Sumatran Tiger. By Nichollas Harrison – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0. Source: Wikimedia

Introduction: “What’s your style?”

A couple of months ago a conversion emerged between a few of my colleagues which got me thinking about the effects of personal training on those who wish to write on martial arts studies. Simply broaching such a question tends to elicit a number of knee-jerk responses.  These range from the ever popular “only a Grand Master of the system is qualified to discuss it” to, on the other side of the spectrum, “practitioners of an art are typically little more than apologists.” Variants of both of these ideas can be found in the popular and more scholarly discussion of the traditional fighting systems.

One does not have to delve very far into the actual process of conducting research before encountering problems with these sorts of initial responses.  My recent book on the social history of the southern Chinese martial arts ended up touching on the evolution of dozens of distinct styles and community organizations.  The world of the TCMA is an incredibly diverse yet highly interconnected place.  In practice it is impossible to discuss any individual style or practitioner in pristine isolation.  Nor is it even imaginable that a single researcher, no matter how great her level of dedication, could gain actual expertise in all of the arts practiced throughout a given region.  At some point it becomes necessary to write about things that one is not an expert in or nothing could ever be said.

If we are honest with ourselves, it is also apparent that this first set of objections is fundamentally about controlling who has a “legitimate right” to frame the public discussion of a given style.  Since the practice of the traditional martial arts are deeply embedded within both social and market structures, certain types of academic discussions might directly affect their cultural prestige or economic value.

This raises some interesting questions as to who “owns” a martial art.  That would make a great topic to explore in a future post.  Yet appeals to traditional modes of authority generally hold very little value in the social sciences or history, and it is not clear why the situation should be any different in martial arts studies.

Questions of objectivity are equally complicated.  The modern martial arts are, by their very nature, designed to transform the individuals who practice them. This is not simply an accidental byproduct of training.  It is the stated goal of a great many systems.

We know that individuals often seek out martial arts training because they feel somehow vulnerable or inadequate.  They are looking for the means to transform their position in their community, to improve their health or appearance, or even to find a way of transcending the self.  Many students of martial arts studies are drawn to the topic precisely because they want to better understand the nature and consequences of this transformational promise.  What happens to an individual when they become part of this community?  Yet once we as researchers enter the training hall we too become the medium upon which this transformation is worked.

Mandarin Rat Snake. http://www.iherp.com/Public/Blog/Detail.aspx?uid=167619

This can be construed as a problem as the culture of the training hall is not the same as the culture of the academy.  Specifically, researchers may pick up some of the beliefs, norms and biases seen in the community that they have become embedded within.

Sometimes we are aware of changes and can “control” for them when recording our observations.  Everyone in my school may believe that the Kung Fu of “lineage X” is superior to anything else in the style.  And I may even have come to accept on practical grounds that it is pretty impressive.  But my basic training as a scholar should prevent me from filling my academic work with all sorts of unsubstantiated value judgements.

Or will it?  More troubling is less explicit, though no less potent, ideas that are absorbed into our subconscious value structure.  Dr. Luke White recently critiqued the atmosphere of a martial arts studies conference that he attended on the grounds that it felt subtly “hostile” (especially to those who might no be martial artists themselves.  As various researchers inquired what fighting styles their counterparts studied, he detected both a competitive impulse and an accusatory finger.

It is well worth remembering that not everyone who writes within the field of martial arts studies is also a martial artist.  Indeed, if you research medieval military history or wuxia novels it is probably not even possible to practice most of what you read about (which, of course, is not to say that such a scholar might not take up some other aspect of the martial arts for the sheer enjoyment of it).

Nor are all of the norms and values of the training hall welcome in an academic setting.  While by no means universal, overly competitive, homophobic, sexist, classist, nationalist, and even “style-ist” sentiments sometimes emerge within elements of the martial arts community.  It may be the origins and cultivation of such socially marginal values that is the focus of our research. Yet we would do well to remember that no one is inherently immune to the pull of such ideas.

Is it better then to preserve a scientific distance from the subject of our study?  Is strict “objectivity” something to be desired in martial arts studies?  In more practical terms, can one do ethnography in a boxing gym from the sidelines?  Or must one actually put on gloves, do rounds with a trainer, and finally enter the ring before you can understand and successfully communicate what it means to be a member of that specific community?

The answers to these questions are not self-evident.  Various scholars have come to different conclusions over the years. I remember a conversation that I once had with my father, an anthropologist who works with Native American communities.  He mentioned an invitation that he had once received to join a secret “medicine society” in a community that he was doing ethnography with.

I realized how rare such an opportunity was.  As such I was shocked to hear that he had turned it down.  When I asked him why, he explained that everything comes with a cost.  Every new identity alters a pre-existing one.  And at some point we all (even ethnographers) have to think very carefully about what price we are willing to pay for knowledge.

On the other hand we have examples of researchers who have thrown themselves into extraordinary situations with abandon.   Loic Wacquant, in Body & Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer, discusses some of the problems with the notion of “objectivity” in ethnographic research. He fully committed himself to membership in his new found community in a boxing gym within the Chicago ghetto and all that this entailed.  Wacquant has advised young ethnographers not to fear “going native.”  In his view, it is a necessity.  He does qualify this assertion by stating that the student should “go native,” but also go “armed” with the proper theoretical tool kit.  That way, when the time comes, they can make sense of what they have experienced.

It is not my intention to definitively resolve this debate.  Indeed, that would go well beyond what is possible in a relatively short blog post.  Instead I would like to use this essay to outline some ways that personal experience seems to affect one type of research that is produced in martial arts studies.  The exercise is purely personal and it is my hope that it will help me to work through some of my own struggles in understanding the value of discussing one’s background in the martial arts.

By Bernard DUPONT from FRANCE – Green Mantis (Mantidae), CC BY-SA 2.0. Source: Wikimedia.org

Unspoken Influences: Selecting a Research Topic

Whether we choose to discuss them or not, our own backgrounds can have a shaping influence on our research agendas.  Nowhere is this more evident than in the selection of a topic and the formulation of a basic theory.  While it is true that not all researchers within martial arts studies engage in personal practice, it seems clear that serious students of the traditional fighting systems are rather over-represented within our ranks.

This is not a surprise.  One of the challenges of an academic life is finding a research topic that can inspire fresh productivity and new publications year after year.  This is probably why a great many scholars choose to write about topics that touch on their own lives.

Yet this does not mean that they are always eager to place themselves at the center of the narrative.  A few months ago I was speaking with a colleague who has the sort of first hand training experience that most martial artists could only dream of.  His interest in writing about the martial arts is rivaled only by his dedication to practicing them at a high level.

He confessed that he gets annoyed when individuals approaching his historical research immediately begin by asking about his practical background.  Rather than second guessing his credentials as a “legitimate” researcher, he would prefer that readers simply engage with the substance of his work, judging both the arguments and data on their own merits.

A scholar’s personal background, even one as fascinating as my friend’s, rarely makes it into the discussion of most historical works.  Nor are they all that commonly seen in quantitative driven social scientific studies.

The reasons why are obvious.  If one’s field of study is the development of Ming era battlefield tactics no style, no matter how traditionally taught, can grant an accurate window onto the military training and life experience of General Qi Jiguang’s troops.  As a scholar you will instead be expected to introduce and interpret a wide variety of historical documents that come closer to capturing the essence of that time and place.

Likewise, students who do quantitatively driven sociological work know that their own life experience is a single (probably atypical) observation within a vast sea of data.  Successful theory testing requires the gathering of hundreds, or even thousands, of other data points before proceeding on to analysis.  To dwell too much on one’s own experience in these sorts of settings might be misleading. We should not be surprised that most historical and social scientific works makes little reference to the author’s personal practice.

It can be debated as to whether this is a good thing.  While these sorts of scholars may be reluctant to treat their own life experience as “data,” it might have had a profound impact on the subject matter they choose to investigate, the specific theories that were tested or even what literature they drew their inspiration from.

My recent work on the history of the Southern Chinese martial arts makes few explicit references to Jon Nielson’s and my own extensive training in Wing Chun.  Why? At the most basic level, solid “sticky hand” skills do not grant any privileged insight into the state of Guangdong’s gentry led militia movement in the 1850s.

Snow Monkeys, Nagano Japan. Source: Wikimedia.

Yet my background in this style did introduce me to the region’s colorful, and at times violent, social history.  It inspired to me to hypothesize that the formation of these fighting systems might grant us insight into a number of ongoing conversations regarding the spread of globalization and its attendant social disruptions.  Indeed, it even granted us an initial set of contacts from which to begin our research.  So while we did not devote all that many pages to a discussion of our combined years of practice, it was our relationship with Wing Chun that made this specific book possible.

The flip side of this insight is that our dedication to this specific fighting system inevitably foreclosed other possible avenues of investigation.  Consider simply the question of geography.  Wing Chun turned our attention to events in Guangdong in the 19^th century.  Yet would our study have been better served by looking at events in Shanghai during the “roaring 1920s?”  Globalization certainly played a role in the story of that city’s martial arts as well.

The economic development of the Pearl River Delta led us to investigate the urbanization of the TCMA as they found new middle class students in the Republic period.  Clearly that was an important development in the modern history of the Chinese hand combat tradition.  But in directing our attention to these issues we never addressed the much more plebeian Red Spear Uprisings that were ravaging much of the rural countryside of northern China at exactly the same time.

That is an interesting dichotomy precisely because the magical practices of the Red Spears, and Ip Man’s “rationalization” of his Wing Chun system, demonstrate two very different pathways by which China’s martial artists attempted to adjust to the challenges of social and economic upheaval.  Both are fascinating interludes in China’s modern martial arts history.

Nor is it simply possible to investigate everything within a single volume.  Every manuscript has a page limit.  The broadening of a study to include more regions or arts always requires a corresponding sacrifice of depth and detail.  At some point researchers must choose which cases allow them to best test their theories or develop their concepts.

The danger in writing about what we know is that we short-circuit this critical process.  Rather than choosing the best data to test our theories, we begin to select hypothesis based on the data that we already have and want to talk about.  And this can lead to all sorts of problematic tautologies.

In some ways the problem originates with our very concept of “objectivity.”  Short of random assignment, there simply isn’t an objective way to choose a research topic.

Once a research question and theory have been settled on, there are all sorts of checks and balances that can be put in place to try and make the research process more objective.  Yet most students are drawn to invest their scarce resources of time and research funding into those topics that already speak to them.

This suggests that we rarely approach our research questions as perfectly blank slates.  When beginning a “new” project, students will already have some idea of what the interesting puzzles are as they begin to formulate their research design.  As a result, some sorts of questions are never asked.  Or there may be certain types of data that are rarely considered.  These silences can have a profound impact on the sort of literature that develops and our overall level of understanding.

Objectivity is a more complicated subject than it first appears.  Bias can be introduced into a study not just in the formal ways in which theories are tested.  It can get baked into the very topics that we choose to investigate.  That fact that all of us bring our own life experience to the table when deciding what research projects to pursue suggests that we must proceed with caution when evaluating our own work.

In some ways I envy modern anthropologists.  The nature of the ethnographic method suggests that they must think deeply about how their own cultural background and assumptions affects their ability to observe and understand the communities that they seek to engage with.  In recent decades we have seen the rise of a somewhat “confessional” strain within the literature as anthropologists realize that they cannot treat their own backgrounds with silence.

Rather, to fully understand the ethnographic data that they seek to relate, readers must also know something about the individuals what produced the record.  What were their goals?  What theories shape their understanding of the tasks at hand?  What possible conflicts or sources of bias might color their presentation of the material?

The structure of your typical “Large-N” quantitative study does not provide much room for this sort of self-reflection. Yet at the bare minimum authors can discuss the hypothesis formation and data selection process. The Introduction or Preface of a historical work may grant a researcher more room to reflect on what drew her to a given project.  What sorts of theoretical tools and life experiences led her to the conclusion that the questions asked are significant ones?

Alexander C. Bennett’s recent historical study Kendo: Culture of the Sword (University of California Press, 2015) is an interesting example of how this sort of discussion might develop. While noting that modern kendo simply is not the same thing as medieval Japanese military fencing, the author goes to great lengths to outline both his personal introduction to the art as a high-school student living in Japan, and his subsequent professional engagement with the world of Budo.

Some of the stories that he relates in the first few sections of his book are helpful in giving readers the tools to understand the basic social and technical structures of a new martial arts system.  More importantly, these discussions create a window onto the background of the author who shaped this research, including his own training history, academic background and potential sources of bias as he discusses an art that has had a profound formative impact on his life.

Photo Credit: Alan D. Wilson.

Conclusion: “What is my style?”

Readers of even empirically grounded works might benefit from knowing a little more about an author’s personal practice.  Yet on a deeper level the individuals who would probably benefit the most from this exercise would be the authors themselves.  None of us approach our research as perfectly disinterested automatons.  In preparing to explain our backgrounds to others we begin the process of revealing to ourselves motivations that may otherwise have remained unspoken.

Only then can we start to ask ourselves some really important questions.  Have I really selected the best set of observations to explore my theory?  What unconscious assumptions have led me here?  Am I asking a question that is critical to the development of the literature, and if not, what would make it more relevant to my readers?

In short, I fully understand the unease that might be invoked by questions such as, “What is your style?” in an academic conference setting.  As was already pointed out, they can all too easily slip into a sort of posturing where reasoned arguments are replaced with appeals to authority that, while common in some training halls, may have no place in the lecture hall.

It is also well worth remembering that as we succeed in promoting martial arts studies as a research area we are likely to see an increasing number of scholars entering our ranks for purely theoretical, rather than personal, reasons.  Of course they will have their own unstated assumptions, biases and backgrounds that need unpacking.  Still, this would be an important sign that we are succeeding in demonstrating the utility of our field to the disciplines at large.  As such, this question may lose some of its salience in the future.

Yet at the present moment in time, it seems that most students in this research area have a strong personal attachment to one or more martial arts styles.  By design these are social institutions that promote a surprising degree of dedication and personal loyalty.  A number of studies in our own literature have shown the profound ways in which they can shape an individual’s norms, beliefs and identity.

We have no reason to believe that scholars are inherently immune to these processes.  This suggests that we also have no apriori reason to believe that an individual’s personal study won’t have some sort of impact on their research. Indeed, most social scientists long ago gave up the notion that something like perfect objectivity was possible or even desirable.

It may be bad form to go around challenging our colleagues by asking, “What’s your style?”  Yet the question is not without value.  It is one that we should constantly be asking ourselves.  How has my practice shaped my approach to martial arts studies?  It is a question with an almost infinite number of answers.  They may even evolve and change as we move from one project to the next.  Everyone will reap the benefits from these critical moments of introspection.

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If you enjoyed this post you might also want to read:  Lives of Chinese Martial Artists (12): Tang Hao – The First Historian of the Chinese Martial Arts

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Introduction

A few months ago I decided to make a more concerted effort to report on academic conferences and seminars happening within the field of martial arts studies.  My hope is to promote greater awareness of current discussions within our growing research community.  Readers interested in following these trends might want to begin by check prior reports here, here and here.

This is something that I cannot do without your help.  If you have recently attended a conference or seminar please consider submitting a brief report that can be shared with the Kung Fu Tea community.  Its a great way to keep the conversation going even after everyone returns to their normal schedules.  Simply shoot me an email, message me on the facebook group, or leave a comment if you know of an event that should be covered.

Today’s report is reblogged from the Martial Arts Studies Research Network (you can see the original here) and was written by Paul Bowan.  As always, Paul did a great job of capturing not only essence of the arguments that various researchers put forth, but the overall “tone” of the event as well.  For those of us who could not attend, reports like this are the next best thing to being there.  Enjoy!

Kung Fury: Contemporary Debates in Martial Arts Cinema
Paul Bowman

A key aim of the Martial Arts Studies Research Network is the forging connections; and specifically of two kinds of connection: on the one hand, connections between academics approaching martial arts from different perspectives and different disciplines; and on the other hand, connections between those working on martial arts inside the university and those on the outside. The first Martial Arts Studies Research Network event at Brighton University in February 2016, saw academics from the social sciences in particular enter into discussions and debates on issues related to gender, youth, sexuality and class with a range of teachers, coaches and practitioners from outside of academia. The second event, at Birmingham City University on 1^st April 2016 brought scholars, researchers and teachers of martial arts in film and visual culture into dialogue with film-makers, distributors, festival organisers and other industry professionals.

The event was hosted by Drs Simon Barber and Oliver Carter from Birmingham City University, who arranged a fast-moving and fascinating day, involving keynotes, panels, plenaries, buffets, receptions and a film screening, all of which went off without a hitch.

The first main event was a keynote address by Bey Logan – a writer, martial artist, actor, director and producer, who is well known for his wide-ranging work within all aspects of the Hong Kong film industry. He began by reporting that his presentation title was initially going to be something along the lines of ‘Why Kung Fu Movies Matter’, but that he changed it to ‘Why I Love Kung Fu Movies and Why They Matter’.

In his talk, Logan’s argument was that although kung fu movies are obviously so much fun for the viewer, they also ‘propose dreams’, dreams that kung fu training itself can in a way make real. I found myself to be in complete agreement with Logan throughout his discussion of the relations between cinematic fantasy, escapism and real life, and I have made similar arguments myself, many times. However, just because Logan’s argument was familiar to me, does not mean it was predictable. Rather, Logan spiced his presentation with a range of interesting and often hilarious biographical and industry references and anecdotes that made for a very fresh and lively presentation.

Bey Logan with Jo Morrell, who has also written her own report on the event which you can read here.

In the process, he also proposed an image for one useful way to understand the logic of the development of martial arts cinema in Hong Kong. The image is that of a bending and stretching mirror. If we think of this image, he proposed, it is possible to see the ways that film production develops, with new films mirroring earlier films, but not identically. Rather, because of the variations and angles of reflection, different films produce exaggerated or stunted dimensions, some flip over from serious to comedy, and others flip back from comedy to serious, and so on, and so forth, in endless dialectical permeations and permutations. (In a way, this image mapped onto an image proposed by Susan Pui San Lok’s later presentation of her artwork projects, in a paper entitled ‘RoCH Fans and Legends’.

I cannot easily do justice to the richness and diversity of Bey Logan’s presentation. But hopefully we will see it in print in the not-so-distant future – Simon Barber and Oliver Carter are keen to develop the conference proceedings into a special issue of the journal Martial Arts Studies (http://martialartsstudies.org/). Suffice it to say that Logan discussed a wide range of films and issues, ranging from accounts of the personalities of key figures in the Hong Kong film industry to an argument in favour of the specific variant of feminism that he sees as unique to Hong Kong martial arts films.

The following panel saw papers by Jonathan Wroot, Hyunseon Lee and Felicia Chan. Wroot discussed issues in the distribution of Hong Kong films in the West in general; Lee explored the transnational and intermedial connections between martial arts film and Chinese opera; while Chan asked the question ‘Must a Chinese (Auteur) Filmmaker make a Martial Arts Film?’

All three papers were stimulating in different ways; but I think that Chan’s paper spoke most directly to my own interests, as it essentially operated at the level of discourse, proposing that not only is the category of the ‘auteur’ socially constructed, and not only does it serve a range of interests, but it also – when we think of how many East Asian ‘auteur’ directors turn to making a martial arts film or two at the mid to late points of their careers – shows us the ways in which a range of forces, expectations and gratifications play themselves out in the types of film production we can see from certain figures in certain times and places. Chan also rather deftly deployed a reflection on the growth of ‘simplified Chinese script’ in such a way as to pose questions of the ways Chinese ‘auteur’ (and) martial arts films are elaborated.

After lunch came an industry panel discussion on the making and distribution of martial arts film, featuring Bey Logan, Paul Smith, and Spencer Murphy, each in their own way representing the realms of film production, promotion, and distribution.

The final session of the day featured presentations from Susan Pui San Lok, Kyle Barrowman and Colette Balmain. Lok showed sections of short films she had made from myriad jumping and flying scenes from the many episodes of different versions of the Condor Trilogy / Return of the Condor Hero, alongside discussion of her ongoing art practice, in a complex argument about the (re)iteration and dissemination of textual elements.

Is this what they mean by “mixed martial arts”? Source: PEGASUS MOTION PICTURES

Kyle Barrowman followed, with a paper that he proposed took issue with aspects of Bey Logan’s arguments about the supposed differences between Hong Kong and Hollywood film. Barrowman argued – contra Logan – that MMA is not an ethically or morally barren world compared to traditional martial arts, and that signs of its complex lifeworlds can be discerned in the emerging movement of MMA films. Barrowman’s overarching project involves reconsidering the American martial arts film, and obviously MMA films seem to map onto this concern; but Logan proposed that MMA has clearly been incorporated into a number of Donnie Yen films, which suggests that there is no necessary correlation of ‘MMA film’ with ‘Hollywood’. In a similar spirit, I proposed – only half joking – that perhaps the best example of a film about MMA and/as ‘culture’ might be Keanu Reeves’ directorial debut, Man of Tai Chi.

Colette Balmain concluded the academic proceedings with a discussion of the heroines of Hong Kong cinema, in an enjoyable and challenging paper that sought to examine the problems and possibilities of female agency within the traditional martial arts film. Her argument was that such cinematic feminism is at once gesturing towards a kind of emancipation whilst always operating within the strictures of certain established representational codes and conventions.

In many ways, then, Bey Logan turned out to have been the ideal keynote for this event. His opening keynote unexpectedly set the scene – and many of the terms – of and for the ensuing academic and industry discussions and debates, all of which made for a wonderfully interconnected and cross-fertilizing day.

But the day was not over yet. After a Chinese buffet and drinks reception, Oliver and Simon led us across to the next building, an erstwhile IMAX cinema, where we watched the eponymous yet hitherto largely unmentioned or undiscussed star of the day – the half hour film Kung Fury.

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If you enjoyed this report you might also want to see: After Action Report on the First Annual Martial Arts Studies Conference

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The Meaning of a Bruised Elbow

I have been working on a couple of projects that have taken me away from blogging in recent days.  These are the sorts of commitments that should bear fruit for the readers of Kung Fu Tea down the road, but in the mean time they are making it difficult to keep up with my regular writing schedule.  As such, this post may be a bit briefer and less structured than some of my other essays.

Even though my time has been tight, I still feel compelled to sit down and write about a subject that has come up multiple times, in different guises, over the last couple of weeks.  Specifically, how should we interpret instances of failure in when thinking about the martial arts?

Failure is a broad topic.  My right arm is currently sporting prominent bruises from my lightsaber combat class earlier this week.  They are an immediate reminder that I failed to properly defend myself from disarming attacks in a free-sparring session.  That in turn speaks to a certain failure in understanding of structure and range in a new style of fencing.  Had I been under attack from a real lightsaber wielding opponent, I likely would have ended up like Luke in Empire Strikes back or Anakin in Episode II!  Luckily in this galaxy functioning lightsabers are rare.

Practicing martial artists are quite used to dealing with these sorts of performance related failures.  It is a normal and expected part of training.  They point out areas where systemic effort can be applied and improvements in performance can be made.  In some cases they may even lead to a fundamental rethink of one’s basic concepts and approach to a problem.  Failure then becomes a valuable spur to new research that may lead to important innovation.

While I have no privileged knowledge of what actually happened in Bruce Lee’s much discussed duel with Wong Jack Man, it is interesting to note that the outcome of the fight is often discussed in these exact terms.  It was an instance of technical failure that led to a series of important innovations and eventually the development of a new combat philosophy, Jeet Kune Do.  In this sense the right sorts of failures are critical to both progress in our personal training and popular narratives about innovation in the martial arts more generally.

Yet failure is not always a strictly personal matter.  Scholars of martial arts studies can apply the “three levels of analysis” to an examination of this concept.  We might see failure as occurring at the level of individual practice (as in the Bruce Lee case), at the institutional level (such as the collapse of an individual school or lineage), or at the broader systemic level, such as the death of all the local folk arts in Guangdong following the 1949 liberation.

Just as an individual fighter might watch tapes of his or her previous fights in an attempt to improve their future performance, students might look at past failures of martial arts to create better theories of how they function and what social roles they actually perform.  Indeed, those of us in the social sciences often find ourselves in the rather paradoxical position of trying to create theories better able to “predict” instances of failure in the past, rather than talking very much about the future at all.

This sort of “post-diction” is one of the main ways that we attempt to test the actual strength of our understanding.  If I create a theory of institutional failure that can explain the decline of the Japanese martial arts in the current era, I would be more likely to put my trust in it if it could also be shown to also speak to their near disappearance in the middle of the 19^th century.  Can our theories grant us insight into past events?

Finding Failure amid Success

All of this sounds simple enough.  Yet as any graduate student in the social sciences will quickly tell you, the most challenging aspects of research projects are often not theoretical but empirical.  Is it actually possible to gather enough reliable historical data to test a theory in anything like a scientific way?  Lots of promising projects simply don’t happen because basic issues in research design cannot be overcome.

Data reliability can also be a critical issue when we start to think about trends in popular culture.  Again, the idea of “failure” is critical to this entire discussion.  By definition most of the organizations that we are aware of entered the historical record and our personal consciousness precisely because, to one degree or another, they succeeded.  Instances of institutional failure have a much harder time making it into the historical record.  As such they tend to be systematically underrepresented.

This is especially true as you go back further in time.  In the case of the Chinese martial arts it does not take all that many decades for the historical record to become very slim indeed.  When we consider the dozen or so manuals that have come down to us form the late Ming period there is a disproportionate probability that these ideas or movements were quite popular at the time and enjoyed a wide circulation.  That is precisely the reason that they are what managed to make it down to us.  Being steeped in this literature it is all too easy to forget that we know very little of the “also-rans” that failed to leave a mark on the literary cannon.

This historical distortion is compounded by the ways in which we talk about important teachers, masters and lineages in the Chinese martial arts in the present.  During the construction of our folk histories success is duly noted, but instances of institutional failure tend to be glossed over.

Interestingly these omissions don’t always apply to the personal or systemic levels.  Instances of massive institutional collapse (for instance the fall of the Ming dynasty, or the Chinese civil war) often become the backdrops for important lineage narratives.  And cases of individual technical failure (frequently a lost challenge match or some other personal setback) are often invoked to demonstrate the persistence and determination of the ancestors.  But there is a middle range of failure that these accounts are usually silent on.

Ip Man’s biography is particularly instructive in this regard.  The popular sketch of his life notes that in 1949 he moved from Foshan to Hong Kong, bringing his beloved Wing Chun Kung Fu with him.  Due to his diminished economic circumstances he was forced to take on students and he began to publicly teach the art.  His students spread the system through their success in challenge matches, and in a remarkably short period of time (30 years) Wing Chun went from being an obscure local style (unknown even in Hong Kong) to one of the mostly widely practiced forms of kung fu within the global community.

All of which is good so far as it goes.  Yet it is interesting to consider what this account leaves out.  Many of Ip Man’s classes were not particularly successful.  In fact, at the beginning of his career in Hong Kong he struggled with student retention.  Class after class failed.  One of the reasons why he was teaching in so many locations was that he was looking for an institutional formula that could catch on, and his early efforts (by in large) failed.  Simply doing what had been done in Guangdong a generation earlier was not going to work.

Nor did his problems with student retention vanish once he discovered new ways to make Wing Chun training more interesting to Hong Kong’s peripatetic urban students.  Retention again became a problem in the middle of his career following the advent of his relationship with another woman.  Then at the end of his career there were institutional disputes that led to him walking out on the VTAA, taking much of the organization’s teaching staff with him.

Anyone interested in exploring these instances further can do so in a number of sources, including my own recent volume which details much of Ip Man’s career. Yet the more immediate point is that we tend to remember only the success of the Wing Chun system and have forgotten many of the setbacks and early failures that it faced.  This creates a distorted view of the past.  Specifically, when we systematically disregard instances of institutional failure we often find ourselves creating theories that have no ability to accurately explain the system’s eventual success.

The truly scary thing about the Ip Man example is how quickly all of this can happen.  A number of Ip Man’s personal students are still alive, as are his two sons.  These individuals have even offered (and sometimes published) very helpful accounts of his early years speaking to both his successes and failures.  Yet the sort of public discussions that have risen up around the style (even in more scholarly circles) exhibits an odd flattening of the historical record.  So often our discussions go from Ip Man arriving in HK in 1949, to his instruction of Bruce Lee, to the explosion of “Kung Fu Fever” in the 1970s while skipping all of the intervening moments in time.

The 1930s were another critical period in the history of the Chinese martial arts, as were the 1890s.  Yet every generation you go back the thinner the historical record becomes.  Most of the failures are simply lost to history.

Failure in the Age of Google

Dealing with these sorts of distortions is challenging.  But in truth historians of popular culture have been aware of these issues for some time.  Once we realize that our data tends to skew we can do something about it.

Some of my recent work looking at the development of “Lightsaber Combat” as a hyper-real martial art in the post-2000 period made me realize that there is another side to this problem that has generated less thought. The internet has had a profound impact on our ability to trace the genesis and growth of all sorts of recent movements.  Once again, this forces us to carefully consider how we interpret instances of failure.

While trying to understand a little bit more about the origins and nature some of the lightsaber groups that currently exist, I found myself going through cached threads on old discussion forums.  What I found was a painstakingly complete record of every to attempt to start a local meet up in the park, a new club or to resurrect a beloved organization.  And most of these efforts were, on an objective level, failures.

No one showed up to the park.  No one could agree on the goal of the club.  Or everyone suddenly remembered why their beloved group had exploded the first time after an ill-conceived attempt to “get the band back together.”  Some of these groups (if you were lucky) failed with a whimper, others went out with a spectacular (and probably scarring) bang.

One way or another, the message was clear.  The vast majority of attempts to do anything end, at one point or another, in institutional failure.

I would be lying if I said that just reading this stuff was not incredibly depressing.  I started to wonder “why did lightsaber combat fail so completely”….and then I caught myself.

This is not a movement that has failed (at least not yet).  From its birth, sometime in the early 2000s, it has grown incredibly quickly.  And as long as Disney keeps putting out blockbuster Star Wars movies (which they look set to do for the foreseeable future) it will continue to grow at a healthy pace.

Suddenly I had a sense that this is what it must have been like to be Ip Man.  Even in a period of active growth, failed schools and empty classes will always outnumber cases of spectacular success.  Entrepreneurs note that nine out of ten small businesses fail in their first year.  I would suspect that the same must be true of martial arts clubs and even casual meet-ups.  Yet this is not always a reflection of the health of a system, whether it is taijiquan, wing chun or lightsaber combat.  Often it just reflects the inherent challenges of putting together a new group.

The problem that students of popular culture face when they look to the more distant history of the Chinese martial arts is that many of the instances of institutional failure are self-erasing.  They just don’t appear in the historical record, skewing our understanding of why some groups actually succeeded.

Students of modern movements face the opposite problem.  Google forgets nothing…absolutely nothing.

Every failed school or meet-up is just as visible now as the day that it occurred.  Within this vast landscape of data it becomes increasingly difficult to make out the shape of the forest for the density of the trees (both standing and fallen).  It is ironic that the digital footprints of a movement which has died, and one that is still exploding, often look pretty similar at a certain level of granularity.

While the lineage myths of the past may further obscure this data, I personally have found that a few well selected “expert interviews” can do wonders for revealing the lay of the land in the post-google era.  In econometrics we often speak of the difference between “statistical” and “substantive” significance.  The former tells us that a trend is real, while the later suggests how big it actually is.  In an era of data overload, ethnography and expert interviews are important tools for actually establishing the direction of trends and their growing or declining magnitude.  Methodological triangulation can really help us to get a handle on some of these issues.

In our personal training we all want to know how to become better martial artists.  Likewise in our academic research we seek to understand why these traditional fighting systems have succeeded.  Ironically, in both cases, the key to understanding success is to pay much more attention to instances of failure.  In the absence of true large-N datasets, keeping it all in perspective is a challenge.

Either failure is too hidden by the historical record, or too eternally present in the collective machine mind that defines our virtual consciousness. Both of these possibilities create problems for those wishing to understand the inner-working of the martial arts.   Nor are there always easy answers to separate out the signals from the noise.  Still, the value of failure has always been in its ability to point out the areas that still need work. As such it is always worthy of our study.

oOo

If you enjoyed this essay you might also want to see: Why is Ip Man a “Role Model”?

oOo

A classic postcard, circa 1920s.

