Taijiquan practitioners attempting to set a new record. Source: dailymail.co.uk

Introduction

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

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

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

Japanese and Chinese martial arts students meeting in Fujian. Source: SCMP

News from All Over

Our first story comes from the (digital) pages of the South China Morning Post.  It recently carried a short article looking at Karate’s Chinese origins.  This discussion comes on the heels of Karate’s inclusion in the upcoming Tokyo Olympic games, while Wushu once again finds itself on the outside looking in.  However this particular piece focuses instead on the academic research of a Chinese scholar named  Lu Jiangwei (from Fujian) who recently completed a doctoral dissertation looking at the origins of “Karate culture” at the Okinawan Prefectural University of Arts.  This is an interesting project as it is clearly encouraging a fair bit of international cooperation among researchers.  At some point I will need to see if I can learn more about Lu’s research methods and findings.

A statue located in the Wong Fei Hung Temple in Foshan.

Perhaps the most famous master of the traditional Chinese martial arts to make the news this week was the noted Hung Gar practitioner Wong Fei Hung.  While he ended his life as a recluse, Wong is perhaps the best known Kung Fu personality of his generation because of the many newspaper stories, novels, radio programs and movies that have embroidered his legacy.  A short note in The Star reports that Wong’s real life disciples and students were unsuccessful in their recent attempts to locate his historic grave.  Apparently the cemetery that he was laid to rest in was demolished to make room for a new high rise development.  While only a short note, this story reinforces the inherent challenges involved in preserving and understanding the physical and architectural history of the Chinese martial arts in a constantly shifting landscape.

Speaking of change, ECNS ran a story on the efforts of mixed martial artists (and the promoters behind the ONE Championship) to establish a foothold in China’s lucrative media and entertainment markets. This is a story that we have covered here before, but what I found most interesting about this article was the language that it used.  It situated MMA as an outgrowth of the traditional Chinese martial arts, and thus their “return” home was something “natural” rather than foreign.  Still, it ended the following note: “As the ancestry of modern mixed martial arts, Chinese kung fu enjoys popularity around the world and now it’s time for the time-honored martial art form to evolve by communicating with the world.”

Photo by Hotli Simanjuntak/EPA. Source: fightland.vice.com

This is not the first time that an MMA promoter has tried to break open the Chinese market and it probably won’t be the last.  One of the challenges inherent in getting a foothold is all of the other combat sports that are already popular with Chinese audiences, athletes, media outlets and bureaucrats.  By far the most important (and economically lucrative) of these is Sanda.  Sascha Matuszak recently wrote a quick introduction to the topic over at Vice’s Fightland blog.  It lays out the facts on the ground quite nicely.  And while you are there check out his other post on the place of the wooden dummy in modern (post-Ip Man) Chinese martial arts training.

The recent attempt to set a record for the largest taijiquan demonstration, Photo: China News Service / CFP

Where is the calmest place on Earth?  According to this photo-essay in the Daily Mail it would have to be in the middle of a massive recently staged (October 18th) Taijiquan demonstration held in Jiaozuo City of Henan province.  Some of the photos generated by this event are as breathtaking as one might suppose.  But another article in the GB Times does a better job of explaining the purpose of the event.  In addition to attempting to set a world record for the largest simultaneous taijiquan practice session, the event organizers were hoping to raise awareness for their bid to have the Chinese martial arts declared an element of “intangible cultural heritage” by UNESCO.

According to a recent study conducted by Yi-Wen Chen, from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, there may be a number of other reasons for these individuals to continue with their Tajiquan practice.  After conducting a review of 33 separate studies (containing about 1,500 research subjects in total) her team found that the regular practice of Taiji can be beneficial for people suffering from a wide range of chronic illnesses ranging from arthritis to cancer.   Reuters ran a story (which was distributed by a large number of other outlets) detailing their specific research findings.

Female student studying Wushu in a scene from Inigo Westmeier’s Dragon Girls.

National Geographic introduced readers of its blog to approximately “36,000 kids you don’t want to mess with.”  The children in question are students of the Shaolin Tagou Kung Fu academy, one of the largest residential wushu schools in China.  The occasion for the discussion was an interview with filmmaker Inigo Westmeier who directed the documentary “Dragon Girls.”  Recently she collaborated with DB Ben Surkin to turn some of that footage into a music video for Gener8ion featuring M.I.A.  The video is great, so if you have not seen it yet be sure to click on the link at the top of the post.  The rest of the article is dedicated to a discussion with Westmeier about the production of the documentary, its reception in China and her other projects.

Bruce Lee with his favorite onscreen weapon.

While best known by practicing martial artists as a weapon associated with traditional Karate, the nunchuck exploded into popular consciousness in the west after the 1973 release of Enter the Dragon.  More recently a number of law enforcement personal are taking a second look at this simple weapon.  This is not the first time that police officers have trained with nunchucks.  It seems that their versatility (they can be used to restrain as well as to strike), and their shorter length are winning converts.

While on the subject of nunchucks, the Seattle Times recently ran a piece on the opening of the second installment of the new Bruce Lee exhibit at the Wing Luke museum.  The piece includes discussion of Lee’s life in the city as well as some more personal photographs included in the collection.  Head on over and check it out.

Into the Badlands by AMC.

Chinese Martial Arts in the Entertainment Industry

AMC’s new series “Into the Badlands” (set to debut on Nov. 15) is continuing to pick up a lot of good press.  In keeping with what we have already seen much of this focuses on the series’ martial arts content.  Evidently the studio believes that this will separate the project both from their other products and competing programs on TV.  The New York Daily News ran a longer than expected piece on the upcoming series which you can take a look at here.  I thought that it was interesting to note that in the post-apocalyptic future imagined by the show there are no longer any firearms.  Obviously that decision gives the directors more freedom to showcase their martial arts assets, and its a common story telling trope in classic Chinese martial arts films (many of which are set in an imaginary past).  Still, its not a storytelling device I am very fond of as it ignores the fundamental fact that the Chinese martial arts, as they exist today, are very much the product of a world in which firearms were present.

Qi Shu plays the title role, a young girl who is kidnapped by a nun and trained to become a killer. Source: New York Times.

When it comes to news stories about the Chinese martial arts, director Hou Hsiao-hsien’s recent film The Assassin is breaking the internet.  Up to one third of all of the stories that I ran across in the last week were about this film.  Readers may recall that the early discussions of this period drama, set in the Tang dynasty, were very positive.  Reviewers loved Hou’s visual aesthetic and he won an award at Cannes for his work.  Now that the film has actually hit theaters a muck larger batch of reviews are commenting, and unfortunately the results appear to be mixed.  While a few reviewers love the film, others are claiming that its falls flat.  Most seem to be somewhere in the middle, capable of appreciating the film’s beauty while claiming that it has some notable shortcoming.  This review at the Globe and Mail seems to be typical of the current discussion.  Everyone seems to agree that what Hou created pushes the boundaries of what you can do with a “normal” martial arts film, but there is less consensus as to whether that was ultimately a good thing.

Of course there is always a lot of classic Kung Fu cinema out there just waiting to be rediscovered by audiences.  Consider for instance the 1978 Shaw Brothers film “Heroes of the East” starring  Gordon Liu, Yuka Mizuno, Kurata Yasuaki and directed by Liu Chia Liang.  It would be an understatement to say that the film as has interesting political subtext, and given current events, it once again seems timely.  Check out this post over at Vice Sports which discusses the film as well as its historic and current geopolitical context.

Source: http://martialartsstudies.blogspot.com

Martial Arts Studies

There have been a number if important developments in the area of Martial Arts Studies.  First off, the publisher Rowman & Littlefield (who helped to sponsor our recent conference at the University of Cardiff) have announced the creation of a new book series dedicated to producing titles within the field of Martial Arts Studies.  Paul Bowman will be the series editor. In the interest of full disclosure I should state that I am also a member of the project’s editorial board.  Obviously this is an important step in developing Martial Arts Studies as it ensures a dedicated outlet for new monographs and will help to build visibility among readers.  To find out more about the book series click here.

Paul recently presented a paper titled “Making Martial Arts Studies: A Tale of Two Books.”  Follow the link to read a copy of the paper or to watch video of his presentation.  Also, researchers interested in publishing in the interdisciplinary journal Martial Arts Studies should check our recent Call for Papers regarding an upcoming special issue titled “The Invention of Martial Arts.”

Vintage French Postcard

Wendy Rouse, who teaches in the Department of Sociology and Interdisciplinary Studies at San Jose State University, recently uploaded a paper to Academia.edu titled “Jiu-Jitsuing Uncle Sam: The Unmanly Art of Jiu-Jitsu and the Yellow Peril Threat in the Progressive Era United States” (Pacific Historical Review, Vol. 84 No. 4.)  This looks like it will be an important article for anyone interested in the early history of the Asian martial arts in the West or those working on questions of masculinity, national identity and racial politics.  The abstract is as follows:

The emergence of Japan as a major world power in the early twentieth century generated anxiety over America’s place in the world. Fears of race suicide combined with a fear of the  feminizing effects of over-civilization further exacerbated these tensions. Japanese jiu-jitsu came to symbolize these debates. As a physical example of the yellow peril, Japanese martial arts posed a threat to western martial arts of boxing and wrestling. The efficiency and effectiveness of Japanese jiu-jitsu, as introduced to Americans in the early twentieth century, challenged preconceived notions of the superiority of western martial arts and therefore American constructions of race and masculinity. As Theodore Roosevelt and the U.S. nation wrestled with the Japanese and jiu-jitsu, they responded in various ways to this new menace. The jiu-jitsu threat was ultimately subjugated by simultaneously exo- ticizing, feminizing, and appropriating aspects of it in order to reassert the dominance of  western martial arts, the white race and American masculinity.

The Fighting Art of Pencak Silat and its Music (Brill 2015) by Uwe U. Paetzold and Paul H. Mason

Brill has recently released a new volume titled The Fighting Art of Pencak Silat and its Music: From Southeast Asian Village to Global Movement edited by Uwe U. Paetzold of the Robert Schumann University of Music, Düsseldorf and Paul H. Mason from the University of Sydney.  Silat has generated a fairly good sized collection of academic studies in the past and that number seems to have accelerated in recent years.  This study appears to be unique in the degree to which it has been shaped by ethnomusicology in addition to other more typical fields including sociology and anthropology.  The publisher’s note is as follows:

Fighting arts have their own beauty, internal philosophy, and are connected to cultural worlds in meaningful and important ways. Combining approaches from ethnomusicology, ethnochoreology, performance theory and anthropology, the distinguishing feature of this book is that it highlights the centrality of the pluripotent art form of pencak silat among Southeast Asian arts and its importance to a network of traditional and modern performing arts in Southeast Asia and beyond.

By doing so, important layers of local concepts on performing arts, ethics, society, spirituality, and personal life conduct are de-mystified. With a distinct change in the way we view Southeast Asia, this book provides a wealth of information about a complex of performing arts related to
the so-called ‘world of silat‘.

Unfortunately you will probably need to head to your local university library to find a copy of this book.  At $175 a copy I doubt that it will end up on my shelf in the near future.  Fortunately Gisa Jähnichen has uploaded a copy of her chapter titled “Gendang Silat: Observations from Stong (Kelantan) and Kuala Penyu (Sabah).”  This will be especially interesting for students with a background in music or an interest in performance.

Redemption: A Street Fighter’s Path to Peace by Michael Clarke

Michael Clarke, a long time karate practitioner and Kyoshi eighth dan, will be releasing an autobiographical work titled Redemption: A Street Fighter’s Path to Peace (Ymaa Publication).  While not a scholarly work students of Martial Arts Studies may find this interesting more as a “primary text” due to its extensive discussion of the modern history of Karate and social observations on violence and martial arts.  It is due out in March of 2016.

Lastly, be sure to check out the first part of my recent interview at Kung Fu Tai Chi magazine where Jon Nielson and I sit down with Gene Ching to discuss our book on the social history of the southern martial arts, Wing Chun and the importance of recent development in martial arts studies.  Expect the second half of this detailed interview to posted sometime next week.

Chinese tea set. Source: Wikimedia.

Kung Fu Tea on Facebook

As always there is a lot going on at the Kung Fu Tea Facebook group and this last month has been no exception.  We discussed modern Daoist meditation practices, the life of Ma Liang (both a warlord and martial arts reformer) and watched some new interviews with Adam Hsu.   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.

Volkerkunde by F.Ratzel.Printed in Germany,1890. This 19th century illustration shows a number of interesting Japanese and Chinese arms including hudiedao.

Three Critical Questions

The inaugural issue of Martial Arts Studies, a new interdisciplinary peer reviewed journal edited by Paul Bowman and myself, will be released very shortly.  In fact, I have it on good authority that it will go live on Monday morning.

Whether you are interested in history, anthropology, cultural studies or martial arts cinema, you are sure to find something within this first issue.  It features a number of articles, both empirical and theoretical in nature, by some very talented scholars who have generously agreed to share their research with us.  It also has a substantial review article as well as a number of discussions of recently released books that may be of interest to students of martial arts studies.  The journal’s homepage is even getting a slick new update as we speak.

Many exciting things are currently developing within the field of martial arts studies and it is our hope that this journal will provide a forum in which students can discover the very best research that is being produced.  Working in partnership with Cardiff University Press, Martial Arts Studies is being distributed as a true “open access” journal.  Any individual with an internet connection will be free to read, download, share or print articles free of charge.  Nor will we ever charge authors a fee for publishing their work with us.

I know that for myself it will be a long wait until Monday morning.  So what better way to pass the time than by doing a little reading in preparation for the upcoming release.  After all, what we have read in the past enhances our understanding of works that we will encounter in the future.

Or maybe you find yourself asking one of the following questions.  What on earth do the martial arts (which strive to be practical) have to do with academic research in the first place?  If I am not a professional scholar, how can I recognize good research on the martial arts?  What sorts of things should I be looking for?  Or alternatively, if you are already an academic researcher, what sort of contribution could a better understanding of these fighting systems actually make to theoretically substantively discussions?  Sure they are interesting, but so what?

Giving some thought to each of these questions will be a great way to pass the hours until Monday morning.  It may also help to ease yourself into some of the coming discussions that you may encounter.  So here are three recommended essays, each of which attempts to address one of the previous questions.  Find the one that is right for you, or just read all three!

A) How can I recognize good scholarship within the field of martial arts studies even if I am not a researcher myself?

-Check out: Writing (and Reading) Better Martial Arts History in Four Easy Steps  or, for an example of a nice historical argument, see: Invulnerability in the Chinese Martial Arts: Meir Shahar on the Origins of the “Iron-Cloth Shirt” and “Golden-Bell Armor”

B) What do the martial arts have to do with academics?  And more importantly, what could universities actually do for the traditional martial arts?

-For a comprehensive answer to that question (and a fantastic review of the current state of the literature) see: Will Universities Save the Traditional Asian Martial Arts?

C) Sure it all sounds interesting, but so what?

-This is how I think about that problem: Martial Arts Studies: Answering the “So what?” question

Good luck with the homework.  And check back here Monday morning to find your first issue of Martial Arts Studies.

Paul Bowman and I are happy to announce that the first issue of the new interdisciplinary journal Martial Arts Studies has arrived. It is free to download, read or share by anyone with an internet connection. Best of all, the journal has sharp new look to compliment its cutting edge content.

Readers of this this issue can expect to see a variety of papers, original research, review articles and book reviews contributed by both young scholars and some of the most respected names in the field.

Our goal for the first issue was to explore what “martial arts studies,” as an academic research area, really is. What does its study entail? What methods or approaches might its students employ? What sorts of questions does it touch on?

Obviously we have only just begun to think about these issues, and I am sure that over the course of the coming weeks and months we will have ample opportunities to explore the arguments of the authors in much greater detail. Still, even at this early stage one thing is clear. Martial arts studies is a field with immense promise. We currently find ourselves standing at the most exciting point of any great adventure, the beginning!

Paul and I both hope that you find much of interest in the pages of this issue, and we encourage you to share it with friends and colleagues. It has been a privilege to be able to work on this project. None of this would have been possible without the generous contributions of our authors, reviewers, editorial advisory panel and most especially the tireless efforts of both our Assistant Editor Kyle Barrowman and the journal’s designer, Hugh Griffiths. To everyone who contributed to this issue we offer our most profound gratitude and thanks.
Click here to read the Autumn 2015 Issue of Martial Arts Studies.

Traditional style Hudiedao. Source: traditionalfilipinoweapons.com

Introduction

Earlier in the summer my co-author, Jon Nielson, and I had the pleasure of discussing our recent book and the current state of martial arts studies with Gene Ching.  As many of you already know, Gene is the Editor of Kung Fu Tai Chi magazine, one of our favorite publications.  He has also been very proactive in bringing some of the more important authors in Chinese martial studies (scholars like Meir Shahar and Peter Lorge) to the attention of his readership.  Yesterday I got a follow-up email letting me know that the second part of our interview had gone live on the Kung Fu Tai Chi webpage.  You can see the original here.

We had the chance to do a couple of interviews following the release of our book, but this was by far the most detailed and thoughtful.  We greatly appreciated the fact that Gene engaged directly with the substance of what we were seeking to accomplish.  The questions in this section covered a variety of topics, but there was a bit more emphasis on martial arts studies as an academic area.

The entire interview ended up being long enough that they decided to split it into two parts.  If you have not yet done so you may want to start by reading the first section of the discussion here.  I have re-blogged the final section of the discussion below.  Also be sure to watch for an upcoming interview with Paul Bowman in the same space.  Gene said that he thought it might be up in a week or so.  Enjoy!

1860s photograph of a “Chinese Soldier” with butterfly swords. Subject unknown, taken by G. Harrison Grey.

Interview

GC: What do you think of all the attention Grandmaster Ip Man has garnered in Chinese film lately? There’sDonnie Yen’s trilogy, Herman Yau’s films, and, of course, The Grandmaster. How might these fictional retellings affect the subject of your book and Wing Chun on the whole?

BJ: On one level it’s a great thing. As the teacher of Bruce Lee, Ip Man has long had a certain level of name recognition among the practitioners of Chinese martial arts in the West. The way that his life’s story has intersected with what was going on in the southern Chinese martial arts is absolutely fascinating. We hope that these films inspire a number of people to dig a little deeper in an effort to come to terms with what he accomplished and the nature of the environment that he lived in.

This project has been something of a labor of love and was years in the making. We started it prior to the release of the first movie. In terms of building an audience, these films have been great! No one could ask for better advertising. And I suspect that most viewers of the films realize that they are watching very fictionalized accounts of Ip Man’s life, so they probably won’t be too disturbed when some of the events in his actual biography turn out differently.

The more interesting questions revolve around how this burst of media attention will affect the practice of Wing Chun itself. Obviously anything that attracts new students will be welcomed by many individuals interested in the health of the art. But by and large these films all attempt to make Ip Man’s Wing Chun conform to a preexisting vision of what the southern Chinese martial arts are supposed to be, and how they relate to larger questions of national and regional identity. One of the things that is interesting about Ip Man was the degree to which he was willing to sidestep some of these expectations in his own day to focus on his unique visions of what Wing Chun should become as a modern system of hand combat. So it will be interesting to see whether this new media discourse pushes his system in the direction of becoming a more self-conscious cultural project.

GC: Family feuds are fairly common within the world of Chinese martial arts. Wing Chun, in particular, has suffered from many such squabbles. What did you do to maintain an objective perspective on Grandmaster Ip Man’s coverage in your book?

BJ: From the very beginning of our research we decided that we wanted to tell the story of Wing Chun, and the southern martial arts, as a “social history.” What that did was to shift our focus away from a “great man” view of history towards one that focused on the social, political and economic environment in which these events took place. That allowed us to focus on the martial arts as social institutions and organizations rather than as reified lineages or cults of personality. It also brought the students of these systems (rather than simply their creators) into the picture. Who studied these arts? What motivated them? How did all of this change over time?

This sort of approach helps to deemphasize some of the sorts of disputes that have plagued the TCMA community. Suddenly who did it “first,” or who did it “best,” is not nearly as important a question as why they did it in the first place, and what it all meant to their communities. So the more academic focus of this work naturally led the discussion in a different direction. And addressing some of these more controversial points is a lot easier if you have first developed a really rich understanding of the environment that all of this was supposed to have happened within.

GC: Have you seen the Wing Chun duan ranking system that China is trying to establish and, if so, what do you think about it?

JN: I guess they are trying to bring order to a disordered community, so I have to respect that, but I hope it doesn’t catch on. Wing Chun is a self-defense system, not a combat sport. Ranking systems are useful to sports combat because you want to match people of equal skill when they compete, but such a system doesn’t really carry over to self-defense.

BJ: It is not anything that I have personal experience with. I suppose anything that helps to make Wing Chun available to a larger audience on the mainland cannot be completely bad. And this is only one part of a much larger effort to promote and harness martial culture that has been going on in one form or another since the 1930s.

Still, there do seem to be certain historical ironies in all of this that are difficult to ignore. While this may create a pathway for certain sorts of state legitimation or support, Wing Chun has always been deeply connected to southern China’s local and regional culture. And I suspect that these ties will continue to strengthen in the foreseeable future, especially in Hong Kong. I think that it is still an open question as to whether these national level efforts will have any sustained impact on the development and actual practice of Wing Chun.

Personally I would be more interested in seeing whether the Hong Kong government might be convinced to do more to support or legitimize the practice of Wing Chun and other local forms of Kung Fu. That seems like a pretty natural fit and there have been some recent moves to include these combat systems in lists of important cultural practices. But so far they preferred to take a slightly more laissez faire approach to the question of actual support or preservation.

GC: When you hear MMA spokespeople like Joe Rogan put down Wing Chun, what do you think?

JN: We haven’t really heard Joe Rogan or any other official spokesman say anything directed specifically at Wing Chun. Instead we observe people who listen to these spokespeople and hear what they want to hear. As with any movement that people identify strongly with, there will always be people who will use general statements to build up arguments against those systems they feel most threatened by. In that way, we see these misdirected criticisms as a testament to Wing Chun’s strong position in the martial arts community.

GC: Do you feel that the Chinese martial arts are growing or fading now? What about with Wing Chun specifically?

BJ: That is a question that you could write a book on. Certainly it is something that a lot of people are wondering about. I can tell you that multiple readers a day come to Kung Fu Tea after doing an internet search on that specific question.

In general the death of the traditional Chinese martial arts has been greatly exaggerated. Certainly things are slower now than they were in the 1980s and 1990s, both in China and the West. Yet what is often forgotten is that those were in many ways pretty exceptional decades in the history of the Chinese martial arts. For a variety of reasons there was an explosion of interest in these systems which for most of the 19th and 20th centuries had actually been viewed as pretty socially marginal. So the most recent historical era might not actually be a great baseline for meaningful comparison.

A lot of the decline in martial arts practice in China today is directly tied to the recent period of rapid economic growth and the expanded opportunities for both employment and recreation that comes with it. In the short run that has not been great news for a number of systems. But in the long run having a healthy middle class with disposable income to spare will probably be great for at least some of these same systems. It is really a question of how well they can adapt to changing cultural and economic circumstances. Note that some arts, like Taekwondo and BJJ, have been expanding at exactly the same time that other traditional Chinese systems are shrinking.

The idea of the “traditional” martial arts changing tends to make a lot of people nervous. But the truth is that these systems are always adapting themselves to their environments. They have changed, often in important ways, in every generation. The real question is how well they are doing it. When people ask me whether the traditional Chinese martial arts are dying, I tell them no, they are evolving.

Wing Chun seems to be doing fairly well at the moment. Unsurprisingly there was a groundswell of interest following the release of Wilson Yip’s film. Nor has the Sherlock Holmes franchise (with Robert Downey Jr.) been bad for enrollments. And I think that the ongoing interest in Bruce Lee suggests a certain degree of sustained public curiosity about the art. At the moment Wing Chun is either holding steady or growing, depending on the area under discussion.

JN: I feel interest in the martial arts comes in waves. Sometimes it surges and sometimes it wanes, but there is always water in the ocean. Right now, a lot of attention is being focused on sport combat. Some see this as detracting from other martial systems, but most people who are really interested in self-defense understand that sport combat is a great form of exercise and entertainment, but won’t replace a serious study of self-defense.

GC: In Paul Bowman’s 2015 book, MARTIAL ARTS STUDIES, he ponders the possibility of martial arts studies as an academic field. What do you think of this notion? Do you foresee doctoral programs in martial arts in major U.S. universities?

BJ: It is becoming increasingly apparent that martial arts studies, as an academic project, is here to stay. Scholars from a number of fields have decided that an examination of these fighting systems can help them to advance fundamental discussions on topics as diverse as identity formation, social conflict, imperialism, nationalism and gender performance. We are seeing anthropologists, historians, cultural studies scholar and a variety of social scientists all doing good work in this area. University Presses are increasingly receptive to these projects, and Paul and I are in the process of launching an academic, peer reviewed, journal meant to encourage the publication of more article length treatments of these subjects.

I think that right now the real question is what sort of project martial arts studies will become. There are a couple of possibilities. First, it might develop into an interdisciplinary research area, a space where scholars trained in the traditional fields come to investigate a set of questions that provide them with a new perspective on established debates. As Bowman has pointed out, development along these lines also has the potential to begin to call into question some of the more artificial boundaries that have traditionally separated the academic disciplines. That is something that he is generally in favor of.

At the June 2015 conference on Martial Arts Studies held at the University of Cardiff, the very distinguished professor (and highly accomplished martial artist) Stephan Chan took issue with this view. In his keynote address he argued that in fact martial arts studies is likely to become a discipline of its own, with a distinct set of conceptual tools and theoretical concerns. He saw its development as being guided by linguistic, geographic, historical and social scientific concerns. One suspects that this vision of martial arts studies would likely find a ready home in Asian Studies departments, but it might have less of an impact on the traditional disciplines.

At this point it is really difficult to predict the details of how things will develop. Either pathway could work, though I suspect that we are more likely to see martial arts studies develop as an interdisciplinary research area first. Creating the basic institutions needed to support named chairs and degree programs in the American university system will take a lot of work and fundraising. But I can tell you that there are already a number of individuals who specialize in the academic study of the martial arts who are graduating with doctorates in anthropology, history and cultural studies. That is certainly one of the big forces pushing martial arts studies forward at this moment in time. There is a lot of hunger among these scholars for a deeper, more sustained and meaningful conversation.

GC: What else might you be working on in the future concerning Chinese martial arts?

BJ: I think it would be fair to say that we have a number of irons in the fire. Paul Bowman and I are looking forward to the launch of our new interdisciplinary journal, Martial Arts Studies, in October. The first issue is currently slated to include a review of our book by Prof. Douglas Wile and we are looking forward to hearing what he thought of it.

We also wrote a fair amount of material that did not fit with our final vision for this book. I think that we will be taking another look at some of this, as well as writing a few new chapters, to develop a different sort of discussion of Wing Chun’s origins and significance aimed more at a popular audience.

Three unidentified children practice Kung Fu near the Shaolin Temple. This press photo was taken in 1982 and it captures the first moments of the “Golden Age” of Kung Fu in mainland China.  Source: Author’s personal collection.

