An Eternal Debate

Some of the most persistent, and for students of Martial Arts Studies most significant, issues revolve around the choices individuals are forced to make.  I was introduced to Wing Chun in what I would characterize as a fairly open environment.  My Sifu (Jon Nielson) was a student of Ip Ching, but he openly talked about and shared techniques from the various other lineages he had been associated with over the years.  His Salt Lake City school held “open sessions” on Friday nights and Saturday mornings which were  exactly what the name implied.  The school was left open, and in the care of one of the senior students.  It was free to be used by anyone who wanted to come in and train.  But that offer was not restricted to the paying students of the school.  Over the years we had multiple Jeet Kune Do, Jujitsu, Kung Fu and Taijiquan students come in, learn a little chi sao, practice grappling or otherwise engage in an (always friendly) exchange of technique.  I quickly learned that my community was defined by those whose interests and backgrounds were similar enough that we could profitably train together, rather than being restricted to only individuals who claimed a specific lineage or art.

On a purely empirical level I think my martial art training benefited from being exposed to a fair number of people who were not trained in our system.  Nor was this experience unique.  After moving to New York state I started an ethnography project with a group of kickboxers.  Once again, I saw something similar.  The regional community was not defined by a single school or style.  Rather, it was a network of individuals, all of whom lived within driving distance of one another and who could (when time and schedules permitted) attend “open mat night” at each other’s gyms. These were chances for students from different areas to come together and engage in some friendly sparring, or maybe work on a more specific set of skills with new people.

While fairly common in some areas, practices like these are far from universal in the Asian martial arts.  I have found that when visiting new schools one of the first things that I need to understand is the degree to which this institution sees itself as being open to, or set apart from, the larger martial arts community.  This tends to impact everything from etiquette to training strategies.  Indeed, it is one of the factors that defines the texture of life within a martial arts school.

A few examples may be in order.  Doug Farrer, in various places, has drawn a sharp contrast between the typically open “park culture” that he observed while studying with the Jingwu group in Singapore, and the closed nature of some of the Choy Li Fut schools found within the city’s red light district.  Where as one group happily displayed their training in public and encouraged him to study with various teachers, the other adopted both the rituals and architectural spaces more often associated with the region’s long history of secret societies.  New disciples were even expected to pledge to “wear a single shirt”, meaning to study no other style of fighting art.  As opposed to the relatively open and modernist trappings of the Jingwu association, these groups typically displayed a more robust understanding of the school as a lineage society, complete with a memorial wall for sacrifices to the ancestors who had gone before.

It would be futile to try and surgically disentangle the sociologically closed nature of this second group from the system of cultural scripts and signs that it was embedded in.  The very definition of categories as broad as “closed” and “open” must, be culturally mediated and carefully qualified.  But it would also be a mistake to see this contrast between closed and open communities as exclusively an artifact of Chinese history.

I have recently had a chance to research the early spread, and cultural adaptation, of Wing Chun in Germany during the 1970s.  Again, both modes of social organization have been on full display.  The older and better established EWTO tends to be relatively closed in its social orientation.  This can be seen in a number of places, from its distinctive uniforms to in-house publications.  Their goal is to provide students with everything that they need to become proficient in self-defense and to find a new and engaging community.  This stands in sharp contrast to the more recent wave of smaller, more independent, Wing Chun schools in Germany that might openly embrace cross-training in Krav Maga, or the Filipino martial arts, and do not attempt to go create such a complete, immersive, cultural experience for their students. 

Nor are these choices restricted to the historically grounded Asian martial arts.  The same debate between openness and closure seems to be raging in the lightsaber combat community, the current focus of my ethnographic work.  To the uninitiated the conversation might not be as immediately evident.  Certainly no one is expected to burn incense and kowtow as they make public vows to (among other things) not study other styles.  Yet these same issues seem to underlay increasingly difficult debates that have emerged on a number of seemingly unrelated topics.

At the moment the biggest debate in the lightsaber community has to do with the question of safety gear (and, to a lesser extent, safety regulations within tournaments) rather than specific techniques, training methods, or anything having to do with Star Wars itself.  Among the major organized groups there are essentially three competing standards for safety gear.  Perhaps the most common, seen in groups like the TPLA (Terra Prime Light Armory) and the SSL (Sport Saber League) mandates a fencing mask and lacrosse/HEMA gloves as the required basic equipment, with some individuals adding al a carte elbow, knee or chest protectors if they are going into a tournament and expect more vigorous matches.  Training or lighter sparring within a school typically sees only the use of a fencing mask and gloves.

This approach is not, however, universally accepted.  One of the largest lightsaber groups, LudoSport, almost totally dispenses with safety gear.  Light gloves are worn, but in general their rules are structured in such a way that strikes to the head are avoided and sparring is not conducted as a “full contact” activity.  These restrictions tend to give LudoSport matches a very distinct visual aesthetic which audiences seem to enjoy.  Still, replicating debates that have gone on in the traditional martial arts for literally centuries, many more traditional martial arts teachers doubt the wisdom of training people to avoid vital targets and always pull their punches.  This discourse seems to be one of many reasons that LudoSport insists on advertising itself as a “sport” rather than as a “martial art.”

On the other side of the spectrum one has groups like the Saber Legion, who create complete (and highly personalized) sets of safety gear which might include everything from motorcycle armor to steel gorgets.  Beyond its rugged utility, many the top competitors seek to make an esthetic statement through their selection of armor.  It serves to frame and give social meaning to the often vigorous exchanges of blows that characterize many of these matches which an outside observer might otherwise have difficulty interpreting.  Again, the greater range of permissible techniques, and adoption of lots of safety gear, makes a LudoSport match appear very different from a Saber Legion event.

Yet one’s choice of safety gear has important implications that stretch far beyond the technical questions of how a lightsaber tournament is organized.  Online debates seem to suggest that these choices are conscious strategies by which various groups seek to organize (and monopolize) the emergence of a new martial space.  Having to buy a full set of Saber Legion approved gear represents a fairly notable economic barrier to entry to the sport.  Requiring such an investment may ensure that those who become fully members of the Saber Legion network will be highly committed.  Thus if one is attempting to establish a new martial art or combat sport, there might actually be good reasons to create high barriers to entry.

Such strategies are not universal.  If Germany is an interesting test case because of the regional popularity of Wing Chun, France must attract our attention as a rapidly growing Mecca of lightsaber combat.  Over the last few weeks I have been seeking to gain a better understanding of the overall situation in that country.  This is still something that I am working on and I will be the first to admit that the exact details of the situation there are not yet totally clear to me. 

Still, one cannot help but note that while the Star Wars films are popular across Western Europe, lightsaber combat seems to be a full order of magnitude more popular in France than Germany, Spain or even the UK.  That simple observation suggests a number of important questions. Yet as multiple groups have entered this space in an attempt to control and organize the development of Lightsaber Combat within the national market, the now familiar choices between “openness” and “closure” have started to arise.

LudoSport, originally based in Italy, has a strong presence in France and has recently been busy promoting their national tournaments.  These are heavily advertised on-line, and the general public, as well as other lightsaber combat students, are encouraged to attend.  But not as competitors.  One must join LudoSport and train extensively in their system to compete in their tournaments.  Doing so also gives one access to a vibrant and well supported social community.  Students frequently travel abroad and the more committed ones may even devote personal time and resources to learning Italian, the language of the lightsaber, much as a serious Western Kendo competitor might study Japanese.

The Sport Saber League, based in Paris, has its roots in France. Like LudosSport it also views itself primarily as a sporting (rather than martial arts) organization.  As such it has focused on creating a set of regional and national tournaments.  But these enthusiastically welcome all competitors, regardless of school or style.  The SSL seems to favor a middle position on the safety gear debates (placing them between the extremes of the Saber Legion on the one hand and LudoSport on the other).  This poses a relatively low barrier to entry.  

A review of their public Facebook group (LED Saber Community) suggests an ideological orientation towards promoting the Lightsaber Combat Community as a whole, rather than just one school or style.  This should not be taken to mean that the SSL doesn’t have a preferred position on all sorts of questions.  Yet they allow more closed groups, such as Ludosport, to freely advertise events which (ironically) most members of the SSL would not be able to actually participate in.  I would suggest that this is a fundamentally “open” community precisely because they have prioritized community building without an expectation of “reciprocity.”

Kung Fu clans in Singapore, Wing Chun schools in Germany, and the growing Lightsaber Combat movement in France present researchers with three distinct cases.  None of these cases share a common art, culture or national history.  And yet in each case a student’s experience of the modern martial arts is structured by similar debates as to whether the community is best served by openness or closure.  Do small and exclusive schools offer a greater sense of community?  Does the commitment that they foster lead to better training?  Or should the martial arts reflect society more generally?  Does a freer exchange of ideas and a space for testing techniques lead to the development of “better” practice?

These seem to be among the most fundamental questions which structure the practice of martial arts in the modern world.  Those who promote these systems often make calculated decisions as to what strategy to follow, and as Adam Franks notes, may move from a position of relative openness to closure for economic or cultural reasons. Even before they start their formal training, students are subtly encouraged to align themselves with one set of values or the other.

As I have noted elsewhere, it is not enough for us to ask about the role or impact of the martial arts in the modern world.  Given the great variety of groups that exist it would be foolish to simply assume that they do the same sorts of social work.  Coming to terms with the dialectic opposition between these two modes of social organization may be an important step in creating a more nuanced view of how martial communities work.  

The remainder of this essay explores three different theoretical frameworks that may help students of martial arts studies do just that.  The first of these, drawing on the work of Peter Beyer, focuses on the the performance of the martial arts as acts of social communication.  The second approach, emerging from the literature on social capital, approaches martial arts organizations as networks of individual relationships and norms.  The last theory draws on the anthropological insights of Victor Turner and his Cornell University colleague James T. Siegel.  It approaches the martial arts as fundamentally embodied and ritual way of bridging the ever widening gap between an individual’s social status and their personal self-image against the background of rapid economic change.

Finally, I should offer one last caveat before exploring these various concepts.  The terms “open” and “closed” function best as basic descriptors indicating something about the relative position of two social institutions which exist on a continuous spectrum.  I doubt that in the real world one would ever observe a martial arts school that exhibited pure openness or closure.    Even the most “open” Wing Chun school must have some sort of understanding of why their practice is different from White Crane, just as even the most accepting lightsaber tournament would restrict a competitor from taking to the floor with a standard HEMA feder.  All groups combine both open and closed characteristics.  Yet it is still important to understand what they hope to accomplish by differentiating themselves along these lines.

Communication and Identity

The first conceptual approach that I would like to introduce is likely to be the most familiar to readers of Kung Fu Tea.  The Epilogue of our social history of the southern Chinese martial arts (co-authored with Jon Nielson) turned to Peter Beyer’s work on the fate of organized religion in the era of globalization to better understand some paradoxes about the development and social function of Wing Chun in the post-1972 period.   Beyers theoretical framework focuses on the modes of communication that are used to construct both identity and sense of belonging in the face of rapid economic and social change.  Many social groups, including large religious traditions, have been forced to navigate these challenges throughout the course of the 20th century.

To review a complex argument very briefly, Beyer noted that religions traditionally functioned as anchors of social meaning because they held a monopoly on the definition and discussion of the “transcendent” world, or that theoretical realm that was unlike our mundane experience.  Only by being able to imagine and occupy this “outside space” could individuals gain a sense of perspective and make sense of their daily (immanent) experiences.  The rapid acceleration of economic and cultural exchanges both eroded the exclusive truth claims of a wide range of traditional institutions (whether religious in nature or not) while at the same time promoting the fortunes of social groups who instead employed highly specialized modes of technical communication, such as professional associations.  While uninterested in making philosophical arguments about the nature of life or the definition of the community, these groups were best positioned to reap immense economic and social benefits from the acceleration of global trade, remaking society in their image.  The end result of this process has been not only the increased secularization of the West, but also the growth of ever more narrow forms of professionalization within the economy.

Not everyone benefits from the construction of ever larger and more profitable global markets.  Individuals who hold scarce factors of production typically lose in the face of expanded trade (see Ronald Rogowski).  Traditional systems of insurance and modern social safety nets fray under the pressures of global capital markets.  And even those who have materially benefitted from global trade are likely to notice a pronounced loss of meaning, or “disenchantment,” within the social sphere.  Indeed, early advocates of the secularization hypothesis were wrong to guess that religion would vanish during the 20th century precisely because they didn’t fully realize that the problems produced by the expansion of economic modernity would open new social functions to “traditional” forms of social organization.

So how will such groups respond to the challenges and opportunities presented by rapid social change?  Beyer proposed that their strategies can be termed either the “first” or “second” integrative response.  In many ways the most obvious path forward is for a small group, such as a martial arts society, to attempt strengthen the social boundaries that separate it from the rest of society.  By instituting a strong identity discourse, based on social separation, it is possible to rebuild a sense of exclusivity and to reestablish communication about transcendent principals.  In this way a martial arts practice that is concerned with establishing “proper relationships” and “traditional identities” while critiquing the trends of the day provides it members with a set of tools necessary to reorient their understanding of the nature and opportunities of the modern world.  The rise of fundamentalism in all of the world’s great religious traditions, a closely related phenomenon, suggests the general popularity of such an approach.

The second integrative response focuses not on the loss of meaning per se, but the material displacement that rapid social change brings in its wake.  Advocates of this approach within the religious sphere might be liberal protestant churches that seek to promote social justice, or who seek to create programs that support refugees and other displaced peoples, themselves the victims of globalization.  Within the martial arts community we see an increased  awareness of the need to deal with issues such as life style diseases among senior citizens, self-defense training for women or minorities, or the possible uses of martial arts in anti-bullying programs in schools.  Indeed, the great debate that structured the transmission and development of the Chinese martial arts, both at home and abroad, throughout the 20th century is whether these practices were best understood as a modern fighting/physical culture system, suitable for addressing concrete social problems, or whether they instead spoke to, and reinforced, something intrinsic in the nature of the ethno-nationalist community. 

In the Epilogue of our volume we did not explicitly address the question of openness versus closure as we were exploring a slightly different set of issues.  Yet Beyer’s theory makes clear predictions in this area.  All things being equal, the need to re-establish and maintain social boundaries suggests that those groups pursuing the First Integrative Response will find a closed and inward looking posture most useful.  Groups who seek to prove the utility of the martial arts in the modern world by addressing the secondary problems caused by rapid economic change will, almost by definition, be forced to reach out to other groups in society.  They will need to adopt modes of communication that are widely accessible and reflect, rather than challenge, core social values.  

Social Capital in the Martial Arts

While pointing to the overall function of these competing modes of communication within the martial arts, Beyer’s theory does not have much to say on how either of these strategies are likely to be carried out.  That is a problem for us as in a very real sense martial arts groups are where the “rubber meets the road.”  These organizations are attractive to scholars precisely because they provide a venue in which abstract notions of identity and social values must find expression in close relationships and bodily practice.  On a technical level, how are open or closed communities actually constructed?  Why do the members of groups come to share these orientations and replicate them through their own, usually independent, actions?

“Rational choice” based theories of social capital formation (popularized in recent decades in the fields of political science and sociology) may provide us with a better set of tools for understanding why the creation of some social networks lead to tight closed groups, where as in other cases more diffuse open relationships between sectors may evolve.  Further, the work of Robert Putnam suggests that the degree of social capital formation can have a profound impact on the proper functioning political and economic institutions.  Further, the overall level of social capital is not set.  Rather, this is something that responds to environmental conditions and evolves over time.  In fact, organizations like martial arts schools may, in certain circumstances, help to promote social capital development.

Within the social scientific literature social capital is typically defined as decentralized networks of trust and reciprocity.  The basic insight that drives this literature is that trust is not something that human beings are typically born with.  Rather, it is a type of social skill that we learn (or don’t learn) through a lifetime of interactions with our fellow human beings.  In a system lacking social capital people might only cooperate with one another through mechanisms such as legally binding contracts and enforced reciprocity.  But these sorts of mechanism are expensive and they tend to limit both the speed and efficiency with which our social institutions can work.

When people are forced to interact with each other repeatedly in small group settings, characterized by face to face interactions (e.g., your typical martial arts school or training hall), it becomes possible for them to build long lasting, secure, relationships such that they are willing to trust and cooperate with one another as a general principal.  I might help my kung fu brother move his new dining table into the house simply because he is my kung fu brother, and that is “what we do.”  Likewise he is willing to accept my help and isn’t suspicious that I am secretly casing his house for burglary because “that is not what we do.”  In short, the value of these relationships comes to find expression in powerful norms of behavior focusing on trust and mutual engagement.  Theorists term this sort of norm building within one’s immediate community “bonding capital.”

Yet once this skill has been learned, it can quickly be applied to all sorts of other situations.  For instance, in China during the 1920s and 1930s martial arts schools were forever sending representatives to larger community committees designed to advance some sort of civic cause, whether it was the celebration of a yearly festival, or providing famine relief for a neighboring province.  This type of broadly based cooperation led to the creation of “bridging capital” which could be applied to members of other groups.  Indeed, the emergence of a healthy, self-regulating, civil society was a byproduct of the rapid creation of social capital that happened in the 1920s and 1930s.  You can actually watch that process unfold as you follow the creation of an ever more articulate and self-aware “national martial arts sector” during the period.

Yet the creation of positive bridging capital is far from inevitable.  If individuals have instead developed a generalized distrust of people outside of the social group (and this seems to have been a common byproduct of Southern China’s strong clan system), then one might not ever move beyond the creation of bonding capital.  An excess of bonding capital might even entrap individuals within clan and corporate networks, and inhibit the creation of a sense of class or national solidarity.  Thus there may be a “dark side” to the social capital formation process.

Alternatively, even if the creation of bridging capital is possible, leaders might attempt to inhibit it.  As Iannaccone noted in his classic 1994 essay, “Why Strict Churches are Strong,” the problem with being a member of many overlapping groups within society is that you may be tempted to invest some of your resources in all of them.  But to be really succeed either a religion or a martial arts group needs to encourage individuals to concentrate the investment of both their time and capital within one primary community.  Encouraging a high degree of bonding capital suggests that such groups are better able to monopolize the attention of their members.  Further, imposing high barriers to entry, such as the requirement to buy expensive training gear, or to learn a highly specialized fencing system, ensures that only individuals with the resources to strengthen the community will be able to find a place within it.  

Similar effects can be achieved by increasing the level of social control that the group exercises over the individual.  This might come in the form of specialized means of address, uniforms, restrictive codes of behavior and a strict schedule.  Not only does a high degree of social control give the school the influence it needs to accomplish its goals, but it also makes these individuals less attractive to other social groups, reinforcing the boundary between “us and them.”  However, if you wish to pursue a more technical or cooperative goal (improving health outcomes for senior citizens, promoting an awareness of the Chinese martial arts, instituting regional after school programs), then leaders will have an equally strong incentive to engage with other groups and encourage their members to build up a “war chest” of bridging capital, that the school can call upon when the proper project arises.

Reconciling the Social and Individual Experience of the Self

A third approach to these problems can be found in the combined works of James T. Siegel (see especially his Introduction to The Rope of God, Michigan UP ,1969) and Victor Turner (“Liminal to Liminoid, In Play, Flow and Ritual”, Rice University Studies 60 1974).  The theories of both anthropologists offer interesting insights into the ways that individuals might respond to rapid social change, particularly within the context of embodied play or quasi-ritual endeavors.  Students of martial arts studies who focus on embodied practice might find their approach to be the most useful.

In many respects Victor Turner’s insights about the nature of rites of passage within tribal societies mirror our previous discussion of Peter Beyer’s exploration of the role of religion (and its monopoly of the transcendent) in the pre-modern West.   Turner noted that during the middle, or “liminal” phase of a classic “rite of passage,” the individuals in his fieldwork were typically stripped of any social rank and even their identity.  Before an individual could transition from being a “child” to “adult,” they first had to be relieved of the identity of a child.  Before a single person could transition to married life they had to be stripped of the trappings of bachelorhood.  Indeed, in these moments of “betwixt and between” none of society’s mundane labels really captured an individual’s status.  It was a moment of radical freedom.  Sometimes they were treated as if they were dead (as in fact their old identity had died).  Being ritually put in a “transcendent” state (and sometimes kept there for an extended period of time) individuals could see the totality of their community from an entirely different perspective.  This often proved to be a profoundly transformative event.

Neither Siegel or Turner believed that it was possible for to fully experience an actual “rite of passage” in modern, socially complex, societies for reasons that I have already explored in other essays.  To simplify, the problem is individual agency.  In a small primary (often tribal) community an individual had no real say as to whether or when they underwent a rite of passage.  While their status was transformed by the ritual, it was the local community that actually demanded, scheduled and staged the rite.  In contrast, initiation rituals in the West are all, at the end of the day, voluntary activities undertaken because someone has decided to change their own social status.  Modern industrial society doesn’t really care if you decide to join the local Elks Lodge, get married or become a Catholic.  These are fundamentally individual decisions, driven by the logic of personal psychology or market consumption, that (while they may alter one’s status) do not transform the community.  So while we see all sorts of things that outwardly resemble liminal rites of passage in the modern world, its not at all clear that they follow the same logic.

So what logic are they playing out?  Given the propensity of martial arts groups to create ever more elaborate rituals (e.g., belt tests, New Year Banquets, etc…), this is a critical question for students of martial arts studies. 

When turning their attention to the emergence of the modern world, both Siegel and Turner sought to address the growing disjoint between an individual’s socially imposed status and their more personal internal experience of the self.   In the Rope of God, an ethnographic history of the Acehnese people of Sumatra, Siegel explored the ways in which instability in global coffee markets first undercut the status of local men vis a vis their families in the 1930s, and ultimately led them to support a variety of Islamic reform movements which, while not new to the area, had never managed to achieve traction in the past.

Rather than seeing economic markets as simply a source of instability, Turner (focusing more on the Western experience) noted the potential of consumption based modes of creative play to be adopted as increasingly personalized and heterodox means of identity creation.  Both scholars noted that through the creation of new voluntary movements, whether religious or consumer based, it was possible for individuals to recapture the perspective of transcendence that had marked the middle stage of rites of passage in traditional settings.  It was this ability to see society from an “outside” perspective which fueled both modern moral reform movements and heterodox modes of aesthetic expression. 

Ultimately efforts directed through social structures concerned with the question of proper values and behaviors (religious, political or community based institutions) tended to more closely mirror the traditional liminal pattern of identity formation, albeit in an updated and modernized guised that privileged the resolution of individual psychological stress.  This was the focus Siegel’s study.  

Tuner’s 1974 paper noted that such a pathway was not the only way forward.  When the search for individual fulfillment advanced through more playful expressions of art and commercial appropriation (such as the full-on adoption of the Star Wars mythos by a group of practicing martial artists), ever more personalized, or “liminoid” communities would result.  Some of these would even be capable of generating blistering social critiques which would have run contrary to the fundamental purpose of the older system of rites of passage.

While Siegel ultimately concluded that a recourse to such measures was unlikely to permanently resolve the disjoint between an individual’s self-understanind and their social valuation, it seems likely that the creative performance of identity outlined above has important implications for understanding of the adoption of openness or closure in the martial arts.  Yet in this case things do not line up precisely with the expeditions of the previous theories. Reform and revitalization movements are theoretically universal in their scope, being open to any member of the community.  And yet their instance that good social outcomes can be created only through the process of individual behavioral purification suggests that the actual costs of entry into such communities might be substantial.  

Liminoid vision of the self demand an ability to engage directly with market-based modes of consumption.  To reimagine yourself as a Shaolin monk one must first be able to afford kung fu lessons, take time off from work and eventually a plane ticket to China.  Yet what a Shaolin Monk, Kung Fu hero or Jedi Knight does in the modern world is left mostly to individuals to work out on their own, and in the companionship of likeminded travelers.  Creative visions are free to proliferate in an open ended and constantly evolving way that makes the very notion of closure difficult to define 

Conclusion

It is not enough to speculate about the survival or social function of the martial arts in the modern world.  The seemingly eternal debate as to whether the martial arts are best expressed as free systems of exchange, or closed communities dedicated to the preservation of tradition, may help us to add considerable nuance to these conversations.  Why do some martial artists choose one vision of the ideal community versus the other?  What do they expect to gain, and how do they make this vision a reality?

This essay has explored three possible approaches to these questions, though there are many others.  The first focused on competing modes of communication and drew on Peter Beyer’s work on the fate of traditional systems of social organization after the advent of globalization.  It noted that closed systems are often adopted as a means to doing “identity work,” while more open modes of organization are better at addressing the concrete secondary problem arising from rapid economic development.

The second model, derived from the social capital literature, noted that reformers might also choose to create relatively closed groups for very practical reasons that didn’t necessarily touch on the question of identity.  Closure leads almost inevitably to a greater degree of dedication on the part of the membership.  This, combined with elevated levels of social control, not only increases the the group’s ability to accomplish its goals, but may make it more attractive to high quality recruits.  Open structures, in contrast, tend to focus instead on the creation of bridging (rather than bonding) capital.  Such institutions are most likely to be of value if a vibrant civil society already exists, or if one seeks to promote societal goals (such as Jingwu’s efforts to save the Chinese nation through martial arts), which require the cooperation of many groups.

Lastly, the anthropologists Siegel and Turner noted that ritual and creative physical practice may continue to have a place in the modern world.  The creation of reform movements and spaces dedicated to creative play enable people to recapture a sense of transcendent social perspective and close the gap (at least for a little while) between their social status on the one hand and their personal experience of the self on the other.  When these impulses are expressed through large social groups, or groups that seek to reform social values, relatively exclusive or closed movements may result.  In contrast, artistic movements and market mechanisms can also empower individuals to envision very different systems of values and goals that are open-ended, and at times idiosyncratic, enough to appear to be chaotic.  Collectively these concepts may help us to better understand why so many eras of martial arts history seem to be marked by the reemergence of the same debates and questions.

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If you enjoyed this essay you might also want to read: Government Subsidization of the Martial Arts and the Question of “Established Churches”

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Introduction

Welcome to “Chinese Martial Arts in the News!”  Lots has been happening in the Chinese martial arts community, so its time to see what people have been saying.

For new readers, 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 let’s get to the news!

News From All Over

“Is this the same Jet Li we all know? Martial arts legend battles illness and injuries as fans express shock.”  So declares our leading article from the South China Morning Post.  Some of the images that accompany the article are surprising enough that you might be tempted to dismiss them as tabloid journalism.  But the SCMP’s martial arts reporting has always been pretty reliable.  Apparently Li’s hyperthyroidism condition (which he publicly announced a few years ago) has not been responding to pharmaceutical treatments.  Evidently the disease, and some other spinal problems, are taking a toll on one of best known actors in the martial arts world.  Here is hoping for a speedy recovery!

Our next article also comes from the pages of the South China Morning Post.  Given the paper’s location in Hong Kong, its no surprise that it carries a fair number of articles on Wing Chun.  This one was interesting to me as it avoided the frequent dichotomy between “Western” and “Eastern” physical practices.  Rather than seeing athletics and the martial arts as opposing practices, it explored the way the two had worked together in the life of one of the region’s Olympic swimmers.

“Practising wushu has helped me in different stages of my life,” said Kong. “When I was young, it was like a form of expression for any active teenager and as I grew up and started serious training in swimming, it helped my back muscles.

“When I was more mature, it helped not only on the physical side but also the mental side, as wing chun focuses on close range movement and every step must be well-controlled and performed with great power.”

As long as we are on the topic of the Olympics, we need to discuss the latest scandal to hit the Taekwondo community.  An important coach and his brother (a well known and successful competitor) now stand accused of multiple acts of sexual abuse.

Two brothers who were towering figures in the world of taekwondo — one an Olympian gold medalist, the other his longtime coach — were accused of sexually assaulting female athletes, including minors, for years in a lawsuit filed in federal court on Friday.

The lawsuit also accused the United States Olympic Committee and the national sports organization U.S.A. Taekwondo of turning a blind eye to the abuse and allowing coaches and athletes who had shown a pattern of predatory behavior to take international trips with young women and girls.

In many respects the basic outlines of the story are familiar ones.  It is disheartening to see prominent martial artists acting in such predatory ways towards their own students, but its also a valuable reminder that no community is immune.  This is something that will only be dealt with through the creation of new institutions and a real emphasis on putting the welfare of young athletes (rather than competitive wins) first.

We are now going to shift gears a bit.  The next set of articles all touch on the cultural value of the martial arts, as well as the sorts of social “work” that they can do.  First off is a really interesting piece from the San Francisco Chronicle reporting on Cheng Pei-Pei (probably the first female martial arts star) being honored at CAAMFest.  It has a number of good quotes on the golden age of Hong Kong film as well as the development of Cheng’s career.  And it all started with her epic first film, “Come Drink With Me.”

From the moment she entered that inn and took a table in the middle of the room with steely confidence amid dozens of leering men — then dispatched them in an epic fight with a fury unseen in cinema up to that point, 19-year-old Cheng Pei-Pei was a star.

The year was 1966, and “Come Drink With Me,” directed by the great King Hu, was the first major martial arts movie to have a woman as the central action star, paving the way for Michelle Yeoh, Zhang Ziyi and many others. And this was 13 years before Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley character in “Alien” broke ground in Hollywood as an action heroine.

From the world of film we transition to the bustling pathways of cultural diplomacy.  First off we have an article titled “Afghan Women Visit China to Learn Martial Art.”  This particular group of women actually spent quite a bit of time studying wushu prior to their arrival in China, but its an engaging read.  As one might expect, it touches on the question of gender within the martial arts.

In a country where women’s sport is severely restricted, the Shaolin Wushu club in a part of Kabul that is home to the capital’s Hazara ethnic community, is a rare exception.

 Sima Azimi, 20, an Afghan girl led a practice session in her country, says Wushu teaches self-defence, but just as important, “it’s really effective for body and soul”.

She learned the sport in Iran, where she won a gold and bronze medal in competition, and she has been teaching in Kabul for about a year, encouraged by her father, with whom she trains at the club’s gym.

Our next article profiles a group of American students who went on their own “Kung Fu Pilgrimage,” accompanied by their Chinese instructor.  This is probably my favorite article in the entire update as it does a really nice job of describing the personal impact of this sort of travel.  By the end of the trip lots of these kids had great stories to tell.  This one is definitely worth checking out.