Kung Fu and the Marriage Market

Love and Kung Fu simply do not mix.  At least that is the strongly implied message to be found on the pages (and silver screens) of many traditional Chinese martial arts stories.  Things are different in the West.  In America audiences cheered when Daniel LaRusso walks away with both the tournament trophy and the girl after defeating the comically Californian villains of the Cobra Kai dojo.

In that case the hero’s mastery of the martial arts seems to be legitimated by his growing success in the romantic and social realms.  The result is a coming of age story in which the previously awkward Daniel is now seen as fully equipped to face the challenges of adulthood.   And it is clear by the end of the film that his girlfriend has decided that he is quite the catch.  That is a critical point which we will be returning to.

All of this makes a fascinating juxtaposition with the early Wong Fei Hung films produced between the 1950s and the 1970s.  In these films the hero goes to (what might appear to American audiences) ridiculous lengths to avoid even the appearance of fraternizing with members of the opposite sex.  In of my favorite scenes an older Wong has been badly beaten and is rescued by two women who find him unconscious in the street.  They tend to his wounds and give him a place to recover.  But upon awaking and finding himself in a woman’s bedroom the solidly patriarchal hero literally throws himself out a window to get back onto the street, where the bad guys are.  It is all done to great comic effect, but the underlying message is clear.  A woman’s bedroom is a greater threat to our hero than all of the sword wielding baddies that central casting can call up.

Or maybe Wong Fei Hung’s fears were more practical.  I am not a literary scholar, but I have noticed a few things when reading older martial arts stories.  Nothing good ever comes from romantic entanglements within the realm of the martial arts.  In general dedicated love stories seem to have focused on promising young scholars, headed off to the big city to make their mark on the world (usually through the examination system), and the various muses that inspired them.

Relationships in Kung Fu stories typically ended in either tragedy or treachery.  Water Margin, sometimes called the ‘Old Testament’ of the Chinese martial arts is a striking example of this.  Every appearance of a woman in the text (with one exception) is immediately followed by someone’s bloody death.  It is almost as though the narrator is trying to tell us something.  The Chinese hero stands at the crossroads of martial glory and romantic success, but he can only choose one path.

Various scholars have noted that this oddly persistent pattern in Chinese martial arts fiction reflects important underlying social patterns.  These, in turn, suggest some interesting conclusions about the social function of the traditional Chinese martial arts during the late Qing and Republic periods that are worth considering.

Specifically, the martial arts tended to attract socially marginal individuals.  These were the “bare sticks,” younger males from impoverished backgrounds with no prospects for an inheritance, marriage or families of their own (in point of fact these three factors were closely related).  These sometimes volatile young men made up the majority of many martial arts schools.

As Valerie Hudson has noted, historically there has been a strongly positive correlation between an increase in the percentage of marginal, unmarriageable males, and social instability in China.  In late imperial China this often took the form of community violence with an increase in the size and scale of clan warfare, salt and opium smuggling and both banditry and piracy.

The problems that these young men faced were not merely economic in nature.  Masculinity in Chinese culture was not seen as a default trait enjoyed by anyone who happened to be born male.  It was something that had to be socially enacted and accepted.  The highly Confucian society saw fatherhood and family leadership (and even waiting patiently to inherit such a role) as the only legitimate expression of masculinity.

Thus the “bare sticks” were forced to find alternate institutions by which they could construct a discourse arguing that they too were males.  The realm of the martial arts was an obvious choice.  Here they could literally embody male Yang energy.  And local society needed any organization that it could get to control and channel the disruptive potential of these young men.  At times the government would even open new militia units with the express purpose of keeping them away from banditry and off the streets.  If civil society decided that it wanted to finance very similar ventures in the form of boxing or crop-watching societies, so much the better.

Unfortunately the martial arts are associated with violence, and other social values that are not exactly “respectable” in Confucian discourse.  These negative associations again challenged the public honor (and masculinity) of students.  So what better way to demonstrate one’s capacity for self-control (and to reinforce the social values of the community as a whole) than to express an exaggerated dedication to chastity in other areas of one’s life?

Thus the traditional Kung Fu story does something pretty amazing.  It attempts to make a virtue of a necessity, and in so doing argues that individuals who are often dismissed as being useless and of no value to society should have a key role in upholding its values.  While commenting on this complex of stories and values, Boretz noted that the Confucian social system enjoyed so much stability for so long precisely because it transformed those groups most inclined to attack the status quo into its greatest defenders.  Wong Fei Hung was actually making a pretty complex argument about the role of martial artists in society when he threw himself out that window.

A vintage postcard showing a beauty in a western style dress. Circa 1920.

The Martial Arts, Marginality and Marriage

The best efforts of the Jingwu Association and other reformers notwithstanding, it is not clear that the modern Chinese martial arts ever managed to leave behind their association with social marginality.  Most of the students at the large Wushu academies in Henan and Shandong come from impoverished farming families who simply cannot afford better educational opportunities for their children.  My own research has shown a strong correlation between economic class and membership in certain martial arts organizations in southern China during the 1920s-1930s.  And when Dr. Daniel Amos revisited the same area to conduct his doctoral research 50 years later, even though society had been totally transformed by the events of 1949, the linkages between class and the martial arts were still firmly in place.  In fact, he dedicated much of his research to an exploration of marginality in the world of southern China’s martial artists.

Similar patterns can be detected on this side of the Pacific as well.  Professional boxers disproportionately come from challenged backgrounds.  And while different sorts of adult martial arts students are drawn to the martial arts for their own reasons, many of them share feelings of personal, economic or social insecurity.  Yet (returning to Daniel-san) perpetual bachelorhood has not typically been part of the mental image of the average western martial artist.

In fact, I know a number of couples who were brought together by their mutual interest in the martial arts.  This is pretty well attested in the more traditional arts, but I have even started to run across it in my recent lightsaber research.  I was reviewing old youtube footage of NY Jedi performances while a member of the organization narrated the action for me.  Over the course of our conversation I was struck by the number of marriages and relationships that seem to have come out of this single group of lightsaber practitioners.

Given the ostensibly celibate nature of the Jedi Order (a trait which seems to have been inspired by stories of chaste Christian knights and mysterious Shaolin monks) I found this to be ironic.  But should it have been?

In the West the martial arts have always promised a certain measure of transcendence. Yet they have found their greatest success as “coming of age” tools, initiating individuals into a more empowered role in society.  A black belt meant something when I was growing up because every other kid in school believed that it did, and so did their parents.

One wonders, however, if this is about to change.  For that matter, how generalizable are my personal observations?  Perhaps the social situation of the martial arts in the West has been (or is about to become) more similar to the traditional Chinese case than we care to admit.

Powerful and much discussed demographic trends are afoot in American society.  Oddly students of martial arts studies have remained largely silent on their implications.  The most important of these are the growing gap in income inequality and the declining number of children being raised in stable two parent homes.  In fact, individuals across the board are marrying later or not at all.

These facts, seemingly separate observations, were brought together by two law school professors (June Carbone and Naomi Cahn) in their 2014 Oxford University Press volume, Marriage Markets: How Inequality is Remaking the American Family.  To be clear, this frequently discussed book does not directly mention the martial arts at all, but it raises some interesting puzzles and possibilities for students of martial arts studies.

As was also the case with late 19^th century China, America today is witnessing rapid increases in income inequality.  Much of this can be traced directly to the decline in certain modes of employment as more of the domestic economy has been exposed to international markets and free trade.  All of this has created a fairly predictable pattern of winners and losers.  Highly educated professionals in the right fields are the big winners from this shift in trade policy.  But those without a college education have been hit hard by the collapse in the manufacturing sector.

While a complicated argument, and too nuanced to fully review here, the authors argue that the expected social results of this shift have been reinforced by the rational decisions that American adults have been making about the utility of marriage. [Interested readers can find a more comprehensive review of their argument here]  Whereas Americans once married across class lines, increasingly individuals are marrying within their own social groups.

This tends to compound the accumulation of wealth at the top of the pyramid as more wealthy people delay marriage while looking for suitable partners.  They also tend to hold liberal views about the equitable distribution of household responsibilities, have a lower divorce rate and enjoy greater economic resources to invest in their children’s future (thus ensuring their future economic success).

At the bottom end of the spectrum the situation is very different. Job security has always mattered more to working class families than pure income, and in the current economy that seems to be the one luxury that no one can afford.  The employment fields once dominated by men have been hard hit by declining wages, massive restructuring efforts and a general deterioration in reliable employment.  Women, however, have seen their ability to earn a living increase.  Thus for an increasing number of working class women investing in a marriage partner seems like a bad deal.

Yet children raised in single income households do not enjoy all of the same educational and social benefits as their more wealthy peers.  It turns out that the greatest predictor of living in poverty is having grown up in poverty.  In this way a self-reinforcing cycle is established in which social dynamics are accelerating the trend toward a growing intergenerational income gap between the haves and the have not.

In short, Carbone and Cahn are arguing that shifts in economic structure and social norms have probably made Daniel a much less attractive marriage partner now than when he first appeared in movie theaters in 1984.  For much of America that cute boy next store has become an economic liability.

Vintage advertisement, circa 1920.

Testing the Promise of the Martial Arts

It is important to remember that many of the martial arts (particularly the Chinese ones) were born during moments of cultural, economic and social crisis.  Hard times should not doom these systems.   They have thrived during similar periods in the past.  But why was that so?

Scholars have noted that the traditional martial arts have made a number of explicit and implicit promises to communities in an attempt to demonstrate their utility.  It is probably no coincidence that during the economic upheavals that accompanied the end of the Qing dynasty guilds and labor unions across southern China became major sponsors of martial arts schools.  And as I have shown in my own research, certain martial arts organizations even offered some of the same social benefits and safety-nets found in guilds.

Less obviously, martial arts schools also offered their members resources to develop their store of social and human capital. Each of these organizations had committees dedicated to charitable associations, lion dance teams or community affairs.  Rising through the ranks of a martial arts association might give someone their first exposure to management experience, or lessons in accounting.

Of course the martial arts have always promised a certain boost in social status to aggrieved young men, whether the “bare sticks” of 19^th century China or Daniel-san after his move from New Jersey to California.  In short, these sorts of arguments seem to imply that as more individuals find themselves falling into socially or economically marginal positions, the demand for membership in martial arts organizations should increase.  After all, these organizations have been promising to “make the weak strong” since at least the time of General Qijiguang.

Unfortunately I am not sure that recent history bears these expectations out.  A good many traditional martial arts organizations have been declining in the West at exactly the same time income inequality has been rising.  The economic uncertainty of the mid 1970s and early 1980s was in fact associated with a boom of interest in the martial arts, but the same cannot be said of the last decade.

Or can it?  While the fortunes of many traditional martial arts have declines, MMA, Krav Maga and BJJ have all seen their fortunes rise.  Successful film franchises have contributed to the growth of arts such as Wing Chun and Lightsaber Combat.  And parents seem just as interested in securing Taekwondo lessons for their children as ever.  That still seems to be regarded as a good “investment” in future success.

Has the economic downturn impacted the success of certain martial arts styles more than others?  Do some systems appeal to socially marginal individuals while other cater to the relatively well off (a situation seen in certain areas of China in early 20^th century).  And what about the promises of the martial arts?  Can these systems help individuals to rebuild their confidence, gain social capital, acquire new skills and ultimately improve their lot in life?

All of these are fascinating questions, and as a social scientist I would like to test them.  Yet how one would go about doing this is not necessarily obvious.  In ethnographic or case study research it would be possible to rely on one’s own observations to establish the degree of marginality found in a specific setting.  Yet if we wished to test these hypothesis in a large-N framework, establishing a reliable proxy variable would be a challenge.

Again, the work of Carbone and Cahn suggest why this might be the case.  Marginality is a slippery if useful concept.  It is certainly related to income, but it cannot be reduced to income.  An individual earning $30,000 dollars a year in a secure job might be less marginal than someone who earned $40,000 but who went through seasonal layoffs.  Likewise educational status, the social prestige of one’s occupation, family background, shared values and other factors all seem to contribute to marginality in their findings on income inequality. In point of fact, it might be impossible for researchers to create a single statistical metric that captures all of these factors.

Then again, the research of Carbone and Cahn also suggests that other individuals may have done much of the heavy lifting for us.  After all, their work shows that socially marginal individuals get married at much lower rates than other groups within society.  Better yet, data on marital status is relatively transparent, easily coded and readily available in many of the sources of survey data that social scientists already use.

While not a direct measure of marginality, Carbone and Cahn’s work suggests that marriage rates might be an exceptionally accurate proxy variable, capable of capturing the nuances of how this situation has evolved over time.  This, in turn, might suggest more accurate ways of measuring what sorts of students are attracted to different martial arts, how this has shifted over time, and whether these systems are delivering on promises of social improvement.

Qing officials in late imperial China were well aware of the complex links between marginality, marital status, the martial arts and periodic outbreaks of community violence.  It appears that at least some similar mechanisms are still in place today.  One wonders how growing income inequality in the West will affect the success of the modern martial arts.

Can we expect a new generation of boxing bachelors?  Will the supply of social capital built up in styles like Karate or Wing Chun allow their organizations to cross-cut this growing social division?  Or might martial arts classrooms succeed in developing alternate status hierarchies and authentic communities where normal social relationships can continue?  Keeping a close eye on marriage rates might give us a simple tool to address some very complex problems.  But what would Wong Fei Hung think?

oOo

If you enjoyed this discussion you might also want to read:  China’s One Child Policy and Martial Arts Studies

oOo

“Chinese Reoccupy Great Wall Area.” 1933. Still taken from Vintage Newsreel.

“In the west, Asian martial arts are everywhere.  They are part of the texture of popular consciousness.  Nonetheless I want to argue that they remain marginal.  That is to say, although Westerners may see them often, and all over the place, they are not simply the norm.”

-Paul Bowman, “the Marginal Movement of the Martial Arts: From the Kung Fu Craze to Master Ken.” 2015.

Introduction

Students of martial arts studies stand at a perpetual crossroads.  It springs from the very nature of our subject.  A great many of us are current or former martial artists.  We have an intimate understanding of the embodied physicality of these practices.  As much as I like talking about the history of Wing Chun, I will be the very first person to say that if you want to understand what the art actually is, don’t start by reading a book or blog post about it.  Not even one written by me.  Go and do it.  Experience the actual system.  Examine how it makes you feel.

At the same time I have to wonder why you are asking me about Wing Chun in the first place?  As a historian I can tell you that it was a pretty obscure art back in 1949.  Chances are good that you first encountered this style through the media, either on TV or film.  That is just fine as the martial arts, while a sensuous experience, have always existed as an aspect of popular culture.  That was also the case in historic Japan and China.  In those countries commercial visual art (woodblock prints), professional storytellers, printed novels and traveling opera performers, spread the stories of various heroes just as effectively as film or videogames do today.

This is why martial arts studies needs to remain an interdisciplinary research area.  It is unlikely that any single methodological toolbox can reveal all that this body of practices has to offer.  On the one hand no less an authority than Douglas Wile has argued that Universities have an unprecedented opportunity to become involved in teaching, preservation and analysis of actual martial arts systems and traditions.

Still, we would be foolish to assume that the physical practice of the martial arts is a self-interpreting process.  The popular literature is littered with experts, spiritual gurus and ethno-nationalist propagandists all of whom would like assist us in discovering the “true” meaning of our practice.  How could it be otherwise?  The martial arts exist as social institutions, and social power is always somewhat fungible in nature.  That makes it a valuable and contested resource.

This realization should also spark a moment of self-reflection.  Images of these practices were introduced to us through an (often media driven) social discourse long before we started to practice them.  And while our understanding of their nature no doubt grew exponentially as we engaged with them, how do these “first impressions” continue to color our understanding of our practice?  How do they help to explain why some sorts of individuals, and not others, tend to be drawn to the martial arts in the first place?

We probably cannot understand our personal experiences within the martial arts, let alone their broader social impact, if we ignore the discourses which bring new students to the school door.  This is not simply a theoretical question.  For anyone interested in the health and future survival of the traditional martial arts it is a vital topic.

Readers interested in exploring this subject more deeply would be well advised to carefully consider Paul Bowman’s recent conference paper from which the introductory quote was drawn.  I suspect that as we look back on the development of martial arts studies it will be remembered as one of the more important papers given this year, particularly for those interested in the global spread and appropriation of the martial arts.

This paper is also a fun read.  It diverges from the (ever serious) mainstream discussion of history and film, and instead takes a look at the evolution of martial arts humor in the West.  As Bowman reminds us, humor is a powerful tool of analysis because it points to deeply held, and widely shared, cultural frameworks.  If you want to know what the public at large thinks about the martial arts, start by considering what they find funny.  This often reveals more nuanced views than a simple opinion survey might be able to uncover.

Unfortunately Bowman notes that the public spends a lot of time laughing at martial artists, rather than with them.  While these systems have successfully spread themselves throughout Western society, with terms like “Kung Fu” and “Ninja” now being part of popular culture, they always seem to lose out in the realm of respectability politics.

Consider the following.  No parent needs to explain or rationalize their decision to send a child to a summer sports camp, or to push them to excel in gymnastics or basketball.  But parents supporting their children in a Judo class or Kickboxing tournament generally come well-armed with a litany of justifications for their recreational choices.  It keeps my kids active, it teaches them to fend for themselves, it prepares them for the ‘real world,’ and (my personal favorite) it ‘builds character.’  Basketball probably does a lot of the same things.  But no one feels the need to concoct elaborate justifications for allowing their kid to try out for the school team.  It is just a normal and expected part of childhood.  And it is fun.

This is where the martial arts run into trouble.  For all of their name recognition, Bowman notes that they remain separated from the norms and hegemonic discourses that define mainstream western society.  Ergo the constant need to justify them as vehicles for other values that society has deemed to be acceptable.  In that sense our justifications of our practices are very revealing.  They speak to the sorts of questions and concerns that our neighbors might have when they learn that we have just signed a child up for a Brazilian Jiu Jitsu class.

The distance between the perceived cultural place of the martial arts and society’s dominant value systems creates a space of puzzlement, tension, and sometimes fear among non-martial artists.  Humor is important as it can be used to either subtly disarm these emotions, or to further marginalize the “deviant” behavior.

“London Sees Thrill of Japanese Sports.”
A Judo match between a British and German competitors. Taken from a vintage newsreel. 1932.

Towards a Media Archeology of Martial Arts Studies: Judo, Kendo and the Dadao on Film     

While I agree with the main thrust of Bowman’s argument I would like to push its application in a more historical direction.  His investigation of the evolution of martial arts humor seems to begin in 1974 with the release of the now iconic disco hit ‘Everybody was Kung Fu Fighting.’  Bowman points out that the meteoric rise of this song through the charts marked, in many ways, the high-water mark of the ‘Kung Fu Craze’ of the early 1970s.

Touched off by grind house Kung Fu films (especially those by Bruce Lee), this interest in the Chinese martial arts had been seen as edgy, counter-cultural and somewhat dark.  This same view was even shared by some in the mainstream martial arts world where Bruce Lee’s movies did not always make a good impression on the more conservative practitioners of the Budo arts.  Yet by the middle of the 1970s the Chinese styles seem to have accomplished what it took the Japanese arts decades to do.  They too became fixtures in the pop culture landscape, and ‘Kung Fu’ quickly joined ‘Karate’ and ‘Judo’ as household words.  Krug places an acceleration in the cultural appropriation of the Asian martial arts as happening in this same time period.

Still, high-water marks foretell an inexorable retreat.  As the Chinese martial arts became famous they quickly lost their aura of danger.  What had been “dark” and mysterious became just another consumer good.

On Main Streets across America, Kung Fu schools opened their doors to throngs of students looking to recapture Bruce Lee’s magic.  The humorous disco hit of 1974 both illustrated and advanced this process.  As Bowman puts it “…the song ‘Everybody was Kung Fu Fighting’ participated in the domestication, sanitization, depoliticizing and, ultimately, ridiculing Kung Fu.”

Nor were the Chinese martial arts alone in this.  As Bowman points out in the rest of the article, what pop culture humorists tended to latch onto after the 1970s was the exotic “Oriental” nature of the martial arts.  The specific culture that gave rise to a given movement tradition (Japan, China, or the Philippines) was less important to western audiences than their essentially “Eastern” nature.  While it often irks aficionados that popular songs or TV shows seemed to confuse Chinese and Japanese traditions Bowman notes that this is simply how these things were perceived by audiences in the West.

Yet what sort of pre-history exists behind all of this.  Is it really the case that the Kung Fu Craze of the 1970s was a totally unique event?  Was this actually the first time that audiences were exposed to the Chinese (or Japanese) martial arts on a massive scale?  And can we trace the often uncomfortable humor that surrounds the martial arts to earlier periods, facing very different political and social challenges?

It seems that one of the hurdles facing students of martial arts studies is a periodic amnesia that grips public discussions of many of these topics.  It is certainly true that Bruce Lee was a unique figure on the western cultural landscape.  Yet he was not actually the first individual to put the Chinese martial arts on film and expose them to national audiences.  Likewise, the Japanese martial arts had gained wide exposure on the silver screen long before Samurai films became favorites of the post-WWII art house theater scene.

While I am still mulling over the specific mechanisms behind this unique form of cultural forgetting, I expect that at least some of it has to do with very basic factors dealing with the advertising and marketing of popular culture products.  The first step in selling the public something “exciting and totally new” is to never remind them that they have actually been exposed to similar things before.  Likewise audiences, in their excitement to be part of a cultural moment, seem inclined to see novelty in places that leave historians and archeologists of popular culture scratching their heads.  Ernest Renan famously remarked that a nation is a product of both collective remembering and forgetting.  It seems that this same sort of forgetting also plays a part in the construction of “new” social and media discourses.

For many research questions the historical antecedents of a phenomenon may not matter.  But in some cases I think they can be quite illuminating.  While the past may be consciously forgotten, its path-dependent structure leaves patterns that shape future events in interesting ways.  This is certainly the case when we examine media representations of Chinese and Japanese hand combat systems.  Consider, for instance, the question of exactly when these things became “humorous” and what that implies about the cultural appropriation of these systems in the west.

“London Sees the Thrill of Japanese Sports.” A still taken from from a vintage newsreel showing a Kendo exhibition match. 1932.

Newsreels: The Japanese and Chinese Martial Arts on Films

Bruce Lee’s iconic ‘Enter the Dragon’ was probably the first Chinese martial art film seen by an entire generation of Americans.  Samurai films had been present in the West for a while, yet they generally reached a smaller audience.  Kyle Barrowman has reminded us that Western audiences were also exposed to the martial arts in a variety of Hollywood films. Yet it is critical to remember that feature films were not the only places where individuals might be exposed to gripping and informative images of the Asian martial arts.

As I have argued elsewhere, the public display and discussion of the Japanese martial arts goes all the way back to the heyday of the magic lantern display.  Heavy glass slides, often delicately painted, along with standardized scripts, provided many late 19^th century and early 20^th century entertainment seekers with their first glimpse of Jujitsu, Kendo, reformed Judo, Sumo Wrestling and the historic Samurai.  Such images and discussions were actually quite popular and widespread almost 70 years before the explosion of the Kung Fu Craze.  More importantly for students of the history of popular media, they also helped to establish basic patterns and audience expectations that shaped the developing film industry.

As such we should not be surprised to discover that the Asian martial arts also made early appearances on film.  Yet they probably had their greatest impact in the now, mostly forgotten, newsreels that ran before or between the feature films that audiences had come to see.

A few words of orientation may be helpful before proceeding.  In an era before television, newsreels were a profoundly important instrument in displaying the sorts of images that would shape public opinion on critical issues.  Prior to the fragmentation of the media market they also had the ability to directly speak to large audiences.  While old newsreel footage may strike us as quaint, we should not underestimate the effect that it had on shaping people’s views of the world.  In fact, newsreels were popular with audiences precisely because (like the magic lantern shows of old) they allowed for a quick glimpse into foreign lands.  For students of popular culture and social discourse they are critical, and substantively important, historical documents.

A full survey of all of the martial arts related newsreels put together in the first half of the 20^th century is well beyond the bounds of what can be done in a single blog post.  But for the purposes of exploring Bowman’s article I would like to ask viewers to consider four specific clips from the late 1920s and early 1930s (an era that is particularly important to my own research).  While I briefly describe each of these scenes I cannot directly host them on this on blog.  Readers are encouraged to take a few moments to view each of these segments as they are discussed.

“London Sees Thrills Of Japanese Sport.” A Vintage Newsreel. 1932.

We begin with two clips that deal specifically with the Japanese martial arts.  These are important because they illustrate many of the trends that Bowman introduced in his paper.  Already in the early 1930s the public discussion of the Japanese martial arts was characterized by humor.  And much of this bears more than a passing resemblance to the sorts of word-play focusing on cultural discomfort that will once again rise to the surface two generations later.

Perhaps my favorite of these clips is titled “London Sees Thrills of Japanese Sports.”  It ran in 1932 and recorded a martial arts exhibition and Judo tournament that pitted competitors from Germany and the UK against each other.  While the German fighters managed to score an upset by winning the tournament, most of the footage focused on the exhibition performances.

The footage is historically quite interesting.  It includes some Kendo Kata work, and a very spirited exhibition match.  Next a member of the audience was selected to try and score a hit against one of the Kendo masters with a Shinai.  Perhaps the highlight of the event was a self-defense demonstration in which a woman defended herself against repeated (somewhat bafoonish) attacks.  While a trained martial artist, the woman in question was an even better actor.  She showed a great ability to play to the audience and give them what they wanted.  And that was humor.  Note the gales of laughter that can heard as she deals damage to her unfortunate attacker, only to end by powdering her nose while standing over the body of her fallen foe.

“London Sees Thrills Of Japanese Sport.” A self-defense demonstration by a female martial artist, choreographed to as to be humorous for the audience. Vintage Newsreel. 1932.

In this case the narrator of the film did not make many jokes himself.  It seemed to be understood by the audience that what they were seeing was intrinsically funny.  And as Bowman suggested, much of that had to do with the western appropriation of Japanese practices and attitudes mixed with questions of gender performance.

In subsequent years the producers of these newsreels would not be so circumspect.  As the 1930s progress (see here, here and here) the humor becomes more pronounced and sharper in its focus.  Increasingly the narrator takes the lead in articulating and directing the humor.  Thus we can almost track the evolution of this particular discourse.  Yet by 1932 it seems to have been already firmly established

Schoolboys “Kendo” at Tokyo. Vintage Newsreel. 1934.

These newsreels are also informative in that they did not confine themselves to domestic subjects.  Like the magic lantern shows that preceded them they functioned as a form of virtual tourism for a public that was hungry for travel and worldly knowledge yet firmly grounded in their own lives.

Schoolboys “Kendo” at Tokyo. Vintage Newsreel. 1934.

Particularly important is this very short segment titled “Schoolboys ‘Kendo’ at Tokyo.” Distributed in 1934 this film offers an important view of the evolving role of the martial arts in the Japanese educational system during a critical decade.  Note that the class has been moved out of the Kendo hall into a training field where the “future soldiers” could acclimate to fighting on bumpy and uneven ground.  The mass engagement between the two groups of sword wielding students rushing towards each other at the end of the film is a great illustration of the sorts of reforms (and militarization) of the Kendo curriculum during the 1930s and 1940s discussed by authors like Hurst and Bennett in their respective histories of Japanese swordsmanship.  In that respect this is another important historical document.

Note that the overall tone of this discussion is once again one of humor.  Even though the practice of the Japanese martial arts by Japanese students should raise no questions of cultural discomfort, humor is still evoked as the dominant paradigm by which a (somewhat disturbing) scene is discussed.  One wonders to what degree imperialist attitudes, or possibly fear in the face of rising militarism, contributed to the establishment of this discourse.

Schoolboys “Kendo” at Tokyo. Vintage Newsreel. 1934.

This makes a fascinating contrast to the next two newsreels.  They show scenes of Chinese hand combat training.  In some ways their historical and ethnographic value is even greater than the preceding films.  Yet how would their Western audiences have described what they were seeing on screen?

An exotic form of military training?  Certainly.  A “martial art”?  Possibly, though that term was not yet as popular in the public discourse as it became after WWII.  A type of self-defense system that they could learn and study for their own betterment and enjoyment (such as Judo, or possibly even Kendo)?  Certainly not.

“Russo/Chinese War Scenes.” Chinese soldiers drill with Pudao. Vintage Newsreel. 1929.

The first of these films is the longest newsreel in the post, yet it is worth watching in full.  The final sequence shows a small formation of soldiers drilling with pudao (horse knives).  The form that they are doing is relatively short, clearly illustrated, and I suspect that someone could even teach it to themselves simply by watching this footage.  It’s a very nice demonstration.

“Russo/Chinese War Scenes.” Chinese soldiers drill with Pudao. Vintage Newsreel. 1929.

“Russo/Chinese War Scenes.” Chinese soldiers drill with Pudao. Vintage Newsreel. 1929.

Yet this is not simply an attempt by the imperial West to show the Chinese as militarily weak or backwards.  This “training exercise” was introduced only after the audience was shown footage of a warlord and his officers, iconic images of modern troops marching along the Great Wall, and ranks of modern machine-guns being deployed in field exercises.  The Chinese military is shown as efficient and well disciplined.  One suspects that a Westerner watching this footage would likely equate the sword drill at the end to the Kendo of the Japanese military.  Which is probably what both the newsreels producer and the Chinese officers who agreed to be filmed both intended.

“Chinese Re-Occupy Great Wall Area.” Vintage Newsreel, 1933.

A similar pattern is seen in our next film, “Chinese Re-Occupy Great Wall Area.”  Dating to 1933 readers of Kung Fu Tea will be pleased to note that the soldiers in this film are drilling with the classic dadao.  Whoever produced this footage went to great lengths to try and make a strong impression on the audience.  The clip juxtaposes images of a vast field of smartly dressed soldiers with close-ups of individual martial artists shot against the sky.  The effect is striking and serves to emphasize the acrobatic elegance of their practice.

“Chinese Re-Occupy Great Wall Area.” Vintage Newsreel, 1933.

The starkness of an individual soldier, engaged in dynamic movement, silhouetted against the sky reminds me of some of John Ford’s iconic WWII footage.  Like his more famous counterpart, this director also had an argument that he was trying to bring to the masses.  It sought to answer once and for all the persistent questions about the willingness and ability of Chinese soldiers to stand and fight.  As if to drive that point home the last sequence is framed by a pair of crossed dadao, inviting the audience to grab one if they dared.

I am interested in these two films because they seem to represent a point of departure in the discussion of the Chinese martial arts in the West.  In one sense what audiences are being exposed to remains remote, especially in comparison to Judo and Kendo.  It is not hard to find newsreel footage of both Western and Japanese practitioners of those arts in the 1930s.  Already they were moving into the realm of cultural appropriation, yet they remain outside of the hegemonic norms and identities.  The result is the emergence of exactly the sort of humor in the 1930s that Bowman predicts and explains in the post-1974 era.

In comparison there is nothing funny about the Chinese sword routines.  They are introduced not as sporting events or community interest stories.  Rather they exist in a grimmer world, one of international conflict, cities falling under martial law and modern armies on the march in Northern Asia.  There are no western practitioners of these arts, and so there is not the same sort of cultural discomfort that Bowman describes.  Those blades instead represent a forbidding reminder of the challenges facing the Chinese people during the 1930s and 1940s.  As such they may make audiences somewhat uncomfortable.  Yet there is nothing humorous about what they represent.

“Russo/Chinese War Scenes.” Chinese soldiers drill with Pudao. Vintage Newsreel. 1929.

Conclusion

Bowman is correct in noting that there is an important relationship between humor and the media driven global spread of the martial arts.  However, this post suggests that this basic pattern may have been established much earlier than the 1970s.  The newsreel footage demonstrates that these discourses were already in place (and even began to accelerate and evolve) by the 1930s.  If you are willing to go back and look at the writing in sports pages many of the same sorts of jokes and subtle concerns about identity masculinity and race can be found in the early years of the 20^th century, just as Jujitsu begins to establish its presence in the West.

