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.

A martial artist on Songshan Mountain. Source: CNN

Introduction

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

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

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

Hing Chao at the famous “Blue House” in Hong Kong. Source: the International Guoshu Association Facebook Group.

Chinese Martial Arts in the News

Our very first story for this week can be found in the South China Morning Post (which, incidentally, runs more stories on the martial arts than one might expect).  It describes Hing Chao’s recent efforts to secure a UNESCO listing for a Hakka style of hand combat as well as his ongoing efforts to use motion capture technology to document southern China’s various Kung Fu styles.  Hing Chao has also been active in some architectural preservation efforts that will be of interest to Kung Fu students.  Take a look at this article (in Chinese with an English gloss) to read more.  Its hard to understate how much the physical landscape of the entire Pearl River Delta region has been transformed in the last two or three decades, making these sorts of efforts particularly useful.

A “Kung Fu” nun demonstrates a pole form at a Tibetan Temple in Nepal. Nuns from this order have been in the news following the devastating earthquake in Nepal.

In previous news features we have followed the progress of Nepal’s increasingly high profile “Kung Fu Nuns.”  This Buddhist monastic community is centered in Ramkot in the Western portion of the Katmandu Valley.  Like everyone else in Nepal they were affected by the devastating earthquake that hit the area exactly one month ago.  Since then the nuns have become a fixture providing relief and labor in neighboring communities, helping those affected in the area to rebuild.  I noticed a few stories about this in the week following the earthquake, but the topic has continued to be reported in the press, both in South and East  Asia as well as the West.  If anything these sad events have helped to further increase this community’s media profile.  The Washington Post ran a story about their efforts that touched on the gendered aspect of their situation.   Readers may also want to check out the reporting in India Today.

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

On a lighter note, the growing market for martial arts tourism is another topic that we have previously discussed.  This was the subject of perhaps the single most widely read story to appear in this weeks news update. Zoe Li, writing for CNN, published a piece called “Kung Fu Hustle: How to Master Martial Arts in China.”  This article interviewed Sascha Matuszak, the editor of The Last Masters blog as well as an occasional guest author here at Kung Fu Tea.  He drew on his experience living, researching and traveling in China to advise her and other Kung Fu pilgrims on some possible destinations to consider. The post gives brief discussions of Shaolin, Wudang, Chen Village, Emei Shan and Hong Kong.  I thought that it was interesting that when discussing Wing Chun in Hong Kong Master Sam Lau got a shout out.  That seemed like a strong choice, especially for people who wanted to study the system in Hong Kong but who only had a limited amount of time to do so.  Hopefully some aspiring Kung Fu students will take the advice to heart.

Kung Fu Tai Chi magazine recently ran a slightly different sort of article on their webpage.  It was titled “Yang Jun on the Cultural Revolution and Taiji Today.”  One suspects that it will not reach nearly as large an audience as the cnn piece, but readers of Kung Fu Tea may find it to be even more important.  For all of our discussion of the ancient (and basically unknowable) origins of the traditional martial arts, I am often struck at how little interest there is in their more recent history.  This is a shame as it was these events that have most directly shaped our experience of these practices.

Additionally, some of the event of the middle and later decades of the 20th century reveal much about the essential nature of these institutions.  Obviously the Chinese Cultural Revolution is one of those critical events that had a profound impact on the martial arts in mainland China.  Many of the Masters and Grand Masters of the current generation were directly affected by these events, yet we do not hear nearly as much of them (at least not in the west) as one might expect.  Hopefully we will see more attempts to record and consider the impact of this episode in the near future.

Taiji being demonstrated at the famous Wudang Temple, spiritual home of the Taoist arts. Notice they wear the long hair of Taoist Adepts. Source: Wikimedia.

The last three weeks or so have seen a number of other stories examining the growth or significance of the Chinese martial arts in a “global” context.  The recent diplomatic meetings between India and China included public demonstrations of both Yoga and the traditional martial arts (Taijiquan).  One of the things that emerged from this discussion of national physical culture was the announcement that China would be pushing for greater UN recognition for Taijiquan.  I am a little unclear as to what exact form this would take, but it seems to be another indication of the importance of the traditional martial arts to the government’s public diplomacy strategy.

Speaking of public diplomacy, the last month has also seen a steady stream of announcements and news articles coming out of various African countries regarding efforts to educate individuals about Chinese culture through the language classes, paper cutting demonstrations and (of course) martial arts training.  For some samples of what has been going on out there you might want to see the following article in the Shanghai Daily about the attraction of Kung Fu for youths in Nigeria.  Alternatively this account looks at the progress of a cultural tour (including the martial arts) in Botswana.

Taiji classes will no longer held at this Central Southland Presbyterian Church hall. Source: The Southland Times

The news on the globalization front is not always universally positive.  Quickly spreading practices, especially when they are perceived as being rooted in a foreign culture, can also cause friction.   I noted with some interest the following news account of a dispute that led to a Taijiquan class being booted out of its training space in a church in Central Southland New Zealand.  While the group had practiced in the space for at least five years without incident, for some reason the Presbyterian Parish Council recently decided that the classes were a threat to their community’s “spiritual wellbeing.”  When asked to explain their reasoning the group cited the supposed Daoist religious origins of the art.  Maybe someone should send them a copy of something by Tang Hao or Douglas Wile? Just a thought.

The growing popularity of the Chinese martial arts also leads to them occasionally popping up where you least expect them.  Consider the following wedding announcement of Lowena Tam and Raymond Lee in the New York Times.  What is the significance of this happy occasion?  Lee is the son of Lee Moy Shan, who was a student of Moy Yat, who was (of course) a student of Ip Man.  Like I said, Kung Fu lineages appearing where you least expect to see them.  Still, congratulations are clearly in order!

