Wisdom of Taiji Masters by Nigel Sutton (2014). Source: Tambuli Media.

Nigel Sutton. The Wisdom of Taiji Masters: Insights into Cheng Man Ching’s Art. Tambuli Media. 2014. 167 pages.

Introduction: Remember a Master of Five Excellences

Zheng Manqing (Cheng Man Ching) may not receive the same attention in the popular press as Bruce Lee, but he was a central figure in the popularization of the Chinese Martial Arts in North America. His students, led by the sometimes pugnacious R. W. Smith, spread both his lineage and legend. While the construction of a hagiography around the beloved teacher is a fairly standard practice throughout the world of the Chinese martial arts, in this case it was not necessary. Zheng was already a giant.

His status as a student of the famous Yang Luchan ensured him a place in the Taijiquan community, and there can be no doubt about his dedication to the art. He was also an accomplished painter, educator and practitioner of traditional Chinese medicine. While many have claimed that Taijiquan is a repository of China’s cultural treasures, Zheng, through his writing and teaching, demonstrated that this could be true.

On a couple of occasions I have thought about writing a biographical sketch of Zheng’s life. Such an essay would certainly make a nice addition to the “Lives of the Chinese Martial Artists” series. Yet every time the idea has come I have decided against it. I cannot shake the feeling that Zheng is simply too big a subject for a single post. There has been enough written about him by his numerous students and grand-students that it would be difficult to cover all of the stories and controversies.

More recently a number of individual have questioned Zheng’s standing as a “Master of Five Excellences.” Some have noted that his American students did not inherit his famed martial ability. Others have questioned the quality of his paintings (he was particularly well known for plant and flower themed pieces) or scholarship. Zheng’s political connections probably helped to spread his reputation. And as both Dr. Mark Wiley and Nigel Sutton point out in the Forward and Introduction to the present volume, Zheng’s rapid rise to fame in the west was influenced by the writings of R. W. Smith. Smith himself was far from a neutral observer, both in terms of who he included in his books and how he described and framed the discussion of the Chinese martial arts. One suspects that at least part of the current discussion is a reaction against this early spin.

Still, a desire to go back and critically engage with the work of the grandmasters is not always a negative thing. While Chinese cultural norms require a certain degree of generational deference, the constantly evolving (and highly contested) nature of the martial arts would almost seem to demand periodic reevaluations of tradition. When this leads to a richer discussion of practice, or a deeper appreciation of human potential, it can be very beneficial.

This is the task that Nigel Sutton took up in his recent book The Wisdom of Taiji Masters: Insights into Cheng Man Ching’s Art (Tambuli Media, 2014). This short work (about 170 pages including the end matter) contains edited transcripts of interviews conducted with various Taijiquan instructors within the Malaysian branch of the Zheng Taiji clan. Most of these interviews were conducted in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and some of the subjects have since passed on. As such this book is an invaluable record of a specific moment in the (often neglected) history of the Malaysian Chinese martial arts community.

My own training is in other arts. While I am sure that Taijiquan practitioners will find many hidden gems in this work, my interests are more sociological and academic in nature. Specifically, while this volume centered on the memory of Zheng and his teachings, it departed from the often observed pattern of focusing only on the Master’s voice as the sole arbiter of authority.

Instead Sutton acknowledges the obvious (but seldom discussed) fact that martial arts institutions are by their very nature social enterprises. While the Master’s teachings provide a central focus that the community structures itself around, in truth these practices are neither self-interpreting nor self-replicating. Instead they require individuals to carry on the memory. They give it life through their own experiences, reflections and innovations.

The martial traditions of the past speak to us with many, sometimes contradictory, voices. These are in a constant state of dialogue and adjustment. Rather than seeing this as a failure of transmission of the one central “Truth,” we should instead consider the many ways in which this very positive adaptation allows the martial arts to evolve and move into a variety of new social environments. By focusing on a selection of voices emerging over the course of a few generations, Sutton’s work allows us to see how this fundamentally social process plays out.

How do the accidents of history, including both cultural and political factors, affect the evolution of a martial art? Zheng’s style is interesting to me in a sociological sense because it moves through both international and trans-national pathways. He himself is a product of the social forces that shaped life in the Republic of China. Then Zheng brought his art to a different sort of environment in Taiwan. From there some of his students spread it to Malaysia during a time of political upheaval. The Master himself eventually relocated to New York City which, during the 1960s, was facing a very different sort of social revolution.

Given the stark differences in these environments, should we really be surprised that something akin to a “national accent” can be detected even within a single martial arts style? By focusing on the Malaysian side of the story Sutton provides us with a laboratory to think about the many factors that govern the expression of the martial arts. Rather than seeing one approach as real and the others as defective or fake, this review seeks to remind us of the many possible social expressions inherent in any one martial tradition.

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

Eight Insights into Zheng Manqing’s Art

At about 150 pages readers could work their way through this book in an afternoon if they pushed ahead. Still, the text presented here will definitely reward a more thoughtful approach allowing sufficient time to digest the sometimes nuanced nature of the arguments being put forth.

Each of the eight main chapters of this book is structured around an interview with a noted instructor or master within the Malaysian Zheng Manqing community. These appear to be edited versions of longer conversations conducted using a semi-structured interview method. It is hard to confirm this as the author has eliminated his own questions from the record, and woven the resulting answers into something resembling a personal essay.

Still, most of the chapters follow basically the same format and address many of the same concerns. These include the respondent’s training history, instructional methods, thoughts on push-hands tournaments, weapons instructions, debates as to whether Zheng Taijiquan is a distinct “style” and numerous other subjects. This was then prefaced with a brief introduction by Sutton that might only be a few paragraphs in length.

The interviews move along at an engaging pace and there is enough continuity between the topics addressed by the various subjects that one could start to detect the tenor of the discussions that were happening within this community at that point in time. Sutton studied with a number of these individuals and was very familiar with the local community as a whole. As such he feels that he was able to achieve a high level of candor in the resulting interviews. I think readers will agree with this as the subjects were very open and generous in discussing both their personal teaching practices and more general thoughts on the nature of Zheng’s Taijiquan. Practitioners of this or related styles will find a lot to think about in these pages.

The book itself is nicely constructed. The cover design is attractive and the text layout makes for easy reading. Many photographs of the various interview subjects are included which complement the overall discussion rather than distracting from it. Readers will want to pay close attention to the volume’s Forward, Introduction and Afterward as these are the main places in which the author attempts to frame his project and discuss his motivations. Some of these insights, such as the issue of R. W. Smith’s connection with Zheng’s legacy in the West (discussed above) are important to bear in mind. Others, such as the brief explanations of the political and social situation in Malaysia and Singapore during the 1960s and 1970s, will be critical for readers who are unfamiliar with the region.

One of the really interesting things about this particular volume was the spontaneous emergence of shared themes between some of these interviews that did not appear to be a direct result of the questions that Sutton was asking. One topic that arose repeatedly was the nature of life within Malaysia’s competitive Chinese martial arts community in the post-WWII environment and the impact that this may have had on the development of the region’s Taijiquan tradition.

The question of what should be taught (what Zheng taught in various places, what the teacher includes in his classes, what happens in different styles) was also frequently discussed providing an interesting glimpse into the world of the working martial artist, as well as posing larger questions regarding the place of innovation and conservatism within a martial arts lineage. A number of anecdotes about Zheng and his career were also passed on, almost always as an attempt to explain some point or to justify a position. Perhaps my favorite of these can be found on p. 44 where we learn that as a young man Zheng did loose challenge fights, but he always learned something from the encounter and then returned to demonstrate the fruits of his hard won lessons.

Other commentators spoke at length about the role of “guts” in the making of a successful Taiji fighter. This discourse was particularly interesting and I was struck by the fact that so many of the teachers describing the critical nature of this quality did so in almost exactly the same terms. All of the martial artists interviewed by Sutton saw Taijiquan as a successful fighting method that needed to be approached and practiced as such.

In theoretical terms perhaps the most interesting question was whether Zheng Taijiquan should be thought of as a separate style even though Zheng himself seemed to have demurred on this point. Was he really practicing a simplified form of Yang style Taijiquan? Or should his statements to this effect be taken only as showing respect to his teachers? If so, how many generations needed to pass (two? three?) before “Zheng Taijiquan” could be considered an independent style? And how should attempts by other martial artists to place it within the boundaries of the Yang school be met? Given the amount that I have written on the creation of new brands and traditions within the martial arts, I found this very practical discussion of the subject to be particularly interesting.

Another overriding theme throughout this book is the perception that Zheng Taijiquan is practiced differently in Taiwan, Malaysia and North America. If this is the case, why? Most of the respondents in this book seemed to be uncomfortable with the idea (sometimes heard elsewhere) that Zheng withheld or changed his teachings when dealing with American students. While not outright rejecting the role of secrecy in Taiji instruction, this seemed to go too far for their understanding of Zheng and his approach to the art. They instead looked elsewhere for answers.

Of course this is also one of the main questions that readers of the book will be forced to confront. I am at something of a disadvantage here as I do not practice any type of Taijiquan and have no basis for making personal judgements of the quality of the various martial artists who are referenced. Nor do I generally find this level of lineage politics to be all that theoretically interesting. Instead I noted the number of times that individuals pointed to their own social history, and the violent nature of life in Malaysia during the post-WWII period, as an explanation for the different “national accents” seen within the Zheng Taijiquan style.

Another factor may also be worth exploring. Rather than emigrating from Taiwan, most of the martial artists interviewed by Sutton were either from Southern China (Fujian or Guangdong), or were born into ethnically Chinese communities within Malaysia that hailed from those areas. A number of these individuals also had backgrounds in the Southern Shaolin arts (including styles like Dragon, Five Ancestors and White Crane) before taking up Taijiquan.

One of the more interesting sub-themes of this book is to compare the various ways that the different masters understood their previous practice of external styles. The transition from the Southern Shaolin methods to Zheng Taijiquan could be a challenge. Still, one wonders how the distinctive cultural background of these individuals (both geographic and martial) affected their subsequent approach to Taijiquan.

I am not a universalist in my understanding the martial arts, nor do I believe that when properly understood all styles lead to the “same place.” Still, when listening to the discussion of fighting tactics given by the respondents, or the ways in which some of them approached the instruction of students (at times even encouraging them to test principals in actual fights as opposed to simply “taking the Sifu’s word for it”) I was struck with the similarities to what I have seen in other southern style schools.

This geographic factor adds an additional layer of complexity to our puzzle. How do we account for the distinct accent of Malaysian Zheng style Taijiquan? Is it an indication that different techniques were introduced in the beginning? Is it instead a reflection of the political and social situation that these martial artists found themselves embedded within? Or is this a result of the translation of Zheng’s Taiwan based school of Taijiquan to the more southern communities of the diaspora? One suspects that multiple factors are at play. Thus the emergence of different national approaches even within a single tradition is likely overdetermined.

Chinese vendors selling street food and tea in Singapore circa 1920s. Source: vintage postcard.

Conclusion: Oral Culture in the Chinese Martial Arts

Bernard Kwan, at “Be Not Defeated by the Rain,” has also posted a thoughtful review of this book that is well worth looking at. In it he details some substantive disagreements with the content of the various chapters. My own criticism of this work is slightly more theoretical in nature.

Specifically, I was left slightly uncomfortable with the degree of “self-erasure” that Sutton exhibited throughout this volume. Consider for instance his very fine account of Lee Bei Lei’s career and teaching style outlines in Chapter 4 (pp. 87-101). While I enjoyed all of the chapters of this book, this one was probably my favorite. My reasons have little to do with Lee’s colorful personality.

Rather, the subject’s taciturn nature forced Sutton to step in and provide a much more substantive introduction and discussion of his personal relationship with Lee than any other interview in this volume received. As I read this I became aware of the degree to which Sutton was actively taking himself out of the picture.

On the surface this might seem like an admirable thing. Sutton is obviously trying to focus attention on the masters (where it should be) and to let them “speak for themselves.” That is certainly appreciated. By taking himself out of the picture he also ensured that this work will not read like yet another martial arts travelogue. As I have noted elsewhere, that is not my favorite genera, so I am glad that he chose a different path.

To pinpoint the problem we need to take a step back and ask what is the actual contribution of this work? I would argue that Sutton’s volume is remarkable because it has managed to recapture the importance of oral culture in the martial arts.

The actual experience of the martial arts is a complex phenomenon that begs for elucidation and analysis. Traditionally this has happened in innumerable tea houses, food courts and restaurants across China and South East Asia. It is there that martial artists gather to discuss what has just happened, how they are being transformed and the ways in which this can be understood within the vast chain of “tradition.” Indeed, the name of this blog references this time honored institution of social discussion and reflection. Martial techniques are transmitted on the training floor, but martial culture is passed on over a late dinner.

It is worth reminding ourselves of this fact because while our understanding of the technical and historical aspects of these fighting systems has increased over the last few decades, this more social element is quickly vanishing in the west. Almost every “old time” martial artist I have spoken with over the last year has had the same complaint. We used to be more than just a class. Now we never go out after training. Everyone is just too “busy.”

Sutton’s book works not just on a technical but also an emotional level. The easy flow of the interviews brings us back to the realm of oral culture and reminds us of why it has been so essential to the creation of identity within the martial arts. Increasingly within the field of martial arts studies our attention has been drawn in two competing directions. A number of students have been approaching hand combat as a type of “embodied experience” capable shaping identity at an almost pre-verbal level. This suggests important ways in which the practice of the martial arts might help to build new types of identity.

Other scholars have instead demonstrated the need to thinking more carefully about the growing body of media (film, TV, novels) that surrounds these fighting systems. Such discourses have a critical impact on what we are likely to find in these hand combat systems. Indeed, in the modern world almost everyone is introduced to the martial arts, and forms their first impressions of them, through media encounters.

Yet embodied experiences are never self-interpreting. Nor do media discourses always speak with a single unified voice. The intensive oral culture of martial practice is critical as it provides students with a social space in which they can negotiate, contest, translate and assign personal meaning to the myriad of physical and cultural forces that have always surrounded the martial artists. All of this points to the continuing importance of participant-observation ethnography so that the evolving place of this oral culture can be better understood.

The central strength of this work is that Sutton remembered that social knowledge is always plural in nature. It is negotiated and contested within communities. And he has become part of that community. Of course we must expect that informants will treat Sutton somewhat “differently” because of his dual insider/outsider nature, or even the fact that he is conducting interviews and doing research. These conversations were always framed by the specific nature of this relationship.

Lee’s chapter was in many ways the most important as Sutton began to come into focus. This allowed the reader to understand how the discussion of the martial arts taking place throughout the volume was a function of an actual set of similar relationships. This enriches the discussion of the Zheng Taijiquan lineage as it enables us to see how the art presents itself, not in some abstract platonic sense, but within the actual confines of an evolving and expanding social institution. That is where the traditional martial arts have always been at their best.

Sutton has done a great service in releasing these interviews. Practitioners of Zheng Taijiquan are likely to find engaging, fresh, perspectives on their practice. Readers more interested in martial arts history will walk away with great stories about the traditional Chinese martial arts community in Malaysia. Indeed, we need to pay much more attention to the strong hand combat traditions that exist throughout the diaspora communities. This book nicely illustrates why.

Finally, within these pages students of martial arts studies will discover raw data on a surprisingly broad number of questions. Whether one is interested in the martial arts as they relate to the construction of tradition, the transmission of identity or the perils of transnational translation, we all might have something to learn from the wisdom of the Taiji masters.

oOo

If you enjoyed this post you might also want to read: Ritual, Tradition and Memory in Singapore’s Chinese Martial Arts Community.

oOo

A street Scene from Guangzhou from roughly 1880.

Introduction

Stories of skilled female warriors have a long history in China. The legend of the Maiden of Yue illustrates these ancient roots.  Yet it was during the final decades of the Qing dynasty that the female martial artist really came into her own as a literary type. Vernacular operas, public storytellers, short stories and a new generation of martial arts novels all featured accounts of amazing women who managed to rescue their hapless husbands and conduct business on their own.

During the Republic period this trend accelerated. A few hand combat styles, including White Crane, Wing Chun and Chuka Shaolin, even told creation stories that centered on the exploits of female martial artists. Images produced during this period have been adapted, repackaged and used in more recent Kung Fu films. These myths still help to define the Chinese martial arts in the public imagination today. But is there any truth behind these late Qing and Republic era legends? Historians including Henning and Lorge have suggested that female martial artists were probably exceedingly rare in real life. Social practices such as footbinding, strong taboos against mixed-sex physical contact and the general tendency to exclude women from the public realm would have made hand combat training difficult.

On a more subtle level, one must stop to wonder what social purpose this training might have had. While I am sure that certain individuals in the 19th century enjoyed or took a measure of personal satisfaction in their hand combat training, these arts were not yet seen as the recreational activities that they would become. Instead they were linked to certain economic, social or ritual functions. One might study boxing to get a job as a security guard, to work in an opera troop or to be recruited as a minor officer in the local Yamen or salt shop. Yet these roles were not open to women. So why might women study the martial arts?

Self-defense was an issue. We have already seen that women sometimes fought during southern China’s early 19th century piracy crisis. Indeed, the folklore of certain southern Chinese styles (boat boxing) sometimes mentions that the wives of fishermen were forced to take up the practice to defend themselves against small groups of local pirates.