The Chinese martial arts, on the other hand, do not seem to come into their comedic own until much later.  This should not be taken as an indication that they were totally unknown, or that Bruce Lee was the very first Chinese martial artist to do something amazing on film before Western audiences.  The newsreel footage that we have reviewed here probably had a striking impact on the audiences that saw it during the early 1930s.  Yet it did not generate the uncomfortable humor that Bowman is interested in as it posed no threat to the West’s identity or dominant values.  Nor was it remembered decades later.

This provides additional support to Bowman’s central argument that (with some notable exceptions) the comedic discourse around the martial arts does not seem to be driven by pure racism.  More important is a critique of how certain types of westerners (often individuals already considered to be marginal by their own societies) seek to live out their fantasies by appropriating alternate models of masculinity or mastery.

What is left unresolved by all of this is the question “why?”  Why is there less public engagement with the Chinese arts than the Japanese one from the 1920s-1940s?  The immediate danger is that students of martial arts studies will fall back on the old trope that prior to the 1970s the world of Kung Fu was insular because the Chinese themselves were racist.  Their arts were not spread because they refused to teach outsiders.

This narrative conveniently ignores the truth that it was the Chinese-American community itself that was being victimized by systemic racism during the 19^th and 20^th century.  It also seems to neglect the fact that while a great many westerners were interested in learning about the Japanese martial arts, very few people seem to have had any interest in the Chinese systems, even when they were advertised to the public through newsreels such as these, performed at the 1936 Olympics, demonstrated by Ivy-League Chinese students as part of popular flood and famine relief programs, or widely seen during Chinese New Year displays in major urban areas.

Ultimately these things were not hidden from the public so much as they were studiously ignored.  Bruce Lee turned out to be a pivotal figure not because he was first to teach the arts, but because he managed to change what an entire generation of people wanted.

Yet his was not the first invitation.  These newsreels are important as they record early attempts to shape a more favorable public opinion of China in the West by showcasing its traditional martial arts.  Together the Dadao and Pudao disrupted the notion that the Chinese people were weak, the so called “sick man of East Asia,” and unwilling to stand and fight back against imperial aggression.  They attempted to showcase a highly disciplined army that had mastered both the modern technologies of the machine gun and mechanized transport, while staying connected to the cultured heritage of its past.  While America may have awoken to the beauty and potential of the Chinese martial arts only in the 1970s, these newsreels are a fascinating reminder that the hand of Kung Fu diplomacy had first been extended to the Western public at least 40 years earlier.

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

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Source: http://tribune.com.pk

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 (almost a month) since our last update so there is a lot to be covered in today’s post.  Let’s get to the news!

A Taijiquan performance by visiting martial artists from neighboring China in Chungju South Korea. Source:

Notes From All Over
Our first story this week originates in Korea.  Its no secret that martial arts related tourism is an ever-growing industry.  Discussions of it here at Kung Fu Tea tend to focus on the motivations and mechanisms by which individuals from the West travel to Asia.  Yet there is also a booming inter-regional trade.  One South Korean city seems to have found a way to attract ever growing numbers of Chinese tourists to its various martial arts centers and attractions.  How?

“Chungju has just the pedigree, as the home of the oldest Korean martial arts “taekgyeon.”

Chungju has also been hosting the World Martial Arts Festival since 1998. And it is a birthplace for the World Martial Arts Union (WoMAU), an international martial arts organization that counts 60 martial arts organizations from 40 countries as its members….

With this background, providing a stage for Chinese tourists to showcase their martial arts skills was not a difficult choice, according to Cho. The city believes exploring this niche market of martial arts tourism will provide memorable experiences to the visitors.

“We have assets of martial arts and we want to use them,” Cho said. “We are trying to vitalize tourism where visitors can actually engage in activities they like.”

Students train at a Wushu Academy in Henan Province. Source: SCMP.com

Our next story was written by frequent guest author and friend of Kung Fu Tea, Sascha Matuszak.  It is a shorter feature as it is just one part of a multi-part series that he did on Zhengzhou for the South China Morning Post, but it will be of interest to readers.  In it he discusses the growing fortunes of some of Henan’s many Wushu Academies.  After a period in which their viability was being questioned, he notes that many of these institutions have managed to diversify their pool of students, instructors, and the sorts of martial arts training that they offer.  Additionally a growing number of students who attend these schools have career plans that fall outside of the traditional industries that they fed graduates into in years past (professional wushu, the military etc…)

Lightweight but strong armor, wired with computer sensors, may allow for the birth of a new class of weapons based combat sports. Source: The Economist.

The Economist recently ran an article titled “Modern gladiators: New body armour promises to transform fighting sports.” It discusses a firm which has created a new type of highly protective body armor that is wired with various sorts of computer sensors.  These allow the suit to absorb weapons based attacks and determine the severity of the resulting injury (which presumably the armor will also prevent).  Obviously this opens up all sorts of avenues for “reality based” weapons training, and multiple armed forces have expressed interest in the project.  But the creators seem to see its real future in the creation of a new type of weapons based Mixed Martial Art.   If this gets off the ground it will be interesting to see whether it remains a contest between styles, or if it births a new hybrid style of its own (as happened in unarmed MMA environment).

“The first official fights, which are being branded as the Unified Weapons Master, will begin later this year in Australia, with competitions expanding to America in 2017.

Nationalistic fervour will be part of the entertainment mix. Martial arts from different cultures, such as Japanese swordsmanship and Chinese staff fighting, will be pitted against each other. Shen “War Demon” Meng, a Beijing fighter who used a particularly ruthless form of kung fu known as “eagle claw” in the Wellington trials, believes the system lends an air of superhero to the martial arts. He also liked the fact there was less need for a referee to have to step in and stop the fight to prevent injury, and that reviewing the detailed fight data afterwards was good for improving his technique.”

An article in New China recently noted that a Chinese martial arts expert in the UK is inspiring British firms to hire older workers.  71 year old Milton Keyne has been a practicing martial artist for the last 55 years.  He has just been hired as the oldest Fitness trainer in the UK by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) in a drive to raise awareness of the talents of more senior workers.  Congratulations are in order!  Hopefully his career will also inspire younger martial artist to take better care of their joints so that we too can be just as active 50 years down the line.

Kung Fu Soft Power in Africa. Source: http://www.globaltimes.com

The role of the martial arts in promoting a state’s image abroad (and how that can be manipulated through the techniques of “public diplomacy”) is a topic that I find endlessly fascinating.  It probably has something to do with my background in International Relations.  As such I am always on the lookout for a good “Kung Fu Diplomacy” story.  This week provided a couple of nice examples of the genera.

The first was titled “Kung Fu Soft Power in Africa.”  It was basically a short editorial looking at the changing public perception of the Chinese martial arts on the continent.  Its worth taking a look at if that is a topic which interests you.

Tiger Shroff, who has recently generated controversy with his remarks about the Indian origins of the Chinese Martial Arts. Source:

The Indian actor Tiger Shroff, has been making waves recently with some statements about the ultimately Indian origins of the Chinese martial arts.  In a fascinating bit of cultural appropriation he has claimed that Kung Fu (which apparently means all of the Chinese martial arts) are really Indian in origin because…(you guessed it)…Bodhidharma went to the Shaolin Temple.

This is hardly a novel claim.  It has even been widely repeated within the Chinese martial arts community (often with an aim towards explaining why the arts of Wudang are “authentically Chinese” while those of Shaolin are not).  Nor does it matter that this is one of the most debunked narratives in all of Chinese martial arts history.  [For the record Bodhidharma did not bring the martial arts to Shaolin, and he almost certainly never actually visited the temple.  But its still a fascinating story that Meir Shahar has discussed in great depth.]

However, Shroff’s statements have hit a nationalist nerve in China and generated some discussion.  And that is now being widely reported in the Indian press.  All of which is a good illustration of why it is a problem when the history of the comparatively modern martial arts gets reduced down to supposedly “timeless” ethno-lingustic mythic narratives.

Good Samaritan faces multiple years in prison after intervening in an assault. Source: Daily Mail.

The Daily Mail is reporting that a Kung Fu student in China is facing multiple years in jail after he attempted to intervene on behalf of a woman who was being sexually harassed.  The intervention escalated into a full scale fight between the two leaving the harasser seriously injured, and the woman supposedly fled before giving a police report.  While the details of this case are not entirely clear, it does appear to be a fascinating example of the interaction between law enforcement, society and the martial arts community in China today.

One of 13 Spectacular Pictures of Shaolin Students. Source: http://tribune.com.pk

 
The Shaolin Temple is (among other things) the institution that has launched a thousand photo-essays.  The latest entry in the genera comes from the pages of the Express Tribune.  Who ever selected these pictures seems to have had a strong attraction to more geometric motifs!  Check them out here.

Custom Graflex lightsabers, similar to those used in the original Star Wars by Luke Skywalker. Source: The Verge

As Lightsaber Combat (a hyper-real martial art) is now one of my research areas, I have decided to keep an eye open for Star Wars related news stories that might be of interest.  One of the issues that my recent blog-posts on LSC highlighted was the importance of materiality.  Specifically, the marketing of high quality replica lightsabers, more than any other single factor, seems to have driven the development of this new set of practices.  Of course, most of the stunt sabers that performers and martial artists use are relatively primitive compared to the examples that you will see this article and the accompanying video feature.  If you wonder what the world of very top-end lightsabers is like, you need to check this out (and bring your wallet)!

Zheng Manqing, the teacher of William Chen, with sword, possibly on the campus of Columbia University in New York City.

Chinese Martial Arts in Film

It looks like we are about to get the Zheng Manqing (Cheng Man-ch’ing) documentary that so many of us have been waiting for.  The new film is titled “The Professor: Tai Chi’s Journey West” and it is directed by Barry Strugatz (who, in addition to being a professional film person, has also studied with some of Zheng’s students).  You can also follow the project’s progress on facebook.  The documentary will premier in Los Angeles on May 6 and in New York City on June 9.  Look for an advance review here at Kung Fu Tea sometime in the next week!

Jackie Chan in Rumble in the Bronx. Source: Indiewire.

The Old School Kung Fu Film Fest is returning to New York City for its sixth season, and it will be featuring some of the finest Asian grindhouse treasures in this year’s screenings.  This is definitely something to follow.  What can you expect at this year’s festival?

“Get limber, because New York’s Old School Kung Fu Fest is back in action and more bruising than ever. Overseen by Subway Cinema (the NYC genre gurus who mastermind the city’s indispensable New York Asian Film Festival), the series is a portal to a glorious past where every fight scene was choreographed with the grace of a hyper-violent ballet and every kick crackled on the soundtrack like a bolt of lightning. And the sixth edition of OSKFF promises to be the best yet, as Subway Cinema has partnered with the recently opened Metrograph theater so that all of these wild treasures can be screened in 35mm.

This year’s fest celebrates Golden Harvest, the legendary Hong Kong studio that rivaled the Shaw brothers and ruled Kung Fu cinema from the ’70s until the ’90s.”

The Kung Fu classics are also gracing the pages of the New York Times.  It notes that ‘A Touch of Zen’ (one of my favorites) will be playing at the Film Forum through May 5th.  And if you are a newcomer to the world of “Rivers and Lakes” (or you just need a refresher course) the Wall Street Journal recently ran a piece titled “Kung Fu Movie Viewing, Made Easy.”  Get yourself up to speed as the film festival season kicks off.

Martial Arts Studies
Recently I published a couple of posts exploring various definitions of the martial arts and attempted to apply them to a “hard case.”  Nevertheless, there is nothing obvious or neutral about the process of defining our terms, particularly in academia.  As Paul Bowman responds in the following short essay, there is a solid case to be “Against Defining the Martial Arts.”  This is a brief paper on an important topic, and I highly recommend it for anyone who wants to think more deeply about how we should go about studying the martial arts.

Chinese Martial Arts Cinema by Stephen Teo (Edinburgh University Press, 2009).

“Is Chinese Martial Arts Cinema Underexamined or Undervalued?”  That is the central question which occupies this essay discussing the upcoming second (and expanded) edition of Stephen Teo’s now classic work, Chinese Martial Arts Cinema: The Wuxia Tradition.  If you read the footnotes of a lot of what is being written in martial arts studies today you will see Teo’s name in all sorts of places.  As such the second edition of this book will be a welcome addition to the personal libraries of many scholars.

 

Prof. Peter Lorge’s single volume history of the Chinese Martial Arts (Cambridge, 2012) has been getting some increased public discussion lately.  This also seems to be connected to the greater popular awareness of martial arts studies as a research area.  Readers may want to take note of this recent review.  I did, however, note the degree to which the reviewer dismissed the civilian aspect of the Chinese martial arts in favor of the more “intellectually respectable” discipline of military history.  While we are making progress we still have a ways to go:

“Author Peter Lorge, a history professor at Vanderbilt University, has written an intriguing and thorough history of martial arts in China. Readers interested in military history or the nation of China will find this a rewarding book.

An important distinction for readers to be aware of is that martial arts literally mean the arts of war. Drawing on the written record that stretches back many centuries, Lorge examines how men really fought in battle as well as how subsequent fictional accounts embellished the skills of warriors and heroes. There is much more in this book about the development and use of weapons and battlefield tactics than unarmed fighting techniques or spiritual matters. Readers looking for a critical discussion of the differences between Crane Technique and the Cobra Kai school should look elsewhere.”

Lastly, Prof. Jill D. Weinberg (Assistant Professor of Sociology at Tufts University) has released a new book through the University of California Press titled Consensual Violence: Sex, Sports, and the Politics of Injury.  It appears that her central argument will be relevant to multiple strains of discussion that are currently proceeding in martial arts studies.  Here is the publisher’s description of the work:

In this novel approach to understanding consent, Jill D. Weinberg presents two case studies of activities in which participants engage in violent acts: competitive mixed martial arts (MMA) and sexual sadism and masochism (BDSM). Participants in both cases assent to injury and thereby engage in a form of social decriminalization, using the language of consent to render their actions legally and socially tolerable. Yet, these activities are treated differently under criminal battery law: sports, including MMA, are generally absolved from the charge of criminal battery, whereas BDSM often represents a violation of criminal battery law.

Using interviews and ethnographic observation, Weinberg argues that where law authorizes a person’s consent to an activity, as in MMA, consent is not meaningfully constructed or regulated by the participants themselves. In contrast, where law prohibits a person’s consent to an activity, as in BDSM, participants actively construct and regulate consent.

A synthesis of criminal law and ethnography, Consensual Violence is a fascinating account of how consent is framed among participants engaged in violent acts and lays the groundwork for a sociological understanding of the process of decriminalization.

Kung Fu Tea on Facebook

A lot has happened on the Kung Fu Tea Facebook group over the last few weeks.  We discussed the finer points of the Wing Chun pole form, examined some martial arts studies conference reports, and thought about the meaning of failure in the traditional hand combat systems. 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.

An astronomical clock in Prague. Photo by Andrew Shiva. Source: wikimedia.

Your mission, should choose to accept it…

Recently I have been invited to contribute chapters to a number of upcoming projects.  I am still attempting to decide what some of these should be, but in two cases the editors of the volumes in question have approached me with specific requests.  For instance, in the next few months I am going to be putting together a generously sized chapter on the history of the Chinese martial arts.

This is a great opportunity, especially as I am coming off a major project of my own and have been thinking about the social history of these fighting systems for a few years.  And it is nice to be presented with a very specific brief.  It saves one the mental energy of having to dream up a project that will fit the larger mission of an edited volume while still advancing your own research agenda.  That can be a tricky. Finally, after spending so much time on regional and local history, it will be nice to get a chapter out articulating a more global view of the Chinese martial arts.

Still, an assignment like this is not without its challenges.  Over the last week I started to do some background reading and research.  That basically means rereading the classic books, looking for new publications, revisiting some of my favorite articles and reviewing what I have already said about the topic elsewhere.  This sort of review is a great way to discover where my personal views have evolved over the last couple of years.

Nor can we afford to ignore some of the very nice treatments of the history of the Chinese martial arts that are already out there.  As I have mentioned before, Stanley Henning’s “The Martial Arts in Chinese Physical Culture, 1865-1965” in Green and Svinth’s Martial Arts  in the Modern World (Praeger, 2003) provides a great introduction to the subject.  It has always been my “go-to” recommendation for someone who thinks they might be interested in learning more about Chinese martial arts history.

More committed readers would do well to check out Lorge’s Chinese Martial Arts (Cambridge, 2011) for the best single volume treatment of the subject.  And those interested in delving deeper into the Republican period (the era I find to be the most interesting) must familiarize themselves with Andrew Morris’ chapter on the topic in Marrow of the Nation (California UP, 2004). Interested readers already have a number of good options to draw on as they explore the development of the Chinese martial arts.

Yet as I reread these and other sources over the last week it occurred to me that there is something else that these works have in common besides their quality.  All of them present a fairly linear, straight forward, account of the development of the modern Chinese martial arts.  Various authors might choose different start and finish dates, yet the feeling of chronological progression pervades all of these works, especially as we come to the more “modern” eras.

This is quite understandable.  In many ways the present really is a product of the past.  It is not unreasonable to see a degree of casualty in the march of time.  Yet if we are not careful our accounting of chronology can quickly slip into a sort of martial teleology, where these fighting systems are inexorably drawn through history, shaped by shadowy forces, and destined to assume some predetermined final form.

This tendency is most clearly visible in some (though not all) historical accounts produced by academics in mainland China.   In this case the source of their theoretical slant is fairly obvious.  The Marxist forces of “historic materialism,” that are believed to have shaped every other social institution, have evolved the Chinese martial arts from a state of lower barbarism (e.g., there is a very good reason that so many of these histories begin with totally improbably accounts of kung fu having been invented to fend off wild animals) and ending with the inevitable triumph of state sponsored Wushu.

I have discussed the shortcomings of these sorts of accounts elsewhere. As students of martial arts studies we should acknowledge that national sponsorship of, and involvement with, the martial arts has often been a powerful force in reshaping them to fit the perceived needs of the state.  These same social and political forces have also had a powerful impact on the ways these arts are discussed in some corners of the scholarly literature.

Nor are these tendencies restricted to socialist states.  Indeed, the demands of modernization and nationalism (as seen in cases of 20th century Japan, Korea and Indonesia among others) have also had a substantive effect on how the martial arts of these states are viewed by their citizens and discussed by scholars.  One suspects that even modernization and secularization theory (touchstones of sociological thought in the West) have had a profound (and less visible) effect on the ways that the martial arts are discussed among scholars.

The unavoidable problem in all of this is the necessity of simplification.  The martial arts of even a single country (in my case China) are a frightening large subject.  Nor are trends always headed in the same direction.  A close examination of the “facts on the ground” will show that many individuals can be seen to harness these social institutions in the pursuit of their own agendas.  For every reformer that advances in public sphere another teacher will emerge demanding a return to a remembered or (more likely) imagined past.

Making sense of this mass of often contradictory data is the job of a historian, and some sort of theoretical framework is the intellectual tool that is employed in doing that.  As such we cannot avoid the necessity of either simplification or theory.  Yet is a linear chronological framework, heavily inflected with either modernist, nationalist or Marxist assumptions the best way forward?  To answer that question we would first have to consider some alternatives.

Clockwork gears at the Liverpool World Museum. Photo by Somedriftwood. Source: Wikimedia

Ordering Principals: The Levels of Analysis

The “Levels of Analysis” is a conceptual tool that students of sociology and political science have used for grouping and evaluating families of theories for decades.  I have discussed different variants of this idea in previous posts.  It may also be able to offer some insight into our current dilemma.

The Levels of Analysis framework traditionally suggests that sociological theories can be divided into three (or possibly four) categories.  In my field these are “systemic” theories (those that seek to understand the nature of complex systems as a whole), “institutional or domestic” explanations (attempts to understand the roles of various social groups) and lastly “individual level analysis” (typically focusing on cognition, decision making and psychology).  While the passage of time does not vanish in any of these categories, it can be understood in different contexts and in less reductive ways.

Let us begin by considering some approaches to the problem that might be classified as residing at the “systemic” level.  Recent trends in Asian Studies have emphasized the need to move beyond an emphasis on events in individual states and to look instead at the complex political, social and economic interactions that were often affecting an entire region.  For instance, during the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, events and attitudes in Japan and China were not as independent from each other as many nationally focused histories would have us believe.  Developments in one state often had a profound influence on every country in the region.

This was certainly true of the Chinese martial arts community.  Reformers were very much aware of what was happening in Japan.  They noted the Japanese government’s more robust support of Budo with envy.  They were aware of Judo’s growing popularity within the international community.  Tang Hao specifically championed many of their methods during the early days of the Central Guoshu Institute.  Yet very few studies have taken up these influences, and I am aware of no substantial comparative case studies.

Thus one possible approach to the problem might be to reject the notion of writing an isolated history of the Chinese martial arts at all.  Instead a regional study, focusing on why similar trends found often very different expressions in even close neighbors, might be more interesting.  At minimum, developments in China should be plotted against, and compared to, events elsewhere in Asia.  An emphasis on strategic forms of social and political influence would replace simpler notions of the “progress of history.”

Another systemic approach might reject the state or the nation as the ultimate unit of analysis.  In my own research on the Chinese martial arts the urban/rural cleavage that dominated so much of popular culture in the late Qing and Republic eras has emerged as a powerful analytical lens for understanding the essential nature of these fighting systems.

More specifically, this conceptual framework problematizes the assumption that the Chinese martial arts share a single historical trajectory.  While urban reformers in the 1920s and 1930s struggled to create secular and scientific fighting systems at the disposal of the state in its revolutionary struggle, their rural counterparts in northern China were busy creating Red Spear units, employing the martial arts to reinforce local leadership structures and promoting magical practices (such as spirit possession and invulnerability techniques) that had not been seen in the region for generations. Both of these strategies were responses to the economic and social strains of “modernization.” Yet they suggest that single linear narratives of the “evolution” of the Chinese martial arts are leaving out some of the most important parts of the story.

The situation is similar at the domestic level of analysis.  Perhaps the most obvious approach here would be to focus on the state/society cleavage.  Indeed, the nature of the martial arts at specific points in time might be a valuable tool for understanding exactly how much influence that state actually commanded.  It might then be possible to group together periods when the state was particularly strong or weak, and to think more carefully about the impact that this had on the development of the martial arts.  Such an approach might also reveal underlying patterns in the relationship between the civilian martial arts and the realm of civil society that might not otherwise be apparent.

The domestic level of analysis is often said to include norms or beliefs about how various social institutions should function.  A discussion of the martial arts in the modern period could be organized by the emergence of certain strains of thought at various points in time.  The popularity of modernist philosophies has come and gone.  Likewise, the fortunes of certain notes of cultural fundamentalism have risen and fallen.  How can these trends (not all of which are linear in nature) help us to understand the history of the Chinese martial arts?

It is not hard to imagine what an “individual level” approach to this problem might look like.  “Great man” biographies have been the stock and trade of historical accounts for decades.  Their stories provide a level of granular discussion and detail that is often missing from systemic or institutionally focused accounts.  Not only can this give us a sense of what it was like to actually be a martial artist at a given moment in history, it can speak directly to the sequence of events leading up to important moments of change.

Nor do the Chinese martial arts lack for important figures demanding greater examination.  Sun Lutang has always struck me as a seminal figure whose life illustrates many important trends in the Chinese martial arts.  In the South Gu Ruzhang plays a similar role.  Likewise the career of the groundbreaking historian Tang Hao, while tragic, illustrates critical trends in the social discussion of the Chinese martial arts.

The challenge with biography is extrapolating from the realm of specific events to general conclusions.  And the life of any single subject is limited in length compared to the scope of even the recent history of the Chinese martial arts.  Still, the social and highly networked nature of this community suggests that if a historian were to skillfully choose two or three figures whose lives intersected, it might be possible to tell much of the story of the modern martial arts while remaining grounded in actual biographical detail.

Nor should historians feel the need to focus only on famous personalities.  Students writing social histories might gain inspiration from the lives of lesser known figures such as the reluctant rebel Zhao San-duo, Fei Ching Po (an ill-fated professional gambler) or the southern martial arts teacher Li Pei Xin. Marginal individuals often face similar struggles, and turn to the martial arts for remarkably similar reasons, even at different points in history.  This illustrates some important structural facts about these fighting systems and their role in Chinese society.  Indeed, some of these patterns have proved remarkably resistant to the “march of history.”

Deconstructed clock gears. Public Domain. Source: Wikimedia.

Conclusion: Moving Beyond the Levels of Analysis

Each of these approaches to discussing the development of the Chinese martial arts has strengths and weaknesses.  None of them are perfect.  As with all such frameworks, each will leave out some part of the story while drawing our attention to a variable that is usually neglected.  This is the original sin of all theory.  I suppose that it can also be thought of as “employment insurance” for academic writers as it strongly suggests that a single account of a phenomenon will never be satisfying.  Students will always prefer to have (and debate) a variety of perspectives.

Perhaps the greatest benefit in moving away from a purely chronological account of the development of the Chinese martial arts is simply to present these systems in a new and exciting way.  One that will spark renewed interest and novel insights on the part of the reader.  They might also move us out of the realm of teleology, reminding us that these fighting systems have been many things in the past, they constitute a vastly complicated realm in the present, and they are likely to take on many new forms in the future.

The conclusions of Marxist or modernist historians notwithstanding, the development of these systems has never been linear so much as it has been “rhizomatic.”  When one pathway has been obstructed seemingly dormant and forgotten possibilities have sprung forth.  While we can always reconstruct a linear “just so” story about how we got here, I doubt that the same logic would ever allow us to extrapolate very far into the future.

Nor should we forget that there is more to the Chinese martial arts than states, voluntary associations and individual practitioners.  Beliefs about these practices have also been carried throughout history on the powerful currents of vernacular opera, wuxia novels and most recently film.  Indeed, the very thought that something now “lost” must once have existed has proved to be a powerful incentive to engage in the re-invention of “tradition” within the Chinese martial arts.

It would be hard to imagine the state of the modern martial arts in China today without the release of the Shaolin Temple in the early 1980s, or Jin Yong’s various novels in Hong Kong.  The Chinese martial arts exist in a perpetual state of revival precisely because individuals find social meaning in the act of reviving them.  They are seen as a source of cultural heritage because they have been accepted as such by vast audiences who do not practice them and know them only by their media representations.  Nor is the current situation all that different from the world of professional story tellers, operas and wuxia novels in the 19^th century.

Finding a way to better integrate these discussions of media discourse and popular culture into individual, institutional and systemic histories remains a challenge.  It is difficult to construct a single framework that can account for both institutional and cultural variables.

Frequently cultural trends appear within accounts of practicing martial artists as exogenous shocks (or vice versa).  Understanding how to bring these two types of discussions together is one of the more important challenges facing martial arts studies as an interdisciplinary field.  As we structure our regional accounts, institutional explanations, or biographical explorations of the martial arts, we cannot afford to lose sight of their origins and place in popular culture.

oOo

If you enjoyed this essay you might also want to read:  The Book Club: Chinese Kung Fu by Wang Guangxi

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The Creation of Wing Chun by Judkins and Nielson.

I recently received a letter from SUNY Press letting me know that The Creation of Wing Chun: A Social History of the Southern Chinese Martial Arts, will soon be released in paperback.  This is wonderful news and due in no small part to the enthusiastic support we received from members of the Wing Chun community and Kung Fu Tea readers.  While the original hardcover edition of this book was quite expensive (at a suggested retail price of $90) the publisher actually had trouble keeping up with demand for it.  I am sure that this inspired them to make the book more widely available.

This brings us to our next big announcement.  SUNY Press is currently having a substantial sale on all of their Asian Studies titles, including our book!  If you order through their webpage and use the coupon code ZAAS16 before May 12th you can get up to 40% off the cost of a hardback edition, or 20% off your pre-order of the soft-cover (which is due to ship on or before July 1).  That brings the price of the hardback down to about $54 and the paperback to a very comfortable $22.  We are confident this new release and sale will make our study of the Southern Chinese martial arts available to much larger audiences who may not have had easy access to a university library.

To briefly summarize, we review the social, economic, and political forces that fostered the development of Wing Chun and the other southern Chinese hand combat systems.  Our book also provides an extensive biographical discussion of Ip Man looking at both his introduction to the martial arts in Foshan and his subsequent efforts to introduce Wing Chun to a new generation of students (including Bruce Lee) in Hong Kong.  If you would like to learn more about the contents of this book you can read the first chapter here.  However I suspect that this interview, which we did with Gene Ching of Kung Fu Tai Chi magazine, will probably give you a better sense of our aims and the book’s contents.

Readers interested in the theoretical questions which drive this project may also want to watch my keynote address at the 2015 Martial Arts Studies conference titled “Imagining Ip Man: Globalization and the Growth of Wing Chun Kung Fu.”  Lastly, Douglas Wile wrote a review of the volume from a martial arts studies perspective.  Collectively these sources should give you a pretty good sense of the topics we covered in this project.

Ip Man and his best known student, Bruce Lee.

A young TY Wong, right, at the 1928 Central Goushu Institute’s national martial arts demonstration in Nanjing, China. Source: From the Collection of Charles Russo.

The Sturdy Citizen’s Club circa 1965. TY Wong, top row second from right, with students in his basement studio in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Source: From the collection of Charles Russo.

Working the Beat: One Journalist’s Efforts at Perfecting the Fine Art of Hanging Out

So I’m up to my elbows in cobwebs chasing down a dead man in a nearby Necropolis…and to be honest, it’s all really a lot of fun.

Let me rephrase that: I’m in Gilman Wong’s garage in the city of Colma, California, trying to find a picture of his dad – TY Wong. For almost a century now, San Francisco has buried its dead in the city of Colma, just a couple miles to the south. At present, there are about 1,500 living souls in Colma and 1.5 million dead ones. That’s quite a ratio, and driving over to Gilman’s house past the massive graveyards, it’s easy enough to daydream in the direction of a zombie apocalypse.

TY Wong (or, Wong Tim Yuen) is one of the pioneering martial artists that I profile in my book, Striking Distance: Bruce Lee and the Dawn of Martial Arts in America.  A Sil Lum master who was quickly recruited by the local branch of the Hop Sing Tong upon his arrival to San Francisco, TY – along with his senior contemporary Lau Bun – oversaw the martial arts culture in Chinatown for more than a quarter century. Despite his many key contributions to the martial arts in America, TY has mostly fallen through the cracks of popular memory. So now, I’m in the graveyard city of Colma, trying to pull him out.

It’s taken me two years to get in touch with TY’s son Gilman. And after letters and phone calls and go-betweens, here we are in his garage dusting the cobwebs off of a photo from the 1940s in a broken frame beneath cracked glass…and it’s a real gem.

If you would ask who my favorite practitioner was that I profiled in my book about the pioneering martial arts scene on San Francisco Bay in the early 1960s, I’d have a hard time settling on just one person. From the old guard in Chinatown, to the innovators in Oakland, to a young trash-talking Bruce Lee, one figure was more compelling than the next. But when it comes to photographs, all of my favorites seem to involve TY Wong.

There’s the 1965 photograph of of him with seven teenage students in his Chinatown school: the Kin Mon Physical Culture Studio (or, The Sturdy Citizen’s Club). Here, TY is pictured next to his one white student at the time: Irish teenager Noel O’Brien. Beginning in 1960 with Al Novak, TY was known to accept the occasional non-Chinese student despite the prevailing exclusionary etiquette of the times.

A true martial artist, there is also the photograph of TY playing the violin in his living room (“he was self-taught,” according to Gilman). But best of all, is the image of TY at the 1928 Central Guoshu Institute’s national tournament in Nanjing, China. TY is on the right in a tai chi pose, with his teacher Long Tin Chee in the center, and senior student Chew Lung on the far left. It’s just a beautiful glimpse of martial arts history, and up to now that image has been my standout favorite.

However, looking through the cracked glass at this photograph of TY, it might just be a contender for my new front-runner. It’s a parade scene from San Francisco in the 1940s, and TY is surrounded by a large team of martial artists. He stands at the center of the entire congregation all in black, holding butterfly swords. Despite the many men around him and his slim stature, TY looks quietly authoritative and formidable.

Gilman and I retrieve this image and several others from the garage, including what we originally came for – the photos from the Arlene Francis show (more on that later). We then proceed inside to talk shop for a few hours. As I said, it’s all quite a lot of fun.

TY Wong standing with butterfly swords, center, during a San Francisco street parade during the 1940s. Source: Photo courtesy of Gilman Wong.

