1 and 2 of the project focus on the role of foreign audiences and media outlets in laying a basic cultural foundation that would shape later attempts to use the martial arts to spread Chinese culture.  Chapter 2, which I have submitted in a slightly modified form to the conference proceedings, focuses specifically on the Boxer Uprising and the ways that foreign diplomats, missionaries and newspaper editors shaped descriptions of Chinese martial artists and social violence more generally to advance their own policy preferences toward China.  Their actions, quite unexpectedly, laid much of the cultural foundation for the explosion of interest in the Chinese martial arts that would make modern public diplomacy efforts in this area viable.

In chapters 3-4 we turn our attention to the role of Chinese reformers and cultural entrepreneurs in shaping the image of China and its fighting system on the global stage.  Discussions of the Asian martial arts and the topics of nationalism or modernism often assume a top down model of influence in which the government captures these institutions and then imposes them on society and the educational system to promote the state’s goals.  Yet in the case of China, most notably prior to 1949 and then after 1975, what a closer examination shows is groups within civil society attempting to use the martial arts to argue for their own, multiple, visions of what a strong and modern Chinese state should look like. Nor can we ignore the success of market actors in the film and entertainment industry (particularly in Hong Kong, but also Taiwan), in crafting radically different visions of China.

The volume’s final chapters turns our attention to the actions of state actors and diplomats.  Here the emphasis is on formal efforts to co-opt this legacy and employ the martial arts within specific propaganda and public diplomacy programs.  I hope to look at a selection of efforts starting at about the end of the cultural revolution and going up to current attempts to have Wushu added to the official list of Olympic sports.

While “Kung Fu” has become a household term, examining the rise of Chinese soft power across a longer time horizon yields some interesting puzzles.  For instance, more than 40 years after his death Bruce Lee is still a beloved film star.  Yet who remembers when the CCP sent a young Jet Li to perform Wushu for Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger on the front lawn of the White House?

Why has the Shaolin Temple succeeded in making inroads in the Western suburban landscape, setting up many small-scale temples and martial arts classes, yet the vastly better funded and more coordinated government efforts to promote the state sponsored sport Wushu, or to win it a birth in the Olympics, have largely failed?  The Chinese martial arts are a genuinely beloved, globally popular, traditional practice.  There is no doubt regarding the cultural attraction that they generate.  And yet the officers of the Chinese government have had a mixed record when it comes to effectively harnessing them as an element of the states public diplomacy strategy.

Chinese martial arts students in Kenya.

The Boxer Uprising as a Modern Event

To better understand this puzzle I would like to briefly consider some of the findings that arose out of the first section of this project.  The Boxer Uprising was a seminal event laying the groundwork for the modern image of the Chinese martial arts in Western popular culture, though it is rarely understood as such.  What it suggests, more than anything else, is the staying power of a good symbol.

It is easy to forget what a major event the Boxer Rebellion was, and the way that it dominated the media during the summer and autumn of 1900.  Every major newspaper, and most magazines, ran articles not just recounting events in Beijing, but attempting to explain to the Western public what exactly a Chinese Boxer was, what they looked like, how they fought, and what they stood for.

And as you would expect, the answers they generated were neither positive nor particularly descriptively accurate.  Boxers were invariably armed with large swords and exotic weapons.  They were cruel, dirty and poor.  They drew their strength from a combination backwards superstition and primordial xenophobia.  Their very existence was a threat to the civilized order and a standing argument for the necessity of military intervention in China.

And the public loved these images.  They powered decades worth of Yellow peril novels and shaped elements of Western policy towards China.  In fact, the very first action film ever made was an attempt to show Western audiences exactly what a Chinese Boxer attack looked like.[8]  It turns out that martial arts films (very loosely defined) have been with us since basically the beginning of cinema.

And these images had real staying power.  But their meanings were not always stable.  During the 1970s a new generation of cinematographers, including a young Chinese-American actor named Bruce Lee, would draw on these same images of rage and vengeance against the forces of imperialism to create films like “Fists of Fury” (1972).  Yet in the very different social and political environment of the 1970s the one time villains became ethno-nationalist heroes.  The disciplined body of the martial artist was transformed from something intrinsically criminal, to an object of cross-cultural desire.

Audiences knew that China had been a victim of imperialism.  Yet now they saw that within its traditional culture lay the tools necessary for both community resistance and personal liberation.  And in the 1970s, as the situation in Vietnam worsened, and social unrest in the US grew, this message was taken seriously.

This narrative is also a powerful testament to the importance of good timing and path dependency.  Other countries may look at the success of China and Japan’s martial arts in the realm of soft power and seek to replicate it in their own attempts to bolster their national influence.  Clearly that was the goal of the Indonesian cultural diplomacy officer that my friend encountered.  Yet without the decades of prior media exposure that Chinese or Japanese images enjoyed, or the growing political and economic clout that they experienced during the post-Vietnam era, success is less certain.