In the following post we will look at another, better documented, case of a female boxer who lived in Guangzhou during the first half of the 19th century. In addition to testifying of the existence of at least a few such individuals, this particular example is useful as it suggests something about where such individuals were most likely to be seen in southern Chinese society.

Image taken from a vintage french postcard showing soldiers gambling in Yunnan province. Note that the standing soldier on the left is holding a hudiedao in a reverse grip. Source: Author’s personal collection.

Gambling and the Chinese Martial Arts

One of my research goals has been to better understand the role of the martial arts in the everyday marketplaces and commercial spaces that made up life in southern China. When talking about the social impact of the martial arts we tend to think of the military, village militias or the hiring of civilian mercenaries (often called “braves”) from among the many underemployed and unmarried young men in the region.

While important, these sorts of discussions overlook just how deeply entrenched the martial arts were within even seemingly unrelated sectors of the economy. For instance, while not all villages had a formal militia, almost all of them appear to have had “crop watching societies” made up of you men (often martial artists) tasked with guarding the fields prior to harvest.

In an era before modern banking, pawn shops were a critical source of liquidity in the local economy. In the Pearl River Delta region these buildings tended to look a bit like castles. They were multiple stories high and designed to sustain themselves during a local uprising or siege. Needless to say, a castle is useless without guards, and pawnshop owners also employed boxers as part of their business strategy.

During the later Republic period other sorts of firms also hired martial artists as a way of solving disputes between (and enforcing their will upon) workers. Obviously the narcotics trade was another place that one tended to run into individuals with a background in the martial arts. Yet one could say the same for both the legal and extra-legal aspect of the salt market.

Gambling was also an important industry throughout southern China. While technically illegal it was often allowed to exist in return for bribes and occasional “tax payments.” Gambling establishment also discovered that hiring martial artists was simply part of the cost of doing business.

These individuals acted as both bouncers and enforcers. Their primary job was to maintain order within the gambling house itself, but they also took on other tasks such as collecting debts and fending off rival interests. Recently we examined a sociological account of traditional boxing in Phoenix Village, in northeast Guangdong. According to this study the towns professional martial artists were all employed by its two rival gambling houses, rather than by the village boxing club itself. Interestingly the club always had to look outside of the community boundaries to find suitable instructors.

In 1835 James Holman (1786 – 1857) published a travelogue titled A Voyage Round the World. This work was remarkable for two reasons. First, it provided readers with an early glimpse of Holman’s travels to China and other point in the Far East during 1830. Part of his discussion of life in Canton included a joint description of the region’s gambling and boxing traditions, as the two subjects could hardly be separated. The second remarkable aspect of this work was the author himself. James Holman was a solo traveler who visited more places in the world than any other individual until the post-WWII era. He was also totally blind and suffered from chronic pain. As a younger man he had enlisted in the Royal Navy and was eventually made a lieutenant. But in 1810, at the age of 25 he lost his sight secondary to a disease acquired while serving on the Guerriere.

The young sailor was then appointed to the Naval Knights of Windsor, granting him lifetime care in Windsor Castle. But he found that hospital life did not suit him, and the thrill of travel helped him to better cope with his condition. In an era when the blind were generally imagined as helpless, Holman’s travelogues caused a public sensation. In an era when few people could travel, he walked across most of Russia, visited Africa, did the grand tour of the continent, explored Australia and sailed to China. His various publications brought detailed discussions of each of these places into countless libraries, dens and living rooms around the English speaking world.

Unfortunately Holman’s account of China is slightly two dimensional and not all that different from other short travelogues that were published in the 1830s-1840s. Much of this was not his fault. China was still a closed country for most westerners. Citizens of the UK were only allowed to visit the “factories” of Canton during the trade season and their movements were heavily restricted. Under most circumstances they could not even enter the city proper. Needless to say, long excursions into the countryside were forbidden. Even the most inquiring visitors to southern China during the early 19th century quickly discovered that there was not that much to explore.

After first stopping in Macao Holman arrived in Guangzhou in the middle of September (1830) and stayed until December 20th. During these three months he explored much of what was available. He took various excursions to Whampoa and other islands in the region. Accompanied by western merchants he visited the gardens and homes of some of the better known Hong merchants. Holman walked the small market streets located between the factories and the city wall. He even had a chance to meet Nathan Dunn (then in the process of retiring) and received an early tour of his incredibly important “Chinese Museum.” This project would do much to educate the western public about life in the Celestial Empire.

Still, Holman does not seem to have developed any special empathy for the Chinese people. While he notes a number of clever inventions and admirable aspects of Chinese life, the overall image that he communicates to his reader is of a people who are cruel and cowardly in turns. He is at pains to explain why the foreign factories need more support. Yet he spends very little energy attempting to understand the minor crises that he witnessed from the perspective of the Chinese government, the local citizens, or even the Hong merchants. By the end of his account it appears that Holman never managed to establish any personal relationship of significance with the Chinese inhabitants of the region. In that sense his writings (republished in 1840 under the title Travels in China, New Zealand, New South Wales, Van Diemen’s Land, Cape Horn, Etc. Etc.), come from a fundamentally different place than Nathan Dunn’s Chinese Museum.

Nevertheless, it is important to note that Holman is responsible for introducing one of the first extended discussions of the Chinese martial arts into the English language literature. This 1835 account also manages to socially situate these practices within the world of professional gambling and introduce us to a venerable female boxer named Fei Ching Po:

“Gambling in China is carried to an unexpected extent; and has obtained so firm a footing, and spread so widely among the people, that the laws enacted for its suppression are attended with results deplorably futile. The universality of this destructive vice, a peculiar characteristic of which is to gain strength, and influence, in proportion to the ill success of its votaries, may account in a great measure for the dishonest and shuffling habits of the people in all commercial transactions in which they are engaged. The general existence of a propensity, so calculated to destroy all the better feelings of humanity, leaves us to regret the misery it occasions, while we hail it as a landmark in our survey of the moral character of the people. The canaille in the streets commonly convert their petty purchases at the small stalls into mere games of hazard, risking the whole amount of the stake for the chance of increasing the quantity of the article which they desire to obtain.

But the vice is not confined to the lower orders: the keepers of gaming-houses in Canton are frequently individuals of rank and property, who enter into alliances to entrap the unwary, and inveigle young men of property into a love of play. Instances are to be of the gentler sex becoming members of such establishments, and sharers in the intolerable plunder they produce. The penal liabilities are the confiscation of all the property found in a gaming-house as well as the house itself, and the punishment of eighty blows to be inflicted on all who play for either money or goods. To play for food or liquors is not considered an offense.

Not long since, the names of some noted gamesters were published and held up for general observation; more with a view to caution the simple than to disgrace the offenders. Amongst them we find the cognomen of Fei-ching-po, who is described as a fat old lady, seventy years of age, in robust health, and a scientific boxer. She retained in her service several pugilists, who attended her as bullies.

Other names are given of persons, with whom the art of self-defense, (with them, doubtless, more frequently the art of offense,) is held in great requisition. This “science” is universally taught and practiced in China, although the local governments do not give it their sanction. They have no pitched battles, but they frequently put forth pamphlets, in which the necessary instructions are given, clothed in terms of the most fanciful descriptions.

The first lesson consist of the learner’s winding his tail tight around his head; stripping himself to the buff; putting his right foot foremost, and thrusting his right fist with all his force against a bag of sand, suspended for the purpose. He is to change his hands and feet alternately and continue punishing the bag of sand for hours together. This is termed by the “Fancy” –“Thumping down walls and overturning parapets.”

The second lesson is called “A golden dragon thrusting out its claws,” which is performed in the following manner: the pugilist grasps in each hand a heavy stone, wrought into the form of a Chinese lock, these he practices thrusting out at his arm’s length, right and left alternately, until fatigue obliges him to discontinue the operation. These are succeeded by other feats, whose titles are equally figurative and appropriate; such as “A crow stretching out his wings. –A dragon issuing forth from his den.—A drunken Chinaman knocking at your door.—A sphinx spreading her wings.—A hungry tiger seizing a lamb.—A hawk clawing a sparrow.—A crane and a muscle reciprocally embarrassed:”—terms, which, it must be acknowledged, would not have disgraced the age of gladiators.”

James Holman. 1840. Travels in China, New Zealand, New South Wales, Van Diemen’s Land, Cape Horn, Etc. Etc. London: George Routledge. pp. 219-222.  Note that an identical account can be found in James Holman. 1835. A Voyage Round the World. London: Smith, Elder, and Co.

A view of the foreign factories in Guangzhou. Source: Wikimedia.

Boxing and the Life of Fei Ching Po

The first question that must be asked upon reading this account is how Holman came to be acquainted with Fei Ching Po, and what he actually managed to observe about the world of Chinese boxing. Given the restrictions placed on his movement, it seems unlikely that he could have gained much firsthand knowledge of these facts. Of course a later account from the 1870s confirmed that short boxing manuals or pamphlets were still being sold in the area’s markets. For some readers Holman’s account of the Chinese martial arts and their early training manuals might sound a little too familiar. In the June 1830 edition of the Asiatic Journal and Monthly Register we find the following account:

“Pugilism in China.—The art of self-defense is regularly taught in China. It is much practiced, although not countenanced by the local governments. In the penal code, nothing appears concerning it. Tracts are printed which would, in all probability, accompanied by their wood-cuts, amuse the fancy in England. The Chinese have no pitch battles that we ever heard of; but we have seen a pamphlet on the subject of boxing, cudgeling, and sword-exercise, in which there are many fanciful terms. The first lesson, for a Chinese boxer, consists of winding his long tail tight around this head, stripping himself to the buff, then placing his right foot foremost, and with all his might giving a heavy thrust with his right fist against a bag suspended for the purpose. He is directed to change hands and feet alternately, restraining his breath and boxing the bag of sand right and left, for hours. This exercise the fancy call “thumping down walls and overturning parapets.” In the second lesson, the pugilist grasps in each hand a “stone lock,” i.e., a heavy mass of stone worked into the form of a Chinese lock. Then, being stripped and tail arranged as before, he practices thrusting out at a man’s length these weights, right and left, till he is tired. Hi is to change feet and hands at the same time. This lesson is called “a golden dragon thrusting out his claws.” Next comes “a crow stretching his wings—a dragon issuing forth from his den—a drunken Chinaman knocking at your door—a sphinx spreading her wings—a hungry tiger seizing a lamb—a hawk clawing a sparrow—a crane and a muscle reciprocally embraced,” with various other specimens or fanciful nomenclature for divers feats of the pugilistic art. –Canton Reg., June 18.”

Holman adjusted the article’s introduction and conclusion, but he simply borrowed the rest of the account word for word. Apparently this piece was first published in the June 18th edition of the Canton Register. This publication, first established in 1827 by William Wightman Wood and James Matheson, was one of China’s first English language newspapers and a fixture of life in the factories. Many of its articles focused on commercial matters within the expatriate community. It also covered certain local events, gossip and political developments in Guangzhou.

Holman’s writings on China can be roughly divided in two. His first few chapters appear to be compiled from the pages of his personal journals and relate events that he was actually involved with. The following chapters provide explanations of life in China drawn freely from a variety of secondary sources. His discussion of boxing falls into this later genera. Given that Holman was turning to the pages of the Canton Register to provide local color, does this source have anything more to suggest about the life of Fei Ching Po and her connection with either gambling or the martial arts?

It turns out that Mrs. Fei appears to have been a well-known figure in the first two decades of the 19th century. I have been able to locate two other appearances that she made in the same paper.

Canton Register. Vol 1 No 15 – Saturday 12th April 1828

“There is a type of Cantonese person that never stops gambling. They meet in flower boats or houses. Occasionally they are people of family or literary rank and of some property. They form partnerships and inveigle the sons of rich men to play. To inspire confidence they wear large gold bangles on their wrists. There are several notable gamblers in the vicinity of the factories of whom:

-Cheung Heem is a 50 years old literary doctor.

-Fei Ching Po is a fat 70 year old woman in robust health who is a good pugilist. She has a group of pugilists around her who act as her bullies. Many years ago a tea merchant saved her from prostitution and left her some money when he died. This was the capital she used to start her gambling house. She is helped by policemen and other swindlers whom she pays liberally. She lives on Honam Island and has a fortune of over $100,000. She is a friend of a Hong merchant’s wife (Poon Ki Qua’s) who has consented to be the adopted mother (Kai Ma) of Fei’s ‘adopted’ son. -Hung Kwai Sze is both a smuggler and a gambler.

-Fei Chuk is shamelessly involved in gambling and kindred vices.

The Law of China is that anyone gambling for money or goods shall get 80 blows and the property in the gambling house will be seized and confiscated. Those who keep gambling houses get the same punishment.”

It is clear now where Holman learned of both Mrs. Fei and China’s laws regarding gambling. More importantly, we have learned something about her life history and social background. Young girls could end up in prostitution in many ways. Some were sold by their parents, others were kidnapped and then forced into prostitution (according to an account in the Register the local magistrate had recently issued an edict on this specific practice). She probably ended up as a concubine of a tea merchant, and from there was able to establish her fortune. Unfortunately the account gives no indication of when she became a boxer, but we do get an indication of how we she managed to run her gambling establishment in the open. After all, if the expatriates of the foreign factories knew about Fei Ching Po, it’s a good bet that everyone else did as well.

Unfortunately Mrs. Fei’s plans for social advancement were cut short when she became entangled with the son of a local magistrate. Two years later (just months before Holman arrival in the area) we find the following account:

Canton Register Vol 3 No 13 – Saturday 3rd July 1830

“Mrs Fei Ching Po is 67 years old. She is the widow of a tea merchant who died young and left her in poverty. Her daughter sold a small house and gave Mrs Fei the proceeds for her livelihood. The old woman used this gift to rent a house and set it up as a posh gambling den for men and women. She bribed the police and very soon had a distinguished clientele and an increasing fortune. Recently the son of the Poon Yu magistrate Hu started visiting her tables and on one night lost $1,000. He became angry and left but returned later to try and win back his loss. Mrs Fei counselled him not to bet more, fearing the matter might get out of hand. Young Hu laid a plot to entrap Mrs Fei but when he revealed her business to his father, it backfired under questioning, and the true story came out. Now Mrs. Fei is in prison and none of her friends can help her.”

Notice that some of the biographical details have shifted over the foregoing two years. The age provided in this account would place her birth sometime around 1763. Her husband’s fortunes have also been reduced in this story, and it was a filial daughter who instead provided the capital to start her business.

Unfortunately this account makes no mention of her reputation as a martial artist or hired muscle. It does however provide a betrayal narrative that reads like it is straight out of a Kung Fu movie. After losing a large sum of money at the gaming tables the son of the magistrate of Poon Yu (an area that should be familiar to Wing Chun history buffs) attempts to frame her for a crime. The entire story comes out in the end, with the magistrate being humiliated and Mrs. Fei headed to jail to face her 80 blows. After 1830 we hear no more about Mrs Fei.

This very public incident had important repercussions. Two weeks later we find the following notice:

Vol 3 No 14 – Saturday 17th July 1830

The Viceroy has unequivocally instructed the magistrates to oppose gaming houses. They have set about a suppression and all are temporarily closed. This diversion of their manpower has permitted some 40 daring robberies to occur at the same time. Both the Nam Hoi and Poon Yu magistrates are consequently threatened with a report of incompetency to the Emperor.

Recently a consignment of Imperial treasure was robbed at the north gate of the city and the guards did nothing. The matter is being hushed-up and the Viceroy is searching for a replacement supply of silver to send.

Flower Boats, Canton China circa 1871. These river barges were often used as floating brothels and gambling houses. James Holman provides some contemporary descriptions of them in his books.  Photo by Emil Rusfeldt

Conclusion

This is not the end of the story. A well-known bandit (who was receiving protection from the local government) turned out to be responsible for many of the robberies. Nor was the Viceroy particularly happy when this was uncovered. But delving into his story would take us too far afield. It is also interesting to note that while Holman had access to the Canton Register, he apparently never learned how the story of his female boxer ended.

What can we say about Fei Ching Po? In terms of her biographical details it seems that she was born around 1763 and (barring exceptional luck) probably didn’t survive much past her arrest in 1830. Multiple authors have noted that during the Qing dynasty the martial arts functioned as a means of advancement for young men of talent with no prospects. It seems that this same narrative applies to Mrs. Fei’s life as well.

In fact, the most striking thing about her story is the social mobility that we see. Possibly taken as a prostitute while still a child, she eventually improved her status through marriage and the good fortune of her children. Gambling was one of the few businesses open to a women of her background, and her prior reputation as a martial artist would have served her well in this world. It is sad that we do not know more about her introduction to hand combat.

Still, this outline of her life story is valuable for what it suggests about the place of these skills in the more plebeian reaches of southern Chinese life. Her story is also valuable for what it demonstrates about the interplay of the various 19th century newspaper accounts, journals and ultimately Holman’s widely read travelogues. Within this web of borrowed sources we see the emergence of one of the earliest discourses on the Chinese martial arts to be found in the west.