Celebrated veteran journalist Gay Talese once said that good journalism is predicated on “mastering the fine art of hanging out”…which of course, is possibly the least academic sentiment ever written, though that’s not to say it’s without merit.

Working a beat as a journalist is a simple enough concept. It means to cover a particular topic thoroughly and on a consistent basis. You get to know the people, the places, the issues, and the nuance by frequently putting yourself in close proximity to them. In this sense, Talese was talking about investing enough time so that something or someone can be seen from many angles; the myriad facets beyond the cultivated identity that is projected to the world.

For my book, I applied a beat reporter’s approach to this particular era of martial arts history. I suppose that is a more formal way of articulating my efforts at perfecting the hangout. Whatever you want to call it, here are a few aspects of the approach that seem the most essential.

Bruce with his new girlfriend (and future wife) Linda Emery, along with James Lee, Ed Parker, and Ed Jr., outside the Long Beach Municipal Auditorium in December of 1963, where Parker was set to launch his inaugural tournament. Bruce and Linda had traveled south from Seattle to Pasadena over Christmas recess (picking up James Lee in Oakland along the way) presumably to watch the Huskies in the Rose Bowl. But really, Bruce just wanted an excuse to visit Ed Parker. Source: Photo courtesy of the Parker Family.

The Horse’s Mouth

While studying History (for my grad and undergrad) I kept noticing something peculiar. It was constantly being explained to me how important primary sources were, of seeking out the accounts of people who experienced events first-hand. Yet, there was zero emphasis on actually talking to those people. You could read their books or archived papers, but no one ever picked up the phone to speak with them directly. Once, when a classmate was discussing his questions about the aging author of a labor struggle memoir, I blurted out – “Why don’t you just call him?” The whole seminar turned around in shock and glared at me, as if I had said – “Why don’t you just assassinate him?”

Over in the journalism department, it was the opposite. My professors berated me for not having enough sources, for not trying hard enough to track people down. It knocked me out of my comfort zone, but in the long run I knew they were right. After all, you can’t ask follow up questions to a book, only to it’s author.

In 2012, tai chi master James Wing Woo published a really nice book about his career and method, titled SIFU. Woo was a perennial figure of the West coast martial arts scene dating back to the late 1930s. His book contains a short interview conducted by well-known journalist Ben Fong-Torres, in which Woo comments briefly on his time amid the martial arts culture of San Francisco’s Chinatown, including his experiences with Lau Bun and TY Wong. Upon reading this, I instantly had a wealth of questions for Woo, and living up to my history seminar point-of-view, I contacted James and was down at his studio in Los Angeles four days later. Woo answered all of my questions, explaining the delicate relationship between TY Wong and Lau Bun, the culture of Chinatown’s little-known Ghee Yau Seah (“The Soft Arts Academy”), and the quiet resurgence of opium in the neighborhood throughout the 1940s. He also conveyed some incredible stories of how TY Wong was the Hop Sing Tong’s go-to enforcer for whenever U.S. servicemen on shore leave got too rowdy while carousing the neighborhood’s Forbidden City nightclubs.

Sadly, James Wing Woo passed away just a few months after I interviewed him. I hate to think how much more information went with him.

Martial artists, even retired ones, are fairly easy to find. They are almost always tied to a school in some capacity, and tracking them down isn’t that difficult. Someone will refer you to them  if you ask, and they love discussing their careers. This is not always the case with sources. Once while writing an article about the Zodiac Killer, I had to track down a former SFPD Homicide Inspector who retired on bad terms. No web site, no school or association, no interest in being found. That was difficult. Finding a martial artist is not.

Long Beach: “He just started trashing people.” A young Bruce Lee, bottom row second from left, standing with other presenters at Ed Parker’s inaugural Long Beach International Karate Tournament in the summer of 1964. J. Pat Burleson, Bruce Lee, Anthony Mirakian, Jhoon Rhee. Back Row, Left to Right: Allen Steen, George Mattson, Ed Parker, Tsutomu Ohshima, Robert Trias. Source: Photo courtesy of Darlene Parker.

Interview Off the Beaten Path

Here’s a quote you’ve probably never heard before: “People were practically lining up to fight Bruce Lee after his demonstration at Long Beach.”

That’s from Clarence Lee, a karate master who taught in the San Francisco Bay Area for more than 50 years. He was a judge at Ed Parker’s inaugural Long Beach International Tournament in the summer of 1964, and he knew the martial arts culture of the era inside out. They don’t quite make ‘em like Clarence anymore. He is now in his late 80s, has luminous eyes, stark white hair, and curses like a drowning sailor. (When I asked him about the reasons for the Bruce Lee / Wong Jack Man fight, he quickly shot back – “Have you ever heard of macho fucking bullshit?”) I don’t doubt Clarence’s opinion on Long Beach, yet I feel like I’m the only person who has ever really asked him.

In this sense, I think that some of the best and most colorful details often come from the supporting cast, as much as the lead; from the batboy, as much as the All-Star shortstop.

Take Barney Scollan for instance, who was an 18 year-old competitor at Long Beach in ’64. Although Scollan had been disqualified early in the day (“for kicking a guy in the nuts”) he anxiously hung around to watch Bruce Lee, particularly after witnessing his dynamic demo the night before in the hotel. Bruce’s actual tournament demonstration had a far more critical tone from the evening prior, and it struck Scollan as a revelation. “He just started trashing people. He got up there and began to flawlessly imitate all these other styles,” Scollan explains, “and then one-by-one he began to dissect them and explain why they wouldn’t work. And the things he was saying made a lot of sense.”

This is all a bit different from what I had been reading for years on Bruce at Long Beach in 1964. The prevailing narrative has asserted that Bruce did a bunch of fancy stunts, and was so fast and so charismatic that everyone quickly fell in love with him. For some reason, I’ve never been told that Bruce challenged the merit of everyone’s approach, and then half the placed wanted to kick his ass afterwards. There were a lot of people at Long Beach in 1964, is it possible that we’ve been relying on the same few sources over and over, and as a result have failed to grasp the complete story?

Oddly enough, it was another unlikely source –  TY Wong’s student Joe Cervara – who summed this all up for me in a perfect sound bite, when he explained to me that his teacher was never fond of Bruce Lee, and considered him – “A Dissident with Bad Manners.” I’ve had never heard that quote before either.

Bruce Lee with Barney Scollan during impromptu demonstrations the night before the first Long Beach International Karate Tournament in 1964. Source: Photo courtesy of Darlene Parker.

Ask Outside the Box

So I’m sitting opposite Dan Inosanto in his office and my first question is simple enough: “Can you tell me about your early martial arts background?” To which he replies, “Yeah, so I first met Bruce in ’64, during the Long Beach….”

I interrupt, “I’m sorry, I wanted to know your background in the martial arts.”

He looks puzzled but a bit relieved, “Oh…ok. Well, my uncle came back from World War II and he started teaching me Okinawan te, they didn’t call it karate back then.”

I cringe to think how many times Dan Inosanto has been asked the same questions regarding Bruce Lee over and over and over. This predictable line of questioning is unfortunate because not only is Dan an encyclopedia of martial arts knowledge, but his CV is literally a who’s-who of early martial arts pioneers in America.

After talking about his earliest days training with his uncle, Inosanto explains his time in the service training with Sergeant Henry Slomanski, an early western karate champion who ran rough-and-tumble training sessions in the U.S. military. Slomanski is one of those often forgotten figures that played a key role in setting the stage for a thriving martial arts culture in America , and Dan Inosanto can talk at length about training with him.

We then move on to his time with kung fu master Ark Wong, and then Ed Parker. When I ask him about Wally Jay, he responds “Well, Wally Jay is sort of like my own personal hero,” before delving into the specifics of the jujitsu master’s exalted career. When I ask him about Leo Fong, he laughs and explains that by coincidence, Fong had actually been his family’s church minister back in Stockton. James Lee? Sure, he remembers James hardening his forearms by banging them against the telephone pole outside Ed Parker’s school in Pasadena. There’s a treasure trove of information here….and to think that I could have vaulted past all of this and just started with, “Tell me when you first met Bruce?”

I once read a piece by William S. Burroughs, written very late in his life, when he said that the questions asked of him by journalists and documentarians had gotten so predictable that he felt inclined to just refer them to other articles and documentaries that already contained the information. In this sense, researchers and journalists need to advance the line of inquiry beyond the obvious.

In Colma, when I arrived at Gilman Wong’s house he a had a variety of images and photo albums laid out on the living the room table, many of which I had seen before. I looked them over and asked, “Are the Arlene Francis photos in here?” He smiles, “No, but I think I have them in the garage.”

In 1955, TY Wong and his students from Kin Mon appeared on the Home show, a popular daytime “magazine program” hosted by Arlene Francis and Hugh Downs. A full decade before Americans were introduced to Kato on The Green Hornet, TY and his Kin Mon students had performed kung fu on NBC. Kin Mon’s appearance on Home is significant not only as a milestone in American martial arts (and broadcast) history, but as yet another prime example of TY evolving the culture beyond the old Tong code of not exhibiting the Chinese martial arts to the non-Chinese.

I don’t think Gilman had ever thought of digging up those particular photos, so it took an alternative line of inquiry to unearth them.

Images from TY Wong’s Kin Mon school performance on NBC’s Home show with Arlene Francis, top left, in 1955. Source: Photo courtesy of Gilman Wong.

The Myth of the Mundane

History isn’t boring. It only seems that way when we’re not looking hard enough.

Think about Colma, for instance. Most people outside of the San Francisco Bay Area have probably never heard of this quiet town two miles south of one of the more colorful cities in the world. Even still, it’s a super interesting place. Consider this: traffic problems in Colma are typically caused by funeral processions. In fact, residents receive text messages to warn them of particularly large ones.

Some of the most notable of Colma’s (deceased) residents include Joe Dimaggio, Wyatt Earp, and William Randolph Hearst.  Many of those who died prior to 1920 were originally buried in San Francisco, before they were (in all-too-modern fashion) priced out of the city’s real estate market, and then relocated to Colma during the middle part of the century.

The advantage of steady beat reporting is that it inevitably shakes the more fascinating details from hiding, even with topics that seem mundane on the surface. And while this can often require a journalist or researcher to take frequent trips back to a certain location, or numerous follow-up interviews with any given source, it seems to always render far more compelling material than first expected.

Together with Lau Bun, TY Wong would oversee the martial arts culture in San Francisco’s Chinatown for more than a quarter century. (Photo courtesy of Gilman Wong)

 
I leave Gilman Wong’s home with some photographs and several pages of notes. It’s all excellent material that has exceeded my expectations, from the Arlene Francis photos to the image of the 1940s street scene, to the subtle nuances of this history that Gilman has conveyed to me. In this regard, the beat has rendered some great results.

If I am in fact getting better at “hanging out,” it is due to some of these approaches that I have learned over time. And in case I lost you on all the graveyard talk (or, you just got caught up staring at TY’s butterfly swords), here is a recap. First and foremost, when it comes to sources, make a wish-list of who you would ideally like to speak with and then pursue each of them individually until they tell you – “no.” (And then politely pursue them a bit more.) The more primary sources the better. Next, look to speak with the fringe players as much as the principal characters, they will give your work unique details and nuance. Do your homework on what is already out there, and ask questions that advance the topic forward. If you need to cover well-tread material, find a new angle at approaching it. Finally, remember that even the most mundane topics can render fascinating details if you invest the time and look hard enough.

As the graveyards stream by on my right, I feel like TY Wong’s legacy is slowly ascending from obscurity. TY is buried out here. So is Lau Bun. I drive out of Colma fascinated with the people and places this history has presented to me. When it comes to the fine art of hanging out, this is easily one of the best beats I’ve had the good fortune to cover.

oOo

About the Author: Charles Russo is a journalist in San Francisco. He is the author of Striking Distance: Bruce Lee and the Dawn of Martial Arts in America (available July 1^st from the University of Nebraska Press). For more photographs and materials related to the book, see the Striking Distance Instagram account (@striking_distance) or the Facebook page.

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Zheng Manqing, with sword, possibly on the campus of Columbia University in New York City.

The Professor: Tai Chi’s Journey West.  First Run Films. 2016.  Directed by Barry Strugatz. 72 minutes.

Click here for the Webpage.

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“The Professor” premieres in Los Angeles on May 6 and in New York City on June 9.

Review

Learning is a matter of desire.  The transmission of complex systems of knowledge cannot be forced.  As such, when we attempt to explain the transmission of a martial art we are always faced with two puzzles.  Why does the teacher desire to share it?  And second, why (and what) do the students actually desire to learn?

Why did they seek out this individual out in the first place?  How do these desires shape the process of transmission and the always tricky business of cross-cultural translation?  How do the needs and wants of a teacher feed into the needs and desires of the students?

As I have researched the history of the Asian martial arts I have come across numerous biographies, interviews and essays all hoping to record the lives and contributions of great teachers.  Unsurprisingly most of these are produced by students.  Yet what is interesting is that (leaving debates about lineage politics aside) most of these accounts have very little to say about the community of students that surrounded the teacher and supported them.

Instead esteemed masters are often cast as remote geniuses, almost unapproachable in stature, whose abilities lay beyond the comprehension of mere mortals.  Alternatively a teacher may be seen as the careful curator of a vast lineage tradition; one who regulated the clan’s relationship with the past and their martial ancestors.  These sorts of popular folk histories are common and they tend to follow certain, almost universal, patterns.  Prof. Thomas Green, in his work on folk history in the martial arts, has explained what sorts of work this type of knowledge does within the community.

Rarely do we come across accounts that take as their central object a teachers relationship with their students.  Perhaps this is because in a traditional Confucian context the nature of such relationships were assumed to be universal.  Yet one of the things that I have always found most interesting (and inspirational) about the Chinese martial arts is the close personal relationships that often emerge between teachers and students.

In truth the structure and nature of these relationships (even with a “traditional” setting) have always been highly variable.  This is critical to understanding the learning process.  The categories “teacher” and “student” are mutually constitutive.  One cannot exist without the other.  Martial arts, as a social system, only appear when both are present.

To ask the question, “How did Taijiquan travel to the West?” is to enquirer about the most deeply held desires and relationships of two sets of individuals.  Yet it seems that most of our popular discussions overlook these questions as they focus strictly on the biographical details of the masters.

Barry Strugatz’s documentary, The Professor: Tai Chi’s Journey West (2016), employs a very different approach.  This project, produced by First Run Films, takes as its subject the life and career of Zheng Manqing (Cheng Man-ch’ing, 1902 – 1975).

Born into relatively challenging circumstances in Zhejiang Province, Zheng went on to become a highly accomplished polymath, sometimes referred to as “The Master of Five Excellences” due to his talents as a painter, poet, calligrapher, traditional medical doctor and martial artist.  In addition to these pursuits Zheng was also an author and a revered teacher.

Over the course of his varied career he held numerous academic and cultural posts.  Zheng got his start in life as a professional painter (specializing in floral subjects) and staged multiple important shows throughout his career.  Yet, as Douglas Wile has noted, it was his great professional flexibility which allowed him to remain relatively successful and well connected throughout the turmoil of the mid 20^th century.

In the current era Zheng is best remembered a talented and prolific teacher of Yang style Taijiquan.  He became a student of Yang Chengfu sometime around 1930 and is reported to have ghostwritten the actual text of his classic work Essence and Applications of Taijiquan.  Zhang associated with such luminaries as Chen Weiming and other leading lights of the Taiji movement.  He is widely remembered by his students for his unique, highly cultured, approach to taijiquan and the creation of his own short form.

Zheng published two early English language texts on Taijiquan (one with the assistance of R. W. Smith) and he taught students in China, Taiwan and the United States.  It should be noted that his approach to Taijiquan also proved to be quite popular in South East Asia.

After arriving with his family in New York City in 1964 Zheng (with the help of a few other individuals such as T. T. Liang and Robert W. Smith) did much to spread and popularize his approach to Yang Taiji in the West.  While a politically conservative figure he found himself thrust into a period of American social upheaval.  In his time in the US Zheng witnessed the civil rights movement, anti-Vietnam War protests and the flowering of the 1960s counter-cultural movement.

Yet this volatile era proved to be fertile ground for Zheng’s teachings.  Acting as a sort of cultural missionary he reached out to a wide range of pre-existing martial artists, hippies, and those who were simply curious about Chinese culture.  It was among these groups that he established his school.

While Zheng chose to reside on Riverside Drive (near the library at Columbia University where he conducted some of his research), at his school in Chinatown he taught classes on the Taiji form, push-hands and fencing.  He even offered instruction in more cultural pursuits, such as calligraphy. Zheng also saw patients and dispensed prescriptions for traditional Chinese medical treatments.

The Professor’s career was diverse and spanned continents.  He was an undeniably important figure in the spread of the Chinese martial arts to the West, yet he is not without his detractors.  And there are certain questions that still linger about important details in his biography.  Yet in comparison to most other 20^th century TCMA masters much has already been written on Zheng.

I have sat down multiple times to write his biographical sketch for the “Lives of the Chinese Martial Arts” series, but every time I have stopped myself before going forward.  Maybe this documentary will finally inspire me to produce something more comprehensive on Zheng’s life and career.  Yet my background is not in Taijiquan and every time I have approached the task I have been deterred by the amount of material out there as well as the passion that Zheng still generate in the martial arts community.

Barry Strugatz seems to have sidestepped these issues by approaching Zheng in a highly focused way.  Rather than attempting to tell the entire story of his involvement with Taiji, he focuses only on the last phase of his career, after the move to New York.  Nor does his film even attempt to chronicle this late period in a systematic way.

Instead the narrator’s voice is reduced to a half a dozen informational screens presenting important details of Zheng’s life at key moments of the documentary.  Between these markers the audience’s attention is monopolized by extensive interviews with a number of Zheng’s surviving students from the New York period.  The viewer is not presented with a single authoritative statement of Zheng’s life, or even a single extended reminisce.

Instead we have the voices and memories of a large number of students, each revealing the essence of their personal, educational and martial encounter with Zheng.  As you would expect these narratives support each other in places, and at other times they diverge.

Some accounts stress his wisdom and virtue, almost to the point of hagiography, while others go on to note that Zheng was not a saint, but was in possession of an ego just like any other human being.  Some of his students recall him as an unassuming individual, while to others he was a magnetic and charismatic force.  The benefit of this approach is that the relatively unfiltered memories offer many glimpses of Zheng’s school and his teaching methods.  Yet, as is always the case with memory, when one focuses on a single detail for too long Zheng fades from view.  Viewers looking for a definitive statement of who he was, and what he accomplished, are likely to be disappointed.

How could it be otherwise?  By the time one reaches the end of this film it is clear that this was never a statement on Zheng so much as it was an exploration of the shared community of desire that existed between him and his students.  This, I think, is the most interesting aspect of film.  What it lacks in biographical detail it make for in the rich portrait that it paints of life in New York for early students of the Chinese martial arts before Bruce Lee and the explosion of the Kung Fu Fever.

The image that emerges here is of a complex community, one split between crew cut wearing martial artist coming out of disciplines like Judo and Karate on the one hand, and long haired hippies looking for a physical expression of the counter-cultural impulse on the other.  Both groups looked to Zheng and saw in him the promise of fulfilled desires, possibly even for a new sort of community.

Nor did these competing cultural currents always sit well with Zheng’s Chinese supporters.  One of the most interesting exchanges in the film is a debate as to whether his school was expelled from one of its early Chinatown locations because the property’s owners were offended that Zheng was teaching black and white students.  Or, as Carol Yamasoki asserted, was the problem that he was teaching hippies whose values were seen as offensive to the more conservative local Chinese community?

It is fascinating to watch the development of a persistent narrative throughout this film that Zheng was forced to “break free” from the oppressive and at least tacitly racist Chinese community in New York so that he could spread his art to outsiders.  Given his conservative nature one wonder’s what Zheng himself would make of these accounts.  Ultimately we will never know.  Yet in telling them his family and students seem to be claiming for him a very specific sort of Chinese identity, one that is fully compatible with progressive American life and which positions itself against the superstitions and parochialism of the past.

One of the films more surprising moments for me came in the opening sequence.  Here the camera focuses on a black and white image of Bruce Lee giving a televised interview in which he expounds briefly on the nature and goals of Taijiquan.

That one would turn to Bruce Lee as the opening act for Zheng Manqing seems a bit odd.  Lee never claimed expertise in Taijiquan, and given his complex relationship with his father (who was a Taiji exponent) one suspects that you would not want to pursue this line of questioning very far.  As I watched this I found myself thinking “Couldn’t we have found a more “proper” voice to introduce Taijiquan?”  Indeed, I kept coming back to that thought for days after watching the film.

If this was a feature length documentary about the history of Taiji in the West, or even the career of Zheng Manqing, the answer would probably be “yes.”  But if we look a little deeper it becomes apparent that this is not a film about either of these things.  Indeed, the actual stars of the show are Zheng’s many students.

Or perhaps its focus is the cooperative community that sprang up between a teacher and a group of students drawn together by deeply felt, mostly unarticulated, desires.  A desire for martial mastery.  A desire for stability and peace in a period of turbulence.  A desire for esoteric knowledge and the promise of truly ancient wisdom.  A desire for an authentic encounter with Chinese culture.  A desire for adventure and exploration.  A desire to experience a profound human connection, and through that to find self-worth.  A desire for an acceptable vision of authority.  A desire for authentic community.

Bruce Lee and Zheng Manqing may seem to be two entirely different types of martial artists.  Their incompatibilities extended far beyond questions of style.  These were men of unequal age who were the products of radically different life experiences.  And yet they both found themselves enmeshed within this same web of desire.  Their contributions to the development of the martial arts in the West were filtered through these desires.  Lee’s standing within the Taiji community ultimately does not matter as, by including him, we are reminded that he was an inspiration to many of the individuals who found themselves drawn to Zheng’s teaching during the later 1970s (R. W. Smith’s spirited protests notwithstanding).  Thus another aspect of the community is revealed through this editorial choice.

Some viewers, I suspect, will argue that Strugatz has drawn the frame around his subject a little too tightly.  Even if we accept the choice to focus on Zheng’s relationship with his students, one cannot help but notice that some of the most interesting personalities are conspicuous by their absence.  Specifically, the Professor seems to be remembered only from the perspective of his New York students.

Even other students and disciples in the US do not make the cut.  Robert W. Smith did much to promote Zheng’s standing in the US through his various publications and teaching efforts.  Smith first met Zheng while stationed with the CIA in Taiwan.  As such their association predates the period of this film.  Yet I was surprised that the only mention of Smith was a memorial note at the end of the credits.

Likewise William C. C. Chen, another important Taiwan era student (and a fixture in the NY Taiji scene) was notably absent.  And one wonders what opportunities were missed by not discussing T. T. Liang and his notoriously complex relationship with his teacher.

This documentary appears to present a wealth of images of Zheng Manqing.  And there is a lot to be said for the strategy of self-consciously approaching a teacher from the perspective of their students.  Yet even here we are seeing only a small slice of the number and types of relationships that existed.  Once again, as we focus too intently on Zheng, dressed in his scholarly robes, “The Professor” seems to recede from view.

It may simply be that it is impossible to present a comprehensive portrait of any individual who could legitimately be called a “Master of Five Excellences.”  Yet Strugatz has painted a compelling image of him at the center of a specific community at a critical time and place in the history of the United States.

This film shines brightest as a primary document recording the needs and desires that drove individuals to seek out the Chinese martial arts in the 1960s and 1970s.  It is also an important remembrance of a critical period in the dissemination of Taijiquan in the West.  For students of Zheng’s Taijiquan it will be mandatory viewing.  While it may not resolve all of the riddles of the Professors’ life it is sure to inspire new discussion.  And students of martial arts studies will find in these conversations new insights about the unique balance necessary to culturally translate a martial art while forging a new community around it.

The Professor’s students. Source: http://www.tai-chifilm.com/whatistaichi

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If you enjoyed this review you might also want to read: Sugong – Exploring a Shaolin Kung Fu Tradition

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The Pagoda Forest at the Shaolin Temple in Henan Province. Source: cnn.com

“Inoue said the Japanese style of judo traditionally focused more on quantity rather than quality, trying to instill a tough mentality. But in Europe, which Inoue describes as “the mainstream of judo today,” judoka train more efficiently.

“A balance between efficiency and inefficiency and a balance between scientific things and unscientific things — you have to look at those, otherwise there’s no progress for our game,” Inoue said. “We’ve switched our mind-set that way.”

“Inoue Determined to Help Japan Keep Pace.” Japan Times, 5/2/2016.

Introduction

 
Who owns a martial art?

On the surface this question would seem to have an obvious answer.  Most of these systems come with a specific name (kendo or taijiquan), and they fall into generally accepted categories, such as Japanese Budo or the Chinese martial arts. The very act of describing these systems in the English language seems to underline an obvious fact.  The martial arts are best understood as the technical and cultural property of the previously mentioned nations.  It is all a matter of common sense.

Unfortunately “common sense” has a nasty habit of transforming itself into complex assumptions that no one ever questions.  For students of nationalism, a fairly modern political ideology spread and popularized in the 19^th and 20^th centuries, an assertion like the one above might begin to raise eyebrows.

While Chinese citizens during the Qing dynasty were certainly aware of the existence of the state and their responsibilities to it, most contemporary accounts indicate they did not think of themselves as members of a unified, polyglot, “Chinese nation” during the late imperial period.  Instead they were much more likely to organize their identity around lineage groups, regional locations and patronage networks.  Strong feelings of national identification didn’t really grip the populace until the founding of the Republic in the post-1911 period.  And yet many of the traditional martial arts (including systems like taijiquan and wing chun) were already well established through local and regional networks prior to the rise of the “the nation.”

The case of “Japanese” Karate makes an even better case study of the complex relationship between the emergence of hand combat systems and national identities.  As many of us already know, this art first came to Japan from Okinawa.  There it went through a process of fundamental transformation, rationalization, and even renaming, before it was determined that it could be a vehicle for the new strain of Japanese nationalism that was then insinuating itself into the martial arts.

So does that mean that Karate is originally an Okinawan martial art?  Possibly.  Yet again the story is more complicated than our nationally focused narratives might suggest.  Hand combat was particularly popular in a couple of areas of Okinawa, and it is not clear to historians that all of these practitioners shared a common style.  And various arts from Southern China (including White Crane Boxing) likely played a critical role in popularizing these modes of hand combat in Okinawa.

So does that mean that Karate is really a Chinese art?  Probably not.  When we push historical arguments to their logical conclusion we find that knowledge about a practice’s “genetic origin” are often unhelpful in understanding how a community actually understands itself and functions today.

While a regionally focused approach to understanding the development of the Asian martial arts shows a lot of potential, the ancient origins of individual techniques have little bearing on their current identity.  This point seems obvious enough.

When a modern American undergoes genetic testing and learns that a certain percentage of his DNA originated in Poland, he may be able to claim previously unknown Eastern European ancestry.  Yet he can’t really claim to now possess a “Polish identity.”

That is a matter of deep cultural knowledge and life experience.  If you are depending on a blind genetic test to discover some aspect of your genetic heritage, we can safely assume that it plays little role in your actual cultural identity.  Nor would most people make the mistake of conflating these two categories when talking about genealogy.

So why do we tend to conflate similar categories when discussing the martial arts?  Why do we routinely assume that some quirk of our wing chun practice shows its deep “Chinese heritage,” particularly when hung gar and taijiquan people do things very differently in similar situations?

A hand colored magic lantern slide, produced in Japan, showing both Judo and Kendo. Source: Author’s Personal Collection.

Nationalism, Globalization and the Martial Arts

I blame nationalism and, more recently, globalization.  Let’s start with nationalism.

When a country sought to enter the nation state system during the 19^th and 20^th century their acceptance was not assured.  One joins this club by being accepted by the other members.  As certain students of nationalism have observed, potential nations had to clear a couple of barriers to justify their claims.  First they had to prove that they possessed a unique culture (often in the form of a print language and folklore), a homeland, and a population.  In short one had to demonstrate that your national identity was unique, and not simply a variation of some larger identity.

Yet in joining the international system Benedict Anderson keenly observed that one accepted that your “unique nation” was now on equal footing with every other nation.  To be a member of a nation is to realize that every stranger that you encounter is also a member of an equally august body.  So while on one level all nations are unique, on a more fundamental level they are also interchangeable.  And this realization cleared the way for a certain sort of competition between them.

One of the reasons that I am interested in the Asian martial arts is that they grew up in conjunction with this new category of “nation states.”  While we tend to assume that both of these things are impossibly ancient, emerging from the mists of time, in truth they are fairly recent.  Still, the roots of these combat systems in the late imperial period were well enough established that reformers could offer them up as proof of an “ancient and continuous” body of unique cultural traditions which supported the claims of legitimacy of the newly established national identity.

Why then do we believe that Karate reveals something essential about the “Japanese character”?  Or that Taijiquan is the key to understanding the Chinese “national experience”?  Because people have been repeating these assertions since about 1920.

Nor do I expect that these patterns of belief will change any time soon.  We now have a sound understanding of the actual historical development of these combat systems, and this is a good thing for those wishing to develop an academic discussion of the martial arts.  Yet the accelerating process of globalization has only served to reinforce the fundamental dilemma that popularized these myths in the first place.

A celebration of the 2011 “world tai chi day.” Source:www.chineseartsalliance.com.

Global Decentering of the Asian Martial Arts

Global markets demand a degree of conformity between states that was previously unimaginable.  Nevertheless, national identity is not fading from the stage of history.  The incentive to argue for one’s uniqueness in the face of corrosive global pressures is accelerating rather than vanishing.  The research of martial arts studies scholars notwithstanding, I suspect that many practitioners will continue to seek “the essence” of ethno-nationalist identity in practices far divorced from the communities that actually created them.

Ironically, this quasi-fundamentalist turn in the development of the martial arts may arise from the very trends that seem to be pushing the development of the martial arts in a more open direction.  The creation of free markets, relatively inexpensive travel and virtually free communication via the internet has created a situation in which all sorts of once local identities now have an ability to migrate to new locations, effectively establishing transnational communities.  In many ways the traditional Asian martial arts are ideally situated to take advantage of these openings.

The types of institutional organization established during the early 20^th century were designed to facilitate the creation of branch schools and “franchises” as a way of spreading an economically lucrative and politically advantageous movement.  Further, having students outside of one’s own ethno-linguistic group reinforces the perception of value, and hence legitimacy, of this body of practice.  Cultivating certain sorts of over-seas teaching opportunities generates not only income but social prestige.  Lastly, cultural factors in the West following WWII, the Korean War, the Vietnam War and the counter-culture explosion of the 1960s and 1970s ensured that these practices would find a receptive audience.

The end result has been an almost unparalleled growth in the global martial arts movement.  This change has been so rapid that many arts have become “decentered.”  If one were to plot the median geographic location of their practitioners on a map it would be clear that their social center of gravity has moved out of their country of origin.

The quote at the start of this article is taken from a recent newspaper profile of the new coach of the Japanese men’s judo team.  In it he is forced to confront the fact that Japan’s standing at the highest levels of international competition has been challenged in recent years.  They simply are not winning as many gold medals as the folks back home demand.

The reasons why are clear.  It is not that the quality of the Japanese Judo community has degraded.  Rather, as he plainly states, the center of Judo practice is now found in Europe.

In a sense this should not be a surprise.  As any of its citizens will be quick to remind us, Japan is a “small island nation.”  Its total population is limited.  This also constrains the number of youth that are available to go into serious Judo training at any point in time.

Further, its approach to training has often prioritized cultural factors over scientifically rational innovation.  Given the huge number of practitioners now found in the rest of the world, the end result seems obvious.  The era of Japan monopolizing the medal podium in this sport is probably over.  Yet the close connection between Japanese nationalism and their years of success in judo (the only Japanese sport to be accepted as an Olympic event) suggests that this realization is likely to be somewhat painful.

Nor is this decentering limited to the case of judo.  Alexander Bennett concludes his recent history of kendo (California UP, 2015) with an argument that the spread of Japanese Budo practices abroad will always be limited by the intimate connections of these practices with identity and nationalism in the eyes of many of their Japanese supporters.  While they may be forced to acknowledge their losses in global sporting events, it is simply too easy to say that on a fundamental level, the “foreigners” will never understand the “true essence” of the art, while leaving all of the relevant terms undefined.  In Bennett’s view this corrosive discourse (something that he has had the chance to observe first hand) may end up limiting the ultimate growth of sports like kendo.