Our last Kung Fu Diplomacy article takes us to Africa, which is where so much of this activity is currently happening.  The Global Times reported on a fairly lengthy Kung Fu festival that has been going on in Nigeria.  In terms of cultural studies, it is telling that the prizes which individuals were competing for on the event’s final day were opportunities to appear in locally produced movies and Chinese TV programs.  The Chinese government and corporations are pouring lots of money into these ventures, but it is still the cultural attraction of a good old fashioned Kung Fu films that seems to be driving a lot of this interest in Africa.

Heavy rains did not deter huge crowds from gathering in Lagos, Nigeria’s economic hub for the maiden edition of [a] Chinese Kung Fu Festival on Saturday. 

The festival was organized by StarTimes, a Chinese firm which offers a direct-to-home pay-TV service, in conjunction with United Bank for Africa (UBA) between April 14 and May 5, 2018. 

Despite the heavy rain, fans of Kung fu had fun. It was a spectacle during the grand finale of the three week-long festival as Lagosians in their thousands, thronged the sprawling National Stadium in the Surulere area of Lagos to watch the next Kung fu super star. 

Another trend to think about is what one might call the progressive “medicalization” of the Chinese martial arts.  This is something that we have seen in both China and the West, though it takes different forms.  Still, in both cases it seems to be an important pathway by which these practices can be made “modern” and socially respectable.  This trend can be seen in lots of areas, though nowhere is it more prevalent than in the popular discussion of Taijiquan.  For instance, NBC has been promoting a story linking Taijiquan to improved sleep and stress management.  But the actual article goes far beyond those studies in pointing out all of the health benefits of the practice.

Matthew Polly’s long awaited (and painstakingly researched) biography of Bruce Lee is just about ready for release.  Amazon says that they will start shipping the book on June 5th, but you can pre-order your copy now.  I was just emailing with Polly and it looks like we will most likely be able to do an interview with him here at Kung Fu Tea.  I really liked both American Shaolin and Tapped Out, and I am looking forward to seeing what he has to say on Bruce Lee’s life and career.  In the mean time, you can find some advance discussions of his finding in this wide ranging interview.  Or, if you would prefer a sensationalized and slightly slimy look at his findings, the Daily Mail will not disappoint!

Finally, the local CBS station in Miami ran a fun piece titled “Capoeira Is an Afro-Brazilian Martial Art That Gets People Moving.”  The article is accompanied by a short video that provides some nice ethnographic images of a local class as well as an interview with the instructor.  It is a good piece and worth checking out if you are interested in the art or just looking for something a little different.

Martial Arts Studies

Summer is here, and that means conference season is upon us!  There is still time to register to attend the 2018 Martial Arts Studies meetings in Cardiff.  The theme of this years conference will be “Bruce Lee’s Cultural Legacies.” This event is always the highlight of my martial arts studies calendar.

If you are going to be in New York during the next week and you want to hang out with a bunch of martial arts studies scholars, you are welcome to drop by a social gathering that I will be hosting on the 27th (Sunday) in Ithaca NY.  This will mainly be a chance for people to hang out and network, and hopefully start some conversations about regional conferences or more cooperative research projects.  If that sounds interesting you can find the details here.

Speaking of conferences and events in North America….it has just been announced that the 2019 Martial Arts Studies meetings will be held at Chapman University and are tentatively scheduled for the end of July.  I will be posting more information as the situation develops.  Special thanks go to Paul Bowman and Andrea Molle Montanari for making this happen!

A number of interesting books are due out this summer.  The first of these will probably be released before our next news update.  Lu Zhouxing’s latest volume, Politics and Identity in Chinese Martial Arts will be released by Routledge on June 14th. The price is an eye watering $144, so you will probably want to head to your local university library to find a copy.  But the publisher’s blurb sounds interesting.  Then again, I am a political scientist.

Chinese martial arts is considered by many to symbolise the strength of the Chinese and their pride in their history, and has long been regarded as an important element of Chinese culture and national identity. This book comprehensively examines the development of Chinese martial arts in the context of history and politics, and highlights its role in nation building and identity construction in the past two centuries. It points out that the development of Chinese martial arts was heavily influenced by the ruling regime’s political and military policies, as well as the social and economic environment. From the early 20th century on, together with the rapid transformation of Chinese society and influenced by Western sports, Chinese martial arts began to develop into its modern form – a performing art, a competitive sport and a sport for all. It has been widely practiced for health and fitness, self-cultivation, self-defense and entertainment. After a century of development, it has grown into an important part of the international sports world and attracts a global audience. It will continue to evolve in an era of globalisation, and will remain a unique cultural icon and national symbol of China.

Lu Zhouxiang is a Lecturer in Chinese Studies within the School of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures at the National University of Ireland Maynooth, Ireland.

Raul Sanchez Garcia’s volume, Historical Sociology of Japanese Martial Arts (also from Routledge) will ship on August 15th.  It is a comparative bargain at a mere $133.

This is the first long-term analysis of the development of Japanese martial arts, connecting ancient martial traditions with the martial arts practised today. The Historical Sociology of Japanese Martial Arts captures the complexity of the emergence and development of martial traditions within the broader Japanese Civilising Process.

The book traces the structured process in which warriors’ practices became systematised and expanded to the Japanese population and the world. Using the theoretical framework of Norbert Elias’s process-sociology and drawing on rich empirical data, the book also compares the development of combat practices in Japan, England, France and Germany, making a new contribution to our understanding of the socio-cultural dynamics of state formation. Throughout this analysis light is shed onto a gender blind spot, taking into account the neglected role of women in martial arts.

The Historical Sociology of Japanese Martial Arts is important reading for students of Socio-Cultural Perspectives in Sport, Sociology of Physical Activity, Historical Development of Sport in Society, Asian Studies, Sociology and Philosophy of Sport, and Sports History and Culture. It is also a fascinating resource for scholars, researchers and practitioners interested in the historical and socio-cultural aspects of combat sport and martial arts.

Raúl Sánchez García is Lecturer in sociology of sport at the School of Sports Science, Universidad Europea Madrid, Spain and President of the Sociology of Sport working group within the Spanish Federation of Sociology (FES). He has practiced diverse combat sports and martial arts and holds a shōdan in Aikikai aikidō.

Lastly, we now have a release date (Nov. 15th) for Paul Bowman’s Martial Arts Studies Reader (Rowman & Littlefield), $34.  This one is not coming out until the fall, but I have seen a number of the contributions and am really quite excited about it.

The Martial Arts Studies Reader answers this need, by bringing together pioneers of the field and scholars at its cutting edges to offer authoritative and accessible insights into its key concerns and areas. Each chapter introduces and sets out an approach to and a route through a key issue in a specific area of martial arts studies. Taken together or in isolation, the chapters offer stimulating and exciting insights into this fascinating research area. In this way, The Martial Arts Studies Reader offers the first authoritative field-defining overview of the global and multidisciplinary phenomena of martial arts and martial arts studies.

Kung Fu Tea on Facebook

A lot has happened on the Kung Fu Tea Facebook group over the last month.  We listened to a lecture on African martial arts, contemplated Taijiquan during the Cultural Revolution, and studied Japanese martial arts based on the use of matchlock firearms! 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!

Solo, the latest addition to the Star Wars franchise, opens around the country tonight.  As such, it is only fitting that I share with readers of Kung Fu Tea my latest article, co-authored with Chad Eisner.  This piece was just published on the Kung Fu Tai Chi magazine webpage.  I was quite happy with the way the essay and accompanying photographs turned out, and I believe that this meditation has something to offer traditional martial artists and Star Wars fans alike.  Chad and I would like to thank Gene Ching, the Publisher of Kung Fu Tai Chi, for his support and willingness to expand the scope of our exploration of the martial arts.

On a more personal note I also owe Gene thanks as this essay accomplishes a longstanding goal.  I vividly remember rushing to the local convience stores as a middle school student in the 1980s, eager to buy the latest editions of whatever martial arts magazines I could find on the news stands.  As we noted in our recent roundtable, the publishing industry has changed a lot since then. For better or worse those periodicals transported me, if only for a few hours, out of my small town and into a larger world.  Publishing books with academic presses and placing articles in scholarly journals has been great.  But if I am honest I have to admit that it is thrilling to see my name in a publication that both has a wider reach, and one with an ability to transport me back to a time when the martial arts were still a beckoning undiscovered country.

LIGHTSABER COMBAT AND THE VALUE OF MYTH IN THE MARTIAL ARTS

by Dr. Benjamin Judkins and Chad Eisner

Martial artists love their myths, and so do Star Wars fans.  After completing a major study of the Southern Chinese martial arts, I recently found myself thinking about the functions that myths, legends and stories play in our experience of the martial arts.  Many Kung Fu students in the West are well-versed in the legend of the burning of the Shaolin Temple.  But how does a narrative such as this really contribute to our practice of the martial arts? And how do these stories sometimes inspire individuals to do incredible things?

For better or worse, most Kung Fu students seem to accept the historical legends that surround their practice at face value.  Practitioners of lightsaber combat have no such luxury.  They are acutely aware that their favored weapons do not (and cannot) exist.  So how does one’s experience of a martial art change when everyone accepts that the founding stories really are myths?  And what can we learn about the martial arts in general by examining the creation of a newly emerging discipline?….Click here to read more at Kung Fu Tai Chi magazine!…

Staging a Global Controversy

Origin stories are very often political.  People everywhere intuitively understand this.  If you can pinpoint (or simply construct) the moment of something’s creation you can also attempt to socially frame its subsequent practice in all sorts of useful ways.  Rhetorical slight of hand allows us to claim that when we know about something’s past we are empowered to act as arbiters of legitimacy or authority in the present.

I suspect that this basic impulse is what first draws so many practitioners to the topic of martial arts history.  Even if the art we practice is only a hundred years old (relatively modern in the grand scheme of things), the moment of its creation is still far removed from our personal life experience. As individuals become aware of this distance, questions naturally arise.  Why was this art developed?  Is my practice correct?  Is it even authentic?  

It is only natural to look to the pioneers of a system for answers, but in their absence we turn to historically informed arguments.  Individuals who are interested in history for its own sake, or those who want to use the development of martial arts communities to understand something about Chinese or Japanese society, are rarer than one might think.  That sort of curiosity typically arises only after people have had a chance to develop a fair level of understanding.  I think that it would be fair to say that among practitioners and casual readers many seemingly historical discussions are actually debates about the nature of current practice.

This basic pattern of communication is not new.  While reading historical sources from the 1920s and 1930s I was struck by just how stable it has been throughout the 20th century.  Consider, for instance, the massive debate surrounding the origins of jujutsu and later judo.  Japan’s rapid economic development, and its revival of the warrior mythos, stoked a fair degree of interest in the island’s martial practices even prior to the events of the Russo-Japanese war.  But following the new power’s stunning defeat of a major European empire, jujutsu became a genuinely fashionable practice throughout the Western world.

This, almost inevitably, led to all of the inconvenient questions that new martial arts students are bound to ask.  Certainly the practice is a reflection of Japan’s proud warrior culture, but when did it actually originate?  Must one be Japanese to master it? How was it really meant to be used?  And what relationship does it have with other, seemingly similar, Asian fighting arts.

Current students still ask what we should make of the multiple lineage accounts within Japanese schools that explicitly link their practice to immigration of culturally important figures fleeing the destruction of the Ming dynasty.  Or that many Japanese spear fighting traditions explicitly link themselves to the mainland.  Or that a few “Japanese” martial arts manuals (most notably the Okinawan Bubishi) show figures wearing Chinese clothing and hairstyles.

Unsurprisingly, Meiji era martial arts reformers, many of whom were deeply involved in the nation building project, had a number of responses to all of these points.  Nor did this ever rise to the level of a true “debate.”  Arts such as Judo, Kendo and later Karate were taken to be fundamental expressions of Japanese culture, and practices that linked society to the Emperor through a set of (supposedly) inherited martial responsibilities.  Links to Chinese sources were downplayed or dismissed, but given the general consensus on these issues there was no need for a heated public debate.  Perhaps the most well known example of all of this was the modification of the characters used to write the name “karate” so that references to its possible Chinese origins could be expunged prior to the practices acceptance by the mainstream Japanese martial arts community.

I suspect that “consensus” might also be a good term to explain the situation in China.  Chinese martial arts reformers were well aware of the strides that their Japanese brethren were making in establishing both government support for their project and moving it into the cultural mainstream.  A number of Chinese reformers (such as Tang Hao) had studied in Japan and returned deeply impressed with what they had seen.  Yet for most Chinese practitioners it went almost without saying that practices like judo had their genesis in the Middle Kingdom.  The point seemed so obvious that it was accepted without extensive debate.

With the rise of Japan as a major imperial power in Asia, this tacit disagreement took on an increasing urgency character.  If you read through the prefaces of Republic era martial arts manuals (such as the collection freely available at the Brennan Translation blog) you will quickly encounter ideas like these in the front-matter of various works:

When the Japanese defeated the Russians east of the Liao river [in 1905], was it not because of jujitsu that they were victorious? Jujitsu is a part of our [China’s] nation’s boxing arts. They actually stole our nation’s secrets and then changed the name. It has recently dawned on our countrymen that boxing arts are our nation’s specialty, able to both defend one’s health and protect the nation. The military uses them for training, and schools hold courses in them, thereby preserving our cultural essence.

Preface by Ling Rongqi. Boxing Art Fundamentals – Illustrated Handbook for Tantui by Hu Jian. Chinese Library of Shanghai, May 1917. (translation by Paul Brennan)

Or in less inflammatory terms, the following lament by Huang Wenshu:

What the Japanese call Judo actually comes from our own ancient tradition. When we examine its effectiveness, it is indeed a profound achievement, but when we examine its methods, it is still not worth a tenth of our Shuaijiao. Unfortunately we are not able to unanimously encourage Shuaijiao in our nation because it is generally looked upon as the superficial tricks of street performers, undeserving of admiration from people of refinement.

The Skills and Essentials of Yang Style Boxing & Martial Arts Discussions by Huang Wenshu, Martial Arts United Monthly Magazine Society, 1936. (Translation by Paul Brennan)

Both government officials and martial arts reformers in China were well aware that Japan’s growing cultural stature on the global stage was intimately connected with a Western appreciation (and even adoption) of its fighting arts.  All of that was a threat to Chinese attempts to isolate the increasingly aggressive country diplomatically and force it to scale back its regional imperial ambitions.  And yet the Chinese government would have trouble accomplishing these goals if their society was seen as weak and undisciplined by the Great Powers.

Chinese martial arts reformers sought to address this problem through a two pronged strategy.  First, as I have reported in numerous recent posts, they attempted to demonstrate to the English language press the strides that their own martial arts had made in the post-1911 era. This came in the form of public demonstrations by Chinese student groups living abroad, distributing newsreel footage of martial arts training in the “new army” and even well placed English language articles in the “treat port press.”  Perhaps the crowing achievement of this effort was the demonstration of Taijiquan at the Berlin Olympics in 1936.  The second aspect of this strategy was to reappropriate for Guoshu the respect and legitimacy that the Western public had granted judo.

Those involved in these efforts saw the stakes as quite high.  Note, for instance the preface to Liu Dianchen’s 1920 Xingyi manual:

Nowadays the world competes over martial abilities. Western gymnastics and Japanese jujitsu are praised throughout the world as unrivaled. But if we work hard in our schools and not dare to fall behind, then we too can be said to dazzle the eyes of everyone and strike awe into their deities. Upon encountering our nation’s martial arts, no one will bother to fight us, knowing they have already lost. For those who know the Way, they are always victorious, while for those who pursue trivial things, there is truly no glory.

Preface by Qi Shukai of Liwu [in Hebei], in Selected Subtleties of the Xingyi Boxing Art by Liu Dianchen 1920 (Translation by Paul Brennan)

The English Language Debate

Still, angry editorials within Chinese magazines and martial arts manuals would do little to advance this cause.  This was simply preaching to the choir as the consumers of such literature were already convinced of the primacy of their hand combat systems.  The real challenge was to distribute these opinions to English language readers.  Only in that way would it be possible to popularize this notion in Western countries.  This was also the biggest challenge facing China’s would be cultural pioneers and propagandists.

Fortunately for them, their argument found a surprisingly warm reception among the treaty port journalists producing English language articles in cities like Shanghai, Beijing or Hong Kong.  Individuals who wrote for papers who generally took an anti-Japanese editorial line, or one that was more favorably disposed towards the nationalist revolution, may have found this theory to be especially attractive.   For instance, the German reporter (and probably intelligent agent) Julius Eigner began his account of “The Ancient Art of Chinese Boxing” with the following observation:

Although jiu-jitsu, the Japanese art of self-defence which originated from the Chinese boxing practices, is known practically all over the world, noting more than the mere fact that there existed such an exercise as Chinese boxing is known to the West.  

Julius Eigner. “The Ancient Art of Chinese Boxing.”  1938. The China Journal. January. Pp. 11-14.

It seems that this particular bit of “folk wisdom” caught on among foreign journalists in China and actually managed to transcend, at least in part, ideological and editorial lines.  Eigner, like other German commentators of the period, was very pro-Chinese and boosted the KMT in much of his writing.  The same cannot be said of Rodney Gilbert. His dire warnings about the dangers of Chinese nationalism, and perpetual suspicion of both the government and communists made him something of an institution among the more conservative voices within the treaty port press system.  Yet its interesting to note that an extensive (and transparently propagandistic) piece he wrote profiling General Ma Liang (an early advocate of national Wushu education) was actually titled “China: Parent of Jiu-Jitsu.”  The opening paragraph of his account (all of which is well worth reading) set the tone for everything to follow:  

About 15 years ago the study of the Japanese system of self-defense generally known as jiu-jitsu became popular in Occidental countries.  Japanese Professors of the art were permanently retained; some Europeans and Americans came to the Far East to take postgraduate courses in Japan, and the impression they gave was that jiu-jitsu was very much more than a system of wrestling tricks, and that it involved a profound knowledge of the human anatomy.  The writer does not remember that while jiu-jitsu received all this advertising abroad, it was ever mentioned that it was not native to Japan but, like so much else in Japan, had been originally borrowed from China.  That the system of wrestling which is parent to jiu-jitsu is still cultivated in China, and is now widely taught, only recently became known to the writer, and though many others may be fully aware of this, it is probably not commonly known that the Chinese professors of the art claim that the Japanese system of self-defence is incomplete and that the old Chinese science of self-defence is still superior.

Rodney Gilbert. “China, Parent of Jiu-Jitsu.” The Far East Republic: A Monthly Magazine Devoted to the Republic of China. Vol. 2 No. 11 (August) 1920. Pp 230-232.

What impact all of this had on the Western reading public is debatable.  Interest in the Chinese martial arts didn’t really begin to pick up in North America until the 1960s.  As karate began to overtake judo in popularity some western martial artists began to openly wonder about the Chinese systems it was said to have descended from.  Of course this was the environment that a young Bruce Lee first arrived in.  Still, the off handed mention of the theory in this 1949 New York Times article suggests that the idea likely gained some traction during the 1940s. It also suggests the degree to which Western journalists were relying on local (Chinese) elites to shape their understanding of the martial arts.

Certain Japanese martial artists seemed to have anticipated that such “confusion” might arise, and throughout the period their statements drew a clear distinction between true Japanese Budo and Chinese Boxing.  Most of these arguments boiled down to the assertion that the Japanese martial arts could not have descended from the Chinese sources as the systems appear to be entirely different.  After all, Japanese kata’s in jujutsu or kendo traditionally required two participants, where as the Chinese cultivated solo performances.  Further, the sorts of punches and kicks that might have influenced the development of Karate were absent from “true” Japanese arts like judo.

In support of this position, we remark first that Jiujutsu as practiced in Japan is not known in China. In that country there is the art before referred to called Kempo, and from the account of it in a book named Kikoshinsho it seems to be a method of kicking and striking.

But Jiujutsu involved much more, as been already made clear. Besides, a student in China, according to the books of instruction, is expected to learn and practice the art by himself, whilst in Jiujutsu it is essential that the two men shall practice together.

Even though we admit that Chingempin may have introduced Kempo to Japan, it is extremely difficult to look upon Jiujutsu as in any sense a development of Kempo….Apart from Chingempin, the Japanese could learn something of the art of Kempo as practiced in China from the books named Bubushi, Kikoshinsho, etc.

We believe then that Jiujutsu is a Japanese art, which could have been developed to its present perfection without any aid from China, although we admit that Chingempin, or some Chinese book on Kempo may have given a stimulus to its development.

Jigaro Kano and Rev. T. Lindsay. 1888. “The Old Samurai Art Of Fighting Without Weapons.” Transactions of the Asiatic Society. Vol 16. 1889. 192-205. P. 198

Kano’s remarks are more temperate in this matter than his Chinese colleagues.  By the standards of the day they can even be read as charitable (note his concessions on the origin of Kempo). They were also prefaced with a surprisingly extensive literature review of period Japanese text that attempted to place the origins of these arts in China.  Each of these was dismissed as mistaken or spurious.  Still, the extensive discussion also revealed that his familiarity with the Chinese arts was fairly limited.  Kano seemed to have no awareness of China’s rich history of wrestling (which, for most of its history was actually more popular than boxing), or even the existence of two person drills and sets in most boxing traditions.

Still, his thoughts on the question seem to have carried weight.  They were largely repeated by Shidachi’s in his 1892 paper, “Ju-Jitsu: The Ancient Art of Self-Defence by Slight of Body.”  Taken together Kano and Shidachi’s articles are one of the earliest attempts by Japanese martial artists to wade into the larger realm of cultural diplomacy.  Both articles attempt not just to tell their readers something about judo, but to frame their perception of Japanese culture by doing so.  Downplaying links between the Japanese and Chinese arts was critical to this project.

Even more important is the essentially triangular nature of these debates.  By in large it doesn’t appear that Chinese martial artists were trying to win over their Japanese counterparts or vice verse.  Given the nationalist motives that characterized both sides such an effort would have been naive.  This was a debate that played out mostly in English language publication.  It was directed towards the global community, and carried out with the goal of legitimizing the nationalist claims and military policies of both states.  As Qi so bluntly observed “Nowadays the world competes over martial abilities.”

All of which brings us to our final reading, one that I have not previously discussed.  It is an account of a Judo exhibition being staged for the edification of the expatriate community (and possibly some Chinese spectators) in Shanghai in 1928.  Its interesting as the entire article really revolves around the interconnection of the the Japanese and Chinese martial artists.  Indeed, the author even seems to have been aware of some of the older Japanese lineage accounts that Kano was forced to deal with in the 1880s.  Yet rather than dismissing them as spurious, or simply symptoms of Japanese fascination with Chinese culture, this particular Western accepted those claims.  Of course the editorial policy of this particular paper always favored nationalist Chinese causes.

I would not treat this author’s opinions as reliable historical facts.  An air of sensationalism surrounds the entire piece.  In point of fact, this exhibition was in no way “the first of its kind” in judo’s history.  Judo teachers had been practicing their trade in Europe (or more precisely, the UK) from the early years of the 1900s.  Still, the article offers valuable insight into the history of the idea of the Chinese martial arts among Western sportsmen.  It is particularly interesting to note how important the idea of textuality and “lost books” are in his discussion.  That is only one of the ideas, outlined here, that would reemerge and help to shape the general public perception of Chinese hand combat systems in the post war years.

At Town Hall Tomorrow Will Be First of its Kind in Judo History

———

Fifteen Judo Experts From Takudai University of Tokyo Will Stage Show Under the Auspices of I.S.C.

———-

For the first time in the history of Japan, the culture of Judo, the famous Japanese art of offense and defense better known to foreigners as “Jui-Jitsu”, will be demonstrated by a team of experts outside of the Flowery Kingdom [Japan] on October 1 at the Town Club and the Takudai University Alumni, 15 Judo experts from the Takudai University of Tokyo, will show local sportsmen how it is done.

The judo experts who in grade range from 1st and sixth grade men, are expected to arrive here to-morrow and will return to Jaan after a stay of two days.The exhibition is expected to be a highly interesting one and will offer local sports followers with two and half hours of “something different.”

Judo was systematized in Japan in the 16th century and since that time has not only spread throughout Japan, but also throughout Europe.  Although brought to Europe only three years ago, Judo has spread rapidly in Germany, Italy, France and other European nations.The culture although adapted for both defense and offense, is mainly for defense and to enable an unarmed man to defend himself from the attack of an armed man.

Judo originated in the Flowery Kingdom in the 15th century as the result of a book published by Chinese advocating the teaching of boxing and sword fighting to combat the Japanese invaders, which fell into the hands of a number of Japanese.This book demonstrated the art of Chinese boxing and the Japanese, using it as their foundation, systematized their own form of exercise which they then called “Budo.” At this stage, “Budo” was a military exercise and practiced by all military men.

Where the Chinese book demonstrated the attack and defense in boxing, the Japanese decided counter-attack and defense.As years went by, more interest was taken in the culture and study of the human body and its weakest points, became one of the principle necessities to become an expert judo man.

Judo then became divided into five different exercises, the perfection of which was vital to become a wearer of a “black belt., the insignia of a first-class judo expert.These exercises were divided and still are at the present time into attack, warding, break-fall, throwing and locks.The attack and warding are based on the fundamentals of boxing or sword-fighting; break-falls consist of the development of the Chinese somersaults used in boxing to break a hold or secure a hold on an opponent.The locks are the different holds on a vital portion of the body which render a man helpless to move.

The demonstration at the Town Hall will include showing the culture of judo from beginning to end.The experts will show the various attacks and defenses, the numerous locks and after demonstration, will engage in bouts to show how its done.

All of the experts coming here are students of the Takudai University of Tokyo and are coming here at the invitation of the Alumni body in Shanghai which sponsored the idea of bringing them here with the object of having the real culture of judo demonstrated to foreigners.

Bookings are now open at Squires, Bingham Co., 17a Nanking Road.

September 28, 1928.The China Press (Shanghai).

oOo

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

oOo

On May 27th just under 20 people gathered in Myers Park over the course of an afternoon to celebrate the arrival of summer with fellow students of martial arts studies and martial arts enthusiasts.  Of course it rained, but a good time was had by all.

When I first conceived the notion of hosting a local gathering I had something a bit smaller in mind.  Possibly grabbing lunch with local faculty and graduate students, or hanging out in one of Ithaca’s many fine coffee shops.  But as the idea was discussed it became evident that there was enough enthusiasm to host something of a more regional character.  Guests began to arrive the day before with some coming from as far away as Michigan and Ottawa.  I even had a chance to run into a couple of longtime readers of Kung Fu Tea!

All in all, we had a great mix of people.  Local martial arts instructors and amateur scholars had a chance to chat with faculty members from a number of institutions and disciplines.  Rain early in the afternoon may have suppressed turnout at first (granted, precipitation in Ithaca never comes as a shock), but by 3:00 the sun came out and we enjoyed beautiful views of Cayuga Lake.

I have come to suspect that the development of martial arts studies in North America lags behind what is currently happening in Europe not because we lack the scholars or academic insight.  It wasn’t all that hard to sit down and come up with a list of a dozen or so individuals in my own area who are doing interesting things with the martial arts in a scholarly setting.  Rather, we have yet to develop the sorts of social networks that promote a deeper level of empirical and theoretical engagement with each others’ work.  

In part this is a reflection of the disciplinary nature of the universities that structure and incentivize so much of our behavior.  It is odd that it seems more natural to engage with authors on the other side of the world (provided we share common disciplinary commitments), than individuals much closer to home who share our substantive research interests.  Good interdisciplinary work enables community building.  I don’t mean that in a purely abstract or aspirational way.  Rather, when we open ourselves to the possibility of new perspectives and approaches, we inevitably discover that rather than being solitary travelers, quite a few of our neighbors have been on this journey the entire time.

All of this has real world implications for the sorts of work that can be produced.  As guests at the BBQ began to mix I saw conversations emerging on topics as diverse as the linguistics of the martial arts to new ideas for video-based studies of practice.  Some amazing stuff can happen when you start putting historians, social scientists and visual artists together, and letting them ruminate on their common obsessions.  Physically bringing scholars together is vital as new perspectives tend to naturally emerge.

It was also fantastic to have a range of local martial arts instructors and practitioners in attendance.  One of the exciting things about our field is that its often impossible to know quite where the one group ends and the other begins.  As I listened to conversations between practitioners and scholars a few consistent themes arose.  The changing nature of real estate markets, and the increasingly important role of travel as an aspect of martial arts practice, seemed to be a subject on everyone’s mind.  Both of these topics could spin out any number of important research questions.  Our theorizing is always the most insightful when it arrises from, and seeks to address, issues from the realm of practice.

Yet what sorts of positive outcomes can a gathering such as this generate, other than a good excuse for some grilling and a chance to hear more about Michael Ryan’s experiences among the stick and knife fighters of Venezuela? What sorts of opportunities for expansion and growth do local communities bring to the table that might be missing from larger national, or even international, gatherings?  In short, why should you think about organizing a similar event in your city or region?

Almost any gathering of martial arts studies scholars is sure to bring together a variety of disciplinary perspectives and research focuses.  And yet a smaller group also lends itself to a degree of focus.  This can be used to identify needs and opportunities that may not be possible at much larger gatherings.

For instance, while we had a good mix of people at our event I noticed that both numbers and enthusiasm tended to skew towards the younger scholars.  And while martial arts studies as a discipline is more visible and respected than it was in the past, younger scholars often have specific needs.

The big one is support of their writing.  At a time in one’s career in which you are expected to write and publish frequently, nothing might be more helpful than the establishment of an enthusiastic writing group.  Having a network of three or four informed readers to pass drafts back and forth between is invaluable.  While we all tend to be experts in our own narrow field, it is critical to have access to insights from other individuals who might be better informed about topics or methods that we touch on only in passing.  At its worst, writing can be an isolating process. Many of us could benefit from the sociality, but also accountability, of knowing that you need to finish a draft of your book chapter for the writing group.

A slightly larger group of individuals may be able to support a martial arts studies journal club.  A standard format for something like this might be a once monthly meeting in which a single member, chosen on a rotating basis, presents an important recent publication to the group.  In addition to reinforcing a sense of local community, these sorts of more detailed discussions are often a great way to keep up on methodological developments outside of one’s field, as well as the state of the martial arts studies literature more generally. That kind of background is sure to improve the quality of our own writing as well.