And there is something else.  Bruce Lee understood his audience, and he was willing to draw from the Chinese martial arts only those things that both Chinese and Western consumer wanted.  That is how market transactions work, and so we should never be surprised to discover that consumers are satisfied with the goods and images that they decide to purchase.

Yet that is not how a centralized state led model of public diplomacy works.  That is often understood as an attempt to push consumer preferences rather than conform to them.  It is not always clear that political officers will have the deep knowledge necessary to craft an effective campaign.  And the very involvement of a government office in what is supposed to be a cultural practice can undercut an art in the eyes of the global public. To put it bluntly, most consumers don’t find propaganda all that interesting.

Kung Fu diplomacy, like the martial arts themselves, is most likely to succeed when it creates cross cutting identities that can help to diffuse tensions and allow individuals to engage in more authentic forms of cross cultural encounters.  While many state actors desire this, achieving it may require them to take a step back and let civil society, market forces and time find a way.

oOo

[1] Lee Wilson. 2015. Martial Arts and the Body Politic in Indonesia. Brill.

[2] Udo Moenig. 2015. Taekwondo: From a Martial Art to a Martial Sport. London: Routledge; Alex Gillis. 2008. A Killing Art. Ontario: ECW Press.

[3] Thomas Lindsay, and Kanō, Jigorō. 1889. “The Old Samurai Art of Fighting without Weapons”, Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, XVI, Pt II, pp. 202–217; T. Shidachi. 1892. “Ju-Jitsu,’ The Ancient Art of Self-Defence by Slight of Body.” Transactions and Proceedings of the Japan Society. Volume I. Transactions April-July, 1892. pp. 4-21

[4] Jasmijn Rana. 2014. “Producing Healthy Citizens: Encouraging Participation in Ladies-Only Kickboxing.” Etnofoor, Participation. Vol. 26 Issue 2. pp 33-48.

[5] Denis Gainty. 2013. Martial Arts and the Body Politic in Meiji Japan. Routledge.

[6] Wendy L. Rouse. 2017. Her Own Hero: The Origins of the Women’s Self Defense Movement. NYU Press (Forthcoming).

[7] See for instance Peter van Ham. 2005. “Power, Public Diplomacy, and the Pax Americana.” In Jan Melissen (ed.) The New Public Diplomacy: Soft Power in International Relations. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. 47-66.

[8] James Williamson. 1900. “Attack on a China Mission.”

Source: South China Morning Post.

An Old Story

It is a pattern that we know well.  After a debate about the utility of the traditional martial arts (and what that suggests about the state of the Chinese body politic), things got ugly.  The conversation descended into public taunts amplified by the media.  Students of Taijiquan, the most popular traditional style practiced in China, felt that they had to defend the honor of their system from a group of upstart fighters who seemed to have no regard for the nation’s culture.  Champions were chosen and a fight was arranged in front of a national audience.  But it was over all too quickly.  The master of Taijiquan was left bloodied and battered in front of a stunned audience.

The media immediately went to work.  What did this embarrassing defeat suggest about the decline of Taijiquan and the traditional Chinese martial arts more generally?  Are its supposed masters frauds?  Do the “internal arts” have any future in an increasingly modern world of global competition and fast paced information flows.

The year, of course, was 1928.

As the baseline level of knowledge that informs public debates on Chinese martial arts history had increased, discussions of the first and second National Martial Arts Examinations, staged by the KMT and the Central Guoshu Association, have become more common in the West. These two events have long enjoyed legendary status in China.  They have been eulogized in popular publications, films and scholarly papers.  They are remembered as the proving grounds from which a generation of martial arts masters emerged.

Lost within the fog of hagiography are some of the serious challenges that plagued these gatherings, including low levels of turnout by China’s diverse martial arts community.  Like the Jingwu Association before it, the Central Guoshu Association (even with official government backing) had troubling expanding its influence into the countryside.  Nor were period audiences all that impressed with the performances mounted by some of China’s traditional martial artists.  Taijiquan faced a public scandal in 1928 when it became clear that its advertised promises failed to deliver results in actual fights.  The noted author and martial arts advocate Xiang Kairan devoted much of his 1929 publication “My Experience of Practicing Taiji Boxing” to discussing the various problems that had been exposed through the system’s poor showing in the previous National Martial Arts Examination.

Yet I suspect that few readers clicked on this post hoping to find a discussion of Xiang Kairan’s observations on the Republic period martial arts.  Another challenge match has been making waves that are being noticed well beyond the boundaries of the Chinese martial arts community.  The South China Morning Post (and many other news outlets) has recently run multiple articles on the recent fight between Chinese MMA fighter Xu Xiaodong and Taiji master Wei Lei. If you have not yet seen video of the fight just follow the link. Trust me, it will not take long.

These sorts of asymmetric match-ups between traditional Chinese martial artists and athletes from the modern combat sports are not particularly rare.  A quick search on Youtube will pull up several examples.  The same may be true for traditional combat arts of other nations as well.  I am not sure as I have never invested the time to do a comprehensive comparative search.  But these sorts of fights seem to be a well-established part of the modern dialogue surrounding the Chinese martial arts.