This general pattern is not limited to the Japanese arts.  Despite the old trope of Chinese masters who refuses to teach “outsiders,” huge numbers of students have taken up various aspects of the TCMA since the 1970s.  Most of the traditional Chinese systems have been very supportive of the growing size and sophistication of their foreign student bases.  After all, they have the potential to increase both the prestige and revenue flowing to a given style.

Still, it is not uncommon to hear worried discussions that at some point Shanghai, Henan, or Hong Kong will no longer be the center of a given practice.  What will happen to the Chinese martial arts when, in an ethnic sense, they cease to be “Chinese?”  One of the very first reviews I did for this blog actually looked at a (nicely produced) Wing Chun documentary in which this exact possibility was debated by some masters in Hong Kong.

The case of Wing Chun is actually particularly interesting as this is not simply a “Chinese” art.  It is even more strongly associated with the region surrounding the Pearl River Delta in Guangdong and (since 1950) Hong Kong.  Both shifts in the global economy and a changing relationship with mainland China have sensitized individuals to the value of these local identities.  As such, the growing overseas popularity of Wing Chun has reinforced the area’s claim to possessing an independent and distinct cultural heritage while, at the same time, threatening to decenter one of its most important elements of cultural heritage.

But we should be clear about the facts on the ground.  It is not the case that at some point in the distant future the geographic center of Wing Chun might shift out of southern China.  That probably happened during the 1990s.

Once again, I think that we can thank Europe.  It is not a case of Hong Kong’s martial excellence declining.  Rather Europe has a huge (relatively unified) market for martial arts training, and Wing Chun has now been established abroad for enough years to develop some real expertise.

This general pattern of cultural drift is in no way unique to the martial arts.  It is a mathematical fact given the way that globalization works.  Any product which gains a degree of popularity will quickly discover that the size of the potential export market (the entire world) is by definition larger than the size of the domestic market (a single country).  This basic fact is why the domestic price of a good always goes up when you open the market to exports.  It also helps to explain why America’s most talented jazz musicians spend their summers in Europe and much of our best single malt whiskey ends up in Asia.

We return then to the essential paradox that has been driving this discussion.  On the one hand national identity has not vanished in the current era.  In fact, the challenges of globalization have made some elements of the national discourse more popular than ever.  Yet the nature of global markets dictate that the transnational demand for many of these most popular symbols and practices will always be greater than the domestic audience in any single city, region or state.  To paraphrase Adam Frank, we live in an era when identity moves, whether you want it to or not.

Hong Kong Airline flight crews practice Wing Chun. Source: South China Morning Post.

Conclusion: The Rise of Intangible Cultural Heritage

This brings us to the final point.  The acceleration of globalization after the 1990s has coincided with the rise of what scholars have called the “cultural heritage” discourse.  Here we see more state and local governments seeking to identify, label and curate either places or practices seen as worthy of protection by the international community.

I recently had an opportunity to watch a lecture delivered at Cornell University by Prof. Yujie Zhu on the various ways in which the cultural heritage discourse has affected communities in China.  It has been posted online and anyone interested in these topics would be well advised to take a moment and check it out.

One of the points to merged from this discussion was that the movement toward designating practices as examples of “intangible cultural heritage” (as opposed to simply concentrating on historic locations) was driven in large part by lobbying on the part of China, Japan and Korea.  They noted that in many cases it was the Confucian value of “faithful transmission” of past beliefs and practices that constituted examples of “heritage” within their cultural framework.

Further, with the massive disruption of China’s urban geography during this period of rapid growth, one suspects that the people were forced to turn to practices, beliefs and identities in an effort to both establish a relationship with the past as well as to build new social networks in the present.

It is interesting to consider the global movement of the Asian martial arts in light of the rise of ICH discussions.  As I have reported in numerous news updates, there has been a lot of pressure to include various martial arts styles, and even specific lineages, on ICH lists drawn up by national or local governments in China.  This has certainly been the case in Hong Kong which, in the last few years, seems to have awaken to the heritage of potential of such quintessentially southern arts as Hung Gar and Wing Chun.

Yet Hong Kong’s government has generally taken a “market led” approach to preserving the past.  They have ignored repeated calls (often coming from individuals within the martial arts community) to provide actual funding or material support to preserve these practices, and have instead claimed that their intention is to establish a list so that private citizens, firms and donors will have a better sense of where they wished to invest their scarce time and money.

On the mainland the support for ICH practices has been somewhat more robust, especially in those cases where a local practice can be tied to heritage tourism (the martial arts at Shaolin or Mt. Wudang are classic examples of this).  Yet given that this same situation is unlikely to play out in Hong Kong (where martial arts tourism is not a large part of the city’s economy) what else could be gained from winning ICH status?

In thinking over Prof. Zhu’s fine talk I began to wonder whether ICH status was not in some way seen as a counterweight to the decentering effects of globalization.  Yes, the basic laws of mathematics dictate that most of the individuals who practice and teach Wing Chun must live outside of the city of Hong Kong.  Yet the establishment of an ICH discourse around the art affirms that it is not simply a self-defense system, or even a pure martial arts tradition.  Rather it is a matter of cultural, regional and ethnic heritage.

Whether this is true, and if such a declaration would have convinced a skeptical middle class in the year 1950 (when the martial arts tended to be much less popular in Hong Kong), is an interesting question.  But this is not today’s question.  Rather, once we have established that a given martial art is linked to traditional cultural values (as defined by the appropriate government committee), after sufficient repetition, it becomes a social fact.

This has the effect of creating a zone within the Wing Chun community that cannot be decentered.  No matter what level of technical excellence is achieved in a school in Germany or San Francisco, one must always return to, and look towards, the art’s “traditional home” to discover its essence.  And to the extent that Hong Kong and Foshan may find themselves competing for the scarce dollars of Wing Chun tourists, an ICH designation cannot hurt!

In some senses this is a very positive development.  Wing Chun has become a critical part of Hong Kong’s identity and that should be emphasized and defended.  And I think that any martial art community will be made stronger through the establishment of a rich web of exchange and travel.  Finally, the historian in me loves the idea of “preservation.”

Yet as a social scientist I know that these topics must be approached critically.  The establishment of an ICH discourse does not just “preserve,” it also changes, sometimes in fundamental ways.

Its aim is to take that which was “threatened” and create “stability.”  Items of low social status are transformed to become centers of  cultural complex programs.  Practices that were economically marginal are redefined as upstanding middle class behaviors.  And in the martial arts it might take what was once a simple hand combat system and transforms it into a bastion of values and identity.

This is all particularly interesting as there are ongoing debates within most martial arts systems as to what their goals should be.  What values should they advance?  Are they effective self-defense mechanisms, or ways of learning about traditional culture?  It is hard to imagine that the establishment of an ICH system would not somehow shuffle this deck and deal out a new round of winning and losing hands.

In conclusion, the complicated discussions that surround identity in the martial arts are, on some level, an inheritance from their brush with nationalism.  The acceleration of these same trends in the current era of globalization has led to the geographic and cultural decentering of many arts.  This is a trend that will likely continue in the future.

Within this context we might be able to understand the sudden interest in ICH labels (even in places where there is no immediate payoff in terms of tourism) as a way of resisting these pressures and reclaiming cultural ownership over a set of practices.  Yet the inherently political nature of this process guarantees that ICH designations will change certain aspects of a given martial arts community while attempting to preserve others.

This complicated balance between local and national identities (seeking to reinforce their own legitimacy) and the transnational communities of students who actually practice and financially support these arts, suggest that it is not really possible to know who “owns” kung fu.  But this debate has been underway (in one form or another) for some time, and it has done much to shape the arts that we currently know.  As such it is a question worth asking.

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If you enjoyed this essay you might also want to read: Producing “Healthy Citizens”: Social Capital, Rancière and Ladies-Only Kickboxing

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25-year-old master Zhong Siyuan practices martial art at the Yuhuang Temple in Luzhou city, southwest China’s Sichuan province. Source: china.com.cn

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 fight between the Armenian and Azerbaijani camps at a recent Kung Fu tournament in the Ukraine. Source: https://www.rt.com

News from All Over

You can file our first story under “Well…that happened.”  A set of European Kung Fu Championships were recently held in the Ukraine.  But the only news stories about the event that are currently circulating focus on an epic, bench clearing brawl that erupted during the Armenian/Azerbaijni match.  Follow the link for footage of the event. After reviewing the tape and various news stories I think that there are a couple of lessons that we can take away from this.

First, we can think of this as an example of “Kung Fu Diplomacy” gone very badly.  The relationship between these two countries has been difficult for years.  And sometimes mutual participation in sporting institutions can be an important step in normalizing relations and spreading a zone of peaceful norms.  That is the basic idea behind the Olympics.  But in other cases events like this can lead to a serious rethink of the wisdom of using folding chairs for seating at a fight.  Sure they are convenient for the venue, but they are uncomfortable both when sitting on them and when getting smacked upside the the head with one.  Maybe next year we will go with theater style seating instead?

Is this the future of the UFC in China?

Continuing with the theme of seemingly unlikely stories, multiple news outlets over the last few weeks have reported that the the UFC is currently in “advanced stage” talks to sell its fight promotion business.  Two of the bidders at the table are actually Chinese firms (Dalian Wanda and a private equity and venture capital firm named China Media Capital).   Current speculation is that this deal, if it goes through, could be be worth $3.5-4 billion USD.  One also can’t help but wonder whether a sale to a Chinese media company might solve the franchises perennial difficulties in cracking the Chinese TV market.

If our first story seemed to illustrate the dangers of Kung Fu Diplomacy, this one shows the strengths of the strategies.  A number of news stories from across Africa have come out in the recent weeks profiling local students who have won opportunities to pursue further studies in China through contests hosted by local embassies and Confucius Institutes.  In general these events seem to have focused on language training, but as I read multiple accounts I was struck by the fact that the Chinese martial arts just kept coming up as a key aspect of Chinese culture that was popular with students and actively drawing them into closer engagement with these broader public diplomacy strategies.  Maybe the best case of this to merge in the recent crop of news stories is this account of Luis Matthew who left the judges in awe with his Chinese Kung Fu performance at a Chinese language proficiency competition held recently in Namibia.  His story is well worth reading as it seems to be representative of a much larger trend that is currently underway.  Click here for the link.  It is also worth noting that this specific account seems to have been singled out for heavy distribution by the Chinese press.  [Sadly I was not able to find a picture from the winning performance.]

It looks like a new version of the Kung Fu game for Kinect is about to drop.  Check out the previous link for the announcement, a game-play trailer and a review.

In a variety of previous posts we have discussed the importance of media in attracting people, and forming their initial beliefs about, the martial arts.  A lot of this discussion has focused on Kung Fu movies as film studies scholars are a driving force behind the discussion.  But in the current era video games are an increasingly important agent in spreading ideas about the martial arts.

In that respect this game is very interesting as it fully harnesses the fantasy of entering a comic book world where it is physically possible to fight the bad guys without ever having to go to an actual school and put in the time necessary to learn from a teacher.  Its the closest thing to a martial arts game on the holo-deck of the USS Enterprise that we have yet seen.  Needless to say its hard not to think of Umberto Eco’s essay “Travels in Hyper-Reality” when watching these trailers.  In fact, I suspect that a cultural studies student could put together a pretty decent paper just on the representations of the martial arts in this set of links alone.

25-year-old master Zhong Siyuan practices martial art at the Yuhuang Temple in Luzhou city, southwest China’s Sichuan province. Source: china.com.cn

Of course it would be foolish to ignore the strength of the “authenticity discourse” that pervades the Chinese martial arts.  The next story taps into these currents.  Multiple Chinese news sites have reported the story of Zhong Siyuan, a 25 year old college student who turned down a potentially lucrative career to instead take up the life of a Daoist nun at the Yuhuang Temple in Luzhou (Sichuan province.)  The photo essay shows her cultivating traditional arts such as music and calligraphy, but also dedicating herself to martial arts training in stereotypical mountaintop location.  Stories like this can easily be read as reinforcing the self-orientalizing discourse that often pervades discussions of the traditional martial arts in China.  Yet at the same time they help to position the martial arts as a “cultural luxury good” that the upwardly mobile both can (and should) aspire to.  See this guest post for a little more on this phenomenon.

Zhong Chen at Singapore’s REDSEA Gallery. Source: http://sea.blouinartinfo.com (I can’t help but notice that the Gentleman on the right bears more than passing resemblance to Batman).

Regular readers will know I am always on the lookout for good Kung Fu related art.  Its a little surprising to me that the TCMA don’t generate more visual art.  As such the following story grabbed my attention, especially as it also plays into the “authenticity discourse” and makes a strong argument about what happens to the Chinese martial arts when they are practiced and appropriated by “Westerners.”

“The Kung-Fu Series by Zhong Chen” explores how Chinese cultural touchstones, like the iconic martial art, are diluted in the process of exportation and representation in Western mass media. The artist’s own experiences living in Australia inform his perspective on the phenomenon of “Western” or Anglo-Australian ideas mixing freely with “Eastern” or Chinese ideas.

Kung Fu visualization by the German artist Tobias Gremmler. Source: https://thestack.com

Over the last few weeks there have also been news stories about another, aesthetically very different, TCMA related art project.  These images were rendered by the German artist Tobias Gremmler using motion capture technology to show patterns of movements within Chinese martial arts forms.  I noted with some interest that the project was backed by the always productive International Guoshu Association.

Taijiquan students, and those interested in philosophy of the Chinese martial arts and their history in North America, will want to take a look at The Professor: Tai Chi’s Journey to the West, a recent documentary by Barry Strugatz.  The LA Times wrote a short review of the film, and I reviewed it here at Kung Fu Tea as well looking at some of the issues most relevant to students of martial arts studies.  The Film Journal also did a piece on the documentary which was less complimentary but also worth taking a look at.

A still from the five deadly venoms.

For those looking for a little more action in their martial arts films, we have a list of the “20 Best Martial Arts Films” courtesy of the the Movie Pilot.  For reasons that I do not completely understand, lists seem to be one of the dominant genera for generating content on the internet.  But this list is actually pretty good, and I noticed that some classic Japanese samurai films got included in the group!  Pretty much everything here is mandatory viewing (and I was even happy to see that Iron Monkey made the cut).

Finally, we have a lightsaber story.  The Syracuse Martial Arts Academy and The Gathering of Sabers recently hosted the region’s first open lightsaber combat tournament.  Fortunately the local news decided to drop by and do both a story and short video segment on the event.  You can see them here.  It is always interesting to observe the ways in which these events are discussed, and it appears that a good time was had by all!  You can follow the group that hosted this event here.

Martial Arts Studies

As always there are some exciting announcements for students of martial arts studies.  The first thing to catch my eye was the announcement of a new forthcoming book from Cambridge University Press that is sure to become a workhorse volume in pretty much everyone’s library.  Later this year they will be releasing an English language translation of Pingyuan Chen’s classic study A History of Chinese Martial Arts Fiction.

Here is the publisher’s blurb:

Chen Pingyuan is one of the leading scholars of modern Chinese literature, known particularly for his work on wuxia, a popular and influential genre of historical martial arts fiction still celebrated around the world today. This work, presented here in English translation for the first time, is considered to be the seminal work on the evolution, aesthetics and politics of the modern Chinese wuxia novel in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, tracing the resurgence of interest in classical chivalric tales in late Qing China.

Now With Kung Fu Grip! How Bodybuilders, Soldiers and a Hairdresser Reinvented Martial Arts for America. By Jared Miracle. McFarland & Company (March 31, 2016)

I also want to remind readers that Dr. Jared Miracle’s much anticipated modern history of the martial arts, Now with Kung Fu Grip! (McFarland & Company, 2016) is about to start shipping. Miracle has been a frequent guest author here at Kung Fu Tea and he recently contributed an important article to the journal Martial Arts Studies.  Needless to say I have been looking forward to the release of this book for quite some time and recommend it to anyone interested in the history of the martial arts.  Be sure to check out his MAS article for a sample of the sorts of discussions that you will find in this book.

Grayson Perry (centre, back), in Episode One of All Man, Channel 4

If you are looking for some immediate satisfaction with no shipping delay, consider checking out this blog post by Paul Bowman dealing with questions of masculinity and gender in the martial arts (specifically in the UK) today.  It is a fascinating read.

An assortment of Chinese teas. Source: Wikimedia.

Kung Fu Tea on Facebook

A lot has happened on the Kung Fu Tea Facebook group over the last few weeks.  We discussed some really old spear work, examined the latest translations of Taijiquan manuals released by the Brennan Translation blog, and discovered a group recreating medieval combat sports in New York City. 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.

Charles Russo. 2016. Striking Distance: Bruce Lee & the Dawn of Martial Arts in America. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 264 pages. $24.95 USD (Hardcover)

Anyone can tell you that it is easier to review a good book than a bad one.  This simple truth makes Charles Russo’s latest volume a pleasure to discuss.  Striking Distance: Bruce Lee & the Dawn of Martial Arts in America (Nebraska UP, 2016) is one of those rare martial arts volumes that is likely to be widely read by individuals practicing a variety of styles.  It will also be of interest to those who are looking for a better vantage point from which to observe the history of the San Francisco Chinese community at a time of immense social change but have no background in the fighting arts.

Still, it is among martial artists that this book will have its greatest impact.  I fully expect that it will be discussed for years to come.  It may even play a similar role to R. W. Smith’s classic Chinese Boxing: Master and Methods (Kodansha, 1974) for a new generation of martial artists seeking to better understand their roots.

The comparison with Smith is an interesting one.  The first thing that readers will notice is the quality of Russo’s writing.  Simply put, this is a wonderfully written book.  Its style is at turns lyrical yet succinct.  Russo’s descriptions of individual events are rich and evoke a sense of texture and place that I have not encountered in very many descriptions of martial arts history.

His ability to reproduce a sense of intimacy, from smoked filled halls to creaky staircases, give his narrative a gripping quality.  This is amplified by the use of short chapters, each of which flows easily into the next.  The end result is a genuinely compelling story.

Smith was also an engaging writer.  While an intelligence officer by trade his writing reflected the journalism of his day.  His brief yet incisive descriptions of the martial artists that he encountered drew in many readers and earned him a great many fans.  I suspect that Russo’s text will be received in much the same way.

Nevertheless, it is the contrasts that I find most interesting.  Smith was a deeply devoted martial artists.  Like many young men of his generation he had come up through the ranks of boxing and judo before moving on to the newer and more exotic fighting systems (karate, taijiquan, kali and the various schools of kung fu) that would erupt into the public consciousness during the 1970s.

R. W. Smith was an early adopter of the Chinese fighting arts and he eagerly sought to promote these in the West. He hoped to not just to document what he saw, but to shape public opinion about these subjects through his writing. While this gave his prose a bite that many readers found enjoyable, it also led him to make some assertions that now require reevaluation.

In comparison Russo has little skin in the game.  He does not identify as a martial artist and has none of the personal or stylistic loyalties that dominate the work of his literary predecessor.  Russo is a professional Bay Area journalist and writer with a keen interest in local history and a nose for a good story.  The San Francisco martial arts scene, from the 1940s through the 1960s, provided ample material to satisfy both of these instincts.

It is even possible that Russo’s status as a non-practitioner was an advantage while researching this volume.  As quickly becomes apparent, this work is not based so much on the sorts of historical research that one does in a library (though there is some of that) but on literally hundreds of interviews and casual conversations with individuals who were direct observers of the events in question.  A certain “neutrality” on the question of local loyalties was probably beneficial in winning the trust of his various sources.

And like any good journalist Russo has spent a good deal of time cross-checking these verbal accounts and comparing them to previously published sources.  When particularly complex issues arise serious thought is given to the credibility of the different perspectives that exist within the community.

Lau Bun demonstrates the use of the Tiger Fork in the late 1960s. Source: http://plumblossom.net/ChoyLiFut/laubun.html

The end result is a nuanced view of individuals like Lau Bun, Wally Jay, Ed Parker and Bruce Lee that steadfastly resists the temptation to romanticize them.    Russo seems to understand that it is the “warts” that humanize us, which make empathy possible in a “warts and all” history.  In this way he avoids the rhetorical extremes of his predecessor.

Yet this is more than the story of a handful of people.  It is also the story of a place.  San Francisco’s Chinatown stands out as a key actor in these events, exerting a type of influence on the unfolding story.  Russo’s history provides critical insights into not just the martial arts, but the neighborhood that supported them.

In my own study of Wing Chun in Foshan and Hong Kong I called for a greater emphasis on local and regional history within martial arts studies.   When we focus on only systemic and national level trends we create a distorted image of how the martial arts were actually experienced by most of their practitioners.  Why did individuals turn to them?  How were they able to express their own desires for the future through these practices?

Russo’s work stand as a powerful testament to the value of a local, layered, perspective in answering these key questions.  One can only hope that this volume inspires future studies tackling different cities, time periods and communities.

Readers interested in Bruce Lee’s life and development as a martial artist will find much value in this volume.  As one of San Francisco’s most famous sons (and martial artists) Lee’s exploits bookend Russo’s narrative.  His narrative begins with Lee’s appearance at one of Wally Jay’s locally famous luals and it ends with his now (in)famous showdown with Wong Jack Man at his Oakland school.  In between we are introduced to the key figures and personalities that shaped the Bay Area Chinese martial arts scene through the middle of the 1960s.

Together with Lau Bun, TY Wong would oversee the martial arts culture in San Francisco’s Chinatown for more than a quarter century. (Photo courtesy of Gilman Wong)

Special attention is paid to Lau Bun (the description of his school is really wonderful), T. Y. Wong (another Chinatown institution) and the Gee Yau Seah club (“Soft Arts Academy”) as the three forces that shaped the area’s small but stable martial arts scene from the start of WWII through the middle of the 1960s.  After that a series of complex social changes in the neighborhood unleashed a reorganization of the area’s hand combat community.

Russo’s project is to excavate the region’s martial arts as they existed prior to the burst of growth and creativity that gripped the area in the late 1960s and 1970s.  This older stratum of social history has always been harder to pin down, and as such he has done valuable work in reconstructing both how the area’s martial arts culture initially evolved, and why a modernist counter-movement eventually began to coalesce in Oakland (a group with which Bruce Lee found a natural home).  Yet it is the accounts of pioneers such as Lau Bun and T. Y. Wong (as well as Ed Parker and Wally Jay) that more historically minded readers will be drawn to.

If I have one serious complaint about this book it would have to be the length.  At about 150 pages of actual text I found it to be too short by half.  Given the engaging nature of Russo’s prose I suspect that most readers will be left wanting more.  Yet that desire is also telling.

When evaluating a work such as this we must ask ourselves whether it is capable of not only answering questions but also inspiring new ones.  I suspect that the answer is yes.

Russo has approached this work as a journalist, and not as an academic student of martial arts studies.  As such he is more concerned with reporting his narrative than asking questions about the causality or social meaning of the events that he relates.  Yet many of his stories might be the jumping off point for further discussions.

One issue that arises repeatedly throughout his text is the supposed teaching ban on non-Chinese students within the traditional Chinese martial arts.  I say “supposed” as while many individuals assert that such a ban was in place, it is not actually clear how many non-Chinese students were petitioning for instruction in San Francisco during the 1940s or 1950s.  Prior to the 1940s there does not appear to have been much in the way of public schools for anyone to study at.  And by the time that Russo’s narrative really gets going there is a small but steady stream of non-Chinese students that appear throughout the period in seeming defiance of such a ban.

So what was the nature and purpose of this ban, and why did it collapse so quickly after the first few years of the 1960s?  In what ways was this norm expressed differently within the Bay Area Chinese community (because of its direct experience of neighborhood level racial hostility) than in the taijiquan community back in China?

With regards to these questions it seems that Russo’s sources provide him with somewhat contradictory accounts, the implications of which are not always clear.  On one level this presents future researchers with a simple empirical problem.  Did Ip Man really kick Bruce Lee out of his school because of his mixed race heritage?  Can this actually be documented by period accounts?

Yet the theoretical implications of this conversation are even more important.  How was it that shared narratives of community exclusion, then inclusion, shaped Chinese American identity in the 20^th century, regardless of what any specific teacher actually chose to do in the face of this norm?  How was this different from, or connected to, the parallel process that was unfolding in Hong Kong, or Taiwan?

At times I expect that Russo’s reliance on interviews and eye-witness accounts has probably led him astray.  If we have learned anything from the field of law it is that human memory is a highly fungible thing, especially when decades have been allowed to intervene.  When Ip Man entered Hong Kong late in 1949 his wife back in Foshan was very much alive.  He was not a widower.  Yet that is not how he is always remembered now.  Russo directly tackles the problem of “motivated memory,” both at the individual and community level, when discussing the aftermath of the Wong Jack Man fight at the end of his study.

Still, anthropologists and ethnographers would be quick to remind us that the “remembered events” that did not really happen are just as critical to understanding the nature and texture of a community as those that did.  If we treat this work only as a simple history of Bruce Lee we might be disappointed by contradictory accounts or historical “mistakes”.  Yet there are already other sources that we can turn to for most of that information.  Such a reading is in danger of missing the point of a work like this.

What Russo has presented us with is the history of a place caught at a critical moment of transformation.  It has often been assumed that the earlier character of this neighborhood is forever lost and that its influence on the shape of the American martial arts has been limited.  After all, Lau Bun and T. Y. Wong are hardly household names within the American martial arts community, despite their notable careers.

This short book makes the opposite argument.  It demonstrates that their history is still a living, breathing thing.  It is a force that is being remembered and retold.  It is valued by the community that bears it and elements of it have become part of local identity.

Lastly, the history of the Bay Area during this critical decade has shaped the subsequent evolution of the martial arts in America in many ways.  Some of them were profound, others are easily overlooked.  This the ultimate message of Russo’s book.  It reminds us that, if understood correctly, local history has a way of becoming all of our histories.

Bruce Lee’s first appearance (of many) on the cover of Black Belt Magazine. October, 1967.

oOo

If you enjoyed this review you might also want to read:  The Wing Chun Jo Fen: Norms and the Creation of a Southern Chinese Martial Arts Community.

oOo

“Russo/Chinese War Scenes.” Chinese soldiers drill with Pudao. Vintage Newsreel. 1929.

Secrecy vs. Advertising in the Chinese Martial Arts

I recently reviewed Charles Russo’s excellent work, Striking Distance, which discussed the spread of the Chinese martial arts on the West Coast of the United States during the middle of the 20^th century.  It is a great contribution to the ongoing discussion of the history of these fighting systems, and anyone who is unfamiliar with it will want to check it out.

In this post I would like to offer a slightly different perspective on a theme that arose repeatedly throughout Russo’s study.  How should we think of the supposed secrecy that surrounded the Chinese martial arts in the West prior to the late 1960s?  This is a topic that Russo treats with a fair amount of nuance.

To begin with, some pretty prominent teachers actually taught western students prior to the “lifting of the ban”, and even those who did not personally do so (such as Lau Bun) had senior students of their own that were more than willing to take up the torch.  Nor is it really clear how many western students were petitioning these masters for Kung Fu instruction during the 1950s.  It must be remembered that the Chinese martial arts were a pretty esoteric subject at that point, and not even as popular within their own community as they would become in later decades.  It may have been very easy to enforce a “teaching ban” in an era when practically no one was asking to be taught.

Even worse, an over-emphasis on the supposed secrecy of the Chinese martial arts has had some perverse effects on how we discuss them.  As Paul Bowman (among others) has noted, when we emphasize the “ban” on outsiders the end result is to throw the charge of racism back on the Chinese-American community when in fact they were the ones who were subjected to vast amounts of actual (not imagined) discrimination.

Still, Russo reminds us that we cannot simply dismiss these norms out of hand.  While some Chinese teachers were willing to violate them, they also report being the victims of various sorts of pressures, ranging from economic to actual threats of violence.  After numerous interviews he concluded that there was no reason to doubt the accounts of actual teachers reporting these attitudes within their own community.  Still, by the early 1970s the flood gates were open.  So possible range of years in which a ban could have seriously restricted the economic freedom of large numbers of potential students and teachers is actually pretty limited.

All of this is very interesting, but it is well worth remembering that the Tong associations of either San Francisco or New York did not monopolize access to, or the public discussion of, these fighting systems.  In the grand scheme of the globalization of the Chinese martial arts they were rather minor players who had more influence over members of their own community than the various masters who started to emigrate directly from China to the west throughout the 20th century (Zheng Manqing being a prime example). While they may have preferred that traditional hand combat methods not be taught, or even discussed, with outsiders, other groups had very different plans.

By the second and third decades of the 20^th century various thinkers in China realized that the martial arts could be employed as important tools of state building and nationalism. Many of these efforts drew inspiration from the Japanese use of Budo culture in these same roles decades earlier.  And once the TCMA began to be reimagined as tools of the state, they immediately became part of China’s growing “public diplomacy” efforts.

In an earlier time public diplomacy was often referred to as “propaganda.” This typically refers to coordinated media programs designed to influence the thoughts and feelings of the citizens of other countries so that they are more favorably disposed to one’s goals or preferred policy outcomes.  Such efforts can take a variety of forms, and they can be led either directly by state actors or individuals in the private sector.

During the Second World War the term propaganda was seriously discredited and left with only negative connotations.  It fell into disuse, except as a slur.   Political scientists and policy makers today are more likely to speak of “public diplomacy” or “national brand management.”  Still, the basic idea is much the same.

Nor is public diplomacy necessarily a bad thing.  It is hard to think of how it is even possible to address certain pressing problems within the international system, from deterring the spread of radical religious identities to building a consensus to fight climate change, without the skillful use of public diplomacy.  It is one of the very basic implements of diplomacy and statecraft that every country has in their toolbox.

Kendo in Shanghai, pre-1920. Period reprint of a vintage photograph. Original photographer unknown.

As Chinese policy makers observed the West’s fascination with Japanese martial arts such as judo and kendo they quickly realized that their own fighting systems could play an important role in shaping how China was perceived by the global public.  After all, the West was looking to the Budo arts to try and understand how the Japanese “national character” had contributed to their surprising military and economic rise.  Essays on judo and kendo were surprisingly common in the early 20^th century, and a fair number of individuals were deciding to try these practices out for themselves.

In contrast, the Western public tended to view the Chinese as politically disorganized, economically backward, socially insular and physically weak.  This was the climate in which the image of China as the “Sick Man of East Asia” began to circulate.

By promoting a streamlined and revitalized system of martial arts training certain policy makers hoped not just to rebuild the domestic body politic, but also to influence how China was perceived on the international stage.  If the new Republic wished to receive any assistance in its struggle against Japanese imperialism and later communism, it was necessary to demonstrate both that the state was unified and that the people possessed the will to resist oppression.  The discussion of China’s proud martial arts heritage, and recent efforts to revive and modernize it, could accomplish both of these tasks at the same time.

In a recent post we looked at newsreels from the 1920s and 1930s in which the Western movie-going public was exposed to these exact messages.  It was also interesting to see how the discussion of the Chinese fighting arts differed from contemporary discussions of Japanese systems.

This post looks at an even earlier example of the use of the Chinese martial arts in Republic era public diplomacy.  During the spring of 1920 Rodney Gilbert wrote an essay titled “China, Parent of Jiu-Jitsu” for the aptly named Bulletin of the Chinese Bureau of Public Information. Later that summer the essay was reprinted in various formats in a number of sources including the North China News in Shanghai (a paper for which Gilbert), the Mid-Pacific Magazine (Volume 20, Number 5), The Literary Digest (May 29^th) and the Far East Republic.

Gilbert was a classic example of a unique sort of adventurer that was drawn to China during the Republic period.  He appeared on the other side of the Pacific flat broke with the intention of becoming a pharmaceutical salesman, but he quickly found his calling in journalism.  Gilbert lived in China for decades becoming one of the media’s “old China hands.”  He wrote for a number of papers and eventually ended up having relationships with such prestigious institutions as the Columbia University School of Journalism.

However, a closer look at this writing quickly reveals that Gilbert was very conservative.  He is best remembered for his many attacks on communism.  Gilbert also played a role in American and Chinese public diplomacy efforts, writing pieces that supported the Republic’s government in an attempt to create sympathy among American readers.  During this period he was in frequent contact with political and social leaders, as well as the OSS (the precursor of the CIA).   Nor were communists his only target.  He also wrote a number of pieces supporting the Chinese government against Japanese aggression.