An email list of local martial arts studies scholars may also be a great way to not just keep in touch, but to advertise events at local campuses, or training opportunities, that might otherwise escape notice.  It recently occurred to me that there are at least two or three events a year at Cornell that are of direct interest to students of martial arts studies.  Unfortunately they are rarely advertised as such, nor are they promoted much beyond the Ithaca area.  I suspect that the situation is probably the same at Syracuse University, Binghamton, SUNY Cortland or the University of Rochester.  Something as simple as a good email list can given a local network the ability to connect and leverage the many resources that are already available, but somewhat invisible.    

Those with greater institutional support and resources have some other possibilities that could be pursued.  I personally would love to see a martial arts studies paper series emerge someplace.  I think that is still a bit in the future, though possibly not as far as one might suppose.

More realistically, the emergence of strong local networks will almost certainly lead to the flowering of reasonably sized, one day, conferences.  Smaller events can be staged without having to find huge sources of fundings, and they can be tailored to fit the research interests and publication priorities of local scholars.  A certain level of focus almost always leads to higher quality presentations.  And while requiring a greater commitment of time and resources to organize, regional meetings would certainly help to raise our field’s profile in the scholarly community.  That, in itself, will almost surely attract the interest of other scholars and graduate students who may be addressing many of these same subjects in their disciplinary work.

Again, most of the topics that we discuss within martial arts studies are already being written about in various regions of the academic world.  The challenge is to continue to bring these disconnected voices into discussion with one another.  And in practical terms nothing motivates a degree of engagement quite as much as a conference invitation and a possible journal article.  Martial arts studies as a field will succeed to the extent that it helps young scholars to grow and thrive.

Despite its abundant natural beauty, Ithaca is not actually an easy place to get to.  The fact that people were willing to fly, drive or take a bus to attend what was essentially a social and networking event speaks volumes regarding the enthusiasm that our subject inspires.  Nor is this situation unique to central NY.   In the coming months I will be carefully considering how this nascent community can be encouraged and fostered.  Yet it is clear that we already have much of what is needed to encourage the growth of strong, overlapping, martial arts studies networks across North America.

Lastly, a few notes of thanks are in order before signing off.  I would like to thank both Prof. T. J. Hinrichs of Cornell and Prof. Daniel Mroz of the University of Ottawa for their support and advice in organizing this event.  A huge note of thanks goes to Tara and Charlena who organized a mountain of food and people over multiple days.  This event could not have happened without them.  Lastly, thanks to everyone who took time out of their holiday weekend to travel to Ithaca.  Your enthusiasm is inspiring!

oOo

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

oOo

“If translation is a form of betrayal, then the translator pays their debt by bringing fame to the ethnic culture…It is in translation’s faithless that [Sicily] survives and thrives.  A faithlessness that gives the beloved life — is that not…faithfulness itself?” 

Rey Chow, “Filmic Visuality and Transcultural Politics,” The Rey Chow Reader, edited by Paul Bowman (Columbia UP, 2010). p. 170

A Reluctant Tradition

Rey Chow always gives us so much to think about.  Even more surprising are the variety of situations where she seems to have something to say.  Upon first encountering the previous quote in Paul Bowman’s 2015 monograph, Martial Arts Studies: Disrupting Disciplinary Boundaries (Rowman & Littlefield), I was so struck that I had to track down the original essay. 

In that piece Chow is discussing certain issues in the cross-cultural translation of Chinese film.  Given the importance of the kung fu genre in popularizing the Chinese martial arts in the West, this is exactly the sort of topic that often comes up in martial arts studies literature.  Its not hard to understand that part of the field’s interest in her work.

What may be more surprising is that I recently found myself coming back to this particular quote as I reflected on a day of traditional Sicilian knife fighting.  In some respects that is an art that seems to be about as far removed from the media soaked realms of kung fu film genre as one can get.  It is not impossible to learn a bit about this art.  Yet compared to so many of the arts of East or South East Asia, these small schools seem to have avoided the global lime light.  While Sicilian gangsters have frequently appeared on the big screen, detailed representations of the region’s folk arts have never (to the best of my knowledge) been featured in a hit movie or English language TV series.  

The media landscape is not totally barren. There are a few privately printed books and a handful  of teachers operating outside of Italy.  The art seems to have gained a bit of a following in Germany, which has an insatiable appetite for all sorts of fighting systems.  But the global hype machine that follows so many fighting systems is notably absent in this case.  One can locate a handful of facebook pages and youtube videos documenting the art.  But the vast majority of these are in Italian and seem to have been produced for a local audience.  Indeed, the caution with which many of these masters have approached the internationalization of their art seems to reflect the tightly held identities of the communities that created and supported these systems.  These remain the sorts of folk practices that Thomas Green might characterize as “vernacular” martial arts.  Some of these systems really do seem to be held within families, and traditions still vary from city to city.

I don’t say this in an attempt to create an overly romantic view of what can be a very serious practice.  Nor should a seeming lack of interest in aggressively promoting these systems be mistaken for a “code of silence” or anything like that.  There is some martial arts tourism that takes place in southern Italy and Sicily, and there are certain teachers who see a need to take steps to preserve their art.  Still, this is one of the rare styles that one is more likely to first encounter in a seminar or training hall than on either the big or small screen.  One is likely to experience and practice new techniques before you ever have an opportunity to translate anything about how they are supposed to make you feel.  Because of that, encountering the Sicilian knife felt profound in a way that transcended the quality of the instruction or the seriousness of the material.  I was able to approach this seminar with few preconceived notions of what I would be doing.  Yet Rey Chow still has much to suggest about the way that these fighting systems are being performed and culturally translated in the current martial arts marketplace.

Translating Tradition

Before delving into a few of the paradoxes that emerged from this seminar, I would like to start with a quick overview of my notes.  Of course I also owe a note of personal gratitude to Sifu John Crescione for teaching the workshop and inviting me to attend. 

About a dozen students gathered at the Syracuse Martial Arts Academy at nine in the morning for our introduction to this rare art.  The ethnographer in me noted that it was a comparatively male class compared to other events I have attended at this school (with only a single female student registered), but the student body was otherwise pretty diverse.  Nor was I the only martial arts studies scholar in attendance. A fellow ethnographer with an interest in this specific practice was also enrolled.  A plurality of the the students (who ranged in age from about 20 to their 40s) had a prior background with knife work coming out of the Filipino martial arts. 

The seminar began with a lecture that situated what we were about to do geographically, historically and culturally.  Students quickly learned that rather than seeing a single knife fighting system we would be treated to a discussion of techniques and training practices that emerged in a number of locations in Sicily.  Sifu Crescione (who runs a Wing Chun school in the Willian Cheung lineage), explained that he first developed an interest in the art in 2010 and had studied with a number of teachers since that time.  For him mastering this weapon was partially a fun intellectual exercise, and partially a means to reconnect with, and derive additional meaning from, his own Sicilian heritage.  

In contrast, most of the students in the class seemed to be motivated by more practical and technical concerns.  Of those present, only my fellow martial arts studies colleague had previously traveled to the region or developed any sort of personal investment in the art.   Thus the seminar itself would best be understood as an attempt to translate Sicilian traditions in such a way that they could be put into contact with, and made legible to, students of other blade fighting arts.  Certain elements of the religious and ethical world that these practices arose from were explained but they resisted any attempts to translate them into universal metaphors.  This introductory lecture was absorbed by the students who sat casually on the ground and arranged themselves in a rough semi-circle.  

The informality of the discursive aspect of the seminar contrasted with the energetic and (on some level) stressful nature of the material itself.  At the end of the introductory lecture students were introduced to a few basic movements and given a simple thrust, parry, counter drill.  This was designed to illustrate two things.  First was the importance of speed (the system contains a series of short thrusts not unlike a Wing Chun chain punch) and second, the danger of mid-range fighting.  Where as many South East Asian traditions prefer to bridge, hook and counter in this range, Sicilian knife fighters, inspired by local saber fencing traditions, tend to favor long distance fighting strategies.  Of course nothing illustrates a conceptual point quite like a well designed drill.  That seemed to have been the pedagogical themes of the day.

Following this object lesson, students were given a formal introduction to the basic cuts, sequences and steps of one school.  Much of the rest of the morning was spent on the practical applications of these techniques.  This also gave the students, working in pairs, a chance to become more comfortable with the longer range attacks and leaping defenses that characterize the Sicilian method.

These same subjects were taken up after lunch, and examined in greater detail.  As in other fencing and weapon systems, evasive stepping and angled entry techniques were the key to locating openings without exposing oneself to counter-attacks.  While the details of some of this footwork was different, on a conceptual level it wasn’t all dissimilar to ideas that I have explored in Wing Chun entry exercises.

At that point everyone donned protective goggles and white t-shirts and armed themselves with non-permanent markers, in preparation for the afternoon rounds of sparring.  These exercises were carried out at three (color-coded) levels of intensity with different preselected sets of targets.  At the end of every round people were encouraged to stop and examine themselves for ink patterns indicating what sorts of strikes had been the most effective, or what areas needed more work.  After about half an hour of this the students looked like collateral damage from one of Jackson Pollock’s more creative sessions. 

After a quick break we turned our attention back to a more technical discussion of cuts, parries and steps which students could practice on their own.  This was accompanied by another short discussion of ethical dimensions in the system, and a bit about how it was being taught today.  At just after 3 (a little over six hours after starting) we were dismissed.  Pictures were taken and DVD’s of instructional material were purchased by those who were interested.  Groups of two or three students at a time thanked Sifu Crescione and drifted out.  Everyone seemed happy, exhausted and excessively colorful as they left the school.

The Translator as Traitor

By any objective measure the seminar was fantastic.  Students who were curious about different types of knife fighting were exposed to something very different from the South East Asian styles which seemed to dominate the backgrounds of those in the room.  Those with a more serious interest in the curriculum had received a nuanced overview of regional traditions, and enough in the way of a structured curriculum and solo and partner drills to keep them busy for many months.   And my colleague and I found out all sorts of cultural and social information about the communities who practice this material, both in Italy and abroad.  Nor are such discussions of still living Western folk combat traditions all that common in today’s martial arts marketplace.  All in all, I would be hard pressed to think of a better way to spend a Saturday.

Best of all, this seminar was precisely the sort of cross-cultural encounter that raised all sorts of questions for students of martial arts studies.  For one, I could look at some of these topics from outside the Chinese historical framework that typically shapes my writing.  As always, such an encounter begins with an act of performance by one party, and a desire to interpret it by another.

This brings me back to the Rey Chow quote at the start of the essay.  When thinking about our personal experience with the East Asian martial arts, those initial acts of performance and consumption have almost always been mediated though film or TV.  Yet in this case the mediation occurred directly through body to body encounters.  While some references to popular culture were possible when trying to explain aspects of Sicilian culture, only a few people in the room had any sort of mental image as to what the system was supposed to look like, or how any of these practices might map onto preexisting tactical or cultural concepts.  All of that had to be physically enacted by the instructor and personally experienced by the student.

So have we in any way “purified” the transmission of a traditional art by minimizing students’ prior exposure to poplar images?  Is our experience somehow more “authentic” because it began in the realm of “practice” rather than “entertainment”?

One suspects that the answer is probably no.  Even the physical performance of an art in this type of setting is an act of cross-cultural translation.  As such it is open to the previously implied criticism that it may be “culturally faithless”.  However, as Chow noted, it is precisely the ability of a representation to be stripped of one cultural context and immersed in another which makes any sort of learning (not to mention genuine cross-cultural encounter) possible in the first place.  An initial act of faithless representation may be necessary to connect with students and to create a sense of cross-cultural desire within them.  Whether that role is filled by kung fu film director in Hong Kong or a Sicilian knife instructor in New York is besides the point.

On an empirical level, one of the most frequent refrains heard throughout this seminar was that some aspect of the knife fighting system mirrored either the tactics or basic concepts seen in Wing Chun.  The instructor would jokingly suggest that either someone from Hong Kong had spent a lot of time in Southern Italy, or that 19th century Southern China had a Sicilian population that had previously escaped detection as the overlap was, at times, quite notable.  No one actually hypothesized that there was any mutual contact between these systems (at least prior to the 1980s when Wing Chun was popularized throughout Europe).   Still, at regular intervals throughout the class the instructor would make an exclamation about the obviousness of a parallel which functioned as a sort of semiotic marker for the students.  It would refocus their attention on a specific concept or technique.

How similar are the two systems in objective terms?  With only five hours of training in Sicilian knife fighting I would hesitate to offer anything like a decisive answer.  Some things did indeed seem quite similar.  The way that targets were treated, the importance of keeping one’s elbow down, fast repeated thrusts, aspects of entry and defensive stepping, all of this seemed intuitively familiar.

On the other hand there were also notable differences.  A foot long stiletto is a fearsome weapon.  Yet it is also a different weapon from a hudiedao or a Chinese military dao.  Of course some styles of Wing Chun sword work favors the thrust (just as the Sicilian knife does), but many others focus on slicing and chopping.  Indeed, the huge variety of blade forms that are seen in antique hudiedao suggest that we should always be cautious when making broad generalizations about what a style “does” or “does not” do. 

Wing Chun swords are almost always used as double weapons.  While at least one school in Sicily teaches double knives, this is much rarer.  Two blades give one an ability to bridge and encumber that tends to favor the midrange.  In contrast, the footwork and basic concepts of the Sicilian stiletto seem to favor a long range approach to fighting punctuated by sudden, highly athletic, lunges and quick retreats.  We did see some knife “sensitivity drills,” but they were a training tool rather than strategic guidance.

In some ways (many of which have to do with basic body mechanics and geometry) the two systems do resemble each other.  In others (the types of weapons, preferred fighting range, etc…) there were differences.  Of course all of this brings up the question of recontextualization.  On this particular Saturday the Sicilian knife was being taught on the grounds of a Wing Chun school, and many of the students (for whatever other differences they may have had) had a basic familiarity with Wing Chun.  Thus it makes sense that the instructor would attempt to map the new system onto the conceptual vocabulary that his students already have.  Teaching, after all, begins with a common language.

The problem with learning something really new and unique is that we are often missing core concepts necessary to make the material fully legible.  As such new information is integrated with, and recontextualized around, those things that we already know.  An interesting question thus emerges.  To what degree do these parallels exist simply in the eye of the beholder?  Are they objective facts, or epiphenomenal manifestations of the process of learning the system?  If we were standing on a veranda in Sicily with a local instructor, would we see the same parallels?  Or, in that environment, would he draw on a different cultural framework to aid the learning process?

That last point is key.  One might suppose that we have been culturally unfaithful, that we have polluted some aspect of the Western art, by mapping it onto a previously understood Chinese system of hand combat.  Yet direct, frictionless, mind to mind transmission of a fighting system just isn’t possible.  In the absence of one system of metaphors, another would have to be created drawing on other cultural practices (perhaps dance, folklore or popular religion). Indeed, one suspects that we saw hints of these earlier layers of instructional metaphors during the “historical lecture” that accompanied the seminar.  Yet if you are not coming out of an early 20th century Sicilian background, they are now no more accessible to a modern American student than the knife fighting techniques that they sought to contextualize.

Conclusion

Cross cultural encounters, whether originating from the East or West, begin with an attempt to establish the desire for communication.  On a technical level, learning doesn’t happen in a vacuum.  It is a process of continually recontextualizing old and new skill sets.  Depending on their prior backgrounds, two students in the same seminar may have had very different experiences as they encountered the Sicilian knife.  Each of these moves, because it involves the abandonment of old symbols for new ones, is an example of Chow’s faithless translation.  Rather than perfectly conveying the life experience of the old master on his veranda in Sicily (something that we don’t have personal access to) we have transposed his understanding into radically different geographic, social and tactical languages.  In a sense we have constructed a system that he might not recognize, at least not at first.

On some level everyone understands that this is going on.  Simply consider the number of groups that are involved in this complex encounter.  On the one hand there are aging Italian masters, many of whom grew up in environments very different from anything that exists in North America today.  On the other you have a multi-racial group of American martial artists united only by their love of black t-shirts and a curiosity about knife fighting (usually as it relates to South East Asia).  Mediating between them is a third (much smaller) group of Italian American instructors who have their own goals and life experiences that they bring to the table.  

If there is one thing that I have learned from studying the Chinese martial arts it is that people are inevitably changed by the creation of new communities.  When looking at the complexity of this situation I can honestly understand why attempts to promote the Sicilian knife or stick fighting methods have been slow and cautious.  On a technical level the material can certainly be transmitted to a new generation of students.  But it will also be socially transformed by any sort of generational or geographic move.  This is a delicate point when a fighting system has come to be understood as a representation of a regional identity or set of values.

Would the global transmission of Sicilian knife culture be a good thing?  Ultimately one suspects that there will be a process of negotiation between masters who wish to preserve their knowledge and values, and “outside” students who, for whatever reason, have come to desire and respect those things.  I think that Rey Chow would suggest that this is a hopeful scenario.  The faithless translator is still motivated by a love of his subject.  As we have seen in many other areas, the success of a martial art can generate a great deal of respect for the culture, language and traditions that gave rise to it.  That sort of respect is universally desired, and is a positive thing in the current global environment.  Yes, everything is transformed by translation.  Everything changes.  It is a willingness to embrace some change for the sake of communication that may yet make the Sicilian knife immortal.

oOo

If you enjoyed this essay you might also want to read: Butterfly Swords and Long Poles: A Glimpse into Singapore’s 19th Century Martial Landscape

oOo

China Picks 2 Women Boxers For Olympics

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Four Men Also Chosen to Give Display of Old Chinese Art

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Six candidates for the Chinese boxing [sic] for the World Olympiad at Berlin in August were chosen yesterday at a meeting of the selection committee.  Four of the successful candidates are from Nanking, one from Shanghai and one from Honan.  Three reserves were also picked and in the event of any of the picked members being unable to to proceed to Germany, the reserves will be substituted.

Among the six selected, two are women boxers from the capital, the seat of the National Boxing Association.  The list of the successful candidates is as follows: —Men….Chang Ven-Kwang (Nanking), Wen King-ming (Nanking), Chen Wel-Yee (Shanghai) and King Zah-sung (Honan), Reserves…Chang R. Ting (Japan) and Kut Yung-sing (Honan). Women….Jul Lee-yuen (Nanking), and Foo Soh-yung (Nanking). Reserve…Liu Nyeo-hwa (Honan).

The names of selected candidates will be submitted to the executive committee of the China National Amateur Athletic Federation for approval.

The boxers of the Chinese art of self-defense will participate in the Olympics in exhibitions, while three Chinese army boxers of the western type will compete in the boxing competition.

It is understood that all the six successful candidates and the three reserves will shortly go to Nanking to undergo a training period….

May 14th, 1936. The China Press.

In 1932 a lone Chinese athlete (Liu Changchun) appeared at the Los Angeles Olympic games.  While he didn’t manage to win gold, his experience did ignite a spark of enthusiasm that led to China’s full scale entry into global athletic competition during the next round of games, held in Berlin in 1936.  Reformers in the fields of athletics and physical education had been working furiously to popularize western games and training modalities for decades, and China had enjoyed some success in regional athletic competitions.  Still, no one expected that the national medal tally of the 1936 games would be vastly different from those in 1932.  Vocal nationalist enthusiasm not withstanding, reasonable observers hoped for a couple of bright performances which would suggest that China was “catching up” in the realm of athletic competition.  After all, the Japanese had already become an athletic powerhouse proving that Asian athletes could compete at the highest levels.  Given the politicized nature of a set of games that have come to be remembered as “Hitler’s Olympics”, Berlin seemed like the ideal place to throw off the “sick man of Asia” mantle.

The political situation surrounding these games was complex.  On the one hand, China’s political elites and athletes were well aware of Germany’s racial policies.  Chinese athletes at the game were among the few who refused to offer the Nazi salute as they entered the Olympic stadium, and Morris reports that many were visibly uncomfortable with the omnipresent displays of fascist culture.  Yet Germany had so far proved to be a staunch military and economic ally in the KMT’s increasingly desperate conflict with Japan.  It had, quite publicly, sent both military trainers and equipment in an effort to remake China’s “new army.” Thus both the German government and the Chinese people had their own reasons for hoping that China would put on a strong showing at the Berlin games.  

Unfortunately this was not to be.  Weakened by a rough, month long, voyage at sea, and robbed  of one of their best chances for victory by a suspiciously reversed call in a boxing match, China’s athletes returned home without moving beyond the competition’s preliminary stages.  Nor, if we are being honest, was this outcome all that surprising.  It was the nation’s first real Olympic outing and its team had no veteran competitors or coaches.  So why was the KMT willing to spend such large amounts of scarce money to mount an Olympic expedition?  Why did this effort come to be seen as a national priority even when no one actually expected gold?

The news item at the top of this essay suggests quite a few of the answers.  Berlin was never simply a bid to collect medals (though China’s hard working athletes certainly tried to win some).  Rather, the pageantry of the Olympics offered a microcosmic stage on the reality of global politics played itself out.  China entered this international discourse with two distinct goals.  The first goal (to be addressed through athletic competition) was to demonstrate that they were a member in good standing within the family of nations.  Secondly, Chinese leaders were desperate to demonstrate that their national culture had intrinsic value, and that it could be reformed for the modern age (much as the Japanese had done).  

For these reasons the government choose to mount a martial arts exhibition team that would travel to Berlin.  It was also the reason why so much of the coverage of the event focused on this group’s performances, rather than the rest of the team’s lackluster results.  While only minor progress was made on the first of these goals, the second succeeded beyond anyone’s expectations.

Globalizing Guoshu

If one was forced to point to a single personality, Chu Minyi would have to be credited as the driving force behind these efforts.  In many respects his actions were a natural outgrowth of the revolutionary enthusiasm of the 1920s and 1930s.  A Western educated physician who came to the martial arts (and government service) later in life, Chu viewed both society and its fighting arts through the lens of the “modernization hypothesis.”  Clearly arts such as Taijiquan (his personal passion) were an invaluable gift from the past.  Yet if they were to reach their full potential they would need to be sanitized, stripped of “superstition” and made socially acceptable to China’s growing middle class.  Practices that had once been rooted in village life and clan defense would have to be carefully restructured so that they strengthened only national identity and loyalty to the ruling KMT.  Lastly, all of these efforts needed to be broadcast on the global stage.  

After all, what good was it to throw off the mantle of the “sick man of Asia” if no one was watching? Strengthening the body politic has always been an inherently discursive act. Japanese budo had already demonstrated that a compelling vision of a reformed traditional culture could be an asset in the global diplomatic area.  By showcasing a stronger China, Chu and others hoped to deter future imperialist aggression and encourage more global support for the Republic.  But actually getting Chinese martial arts in front of Western audiences (who, during the 1920s-1930s were not exactly clamoring for kung fu) had been a problem.

In some ways this basic strategy goes back to the Jingwu Association, if not a bit before.  They too pioneered a modernist approach to the martial arts, seeking to strip them of secretive or local practices while at the same time using them to promote progressive Western values such as feminism.  Indeed, Jingwu learned early on that martial arts demonstrations were the perfect venue to demonstrate to the world that the place of women in Chinese society was changing at a breakneck pace. They also pioneered strategies such as inviting foreign correspondents to their demonstrations, publishing material in English and opening branch schools in overseas Chinese communities.

The Guoshu movement adopted all of these same techniques, but began to formally integrate them into the state’s cultural/public diplomacy efforts.  The weakness of the KMT’s military forces vis a vis the Japanese suggested that less expensive “information based strategies” would be critical to defending China’s place in the tumultuous global system of the 1930s.  During this later period demonstrations by overseas student groups, publicity tours and even the occasional foreign language newsreel showcasing the Chinese martial arts started to appear.

For this reason the Berlin Olympics represented an opportunity that Chu and the other Guoshu reformers simply could not ignore. This would be a chance to display the vast strides that had been made in modernizing and rationalizing the Chinese martial arts before a truly global audience one.  The nature of the venue also suggested that a successful show would be widely reported throughout the international press.

The timing was right for such a venture for other reasons as well.  The resurgence of nationalism in the interwar years led to a renewed interest in “national physical culture.” So many countries wanted to display their domestic practices that the Olympic organizers were forced to limit the time allotted to each exhibition to 45 minutes.  And while no exhibit was more “exotic” than that staged by the Chinese (foreshadowing, in a way, the self-orientalizing discourse that would come to dominate the post-WWII discussion), many were a good deal larger.  Countries like Sweden, Finland and Germany each filled the Olympic arena with hundreds, and in some cases thousands, of athletes demonstrating examples of national physical culture.  The audience loved it.  While the Chinese athletes faced an uphill battle on the playing fields, the Guoshu team was well positioned to ride a wave of national physical culture enthusiasm.

Still, no one was leaving anything to chance.  Chu was well aware that the best way to get your message heard is to repeat it.  And repeat it he did, loudly and often. 

The nine members chosen for the exhibition team were selected on May 13th and reported in the press on the 14th.  By the 15th a feature article in The Chinese Press reported that they, along with Ma’s newly selected track and field team, had been invited to a special event hosted by the German diplomatic delegation and local Chinese dignitaries.  While the track and field team dutifully listened to political speeches and watched a recently produced propaganda film extolling Germany’s olympic virtues, the exhibition squad was expected to entertain the international dignitaries with a martial arts exhibition.  Chu narrated the entire event in both Chinese and French.  Of course translation was provided for those speaking other languages.

This was the first of many martial arts exhibitions that year designed to entertain crowds and reinforce the vision of China’s modern athletic prowess.  On June 26th the entire Chinese Olympic team boarded an Italian steamer for the journey to Venice.  While the athletes attempted to fight off sea sickness and stick to their training schedule, Morris notes that the exhibition team gave demonstrations in the South East Asian ports of call, all in an attempt to reinforce the sense of transnational Chinese identity.  Never missing an opportunity to play to a captive audience, they also anchored the “Olympic Evening” and “China Night” galas that were held over the course of the journey (Morris 178).

Chu also sought burnish Guoshu’s modernist credentials by employing the latest technology.  He commissioned a German language film titled “Our Nation’s Ancient Tiyu Styles” to the 1936 Olympic Sports and Physical Education Film Contest.  This project featured Chu demonstrating Taijiquan, shuttlecock and traditional archery.  For good measure he included a fair amount of footage of his own, undeniably “modern,” mechanical training apparatuses.  While I have been unable to locate a copy of the original German language film, a Chinese language version using the same footage still exists. That gives us a pretty good idea of what would have greeted patrons of the film festival.

Chu was well positioned to craft a vision of the martial arts that would appeal to Western audiences.  The entire thrust of the Republic era move towards rationalization and modernization did double duty in this respect.  All of this was especially evident in Chu’s own project, which he called Taijicao, or Taiji calisthenics.  He had traveled to Europe and presented this material (termed “circular exercises” in both English and French so as not to intimidate a potentially friendly audience) at the 1934 Brussels International Exhibition two years earlier.  The 1936 Olympic team also began their official exhibition with a display of Taijicao as an announcer read over the PA system and radio a statement on the “history and character of the Chinese art of boxing.”  Chu is reported to have also prepared a program with explanations of the Chinese martial arts in a variety of European languages.  While I have heard rumors of these coming up at auctions, I have not yet been able to locate a copy in a university library.

While much smaller than the exhibitions staged by many of the European countries, the Chinese performance enthusiastically received by the assembled crowd of between 26,000 and 30,000 spectators.  Fast paced two man weapons sets made a lasting impression on the crowds who had never seen anything quite like that before.  Morris (179) reports that Hitler was so impressed with one martial artist’s trident work that he actually refused to shake his hand when awarding a special trophy to the exhibition team as he suspected that he may have called on supernatural powers.   Of course the German state, which was in an alliance with the KMT, was invested in this display being remembered as a success.  As such the government controlled Trans-Oceanic Newswire service spread rave (if brief) reviews far and wide. For good measure Hitler instructed his ambassador to award both Zhang Zhijian and Chu Minyi special olympic medals for the accomplishments after their return to China.

Yet the work of the martial arts exhibition team was far from over.  In addition to the athletes and the martial artists, the Chinese government also sent an “investigative team” tasked with studying Western physical education practices.  This effort was led by Gunson Ho, another individual who we have briefly discussed on the blog. After the closing of the 1936 Olympiad the martial arts and investigative teams undertook what can only be considered a  well planned public diplomacy tour.  Each of these teams traveled to a variety of German cities as well as Denmark, Sweden, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Austria and Italy to display the modernized Chinese martial arts, and then listen to lectures on the latest ideas in the study of physical culture.

Conclusion

The 1936 expedition was a costly undertaking, and yet Chu, Ma and Ho were determined to make the most of it.  The value of the good press won by the exhibition team was priceless, and it served to blunt the otherwise disappointing performance of the Chinese athletes in foreign discussions. The Chinese newspapers, it should be noted, were much less forgiving.  

And by mounting an extensive goodwill tour through both South East Asia and Western Europe, the Chinese state was able to build on the initial enthusiasm generated by the Olympics and drill down on its core message.  Not only was revolutionary China a modern unified state, it had treasures of its own to offer global society.  This message seems to have been met with enthusiasm pretty much everywhere the Guoshu team went.

While weighting the cost and benefits of the 1936 games, an Olympiad that resulted in no medals and little glory on the actual playing field ,Shen Siliang, the director general of the Chinese delegation noted:

“The achievement of international recognition alone is worth millions to us as a nation and more than justifies the amount [of money] spent on the tour….I believe [the athletes] have accomplished more for China than several ambassadors could have achieved in years.” (Quoted in Lu and Hong, Sports and Nationalism in China).

In some ways the entire concept of “public diplomacy” is a bit anachronistic.  While the subject is commonly discussed by scholars today the term didn’t really exist in the 1930s, though E. H. Carr and a few other scholars, looking at the importance of propaganda in WWI, had begun to theorize that something like this was on the horizon.  Still there doesn’t seem to be any doubt that Shen understood the Berlin Olympiad in essentially political and diplomatic terms.

Judged by these criteria, the political value of the Berlin games far outweighed whatever setbacks China endured on the playing field.  Further, diplomatic and sports historians can no longer view the Guoshu exhibition team as a mere supplement to the serious business of athletic competition.  These individuals bore the weight of the government’s cultural diplomacy strategy, and they did not disappoint.  They endured the same harsh travel conditions as everyone else, yet were expected to perform almost continually. Of course all of these successes would be swept away by the fires unleashed in 1938.  The war in the Pacific devastated the Guoshu program and left it a shell of its former self.  