Introduction

Two weeks ago I moved to Ithaca NY and things have been a bit hectic. I have not been able to get as much reading and writing done as I would like. Yet there has been no corresponding decrease in the appearance of new ideas that I want to explore in blog posts. Now that I finally have a working office set up perhaps I can begin to work my way through this growing backlog.

One of the big topics to emerge in the news recently was the impending end of China’s “One Child Policy.” For readers who may be unfamiliar with the topic, this was an audacious experiment in social engineering conceived of by the Chinese government following the Cultural Revolution (1978) as a way of limiting the country’s burgeoning population growth. It was hoped that this would then result in a socially and economically optimal demographic balance that would lead to prosperity.

The following post has two slightly different, but ultimately related, goals. First I would like to think a little bit about the effects of this policy on the traditional martial arts in the PRC, as well as what its transformation into a “Two Child Policy” might portend for the future. Nor is this discussion as far-fetched as it might appear. Government officials, writers and social scientists have been aware of the link between demographics trends and patterns of social conflict in China (many of which have helped to promote the martial arts) since at least the 19th century. Often these discussions have focused on the issue of “bare sticks,” young men who for economic or social reasons cannot marry and have traditionally fed China’s many martial arts traditions.

Secondly, what does all of this suggest about the nature and possible uses of Martial Arts Studies as an academic research area. Scholars are quickly building an impressive database of information on the historical development of these fighting systems as well as better models of how they interact with society. But what is the ultimate point of this? How can we as researchers actually apply this knowledge? What is it good for?

Before delving into these twin discussions we might wish to begin with a quick overview of the One Child Policy. This set of directives is actually more complicated than its totalizing title might lead one to believe. The policy evolved over time, and its application has never been uniform. While much has been written on the subject, demographer and economists have never come to total agreement on its actual effectiveness or impact on Chinese society. A few of these debates may even be relevant to our discussion of how it may have interacted with the fate of the martial arts in the PRC.

A group in the same general area today.

A Quick Overview

Originally intended as a measure that would last only a single generation, the “One Child Policy” saw a number of important revisions over the course of its lifespan. Since enforcement of the policy was largely carried out at the provincial level there was a fair degree of variability in how it was enforced throughout the country. Still, estimates by demographers suggest that anywhere from 200 to 400 million births were prevented by this policy which is now slated to be substantially modified (basically into a “two child policy”) within the coming months.

In practice the subset of couples that were strictly restricted to a single birth in recent years was actually smaller than one might expect. Again, estimates vary, but it seems likely that only 35% of couples in the past decade were strictly restricted to a single birth. Exceptions to the policy were numerous. Individuals living in rural farming villages and ethnic minorities could apply for additional birth permits. And after 2013 all couples could apply to have a second child if either one was a single-child themselves.

Discussions of the One Child Policy are always complicated by a number of factors. Obviously it has been a politicized topic in the West where the enforcement of this directive has been tied to accusations of human rights abuses. And demographers have struggled to come to terms with the effects of what has been, in many ways, an unprecedented social experiment.

It is certainly true that China’s population growth curve bent down sharply after enforcement of this policy was instituted. Its advocates have noted that it seems to have cut the countries potential population by several hundred million (again, exact estimates differ). Yet critics of these policies note that China’s overall birth rate fell at exactly the same time that its economy entered its rapid growth phase, a large percentage of the population relocated from primarily agricultural to urban areas, and opportunities for female education and employment improved.

We know from studying population dynamics in other countries that these same variables are more than capable of explaining dramatic dips in population growth rates. For instance, the shift in China’s growth curve closely matches those also seen in the case of Vietnam. Yet its smaller southern neighbor never adopted a single child policy, and instead relied on public education and market forces. Likewise Hong Kong never considered anything akin to the PRC’s enforced social engineering strategy. Yet it currently has one of the lowest birthrates in the world.

When thinking about the effects of the One Child Policy we are first forced to ask ourselves whether it really had much of a substantive impact on Chinese society at all. Reporters working this story recently found that most of the individuals in urban areas who they interviewed (those most likely to be restricted to a single child under the old system) have said that, policy changes notwithstanding, they have no plans to seek a second birth. The costs of housing, raising and educating a second child in the current economic environment are just too onerous.

Indeed, it is hard to underestimate the importance of household economic calculations in explaining demographic trends. I doubt that even the most ardent economist would claim that people are actually mathematically rational in their decision making. Yet hard budget constraints are impossible to ignore. And the population declines that we have seen in recent decades in states like Vietnam and Russia indicate that economic factors may be more than capable of explaining most of the variance that we see in the Chinese case as well. Without the One Child Policy it is likely that China’s total population, while possibly a bit higher, would not be radically different from what we see today.

Yet even if the total population numbers did not change, it is still possible that this policy has had other consequences which need to be taken into account. Demographers have noted that how this policy was drafted, and the ways in which it interacted with traditional Chinese culture, reinforced a strong preference for male children. Sex selective abortions have resulted in a massive demographic skew. And as we have seen in previous posts, large numbers of unmarried males (or “bare sticks” in the Chinese vernacular) have not always been a force for social stability in China’s past. In fact, martial arts societies recruited quite successfully out of this demographic pool in the 19th and earlier 20th centuries.

The rapid decline in birth rate has also skewed the age distribution of China’s population, and these effects will continue to grow stronger over the coming decades. On the macro level there are simply fewer active workers to support the growing number of retired senior citizens who are living longer and healthier lives.

Within individual families these trends can be felt even more starkly. With a weak social safety net individuals continue to rely both on their personal savings and their children for financial support in their old age. Yet the rigid enforcement of the One Child Policy in some demographics has led to the “4-2-1 Problem,” where a single working child may be called on to support up to six elderly adults (two parents, and four grandparents).

The burdens placed on single children in this situation are stark and immediately evident. Yet if we return to the macro level it becomes apparent that this rapid decline in the size of the overall workforce could pose a serious problem for China’s economic prospects in the coming decades. It seems that these very real economic and social fears were largely responsible for the political decision to walk back the One Child Policy.

Nor do these issues exhaust the list of social ills that are often attributed to the One Child Policy. Some writers have referred to those living in China now as “the loneliest generation” as vast numbers of singletons grew up without the benefit of brothers, sisters, cousins or even many neighbors of their same age with which to share their childhood. Adults have attempted to compensate for this by lavishing attention and spending on the few children in their extended families leading to what some have termed the “Little Emperor” problem of spoiled and generally fragile children who then go on to struggle in an educational and social system that demands a high degree of discipline.

On the other hand these same supposedly “spoiled” children are often overwhelmed with the social responsibilities that they personally bear to multiple generations of their own families. Even if China’s total population might be roughly the same without the advent of the One Child Policy, this experiment still seems to have had an important effect on the contours of Chinese society.

Shaolin Masterclass. Photo by Jack Latham. Source: FT.com

Demographic Change and the Martial Arts

This brings us back to the martial arts. What impact did the One Child Policy have on the development of both official and folk Wushu after the close of the Cultural Revolution? What changes in the development of the martial arts might we expect to see in the wake of its departure? And what does all of this imply for the field of martial arts studies?

In a recent paper my colleague, Dr. Paul Bowman, asked what is the point of martial arts studies? Once we have accumulated this knowledge about the ways in which martial arts systems develop and interact with society, what do we do with it? What possible solutions to this more theoretical question might a quick consideration of the One Child Policy suggest?

Historical work on the traditional martial arts has demonstrated that these practices were not distributed evenly across Chinese society. Up through the early 20th century there was a distinct social stigma that accompanied the practice of these systems. Their spread was often associated with practical concerns such as village defense or making a living either as a guard, opera performer or bandit. As such the traditional hand combat arts were more commonly encountered in some areas of the country than others. Further, in my own research on the martial clans of Guangdong province I noticed that they tended to be practiced by second and third, rather than first, sons within a family.

Obviously there are a number of exceptions to this last point, particularly in cases where the martial arts were essential to the family business (guards, soldiers, pharmacists, bandits). Yet among those who might be said to have adopted these systems by choice, there does seem to be a bias towards second sons. For instance, it was Ip Man, and not his older and better established brother, who would go on to become a master of Wing Chun kung fu after Chan Wah Shun took up teaching in the Ip clan temple. Why might this be?

The answer seems to come down to questions of responsibility and the duties of filial piety. First sons were more senior, and in the case of the family businesses might well be expected to continue on in the enterprise. Often the family would invest substantial resources in their education in the hopes that they might win office through the civil service system and thus increase the prestige and fortunes of the clan.

In economic terms we might argue that it was more expensive for first sons (excluding those in certain specific industries and situations) to study the martial arts. They were often afforded other opportunities that were too valuable to lightly discard. And they also felt the greatest weight of social expectation to succeed. In short, the “opportunity cost” of the martial arts was simply too great to make if affordable in a good many cases.

The situation was slightly different for younger sons. While they would still expect to inherit something of the family estate, they do not seem to have born the same weight of parental expectations. Further, I have often suspected that a number of families decided that once the clan fortune was secure, having a couple of “security specialists” on hand to make sure that everything ran smoothly might be a great investment. Thus it could be rational for second sons to invest themselves in a martial education even though their older brothers were being encouraged in a more “civil” direction.

Nor can we forget the “bare sticks,” younger males from poor families that did not expect to inherit anything. Economic considerations combined with the problem of the “missing girls” meant that their marriage prospects were limited. These young men also tended to be more loosely tethered to their home communities and clans. Such individuals were often viewed as somewhat expendable and were the most likely to be caught up in clan warfare, smuggling, petty criminal groups and even martial arts societies. This last pursuit may have provided them with an alternate means of constructing a masculine identity within a predominately Confucian society.

As we can see, the distribution of the martial arts knowledge throughout Chinese society tended to be correlated with certain demographic and economic variables during the late imperial period. And the One Child Policy was consciously designed to reengineer those exact aspects of society. So how might it have affected the subsequent development of the Chinese martial arts on the mainland?

Ultimately these sorts of counterfactual questions are impossible to answer with precision, especially when we are looking at a vastly complicated social experiment with a sample size of one. Still, it may be possible to discern a few key patterns worthy of further consideration.

To begin with, we should recall that in urban areas any couple lucky enough to have a son on their first attempt was not likely to be allowed to have another child (unless they were a member of a minority group). Thus in these areas a very large percentage of all males would now find themselves in a situation where they alone bore the weight of their parents’ and grandparents’ expectations. This would seem to increase the social costs of martial arts training and make it likely that fewer parents would actively seek out these opportunities for their children.

Of course martial arts training did not vanish after the end of the Cultural Revolution. It actually went through a boom in the 1980s. Yet by in large the individuals who took up training early in this decade were still the product of a previous generation. As time went on fewer children enrolled in both official Wushu programs and folk martial arts classes. This trend became especially pronounced towards the end of the 1990s and beyond as China’s economy picked up steam and parents became increasingly anxious about forgoing the possibility of a lucrative career for their children.

In short, there is circumstantial evidence that economic considerations, made more acute by the One Child Policy, have probably inhibited the total number of martial arts students. It has likely also skewed which sorts of children will take up the martial arts and the sorts of practices that they will be introduced to.

Readers might recall that individuals living in more rural areas were generally allowed to have a greater number of children. One suspects that this was probably a good thing for the development of the martial arts in China as these practices have always been more popular in rural areas. Further, journalists and researchers who have interviewed individuals studying at China’s many fulltime Wushu based schools have noted that the students in these vocational programs tend to come disproportionately from poor rural backgrounds.

From the 1920s-1950s martial arts reformers on the mainland succeeded in an effort to re-brand their fighting systems as tools of public health, physical education and nationalism that were fit for urban middle class students. Such individuals were expected to already have full time occupations and thus approached the martial arts mostly as a recreational activity. The Jingwu and later Guoshu movements are the best known examples of this trend, but many schools and groups were working along similar lines.

Obviously the advent of the government’s new Wushu system in the 1950s (subsequently expanded after the end of the Cultural Revolution) meant that none of these Republic era approaches would be coming back. And while there was a sudden outpouring of interest in folk masters teaching in urban areas in the 1980s and early 1990s, I have wondered over the years if one of the effects of the One Child Policy was to generally suppress interest in the martial arts as a recreational activity in urban areas, and to once again re-center these practices in more rural areas where they would be seen as a fulltime course of study in preparation for a career in the military. Ironically, this is not all that different from how many families living in the same regions had viewed them in the 19th century.

What then might we see in the future with the relaxation of the One Child Policy? The most obvious (but also the most problematic) prediction might be that this change would lead to a notable increase in the birth rate. Clearly certain party officials hope to see some increase in the number of new workers being born. And as families have more children over which to spread the burden of social obligation, they might be more willing to let some of their sons (and increasingly daughters) participate in martial arts training. Observers have been noting the declining fortunes of the traditional arts within China for some time, and the lack of new students is often explicitly tied to parental objections. So it does not seem unreasonable to expect that an increase in the birth rate might be tied to an increase in the absolute number of martial arts students.

Unfortunately these exercises in forecasting are never so simple. A large number of reporters interviewing young couples in Chinese cities have noted that the people whom they interviewed in recent weeks are not actually anticipating having more than one child, despite the promised policy change. Their reasons are essentially economic in nature. Given the expense of raising a child, the difficulty in arranging for child care, and the soaring cost of real estate, few working class urban couples feel that they can afford to have more than one child. Thus a number of observers have speculated that the change in policy might not lead to the boom in births that government planners are hoping for.

Yet even these more cautious predictions may require their own set of caveats. The existence of a robust “birth tourism” industry indicates that at least some Chinese couples are interested in and planning for the possibility of multiple births. Further, many parents are very worried about the social and psychological effects of being a singleton.

Even the economic arguments about the costs of raising a child are more complicated than they first appear. Lacking a European style safety net, and facing the possible end to decades of rapid economic growth, it seems likely that a number of couples may decide that having a second child is the best insurance against poverty in their old age that they are likely to be able to afford. In short, it is not entirely clear how the long term value vs. short term costs of an additional child will look in the next five or ten years.

While not everyone will decide to increase their family size, and these measures may be too little too late to create the sort of population bump that the government is hoping for, it is likely that the relaxation of this policy will change some of the details of how births are distributed across Chinese society.

Female student studying Wushu in a scene from Inigo Westmeier’s Dragon Girls.

What Do we do with Martial Arts Studies?

As I noted at the opening of this essay, students of martial arts studies must at some point begin to articulate the purpose of this new field. Our primary mission may be to better understand the origin of these fighting systems, how they have been discussed through time, and the various ways in which they have contributed to their host societies. But once we have accumulated this body of information, what do we do with it? What is it good for? Is understanding the martial arts the only goal, or a means to something bigger?

Personally I hope for the latter. I fully expect that many projects will take these fighting systems as their “dependent variable” (meaning the thing that is explained). Yet the most interesting thing about the martial arts is what they can reveal about the hidden nature of the communities around them. Societies often do a good job hiding certain types of conflict, friction and rupture. The martial arts, by exploring, amplifying, or seeking to ameliorate social conflict, can illuminate the details of cleavages that would otherwise remain invisible to the outside observer. This is especially true in periods of rapid social change.

As a thought experiment let us assume that the average Chinese birthrate does not change a great deal in the coming generation. Certain western observers might conclude from this that market forces (e.g., hard budget constraints) have more of an impact on family fertility decisions than government policy, especially in increasingly urban middle income countries. Thus they might say (and some already are) that the One Child Policy had very little impact on Chinese society. Would this view be correct?

Shifts in future patterns of social conflict and martial arts practice might well tell a different story. For instance, renewed interest in the folk martial arts centered in urban areas like Guangzhou, Shanghai or Beijing might point to the growing strength of an urban middle class that can afford both the luxury of additional children and investments in cultural pursuits. Such a finding would herald the coming of a certain sort of Chinese modernity.

Continued stagnation of the urban folk arts might signal something very different. Particularly if this were to be accompanied by renewed strength within the rural Wushu vocational schools as hard times inspired rural families to increase their birthrates as a hedge against the future. Renewed interest in these vocational institutions would also signal the emergence of a new, but very different, vision of Chinese modernity. Thus the sorts of martial arts that social groups choose to invest in may reveal critical information regarding their private beliefs about the future.  And as “costly signals” these opinions would be hard to ignore.

Every new macro-level development within a complex  social system creates groups of winners and losers. The art of politics often focuses on compensating, quieting or shoving aside one of these two groups. The sorts of conflicts that change brings about are not always readily apparent, especially in their early stages. Yet the martial arts have functioned as tools for addressing these tensions in the past, and they are likely to continue to do so in the future. The state has used them to promote its unifying vision of the nation, while local groups have looked to them as signs of identity and centers of cultural resistance.

I do not know what the end of the One Child Policy will bring. Yet even if birthrates remain unchanged the creation of a new demographic regime may still have an important impact on Chinese society. The value of Martial Arts Studies as an interdisciplinary pursuit goes far beyond its immediate object of study. Rather than simply being a body of facts relating to the origin and functioning of various hand combat systems, it may provide us with a lens to interpret and study aspects of social conflict that might remain invisible to more conventional modes of analysis. As we have already learned “the personal is political,” and nowhere is this more apparent than in the realm of the martial arts.

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

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Still shot of Bruce Lee in the opening scene of “Enter the Dragon.”

Introduction

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

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

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

A scene from the 13th World Wushu Championship in Jakarta. Source: AFP.

News Stories

Wushu was once again a prominent story in the news cycle over the last few weeks.  A number of articles focused on the recent 13th annual World Wushu Championships held in Jakarta.  Teams from a large number of countries (including the United States) took part and the event received quite a bit of coverage in South East Asia.  The following article attempted to put Wushu in a historic perspective (I particularly like the note about a young Jet Li performing for Richard Nixon at the White House) while looking ahead to future expansion in the global sporting community.  As one would expect, this included a new round of speculation as to whether the Chinese fighting arts might finally find a home in the 2024 Olympic games.

The mixed martial arts have also continued to make news in China.  The country’s immense media market has proved to be a valuable prize for MMA fight promotion companies in a number of states, and not just the UFC.  This article looks at the South Korean based ROAD Fighting Championship and their plans to hold their first ever Chinese event in the Shanghai Oriental Sports Center.

Sunday morning Taiji practice at the Temple of Heaven in Beijing.

A number of news outlets were reporting the results of a recent string of studies on the benefits of regular Taijiquan practice for individuals suffering from a wide range of chronic illnesses from congestive heart failure to cancer.  One of the most visible of these articles was published in the New York Times blog and looked at the potential of Taiji to treat sleep disorders.  Harvard Health Publications also ran a short article summarizing the findings of a recent study in the British Journal of Sports Medicine that had compiled data from 33 smaller studies encompassing nearly 16000 adult patients.  It showed statistically significant quality of life improvements for patients suffering from a broad range of serious chronic conditions after they began Taiji practice, even in comparison to other forms of exercise.

Of course not all martial arts practices are equally good for one’s health.  This fact was recently demonstrated by a martial arts enthusiast in Suzhou who, after one too many drinks, scaled a street light pole, balanced himself above a busy road, and decided to practice his forms (click for video).  Luckily he managed to climb down on his own, but one suspects that the Harvard Medical School would probably not endorse this particular style of practice.

A photo of female martial artists from the Jingwu Anniversary Book. The woman on the left is Chen Shichao, one of the most vocal campaigners for the equality of female martial artists within Jingwu. She toured China and south east Asia promoting female involvement in the martial arts.

The Stoneybrook Press blog recently ran an article titled “Anatomy and Gender in Martial Arts.” It is an introductory effort and I doubt that it will contain any revelations to those who follow the topic.  Still, I thought that it was interesting as a sign of the sorts of questions regarding the martial arts that popular readers are currently interested in.  At this moment gender seems to be high on that list.

Bruce Lee is always a topic of interest for the media, but the last few weeks have seen a pronounced surge in the number of stories about this iconic film maker and martial arts reformer.  I strongly suspect that even more pieces will be making an appearance in the next week or so.  Friday the 27th is the 75th anniversary of his birth and a number of media outlets are expected to note the occasion.

A somewhat preparatory article recently appeared in the pages of the South China Morning Post.  Its title (“Bruce Lee, a global hero who epitomised Hong Kong’s strengths – it’s just a pity the city could not preserve his former home“) pretty much sums up the piece.  The article mixes an acknowledgement of Lee’s importance to his home city’s global image with open criticism of government officials who failed to preserve his former estate as some sort of museum to his legacy.  Interestingly this article was authored by none other than Lam Woon-kwong, the convenor of Hong Kong’s Executive Council.  The comments on this piece also reveal something of the current popular sentiments on the issue.

I am not sure that I could count the number of times that Bruce Lee has made the cover of Black Belt Magazine, but earlier this month I was surprised to find him gracing the front of the a special issue of Newsweek.  The commemorative magazine celebrates his 75th birthday with a number of articles on various aspects of his life and career.  These include a discussion of his “Flawless Technique,” an exploration of the Hong Kong cityscape that shaped his childhood and adolescence, and an overview of “Bruce Lee’s School of Hard Knocks.”  I noticed that the Newsweek webpage also had an extensive excerpt of an article titled “The Kato Show: Bruce Lee as the Green Hornet’s Sidekick.” Given the discussion that has broken out in the last week as to what is (and is not) “revolutionary” about the AMC series Into the Badlands portrayal of Chinese masculinity on western television, this discussion may be worth reviewing.

The traditional art of Fujian province have also been in the news this month.  Yibada.com ran a piece on the area’s White Crane tradition, how it planted roots abroad, and what needs to happen for the system to gain increased international attention.  The article also contains a brief discussion of some of the ways in which local governments have sought to promote White Crane.

Ecns.com also ran a piece looking at events in the same region.  It published a short (and uninspired) photo essay of the fifth Southern Shaolin Martial Arts and Culture Festival held in Putain city (Fijian) on November 8th.  In its words “The festival has brought together various schools and aims to promote Chinese Buddhist culture. Located in the east of the Qingyuan Mountain of Quanzhou, the Quanzhou Shaolin Temple, also called the South Shaolin Temple, is the birthplace of the South Shaolin martial art, which has spread to Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macao and even Southeast Asia.”  Unfortunately with the exception of this single contested historical assertion, the article did not offer much in the way of a substantive description of what could have been an interesting event.

A still from AMC’s Into the Badlands.

Chinese Martial Arts in Popular Entertainment

The last month has seen quite a bit of entertainment news.  Perhaps the biggest event was the release of the first episode of AMC’s much anticipated (and heavily promoted) new series Into the Badlands, staring Daniel Wu and inspired by the classic Chinese fable “Journey to the West.”  The initial reviews of the series have been decidedly mixed, but they make for very interesting reading, particularly for anyone concerned with the place of the Asian martial arts in current popular culture.  Wired magazine kicked things off with a generally positive discussion that delved into some of the shows technical details.  One of the interesting points to emerge from this piece was the author’s observation that the current martial arts action available on the small screen has tended to favor close range in-fighting (Daredevil, Green Arrow) but Badlands quite consciously breaks with this pattern of fight choreography.  It will be interesting to see how subsequent action sequences in this series evolve (as well as if other choreographers begin to pick up on its more extensive style), but this observation plays into a previous conversation that I had with Paul Bowman here and here.

Other reviews were less kind.  Some noted problems in the coherence of the basic ideas behind the fantasy world that the drama is set in as well its visual design aesthetic.  A number of reviewers found the first episode to be too stiff and gory enough that it might have trouble moving beyond a dedicated martial arts fanbase.  The English language broadcast of CCTV (basically Chinese public television) had a different take on the series.  It instead viewed the project as a groundbreaking exercise in the way that Asian American were being portrayed on American television.  While listening to this I could not help but be struck with dejevu as so much of this conversation is identical to the sorts of assertions that are often made about Bruce Lee (see for instance the Newsweek special issue above).  In fact, by the end of the discussion I was starting to wonder if the promotional material for Badlands was engaging in some sort of subconscious erasure of the past.

USA Today published an interview with Daniel Wu that helped to address some of these points.  In it he discussed Bruce Lee, Jet Li and Jackie Chan as his favorite film stars and he began to explore some of the ways in which the portrayal of the martial arts in film and TV have traditionally differed.  Yet he remained largely silent on other martial arts based TV series (such as the Green Hornet, Kung Fu, Walker Texas Ranger, Daredevil etc…).

The New York Times engaged more directly with some of these points in its own, largely unfavorable, review of the series.  After characterizing the show as at best “perfectly average” (and probably the weakest of AMC’s various projects) it tackled the stylistic and aesthetic parallels between Badlands, set in a post-apocalyptic “old west,” and the original Kung Fu series, starring David Carradine, which introduced many of these same themes to American TV audiences in the 1970s.  In a revealing exchange Miles Millar (one of the creators of Badlands) directly attacked the earlier series and called the casting of Carradine (who was white) as a mixed-race monk “a travesty.”  He then pointed to Wu’s starring role in the current production as part of an effort to “redress that old injustice.”    Yet the Times critic goes on to note that the original Kung Fu series succeeded in large part because Carradine, whatever his race, was a better actor than Wu who has a limited emotional range and only really only shines in fight sequences.  While a fascinating exchange it should also be noted that much of this exchange seems to rest on unexamined assumptions (held by both sides) regarding Chinese vs. Western styles of acting and even what constitutes a proper, skillful or “realistic” martial arts story.  Still, if this final review by the Toronto Sun is any indication, it remains an open question as to whether the dramatic elements of this program will succeed in attracting and maintaining the diverse audience that AMC needs.

The Assassin. Source: Toronto Film Festival

Taiwanese Director Hou Hsiao-hsien’s much lauded film The Assassin (discussed in our last news update) was the big winner at this years Golden Horse Awards presentation.  Huo’s film earned a total of 11 nominations and by the end of the evening it had walked away with five winning statues.  These included the Golden Horse for Best Director and (in a turn that surprised no one) Best Cinematography.

Fans of the “Ip Man” franchise have greeted the increasing flow of images, interviews and information about the upcoming film (Ip Man 3) with enthusiasm.  A new trailer was even released in which you can see Donnie Yen and Mike Tyson trading blows.  I personally am even more interested to see how they handle the long poles and butterfly swords in this one.  Click here to see more.

Lastly, for anyone dreading the prospects of a Kung Fu free Thanksgiving, El Rey has your back.  It will be celebrating the great American tradition of feuding families this Thanksgiving with a 72 hour Kung Fu movie marathon.  I ran through the list of titles and it seems that all of the classics are there.   Shannon Lee and Dario Cueto will host this buffet of classic martial arts cinema.

Martial Arts Studies
There have been some very exciting developments in the academic field of Martial Arts Studies over the last month.  First, the new peer-reviewed interdisciplinary journal Martial Arts Studies released its Fall issue.  It is free to read or share on-line and offers a number of original articles, book and literature reviews.  Anyone who has been following this field (or Kung Fu Tea) will be sure to recognize a number of the names of contributing authors.  Head on over to check out the journal’s crisp new homepage, or go straight to the articles.  And while you are there be sure to check out the following book review by Douglas Wile!

Paul Bowman has recently traveled to South Korea to participate in an academic conference held at the Seoul National University on Martial Arts Studies.  There he presented a paper titled “Everything you know about Taekwondo.”  We have been promised a full report on the event after his return.