The longest and most complete versions of this article (which I have so far been able to locate) appears to be the one published by the Far East Republic, quoted verbatim from the Bulletin of the Chinese Bureau of Public Information.  I have not been able to find a lot of information on this later publication.  Apparently it only ran for a few years, and its goal was to print English language articles designed to educate and encourage support for the Chinese government among Western readers.  The profile of many of its contributors seems to have been similar to Gilbert’s.  Again, many of them were notably conservative writers with connections to various figures in both the Chinese and western policy establishments.

This particular essay is quite interesting and a few individuals have already commented on versions of it.  Joseph Svinth reprinted a shortened commentary on the piece as published in the Literary Journal (May, 1920) in the Electronic Journal of Martial Arts Studies (EJMAS) in 1999  Acevedo quoted extensively from Svinth’s version in his own blog post titled “Ma Liang – Chinese Martial Arts Modernizer, Warlord and Traitor.”

Rehabilitating Ma’s image after his notorious crackdown on student protestors seems to have been one of the specific goals of Gilbert’s commission.  Nor should we overlook the fact that Ma himself had just published his groundbreaking, four volume, “New Martial Arts of China” prior to the release of this article.  Gilbert obliquely notes the release of these books before pointing out that various western military men had examined Ma’s methods and declared that there was nothing here that could not be adopted by Occidental armies wishing to brush up their own training.

All of this should remind us that when we approach this article we are looking at a piece of public diplomacy, emerging from a specific time and place, with a very specific policy agenda.  This is not a work of disinterested journalism or the product of a trained anthropologist.  In fact, one rather strongly suspects that it was General Ma himself who commissioned the Bulletin of the Chinese Bureau of Public Information to promote both his book and military training system while knocking the Japanese down a peg.  Given his important but colorful place in modern martial arts history, this is an important possibility to consider.

Even more critical is to remember that at the same time that the “Old Tong Code of Silence” may have been in full force in certain neighborhoods in the US, vastly larger forces were mobilizing around the idea of promoting the Chinese martial arts on the global stage.  Figures like Ma were well aware of the profound effects of Judo on the Western discussion of Japan, and they sought to promote the Chinese martial arts to boost both their own national image and policy goals abroad.

Perhaps the apex of these efforts would be achieved during the 1936 Olympic Games when Taijiquan was demonstrated to a receptive global audience.  But that should not be understood as a unique event.  Throughout the 1920s and 1930s there was a steady drip of English language articles, books, demonstrations and newsreels all attempting to bring a more favorable vision of the TCMA into Western discussions of Chinese society.  Rather than focusing on a so called “code of silence,” the more interesting question might be to ask why these liberalizing efforts failed to gain greater traction, and how they came to be so totally forgotten.  Yet that is the topic of another post.

When reviewing Gilbert’s discussion of Chinese martial arts readers may want to keep two questions in mind.  First, did he actually witness the event that he reports here?  While it is generally assumed that the answer must be yes, I can’t help but notice that Gilbert never actually claims such in his article.  Rather the entire discussion is phrased in terms of what a theoretical visitor might see if he were able to take in Ma’s (rightly famous) demonstration.  Nor does Gilbert make any claim to expertise in the Chinese martial arts beyond what he has seen on the opera stage.

Secondly, note the rhetorical skill with which Gilbert makes an important two part move.  First, he asserts the uniqueness of the Chinese martial arts and their (historically grounded) superiority to similar Japanese systems.  It is this deep connection to the nation’s history that makes them (and subsequently Ma’s leadership) uniquely well suited for the simple Chinese people, turning “loutish coolies” into modern disciplined soldiers.  Yet at the same time, the deep truths behind these practices are seen to be perfectly compatible with western norms of progress and efficiency.  As a result, it is the western readers and military officers who can immediately identify the actual value in Ma’s program, while a reluctant Chinese nation is only now being convinced to embrace what was best about their past.  It is the Chinese people who are surprised by Ma’s success, but not the western public.

While Gilbert’s readers reside outside this system of bodily practice, the author succeeds in creating a sense of belonging to an “insider” community based on the assumption of shared norms.  In that way readers may be convinced of the value of the martial arts as well as Ma’s heroic leadership.  This dual move also serves to legitimate China’s place in the global community of nations.  It is seen to have a unique cultural heritage which is, nevertheless, of universal value.  It is exactly this claim which would propel the rise of so many Asian martial arts during the second half of the 20th century.

Shuaijiao Masters in Tainjin, 1930. Source: http://fightland.vice.com/blog/shuai-jiao-chinas-indigenous-wrestling-style

China, Parent of Jiu-Jitsu

By Rodney Gilbert

The Far East Republic: A Monthly Magazine Devoted to the Republic of China. Vol. 2 No. 11 (August) 1920. Pp 230-232.

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

Gen. Ma Liang, Enthusiast

The most ardent living patron of physical training along old Chinese lines is the Commander of the 2^nd Division of the Frontier Defence army and of the 47^th Mixed Brigade, General Ma Liang, now Occupational Commissioner at Tsinanfu.  Among foreign newspaper readers General Ma Liang is probably best known through his conflict with the student demonstrators in Tsinan last spring when he was given a great deal of adverse advertising and was reported to have made many speeches, which seemed to anyone familiar with the man’s character utterly inconsistent with the whole trend of his ideas.

To old residents of North China, he has been known for many years as an instructor in various military schools.  For a time in 1912 he was acting President of the Peking Government University.  Nearly every prominent military man in North China has been associated with him at one time or another and he has many staunch friends.  But for some reason it does not seem to be generally known in either foreign or Chinese circles that for 18 years General Ma has been working upon a revival of ancient Chinese military training; that he has trained more than 30,000 students in his revivified science and has introduced his system of physical culture into so many branches of the army that more than 300,000 soldiers are indirectly his pupils in a system of physical training designed to school them in self-defence.

The value of the work which General Ma has done can never be appreciated until one has seen a corps of his students going through their exercises.  The foreigner in China usually has the impression that the Chinese take no interest in physical culture and that they would much rather be spectators of exhibitions of physical prowess than participate in any sort of sports.  Perhaps it is because General Ma’s system of training is indigenous and is hallowed by ancient traditions that the Chinese take so kindly to it, but whatever the reason, General Ma’s pupils do take up thir [sic] work with a vim and enthusiasm which would astonish any foreigner who has preconceived notions of the Chinese aversion to rough sports.

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

The Biggest Thrill on Record.

The writer has witnessed the sports of many peoples, has been in the audiences of all the great circuses and Wild West shows, and is familiar with all the Occidental sports from boxing to lacrosse, but he has never seen a performance in which more skill and agility were shown or an exhibition of rougher horse-play than that which is provided by the men who drill in Tsinan under General Ma Ling’s personal supervision.

The dramatic features of the performance, like all Chinese affairs of the kind, are perfect.  One feels throughout that no feature of the drill was ever designed without having the spectator in mind.  To the European, this detracts a little from the performance and is bound to get the impression that the training is more showy than practical, and while much is done that is exceedingly graceful and requires much agility, it is much better adapted to the theatre than to the actual field of combat.  The Chinese of course never get this impression.

Almost every foreigner who is interested in Chinese affairs has seen displays of sword manipulation in the theatre.  The hero of the piece rushes out with a glittering blade in each hand, slashes the air with them in all directions, does all manner of wonderful acrobatics which frequently force him to turn his unprotected back to the enemy, and one’s Chinese friends explain in an impressed tone after it is all over, that this paragon of agility was fighting fifty enemies.  It would be very unjust to General Ma, indeed, to give the impression that this whole performance is of this character, but there is enough of it introduced to make the Chinese spectators gasp and to make any foreign witnesses who have seen real broadsword contests smile.  If one views the whole performance as nothing more than a show, an entertainment, he is bound to confess it is one of the best he has ever seen, and that most of the acrobats and swordsmen in Chinese theaters are amateurs compared with General Ma’s soldiers, everyone of whom is thoroughly drilled in the various arts of which samples are given during the performance.

Stage and Properties.

The show begins gently and placidly with a drill in calisthenics and comes to a climax in a whirlwind of violence in which the performers are groups of sun-blackened over-muscled men of terrific strength and agility, none of whom one would care to meet in the dark.  The drill-ground is a small court in which the earth has been rolled hard and from which every pebbled and fragment of stone has been carefully picked.  Along the wall there is rack of antique Chinese weapons, straight swords, curved swords, lances, halberds, quarter-staves, clubs linked together like flails and many other weapons for which we have no name.  At the south end of the court there is a number of large stone dumb-bells, piles of granite paving stones and little heaps of bricks and tiles which serve an astonishing purpose at the end of the show.

The audience sits under a pavilion at the north end of the court and after tea and cigarettes have been served, a group of students from the training school, which is now supplying instructors in physical culture to the schools in the army of many provenances, file through a gate in the south end of the court and do their calisthenics.

We Occidentals have gone pretty thoroughly into calisthenics, but the Chinese have contrived to devise a system of movements which has little in common with anything one sees in Western gymnasiums.  It seems designed to develop suppleness and double-jointedness rather than muscular strength.  This is very hard to describe, but if one can imagine a system of drill for a class of would-be contortionists, he will have some understanding of the peculiarities of this system.  In a remote city in Shensi, the writer once saw a soldier with his foot on the parapet of the city wall, apparently making a violent effort to make his knee joint bend the wrong way.  He explained that he was preparing his leg muscles against possible strain and this seems to be the basis of Chinese calisthenics.  The muscles are twisted and the joints are strained by every movement and the result is that the boys are remarkably lithe and tough, rather than much developed.

A local militia armed with poles and spears outside of Guangzhou, 1938.

Quarter-Staff for the Million.

Following the calisthenics comes a sword drill with straight swords, and following this there is a drill in the use of a quarter staff about six feet long.  At this point in the performance, General Ma will explain to his friends and guests, that in this drill he has devised something which will rejuvenate China and give every man, woman and child not only a good physique, but also self-reliance.  He points out that the Chinese people are poor and that they cannot all possess firearms and be skilled in their use, but that a man with a good-sized club who knows how to use it, can take care of himself almost anywhere and that its constant use will give him and excellent physique.  As he says, almost anyone, no matter how poor, can procure a club, and his training in the use of a club will give a man strength and self-reliance; that if everyone in China could be persuaded to go through this simple training the people would be much more vigorous and aggressive, mentally as well as physically.

As this is a plea which is advanced for drills and gymnasiums of all sorts in every country in which it is vogue, there is nothing novel in the theory to the Occidental, but among the Chinese General Ma’s arguments for universal physical training are probably more unique and somewhat radical.  He declares that the Chinese are too drowsy; that they sleep too much, sit too much and eat too much and that anything which would make them more active physically and more self-reliant in their personal encounters with one another would make them more aggressive and confident as a nation.

The quarter-staff drill is a little more strenuous than calisthenics.  It is followed by exhibitions of boxing in which kicking also plays a part, and which, while it is apparently staged simply as an exhibition of agility and muscular control, involves some pretty hard slapping and kicking. The men dive about the courtyard, landing upon the hard ground in all possible attitudes, roll over lightly, and bound to their feet.  It does not seem to do the least harm to one of these acrobats to slide a few yards along the hard earth on his face, and a vigorous kick in the jaw simply starts one of the boxers on a series of back somersaults which he concludes with a bow and a smile.

Wrestling Fast and Furious.

After this comes the wrestling which is fast and furious and which is very evidently no child’s play.  General Ma shows the keenest interest in this and impresses his friends with the fact that it is much more completely developed than the “small part” which the Japanese have borrowed.  To the foreigner it would certainly seem the most business-like and most useful part of the whole performance.

The men strip to the waist and put on short, closely quilted canvas jackets which are belted with long sashes.  The play is too fast and furious for a spectator to understand the rules clearly.  It would seem that all grips are taken upon the canvas jacket, tripping is apparently permissible and while the spectators sometime protest against leg-holds, some of the wrestlers resorted to this.  A man is thrown when he loses his balance and immediately releases his hold upon the adversary.  In most cases, however he does not go down gently, and some of the throws are so violent that the thud of the defeated one’s body resounds throughout the courtyard.

In this phase of the drill the Japanese are of course intensely interested.  General Ma says that thousands of Japanese officers and men have come at one time or another to see the performance, and, according to credible witnesses, one or two of the best wrestlers have thrown every jiu jitsu champion whom the Japanese have been able to bring to Tsinan.

A vintage photograph showing Republic era army troops at the Winter Palace in Beijing posing with Stone Wheels and a Wukedao (Heavy Knife). Source: Author’s personal collection.

The Spectator Gasps.

Highly dramatic combats with lances and swords follows the wrestling and while it is certain that the men purposefully miss one another in their lunges and slashes, they miss by so narrow a margin that the spectator is out of his seat throughout most of the contest.

After these artists come the strong men, as highly developed as any whom we are accustomed to see in the Occident.  One man takes a dumb-bell weighting 266 popnds [sic], tosses it in the air catches it on his upturned forearms tosses it again, catches it in one hand, rests it upon his head and then twirls it about his neck, shoulders and waist.  Another lies upon his back, supports dumb-bells weighting 540 pounds on his feet and hands and upon these a pyramid of nine men is built.  A number of lesser lights perform with lesser dumb-bells, then a man rushes to the front, two others toss a granite paving stone four inches thick on his back and it cracks with a sledge hammer.

This is a signal for a general furor of tile and brick breaking among the acrobats.  They break bricks in their hands, break them over their arms, over the backs of their necks, and over each other’s faces.  One man leans over balances six bricks on the side of his face, while another smashes them all with a seventh.  A man with half a dozen tiles in each hand will clip them over his neighbor’s ears and break them all.  Finally in the midst of this whirlwind of destruction, one round-headed devotee drops on his knees, puts half a brick on top of his head upon which a huge slab of granite is balanced which is then shattered with a sledge hammer.  The show is then over.

Silk from a Sow’s Ear.

This is an exemplification of what General Ma is his book describes as “The Chinese New Military Art.”  In this age of tanks, aeroplanes, ponderous artillery and poison gas, the layman is probably puzzled to understand what such a show as that which I have superficially described, has to do with military science.  Military people know, however, that the physical fitness and spirit of the man engaged in modern conflict are still more important than the machinery used.  The layman sees in General Ma’s drill nothing but a highly diverting circus, but the military man sees in it a system of mental and muscular training which takes a loutish and stupid coolie and makes of him an alert, sensitive, highly disciplined man who can be readily trained in the use of any weapon and is prepared to undertake any amount of training, fatigue and hardship.

Military men who have seen the show have told the writer that there is scarcely any feature of it which could not be adapted to Occidental uses, and they all agree that if such a system of physical training were introduced in the Chinese schools it would tremendously enhance the value of the Chinese male population as military ma-[le population as military material.] [sic].

(By Rodney Gilbert in Bulletin of the Chinese Bureau of Public Information.)

 
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If you enjoyed this post you might also want to read: Research Notes: Foreign Attitudes towards Kung Fu in Colonial Hong Kong
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Chu Minyyi, “Taiji Boxing Photographed.” Source: Brennan Translation Blog.

Introduction: The Architects of Kung Fu Diplomacy

I recently had the opportunity to examine a very interesting series of magazine articles, produced in 1920, discussing the efforts of the (in)famous General Ma Liang to promote the study of the traditional martial arts throughout both the Chinese military and state.   The most important thing about these articles was that they were all published in English, and distributed via a coordinated public diplomacy effort, at a time when it is generally assumed that the Western reading public knew nothing about the Chinese martial arts.

Indeed, a certain line of popular thought holds that prior to 1960s the leaders of the martial arts community went to lengths to avoid teaching, or even discussion, their art in the presence of “foreigners.”  The fact that these hand combat systems were being actively promoted in the Western press in an attempt to sway public opinion about Chinese society should be a valuable reminder that there were actually multiple competing discourses surrounding the martial arts in the pre-WWII period.  Not all of them shared the same goals.

Given how little recognition these efforts typically receive I thought that it might be helpful to provide a few profiles of some of the key players in early attempts to interpret and present the Chinese martial arts to international audiences.  The Republic period offers a number of possibilities, but none of them were as energetic as Dr. Chu Minyi.  While his career in the Chinese martial arts was actually rather brief, he had an out-sized impact on the global perception of these fighting systems (and Taijiquan in particular) prior to WWII.

Chu’s life was one of adventure and even intrigue.  He was an exceptionally intelligent individual who enjoyed a varied academic career followed by a stint in the Nationalist government.  These are the achievements that he is normally remembered for.  The last time I checked, his Wikipedia page focused exclusively on these aspects of his career and did not even mention his work as a tireless promoter of the Chinese martial arts.

Andrew Morris has chronicled much of this other thread of Chu’s story in his excellent Marrow of the Nation: A History of Sports and Physical Culture in Republican China (California UP, 2004). Still, in his single chapter section devoted to guoshu he was only able to hit some of the highlights of Chu’s short but spectacular involvement with the martial arts.

Additional information on Chu’s approach to the martial arts can be gleaned directly from the pages of the many of martial arts manuals that were published during the late 1920s and 1930s.  Chu published manuals on Wu style Taiji, as well as his own innovations, in 1929, 1931 and 1933.  Obviously these are all important texts.

Yet even more interesting in some respects was his involvement with other people’s writings.  His name appears (or is shamelessly dropped) widely in manuals produced during this period.  Chu was often called upon to provide inscriptions and gifts of calligraphy that would grace the front-matter of new works.  He actually produced enough of these over the 1930s that it seems possible to observe a subtle evolution in his style of calligraphy.

More important were the prefaces that he wrote for (among others) Wu Zhiqing’s 1931 text on the Zhao school cannon fist method and Wu Tunan’s 1934 manual of taiji saber practice.  It is from these sources, the basic outlines of his political career and Morris’ discussion of his involvement with the Guoshu movement that the following biographical sketch has been assembled.

Still, some words of caution are in order.  While this account attempts to combine multiple aspects of a life which are normally treated in isolation, it is far from complete.  I have a number of outstanding questions about Chu’s personal life and his inner motivations.  He has also been discussed in a number of works of political history that still require additional research.  Lastly, some of his most interesting publications are now quite rare and I have not yet been able to locate copies of all of them.  As such this “sketch” must remain just that.  It is only the first few steps in exploring a remarkable (and tragic) life.

Image of a Taiji Boxer. Source: Burkhardt, 1953.

Early Life

Chu Minyi was born into a gentry family living in the Wuxing district of Zhejiang province in 1884.  His father was a distinguished physician and was able to provide his son with a fine education.  During the concluding decades of the Qing dynasty (for the sons of rich families) this often meant cutting short a strictly Confucian education so that promising students could be sent to schools in Japan, Hong Kong or the West.  This exposure to western learning became a hallmark of the rising “new gentry” class and would create many of the reformers that drove the early stages of China’s nationalist revolution and period of rapid reforms.

In 1903 (at the age of 19) Chu was sent by his family on the first of many foreign expeditions.  Initially he traveled to Japan where he studied both economics and politics.  Later he traveled to Singapore, joined a revolutionary chapter of the Tongmenghui, and then he and the fiery Zheng Jingjiang (who would go on to become one of the “Four Elders of the KMT”) went on to France.  There they joined a group of Chinese anarchist supporting revolutionary causes in the home country.

Chu proved to be not only intellectually but also politically energetic.  In 1911 he returned briefly to Shanghai, where he took up a leadership position in the Tongmenghui in support of the revolution.  Unfortunately he quarreled with Song Jiaoren and soon left once more for Europe.  There he followed in his father’s footsteps and earned degrees in both medicine and pharmacology.

In 1915 Chu rushed to China, this time to resist Yuan Shika’s attempt to establish a new Chinese empire.  Yet once again the political conditions were not ripe for relocation and he returned to Europe.  In 1921 he took up the position of Vice President of the Institut Franco-Chinois of the University of Lyons.  A year later he moved on to the University of Strasbourg where, in 1925, he earned his doctorate.

In 1925, following the death of Sun Yat Sen, Chu finally made a more permanent relocation to China.  He settled in Guangzhou and was subsequently named as a member of the KMT’s Educational Commission.  He also assumed an important academic post as the head of the Guangdong University’s medical school.  At the age of 41 Chu had finally returned “home.”  But that does not mean that he was content to sit still.

“The way of softness will succeed” Chu Minyi’s inscription for Wu Jianquan’s 1935 manual. Source: Brennan Translation Blog.

The Taijiquan Years

In much of his later writing Chu would describe himself as a “Taiji addict.”  No doubt this was a vivid image at a time when opium and heroin addiction were crippling public health epidemics in cities like Shanghai and Guangzhou.  He practiced his beloved art daily, and (as his many shirtless pictures attest) Chu kept himself in top physical shape.

In some of his biographical writings he mentions that he was always physically active, and studied various forms of calisthenics while in Europe.  Yet I have seen nothing in his life history to suggest that he studied the martial arts while on his long educational sojourn.  This Western educational background would have a profound impact on Chu.  Throughout the rest of his career he would seek to place both “national strengthening” efforts and martial arts on a firm scientific footing.

After 1925 Chu’s life work took on a different character.  Politics and a growing obsession with the martial arts came to replace his earlier academic appointments.

This transformation began when Chu boarded a train headed for Shanghai.  There he met with the renowned Taijiquan teacher (and founder of the Wu-style) Wu Jianquan.  Apparently Wu agreed to teach the young official and even allowed him to photograph each of the postures in his form for future study.  And study them he did, as well as the teaching of Wang Zhiqun and Wu Zizhen after returning to his post in Guangdong.  When he eventually returned to Shanghai he resumed his studies with Xu Zhiyi, a disciple of Wu Jianquan.

This period of intensive instruction lasted until approximately 1929. Chu’s relatively late start in life, and short period of instruction, should serve as an inspiration for “non-traditional” martial arts students everywhere.

Of course this was also a dynamic period in the development of the Chinese martial arts.  When Chu arrived in China the Jingwu Association was just past the height of its fame and doing much to promote the martial arts as a form of physical cultivation suitable to the growing urban middle class.  Purged of its superstitious and feudal associations it was capable of strengthening both the psyche of the people as well as their bodies leading, in their own words, to “national salvation.”  As both an ardent nationalist and physical fitness enthusiast this message must have been deeply appealing to Chu.

Financial difficulties soon halted the rise of the Jingwu Association, but its lessons had been learned.  The KMT quickly moved to establish its own national martial arts program under the banner of the Central Guoshu Institute.  Chu saw in this move a chance to combine his love of physical culture with a winning political cause.  He was quick to jump on the Guoshu bandwagon.

A portrait of Wu Jianquan from “Taiji Boxing Photographed.” Source: Brennan Translation Blog.

In the December 1928 issue of the Educational Review, in an article titled “Central Committee Member Chu Min Yi’s Great Hopes for the Guoshu: Presenting Glad Tidings to All of Humanity” he laid out his opening salvo (p. 3-4).

“We know that Chinese Boxing Styles are the finest of all he guoshu and provide even healthy physical development.  We can scientize them now, using methods of science to do this research—but how do we do it?  It requires paying attention to mechanics and psychology, looking into physiology and hygiene, setting down rules and methods, and explaining them with sound theory….

Our goals in working to promote guoshu are to gather together all those who excel in martial arts and all of the finest points of martial arts.  Then we can give this organized, systematized, scholarly, and methodological guoshu to all the people of the world…spreading Chinese guoshu to the entire world will mean glad tidings for humanity.” (Translation quoted from Morris, p. 22).

This succinct statement outlined the path that Chu would follow over the next decade.  When discussing this period authors generally focus on the topics covered in his first paragraph, the reform, modernization and “scientization” of the traditional martial arts to make them a strong tool to support the state in its revolutionary struggles.  This was, after all, the critical struggle facing the guoshu establishment.  Declarations of “taking the Chinese martial arts to the world” are often seen as elaborate rhetorical flourishes, placed in texts such as this more for the psychological benefit of Chinese readers than foreign ones.

I would like to suggest that it may be time to start taking the second half of Chu’s statement just as seriously as the first.  It is true that Republic era reformers failed to make the Chinese martial arts popular in the West prior to the outbreak of WWII. They also failed to bring the unity and rationalism that they sought to impose on their own hand combat community.  Yet both of these efforts are important for what they suggest about the ways that certain individuals in the KMT sought to use the martial arts as a tool of statecraft.

Specifically, the nature of any sort of nationalist discourse is such that it will always reach at least two audiences, one domestic and the other global.  Policy makers may try and isolate these two realms, to control the flow of information between them.  Yet information always leaks.

More adept leaders realize this and try to use this property of strategically motivated speech to their advantage.  This is done by crafting statements that both bolster the unity of the body politic domestically while increasing the respect (or fear) that the state garners in the international realm.

The political scientist Robert Putnam famously characterized this paradox of strategic communication within the international realm through the metaphor of a “two level chess game.”  Being a policy leader is difficult as you face at least two related, but different, simultaneous games, the domestic and the international one.

These can be envisioned as two differently configured chess boards.  Yet as a policy maker you only have a single set of pieces that appear on both boards.  The challenge of strategic speech (and action) is to come up with a single move that maximizes your outcomes (or minimizes losses) across a variety of opponents at the same time.

Martial Arts reformers such as Chu would have been intimately familiar with the basic logic of Putnam’s paradox.  They would also have known that, properly played, this situation could strengthen the hand of the traditional martial arts within Chinese society.  After all, the Japanese cultivation of Budo had proved to be a masterstroke of strategic communication.  On the one hand it had helped to unify domestic society and strengthen the state.  Yet it had also proved to be a powerful international symbol of Japanese strength, uniqueness and legitimacy as a rising power in the realm of global politics.

Chu would have known from first hand observation that Westerns looked to arts like Judo and Kendo in an attempt to understand the Japanese “national character.” By in large they liked what they saw during the 1920s and early 1930s.  And in an increasingly interconnected world no country could afford to ignore the imperatives of global public diplomacy.

This was especially true if China wished to gain western support in fending off Japanese imperialist claims.  Demonstrating that the people had the physical strength and spiritual will to resist these efforts was critical to China’s public diplomacy.  Thus the guoshu effort was never simply domestic in nature.  It derived much of its potential value from the fact that Chinese policy makers expected that their efforts would be observed and commented upon by other states in the international system.

This strategy required real effort, and a fundamental rethink of what the Chinese martial arts should be.  In a previous era, when they had functioned largely as a means of ensuring one’s economic prospects as a soldier, guard, opera performer, bandit, pharmacist or the like, secrecy made a good deal of economic sense.  The monetary benefits of a skill were linked to their scarcity, and they accrued to an individual.   In an era when most martial arts methods did not even have names, the emphasis was on either local defense or personal attainment and prestige.

Nor did these considerations magically disappear within the folk martial arts sector at the dawning of the Republic.  For Chu and other reformers these older attitudes were a real danger.  In their view a martial art did not belong to a single teacher or small lineage organization.  They were rightly understood as the property of the nation as a whole.  To keep them secret was both to rob your neighbor and flirt with disaster should a master die before properly training a successor.

Throughout the writings of the guoshu period there is a palatable feeling of horror that dominates these discussions of secrecy. It is certainly evident in Chu’s own writings during the 1930s.  I suspect that this sentiment is a natural result of a shift in perspective in which the martial arts are transformed from a type of private to community property.  The fact that this debate went on for as long as it did would suggest that ultimately the guoshu reformers were not very successful in bringing the folk martial arts community to heel.  But that is a topic for a different post.

Chu’s next major text was released in 1929.  It was a full length training manual titled “Taiji Boxing Photographed.”  The text began with a guest preface and an introduction by the author.

Chu’s introduction to this work is uncharacteristically partisan.  He harshly attacks the various forms of Shaolin Kung Fu that were then popular and emphasizes his personal achievements with Taiji’s training methods.  This introduction is short and it stands out as it so visibly contrasts with his later writings.

In later efforts Chu would go to lengths to disavow Kung Fu’s traditional rivalries and argue for the centrality of national strengthening over personal attainment.  As such his 1929 document seems to be a transitional piece, still reflecting an enthusiasm for Wu style Taijiquan that has not yet been subordinated to the demands of the nation and the masses.

One of Chu Minyi’s training devices. Source: Brennan Translation Blog.

Other tensions are also apparent in this early document.  In addition to important photographs of Wu Zhiqing, this manual starts with a reprint of the corpus of Later Imperial texts commonly called the “Taiji Classics.”  These sit in dynamic contrast with the final section of the text in which Chu demonstrates the construction and use of a number of special machines that he has created for the express purposes of practicing the more tactile aspects of Taijiquan in the absence of a training partner.  These devices include a heavy ball suspended from elastic cords and a free spinning horizontal bar likewise suspended from the interior of a square metal frame.

Chu is quick to point out that these “scientific” devices are in no way superior to the assistance of a skilled training partner.  Yet he goes to great lengths to discuss their value in “modern” training situations.  After all, what mechanical devices lack in psychological intent they make up for in the ability to mass produce an identical experience that can be experienced by a wide range of students in a number of locations.  Each of these students, working on identical machines, is free to imagining their fellows engaged in the modern, scientific, and solidly bourgeois study of China’s new Guoshu arts.  While these may be grounded in the country’s ancient cultural heritage, Morris notes that Chu consistently goes to lengths to reimagine the martial arts as something only accessible to China’s educated middle class.

Shortly after the publication of this first manual Chu’s official responsibilities found him on a ship returning to Europe.  In 1930 he headed up China’s educational display at the “International Exhibition” in Liège.  This proved to be an important trip for Chu.  He brought a number of his Taiji balls so that he could demonstrate their use in the traditional martial arts and physical training to a foreign audience.  In doing so he hoped to prove that China had both a uniquely ancient system of physical education, but one that could be rationalized, taught and reproduced through mechanical and scientific means.

While on the ship he reports that he also turned his mind to the problem of bringing Taiji to the masses.  Like other reformers during the period he noted the difficulties in teaching a form as long and complicated as those typically seen in the Yang and Wu styles to casual students. They took too long to learn and, worse yet, were too easily forgotten.

Like other figures (including Zheng Manqing) Chu responded by creating his own short form.  This, when combined with other concepts and movements, formed the basis of Chu’s “Tai Chi Calisthenics,” perhaps his most important contribution to the martial arts of the 1930s and 1940s.

After returning to China in 1931 his initial manual on Tai Chi Calisthenics was published, and then expanded and rereleased in 1933.  Andrew Morris notes that in the same year he had his exercises translated into English and French so that they would be more accessible to a global audience.  He even dropped the somewhat intimidating term “Tai Chi” from their titled and renamed them simply “circular exercises” for the benefit of Western readers (pp. 226-227).  These translated exercises were then presented to a global audience at the Belgian Centennial Exhibition.

Chu’s evolving stance on the martial arts was also captured in the 1931 preface that he contributed to Wu Zhiqing’s manual on Zhao School boxing.  Note for instance that his previous disdain for Shaolin boxing has been replaced with a new sense of ecumenical brotherhood…as long as all sides agreed to turn their secrets over to the nation.  After all, Chu reasons, China is entering a dangerous period of national competition, and the martial arts have a role to play in these struggles.

“Chinese martial arts can be roughly classified into two branches: Wudang and Shaolin, commonly known as internal training and external training. Although they are different in origin and development, their aim of bringing strength and health to the body is the same. Therefore we should not be biased toward one or the other, but should instead advocate both. Sectarianism is the biggest hindrance to learning and development, and it is unfortunate that colleagues within the martial arts world will often use it to try and one-up each other, which rarely leads to progress. But worst of all are the naive and stubborn who keep their treasure for themselves and are not willing to reveal what they have learned nor freely teach it to others. Although they may have an amazing skill, every bit of it will be lost forever unless they can be generous enough to share what they have….

The way of survival is that the superior succeed and the inferior perish, the stronger animals devouring the weaker. It is entirely a matter of national determination as to whether we will ascend to become one of the strong and prosperous nations. Our rise or fall as a nation is simply a matter of whether or not we strengthen the people as a whole. To achieve this, we must first of all pay particular attention to physical education. Martial arts are the special treasure of our nation, truly the highest form of physical education, and they are a far more economical use of our time and money than exercises such as Western calisthenics. If we encourage capacity to engage in martial arts, then it will not be that they cannot be popularized…..”