Still, one wonders what Chu and fellow martial artists would have been able to accomplish had they been given another decade to pursue the path of “Kung Fu Diplomacy.”  As we take a closer look at the Berlin games it becomes evident that this was not a singular event.  Rather, it was simply the most visible manifestation of an increasingly well established program to deploy China’s traditional culture to take control of its public image on the global stage.

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If you enjoyed this essay you might also want to read:The Cultural Translation of Wing Chun: Addition, Deletion, Adoption and Distortion

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They say a picture is worth a thousand words.  If true this will be a weighty essay.  Yet that was always the thing about Harrison Forman, the renowned photo-journalist, writer and explorer.  As a correspondent he was a double threat, capable of producing both beautiful images and the narrative that went along with them.

This essay, which features a number of his photographs (all of which are housed in the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee’s digital collection) is something of a departure from my normal posts.  It is more of an photo essay than an academic discussion.  Still, I think that Harrison’s image can help us to come to terms with a critical historical point.

It is all too easy to create simplified accounts of the Chinese martial arts.  This is true at any point in time, but our discussions of comparatively recent, 20th century, events seem particularly prone to this.  When faced with the very forceful modernizing and nationalizing argument of the Jingwu movement, it is easy to forget that more traditional schools existed across China.  Often located in secondary cities or more rural areas, they typically wanted nothing to do with these approaches.  Indeed, both the Jingwu and Guoshu movements struggled to succeed outside of China’s rapidly growing urban centers.  As I explored at length in my volume on the history of the Southern Chinese martial arts (written with Jon Nielson), instructors in places like Foshan resisted these pressures and continued to explore the ways in which regional fighting traditions could reinforce local power networks and modes of identification.

Likewise, when we focus only on the lineage histories of Southern Kung Fu schools, it is possible to forget that certain professions, from armed escort services, to itinerant doctors, to opera troops, had their own reasons for pursuing martial arts training.  All of this existed in a different social sphere from General Ma Liang’s efforts to introduce his New Wushu into national school curriculums, or the efforts of Chu Minyi to create a middle class system of “Taiji Calisthenics.”

We have recently explored these efforts, and our post on the 1936 Guoshu Oympic exhibition team reinforced our understanding of the modernizing trends within the world of Chinese physical culture.  But it would be a mistake to assume that this was all that there was, or even that it captured the texture of most individuals’ interactions with the martial arts.

The modernizing groups are comparatively easy to study as they had a coherent ideology and left a trail of documents that consciously framed and situated their efforts within Chinese history.  Yet while the Guoshu movement, at its height, could claim tens of thousands of members, it is easy to forget that China’s self defense societies, crop watching groups, and village militias counted their collective memberships in the many millions.  These groups were omnipresent in the countryside during the chaotic years of the 1920s, several survived the comparative calm of the mid 1930s, and they erupted back onto the scene as China was dragged into war by the Japanese at the end of the decade.

It is difficult to generalize when it comes to these sorts of local self-defense groups.  Many did hire local martial arts instructors as trainers.  This was generally a good idea as the expense of buying rifles and handguns meant that traditional weapons, including spears and swords, continued to be seen in large numbers through the end of WWII.  While it might seem as though such weapons had no place on a modern battlefield, they were ideally suited to controlling small civilian population centers located across China’s vast landscape. “Protecting” the civilian population, rather than directly fighting the Japanese, was a typical mission for many of these groups.

The amount and type of training that any group received varied tremendously.  And some of the most successful movements, including the Red Spears, also drew on ritual practices and invulnerability magic in addition to more mundane weapons training.  That movement was especially important during the Warlord period as protecting village resources from both hostile neighboring towns and predatory tax collectors became a priority.

It is ironic that we have so few good photographs given the millions of people who actually served in Chinese militias during the 1920s. However, the globalized nature of conflict during the 1940s guaranteed that the final incarnation of these militias would be better documented.  In many ways this was the last great hurrah of the traditional Chinese village militia.  But thanks to the photographs of individuals like Harrison Forman, we not only have a better idea of what mass peasant mobilization looked like in the 1940s, but can hazard a guess as to what similar formations of Red Spears might have looked like a decade or two earlier.  It is also important to note that while such images have largely been absent from academic discussions of Chinese martial arts history, they were widely circulated in newspapers throughout the 1930s and 1940s.  As such they likely helped to shape period notions of traditional Chinese hand combat methods in the West.

Who was Harrison Forman (1904-1978)? Born in Milwaukee, he was trained initially as an artist and later graduated from the University of Wisconsin (1929) with a degree in Asian languages.  Flying was an early passion, and Forman first travelled to China to sell American aircraft.  However, a career in sales was quickly derailed by his adventurous spirit.  Forman became an early explorer in Tibet and quickly earned the title of “the modern Marco Polo.”  Like his predecessor he came to be known to the public through his talent as both a travel writer and the producer of popular newsreels.  It was as a journalist that Forman would be best remembered.

Critics might contend, however, that Forman’s reporting was flawed.  While often richly descriptive, he seems to have had a disturbing habit of trading access to hard to access locations for positive coverage.  Of course this was an era in which all foreign journalists were subjected to heavy censorship.  Still, one cannot help but notice that when embedded in KMT controlled areas Forman wrote glowingly reports of the Nationalist government.  After convincing Japanese administrators (during the early stages of WWII) to allow him to photograph the interior of Taiwan, he produced highly complimentary articles about their administration as well.  And later in the war, when he was posted to the Eighth Route Army, he wrote very positive assessments of the Communist Party and its leadership.  Indeed, his rose-colored assesment of this last group ensured that he would be criticized and marginalized as the debates over “who lost China” heated up in the domestic American political arena after 1949.  I personally suspect that Forman was, at heart, an adventurer and explorer, and may have been a bit too eager to say what needed to be said to “get the story.”

Still, the stories he got were often marvelous.  Of particular interest was his time following the Communist Eight Route army with a group of Min Ping (or People’s Militia) members in Yan’an in 1944.  All of the photos in this post are drawn from that particular expedition.  Nor have I even scratched the surface of the visual record that Forman captured.  He literally took more pictures of these groups than I could count, and he produced many thousands of images of the war in China.  But all of this is really a footnote in his career.  In most circles he is best remembered for his newsreel footage of the Japanese bombing of Shanghai in the opening stages of the conflict, as well as the many special reports that he produced for the National Geographic Society (of which he was a life long member) and the New York Times.  After his death his papers (including many volumes of hand written diaries and tens of thousands of photographs, slides and undeveloped negatives) were donated to the University of Wisconsin.  Much of the collection has now been digitized and made publicly available.  I would suggest that anyone who is interested in the period take a look at the collection. But be warned, fully exploring all of his writings and images will be a long term project.  I have only scratched the surface over the last few days.

Not surprisingly I found myself especially drawn to Forman’s photographs of martial artists, soldiers and militia members.  A number of his shots recorded rallies and meetings of huge groups of militia members that seemed to fill entire valleys.  These incredible images give one a real sense of what it must have been like to see a group of thousands of Red Spears preparing for a skirmish a decade earlier.  Yet Forman never seemed to lose sight of the individual story, either as a journalist or photographer.  These group shots were juxtaposed with carefully composed portraits, some of which could easily hang on a gallery’s wall.

Readers should not assume that the small group of photos that I used in this post are entirely represantitve of his body of work.  Obviously I was more interested in the images of militia members armed with spears rather than those featuring rifles or machine pistols, yet both types of soldier could be found in abundance.  Forman also took many shots showing militia members at work.  One group of photos recorded individuals carving wooden cannons (used as primitive mortars), while another series of photographs showed militia members boobytrapping furniture as a village was abandoned ahead of a Japanese advance.  Other photos showed soldiers laying landmines or carrying equipment.

Collectively Forman has left us with a remarkable visual record of a Chinese militia group in the the final years of WWII.  Military historians will find much of interest in these images.  But for students of martial arts studies they are a stark reminder that the urban and middle class approach to hand combat was not the only one that exited during the Republic era.  Indeed, it wasn’t even the most commonly practiced.  Rather, these Chinese martial arts have always reflected the values and conflicts of the communities that supported them.  They have been, and continue to be, many things to many people.

***A special note of thanks goes to Joseph Svinth who first told be about University of Wisconsin’s collection of Forman’s photographs and sent some examples of his work that really sparked my interest.  This post would not have happened without his generosity.***

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If you enjoyed these photos you might also want to see: Tai Hsuan-chih Remembers “The Red Spears, 1916-1949”

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Telling a Tale

Brief biographical sketches of Chinese martial artists are some of my favorite posts to write.  I am not sure why, but I find the challenge of reconstructing a very different type of life, or way of living, irresistible.  Societies and cultures are never stable targets.  They are constantly moving, splitting and changing.  A good biographical discussion reveals not just the details of one individual’s life, but throws light on the concerns, events and issues that shaped it.  If approached correctly, biography can be an enlightening case-study touching on all sorts of theoretically relevant issues.

Which is not to say that writing something like that is easy.  Authors face a couple of critical challenges.  First, one must locate an individual who lived in interesting times.  Second, you need to work with someone whose life was well enough documented that that you actually know what they were up to. Yet they cannot be so well understood that there is nothing left to say.  The first of these conditions is generally not limiting when dealing with Chinese martial artists in the late Qing or Republic era.  The process of revolution and social upheaval that gripped Chinese society during much of the 20th century ensured that the nation’s martial artists were living in proverbially “interesting times”.  Yet finding a figure whose life was well enough documented to permit actual study is often a challenge.  The flames of social transformation do not always leave as much of a paper trail as later historians might want.  It is all about finding a happy medium as our first and second conditions often work against each other.

Luckily for us, Wang Ziping (1881-1973) appears to be the exception who scores well on both scales.  The son of a locally well known martial artist (and the father of a martial arts dynasty in the current era), Wang lived through some the most wrenching transitions in modern Chinese history.  Each of these eras left a mark on his long and varied career.  Best of all, the celebrity that he acquired in his lifetime ensured that this life would be comparatively well understood and documented.  That doesn’t mean that we know everything.  Tantalizing mysteries emerge as we attempt to piece together both the facts and legends surrounding an exceptionally full life.  But in doing so we are rewarded with a better understanding of pivotal moments in the development of the Chinese martial arts.

As always, the standard disclaimers apply to this essay.  I am not a student within Wang’s lineage and I do not claim to have any private information regarding his life or career.  This essay was constructed from a number of publicly available Chinese and English language sources, as well as my own work with Republic era newspaper articles.  Various accounts given by Wang’s own family have been particularly helpful in understanding his personality and the texture of his life. By synthesizing these accounts we may yet learn something new about Wang’s impact on the martial arts.

Strong Body, Strong Nation

Wang Ziping was born to a family of locally well known Muslim martial artists in Cangzhou, Hebei Province, in 1881.  One might think it only natural that this child would go on to have a distinguished career in the same field.  After all, the rising tide of nationalism at the end of the Qing dynasty ensured that the popularity of the martial arts would increase until 1900.  And the growth of social disorder in the late 19th and early 20th century suggested that an armed guard or soldier would always be able to find work.

Ironically, Wang would have to struggle to carve out a place for himself in the region’s rich martial landscape.  Various accounts have stated that Wang’s father thought his son was too frail to be a martial artist and so refused to train him.  On the surface such a story seems odd as its the reversal of the “standard formula” in which parents, worried for the health of a sickly child, seek out martial instruction in an attempt to boost development and vigor.  Family accounts suggest, however, that Wang’s father actually wanted his son to pursue a more academic education, and thereby contribute to the family fortune by finding professional work.

This ban on martial arts practice did not sit well with the family’s youngest member.  At the age of six Wang headed out into the forest where he would dig trenches to practice both his vertical leaps and long jumps.  He made improvised training equipment from stumps and tree trunks.  And with the encouragement of his mother he began what would be a life long quest to develop new modes of strength training (such as swimming to retrieve weights from the bottom of a pool) in the hopes of developing both his body and future prospects.  Through diligent work Wang developed both an extraordinary level of functional strength and jumping abilities that would shape his reputation for decades to come. 

Still, it may not have been immediately evident as to whether these superhuman efforts were going to paying off.  Some accounts suggest that as a youth Wang was expelled from his village for being a “Boxer Bandit.”  I suspect that this has fed the belief that he was a sworn member of the local Yihiquan chapter and got caught up in the Boxer Rebellion in that way.  While not an expert in this particular area, I wonder how likely it would be that a devote Muslim youth would seek to join a heterodox religious movement based on spirit possession by Chinese gods and legendary figures?

Other accounts, which seem a bit more plausible, suggest that the young Wang actually joined the army and worked as a physical trainer/martial arts instructor, putting his years of solitary physical training to good use.  Many Muslim youth would get caught up in the chaos of the Boxer rebellion, but as soldiers who were brought in to reinforce the capital. Indeed, Muslim soldiers were on the front lines of some of the most bitter military battles in the campaign.

One way or another, Wang survived his brush with the the Boxers, and like so many other displaced soldier and martial artists, melted into the countryside ahead of the punitive raids carried out by each of the eight allied nations.  While a formative period in Wang’s life, sources dealing with these years are scarce and stories abound.  As Cohen might caution us, painting someone as a Boxer is the sort of thing that would have gone over much better in 1930 than in 1910.  By the 1960s any involvement with the porto-marxist peasant uprising might even be seen as glamours. Yet in 1901 such an admission might get you killed.  As such we need to exercise caution when dealing with accounts of this period that are not based on contemporaneous sources.

The various stories agree that following the abortive uprising Wang moved to Jinan (the capital of Shandong province) and attempted to make a living as an itinerant merchant.  As he traveled from place to place he sought out other martial arts masters.  Some Chinese language accounts also suggest that he became involved with Ma Liang’s attempts to promote a simplified martial arts regime among the provinces troops and population.

It is also clear that it was during this period that Wang first encountered Yang Hong Xiu, his future teacher, possibly performing a public feat of strength including a mill stone.  In point of fact mill stones figure prominently into many stories of Wang’s early exploits.  It was at this time that he began to devote himself to the full time study of the martial arts.

During his third decade Wang developed a reputation for fighting challenge matches with the foreigners who intruded into local life in Shandong province.  Of course all of this was happening in years after the 1911 revolution and the immense rise in national consciousness that this portended.  Perhaps the most famous of these stories, related by Wang’s daughter and granddaughter, revolves around an effort to save the culturally significant carved doors of a local mosque from a group of Germans who wished to purchase them.  This story likely took place sometime between the start of the Republic and the German retreat from the area at the end of WWI.  As with many (though not all) of these encounters, Wang won the bet and saved face for the nation through a display of his strength (lifting sets of bells or mill stones) rather than by fisticuffs.  Indeed, he seems to have been just as famous as a strongman as a martial artist.

That is not to say that he never fought.  At some point in the 1910s he is said to have crossed hands with an American physical education teacher in Qingdao and another German fighter.  Some accounts also suggest that later in the decade he confronted a group of Japanese martial artists.  They were armed with spears and he carried a pole.  It is known that Wang confronted a Russian strongman in a park in Beijing in 1919, and in 1921 he got involved with a challenge laid out by an American named fighter Sullivan who seems to have been making the rounds of the local theaters.  That last point is important as it reminds us that many of these confrontations were between professionals. They had an undeniably economic component to them, even if they are now mostly discussed in terms of national honor.  This sort of activity was a common way for traveling boxers, strongmen and wrestlers across the world to make a living in the early 20th century.

Still, an undeniable pattern emerges when we examine the accounts of his activity in the 1920s.  Whether in the ring or engaged in feats of strength in the local marketplace, Wang was making a name for himself by systematically knocking down representatives of each of the foreign powers in China.  He was putting his prodigious physical capital to use in ways that could only be read politically.

This aspect of his career would be magnified in the coming decades.  It appears that Wang had some sort of relationship with Genera Ma Liang and would appear in some of his famous martial arts exhibitions.  These events were often witnessed and reported on by foreign reporters.  In December of 1922 the North China Herald ran a breathless article narrating a particularly grand demonstration staged by Ma in Shanghai before a cosmopolitan audience.  It was a long and detailed piece.  But a full third of the article was dedicated to an account of the strongman show that Wang staged right in the middle of the performance.  Some of the feats he performed were Chinese in their cultural origin, while the reporter identified others as being identical to the sorts of stunts that one might see performed in the West. By the end of the evening no one doubted Wang’s extraordinary strength.  One wonders how many other shows and tournaments Wang was part of in this era as Ma Liang was staging events like this one with some regularity.

All of this exposure paid off and Wang Ziping’s reputation began to grow at the national level.  His granddaughter reports that in 1923 the famous Chinese painter Qi Baishi even wrote a poem celebrating Wang’s achievements in defense of the nation titled “Subduing the Tiger in the South Forest, Dispelling the Dragon from the Ocean Depths.”  In many ways the charismatic (and photogenic) Wang was becoming a recognized public face of the era’s martial art movement.

This same prominence would also carry Wang through the following decade.  In 1928 he was named the first director of the Shaolin teaching division of the newly created Central Guosh Institute.  This was a a very high profile appointment that once again gave Wang a degree of national exposure.  Unfortunately it didn’t last long.  The initial plan for the Guoshu organization called for it to be split into “Shaolin” and “Wudang” divisions that would be responsible for promoting the external and internal arts. As Andrew Morris has noted, the plan turned out be a disaster. While the Guoshu movement was tasked with uniting China’s squabbling martial artists, this division basically forced different styles to compete with each other for scarce budgetary resources.  It took mythic rivalries and made them real.

By all accounts Wang had never lost a public fight, and he wasn’t about to start now.  His battles over simple administrative matters with Zhedong (a Xingyi master and head of the Wudang division) quickly escalated from merely epic to truly dangerous.  The pair’s underlings even attacked each other with spears.  At this point the Guoshu movement’s political leadership intervened and disbanded the pathological divisions which they had inadvertently created.  A new administrative team was brought in and the organization was put on a firmer organizational footing.  Wang kept an appointment, however, as an instructor of the Shaolin arts.

That turned out to be quite fortunate for one of the group’s new administrators.  Tang Hao was involved with the group’s early publishing and education efforts.  The Japanese educated lawyer used the opportunity to pursue his passion for martial arts history and in 1930 began to release the results of his research into the true origins of Taijiquan (which he placed in Chen village) and Shaolin Boxing (which he argued had nothing to do with Bodhidharma or the other popular myths).  

While he is now remembered as the father of Chinese martial studies, audiences at the time were less appreciative of his work.  Tang Hao’s efforts to explode the mythology surrounding the Chinese martial arts led to a remarkable number of threats in a short period of time.  Nor does it appear that his employers did much to back him up.  Wang, however, supported Tang Hao and helped to assure his safety as he made a tactical retreat from the capital.  This was early evidence of shared sympathies that would see both Tang and Wang become part of the new martial arts establishment after the rise of the Community Party in 1949.

A later NY Times article (written in 1949) suggested that Wang Ziping fought a Japanese martial artist in a public bout in 1933, at close to the age of 50.  That would seem to be entirely in character, but I haven’t been able to find any other specific references to the match.  But we do know that in 1935 Wang received yet another prestigious appointment, this time as a judge for both the boxing and wrestling portions of the Sixth National Games.  While Wang’s credentials as a martial artist are often discussed, we forget that he was also a talented wrestler.  Indeed, the entire topic of Republic era wrestling seems to have slipped out of the current conversation.

Wang remained active with the Guoshu movement right up until the very end.  In 1949, in a strategic bid to increase the profile of his floundering organization,  General Zhang Zhijiang gave an exclusive interview to the NY Times discussing the state of Chinese martial arts.  The end result was a lengthy article in one of the most important English language newspapers examining the highs and lows of the Guoshu movement.  Of all its many heroes, Zhang chose to focus much of his discussion on Wang Ziping, and the extraordinary physical abilities that he retained even at the age of 70.

There appears to have been something undeniably charismatic about Wang’s personality.  Beyond his physical talent, or abilities as a teacher, people just liked him. While he never wielded the level of influence of Generals Zhang Zhijinag or Ma Liang, those sorts of people saw in him an ideal public face for the Chinese martial arts.

Nor would this be the last time that English languages audiences would hear of Wang’s exploits.  The immigration of family members to the West ensured that Wang’s contributions to the Chinese martial arts would take root here.  But during the Cold War, PRC propaganda publication such as China Reconstructs, continued to run features on the reform of the martial arts that highlighted Wang’s contributions.

After the rise of the Communist Party, Wang accepted a number of appointments in athletic and political bodies.  He continued to be involved with the teaching and promotion of the martial arts, and the practice of traditional Chinese medicine.  His daughter held a prestigious professorship in Wushu, coaching both a martial arts and archery team. In 1958 Wang published a volume titled “Twenty Therapeutic Exercises for Treating Disease and Prolonging Life.”  This, along with the creation of his “Green Dragon Sword,” have remained among his most appreciated original contributions to the Chinese martial arts.

The apex of this final phase of Wang’s long career came with the dawning of the 1960s.  In 1959 he was appointed the Chief Referee of the First National Wushu Exhibition.  Then in 1960 he was invited to accompany Zhou Enlai on a state visit to Myanmar.  Here he was once again called upon to demonstrate, and to be the public face of the Chinese martial arts.  At the time he was nearly 80 years old.

The situation for China’s elite martial artists deteriorated rapidly with the start of the Cultural Revolution.  University Wushu programs were mothballed and coaches and professors (such as Wang’s daughter and son-in-law) lost their employment.  Wang himself was forced to close his traditional medicine practice and to stop publicly teaching the martial arts.  His wife had a heart attack and died after a visit from the Reg Guard.  Wang’s granddaughter, Grace Xiaogao Wu-Monnat, has given a particularly detailed (and touching) account of her family’s fortunes during this time period that is well worth reading. 

While he passed away in 1973, and thus missed the “Kung Fu Fever” that would erupt at the end of the decade, Wang remained dedicated to his beloved martial arts.  Perhaps being forced to struggle to learn them taught him that any vision could be accomplished with hard work.  As he repeatedly told his young granddaughter, struggling to find her own path to martial accomplishment in the depths of the Cultural Revolution, “All you need is a dream. And you can be everything you ever want to be.”  What better ambassador could the Chinese martial arts have had?

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If you enjoyed the biography you might also want to read: Lives of Chinese Martial Artists (16): Yu Chenghui – Realizing Swordsmanship in an Era of Restoration

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Introduction

Welcome to “Chinese Martial Arts in the News!”  Lots has been happening in the Chinese martial arts community, so its time to see what people have been saying.

For new readers, 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 let’s get to the news!

News From All Over

The always reliable South China Morning Post once again opens our martial arts coverage this month.  However, the subjects of their stories over the last few weeks have been a little different from what we often see.  They kicked things off with lots of coverage of the current MMA situation in China.  Their first article of note was titled: “Enter the Dragons: UFC on guard as it prepares for wave of Chinese fighters at elite level.”  Unsurprisingly, Bruce Lee occupies a special place in Hong Kong’s martial imagination, so it wasn’t really a surprise to see an allusion to him in this title.  Still, it is interesting to note that none of these articles draw a strong contrast between traditional kung fu and MMA.  Rather, they seem to be treated as silent continuations of one another.

This first article seems to be more of a pre-fight “hype” piece than a serious exploration of the Chinese MMA scene:

Song “The Terminator” Yadong is one of the rising stars of mixed martial arts in China and it’s from that vantage point that he declares it is now not so much a matter of “if” fighters from the mainland will shake up the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) but “when.”

“It won’t be long now,” says Song. “It takes time to have the ability to be a UFC champion but for a Chinese fighter I think this is now mission possible.”

More interesting has been the coverage of Xion Jingnan, a rapidly rising star in the ONE Championship league.  The coverage of her career has shed a bit of light on the  development of different aspects of the sport (and its fighters) in China.  Check out this piece in Forbes for a nice discussion:

The culture of martial arts in China is rich. It dates back more than 4,000 years. Courage, patience, endurance, will, and perseverance are concepts associated with the culture’s “martial morality.” ONE Championship strawweight champion Xiong “The Panda” Jingnan has demonstrated these traits during her ascent to the level of champion martial artist.

On the current landscape, Xiong has become the most successful active martial artist from China. She is scheduled to battle Brazil’s Laura Ballin at ONE: Pinnacle of Power on June 23 at Studio City Event Center in Macau where there should be an enthusiastic crowd on hand to cheer on the champion.

Our next big story also hails from the pages of the SCMP.  At first the premise seems pretty unlikely. Yet as a student of Martial Arts Studies, I found this article to be a very interesting read.  It really touches on all sorts of problems that are commonly discussed in the literature.

The article profiles the rise of a local Chinese professional (e.g., fake) wrestling company which draws its talent almost exclusively from the ranks of wushu students produced by the schools surrounding the Shaolin Temple.  Obviously that is quite a story in itself, but things really get interesting when the discussion turns to the role of the government in regulating this relatively new practice, and the sorts of accommodations that the company has been forced to make.  I suspect that this case has all sorts of implications for the regulation of “martial speech” more generally.

But all the money in the world means nothing for any entertainment or sporting promotion in the mainland without government backing.

“Typical wrestling can be a little too violent. If we try to copy the Japanese way and put that into the Chinese market, our product will be killed by the government,” Nee said.

“We talked to government people, they gave us direction. We will use this to spread Chinese martial arts culture to the world, to make our young Chinese generation go for martial arts, become stronger and healthier.”

As long as we are on the topic of Shaolin, I just saw an update on their much delayed attempt to build a daughter temple/tourist attraction on Australia’s Gold Coast.  Long story short, it looks like the project is still alive and moving forward, but in a less ostentatious form.

The recent death of Anthony Bourdain has received wide coverage in the global media.  Interestingly, in Hong Kong a couple of these stories focused on his dedication to BJJ as a means of coping with his history of substance abuse and other personal demons.  A few stories on this subject appeared just before his death (“Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown hits Hong Kong as celebrity chef feeds his jiu-jitsu addiction“), and others were released after the news of his suicide spread.  Taken as a set they create an interesting case study in the various narratives that have arisen around the martial arts and topics such as drug addition and mental health.  Those are issues which have a rich history in the Chinese martial arts, and I should probably try to explore them over the coming weeks on the blog.

Bourdain is a confessed jiu-jitsu addict. Every day he is home in New York, he takes an hour long class with his principal instructor Igor Gracie, before another hour of working on techniques and drilling, and then sparring, at the Renzo Gracie Academy in Manhattan.

“I used to hang around cold stairwells first thing in the morning waiting for dope. Now I hang around cold stairwells waiting for jiu-jitsu,” Bourdain wrote in a 2015 blog post.

“When I’m not in New York, when I’m on the road shooting Parts Unknown, I go to whatever local gym, yoga studio, garage, cellar claims to teach Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu – places where the term ‘parts unknown’ can really apply. Until I walk in the door, I have no idea what I’ m going to face.”

While we are on the subject of substance abuse, we should probably also mention an article in the Shanghai Daily titled “Martial arts training offered to addicts in Shanghai.”  I don’t think this piece has any relationship with the broader press coverage of Bourdain’s death.  Rather, it is another reminder that martial practice has long been connected to addition recovery in the popular consciousness.  As such the practice of arts like Taijiquan and Qigong are making their way into a wide variety of new environments including recovery clinics, homeless shelters and even prisons (note this recent BBC report).

The city’s drug rehabilitation authority has introduced traditional Chinese martial arts like tai chi, as well as other sports, into the treatment regimes of local addicts.

Recent research findings showed that those who participated in this sort of exercise therapy were half as likely to relapse as those participating in traditional drug rehabilitation education alone.

Of course there were also stories about Taijiquan’s growing popularity in more mundane environments.  One Chinese tabloid ran an English language feature titled: “Tai Chi gets popular in fast-paced New York.” It contained a more detailed than expected profile of a Taijiquan group in the city and a look at some of their recent activities.

More and more people have been joining, not only Chinese or Asians, but also people from various races and cultural backgrounds,” said Sitan Chen, founder and chairman of Tai Chi Qigong Association of America (TCQAA), in an interview with Xinhua, on the sidelines of the 2018 Tai Chi & Health Qigong Festival held in Westbury, New York, in early June.

Now in its seventh year, the Tai Chi festival featured various presentations, demonstrations and mini-classes joined by dozens of teams from the New York City metropolitan area.

Yet for all this, Bruce Lee has once again been the biggest story.  The release of Matthew Polly’s new biography has been timed to coincide with the 45th anniversary of the Little Dragon’s death and the book is generating some healthy buzz.  It seems to have inspired dozens of reviews, comments and think pieces in the last few weeks, all of which have been launched by Polly’s extensive research and enjoyable prose.

The general atmosphere of this moment has been taken up by one of these pieces titled (appropriately enough) “Bruce Lee’s life still fascinates 45 years after his death.”  Or for readers who want to skip right to the good stuff, be sure to check out this account of Lee’s now mythic fight with Wong in the San Francisco Weekly.  Finally, in a piece that uses Polly’s discussion of Lee’s complex ethnic heritage as a point of departure, the South China Morning Post has characterized Lee as “an everyman hero for the globalized age.”

Lee was a cultural mutt ahead of his time. He would have been perfectly at home in today’s globalised world, with all its cross-cultural conflicts but also multicultural tolerance and mutual copying.

If you haven’t already ordered a copy of this important new biography it is currently shipping from Amazon.

No one does a mass choreographed event quite like China’s large Wushu vocational schools. It seems that they, along with China’s other elementary schools, have been quite busy over the last few months.  The visuals of this particular demonstration are well worth checking out, but you have to watch the video to get the full effect of what is going on.

This article is interesting as it gives a more in-depth view of a smaller scale (but still quite impressive) display put on by a number of “civilian” kindergarten and elementary schools. 

Nearly a thousand children from 17 kindergartens and elementary schools from five Chinese cities and provinces attended the display. They were divided into two phalanxes, with the kindergarten group performing a set titled “Chinese Martial Arts Gymnastics,” and the elementary school students performing “The Red Sun Rises from the East.”

“The purpose of this activity is to enable kids to get to know traditional Chinese culture, to learn the values of our ancestors which weighted both intelligence and physical courage. The process of martial arts training can also increase their health and physical strength and let more children learn the charm and spirit of martial arts,” said Wang Tianming, the event’s organizer and choreographer.