I am very excited about the next announcement.  My friend Charles Russo has spent the last few years working on a book on the early history of the Chinese martial arts on the West Coast for the University of Nebraska Press titled Striking Distance: Bruce Lee and the Dawn of Martial Arts in America.  It looks like his hard work has paid off and the volume is now available for pre-order on Amazon (for the very reasonable price of $25).  Unfortunately we will still need to wait until June of 2016 for this volume to ship, but its never too early to mark your calendar.  I expect that this book will make a big splash when it finally lands.  In the mean time here is the publishers blurb:

In the spring of 1959, eighteen-year-old Bruce Lee returned to San Francisco, the city of his birth, and quickly inserted himself into the West Coast’s fledgling martial arts culture. Even though Asian fighting styles were widely unknown to mainstream America, Bruce encountered a robust fight culture in a San Francisco Bay area that was populated with talented and trailblazing practitioners such as Lau Bun, Chinatown’s aging kung fu patriarch; Wally Jay, the innovative Hawaiian jujitsu master; and James Lee, the no-nonsense Oakland street fighter. Regarded by some as a brash loudmouth and by others as a dynamic visionary, Bruce spent his first few years back in America advocating for a more modern approach to the martial arts and showing little regard for the damaged egos left in his wake.

On the Chinese calendar, 1964 was the Year of the Green Dragon. It would be a challenging and eventful year for Bruce. He would broadcast his dissenting view before the first great international martial arts gathering and then defend it by facing down Chinatown’s young ace kung fu practitioner in a legendary behind-closed-doors high noon showdown. The Year of the Green Dragon saw the dawn of martial arts in America and the rise of an icon.

Drawing on more than one hundred original interviews and an eclectic array of sources, Striking Distance is an engrossing narrative that chronicles San Francisco Bay’s pioneering martial arts scene that thrived in the early 1960s and offers an in-depth look at a widely unknown chapter of Bruce Lee’s iconic life.

If you are looking for something to read over the holiday weekend you might want to consider the following chapter from the 2012 Routledge Handbook of Heritage in Asia (eds. by Daily and Winter) titled “Fighting modernity: traditional Chinese martial arts and the transmission of intangible cultural heritage.” Patrick Daily, the author, recently posted a PDF of this piece to his Academia.edu webpage, which is a great resource as I am constantly scouring the academic journal literature on the Chinese martial arts and had never run across this paper before.  I suspect that I am not the only person who missed it, but it is now available to a much broader audience. Daily is a faculty member of Nanyang Technological University, Earth Observatory of Singapore.

The Creation of Wing Chun by Judkins and Nielson.

If you are in the mood for something a little lighter, Kung Fu Tai Chi magazine has now released the second half of my interview discussing both my recent book on the history of Wing Chun and the Southern Chinese martial arts (with Jon Nielson) and the future of martial arts studies as an academic field.  You can read it here.

Its facebook time!

Kung Fu Tea on Facebook

As always there is a lot going on at the Kung Fu Tea Facebook group.  We discussed Daoism in Western Taijiquan manuals, the connection between the English Suffragettes and Jujitsu and some of the ways in which China’s “One Child Policy” impacted the traditional martial arts.   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.

Bruce Lee with his favorite onscreen weapon.

Introduction: Bruce Lee at 75

Yesterday I celebrated Thanksgiving with my family. As is customary on this day of remembrance I took a few moments to think about the last year and review the many things that I had to be grateful for. The year has been an eventful one.

In the professional realm I had a book published on the social history of the southern Chinese martial arts. I also delivered a keynote address at the first annual martial arts studies conference in the UK and, just recently, saw the publication of the first issue of our new journal on that same topic. I have had opportunities to meet and share my interests with all sorts of fascinating people from all over the world, and have started a number of other projects that should be bearing fruit months and years down the road. As the old Chinese saying goes, a wise man thinks of the source of the water that he drinks, and as I did so it occurred to me that I owe a profound debt of gratitude to Bruce Lee.

Today is the 75th anniversary of Lee’s birth in San Francisco. Born in California and raised in Hong Kong before returning to the West Coast at the end of the 1950s, Lee had a profound effect on the worlds of film, popular culture and the martial arts. While many claims about his career are exaggerated (one should treat with a certain degree of suspicion any assertion that someone was the “first” to do anything) there can be no doubt as to his ultimate impact on the public perception of the martial arts in America, as well as their rapid spread and popularization.

For anyone wondering what the point of Kung Fu was, Lee had a very specific answer. It combined a laser like focus on the problems of practical self-defense with a need to find personal and philosophical meaning in their practice.

Like others who came before him, Lee argued that the martial arts were ultimately a means of self-creation. Yet drawing on the counter-cultural currents of the time he freed this discourse from the ideological chains that had linked such quests with ethno-nationalist projects for much of the 20th century. He instead placed the individual student at the center of the process. For Lee the martial arts went beyond the normal paradigms of personal security and self improvement and became a means of self actualization.

His own image on the silver screen promised that through these disciplines and their philosophies one could craft a “new self,” one that was fully fit for the challenges of an age of global competition and strife. It was promised that this “new self” would grow out of the process of self expression which the martial arts facilitated. Of course one had to first understand the true nature of these systems to free oneself from their stultifying structures. Individuals might agree or disagree (sometimes violently) with Lee’s assertions, but its hard to underestimate the impact that he had on the ways in which the martial arts are discussed in the West today.

Does this mean that in the absence of Bruce Lee I would not have written my book, or that we would not currently be reading a blog about martial arts studies? Ultimately those sorts of counterfactuals are impossible to answer, and they may cause more confusion than light. Japanese teachers had been promoting their arts in the west since the dawn of the 20th century. Sophia Delza knew nothing of Bruce Lee when she introduced Wu style Taijiquan to New York City. And the Korean government’s heavy support and promotion of Taekwondo had more to do with their own post-colonial struggles with the memory of the Japanese occupation than anything that came out of China.

I suspect that even in a world in which Lee had never existed the martial arts would still have found a respectable foothold in the west. A demand for these systems existed as part of larger cultural trends following WWII, Korea and the Vietnam War. Lee’s genius lay in his ability to understand and speak powerfully to the historical moment that existed.

Following his own advice he bent with the flow of history rather than fighting against it. Certainly some things would remain the same. That seems to follow from the structural nature of 20th century modernization and globalization. Ultimately our theories about the history of the martial arts are very much stories about these two forces (among others).

Yet would I be a student of Wing Chun, a somewhat obscure fighting system from the Pearl River delta region, without Bruce Lee’s rise to fame? Would I have had an opportunity to convince a university press to publish a book whose central historical case was built around a detailed, multi-chapter, biography of Ip Man, Bruce Lee’s teacher? And what of those individuals who study the martial arts? Would this body be as diverse (and sometimes radical) in the absence of Lee’s striking ability to speak to African and Latin-American martial artists (as well as many women and Asians) in the volatile 1970s?

Anthropological studies of the martial arts and social marginality remind us that people who are the most attracted to messages of resistance and individual empowerment are precisely those who have also been disempowered by the dominant social systems of the day. While the globalization of the East Asian martial arts would have come in one guise or another, its clear that I do have a lot to be grateful for when thinking about Lee’s contributions as a film maker, teacher and popularizer of the Chinese martial arts.

Birthdays are also important times for looking to the future. There can be no doubt that Lee’s image has retained a remarkable grip on the public imagination. Decades after his death he still frequently appears on magazine covers and in video games. Books bearing his name (either as an author or in their title) are found in every bookstore with a martial arts section. And Lee’s impact on the realm of martial art films can still be detected with ease. Countless allusions to his more iconic fight sequences can be seen on both the big and small screen. Ninjas may come and go, but even in the age of MMA it seems that Bruce will always have a home on the cover of Black Belt magazine.

Still, one wonders if we are not starting to see changes in some aspects of how Lee is remembered and discussed. AMC recently aired a new series titled “Into the Badlands.” I have been following the advertising efforts around this project with great interest. The show’s creators have prided themselves in their extensive use of the martial arts. In fact, much of their advertising copy focuses on the fact that they are bringing “real” martial arts to the American small screen for the first time. Of course to make this claim with a straight face it is first necessary to seriously downplay, explain away or “forget” quite a bit of equally revolutionary TV that has come before, from Bruce Lee in the Green Hornet to Chuck Norris in Walker Texas Ranger.

A lot of discussion has also focused on Daniel Wu, the lead actor of this project. The show’s promoters have discussed the supposedly revolutionary nature of his role and the many ways in which he is changing the portrayal of Asian males in the entertainment industry. Yet if one drills down into this rhetoric very far what quickly becomes apparent is that Wu is seen as revolutionary in many of the exact same ways that Lee was seen as exceptional in his own era. The one real difference that stands out is that Wu’s character has the potential to develop a truly romantic storyline, where as this was something that was usually not seen with Lee’s films.

While the blame for this is often put on Hollywood (and there is no doubt that much of that is justified) one must also remember that Lee’s heroes came out of a genera of Cantonese storytelling and filmmaking in which romantic and martial leads tended to be somewhat segregated for important cultural reasons (see Avron Bortez for an extensive discussion of the construction of masculinity in the world of Kung Fu). While I applaud Wu for being able to pursue the sorts of roles that he finds interesting, I worry that his revolution is simultaneously erasing some of the traditional conventions of Chinese film and literature rather than challenging Western audiences with something unfamiliar. This is essentially the same discussion of hybrid borrowing vs. hegemony that seems to emerge in so many discussions of the globalization of popular culture. But whatever the ultimatel resolution to this debate, it seems that there is an effort on the part of certain advertisers to retool and downplay Bruce Lee’s achievements in an effort to create a moment of “revolution” in the current era.

Readers interested in looking at this specific discussion can see a number of the links that were included both in the most recent news update and on the Facebook group (in particular the Slate article titled “Daniel Wu is the Asian Action Hero that Bruce Lee Should have Been.”) Actually resolving the specific questions raised by all of this might take some time and far exceed the space available in this post. Yet reviewing it led me to ask whether Bruce Lee is still the revolutionary figure that he once was. In our current moment do we still need Bruce Lee and his message of radical self-creation through the martial arts? Can he still act as a force for the popularization and spread of these fighting systems? Or is he becoming too culturally remote from modern students, readers and audiences? Is it likely that the public will remember his 100th birthday with the same enthusiasm that is greeting his 75th?

Ip Man and his best known student, Bruce Lee.

Bruce Lee and the Tao of Gung Fu

As I thought about these questions over the last couple of days I found myself turning to Lee’s unpublished “manuscript” The Tao of Gung Fu. In some respects this may seem like an odd choice. This book was never published in Lee’s lifetime, and as such most of this material had a rather limited impact on the way that people discussed either him or the martial arts in the 1970s and 1980s.

Nor is it always clear to me the degree to which this collection of chapters can be considered a true “book.” From the editor’s (John Little) description it appears that Lee abandoned the project before a complete manuscript was pulled together. A number of the early chapters were in place (they even make internal references to each other) but after that there may only have been an outline. This has been flushed out with notes, drawings and other pieces that Lee wrote over the years. Some pieces are in a more finished state than others, but none of it was ever intended to be made public during Lee’s life. In fact, it must be remembered that he made the rather conscious decision to walk away from the project. As such we can only speculate as to what would have made it into the final version had Bruce decided to actually pursue publication.

One of the things that bothers me about this particular book, as it was posthumously published by Tuttle and the Lee estate, is that it attempts to seamlessly weave this mass of material together into a coherent whole rather than letting the individual pieces, written over a range of years, stand on their own. Nor does it attempt to label what the original documentary sources of the various “chapters” actually were and how they fit into the larger body of Lee’s papers.

Obviously this is an annoyance for other historians working on Lee. And it is especially problematic when one realizes that a number of these essays were originally composed as papers for Lee’s classes as University of Washington. While clearly bright and interested in philosophy (as well as its application to the martial arts) Lee is the sort of student who likely gave his teachers heart burn. As multiple other scholars (including John Little and James Bishop) have pointed out, Lee was guilty of plagiarizing a number of passages and key ideas throughout these essays.

In a few cases he simply borrowed text while dropping the quotes and footnotes, while in others he followed his sources much too closely (a problem known as “patchwriting”). In a number of other cases he appropriates ideas or insights without proper citation, or plays fast and loose with his sources. For a student of philosophy a surprising number of very detailed arguments are simply attributed to “Taoism” with no further support.

Worst of all, some of Lee’s best known personal stories, such as his exchange with his teacher Ip Man about the problem of relaxation, turn out to have been lifted from other sources (in that particular case the important popularizer of Zen, Allen Watts who had a striking similar exchange with his Judo teacher). James Bishop seems to be the best source currently available on the extent of Lee’s plagiarism and the sources that he was actually drawing on. Of course Lee never intended that these essays be published, let alone to be printed on t-shirts.

Given this list of problems and cautions, one might wonder why I would even discuss such a book. Simply put, the Tao of Gung Fu is a critical work not because the material in it is in any way original, but because it does a great job of clarifying the issues that were being discussed among a certain type of Chinese martial artist at a specific moment in time, and the sorts of sources that they had available to them (both in terms of technical manuals, but also cultural and philosophical resources) to make sense of all of it. While fans might be crushed by some of the instances of Lee’s patchwriting and plagiarism (which varied from unintentional to egregious) the transparent nature of these problems is actually a great blessing to cultural historians and students of martial arts studies.

Lee often starts by outlining questions that a wide variety of readers in his era would have found interesting, and with only a few minutes of googling you can figure out exactly what resources a young, somewhat educated martial artist would have had access to in both the Chinese and English language literatures. In short, for anyone interested in the specific steps by which the Chinese martial arts were culturally appropriated by the West, this is a remarkable resource.

If you want to better acquaint yourself with the sources of Lee’s philosophy on the martial arts, this is the book that I would recommend. And for Wing Chun students it has the additional bonus of providing critical insight into how (at least some) individuals were discussing the system during the late 1950s and 1960s.

What then is the ultimate root of Lee’s philosophy of the martial arts? What ideas did he turn to in order to both make sense of these fighting traditions and to provide them with increased social meaning (and status) against the backdrop of Chinese culture and thought?

The Tao of Gung Fu provides an embarrassment of riches on these sorts of questions. Students of Wing Chun will likely find Lee’s discussions of Chi Sao (some of which is quite philosophical) to be the most interesting. And readers of history will no doubt want to pay close attention to Lee’s understanding of the subject as discussed in the book’s closing chapters.

Yet perhaps one of the most important themes in Lee’s thinking is outlined in the very first chapter before being expanded upon throughout the rest of the manuscript. Here we see Lee outlining a three step process (one that he attributes to Daoism) in which something progresses from 1) the “primitive” stage 2) the stage of “art” 3) the stage of “artlessness.”

Most often this progression is applied to the martial arts themselves. Lee sees in this pattern the meta-history of the Chinese martial arts as a whole. They progressed from a simple, but natural, system to a more sophisticated but stultifying understanding. Finally, after years of hard work Chinese martial artists practiced, experimented and realized what non-essential material could be stripped away, leaving a set of systems what was both sophisticated but once again natural in its execution.

In other places Lee appears to apply this same process to the life history of individual styles. It can also be viewed as the stages that any given martial artist must progress through. In fact, Lee’s iconic “Liberate Yourself from Classical Karate” article is premised on this idea, as well as Lee’s contention that most Western martial artists at the time were stuck in stage two.

Lee’s use of this basic framework extended far beyond the martial arts. At times he seems to have seen it as a more general lens by which we could examine the struggle of humans with both the natural and social worlds. Note for instance that Lee attempts to explain this teleology to his readers by using it as an explanation of the evolution of Chinese grammar between the classical and modern periods. And grasping its logic seems to be a precondition for the introduction of his later discussion of the nature of Yin and Yang in both the martial arts and Asian philosophy.

Given the centrality of this idea to Lee’s thought, it might be useful to ask where it originates. Lee himself claims that the idea is indigenous to Taoism and, at other points, Zen. This later claim may be bolstered by the observation of some Japanese stylists that their own systems suggest a similar progressive understanding of katas (or forms) in three progressive stages.

At the same time it must be remembered that Lee was a philosophy student when much of this material was written, and then resonances with some of the western thinkers he would have been introduced to is noteworthy. The system Lee is proposing seems to be somewhat in debt to Hegel and his progression from “thesis,” to “anti-thesis” and ultimately “synthesis.” We have already seen that Lee was very familiar with the works of Allen Watts, and its possible that this idea may have found its genesis in his writings. Indeed, this might be why Lee sometimes claims that he was outlining a “Zen” theory of progress.

While I suspect that this element of Lee’s thought reflects his study of Western writers and sources, once established it is the sort of thing that you can begin to see everywhere. We know, for instance, that Lee was influenced by the ideas of the mystic and writer Krishnamurti. While I have yet to find an exact statement of this idea in his writings, once it has been established in your mind it’s the sort of thing that will find easy parallels and support in some of Krishnamurti’s statements. Much the same goes for the Dao De Jing. I suspect that this theory of “becoming” struck Lee with such force, and became a cornerstone of his thought in this period, precisely because it seemed to find support in so many sources. The ease with which both Eastern and Western (and possibly even Marxist) sources could be used to illustrate aspects of this theory must have made it seem both universal and self-evident.

I suspect that this idea was also critical to Lee because while it facilitated a rejection of stultifying forms, it also argued that these things could only be overcome through study, experimentation and exhaustive practice. When we look at Lee’s workouts in this period (also provided by John Little) we see that Lee was drilling himself in basic techniques at the same time that he was advocating empirical verification and freedom from pointless tradition. There has always appeared to be a fundamental tension here, between what is necessary to learn a technique, and the desire to transcend it in the search of something more natural or personal. This three step teleology spoke directly to that dilemma, and claimed that the way forward was not a return to a primitive state that rejected scientific advances, but rather through a long and arduous process of additional practice, refinement and (most importantly) experimentation.

Bruce Lee sketching on the set for Game of Death. Photograph: Bruce Lee Estate. Source: The Guardian.

Conclusion: Walking On

While interesting on a technical level, its also important to think about the social implications of all of this. The claim that the only true knowledge which is possible is self-knowledge, gained through extensive practice and experimentation, is most likely to be attractive to individuals who feel themselves to be alienated from other sources of social power or meaning. Indeed, the basic ideas about self-actualization that Lee draws on have their origins in China’s martial arts sub-cultures which often acted as an alternate means of self-creation for marginal individuals within Chinese society.

As I have argued at length elsewhere, this would have been the context in which Lee first saw the martial arts being taught in Ip Man’s school to a generation of often angry, surprisingly alienated, young men in the Hong Kong during the 1950s. Lee’s contribution was to take this basic pattern and to combine it with the philosophical and counterculture currents of his own day in such a way that westerners could access this same technology of self-creation.

The 1970s, when the Chinese martial arts first exploded into popular consciousness, was a volatile decade. Globalization in trade markets was causing economic pain and increased income inequality at home at the same time that some western nations faced both security challenges and open conflict abroad. Nor did the gains of the civil rights movement in the US ensure the spread of racial harmony. Everywhere one looked traditional social institutions seemed to be under attack and society was struggling to produce new ways of understanding and coping with these challenges. Given these structural factors, it is not surprising that Lee’s onscreen presence and martial arts philosophy (to the extent that it was known at the time) had a profound effect on a generation of seekers looking for a new set of tools in their quest for self-production.

In many respects we seem to be entering a similar era. Clearly the situation today is not identical. The Cold War is gone, and an information and service based economy has replaced the manufacturing one (at least in the West). Yet many of the more fundamental concerns remain the same. Economic insecurity, militarism abroad and social conflict at home are once again challenging basic notions of what our nations stand for. Levels of public trust in a wide range of institutions has reached an all time low, and social organizations that once supported vibrant communities in past eras are struggling to survive.

Indeed, many of these factors are directly challenging the economic health and social relevance of the traditional martial arts today. Yet where large schools might falter one wonder’s if we are not seeing a renewed opportunity for the expansion of Lee’s ethos of individual struggle, experimentation and practice. If nothing else the recent discussion of Daniel Wu by the advertisers at AMC could be seen as evidence that there is a hunger for the renewal (and expansion) of the sort of revolution that Lee originally introduced to the West in the 1970s.

As the needs of students and audiences change I fully expect that the ways in which we see Bruce Lee will continue to evolve. That is the sign of a healthy discourse, and it suggests that Lee might be just as important for understanding the current situation within the martial arts community as its mid-twentieth century history. Given the cultural moment that we now find ourselves in, Lee’s promise of self-creation and his basic philosophy seem more important than ever. And as long as his achievements continue to be the yardstick by which each new “revolution” in the martial arts is measured, it seems likely that the memory of the Little Dragon will indeed live to see its 100th Birthday.

oOo

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

oOo

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

Given that today is “Cyber Monday,” one of the largest on-line shopping days of the year, it is only fitting that I give something away.  A reader recently informed me that the State University of New York Press has posted most of the first chapter of my book, The Creation of Wing Chun: A Social History of the Southern Chinese Martial Arts, as a PDF to their webpage.   As such this seems like the perfect time to share that text with my readers here at Kung Fu Tea.  You can find it by clicking this link.

I actually thought that it was a bit odd that they decided to convert Chapter 1, titled “Growth and Disorder: Paradoxes of the Qing Dynasty,” into a sample PDF.  This section of the text attempts to provide readers with the basic historical and conceptual tools to make sense of the later case studies (though there is some good information in there for martial artists to be aware of).  If SUNY had asked my advice (which they did not) I would have told them to post my Introduction instead.  Not only does it outline the project, but many readers might find its literature review to be really helpful.  In this case it looks like they decided to jump right into the “meat” of the text instead.

If, after reading this chapter, you decide that you want to hear more directly how I discuss Wing Chun, you can check out the following conference paper, which summarizes the book’s conclusion.  You can also find Douglas Wile’s recent discussion of my book here. Or you could just head on over to Amazon and order either a hardback copy for your library or the electronic version (at a notable discount) to read on your Kindle.   And if you still need something to ponder while waiting for you acquisition to arrive, try checking out this recent essay which asks whether the world still needs the memory of Bruce Lee?  Enjoy!

A studio image of two Chinese soldiers (local “braves”) produced probably in Hong Kong during the 1850s. Note the hudiedao (butterfly swords) carried by both individuals. Unknown Photographer.

Bernard the Kung Fu Elf, training for a spot on the elite North Pole Alpine Search and Rescue team. (Source: late 1940s Swedish Postcard, Authors personal collection.)

“In business, be competent.
In action, watch the timing.
No fight: No blame.”

Introduction

I bet you didn’t know that the Dao De Jing was full of Christmas shopping advice. It turns out that it is, and this is the perfect time to start thinking hard about what you are going to get that hard to please martial artist on your list. Or if you are the one looking for some martial arts books and gear to help you pass those long winter nights, this is the post for you.

This year’s shopping list is split into four categories: books, weapons (mostly sharp), training equipment, and items of cultural interest. I have tried to select items at a variety of price points for each category. Some of the gift ideas are quite reasonable while others are admittedly aspirational. After all, Christmas is a time for dreams, so why not dream big!

Given the emphasis of this blog, most of these ideas pertain to the Chinese martial arts, but I do try to branch out in places. I have also put at least one Wing Chun item in each category. Nevertheless, with a little work many of these ideas could be adapted to fit the interests of just about any martial artists.

As a disclaimer I should point out that I have no financial relationship with any of the firms listed below (except for the part where I plug my own book). This is simply a list of gift ideas that I thought were interesting. It is not an endorsement or a formal product review. Lastly, I would like to thank my friend Bernard the “Kung Fu Elf” (see above) for helping me to brainstorm this list.

Books: Feed your Head

For a supposedly oral branch of popular culture the Chinese martial arts sure do produce a lot of books. In fact, books make the ideal gift as they cater to a wide variety of interests, are never the wrong size and (unlike a number of items slightly further down) will not slow you down in the airport security line.  My first pick for this year would have to be Kung Kuen Fundamentals and Hung Kuen Training by Lam Chun Fai (and Hing Chao).   You can think of these as volumes one and two of the same project.  At about $50 they will be the most interesting to students of Hung Gar in all of its many incarnations.  But the historical discussions in these volumes will also make them of interest to any student of the Southern Chinese martial arts.  The quality of these volumes is excellent and you can find a description of the contents of both books here.

Of course one of the challenge that Bernard and I face every year is coming up with gift ideas that might appeal to a wide range of readers, and not just those from a single style .  That is why I like this next suggestion.  As some of you already know Ted Mancuso has been working on a short series of books looking at the basic weapons that appear in the Chinese (and Asian) martial arts.  Probably no weapon is more commonly encountered than the staff or pole.  In this volume this often overlooked weapon and training tool gets the detailed discussion and focus that it so richly deserves.  If you have been thinking of taking another look at your pole form, you may find the discussion in this book to be interesting and helpful.  While you are at it you might also want to check out his discussion of the spear.

The sorts of literature that we see engaging with the martial arts has now expanded well beyond the “how to” manual.  Those whose tastes run towards the philosophical and autobiographical may want to check out Not Afraid: On Fear, Heartbreak, Raising a Baby Girl, and Cage Fighting by Daniele Bolelli.  This book tackles some pretty intense subject matter but Bolelli is always an engaging writer with a flair to discussing the martial life.  Better yet it just started to ship a few days ago, making it the perfect gift for the martial artist on your list.

Readers interested in exploring beyond the standard literature on the Chinese martial arts may be interested in Alexander C. Bennett’s recent historical, cultural and political account of the development of Kendo.   Kendo: Culture of the Sword (published by the University of California Press) is a nice example of the sort of work that we are seeing in this new generation of martial arts studies research.  Obviously many of the individual events that Bennett discusses are grounded in Japanese history, yet the more general themes that arise in an investigation of the origins of Kendo can be seen in the evolution of a number of arts throughout Asia.  Hopefully the next couple of years will see the publication of some serious comparative studies which will allow us to better leverage our growing understanding of these individual arts to tackle more basic theoretical questions.

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

What gift list would be complete without an author plugging their own book?  Obviously students of Wing Chun (and those interested in the lives of Ip Man or Bruce Lee) will find this work to be very interesting.  In addition to providing a detailed case study of the development of Wing Chun in and around Foshan, this book outlines a social history of the broader hand combat community of the Pearl River Delta region.  Thus readers from a variety of Chinese styles may find this discussion quite helpful.  While I realize this book maybe in the “aspirational” category at $90 for some, it is a very good example of how an  interdisplinary approach (economic, political, and historical) can lead to a better understanding of what factors influence the development of martial arts styles.  For those who may not be familiar with the specifics of these systems, don’t worry, it has been written in a very accessible way.  No prior experience in Wing Chun is necessary.   I should also mention that I have seen copies of this book on-line going for about $75 if you shop around.

Weapons: The Cutting Edge

The Christmas Gift Guide is always one of the most popular end of the year features here at Kung Fu Tea, and I know from prior reader feedback the “weapons” category seems to demand the lion’s share of that attention.  The big news this year is that Kris cutlery had brought their line of hand crafted hudiedao back!  I have always really liked these swords as they are in many ways the closest copies that you will see to the sorts of swords that were actually carried for combat purposes in the middle and later parts of the 19th century.  As this post reminds us, we do need to be careful about making broad generalizations as there was always a huge amount of variation in the styles, dimensions and even construction techniques seen in this class of weapon.  Nevertheless, most of the antique hudoiedao that one will encounter today will look a lot more like this than what you typically see hanging on the walls of the average Wing Chun school.