It is fascinating to realize that in 1830 we already had accounts of commercially printed kung fu manuals, strength training techniques and female boxers. Yet the generally hostile attitude of these authors towards the Chinese and Chinese culture quickly turned the conversation in other directions. This again serves to remind us that the long delayed “discovery” of the Chinese martial arts in the west had nothing to do with their supposed secrecy. It was much more a reflection of what we were actually willing to see and accept. After all, this stuff had been in the newspapers for 130 years.

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

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A doorway in the famed Liang Yuan garden of Foshan. Source: Wikimedia (cc).

Introduction

I have been working on a couple of projects that have taken me away from the blog over the last couple of weeks. One of the more challenging of these has been a review David Faure’s very detailed writings on the evolution of key institutions that define what we tend to think of as “typical” southern Chinese life. These include such foundational elements as the spread of the state’s influence throughout society, the evolution of Cantonese identity, the creation of the area’s pervasive lineage structures and the rise of the southern gentry.

None of this has much to do with the martial arts, at least not directly. Yet the threat of violence pervades Faure’s story. Pirates lurk in the waters, violent lineage feuds are distressingly common and both landlords and marketplace organizers “hire” huge amounts of private security (though it is not always possible to detect where legitimate security ends and the protection rackets begin). Social violence (including the martial arts) haunts his work. Often it becomes an engine for institutional innovation. Yet David Faure (Department of History, The Chinese University of Hong Kong) is usually much more interested in explaining how these groups were organized, financed and integrated into society than the technical details of how they plied their trades.

These are all critical questions. The martial arts have always existed as an expression of currents and institutions within Chinese popular culture. While practitioners tend to think of these things as primarily systems of fighting techniques, or even philosophies, from the perspective of Chinese martial studies it usually makes more sense to conceptualize them as social institutions. Their existence is a function of the sorts of relationships that exist between the much larger networks of lineage associations, pawnshops, security companies, secret societies, tax farming companies and government offices (among other potential employers) that generate the demand for their services. As these more fundamental social structures evolve, the martial arts are forced to change.

This is an important point to emphasize as casual readers often underestimate just how much evolution was actually happening in southern China over the course of the late imperial period. In one of his more important works (at least for those of us trying to understand the martial arts) titled Emperor and Ancestor: State and Lineage in South China (Stanford UP, 2007) David Faure traces the evolution of such basic social institutions as lineages, corporate property ownership and the emergence of a local gentry in painstaking detail through his study of genealogical and family documents dating from the 15th-19th centuries.

Orientalist assumptions about the “ancient and unchanging” nature of China notwithstanding, Faure demonstrates that each of these categories was fundamentally transformed over the course of the late imperial period. The social life (and even the typography) of southern China in the early Ming would have been unrecognizable to a resident of the same area in the late 19th century. Much of what we think of as “traditional” southern Chinese life really only gels and comes together in a recognizable form in the 18th century.

Faure brings substantial documentary evidence to bear on these questions. Nor does he shy away from attacking or reevaluating much of prior academic literature on the region. His work engaged directly with the likes of Diane Murray, Maurice Freedman (perhaps the best known student of the lineage system in southern China) and Fredrick Wakeman Jr. (whose works on political history and conflict have been invaluable to those trying to understand the problem of social violence in southern China).

Faure’s critiques demand a substantial reevaluation of Freeman’s work yet he often seems to support Murray’s findings. His engagement with Wakeman is perhaps the most critical issue for students of martial arts studies. Yet in a number of cases I am not convinced that his broad reading of events is all that different from his predecessor’s. Of course with my own background being in political economy, I have to admit that his presentation of the institutional micro-foundations behind these clashes is pretty compelling.

This is also the reason why I haven’t really been writing about Faure. His work demands a close reading that students of social life in southern China will love, but those of us primarily interested in martial arts are likely to find it to be impenetrable. A careful review of his various debates with Wakeman might be more interesting for students of martial arts history. Yet it would also take more time to pull together than I have this evening. That will have to wait for another post.

Instead I would like to look at three insights that emerged during Faure’s description of Guangdong province’s growing economic prosperity in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Each of them opens a space to better understand the world that southern China’s martial artists inhabited. Taken together they remind us that it is probably pointless to research the social history of individual practitioners or styles without also striving to continually update our understanding of the world that these actors were embedded in.

A water feature in the Liang Yuan Gardens. Source: Wikimedia (CC).

Foot Binding in Southern China

Gender is a popular topic in discussions of Chinese martial studies. It can be addressed from various perspectives ranging from the purely historical to the highly theoretical. Over the years the southern Chinese martial arts have created large numbers of mythic female heroines. They can be found in operas, films, novels and style creation myths. Yet martial arts historians are quick to remind us that in reality very few females ever practiced boxing.
Period accounts would seem to confirm this, and the lack of female participation is theoretically overdetermined. Everything from the economic functions of the martial arts to the existence of strong taboos against mixed-gender association would have made this difficult. The practice of foot binding is also frequently noted as an explanation of female exclusion.

How realistic is this last reason? While a few female martial artists did exist, we know that they were relatively rare. How much of a role did the practice of foot binding play in this?

Early western observers of life in Southern China were fascinated by this topic and often included descriptions of women with tiny feet in their accounts. Indeed, artist and social critics alike reproduced the image of bound feet. Nathan Dunn made sure to include multiple pairs of diminutive women’s shoes in his famous Chinese Museum.

Nevertheless, this is one area where we need to be careful about putting too much emphasis on contemporary western accounts. Very few European or American visitors were allowed to venture far from their factories in Canton during the early 19th century. As such they didn’t really have much of an opportunity to observe how most of the women of the region went about their daily business.

The first thing that we need to bear in mind is that while foot binding was practiced in the Pearl River Delta, it was not universal. Women from the Hakka, Manchu and Tanka groups never bound their feet. Nor does it appear that the habit was as strictly practiced among Cantonese women in the second half of the 18th century and early 19th century as one might suppose.

While discussing the growing economic prosperity of the population of the Pearl River Delta region during this period, Faure turns to eyewitness accounts left by Zhang Qu, the provincial surveillance commissioner. In a work titled “Seen and Heard in Guangdong” (Yuedong Wenjian Lu, 1738) Zhang makes a number of important observations.

He notes that in absolute terms the majority of women in Guangdong did not bind their feet. This practice seemed to be restricted to women from the better families of the region. But even then foot binding generally did not begin until the girl was already about 12 years old. Zhang noted that while men tended to wear shoes, most women went barefoot. While they often owned shoes they carried them as an accessory in their sleeves and only put them on when entering a friend’s or neighbor’s home. Lower status women, such as servants, tended to go barefoot at all times, even when traveling to the market.

It would be interesting to look for some other accounts to collaborate this report. But if Zhang’s report is to be believed it suggests that the practice of foot binding was probably not a key critical factor in keeping women out of the martial arts. Other rules of social propriety were probably much more influential. Further, female boxers such as Fei Ching Po, probably didn’t have to worry about foot binding at all due to their social background and generally low social status.

Another structure in the Liang Yuan Garden. Source: Wikimedia (cc).

Printing and the Commercialization of the Southern Chinese Martial Arts

In two prior posts (see here and here) we have encountered western descriptions of the production and sale of printed martial arts training manuals in the marketplaces of the Pearl River Delta region during the early and middle parts of the 19th century. These works were very simple and included crude wooden block illustrations along with short descriptions of movements or strength training exercises. They were also quite inexpensive and appear to have been a popular genera of ephemera.

In this case we are very much in the debt of these early western accounts as I am not aware of any surviving examples of this once thriving trade. Of course that has always been the problem with ephemera. Cheaply printed chapbooks and almanacs conveyed much of an era’s popular culture in both the East and West, yet it is always surprising how few of these works remain.

Still, if we wish to better understand the few accounts of these early predecessors of modern manuals that have come down to us, we need to know a little bit more about the publishing industry that created and sold them. Only then can we start to make some guesses about the function of this sort of material in local popular culture.

Unsurprisingly the fortunes of Guangdong’s publishing industry closely followed the rapid economic rise of the region which occurred in the closing decades of the 18th century, and the first years of the 19th. Prior to this boom there had been very little book publishing in the region. Scholars had produced and distributed works as written manuscripts, and it is known that a reading public existed. Yet the wooden printing blocks that the area produced cheaply in the middle of the 18th century were often shipped to other cities (such as Nanjing) where the actual publishing and marketing of the books happened.

Yet by the first decade of the 19th century the area suddenly had a thriving publishing industry which was producing a large number of works for a reading public that encompassed a great many levels of education and interest. Academic works and collections of poetry were plentiful, but increasingly bookstores began to carry cheaply produced mass market works including religious texts, story-telling scripts, and collections of songs. Of course boxing primers were also on offer.

Faure points out that much of this material was closely related to the vernacular performance traditions that later came to be known as “Cantonese Opera” (another subject of much interest to students of the region’s martial arts). In fact, this cheaply produced literature was notable for the degree to which it incorporated local dialect terms into a more recognizable classical framework. Hand copied texts remained popular, but it is hard to underestimate how important the development of the local printing industry was to the creation of a robust sense of regional identity.

Mirroring some of the arguments that Benedict Anderson made elsewhere, Ching May-bo has asserted that it was the emergence of this printed vernacular (designed to feed growing market demand) coupled with certain intellectual trends among local elites that created the “Cantonese identity” in the first two decades of the 19th century.

Local pride and identity has always been a central feature of the area’s martial arts. As such it is fascinating to realize that the very first printed southern Chinese martial arts manuals were being produced as part of the wave of popular literature that strengthened and gave birth to the region’s Cantonese culture. This discovery once again illustrates how central Chinese martial studies can be to gaining a better understanding of the fundamental structure of social life.

A view from the Liang Yuan garden contrasting old and new Foshan. Source: Wikimedia (cc).

Foshan: A Trip to the Market

Very often discussions of the “commercialization” of the traditional Asian martial arts place this development in the recent past, often tying it to the process of the globalization and cultural appropriation. But as the foregoing discussion suggests, the commodification of the martial arts far predates the internet, Bruce Lee or the Vietnam War.

It is clear that the growth of economic markets promoted certain sorts of developments within the martial arts. The need for large numbers of security personal to safeguard trade and the evolution of a more heavily monetized economy alone can account for a certain amount of change in the sociology of violence. Yet what is really interesting to note is that these growing marketplaces were not just facilitating the practice of the martial arts, rather they were commercializing the image of these fighting systems through the development and spread of popular media.

This sort of commercial exploitation appears to have been baked into the southern fighting arts from the moment of their emergence as a self-conscious social institution. In fact, the emergence of this commercialized discourse on the martial arts appears to be co-constitutive with the formation of location identity itself.

Clearly “the marketplace” needs to be a central actor in our understanding of the emergence of the modern Chinese martial arts. So what did the markets of the Pearl River Delta look like in the late 18th and early 19th century, during the period of rapid economic growth directly prior to the Opium Wars and the Taiping Rebellion?

To borrow a term from Faure, the martial arts, like so much else of the region’s 19th century culture, emerged from an economically driven “culture of consumption” (Faure 249). Luckily students of this region have a handful of interesting descriptions of Foshan, the consummate market town and an incubator for regional martial arts development, which give us some idea of what this culture may have looked like.

One of the many printed works produced during this period was an 1830 walking guide to the market streets of Foshan. The original work was 13 pages long (more a pamphlet than a book) which now survives in only a single known copy held by the British Library. I have already checked and this manuscript is not listed in their electronic catalog. My guess is that not that many scholars have ever worked with it.

David Faure includes a brief overview/translation of the text within his own work. Its description of the richness and vitality of Foshan’s markets is important enough that I am including the entire section below so that readers can get a better idea of the density and sophistication of the commercial world that gave rise to practices like Foshan’s lineages of Wing Chun, Choy Li Fut and Hung Gar.

“Down Odd Street (Qiling jie), for instance, one found the medicinal herbs guild, which sold medicines from Sichuan and Hunan-Hubei. To its west, one passed into Ever-Prosperous Street (Changxing jie), where yarn, lamps, soap, boots, cups and various musical instruments such as the lute and the flute were sold, and to its south there was Woolen Yarn Street, which sold gold thread, flattened, gold-leaf sacrificial paper, used formal gentry dress, and miscellaneous books.

Odd Street was not yet a major business center in Foshan. The main street would seem to have been Prosperity and Office Lane, where there were three hundred shops selling goods from the capital and other provinces; these included jewelers, sellers of books from the lower Yangzi, and sellers of winter hats and furs, sewing needles, and paper items of all sorts, including invitation cards.

For the local products for which Foshan was famous, one went to the Yellow Umbrella Main Street, which had shops selling incense, iron wire and lace hats. This led to High Ground, which sold local silk. Next to the “longevity tablets guildhall”—undoubtedly a local temple at which spirit tablets were deposited—at Wealthy Ward and Morning Market, there were shops selling medicinal powder and rouge. On Prosperity and Peace Street, there were iron foundries and more shops selling pills.

These were only some of the retail shops, for the wholesalers were to be found beyond the stretch leading from the Fen River pier to the Temple of Efficacious Response: high-grade rice shops on White Rice Street, but course rice on Gui County Street; palm-leaf fan shops on Peace Street, tobacco shops on North Street, mat dealers on Old Betel Nut Street, cotton dealers on Bean Paste Street, Fujian paper stores on Prosperity Street, chopsticks, brass water pipers, objects made from buffalo horn, and imported knives on Straight Chopstick Street, and cast iron woks in North Victory Ward.

Near the part of Foshan known as Danjia Sands, one found trades that went with the lower status suggested by the name of the place: coffin shop, timber shop, and shops for wooden grinders. Tianhou temple on the road from the Fenshui pier leading east, where there was also shops selling course rice and cast iron incense burners. The fish and pig market were there too, and located there as well were the Red Flower Guild—the theatrical companies guild for the whole of the Pearl River Delta—and, possibly because of its presence, shops selling theatrical costumes.

Many other guilds were located in Foshan too: the Jiangxi Guild was on Bran Paste Street, the Fujian Paper Guild and the Southern Hubei Guild on Peace Street, the North Hubei Guild on Forward Street, the Shaanxi Guild at West End, the Zhejiang Guild at the Solemn Gate, and the Frying Pan Guild at Strange Bird Temple.”

Liang Yuan garden has a particularly fine collection of viewing stones such as this magnificent example. Source: http://www.chinatouronline.com

Conclusion

Nothing in this post has spoken to the actual practices of individuals like Wong Wah Bo, Leung Yee Tai or Leung Jan. Yet our quick look at the markets of the Pearl River Delta has revealed some interesting facts about the social world that shaped their art. To begin with, the exclusion of female students was likely based on cultural norms and taboos rather than the practice of foot binding.

Secondly, both the southern martial arts and opera were closely related to the boom in cheaply printed vernacular material that would give rise to Cantonese identity in the early 19th century. This not only tells us something important about popular tastes in the period, but it also reminds us that the commercialization of these fighting systems is not a new development. It appears that they have existed in a media discourse (initially promoted by chap-books and opera) from the very start.

Lastly, the martial arts of the Pearl River Delta were connected in complicated ways to a much larger and more vibrant commercial world that many of us might expect. Understanding the development and spread of these fighting systems may shed light on how the development of this “culture of consumption” affected those at the lower end of the social scale. While Faure’s work does not explicitly deal with martial arts, it does reveal quite a bit about the social foundations on which these practices rested.

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If you enjoyed this post you might also want to read: The Soldier, the Marketplace Boxer and the Recluse: Mapping the Social Location of the Martial Arts in Late Imperial China.

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Opium Poppy. Source: Wikimedia.

***I am in the middle of a reading project to prepare for some up-coming posts here at Kung Fu Tea.  As such I have decided turn to the archives for this Friday’s post.  This essay was initially written to provide some context for discussions of opium use among southern Chinese martial artists, including possibly Ip Man.  Readers responded well to it when it first came out in December of 2013, and if nothing else it may help to bring an often romanticized aspect of life during the Republic era into greater focus.  Enjoy!***

Introduction: Wu Song Beats the Tiger

One of the fascinating, yet also frustrating, aspects of Chinese popular culture is the facility with which it generates rich new vocabularies to describe the everyday minutia of life.  In some areas, most famously among Republic era criminal groups, these quirks of language could become almost an independent dialect.  The thick patchwork of euphemism and allusions managed to convey the speaker’s essential point to initiated members of the “Rivers and Lakes” (often in very colorful terms), yet it would baffle the average listener.  Indeed being fluent in the speech patterns of these groups was a valuable job skill for any member of an armed escort company and many other types of martial artists as well.

Many areas of Chinese civil society (and the martial arts are no exception) exhibit this same tendency.  Still, the areas traditionally dominated by criminal enterprises, perhaps due to the increased need for discretion, seem to have gone the farthest down this linguistic byway.  The world of opium smoking and drug abuse is a good example of this.

By in large individuals who lived in Guangzhou and southern China did not go to “opium dens” to spend time and get their fix.  Only anti-opium zealots and foreign missionaries used terms like that.  Most people claimed to go to “chatting houses.”  Indeed period accounts of opium selling establishments describe them as full of conversation as the various patrons discussed the day’s events in an atmosphere that is often sharply at odds with our current notions of what an “opium den” should be.