In fact, when this film first came out I debated as to whether I should post it to the Facebook group.  Was this real news?  It is not just that we have heard this story before, it’s the latest incarnation of an all-time classic.

At some point I need to do some serious thinking about the efforts to retrospectively draft Bruce Lee in the UFC.

While watching this fight I found it hard not to think about the efforts of pioneering Chinese martial artists in the United State like Leo Fong who spent much of the 1960s-1970s looking for innovative ways to cross train in Boxing, Judo and Jeet Kune Do.  As long as we are in the Bay Area, we should also recall James Yimm Lee’s call for scientific physical training and realistic combat drills in his long simmering feud with the traditionalist T. Y. Wong.  And all of that was just a prelude to Bruce Lee’s outspoken attacks on the entire traditional martial arts scene. One could probably put together a similar list of innovators (and rivalries) in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia and Indonesia as well.

There are differences as well as similarities in all three of these time periods.  In 1928 the “pure fighters” challenging Taiji’s dominance were students of more combatively inclined external Kung Fu schools.  In the 1960s Bruce Lee and others were cross training in systems like boxing, judo, fencing or the Filipino martial arts.  In the current era Muay Thai, BJJ and American style MMA camps have moved to the fore.  And the explosion of social media has certainly changed the texture and feel of this conversation.

Still, one cannot shake the feeling that we have been here before.  An advocate for “realistic” and “modern” approaches to training issues a challenge, “traditionalists” of all stripes line up, and it’s the 1964 Long Beach International Karate Championships all over again.  This is a drama that, in one form or another, has been playing out for the better part of a century.  And that is ok, because it turns out that it’s a story we love.  I have had more readers contact me to ask if I was planning on talking about the recent Xu Xiaodong/Wei Lei fight than any other news story that I can remember.

I am not sure that there is much that is new or noteworthy to say about the fight itself.  Clearly Wei was terribly unprepared for the fight.  It didn’t look like he had ever done any serious sparring.  And to be totally honest, he went down fast enough that I couldn’t even get a decent read on how talented Xu is in absolute, rather than relative, terms.

Yet the more I thought about the event, the more I decided that the most interesting aspect of this fight was not actually the two combatants, but rather the audience that they sought to appeal to.  After all, we only heard about this event because many people around the globe decided to talk about it first, which then inspired some major media outlets to start writing stories.  And I use the term “story” intentionally, as I expect that many people were fascinated by this event because it seemed to speak to issues that were bigger than the details of Wei’s training regime.

Professor Carlo Rotella, a noted historian of Boxing, recently delivered a guest lecture at Cornell titled “My Punches Have Meaning – Making sense of boxing.”  I think that some of his insights might be worth considering in the current context.  He noted that individuals who are engaged in the professional combat sports very much want to believe that there is a meaningful logic behind the most important events in their athletic careers.  And yet the more closely they are matched in skill and ability (things that yield a competitive and entertaining fight from the audiences point of view) the less likely this seems to be true.  Any fight will have a winner or a loser.  But the more closely matched the two fighters are, the more influence random occurrences seem to have on the outcome of a given match.  For that reason, when evaluating the career of a given athlete, members of the Boxing Hall of Fame are careful to look at an entire series of fights over a long stretch of time, and not just a single victory or loss, when trying to decide between two possible athletes for induction.

Both the athletes and the audiences, however, cannot stand the thought that at its core the sort of violence that we see in the ring is both devoid of moral meaning and more random than we would care to admit.  We respond to this void by attempting to impose social meaning onto what is about to happen, or to retrospectively draw meaning out of unexpected events.  Rotella noted that you see these attempts everywhere, from the musical selections as fighters walk to the ring (or cage), to the way that sports journalists attempt to connect certain match-ups to larger trends in the sport, or even sociological shifts in society.

All of which bring us back to the reoccurring battle between traditionalists and modernists (however the two camps are being defined in a given decade) within the Chinese martial arts.  The rich history of sports writing suggests that humans have no problem finding meaning in the punches of even the most evenly matched competitors.  Yet when the styles of combat, training methods or ideologies of the fights are very different this exercise becomes even more socially useful.  Indeed, it is the very asymmetry of the match-up, the expectation of a blow-out, that might generate interest among the audience.

There is no reason to expect that the average fight between randomly selected Taijiquan instructors and professional MMA athletes would be particularly interesting.  While individual Taiji students may be interested in fighting, their art is clearly designed for a number of goals, ranging from self-defense to preserving elements of Chinese culture and working towards physical and emotional health.  MMA is only designed to do a single thing, and that is win in the octagon.  And if there is one lesson that modernity has taught, it is that highly specialized skills will almost always beat generalist approaches to the same problems.  That is true in the workplace (ergo the explosion of new professions in the last century) and it also seems to be true in sporting competition.

This will not come as a surprise.  On an intuitive level, it is something that we all seem to recognize.  We accept that to be a jack of all trades is to be a master of none.  And that probably means getting choked out by a grappling master at some point in your personal training. Yet that reality does not seem to be the determining factor in how most people approach the martial arts.  At best, it is one half of an ongoing dialectic.