I have always been particularly fond of this blade profile as well as the steel handguards.  The form feels different when performed with knives like these and they force you to reprioritize your approach.  And if you ever wanted to do any cutting exercises, these blades (rather than very expensive period antiques) would be the way to go.  (It goes without saying however that either forms practice or cutting with live blades can be very dangerous and these exercises should be supervised by someone who knows what they are doing).  The last time I I talked with Kris about these swords they had dropped them from their lineup as they were too expensive to make, so I am thrilled to see them back and comparably priced ($265) to what they were.

http://www.everythingwingchun.com/

Those looking to get a feel for this older style of blade without making the big investment necessary to purchase a set of vintage swords (or the more moderate investment necessary to get a set of decent reproductions) might want to consider these plastic training swords from Everything Wing Chun.  The blade profile is close to correct and long enough (14 inches) to get you into the sorts of sizes that were commonly encountered in historic weapons.  Better yet, you can practice your forms or train at the school without having to worry about getting cut or destroying your $1200 antiques!  For $35 these are a great training tool.  And if the “stabbers” are not your style you can get very similar practice swords with a wide range of blade shapes and lengths from the same source.  The Wing Chun practitioner on your list would get a lot of use out of these training knives.

Chu shing Tin demonstrating the pole form. Source: http://www.wingchun.edu.au

Of course the Butterfly Swords are only half of the Wing Chun weapons equation.  Even more critical in the training of basic skills in the long pole.  I love the pole because of its versatility.  In skilled hands its a fearsome weapon, yet it is also a simple piece of equipment for strength training and conditioning.  Really nice poles made from exotic hardwoods can set you back a $200-$300, but for basic daily training its hard to go wrong with these red oak poles, also from everything Wing Chun.  At $70 they are priced to sell.

Of course there is no reason to stick with the tried and true.  Why not consider giving yourself the gift of a new set of weapons skills (and possibly a trip to the emergency room) over the holidays.  Various sorts of chain whips have been a part of southern Kung Fu culture for a long time.  I have always been interested in learning more about them, but never had the time.  But if you decide that this if your project Tiger Claw had both seven and nine section whips as well as instructional DVDs and books.  Just remember what I said about the emergency room.

Qing Damascus Lamellar Zhibeidao. Source: http://armsandantiques.com

Our last selection is strictly for the seasoned weapons collector looking for something really unique.  This late 19th or early 20th century sword appears to be Jian but in fact is slightly different.  The blade has only been sharpened on one edge and had a different cross-section than what you might be expecting.  This style of sword (called a Zhibeidao) shows up from time to time but is not very common.  I have always wanted to handle one of these but have yet to get the chance.  But that chance could be yours for the (not totally unreasonable) price of $1500.

Training Gear

Do you want to train like a Shaolin monk?  No, I don’t either.  But at least you can wear their now iconic foot gear as you train in the (relative) comfort of your local school.  These are inexpensive, no frills, shoes that won’t break the bank.  But they are also instantly recognizable in the world of the Chinese martial arts and sure to bring a smile when unwrapped.  These shoes are available in white and black.  Personally I like the black better, but white is definitely the classic look.

Photo of Wallbag. Source: Everything Wing Chun.

If there is a Wing Chun stylist in your life, why not help them to upgrade their wall bag?  As I tell my own students, a wall bag is both the most important, and the least expensive, piece of training equipment you will ever use.  It does everything from training the basic punch to conditioning the hands and more.  Lots of places on the internet carry decent wall bags, though I have always appreciated the little bit of extra quality that you get when you splurge for the leather lining or embroidery.  For Christmas this year why not give the gift of chain punches?

Speaking of bags, here is something else to consider.   We certainly used the heavy bag in my Wing Chun school, but I didn’t come to appreciate how important a training tool it was until I started with a group of kickboxers as part of an ongoing research project.  Now I am a convert.  Rounds on the heavy bag are always going to be a part of my basic boxing and conditioning workout.  I like this particular model for a couple of reasons.  First, its free standing so you don’t have to worry about hanging it.  Secondly at 72 inches its tall enough to be “realistic.”  At the same time padding goes all the way down to the base allowing you to train the low kicks and knees that are critical for self defense drills.  At $250 its not cheap, but its still a great investment if you have the space.

If you are going to start using the heavy bag for serious training routines you will probably want to invest in a set of gloves at some point.  Either the lighter MMA or the more traditional Boxing models will do.  For bag work I prefer the heavier traditional boxing gloves.  There is no need to spend a fortune on these and you can generally get a pair of decent gloves for between $30 and $70 dollars.  The two most common makers are Title and Everlast.  Between the two I always feel more comfortable with the slightly squarer fist shape of the Everlast gloves.  Your millage may vary.  Its also nice to have some gel in the gloves, especially if you plan on using traditional wrist wraps.  These gloves will only set you back about $60.  And if you ask around at your local gym or YMCA you will probably discover that they already have a heavy bag in a closet or back room.  Add a round timer and an mouth guard and you are ready to add a new dimension to your workout.

Buick Yip – Mui Fa Jong. Source: Everything Wing Chun

No Christmas gift list would be complete without a nod to the traditional wooden dummy (particularly where Wing Chun students are concerned).  But this year I thought I would feature something a little different.  The hanging dummies made famous by Ip Man and Bruce Lee get most of the press, but the Chinese martial arts have generated a lot of other sorts of training devices that are technically “wooden dummies” as well.  Perhaps the best known of these are Plum Blossom Poles.  Wooden pillars are typically sunk into the ground and are supposed to help students with their balance, stepping and shifting.  Some Wing Chun schools (including mine) even practice Chi Sao on the Plum Blossom Poles.  Recently Buick Yip, who makes some of the very nicest wooden dummies out there, has started to produce his own line of portable Plum Blossom poles.  Each pole is seven inches across and six inches high.  They are made of camphor wood and could be attached to a board, though they are meant to be portable.  I think this last feature is great as I have worked in a couple of training spaces that are small enough that it would certainly have been nice to be able to pack up the plum blossom poles when not is use.  Like everything Buick Yip does, this footwork dummy is a thing of beauty, and at $300 you will pay for it.

Artistic and Cultural Objects

Our final set of suggestions is less specific to any given tradition or training method, and instead focuses on the artistic or cultural aspect of the Asian martial arts.  Everyone loves a good martial arts documentary, and one of the best ones to come out in the last couple of years was “The Black Kung Fu Experience” directed by Martha Burr and Mei-Juin Chen.   One of the reasons why I personally like this documentary is that touches on a number of sorts of themes that we often discuss in martial arts studies, but it does so in very concrete and personal ways.  All in all, its a nice introduction to what is too often an overlooked chapter in the history of the martial arts in the west.

Woodblock print of Chinese warrior holding a sword.

Or perhaps you would like to spend a few of the upcoming cold and dark winter evenings exploring the origins of Chinese martial arts culture?  In such case it might be worth investing in a good translation of Outlaws of the Marsh (also sometimes called Water Margin).  This sprawling novel has had a profound impact on the way that the martial arts have been imagined and understood within many successive generations of Chinese popular culture.  Some researchers have gone so far as to call it the “Old Testament” of the Chinese martial art world.  That assessment seems about right to me, and I have always been a bit surprised that we have not seen more discussions of it in the recent literature.  Certainly for those interested in how the Martial Arts may have been imagined in the Song, Yuan and Ming dynasties, this is a critical resource.  But the 108 Heroes of the marsh are also living and vital figures in modern popular culture traditions.

Or how about a little art for the wall?  The Chinese martial arts have always generated great visual images, but these days I find that I am more interested in photographs that manage to escape the stereotyped misty mountains and show these traditions in a more vital, modern and urban context.  While quickly perusing the offerings of allposters.com I found a couple of great images that could grace the wall of either your home or school and are available in wide variety of sizes and framing options.  The first of these is the now iconic image of a Shaolin monk walking onto the grounds of the temple in Henan while carrying an Burger King bag.  This image became somewhat famous after it graced the cover of Matthew Polly’s book American Shaolin (which might also make nice Christmas gift for someone).  Now it can hang on your walls as well.  The second image captures a slice of modern Taiji culture, as well as the Shanghai city skyline.  Both are great pictures.

Mini buick yip dummy. Source: Everything Wing Chun

Miniature wooden dummies are apparently now a thing.  This actually makes me glad as I am always looking for sculptural expressions of Chinese martial arts culture, and I have always felt that the strong lines of the traditional Mook Yan Jong make a great architectural statement.  Now you can put that same statement on your desk.  Buick Yip (the maker of the Plum Blossom Poles that we discussed above) has released his own line of miniature dummies made to the same exacting standards as his full size models.  And like the originals these too are available in a variety of exotic hardwoods including Lychee and Tiger Marble.  The dummy stands about a foot tall and the body has a diameter of one and half inches.  Its the perfect size to use either as a gift or award.  At $130 I suspect that it is as close as I will get to owning a Buick Yip dummy for the next couple of years.

A home silhouetted by the moon on Christmas eve. These architectural cards were some of the most commonly given and are a valuable remainder of the material lives that Americans at the turn of the century aspired to. Note the art nouveau influenced gate. (Source: Vintage American Postcard, authors personal collection.)

Conclusion: The Best Things in Life are Free

Its important to remember that many of the best things about the holidays come free of charge.   These include the chance to spend time with our friends and families, to get caught up with old training partners or teachers, and to reflect on what the new year might hold.  But now you can also add a subscription to the new interdisciplinary journal Martial Arts Studies to that list.  Published twice yearly this journal is available for free to anyone with an internet connection.  It features research and discussion by some of the top names in the field and it will look great on your tablet, desktop or phone.  So as you get caught up with your “Kung Fu Family” over the holidays please consider passing the link along.

And if you still need help shopping for all of the martial artists on your list consider checking out the 2012, 2013 and 2014 gift guides.

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

Religion, Violence and the Asian Martial Arts
Tel Aviv University – Department of East Asian Studies Conference, November 23, 2015.

Introduction

Today’s post will introduce readers to some of the recent developments in the global field of Martial Arts Studies. This comes in the form of a conference report, submitted by Abi Moriya, on a recent gathering held at Tel Aviv University titled “Religion, Violence and the Asian Martial Arts” on November 23rd of 2015. Sponsored by the Department of East Asian Studies this one day conference featured some very well-known writers who will already be familiar to readers of Kung Fu Tea, as well as the work of a number of younger, up and coming, scholars.

The following report focuses most if its attention on the keynote addresses. While all of the topics are important I suspect that many readers will be most interested in the results of Prof. Zhou Weiliang’s research into the history and possible whereabouts of the “Southern Shaolin Temple.” Still, after reading through the conference program I admit that I am looking forward to seeing a number of these papers in print.

Increasingly we are seeing more gatherings dedicated to Martial Arts Studies and related topics around the globe. If you find yourself in attendance at one of these conferences please consider submitting a report of your own so that other readers can keep up with this ever evolving conversation.

Lastly, there is a news item that needs to be discussed before going on. The schedule has just been published for the upcoming conference titled “Gender Issues in Theory and Practice.” This event, sponsored by the Martial Arts Studies Research Network, will be held at the University of Brighton on February 5th, 2016. Attendance is free, but they need you to register anyway. Click here to see the list of papers and to find the registration details. Hopefully we will be able to get some reports from this event as well!

Conference Report: Religion, Violence and the Asian Martial Arts

The topic of this conference is timeless, yet it is also very relevant to the present situation in Europe and the Middle East. What is a photograph of a terrorist from the Islamic State, who decapitated one of his victims, doing in a lecture about Guan Yu? Israel, like other countries, is facing at this moment a wave of violence. Recently much of this has taken the form of knife and blade attacks. If we try to analyze the situation we will soon face its religious and ideological components. But still, trying to successfully weave together the numerous threads of the headlines is not an easy task.

As with most academic lectures, the chosen language of presentations at this conference was English. The exception was Prof. Zhou Weiliang who spoke in Chinese. I believe that most of the participants in this event had some familiarity with Asian culture. Nevertheless, translating ideas that are deeply rooted in one culture to another language is not that easy.

We try to describe our region, to formulate its rules and our thoughts through imperfect language. This is also a common challenge in the martial arts. Many times we describe in words feelings and movements only to discover the gap between words and deeds.

Popular Chinese terms, which may be understood by every educated Chinese person, have found their way to the western world through a different prism, sometimes trying to remain loyal to older translations. That reminds me of a saying of Bruce Kumar Frantzis: “When Taiji Quan terms were first translated to English there wasn’t a good Taiji Quan teacher who knew English well and vice versa…”

The first session of the conference had three distinguished guests, all well known to the CMA community, who gave short (20 minutes) lectures:

Professor Barend ter Haar – Oxford University
Professor Meir Shahar – Tel Aviv University
Professor Zhou Weiliang 周伟良 – Zhengzhou University

Since I was asked to give a Xingyi Quan demonstration at the opening of the conference, I had plenty of time to watch the whole event from the audience’s point of view.

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

Lecture 1: Prof. Barend ter Haar: “Guan Yu: Violent and Moral Deity.”

As far as I know, China never had a single organized pantheon of gods, so there is no universal “God of War” who is common to all the Chinese, like Mars in ancient Roman religion and myth, or Ares in ancient Greece. Guan Yu 關羽is a god of war who is associated with Confucianism while Zhen Wu is linked to the Daoist tradition, etc.

In his lecture, professor ter Haar discussed briefly Guan Yu’s life. He claimed that he was an “unsuccessful historical figure” who was eventually decapitated. So, how did such a figure became worshiped and highly popular in Chinese culture?

According to ter Haar he was deified because he came to be associated with an admired quality: loyalty, and more specifically his loyalty to Cao Cao曹操; a warlord and the penultimate Chancellor of the Eastern Han who rose to great power in the final years of the dynasty. Ter Haar then made a great leap to the present, showing a decapitation by the Islamic State, and declaring that “This is how Guan Yu’s death would look today.” The audience was asked to turn their heads in case the modern version was too much to watch…

The second section of the lecture focused on Guan Yu’s figure in different temples and its evolving iconography: including his red face, unique beard and iconic weapon. My interest in this part did not last long as the Guan Dao 關刀 (yanyuedao 偃月刀) was not the focus of the discussion.

The third part of the lecture described a street performance by a local theatre company in Taiwan, which included Guan Yu’s figure. Ter Haar also discussed Daoist practices which are predominant in Guan Yu worship. Many temples dedicated to Guan Yu, including the Emperor Guan Temple in Xiezhou County, show heavy Daoist influence. Every year, on the 24th day of the sixth month on the lunar calendar (legendary birthday of Guan), a street parade in the honor of Guan Yu was held.

I was expecting that all these disparate strands of information would somehow be woven together into a single argument, but alas…. During a conversation with a doctoral student of the Department of East Asian Studies, I learned that this is how Professor ter Haar prefers to “slice the apple,” by chopping it into many sections.

Lecture 2: Prof. Meir Shahar: “Martial Gods and Divine Armies.”

My acquaintance with Professor Shahar goes many years back. He reviewed my own book, and kindly invited me to his CMA history course at the TLV University as a guest lecturer and for demonstrations.

Professor Shahar is currently focusing on the history of Chinese gods, especially Nezha. He has written a book awaiting publication titled the “Oedipal God: The Chinese Nezha and his Indian Origins.”

Many books have been written about symbolism in Chinese culture (1), but it is always a pleasure to discover some new facts. In his lecture, Shahar described divined armies who have a protective roll in Chinese culture and are worshiped by the common people. Most of the pictures he showed were taken during his trips to Taiwan.

One of the most interesting subjects in the lecture was the symbolism of different objects and their meaning. Five bamboo sticks in the grounds which surround the village represent these same divine armies. At times the direction they face correlates to the five elements.

The next picture was of a priest who carried a special prayer. Afterwards the townspeople marched around the village and entered into a collective trance. This allowed them to stab, puncture, and hit themselves in various ways. At that point I was amazed to see that along the parade route what Shahar described as “Mini Golf Carts.” Each of these carts contained various weapons, needles, whips, etc., which were selected and used by the people in trance.

The last part of the lecture was an explanation of the temple’s structure. Under the table at the front there is a statue of a tiger, named simply the “Black Tiger.” This is symbolic of the lower divine god. The statue on top of the table is usually of a martial god, such as the Diamond God (Jingangshou pusa 金剛手菩薩), which represent the middle divine god.

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

Lecture 3: Professor Zhou Weiliang “The Heaven and Earth Society and the Southern Shaolin Monastery”; Tiandihui Yu Nan Shaolin Si天地會與南少林寺.

Perhaps because my written Chinese is not fluent, I was not exposed to much of Professor Zhou’s writing prior to the conference. Some of his publications (2) were mentioned in Meir Shahar’s book (3), others in Stanley Henning’s article , who wrote:

“Professor Zhou left no stone unturned in his efforts, and has covered all aspects of the Chinese martial arts – historical, technical, and socio-cultural – in amazing detail. His writings, of which I have just mentioned a few, are essential reading for gaining an understanding of the full scope of activity that makes up the term “traditional Chinese martial arts.” Professor Zhou is, without question, one of China’s top martial studies scholars.”(4)

I had the opportunity to have lunch with Prof. Zhou and found him to be “not very Chinese.” Mr. Zhou is a great interlocutor, expressive and straight forward. Not the “beating around the bush” type of guy. I felt very comfortable talking with him. I found that he practices different martial arts, and that he had even made an appointment with one of the university’s doctoral students to practice Tan Tui 彈腿.

In his paper he focused on the question: “Is there a southern Shaolin monastery?”

The first part of the lecture described rebellious societies in Fujian province, especially the Heaven and Earth Society (Tiandihui a.k.a Hongmen 洪門) and their connections to the martial arts, since some of the founders came from that province. The Hongmen grouping is today more or less synonymous with the whole Tiandihui concept, although the title “Hongmen” is also claimed by some criminal groups.

The second part of his paper turned to a survey of three different monasteries in Fujian. All of these claim to have direct roots going back to the shaolin monastery in Henan, and call themselves the “Southern Shaolin Monastery.” Professor Zhou showed pictures and gave a short description of the three. His conclusion was sharp and clear: Even though there were some archeological discoveries at one of the monasteries, none of them is a “real Shaolin.”

At the conclusion of his lecture I asked him about the Fujian White Crane systems practiced in Taiwan. Specifically, does the fact that some of these groups use Buddhist terminology indicate any connection to the Shaolin Monastery? Professor Zhou’s replied that there is no such connection and, worse yet, some styles may use false names in order to claim a superior link to Shaolin.

I will speak more briefly about the second session of the conference. I guess that the way to become a professor is to spend endless hours standing in front of an audience. That was very clear in contrast to the first session starting with things like the flow of speech and ending with the body language and apparent inability to sit comfortably at the lecturers table. My heart and empathy goes out to the doctoral students of the second session, who all gave their best effort. Yet all in all, papers read directly from the page are not very interesting to me.

The material itself, such as a written document by A’de 阿德, which was provided to Professor Shahar, and from him to a doctoral student, has true value and deserves its own discussion. Professor Zhou saved the day in this case by noting that this document should not actually read fluently, but is instead a poetic verse which describes different styles, weapons and deities of the Shaolin temple.

To conclude this short review, I am sure that this conference has been another brick in the construction of the edifice of Martial Arts Studies both in Israel and abroad. This field, populated by both academic and independent researchers, is infinite, so it is no wonder that some prefer to focus their research on specific subjects. My personal hope is this experience and knowledge will influence my own point of view in my work at the School for Coaches and Instructors, Wingate Institute, where our team trains and educate the future generations of martial arts teachers.

oOo

About the Author: Abi Moriya is a professional teacher and researcher whose involvement in the CMA and FMA spans more than three decades. In addition, Abi Moriya is a teacher of Qigong, Shiatsu and TCM, and a senior member of the Martial Arts faculty at the Nat Holman School for Coaches and Instructors, Wingate Institute, Israel.

Published Works:
Lightened Tiger, Darkened Dragon: Chinese Martial Arts; A Cultural View. TLV: Madaf Publication, 2015 (Hebrew).
Krav Maga: Teaching With Doubt! Co-author with Dr. Guy Mor. TLV: Self publication, 2015 (English).

oOo

Notes

1) Williams, C.A.S. Chinese Symbolism and Art Motifs: A Comprehensive Handbook on Symbolism in Chinese Art through the Ages. NY: Dover |Publications, 1976.

2) Zhou Weiliang. “Ming-Qing shiqi Shaolin wushu de lishi liubian” (The historical evolution of the Shaolin martial arts during the Ming-Qing period). In Shaolin gongfu wenji (q.v.)
Zhou Weiliang. Zhongguo wushu shi中国武术史 (History of Chinese Martial Arts). Beijing: Gaodeng jiaoyu Chubanshe, 2003.

3) Shahar, Meir. The Shaolin Monastery: History, Religion, and the Chinese Martial Arts. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2008.

4) Henning, Stanley E. “Professor Zhou weiliang: Leaving No Stone Unturned. In China’s New Wave of Martial Studies Scholars”. Journal of Asian Martial Arts, Vol. 15 No. 2, 2006, pp.15-18.

Painting of a man yielding two long iron whips on pith paper. Canton, mid 19th century. Source: Digital Collections of the New York Public Library.

Introduction

History is difficult. It goes beyond gaining access to appropriate sources, records and languages. The challenges that we face are often more basic and conceptual. At the present moment there is a lot of interest, both in popular and scholarly discussions, in finding the “real origins” of various Asian martial arts.

Perhaps this should not be a surprise. A number of these fighting systems have strongly linked their credibility as hand combat practices to very specific genealogies or fantastic creation myths. And as scholars attempt to establish martial arts studies, a different “quest for origins” is emerging, one that will allow us to understand the contributions that these systems have made to the maintenance of a wide range of identities and social institutions.

Whether our conversation is popular or academic in tone, one specific problem always seems to emerge. The ways in which we want to speak about “origins” are concrete, singular, linear and logical. And yet most events of sufficient complexity to be of any interest to social scientists do not actually emerge this way. A gap exists between the language that is used (both spoken and conceptual) and ways in which complex systems actually generate social outcomes.

Consider the following exercise. Think about an event of real significance in your life; the start of a relationship, getting your first professional job or even purchasing your first car. If I were to ask you about this event three different times, in three different settings, I am fairly certain I would get three different versions of the story. Simply consider all of the various ways in which you have already described your profession, your faith or dislikes in the past. Does this mean that the first two times you told me the story about your job that you were lying? Or worse yet, that people are infinitely changeable and there is no discernible logic of causality at work in our lives?

I do not think so. Rather, because our lives are the product of multiple complex systems (psychological, cultural, economic, political….etc) most of the decisions that we come to are “overdetermined.” Or to put it slightly differently, there are many sorts of constraints that help to explain our actions, and they are no less real for the fact that we often perceive their workings dimly if at all.

I suspect that individuals tell the same story differently because as their setting changes other factors are moved to the forefront of their thought. They become more conscious of new parts of the puzzle. So it seems appropriate to tell the story that way in a given setting. This is why to really know our teachers, friends and parents we listen to their stories not once, but many times. Why should it be any different with the martial arts?

The same basic problem emerges when we debate the first instance of any behavior. Who was the first person to teach Chinese martial arts in America? Who wrote the first book of Taijiquan? Who was the first individual to challenge the way in which the modern world perceived China? These are all questions that have been discussed at length. And as we listen to the ensuing debates one cannot help but think that often these discussions talk past one another. Yet given the complex nature of causality, how could it be otherwise?

While it is probably impossible to fully account for the complexities of causality within an empirical case study or historical discussion, there are somethings that we can do to alleviate the problem while at the same time producing a richer picture of the social environment which created the outcome that we are interested in. The key is to remember to tell our story more than once, and to do so in systematic and rigorous ways.

Image of a man holding a “horse knife.” Guangzhou, mid 19th century. Source: Digital Collections of the New York Public Library.

LaRochelle and the Four Types of Origin Stories

Recently I had an opportunity to read a paper by Dominic LaRochelle (Laval University) titled “The Daoist Origins of Chinese Martial Arts in Taiji quan Manuals Published in the West.” Building on the prior writing of Douglas Wiles (who looked at late Qing and Republic era Taiji quan manuals in China) this paper argued that the authors of English language Taiji publications closely followed older Chinese literary models in advancing the view that the art of Taiji was a fundamentally spiritual and Daoist undertaking. La Rochelle noted that this discourse was in active opposition to a more historically rigorous line of argument (originally championed by Tang Hao) that tends to see Taiji as the result of military, social and political causes clustered around Chen village in Henan. Further, the actual content of this “Daoism” in practice tends to much more closely resemble contemporary western spirituality than traditional Chinese religion.

In building his case LaRochelle reviews a number of Taiji publications produced in the West, and examines the rhetorical strategies that each adopts in positioning Taiji as a uniquely Daoist practice. While the common critique of such material is that it is profoundly simplistic and unoriginal, with each work simply republishing what had come before, things became more complicated as each account of Taiji’s origins are subjected to a close reading. Rochelle found that while each work ultimately came to the same predetermined conclusion, their actual understanding of what it meant to say that Taiji was a Daoist art varied quite a bit. This, in turn, effected how various authors described the origins of the system.

To simplify, LaRochelle found that one could identify four different types of (non-exclusive) creation narratives for Taijiquan. Depending on the type of argument that authors wished to make they tended to explain the creation of the art in terms of its technical, philosophical, mythological or historical origins.

For instance, a technical argument about the Daoist nature of Taiji might focus on the similarities between ancient Daoyin gymnastic practices and a modern short form. Philosophical discussions find deep resonances between elements of practice and classical literary texts including the Yijing or the Dao De Jing. Mythological accounts often trace their roots back to Mt. Wudang, and include stories such as the famous account of the crane and snake or the involvement of immortal saints. Finally historical accounts of the origins of the art often take the form of lineage discussions in which complex chains are created connecting sometimes dubious ancient ancestors to modern practitioners in a single flow of martial legitimacy. Because these different modes of argumentation are not necessarily exclusive some texts managed to weave more than one strain into their accounts of Taiji’s origins.

LaRochelle’s article focused primarily on the ways in which Taijiquan emerged as a Daoist practice in the West, and at some point I would like to return to this basic thesis. Yet what really struck me as I reviewed this piece was his four part typology of “origin” stories. Indeed, the Chinese martial arts are rife with such accounts, and I am always keeping an eye open for a better way to classify and sort these creation myths. The four part system that he proposes is nice because it is fairly comprehensive yet not overly complicated.

I also think that we can expand this approach in some easy ways to make it even more useful. For instance, discussions of the creation of many arts other than Taijiquan might benefit from just such a device. “Historical” discussions of Wing Chun tend to give pride of place to lineage genealogies spreading out in both directions from Leung Jan. “Mythological” approaches draw freely on southern China’s rich folklore concerning the burning of the Shaolin Temple. Ip Man’s own account of the system combines both of these aspects.