Likewise the act of smoking opium itself accumulated a number of catch phrases over the years.  One in particular got me thinking about the longstanding connection (at least in popular mythology) between opium use and the Chinese martial arts.  Residents of the Pearl River Delta region of southern China during the 1920s and 1930s would often refer to opium smoking as “Beating the Tiger.”

This phrase is a direct reference to the classical and very popular novel Water Margin in which the hero Wu Song kills a tiger with his bare hands while in a highly inebriated state.  The story of Wu’s exploits are among the best known in Chinese martial fiction and countless schools have named some pose, position for routine in his honor.  Yet most of us would not think of opium users as potential “Tiger killers.”

Indeed the stereotypical image of an opium addict is a shrunken, emaciated husk of a human being, lethargically dreaming away the remaining years of their life.  Nor is this view of opium consumption confined to the west.  Anti-opium campaigners in China went to great lengths to create and popularize this image during the late Qing and Republic periods.

Yet the reality of Opium use in southern China was more complex than the simple portraits produced for public consumption.  In fact the use of this drug intersected with a number of important cleavages in Chinese society.  It was used by a wide variety of individuals for different reasons depending on their economic class, social standing and physical health.

Nor can we take the Republican government’s half-hearted “crusade” for opium eradication at face value.  In truth the “anti-opium medicine” distributed by the officially licensed “opium treatment centers” was simply a highly taxed attempt at establishing a government monopoly on drug sales.  It is unlikely that any of the county or provincial offices in Republican China could have financed their day to day operations without the revenues that came from the sale of narcotics.

Given the prominent place that opium consumption occupies in our discussion of popular culture during the Republic of China, how did it influence the martial arts?  When we read accounts of martial arts masters campaigning against the use of the opium, how do these views help to situate them in the ongoing public debates of the period?

Alternatively, when we come across accounts of addicted martial arts masters, what questions should we as critical historians of popular culture actually be asking?  How common was drug abuse in southern China during the Republic period?  And if we do encounter clear evidence of drug use, how does that help us to understand the milieu that surrounded the martial arts?

This is too large a topic to fully address in a single blog post.  Instead my goal will be to provide some basic background that might be helpful in thinking about this issue, and to briefly discuss how opium intersected with three distinct issues that helped to define Chinese life during the 1920s-1930s.  These are the questions of economic class, political loyalties and access to modern health care.

A Woman Smoking Opium in Shanghai. Source: Unkown.

Political Narratives and the Limits of our Understanding of Opium Use

It would be an understatement to say that opium use was a politicized issue during the Republic of China period.  Despite frequent assertions to the contrary opium was not introduced to China from the west (though British traders did open up a new route to import supplies from India in the early 19^th century).  Indeed the drug has been part of China’s traditional pharmacopeia since at least the Song dynasty and its various effects and medical uses were well understood by medical doctors.  Prior to the introduction of European imports the drug was too expensive for most poor patients to afford, but it was produced locally in some areas of China.  It was routinely used to treat the symptoms of a number of ailments ranging from asthma and tuberculosis to arthritis and declining appetite.

So far as opium’s use was confined to the well-off and generally (though not always) explained in medicinal terms, it was of little interest to the government.  However the rapid increase of imports during the 19^th century created a vast new pool of peasant and urban working-class consumers.  It also created a terrifying balance of payments problem for the Chinese economy as silver began to stream out, meaning that it could no longer be used to finance the military and government.  At this point the state’s paternal duty became clear and opium use was increasingly portrayed as a social scourge with serious economic and national consequences.

Throughout the Republic period the government routinely treated all users of opium as addicts.  Further, high rates of opium “addiction” were pointed to as explanations for various social, political and economic failings.  Reformers pointed to opium use in the ranks (rather than poor leadership and the lack of modern supply lines) as the real reason behind China’s various military defeats at the hands of western powers.  Increased opium consumption by the peasants was seen as a cause for the economic impoverishment of the countryside (though unbiased social observers doubted that the countryside was in fact any more impoverished than it had been in the heyday of the Qing dynasty.)

Opium use was seen as a source of both physical and psychological weakness in the body politic.  The Japanese in particular were suspected of importing large amounts of the drug into China as part of a plot to weaken the resistance of the Chinese people (as opposed to simple greed, a more traditional motivation).  The use of opium by young men was seen as especially dangerous as it robbed the productive class of its ability to work and build the economy.  Slowly China was being reduced to a nation of wastrels.  Was it any wonder that others looked at China and called it the sick man of Asia?

The reality of the situation was much more complicated than any of the critiques by anti-opium crusaders might suggest.  Virgil K. Y. Ho has written one of the most comprehensive reevaluations of the opium issue in Chapter 3 (“The Problem of Opium Smoking in Canton”) of his volume Understanding Canton: Rethinking Popular Culture in the Republican Period (Oxford UP, 2005).  I recently undertook a reading project on urban life and its attendant problems in Southern China during the 1920s-1930s.  So far this book has proved to be extremely valuable.

If you have any interest in these issues I suggest getting hold of a copy.  Most of the social background on opium use in this post is drawn from Ho’s examination of period source.  Unfortunately he never really addresses hand combat in his carefully researched volume.  Nevertheless, it still provides a useful starting point for a lot of discussions that will be of interest to students of Chinese martial studies.

Ho notes that it is basically impossible to find anything like official statistics on the rates of opium use or addiction in Guangzhou and the surrounding countryside in the 1920s-1930s.  One missionary reported that around 60% of the young men in the city smoked opium, but it doesn’t seem that this is a reliable figure.  The local government itself was remarkably coy in its attempts to assess the scale of the problem.  This is likely because the KMT was the largest drug dealer in the city.  Most of its records focused on the amount of money that it earned from selling narcotics franchises to various tax farming companies, and not their customers.

Still, one would never suspect this to be the case simply by listening to their rhetoric.  Sun Yat Sen’s strong denunciations of opium use were widely republished.  The government also sponsored occasional campaigns to get families to commit drug addicted members into the state run recovery programs.  It is unknown how successful these detox efforts actually were.  But given the government’s reliance on opium revenues we should not be surprised to learn that they only received half-hearted support from the state.

Ho estimates that by 1930 Guangzhou had a population of about 1 million individuals.  The various methods that he employed for estimating drug use yielded different figures, but on average it seems that the city had a few tens of thousands of serious drug addicts during most of this period, rather than the hundreds of thousands suggested by some official accounts.  Indeed opium use was a common feature of local popular culture, but according to his estimates its consumption does not seem to have reached the same levels (or had the same socially destructive effects) as what was observed further north in Shanghai at roughly the same time.

One of the problems with estimating these numbers is knowing who to count as a “drug addict.”  Official KMT propaganda cut the Gordian knot by simply treating any individuals who had used opium at any time for any reason as an “addict.”  In the case of drugs like heroine (which would become a problem later in this period) this is probably correct.  Yet Ho notes that the social reality of opium consumption was actually much more complex than that.

To begin with the drug had a long and distinguished history in traditional Chinese medicine where it was used to treat the symptoms of a number of diseases and as a general painkiller.  Interestingly enough opium was actually quite effective in many of these roles.  In fact, we still use codeine, a derivative of the same drug, for some of the same purposes today.

Ho also pointed out that most people who used opium, even recreationally, never became addicted to it in the classical sense of the term.  When prices went up they responded by consuming less or ceasing to use the drug all together.  This doesn’t mean that a number of people didn’t become addicted to it.

In fact, tens of thousands of individuals at a time became physiologically dependent on the drug.  Once established, breaking the addiction could be very difficult, with hospitals in Guangzhou and Taiwan reporting a 2-10% mortality rate for those who tried to do so even in medically supervised settings.  But this was not the experience of most people who took the drug.

A typical period postcard featuring female drug addicts. This post card was also published in Japan, probably in the 1920s.

Official accounts are full of stories of individuals being bankrupted by the exorbitant costs of opium and turning to crime or banditry.  Again Ho finds little truth to these claims.  Bandits were likely to be habitual opium users, but they tended to end up in their rarified profession for economic and social reasons that had nothing to do with opium per se.  In fact the drug was available in a number of grades and strengths that ranged from the luxurious (fine imported Indian opium) to the dirt cheap (the Japanese “red pills”).  It was the rapidly falling price of this good that allowed it to transition from a rich man’s medicine to a general feature of Chinese society in the first place.

In short, Ho concludes that much of the official rhetoric around opium consumption is somewhat deceptive.  While a dangerous substance, opium addiction rates were lower than many period accounts would lead one to suspect.  Further, the actual reasons why opium was consumed tended to be rather complex and to evade any broad generalizations.

The government’s interest in the substance is easier to grasp.  After making some initial plans to actually suppress opium consumption the KMT quickly came to realize that they could not finance their various military and political projects without the revenue stream that an official opium monopoly promised.  The party’s monopoly in this area was challenged by other factions seeking to capture a piece of the market including organized criminal gangs, foreign merchants (notably the Japanese during this period), and even certain groups within the Chinese military who wanted an independent revenue stream.  While the KMT’s official rhetoric decried opium consumption, its actual actions were less convincing.

Still, not all elements in Chinese society treated the issue as lightly as the government did.  A number of groups across the political spectrum campaigned against opium consumption.  Martial arts groups were often part of this.  The Jingwu Association sought to physically strengthen the Chinese people through the spread of the martial arts and improved hygiene.  They positioned themselves as opponents of opium consumption in an attempt to bolster their nationalist appeal.

Other individuals, such as the Taiji Quan master T. T. Liang had a more personalized understanding of the problem.  Prior to taking up Taiji Liang had been a customs official for the KMT.   One of the requirements of his job was to see that the correct shipments of drugs were received at the port, but the supply of competing dealers (including the Triads and other military groups) was kept out.  Needless to say this aspect of his career nearly got him killed more than once.

While Liang survived the more deadly encounters of his youth his constant exposure to the world of drugs, alcohol and women eventually caught up with him, landing him in a hospital at a relatively young age.  He credited his subsequent study of the martial arts with restoring his physical health and spiritual balance.

It is important to remember that the 1930s were a critical time in the evolution of the traditional Chinese martial arts.  These fighting systems were being introduced into newly expanding urban areas.  Of course these were precisely the sorts of places where vices like drug use, alcoholism and prostitution were also on the rise.

In this environment it is not hard to understand why so many individuals might turn to the martial arts as both a physical practice, but also a social structure, to help them reassert control over their lives.  Indeed, this promise of personal restoration and empowerment is central to the Republic era martial arts revolution.

Some groups, such as Jingwu and the Central Guoshu Institute, refocused this promise on the nation as a whole.  Yet I suspect that many of the era’s students were actually looking for a more personal type of salvation.  In this context the turn towards “internal training” rather than “combat efficiency” actually makes a good deal of practical sense.  Rather than simple escapism, this move was an attempt to address some of the concrete problems of the period.

Of course other martial artists would have found themselves on the opposite side of this issue.  Many of these individuals were employed either in the military or the various government police forces during this period.  Some of them would have been tasked with ensuring the proper flow of drugs.  Thus when we hear rumors, such as the persistent claim that Ng Chung So’s school was run out of an opium den in Foshan, we should stop and consider what this really implies.

If this is true (and there is not a lot of actual evidence other than hearsay at this point in time) what does this imply about the place of Wing Chun in Foshan’s larger social structure and economy of violence?  Whose opium was being sold here?  Was it officially licensed and taxed opium, provided by the KMT?  Or were these illicit drugs that came through shadier channels?

Later accounts claim that this particular “chatting house” was partially owned or run by a local gangster named “Bird Fancier Lam.”  It is also supposed to have been a well-known establishment which was patronized by the sons of many wealthy and successful businessmen (exactly the same sorts of individuals who studied Wing Chun with Ng).  If all of this true, then a fascinating picture emerges.

For purely political reasons it seems unlikely that the local gentry would hang out in an establishment that was constantly in danger of being raided whenever the government decided that they wanted to shore up their market share.  This was actually a fairly common occurrence at the time and it might lead to blackmail attempts.  The nature of its supposed clientele might suggest that Ng’s opium den was either officially licensed by the government or was at least making the proper payments to stay in their good graces (and hence to operate openly in the middle of town).

If (and this is a real supposition) all of this is true, then we now know a couple of important things about the social position of Wing Chun in the Foshan era.  This was not an anti-establishment group.  Rather it recruited from the more economically successful members of the local community, and its central school operated out of an establishment that was likely under de facto government protection.  The fact that “Bird Fancier Lam” was involved with the establishment would also suggest something about the sort of individuals who the local government was willing to team up with in the establishment of their opium monopoly.

Very often modern historical accounts assert (often with no evidence other than a hand full of oral accounts which might date back to the 1970s) that one master or another was an opium user.  The label of “addict” also gets tossed around rather freely.  I think a lot of modern martial arts students have a romanticized view of the past and simply accept that everyone smoked opium because that is what China was like.  This is not really the case.

As students of martial studies we need to consider these claims much more carefully.  It may well be that certain prominent individuals did use opium, or some other drug.  Yet this is a claim that needs to be proven.  I say that not because I am all that interested in protecting the honor of past masters.  Rather, if such an assertion can be demonstrated, it becomes as a treasure trove of social and personal information.

Individuals consumed opium for a variety of complex reasons.  Nor was there only one source for these drugs.  All of this helps us to paint a detailed picture of these individuals within local society.   Thus when we hear an account of drug use we need to consider the credibility of our sources and then think long and hard about what else this might imply about a given master’s career and social status.

Gentlemen smoking both opium and tobacco pipes. Source: Charles J. H. Halcombe. The Mystic Flower Land. 1896.

Who Actually Smoked Opium?  Wealth and Public Health

Ho asserts that while opium use had started out as a privilege of the rich, by the 1930s the habit was widely distributed throughout society.  Working class individuals seem to have been particularly prone to use the drug for a variety of reasons.  After all, these people were the least likely to have access to modern biology based medicine.  Thus when they had an illness, anything from a toothache to cancer, they were more likely to turn to opium to treat the symptoms of the disease rather than to go to a hospital and receive more comprehensive medical care.  And in some cases (such as the large numbers of people who died of tuberculosis each year) there simply was no effective cure to be had.

Of course the working poor had other reasons to turn to opium use.  We typically think of the drug as inducing a lethargic dream like state in the user.  This could happen when taken in large doses.  Yet opium could also have a number of other effects.  Users (particularly those who took smaller doses) reported feeling energized and less sensitive to fatigue and pain.

Individuals like rickshaw pullers, coolies and salt porters tended to use opium at much higher rates than other groups.  These were physically grueling occupations with long working days (12 hour shifts were not uncommon).  People in these professions were also likely to sustain injuries that would make it difficult to continue to work.  Yet for many such employees missing a day’s work meant going without a meal.

During normal times the average porter or rickshaw puller could buy a day’s worth of opium for about 10% of their salary (prices could spike rapidly in times of political instability).  Given the relative cheapness of some versions of the drug it is not surprising that such individuals used it as an aid to overcome the boredom and sheer physical exhaustion of their days.  It was these individuals, who turned to opium for its simulative properties, who found within it Wu Song’s elixir.  Like their hero they were also seeking to “beat a tiger.”

We often associate opium use with muscular atrophy and physical weakness.  However, as Ho points out, this is basically a myth (with the exception of some serious cases of long term addiction).  Those symptoms usually have more to with malnutrition and other underlying health concerns.  One of the attractions of opium for working class individuals was precisely the fact that it did not lead to the same sorts of physical degradation as other drugs, and thus it did not impair their ability to do physical work.  For the most part you could not tell who was a regular opium user simply by looking at them.

Opera singers were also likely to turn to opium as a source of energy and revitalization in an otherwise brutal working environment.  Ho reports that during the festival season some opera musicians might actually be forced to perform for more than 20 hours a day with only a few breaks.  Between public performances and private appearances opera singers might also face taxing schedules.  Opium was usually sold by licensed vendors at temple festivals.  Their concession fees helped to pay for the opera performance.  As such there is a traditional association between Cantonese opera and opium consumption.

This is interesting as it was precisely these sorts of individuals, people employed in steady jobs, but on the lower end of the socio-economic spectrum, that were most likely to end up as martial artists during the 1920s and 1930s.  While some martial reformers were pushing to recruit members of the middleclass, by in large the martial arts remained a powerfully working-class phenomenon in places like Foshan and Guangzhou.

Of course wealthy individuals also consumed opium.  Occasionally they even took up Kung Fu.

Ho reports that in general society tolerated opium use by elites to a much greater extent than by the working class.  Wealthy individuals were thought to tolerate the effects of the drug better because of their healthier diets and lifestyles.  I suspect that government officials also assumed that respectable members of the community were less likely to become addicted to the drug because of their superior “will-power” and “morality.”  Of course such beliefs also exempted powerful members of society from the same social constraints that were being promoted for everyone else.

Ho reports that by the Republic period every upper class home being built in Guangzhou contained a special parlor set aside where guests could be entertained and enjoy smoking exotic imported opium.  More disturbingly he notes that certain upper-class families also intentionally addicted their sons to opium smoking in an attempt to keep them in the house and away from the brothels and gambling establishments of the city where they might do real harm to the family’s fortune.

It is clear that Southern China’s upper class in the 1920s-1930s did not share the same moral panic about opium smoking which occasionally swept through the rest of society.  Still, this does not mean that everyone of financial means was an opium addict.  Rather it was seen as less of a problem than other social ills such as gambling.