As I noted in the conclusion to my volume on the social history of the Southern Chinese martial arts (co-authored with Jon Nielson), many individuals turn to the martial arts as a source of meaning and identity in a world where the forces of globalization and rapid economic change have disrupted basic social structures. Yet there is more than one way in which the martial arts might step into this breach.  On the one hand, they might attempt to address a problem that rapid social change has created (e.g., how do I defend myself against rising crime, or how do I show that in the 21^st century professional Chinese athletes can beat the best American fighters?)

Alternatively, other arts might choose to address the more fundamental problems that occurred when individuals became unmoored from their traditional communities or sources of identity.  If your village in southern China has been knocked down to make way for a new “third tier city” composed of mostly empty apartment buildings and shopping malls, maybe a traditional practice like Taijiquan can offer a new and more flexible vision of what it means to be part of an authentic Chinese community in an era when the very notion of community is eroding.

When discussing the ways that various religious communities have adapted in the face of globalization Peter Beyer termed these two strategies the “First and Second Integrative Responses.”  Some religious communities respond to social dislocation by focusing on a very specific set of concrete issues (the problem of social justice in poor Latin American countries), where as others turn to more far reaching philosophical and social discourses in an attempt to reestablish dislocated identities (the rise of fundamentalism in all of the world’s major religions).

The dual trends that we see within the Chinese martial arts are not surprising.  Across a wide range of social issues there is a similar pattern in which debates have broken out between those looking for empirically verifiable results in narrowly defined, but socially relevant, areas and others who have turned to a more generalized discourse that promises a single set of principles that can reframe and restore meaning to many areas of human endeavor.

It is not a coincidence that Taijiquan is the most popular martial art in China today, while the Mixed Martial Arts are one of the quickest growing trends.  This is a specific instance of a much more general trend.  Nor should we be surprised to discover that in one form or another this debate has been going on for a long time.  China’s current encounter with global markets began in the 19^th century and it reached a fevered pitch after the Boxer Rebellion in 1899-1901.  Scholars like Douglas Wile have previously explored the ways in which Taijiquan reorganized itself and emerged as an elite led response to the existential crisis that Western globalization posed to China during the late 19^th century.

Nor can we expect an end to this debate any time soon.  Individuals (in both China and the West) end up in the opposing wings of this dialectic because they feel different insecurities, or they select different strategies to understand and mediate the challenges of a rapidly changing society.  Learning to live together in harmony also seems unlikely.  The articulation of one world view, or set of values, seems to undercut the legitimacy of the other strategy.  Either China needs “scientific truth” to prosper, or it needs to “remember who it really is.”  But in practice it is difficult to select “both” for the same reasons that it is challenging to be both an MMA champion and Qigong master.  Some goals cut against each other on such a fundamental level that compromise becomes difficult.

When Xu and Wei square off against each other, we just cannot tear our eyes away.  Anyone who is familiar with the last 50 years of Chinese martial arts history could probably guess how that fight was going to end.  Yet it is that weight of history that gives each subsequent bout meaning.  We watch expecting the “specialist” to marshal the forces of modern scientific training and win, while hoping that the “generalist” will give us some reason to believe that a shift in cultural values might provide an effective way to deal with the challenges of the modern world.  The fact that we have all made similar (sometimes contradictory) choices in many areas of our own lives means that we all have some skin in this game.  We are compelled to watch fight after fight because we also believe that those punches have meaning.

oOo

If you enjoyed this essay you might also want to read: Two Encounters with Bruce Lee: Finding Reality in the Life of the Little Dragon

oOo

Introduction

Few individuals have influenced our understanding of the martial arts during the late Ming dynasty more than Cheng Zongyou.  His manuals provide historians a glimpse into a world of martial arts practice that is at the same time familiar and strange.  His works describe an environment that is characterized by a multiplicity of competing schools and ongoing disputes about the authenticity and legitimacy of various techniques.  Cheng’s frequent use of Buddhist metaphor when describing the Shaolin fighting method, while more superlative than theoretical, even seems to have resonances with the way the Chinese martial arts are often discussed today.

Yet his beloved pole fighting method was not only intended for the training ground.  Cheng was promoting the martial arts in an era when China’s people were threatened by insurrection, pirates and the rise of bandit armies.  Martial artists were in demand as military trainers.  At least one of Cheng’s instructors would die in battle while leading military expeditions in the field.  As the security situation deteriorated the gentry and rich landlords increasingly turned to private militias to maintain some semblance of order, if not actual peace.  This was the world that inspired Cheng Zongyou to take up the brush and to begin to systematically record and explore the era’s martial arts.

I have quoted Cheng’s various writings in many places on this blog. Yet by some oversight he has never received a post of his own.  As such I have decided to make Cheng Zongyou’s career the next addition to our ongoing “Lives of the Chinese Martial Artists” occasional series.  All the information here is available in the secondary academic literature.  Hopefully I will be able to clarify a few things for myself by gathering it all into one place.