More “technical” discussions tend to find parallels with the arts of Fujian province or to look back to the region’s long history in training local militia forces in the use of Long Poles and Hudiedao. Stanley Henning has sought to go further, connecting the technical genesis of both White Crane and Wing Chun to specific postures preserved in the woodblock prints that illustrated General Gi Jiguang’s Fist Classic.

If we were to apply the same degree of scholarly rigor to the philosophical origins of the art we would likely be forced to look at a number of the “Cotton Boxing” manuscript textual traditions that circulated in the Pearl River delta region during the late 19th century. Or, as I recently touched on in my recent study, we would need to seriously consider how the ethos of Southern China’s rapidly evolving economic markets provided a social space in which local martial arts traditions could grow and evolve in a purely civil context. In contrast the popular philosophical discourse often seen within the Wing Chun community focuses on both Chan and Daoist parallels.

All of this complicates how we look at competing hypotheses. Can we simply dismiss out of hand any discussion of the burning of the southern Shaolin Temple as objectively “untrue?” Is Henning’s theory linking the ultimate origins of Wing Chun (and a number of other arts including Taiji) to the popular dissemination of the Fist Classic correct by virtue of the fact that it references the oldest existing document that seems to show technical movements similar to modern Wing Chun (and a number of other arts) in a coherent form? I think that the framework advanced by LaRochelle would urge caution.

This should not be taken as an embrace of absolute relativism on his part or my own. While I believe that responsible historians have to be modest in making affirmative claims about the past I absolutely accept that we can use empirical evidence to test and discard less effective theories. Yet what exactly are these things supposed to be theories of?

The real value in adopting a conceptually complex understanding of the problem of origins is that it forces us to move beyond simple debates and to think more carefully about how we construct our theories in the first place. When we discuss the origins of Wing Chun, Taijiquan or Karate, what are we actually trying to understand? Are we really looking to challenge what we know, or are we instead interested only in gathering evidence to support a predetermined ethnonationalist, spiritual or modernist agenda? And if we are asking fruitful questions, what specifically do we want to know?

Jon Nielson, my co-author and a scholar in his own right, is also a full time professional Wing Chun instructor. He is deeply engaged in studying, understanding and deconstructing his style’s basic forms. Thus when he searches for the “origins” of Wing Chun he is very much interested in the sorts of technical history that Henning is talking about. If he can understand the ultimate origin of the Six and a Half-Point Pole form, he may acquire additional information about what its movements originally implied in a military context and how they might better be performed. Interestingly he has less interest in whether anyone practicing this proto-art would have called it Wing Chun (or anything else).

I think that these questions are fascinating. And when I am in the training hall I am deeply engaged with them. But I have a day job as a social scientist. I study the Chinese martial arts academically to better understand how civil society works, the ways in which new identities form and how communities react to stress and violence. These are questions of vital interest in understanding not just the past, but our present environment.

From my perspective, knowing when and why a group of martial artists took up a new name and formed a new social organization is of critical importance. What social institutions facilitated this transformation? What threats did they perceive in the local environment? What larger myth complexes inspired them? How this process unrolled between the 1850s and the 1890s is actually relevant to theoretical discussions in a number of fields. But how the Six and a Half-Point Pole form evolved over the same 30 year stretch probably is not. So which of these approaches to the arts origin is “true?”

This is a question that simply does not make much sense. Again, this is not a call for post-modern relativism. Some historical theories may be much better than others and they should be treated as such. Yet it is a helpful reminder that the martial arts which we have today are, like most complex phenomenon, massively overdetermined. They exist at the confluence of rich streams in economic, political, military, cultural and social history. Rather than arguing which of these sources in the most important in some universal sense, we should instead ask ourselves what exactly we are proposing a theory of, and what source of data would best test the specific hypothesis that derive from this theory. I don’t think that this step alone would resolve all of the big debates in Chinese martial studies, but it would help to make those discussions more productive and focused.

A man with a sword (dao) and shield. Guangzhou, mid 19th century. Source: Digital Collections of the New York Public Library.

Conclusion: Martial Arts Studies as an Interdisciplinary Project

 
Occasionally our goals are grander. Rather than attempting to understand a single aspect of an art (or place) we set aside the resources to advance a more comprehensive study. Rather than following only a single chain of causality back through time we strive to understand the nature of the territory that structured and gave rise to a martial art. Douglas Wile has attempted such a project with his investigations of Taijiquan. Meir Shahar has done much to advance our understanding of the Shaolin tradition in late imperial China. And I have attempted to illuminate the world of the Republic era southern Chinese martial arts.

One of the things that all three of these projects have in common is their complexity. If you sit down and begin to map out the causal mechanisms discussed in each of these books you will quickly come across a lot of moving parts. That, I think, is why LaRochelle’s relatively simple typology really grabbed my attention. I spent quite a bit of time attempting to explain to my readers why an interdisciplinary approach to the martial arts was necessary. Yet if you expand his model from the realm of the purely empirical to the theoretical, it gets to the same place in an intuitively appealing way.

Interdisciplinary work is not necessarily easy, and it is a concept that poses its own challenges. In my personal opinion the very best such work is produced cooperatively by multiple scholars with a deep appreciation of both the tools and limits of their own fields. I am always the most excited about work that creates new communities of researchers united in the pursuit of questions that had previously eluded any one discipline.

Also critical are research projects that probe the limits of a field and its key theories or methods. These are often not well understood. When we challenge the boundaries of the various disciplines we expose their fundamentally artificial nature. Paul Bowman’s recent monograph on martial arts studies does exactly this, demonstrating that the study of these fighting systems might help us to reconfigure the ways in which we attempt to understand our world in fundamental ways.

Still, both of these approaches to interdisciplinary research are challenging. The first requires the resources necessary to sustain not just an individual research project, but an entire team of scholars. In practice that means winning a substantial grant. The second presupposes a deep background (and interest in) a variety of theoretical literatures. Still, they do not exhaust the list possible approaches to interdisciplinary research and writing.

Those working on more empirically focused projects, or who need to produce rich, yet still theoretically tractable case-studies, would do well to consider this four part outline. Anyone investigating the origins of a martial arts style, group or practice is likely to encounter a variety of creation myths. Sorting these into the technical, philosophical, mythological and historical categories proposed by LaRochelle is a great way to begin to get your hands around the discourses that exist within a given community.

When it comes time to more rigorously discus the group’s actual origins, these same four categories can provide critical balance. The technical origins of an art may focus on the transmission of its actual movements and pedagogical traditions. The origins of the folklore and myths surrounding an art can say something about its place in popular culture, the groups within society that it appeals to and the social functions that it performs. Historical discussions will likely turn our attention to the lives and contributions of individual practitioners. And philosophical questions can tell us something about the larger cultural constructs that structured their approach to the world.

Adopting each of these approaches will require delving into different literatures and bodies of theory. That is always a complicated and time consuming process. Yet one of the great benefits of embracing an interdisciplinary approach to the question of “origins” is to move us away from overly simplistic or “silver bullet” models of causality.

This approach promises another benefit as well. The embrace of a more complex framework naturally redirects our focus from the individual fighting system outwards towards the society and environmental conditions that gave rise to it. This is a critical point. If Martial Arts Studies is to succeed as a research area in the current era, this is where our focus must most often be.

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If you enjoyed this discussion you might also want to read: Bodhidharma: Historical Fiction, Hyper-Real Religion and Shaolin Kung Fu

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“Monkey Boxers” performing in a public market in Shanghai circa 1930. Source: Taiping Institute.

Introduction

Spirit possession is a fascinating but rarely discussed aspect of the traditional Chinese martial arts.  Reformers in the field of physical culture spent much of the 20th century attempting to erase the national embarrassment of the Boxer Uprising in which young martial artists who practiced a type of “spirit boxing” were seen as having jeopardized the physical security and financial health of the state.  Elite opinion turned sharply against all of the traditional martial arts in the wake of this uprising. As subsequent generations of reformers attempted to rehabilitate the public perception of these practices they went to lengths to strip out anything that seemed to be too feudal, parochial or superstitious.  Indeed, the “traditional” arts that most of us practice today are in large part the product of these 20th century “modernization” and “rehabilitation” efforts.  Which is to say, its not entirely a coincidence that we hear so little about spirit possession techniques.  While such practices still exist in some area’s (and may more commonly be seen in temple procession troupes), they have undergone a process of cultural marginalization for much of the last century.

Perhaps this is why spirit boxing always generates such interest when accounts of its various techniques rise to the surface.  The Red Spear movement in Northern China came to prominence during the 1920s and 1930s in large part on the strength of its esoteric magical practices. As a result of this and a few related incidents, most discussions of spirit boxing continues to focus on the lives of relatively impoverished (and physically insecure) northern peasants during the late 19th and early 20th century.

Yet spirit possession techniques were never confined only to a single geographic region.  Their exponents could also be found in parts of Southern China and even Hong Kong.  Daniel Amos has published a fine ethnographic study of a contemporary spirit possession cult titled “Spirit Boxing in Hong Kong: Two Observers, Native and Foreign” along with Ma Kai Sun (Journal of Asian Martial Arts, Vol. 8 No. 4 (1999): 32 pages).  Readers interested in learning more about the subject may wish to start there.  Fortunately this is not the only account of such groups that students have access too.  The following newspaper story offers another view of these practices, as they were practiced in the villages of the New Territories 50 years earlier.

A few words about the source of this account may be in order.  It was originally published in The Hong Kong Daily Press on October 31, 1922.  This paper ran from the 1860s to the early 1940s and was one of the major English language media outlets to serve the city.  Discussions of the traditional Chinese martial arts were not unheard of in the local foreign language press, but they were also not all that common.  In this case the occasion for the story seems to have been an upcoming party at the Government House in the first week of November, which was expected to feature a traditional martial arts performance.

I have yet to track down an account of the event in question, but given the political and social activism of the Jingwu Athletic Association in Southern China during the early years of the 1920s, one rather strongly suspects that they were to be the guest at the government gala.  If this was the case than we can be relatively certain that spirit possession was not on the party agenda as it would have been antithetical to the reformist aims of this group (and most other ones of the period).

In an attempt to edify the reading public a reporter from the paper interviewed a local Chinese authority on the subject of traditional boxing.  Unfortunately the article lists neither the name of the reporter or source.  This seems to be a fairly common editorial practice during the period.  Yet it was the Chinese expert who appears to have steered the interview away from more recent developments in the martial arts, towards the remembrances of his youth.  After a brief historical discussion which situates the Chinese martial arts both in dynastic history and in relation to their better known cousin’s in Japan (Judo and Jujitsu), the discussion settles on local spirit boxing traditions among the village youth of the New Territories.

The account ends abruptly, leading one to suspect that a longer piece was paired down to fit a set number of inches of “column length” (another common editorial practice.)  There are also a few places in which the electronic scans of the article could not be transcribed with confidence.  These have been marked with brackets [ ].  Yet for all of that, this short article contains a number of interesting details pertaining not just to the rituals of a local spirit boxing technique, but also as to how the traditional Chinese martial arts were discussed and understood by social elites in southern China during the Republic period.  The history, social anxiety and even vocabulary in this piece is worthy of further consideration.

A picture of a young militia group. Luckily the hudiedao of the leader have become dislodged in their sheath. We can confirm that these are double blades, and they are of the long, narrow stabbing variety seen in some of the prior photographs. Source http:\\www.swordsantiqueweapons.com.

CHINESE BOXING AND FENCING.

HISTORY OF THE ART

 

In view of the fact that the Garden Fete at Government House on November 4th is to include an exhibition of Chinese Boxing and Fencing, many of our readers will probably be interested to know something of this art as practiced in ancient and modern times. The following account has been supplied by a local Chinese scholar of no mean repute:-

The art of Kei Kik, includes dexterity in wielding sword, spear and knife as well as skill in the use of fists and feet. This peculiarly Chinese form of what we may call Chinese boxing and fencing has a history dating back to the period of the “Waring States,” some three centuries before the Christian Era. It was developed in the succeeding dynasties of Ts’un and Hon. A certain Ts’ai Man is commemorated in the history of the Hon Dynasty as being a famous exponent of the art, and the men of the Ts’ai State are said to have greatly esteemed such skill. In the province of Ho Nan is an ancient temple called Shin [Lam Tsz ?] whose priests and acolytes in days gone by were continually engaged in exercises of this nature. Thirteen of them won fame as “boxers and fencers” when they helped the Emperor T’ai Tsang of the T’ang dynasty to subdue the rebellious Wong Shai-ch’ang in the early part of the 7th Century, and established a traditional “School” of the art known as the “Shin Lam P’ai.”

It is clear that in those days a real military value was attached to skill in Kei Kik, but later with the development of firearms, the art became neglected as a practical field of martial endeavor. Transplanted to Japan, however, it doubtless became the historical parent of Judo or Jujutsu.

But although the Chinese expert may have lost his military importance, the practice of the art has persisted, partly, perhaps as a form of self-culture and partly as a pastime for boys and men. In very recent Republican days indeed there are not warning signs that the practice has been deliberately recognized as tending to stimulate a militaristic spirit, but this is not the place to touch on certain modern aspects of Chinese social life.

The writer has pleasant recollections of many a spirited exhibition of “boxing” given by village boys in the New Territories. In certain villages there between the 10th day of the 7th moon and the 9th day of the moon, performances of “Stupefying the Toad” take place. Three or four boys lie face downward on the ground while others sit round them and chant the refrain:-

Little Toads and King Toads.
Hifflody Piggledy.
Into the Lotus-Pond
In they go.
Break the branches, break the reed,
There come the Toads? I don’t know.
Jumping on the toad-throne to [] their books.

What the meaning of this nursery rhyme is the writer cannot say, but the chant invokes the spirits of ancient fighting men, ancient masters of boxing and fencing, and it must be kept up till the boys lying face downwards become, as if they were mesmerized. Their “heart goes,” and passes beneath the earth by way of the Fairy Bridge. When the heart has gone, the invoked spirit enters, the symptom being a coldness of the feet and a violent trembling of the body. The master of the ceremonies thereupon cries out “Master, up and perform!” If he did not call this out, no medium would ever get up. He must on no account utter the boys’ real names, as this would at once restore them to consciousness. The assumption throughout is that each medium becomes “mung” or stupefied, and that all his actions when in this state are involuntary, dictated by the spirit of the dead master. Jumping up, then, they proceed to box with fists and feet. After a minute of this they are told to sit, and then they may smoke but on no account drink tea. Then, still sitting, they sing a song, some ancient song that their dead masters used to sing, and then they perform a kind of sword-stick exercise with long thin bamboo poles. On one occasion one boy accidentally banged another on the head, and the instant reproach sounded extremely like an everyday exclamation of a Yung Tsai of the Old Market, and not at all like the grave utterance of an ancient boxing-master.

Finally, their real names are cried in a loud voice, and the mesmerized boys awake. The role of medium is said to be very exhausting and only possible for those with [yin ?]; eyes expressive of the female principle or passivity.

Detail of postcard showing traditional practitioners performing in a marketplace. Japanese postcard circa 1920.

Further Notes on Toads and Martial Spirit Possession Games

Students of Chinese folklore may already be familiar with some variant of this activity, often associated with boys and the Moon festival in Guangdong province.  Compare the above account to the much earlier one published in the 1887 edition of the China Review (Volume 15) on page 123:

Mai Sin Mesmerizing

From the 1st to the 20th of the eight month the Chinese in the Kwong-tung province have a custom of putting lads into a mesmeric or clairvoyant state in which they perform feats of skill with swords, spears, iron bars, and shields in mimic fight, while supposed to be possessed by the spirits of long-deceased famous fencing masters.

On these occasions sever big lads lie on the ground in a row, either in-doors or out, and men wave lighted incense sticks over them, while they repeatedly chant the following incantation accompanied by the beating of gongs.

“Ye little toads* and king toads,
Descend, ye proud, to cool abodes!
Arrive at our cool rooms we bow,
Change hands and enter cool rooms!”

As the lads become or pretend to become possessed, they rise and are assisted to seats, where they are asked then, the sze fu’s lottery surnames and honoured names, whence they come, how many there are, if they will please take a drink of tea. They give the names of renowned performers of the past and say they come from Canton, or some distant place. When they are as many in a state of clairvoyance as each says had left, they are put to perform with swords, etc., to the amusement and wonder of the numerous on-lookers, who all seem to believe the lads are really the mediums of supernatural agents, or else, they say, they could not perform as they do, as they have never been taught.

*In Chinese legends the toad k’am eh’ii or shim ch’ii is reckoned one of the animals that inhabit the moon; as this performance takes place during the time of the bright mid-autumn moon it is only natural it should be appealed to for assistance at the ceremony.

It is interesting to read these two reports side by side.  While some details of the incantations have changed, and others have been totally flipped, its clear that this same basic game enjoyed quite a bit of popularity in southern China.  I thought that the later account’s explanation of the importance of toad imagery in spirit possession exercises was particularly helpful.  Yet this game did not always take on a martial character.

The anthropologist and folklorist Chao Wei-pang also recorded this game as one of many played at mid-autumn festival in Guangdong (see “Games at the Mid-Autumn Festival in Kunagtung”) while doing research in the 1920s.  In reading through the paper its remarkable to note how many of these popular games involve magic and spirit possession.  Apparently this festival was thought to be an especially auspicious time for such activities.  And a number of the exercises that men might take part in could lead to episodes of Spirit Boxing.  Yet the variant of the spirit possession ritual via toad that Chao presents, while still viscerally physical in nature, is not seen as directly martial (pages 10-11):

14. Encircling a Toad

This game is played in a similar way as the above in Ch’ao-chou but only by boys.  When the boy standing in the center is unconscious, he tries to find a cave and creep into it.  In Canton this came is called Mu Ch’in-ch’u or ‘Bewitching a Toad.”  It is played there is a different way. A boy is Chosen to be the Toad King.  He lies prostate on the ground; while others hold sticks of incense and repeat the following spell:

“Toad’s eff, toad’s child.

This evening the Great King comes to invite you.

He buys a fire basket and fir Branches.”

Having been bewitched, the boy jumps about like a real toad.  He Sometimes even injures his head butting accidentally against a wall.  He is stopped by sprinkling water on his head.

Once again, we appear to be seeing another variant of the same basic activity.  Yet in this case the spirit of the toad no longer assists one in channeling a great boxer of ages past, but rather it imparts its own unique physical abilities onto its medium.  This is especially interesting as Chao next mentions a basically identical game in which monkeys are instead invoked.  Needless to say, pictographic monkey styles of boxing have always been very popular throughout the recorded history of the Chinese martial arts.

Conclusion

These account, while far from exhaustive, do help to remind us of a few vital facts.  First, spirit boxing has a long and well established history in Southern China, just as it does in the North.  While most martial arts organizations attempted to move away from these practices in the Republic period they remained popular in the countryside because they were deeply embedded in fabric of local popular culture.  Lastly, these practices were widespread enough that they continued to influence the way that many individuals described the traditional martial arts even after the rise of later reform movements (such as the Jingwu Association).

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If you enjoyed this post you might also want to read: Acquiring “Dark Powers” in the Southern Mantis Tradition: D. S. Farrer Examines the role of animals in the Chinese martial arts.

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Chin Woo crouching tiger quarterstaff stance, Singapore, 2007

Introduction
It is my distinct pleasure to introduce the first entry in a new series of guest posts titled “Doing Research.”  Compared to other fields of scholarly inquiry, Martial Arts Studies has a distinctly democratic flavor.  This stems from a number of sources.  Mostly obviously, the martial arts are widely practiced in both the East and West in the current era.  Many individuals were introduced to these systems while students at a college or university and are interested in seeing a more intellectually rigorous (or even academic) treatment of this phenomenon.  And certain practitioners want to go beyond reading studies produced by other writers and undertake research based on their own time in the training hall.   The emphasis on ethnographic description, oral and local history, as well as the methodological focus on community based collaborative research within Martial Arts Studies (itself a radically interdisciplinary area), makes participation in such efforts both relatively accessible and highly valuable.

There is also another class of reader who might find themselves embarking on their first ethnographic research project.  With the growing popularity of this field of study we are increasingly seeing classes in Martial Arts Studies offered at the undergraduate and graduate level.  Some of these courses include a “research component” in which students are encouraged to go out and join a class or school in the local martial arts community and then to reflect on their experience.

What ever their source, a new generation of novice researchers is likely looking at the challenges that lay ahead and asking themselves, what comes next?  To help smooth these first forays into the world of ethnography, a number of researchers (most of whom have taught these sorts of classes in the past or have conducted field research) have agreed to contribute to a series of short posts on this topic.  Each of these will attempt to pass on a single piece of advice, insight, research strategy or concept that the author wishes that they might have had when first setting out to begin their fieldwork.  Most of these posts will be released in the first few months of 2016, but after some discussion it was decided to launch this series over the holiday break.

D. S. Farrer has generously offered to open this series with a post titled “Fieldwork Methods in Martial Arts Studies.”  Farrer is an anthropologist and longtime student of the martial arts.  He has studied a number of systems and his contributions to Martial Arts Studies have been discussed on this blog both here and here.  For an added sense of depth readers are strongly encouraged to take a look at Farrer’s recent article in the Fall 2015 issue of Martial Arts Studies in which he further expands upon his anthropological approach to researching the traditional Asian fighting systems.

His essay below serves as an introduction to the upcoming series and advances a few of the considerations that novice researchers will need to take into account as they begin to plan their field work.  The list of references at the end of this post is well worth the price of admission and will be especially valuable for anyone wondering about the current state of the discussion or wanting more guidance in planning their own project.  We hope that this occasional series will give students of all backgrounds something to consider as they tackle the unique challenges inherent in doing field research on the martial arts and combat sports.

Fieldwork Methods in Martial Arts Studies

Since 2001 I have researched martial arts in Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Guam, Yap, China and Hong Kong (Farrer 2015). At the outset of my career, the indomitable prison anthropologist, Ellis Finkelstein (1993), said: “You don’t become an anthropologist by reading books, someone has to take you under their wing and show you the ropes.” To set up my research project on silat, we reviewed the essentials of anthropological research methods or ‘ethnographic fieldwork,’ including hypothesis (question) formation, the literature review, participant observation, language acquisition, gaining access, sampling, key informants, covert and overt approaches, subjectivity and objectivity, reflexivity, theory and practice, reliability and validity, induction and deduction, emic and etic concepts, informed consent, writing fieldnotes, description and explanation, triangulation, depth interviews, dangers, ethical concerns and publication (Farrer 2009). To cover ethnographic fieldwork requirements is a tall order for a short blog, so the novice researcher should seek a guide, just as they would seek out an expert to learn a martial art. That said, much of what Dr. Finkelstein relayed may be found in Michael Agar’s (1996) The Professional Stranger (see also Robben and Sluka 2006). Below I address the essential attributes of fieldwork methods, and the “who, what, why, when, where, and how” of participant observation.

Great insights may be gleaned from observing different cultural ways to solve common human problems. Therefore anthropologists recommended extended periods abroad learning about the ‘other’ to better understand the ‘self’ and their own societies (Agar 1996; Pelto 1970). Classical fieldworkers ideally spent eighteen months fully ‘immersed,’ learning the language and the rules associated with another culture and environment (Malinowski 1948). Nowadays, while the emphasis remains on “being there” anthropological fieldwork may involve travel to multiple locations, be of short or long duration, and be conducted at home and online (Davis and Konner 2011). The supposed distance between self and other, ‘us’ and ‘them,’ similarities and differences, may be regarded as an ‘ontological’ device, to contrast the lifeways, worldview, existence (‘being’) of self and other, where social anthropology is the study of social relations (how people relate to one another and their environment). ‘Epistemology,’ how to know, via experience, exposure, then, is intimately tied to ontology. Ontological assumptions concerning the subject, for example, whether societies are fundamentally moulded by economic structures or religious actions, condition epistemology—how to know—with scientific, positivist/realist/Marxist or phenomenological/interpretivist theoretical perspectives. Predominantly a sociological concern, ‘methodology’ is the study of methods; whereas ‘research methods’ are the actual tools employed— mostly, for anthropology this means ‘participant observation’ and ‘depth interviews.’ Training in methodology affects the ultimate selection of research method, using, for example, an experiment to test a hypothesis and/or depth interviews to generate a narrative account.

‘Performance ethnography’ is where the researcher joins in and learns a martial art from the ground up as a basis for writing and research (Farrer 2015; Zarrilli 1998). Similarly, Wacquant’s (2004) ‘carnal sociology’ of boxing is based in participant observation (and the occasional beating). Martial arts fieldwork may involve a higher degree of participation as compared to observation in regular anthropology. The ratio of participation to observation is something the fieldworker needs to periodically address. Too much participation may obscure observation making it difficult to write detailed in situ notes and record verbatim conversation. Observation without participation may leave the fieldworker with scant appreciation for what is really going on. Basically the researcher joins in with day-to-day activity and keeps an on-going written record or ‘fieldnotes.’ Notes may run into hundreds of pages. Good notes are written in first person, recording local concepts, using the active voice to “show” rather than “tell” (Emerson et al: 1995). Some ethnographers record as much data as possible in exacting detail to provide a snapshot of a culture at a particular time; others employ fieldnotes as an inspirational source of material from which to write. While ‘ethnography’ and ‘anthropological methods’ are often used interchangeably, more precisely ‘ethnography’ is descriptive recording, whereas anthropology engages social activity to formulate social theory (Ingold 2014). Ethnography seeks to describe (who, what, when, where). Social anthropology ventures to describe and explain, where explanation asks ‘how’ and/or ‘why,’ to relate the individual to the society, the particular to the general (induction) and/or the general to the particular (deduction). Explanation links theory to practice, testing a hypothesis, or tracing out lines of interconnections (multiplicities).

Participant observation provides a ‘primary’ source of data, where the information gathered is collected first-hand by the researcher, supplemented by ‘secondary sources,’ such as knowledge gained from existing literature. Participant observation has been considered too ‘subjective’ for the purposes of ‘objective’ or ‘positivist’ data collection in the social sciences, where ‘subjective’ choices, values, and preferences supposedly tarnished research findings, to ‘confound variables,’ obscure relations of cause and effect, and conjure up spurious correlations (Pelto 1970). The problem of objectivity and subjectivity in fieldwork was broached by notion of ‘reflexivity,’ where the researcher recognises, takes into account, and incorporates changes in the interlocutors and researcher as part of the research design (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992).

Primary data helps to ensure ‘validity’ (what is supposed to be measured is actually being measured), if not always ‘reliability’ (where another researcher may repeat the same measurement), because non-digital ethnographic studies were by nature bound in time and space to the presence of the researcher with the ‘informants.’ Nowadays ‘informants’ are called ‘interlocutors’ or ‘correspondents,’ but should never be referred to as ‘respondents’ (a term reserved for those ticking boxes on surveys). Gaining access to key informants and a (martial arts) group may be achieved by serendipity, introduction, or through a literature review followed by a formal request. A ‘key informant’ may provide an endless stream of valuable information (Whyte [1943] 1993); alternatively they may act as disruptive gatekeepers barring access to vital information (Metcalf 2002). Crosschecking findings with multiple informants is important to ensure reliability and validity (Babbie 2016). ‘Triangulation’ is further achieved by applying other methods such as depth interviews, extended conversations with occasional open-ended rather than closed-ended (yes/no) questions.