Ip Man as he actually existed during the Hong Kong years.

Conclusion: Was Ip Man an Opium Addict?

For students of Wing Chun this entire discussion tends to become very personalized.  Starting in the 1980s there were a number of accounts that surfaced claiming that Ip Man was in fact a drug addict.  The details of these rumors tended to vary from one account to the next.  Ip Man was known to be a heavy tobacco smoker and most of the accusations suggested that he also consumed opium as well.  A few claimed that he was a heroin addict.  Indeed that drug had gained popularity during the late Republic period.

Some of these accounts focus on a period of his life in Hong Kong during the 1950s, while others purport to comment on his prior incarnation as a still carefree playboy in Foshan.  In some stories (notably one passed on by Leung Ting) his addiction is linked to an affair with a woman from Shanghai.  Interestingly none of these accounts (at least nothing that I have yet seen) claim that he was still using drugs in the final decade of his life.  This is the period that we actually have the most information about.

Judging the credibility of these accounts is very difficult.  Obviously there is a strong tendency to defend the honor of one’s teacher, especially in a period when drug use has been redefined as a serious crime.  Thus we must remember that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

At the same time, many of the existing accounts of his drug use have their own credibility issues.  Some are second or even third hand.  A lot of them are simply implausible.  Ip Man’s gaunt appearance late in life had a lot more to do with the fact that he was dying of throat cancer than any past drug use.  Some of these accusations seem to be an attempt by students of one generation to discredit the martial heritage of their Kung Fu brothers by claiming that Ip Man’s teachings at other times was compromised.  Only they were in a position to inherit his “true system.”  Given the nature of lineage politics these sorts of claims need to be treated with caution.

In various interviews conducted in Hong Kong my research partner has repeatedly and directly asked Ip Ching (Ip Man’s younger son who lived with him during the 1960s) about the accusations of drug use.  He has flatly denied any knowledge of his father ever using drugs, whether opium or heroin.  Of course most of the stories focus on either the 1950s (while he was still in Guangdong) or the 1920-1930s.

It is possible that Ip Man may have habitually used drugs in the past but was clean by the final decade of his life.  Still, a serious addiction is a tough thing to beat.  What Ho would remind us is that most of the people who consumed opium during the Republic period, for whatever reason, did not end up as junkies.  Nor was it usually possible so casually assess whether someone was a drug addict.  Losing weight and spending a lot of time napping are not actually evidence of drug use.  In Ip Man’s case they could well be evidence of growing old.  We often forget that he took up Wing Chun instruction in Hong Kong at the same stage of life at which most people are thinking about retirement.

Was Ip Man a serious drug addict?  There does not seem to be much in the way of actual independent and verifiable evidence to support that, at least for the later stages of his life.  Did he habitually use drugs at some point in time?  That is more plausible.  Occasional opium use was pretty common in Southern China within his social class during the Republic era.  His employment as a detective in the police department would have brought him into close contact with both the criminal and official elements that drove the area’s narcotics trade.

After reviewing the various accounts I remain hesitant to answer this question in a definitive way.  Ip Man’s life seems to be passing from the realm of “lived history” to “martial arts mythology.”  As such we need to carefully consider the ultimate origin and function of these accusations.

Regular readers of Kung Fu Tea will know that I am generally an advocate of “warts and all” biography.  Still, I am concerned that these sorts of accounts are a symptom of an “Orientalizing” tendency within the martial arts community.  Our romantic notions of the past lead us to accept a vision of Chinese popular culture and its relationship with narcotics that is actually not all that accurate.  I suspect that these sorts of stories tell us as much about Ip Man’s teenage students during the 1950s (and even us today) as they do about him.

In conclusion, these are accounts that need to be demonstrated rather than simply asserted and accepted.  If we could show that Ip Man did use certain drugs at a specific point in time, this would actually open a valuable window into understanding his place (and by implication Wing Chun’s place) in Chinese popular culture.  From a historical perspective this is a very exciting prospect.  Yet it is precisely the value of this potential discovery that necessities caution on our part when evaluating our current sources.

Of course students of Chinese martial studies will encounter very similar issues in other styles and lineages. Nothing about this issue is really unique to Wing Chun.  Instead it points to the importance of placing the martial arts within the broader framework of the era’s popular culture, rather than attempting to understand them in pristine isolation.

oOo

A weight used in the measurement and sale of opium. Source: Wikimedia.

oOo

The Creation of Wing Chun: A Social History of the Southern Chinese Martial Arts by Benjamin Judkins and Jon Nielson. State University of New York Press, 2015.  This work looks at southern Chinese martial arts traditions and how they have become important to local identity and narratives of resistance.

Last week I noticed that Kung Fu Tea had attracted over half a million views since its launch in 2012.  That seemed like a significant milestone and I wanted to do something to mark the occasion, but I wasn’t sure what.  Luckily the State University of New York Press mailed out their fall catalog resolving my dilemma.  While flipping through its pages I discovered (much to my surprise) that my volume on the social history of the southern Chinese martial arts is now available for pre-order.  A quick chat with the editor confirmed that the books are leaving the print shop now and everything is expected to be in the warehouse by July 1.    As such we will be celebrating the half-million visit threshold with a book launch!

We are very pleased that this project found a home with SUNY Press.  They have published some great works on the martial arts over the years including both Douglas Wile’s Lost Tai-Chi Classics from the Late Ching Dynasty (1996) and Farrer and Whalen-Bridge’s edited volume Martial Arts as Embodied Knowledge: Asian Traditions in a Transnational World (2011).  Jon Nielson and I are so honored that SUNY decided to continue the line with our volume.  I will be discussing this project more over the next few months, but for now I would like to start with the announcement from the publisher’s catalog:

The Creation of Wing Chun: A Social History of the Southern Chinese Martial Arts

This book explores the social history of the southern Chinese martial arts and their contemporary importance to local narratives of resistance.  Hong Kong’s Bruce Lee ushered the Chinese martial arts onto an international stage in the 1970s. Lee’s teacher, Ip Man, master of Wing Chun Kung Fu, has recently emerged as a visible symbol of southern Chinese identity and pride.

Benjamin N. Judkins and Jon Nielson examine the emergence of Wing Chun to reveal how this body of social practices developed and why individuals continue to to turn to the martial arts as they navigate the challenges of a rapidly evolving global environment.  After surveying the development of hand combat in Guangdong Province from roughly the start of the nineteenth century until 1949, the authors turn to Wing Chun, noting its development, the changing social attitudes towards this practice over time, and its ultimate emergence as a global art form.

Benjamin N. Judkins holds a doctoral degree in political science from Columbia University.  Jon Nielson is chief instructor at Wing Chun Hall in Salt Lake City.

August 1. 362 Pages. 4 Maps, 1 Table

$90 Hardcover ISBN 978-1-4384-5693-5

Click here to order directly from the publisher.

Introduction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bruce Lee. Detailed portrait.

Wing Chun as a Commodity in the Global Marketplace

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two Visions of the Wing Chun Community

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

Warning: Speculation Ahead

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Red Boats and Wooden Dummies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Looking Further into the Nautical Origins of the Jong

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

A simple striking dummy employed in some Bagua schools.

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

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

oOo

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

oOo

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

Introduction: Hong Kong, Regionalism and the Martial Arts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Rise of China’s New Regionalism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion: Hong Kong’s Intangible Cultural Heritage Reconsidered

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

oOo

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

oOo

Source: http://www.swordsantiqueweapons.com

Introduction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

oOo

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

oOo

Ip Man practices Chi Sao With Moy Yat.

Introduction

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

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

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

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

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

A Social History of Chi Sao

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ip Man and his best known student, Bruce Lee.

A Short Visit to Phoenix Village

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion: The Situation Today

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

oOo

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

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Chinese martial arts display. Northern China, sometime in the 1930s.  I particularly like the wide assortment of traditional weapons which can be seen in this photo.  Source: Author’s Personal Collection.

“War is a continuation of politics with other means”
-Carl von Clausewitz, On War

“A sabre,” said my teacher, Szabo,”is a tool for changing your opponent’s mind.”
-“The Sabre’s Edge” by Rogan Winter

Introduction

No topic seems to have grabbed the attention of so many martial arts thinkers, reformers and writers as “reality.” The concept enjoys a prominent place in the ongoing debates about the fate of the traditional hand combat systems in the age of the mixed martial arts and the UFC. Other individuals have employed the metaphor differently, emphasizing the importance of “real world self-defense.”

Nor is this a recent rhetorical innovation. It turns out that certain actors have been debating the reality of the martial arts since the early years of the 20th century. We often forget that the seemingly traditional disciplines of Judo and Kendo in Japan, or the Jingwu Association in China, were themselves reform movements. Their creators were quite concerned with the role of these combat systems in the larger “body politic” of the nation state. For them reality was a matter of modernization and reform.

The advocates of “reality” have never spoken with a single voice. Their discourse has always woven together competing demands and irreconcilable differences as to what the brave new future of the martial arts should hold. This is not to say that they were without some points of convergence. In fact, the one thing that seemingly everyone could agree on was that there was something seriously wrong with the traditional Chinese martial arts.

Secrecy was, and continues to be, viewed as the bane of these systems. Techniques passed on only to favored disciples can imperil the survival of a lineage. Likewise, the inability to standardize practices and the principles of advancement seriously hampered the state’s ability to co-opt these systems of regional knowledge and redeploy them as tools of government policy and nation building. Indeed, the continuing struggle to reform and expand the duan system in mainland China today demonstrates that this has been a long term problem for generations of reformers.

Needless to say, modern combat sports practitioners question many aspects of traditional training, including its emphasis on the learning and performance of various sorts of forms. While weapons play an important part in criminal violence, most schools continue to teach focus on skills such as the sword, spear and tiger fork rather than the more commonly encountered knife, handgun and crowbar. Other modernizers question whether activities such as meditation, internal training or lion dancing should even be associated with the “real” martial arts at all. Where some see cultural richness and heritage, others perceive only techniques that have no place in the octagon.

The following essay will argue that the idea of “reality” is probably doing less to advance our popular (and occasionally even academic) discussions of the martial arts than is generally thought. Or perhaps it would be better to say that our notions of “reality” are sadly under-conceptualized. Violence may be a reality of life. But even a few moments of thought should be enough to convince us that the sorts of violence faced by a modern fighter pilot, a member of a prison cell extraction team and an MMA athlete have very little in common. Each of them might be seriously injured in the pursuit of their occupation. Yet one suspects that their “personal realities” are better defined by their differences than similarities.

It then stands to reason that if we are going to speak about “reality,” particularly as it applies to the traditional Chinese martial arts, we must first begin by being very clear as to who we are talking about and what sorts of situations they actually face. Once we do this a number of complicating factors emerge. Many of the most traditional and seemingly backwards aspects of these social organizations may serve important social function. Finally, I suggest that concepts like “credibility,” “reputation” and “costly signaling” may do more to advance our understanding of the TCMA as a community based strategy for dealing with social violence than the ever shifting mirage of “reality.”

A 1920s postcard showing traditional practitioners performing in a marketplace. Note that both the previous images rest on the assumption of an unseen audience who observes and evaluates this performance. Source: Author’s Personal Collection

Consider the Ants…

Ants are one of the most successful species to ever inhabit the planet earth. Like humans they are social animals that depend on complex systems of communication and specialization for the survival of the community. They also resemble us in having found ingenious ways to colonize and utilize a remarkable percentage of this planet’s landmass. In fact, their sheer population density can lead to some other, less charming, parallels. Certain types of ants commonly engage in border disputes with neighboring colonies.

In a recent review of The Professor in the Cage (Penguin 2015), I criticized a number of aspects of the Jonathan Gottschall’s theoretical and empirical approaches to the problem of social violence. Simply put, I do not believe that evolutionary biology can explain nearly as much about the varieties of violence as the author does.

Still, Gottschall is an engaging writer and I actually liked quite a few things about his sixth chapter titled “War Games.” My initial review of his work ran longer than anticipated so I did not get a chance to explore a few of his insights there. While I continue to disagree with him as to the ultimate cause of these variables, I agree that his observations here raise important issues to consider when studying the problem of social violence. Of particular importance was his discussion of warfare among ants.

As a student of international relations I have spent a lot of time reading, thinking and teaching about war. While my personal research has been in the subfield of political economy, basic IR theory has always been dominated with questions of war and peace. Classes on foreign and security policy tend to generate the sort of student credit hours that cash strapped departments are looking for. And it turns out that we and ants have reached many of the same conclusions about fighting.

The basic problem with warfare, as any scholar of international relations (or soldier ant) can tell you, is that it is very costly. This is a result of the private information (or secrets) that each side hold about their true capabilities. In a world with no secrets, where both sides knew the others’ exact strengths or weaknesses, actual combat would probably never happen. Both sides would be able to calculate with precision who would win, and what the costs would be, in advance of an actual fight.

In this case fighting is not only mathematically irrational, it is just plain dumb. Knowing the outcome in advance the losing side should just hand over what would have been taken. The unpleasantness of war is averted and neither side suffers the material destruction that combat always bring. In short, both sides are better off if you reach a deal rather than fighting. Just like you learned in kindergarten.

Unfortunately we do not live in a world with perfect information about what all actors are actually capable of. Given that no one has a magical crystal ball, everyone will have a very strong incentive to make themselves appear to be stronger than they really are in an effort to convince the others to back down. To further complicate matters, we realize that everyone else is probably lying about their true capabilities, just as we are. As such their shows of strength, giant military parades or promises of bloody retaliation lack credibility.

In practice both sides of any conflict have difficulties calculating what the true probabilities of victory are, or what they stand to lose when they tangle with an opponent of unknown strength. And that is a problem because history has shown that these sorts of calculations on the part of political elites really matter. Countries don’t necessarily go to war because they think they will win. They go to war because they think that they will profit. Actually, China’s long history of negotiations with bandit warlords is a fantastic illustration of this very principal, but that is a topic for another post.

The basic problem then is that under the shadow of incomplete information, talk is cheap. Neither side has an incentive to believe that the threats or promises of the other are legitimate, and so both may miscalculate what they will gain in absolute terms from fighting. Or in the words of one of my teachers “war is in the error term.”

What is really painful about this situation is that diplomats have sensed this, at least on some level, for a very long time. Yet there are no quick and easy ways to escape this problem. Promises lack credibility, and verification schemes can easily be spoofed.

What is needed is some way to bring credibility to the bargaining table. Specifically, genuinely strong parties need to be able to send a signal that everyone can observe which cannot be spoofed. The classic solution to this dilemma is to turn away from promises to inflict pain on the other guy, and to instead do something which inflicts a little pain on yourself.

In the political science literature we refer to these efforts as “costly signals” and it is hoped that they will do at least three things. First, they demonstrate the reality of your resolve. Second they signal your ability to actually pay the costs of carrying out the threat in question (most threats are inherently incredible, but again, that is a post for another day). Lastly, they establish your reputation among other player who may be watching this conflict, but who are not directly involved in it. By creating a strong reputation now you lower the probability of future conflict.

How all of this plays out in the world of modern diplomacy can be somewhat abstract. For instance, economic sanctions are generally only credible (and effective) if the target believes that they are the first step on an escalatory pathway that goes someplace very bad. Sanctions programs that only impose pain on foreign companies are generally seen as lacking this sort of credibility. But if the sending country is willing to impose the sorts of sanctions that would materially damage one of its own important industries, then other players generally sit up and take notice. That is a pretty clear sign that something much worse is coming in the immediate future if steps are not taken now.

Likewise if a leader responds to an attack against their national interest by flying some isolated drone missions, what the antagonist may perceive is that she does not care enough about this issue to risk putting lives on the line. As such they should push forward with their provocations. However, placing “boots on the ground” (and hence in harms way) generally sends a much louder signal about one’s resolve. Again, it is often the costly signal, the one that imposes a certain amount of political or economic pain on yourself, that helps to clarify the problems of incomplete information and avoid needless conflict.

Remarkably the ants have come to the same conclusions without the aid of game theory or formal mathematical models. Gottschall points out that when the worker ants of two competing colonies encounter each other in the field they do not simply engage in total war. That would lead to highly unpredictable and needlessly costly outcomes for both sides. Instead each faction summons its specialized warriors. They form lines, march back and forth, show off their mandibles and engage in limited raids.

This behavior is highly stylized and is notably different from the ant version of “real” warfare. But to say that their behavior in this instance lack “reality” would be to miss the point of what is actually going on. It is still a form of costly violence. Mounting the appropriate mock skirmish lines sacrifices colony resources and it reveals information about the number, variety and strength of the communities in question that is very difficult to fake. In short, it moves the ants out of the realm of incomplete information, and a little closer that theoretical space where the “error term” goes away and unnecessary conflict disappears. A few very weak colonies might simply be overrun after failing to mount a mock defense. But the more usual situation is that both sides sense the relative strength of the two communities, and the shared resources are reallocated towards the stronger party without damaging conflict.

Not bad for a group of insects that have never had the benefit of an intro IR course. Of course the ants have had millions of years to develop their own unique approach to intra-species diplomacy. Gottschall concludes that since similar behaviors can be seen in a wide range of species, from humans to ants, that they must have some sort of basis in evolutionary biology.