Front Gates of the Shaolin Temple Prior to the 1928 Destruction of the Temple. This photo was part of a Republic of China era survey of the temple grounds.

Life and Career

Most entries in this series start out with a biographical discussions of the individual in question.  In this case, our exploration of Cheng Zongyou’s background must be brief as we do not know much about his life.  Stanley Henning reports that Cheng was probably born in 1561 (Martial Arts of the World, 95). Unfortunately, we do not know much about other life events, or even when he died.

Meir Shahar has written more about Cheng’s contributions to the martial arts than any other scholar in the English language literature.  His treatment of Cheng’s life can be found in his 2001 article “Ming-Period Evidence of Shaolin Martial Practice” (Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, Vol. 61, No. 2, pp. 359-413) or in a slightly expanded form in his 2008 volume, The Shaolin Monastery: History, Religion and the Chinese Martial Arts (Hawaii UP, see especially 56-62). Readers should also note his translation in the 2005 Hawaii Reader in Traditional Chinese Culture titled “Cheng Zongyou’s Exposition of the Original Shaolin Staff Method.”  Most of the research on this figure in the Chinese academic literature remains untranslated.

While many details about Cheng’s life are a mystery, we know a bit more about his family.  Shahar notes that he was a son of a wealthy gentry family in southern Anhui province.  There had been a number of degree holder’s in the Cheng clan, but in Zongyou’s generation the deteriorating security situation seems to have shifted the family’s interests in a notably martial direction.

Cheng Zongyou was far from alone in his interest in the martial arts.  We know that several brothers shared his interests, and that he had both uncles and nephews who also took the military exams and devoted themselves to the martial arts.  In fact, Shahar reminds us that during the late Ming many young gentlemen (the author Wushu being a prominent example) turned their interests to military matters.  Rather than this being a hobby one suspects that their families decided that this was necessary to defend their economic and social status in changing times.  As such, Zongyou’s study and research appears to have been both financially and socially well supported.  Returning to his hometown after decades of study and travel Cheng Zongyou managed to raise a model militia, trained using his own techniques, composed of at least 80 members of his own estate.  This framework is important to bear in mind when discussing his earlier training.

As a younger man Cheng Zongyou (and a number of other close family members) traveled to the Shaolin Temple in Henan province.  His subsequent publications claim that he studied with a succession of renowned teachers and mentors for over a decade before finally following one of his instructors on expeditions outside of the temple.  The instruction that he received within the walls of the temple seems to have been the basis for much of his later activity as an author.

Henning characterizes this as a “claim,” rather than as a fact, in his 2010 article for Green and Svinth (“China: Martial Arts” 95).  His caution should be carefully considered.  We do not have any independent documentation (that I am aware of) that places Cheng Zongyou at Shaolin during this period.  And even during the Ming, many martial artists were attempting to ride the venerable temple’s coat tails.

When we turn to circumstantial evidence is the picture is mixed, but it seems to lean in Cheng’s favor.  It is odd that in his extensive discussion of Shaolin’s pole fighting Cheng makes no mention of the simplified system that General Yu Dayou introduced to the temple a generation before.  That might reflect the interests of his teachers, or that as a relatively recent addition, it did not appear to be “authentically Shaolin” from Cheng’s point of view.  Indeed, he mentions the supernatural origins of the Shaolin method in multiple places in his subsequent publications.

A detailed view of one of the 19th century murals at the Shaolin Temple in Henan. Original published source unknown.

On the other hand, Cheng does discuss several teachers who do appear in other period texts and records.  Further, he describes the process of learning at Shaolin in some detail, as well as exploring new trends that he has seen at the sanctuary.  For instance, in his 1610 Exposition on the Original Shaolin Staff Method we find the following aside on the growing popularity of unarmed boxing (still at this point a new trend) at the temple:

“Someone may ask: “As to the staff, the Shaolin [Method] is admired.  Today there are many Shaolin monks who practice hand combat (quan), and do not practice the staff.  Why is that?

I Answer: The Shaolin Staff is called the Yaksa (Yecha) [method].  It is a sacred transmission from the Kimnara King (Jinnaluo wang) (Shaolin’s tutelary diety, Vajrapani).  To this day it is known as “Unsurpassed Wisdom (Bodhi)” (wushang puti).  By contrast, hand combat is not yet popular in the land.  Those [Shaolin monks] who specialize in it, do so in order to transform it, like the staff, [into a vehicle] for reaching the other shore [of enlightenment.]”

(Shahar’s  2008 translation of Shaolin Gungfa, page 114).

Cheng Zongyou paints a fascinating picture in which the late Ming Shaolin monastery has come to function as a military school for the state.  Within the sanctuary one can find dozens of instructors who are offering classes to a variety of students rather than promoting the highly exclusive lineage systems that we tend to associate with the martial arts today.  That makes sense as Shaolin was attempting to offer all the basic skills that a young officer might need.  Cheng Zongyou mentions receiving instruction in not just pole fighting but also the spear, fencing, archery and even riding.  Of all these subjects, Shaolin was most famous for its expertise in the pole, and Cheng’s description makes it clear that this topic was being tackled by many teachers.