An adequate if not ‘representative sample’ may be collected through ‘snowball sampling,’ where one informant introduces another and so on. However, it may be difficult, dangerous, and even unethical to study two groups simultaneously, to test a hypothesis in a ‘field experiment,’ where one is the ‘control group’ and the other the ‘experimental group’ (Festinger et al 1964). ‘Field experiments’ occur in social psychology: anthropology may regard such procedures as simply generating other forms of narrative (Clifford and Marcus 1986). Nevertheless, comparisons are possible via a series of case studies either carried out longitudinally (over extended periods of time) or simultaneously by multiple teams of researchers. Distancing themselves from a colonial past, some anthropologists advocate ‘community based’ ‘collaborative research,’ where the community helps to investigate itself, and maintains control over the research outcomes (Barbash and Taylor 1997). Community participation is achieved by asking interlocutors to advise at every stage of the research process, from the formulation of the project right down to reading the final draft of the report to check for inaccuracies and produce a rounded, detailed, sincere account. Large-scale community participation is achievable given widespread contemporary access to digital and visual technologies in social media environments, spurring the development of visual anthropology and digital ethnography (Pink et al 2015).

Community based collaborative research, Ah Kin and Ah Feng, Hong Kong, 2012.

To some extent anthropologists differentiate internal, ‘emic’ attributions, concepts employed by the informants, from external, ‘etic’ theoretical concepts and constructs developed outside the field site (Pelto 1970). Dividing emic from etic may not be realistic where the researcher is ‘interviewing up,’ researching high social status people with advanced degrees, or conducting ‘dialogical’ research in an on-going conversation, where the anthropologist shares knowledge and expertise concerning problems at hand (Fabian 2014).

Signed permission slips should be obtained from informants prior to carrying out research, where a brief explanation or ‘cover story’ is provided to attain ‘informed consent.’ Informed consent and community participation necessitates an open, ‘overt’ approach to the research, rather than a ‘covert’ or secret investigation, to avoid ethical dilemmas and gain richer data (Alfred 1976). Publishers often require informed consent forms prior to publication, covering participant observation and interviews, and may insist on the consent of those filmed or photographed (unless the film or photograph is ‘public domain’), the photographer/filmmaker, and the owner of the photograph/footage. Names presented in ‘research outcomes’ (articles, chapters, books, blogs) may be their actual names, or pseudonyms, depending on the sensitivity of the data, whether obscuring the names is realistic, and taking into account the wishes of the interlocutors.

As a general ethical precept the researcher must “do no harm,” and protect the interlocutor’s identity and right to privacy, because the publication and dissemination of the research may result in negative unanticipated consequences. Correspondingly, the martial arts researcher may be a “vulnerable observer” subjected to routine violence as part of their fieldwork (Behar 2014). Martial arts are commonly entangled with shamanic, mystical, and magical practices that may involve murderous assault sorcery (Farrer 2014; Whitehead and Finnström 2013). Historically many anthropologists were thrown into the deep end to conduct fieldwork, but given the expense and time-consuming nature of this enterprise decent preparation is essential.

Pilot research on Yap, Micronesia, 2013.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Dr. Douglas Farrer is Head of Anthropology at the University of Guam. His research interests include martial arts, the anthropology of performance, visual anthropology, the anthropology of the ocean, digital anthropology, and the sociology of religion. On Guam he is researching Brazilian jiu-jitsu.

REFERENCES

Agar, Michael H. 1996. The Professional Stranger: An Informal Introduction to Ethnography. 2nd ed. San Diego: Academic Press.

Alfred, Randall H. 1976. ‘The Church of Satan.’ Pp. 180–222 in The New Religious Consciousness, eds. Charles Glock and Robert Bellah. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Babbie, Earl R. 2016. The Practice of Social Research. 14th ed. Boston, MA: Cengage Learning.

Barbash, Ilisa, and Lucien Taylor. 1997. Cross-Cultural Filmmaking: A Handbook for Making Documentary and Ethnographic Films and Videos. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Bourdieu, P. and Loïc J. D. Wacquant. 1992. An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Clifford, James and George E. Marcus. 1986. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Davis, Sarah H. and Melvin Konner, eds. 2011. Being There: Learning to Live Cross-Culturally. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.

Emerson Robert M., Rachel I. Fretz, and Linda L. Shaw. 1995. Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes. London: The University of Chicago Press.

Fabian, Johannes. 2014. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object. New York: Columbia University Press.

Farrer, D. S. 2009. Shadows of the Prophet: Martial Arts & Sufi Mysticism. Muslims in Global Societies Series. Dordrecht: Springer.

Farrer, D. S. ed. 2014. ‘War Magic & Warrior Religion: Sorcery, Cognition & Embodiment.’ Social Analysis: the International Journal of Social & Cultural Practice, 58(1).

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Chinese Officer and Soldier with Ring Hilted Sabers

Today’s post is an early Christmas gift.  When I first decided that it would be wise (for research purposes) to collect and catalog images of period martial artists, I was faced with a couple of dilemmas.  Perhaps the most pressing was to determine what constituted a photo of a “martial artist.”  The realm of hand combat instruction in China was filled with all sorts of figures, from opera singers to private security guards and even bandits, who depended on the martial arts to make a living.  Yet they do not all fit into a modern understanding of “proper” kung fu students and schools.

Soldiers also fall into this category.  For many individuals the martial arts were a very practical educational choice to prepare for a career in the military.  So under what circumstances is a photo of a late 19th century soldier also a potentially important image of a martial artist?

My answer to this question has shifted over the years.  At the moment I have decided that a soldier is also a martial artist if he is acting as such (for instance, practicing archery) or displaying either objects of values associated with Chinese martial culture (e.g., one occasionally finds photos of soldiers participating in lion or dragon dancing at festivals).  I will be the first to admit that this is more of a rule of thumb than a comprehensive typology for classifying images.  Unfortunately I had yet to work even this out when I first began collecting period postcards and photographs.

You can see a scan of one of the very first postcards that I puzzled over at the top of this article.  For reasons that I have not entirely worked out, some of the best photos of early Chinese martial artists appear on Russian postcards.  Soldier and martial artists were also plentiful in the British, American, Japanese, German and French spheres of influence.  And over the course of this series we have seen interesting images emerge from all of these geographic areas.  But for some reason, whether it was local culture or consumer demand back in Europe, martial images seem to have made up a larger percentage of the Russian catalog.

The image at the top, which probably dates to the very end of the 19th century or the early 20th, shows a Chinese military officer flanked with four soldier who appear to be armed as his personal guard (recall that regular troops in China in the early 20th century generally carried rifles). When I first saw this postcard I was fascinated by the image.  Not being able to read Russian I am not exactly sure where the photo was taken, but one can clearly see the crenelations of a fortress or city wall behind them.  These were quite common in northern and central China at the end of the Qing dynasty.  Even more interesting are the long, ring hilted, sabres carried by each of the soldiers.  The central officer is armed with what appears to be a European style blade.

Unfortunately I decided that these particular soldier were not a “priority” and I passed on the image.  I immediately regretted that decision and spent the next three years looking for another copy of this postcard.  Earlier this month two examples hit the market at exactly the same time.  Luckily I managed to snag one and am now sharing my good fortune with you.

One might assume that such a long search indicates that the image in question was very rare and had little impact on anyone’s perception of Chinese culture or the martial arts.  That is probably not the case.  I suspect that this image was actually quite popular.  Each of the three examples that I have come across in the last few years is slightly different from the others.  This indicates that each of these examples (see below) comes from a different printing of the card.  It must have been commercially successful to warrant this degree of sustained attention.  The scarcity of this image today is probably a better indicator of the incredibly low survival rates for all sorts of ephemera rather than its circulation figures at the time.

Taking a Closer Look at the “Tai Chi Saber”

From a martial arts perspective, the most interesting thing about this image is the swords (or more properly dao) carried by the soldiers.  Pay special attention to the “S” shaped guards, cord wrapped handles (probably over wood scales) and ring pommels seen on each weapon.  Occasionally one sees modern interpretations of this basic blade shape marketed as the “Tai Chi Saber.” The weapon even seems to have achieved a degree of popularity among practitioners of certain forms.  Needless to say this is not an “official” name for these sorts of swords.  Chinese martial artists, in general, seem to have employed the weapons that were at hand rather than commissioning specific designs for their local styles. Instead this was a style of dao that was popular in northern and central China from roughly the middle of the 19th century to the 1930s.  It was carried by a wide range of local militia members, bandit forces, security guards, martial artists and apparently even some more regular soldiers.

One of the reasons why this image has always fascinated me is that I have owned a couple of these swords over the years.  I would have loved to provide detailed photos of one of these blades as it is a pretty close match to the examples in the postcard.  Unfortunately that weapon is currently on loan to my Sifu on the other side of the country.  Instead I found a couple of examples that were posted over at Swords and Antique Weapons for study purposes that may help to shed some light on what these blades are like for anyone who has not had a chance to handle one.

http://www.swordsantiqueweapons.com/s205_full.html

http://www.swordsantiqueweapons.com/s205_full.html

The first of these is the sort of blade that may have been used as a presentation sword or carried by more elite guards whose employer was looking to make an ostentatious statement.  This particular sword is 111 cm long (about 44 inches).  Its blade is decorated with both piercings and fullers, and the spine has been incised with a bamboo pattern.  That last flourish actually seems to have been somewhat common on these swords and can even be seen on my own, much more plebeian, example.

In general these swords are lighter and faster in the hand than you might expect given their length and width.  This is possible as the profile of the blade is rather thin and flat coming to a sharp edge optimized for slicing rather than bashing armored targets.  As you move towards the tip this tendency becomes even more pronounced, much as you might expect with an ox-tailed dao of the same period.  Of course one has to be careful making generalizations about blades of this era as they have often been polished more than once and this can change both their weight and geometry.  If you see one of these swords with a oddly rounded tip and fullers that lack definition or depth, this is an indication that you are dealing with a “tired blade” that has seen too many polishings.  Given the lengths and weight of the handle, it seems that many of these swords could have been used with either one or two hands.

http://www.swordsantiqueweapons.com/s109_full.html

The second example of a blade of this type is more typical of what one might encounter today.  Because these swords appear to have been popular with civilian martial artists and militia members, they show up on the antique market with some frequency.  Unfortunately a lot of these swords are in “relic” or “dug” condition.  Still, it is possible to get a real sense of how they would have handled, and many of them are sturdy enough for forms practice.  Needless to say, all of the normal disclaimers about the proper inspection and careful use of antique weapons apply here.

This more typical sword is about 93 cm in length, 69 of which is blade.  Aside from that, the basic profile of the blade appears to be similar.  It was also a nicely decorated weapon in its day.

Over the years I have seen some discussion of these swords and whether they could be considered true “military” weapons or if they were the exclusive domain of civilian martial artists.  In a sense these sorts of questions are impossible to answer because of the ever shifting boundaries between the “official” military, sanctioned and unsanctioned local militias, bandit groups and warlord armies.  Soldiers and even important commanders moved back and forth across these lines and when they did they took their weapons with them.  Thus what one might encounter at any given garrison in the final years of the Qing dynasty might deviate substantially from the official regulations for the Green Standard Army. Still, the postcards discussed here provide a suggestion that at least some of these swords ended up in military hands.

oOo

If you enjoyed this post you might also want to read:  Through a Lens Darkly (18): Chinese Martial Arts and Early 20th Century Cigarette Cards: Building the Global Image of Kung Fu.

oOo

An iconic Christmas print by Thomas Nast, considered by many to be the inventor of the modern American image of Santa Clause.

Happy Holidays!

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all of Kung Fu Tea’s readers.  Thanks so much for your support and feedback over the last year.  I think that Santa left one or two things under the tree for me.  Hopefully he did the same for you.

We will be returning to our normal posting schedule after the first week of January, but I might have one or two short articles to go up before then, so check back often.  If, however, you find yourself looking for some long-reads over the holiday, consider checking out one of these classic posts:

December 2012: Ip Man and the Roots of Wing Chun’s “Multiple Attacker” Principle, Part 1.

December 2013: Are the Traditional Chinese Martial Arts Dying? “Kung Fu Tea” talks with “The Last Masters.”

December 2014: Secrecy: A Critical Ingredient in the Ongoing Evolution of the Traditional Martial Arts

December 2015: Doing Research (1): Fieldwork Methods in Martial Arts Studies by D. S. Farrer

Introduction

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

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

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

Robert Downey Jr. and Eric Oram working on the wooden dummy.

Chinese Martial Arts in the News

As you can tell from this blog’s subtitle, I write about Wing Chun in addition to the history of the Chinese martial arts as a whole.  As such I am always on the lookout for a good Wing Chun story when putting these news updates together.  But needless to say, very few of the leading stories have much to do with my personal style.  The closest we usually get is something about Bruce Lee.  This month, it seems, is the exception to the rule.  Wing Chun was in the news a lot.

Perhaps the mostly widely read story discussing these Chinese martial arts this month actually came out on Christmas Day.  Shortly after Robert Downey Jr. received a pardon for some prior offenses related to his personal struggles with substance abuse a slew of stories emerged about the role of Wing Chun in helping to motivate him to both seek and find sobriety.  As is often the case most of them seem to have been based on the same source material.  I personally liked TMZ’s piece, which included interview material with his Sifu Eric Oram as well as a link to a nice video.

As a side note I should mention that people always ask me about the impact of the recent Ip Man films on popular interest in Wing Chun.  It is true that those projects have given the art some great exposure.  But after Sherlock Holmes came out I was seeing just as many people coming into my Sifu’s school because of Downey as Ip Man.  I think it would be unwise to underestimate the publicity that he, and his story of overcoming serious challenges in his life, has brought the art.  And for at least a few days this was probably the most widely read story dealing with the TCMA in the mainstream press.

Wing chun is the essence of correct and efficient movement, says Nima King at his school in the Central District of HK. Photo: Bruce Yan, SCMP.  Also note the very expensive looking dummy in the background.

This was not the only Wing Chun related story to find its way into the news over the last few weeks.  The South China Morning Post recently ran a feature on Sifu Nima King’s Central District school titled “The Ip Man in all of us: classes teach kung fu for Hong Kong office workers.”  This is a more detailed profile than what you normally get and we even hear a little bit about Nima’s teacher, the late (and highly respected) Chu Shong Tin.  As with any martial art there are different types of emphasis that can be brought to the fore when teaching or discussing Wing Chun.  In this case what might be thought of as lifestyles issues (rather than fitness or self defense) dominate the discussion.  But in that sense this fits nicely with the somewhat similar emphasis that arises out of the Robert Downey Jr. narrative that also seems to have gained traction over the last few years.

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

Wing Chun is not the only traditional art to be in the news.  As usual there were a number of stories about the health benefits of Taijiquan.  One of the more interesting of these was run on the English language webpage of CCTV and was titled “Tai Chi Groups Taking Over the Parks.”  This will not come as much of a surprise to anyone who has spent time in a major city in China where martial artists have long staked out their claim to a great deal of real estate in that countries public spaces.  But, as the article notes, we are starting to see the same thing in other areas as well.  The article hints at the “Americanization” of Taijiquan as it moves abroad, but aside from some vague hints at the “Orientalization” of the art in the Western imagination, this aspect of the article is not as extensively developed as one might like.

Representatives of Chinese Sanda fighters participate Wednesday’s news conference. Source: chinadaiy.com.cn

I am not sure that I would personally classify modern competitive Sanda as a “traditional martial art” (honestly, on some days I doubt whether Wing Chun as taught by Ip Man would really qualify) but the good folks over at the China Daily seem to have a degree of clarity on that issue.  They recently ran an announcement that the national Wushu administrative bodies have given the go ahead to create the first competitive professional Sanda league next year.  Named the Wushu Sanda Pro League, this organization will sponsor various types of competitive fights between a relatively small, hand picked, group of high profile fighters.  It seems that the hope is to use some of the institutional mechanics that are driving the various MMA organizations competing for a share of China’s media market to raise the profile of Sanda among China’s viewers.  In fact, I rather suspect that defining Sanda as a “traditional” art in this context is simply to claim it as Chinese and thus create some dynamic tension with the more international MMA movement.  You can read more about this project here.

RIP Yang Jian Bing. Source: SCMP.com

Earlier this month Yang Jian Bing, only 21, died the day of his scheduled ONE Championship 35 fight in Manila.  It was later determined that Yang died of complications of severe dehydration as he attempted to cut weight for the upcoming fight.  This story received a lot of coverage and sparked renewed debate about the dangers of weight cutting in combat sports.  The ONE Championship has since announced a series of changes to their weigh in procedures in an attempt to prevent the use of dangerous practices to achieve drastic short term weight loss in the future.

While on the subject of death in combat sports, be sure to check out this short article in the New Yorker.  It follows the fate of an early research collection on deaths in boxing.  This may not be considered of much interest for many readers, except that these files ended up in the hands of first R. W. Smith, an important writer on the Chinese martial arts in the post-WWII period, and then Joseph Svinth, one of the more frequently cited authors on Martial Arts Studies in our current era.  It even includes some nice interview material with Svinth in which he discusses his research and writing.  Of course Smith, while initially trained as a boxer, turned against the sport as he became aware of its problem with repetitive brain injury.  This then factored into his promotion of the TCMA.  All in all its a fascinating read that includes some of the more important names in the development of Martial Arts Studies.

Bruce Lee inforgraphic. Source: SCMP.

Over the last few months there has been much discussion of Jack Ma’s purchase of the South China Morning Post.  Various media critics (who were already concerned with what they saw as the paper’s softening editorial independence) have worried about what this means for the long term independence of the paper.  While I can’t speak to larger trends in editorial policy, the last month seems to indicate that the paper’s long standing interest in the martial arts of southern China remains fully intact.  The SCMP actually put out more features mentioning the martial arts than I can list here.  As such I have chosen the two that I personally found to be the most interesting.  The first is an “infographic” on the life and career of Bruce Lee.

I do not count myself as an expert on the life of the Little Dragon, though I am called upon to write about him from time to time.  As such I am going to be saving a copy of this timeline as a handy reference to keep on my desktop.

The home of Wing Chun as we like to imagine it. The Cantonese Opera stage on the grounds of Foshan’s Ancestral Temple.  Photo: Author’s Personal Collection.

The other piece that I really enjoyed was a feature titled “How to Spend 48 Hours in Foshan, City of Ceramics and Kung Fu Legends Bruce Lee and Ip Man.”  As the article correctly points out, the sights in Foshan are an easy daytrip for anyone who is going to be in Guangzhou, and this much smaller city has a lot going on, if you know where to look.  Foshan is also the home of some great martial arts history.  But if you decide to go, don’t limit yourself to just Wing Chun.  The city also saw important innovations in Choy Li Fut, Hung Gar, White Eyebrow and even Jingwu!  And if you want to know where to eat or what other cultural sites to hit while you are there, this article will help you out.

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

Chinese Martial Arts in the Entertainment Industry

I have been discussing the press coverage surrounding AMC’s new martial arts series Into the Badlands for a few months now.  Just when I thought that there would be nothing new to say, I ran across this Wall Street Journal blog article.  Its interesting precisely because it focuses on what goes into filming the massive “50 vs. 1” fight scenes that are a staple of so many movies, and this series in particular.  It turns out that this sort of choreography presents directors with its own challenges, not least of which is where to find 50 extras who already know Chinese martial arts?  Check it out.

Probably not going to happen anytime soon. Source: http://www.nothinguncut.com

Donnie Yen has been back in the news.  Martial Arts fans are excited to see Ip Man 3, while Star Wars fans want to know more about his upcoming role in that iconic franchise.  You can see Yen discussing these topics, and others, in this interview that he did with the South China Morning Post.  Or if you want to cut right to the can read an early review of Ip Man 3.  It appears that the directors have deliberately moved away from sweeping nationalist themes and “fights to the death” in this last film and have instead decided to provide a much more nuanced exploration of Ip Man as a martial artist and family man.  As someone who just wrote a detailed biography of Ip Man I can vouch for the general lack of “fights to the death” in his martial arts career.  I for one am very interested to see how Yen’s portrayal of Ip Man will evolve in this film.

Michelle Yeoh. Source: http://english.cntv.cn

The Ip Man franchise is not the only one getting an new edition.  There has also been a fair amount of press coverage of the sequel to “Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon.”  You can find one such discussion here.  All of the advance footage of the film that I have seen has been just as beautiful as one might hope.

One image from Ameena Rojee’s project “Hard Work.” http://www.ameenarojee.co.uk/hardwork

News From All Over

Our next item come from a somewhat unusual (if beautifully illustrated) source.  It seems that the British Journal of Photography maintains a blog.  One of their recent features profiled Ameena Rojee’s project “Hard Work.”  This collection of photographs documented life at the School of Shaolin Kung Fu in Qufu, China.  The entire shoot lasted one month and Ameena captured some striking images.  But rather than the lush, highly polished images that we are used to seeing on the tourist material, her work often emphasized the bleak nature of the landscape, the ugliness of the local pollution and construction, and the “smallness” of her subjects against the immense backdrop of the local environment  Its a different take on a subject that a lot of us feel that we are already familiar with, and its worth checking out.

While we often discuss Chinese martial artists, less thought is typically devoted to the physical structures and spaces that organize their activities.  This is an problem as the nature of the space that one works within has a profound impact on the types of training that can occur.  We are all familiar with the images of Chinese martial artists training in public parks, but what are these spaces like, and what is their place in the local community?  The Economist recently decided to tackle this conversation in an article titled “Park life: A day in the life of one of the capital’s few green spaces.”  It mentions martial artists, but the entire article is well worth reading so that we can think a little more deeply about the spaces that these martial artists inhabit.

Martial Arts Studies by Paul Bowman (2015)

Martial Arts Studies

There have been some interesting developments in the interdisciplinary realm of Martial Arts Studies over the last month.  Gene Ching, the Editor of Kung Fu Tai Chi magazine, ran a detailed two part interview with Paul Bowman on Martial Arts Studies on the journal’s webpage.  Its well worth reading and a great example of substantive engagement between the scholarly and practicing community.  Click here for Part 1 and Part 2.  While exploring this intersection between popular and scholarly discussion, be sure to also check out this short essay that Paul wrote on the theoretical implications of how we discuss and think about the now legendary fight between Wong Jack Man and Bruce Lee.

Illustration from Meyer’s Longsword. Source: Bloody Elbow, MMA History Blog.

Daniel Jaquet (a Post Doc Visiting Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Art and Knowledge) has posted an article on Academia.edu (free to download and read) titled “Historical European Martial Art: A crossroad between academic research, martial heritage re-creation and martial sport practices.”  This is coming out of the German Martial Arts Studies literature that we have touched on a few times here at Kung Fu Tea.  While his article addresses issues in the relationship between historians and practitioners of the traditional European Martial Arts, it seems to me that many of these same issues could also be discussed with regards to Asian traditions.  As such his paper might make an interesting launching point for a comparative discussion.

The abstract is as follows:

Historical European martial arts (HEMA) have to be considered an important part of our common European cultural heritage. Studies within this field of research have the potential to enlighten the puzzle posed by past societies, for example in the field of history, history of science and technology, or fields related to material culture. The military aspects of history are still to be considered among the most popular themes of modern times, generating huge public interest. In the last few decades, serious HEMA study groups have started appearing all over the world – focusing on re-creating a lost martial art. The terminology “Historical European Martial Arts” therefore also refers to modern-day practices of ancient martial arts. Many of these groups focus on a “hands-on” approach, thus bringing practical experience and observation to enlighten their interpretation of the source material. However, most of the time, they do not establish inquiries based on scientific research, nor do they follow methodologies that allow for a critical analysis of the findings or observations. This paper will therefore propose and discuss, ideas on how to bridge the gap between enthusiasts and scholars; since their embodied knowledge, acquired by practice, is of tremendous value for scientific inquiries and scientific experimentation. It will also address HEMA practices in the context of modern day acceptance of experimental (or experiential) processes and their value for research purposes and restoration of an historical praxis. The goal is therefore to sketch relevant methodological and theoretical elements, suitable for a multidisciplinary approach, to HEMA, where the “H” for “historical” matters.

It is the season for book awards, and I noticed that at least one of the titles that I discussed here earlier this year has done rather well for itself.  Lisa Funnell’s volume Warrior Women: Gender, Race, and the Transnational Chinese Action Star (SUNY Press) considers “the significance of Chinese female action stars in national and transnational contexts.”  It was recently named a Bronze Medalist in the 2015 Independent Publisher Book Awards in the Women’s Issues category; it grabbed the 2015 Emily Toth Award, and it was a finalist for the 2014 ForeWord IndieFab Book of the Year in Women’s Studies.  This is great news as the more recognition that titles like this earn, the more scholars will be exposed to the importance of Martial Arts Studies.

Lisa Funnell is an Assistant Professor in the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at the University of Oklahoma, where she is also an affiliated faculty member of the Film and Media Studies Program and the Center for Social Justice.

On November 23rd the Department of East Asian Studies at Tel Aviv University held a one day conference titled “Religion, Violence and the Asian Martial Arts.”  It featured a number of well known researchers as well as papers by some up and coming graduate students.  See here for a full report on this event.  This may be particularly important for anyone who is curious about the debate surrounding the possible existence of the Southern Shaolin temple in the Chinese language academic literature.

We also have some upcoming events to look forward to.  The Martial Arts Studies Research Network will be hosting a conference looking at questions of gender in the martial arts in February.  And the Second Annual Martial Arts Studies conference will be held this July at the Cardiff University.  That event has already locked in a number of confirmed speakers (including Adam Frank, Daniel Mroz, Benjamin Spatz,  Phillip Zarrilli, Paul Bowman and myself)  but if you are interested in going there is still time to submit a proposal to the organizers.  Check out this link for more information on both of these events.

Hing Kee shop in Wan Chai Road, Hong Kong. Source: Wikimedia.

Kung Fu Tea on Facebook

As always there is a lot going on at the Kung Fu Tea Facebook group.  We discussed spirit possession in the traditional Chinese martial arts, Star Wars, female friendly training spaces and why academics need to take blogging more seriously.   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.

Happy New Year!

New Years is a good time to sit back and reflect on recent accomplishments and events.  2015 has been a huge year for the field of martial arts studies.  Things had been picking up for a while, but in the last year we saw a veritable explosion of new books, articles, conferences and even a journal launch.  Likewise we have seen quite a bit of reporting on the Chinese martial arts in the popular press, including the emergence of some important trends.

Below is my personal countdown of the top 10 news stories that had the greatest impact in the world of the Chinese martial arts in 2015.  While some of these stories made a big splash during the year, others were less well reported.  A few are general patterns that appeared over the course of many months and one or two are just for fun.  Collectively they remind us of where we have been and point to a few places that we might be headed towards in the coming year.

Japanese and Chinese martial arts students meeting in Fujian. Source: SCMP

10. Increased Exposure for the Southern (and other Regional) Folk Martial Arts

As part of my ongoing research I spend a fair amount of time looking at how the mainstream and more specialized media discusses the Chinese martial arts.  Some trends are more subtle than others, but there are a few things that you can always count on.  In terms of subject matter there are some clear winners.  When a new story comes out there is a decent chance that it will focus on one of a handful of topics.  Bruce Lee and Taijiquan are both very popular, as is coverage of the latest martial arts movies.  More rarely you might get a feature on some aspect of Wushu, or the promotion and practice of the Mixed Martial Arts in China.  A lot of the coverage of the traditional folk arts tends to focus on the better known “internal” styles of the North.