Martial Arts Studies

Prepare yourselves. The first “special issue” of the interdisciplinary journal Martial Arts Studies is on the horizon.  Produced by our Guest Editor, Mike Molasky, this issue will focus exclusively on the development and global spread of the Japanese martial arts.  We have all been working on last minute editing and I can attest that this is an impressive batch of papers.  Right now our tentative layout for the completed issue is as follows:

Table of Contents

Bowman and Judkins: Editorial

Molasky: Guest Editor’s Introduction

Yasuhiro Sakaue, ‘The Historical Creation of Kendo’s Self-Image from 1895 to 1942: A Critical Analysis of an Invented Tradition’

Bok-kyu Choi, ‘The Dissemination of Japanese Swordsmanship to Korea’

Kotaro Yabu, ‘The Acculturation of Judo in the United States during the Russo-Japanese War: Beyond the ‘match-based’ historical point of view’

Andreas Niehaus, ‘Narrating history in the manga ‘Jūdō no rekishi – Kanō Jigorō no shōgai’ (1987)’

Tetsuya Nakajima, ‘Japanese martial arts and the sublimation of violence: An ethnographic study of Shinkage-ryu’

Raúl Sánchez García, ‘An Introduction to The Historical Sociology of Japanese Martial Arts’

William Little, ‘Putting the Harm Back into Harmony: Aikido, Violence and ‘Truth in the Martial Arts’’

Book Review: Ben Judkins in Memory of Denis Gainty. 2013. Martial Arts and the Body Politic in Meiji Japan. London and New York: Routledge.

We also have a number of exciting conferences coming up.  The first of these is right around the corner. On July 11-12 the Fourth Annual Martial Arts Studies Conference in Cardiff will be examining the “Cultural Legacies of Bruce Lee.”  That is always a great event.  Then on October 17-19 there is another conference (which I believe is still accepting submissions) at the University of Rzeszow in Poland.  There will be more news on other conferences (including upcoming events in Germany and China) as the summer progresses, so stay tuned.

Lu Zhouxiang’s 2018 volume, Politics and Identity in Chinese Martial Arts is now shipping from Amazon (Routledge, $137 Hardcover, 244 page).  This one is kind of pricey so bug your local university library to buy a copy.  The publishers’ blurb sounds fascinating:

Chinese martial arts is considered by many to symbolise the strength of the Chinese and their pride in their history, and has long been regarded as an important element of Chinese culture and national identity. This book comprehensively examines the development of Chinese martial arts in the context of history and politics, and highlights its role in nation building and identity construction in the past two centuries. It points out that the development of Chinese martial arts was heavily influenced by the ruling regime’s political and military policies, as well as the social and economic environment. From the early 20th century on, together with the rapid transformation of Chinese society and influenced by Western sports, Chinese martial arts began to develop into its modern form – a performing art, a competitive sport and a sport for all. It has been widely practiced for health and fitness, self-cultivation, self-defense and entertainment. After a century of development, it has grown into an important part of the international sports world and attracts a global audience. It will continue to evolve in an era of globalisation, and will remain a unique cultural icon and national symbol of China.

Lu Zhouxiang is Lecturer in Chinese Studies within the School of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures at the National University of Ireland Maynooth, Ireland.

We also now have a firm release date for Tim Trausch’s forthcoming (Oct. 2018) edited volume, Martial Arts and Media Culture: Global Perspectives (Rowman&Littlefield, 304 Pages, 128USD Hard Cover).  Needless to say I can’t wait to get my review copy of this one!

Signs and images of Chinese martial arts increasingly circulate through global media cultures. As tropes of martial arts are not restricted to what is considered one medium, one region, or one (sub)genre, the essays in this collection are looking across and beyond these alleged borders. From 1920s wuxia cinema to the computer game cultures of the information age, they trace the continuities and transformations of martial arts and media culture across time, space, and multiple media platforms.

Tim Trausch is a research associate in the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Cologne, Germany.

Kung Fu Tea on Facebook

A lot has happened on the Kung Fu Tea Facebook group over the last month.  We saw a hilarious video on knife defense, examined an antique Chinese spear head, and found out what Jet Li would have looked like as a Jedi! 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!

Winning and Losing

In the movies martial artists win their battles.  Early losses, inserted into a script for the purposes of “character development,” are redeemed in a climatic final scene.  Those of us who train, however, know that this formula is often backwards.  In real life defeats follow initial victories.  At 59 years of age, and reflecting on his own experience in the martial arts, Anthony Bourdain observed that time and injury take an inevitable toll.

“I tape my fingers (in the forlorn hope that it might mitigate the osteoarthritis and Heberden’s nodes associated with grip fighting). I will never be a black belt. I will never successfully compete against similarly ranked opponents half my age, I will never be great at Brazilian jiu jitsu. There is an urgency to my training because I’m sure as shit not getting any younger, or more flexible. I’m certainly not getting any faster.” 

Some systems of training are easier on the body than others, but the cold truth is that the practice of any fighting art inevitably cannibalizes much of the physical capital that it seeks to create.  All of us reach a point in life when we begin to grimly calculate how many “good training years” we have left, and how much more we might reasonably seek to master.  Through careful practice and good luck we might forestall the inevitable, but this is a battle that we all must lose.  To train as a martial artist is to learn to face defeat with a degree of equanimity.  I would suggest that this lesson is not peripheral to our practice.  It is intrinsic to any quest for embodied knowledge.  

The tragic ending of Bourdain’s own battle against his inner demons has launched a wave of public reflection, as well as celebrations of his life.  I was struck by how many of these obituaries, reviews and think pieces have focused on his passionate engagement with the martial arts.  Indeed, his enthusiasm for Brazilian Jiujitsu was often brought up in practically the same sentence as praise for his willingness to talk about his past struggles with drug addition.  The subtle implications of this pairing are, of course, clear.  Bourdain had found a higher power in the monastic discipline of serious martial arts practice and was drawing on this to combat a history of heroin and crack cocaine usage.  Even if he ultimately lost his battle, surely his martial arts practice helped him to hold out as long as he did.

Some of Bourdain’s own writings seem to wink at a connection between these two episodes in his life. He noted: 

“I used to hang around cold stairwells first thing in the morning waiting for dope. Now I hang around cold stairwells waiting for Jiu Jitsu.”

Very few of his casual viewers could probably guess what Bourdain actually felt waiting in that stairwell, anticipating a grueling workout.  Yet I would guess that this line of narrative nevertheless sparked of a wave of recognition within his audience.  After all, martial arts and drug addition have long formed an oppositional pair in the public consciousness.

On strictly empirical grounds this is actually somewhat odd. The many elite fighters who are caught using banned substances for either recreational or performance enhancing reasons (or in Bruce Lee’s case, both) are quickly forgotten.  They do not conform to what we think we know about the martial arts, or the elite athletes who are lucky enough to pursue them.  Political psychologists would be quick to remind us that when a piece of new information does not comport with our prior theories or beliefs, its all too easy to find a reason to dismiss it. The end result is that experienced “reality” is a highly individualized phenomenon.

Yet accounts of celebrities who have turned to the martial arts in an bid to increase their personal wellness or combat drug addition are amplified and echoed throughout the media.  The release of the initial Ip Man movies certainly brought some curious new students into my teacher’s school in Salt Lake City back in 2008 and 2010.  Even more impressive were the crowds which would appear following Robert Downy Jr.’s periodic discussions of the many ways that Wing Chun had helped him to get his life back on track.

There is no denying Downy’s star power.  And the ease with which Sherlock Holmes’ Japanese inflected Bartitsu was replaced with a Wing Chun inspired interpretation of bare knuckles boxing was striking.  Still, I suspect that Downy’s story (and endorsement) had such staying power within the public imagination as it conformed to a self-help narrative that was already widely accepted.  Rather than being a complex social, medical and economic phenomenon, in this view substance abuse reflects some sort of deficit in the national (or personal) character.  As such, something that teaches “self-control” and “discipline” is exactly what individuals struggling with addiction (or even underlying mental health problems) need.

This is an area where we must tread carefully, both as martial artists and scholars.  On the one hand, we know that practically any type of regular vigorous exercise has undeniable physical and psychological benefits.  And certain types of martial arts training may have an edge when it comes to teaching “mindfulness” and developing self-discipline.  It is also clear that an increasing number of addiction recovery programs are turning to the martial arts as one aspect of a wider treatment plan.

Still, I haven’t seen any clinical research suggesting that martial arts practice can fundamentally change the brain chemistry of someone struggling with a serious mental illness, or that individuals are more likely to become addicted to their prescription opioids because they somehow suffer from “weak characters.”  Indeed, one of the dangers in these sorts of discourses is that as we personalize the struggle for wellness and recovery, we simultaneously ignore the larger societal trends that lead to massive waves of addiction in the first place. An exclusive focus on “individual responsibility” risks falling prey to a pernicious species of policy blindness.

The Sick Man of Asia

Then there is the overwhelming sense of deja vu.  As a student of modern Chinese social history, it is hard not to draw the obvious parallels between the current (North American) opiod crisis and the one that gripped Southern China in the closing years of the Qing dynasty, stubbornly persisting through the Republic.

One wants to avoid facile equivalencies.  Shanghai in the 1920s was a vastly different place than San Francisco today.  If nothing else modern Americans do not have to contend with a trade system that allows the Japanese to export a limitless number of their notorious “red pills.”  Our own pharmaceutical industry has stepped into that breech, replacing old fashioned economic imperialism with an updated species of predatory medical capitalism.  Still, structural factors such as rapid social displacement, growing inequality and erratic policy making certainly compounded the problem in both eras.

And then there are the martial artists.  Again, one must be careful to avoid overly broad generalizations.  Both the martial arts and substance abuse were such widely distributed social phenomenon in Republican China that they tended to overlap in strange, and sometimes surprising, ways.  

Many martial artists were staunch opponents of opium use.  But those who worked as security officers for the state (which claimed to have a legal monopoly on the sale of opium) or as enforcers for various criminal gangs (who contested said monopoly), likely found themselves actively supporting the trade.  We also tend to forget that while Chinese social opinion saw opium use by marginal people (peasants, common laborers, soldiers) as a serious problem, the “better classes” were thought to be immune to many of the problems associated with long term drug use due to their innately “superior moral character.”  Hence it should not really be a surprise to learn that Ng Chung So’s Wing Chun school (catering to the sons of wealthy local business owners) operated out of the back room of a fashionable “opium den” in Foshan.

Still, there was enough opposition to opium usage within the martial arts community that a fairly recognizable discourse could emerge.  One of the more unvarnished accounts of this era can be found in the reminisces of the well known Taijiquan teacher T. T. Liang, as recorded and published by his student Stuart Alve Olson.  Liang provides the reader with colorful retellings of what it was like to be a Custom’s Officer caught in the crosshairs of competing opium interests during the “roaring 20s.”  But his personal journey within the martial arts really begins in a hospital bed in 1945 when, forced to confront his own imminent mortality, he resolved to save himself by finding a Taijiquan teacher.  His was hardly a unique story during that era. I suspect that at least some of the veiled references to the both personal and “national health” that pepper the period’s martial arts manuals are veiled references to the scourge of addiction.

The more nationally focused movements didn’t bother to veil their criticism of opium use, and proudly argued that the martial arts were a means to individual and national salvation.  As in so many other areas, the Jingwu Association seems to have pioneered this message in their publications.  Of course the group also had long standing campaigns to promote better public hygiene and education as well as the martial arts. 

Their ten year anniversary book, discussed at length by Kennedy and Guo, even included political cartoons (titled in English) editorializing on detrimental national effects of individual drug use.  They made their argument by juxtaposing the image of a young and healthy Jingwu student, capable of working or fighting for his nation, with an image of loafers and weaklings of “low character” who could only cluster around an opium pipe.

This returns us to one of the major differences between Republican China and the current situation in the United States.  While reformers in both places have promoted the martial arts as the key to recovery, character building and wellness, the end goal of this process is not always the same.  When reading through the front matter of various TCMA training manuals from the 1920s, it quickly becomes apparent that the health and recovery of citizens was being promoted precisely because it was believed that this would lead to the strengthening of the Chinese state in the global arena.  Individual wellness was not a goal in itself so much as it was portrayed as a means to a much greater end.  This promotion of middle class and urban martial arts was not a matter of “post-modern” values. Indeed, the nation’s martial arts teachers were expected to produce physical capital that could then be fed directly into China’s rapidly modernizing industrial sector.

In contrast, the current Western discourse linking wellness and the martial arts is an almost perfect example of what Ronald Inglehart would characterize as postmodern values.  These focus on the welfare of individuals (rather than the state or the economy) and emphasize the critical importance of the “intangible” aspects of life. While a surface reading might suggest a great deal of rhetorical continuity within the ongoing medicalization of the Chinese martial arts over the last 100 years, a closer examination suggests that these efforts have actually been tied to substantially different set of values.

Why Practice?

So what actually motivates individuals who take up the martial arts today, especially those who do so later in life?  Anthony Bourdain’s autobiographical accounts are suggestive.  Initially the pull of “social networks” seems to have had more to do with his choice than any lingering need to fight heroin addiction.  By most accounts he had ended his relationship with that drug in the 1980s.  It wasn’t until 2014 that Ottavia Bourdain, his first wife and an avid martial artist, convinced him to sign up for classes in Renzo Gracie’s gym in Manhattan, where she conducted much of her training.

It is clear from his writings that Bourdain quickly got “hooked” on his new hobby.  Soon he was training multiple hours a day whenever he was in NY and visiting schools around the globe as he traveled to shoot on location.  While he jokingly described his new found passion as “an addiction,” his public discussions of the art rarely touched on, or even alluded to, his own history with substance abuse.  That is interesting as this was a topic that Bourdain freely discussed.

His public discussion of BJJ seemed to focus instead on its all consuming nature.  He loved the physical and tactical challenges that it posed.  Bourdain seems to have been interested in the conceptual basis of his physical practice, repeatedly characterizing BJJ as a chess match.  And a brutal training schedule may have been quite helpful in his role as a television personality who needed to both eat and drink for a living while gaining no weight.

Another point that Bourdain repeatedly came back to was the emotional experience of engaging in something totally new.  His professional worlds had previously included kitchens, restaurants and writing desks.  He had never been one for the gym, let alone the training hall.  He described with awe the sensation of becoming an absolute beginner, of going back to square one and admitting that he knew nothing.  In talking about his martial arts training he explained:

“It’s like being the newest, worst cook in the kitchen all over again, looking up that impossibly steep learning curve to the broiler station. I liked that feeling then. I like it now.

The first day, all those years ago, when my chef addressed me by name at the end of the shift, was a golden moment.”

One can hear echoes in this quote of Dan Inosanto’s famous extortion to always be a white belt in something.  Becoming that white belt is not just a technical process, it is an emotional one as well.  This quote suggests that it unleashed a wave of nostalgia in Bourdain for a much earlier point in his career, a period when everything was still touched by mystery.  To become a white belt is not just to accept a new teacher, or a new system.  It recaptures part of the inexperience of one’s own youth.  I still vividly recall my excitement as a new Wing Chun student, and the strange sense of freedom (even possibility) that arose from simply being a new student in the back of a class after having spent the better part of a decade performing at the front of a lecture halls.

When discussing the connection between martial arts practice and addiction recovery most professionals are very careful to point out that this is a supplement to, rather than substitute for, other sorts of treatment (particularly if there are underlying mental health issues). Yet regardless of how you come to them, the martial arts can be an invaluable tool for restoring one’s physical health and mental calm.  They allow individuals to gain new social skills and an increased sense of psychological resilience.  And everyone enjoys a healthy self-esteem boost when discovering “My body can do what?”

In reading Bourdain’s accounts of his own training, and reflecting on my own experience, I think that there is something else.  There is just so much nostalgia in his final quote.  Of course the Asian martial arts have always traded in romantic images and feelings of nostalgia. Nostalgia can be a double edged sword, particularly if its strongly felt but not linked to any sort of action.  In those cases it risks turning into a form of toxic resentment for that which is new or different.  Yet by linking these powerful emotions to healthy activities, increased engagement with a community and a general desire to expand and improve ourselves, the martial arts can be an extraordinary vehicle for positive change.  

At the start of this essay Bourdain observed (with an unfortunate degree of foresight) that as a 59 year old BJJ novice he would never compete at the level he desired.  He would never earn a black belt.  He would probably never be faster or stronger than he already was at that moment.  So why should a middle aged person, or senior citizen, start a martial art that they will probably never master?  Because simply setting out on the journey can unlock both social and psychological forces that put us on a pathway to personal wellness. 

oOo

If you enjoyed this essay you might also want to read: A Brief History of Nostalgia and the Future of the Martial Arts.

oOo

Rethinking the Conventional Wisdom

Our daily conversations are made up of innumerable facts drawn from what might be termed, “the conventional wisdom.”  The contents of this warehouse of social knowledge are so widely shared that none of us stop to wonder where these insights originated.  These are the facts that “everybody knows.”  Unfortunately, what everyone knows can quickly become what no one critically examines.  Nor are these “facts” always neutral in their social implications.  

Let me illustrate with a quick example.  A few weeks ago I was editing an excellent chapter for another scholar when the topic turned to definitions (always a perilous subject for the unwary). As the author listed off a number of world martial arts traditions they tossed out the term “kung fu” and then immediately noted that, in fact, this was a misnomer and implied that wushu was the correct name.

But is “wushu” always correct?  In what sorts of circumstances or discussions might a scholar choose one term over the other?  The term ‘kung fu’ is quite widely used in daily conversation about the martial arts in Southern China.  Of course many of the earliest Chinese martial artists in the United States (including Bruce Lee) were from Fujian or Guangdong. They brought both their local styles and vocabularies with them.  Hence its no surprise that Westerners who practiced these styes tend to have adopted the term kung fu as well.  Within the southern Chinese martial arts community this is not a sign of confusion or ignorance.  Some martial artists in places like Hong Kong, Taiwan and South East Asia have both stylistic and ideological reasons for avoiding ‘wushu’. 

None of this was really an issue for this author or their chapter.  While I have previously published on this topic, they were not specialists on the Chinese martial arts and there would be no reason to expect that they would be versed in an area so far outside their speciality.  In truth we are all a bit blind when we start to move beyond our focus. At that point all of us end up relying on the “conventional wisdom” to some degree.

Still, quite a lot of work, effort and repetition went into constructing the idea that “kung fu” is a misnomer.  So perhaps it would be worth our time to think a little more carefully about how the term “kung fu” actually entered English language usage.  Further, we need to think carefully about the political implications of the terms that we use and avoid choosing winners and losers in ongoing cultural debates that we often see only dimly.  Our job as students of martial arts studies is to identity, study and comment on these discussions.  Yet we need to be very careful about carelessly intervening in a debate that pits attempts to ground martial arts practice within local or regional cultures (for which the use of the term kung fu has become something of a proxy) against competing efforts to construct a totalizing and unifying national discourse (guoshu in the 1930s, or wushu after the 1950s).    

The Role of the Jingwu Association

As I indicated above, I have discussed this issue in the past. Rather than rehash all of those arguments here, it is sufficient to note two points.  First, the term kung fu has been circulating within the English language literature on the Chinese martial arts for much longer than most individuals and the OED (which is of no help in this case) suspect.  Secondly, there has never really been a single universally accepted term for the Chinese martial arts.

Perhaps we can expand on that last point.  Given the wide geographic and temporal spread of traditional fighting techniques across Chinese history, scholars have located a rich vocabulary that has been used to name and describe these arts.  Even some of the most common terms for civilian martial arts in the modern era, like quanban (a term meaning ‘fist and staff’ that was extremely popular during the late Qing dynasty) have vanished from modern usage.  Indeed, the case of quanban is instructive.  Stanley Henning noted that the word fell out of favor post-1911 as it was used by the Manchu Qing government to distinguish “unimportant” civilian activities from the “reality” of archery and weapons training used in the military.  After the collapse of the dynasty the term came to be seen as an externally imposed colonial label and it was rejected for largely political reasons.

Indeed, the immense waves of nationalism unleashed by the 1911 revolution would have a substantial effect on the Chinese martial arts.  These practices were still reeling from the humiliation and suppression that they had faced following the Boxer Uprising.  Yet in the early years of the Republic small groups of reformers decided that the martial arts could be saved by making them a tool to modernize and serve the state.  Indeed, Japanese martial artists had already pioneered this pathway in the late 19th century.  But where was the Chinese answer to kendo or judo?  Only a unified martial art could help to both unify China’s fractured body politic while at the same time forcefully announcing to the rest of the world (much as Japanese wrestlers had done in North America and Europe) that China a was strong nation looking ahead to the future.  What would this new system be called.  And what would it look like?

One of the first individuals to put forth an agenda (and then attempt to legislate an answer through the ongoing debates on national curriculum reform) was the warlord and boxing enthusiast Ma Liang.  The general’s troops had gained fame through their martial arts training and high level of physical condition.  Eventually Ma decided to adapt his simplified martial arts training program for civilian use and began to implement it within the schools of his home province (Shandong).  The plan was to eventually expand the effort throughout all of China.  To this end text-books were published, legislation was passed and a training program was even established to train instructors.

While Ma got off to a quick start, his program never really succeeded on the national level.  But in the late 1910s it was probably the best known national reform effort within the Chinese martial arts.  In addition to easily available textbooks, Ma had also developed a catchy name.  He called his simplified national style “new-wushu.”

Ma’s biggest competitor in the late 1910’s and early 1920’s was the Shanghai based Jingwu (Pure Martial) Association.  In many ways this movement was very different.  It lacked Ma’s obvious militarism and was headed by civilian business tycoons who were more at home in the boardroom than on the battlefield.  But in an era when superior marketing strategies would carry the day, that was exactly the edge that the Jingwu Association needed.  Jingwu envisioned a much richer catalog of physical culture, one aimed at China’s growing, and increasingly affluent, urban middle class.  Their martial arts curriculum taught a number of complex forms taken from various styles, and then mixes all of this with basketball games and roller skating expeditions in the park.  Jingwu succeeded because they crafted an absolutely compelling vision of what modern Chinese society should be, and the role that the martial arts should play in its creation.

Yet if the global success of judo taught Chinese reformers anything, it was the need for good branding.  The very fact that Ma named his art new-wushu suggested that the term “wushu” itself had a public relations problem.  China’s martial artists were still struggling to emerge from the shadow of the Boxer Uprising and the general public perceived them as being backwards and superstitious.  Hence Ma’s emphasis on the “new” and rationalized elements of his program. 

Coming up with a Chinese language brand was only half the battle. The business leaders at the head of Jingwu knew that it was pointless to throw off the mantle of the “Sick Man of East Asia” if nobody was watching.  Japanese wresters had proved that martial excellence was a way for Asian countries to get noticed and earn a degree of (still grudging) respect on the global stage.  China’s martial artists had every intention of following in their footsteps.

And yet there was genuine linguistic confusion in the English language literature as to what their practice was even called.  One will search period treaty port newspapers for discussions of the “martial arts” in vein.  That term never really took hold in English until the post-war era.  Instead one finds references to: Chinese boxing, Chinese gymnastics, juggling, national boxing, national arts, pugilism and even “the noble art of self-defense” (among others).  When a newspaper printed an article on judo, everyone in Asia and the West knew what it was talking about. But if a newspaper were to print an article on a prominent teacher of “national boxing,” there was a very good chance that no one would know what it was describing.

To solve this problem the Jingwu Association appears to have adopted two strategies.  The first was to distribute some English language material on the Chinese martial arts.  For instance, Kennedy and Guo noted that their ten year anniversary memorial book included multiple sections that were in English.  These should not simply be seen as a vanity project to increase the groups’ (already substantial) cosmopolitan credentials.  At the same time these tracts were being produced, the Jingwu Association was also actively inviting reporters from English language events to its events.  The result was a steady stream of English language articles on Jingwu demonstrations throughout the late 1910s and early 1920s.

Jingwu’s second strategy seems to have been to provide these English language journalists with a handy name for the Chinese martial arts, a single word that would put them on the same rhetorical footing as Japan’s increasingly famous judo.  The term that Jingwu settled on was “kung fu.” Their preference for the term likely reflected the fact that many of the groups founding members were actually part of the Cantonese community in Shanghai.  In addition, the term kung fu allowed them to clearly distinguish their product from Ma Liang’s “new wushu,” and its older (and supposedly more suspicious) cousin’s in the countryside.

It is pointless to introduce a term without being able to define it.  And that brings us to the second half of this post, the transcription of an article titled “Chinese Athletics” which appeared in the English language Shanghai Times on December 18th, 1919.  Published during the huge 10 year anniversary celebrations, this article was clearly an effort to both introduce the term “kung fu” to an English language audience, and to provide an extensive background discussion of what the Chinese martial arts really were.

Readers should take note of the repeated attempts to position kung fu as prior (and hence superior) to Japanese judo.  More interesting still is that a close reading reveals that large sections of this article were borrowed directly from the afore mentioned English language sections of the group’s ten year anniversary book.  This material was rearranged, and some minor modifications in wording were made.  The spelling of “kung fu” seems to have been modified to “Kungfu” throughout.  Still, all of this suggests an effort to coordinate the group’s messaging to foreign audiences.

There are historical tensions within this article that also merit consideration.  The account clearly alludes to the previous year’s vicious public debate with the famous writer Lu Xun, who took to the pages of New Youth.  He had sought to equate efforts to put martial arts instruction in public schools with the sort of mania that preceded the eruption of the Boxer Uprising (See Andrew Morris, Marrow of the Nation, 193).  Like Ma Liang, Jingwu tried to draw a very clear boundary between the faulty practices of the past and the newly restored and rationalized practice of “kung fu.”

However, for this to be an authentic expression of the Chinese national essence it could not be too new.  This article gives kung fu its own origin myth, one tied directly to the Yellow Emperor and the founding of China.  That is a revealing rhetorical choice.  During much of the late imperial period the Yellow Emperor had slipped in stature.  Yet with the birth of the Republic he was rediscovered as a popular symbol of Han ethnic nationalism and resistance to outside aggression.  It is not a total surprise to see him become the patron saint of Jingwu’s kung fu given their goal of “national salvation.”

Kung fu’s appearance as a popular English language term for the Chinese martial arts is neither a misnomer nor a misunderstanding. It is also not a coincidence.  The Jingwu Association had been attempting to lay the foundation for all of this as early as the 1910s.  The irony is that they were attempting to use kung fu as a unifying term for a national practice (much as wushu is used today), while in the modern era it has come to be associated primarily with the regional martial cultures of southern China.  A complete explanation of how that part of the story unfolded will need to wait for another post.  Still, this discussion illustrates that much of the actual history of the Chinese martial arts during the 20th century revolves around efforts to create a cohesive social sector through the invention of a unifying brand or program.  Each of these competing labels carried political implications, and all of them defined new sets of winners and losers.  If we lose sight of this as we reach for an “easy label,” we risk becoming part of the process of political debate rather than students of martial arts studies.

CHINESE ATHLETICS

___________

The Chin Woo Association

___________

Tomorrow will witness the first of three entertainments given under the auspices of the Chin Woo Athletic Association in commemoration their tenth anniversary.  There will be performances also on Saturday and Sunday evenings.  All of these will be given at the 

[illegible] Theatre on Jukeng Road off North Szechuen Road Extension.  A special feature of the entertainment is the screening of some 5,000 feet of motion films describing the history and activities of the Association during the past ten years.  These films were taken by the members of the Association’s Camera Club.

The Chin Woo Athletic Association was formed ten years ago and was received with much disfavor and unfair criticism, not only from the press but from the general public who claimed that the Association was only a place for the breeding of “Boxers.”  The founders, however, were not at all discouraged, knowing the need for physical culture for the four hundred millions and the value of “Kungfu” as a form of gymnastics.  So they persisted in their efforts and brought the club from a membership of 8 to 800, from a rough little hut to its commodious building with modern conveniences, thus far exceeding their expectations.  In Shanghai alone it has three branches with a membership of 500 of their own.  Canton and Hankow each boast of an association. But what is most important of all is that the Association provides voluntary physical directors to two universities, three colleges, and about a dozen schools.  “Kungfu” has been called boxing but in reality it is no more than gymnastics combined with interesting contests in which young men so delight.  With the old material at hand, the Association has attempted to follow modern methods of instruction.  It has passed the experimental stage, and its success is proved by “Kungfu” being adopted for class work along modern lines.  Several works have been compiled and published, all of which have a very large circulation.

While most of the schools now clamor for its system of Chinese gymnastics (“Kungfu”) the Association also maintains other forms of physical recreation: football, basketball, tennis, and other such competitive games are provided.  Besides there are instructive classes for intellectual development and amusement.  The Camera Club boasts of an invention by one of its members and a string band second to none in Shanghai.  Educational classes in Chinese and English are conducted for its members.

The year now closing has been a significant one for the Association, a donation of $30,000 from an anonymous donor making it possible for further extension.  Ground has already been purchased for a recreation park which will be thrown open to all Chinese.  More money, however, is needed and by conducting the three entertainments mentioned above, the Association hopes to be able to raise a little towards this.

History of Chinese “Kungfu”

China is weak but she certainly claims to be the author of the art known to the Japanese as “Judo” or “Jijusu.”  Prof. Arima in his work “Judo” (Chapter II) defends that judo is indigenous to his countrymen and not foreign basing his argument on a book called “Kuyamitoride[?]” and the existence of the Takenonchi school some 400 years ago.  Self defense being natural to everybody, the art is known to every people on the globe almost since human beings were found.  Of course, as Prof. Arima says, it was in its initial stages.

The history of the Chinese arts of self-defense or “Kungfu” begins from the time when our ancestors first came to dwell in the best part of the continent of Asia.  Emperor Hwang Ti made it possible for us to live permanently and extend our area of occupation by defeating the Chi Yao, the leader of the Miao tribes.  The battle was fought at Ti Lo, Chili and won for China such a glorious future that till 1895 she had been the one power of Asia.

Since the days of Huang Ti till the Boxer Upheaval in 1900 entrance to military service was by examination of the knowledge of “Kungfu.” No man in the service was not versed in it and the military leaders could only distinguish themselves by being masters.  Because of the wretched conditions of communications and the lack of police organizations, “Kungfu” was a necessary equipment of every businessman in traveling.  Many a story is told of travelers seeing gangs of desperadoes and extricating themselves through defeating the opponents at “Kungfu.”  In those days daring men with a good knowledge of “Kungfu” carried on a business that was called “Piao Chu.” At a certain charge “pao-piao” would be sent to accompany a party through a bandit-infested area and whose service was like that of a personal guard.