I disagree with the last part of this chain of reasoning. Genetic pressure seems like an odd thing to turn to in this case as humans and ants are not particularly closely related and experience selective pressure quite differently. Instead the logic of costly signaling stems from the problem of limited perception and incomplete information. It is fundamentally a paradox of meaning and communication that has been predicted, explored and explained in painstaking mathematical details by theorists such as James Fearon (who developed this concept) and Kenneth Schultz. The mathematical models of both of these scholars would seem to indicate that these patterns of behavior arise out of a very specific sets of structural constraints rather than Darwinian destiny.

A Dragon Dance performed by the Ben Kiam Athletic Association in Manila, Philippines, sometime during the 1950s. Copyright Tambuli Media.

Lion Dancing and the Reality of Kung Fu

Still, these questions of ultimate origins are much less important when we stop to consider how these same principals might apply to the social role of Lion Dancing in the southern Chinese martial arts. I suspect that students of Martial Arts Studies always suffer from what might be called “technical envy.” By this I mean that we tend to be really curious about, and latch onto questions concerning, techniques and practices that are not part of our specific training. In general this expression of human curiosity is a good thing as it helps to avoid too narrow a sectarian view of the martial arts.

Most Wing Chun schools in the Ip Man lineage are not involved with Lion Dancing; so that has always been something that I have struggled to wrap my mind around. In my research I have been particularly interested in accounts of the sorts of social violence and competition that accompanied Lion Dancing in Guangdong during the 1920s-1930s, Hong Kong in the 1950s-1960s and even New York City in the 1970s.

The political scientist in me is fascinated by the fact that a lot of this conflict was rooted in questions of territory and often seemed like an outgrowth of social competition between other important factions or players in local society. Simply put, martial arts schools in southern China during the 1920s-1930s did not exist in a vacuum. They were supported by clan associations, guilds, secret societies, criminal groups, social movements and even political factions.

While not everyone in a given martial arts school might be equally aware of these meta-structural issues, these larger players seem to have benefited from having access to a body of disciplined, somewhat militarized, young men who could project their image in the local community. I think that it goes without saying that there was always a tacit threat in this. But these groups also played a more positive role during community festivals and possibly through their civic associations.

Still, the example of the ants and their solution to the dilemma of incomplete information might help to illustrate certain aspects of what was going on in those tense minutes when two rival Lion Dance troupes met in the street. The size and discipline of each group, as well as their subtle performance of signs of respect and disrespect, were the elements that comprised a form of territorial conflict. Many of these groups were competing for turf. Business owners had to pay for performances and these activities were never without the occasional accusation of being a protection racket. Yet on a more fundamental level one wonders whether this was really about the Lion Dancers at all?

When two troops of Lion Dancers met in the streets of Foshan in the 1920s, was this really a stylized competition between groups of independent martial artists? Or was it a meeting between the much larger Hung Sing and the Zhong Yi associations who organized many of these troops? Or were they simply a cat’s paw for the more deadly conflict between the leftist labor unions and local KMT party machinery that backed these larger community organizations?

In short, individuals who worry about the “reality” of the traditional Chinese martial art and their association with practices such as Lion Dancing, may need to take a step back and reevaluate some of their more basic assumptions. As I mentioned in a discussion with a friend the other day, many of the current uses of the term “reality” seem to focus rather narrowly on the athletic prowess of individual athletes. And there is absolute nothing wrong with that. If your goal is to win a match in the octagon (as was Gottschall’s) then it would be counterproductive not to spend a lot of time and effort in an MMA gym.

Yet the prevalence of costly signals in all sorts of situations where we also see traditional martial artists should cause us to pause. As Clausewitz observed in his opening quote, violence does not happen in a vacuum. In the political arena it is only one part of larger project of getting what you want. Or to put it another way, picking up a sabre is just as much a means of changing someone’s mind as potentially killing them. The fact that costly signals are being sent through the use of certain sorts of force means that there is an intended audience which we should also be paying attention to.

Violence is often an inherently social act. The world of martial arts fiction is replete with stories of lone heroes who take down their nemesis. Yet if history has shown us anything, it is that conflict is usually much more complex than this. Sometimes it engulfs whole communities pitting them against one another. The stakes are much higher in these sorts of encounters, and it should not surprise us to discover that traditional martial arts organization may have had strategies for dealing with these situations. In fact, these were likely the sorts of events that allowed other community actors to justify supporting potentially problematic martial arts schools in the first place.

One of my younger brothers has just started law school in a medium sized city with a history of violence in the neighborhoods surrounding its university campus. A few weeks ago a classmate and his wife were surrounded by a group of seven attackers and viciously beaten while leaving a café near the campus. There was no particular economic, ideological or racial motivation for this crime. It was purely social, and one suspects territorial, in nature.

I bring this event up only because I think that it bears on the question at hand. The victim of this crime was in some ways far from the average guy. He was young, healthy and a military veteran who had returned from combat service in the Middle East. He was familiar with many different levels of “reality based combat training.” And none of that mattered.

Why should we expect it to? Getting ambushed by seven determined attackers is pretty much an impossible situation for an individual to recover from. I think that on some level we all know this. Yet many individuals join martial arts schools precisely because they fear such attacks.

How can this help us to understand traditional Chinese martial arts schools as they evolved during the early and middle years of the 20th century? I suspect that we have a tendency to misunderstand period accounts of these communities because we subconsciously project our own preoccupations and goals onto them. Attacks like the one described above were not uncommon in the various neighborhoods of Hong Kong, reeling as they were with social resentments and a refugee crisis in the early 1950s. Accounts indicate that young men often responded to such events by joining a local martial arts school. Interestingly the police (and often their own parents) viewed this as a form of gang activity. And they may have had very good reasons for doing so.

Can even the most excellent Kung Fu protect you from an ambush by a dozen attackers intent on doing you harm? Probably not. But having a gang of guys at your back, or being a member of group willing to inflict huge costs on those who attack one of their own, does tend to work.

Once we start to think of the basic unit of self-defense as being group rather than the individual, many of the “less realistic” methods of the traditional schools, and even organizations like the Red Spears, start to make a lot of functional sense. Individual athletic prowess, while good, is no longer the most important factor. One wants to be sure that new members of the community will be loyal and disciplined, and so those values are explicitly selected for and tested in training. Public feats of strength, numbers and pain endurance (whether through roof top fights or temple processions) help to build the group’s reputation. Activities like Lion Dancing not only builds morale, but they also provide a valuable venue for broadcasting costly signals about your strength and resolve throughout the community. In that way they become an exercise in reputation building that does not depend on the actual use of force.

I think that it would be too simplistic to say that there is a single discourse that has dominated the conversations surrounding the martial arts in the West. Obviously the individuals who take up these pursuits are motivated by a number of factors. Yet it is interesting to me that the TCMA are so often seen as a vehicle for a purely individual type of self-expression or self-realization. And the sorts of violence that are most popular in the public imagination at the moment are the ones that occur in the ring or the octagon. These are, after all, environments that celebrate a more individualistic set of values.

The rhetoric of self-actualization is by no means absent in the traditional southern Chinese martial arts. But the martial clan or family has always played a much more pronounced role in the narratives that emerged from southern China, South East Asia and Hong Kong. Often it is through engagement (and sublimation) with the group that individual transformation is achieved. And many of the tales of actual fighting that emerge from these same areas emphasize the reality of social violence and the importance of a strong and skilled community as the actual unit of self-defense.

In some ways this may be a reflection of cultural values. It would certainly not be the first time that Eastern and Western individuals have diverged in their assessment of community values. Still, as a political scientist I am more inclined to see in these differences self-conscious strategies meant to accommodate the varieties of social violence have emerged in a variety of times and places.

All of this should make us a bit more skeptical of the uncritical use of “reality” in descriptions of the martial arts. The “reality” faced by a single individual versus a group may be quite different. It simply does not make sense to discuss “reality” without first defining our actors and their goals. Yet one suspects that “the real world” is occasionally invoked as a rhetorical strategy specifically to avoid such questions.

When looking at a number of issues in the historical development or comparative analysis of hand combat systems, we might instead benefit from enlarging our conceptual vocabulary to include ideas like “credible threats” and “costly signals.” They remind us that we cannot ignore the fundamentally social nature of a lot of violence in our quest to finally capture reality.

oOo

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

oOo

The Creation of Wing Chun by Judkins and Nielson.

Introduction

I try to stick to a Monday/Friday posting schedule, but every once in a while something comes up and I have to break from routine.  This week the surprise is a very pleasant one.  Earlier in the summer my co-author, Jon Nielson, and I had the pleasure of discussing our recent book and the current state of martial arts studies with Gene Ching.  As many of you already know, Gene is the Editor of Kung Fu Tai Chi magazine, one of our favorite publications.  He has also been very proactive in bringing some of the more important authors in Chinese martial studies (scholars like Meir Shahar and Peter Lorge) to the attention of his readership.  Yesterday I got a follow-up email letting me know that the first part of our interview had gone live on the Kung Fu Tai Chi webpage.  You can see the original here.

We have had the chance to do a couple of interviews following the release of our book, but this one was by far the most detailed and thoughtful.  We really appreciated the fact that Gene engaged directly with the substance of what we were trying to accomplish.  The entire interview ended up being long enough that they decided to split it into two parts.  I have re-blogged the first section of the discussion here, and readers can watch Kung Fu Tai Chi magazine for the second half, which is due to be released soon.  Also be sure to watch for an upcoming interview with Paul Bowman in the same space.  Enjoy!

Ip Man practices Chi Sao With Moy Yat.

Interview

Benjamin N. Judkins holds a doctoral degree in political science from Columbia University. Jon Nielson is chief instructor at Wing Chun Hall in Salt Lake City, Utah. They have joined forces to write THE CREATION OF WING CHUN: A SOCIAL HISTORY OF THE SOUTHERN CHINESE MARTIAL ARTS, published by the esteemed scholarly press SUNY. The work covers much more than just Wing Chun. Part I: Hand Combat, Identity, and Civil Society in Guangdong, 1800–1949, is a fascinating read for any serious student of Kung Fu. It provides an inclusive timeline for Jingwu, Hung Mun, Hung Sing, Hakka, and the Central Guoshu Academy from a socioeconomic perspective that is insightful and thought-provoking. This is one of the most exciting new contributions to the field. I had the opportunity to discuss this book with the authors.

GC: You are both Wing Chun practitioners obviously. Tell us a little about your background with this style and why you came to practice it.

BJ: While I had some interest in the martial arts, I had never really considered studying a Chinese style before moving to Salt Lake City about ten years ago. While working at the University of Utah my wife decided that she wanted to take a self-defense class. I did a little bit of research on what was available in the area and it looked like Wing Chun might be a good fit, and I agreed to sign up for a class with her. That is how I first met Sifu Jon Nielson.

While we both enjoyed the class, I was struck with how differently Wing Chun approached basic questions of movement from the Japanese and Korean arts I was more familiar with. I felt compelled to dig deeper to try to understand what was going on at both a physical and historical level.

JN: I had practiced several styles of martial arts before I stumbled on Wing Chun. All of the others left me with questions as to how and when to apply the different techniques and how they all fit together. Wing Chun immediately started answering those questions for me, and it has continued to be a source of investigation and discovery from that time until now.

Ben Judkins

GC: Ben, your blog, Kung Fu Tea, has been going since 2012. For those of our readers who aren’t familiar with Kung Fu Tea, explain what your intentions for this are. What inspired you to launch this? Has it met with your expectations so far?

BJ: There were a few different reasons why I started that blog. By the summer of 2012 most of the basic writing and research on our book was already done and I was getting ready to start shopping the manuscript to university presses. That can be a long process even under the best of circumstances (academic publisherS tend to move slowly compared to commercial ones), and since our volume was attempting to further a relatively new research area, I expected that there might be some delays.

Starting a blog seemed like a great way to use some of the down-time during the review process. It has allowed me to systematically explore other areas of the Chinese martial arts that I might not have otherwise engaged with. Finally, Kung Fu Tea has been really helpful in pulling together a community of individuals who shared our passion for a more academic approach to the martial arts. Anyone who is interested in checking out the blog can find it at chinesemartialstudies.com.

Kung Fu Tea has far exceeded my initial expectations. The last few years have seen an increase of interest in the martial arts by both scholars and graduate students in a variety of fields. And it turns out that a surprising number of martial arts practitioners are also interested in seeing the growth of a more rigorous discussion of the history, sociology and cultural meaning of these fighting systems. In fact, while attending the recent Martial Arts Studies conference at the University of Cardiff, I had an opportunity to meet readers from all over the world who were coming together to present and discuss their own research. It was an incredibly exciting moment. I think that opening a door to these sorts of conversations is about the best thing that an academic blog can do.

GC: What inspired you to write THE CREATION OF WING CHUN?

JN: When I met Ben in 2005, I had been studying and practicing Wing Chun for 25 years, but I had yet to see anyone do a serious treatment of Wing Chun’s origins. Back then, very few people took martial studies seriously as an academic pursuit. Any attempt at ferreting out Wing Chun’s origins was done through oral stories that isolated themselves from any real history.

I was interested in what else was going on socially, politically, economically and religiously. I thought that if we could get a better idea of how those movements corresponded with the developing martial arts, we might have a better idea of the events that shaped what eventually became known as Wing Chun.

When Ben told me that he was a political scientist with an interest in anthropology, I asked him if he was interested in researching this topic. Ten years later, they’re finally publishing our book.

Sifu Jon Nielson

BJ: Sifu Nielson was really the driving force behind the genesis on this project. After studying with him for a while he told me about his desire to create a book that would explain the origin and nature of Wing Chun in a historical way, rather than one that simply replicated the oral folklore that surrounds the Chinese martial arts. At the same time that he approached me with this idea, I had been working on a conference paper looking at a few different aspects of the Boxer Uprising which erupted at the turn of the 20th century in northern China.

I realized that beyond simply telling the story of Wing Chun, the evolution and development of the Chinese martial arts provided a really important window onto the sorts of social conflict and disruptions that accompanied the advance of imperialism, trade and globalization in China during the 19th century. In many ways these forces shaped the development of what we now think of as the traditional martial arts. Nowhere was that more apparent than in southern China. So this book really grew out of the realization that the answer to the specific question of how Wing Chun evolved had broader implications for all sorts of questions about globalization, identity formation and social conflict in late 19th and early 20th century China.

GC: Tell me a little bit about the title of your book? What does it convey and what sort of audience are you trying to reach?

BJ: Our title went through a couple of iterations. My original idea was “Rebels on Red Boats: A Social History of the Southern Chinese Martial Arts.” I loved that it captured the romanticism of the Cantonese Opera Rebellion (otherwise known as the Red Turban Revolt) and the ways in which its memory has echoed through the history of the martial arts in that area. It also emphasized the fact that this book really addresses the milieu that all of the southern Chinese martial arts emerged from. So if you are a Choy Li Fut or Hung Gar practitioner, you may find something in here that is interesting. All of these arts emerged from the same general area and historical processes. That was one of the things that we were ultimately trying to get at.

However, our publisher thought a more specific and tightly focused title that emphasized Wing Chun might be better. And that is certainly true. In the second half of the book we outline Wing Chun’s rise both as a regional and later as a global art. Still, you cannot really divorce that narrative from everything else that was going on around it, both socially, politically, and in the world of the martial arts. And I still think that “Rebels on Red Boats” has a nice ring to it. Maybe we will save it for a future project.

GC: I was really impressed by Part 1 of your book. It’s one of most cohesive histories of the development of southern Kung Fu since the fall of the Qing I’ve read so far. What were some of the unique approaches and challenges you encountered when tackling this?

BJ: I think that the main thing was just that this is a relatively new exercise in what is still a theoretically developing research area. Douglas Wile really demonstrated the possibility for this sort of project with his 1996 volume, The Lost T’ai-chi Classics from the Late Ch’ing Dynasty (also published by the State University of New York Press). Meir Shahar’s volume on Shaolin and Peter Lorge’s wider historical work helped us to build a case that there is both an academic and popular audience for this sort of work beyond what you might expect.

Still, there had not yet been a really focused (English language) academic study of the southern Chinese martial arts. We were left to search through the existing literature in order to pull together a compelling vision of what was going on in the region that could account both for the broad outlines of the development of southern Kung Fu, but also suggest some new and interesting areas for investigation that might not have been as obvious at the outset. And since we were also free to define the theoretical scope of this project, we wanted to do something that would demonstrate the inherent strength of an interdisciplinary approach in tackling questions like these.

One of the things which surprised us both was that once we got into it, we found that there was already a fair amount of information in the historical and social scientific literature on the region. More than one might expect at any rate. Yet previous scholars had not been looking specifically at the martial arts and there was very little sense of what was relevant or how these discrete things fit together.

JN: Mainly what got in the way was what had been done on the Wing Chun creation myth previous to our efforts. You find that people have a strong tendency to cling to old notions, even when evidence to the contrary is right in front of them. We had to sort through and discard a lot of poor scholarship to get to the bottom of what was really going on. What we found, though, was that much of what we had been looking for was already published in scholarly books and articles. It’s just that no one had put it all together before.