One of the more interesting developments of 2015 was a pronounced undercurrent of stories that bucked this general trend.  The Southern arts of Fujian and Guangdong prefectures in particular received more recognition this year than in the past.  There does not seem to have been a single driver behind this trend.  Rather what we saw in 2015 was an interesting confluence of forces.  On the one hand there was an increased awareness of global exchange and influence in the history of the development of various fighting systems, such as this series of stories on Kung Fu’s influence on Karate.  Given Southern China’s importance in Asia’s historic trade networks, it was only natural that its martial arts should be featured in some of these discussions.

Other trends also directed the media’s attention to these styles.  The interest in global exchange seems to have been accompanied by an increase of discussion in the role of certain martial arts in maintaining regional identities, or the promotion of these more local identities abroad.  At times some of these discussions even took on a political tone as local governments debated whether their resources should be used to preserve or promote various aspects of martial heritage.  A number of these strains came together in the reporting on Hing Chao’s efforts both to preserve the historic architecture of Hong Kong’s martial past, as well as his current efforts to promote the various Hakka fighting systems as a critical element of the region’s intangible cultural heritage.  Thus while Bruce Lee and the health benefits of Taiji continued to dominate headlines in 2015, the more subtle emergence of discussions of China’s many regional martial arts styles seems to point to important future trends, including a loosening of the links between the “traditional” martial arts and entho-nationalist paradigms that so dominated the 20th century.

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

9. Wushu

While 2015 has been a good year for the regional folk arts (at least in terms of increased media exposure), the situation for Wushu has been more mixed.  After a flurry of discussion (some of which involved direct comparisons to a newly energized movement promoting competitive Karate) it was decided that Wushu would once again be locked out of Olympic competition in the 2020 Tokyo games.  At the same time a number of stories noted that Wushu has succeeded in building a broader base of popular support among martial artists outside of China. And some of the press coverage that the sport received was quite positive.

Perhaps the most interesting development that I encountered in the Wushu story over the last year was not something that was reported in the press.  While I did not talk with anyone important in China’s sports bureaucracy, in my discussions with the various Chinese scholars and martial arts observers there seemed to be a shift in how the Wushu problem was being understood.  Increasingly these individuals were willing to step back and ask some deeper questions about whether Olympic competition would actually be good for the development of their sport (which is already very popular at the regional level).  And if not the Olympics, where should Wushu go next?  I have no idea what, if anything, will come from these sorts of more fundamental questions, but its something that I will be following in the coming year.

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

8.  Into the Badlands – With heavy promotion

AMC, the home of such hits as The Walking Dead and Breaking Bad, recently aired their new martial arts themed series Into the Badlands.  Ostensibly inspired by the Chinese classic “Into the West,” the show has billed itself as the long awaited return of authentic martial arts to the small screen.  In fact, some of the show’s promotional material has gone so far as to suggest that it is bringing “authentic” Chinese martial arts to American television for the first time (which then leads to really interesting questions about what Bruce Lee was doing back in the 1960s).

In some ways the story here is not the series itself, which has been judged rather harshly by the critics.  While everyone agrees that the fight scenes are well done, even fans of the genera have been left to wonder whether there just might not be too many of them, and to ask more serious questions about the quality of the writing, acting and world creation that have gone into the project.

The far more interesting thing from the perspective of martial arts studies is the way in which this series has been promoted.  To begin with, this is clearly the most heavily advertised and hyped martial arts project to ever grace the western TV screen.  As I reviewed the various news updates for the year in preparation for this post I was surprised to encounter extensive promotion of this series almost a full year before the project was ever available to audiences.  So whatever the show may lack in its production values, it has more than compensated in the advertising and social media departments.  Secondly, the ways in which the series is being promoted as groundbreaking in the portrayal of Asian leading characters is fascinating.  While it is true that the story has romantic elements that would never have made it into a Bruce Lee project, its also critical to note that much of the discussion of its “revolutionary” nature sounds like it was lifted directly out of a Bruce Lee biography.  We are left with the paradox of something that claims to be “new,” but the type of “revolution” that it represents is one that will already feel very familiar to audiences.  You can read more about these questions here.

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

7. A Good Year for Donnie Yen

Into the Badlands is not the only entertainment story to make our top 10 list.  At times it felt like 2015 was the year of Donnie Yen.  Ip Man 3, just released, continued what can only be called one of the most successful martial arts film franchises of recent memory.  Controversies surrounding the possible role of Bruce Lee and and the Boxing Champion Mike Tyson helped to whip up even more interest in the project than might otherwise be expected.

Nor was this the only blockbuster that Yen found himself associated with.  After beating out a number of competitors (including reportedly Jet Li) it was announced that Yen had been cast in the upcoming Star Wars film, Rouge One.  While Yen has developed a substantial following among western fans of martial arts films, this new role is sure to boost his name recognition among a much wider audience.  It is also the most brilliant plan to avoid being typecast as Ip Man that I could possibly imagine.  And by accepting this role Yen has automatically endeared himself to both fans of the series who were critical of its lack of Asian characters (despite borrowing heavily from Asian martial arts lore and swordsmanship) as well as those who wanted to see established martial artists in what is been billed as a “gritty” and “more realistic” Star Wars film.

These two projects also given Donnie Yen a windfall of earned media exposure, much of which came in the way “will he, won’t he” interviews pontificating on his future within the martial arts genera, the Star Wars universe and the state of both Hollywood and Hong Kong film.  It was a good year for Donnie Yen, and one that set him up for even greater media exposure in 2016 and beyond.  And did I mention that he still found time to record the best PSA ever?

A “Kung Fu” nun demonstrates a pole form at a Tibetan Temple in Nepal. Nuns from this order recently traveled to CERN Switzerland where they displayed their skills and discussed “energy” with a set of confused particle physicists.

6. Gender Takes Center Stage in the Discussion of the (Chinese) Martial Arts

Scholars have been interested in the intersection of gender and the martial arts/combat sports for some time.  The area is a rich one for anyone who writes on identity formation or a number of other topics.  But 2016 was a year in which some of these discussions seemed to capture the interest of a more general readership.

Readers may recall that a devastating earthquake hit Nepal earlier in the spring.  A number of “human interest” stories on the aftermath of tragedy focused on a local order of Buddhist nuns who practice the Chinese martial arts.  In the wake of the earth quake they put both their labor and more specialized skills at the disposal of their neighbors, and a number of western media outlets detected a gendered aspect to the story.  And throughout the year media outlets such as the South China Morning Post ran features looking at the practice of the martial arts among women around the world.  Often these stories also intersected with the previously noted trend of an increased interest in regional fighting practices.  And the Assassin, perhaps the most discussed martial arts film of 2015, put forth a compelling and complex vision of a martial heroine.

Within the realm of martial arts studies we saw a number of publications on gender within the martial arts and combat sport.  The most important of these was the edited volume titled Global Perspectives on Women in Combat Sports: Women Warriors Around the World by Alex Channon and Christopher Matthews.  Other works dealing with gender in context of Martial Arts Studies gained important recognition from their peers, such as this award winning title from SUNY Press.

Other works, including this project by two sociologists at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, focused instead on the construction of masculinity in the Mixed Martial Arts and combat sports.  While not without its faults, Jonathan Gottschall’s highly engaging work, the Professor in the Cage, asked many of these same questions, while also bringing the academic study of the martial arts to a truly mass readership.

Taiji Boxer. Source: Burkhardt, 1953.

5. Quantifying the Health Benefits of Taijiquan

A host of factors, including greater sociological acceptance, rising health care costs, an aging population and increased skepticism of opiate based strategies for chronic pain management, have motivated the western medical community to take a more systematic look at “alternative” Asian medical practices including herbalism, qigong mediation, acupuncture and Taijiquan practice.  Indeed, the medical benefits of practices like Taijiquan have been discussed from time to time in the West for more than a century.  Yet only recently have medical professionals dedicated the attention and resources necessary to systematically test and describe the benefits of Taiji for a wide number of (most chronic) conditions.

A recent review article in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, which examined, correlated and interrogated the results of a large number of smaller studies conducted in recent years, attempted to do just that.  The results were surprisingly positive for people suffering from a very wide range of chronic conditions (including insomnia, diabetes and arthritis among others).  These findings were widely reported in a number of outlets and ended up working their way down in the mainstream media.  Hopefully this will clear the way for more individuals to discover the benefits of the traditional Chinese martial arts for themselves in the upcoming year.

Shi Yongxin (L), current abbot of the Shaolin Temple, presents a sculpture of Bodhidharma to Professor Charles Mattera of United Studios of Self Defense (USSD) from the United States.

4.  Abbot Shi Yongxin shows off his defensive skills

Back in 2014 there was a story about the Shaolin Temple in Henan Province advertising job openings for public relations and media specialists.  Indeed, the Temple has a knack for keeping its name in the news, and given its vital importance to Henan’s tourist industry, that is probably a good thing.  Much of its success in this area in recent years has been attributed to (or, depending on who you ask, blamed on) its current Abbot, Shi Yongxin.  Sometimes called the “CEO Monk,” the Abbot has brought modern business and promotional methods to the Temple.  He has been especially aggressive in his attempts to build his institution’s market share in both China and abroad.

Still, there complexities to Shi Yongxin’s reputation.  On the one hand he has proved to be a lightening rod for controversy (ranging from past claims that he has commercialized Chan Buddhism to consorted with prostitutes), yet he has also shown himself to be exceptionally adroit in the realm of survival.  Few of the charges thrown at him seem to stick for long.  2015, however, put even his prodigious defensive skills to the test.

Earlier this year readers of Chinese social media seem to have discovered the plans, long in the works, for the Shaolin monastery to build a combined daughter temple/kung fu complex/luxury hotel/golf course in the tourist mecca that is Australia’s Gold Coast.  This led to renewed questions as to whether the construction of costly tourist attractions and luxury hotels in foreign countries is really the sort of business that Buddhist monks are supposed to be heading up.  Luckily environmental impact concerns halted construction of the golf course and luxury condo development, blunting at least some of the more controversial optics associated with the project.

The wider Shaolin brand may also have taken another hit with the trial of Juan Carlos Aguilar, the self-styled “Shaolin Monk” responsible for torturing and killing two women in Spain.  Aguilar studied at one of the many local Kung Fu schools surrounding the Temple, but did not have any relationship with the actual Shaolin organization.  While they quickly moved to distance themselves from Aguilar, its not the sort of press that any organization wants.

Still, the worst was yet to come.  After Shi Yongxin missed a public appearance in Thailand it was suggested that the Abbot had been prohibited from leaving the country due to an investigation of a new set of charges by an anonymous insider accusing the Abbot of, among other things, having both a secret family outside of the walls of the temple and financial improprieties.  The timing of these accusations were especially dire as they coincided both with a highly publicized (and feared) crack down on corruption among public figures on the one hand, and a renewed set of investigations into wrongdoings by various religious groups on the other.  Thus Shaolin, always a favorite topic on Chinese social media, found itself at the confluence of a number of dangerous currents.

As the summer firestorm subsided Shi Yongxin reemerged in public and began to once more lead events at the temple.  His supporters have claimed that the charges against him are trumped up, and that he has laid the claims to rest (or at least proved the excellence of his bureaucratic kung fu).  However, as late as this fall his attackers were reiterating the charges and pointed to other ongoing investigations.  At the moment Shaolin appears to be taking a well deserved break from the headlines, but while reviewing the events of this summer I was once again struck by how widespread coverage of controversies at the temple have become.  While the debate may have been fueled in its early stages by micro-bloggers on Chinese social media platforms, by the summer its seems that most of the major western media platforms were talking about the story.  Hopefully the Temple will find a return to tranquility in 2016.

For the complete issue (including a number of review articles not listed here) go to martialartsstudies.org

3.  The Year that Martial Arts Studies Took Flight

Over the last few years a number of us have been tentatively discussing the creation (or renewal) of “martial arts studies” as an interdisciplinary research area dedicated to the academic investigation of the history, practice, meaning and theoretical significance of the traditional fighting systems and combat sports.  The last decade had seen a fair amount of movement in that direction, and the pace of developments had been accelerating in recent years.  Yet it is now clear that the way in which we discuss this project must change in the post-2015 environment.  Martial Arts Studies is no longer an aspiration.  2015 was the year that many long planned projects burst into full flower.  Martial Arts Studies has arrived.

The number of accomplishments over the last year is almost too great to list.  Respected university presses and academic publishers put forth a number of important titles that will help to shape both the empirical and theoretical discussion for years to come.  A sample of these include Martial Arts and the Body Politic in Indonesia by Lee Wilson (Brill, 2015), Global Perspectives on Women in Combat Sports edited by Alex Channon and Christopher Matthews (Palgrave, 2015), Kendo: Culture of the Sword by Alexander C. Bennett (University of California Press, 2015),  Taekwondo: From Martial Art to Martial Sport by Udo Moenig (Routledge, 2015), Martial Arts Studies: Disrupting Disciplinary Boundaries by Paul Bowman (Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), and my own book The Creation of Wing Chun: A Social History of the Southern Chinese Martial Arts (State University of New York Press, 2015).

While such publications are critical to the growth and acceptance of any field they are far from 2015’s only accomplishment.  A number of interdisciplinary conferences have been held over the last year seeking to engage a diverse body of scholars from around the world.  Discussions of the progress made in these meetings can be seen in the reports on the following events in Israel, Korea and at the First Annual Martial Arts Studies held in the UK.  Obviously a number of other events and conferences (some more theoretically specialized) are also scheduled, and we hope to hear more on them later.

At least two research institutes have been founded in the last year to advance the promoting of Martial Arts Studies.  The first of these in the Martial Arts Studies Research Network (headed by Paul Bowman) in the UK, and the other is the BUDO-Lab at Chapman University (under the guidance of Andrea Molle).  Rowman & Littlefield Press has also announced the creation of a new book series of Martial Arts Studies (edited by Paul Bowman) which will also be vital to supporting the ongoing growth of the research area.

Nor could we neglect to mention the release of the first issue of the new journal Martial Arts Studies (co-edited by Paul Bowman and myself).  While recent years have seen the publication of a number book length studies of the martial arts, there was no single journal dedicated to establishing and interdisciplinary conversation on this topic.  In fact, after conducting an extensive literature review for my own book on the history of Wing Chun, I decided that this was the probably the single greatest obstacle facing the development of the academic literature on the martial arts.  Now, in partnership with Cardiff University Press, there is a freely available, open source journal devoted to promoting this previously neglected area of the literature.

Nor should we neglect to mention the headway that martial arts studies has made in the classroom, especially at the undergraduate level.  This is a topic that we will be hearing more about in the coming year in a special series to be hosted here at Kung Fu Tea.  While 2015 has been a banner year for Martial Arts Studies perhaps its most impressive accomplishment has been the establishment of a firmer foundation for promoting future research.

2.  Bruce Lee at 75

As I mentioned at the top of this post, Lee is always a popular subject.  This last year saw an additional surge of interest in the the life of the Little Dragon, and its ongoing cultural relevance, as he reached what would have been his 75th birthday.  Signs of these festivities were hard to miss.  While it is no surprise to see Lee gracing the cover of Black Belt magazine, it was slightly more interesting to see him on the cover of his own special issue of Time.  South China Morning Post was not to be outdone.  They also ran a number of features on Hong Kong’s favorite son.  You can see a summary of much of this discussion (as well as links to specific pieces) here.

Of course birthdays are also a good time for introspection, meditation and long-form blog posts.  For instance, with all of the discussion of the “revolutionary” nature of Into the Badlands, does Western popular culture still need Bruce Lee?  And if so, why?  Will we still be talking about him at his 100th birthday?  You can find my own reflections on these questions here:  Bruce Lee: Memory, Philosophy and the Tao of Gung Fu.

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

The Top News Story of 2015: Kung Fu Diplomacy

This brings us to my pick for the top news story of 2015.  It is the ever growing importance in China’s public diplomacy (or possibly “national branding”) strategy within press and media discussions of the martial arts.

As one looks back over the history of the traditional Chinese martial arts you quickly get the sense that there are really two separate, yet interconnected, stories at play.  On the one hand there is the question of what actual martial artists do at any given point in time.  This is what a lot of academic and lineage history focuses on.  Then there is the question of what people (usually non-martial artists) are saying about these hand combat systems at that same moment in time.

How does this popular discourse impact the cultural meaning of martial arts practice within society?  Are these messages absorbed, resisted or co-opted by actual practitioners?  And who “controls the messaging?”

Is it martial arts teachers and reformers with their voluntary associations?  Novelist, reporters, TV actors and film producers who promote the martial arts for their cultural and economic value?  Or local and state governments that see in them either a source of tourist dollars or a means of strengthening nationalism and state penetration of society?  In actual fact all three of these actors tend to be active at the same time, and their vision of what the martial arts are, or should be, can harmonize or clash in fascinating and complicated ways.  Much of my writing here at Kung Fu Tea has been dedicated to teasing out these competing influences.

At various points in its modern history the enthusiasm of China’s government for the martial arts has waxed and waned.  The KMT sought to use the Central Guoshu Institute to strengthen its statist aims and better resist Japanese aggression in the 1930s.   After 1949 the Communist government saw Wushu as a way of implementing a vision of China’s martial and athletic culture firmly based in Maoist collectivist and non-competitive values.

A survey of press coverage over the last year indicates that the Chinese government is once again taking a renewed interest in the martial arts.  Yet this time their focus is different.  Rather than simply influencing their own society, they have realized that the positive association that foreign peoples already have with the Chinese martial arts make them a powerful tool of public diplomacy.  By promoting both the practice and discussion of the martial arts abroad, Chinese diplomats hope to educate the global community about their culture, values and to create a greater sense of “good will” and trust towards China.  This is all the more important in an era when China is actively beginning to flex its muscles as it tries to discover its proper place on a global stage.  A healthy store of political trust could be the key to weathering the sorts of mishaps, misunderstandings and conflicts that are sure to happen along the way.

Of course Kung Fu is not the only (or even the most important) tool in China’s public diplomacy arsenal.  Currently the Chinese state is expanding its network of Confucius Institutes at Universities around the globe where language training and other university level course work is provided.  Nor can we neglect the role of TV and radio stations owned by the Chinese government in crafting a certain image.  And Chinese cooking is even more popular globally than the martial arts.

Still, it is interesting to note how often efforts to promote the martial arts intersect with these other tools and strategies.  CCTV regularly runs stories on the growing popularity of Wushu, while Confucians Institutes have often taken the lead in providing Taijiquan classes for local communities.  The government has gone to some lengths to promote the teaching of the martial arts in areas like Africa and Nepal where Chinese financial interests are becoming ever more pronounced.  Often the source of these stories is fairly transparent, such as when they are directed by a government agency or CCTV.  In other cases it is less clear when a press office simply puts out a news release that is picked up by one of the many tabloid news services or webpages.

A lot of positive good will and social capital was created around the Chinese martial arts in the West between the 1970s and the 1990s.  During these decades it was overwhelmingly private actors, both martial artists and media figures, who controlled the narrative that determined how the public would view the martial arts.  Yet in almost every news update that I reviewed over the course of the last year there was at least one story that focused on “Kung Fu diplomacy.”

Public diplomacy is not necessarily a bad thing.  Indeed, America, and pretty much every other country in the world, has its own public diplomacy strategy.  The world is always a better place when states can peacefully discuss their values and competing visions of the future.  That is the very essence of diplomacy.

As a political scientist with a background in International Relations, public diplomacy is one of the topics that I have a professional interest in.  The important development in the current case is that we are seeing number of governmental and NGO (but politically active) actors stepping up their discussion of, and engagement with, the martial arts precisely because they think that it might help with these “national branding” efforts.  While interesting on a number of counts, one must also wonder how it will change the existing narrative around these traditional fighting systems.

On one level none of this is new.  Actors in the Nationalist Chinese government sent a martial arts demonstration team to the 1936 Olympics for a reason. And who could forget a young Jet Li performing a Wushu routine for President Nixon on the White House lawn in the middle of the Cold War?  Yet the sheer volume of Kung Fu diplomacy stories that we have seen reported in 2015 indicate that there may be some trends here that deserve further considerations in 2016.

A Guoshu school located in Tianjin, 1927. Source: The Taiping Institute.

Introduction

Welcome to our fourth annual discussion of the top webpages in Chinese martial studies. The purpose of this series is to acknowledge some of the individuals who have made great contributions to our understanding of the traditional martial arts in the last year. We also hope that visitors who are not familiar with these authors will be inspired to go out and discover some of these resources for themselves. Anyone interested in going back and reviewing our previous selection for 2013 or 2014 should click here.

After considering the questions we are ready to announce Kung Fu Tea’s selection’s for “Top Chinese Martial Arts Webpage of 2015.” To be eligible a webpage must have posted regularly in the last year and to have shown excellence in the study and understanding of some aspect of Chinese martial culture. It is also expected to have made a substantial original contribution in its research, journalism, analysis, art or creative writing. Finally, the webpage must be searchable and available on the open internet.

Beyond that everything can (and does) get quite subjective. “Chinese martial culture” is a huge research area with lots of different branches. Better still, there are a great many individuals devoting their time and resources to researching and spreading this information. The pace and quality of this work has grown markedly in the last year. Collectively our community turned out some great work in 2015. Narrowing the field down to a single “winner” was a challenge. There were a number of strong contenders that I looked at, each advancing their own understanding of the arts and unique style of writing.

The winner was the webpage that best responded to both the challenges and opportunities that 2015 presented. Specifically, how can we bring practitioners, students of Chinese popular culture and historians together into a single conversation that advance our understanding of the development and the practice of the traditional fighting styles? How can we best preserve the unique fighting systems of southern China? Is it possible to present a meaningful conversation on these topics that cross regional, cultural and linguistic boundaries?

The Winner!

I am very happy to announce that this years winner is the “International Guoshu Association” Facebook group.  This community, run by Hing Chao, has become a critical source for updates, information and news on both the various conservation and awareness projects that the group is undertaking, as well as martial arts related events in Hong Kong more generally.  Hing Chao himself will be no stranger to regular readers of Kung Fu Tea.  He also made our list of Top News Stories of 2015.  Readers will remember his recent work documenting Hung Gar traditions, as well as organizing festivals and promoting awareness of the traditional Hakka martial arts.  Those with a slightly longer memory will also remember him as the driving force behind the short lived, but very high quality, English language Journal of Chinese Martial Studies.  (If you have not read the back issues of this publication I highly suggest checking it out).

Even within this distinguished lineup, the International Guoshu Association Facebook group continues to stand out.  Over the last year it has published a fantastic mix of event reviews, vintage photos, community awareness notes and media reports.  Its one of the few webpages that I find myself checking daily.  The mixture of Chinese and English language posts is great and the “micro-blogging” format of the Facebook group is well suited to the community’s essential mission at this moment in history.  If you have yet to check this group out, please consider doing so.

The Runner Up

At this point I would also like to highlight one more webpage that was launched in 2015 which I expect will have a huge impact on future conversations.  It is the new interdisciplinary journal Martial Arts Studies.  By way of full disclosure, since I am closely involved with this project (as a founding co-editor) I preemptively disqualified it from consideration for this years prize.  “Conflict of interest” and all of that.

Still, as an imprint of Cardiff University Press, and with the backing of an impressive editorial advisory committee of respected academic researchers from around the world, this journal will provide a critical outlet for new scholarly research on the martial arts.  Better yet, anyone can read this peer reviewed journal for free on its shiny new webpage.  The first issue, released earlier this Fall is available here.  This new project had a great first year and we are looking forward to big things in future issues.

Cityscape by Jay Musler (1981). Blown, cut, Sandblasted and painted glass. Corning Museum of Class. Picture by Benjamin Judkins.

…When I asked why he was not more active teaching himself, he answered in a gravelly voice:

In my opinion, the world has changed. I never teach my son and grandson. People ask me to teach, but people’s minds nowdays are wicked….

A real master can only teach real kung fu to his disciple who learns under him for at least 10 years in order to know his character well or he will create problems. We’ll not teach the practical use of Kung Fu to those who learn only 2 or 3 years. This is the traditional culture. That’s why a lot becomes extinct. Chinese traditional kung fu is like this.

When I asked whether it was possible to modify the way that students were selected and basic training methods, all of the masters at the table said ‘no.’ They made it clear that the processes through which they learned Kung Fu were integral to the arts and that it would not be possible to teach properly if things were made ‘easier.’…Furthermore, they said that even if they wanted to change the methods, they could not, because they made an oath and were obligated to continue teaching the way that they were taught by their masters. One commented:

It has carried on from generations to generations in this way. From master to student through time. So we can’t do it freely as we wish. We must respect the way things were done. This is how we respect our masters.

P. Daly. 2012. “Traditional Chinese Martial Arts and the Transmission of Intangible Cultural Heritage.” In Daly and Winter (eds.) Routledge Handbook of Heritage in Asia. London: Routledge. pp. 360-361.

Introduction

Anyone who has been keeping up with the news will know that “intangible cultural heritage” has become a hot topic in the more political corner of the martial arts world. Both national and international groups (such as the UN) have mechanisms to designate items (works of art) and places (either architectural or natural) as important examples of “heritage”; meaning objects inherited from the past, enjoyed in the present and worthy of being passed on to the future. More recently the bodies that direct this work have become interested in the human and cultural elements of this process. Skills, identities, languages and beliefs have increasingly been deemed examples of “intangible cultural heritage” (ICH) and efforts have been launched to preserve the human capital behind them.

The bestowal of an ICH designation on a group or practice is not without consequences. It can lead to an increased sense of internal legitimacy or value being placed on what have often been marginal or minority practices. In some cases it may even open the way for the eventual monetization and economic exploitation of a once forgotten cultural practice through renewed interest on the part of visiting scholars, collectors or tourists. While these blessings are not without their inevitable complications, it is no surprise that we often see competition, both within and between states, as to what practices should be recognized as part of a nation’s “heritage.”

One of the difficulties in the study of the Chinese martial arts is that for much of their history they were considered “feudal” and “backwards” practices by cultural elites both within and outside of Chinese society. Some modernizers called for the reform of the martial arts (such as the Jingwu and Guoshu movements in the 20th century), while other intellectuals (including many May 4th Reformers) simply stated that they had no place in China’s quickly developing modern society. While these practices have always been critical to the identities of certain groups or individuals, very few objective observers of the Qing dynasty or the Republic period would have argued that the civilian schools of boxing and self-defense were in any way central to China’s grand cultural heritage.

Luckily the traditional Chinese martial arts survived China’s tumultuous 20th century. In some areas they even thrived. And in terms of social respect, it is impressive what a difference the passage of a century can make.

Over the last decade the Chinese government, as well as the administrations of Hong Kong and Taiwan, have all made concerted efforts to grant ICH status to certain traditional martial arts practices. Students of Wing Chun and fans of traditional Chinese culture may find Hong Kong’s most recent heritage list to be particularly interesting.