Old China keeps no official record of things other than literature.  This explains why record of the art of “Kungfu” is found in a few strayed leaflets.  Either because suppression or the desire of the authors to avoid abuse, a great part of works on “Kungfu” was lost.  It is a great pity, but one that could not be prevented.  The only work that is still in existence and authentic is “Ba Tuan Ching” or “Eight Developments” by You Fei (A.D. 1300) one of China’s greatest warriors.  There is another work named “Yih Chin King” or “Development of the Muscles” by Ta Moh. In this book much alteration had been made and it is difficult to vouch for its authenticity.

After the overthrow of the Ming Dynasty, the Chinese restive of the Manchus began to pay particular attention to “Kungfu.”  Any of the warriors who served under Ming fled to distant parts (including Japan): others became monks and lived in secluded places.  It was then that [the] Japanese began to have “judo.”  Among those who entered monasteries were the founders of two famous schools in “Kungfu,” “Siao Ling” [Shaolin] and “Wu Tang.”  These two schools existed for quite a while and had many followers.  “Siao Ling” was noted for “Wa Kung” (external development) and “Wu Tang” for “Nai Kung” (internal development).  The former, however, has more followers.

None of those persons well versed in “Kungfu” would not say that they do not belong to “Sia Ling.”  But the school has many divisions each claiming its advantages over others.  They can be grouped under two sections, the North and South.  Prof. Fog in founding the Chin Woo Athletic Association had in mind the object of uniting the different divisions for developing the art.  His success is seen to-day in the number of professors maintained by the Association representatives of [illegible] divisions and the number of followers, both men and children.

The Shanghai Times, December 18, 1919. Page 16.

oOo

If you enjoyed this discussion you might also want to read: “Fighting Styles” or “Martial Brands”? An economic approach to understanding “lost lineages” in the Chinese Martial Arts.

oOo

National boxing is very popular in Fatshan city.  It is reported that there are some eight national boxing schools which are directed by well-known national boxers.  School fees are only from two to three dollars a month.

“General News,” Canton Times, September 9^th, 1919 (page 7)

Foshan would have been a fascinating place in the late 1910s.  The Hung Sing Association’s brand of Choy Li Fut dominated much of Guangdong’s martial arts scene.  Interesting and innovative things were happening in the Hung Gar community.  And of course Ng Chung So was cultivating a small but dedicated community of Wing Chun students on the eve of a period of rapid growth that would unfold in the 1920s and 1930s. This brief notice informed English language readers in Hong Kong and Guangzhou of something that we already know.  The Southern Chinese martial arts were about to enter a brief, but brilliant, golden age.

What was the social position of these practices, and how can we best explain their flowering?  Popular theories on both questions abound.  We hear tales of a Southern Shaolin Temple, wandering revolutionaries and secret societies galore.  In more academic works we encounter the Jingwu Association’s sophisticated, nation wide, advertising campaigns, or the attempts of government officers and educational reformers to create a new martial art for the new Chinese nation. 

It is easy to pit these two schools against each other and assume that this is the totality of the debate.  If the mythological explanations are wrong than the elite driven national narratives must be correct. What is more confusing is that there are elements of truth on both sides.  

While it is clear that the Qing never inspired southern kung fu by burning an actual temple full of real Shaolin monks, that image gripped the public imagination and allowed countless local styles to wrap themselves in the banner of Republic era nationalism and revolution.  This facilitated the localization of abstract notions like “the nation,” and provided a pathway for individuals to enact and experience a new imagined community on an embodied level.  Likewise, the Jingwu Association advertised a middle class art that was both socially progressive and compatible with the demands of modernity.  They provided a ready made pathway for those who wished to argue that the Chinese martial arts should serve as the foundation for modern Chinese society.  Indeed, we are still feeling the effects of their reforms.

Yet both of these explanations tend to neglect the actual experience of most of Southern China’s martial artists.  Wuxia novels were written in a high literary style and tended to be more of an elite past time. Likewise, while the urban middle class that Jingwu appealed to was growing in relative terms, it was still a very small proportion of Southern China’s total population.  Most urban citizens were common laborers or domestic help.  They couldn’t afford Jingwu’s dues and likely had little interest in the global, cosmopolitan, vision that it promoted.

To understand the rapid growth of the martial arts in Southern China, one should start by investigating local labor markets.  More specifically, we need to focus our attention on the relationship between the region’s many small labor unions and the massive proliferation of urban martial arts schools in the Republican period.  These are issues that Jon Nielson and I already examined in our book, The Creation of Wing Chun: A Social History of the Southern Chinese Martial Arts, but perhaps a more focused discussion is in order.

Consider again the news clipping at the top of this essay. It actually makes a great deal of sense that Foshan would have led the way towards the professionalization of the martial arts marketplace in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  Its position in the regional trade system made it a unique manufacturing powerhouse.  The city was famous for its commercial porcelain exports and it enjoyed a monopoly on the regional production of iron goods.  Silk and sugar were also regionally important trade goods.  And its streets were filled with workshops making the household goods that supported Guangzhou to the East.  Indeed, much of what was sold in Guangzhou was first manufactured in the workshops of Foshan.  The “industrial revolution” (and I am using that term very loosely here as most of this production actually happened in small shops), came early to Foshan.

All of this had a critical impact on the development of local labor markets.  In an era when most peasants in the countryside rarely had much cash on hand (inhibiting their ability to buy luxury items), workers in Foshan were paid a steady wage.  They worked predictable hours.  More importantly, they were organized into collective trade guilds.  In addition to negotiating working conditions, these groups were responsible for providing certain goods to their members, such as housing, shared worship spaces (sometimes a cemetery) and even entertainment.   During the final decades of the Qing dynasty it became increasingly popular for guilds to use their pooled economic resources to hire martial arts instructors.  And given the region’s occasional bouts with labor unrest, it is hard not to see that as a recreational choice with social implications.

This process continued and accelerated as later industrialization swelled cities like Guangzhou, Shanghai and Hong Kong with peasants leaving the countryside looking for (relatively) well-paid work.  While patterns of guild organization gave way to small labor unions, these still functioned as something of a social safety net, providing housing assistance, entertainment and networking opportunities.  Lin Boyan (1996) has described how displaced workers from the countryside would pool their resources to hire a local martial arts teacher, bringing them to the big city.   This was a world that was at once familiar, but still quite different from, the era of small town militias and public boxing grounds that had come before.  Note the following observations on the Guangzhou’s changing cityscape as reported in the North China Herald.

CANTON’S AMUSEMENTS

_________

More Time Now for Play

_________

From Our Own Correspondent.

Canton, Sept. 5.

The Cantonese are giving more time to amusement, or as a matter of fact they have more time to play.  The civil servants and railroad employees in the city, who have regular office hours, have adopted tennis as their popular form of recreation.  The Sun Ting Club, an organization of returned students and younger officials and leading merchants of the city, has a baseball team of more than 20 regular members.  The Y.M.C.A. gymnasium and swimming pool are attracting a large number of business and professional men daily, and the law court and department store clerks enjoy their games alike in these places.

The laboring class now has more time for amusement and play since the success of its demands for shorter hours and higher wages through a series of strikes. Its members usually organize themselves into clubs for physical training, usually boxing,—now under the title of “national art of self-defense.”  These clubs also teach the Cantonese popular amusement of lion dance, displaying their skill at parades or other public appearances.

The moving picture shows are now an institution in Canton, and there are half a dozen theatrical [opera] companies here wholly composed of young women and girls.  Nowadays the country towns and villages have no difficulty in getting support for a show to come to their towns for a season from two to four days at a time with four or five shows in a couple of months.  In Canton the show places have to close at midnight, while in the country districts one may last from eight o’clock in the evening to five in the morning.  In addition to the regular theaters, the large department stores and amusement parks provide a variety of shows for which a general admission fee is charged, and many spend their leisure hours there.

“Canton’s Amusements: More Time Now For Play,” The North China Herald. September 17, 1921.

Once again, the advent of limited work hours and greater pay (the fruits of hard fought battles with business owners), opened the doors for an explosion of kung fu schools.  Again, all of this happening in the middle of the Jingwu era, but that organization’s progressive reforms and nationalist agenda do not seem to have much to do with the trends reported in these articles.  And while Jingwu would vanish (except in South East Asia) between the 1920s and the 1950s, the sorts of folk kung fu styles favored by these labor unions (Hung Gar, Southern Mantis, Choy Li Fut, Wing Chun) are still very much the backbone on the modern kung fu community.

Still, as this newspaper account makes clear, the popularity of these styles did not emerge in a cultural vacuum.  These practices were consumed by the same workers who enjoyed the growth of opera (indeed, the “Red Boats” were still a common sight in the 1920s) and cinema.  The social meaning and identity of these practices sat in juxtaposition to pursuits like tennis or swimming, activities that were far more popular among China’s upper middle class mangers.  Still, both kung fu and western athletics benefited from the same expansion of the region’s leisure economy.

This is not to say that the social implications of joining a kung fu school were identical to signing up for a baseball team.  There was often an undercurrent of social power (perhaps even coercion) in the former that was not evident in the latter.  Workers certainly enjoyed martial arts practice, yet many of these schools were sponsored by “Yellow Unions” which included the company’s officers within their membership.  In that case one’s employer might gain additional social leverage over workers by also having a leadership role within the martial arts community.  And martial arts teachers were even hired to help firms “deal with” labor issues.

Boxing was also seen as an important mechanism for militarizing the labor movement by members of the KMT and other social reformers.  Promoting this sort of martial arts training seems to have been regarded as a extension of party’s more revolutionary and anti-imperialist goals.  (One could discuss the clear thematic connections to the newly resurgent mythos of the burning of the Shaolin Temple here, but that will need to wait for some future post).

Nor was this militarization of the labor force merely theoretical.  Jon Nielson and I discussed the impact of the 1925 boycott of British goods (and trade with Hong Kong) in our previous volume. Multiple martial arts instructors and organizations were involved in that effort.  Yet the following report from the China Press notes that by the second year of the strike such training had become mandatory for the workers on the picket-line and in Guangzhou. 

By suggestion of the Kuomintang Workers Delegate Conference, comprising more than 170 labor unions in Canton City alone, for members not joining the picket regiment which will be trained under military system, all labor unions quartered in Canton will conduct classes of boxing.  It may be recalled that this conference has decided to organize a picket group of 1,700 to 2,000 strong.

“All Foreigners At Canton Under Police Surveillance.”  The China Press. September 23, 1926. P. 7.

Still, it was not all revolution and “charging the barricades.”  The promotion of martial arts within labor unions also seems to have been part of the government’s larger efforts to promote physical culture.  We already discussed Chu Minyi’s efforts to create upscale martial arts clubs for public sector employees. Those efforts did not occur in isolation.  Rather they were an extension of trends that had been going on for some time. Once again, we can turn to the China Press for another news clipping that nicely fuses labor relations, martial arts instruction, and the promotion of a national physical culture movement, this time from 1933 (the height of the Guoshu era). Again, these are the stories that we ignore when we focus exclusively on a handful of elite social movements.

Labor Unions Due to Battle in Athletic Contest Next Spring

For the first Time in local Chinese athletic history, an All-Shanghai Labor Track and Field Meet will be held at the Public Recreation Ground, Nantao, next spring.  Four open Championships will be staged.  They include track, field, all games and Chinese boxing.  Each labor union is required to participate in at least one of the four championships games.

The China Press. December 16, 1933 page 6.

Conclusion

All of this would be stripped away by the victory of the Communist Party in 1949.  Its important to note that they never explicitly banned martial arts practice.  Indeed, the newly reconstituted wushu sector was promoted and cultivated within the sports and educational realms.  Many of China’s most famous remaining martial artists found new homes as coaches at universities or teaching Qigong and Taijiquan classes in hospitals.

But that sort of elite practice excluded most of the nation’s population.  As the Party transformed the economy, nationalized markets and banned labor unions, more plebeian martial artists no longer had the incentive or opportunity to continue to practice.  By the end of the 1950s much of the martial arts culture that had dominated the Republic era simply vanished on its own.  

Things were different outside of China.  Small labor unions continued to sponsor martial arts classes in South East Asia and Hong Kong. Wing Chun students can all recite by heart how Ip Man began his teaching career at the Restaurant Worker’s Union headquarters in Hong Kong. Nor was this the last labor group he would teach during the course of his Hong Kong career.  In light of the foregoing discussion it should be clear that this is not an incidental element of the story, or a bit of local color.  It reminds us of the historic importance of Southern China’s guilds and labor unions as engines of working class martial arts practice.  During the Republic period they promoted and shaped popular kung fu traditions.  In the early 1950s one union in Hong Kong gave Ip Man a leg up, ensuring Wing Chun’s survival and eventual spread throughout the global system.

oOo

If you enjoyed this you might also want to read: Lives of Chinese Martial Artists (3): Chan Wah Shun and the Creation of Wing Chun.

oOo

Feeling the Heat

Here is a fun fact to consider.  The modern mechanical air conditioner was invented by Willis Carrier (a Cornell graduate I might add), not in Arizona or Florida, but in western New York state.  It may come as something of a surprise to learn that Buffalo, best known for images of apocalyptic levels of snow, is the home of AC.  We are not exactly in the sun belt, but every year central and western NY get a couple of weeks of temperatures hovering around 100 degrees with humidity levels to match.  That combination can be punishing.  It can even be dangerous.

Hence my dilemma. Should I cancel this week’s Friday evening meet up of a martial arts group which I run in a local park? The forecast is predicting temperatures in the mid 90s with high levels of humidity.  I think the entire county will spend most of the week under a heat advisory.  Just looking at the numbers one wonders whether its even possible to train in these sorts of conditions.

The short answer to that last question is yes.  Places like Hong Kong and Singapore have much more severe summer heat and they are the home of many of the martial arts communities that I am most interested in.  But that doesn’t mean that training in the summer heat is always fun, or even a good idea for individuals who have not acclimated to it.

I had the opportunity to live in Japan as an undergraduate and experienced a very memorable summer while there.  That was probably my first exposure to training under extreme heat conditions.  I was a member of a small college martial arts club which only had a handful of members.  It was a relaxed, student run, affair. Normally the guys who did judo worked together and the small click of kendo students trained in their own corner of the room.  I would work out with the single karate student as I was studying ITF Taekwondo at the time.

The whole thing was a lot of fun.  But just as the summer heat got miserable, the kendo students decided that it would be great to host the rest of us for some “special training.”  I actually suspect that they were worried that I would leave Japan without getting to experience the country’s most popular martial art.  Kendo had always looked fascinating, so I was happy to train with them, however briefly.

The first thing I learned was how suffocatingly hot all of that gear can be, particularly when you are training in a not sufficiently air conditioned dojo.  The second thing that I learned was just how hard all of that kneeling could be when your legs were spasming with muscle cramps as a result of dehydration.  Which is to say, I Ioved every minute of it.  But I do not want to inflict anything like that on the Friday night training group.

Advice for Training in the Heat

Late last year I published another short essay on training in extreme weather.  At the time we were concerned with the costs and benefits of working out in the snow.  Ultimately we concluded that there are substantial health benefits to be gained if certain precautions are taken.  So what about training in the summer heat?  Is there any gain to be had from all the pain?  Should we all head out for a run in the heat of the day?

As always, there are certain dangers that one needs to be aware of, and you should never undertake any serious exercise program without consulting your doctor.  That is always good advice, but it turns out to be especially true when discussing physical training in extreme weather as that may stress your heart or lungs. 

So lets start with the bad stuff.  What could possibly go wrong? Quite a bit as it turns out.

Dehydration is probably the most common issue to arise.  One needs to be well hydrated before starting any outdoors activity, and in extreme heat it is important to stop and take regular water breaks as you may already be well on the way to dehydration before you feel thirsty.  Common symptoms of dehydration include muscle cramps (like the ones that I experienced in Japan).  Also note that children are more susceptible to dehydration than adults.  While I am generally all for “traditional training,” I would approach with caution any practice that restricted your access to water while exercising in extreme heat.

More serious is heat exhaustion. Watch out for feelings of lightheadedness, nausea, vomiting, physical weakness, excessive sweating or cold, clammy skin.  During a bout of heat exhaustion one’s internal body temperature may rise as high as 104 degrees.  If you continue to exert yourself beyond this point bad things tend to happen.

The most common of those would be heatstroke.  This is a life and death condition that occurs when an individual’s core body temperature moves above 104 degrees.  The skin may be red and dry from lack of sweat.  Heart beats per minute and respiration rates shoot up as the body seeks to cool itself.  Lastly, confusion, irritability, visual problems and dizziness may be followed by loss of consciousness, organ failure and death.

The Mayo Clinic suggest that anyone exercising in the heat be familiar with the following warning signs:

• Muscle cramps
• Nausea or vomiting
• Weakness
• Fatigue
• Headache
• Excessive sweating
• Dizziness or lightheadedness
• Confusion
• Irritability
• Low blood pressure
• Increased heart rate (beyond what one expects during exercise)
• Visual problems

If you begin to develop any of these symptoms, stop, move to a cool place, get hydrated and let your body temperature return to normal.  Remove any excessive clothing or bulky training gear. Individuals suffering from heat exhaustion will need to seek medical help if their body temperature remains elevated.  Needless to the say, the same goes for anyone with signs of heatstroke.

That is basically everyone’s official list of things to watch for in extreme heat training.  I would like to add a couple of additional items based on my own observations.  To begin with, most of us only experience exercise under these conditions when we are outdoors. Always wear waterproof sunblock whenever you are training outside.  Nothing ends an outdoor exercise program quite as quickly as a bad case of sunburn on the first or second day.

Second, consider all of the things that want to eat you.  In central New York that mostly means mosquitoes and ticks.  I suppose if I was in Florida the list would be different.

Mosquitos are a nuisance that can be taken care of by finding sweat resistant bug spray.  Ticks, however, are a more serious matter.  As carriers of Lyme disease they are becoming a serious public health issue where I live, particularly for individuals who may include hiking or trail running in their workout.  And lets face it, there is nothing more epic than doing your forms after hiking or jogging to the top of a cliff.  Always check for ticks at the end of any instagram worthy adventure, and consider wearing long, breathable, workout pants if you know that you will be hiking in an area where they are common.

With all of that on the table, is there actually any reason to put up with the risks of training in the summer heat when most of us have access to temperature controlled spaces? Absolutely. There is a small body of clinical evidence that suggests individuals who properly acclimatize and train in the heat for short periods of time (typically a couple of weeks) see greater performance gains than athletes doing identical workouts in cool spaces.

The paper that is most often cited in these discussions is a 2010 experiment conducted by Santiago Lorenzo at the University of Oregon.  After carefully observing the baseline performance levels of 20 elite cyclists, 12 were assigned a workout schedule to be conducted in a temperature controlled room set at 100 degrees, while the remaining control group did the exact same workout in a room cooled to a chilly 55 degrees.  At the end of a 10 day training period the performance of the two groups of cyclists was once again observed and measured.  

The results were striking.  The control group showed no improvement, most likely because they were all elite athletes near the top of their game to begin with.  But the group who had worked out in extreme heat saw a 6% performance boost.  Researchers hypothesized that this was a result of increases in their VO2Max (the total amount of oxygen your body can use during an intense effort) and their total blood volumes.  By producing more blood the body was able to continue to cool itself efficiently without robbing the large muscle groups of the oxygen that they needed to function (which is a contributing factor to the cramps discussed above).

As with all good things, moderation is the key.  One must be in excellent shape to carry out this sort of regime while locked in a 100 degree room.  Most of us will be working our way up through the 80s and 90s, slowly acclimating to the rising temperatures, and remembering to pay close attention to the humidity.  High levels of humidity interfere with the body’s ability to dissipate heat through sweat and that increases the likelihood of heat exhaustion or heat stroke.

Yet from an athletic standpoint, the interesting thing is how quickly the body can adapt to these new conditions.  It wasn’t necessary for these athletes to train in the extreme heat for months.  They saw marked improvements in less than two weeks time.

What is Old is New Again

This brings us back to the Asian martial arts.  Many Chinese teachers insist that year round outdoor training is the key to building up one’s physical stamina and psychological perseverance.  “Eating Bitter” has always involved grueling training in difficult environmental conditions.

Some martial artists in Japan seem to have taken this same basic tendency and refined it to the point of asceticism.  Of course the bushi of old would have trained outdoors as that was where most fighting actually happened.  Being able to mount an effective attack or defense in the heat of the summer, or on a cold winter night, was a very practical thing.

In the hands of Meiji era martial arts reformers, such practices came to be reimagined as a way of sharpening the fighting spirit of the nation’s youth, rather than just their technical skills.  Perhaps the most famous of these efforts originated with Kano Jigoro who, in 1897, established Shochu-Geiko training at the Kodokan.  Traditionally held during the entire month of August, students were expected to engage in long, specially designed, workouts timed to occur during the hottest part of the day.  These were instituted to inure students against environmental distraction while promoting perseverance in the face of adversity.  A similar training regime was also instituted for the coldest days of winter.  

Both the summer and winter training regimes are still part of Kodokan judo today.  From a historical perspective its interesting to note that such ascetic practices attracted the attention of early western authors reporting on the Japanese martial arts with an eye towards explaining the country’s rapid modernization.  For instance, E. J. Harrison devotes a paragraph to these practices in his seminal text, The Fighting Spirit of Japan (1912).  Unfortunately he was more interested in the extremes of cold weather training than heat.  Likewise, the practice is briefly discussed in W. H. Morton Cameron’s 1912, Present Day Impressions of Japan. 

Both of these works were meant to appeal to a general audience, rather than the small community of sportsmen who actually practiced jiujitsu or judo in the West.  Yet that is what makes them so significant. An ethos of spartan self-denial was quickly linked to the Japanese martial arts within the public imagination, and early accounts of Kano’s “summer training” helped to establish that.

Kano’s plans for moral and spiritual education not withstanding, it is interesting how closely Shochu-Geiko resembles elements of modern sports training.  Again, such practices only need to be carried out for a matter of weeks, rather than months, to get the benefits that are available.  And while he probably didn’t have tournament wins in mind when instituting the practice, this type of training likely aided his fighters as they carried out contests in Japan and abroad.   

All of which returns us to my dilemma.  It is vitally important to know one’s own fitness level.  But there is no intrinsic reason to avoid training in extreme heat.  Martial artists always benefit from the ability to work on our skills under challenging conditions.  As such, I believe that the climate should usually be treated as a (carefully deployed) training tool rather than as an obstruction.

I doubt that everyone in my martial arts group is acclimated to the current levels of heat as most of our workouts happen in a well appointed, pleasantly air-conditioned, school.  As such I will be watching the heat index closely and using that number for my final decision.  But I will also be encouraging my students to get used to outdoor exercise as part of their daily practice during the summer months.  Even if you have to go slow and keep the workout short, its another opportunity to come to understand what both you and your art are really capable of.  

oOo

If you enjoyed this essay you might also want to read:  Spreading the Gospel of Kung Fu: Print Media and the Popularization of Wing Chun (Part I)

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Veronika Partikova and George Jennings. 2018. “The Kung Fu Family: A metaphor of belonging across time and place,”Revista de Artes Marciales Asiáticas.Volume 13(1), 35-­52.

A Success Story

The latest issue of Revista de Artes Marciales Asiáticas(RAMA) is now available on-line, free to anyone with an internet connection. This journal is published twice yearly by the Department of Physical Education and Sport at the University of León in Spain. In circulation since 2006, they began by reprinting Spanish language translations of articles in the (now defunct) para-scholarly Journal of Martial Arts Studies.  In 2012 RAMA transformed itself into an independent, open-source, journal of original scholarly content in Spanish, Portuguese and (more recently) English.  While their catalog of contributions to the critical and theoretical English language literatures is still growing, RAMA has featured work by talented scholars including Thomas Green and Jared Miracle.

Scrolling through the Table of Contents for the latest issue I was delighted to discover that we can now add George Jennings and Veronika Partikova to that list. Their co-authored paper is an extensively researched qualitative study titled “The Kung Fu Family: A metaphor of belonging across time and place.” This article is based on the content analysis of field interviews conducted by Partikova and Jennings for other, independent, research projects.

I really like this paper for a number of reasons.  First, as even a quick glance at its extensive bibliography indicates, this project has been fully engaged with recent developments within the field of martial arts studies since its inception. That not only minimizes the probability of treading over old ground, but it often leads to papers based on theoretical insights (or methods) that will be of interest to a broader range of scholars. A closer examination of their argument suggests that this is certainly the case here.

My second reason for really liking this paper is more personal.  In 2017 I served as the chair for a panel at the Martial Arts Studies meetings where Partikova presented some of her research on a related topic.  That led to a conversation with Jennings (also present at the panel) which resulted in the paper under discussion.  The very existence of this article is an illustration of the gains to be had from cross-disciplinary discussions, as well as the value of regular conferences and seminars in the promotion of new research areas.  While both of these authors deserve congratulations for their achievement, the publication of this piece also strikes me as something of an “institutional success story,” illustrating the cohesive growth of the field of martial arts studies over the last couple of years.  Its a bit like watching a child grow up…

Researching the Kung Fu Family

Which brings us back to the article in question.  Have you ever noticed how common family-based metaphors are within in martial arts discussions in general, and the traditional Chinese martial arts in particular?  Consider the ease with which we deploy terms such as calling someone a “kung fu brother,” or asserting that one’s teacher has become “like a second father.”  At times this rhetoric seems to transcend the realm of mere metaphor and speaks to something deeper.  We probably all know someone who has forsaken a degree of contact with their biological family to spend more time with their “kung fu family,” either by moving to a different city or country.

In a more metaphysical sense many of us see our involvement with the martial arts as connecting us to something “greater” than ourselves.  This might be a sprawling global community of practitioners who share an aspect of our identity, even if we will only meet or touch hands with a small fraction of them.  Or perhaps we feel the genealogical weight our “family tree” establishing us as part of a lineage of students that transcends time itself.  Through our practice we touch immortality.  Looking at the pictures that hang on the memorial walls of many traditional schools, we may feel an emotional connection to our “ancestors” and even come understand ourselves as part of what Douglas Farrer terms the style’s “deathscape.”

In the modern world membership in any martial arts organization is typically a voluntary undertaking.  The kinship ties that we physically enact and verbally invoke are clearly understood to be fictive in nature.  Yet one cannot easily dismiss the strength of these bonds.  Perhaps this is why martial artists form many cultures, and in many time periods, have turned to the family as their favored metaphor to explain the nature of belonging within such a community.

The notion of a “kung fu family” clearly does certain sorts of work within the TCMA.  Like all families, this concept seems to mediate between the manifest reality of visible change and our deep psychological need for continuity.  On a personal level the notion of “family” provides the role models that that we will strive to emulate.  At the same time it explains in implicit terms how it is that an art clearly evolving in each generation may still lay claim to an unchanging “essential” nature. Within the logic of mundane life it is impossible to maintain this sort of contradiction.  Yet it is the very thing that allows a family’s corporate identity to maintain itself intergenerationally.

Partikova and Jennings set out to shed some light on this phenomenon by carefully examining patterns of speech and metaphor in a set of roughly two dozen interviews conducted by the researcher in both Europe and Asia.  While their research locations varied, as did the styles practiced by individual respondents, they focused their energy exclusively on Western students of traditional Chinese martial arts.  As such individuals of Chinese nationality, or participants in more sport-oriented activities (Wushu, boxing, etc…) are not represented in this survey.

The authors drew on the theoretical insights of Lakoff and Johnson (1980, 1999) and Lakoff (1992) to develop a set of theoretical tools that would allow them to analyze and bring into focus a wide variety of linguistic metaphors that seemed to equate membership in a martial arts group to that of a family.  Rather than seeing metaphors as purely poetic (or political) linguistic constructions, Lakoff and Johnson posited that each of these emerges from our prior embodied physical experience.  Language and metaphor thus arise out of our experience of embodied physicality. Nor is there any more common shared experience than growing up within, and being subject to the authority of, one’s family.  More specifically, in their interviews with various martial artists they examined and found commonalities among the following six sentiments all related to the notion of “martial art as family”:

• Lineage as Family Tree
• School as Home
• The Club as a Nuclear Family
• Teacher as Father
• Classmates as Siblings
• Kung Fu as Relationships

Having explored a number of shared rhetorical patterns they then concluded that the metaphorical concept of “family” is critical to establishing a sense of shared belonging and place within what are otherwise surprisingly diverse communities. The family metaphor seems to be a critical tool whereby the previously exclusive Chinese martial arts have managed to transcend boundaries of time and culture, thereby emerging as a truly global phenomenon.

While this paper is empirical in nature and focuses specifically on a handful of (mostly Southern) Chinese martial arts, one suspects that the images that the authors explored can be found much more broadly throughout global martial arts culture.  I have certainly had a number of individuals describe their coaches and trainers are being “like a father” while conducting research with other types of martial arts. Indeed, the family unit is such a basic aspect of human psychology that I suspect we are prone to seeing it everywhere. It is precisely that sort of fungibility which makes the paper methodologically interesting and likely to appear on course reading lists and syllabi, even if one’s research interests do not focus on the traditional Chinese martial arts.

Indeed, I suspect that it is the paper’s theory section which will generate the most attention.  While this piece features the qualitative analysis of dozens of interviews conducted on two continents, their most innovative move was the use of Lakoff (1992) and Lakoff and Johnson (1980, 1999) as a theoretical framework.  They argue that not only could this approach be applied to a number of fruitful research questions, but that it might be particularly important in dealing with the embodied nature of identity. In underlining what they see as their unique contribution they go on to state:

Besides this article, to date and to our knowledge, no published study on traditional martial arts has overtly used the Contemporary Theory of Metaphor or metaphor analysis as a theoretical and methodological guiding point. (140)

This last assertion seems somewhat problematic.  Denis Gainty relied very heavily on Lakoff and Johnson in the construction of his ethnographically grounded approach to historical research in Martial Arts and Body Politic in Meiji Japan (Routledge, 2013).  While it is true that Gainty didn’t specifically favor Lakoff’s 1992 “Contemporary Theory of Metaphor,” much of the rest of their discussions overlap.  Indeed, Gainty goes even farther than Partikova and Jennings in the use of Lakoff and Johnson to construct a theory of embodied identity within the martial arts that would make obsolete the critical approaches built on Foucault, Derrida and Bourdieu (among others) who he viewed as overused (Gainty, 138-141).  It would not be an understatement to say that Gainty also built his entire study around what he considered to be the unique theoretical contribution of Lakoff and Johnson.