Returning to Henning’s original question, is Cheng Zongyou offering us an “authentic” glimpse at the Shaolin staff method?  Or to put it differently, is he acting as a good Confucian and simply relating the learning of the sages for the edification of his readers, or is his work more innovative than its title may suggest.  Did later readers inherit Shaolin’s pole method, or Cheng’s?

The nature of instruction at the Temple itself, as described by Cheng, complicates any attempt to answer such a question.  Rather than there being a single unified Shaolin approach to pole fighting the temple featured a variety of teachers.  Their approaches were apparently different enough that students made conscious decisions to seek out some mentors rather than others.  Cheng describes the composition of his first major work as follows:

“My great uncle, the military student Yunshui and my nephews Junxin and the National University student Hanchu had studies with me once at Shaolin.  They pointed out that so far the Shaolin staff method had been transmitted only orally, from one Buddhist master to the next.  Since I was the first to draw illustrations and compile written formulas for it, they suggested I publish these for the benefit of like-minded friends.  At first I declines, saying I was not equal to the task. But then illustrious gentlemen from all over the land started commending the supposed merits of my work.  They even blamed me for keeping it secret, thereby depriving them.  So finally I found some free time, gathering the doctrines handed down to me by my teachers and friends, and combined these with what I learned from my own experience.  I commissioned an artisan to execute the drawings, and, even though my writing is somewhat vulgar, I added to the left of each drawing a rhyming formula (gejue).”

Given that Cheng was combining the insights of some instructors, but not all, while at the same time adding his own experiences and insights, one wonders whether his work should actually be regarded as an innovation within the Shaolin pole fighting method rather than a simple transmission.  Indeed, the very act of taking an exceedingly complex body of material and reducing it to a single text implies not just a loss, but also a transformation of the material.

Cheng seems to have suffered remarkably few misgivings regarding the nature of his project.  In the current era we almost reflexively question one’s ability to “learn Kung Fu from a book.”  Cheng, on the other hand, informs his readers that with the addition of woodblock images (a recent trend in Ming era publishing) readers would be able to do just that:

“Just casting a glance at one of the drawings would probably suffice to figure the position depicted therein.  Thus the reader will be able to study this method without the aid of a teacher.  Despite an apparent simplicity, each sentence captures the secret of victory and defeat, each drawing harbors the essence of movement.  Even though staff fighting is called a trivial art, its explication in this book is the result of strenuous effort.”

Many martial artists in both China and the West have spent a good deal of time attempting to reconstruct Cheng’s various methods, and it seems that the process is generally more difficult than he suggests.  It is likely that Eric Burkart’s recent work on European fight books may be of some help here. Cheng simply assumed that any reader who picked up his book would already share much of his knowledge about specific techniques, vocabularies and even basic (culturally determined) habits of movement.  Given the constraints of space inherent in the publishing enterprise, that which is assumed to be “common knowledge” is almost always left out of a fight book.  This makes their later reconstruction (centuries after these deep forms of cultural knowledge have died) a fundamentally creative and rhizomic process.  Thus, another layer of interpretation and mystery is inserted between modern readers and the actual substance of Ming era Shaolin practice.

While Cheng did not restrict his writing to the Shaolin pole method, it was clearly his passion.  The 1610 Exposition of the Original Shaolin Staff Method is longer than his next three books combined.  These were released in 1621 (along with the Staff Method) in a collection titled Techniques for After-Farming Pastime.  While outwardly bucolic one suspects that this title was meant to hail other landlords and members of the gentry who were thinking of organizing their own community militias out of the ranks of local peasants.

This collection included works on the crossbow, the spear and the saber.  Of these efforts, the last is probably the best known.  Rather than discussing the Chinese military dao this work reflects the interest in Japanese swordsmanship that had been inspired by the coastal raids of the 16^th century.  Peter Lorge notes that Cheng had studied his “Dandao” techniques with Liu Yunfeng, who in turn was a direct student of Japanese fencing (2012, 179).  This work begins with a number of combat applications against the spear, before providing a dulon suitable for solo-practice.  This comes with a movement diagram similar to those used in the Staff Method.

Lorge observes that while this was popular among Chinese martial artists at the time, the actual practice of the dandao and other schools of Japanese fencing appear to have died out quickly.  General Qi Jiguang proved that better training and the use of pole arms was the easiest way to defeat Japanese swordsmen.  Of course, that same trend was playing itself out on Japan’s battlefields and the sword increasingly became a weapon of personal defense (179).  This suggests that subsequent flurries of interest in the dandao (and Cheng’s text) in the Qing and Republic eras might best be understood as revival movements.

In 1629 Cheng went on to publish another manual titled History of Archery.  Stephen Selby suggests that like his Staff Method, this work is inherently conservative.  It again ignores the innovations that General Yu Dayou and Qi Jiguang introduced to simplify military archery and instead favors the older techniques of the early Ming dynasty.  Still, Cheng’s illustrations were path breaking.  Selby states that his manual was the first to provide detailed illustrations of techniques that had been written about for hundreds of years but were never clearly visualized (2000, 276).