Chu was relentless in promoting his new training regime and he seized any platform that he could to demonstrate his system.  Perhaps his finest domestic performance came in 1933 when he borrowed and trained 2,000 local school children who demonstrated these methods (led by Chu himself) at the National Games in Nanjing.

Chu Minyi’s famous Taiji Ball. Source: Brennan Translation Blog.

In 1934 Wu Tunan’s Wu Style Taiji Saber was released complete with a preface contributed by Chu Minyi.  Again, the entire thing is important, but for our purposes the most interesting aspect of his discussion is the single minded focus on the national, rather than individual, nature of the Chinese martial arts.  It was this corporate responsibility that demanded a “rational and scientific” approach to reforming the Chinese martial arts.  Anything short of this was simply national suicide:

“Therefore we nowadays should strive to rectify these mistakes of previous generations. It is inappropriate to only use martial arts as a way to gain individual health and happiness. We should instead have a deep concern for the well-being of the group, and we should look upon martial arts as a means of more efficiently strengthening our people, thus we should humbly do our utmost to popularize these arts. We especially should meticulously study them, arranging everything about them to make them systematic and organized, then compile them into specialized books to be widely circulated, sometimes even coming up new methods that are more convenient to learn if we have to. In order to be able to make progress in carrying this out, we will, all of my comrades, have to work hard together.”

A dedication to publishing as a way of demonstrating the new-found middle class “respectability” of the martial arts was a hallmark of the entire Republic period.  Chu seems to have been especially active in this area, but he was not wedded to the medium of the printed word.  Rather, he adopted the most modern means that he had at his disposal to spread the gospel of Taijiquan as well as his own Tai Chi Calisthenics.

In 1935, in conjunction with the Venus Film Company, Chu commissioned the production of a newsreel showing him demonstrating various aspects of Chinese traditional physical culture.  This included Taijiquan, Tai Chi Calisthenics, his training devices as well as traditional archery and even shuttlecock.  His stated purpose in making the film was to have something to show when he traveled abroad that would illustrate the martial arts.

I suspect that multiple versions of the film were eventually produced.  A 1937 Chinese language copy was printed for domestic consumption and it likely contains the earliest visual record of Wu style Taijiquan.  Andrew Morris, on the other hand, reports that Chu had a German language version made which was shipped to Europe and entered into the 1936 Olympic Sports and Physical Education Film Contest where it was displayed for western audiences (p. 227).

Indeed, the 1936 Olympics, held in Berlin, were a critical event in the history of China’s Kung Fu diplomacy.  While their Olympic team turned in a lackluster performance on the playing fields, Chu had something special planned for the closing ceremonies.  There his team of handpicked martial artists performed an hour long demonstration of the traditional Chinese fighting arts.  Their efforts were greeted with enthusiasm by a crowd of 30,000 onlookers.  The event included demonstrations of Taijiquan and weapons work, but it was a Chu’s own Tai Chi Calisthenics that opened the performance.

In an attempt to explain to the public what they had just seen Chu Minyi also wrote a 28 page pamphlet as an official guide to Chinese delegation’s Guoshu performance.  This is now a fairly rare piece of ephemera, and I have yet to locate a copy.  But a description from an auction catalog, discovered by the Taijiquan writer Martin Boedicker, noted that the pamphlet contained identical texts written in English, French and German.  Apparently Chu wanted to be sure that the wisdom of China’s traditional physical culture would reach as large a Western audience as possible.

A portrait of Chu Minyi circa 1940. Source: Wikimedia.

Conclusion

The Japanese invasion of China in 1937 had a profound effect on the remainder of Chu’s career.  Initially he found himself trapped in Shanghai by the pitch battle fought over the city.  When his brother-in-law, Wang Jingwei, formed the pro-Japanese Nanjing Nationalist Government Chu joined his administration and held a number of important positions.  He spent much of 1940 and 1941 as its foreign minister attempting to negotiate the Axis power’s diplomatic recognition of the collaborationist government.

Chu used his new political platform to promote his training methods.  These were subsequently declared the “citizens calisthenics” by the Nanjing government.  Yet any such victories were short lived.

In August of 1945, after the Japanese surrender, Chu was arrested by Republic forces in Guangdong.  In April of 1946 he was tried for treason and, despite some showings of public sympathy, was executed for his crimes against the state.  Even his last moments illustrate the dynamic tensions that characterized his engagement with the martial arts.  Morris reports that his final act was to perform a Taijiquan form before his astonished executioners, demonstrating the equanimity of the sages of old.  Yet his officially recorded last words are a request that his body be donated to the local hospital to advance the cause of scientific medical research.

This biographical sketch is already longer than I intended.  Unfortunately a number of critical questions remain. After living a life abroad why, at the age of 41, did Chu turn to the study of Taijiquan?  And how did it become such an obsession?

Was this an attempt to emotionally or spiritually reconnect with the “essence of a nation” that he had fought for from a distance?  Was it a calculated political decision to advance his career when it appeared that Guoshu would become an important element of KMT statecraft?  And if the violent events of 1937 had not intervened, what other plans did Chu have for advancing the TCMA on a global stage?

Chu’s life would make a fascinating, if tragic, film.  As we examine his various actions it becomes evident that, on a fundamental level, it is impossible to disentangle the domestic and the international discourses that surround the martial arts.  They are tightly linked, both reinforcing the other.  Chu understood this truth better than some others.

When Republic era martial arts reformers translated their materials into Western languages, or claimed a mandate to spread Kung Fu to a global community, rather than dismissing these statements as vacuous rhetorical flourishes, Chu Minyi’s career strongly suggests that perhaps we should take them at their word.  Even a brief examination of his contributions reveals that the TCMA’s engagement with the global system is both older and more complex than many students have previously recognized.

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If you enjoyed this article you might also want to read:  Lives of Chinese Martial Artists (10): Chen Shichao and Chen Gongzhe: Creating the Jingwu Revolution
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Chinese Sword Dance. Vintage postcard Circa 1950. Source: Author’s personal collection.

Introduction

In a recent post discussing the portrayal of the Asian martial arts in early 20^th century Western newsreels, I called for a “media archeology” of the early imagery surrounding these fighting systems.  The following post comments upon two examples taken from my collection of vintage postcards to better illustrate how ephemera can help us to uncover details of the now forgotten discourses that shaped both the popular culture of that era, and by extension our own.

On the surface the two images that we will be discussing share many similarities.  Both are dominated by a single male figure, center frame, wielding a Niuweidao (ox-tailed saber) of the sort that has been popular with civilian martial artists from the late 19^th century onward.    It was actually the strong, iconic, images of these swords that first drew me to these postcards.

In both cases the sword is used as a visual shorthand to convey a specific emotion.  The same can be said for the feeling of physical motion conveyed by the two swordsmen.  Lastly, we should note that neither gentleman is described by the card’s publisher as a “martial artist.”

Nevertheless, our swordsmen have distinct stories to tell.

These images were used to support and spread very different discourses about the Chinese martial arts.  And all of this was happening at a time when that topic is generally considered to have been invisible in the West.  Yet how exactly did the stories of these two swordsmen diverge?  To answer that we will need to know a little more about these postcards as physical objects.

“Well Known Sword Juggler in Shanghai City”

Before analyzing the image at the top of this post I would like to revisit another postcard to establish a starting point for the following discussion.  It is titled a “Well Known Juggler in Shanghai City.”  At one time this was one of the most iconic images of the Chinese martial arts available to Western consumers.  I come across about one copy of this postcard a year indicating that it must have been very popular and widely distributed.  I don’t think that I have ever seen a postmarked copy of one of these cards.  It may have survived in such great quantities precisely because people saved the striking photo in their scrapbooks.

There are two ways of thinking about the age of any postcard.  First, we can consider the image itself.  Here we have a photograph produced sometime between the late 19^th century and 1911.  Given the hair style worn by the martial artist, it could not have been produced after the advent of the Republic.

“Well Known Sword Juggler in Shanghai City” Vintage postcard, 1907-1914. Source: This particular scan from the digital collection of the NY Public library. They managed to get a crisper reproduction than I could.

In short, this is a classic image of a late Qing street performer of the sort that is so often remembered with varying levels of derision by modern Chinese martial artists.  The photograph itself emphasizes the urban (and filthy) nature of his surroundings.  The subject is skinny with pronounced ribs.  Yet he also embodies a sort of dangerous, exuberant energy.  While the customers receiving this card probably would not have been able to identify his stance, it is clear that he is dedicated to his plan of attack.

The production of the card as a physical object probably coincided closely with the capture of this photograph.  The type of split back used on the card strongly suggest that it was printed in Germany (it bears the VDK trademark) sometime between 1907 and 1914 and was intended for export to a variety of Western countries.  The card also indicates that it was sold through Kuhn & Komor, a well-known multinational firm specializing in the sale of exotic luxury goods with its headquarters in Shanghai.  WWI effectively ended Germany’s global dominance of the postcard industry so we can conclude, with a fair degree of precision, what this card was produced sometime after 1907, but prior to 1914.

The next set of images is labeled “Chinese Sword Dance” (A3-A4).  This title is the first thing that we should consider.  While “juggling” is a type of vulgar street performance, “dance” (especially early 20^th century national folk dances) had a different level of respectability.

Though the weapon held by this martial artist is nearly identical to what we saw before, nearly everything else has changed.  While more difficult to date this photo was probably taken in the 1930s.  Note that a neat western haircut and polished flair has replaced the traditional queue.  All of this suggests that we are now in the era of the ethno-nationalist (and statist) Guoshu movement.

The setting of the photo is also important.  Here we see a martial artist in a rural area, performing his ancient national “folk dance” upon a set of stairs that look like a relic of the past.  While the first image radiates a feeling of raw power mixed with the sort of anxiety that comes from living on the street, this photo cultivates a serene and relaxed atmosphere.

Like the first martial artist, this one is also in motion.  Yet he seems ready to “bend” and twist rather than lash out.  We are left with the clear impression of a well fed and well clothed country gentleman.  While youth dominates the first frame it is difficult to read the age of the second martial artist.  He seems neither particularly young nor old.

Identifying the circumstances under which this postcard was produced is more challenging.  The image at the top of this essay is the third (A3) in a series of unknown length.  I found another image online showing the next card in the series (A4) but I have not been able to locate any others.

An examination of the back of this card shows that it was printed in Japan, but there is no indication of who the publisher was.  It also appears that this card was produced for export to a global market.  Under a magnifying class you can see the pixelation in this image indicating that it is not a true reproduction of a photograph.  Instead it is a lithograph image reproduced via the photochrome process.  This production technique was invented in 1939, and it seems unlikely that Japan would have been exporting many postcards during WWII.  So the late 1940s to 1950s (or possibly later) is a better guess.

Also note that there were production issues with these cards.  The cheap dyes used in reproducing this image are starting to fade, and all of the copies of this card (A3) that I have seen have identical scratches on the image.   Again, all of this points to a cheaply produced, post-WWII postcard.  For sheer quality it is actually hard to do better than the pre-WWI German examples.

“Chinese Sword Dance.” Vintage postcard.

Two Swordsmen, Two Discourses

While we may be tempted to commence our analysis with the martial artists themselves, perhaps we would get better traction on the evolving discourse surrounding the traditional Chinese martial art by considering the backgrounds and labels that frame these images.  Once again, in neither case are we dealing with the “martial arts,” a term that was increasingly applied to Japanese fighting systems by the 1950s.

The first image is urban in nature.  Not only is the subject found on the street, but he is labeled as a juggler from “Shanghai,” not China.  One suspects that it was the sprawling and dangerous metropolis itself that was the star of this image.  Martial arts demonstrations were just one of the many sights that tourists could observe on the city’s streets.

This is actually somewhat ironic as in the late Qing the practice of the martial arts was overwhelmingly identified with rural areas.  Much of the derision aimed at professional marketplace martial artists had do with the fact that they were vagabonds who had abandoned their villages for a life of (supposed) hedonism and easy money on the streets of the big city.

The largely Confucian ire directed at these individuals was only partially based on the martial nature of their practice.  It also had its roots in the deep suspicion of the city and the types of people who flocked there (especially to the entertainment districts).  The boxing societies of rural youth relocating to urban factories, or the crowds that gathered to watch transient street performers, seemed indicative of the local disorder that made China at once colorful and somewhat backwards in the eyes of many reformers.

Given the nature of the product, a postcard does not have to fully establish any of these discourses, or even attempt to add nuance to them.  They are basically a type of “kitsch,” rather than art.  Like all forms of kitsch, postcards draw on iconic images to trigger pre-existing culturally conditioned responses.

In this case the process seems to have translated indigenous Chinese cultural anxieties about martial artists in a fairly straightforward way.  Western tourists were only too eager to be drawn in by the spectacles that they saw on the street, and to find in them an encounter with a dangerous and exotic “oriental other.”

The martial arts reformers of the 1920s and 1930s worked hard to re-imagine these fighting systems.  They published books to combat the (somewhat overstated) image of illiteracy that dogged them.  Whereas the martial arts had once been most strongly associated with local culture and specific regions (such as “Shanghai”), they sought to re-brand them as carriers of China’s “ancient national heritage” and thus rightly the property of all.

They reformed the ways in which these arts were taught and classes were structured.  All of this was done in an effort to make them more accessible to working professionals with nine to five jobs.  Lastly, as Republican era popular culture increasingly turned against traditional rural values, and instead came to re-imagine urban areas as China’s future, they worked to promote these systems in cities across the country.

In truth these reformers never managed to stamp out the older, more regionally focused, martial arts culture.  Yet they did succeed in laying down a new stratum of social discourse that partially obscured it.  For an increasing number of Chinese citizens after 1920, the martial arts would become respectable objects of study, capable of improving health, teaching discipline and unlocking the paradox of China’s once and future national identity.

The amazing thing about this second set of postcards (A3-A4) is the degree to which they highlights every one of these points.  This is an image of a cultured martial artist with time to spare for self-improvement.  He is the very embodiment of middle class prosperity.

Yet he also represents the modern man who seeks to find balance with (and build upon) the past.  His “dance” is proudly proclaimed to be a national, rather than a regional, art.  The twisting movements suggest strength wrapped in softness.

While he stands in a rural area, it is not the type of countryside that gave Republic era social commentator heartburn.  Rather than declining agriculture and poverty we instead see ancient steps, a relic of China’s past, sanitized and devoid of any “distracting” modern elements.  By acting as the backdrop for this set of images, we are assured that the new national arts (guoshu) are capable of cleansing and restoring the country as a whole.  The urban values of progressive enlightenment will soon become “Chinese” values.  This is a rural countryside yes, but one that has been pacified and colonized by indigenous dreams of an “Orientalized past.” The martial arts now act as a gateway for the physical experience of this cultural construct.

Conclusion: A Picture’s Journey to the West

While these may have been the dominant discourses running though the minds of the martial artists and cameraman in the 1930s, when this image was first produced, how might it have been translated by Western consumers in the late 1940s or 1950s?

Given the events of WWII the Chinese, who had once been viewed with a great deal of suspicion in American cities, were quickly being recast as “model minorities.”  Discussions of Chinese history and philosophy became popular during the 1950s as the currents of the Western counter-cultural movement found an easy ally in the self-Orientalizing discourse that had also come to dominate much of the discussion of the traditional martial arts in the previous decades.  If anything these trends accelerated after the liberation of the mainland in 1949 as western populations (with the encouragement of the KMT in Taiwan) found new reasons to wax nostalgic for the loss of traditional Chinese culture.

These simple postcards bear visual testimony to the sorts of popular discourses that existed, both in China and abroad, about the traditional martial arts in the first half of the 20^th century.  Better yet, when set in a series they suggest something about how these discourses evolved over time (from the early to late Republic), and the ways that they may have been translated by the foreign audiences.  While much was undoubtedly lost in the process, certain key symbols did convey.  Any viewer of these postcards can see the martial arts becoming less threatening, poor and parochial.  Instead they are re-imagined as relaxed, cultural in nature and national in origin.

The basic outlines of this transformation would have been immediately recognizable to any of China’s many martial arts reformers.  This subtle shift in imagery also constitutes the prehistory that makes the later, post-1960s, explosion of interest in the Chinese martial arts possible.  A media archeology of these discourses suggest that they have deeper roots, and more complicated entanglements, than might at first be apparent.

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If you enjoyed this you might also want to see:  Ming Tales of Female Warriors: Searching for the Origins of Yim Wing Chun and Ng Moy.

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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.

Introduction: J. G. Wood and the Popularization of the “Oriental Obscene.”

The following post introduces a few accounts of the Chinese (and other Asian) martial practices taken from a book first published in the United Kingdom during the 1860s.  When discussing sources such as these I find that there is a tendency to dwell on the rediscovery of “the first” account of some sort of behavior or art.   In this case I am very happy to say that the Rev. J G. Wood broke no new ground.  That is precisely what makes his early, and often overlooked, accounts so interesting to students of martial arts studies.

Wood was deeply interested in natural history, and he dedicated much of his life to researching, studying and writing about the varieties of biological and social life.  Born in London in 1827, and educated as a member of the clergy (at Oxford), he gained a fair amount of fame in his lifetime for his writings and innovative lectures on the natural world.  Yet Wood was not really a research scientist.  Instead he excelled as a popularizer of scientific thought.   While Wood was never the first person to write on some new topic, he was often the second.  And what he wrote entered the public discussion.

These facts are easily confirmed.  Wood’s books were best sellers during his lifetime and went through many editions.  They also managed to be referenced in the popular culture of their day.  Both Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Mark Twain cited or referenced Wood’s encyclopedic collections in their own works of popular fiction.

While Wood seems to have been preoccupied with the natural sciences, on a few occasions he did venture into the field of traveler’s tales and ethnographic accounts.  This is not surprising as by the second half of the 20^th century travelogues had become one of the most popular genera of popular literature throughout the West.  Thus it would not be unusual for a professional author with a penchant for collecting to try his hand at such a profitable game.  Wood’s most popular (and frequently reprinted) effort in this area was the two-volume set The Uncivilized Races, or Natural History of Man (1868).

Readers should note, however, that Wood was not a global explorer.  After becoming a professional lecturer late in life he did have the opportunity to visit North America on a number of lecture tours.  Yet he did not directly observed most of the societies he discussed in The Uncivilized Races.  Like Frazer and Durkheim, he conducted his ethnographic research in the library.  In the social realm, as in the natural, Wood popularized preexisting discourses rather than creating them.

This is precisely what makes him so useful to us.  The problem with spending huge amounts of effort to locate the lost and forgotten “very first account” of some obscure practice is that it was so often ignored by its intended audience.  That is precisely why these things are so hard to find.  The same forces that make them obscure today often limited their relevance even to their contemporaries.

Yet if we want to know what the general level of understanding of Chinese, Japanese and Indian martial practice was during the middle of the 19^th century, Wood is a good place to start.  And if we are interested in the ways in which the Western public imagined these practices and their connection to social violence during the 1860s, he is invaluable.  While far from groundbreaking his volume reminds us of the sorts of accounts that would have been available to a curious reader able to gain entrance to a fair sized library during the second half of the 19^th century.  And there is more there than one might think.

This brings us to the content of Wood’s collection.  In this post I have excerpted a single section of his discussion of warfare in 19^th century China as it will be of the greatest interest to readers of Kung Fu Tea.  Yet Wood also reported accounts of the martial and military arts (broadly defined) of the Manchu, Japanese and Indian peoples as well.  As such this volume presents us with an opportunity to observe the ways that these discourses were starting to diverge in the 1860s.

Wood’s Chinese chapter seems to be driven by his own preoccupation with weapons and weapon collecting.  After a discussion of Chinese field artillery and siege guns (omitted from my post as it is mostly of interest to military historians) he turns to a discussion of more familiar topics.  These include one of the most detailed period discussions of the Chinese repeating crossbow I have ever seen (a weapon that Wood had obvious admiration for and found to be totally ingenious in its operation and simplicity), the types of swords and double swords seen in public sword dancing displays, and finally the use of extreme means of torture and execution by the Chinese judicial system.

I have always been fascinated by the repeating crossbow, and so I was happy to run across Wood’s assessment of the weapon’s design and capabilities.  And it is fascinating (though not unprecedented) that a resident of the UK could speak with confidence about the sorts of Kung Fu displays that they had observed in their home country during the middle of the 19^th century. I did, however, omit most of the discussion of torture and execution that takes up the majority of this chapter.

On the one hand this material is not terribly relevant to how we define the martial arts today.  Yet I did include the introduction to the section because it appears to have been very relevant to how Wood and others understood the parameters and meaning of social violence within China during the 1860s and 1870s.  While at one point the author finds himself making a mental equivalence between the practice of a Chinese sword dancer and western fencer (speculating that the later would likely get the better of the former), it is clear that for the most part he did not view the Western and Chinese realms of the “martial arts” to be equivalent.

When discussing the military (and recreational) practices of Europe, Wood, like any good child of the enlightenment, emphasized rationality and efficiency.  Yet when discussing the Chinese (and to a lesser extent other Asian nations) the physical practice of these arts could not be separated from the cultural and psychological impulse towards cruelty and actual sadism that he saw throughout society.  His readers are burdened with oddly personalized stories of graphic tortures and executions in an attempt to raise a level of sympathy for the Chinese people.

Yet they are informed, in almost the same breath, that these same long suffering victims are primed to unleash similar cruelties on their own vanquished enemies.  Like others in his generation Wood built an image of China’s national character (as well as its fighting arts) grounded in a culturally conditioned impulse towards cruelty.

Such account only became more common in the popular literature with the rise in anti-Christian violence and the approach of the Boxer Rebellion (1899-1900).  By this era there is often a sharp divide in how the Chinese and Japanese martial arts are discussed in Western texts.  While the Chinese arts are still imagined as the preview of dirty market place performers, religious fanatics and sadistic jailers, judo and kendo are held up as important cultural accomplishments and a key to understanding the Japanese miracle.

Importantly no such tendency is yet evident in Wood’s work.  Published in the 1860s (and relying on accounts that were even older), the Samurai are still very much a living presence in Wood’s vision of Japan, and this does nothing good for his opinion of that country’s martial arts.  Wood seems to have adopted the popular late Tokugawa civilian opinion of the Samurai class which saw them only as a repository of derelict and dangerous individuals who, more often than not, contribute little to the actual support of society.

Wood notes with some relish the similarities between urban, low ranking, Samurai and the Western tradition of “swashbucklers.”  He dwells on scenes of Japanese swordsmen testing their blades of stay dogs, leaving dismembered and disabled animals in their wake.  Nor would it have been hard to find Japanese merchants or artisans who would have agreed with Wood’s critique of the moral development of the samurai.  It seems that the real (notably unromantic) Samurai needed to vanish before either Japanese or Western society could develop an acute case of nostalgia for their martial pursuits.

Wood’s accounts of both the Chinese and Japanese military classes focused on powerful symbols of cruelty and disorder.  While he discussed instances of Chinese sword dancing, and the precursors of modern Japanese Kendo and Sumo wrestling, these activities seem to have been viewed as ultimately extensions of pathological cultural processes.  The Western reading public knew about them.  Even by the 1860s they had entered some level of popular discourse.  But they were not yet seen as the sorts of practices that anyone would want to make a Sunday afternoon hobby of.

Sylvia Shin Huey Chong may be of some help in thinking about Wood and what his work suggests about the place of the Japanese and Chinese martial practices (and violence more generally) in 19^th century popular thought.  In a book titled The Oriental Obscene: Violence and Racial Fantasies in the Vietnam Era, she puts forth an analysis of popular media in the 1980s that argued that the image of Asians as both the perpetrators and victims of horrific acts of violence and brutality reflected the psychological state of a country dealing with the fallout of a war of imperialist aggression in an era when Asians were becoming an ever more visible aspect of America’s social landscape.

While reading Wood I was struck by this same dual portrayal of Chinese citizens as both victims of unimaginable violence and incorrigible sadists.  Further, these accounts also emerged in the wake of a number of imperialist wars in Asia, and at a time when China was increasingly becoming a central hub in the global trade network (indeed, that was the root cause of the Opium Wars).

Obviously there are many aspects of Chong’s carefully argued critique that are unique to the post-Vietnam American experience.  Still, her basic insights may help us to make sense of some of the most puzzling, and troubling, aspects of Wood’s treatment of Asian martial practices.  Ultimately the obsession with judicial violence in accounts like his may suggest more about social state of 19th century Europe than China itself.  Nor would these attitudes disappear quickly.  They would linger and in some cases be reinforced by the conflicts of the 20th century.  The reemergence of these attitudes (commented on by Chong and others) followed a well-worth pathway in Western popular culture.

Chinese Warfare

“The most characteristic Chinese weapon with which I am acquainted is the repeating crossbow (shown on page 1425), which, by simply working a lever backward and forward, drops the arrows in succession in front of the string, draws the bow, shoots the missile, and supplies its place with another.  The particular weapon from which the drawings are taken was said to have been one of the many arms which were captured in the Peiho fort.

It is not at all easy to describe the working of this curious bow, but, with the aid of the illustration, I will try to make it intelligible.

The bow itself is made of three strong, separate pieces of bamboo, overlapping each other like the plates of a carriage-spring, which indeed it exactly resembles.  This is mounted on a stock, and, as the bow is intended for walled defense it is supported in the middle by a pivot.  So far, we have a simple crossbow; we have now to see how the repeating machinery is constructed.  Upon the upper surface of the stock lies an oblong box, which we will call the “slide.”  It is just wide enough to contain the arrows, and is open above so as to allow them to be dropped into it.  When in the slide, the arrows necessarily lie one above the other, and, in order to prevent them from being jerked out of the slide by the shock of the bowstring, the opening can be closed by a little wooden shutter which slides over it.

Through the lower part of the slide a transverse slit is cut, and the blow string is led through this cut, so that the string presses the slide upon the stock.  Now we come to the lever.  It is shaped like the Greek letter [illegible] the cross-piece forming the handle.  The lever is jointed to the stock by an iron pin or bolt, and to the slide by another bolt.  Now, if the lever be worked to and fro, the slide is pushed backward and forward along the stock, but without any other result.

Supposing that we wished to make the lever draw the bow, we have only to cut a notch in the under part of the slit through which the string is led.  As the slide passes along the stock, the string by its own pressure falls into the notch, and is drawn back, together with the slide, thus bending the bow.  Still, however much we may work the lever, the string will remain in the notch, and must therefore be thrown out by a kind of trigger.  This is self-acting, and is equally simple and ingenious.  Immediately under the notch which holds the string, a wooden peg plays loosely through a hold.   When the slide is thrust forward and the string falls into the notch, it pushes the peg out of the hole.  But when the lever and the slide are drawn backward to their full extent, the lower end of the peg strikes against the stock, so that it is forced violently through the hole, and pushes the string out of the notch.

We will now refer to the illustration.  Fig. 1 represents the bow as it appears after the lever and slide have been thrust forward, and the string has fallen into the notch.  Fig. 2 represents it as it appears when the lever has been brought back, and the string released.

A is the bow, made of three layers of male bamboo, the two outer being the longest.  B is the string.  This is made of very thick catgut, as is needed to withstand the amount of friction which it has to undergo, and the violent shock of the bow.  It is fastened in a wonderfully ingenious manner, by a “hitch” rather than a knot, so that it is drawn tighter in proportion to the tension.  It passes round the end of the bow, through a hole, and presses upon itself.

C shows the stock and D the slide.  E is the opening of the slide, through which the arrows are introduced into it, and it is shown as partially closed, by the little shutter f.  The lever is seen at G, together with the two pins which connect it with the stock and slide.  H shows the notch in the slide which receives the string.  I is the pivot on which the weapon rests, K is the handle, and L the place whence the arrows issue.

If the reader should have followed this description carefully, he will see that the only limit to the rapidity of fire is the quickness with which the lever can be worked to and fro.  As it is thrust forward, the string drops into its notch, the trigger-peg, the arrow is propelled, and another falls into its place.  If, therefore, a boy be kept at work supplying the slide with arrows, a constant stream of missiles can be poured from this weapon.

The arrows are very much like the “bolts” of the old English cross-bow.  They are armed with heavy steel heads, and are feathered in a very ingenious manner.  The feathers are so slight, that at first sight they appear as it they are mere black scratches on the shaft.  They are, however, feathers, projecting barely the fiftieth of an inch from the shaft, but being arranged in a slightly spiral form so as to catch the air and impart a rotary motion to the arrow.  By the side of the cross-bow on Figure 2 is seen a bundle of arrows.

The strength of the bow is very great, though not as great as I had been told.  It possesses but little powers of aim, and against a single and moving adversary would be useless.  But for the purpose for which it is designed, namely, a wall-piece which will put a series of missiles upon a body of men, it is a very efficient weapon, and can make itself felt even against the modern rifle.  The range of this bow is said to be four hundred yards, but I should think that its extreme effective range is at most from sixty to eighty wards, and that even in that case it would be almost entirely useless, except against large bodies of soldiers.

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

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

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

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

J. G. Wood. 1876. The Uncivilized Races of All Men in All Countries. Vol. II. Hartford: the J. B. Burr Publishing Co. Chapter, CLIV China—continued. Warfare.—Chinese Swords. pp. 1434-1435. (Originally published in 1868.)

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If you enjoyed this article you might also want to read:  London, 1851: Kung Fu in the Age of Steam-Punk

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Ken Chun Talks Wing Chun. Source: http://www.examiner.com

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!

Daniel Wu, being interviewed for CCTV.com

News from All Over

Summer is blockbuster movie season, and that certainly shows in the current news update.  A particularly interesting set of reports came out on CCTV’s English language TV and internet networks over the last couple of weeks.  They featured Daniel Wu who generated a lot of publicity for his portrayal of the complex hero Sunny on AMC’s Into the Badlands.  Now he is back in the news, this time for his role as an Orc villain in the fantasy film Warcraft.  CCTV has released a major profile on Wu commenting on his impact on American popular culture, as well as his quest to find the right balance of body and spirit through the martial arts.  Also see here.  Readers should also consider how these interviews function in the framing of the TCMA for the purposes of English language public diplomacy.

Chinese deputy Premier Deng Xiaoping and retired world champion Muhammad Ali [alias Cassius Clay] shake hands in Beijing at a meeting during which Deng invited Ali to return to China to train boxers for the 1984 Olympics, December 19, 1979. AP PHOTO

Meanwhile, a very different sort of profile has been running on the other side of the Pacific.  The Epoch Times (based in New York City) recently ran a piece on Li Youfu, who will be the head judge at this years International Chinese Traditional Martial Arts Competition.  As you might expect the discussion quickly turns to spiritual matters and Li’s relationship with the Falun Gong movement (a valuable reminder that private groups can also harness the power of Kung Fu diplomacy, making this a contested space).  But there is also an interesting historical dimension to this discussion, including the various ways in which the Cultural Revolution actually accelerated Li’s martial arts training.  As such this article hits on a couple of the topics that we have been discussing at Kung Fu Tea over the last few months.

Pushing Hands at the 108 Studios. Source: Fiona Lee/hoodline

Switching to the West Coast, Hoodline had a very nice piece titled “Pushing Hands: Tai Chi in Chinatown Draws Old and Young.”  More than just a profile of a single school, this article provided an overview of the San Francisco Taijiquan scene and even dipped into the area’s rich martial arts history.  Overall a nice, if somewhat short, piece.

Zhang Hexian, 93, leading a group of Kung Fu practitioners. Source: http://www.womenofchina.cn

Multiple Chinese tabloid and news outlets have been promoting stories and video of Zhang Hexian, a 93 year old resident of Ninghai, Zhejiang Province, who has been practicing the martial arts for nine decades.  Not much detail was provided about her specific style, other than the fact that its a family tradition, now open to anyone interested in Kung Fu.  You can read more about her here.  Or, if you would like to see her in action, click this link.  Needless to say she appears to be the (eternally vital) archetype of the “little old Chinese martial artist”  that has launched so many kung fu pilgrimages.