GC: What aspects of Chinese history do you find are the most misunderstood amongst Chinese martial arts aficionados?

BJ: The traditional martial arts are a topic that many people feel very passionately about, and yet there is a lot of room for misunderstanding. Mostly we get the setting all wrong. One of the main difficulties in explaining the deeper history of these arts is that most people have very little idea what traditional Chinese society itself looked like. This is not necessarily an easy thing to reconstruct and there are many historians who have dedicated their entire careers to those questions.

What we found when looking at events in the Pearl River Delta region was that the martial arts did not really exist as a set of separate or independent institutions apart from the rest of society. These organizations tended to be supported by, and deeply implicated in the competition between, powerful lineage clans, economic guilds (and later trade unions), secret societies, the government, social movements and political factions. Changes in this broader social environment were often the precondition for big shifts in how the martial arts were organized.

A really exciting thing about Chinese martial studies as an academic research area is that it opens a very detailed window onto the interactions of these diverse actors. Yet most often the histories of the martial arts are discussed without this sort of social context. In that case, even if all of the facts that you have learned are true, they are not likely to be all that meaningful.

I think that many readers initially approach the Chinese martial arts as something impossibly ancient that emerged only in sacred temples on some misty mountain. In that sense they have become a typical Orientalist fantasy for Western consumers. Most of the hand combat teachers critical to our current styles lived in the 19th and 20th centuries. That means that when we think about the “traditional” martial arts, we are dealing with a pretty modern body of practices and meanings. As Douglas Wile has reminded us:

“Anything earlier than the Republican period (1911–1949) tends to slip into the mists of “ancient China,” and we often overlook the fact that Yang Lu-ch’an and the Wu brothers were of the same generation as Darwin and Marx, and that the Li brothers were contemporaries of Einstein, Freud and Gandhi. Railroads, telegraphs, and missionary schools were already part of the Chinese landscape, and Chinese armies (and rebels) sometimes carried modern Western rifles…It is our proposition, then, that this watershed period in the evolution and theory of t’ai-chi chüan did not take place in spite of larger social and historical events but somehow in response to them.” (Wile, 3)

Wile’s remarks on this point are important and bear repeating. In some ways the popular discussion of Chinese martial arts have progressed a lot since he wrote those words in 1996, and yet there is still this disturbing sense that somehow these fighting systems are primeval, existing outside of the push and pull of ordinary historical or social forces. One of the goals of our work has been to provide a framework that will strongly ground discussions of Wing Chun, and the other Southern martial arts, within the flow of actual social, economic and political history.

For Part 2, stay tuned to KungFuMagazine.com.

Traditional style Hudiedao. Source: traditionalfilipinoweapons.com

Introduction

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

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

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

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

Interview

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Introduction

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

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

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

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

Conference Report: Religion, Violence and the Asian Martial Arts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

oOo

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

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

oOo

Notes

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

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

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

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

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

Introduction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHINESE BOXING AND FENCING.

HISTORY OF THE ART

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Notes on Toads and Martial Spirit Possession Games

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

Mai Sin Mesmerizing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

14. Encircling a Toad

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

“Toad’s eff, toad’s child.

This evening the Great King comes to invite you.

He buys a fire basket and fir Branches.”

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

Introduction

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

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

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

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

The Winner!

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

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

The Runner Up

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

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

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

The TCMA as a Perpetual Revival Movement

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the “Chin Woo” is Doing.

Unique Show at Queen’s College.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Feb. 1, 1963: Dragon, manipulated by 40 men, takes part in Chinese New Year parade for the Year of the Rabbit in New Chinatown.

Introduction

The Spring Festival (or “Chinese New Year”) is now upon us. The most important holiday of the Chinese social calendar, this time of year is also significant for students of martial arts studies. It is a busy time for Lion, Qilin and Dragon Dance associations, as well as the martial arts schools and community groups that sponsor them. Indeed, it is a time of the year when martial skills and values are on public display. They can be seen in the various sorts of street processions that have long been part of life in Chinese communities as well as in smaller martial arts and dance exhibitions celebrating the season.

In some cases the sheer number of individuals and groups taking part in these displays also leads to social tension and the memory of past community conflict. Stories of never quite forgotten fights seem to be most commonly associated with Lion Dance companies in large urban centers like Hong Kong or New York. Still, as the discussion in today’s post makes clear, such tensions play an important part in a wide range of traditional rituals designed to celebrate the lunar New Year.

Why this should be is something of a paradox. The Spring Festival is widely seen as a time from setting aside community conflicts and getting a fresh start. Such values are not only verbally taught, they are reinforced through ritual means. Why then do martial values play such a prominent role in these displays? And what does this suggest both about the nature of community life and the role of the martial arts in the selective suppression or expression of conflict?

To help us delve into these questions we will be taking a look at a paper titled “Dragon Dance in Tu Village: Social Cohesion and Symbolic Warfare” by Tu Chuna-fei, Thomas Green, Zheng Guo-hua and Feng Qiang. This article was published in the Ido Movement for Culture. Journal of Martial Arts Anthropology, 2013, Vol. 13 Issue 1.

The authors of this article begin by noting that while many martial arts, rituals and practices from the past have been preserved as part of the quest to safeguard China’s “intangible cultural heritage,” the actual activities themselves have almost always been divorced from the social context that gave rise to their creation. Further, these diverse practices have been re-imagined as “traditional” sports. Obviously this is a conceptual category that did not exist when such activities were being practiced by their original communities, and it further deemphasizes the original social context of such practices.

In an attempt to recover the lost social context of one Spring Festival celebration the authors of this paper conducted a number of interviews with individuals in the Tu Village area who were old enough to remember the original festival processions for which the town developed a regional reputation. Each of these individuals had been associated in some way with the local power structure (organized through the clan associations) in the area prior to the Communist takeover in 1949.

It was during the post-1950 era that the practice of the Tu Village Dragon Dance (like so many other traditional arts) first lapsed. Thus the reconstruction of the organization of this festival allows these scholars to tell us something about the execution and social function of a Dragon Dance. Their investigation also reveals details about the local power structure that might otherwise have been forgotten.

Lastly, this article also helps us to understand how traditional “martial values” can erase certain conflicts within a community while still acknowledging, or even exacerbating, others. After considering this case we can begin to make our own arguments as to why martial displays have been such an important part of festival displays.

Dragon dance at a public festival in San Francisco. 1965. Source: UPI press photo.

The Tu Village Dragon Dance

Durkheim famously argued that the sacred is, at heart, social. The rituals of traditional Chinese society, in which cycles of sacrifice unite families, lineages, clans, villages and even regions seems almost designed to illustrate his point. Nowhere is this more evident than in the Tu Village Dragon Dance.

In the 1930s and 1940s Tu Village (Nanchang County, Jiangxi Province) was a primarily agricultural rice producing area (the local economy has since diversified). The village itself was part of a regional economic network of other farming hamlets. In some cases it was on friendly terms with these settlements. Yet it engaged in fierce competition with its close neighbor, Deng Village, with which it shared a common water source. Obviously water is a critical element of rice farming and resource driven conflict between villages was a common feature of this era. Nor were such tensions always kept at bay. The historical record is littered with examples of similar tensions that suddenly escalated into real aggression.

This was not the only potential source of potential conflict in the region. Tu Village itself was structured as a typical “single surname” settlement. Yet upon closer inspection things were actually much more complicated. As one of the larger settlements in the region, it was also somewhat similar to a “temple village.” A large temple, complete with its own extensive landholdings and tenant/guardian families, was located within the village boundaries.

In actual fact there were three major surname groups within the village. These were Tu, Bao and Li. Both the Tu and Bao families maintained their own ancestral clan temples. Yet village residents, pointing to “ancient traditions,” noted that important ancestors of both the Tu and Bao families had intermarried. The situation with the Li group was similar, if a bit later. Thus the three surnames constituted a single “extended family” which was administered on a day to day basis by a group of clan elders, representing the more senior families in the village.

To better understand how a unifying identity within Tu Village was created (as well as how their conflict with the neighboring Deng Village was reinforced) it is necessary to turn to the local communal celebration rituals of the Spring Festival. Prof. Green and the other authors of the article discuss this in some detail. For our purposes we will simply touch on a few of the most relevant factors.

One of the larger and more prosperous local towns, the celebrations of Tu Village were remembered as being especially spirited and notable. The town even managed to draw in additional outside visitors eager to take in the celebration.

The heart of the event was a multi-day Dragon Dance procession which visited, in turn, the local temples (both of the gods and clans), the homes of notable residents, outlaying settlements with which Tu Village was on friendly terms, and lastly, the shared lake near Deng Village. This last stop represented the boundary of Tu’s economic and political influence. There the procession took on a more menacing character.

One of the reasons why festivals are of interest to students of Chinese martial studies is that such processions are often led by local martial arts schools or their various community associations. Avron Boretz has noted that there are very good ritual reasons that unmarried young men, who have little social status in a traditional Chinese community, are called upon to embody martial values in these celebrations. Further, this opportunity for community involvement under the guise of an alternate value structure can be an important engine for self-creation among marginal males. Boretz has also noted, somewhat ironically, that on the whole this usually tends to reinforce, rather than fundamentally challenge, the core values of the community. Thus individuals who might otherwise become alienated are tasked with reinforcing social order.

In the major case of his ethnographic research Boretz was looking at the martial and religious performances of relatively small temple associations embedded within larger, modern, urban communities. While the basic principles that he articulated are evident in this case as well, the details of the festival’s organization are quite different.

Put simply, the Tu Village Dragon Dance was an immense affair. Rather than being something that a single voluntary association might host, it required the active participation of practically the entire adult male population of the village.

The procession itself included a number of features.  The most important was a large wicker and paper dragon-lantern comprised on nine articulated sections and an ornate head. This was carried by a rotating group of middle aged, married, dancers drawn from each of the three surname households.

Next there were three palanquins that held the images of the gods normally housed in the village temple. The Dragon Dance was actually performed as a “sacrifice” to the gods who followed it along the route. These statutes were born by young unmarried (and relatively low status) men drawn from each of the three families.

In addition there were larger groups of male reserve dancers who could switch out when members of either group became exhausted. Readers should recall that the festival was a multi-day affair. There would also have been musicians, organizers and even a team of gunners who were responsible for firing the antique cannon that led the procession and announced its arrival the various stops.

Green points out that women, older men and children were also involved in the procession. In functional terms they were more than simply the audience. It was they who witnessed and bore testament to each element of the carefully scripted social drama which the procession played out.

The administration and management of the festival was also a complicated undertaking. It monopolized the attention of the town’s elite residents, albeit in a slightly different way. The festival itself was funded through the rents of the local temple’s generous land holdings. As such, actually financing the event was rarely an issue. The clan elders oversaw and managed all of the financial aspects of the performance. Green et. al. noted that the local elite were so highly involved in this particular event that it took on the trappings of an “official” event.

Nevertheless, the elders did not run the performance of the festival. The actual hosting duties associated with the festivals, as well as certain aesthetic and administrative decisions regarding how the festival would look in a given year, rotated between all of the heads of households for each of the three surnames found in the village.

Following the town’s creation myth, the senior lineage of the Tu family was the first to host the festival. The next year they were followed by the ranking representatives of the Bao and then finally Li groups. After that the task was returned to the second most senior household within the Tu clan before moving on to the other two groups. In this way every household in the village would eventually get an opportunity to act as the Dragon Dance’s host.

Not surprisingly, much prestige was associated with the responsibility to hosting the festival. While the procession itself was payed for by the Temple’s rents, families competed with one another to provide additional gifts, food, or some additional detail of performance to make their turn especially memorable.

There are some interesting dynamics at play in this organizational system. On the one hand the rotating responsibilities for hosting the festival serve to reinforce both the town mythos and clan based power structure. It is no surprise that the Communist party was so eager to do away with such practices.

Yet at the same time this rotation provided a ritualized basis for extending a fair amount of prestige to every household in the village. Further, it allowed newly ascendant families to show off their wealth, effectively converting it to social status, in a way that was socially acceptable to the village as a whole, rather than destabilizing to it.

Green and the other authors of this article repeatedly emphasized the role of gift-giving in this celebration. The Dragon Dance itself was meant to be seen as a gift. On one level it was a gift that was given by the villagers to the local gods who rode in the procession. The dragon was danced in front to the village’s ancestral halls for the benefit of the ancestors. It visited friendly local hamlets as a gift for Tu’s political allies in the region. And of course the Dragon visited the homes and streets of village residents.

A key element of the celebration was the widespread tradition of inviting in-laws to Tu village to also enjoy the display. This village celebration was seen as a gift that every family should extend to their in-laws. In explaining this aspect of the tradition Green et. al. note that the main handicraft industry of the region (the making of rice noodles) was relatively labor intensive. As a result it was common for families to call on their networks of in-laws to pitch in during busy times. Thus the gift giving embodied in the Tu Dragon Dance reinforced economic networks of vital importance that transcended the normal social barriers of household, clan or village.

Still, the story of the Tu Village Dragon Dance is not without a dark side. The creation of any social community is only possible by explicitly defining who lies beyond its boundaries. To whom do these networks of reciprocity not apply? Or following the economic logic of agricultural life, with whom do we compete for resources?

The procession of the dragon through its traditional route can be thought of as a ritualized pilgrimage tracing out and reinforcing the boundaries of the community. It is no mistake that the climactic moment of the final day of the event occurs when the group moves to the local lake (the main water source needed for agriculture) and performs their dance within sight of Deng Village.

This is no gift. Rather it is a taunt and an assertion of “ownership” over a shared resource that Tu village did not totally control. In this gesture the authors of the article see an example of “symbolic warfare.” To them this element of the display is just as critical to understanding its social function as the unifying aspects that came before. They note:

“Victor Turner characterizes ritual as a “social drama” which consists of three stages: a movement from structure to anti-structure and ultimately a return to structure. At the beginning of the ritual, participants are arranged in strict accordance with their social positions in everyday life so that the ritual conforms to the values and norms of the “structure”. During the peak of the ritual, the social positions of participants gradually disappear; distinctions between them are temporarily eliminated, and they become a community. At the peak of the festival (Lantern Night), “we” (Tu Villagers) confront our traditional enemies (Deng Villagers) via the Dragon Dance. Because the confrontation is merely symbolic, after the festival, participants’ social positions and original roles in everyday life are resumed with peace and order undisturbed. (Green et al. p. 8).”

A Dragon Dance performed by the Ben Kiam Athletic Association in Manila, Philippines, sometime during the 1950s. Copyright Tambuli Media.

Why ‘Wu’ is the Transformative Element

This is a strong note on which to end their paper. And Victor Turner’s framework of “social drama” can do much to help us understand exactly what is at stake in the Tu Village Dragon Dance. Yet to actually answer the question that opened this article (why are specifically martial values central to these sorts of celebrations), we will need to push a little deeper.

First, it may be useful to think about the degree to which the Dragon Dance is best understood as an act of “symbolic warfare.” It is easy to see how the display could be taken as a threat. It gathers together the entire fighting age male population of the village. The dancers announce that they would like to get the attention of the residents of Deng village by repeatedly firing a piece of field artillery in their general direction. Finally, this explicitly martial display happens in front of a natural resource that Tu Village would very much like to monopolize. But in the majority of years it seems that the aggressive impulses behind this display were channeled into the dance itself and actual violence was avoided.

We can certainly analyze this event in purely symbolic terms if we would like. Yet before doing so it may be useful to delve just a little deeper into the history of such displays. In point of fact, they did not always remain as non-violent as one might like. Armed conflict and militarized feuding between clans and villages was a very real part of life throughout southern China during the Qing and Republic periods. While such conflicts were present in all of China’s regions, period commentators were clear that they were particularly serious in the south. Further, actual historical accounts confirm that simmering conflicts occasionally escalated to the point of violence following a dance performance or martial arts display by one group in territory that another also claimed.  The provocations involved in this ritual may be more serious than a casual reader might suspect. Nor can we ignore the importance of environmental variables. Behavior that might be ignored in good years would be much more dangerous in periods of drought or regional conflict.

This general pattern is by no means confined to the Dragon Dances of Jianxi Province. It appears to be a common feature of all sorts of processions. Lion and Qilin dancing also attempt to consolidate a community while defining its boundaries.

Historically speaking, outbreaks of violence between Lion Dance troops have been common in places as diverse as Hong Kong and New York City. Even in periods in which actual violence was uncommon, observers (including Anita Slovenz) noted that groups reacted to the meeting of competing performance groups on the street with great anxiety. Entire ritual codes were created to enable two lions to pass each other without incident (or instead to provoke one if the parties so wished). In the cases that Slovenz studied, these conflicts were basically a reflection of more fundamental economic and political struggles on the part of the social organizations who sponsored the various martial arts schools and dance associations in New York.

Thus the situation which we see in Tu Village is not simply an artifact of its geographic setting. Rather, what Green et. al. describe is a specific expression of a much more general pattern. Historically speaking, the possibility of violence was real. This must have colored the attitude with which the various dancers approached their task.

It might also be worth asking whether at the end of this festival the participants returned to their “normal place” in the social order, and life simply went on as before. In a sense we must disagree with this. One of the fundamental purposes of the Dragon Dance was to allow the host family to gain (or possibly lose) social status. Likewise the diplomatic and gift-giving elements of the Dragon Dance were designed to build and extend economic networks that were previously weaker or small. One gives a gift with the expectation of incurring a social obligation. Even low status unmarried dancers might compete for an opportunity to help carry the statues of the gods because, while physically exhausting, this increased his family’s reputation within the community.