A different view of the same mural. Shaolin, 19th century. Original published source unknown.

Conclusion

Unfortunately, we do not know how Cheng’s story ends. Perhaps that is poetic justice as his contributions to the Chinese martial arts live on.  At multiple points (during the Republic, after the end of the Cultural Revolution, and today) Chinese students have exhibited renewed interest in his work.  Nor can scholars deny the historical and descriptive importance of his writing.

Cheng Zongyou paints an image of the Chinese martial arts that is almost intoxicating for modern readers.  It all seems so familiar.  His descriptions of a thriving Shaolin temple, or the era’s many disputes and rivalries, sound so vivid.  The images in his texts are evocative, if not always descriptive.  Likewise, his use of Buddhist metaphors promises a merging of the martial and philosophical realms that has proved deeply appealing to individuals in both the East and West.  Cheng seems to function as a bridge between the present and a past that we wish existed.

Yet careful readers will also detect disjoints that, in their own way, are just as informative.  His was a world in which unarmed Boxing was just starting to capture the public imagination, and most martial arts instruction happened on the militia training ground.  Rather than learning in modern schools, those who could afford to do so hired instructors who became part of their estates, or traveled to defacto military schools like Shaolin or Emei.  Nor were these skills purely academic.  Even famous teachers might be cut down while fighting bandit armies, as was the fate of one of Cheng’s Shaolin instructors.

While at a recent workshop I was listening to several scholars debate the translation of a 17^th century Japanese medical text.  One of the diseases that it mentioned seemed to share many of the characteristics of Anorexia.  But other elements of the description did not fit that pattern.  And still others pointed to behaviors that may have been more religious in nature.

As the conversation went on a more experienced researcher, with considerable expertise in this area, stepped in to remind the group that, in general, it is just not possible to impose modern disease diagnosis on older medical texts.  Our world view is not their world view.  Our empirical observations are not their empirical observations.  When we impose modern categories on ancient documents we inevitably damage our ability understand the world that they lived in while still failing to make the facile analogies that we seek.

I was reminded of this conversation as I reviewed the sources on Cheng Zongyou and the ways that they were sometimes used in popular discussions.  Like that medical text, he is challenging precisely because he seems to hover right on the edge of our modern understanding of the Chinese martial arts.  And it is just so easy to romanticize his decade at Shaolin at the height of its Ming glory.  Who among us would not jump at the chance to do that?  Yet we cannot fully appreciate Cheng’s vision of the Chinese martial arts if we ignore the many differences in an attempt to bring his experiences closer to our own.

Preface – Exposition of the Original Shaolin Staff Method

The Shaolin Monastery is nestled between two mountains: that of culture (wen) and that of fighting (wu). Indeed this monastery has transmitted the method of staff fighting and the doctrines of the Chan sect alike, for which reason gentlemen throughout the land have always admired it.

Since my youth I was determined to learn the martial arts.  Whenever I heard of a famous teacher I wouldn’t hesitate to travel far to gain his instruction.  Therefore I gathered the necessary travel expenses and journeyed to the Shaolin Monetary where I spent, all in all, more than ten years.  At first I served Master Hongji, who was tolerant enough to admit me to his class  Even though I gained a sketchy understanding of the techniques’ broad outlines, I didn’t master it.

At the time Master Hongzhuan was aleady an old man in his eighties.  Nevertheless his staff method was superb, and the monks venerated him the most.  Therefore I turned to him as my next teacher, and each day I learned new things I had never heard of before. In addition, I befriended the two Masters Zongxiang and Zongdai, and I gained enormously from practicing with them.  Later I met Master Guang’an, one of the best experts in Buddhist technique.  He inherited Hongzhuan’s technique in its entirety, and had even improved upon it.  Guang’an tutored me personally, and revealed to me wonderful subtleties.  Later I followed him out of the monastery and we traveled together for several years.  The marvelous intricacy of the staff’s transformations, the wonderful swiftness of its manipulations—I gradually became familiar with them, and I attained sudden enlightenment (dun).  I chose this field as my specialty, and I believe I did have some achievements.

As for archery, riding, and the arts of the sword and spear, I paid quite some attention to their investigation as well, however by that time my energy of half-a-lifetime had already been spent.  My great uncle, the military student Yunshui and my nephews Junxin and the National University student Hanchu had studies with me once at Shaolin.  They pointed out that so far the Shaolin staff method had been transmitted only orally, from one Buddhist master to the next.  Since I was the first to draw illustrations and compile written formulas for it, they suggested I publish these for the benefit of like-minded friends.  At first I declined, saying I was not equal to the task. But then illustrious gentlemen from all over the land started commending the supposed merits of my work.  They even blamed me for keeping it secret, thereby depriving them.  So finally I found some free time, gathering the doctrines handed down to me by my teachers and friends, and combined these with what I learned from my own experience.  I commissioned an artisan to execute the drawings, and, even though my writing is somewhat vulgar, I added to the left of each drawing a rhyming formula (gejue).