This is all the more remarkable when we remember that Wing Chun was never practiced in the city on a large scale prior to 1950, and it didn’t gain a substantial following (compared to the other better established martial arts systems) until the 1970s-1980s. Yet it has now become an undeniable aspect of the city’s cultural landscape. At the international level the Peoples Republic of China is currently in the midst of a campaign to promote Taijiquan’s designation as a piece of critical world heritage by the United Nations, on par with its recent acknowledgement of Yoga.

For all of these reasons discussions of ‘heritage’ as a theoretical and analytical category have been appearing in the sorts of scholarly discussions of the martial arts that I follow. While looking at submissions for a book series on martial arts studies I noted that a reviewer specifically requested to see potential titles that would address the traditional martial arts within the context of heritage studies. And recently, while reviewing Daly and Winter’s excellent Routledge Handbook of Heritage in Asia (2012), I came across an article titled “Fighting Modernity: Traditional Chinese Martial Arts and the Transmission of Cultural Heritage.” The extended quote at the start of this post is drawn directly from this article.

If it sounds familiar it is probably because Prof. Daly used the same set of quotes in a documentary that he directed and released a few years ago titled “Needle Through Brick.” Both the article and the documentary look at the challenges of transmitting the traditional Chinese martial arts in the current era of globalization by following a number of schools and masters within East Malaysia’s traditional Chinese martial arts community.

While the article and the documentary share many of the same sources, what I find to be most interesting is the stark differences that emerge between them. Obviously Daly’s (very helpful) theoretical discussion and literature review is confined to the printed article. Such probing investigations would have felt out of place in a documentary that followed the “show, don’t tell” conventions of the genera.

Beyond these stylistic differences more fundamental variables come into play. While both works emphasize the struggle of passing on ‘heritage,’ they come to differing conclusions as to whether this project is ultimately possible.

The documentary follows more closely the story line of a handful of Wushu students who practice at the Chinese Martial Arts Association (CMAA). Realizing that their competitive careers in this sport will be limited, these students are also embarking on an exploration of the traditional martial arts. Under the guidance of Master Eric Ling it appeared that Wushu and traditional clubs would be able to work together to preserve authentic kung fu. The martial heritage of Chinese culture was secure and being successfully conveyed to future generations.

The concluding discussion of “Fighting Modernity” paints a very different picture. This article instead focuses its resources and theoretical attention on a group of aging “traditional” masters. The picture that they paint of the future of Kung Fu is bleak.

Few if any of them are teaching. Of those who have taught, none seem to have a student who they believe to be qualified to carry on the lineage. Each expresses doubts about the economic viability of the martial arts and the quality of their students. One is overwhelmed with the sense of fatalism. “Real” kung fu, as opposed to the flashy Wushu the kids are doing, is about to die out and the individuals who might be expected to preserve it feel that it is impossible to save.

From a theoretical perspective Daly seems to suspect that they may be right. In fact, his concerns about the preservation of the Chinese martial arts in Malaysia pointed to a much broader problem with the entire effort to preserve all sorts of elements of intangible cultural heritage skills across Asia.

How can we reconcile these two visions of the future of the traditional martial arts arising (ironically) from the same research project? Is it possible to adapt the ways in which the traditional martial arts are introduced to students while preserving their underlying cultural values? If, so, how far can we go? Who determines what is “central” to the martial arts when multiple visions of Chinese modernity come into conflict? How can we understand the decision of some actors not to pass on their skills? Lastly, what are the limitations of the ICH framework for understanding the rich variety of martial arts communities that actually exist?

Red Pyramid by Stanislov and Jaroslava (1993). Corning Museum of Glass.

Fighting Modernity

The best way to address these questions is with a close reading of Daly’s chapter, yet in a post like this we will only be able to hit a few of the high points. Better yet, readers interested in applying the cultural heritage concept to martial arts studies should take a close look at the entire volume that Daly and Winter edited for Routledge. While only a single chapter speaks directly to the martial arts, a number of them raise issues (such as the role of “cultural tourism” and the possibility of a “developmental heritage trap” similar the “curse of natural resource abundance”) that could be applied very widely throughout these studies.

Readers should also take special note of Chapter 1, which serves as an introduction both to the field of heritage studies and as a review of the major topics and debates that this volume seeks to speak to. A number of these discussions (such as the debate between the rhetoric of ‘preservation’ vs. ‘sustainability’) could potentially be valuable to studies of Asia’s traditional hand combat systems. Read as a unit this introductory chapter helps to frame and highlight significant elements of Daly’s more detailed discussion of the Chinese martial arts in Chapter 23.

The later chapter (titled “Fighting Modernity”) proceeds in six sections. In the first we are introduced directly to a few of the informants that the author relies on and the very concrete problems that they see in the transmission of their shared martial heritage.

The next part of the article focuses on the major theoretical questions that the investigation touches on. The author looks at the role of rapid economic development in social disruption as well as the growing realization of the importance of non-physical forms of cultural heritage. He then introduces his central research question; in what ways should traditional pedagogies be considered an aspect of ICH? If these skills or types of knowledge are removed from their social framework and preserved only in museums or universities, employing different modes of knowledge preservation, have we lost the essence of an ICH?

While the author acknowledges that both the meanings and modes of transmission of ICH have changed over time, he wonders how much flexibility there can actually be in the traditional martial arts where certain social values come into existence as they are invoked directly in the relationship between teacher and student. It would appear that for Daly this relational element of pedagogy in the TCMA is much more central to their “authenticity” than simply getting the physical movements right. While it does not appear that the author goes so far as to understand the martial arts as primarily social institutions, it is clear that he sees certain sorts of relationships as being central to their continuation. This raises important questions about what an ICH designation should really be trying to preserve in the first place.

The following section includes the bulk of Daly’s ethnographic observations. It highlights excerpts from a number of the masters that he interviewed as well as analysis of the sorts of relationships that typically exist between masters and students during the process of training.

These observations were critical to his overall conclusion that it was the ‘unsystematic’ nature of TCMA training which made it unappealing to parents, schools and government agencies in the second half of the 20th century. Each of these institutions was more likely to throw their support behind standardized, rational and linear arts such as Taekwondo, Wushu or Judo. Thus it is not so much the “traditional” element of the Chinese martial arts that make them unappealing, or even the values that they promote. Rather the problems arise from the disconnect between traditional and modern views of pedagogy.

This section ends with perhaps the most important paragraph of the paper:

While masters were quick to emphasize the necessity of strict adherence to traditional roles to maintaining the arts, it needs to be recognized that this is part of the broader self-construction of authority and social positioning. The perceived onslaught of modernity is not just an assault on the TCMA, but also upon long-standing power-structures, systems of knowledge production, flows of social capital and lines of patronage – all of which are demonstrated above. Therefore, it is important to read deeper into discussions of safeguarding to situate intangible cultural heritage within a broader context of social contestation and the unravelling of pre-existing social expectations that are implicit parts of many ICH practices and embodied within social transmission. The masters that I interviewed were quick to point out a wide range of external reasons why their traditions were fading, but much less inclined to be critically reflective of their roles within this process as potential obstacles to adaptation. (p. 358)

These are important ideas, and I wish that Daly had expanded upon them substantially in his concluding remarks. The lack of emphasis given to these points makes his paper seem, in some ways, like an unfinished project.

The next section of the chapter takes a closer look at a few of the specific factors that are impeding the transmission of the traditional martial arts. These include the need to make a living and the low economic value of martial practices, at least for individuals who were trying to make a living as a full time instructor. Interestingly the idea that Sifu’s should teach full time was widely held by the Master that Daly interviewed though he did not attempt to critically interrogate this notion.

The competing interests of young people were also a major factor in this discussion. The Wushu program of the Chinese Martial Arts Association (also seen in a Needle Through Brick) were once again brought into this discussion, yet this time they were not portrayed as a conduit bringing students into the TCMA. Rather Wushu was viewed only as a direct competitor to the traditional arts, and one that was systematically advantaged due to its government support, rationalized nature and inclusion in local school programs.

Daly then moves on to his concluding discussion. Readers will already be familiar with a good chunk of this material as it was used to introduce the current essay. Extrapolating from these points the author notes the emergence of a fundamental paradox for anyone interested in preserving the TCMA as an element of intangible cultural heritage.

The threat to heritage practices comes not so much from a simple “forgetting” of the skills in question. Rather, rapid economic development creates widespread patterns of social change. This change dictates new classes of “winners” and “losers” within society all of which brings about fundamental shifts in values, neighborhood institutions and social capital networks.

The traditional martial arts, whose demise is lamented by the masters that Daly interviewed, was not understood as simply a set of self-defense skills. Rather it was a means of conveying a range of values and relationships that supported a social world that had now vanished due to economic change. The preservation of these techniques would require institutional innovation, yet by definition, the values of these new institutions (capable of competing in the rational, standardized and linear world of modern pedagogy) could not be the same as those that had shaped the now elderly group of master in their youth.

In their view, these masters were the ones who were properly authorized to state what constituted an “authentic heritage discourse.” They were the guardians of traditional values and hence “real” kung fu. While it might be tempting to see their withdrawal as a form of protest against their own marginalization, a sort of “weapon on the weak” (to use the James C. Scott’s phrase), in reality it may simply have been the dawning realization that one cannot convey social values that society no longer wants. But does this mean that “real” Kung Fu is dead?

Javier Pérez (Spanish, b. 1968), Carroña (Carrion), Murano, Italy, 2011. Blown glass chandelier, assembled, broken, taxidermied crows. The Corning Museum of Glass.

Conclusion

To answer this question it may be necessary to first take a step back from the theoretical discussion of heritage preservation and ask some basic historical questions. This may help us to better understand what exactly an attempt to understand the Chinese martial arts as examples of intangible cultural heritage might entail.

While Daly’s work has much to recommend it, his discussion of history, in both the article and the documentary, is very thin. Like many commentators he simply starts with the assumption that the there is a single, basically coherent social pattern that represents all of the “traditional” Chinese martial arts. Conveniently his informant are inheritors of this homogeneous pattern which supports an equally stable and universal set of “traditional” values.

Secondly, he assumes that the Chinese martial arts, as he encountered them in Malaysia, are truly ancient. Viewers of his documentary are informed in the opening shots they date back “thousands of years.” All of this is critical as it informs Daly’s view of the object being preserved through ICH status as well as the sort of values that it has represented within Chinese society.

At the same time Daly seems to be aware of the dangers of making hard and fast generalizations about the Chinse martial arts. On pages 352 of his article he laments the lack of academic publications on the history or the culture of the Chinese martial arts. Most of what he has found on the subject has been published in popular magazines or trade journals. The only areas of academic research that he notes are media and film studies and he does not seek to critically engage with this material.

Rather than being a simple inconvenience, this lack of academic literature is a problem for Daly as it may have impeded the ability of the appropriate governmental and NGO bodies to determine that the TCMA should be granted ICH status and protection. This implication is, in itself, a fascinating commentary on the social (and potentially economic) value of academic research into “heritage” practices. Daly states that his research is meant to address this silence and in so doing “push the boundaries of practices that are typically recognized as intangible cultural heritage.” Further, “It is important to acknowledge, as many non-academics have, that the traditional Chinese martial arts have been part of Chinese history for several thousand years.” (pp. 351-352.)

It is certainly true that we need to see more academic research on the history and culture of the Chinese martial arts. And some very good work has come out after this piece was published in 2012 that may have been helpful to the author’s discussion had it been available. Still, while reading through the list of Works Cited at the conclusion of this article, it was remarkable to note that not a single academic source on the history of the Chinese martial arts had been consulted.

Obviously Peter Lorge’s single volume history Chinese Martial Arts (Cambridge UP) came out in 2012 and may not have been available at the time that Daly was writing. Still, other potentially helpful works should have been readily at hand and in any university library.

Wile’s work on the evolution of modern Taiji in the late 19th century was published by SUNY press in 1996 and is widely cited. Adam Frank’s ethnography of pedagogy and identity in the traditional martial arts in Shanghai (a topic directly relevant to the study at hand) came out in 2006. Morris’s research on the evolution of social attitudes within the martial arts community during the Republic period was published by California University Press in 2004. Meir Shahar’s work on the Shaolin Boxing tradition (Hawaii UP), if consulted, would have strongly suggested that many of the fears about the disappearance of the “authentic” martial arts were already a well-established aspect of the discourse by the second half of the Ming Dynasty (2008). And of course multiple works by authors like Stanley Henning or Kennedy and Guo could have helped Daly to establish a detailed timeline of the modern history of the Chinese martial arts.

It is certainly true that the academic literature on this subject was not as well developed in 2012 as it should have been. Yet it does not appear that the author identified or engaged with any of the important sources that would have been readily available when he was doing this research. Rather, it appears that his entire mental map of the history and the development of the traditional arts came from popular publications (some of which are listed in his Works Cited) and his discussion with his informants in the field.

If Daly had actually engaged with the available historical or ethnographic discussions, what would he have found? To begin with, the traditional Chinese martial arts, as he encountered them, are not “thousands” of years old. Individuals have had systematic ways of fighting with sticks, swords and bows for thousands of years, but there are real questions as to how much of this material can be termed a “martial art” in the modern sense of the term (and almost certainly not as Daly employs it).

Shahar does much to reveal the deep roots of what might be thought of as “modern” Chinese martial arts culture in the 17th century, yet as both Wile and Morris show in great detail, these strains were extensively modified in the late 19th and early 20th century as China came into contact with the forces of imperialism, colonialism, economic globalization and modernity. The specific traditions that Daly seems to be interested were all shaped by the economic and social trends of the late 19th century and the Republic period.

In short, had he seriously engaged with the historical literature the first thing that Daly would have realized is that the TCMA are not something that “survived” globalization and need to “preserved” in the face of economic change. He is dealing with social institutions that are very much a product of modernity and the first round of globalization which occurred in the late 19th and early 20th century. This brings up a critical point raised in Chapter 1. Some objects of “heritage preservation” may be better understood as examples of “invented tradition” (Hobsbawm and Ranger, 1983). While the folk histories that exist within these styles would not lead one to suspect that this is the case, a quick study of the existing academic research on their history would certainly point to that possibility.

This then suggests some questions about the social values that might be conveyed by the TCMA. Can they really be understood as a unified and homogeneous block emerging from the mysterious past? Again, the answer would seem to be no. A familiarity with the modern history of this movement will show that it is rife with discussions and disputes as to what the martial arts should be, and what role (if any) they should play in civil society. Not all masters agreed on these points.

The Guoshu and Jingwu movement (which are both now considered “traditional” Kung Fu styles) started by questioning and discarding the very basic teacher-student relationships that Daly identifies as being at the heart of the Chinese martial arts. Readers should recall for much of the 20th century these were the most popular hand combat institutions of the day.

Other teachers, such as Ip Man in the Wing Chun system, took a middle road between these extremes. While the structure of his school would have looked very familiar to Daly’s masters in East Malaysia, his understanding of a “proper” martial art might not have sat so well with them. Ip Man did everything in his ability to strip out “useless” cultural content in an attempt to make a highly efficient, empirically tested, self-defense art. He saw this as the key to ensuring the survival of his system in the “modern world” of the 1950s and his students loved it.

Ip Man (and many other reformers like him) represented a direct challenge to the sorts of masters that Daly worked with sixty years later. The very fact that the paradox which the author outlines has been debated since the 1920s would seem to indicate that there is more than one set of competing values within the world of the Chinese martial arts and that none of them are going away anytime soon.

Avron Boretz, in Gods, Ghosts and Gangsters: Ritual Violence, Martial Arts and Masculinity on the Margins of Chinese Society (Hawaii UP, 2011) does a good job of pointing out how the “traditional” martial values of interest to Daly function as mechanisms for the self-creation of sometimes highly marginal individuals. The fact that Ip Man’s system championed another set of values naturally reflects the fact that he (and his students) had a different background and a richer set of social options. And the martial values of the Jingwu system were likewise calculated to reflect the social norms held by China’s growing, educated and increasingly urban middle class.

A more historically informed view of the Chinese martial arts would not support the simple dichotomy of Wushu (free of all traditional values) on the one hand versus “traditional” kung fu (which embodied a universal set of norms) on the other. Rather it would have shown that Chinese society was a diverse place, and many groups have employed the martial arts as a tool for creating their own vision of what Chinese modernity should be, and what values their fellow citizens should accept. The Chinese martial arts are not simple victims of modernity, rather they are tools that have been used to amplify the agency of their practitioners through their interactions with both the state and society.

Some of these efforts have been more successful than others and balances naturally shift over time. Yet what is not clear to me upon reading this article is why the author assumes that the types of kung fu done by his set of “traditional” masters, or the values that they hold, are inherently more authentic, “Chinese” or worthy of preservation than any other vision of the Chinese martial arts to arise during this same period.

The danger in this critique is that some reader might conclude that the current martial arts styles are unworthy of study and preservation (or that their values should not be passed on) simply because these things are often not as old as their creation myths might lead one to believe. I want to stress that this is not the case.

Something does not have to be ancient or universal to become an important part of a community’s heritage. America’s great contributions to the world are jazz and rock and roll. Neither of these musical generas are any older than the southern Chinese martial arts that Daly is interested in. Yet they are both critical pieces of American’s cultural heritage.

The problem in accepting an ahistorical and hegemonic view of the traditional martial arts is not that it will cause our efforts to preserve them to fail. They might succeed all too well. The martial arts have never been just one thing or represented a static set of social values. Instead they have been dynamic tools by which somewhat marginal elements of Chinese society have articulated their own (often contrasting) visions of the many pathways to China’s modernity.

As the economic structure of Chinese society changes this struggle must also evolve to retain its relevance. Further, a study of the actual history of the martial arts shows that they have been exceptionally adept at making these transitions in the past. Yet by creating an unchanging vision of the past capable of supporting only one a single set of values we might bring this process to a halt, depriving future generations of their chance to find what is most beautiful in the Chinese martial arts. That is almost surely a greater threat to these systems than the waves of globalization and rapid economic growth from which they first emerged in their current form in the early 20th century.

The concept of intangible cultural heritage potentially has much to offer Martial Arts Studies. Yet we must begin with a more nuanced understanding of what we seek to sustain and its actual relationship with broader social trends.

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If you enjoyed this you might also want to read:  Kung Fu is Dead, Long Live Kung Fu: The Martial Arts as Voluntary Associations in 20th Century Guangzhou

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A Vintage Postcard showing a Shanghai Sword Juggler. Source: Author’s Personal Collection.

The TCMA as a Perpetual Revival Movement

Kung Fu has an odd relationship with the past. It seems that for the last century (at least) each generation has discovered the beauty of the Chinese martial arts only to realize that they are quickly “dying out,” and will likely succeed in doing so unless steps are taken. In other words, there is a strain of the Chinese martial arts that exists in a state of perpetual revival. This is not just to say that each generation must discover these arts for themselves, but that the very language of “loss” and “preservation” are inherently bound up in this process.

Once we understand this, we come closer to grasping the social meaning and function of these practices throughout time. This same discourse seems to be deeply meaningful in our own era. In striving to preserve an ‘authentic’ aspect of martial history, practitioners find something equally authentic within themselves. It may be an increased awareness of their Chinese heritage, a sense of self-creation and empowerment, or simply the awe of touching a relic from humanity’s deep past. After all, few things in our daily life claim to be as ancient as Kung Fu.

Recently I was struck by the notion that not only is there a degree of regularity in the on-going rediscovery of Kung Fu, but that certain rhetoric regarding its social meaning and significance also reappears, with surprising regularity, over the decades. Each generation is bound to rediscover, more or less, the same thing about Chinese masculinity, whether it is embodied in Huo Yunjia, Bruce Lee or, more recently, Daniel Wu. Not only have these individuals carried the same symbolic torch, but they have even been discussed in broadly similar terms by their contemporaries.

This is not to say that they have all played identical roles. Ideas about gender, nationalism and identity are in constant flux. Change is a vital part of this process. Still, the similarities between them are interesting enough that it causes one to stop and think.

The need to look into the past and discover something of value, an idea or symbol that will point the way to a better future, is not confined to the present moment in history. This seems to be an almost universal impulse. Perhaps we enthusiastically rediscover similar inspirations in the lives of each of these figures because there is a ‘Kung Fu shaped hole’ in the human soul?

Alternatively, if we dig deeply enough we will find that the archaeology of popular history and media provides valuable insights into the motivations and meanings driving the current embrace of the Chinese martial arts. The fact that each generation is compelled to “discover” so much anew also mandates that much must also be “forgotten” just as regularly. I personally find the odd forgetfulness that surrounds the contemporary history of the Chinese martial arts to be one of their most fascinating traits. Yet one still suspects that deep currents of discourse from the past shape at least some attitudes in the present even if most of us remain blissfully unaware of this cultural inheritance.

For this reason I am always looking for clues as to how the Chinese martial arts were perceived within the ‘trans-national’ or ‘global’ community prior to their rediscovery in the 1970s. It is tempting to allow our impressions of these attitudes to be shaped by the narratives of popular Kung Fu films in which Western forces were always implacably hostile to the Chinese martial arts. These practices were, after all, tasked with defending the nation’s dignity against the forces of imperialism and spiritual colonization.

Nor is it all that difficult to find racist or bigoted accounts of the Chinese martial arts. Still, it is interesting to note that many of these hostile accounts date to the middle or later periods of the 19th century. This was an era of active military conflict throughout the region and doubts about the Qing government’s ability to adapt to its rapidly changing environment.

By the second and third decades of the 20th century there was a notable change in foreign language discussions of the Chinese martial arts. The main sentiment expressed by these writers was one of mild curiosity rather than derision. And a notable percentage of western authors were inclined to see positive values and potential strengths in these systems of boxing and gymnastics. (Readers should recall that the Chinese hand combat systems were rarely referred to as “martial arts” in the pre-WWII period).

The following Research Note includes two articles found in Hong Kong’s English language newspapers written nearly a decade apart. Both are interesting in their own right and introduce some important facts about the period in question.

The first documents a Jingwu (Chin Woo) demonstration at a local school. This specific organization did much to promote the practice of the Chinese martial arts among students during this decade, spreading their base of support widely throughout society. Readers should also note that this article follows Jingwu’s linguistic convention and uses the term “Kung Fu” as a label for the traditional Chinese martial arts. This usage provides further evidence reinforcing certain arguments about the historical evolution of the term that I made here.

The second article reminds us of the importance of court records and legal proceeding as historical resources. It is a notice of charges against a Kung Fu teacher in Kowloon for the possession of unregistered weapons. The brief nature of this account raises as many questions as it resolves about how the martial arts community interacted with law enforcement during the 1930s.

The police appear to have had no interest in pressing charges against the Sifu as they were aware that the weapons were only used in teaching, and the judge dismissed the case as a technicality after imposing a minimal fine. Still, one wonders why the instructor was dragged into court at all for a weapons offense that no one was interested in enforcing. We know that during the 1950s-1980s there was a degree of hostility between the Hong Kong police and traditional martial arts schools, whom they often viewed as fronts for organized crime and Triad activity. Cases such as this one raises the question of how far back these tensions went.

Taken together these articles seem to illustrate a more nuanced reception of the traditional Chinese martial arts on the part of Westerners in southern China than current popular culture troupes might lead one to suspect. Their attitude was not always one of derision or implacable hostility. Jingwu’s involvement with the education of the youth was seen in a generally positive light. Both the police and presiding judge in the second account seemed capable of distinguishing the social function of the Kowloon school as a place of instruction from any technical infractions of weapons regulations that existed at the time.  As a set these articles shed light on how the Chinese martial arts were being discussed and imagined prior to their “re-discovery” by the English speaking world in the 1960 and 1970s.

A typical Jingwu training class in front of the second Shanghai Headquarters of the group. Note the emphasis on forms and line-drills.

CHINA’S YOUNG IDEA
The China Mail, Page 4
2/25/1924

What the “Chin Woo” is Doing.

Unique Show at Queen’s College.

Small Chinese boys whirling huge swords around their heads and, grotesquely costumed in clownish rigs, performing quaint ballet. Chinese flappers swinging an equally nimble blade and then dancing a graceful pas a deux—these were some of the sights seen in the hall of Queen’s College yesterday afternoon, when prominent members of the Chin Woo Athletic Association gave a demonstration of the form of physical culture which it is their purpose to persuade the young people of China to take up.

It was altogether a unique show. The hall was filled with scholars from Queen’s college, who applauded the performances with much warmth, and members of the teaching staff, who looked on with evident interest. Under the genial supervision of Mr. Tang, a squad of boys kept the fry occupying the front “stalls” in a permanent state of apprehension by their smartly performed evolutions with a sort of Chinese claymore and following this came a vimful exhibition of kung fu, or Chinese boxing.

Mr. Lo Wei-tsong, one of the directors in Shanghai of the Chin woo, who had earlier explained to the gathering the objects aimed at by the system of physical culture the association teaches, proceeded to practice what he preached by demonstrating, with the help of Mr. Yao Shur-pao a number of useful holds and grips which might be used in self-defence. Clad only in tiger skins they looked a picturesque pair and certainly proved themselves exceedingly capable exponents of their art.

But the piece de resistance, as far as the audience was concerned, was unquestionably the comic ballet in which half a dozen Queens College boys participated. Dressed as clowns, they wore absurd masks and their antics made them appear for all the world like a collection of mechanical toys. The basic principal underlying this performance is that it must be done to music and it said much for the training of the youngsters that, owing to the fact that someone had lost the key of the cabinet containing the musical instruments, they did their “turn” remarkably well without other accompaniment than a sort of sing-song chant by their instructor. Later when one of the “property” swords had been requisitioned to break open the music box, and the musicians had fished out their instruments, clamorous demands for an encore were yielded to and they repeated their quaint performance with added gusto.

How far the modern young woman of China has succeeded in overstepping the bounds previously imposed upon her by prejudice and tradition may be gauged from the fact that three Chinese girls from Canton took part in the programme and followed an exhibition of swords dancing and kung fu with something rather less martial in the shape of an elegant minuet with which their juvenile audience was obviously, as one of the lady teachers put it, “tickled to death.”

As an exhibition of Chinese Calisthenics the performance was extremely interesting and the Chin Woo Association whose motto appears to be something like our own mens sna in corpore sano deserve high praise for their efforts in this way to advance the physical development of China’s youth. Thanks expressed by the headmaster (Mr. B. T. Tanner) to Mr. Lo Wei-tsong, and cheers for all concerned ended a highly entertaining afternoon.

Confiscated weapons. Shanghai Municipal Police Department, 1925. University of Bristol, Historical Photographs of China.

POSSESSION OF WEAPONS
Hong Kong Daily Press, Page 11
5-28-1938
CHINESE BOXING INSTRUCTOR FINED

Ng Hak Keung, boxing instructor of the Yuk Chi School and the Ching Wah Boxing Club, was charged before Mr. Macfadyen at the Kowloon Court yesterday with possession of three swords, two daggers, four spear heads and four fighting irons.

Dept.-Sergt. Pope said that the weapons were used for instruction purposes and the police were not pressing the case.

Defendant said that he was under the impression that as the blades were not sharp he need not have a licence.

His Worship remarked that it was only a technical offense, and fined the defendant $10.

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If you enjoyed this Research Note you might also want to read: The Invisibility of Kung Fu: Two Accounts of the Traditional Chinese Martial Arts

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