It would have been potentially constructive to see a more direct theoretical engagement between these two sets of authors who clearly share similar theoretical concerns and yet developed different research methods for approaching them (qualitative interview analysis vs historical ethnography).  The unfortunate death of Denis Gainty makes any sort of mutual exchange along these lines impossible.  But we appear to be reaching a tipping point where Lakoff and Johnson’s possible contributions to the martial arts studies literature will need to be studied and debated in a more systematic way.  If nothing else their reoccurrence seems to signal a degree of discontent in how embodied identities and knowledge are currently treated.

Still, Partikova and Jennings have opened a rich area for future investigation simply by verifying and documenting what might seem to be an idiosyncratic, even orientalist, verbal tick among some Western students.  Unfortunately, their study looked only at a narrow range of similarly situated practitioners, and thus doesn’t really provide us with the degree of variation that we need to delve more deeply into the sorts of social work that these familial metaphors might do.  Still, this paper suggests a pretty clear research agenda.

For instance, it would be very interesting to see how other sorts of martial arts traditions employ family-based metaphors.  How might Mexican boxers, German judo students and Brazilian capoeira practitioners score on the six points outlined above?  What about lightsaber combat students?  I will certainly be keeping an ear open for familial metaphors in my own fieldwork from now on.

It seems intuitively unlikely to me that the density or type of family-based metaphors would be a constant across all martial art and combat sport practices. That is probably a good thing as variables are much more interesting than constants.  Understanding more about the metaphors employed by different arts could potentially tell us something about how they seek to position themselves in society. For instance, in a forthcoming article Swen Koerner, Mario Staller and I note that the EWTO seems to have employed certain patriarchal familial metaphors in its popular publications when attempting to reach German Wing Chun students who were socially discomforted by the rising acceptance of feminist norms in the early 1980s.  Being able to document how various groups evaluate, tweak or strategically deploy this stock of shared metaphors might, in turn, reveal something about why some individuals might be drawn to a traditional martial art versus a modern combat sport or simply a non-competitive cardio-kickboxing class.

Second, the logic of Lakoff and Johnson would suggest a need to carefully interrogate our key terms.  Partikova and Jennings note, of course, that the very notion of “family” is culturally bounded.  Any Anthropology graduate student can explain in excruciating detail how kinship terms, marriage and child rearing practices vary from one culture to another.  In certain key respects the embodied experience of life within the average Chinese family is probably quite different for its American, German or Brazilian counterparts.

While we may all be displaying a great deal of agreement in metaphors that we use (everyone talks about the Sifu as “father”), one suspects that this actually means something vastly different for rural martial artists in the PRC than for a small Wing Chun school in upstate NY.  To paraphrase Krug (2001), we have come to agree on the exterior form of interculturally shared knowledge, but we still experience its texture quite differently.  Perhaps Lakoff and Johnson’s insights about the essentially embodied (and hence always culturally bounded) nature of language and metaphor might provide a mechanism for explaining the repeated failures to interculturally convey the “texture of knowledge” in his article on the “Three Stages of the Appropriation of Okinawan Karate” (Cultural Studies <-> Critical Methodologies, Volume: 1 issue: 4, page(s): 395-410).

Nor are all of the implications of this research purely theoretical.  Once we become aware of the metaphors that we use to describe our experiences within the martial arts, we can start to think more clearly about the impact that they might have on others in our training spaces.  For instance, it is probably not a coincidence that women are underrepresented in so many traditional Chinese martial arts schools while at the same time the familial metaphors that we use can have a notably patriarchal ring to them. Does our language really create open and inclusive spaces? Given that many of these social and linguistic structures are rooted in late 19^thand early 20^thcentury Confucian society (which was patriarchal in ways that are difficult for modern westerners to even imagine), this should probably not be a surprise. On a normative level the work of Partikova and Jennings may also present us with an opportunity to stop and reflect on the types of kung fu families that we want to build today.

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If you enjoyed this review you might also want to read: Dream Factories: The Silver Screen and the Popularity of Close Range Fighting Styles

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Matthew Polly. 2018. Bruce Lee: A Life. New York: Simon and Schuster. 656 pages. $35 USD.

Introduction

Matthew Polly is perhaps the best known and most popular author writing on the martial arts today.  His first two books took us on a whirlwind tour of life in the Shaolin Temple and MMA training for the octagon.  His latest project is a painstakingly researched biography of the famed actor and martial artist, Bruce Lee.  This book has already generated a lot of public discussion.  I don’t think that I am going out on a limb when I assert that this volume is likely to go down as the definitive Bruce Lee biography. I am thrilled that Matthew was willing to drop by Kung Fu Tea, and talk in some detail about both Lee’s life and the process of biographical research. Enjoy!

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Kung Fu Tea (KFT): Lets start our conversation at the end, which is where your biography begins as well.  Bruce Lee dies.  And the cause of that death has inspired huge amounts of speculation over the years.  Not to be out done, you advance your own, well-reasoned and very plausible, argument that Lee essentially died of heatstroke.  I find that interesting as it’s the sort of thing that could actually happen to anyone. It is tragic whenever someone dies from an event like this, but it also strikes me as essentially an accident.  It is like hearing that someone was hit crossing an intersection.  We tend to avoid ascribing moral weight to random events. As such, I suspect that some readers might not be satisfied with such a “common” cause of death. 

So lets talk about the significance of Lee’s death.  Why does it still matter to people, 45 years later, how Lee died?  And ultimately does having an answer change anything about our assessment of either his life or career as a martial artist?

Matthew Polly: There are two things everyone I’ve met on this journey knows about Bruce Lee: he was an expert at kung fu and there was something fishy about his death. Linda Lee has written that the question she gets asked the most is: “How did Bruce die?” His death is tied up with his legend in the public mind. We have a special place in our culture for celebrities who die young at the peak of their powers (James Dean, Marilyn Monroe). And part of Lee’s iconic status rests on that fact that we were never able to watch him grow old. More importantly, people find it difficult to let someone go if the cause of death remains a subject of controversy (JFK). It’s a wound that people keep picking at. It matters in Bruce’s case specifically because it remained a mystery for so long.

This made it particularly hard for Bruce Lee biographers over the years, because they had to end their books on an open question. Maybe it was an aspirin allergy? Or maybe it was the Triads? Or maybe it was a curse? Maybes are not a satisfying conclusion to a story.

How someone dies, particularly if they die young, makes a difference in how we understand their story. Suicides, like Robin Williams, cast a pall and force the biographer to look back into a life for clues of depression, etc. A murder would raise questions like: “Was Bruce reckless? Did he offend the wrong people?” Heat stroke can be random, but there are risk factors associated with it. In Bruce’s case, they were lack of sleep, weight loss, and having his armpit sweat glands surgically removed a few months before his death. He collapsed once and nearly died of heat stroke on May 10. Instead of taking a break or a vacation, he dove back into work. If the heat stroke theory is correct, then Lee’s relentless drive for perfection made him vulnerable and fate did the rest. His story becomes a parable of someone who paid the ultimate price to achieve his ambitions. So yes, how someone dies can very much change the way we perceive their life.

KFT: Let me now toss out another impossible question for you.  You are no stranger to the world of professional martial arts.  You lived at the Shaolin Temple before it was cool.  You trained in Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) and fought in the octagon.  In your assessment, how good of a martial artist was Bruce Lee?  Or is that the sort of question that those of us who never had a chance to touch hands with him can never know the answer too?

Matthew Polly: This is everyone’s second favorite question about Bruce after “why did he die.” You can never know for certain how good someone is unless you can exchange with them in person, but you can make some general observations even about people you have never met. The important factor is to break the “martial arts,” which is a huge category, into what I consider to be its four subsets: 1) no-rules combat (warfare, street fighting); 2) combat sports (boxing, kickboxing, wrestling, MMA); 3) stage combat (kung fu movies, Pro Wrestling, Peking Opera); 4) spiritual combat (Zen, Taoism, the quest for enlightenment).

As to the first category, Bruce’s mother style of Wing Chun was primarily a stripped down street-fighting art form, as was Lee’s later invention of Jeet Kune Do. Wing Chun appealed to him because street fighting was Bruce’s favorite extracurricular activity. By all accounts, he was excellent at it. He certainly put in enough practice. One of the main reasons he had to leave Hong Kong is because the police told his mother if he didn’t quit picking fights they were going to throw him in jail. I would say he was an elite street fighter, particularly for his size.

As for the second, Bruce had very limited experience with combat sports: he competed in one boxing tournament as a teenager. He didn’t like the rules associated with combat sports. I think he could have been very good if he chosen to pursue a particular combat sport, but he didn’t, so he wasn’t.

It is the third category where I believe Bruce was the best the world has ever seen. His legend rests almost entirely on his performances in four kung fu flicks, which were so magnetic, graceful, and ferocious that they inspired millions of young boys and girls to take up the martial arts. I know, because I was one of them. Jackie Chan is a more acrobatic performer and Jet Li has mastered far more techniques, styles, and weapons, but no one has ever seemed deadlier on screen than Bruce Lee.

As for the fourth, Bruce Lee was a seeker. He was deeply invested in the spiritual side of the martial arts. It’s one of the qualities that makes him so fascinating. In my view, he was on the path and headed in the right direction, but when he died, at the age of 32, he still had a ways to go, as do most young men. If he had been granted another 30 or 40 more years of life, I think he would have found the inner peace he was looking for.

KFT: I wonder if I could get you to say a few words on genre.  Obviously, your voice and personal experience comes through in all of your books.  But as I think back on them they are different works.  American Shaolin really strikes me as a story of place.  Tapped Out, while a personal journey, is also an exploration of a practice and a fighting culture. So why, for your third act, did you choose to journey into the realm of biography?  That must have called for a very different approach to researching and actually writing a book?

Matthew Polly: The reasons for the shift were largely practical. While training MMA for my second book, Tapped Out, I ended up with a broken nose and cracked ribs. For my next project, I wanted to find a topic that didn’t involve me getting punched in the face.

My first two books were written from a first person perspective in a gonzo style. I wanted to be the P.J. O’Rourke of martial arts writing. For a biography of Bruce Lee, I had to reinvent my prose style and switch to third person. It took several drafts, and each one involved editing myself out of the main text and sublimating my sense of humor. A lot of the first person storytelling and jokes were removed to the end notes, which I think of as the DVD extras. As I rewrote and rewrote over a three year period, I would remind myself, “This is not about you; it’s about Bruce. He has an amazing life story. Don’t get in the way of it.”

I also feel it is important for the prose style to match the subject. Bruce preached simplicity, directness, and economy as the tenets of his martial arts style. I tried to keep those principles in mind when writing about him.

KFT: Biography, as a genre, is something that has acquired a sort of checkered reputation among both academic historians and literary critics. Roland Barthes rather famously characterized it as “A novel that dare not speak its name.”  And others have gone even further in asserting that by forcing us to find significance in the random occurrences of a life based on our foreknowledge of how it is going to end, all biography is a type fictional (if often very well researched) writing.  One simply cannot package and tell another human being’s story without utterly transforming it.

I have certainly written a fair number of biographical sketches in my own academic work (including a short treatment of Ip Man), so I have my own thoughts on this issue. But I was wondering how you would respond to these charges.  Can we capture not just the events, but the texture, of another human being’s life?  Or, in some ways, is all of this asking the wrong question?

Matthew Polly: Once when I was sitting in Princeton’s student union I overhead a Comp Lit grad student say to some young coed he was trying to impress, “Clarity is hegemonic.” That was the moment when I realized I was never going to become an academic. In my opinion, if you can’t express an idea in a way that an intelligent, educated person can understand, then you don’t really understand the idea yourself. I would like the months of my life back I wasted trying to decipher the writings of Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida. Perhaps biographies resemble novels, because so many novels are just biographies with fancier prose and more imaginative plot lines.

Secondly, who says a life is a random occurrence of events with no causal connections and no meaning that can be derived from knowing how it ends or how it began for that matter? That kind of argument strikes me as a kind of flippant nihilism. Of course, adapting any human experience—a life, a war, a social struggle—into a book or a film involves the use of elements associated with fiction, like compression and scene setting and themes. The question with biographies is not: “Does this one exactly capture the life,” but “how close to the truth does it get?” There have been over a dozen biographies written about Bruce Lee. If you read all of them, as I have several times, it is pretty obvious which ones are better representations of his life and which ones are worse.

KFT: I once had a conversation with Charlie Russo (who has written extensively on the history of the Chinese martial arts in the Bay Area) about getting good research interviews. I personally have always believed that my prior experience as a martial artist gives me a degree of insight into what sorts of questions are interesting, or what answers might be plausible.  Still, I am aware that being enmeshed within the complex social world of the martial arts has probably closed certain doors to me.  

I have always been impressed with Charlie’s ability to open doors and get interviews. I suspected that as a non-practitioner he might be able to more credibly explain that he is just looking to tell a neutral story of a neighborhood.  What was your experience?  What was one time when you benefited from your extensive martial arts background, and when may it have complicated things?

Mathew Polly: First off, let me say that I love Charles and adore his book Striking Distance. It is one of the few well-written, well-researched books about Bruce out there. Charles and his book were extremely helpful in my research and I relied upon his work a great deal in covering the Bay Area period of Lee’s life. Every Bruce Lee fan should buy his book.

But to address the question, my experience is that the type of person who prefers to tell his story to a non-expert is usually a con artist. Honest people prefer an expert, because they don’t have to explain as much. So for example, Wong Jack Man and his students, like Rick Wing who wrote Showdown in Oakland, have been trying to sell a lie for fifty years—WJM really won that fight with Bruce Lee. They even got Hollywood to go for it with Birth of the Dragon (2016), which is nearly as inaccurate a depiction of the match as Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story (1993). Anyway, I got Rick Wing to agree to an interview with me until he found out about my background as a martial artist and then he backed out of it. I’m still amused by the irony that Rick tucked tail and ran from me just like his master Wong Jack Man did from Bruce.

For almost everyone else, my background as a fairly serious martial artist and a reasonably successful martial arts author was a benefit. They knew they weren’t wasting their time with some fanboy who was going to write something that no one was ever going to read. I’m proud to say that my Bruce Lee biography is the first one ever put out by a major New York publishing house (Simon & Schuster). My background also proved particularly useful in an interesting way with Betty Ting Pei. She’s deeply into Buddhism and the fact that I had lived in a Buddhist Temple in China was a connection she brought up repeatedly during our series of interviews.

KFT: A lot of the press coverage of your book has tended to dwell on its discussions of the more sensational aspects of Lee’s life, such as his drug use or various extramarital affairs. But one of the things that didn’t seem to come up all that much in your discussion were the persistent accusations of plagiarism that have followed Lee through the years.  Obviously, some of this stuff is difficult to deal with as one rather doubts that Lee ever intended to have his private notebooks published after his death.  Yet the college philosophy paper articulating his now famous “be like water” philosophy, in which Ip Man helps him to overcome difficulties in his Wing Chun, is clearly dependent on a published work by Alan Watts on hitting, and then overcoming, a conceptual wall in Judo.  I guess that raises two questions.  First, how do you deal with a massive amount of misattribution within discussions of Bruce Lee’s philosophy.  And second, what insight, if any, can we can gain about Lee’s personality from his rather liberal appropriation of Alan Watts?

Matthew Polly: James Bishop, who dedicated a large portion of his book, Bruce Lee: Dynamic Becoming, to the subject of misattribution and plagiarism in that college essay, has already emailed me repeatedly on this topic. When I was at lunch recently with Richard Torres, who teaches JKD and knows his Bruce Lee history, he pulled out Alan Watts’ book with the appropriated sections underlined. And now you bring it up. In journalism that’s called the rule of threes.

Clearly in retrospect, I should have either cut the college essay or addressed the “similarities” in the main text or at the very least an endnote. I let it slide because I had written earlier in the book that Bruce was a terrible student who often paid classmates to do his homework for him. I also happen to believe that, while Bruce borrowed language and imagery from Watts, he was genuinely trying to describe a similar spiritual epiphany. But the issue still bothers me, and if I have a chance to release an updated version I will address it more directly.

The misattribution topic is different as you noted. For readers who may not be aware, Bruce wrote down quotes he liked in his private notebooks without including the names of the writers, because he knew who they were. After he died his notes were published and these quotes from authors ranging from Chairman Mao to St. Augustine were misattributed to him. They now seem to live in perpetuity as “Bruce Lee Quotes” on the internet. My view is this was not Bruce’s fault, so I dealt with it in an endnote.

What does the fact that Bruce cheated in grade school and plagiarized at least one essay in college tell us about him? As I repeatedly pointed out in my book he was a hyper-competitive person who was not above bending the rules to achieve his goals. One of the anecdotes I tell is how Bruce asked Chuck Norris to gain twenty pounds so Norris would be fatter and much slower than him on film. I got into a debate with John Little, who fact-checked the book for me, about this story. He doesn’t believe it ever happened. My response was: “Come on, John, we both know Bruce would do whatever it took to win. That was a core tenet of JKD, which he explained to the protagonist of Longstreet when Lee taught him he should bite in close-quarters combat. He repeated the lesson when he bit Robert Baker in Fist of Fury.” Children are taught not to bite from an early age. Students are taught not to cheat. Bruce didn’t like rules or being told what to do. He liked the win. It was both a character flaw and strength. He never would have become the first Asian American male actor to star in a Hollywood movie if he hadn’t possessed such a relentless drive to succeed.

KFT: Martial arts were personally very important to Bruce Lee, and they consumed a huge number of hours within his unfortunately short life.  And yet when I read your biography I constantly got the sense that they are slipping into the background, that something else was always taking priority. Lee’s passions notwithstanding, most of this book seems to be about things not directly related to the martial arts (e.g., his acting career, family struggles, etc…).  

As I thought about this I started to wonder whether this was a reflection of who Lee was.  Was Lee basically a professional actor (from childhood) who had an interest in martial arts?  Or is this difficulty in capturing his personal discipline more of a reflection of the essential limitations of contemporary biography as a genre?  

When we tell the story of someone’s life, things are supposed to happen.  Events move towards an inevitable endpoint (ergo Barthes’ prior objection).  And yet the reality of serious martial arts training is that outwardly, very little appears to happen at all.  Every day in the gym looks similar to the one before, and the one that will come afterward.  Structure and consistency is one of the things that makes martial arts training attractive to some people.  But does that sort of monotony also tend to marginalize an aspect of someone’s life when we tell their story?

Matthew Polly: The answer to this question is fairly simple: it is a reflection of who I think Bruce Lee was based on my research. I have a lot of experience writing about the tedium of martial arts training and finding ways to make it interesting to readers. I dedicated exactly as much space to it as I felt it deserved in proportion to his other interests. This is a prime example of the legend not corresponding to the reality. Bruce Lee was an actor first, who became obsessed with the martial arts and then merged his two passions to become a martial arts actor as an adult. His father was an actor. Bruce faced his first movie camera at two-months of age. By the time he was 18 he had appeared in nearly twenty films—none of them kung fu flicks. He didn’t take up the martial arts until he was 16. He only taught martial arts in America, because he didn’t believe he could get an acting job as an Asian in Hollywood.

The second a Hollywood producer called him he dropped martial arts instruction like a hot potato and only took it up again after the Green Hornet was cancelled and he couldn’t get another paying gig. Even then, he focused primarily on teaching celebrities in the hopes that they would help advance his acting career, which they did. And as soon as his film career caught fire he closed down all his martial arts schools. When Bruce wrote down his “Definite Chief Aim” in life, the first line was: “I will become the first highest paid Oriental superstar in the United States.” He never mentioned any goal associated with the martial arts. Because people only watch his last four films and not his first twenty, they believe he was primarily a martial artist. But Bruce was an actor who became a great martial artist. Chuck Norris was a great martial artist who became an actor. Chronology matters. It is one of the main reasons Bruce is more convincing on film than Chuck.

KFT: I wonder if you could talk a bit about your research methodology for this book and maybe give a bit of advice to graduate students or amateur scholars who are reading this.  My training is in the field of Political Science, and while we interview politicians for our research projects, we rarely ever use the things they tell us as primary sources of data.  Our baseline assumption (well supported by years of experience I might add) is that they will just lie to us about any important or controversial topics.  And, in a sense, I guess it is understandable.  The line between studying politics and becoming involved in politics can be pretty thin.  Our basic rule of thumb when doing research is something like “contemporaneous documentation or it didn’t happen.”

For better or worse, most regular people don’t document their home life, emotional states or career choices, basically all of the things that we really want to know about in a biography.  Occasionally we get lucky and find letters, but you had to do a lot of interviews for this book.  How did you structure your interviews with an eye towards get reliable responses and (just as critically) how did you go about assessing the credibility of the resulting data?

Matthew Polly: Someday you’ll have to explain to me how you got from Political Science to Wing Chun. But to get to your great and complex question, here’s a few pointers I’ve picked up along the way. First, as with any investigation, be it a biography or Robert Mueller’s Russia probe, the key is to gather all the documentation first and become an expert in it. That way you know when someone is telling you something new. Then you can isolate the new material and poke at it until you decide if it is true or false.

Second, if you know a subject cold you can gauge the overall veracity of the person you are interviewing. For example, when Sharon Farrell recounted her affair with Bruce Lee to me, she didn’t have any contemporaneous documentation, but she described Bruce Lee with such specific details that I realized either she knew him intimately or she had read every single book ever written about him, like I had, because her account tracked perfectly.

Third, the more often a person has been interviewed the more likely they are to lie. Average folks don’t generally lie to journalists, and, when they do, they are usually bad at it, because they lack the practice. I found that the most unreliable sources were usually the people who had been interviewed the most about Bruce Lee, because they had their “stories” down cold.

Fourth, people will lie and tell the truth in the same interview. You shouldn’t throw out the entire interview just because you discovered one lie in it, but you have to be more careful about the rest of it. I interviewed one person who was a pathological liar but everyone else only lied when it was in their self-interest. When in doubt be most suspicious of self-serving tales.

Fifth, lying is an art form but so is lie detection. Cops are good at it because they spend a lot of time interviewing liars. The more people I interviewed the better my antennae got.

Sixth, the bigger concern for biographers, in contrast apparently to political scientists, is not with lies but with inaccurate memories. People are generally pretty good at remembering emotional moments—an argument or a fight or a sexual encounter—but they are terrible about time. There are at least a dozen people who claim they talked to or met with Bruce Lee on the day before he died. That’s because they talked or met with Bruce in the weeks or months before he died, and the shock of his death condensed the time frame in their minds.

Finally, the single most important thing for a biographer to reconstruct is the person’s timeline. I repeatedly had to go back and rewrite sections because I figured out someone had told me a true story but got the year wrong. As I argued above, chronology matters.

KFT: You must have read a lot of what has been written about Bruce Lee over the years in your research for this book.  Did you notice any patterns in what he meant to his fans or admirers?  Has the social meaning of Bruce Lee as an icon or image changed over time?  As you talk to readers of your book, what role does he occupy in the social imagination today?

Matthew Polly: I didn’t focus a lot of my attention on fans’ reactions to Bruce Lee, but my general impression is that Bruce Lee as an international icon has meant different things to different groups. To white Westerners like myself he was the Patron Saint of Kung Fu. He was the reason we started studying the martial arts. Martial arts improved our lives, so we view him as an inspirational, missionary figure.

To Asian-Americans, he gave them their first badass archetype, so he became like the demigod of war. (Over time, as Bruce has remained the only iconic Asian-American, and no one else has been elevated to join him in the pantheon, the image of the Chinese kung fu master has begun to be seen as more of a burden or an annoying cliché.) African-Americans saw him as a non-white guy beating up white people in his films, so he was adopted by the hip hop community as a racial empowerment figure. In Eastern Europe he became a figure of anti-communist resistance. The first statue ever erected to Bruce Lee is in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

The scandals surrounding Bruce’s death soured the Chinese public on him in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the rest of SE Asia. I have a Taiwanese friend who told me when he was growing up Bruce Lee was dismissed for not being Chinese enough. His reputation didn’t turn around until the mid-2000s. Why? Mainland China had no idea who Bruce Lee was until they started to open up in the 1990s. The government decided to reclaim Bruce, like they did Confucius, as a Chinese hero. In 2008, state run TV (CCTV) did a 50-part, highly fictionalized, series about his life, which became the biggest TV hit in the country’s history. Suddenly Hong Kong became very interested in revitalizing Bruce’s image as mainland tourists flooded down to get their picture taken next to his statue in Hong Kong harbor.

My real expertise is in how Bruce Lee has been portrayed in the media—magazines, books, TV, and film. He is a fascinating figure because no one outside of SE Asia knew who he was. Enter the Dragon was released a month after his death, so his fame was almost entirely posthumous. At first there was a rush to simply explain who he was. The first two biographies about him were very thin but they contained the best reporting of all of them up until Russo’s and mine. Alex Ben Block wrote the first one in 1974 and it sold 4 million copies. His take was about like mine: Bruce was an actor who became a great martial artist. He was a bit cocky, egotistical, and self-centered but he was also a loyal friend and progressive figure on race.

What you can see is Bruce’s legend grows over time from these fairly accurate biographical studies until he became almost superhuman. Driven by the marital arts magazines, he goes from being a great martial artist to an invincible fighter, from a young man with a serious interest in philosophy to an enlightened Zen master. This culminates with the 1993 release of Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story, which adds perfect husband and father to the image. Then John Little released a series of books culled from Bruce’s extensive archives of letters and notebooks, which contained all those misattributed quotes we discussed earlier. By the late 1990s, he borders on a semi-religious figure, St. Bruce.

This causes a reaction and skeptics like George Tan, Davis Miller and Tom Bleecker seek to tear down this impossibly inflated image. Message boards on the internet are set up to debate “How Good a Fighter Was Bruce Really?” “How Did He Die?” “Where Is the Lost Footage to Game of Death?” And then it goes relatively quiet for about a decade. My goal was to avoid these fights over Bruce’s legend as much as possible and get back to what the first biographers were trying to figure out: Who was Bruce Lee really as a human being? I came to a similar conclusion only with a much longer bibliography.

KFT: My final question is about Matthew Polly.  And I am going to cheat a bit by giving it two parts.  You dedicated a lot of time to this project over a number of years.  How has studying the life of Bruce Lee changed you as a martial artist or writer?  And as one of the most reliable and popular authors to write on the martial arts, what sorts of projects are on the horizon?  What should your readers be waiting for?

I’m much more interested in other people’s stories than I am in my own. That may also be a function of age. When I was younger I wanted to sort out what was going on inside my head, but I had an absolute blast figuring out what made Bruce tick. As for now, I haven’t decided if I’m going to write another book about the martial arts or a martial artist or perhaps a biography of a famous person in a totally different field. One of the main reasons people think of Bruce Lee primarily as a martial artist is because he died before he could branch out into different genres besides chopsocky. I’m convinced he would have tried his hand at comedies, thrillers, rom-coms, and dramas. If I were to die tomorrow, my short Wikipedia page would list me as a martial arts author. If not the next book then the one after, I’d like to branch out as well.

KFT: Thanks for dropping by and giving us another glimpse into Bruce Lee’s life and the process of writing about the martial arts.  I am sure that I speak for all of the readers when I say that I hope you have at least one more martial arts volume left in you.  But in any case, we hope to have you back on Kung Fu Tea soon. Seriously, I can think of half a dozen topics that we need to chat about!

oOo

If you enjoyed this interview you might also want to read: Bruce Lee: Memory, Philosophy and the Tao of Gung Fu

oOo

A History of Desire

When thinking about the diffusion of the Asian fighting arts to the West, we must distinguish between the history of the martial arts as they were practiced, and their evolution as symbols within the popular imagination.  Obviously both subjects are important.  Yet no one takes up a practice (or enrolls a child in lessons) before they are capable of imagining what they might gain.

This dichotomy between practice and perception suggests some interesting research questions.  Perhaps the most immediately relevant to this blog (and my ongoing research) would be, what exactly did Western audiences imagine when they saw images of Japanese judo or kendo students during the early 20^thcentury?  What similar or different meanings did they ascribe to “Chinese boxers” or “sword dancers” when they appeared in period postcards or newspaper accounts.  And how does all of this help us to understand the relatively early adoption of Japanese practices in comparison to their Chinese counterparts?

The standard explanation for all of this has simply ignored the realm of ideas and public discussion all together, extrapolating instead from practice.  It has frequently been asserted that no one in the West knew about the existence of the Chinese martial arts prior to the 1960s.  And in any case, the schools that did exist were “secretive” and closed to non-Chinese students until Lau Bun, Bruce Lee or some other pioneer threw open the flood gates, kicking off the process of transmission to an eager West.

I think we can safely say that this sort of popular reading of the situation is wrong on all counts.  We have now reviewed enough popular media from the late 19^thand early 20^thcenturies to establish that “Chinese boxing” (as the practice was most frequently termed in the period) was not a mystery.  Individuals might see it on postcards, in newsreels or even in local demonstrations.  Yet very few Westerners seemed all that interested in learning more about it until the late 1960s and early 1970s.  What changed was not so much the supply of the art (which, in all truth, remained limited even after immigration policies loosened), but rather the public’s demand for it.

This brings us back to the realm of ideas. We might even term our subject the history of cross-cultural desire.  What did Western consumers in the early 20^thcentury desire from images of Japanese martial attainment?  As we work on that puzzle we might gain some insight into what was missing from the images of the Chinese “sword dancers” which were also pretty popular during this same period.

Enter the Stereoscope

I recently acquired a vintage stereoscopic card that seems to speak directly, and rather self-consciously, to these questions.  These dual images were meant to be viewed through a table top or hand-held unit which, with the help of a set of lens, transformed two slightly offset photographs into a single three-dimensional image.  Collecting and viewing these cards was an immensely popular pastime in the late 19^thand early 20^thcentury.  Consumers in the West hungered for information about life abroad, but relatively few people had the resources to travel by steamship and train.  Travelogues of journeys to destinations in exotic Japan and China became instant best sellers.  Further, stereoscopic images were typically sold in sets which included extensive discussions of the places and people featured in the virtual tour.

All of this needs to be remembered when we think about early discussions of the Asian martial arts in the West. Images and accounts of these practices were being reproduced and packaged for sale by the same industries designed to satiate a hunger for travel and cross-cultural desire. Indeed, we tend to forget that the rapid reduction in transportation costs kicked off by the advent of steam travel in the late 19^thcentury initiated the first period of true economic globalization.  All of this inspired the rapid development of new martial practices throughout Asia, while simultaneously transmitting accounts of their practice to the West.