Together these drawings and formulas constitute a volume, which I titled: Exposition of the Original Shaolin Staff Method.  Just casting a glance at one of the drawings would probably suffice to figure the position depicted therein.  Thus the reader will be able to study this method without the aid of a teacher.  Despite an apparent simplicity, each sentence captures the secret of victory and defeat, each drawing harbors the essence of movement.  Even though staff fighting is called a trivial art, its explication in this book is the result of strenuous effort.

If this book serves like-minded friends as a raft leading them to the other shore [of enlightenment], if they rely upon it to strengthen the state and pacify its boarders, thereby spreading my teachers’ method and enhancing its glory, yet another of my goals would be accomplished.

(Shaolin Gungfu circa 1610.  Translated by Shahar (2008) 56-59).

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If you enjoyed this post you might also want to read:  Writing (and Reading) Better Martial Arts History in Four Easy Steps

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Source: Wikimedia

Introduction

Greetings!  I am traveling for a conference and workshop where I will attempt to convince a group of political scientists that they should pay attention to Martial Arts Studies. (If you would like to see my presentation click here).  As such, I have arranged something special for Kung Fu Tea in my absence.  The Martial Arts Studies Research Network just wrapped up a small conference in Bath that focused on the Japanese martial arts.  While this is a very interesting subject I suspect that most of us were not able to attend.  So, after talking it over with the conference organizer, it was decided to share some of the presentations here in an attempt to bring a larger number of people into this conversation.  The video quality is not fantastic as everything was shot from a static camera angle.  But some of this material is really great, so feel free to just let the audio play in the background.

The conference featured several papers and I will only be able to share a handful of them here.  I decided that it might also make things more interesting to pick a small subset of presentations, all of which addressed similar themes.  Over the next week we will be looking at a group of papers each of which examines the global spread of the Japanese martial arts into a different area of the world, and from a slightly different theoretical perspective.

Our first paper was presented by Dr. Emelyne Godfrey.  She tackles a number of topics including the early 20th century popularization of Japanese martial arts in the United Kingdom and Suffragette jujitsu.

Dr Godfrey is a writer and researcher specialising in the Victorian and Edwardian eras. She is a regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement and has been interviewed by the BBC on numerous occasions. Author of Masculinity, Crime and Self-Defence in Victorian Literature (2010), and Femininity, Crime and Self-Defence in Victorian Literature and Society (2012), her latest work Utopias and Dystopias in the Fiction of H.G. Wells and William Morris will be available in September 2016. Dr Godfrey is currently working on a book on the suffragettes.

Click here, or on the image below, to see the presentation!

Introduction

Greetings!  I am currently on the road for a conference and workshop.  As such, I will be sharing some papers that were presented at the Martial Arts Studies Research Network’s recent conference in Bath.  If you missed the first presentation in this series, click here for the discussion of “Bartitsu and Suffragette Jujitsu of the Early 20th Century.”

In this presentation Dr. Bok Kyu Choi will be discussing the dissemination of the Japanese martial arts in Korea. While most of the papers at this conference looked at events in the modern period, his research was unique in that it focused on an earlier era of Korean/Japanese interaction.  This talk may be of particular interesting to those of you who follow the Chinese fighting arts during the late imperial (Ming/Qing) period.

Dr. Bok Kyu Choi is currently affiliated with Leiden University as a visiting lecturer on Korean martial arts theory and practice.  He obtained a Masters degree from the Seoul National University researching the modern history of the Korean martial arts and then a PhD (also from SNU) with his dissertation on the interpretation of the Muyedobotongji and its significance in modern times.

Click here, or on the image below, to see more!

Introduction

Greetings!  I am currently on the road for a conference and workshop.  As such, I will be sharing some papers that were presented at the Martial Arts Studies Research Network’s recent conference in Bath.  If you missed the first or second presentation in this series, click here to see the discussion of “Bartitsu and Suffragette Jujitsu of the Early 20th Century” or the “Dissemination of Japanese Martial Arts to Korea.”

While the previous papers have been largely historical, the work of Prof. Hatsuki Aishima is ethnographic in nature.  Her presentation looks at Karate’s adoption in Egypt, and asks how middle class identity is enacted through the practice of the Japanese martial arts.  While a relative new comer to the Martial Arts Studies community her work suggests some fascinating questions.

Hatsuki Aishima is a social anthropologist specializing in Islam and public culture in the contemporary Middle East. She received her MA from Kyoto University (Area Studies, 2002) and DPhil from the University of Oxford (Oriental Studies, 2011). Before joining Minpaku in July 2016, she worked as Lecturer in Modern Islam at the University of Manchester. In her monograph, Public Culture and Islam in Modern Egypt (I.B. Tauris, 2016), she explored the roles of mass media and modern education in shaping the public knowledge, scholarly culture and the literary tradition of Islam. She is currently working on an urban ethnography of karate practitioners’ communities in Egypt.

Click here, or on the image below, to see more!