Taijiquan. Source: Edwin Lee/flickr

The last few weeks have also seen the public discussion of a number of new studies focusing on the various benefits of regular (low impact) Taijiquan practice for senor citizens.  Perhaps the biggest news is one study purporting to demonstrate that the practice of this martial art can have the same impact on a patient’s blood pressure as a pharmaceutical regime.  Another study looked at how the focus on balance and strengthening in Taiji helped some senior citizens lessen their fear of falling in daily life.  Finally, one last article examined the health benefits of this practice for those with arthritic knees.  So maybe there is something to that archetype after all….

A statue of Bruce Lee erected in the Los Angeles Chinatown. Source: english.peopledaily.com.cn

“Why Bruce Lee is Still Relevant.”  That was the title of a think piece published on the Esquire Middle East blog recently.  The post focused on Lee’s role in the popularization and normalization as the Asian martial arts in the West and how great that has been as a corrective to the overly lax, self-esteem indulging, education that most kids are getting in school these days.  The post quickly devolves into a rant in favor of increased discipline and hierarchy in education, leading me to suspect that the author lacks even a passing familiarity with the life or thought of the individual who wrote the manifesto-like essay “Liberate Yourself from Classical Karate.” So all things considered, this is a valuable reminder that “the author is dead” and none of us will get to define, let alone control, our intellectual legacies.

Images of Bruce Lee and his mother. Source: Charles Russo/fightland.com

Bruce Lee fans who are a little more attentive to details and controversies surrounding his life may want to check out Charles Russo’s latest post over at the Fightland blog.  It is titled “Was Bruce Lee of English Descent?”  Then, after you are done with that, you will want to review this essay by Paul Bowman discussing the actual significance of questions like this.  Russo is also a long-time friend of Kung Fu Tea and readers should definitely check out his recent book on the early history of the Chinese martial arts in the Bay Area.

John Vincent, co-founder of Leon (left) with Julian Hitch. Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk

The Telegraph recently ran an article on John Vincent, the co-founder of the upscale fast food restaurant Leon (in the UK).  He discussed both his background in Wing Chun, business strategy, and how there is basically no conceptual space between the two.  Vincent has even added elements of martial arts training to his workplace to increase efficiency and employee well being while reducing wastage.  Its an interesting discussions which in some ways sees Wing Chun as shading into a “lifestyle brand.”  This is certainly not the first time that I have run across this idea, but its something that I generally associate with other Chinese arts (especially Taijiquan).

That was not Wing Chun’s only appearance in the news.  The Examiner published an interview with Ken Chun.  You can see Part I of the interview here.

The Final Master. Source: LA Times.

Chinese Martial Arts in Film

Wing Chun will be making another appearance on the big screen, this time in the guise of Xu Haofeng’s latest film “The Final Master.”  Xu was the co-writer of Wong Kar-wei’s Ip Man bio-pic “The Grand Master.”  This film also features a complex and engaging story, but visually it is an entirely different movie.  If nothing else blades, rather than fists, seem to be the true star.  Rather than a return to the visual fantasy of Wuxia dramas, these swords remain elegant yet gritty, giving the entire project a feeling of “blade-fu.”  While I don’t endorse the films love of the reverse grip (at least not with something the size of a butterfly sword), fans of the hudiedao now have a film to call their own.  And both the Hollywood Reporter and LA Times seem to like it.

Donnie Yen. Source: Time Out Hong Kong

Regular readers of these news updates will know that Donnie Yen has been on an extended media tour for a couple of months now.  All of this has been sparked by the success of Ip Man 3 (which he says will be his last kung fu film) and the building anticipation over his appearance later this year in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.  In this interview Yen talks about both of those projects, his future plans, and the under-representation of Asians in Hollywood (based on China buying power in today’s global media market).  But the most interesting thing about this interview was that he reflected on his mom, who is a very accomplished TCMA master living and teaching in Boston.  I have been kicking around the idea of doing a profile on her for a while now, so I was fascinated to see her being discussed in the media.  If you are Donnie Yen fan this interview is worth checking out.

A number of reviews of Barry Strugatz’s documentary, The Professor: Tai Chi’s Journey West (2016), examining the NY phase of Zheng Manqing’s career have come out in the last couple of weeks.  For two examples see the pieces in the Hollywood Reporter and the LA Weekly.  You can see my own review of it here.  Readers should also note that the upcoming edition of Martial Arts Studies will carry a review by Douglas Wile who has previously studied and written on the life of Zheng. The Professor will premier in NYC on June 9th.

Kendo and Judo as part of life in the Japanese Navy. Source: Vintage Postcard. Author’s personal collection.

Martial Arts Studies

There has been a lot of activity in the martial arts studies community over the last few weeks.  To begin with, we are currently putting the finishing touches on the second issue of the interdisciplinary journal Martial Arts Studies.  This will be a thematic issue examining a variety of topics surrounding the “invention of the martial arts.”  I will post an announcement on this blog as soon as the issue is ready to go public, and I am sure that some of the articles and reviews will inspire discussion.

Rowman & Littlefield Press has just announced the release of the first book in their new martial arts studies book series.  The Virtual Ninja Manifesto: Gamic Orientalism and the Digital Dojo, by Chris Goto-Jones, is poised to expand the borders of martial arts studies.

Navigating between society’s moral panics about the influence of violent videogames and philosophical texts about self-cultivation in the martial arts, The Virtual Ninja Manifesto asks whether the figure of the ‘virtual ninja’ can emerge as an aspirational figure in the twenty-first century. Engaging with the literature around embodied cognition, Zen philosophy and techno-Orientalism it argues that virtual martial arts can be reconstructed as vehicles for moral cultivation and self-transformation. It argues that the kind of training required to master videogames approximates the kind of training described in Zen literature on the martial arts. Arguing that shift from the actual dōjō to a digital dōjō represents only a change in the technological means of practice, it offers a new manifesto for gamers to signify their gaming practice. Moving beyond perennial debates about the role of violence in videogames and the manipulation of moral choices in gamic environments it explores the possibility that games promote and assess spiritual development.

I had a chance to look at an early version of this manuscript and its a fascinating project.  Given the importance of video-gaming in shaping current popular discourses about the martial arts, it will be nice to have some theorizing in this area.  Chris Goto-Jones is Professor of Comparative Philosophy & Political Thought at Leiden University, where he was previously Professor of Modern Japan Studies. He is also a Professorial Research Fellow of SOAS, University of London.

Paul Bowman has just announced a new forthcoming volume titled Mythologies of Martial Arts (also published by Roman & Littlefield).  This short volume, modeled in many ways as a response to Barthes’ 1957 classic Mythologies, is Bowman’s most accessible work yet.  I also had a chance to take a look at some early chapters of this project.  While his 2015 volume, Martial Arts Studies, has already had an impact on scholarly discussions, I think that this book is poised to reach a much larger audience.  You can see a more detailed description of the project here.  Expect a release date sometime in November.

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

There are also a number of conferences coming up this year that will be of interest to students of martial arts studies.  Building on the success of last years effort, the Second Annual Martial Arts Studies conference will be held at Cardiff University from July 19th-21st.  If you are going to be in the UK there is still time to register, but please hurry as arrangements are currently being made for the dinners.  This is looking like it will be a great conference with an impressive group of speakers and presenters.

On October 6th-8th the German Sports University in Cologne will be hosting a conference titled “Martial Arts and Society – On the Societal Relevance of Martial Arts, Combat Sports and Self-Defense.”  This years conference will also feature English language sessions so please check out their call for papers.  I will be attending this conference to deliver one of the keynotes and look forward to meeting a broader slice of the martial arts studies community.

Chinese American students in San Francisco.

Are you thinking of teaching an undergraduate martial arts studies class?  What happens in the classroom is, in many ways, just as vital to the growth of our field as the progress on the research front.  As such I am always on the lookout for new syllabi.  Recently Jeffrey T Martin of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (Anthropology) posted his syllabus for Asian Martial Arts Anthro 399 to Academia.edu.  Take a look at what his students will be discussing.

Kung Fu Tea in NYC. Photo by Charles Russo.

Kung Fu Tea on Facebook

A lot has happened on the Kung Fu Tea Facebook group over the last few weeks.  We discussed snake kung fu, vintage taijiquan pictures, and the Hakka martial arts in Hong Kong. Joining the Facebook group is also a great way of keeping up with everything that is happening here at Kung Fu Tea.

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

A painting of Hua Mulan.

***We are currently in the final push to prepare and release the second issue of the interdisciplinary journal Martial Arts Studies.  This will be a themed issue examining different aspects of the “invention of the martial arts” in a wide variety of settings and time periods.   Paul Bowman and I are very excited about the selection of articles and reviews that we will be presenting later this week.  But at the moment all hands are needed for the final round of proof-reading, editing and otherwise preparing the issue for its impending release.  As such we will be revisiting an important discussion from the archives, touching on the prehistory of the Wing Chun mythos, for today’s post.  Enjoy!****

I propose to speak on fairy-stories, though I am aware that this is a rash adventure.  Faerie is a perilous land, and in it are pitfalls for the unwary and dungeons for the overbold.  And overbold I may be accounted, for though I have been a lover of fairy-stories since I learned to read, and have at times thought about them, I have not studied them professionally.  I have been hardly more than a wandering explorer (or trespasser) in the land, full of wonder but not of information.

J.R.R.Tolkien. “On Fairy Stories.” 1939.

Introduction

These are the words with which J.R.R. Tolkien, the distinguished author and professor of English, began the 1939 Andrew Lang Lecture at the University of St. Andrews.  The entire essay is well worth reading.  Tolkien had devoted considerable thought to the growth and evolution of stories and he was well aware that they take on a life of their own.  If we were to substitute the words “martial arts mythology” for “fairy stories,” the preceding quote sums up many of my feelings towards our own subject.

The early Republic of China period generated an enormous body of new martial arts folklore.  As a community we are still identifying, contemplating and digesting a lot of this material.  Some critics, upon learning that the wine they drink is not of the vintage that they first assumed, are prone to dismiss the entire exercise as a fraud.  They wish to get as far back into the “authentic martial arts” as they can and often see the relatively late Republic period as one of hucksters “diluting the arts.”  Yet in most instances the wine actually tasted pretty good before anyone stopped to take a closer look at the label.

Herein lies our dilemma.  Many of the elements of the traditional arts that are the most popular today, generating the most excitement with audiences in both the East and the West, are not the ancient and “authentic” material, but rather the later innovations of the 1920s and 1930s.  If we were to simply throw out everything that was “new” and return to some arbitrarily dictated “golden age” (1800, 1600, 1100, 500…….) we would not just discard a lot of recent marketing, but also much of what attracts people to the traditional Chinese martial arts in the first place.

Consider for example the Wing Chun creation myth.  Wing Chun is one of Southern China’s more recent boxing styles.  Its mythology claims that the arts dates back to the 1720s at the earliest, whereas most hand combat schools prefer to situate their genesis at an even earlier point in China’s long history.

Almost all of these claims are massively exaggerated.  Yet ironically the order of the points on the timeline is approximately correct.  Wing Chun is a younger art.  Its first organization probably dates to the middle of the 19^th century and it was later reformed in the Republic period.

This relative newness has done nothing to prevent the art from generating a rich body of folklore.  Its mythology even has some interesting and unique features.  For instance, students often marveled that Wing Chun is one of the few martial arts from China to be “invented by a woman.”

Nor does this association with the feminine principal appear to be some sort of fluke.  Both the creator of the art (Ng Moy, a survivor of the destruction of Shaolin) and her student, (Yim Wing Chun, who was forced to fight a challenge match to prevent a forced marriage) were women.  It was only in the third generation that male students entered the art.

The gender of these two individuals had a profound effect on the development of Wing Chun.  Ng Moy began with the standard Shaolin arts, but after becoming a recluse in South West China she had a vision of a crane fighting a snake.  Only after this revelation was she able to combine both evasive movements and structured direct attacks in a way that would allow a smaller fighter, like a woman, to overcome a much larger and stronger opponent.

Of course Ng Moy was a master of the martial arts.  Her abilities are the stuff of legend.  The real question was whether this system could be taught to a new student, one without any physical advantage or extensive training in the martial arts?

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

The story of Yim Wing Chun provides us with the perfect proof of concept.  The older woman takes the young daughter of a tofu merchant to her mountain retreat where she initiates her into the mysteries of her art.  Upon descending from the mountain the young girl promptly proves that a smaller person can defeat a much larger opponent by employing the proper principals and structures.  Fittingly it was Yim Wing Chun who gave her name to the art.

Modern Wing Chun students still love this story.  I have provided only the briefest outline of it above, but it is rich in meaning and symbolism.  It is amazing how much understanding a thoughtful reader can pull out of it.

The only problem is that this myth is generally read as a historical account.  In fact it is a piece of popular literature.  I say literature, rather than folklore, quite intentionally.  This is not the sort of thing that orally evolved over a long period of time, at least not in its present form.

Rather, some individual, probably working in the 1930s, sat down and appropriated certain stock characters from Wuxia martial arts novels that had been recently published in the area, possibly combined them with older traditions from the White Crane or Hung Gar clan, added in what might be an authentic (or partially-authentic) genealogical name list, and consciously composed the story that we have today.   I have already discussed the details of this process (particularly as they apply to the evolution of the character Ng Moy) elsewhere.

Nevertheless, this story was not created in a vacuum.  If it was it would be easy for students of Chinese martial studies to ignore it.  One could simply write it off as a flight of fancy or as a particularly effective advertising gambit.

I do not think that this would be very wise in the present case.  To begin with, it is an interesting (and fairly sophisticated) example of the sort of storytelling that was going on all over the hand combat community.  The martial art story telling tradition was not new.  There had been a vibrant market in cheaply printed martial arts novels throughout the late Qing.  But it was usually authors and publishers who generated the mythology.  Martial artists seem to have been more concerned with their military, law enforcement, operatic or criminal careers.

As the nature of the economy changed in the early 20^th century the creation of public commercial hand combat schools became a possibility.  Each of these newly created institutions discovered that they needed the sort of historical authenticity that can only be provided by a really compelling backstory.  Schools from earlier periods may have had their own backstories as well, but most of the ones that we possess now date from the early years of the 20^th century, or just a little earlier.

Other things changed beyond the sheer volume of stories that were published.  New types of characters emerged.  One of the most interesting things about the Republic period literature was the sudden proliferation of female heroes in these stories.

Traditionally wuxia novels, like the martial arts themselves, had been a male dominated domain.  It is true that there are occasional references to female knights-errant in some of the older works.  There is even a female hero in the classic novel Water Margin.  But these figures were very much the exception that proved the rule.

Very rarely did women appear in older martial stories and when they were mentioned it was almost never in a heroic capacity.  Instead they were often used as a malignant plot device to give the male hero a chance to “restore the proper social order.”

All of this begins to change in the Republic period.  Certain reform movements (most notably Jingwu) began to actively teach and cultivate female martial artists, giving them an increased prominence in society.  But even before that there was an explosion of female characters in martial arts stories.  These characters manage to break out of the stereotyped roles of “virgin-martyr” and “femme fatale” and become actual heroines.  They also appeared in a wide range of stories, from the comic to the historic and even the tragic.

This literary trend should be remembered when reading the story of Yim Wing Chun and Ng Moy.  There are certainly older stories of female warriors, but these two characters were imagined and put to paper at the height of the popular interest in martial arts heroines.  The very fact that the Wing Chun creation narrative focuses so closely on a pair of female warriors, and is so self-conscious in its discussion of how a smaller and weaker “female” body could defeat a stronger and larger “male” one, is yet another piece of circumstantial evidence that we are dealing with a literary creation of the early-mid Republic of China period.

The thing that I find most interesting about all of this, and which most discussions tend to ignore, is that a story which was explicitly composed to address the tastes and needs of individuals in Southern China in the 1930s can continue to speak so strongly to individuals on the other side of the world today.  That is a remarkable achievement and one to be admired.

Martial arts fiction is actually much more complicated than something like wine, which simply improves with age.  It is more like a gourmet soup.  It has many ingredients, some of which blend imperceptibly together, while others stand out providing high notes and a sense of depth.  To the uniformed it may look as though the chef simply pours everything into the pot and stirs, but there is usually some very important selection that goes into a good recipe, or story.

Is it possible to look at these stories and guess what ingredients went into them?  Can we understand how the 1920s narratives of female warriors were constructed and why they struck such a cord with audiences?  Certain large elements within the Wing Chun narrative are easily identified, though it is hard to ascertain what their original form was before they went into the pot.

The female creator of Yong Chun White Crane can be seen in both the later stories of Ng Moy and Yim Wing Chun.  Further, the Cantonese Opera Singers with their ill-fated rebellion is easily distinguished.

Professor Tolkien at Oxford University. Incidentally this is what an academic office is supposed to look like!

But what else can we detect floating in the broth?  What sorts of ideas about female warriors were common in popular culture and why did they start to rise to the top at the end of the Qing dynasty?    In the same essay that I quoted earlier Tolkien warns that such an enterprise is difficult and possibly not as profitable as it might be hoped:

 “…with regard to fairy stories, I feel that it is more interesting, and also in its way more difficult, to consider what they are, what they have become for us, and what values the long alchemic processes of time have produced in them. In Dasent’s words I would say: ‘We must be satisfied with the soup that is set before us, and not desire to see the bones of the ox out of which it has been boiled.’”

In both literary and ethnographic terms his advice is sound.  Once we have separated our dinner into its various components it will no longer be “soup.”  In the quest for the bones we will have lost some of the emergent properties that made these stories so powerful and interesting to us in the first place.  Still, to the historian bones can be a useful thing.

Tang Saier: Buddha Mother and Rebel Warlord

David Robinson, in his book on Ming social history (Bandits, Eunuchs and the Son of Heaven, Hawaii UP, 2001), argues quite convincingly that we have generally underestimated the importance of violence in daily life during even relatively peaceful eras of dynastic history.   China’s history was literally written by Confucian scholars who saw the word in deeply ideological terms.  They sought to promote a certain vision of the past so as to guide the decisions of rulers in the future.  In their narrative violence is a tragic aberration, or the result of social disorder in either society or the court.

Robinson instead argued that violence was a regular feature of daily life in late imperial China.  The government and the military were chronically underfunded and understaffed.  Without the cooperation of local “men of action” it was impossible to accomplish any task from clearing the road of bandits to collecting tax payments.  There was an actual “economy of violence” that stretched through all levels of society, from the highest eunuchs at the court down to village thugs.  This market in violence was just as complicated, and essential to the good governance of the kingdom, as any other aspect of the economy.

It should come as no surprise then to learn that the sphere of women often intersected with the economy of violence.  The Venn-diagram of China was simply not big enough to keep these two massive cultural areas from intersecting.  Then as now women were often victims of violence.  But at other times they were actually independent agents in these destructive cycles.

Consider for instance the social upheaval caused by the Yongle Emperor (1360-1424).  Hongwu, the first Emperor of the Ming dynasty, left a complicated succession situation at the time of his death.  After his first son preceded him, the Emperor decided that the throne should go to his primary grandson (reign title Jianwen), rather than his own next inline surviving son.  The younger, militarily minded, son of Hongwu would not let this slight pass, especially when Jianwen started to eliminate his powerful siblings.  After a successful military campaign Yongle was able to oust his nephew and capture both the capital and the throne for himself.

Unfortunately it was easier to capture the physical space occupied by the capital than the hearts and mind of its inhabitants.  Many important officials flatly refused to serve the new Emperor, and were murdered (along with their families) as a result.  In an attempt to consolidate his legitimacy, and address long standing tactical problems, Yongle ordered that the capital be moved north to Beijing.

This too was easier said than done.  Beijing had been devastated by disease and disaster.  It needed to be rebuilt.  New walls and a grand palace (the Forbidden City) had to be constructed.  Nor could this be done in an economic vacuum.  Other northern economic and population centers also had to be upgraded to shelter and service the new capital.  Even the Grand Canal had to be restored.

This was a massively expensive undertaking.  To finance it the tax role needed to be restored and huge amounts of waste-land had to be reclaimed and tilled.  Vast numbers of workers were necessary to carry out all of these tasks.  Labor was the one item the one item that the Yongle Emperor had in relative abundance.  Nevertheless, tapping those reserves turned out to be more expensive than he imagined.

In order to carry out the various rebuilding projects large numbers of peasants from poverty stricken, and notoriously rebellious, Shandong province were pushed into government labor corvees.  These demands upset the economic and social situation in the area, leading the normal banditry and millennial movements to morph into something much more dangerous, open rebellion.

A painting depicting Tang Saier opposing the troops of the Yongle Emperor.  Note the paired sabers, favored by a number of China’s literary heroines.

One of the critical leaders of this movement was Tang Saier, a woman.  Along with her husband she was successful in leading a group of rebels in the capture of a number of walled cities in Shandong starting in 1420.  In each case the imperial representatives were murdered and her band gained more followers.  Eventually she commanded a rebel army that numbered in the tens of thousands.

Tang Saier used what social roles were available to her in crafting her public political personality.  On the one hand he posed as a self-styled female knight-errant.  Like other warriors from this mold she was seen as fighting both against injustice and for the establishment of the proper social order.  And by all account she was an active and successful military leader.

Prof. Victoria Cass has pointed out that there was also another aspect to her persona.  She was widely seen as a religious adept.  As the de facto “god-mother” of the area’s White Lotus movement she was expected to display the signs of mystical (and even magical) attainment.  Stories circulated that enemy weapons could not harm her, or that she had come into possession of her martial skills when she found an arcane text and a magical sword in a mountain cave.  Some claimed that she was chosen by the Primal Mother of the Nine Heavens, the problematic patron saint of female mystics, recluses and warriors.  Others, including her troops, called her “Mother Buddha.”

This mixing of the martial and magical is typical for millennial uprisings in northern China.  The same basic patterns will reemerge in the rebellions of the late 19^th century.  However, Prof. Cass points out that the thematic mixing of the mystic and martial archetypes was much more common in female warriors and military leaders than male ones.  To their followers these miracles were signs that the leader was a true adept who followed the dictates of heaven.  To the state they were evidence of dangerous sorcery and a threat to the established social order that went well beyond the purely military potential of such groups.

The Yongle Emperor may have been particularly vulnerable to the challenge posed by a movement like Tang Saier’s.  Clearly he would have remembered that his own grandfather used his leadership of a millennial army to seize control of the state and establish his own dynasty.  Further, Yongle was moving the capital to the north at a time when his legitimacy was still a sore spot.  He showed little restraint in crushing the new rebellion in Shandong.

What happened next was remarkable.  The imperial army was able to destroy the poorly armed, fed and trained rebels.  Yet after an extensive search they failed to catch Tang Saier.

Obviously the first rule of fighting a messianic figure is not to let her get away, thereby establishing expectations of an imminent return backed by heavenly armies.  In a symbolic sense the legitimacy of the Yongle Emperor’s reigns was based on his ability to find and punish dangerous heterodox leaders who threatened the kingdom with chaos.  This is what it meant to be the “Son of Heaven.”  Yet in this case the search yielded nothing.

The Emperor was incensed and decided (reasonably) that the only way that Tang Saier could evade imperial justice for so long was if someone was hiding her.  Of course there were not that many bases of independent power in the poorer regions of northern China.  The gentry in the area was weak, and most of the big rebel bands had just been crushed.  That left the temples and monasteries, institutions which the state viewed as potentially problematic at the best of times.  It would have been all too easy for Tang Saier to blend into the poorly regulated local religious landscape as either a Daoist or Buddhist adept.

The Emperor’s agents turned their attention to the area’s religious institutions.  On imperial orders the region’s entire population of nuns (both Buddhist and Daoist) was put under arrest and brought to the new capital for questioning.   It was illegal to take up a religious vocation without a license from the government.  These were highly regulated and generally only given to the educated and orthodox.  One can only assume that a huge number of “unofficial” Buddhists and Daoists clergy were returned to the tax role, as well as the land owned by their temples and sanctuaries.  This sweep of the local religious landscape would have been a great help to the Emperor’s efforts to establish de facto social control over northern China.

The one thing it did not accomplish was locating Tang Saier.  Like the later “Elders of Shaolin” and Ng Moy, she successfully evaded the imperial dragnet and was never heard from again.  This was a major embarrassment for the government.  An individual bandit warlord or rebel might evade capture and no one outside of the effected region would really know or care.  But the move against Shandong’s religious community was an event on such a massive scale that it could not be kept secret.  Now everyone knew who Tang Saier was, and they knew that she had gotten away.

The wife of a Chinese general circa 1810. Notice that both she and her female attendant are armed. Source: Digital Collections of the New York Public Library.

The Literary After-life of Tang Saier

There is a lot we do not know about Tang Saier.  It turns out that much of what we know about the birth, death and lives of important rebel leaders is glean from imperial records.  These in turn reflect interrogation and trial documents as well official reports.  Given that she was never captured we actually don’t have a clear idea of when she was born or died.

This lack of basic biographical facts has not stopped a rich literature, some political, but most fictional, from springing up around her.  The Ming vilified her as a witch and sorcerer.  Qing historians reevaluated her legacy, and Republic and later Communist historians noted that she fought against what amounted to legalized slavery.

Tang proved to be too charismatic and mysterious a figure to ever disappear from popular discussions, either at the level of local folklore (where she is still remembered) or in the more elite literature.  Ironically an “outsider” like the rebel Tang Saier became the perfect vehicle for a certain group of 18^th century Ming loyalists to criticize the political and social conventions of their day.

The first (surviving) novel about Tang Saier was published in 1711 by Lu Xiong.  Lu was highly educated but on the orders of his father (a Ming loyalist) he never sat for the imperial exams, and instead became a physician.  Apparently Lu shared many of his father’s political views and he employed Tang’s criticism of the Yongle Emperor as a screen to comments on much more recent events without running afoul of the censors.

His novel, titled Nuxain Waishi (The Unofficial History of the Female Immortal), was shared widely in manuscript form before it was published and it had many admirers.  The first edition appears to have been fairly successfully.  Unfortunately, the novel was closely tied to a critique of events in the opening years of the 18^th century, and as such it was not widely read by succeeding generations, except perhaps by those with an interest in martial arts fiction.  The sweeping nature of its heterodox claims may have also impacted its popularity.  For more on this work and its reception see The Sword or the Needle: The Female Knight Errant (Xia) in Traditional Chinese Narrative by Roland Altenburger (Peter Lang Publishing, 2009).

Perhaps the lasting contribution of this work was its discussion of gender.  Altenburger notes that the novel seems to totally uproot traditional hierarchies and this includes extolling the martial virtues and potential of Yin, or female energies, while at the same time “deflating” male figures and archetypes.  In previous novels female swordsman succeeded only by becoming, in effect, “honorary men.”  Yet that is not the strategy of the heaven-sent protagonist of Nuxain Waishi.  This fictionalized version of Tang represents the Yin energies of the moon and she embraces them to use them to their full advantage.

This choice raises a pressing question.  How can a smaller weaker female body triumph in the intensely physical realm of the knight-errant, where one is expected to meet you enemy not just through strategy (long seen as the strong suit of female warriors) but also through force of arms?  For Lu the answer was clear.  Tang was renown as a female Daoist adept, so the answer must be magic.

While somewhat jarring to modern readers I think this move makes a lot of sense.  The Yin forces of corruption and chaos had always been feared on the battlefield.  As late as the end of the 19^th century military leaders in China had attempted to co-opt Yin magic and turn it to their own ends.  It was entirely in keeping with character for Lu to endow his heroine with these same abilities.

Nuxain Waishi may have had a limited readership, but many of its themes went on to influence other, more important novels.   Altenburger notes a number of intertextual dependencies between it and Xianxia Wu Huajian (Five Flower Swords of the Immortal Knights, 1900).  This novel, published under the pseudonym “The Shanghai Sword Freak” by Sun Jiazhen, had a much deeper impact on the development of the modern martial arts novel.

Sales of the initial publication were quite good.  It was so popular that in the early Republic era many authors wrote unauthorized “sequels” hoping to cash in on its success.  In fact, so many people were profiting from the work that its real author actually decided to get in on the act and write a sequel of his own which he had never originally intended to produce.  In this way Sun’s initial story spawned an entire group of novels.  This body of literature, all of which was connected to the memory of Tang Saier, helped to popularize the idea of the female knight errant and set the stage for its the subsequent explosion in the popular consciousness.

Like other authors before him, Sun was forced to ask where exactly a female martial artist would receive her skill or strength from.  Sadly none of these story tellers were actually connected with the real martial arts, so once again magic seemed like a plausible answer.  But this magic had to be different from that employed in the 1711 novel.

In the earlier story Tang was reimagined as a heavily emissary.  She was an embodied immortal sent to protect the legitimate Ming emperor from his corrupt uncle.  But in Flower Sword the plot is more complicated.  A group of immortals are sent to convey their skills, but they must recruit human disciples who are responsible for fighting the battles of this world.  Ultimately the story develops a gender balanced cast of characters. But how do these fully-human females survive in their new calling?

This time it is Daoist alchemy that is specifically invoked.  Human male martial artists recruited by the brotherhood need no physical augmentation to learn the superhuman techniques of the immortals.  Female recruits, however, are given a pill made through alchemical processes.  It strengthens them and hardens their bodies, as well as replacing their bones with light.  Still, the process leaves them in essence female.  They are not so much endowed with Yang properties as made capable of defending themselves through their Yin powers.  They must also master their boxing skills the old fashioned way, through practice.

This sort of flashy external alchemy allows for exciting plots and tense confrontations between good and evil.  Yet at the same time that this is coming out Sun Lutang is starting to publish his own martial philosophy, now available to the middle class reading public.  In these works he too claims that a combination of martial arts and Daoist practices could renew health and promote longevity.  However, for Sun the alchemical furnace that powers this transformation is the internal one.  It goes without saying that his ideas were the more reasonable ones, but ultimately it was the thriller wuxia novels that sold more copies.

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

Conclusion

Tolkien’s initial warnings should be carefully considered.  It is a difficult and dangerous thing to take a living story and try to understand where it came from.  Difficult because in the process of writing, information is not just conveyed, it is twisted, molded and recombined in irrevocable ways.  Once you have made the ox into a soup there is no way to reconstruct the draft animal, let alone to understand its place in an early agrarian society.  The exercise is dangerous as stories are written for a reason, and in breaking them down into a series of interconnected parts we are prone to miss the emergent properties of the system as a whole.  Those were, after all, what attracted most readers or listeners in the first place.

Still, we have learned some important facts about the evolution of Chinese popular culture.  It is certainly true that the motif of the female martial artists exploded in popularity in the early Republic period.  We cannot analyze and understand the Wing Chun creation myth, or many other modern hand combat legends, if we divorce them from this setting.

Yet we have also discovered that this motif has much deeper roots in Chinese literature and culture.  It is possible to find stories of important female warriors in practically every period of Chinese history.  For the sake of brevity I restricted the current essay to an examination of a single figure from the Ming dynasty, but this exercise could be repeated any number of times.

Tang Saier is interesting to us for a number of reasons.  Obviously the story of a female religious adept turned warrior has many echoes in the folklore of the southern Chinese martial arts.  Her evasion of the Yongle Emperor’s attempts to reassert control over the temples and arrest the nuns even prefigures the development of literary figures like Ng Moy in important ways.

Yet what is really remarkable is the relative ease with which we can trace the development of stories based on her life and their subsequent incorporation into modern literature.  It may not be possible to identify all of the source material behind the Wing Chun creation myth, but stories like this one certainly helped to give it flavor.

Of course one central question remains unanswered.  We have now seen how the idea of the female knight-errant exploded in Republic era popular literature, but why did this trend emerge in the first place?  And what relationship, if any, did it have to the transformation of China’s traditional hand combat systems?  We will pursue these questions in a future post.

Martial Arts Studies, Issue 2: The Invention of Martial Arts

We are happy to announce that the Spring 2016 Issue Martial Arts Studies is now available, free of charge, to any reader or institution.  This open source, peer reviewed, interdisciplinary journal is an imprint of Cardiff University Press.  The articles featured in this issue explore a variety of topics surrounding the “invention of martial arts” in a global setting.  It also includes a number of reviews of recent books, documentaries and conference reports.

Simply click either of the images to download a complete copy of the edition, or visit this link to find PDFs of individual articles or to search our archives.  For an overview of the contents of this issue, readers may also want to start by taking a look at our opening editorial.

Are you interested in contributing to Martial Arts Studies?  If so, see our Call for Papers. Please feel free to share any of these links on your social media accounts.  Let your colleagues and friends know that a new issue of Martial Arts Studies is now available.