As such we should not be surprised to discover the occasional stereoscopic image of Asian martial artists or traditionally dressed soldiers during this period.  The current photograph features a group of Japanese boys going at it with bokkens and sticks as their parents look on.  In the foreground one can see one of their teachers attempting to direct the action.  The cherry tree blossoming in the background suggests that this was a school festival or an athletic day, rather than part of a regular martial arts training program.  Still, the publisher seems to consciously equate the two.

Flipping the card over readers will find the following discussion of the Japanese educational system and the place of “fencing” within it:

You are in the northeastern part of the city; the Imperial University, the Art School, the Zoological Museum and a number of other educational institutions are in this district.  This part of the park is a favorite place for schoolboys’ games.  You see the native teacher wears European clothes, and at least the caps of these struggling, hard-hitting youngsters are of European cut, but the spirit and energy with which they are playing did not have to be imported from the west!  Not one of these boys but knows by heart stories of Japanese loyalty and heroism that stir his blood.  It is not without effect that their ancestors, generations after generation, were taught the nobility of self-sacrifice for a beloved superior of a great idea.

Just at present these are merely jolly youngsters whose hardships consist only of severe demands by their school. They work much harder than English or American boys.  Besides learning to read and write their own immensely difficult language that means memorizing and learning to draw with a brush and ink, several thousand word-signs), learning Japanese history, etiquette and morals, all the boys study English too.  They will have to pass fairly difficult examinations in English grammar, general history, geography, arithmetic, geometry, and the natural sciences if they are to occupy any but the commonest positions in life.  What makes the case harder—though they themselves do not realize it—the scanty diet of Japan gives them an insufficient physical basis for all this severe work. The consequences is that many ambitious youth break down.

A great deal is made of athletics in boy’s schools.  The gymnasia are well equipped with modern apparatus.  Fencing, running, leaping, all are enthusiastically cultivated. Boat races are favorite amusements of the University students.  Baseball is immensely popular and admirably played. (See Lafeadio Hern’s chapters on School-life in his “Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan.”)

From Notes of Travel No. 9, Copyright 1904, by Underwood & Underwood.

As with any sort of period discussion, a note of caution is in order.  This image bears a copyright date of 1896 and gekiken (or kendo) was not yet an official part of the national curriculum for Japanese middle and high school students.  That didn’t stop individual schools from adopting either judo or fencing as core elements of their physical education programs. Yet in 1896 this topic was still generating policy studies and heated debate within the government. Denis Gainty’s discussion of the educational reform in the period makes it clear that the Ministry of Education was actually firmly opposed to the widespread adoption of fencing as (among other drawbacks) they were worried about repeated head trauma and other injuries to students.  They actually favored western inspired physical education policies and games.  Such practices wouldn’t become a mandatory element of the Japanese educational system until the early 1910s.

I will admit to having dismissed the Ministry of Education’s concerns when I first read them as being overprotective and a bit unfair to the martial arts.  Still, looking over this photograph one wonders whether they may have been on to something about the potential for head trauma!

This sort of bureaucratic nuance tended not to make its way into popular Western discussions.  They emphasized the “essentialist” nature of Japanese martial arts practice.  Fencing reflected values deeply embedded in the core of the Japanese nation. Just as the Meiji reformers intended, once the actual Samurai had vanished as a social class, the entire population could be reimagined along such lines.  It wasn’t just Japanese citizens who were involved in this project.  The Western press fully supported this rhetorical move as well.

In the case of Japan, cross-cultural desire seems to have been driven by the perceived effectiveness of these practices. While early Japanese wrestlers in the West were not undefeated, they won enough matches to inspire a fair degree of public interest.  They could even count among their many fans President Theodore Roosevelt who famously received instruction in the White House for a time.

We can find other clues as to the source of this desire in the dates on the card.  This particular card seems to have been published after 1904, using an image recycled from an earlier collection.  As such it was probably in circulation just after the end of the Russo-Japanese war.  Japan’s victories in this conflict electrified reading audiences in the West who were shocked to see a rising Asian power defeat a major European empire. The question on everyone’s mind was “How did they do it?”  How was Japan able to become a modern power so quickly?  It is not a surprise that attention would turn to their school system, or the use of the martial arts as a sort of “moral education.”

That last notion would continue to fascinate Western audiences for decades.  It may even be the progenitor of our rather paradoxical current belief that all children between the ages of 5 and 15 should spend at least two evenings a week in a local taekwondo gym as it “builds character.”  As the Chinese proverb reminds us, consider the source of the water from which you drink.

The charmingly chaotic nature of this scene reminds me of a related newsreel which promoted similar ideas.  This short film was produced exactly 30 years later (in 1934), and it is well worth watching. It begins with a massive outdoor kendo class with hundreds of students overseen by a number of instructors standing on a raised platform.  In the second scene the initial order has given way to two mobs of students rushing after each other in a fanciful recreation of some sort of medieval battle, but one in which spears, archers, horses, cannons and tactics play no role.  Meanwhile the narrator informs the audience:

“No good the little Jap boy saying ‘no can do.’ He just has to.  Here is the mass production of the ‘can do’ spirit at a Tokyo school. Besides being an old Japanese custom, it makes the youngsters tough and gets them used to taking the buffetings of life…

[The charge begins]

Spectacular! But there are probably one or two bad headaches after the skull cracking is finished.”

Schoolboys “Kendo” at Tokyo. British Movietone. August 6, 1934.

Conclusion

In some ways our two images are notably different.  While the stereoscopic card probably shows some sort of festival or community display, the second image provides an almost chilling insight into the actual militarization of school martial arts programs a few years before the invasion of China and the Second World War.  Yet the Western story about these images never changes.  In both cases the “fencing” is seen as an effective toughening exercise fully integrated into a modern educational system.  This probably played quite well with a Western audience raised on their own exhortations to live out a vision of “muscular Christianity.” If anyone doubted the utility of these exercises they could simply be pointed toward Japan’s many military victories, of which the Russo-Japanese War was just an opening salvo.

The Chinese martial arts, in contrast, lacked such credentials within the popular imagination.  The Chinese military had been repeatedly defeated by both Western powers and the Japanese.  Reformers like General Ma Liang, the Jingwu Association and later Chu Minyi were eager to follow the Japanese lead and institute regular martial arts training as part of the national school curriculum.  Yet their efforts, even when they won coverage in the English language press,  seemed to lack the “rough and tumble” ferocity that Western audiences admired.  While individual acts of athleticism might be admired or mocked in various articles, Chinese boxing as a whole didn’t seem to serve an equivalent purpose in Western media discussions.

Judo, jujutsu and kendo all appeared to answer the most pressing question of the day, “How do the Japanese do it?” The real problem wasn’t that individuals in the West had never heard of the Chinese arts.  Rather, no one was asking an equivalent question about China’s foreign policy or military accomplishments. It was precisely these larger national narratives that inspired the public toward cross-cultural desire or indifference.  The global “discovery” of kung fu would have to wait until we all started to ask a different set of questions in the wake of the Korean and Vietnam Wars.

oOo

If you enjoyed this brief Research Note you might also want to see: The Boxing Master, the Pirate’s Wife and the Soldier: Three Scenes from Southern China’s Piracy Crisis, 1807-1810

oOo

Introduction

Welcome to “Chinese Martial Arts in the News!”  Lots has been happening in the Chinese martial arts community, so its time to see what people have been saying.

For new readers, 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 let’s get to the news!

News From All Over

There has been lots of news on the Kung Fu Diplomacy front.  As regular readers of this blog know I have an interest in Nepalese weapons and history, and am constantly on the lookout for stories about those subjects. I don’t always share them here, but this story brought two of my interests together!  A group of Chinese martial artists from Nanjing recently traveled to Nepal to stage a demonstration for a large group of children.  Wushu has been growing in popularity in the region for years and it seems to be part of China’s strategy for increasing its social capital in the region.  This event was no exception.  Note, for instance, these quotes from the story:

Addressing the function, Chinese Ambassador to Nepal Yu Hong said that such events hold a great significance to enhance people-to-people relations between Nepal and China.

“Wushu is an integral component of China and I believe this show will help Nepali children understand more about Chinese art and culture. This show is an important part of cultural exchanges,” Yu said.

On the occasion, President of Nepal Olympic Committee Jivan Ram Shrestha said that Chinese martial art is very popular in Nepal, and the show can bring the children of the two countries together. He also took the occasion to appreciate China’s assistance in development of Nepal’s sports sector.

Meanwhile a slightly more formal version of Kung Fu Diplomacy was on display in Qatar.  A group of “Shaolin Monks” were sent to the National Theater in the capital to stage an official event commemorating the 30th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between these two countries.  This was arranged by the Chinese embassy suggesting yet another point of contact between the martial arts sector and the official diplomatic community.

Of course the global flow of martial artists doesn’t only trend in one direction.  Yet another article in Xinhuanet notes that lots of foreign martial arts pilgrims head to the Shaolin Temple every summer.  In fact, the article seems to imply that it is mostly the intrusion of foreigners that spoils the “peaceful,” zen-like serenity of the temple.  Not that this matters to the Temple’s Abbot who sees all of this as a sign that his efforts to establish Shaolin as a global “lifestyle brand” are paying off.  I would take this article with a grain of salt, but it has some great quotes:

On Saturday evening, more than 120 Kung Fu fans from 20 countries and regions gathered in the sacred meditation hall and put on a diverse selection of performances to celebrate their Shaolin roots in the presence of the abbot Shi Yongxin….

The most mesmerizing segments of the evening gala included a group of grey-robed Africans singing and dancing to the beats of the djembe, American students’ stunning display of acrobatics, athleticism, and agility, and a musical about seeking the truth of Shaolin culture in the birthplace of Kung Fu put on by a group of Russians. The zealous audience went wild with most rising to their feet and in thundering applause.

This celebratory event is a microcosm of what Shaolin Temple is hoping to achieve on the global stage in the future and a part of its attempt to broaden its appeal to foreign audiences.

Those looking for a more visual discussion of the gathering will probably want to check out this photo-essay in ECNS.  This is only a small selection of the sorts of stories that have been circulating in recent weeks.  Summer, it would seem, is cultural diplomacy season.

Bruce Lee continued to dominate the headlines for a second month, thanks in no small part to Matthew Polly’s recent biography.  Be sure to read our interview with Polly if you have not already seen it. The most impactful of the recent pieces was one that ran on CNN titled “New Bruce Lee bio debunks myths about the ‘kung fu Jesus’“.  Despite the title, that piece seems to be relatively balanced compared to much of the recent press coverage.  A lot of the tabloids are just latching on to the most sensational (and truthfully, the least consequential) aspects of Polly’s book.

Indeed, this book seems to have functioned as something of a shared global-spectacle, reigniting the public conversation about Lee.  That, in turn, has led to some interesting think pieces.  This one, titled “Bruce Lee, my Father and Me” would be particularly important for anyone interested in the intersection of politics, martial arts and global popular culture in the post-9/11 era.

Unsurprisingly the South China Morning Post has run a number of follow-up stories capturing different facets of the Bruce Lee phenomenon.  One of my favorites was a piece on Jackie Chan and a number of other actors who tried to emulate (or in some cases just clone) Bruce Lee’s performances after his death.  Other articles focused on Lee’s Hollywood connections to individuals like Steve McQueen and (very tangentially) to the Manson murders.  And then there was this podcast which asked how Bruce Lee used kung fu to fight bigotry.

Again, this is just a small sampling of the many stories on Lee that are circulating right now.  In fact, the martial arts studies community just wrapped an entire conference dedicated to Lee and his legacy.  Hopefully we will have a full report on that in the next week or so.  It seems safe to assume that we will continue to discuss Lee’s legacy for decades to come.

Chinese Martial Arts on the Big Screen

We have some great news for fans of the Ip Man film franchise.  GQ notes that the first three films (all featuring Donnie Yen) are now up on Netflix.  They also published a short review praising the series, though oddly they seem to have liked Ip Man 2 better than the original.  I guess there is no accounting for taste.

If your taste in Kung Fu films runs in a more vintage direction, and you were anywhere near NYC, I am sure that you have been spending some quality time at the MOMA lately.  They have been celebrating the late martial artist, choreographer and film director Lau Kar-leung with a ten film retrospective titled The Grandmaster (5-17 July).  This would have been a blast, I wish I could have been there.

Speaking of the Ip Man franchise, it looks like they wrapped filming all of the China based sequences for number four back in June.  The big surprise in recent days was the announcement that the story will feature a showdown between Donnie Yen and Jackie Chan.  Which could be great!  However the circumstances of the fight sound…interesting.  Lets just say Ip Man may be helping to bail a young Bruce Lee out of trouble…on this side of the Pacific.  Honestly, I would love to see what the meetings are like where they come up with stuff.  Of all the stories you could have told about Bruce Lee’s relationship with Ip Man….

Loose Ends

Taijiquan, as always, has been in the news.  Most of these articles continue to focus on the arts growing popularity in the West as a result of its therapeutic powers.  I thought that the most interesting of the recent batch was this piece, profiling the students in local class.  The upshot is that they are all cancer survivors and their group is sponsored by the Cotton O’Neil Cancer Center.  Its not a long piece, but the interviews are good and start to get at the unique personal experiences of these students.  This seems like a great research opportunity for anyone with a background in medical anthropology and an interest in the martial arts.

Last but not least, I made the local newspaper!  Or it would be more accurate to say that my lightsaber combat group did.  And the blog even got a shout-out as well. A reporter from the Ithaca Times visited one of my classes and spent about an hour interviewing me afterwards, trying to wrap his head around what we were doing.  He wasn’t a martial artist, but all in all I think that he did a good job in capturing what this project is all about.  So yeah, if you are ever in Central NY come on down and check out the “ancient” art of lightsaber defense!

Kung Fu Tea on Facebook

A lot has happened on the Kung Fu Tea Facebook group over the last month.  We saw a fantastic historic image of a Chinese weapons workshop, watched some newsreel footage with  “Big Sword” troops from the 1930s, and found out what Ninjas actually ate for dinner! 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!

***Luke White has generously offered Kung Fu Tea the following report on this year’s fourth annual Martial Arts Studies Conference at Cardiff University.  Sadly I was not able to attend, but reading Luke’s report makes me feel as though I was there.  That illusion will be further sustained by the fact that most of the papers were filmed and I expect that they will be showing up on-line soon.  And I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see a number of these papers in the pages of various journal during the upcoming year.  But you can read about them first right here. Thanks Luke!***

Conference Report – 4^thAnnual Martial Arts Studies Conference, Cardiff University, 11-12^thJuly 2018. By Luke White

The enthusiasm, energy and excitement of the fourth annual Martial Arts Studies conference – and the sheer variety of inquiry – would have been familiar to anyone who’s attended any of the first three of these. Whilst these first three, however, had been open in their call for papers, this year’s conference was different in having a particular theme. Marking the 45^thanniversary of his death, it took up the question of “Bruce Lee’s Cultural Legacies.” This meant the conference was somewhat smaller than in recent years, with around 45 attendees. However, not only did the standard of papers remain incredibly high, but the range of approaches to thinking about Lee remained dazzling. It quickly became clear that the focus on Lee was hardly a contraction of the scope of Martial Arts Studies, so wide is his influence in the historical rise of interest in martial arts during the late twentieth century. To think about what the martial arts are or mean today is probably, one way or another, to already be juggling with “Bruce Lee’s legacies.” The complex, multidimensional image of Lee and his legacy, as it was teased out over the conference, seemed a testament to the rich interdisciplinarity and the lively and open exchange of approaches that have characterized “Martial Arts Studies” so far in its still fairly short institutional life.

Film, media and cultural theory, of course, were prominent. Eric Pellerin examined the varying extent of authorship that Lee commanded over his films, as star, director and producer, in a paper that teased out the battles Lee fought to control the meaning of his image. Lindsay Steenberg located Lee’s performances within the longer tradition of “gladiator” movies and the versions of martial and Stoic masculinity that these entailed. Lee’s version of the gladiator, she suggested, marks a subtle shift in ideals of masculinity from that which could be embodied in the sheer bulk of Steve Reeves and other stars of the “Sword and Sandal” genre. Lee enacted a change from a “sculptural” and immobile ideal of Stoic manliness to a kinetic – and actively intellectual – one.

My own paper also sought (if rather differently) to explore the ripples in Western ideals of masculinity produced by its encounter with Bruce Lee and the “kung fu” craze. I examined the figure of the ninja, as depicted in the recent Netflix/Marvel/ABC serial Daredevil, as a case of the ongoing fascination in American popular culture with Asia and the Asian martial arts. I argued that the imitation of these by a hero such as Daredevil (and by extension more broadly by Euro-American martial artists) marks a somewhat complicated and ambivalent phenomenon, somewhere between appropriation and identification, Asiaphilia and Asiaphobia, mimesis and alterity, racism and anti-racism, where the imaginary Orient becomes a way to renegotiate fragile and crisis-prone Occidental male identities.

I was not alone in bringing up questions of ethnic identity and its transcultural representation. Glen Mimura explored Lee as a figure whose legacy has a certain drift towards the conservative masculinity most obviously embodied in Chuck Norris as right-wing cult icon. However, for Mimura, this is countered by a “discrepant cosmopolitanism” in Lee’s martial and cinematic legacy – the latter drawing more heavily, for example, from Sergio Leone’s Italian Spaghetti Westerns than it does on “classic” Hollywood style. Mimura also presented a striking image of the everyday racial tensions that would have surrounded Lee in his American life – the Black Panther Party headquarters, for example, were founded only four blocks from Lee’s home in Oakland, and just weeks after he moved from the area, in response to the systematic brutality of the local police. We can only speculate on the ways that this might have touched Lee’s life.

Aaron Magnon-Park traced the effects of the pervasive racism of the era into the soundtracks of Lee’s films. Lee was uniquely placed as an actor amongst his Hong Kong peers to cross over into Hollywood, due to his fluency in English. However, his accented speech nonetheless made him vulnerable to “othering.” After tensions arose during the shooting of Enter the Dragon, the director and screenwriter (allegedly) packed the script deliberately with words featuring the hard-to-pronounce letter “R,” as a means to humiliate the film’s star. For my money, the trick backfired, and Lee’s ravishingly suave, fluent-yet-accented speech is a key ingredient of his appeal. Dubbed into more standard English and stripped entirely of his linguistic otherness, Lee would only have been a less exciting figure – as was evidenced in the number of times in the conference that we found ourselves brought back to Lee’s famous phrases and the ways that he spoke these. If we are still haunted by the absent presence of Lee, this seems to be as much through the medium of his voice as through his fists.

Though the importance of cultural theory is unsurprising in a conference about a film star, Lee was also approached from very different disciplinary angles. Lyn Jehu offered a fascinating paper moving our focus on Lee’s legacy from the silver screen to the training mat. He asked what legacy Lee’s provocative essay “Liberate Yourself from Classical Karate” has today. To answer this, Jehu interviewed and observed contemporary practitioners who identified as exponents of both “traditional” and “modern” martial arts. Although Jehu’s findings, overall, were much more sympathetic to the open and non-hierarchical pedagogies of the non-traditional arts, he nonetheless teased out some fascinating contradictions in the beliefs of both groups, which raised questions on the one hand about the claims of modernizers to have liberated themselves from the “classical mess” Lee critiqued, and on the other for the traditionalists to be immune to the changes that Lee brought with him. “Tradition” and “modernization” seem, in fact, to be intensely problematic categories.

Like Jehu, Colin McGuire pursued his interest in martial arts theory into the training hall. Bringing an ethnomusicological perspective on Lee, McGuire examined his theoretical writings for their terminology of rhythm, tempo and cadence. As is particularly evidenced in martial arts practice, musical understanding, he proposed, allows us to master the temporal dimension of our existence. It also means that practice is inescapably permeated by culture. With a perspective also emerging from the social sciences, George Jennings set about understanding Lee not so much as a film star but as a “founder” and innovator, looking to understand constants that lead people to found new martial arts. David Brown drew on Max Weber’s account of charisma to understand the magnetic appeal Lee had over others, making a fascinating attempt to reground such appeal (which remains somewhat abstract in Weber) in the body.

Perspectives were also offered from the perspectives of a range of cultural practices beyond film and television. Vera Kérchy explored the fascination of avant-garde French playwright Bernard-Marie Koltès with martial arts cinema, which, she argued, provided a blueprint for the repeated scenes of existential confrontation and the constant threat of violence in his theatre. Caterina McEvoy discussed the inspiration she drew as a sound and installation artist from Lee’s philosophical ideas. Animator John Twycross’s project started from the desire to fight Bruce Lee (virtually) and the disappointment in simulations such as Electronic Arts’ MMA fighting gameUFC(2014), which includes Lee as a character but actually only offers him the same generic martial arts movements as other characters. Twycross has been working on the challenges of transforming Lee’s filmic appearances into a digital avatar that more fully captures his idiosyncratic style of movement. Sally Chan came at Lee with an insider’s perspective on the advertising industry’s struggles to produce more ethnically diverse (and, let’s face it, less racist) images for its audiences’ identification. Her paper traced the changing nature of adverts that have sought to capitalize on images of Bruce Lee from the 1980s to the present.

We also met a philosophical Lee – or actually a series of philosophical Lees. Kyle Barrowman, in a provocative paper that steers the study of Lee away from the concerns of the left-liberal scholarship that dominates the British humanities, read his ideas in terms of a tradition of American individualism that can be traced through the “perfectionism” of Emerson, Cavell and Rand. Barrowman’s paper was striking in the way that it problematizes the “countercultural” Bruce Lee in whom many of us are invested, and points to the ideological complexity that would have surrounded the West-coast American context in which he developed his ideas.

If Barrowman’s paper, however, places Lee’s thought within a Western context, two papers squarely relocated him within Chinese philosophical history. Wayne Wong proposed the concept of yi(“ideation”), central to Chinese aesthetics since the sixth century, as a key to understanding Lee’s work. Lee offered us this ideation, he argued, not only through cinema but also through a theory of fighting. Wong’s paper – like his recent essay in Martial Arts Studies Journal – was enormously useful in extending and challenging attempts in Anglophone film studies to account for martial arts cinema aesthetics in purely Western terms.

Siu Leung Li – just one of the eminent keynote speakers at the conference – read Bruce Lee in terms of Mencius’s traditional opposition between those who labor with their body and those who exercise their minds, and of the subsequent division in Chinese culture between the “martial” and the “scholarly.” Doing so, he foregrounded the unusual extent to which Lee managed to forge a star image not only as a fighter, but also a philosopher. Li’s paper also brought us to consider Bruce Lee’s use of his sources, and his use of unattributed paraphrase. This has drawn criticism from some as “plagiarism,” but might alternatively be fitted into the procedures of the traditional genre of “poetry talk.” As a thinker, Lee proceeded primarily by quoting others, adding little of his own. However, as Li emphasized, in doing so he creatively put their words to work in new ways. The paper also brought us back once more to Bruce Lee’s haunting voice, and the paradox that Lee’s trademark rhythmical intonation of his famous sayings (loaded as this seems with “Chineseness”) actually really only works effectively in English, not in his native Cantonese.

A final Lee we met was the biographical Lee. There was, of course, an interest in the facts of Lee’s life throughout the conference. However, we were lucky to have as another keynote Matthew Polly, whose new biography of Lee has just been published. This is the product of some seven years of research during which Polly conducted over a hundred interviews. Produced somewhat beyond the auspices of Lee’s estate, which is famously protective of the star’s image, it promises to offer the first really definitive account of his life, escaping both hagiography and sensationalism. Polly’s presentation – which concentrated on Lee’s childhood and family background – was fascinating, uncovering material that had escaped previous researchers. From the evidence of his presentation I can’t recommend the book enough to anyone with an interest in Lee – my copy is already on order!

The Bruce Lees we met during the conference, then, were multiple and in many ways contradictory. Lee remains an enigma. Was he a plagiarist or a genius? Does he belong to Chinese or Western culture? Does he offer us emancipatory or conservative images of masculinity or ethnicity? Did his films change or reinforce the ways East Asia had been imagined in America and Europe? Does he exemplify cosmopolitan mixture or ethnic specificity? Was he an entrepreneurial individualist fighting his way to the top of a competitive marketplace for celebrity, or is he a countercultural “Third World Warrior”? Was he the martial artist who did away with “classical mess,” or an expert whose brilliance was built on thousands of hours of traditional form practice during his early studies? Perhaps many of the seeming contradictions that we found ourselves repeatedly juggling over the two days of the conference are just more sophisticated versions of the phenomenon, which Paul Bowman pointed us towards in his keynote (ironically titled “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Bruce Lee”). A plethora of questions circulate on the internet: “Could Bruce Lee have beaten Mohammed Ali?” “Really,how good were Lee’s martial arts?” (etc., etc.) Bowman picked just five of these questions, which he, as a “Bruce Lee expert” gets repeatedly asked. Rather than answering them, Bowman took apart their presumptions and highlighted their absurdity – Lee’s image in all its enigma, as a kind of undecidable “quantum event” – seems to act, he suggested, as something of a “lure” for our projections. The demand for “Reality” addresses us emotively and affectively, rather than just rationally. In this regard, Lee has taken on for fans and interpreters alike something of the quality of scripture, which is always, of course, selectively read.

What should we make of Bruce Lee’s legacy, now, 45 years after his death? Certainly, Lee seems to have been profoundly implicated in a series of socio-cultural changes which are perhaps still ongoing today: seismic shifts in the fault-lines between “The West” and its “others,” and even between masculinity and femininity. Analysis of Lee, as an icon around whom much of this was articulated, remains important. The shiftingnature of this legacy was indicated by the sense – repeated at a number of moments in the conference – that his image is still changing. The earliest Lee-themed adverts that Chan showed imagined him in decidedly lowbrow, “chopsocky” terms; increasingly, he is figured in advertising as spiritual, calm and philosophical. This finding was echoed in Steenberg’s breakdown of language in recent “#BruceLee” Twitter posts. Perhaps even the interest during the conference itself in claiming Lee not just as an excellent actor or fighter but as a thinker constitutes part of this changing image. This might, again, suggest ongoing shifts in wider ideas about the martial arts, and about gender and race – shifts which seem broadly positive.

Lee’s influence in the martial arts themselves, of course, is ubiquitous. As one attendee noted in one of the discussion sessions, it is probably even visible in the rise of interest in Historical European Martial Arts. But Lee’s fame beyond this context is paradoxical: as was also noted more than once during the conference, he’s one of the few people across history whose face is recognisable by almost everyone, globally. However, relatively few people have actually watched a Bruce Lee movie from start to finish. So, is Lee a genuinely significant cultural figure or just a matter of intense interest to a fringe minority?

Similar questions, of course, dog the wider question of the “relevance” of Martial Arts Studies. Perhaps at the heart of this paradox there lies another of the false binaries Bowman’s paper warned us about. Nonetheless, the very existence of our keynote speaker Matthew Polly’s lively, accessible biography seems to hinge on the belief – not only of Polly but also his publishers – that Lee is a figure with a mainstream interest beyond a small group of obsessives or academics. Certainly, the response that Polly’s work has garnered in the mainstream media suggests that this appeal may exist. I for one will be crossing my fingers (along, I am sure, with Polly!) that sales bear this out. That this is only happening now suggests that something is in the wind, and Lee’s hour is finally at hand.

About the Author: Luke White is Senior Lecturer in Visual Culture and Fine Art at Middlesex University, London. He is currently working on a book about kung fu comedy films.

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If you enjoyed this report you might also want to read: Violence and the Martial Arts: Contagion or Cure?

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Paul Bowman and I are happy to announce that the sixth issue of Martial Arts Studies (an imprint of Cardiff University Press) has been published and is now available. This interdisciplinary academic journal is free to read or download by any individual or institution with an internet connection. Today’s release is also a special issue, guest edited by our good friend Michael Molasky, Professor of Asian Cultural Studies in the School of International Liberal Studies at Waseda University (Tokyo).

Titled “New Research on Japanese Martial Arts,” the issue critically examines the state of the Martial Arts Studies literature in Japan. Prof. Molasky has also selected a few pieces from the global (English language) literature that compliment the theme of the journal and showcase important theoretical or methodological discussions.

On a personal note, I am very happy to see the release of this special issue as I feel the Japanese martial arts are somewhat underrepresented in the current Martial Arts Studies literature. While these were the first Asian fighting systems to spread throughout the global environment, and they set the pathway that many other traditional fighting systems would follow, there hasn’t been a lot of discussion of what is happening in Japan today. This is all the more paradoxical given the large numbers of Japanese scholars who write on these topics. A close reading of Prof. Molasky’s editorial goes some way towards explaining the current state of affairs, and we hope that this issue will be a downpayment on its betterment.

If you are looking for someplace to begin, you can find a quick overview of the issue’s themes and each article in the opening editorial. Prof. Molasky’s contribution provides an important discussion of the Japanese literature which must be considered mandatory reading.  I would recommend taking some time to digest that before going on to any of the seven research articles or two special reviews which the issue offers. It is our sincere hope that all of this represents the first step towards a more substantive engagement between the Japanese and global martial arts studies communities.

Front Matter

Opening Editorial – Paul Bowman and Benjamin Judkins

On Martial Arts Studies in Japan: A Provocation – Michael Molasky

Research Articles

The Historical Creation of Kendo’s Self-Image From 1895 to 1942 – Yasuhiro Sakaue

The Dissemination of Japanese Swordsmanship to Korea – Bok-Kyu Choi

The Acculturation of Judo in the United States During the Russo-Japanese War – Kotaro Yabu

Narrating History in the Manga ‘Judo No Rekishi – Kano Jigoro no Shogai’ (1987) – Andreas Niehaus

Japanese Martial Arts and the Sublimation of Violence -Tetsuya Nakajima

An Introduction to the Sociology of Japanese Martial Arts – Raul Sanchez Garcia

Aikido, Violence and ‘Truth in the Martial Arts’ – William Little

Reviews

Denis Gainty. 2013. Martial Arts and the Body Politic in Meiji Japan. London and New York: Routledge. Reviewed by Benjamin N. Judkins.

Tetsuya NAKAJIMA. 2017. Kindai Nihon no budoron – mondai no tanjo [Discourse on Budo in Modern Japan – The Origins of the ‘Sportification of Budo’ Problem]. Tokyo: Kokusho kankokai, 2017). Reviewed by Mike Molasky.