In short, while the cosmology of the Dragon Dance might emphasize a return to a stable and unchanging social order, many individuals took part in the ritual precisely because they saw in it the possibility of better luck and increased social standing in the upcoming year. To understand the role of explicitly “military” (wu) social values in mediating this dialectic we must return briefly to the work of Victor Turner.

Turner noted that when functioning as a “social drama” ritual consisted of three stages. First a symbolic structure was established. Secondly, there was a movement away from structure toward anti-structure, a radical state where all social distinctions broke down. He referred to this phase as “communitas.” This then was followed by a reintegration back into the “normal” social structure.

It is easy to see how the Tu Village Dragon Dance reinforces the area’s existing social structure. It is payed for and supported by village elites using rents collected from the poorest elements of society. The rotating system of determining the host is designed to reinforce the village’s creation mythos and clan based power structure. Even the roles that dancers could perform were predicated on their marital and social status. Needless to say, no women were allowed to participate in what was explicitly a patriarchal affair. So the initial social structure and the return to that same state are evident in the ritual’s fundamental organization. But where do we see an anti-structure arising? Is there a true moment of communitas within this ritual?

The authors sensibly suggest that this state is invoked at the moment that the dancers enter their “confrontation” with Deng Village. Yet from an outside perspective, this aspect of the performance would seem just as structured as any other. Why might it be experienced differently by the dancers themselves?

This is where the historical reality of community violence becomes critical to our story. Much like Anita Slovenz’s Lion Dancers in the 1980s, no matter how peaceful things have been lately, it would be hard to discount the possibility of actual violence erupting again at some point in the unknown future. This would be especially true when engaged in what all parties agreed was an intentionally provocative set of acts.

The looming shadow of conflict is the key. While ritual may reinforce the nuances of social order, actual community violence is rather indiscriminate in the instant that it strikes. In that moment, when the entire male population of Tu Village lines up on the border of Deng Village and fires off their cannon, they are stepping away from the normal social conditions that define one’s fate in life. As a group they are moving into a different realm. It is a realm where any two men may be called upon to fight side by side, and any one of them may fall to injury. In this case it is the visceral possibility of violence that makes communitas real.

It is also the key to understanding the transformative power of these rites. Indeed, in Chinese culture role of Wen (or “civil values”) has traditionally been to judge and decide. Yet Wu (or “military values”) have always been seen as the means by which change is actually brought about.

In his critical examination of Republic era wuxia (swordman) novel Petrius Liu noted that often these stories centered on a conflict of values between the hierarchically organized principal of “all under heaven” (which was embodied in the Confucian social and political structure) and the idea of “between people.” The later idea was a more horizontal mode of social organization (characteristic of the literary realm of “Rivers and Lakes”) based on the idea of radical brotherhood and social values.

Such stories argue that by enacting these martial heroic values, justice can be restored in the community and change can come about. Returning to the structure of the Dragon Dance, those who provide “heroic” amounts of food and alcohol for the dancers will be remembered in the future. A successful host will go down in popular lore. And in a moment of conflict with the hated Deng Village a landlord and tenant may find themselves finally reconciled through a common purpose.

The changes that are brought about are real, and each is facilitated by an appeal to classical martial values. And when, at the end of the ritual, all of the individuals are reintegrated back into the social structure, local society itself changes. It is allowed to adapt to new social facts, but to do so in a way that reinforces the promise of a deeper, more fundamental, stability.

Why then are martial values central to these celebrations? Annual rites must always balance the competing demands of change and stability. Victor Turner gave us powerful models for understanding how this process can be negotiated within the pattern of community ritual. By embodying a separate set of norms and identities (those associated with the experience of communitas) martial values act as the engines of change within Chinese society. The importance of martial arts studies as a discipline goes well beyond the study of individual combat systems. At its best it can allow us to understand where society has been and where its values might take it next.

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If you enjoyed this you might also want to read: Lion Dancing, Youth Violence and the Need for Theory in Chinese Martial Studies

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Introduction

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

While we try to summarize the major stories over the last month, there is always a chance that we 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!

Sifu Allen Lee, 1948-2016. Source: http://www.wingchunnyc.com/

 
A Busy Month for Wing Chun in the News

Given my personal interest and research focus, I always start these posts by looking for stories relating to Wing Chun.  Most months offer few substantive stories to choose from.  But the last three weeks have proved to be an exception to that trend.

That said, our first Wing Chun related story is a sad one.  Sifu Allan Lee of Wing Chun NYC has passed away.  Lee was a personal student of both Ip Man and Lok Yiu and his contributions to the Wing Chun community in North America will be sorely missed.  Those interested in learning more about his life may want to start here.  His students are currently raising a fund to honor the life and legacy of Sifu Lee.

Master Sam Lau, also a student of Ip Man. Source: Timeout Hong Kong

In happier news, Time Out Hong Kong recently ran a profile of Master Sam Lau, another of Ip Man’s original students who is still actively teaching and promoting the art of Wing Chun.   I have never had a chance to visit his school but he is one of the people in the Wing Chun community whom I would most like to meet if given the opportunity.

The short article in Time Out covered a lot of ground.  It discussed Ip Man’s early days in Hong Kong and the initially hostile reception that Wing Chun received.  Master Lau then went on to discuss some of the misconceptions about Ip Man promoted by the recent films.  Lastly the question of government support for the preservation of Wing Chun (a topic which he has addressed a number of times) was discussed:

“The situation is not helped by the lack of governmental support, both in Hong Kong and mainland China. “Unlike taekwondo in South Korea or karate in Japan, which are endorsed by their governments or large institutions, we can only rely on ourselves. The kind of kung fu supported by the Chinese government relates more to acrobatics, which has lost the original intentions of kung fu,” states Lau.”

After articles detailing events in North America and Asia, we next turn our attention to the Middle East.  The Shanghai Daily ran a short piece on the opening of a new school in Cairo, Egypt, to meet the region’s growing demand for Wing Chun instruction.

Located on the first floor of a building in a quiet street, Egypt Wing Tsun Academy, the only officially certified Chinese academy for Wing Tsun in the Middle East, consists of a medium-sized parquet-floor hall with a wall-size mirror on top of which there is a portrait of Grandmaster Ip Man, Chinese Kung Fu legend Bruce Lee’s teacher.

“The popularity of Wing Tsun martial art increased in Egypt due to the recent movies about Ip Man, Bruce Lee’s teacher, and the circulated online videos on it,” Sifu Noah told Xinhua at the academy.

Of course the recent release of Ip Man 3 is the looming issue in the background of many of these stories.  On the one hand the historical myth-making promoted by these films tends to irritate Ip Man’s still living students and family members.  Yet it cannot be denied that these films have been a boon for the popularity of the style that he devoted the final decades of his life to promoting.  As a community, what should our feelings be towards these films?

A still from Ip Man 3. Source: The Hollywood Reporter.

Master William Kwok, who teaches Wing Chun at Gotham Martial Arts, takes up this question in our next article. He argues that it is basically OK to like (or even love) the Ip Man films despite the fact that they have a wildly creative relationship with history.  After all, we expect a lot of things from a good Kung Fu film, but accurate biographical discussion is one of the few things that audiences rarely clamor for.  In my view the most interesting aspect of this piece wasn’t actually the discussion of the films themselves, but the insights that the exercise offered on the state of Wing Chun in the US today and the sorts of students that the art is attracting.

Marie-Alice McLean-Dreyfus, writing for The Interpreter, had a different take on the film.  Drawing on the work on Dr Merriden Varrall she argued that Ip Man 3 closely reflected the world view and foreign  policy positions of the Chinese government.  Specifically, she argued that audiences in China are likely to view the film as a metaphor for the current conflict between China and other states for influence and access to disputed regions of the South China Sea.  Her discussions included a few obvious misreadings of the film (e.g., Ip Man lives in Hong Kong during the 1950s, not Foshan).  It also wasn’t clear to me that audiences in Hong Kong would approach what to them would be a distinctly local story through the same set of interpretive lens as viewers in Beijing or Shanghai.  Still, its interesting to see the sorts of discussions that Martial Arts Studies promotes appearing in a wider variety of publications.

Other recent discussions of Ip Man 3 have focused on problematic aspects of the films marketing and business model.  Or, as the LA Times put it, “Chinese regulators smell a rat over ‘Ip Man 3’ ticket sales.”  There is no doubt that the film has been quite popular with audiences.  But the volume of reported ticket sales are so high that it strongly suggests that the film’s production company has spent millions of dollars buying up tickets for performances of the film on screens that may or may not even exist.  Obviously such a promotion strategy would provide a nice windfall for certain theater chains, but it would also overstates the popularity of Ip Man 3 and by extension the financial health of its parent company.

It turns out that this sort of manipulation is not unheard of in the Chinese film industry.  When domestic productions employed similar strategies to boost their numbers against foreign films government regulators had been content to turn a blind eye to the practice.  It is also thought that theaters have also systematically unreported the ticket sales of foreign films and then pocketed the difference.  But similar tactics aimed at domestic competitors can seriously disrupt markets and undercut our understanding of both the actual character of Chinese movie-goers (e.g., what sorts of films would they actually want to see in the future) and successful advertising strategies (how can we reach these consumers).  Apparently the abuses surrounding the release of Ip Man 3 have inspired government regulators to publicly put their foot down.  Interestingly this story is starting to make the rounds and I have seen it reported in a couple of other places, including the Wall Street Journal.

Nevertheless, there is one marketing strategy that always succeeds.  Make a viral video.  One is currently circulating in which Ip Man himself offers viewers a “lesson” in Wing Chun.  The discussion in question mostly focuses on the question of what happens when Ip Man decides to “bring the pain.”  I thought it was interesting that this montage of epic beat-downs began with some footage of dummy work in an effort to establish the “theory” behind the silver screen magic to come.

The reviews for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny are in, and it would be overstating things to say they are mixed.  Variety sums up what the critics have been feeling when it says:

“What a lousy year for long-delayed sequels: It may not be a stink bomb of “Zoolander 2” proportions, but in many ways “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny” feels like an even more cynical cash grab. Trading on the pedigree of Ang Lee’s 2000 Oscar winner but capturing none of its soulful poetry, this martial-arts mediocrity has airborne warriors aplenty but remains a dispiritingly leaden affair with its mechanical storytelling, purely functional action sequences and clunky English-language performances. The result has grossed a healthy $32 million in China so far and began its Stateside streaming release on Friday (while opening on about a dozen Imax screens), but regardless of how it fares, exec producer Harvey Weinstein’s latest dubious non-contribution to Asian cinema will add some quick coin but no luster to Netflix’s library.”

If anything the discussion in the Atlantic, which featured an extended piece on the film, was even more negative.  They introduce the project to the readers with the following line.  “Sword of Destiny, Netflix’s new sequel to Ang Lee’s 2000 Oscar-winner, feels like little more than a desperate knockoff.”  Nor do things improve as the author delves into the details.  The upshot of all of this is that the big miss with Crouching Tiger is calling Netflix’s strategy for distributing new and innovative original films into question.

Ju Ju Chan at the Los Angeles premiere of Crouching Tiger. Hidden Dragon – Sword Of Destiny. Source: SCMP.com

One piece of positive press I found emerging from this project was the following story in the South China Morning Post.  They ran a couple of linked articles on the growing popularity of Muay Thai kickboxing with women in Hong Kong.  The first of these profiled Ju Ju Chan who starred in the Hidden Dragon sequel.  When not working as an actress she is a Muay Thai coach at the Fight Factory Gym (FFG) in Central where she teaches both kickboxing and functional fitness classes for women three times a week.  About 40% of the kickboxing students at this gym are currently women.

Candy Wu fights Macau’s Tam Sze Long during the Windy World Muaythai Competition 2014. Source: SCMP

The SCMP also ran a longer and more detailed article titled “Young and dangerous: Hong Kong’s women muay Thai boxing champions.” This piece profiles four young female fighters who compete and work as coaches in an up and coming gym that caters to female students.  I thought that the following quote opened an interesting window onto the motivations and background of one of these women.

“Muay Thai has boomed in popularity as a fitness regimen globally in recent years, but so has the number of tournaments for serious practitioners looking for a fight. And despite the risk of injury, a small number of Hong Kong women have broken the sex barrier by competing in the traditionally male combat sport.

“I’ve liked men’s sports since I was very small,” says Tsang, who previously practised wing chun. “I got into muay Thai because I found it more exciting. The punches come lightning fast so you have to know quickly whether to fight back, block or move away. I find that fun.”

A still from Chinese Boxer, a 1970s Shaw Bros. production. Source: avclub.com

Ever wonder what Kung Fu films looked like before Bruce Lee put the genera on the map in the west?  If so the AV Club has a suggestion for you.  Check out the 1970 Shaw Brothers production Chinese Boxer.  I will admit to never having seen this film, but after this discussion I am inclined to make time to do so.

Speaking of Bruce Lee, a museum exhibit dedicated to the late star’s life is set to open in Beijing.  The items are on loan from the Lee estate, and the discussion in the article suggests that this is at least part of the exhibit that was recently showing at the Wing Luke Museum.

Who doesn’t feel inspired by an epic martial arts infused landscape shot?

Medical studies extolling the virtues of Taijiquan practice continue to roll in.  The most recent findings, published in the Journal of the American Heart Association, found a small but statistically significant improvements in practitioners blood pressure and cholesterol levels for those doing a gentle style of Taiji or Qigong.  The South China Morning Post also ran an article on these findings titled “Why Chinese exercises such as tai chi are good for patients’ all-round health.”

Taiji practice at Chen Village. Source: Shanghai Daily.

Taijiquan was also in the news for other reasons.  The Shanghai Daily ran a feature that focused on the variety of students coming to Chanjiagou to learn Chen style Taijiquan.  The article touched on both the motivations and personal stories of some of these students, as well as the business of martial arts tourism.  Click here to check it out.

Martial Arts Studies
As always, martial arts studies has been a busy place.  But that does not mean we can’t have fun.  After all, who doesn’t like a good martial arts joke?

Paul Bowman has recently been at a conference help at Waseda University (report to follow) in which he presented a working paper titled “The Marginal Movement of Martial Arts: From the Kung Fu Craze to Master Ken.”  Be sure to check this out if you want to deepen your appreciation of martial arts humor.

Also, the Martial Arts Studies Research Network has released a list of confirmed speakers for their one day conference (held at Birmingham City University on April 1) titled “Kung Fury: Contemporary Debates in Martial Arts Cinema.”  Click the link to register for this free event.  Its an impressive list of speakers for a one day gathering.  There are too many names to list them all, but here are some of the topics that the papers will cover:

• Martial arts cinema and digital culture
• Funding and distribution
• Film festivals, marketing and promotion
• Martial arts cinema heritage, nostalgia and memory
• Mashups and genre busting intertextuality
• The place of period cinema
• Martial arts stardom and transnationality
• Martial arts audiences and fandom

Women Warriors and Wartime Spies of China by Louise Edwards (Cambridge UP, 2016).

While not directly addressing the martial arts, I am sure that this next book will find its way onto all of our bibliographic lists and works cited pages.  Cambridge University Press is about to release a volume by Louise Edwards titled Women Warriors and Wartime Spies of China.  In it Edwards discusses some of the most famous female spies and warriors in Chinese history (including devoting an entire chapter to Qiu Jin) and then goes on to address the importance of this archetypal image in Chinese society.  Given the centrality of female warriors to the Wing Chun creation myth (which I have always suspected dates to the Republic period) I look forward to seeing her discussion.  Here is the publisher’s summary:

In this compelling new study, Louise Edwards explores the lives of some of China’s most famous women warriors and wartime spies through history. Focusing on key figures including Hua Mulan, Zheng Pingru and Liu Hulan, this book examines the ways in which these extraordinary women have been commemorated through a range of cultural mediums including film, theatre, museums and textbooks. Whether perceived as heroes or anti-heroes, Edwards shows that both the popular and official presentation of these women and their accomplishments has evolved in line with China’s shifting political values and circumstances over the past one hundred years. Written in a lively and accessible style with illustrations throughout, this book sheds new light on the relationship between gender and militarisation and the ways that women have been exploited to glamorise war both historically in the past and in China today.

Louise Edwards is Professor of Chinese History and Asian Studies Convener at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. She publishes on women and gender in China and Asia.

Readers looking for English language translations of primary texts dealing with the Chinese martial arts should follow the always fantastic Brennan Translation blog.  It recently released a new translation of  TAIJI BOXING PHOTOGRAPHED by Chu Minyi (The Many Blessings Company of Shanghai, 1929).  This is a fascinating text written by someone who was not only a martial arts enthusiast but an important figure in Republic era politics.  He also had some ideas for innovative Taiji training dummies that are introduced in this manual.  Be sure to check it out.

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

Kung Fu Tea on Facebook

A lot has happened on the Kung Fu Tea Facebook group.  We discussed the definition of “martial arts,” getting the most out of your training while abroad, and rare footage of the Wing Chun master Pan Nam.   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.