The Kung Fu Fruit Vendor. Source: the Shanghaiist.

So did you hear the one about the Kung Fu fruit vendor?  Nope, its not pitch for a throwback Kung Fu film.  Rather one enterprising merchant in Hangzhou has found a creative way to keep his Qigong skills sharp while attracting new customers.  His method, issuing open challenges to the crowd.  In historical discussions we often come across accounts of various sorts of “marketplace performers” during the Late Imperial or Republic periods.  It would seem that the tradition is not yet dead (at least not in Hangzhou) and a free Kung Fu demonstration can still draw a crowd.

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

Kung Fu in the Entertainment Industry

The Cannes Film Festival has recently wrapped up.  Among the big winners this year was Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s artistic martial arts tale “The Assassin.”  The film, which follows the story of a young girl kidnapped by a nun, taken to the mountains and trained to be a deadly assassin, has been getting a lot of attention, such as the following review in the New York Times.  And it looks like this early buzz was well supported.  While a costume drama set in the Tang dynasty, Hou’s film is also said to be minimalist and highly artistic in its aesthetic vision.  Apparently the Powers That Be agreed with this assessment and Huo took home the “Best Director” award for his efforts.  This win has also made in splash in Taiwan’s press.  Clearly this is a film that is going on my “to watch” list.

Jackie Chan lead a martial arts demonstration outside of Dili in 2008. Source: http://www.china.org.cn

Not every martial arts film is going to be an artistic triumph.  Some of them are not even destined to be very good.  Nor are we seeing as many elaborate and technically difficult fight sequences.  Jackie Chan thinks he know why it is that Hollywood is not producing good martial arts films anymore.   Click the link to see what he has to say.  I realize that not everyone is a Jackie Chan fan, but there is some interesting stuff in this interview.

While we are on the subject of Americans, action films and doing your own stunts, it sounds like Mike Tyson had a mishap on the set of Ip Man 3.  His fist met another actor’s elbow and the result was a painfully (as a number of us can personally attest) fractured finger.  But apparently he was a pro and they just kept right on filming.

Robert Downey Jr. sporting a Bruce Lee T-shirt. Source: Business Insider.

Bruce Lee has also been in the news over the last few weeks.  He even made a fascinating cameo appearance in the recent summer block-buster “Avengers: Age of Ultron.”  Did you catch it?  This was not the first time that Robert Downey Jr has made a public appearance while sporting a Bruce Lee shirt, but I was fascinated by the time of its appearance in the film.  It turns out that there is also a bit of a story behind this cameo, as told in the following article by Business Insider.

Bruce Lee fans may also want to note that Justin Lin is bringing a new series to Cinemax titled “Warrior.”  This new show is said to be based Lee’s original material for a project of the same name which later evolved into the “Kung Fu” TV series with David Carradine.  The article describes “Warrior” as “a visceral crime drama that traces the path of a gifted but morally corrupt fighter thrown into crisis after a lifelong quest for vengeance is undermined.” It’s based on handwritten notes from Bruce Lee that were brought to light by his daughter, Shannon Lee.”  Sounds like good stuff.

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

Martial Arts Studies

Jon Nielson and I are happy to announce that our book, The Creation of Wing Chun: A Social History of the Southern Chinese Martial Arts is now available for pre-order from both from Amazon and directly from the publisher, the State University of New York Press.  The hardback edition of the book is currently set to ship on August 1.    This is one of only a very few English language academic books looking at the history of the Chinese martial arts, and the only one (that I am aware of) to focus on events in southern China.  Wing Chun students may also be interested to note that it offers the most comprehensive treatment of Ip Man’s biography and career to date.  From the publisher:

“This book explores the social history of southern Chinese martial arts and their contemporary importance to local identity and 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 highly 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 turn to the martial arts as they navigate the challenges of a rapidly evolving environment. After surveying the development of hand combat traditions 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.“

I am very excited to see this project finally coming to fruition.  We will be covering news relating to the roll-out of this book both here and on the Kung Fu Tea Facebook group in the coming weeks.

Alex Channon and Christopher R. Matthews also have a new edited volume coming out.  (I would have included a cover image but it does not seem to have been released yet.) Global Perspectives on Women in Combat Sports: Women Warriors around the World in Palgrave’s “Global Culture and Sport Series” is due to be released at the end of August.

“This volume presents a wide-reaching overview of contemporary research and scholarship on women’s engagement in a range of combat sports across the world. Including chapters on boxing, wrestling, mixed martial arts, and various other fighting disciplines, the collection provides readers with a comprehensive analysis of the current significance of women’s involvement in these sports, as well as charting many of the problems and opportunities they face in establishing and developing careers within them.

With contributions drawing from anthropology, phenomenology, philosophy, sociology, and sport psychology, this book will appeal to readers interested in the development of women’s sport; the relationship between sport and gender; and the wider, contemporary social significance of combat sports around the world.”

Fighting: Intellectualising Combat Sports, Ed. Keith Gilbert (Common Ground Publishing, 2015).

Keith Gilbert also has a new book out that will be of interest to a number of Kung Fu Tea readers.  Fighting: Intellectualising Combat Sports is an edited volume currently available from Common Ground Publishing.  This book is unique in that its various chapters cover a range of both theoretical and practical topics related to the martial arts.

“This book is the first of its kind that relates specifically to the practical and theoretical aspects of martial arts in contemporary society. Within its covers are a collection of thirty-five cutting-edge chapters by leading practitioners and academics who raise questions and provide answers regarding the broad relationship between fighting and the intellectualisation of the sports that constitute the martial arts. In their writings they highlight the remarkable work being undertaken by coaches, practitioners and exponents of various martial arts and the benefits of martial arts to children and positive health of individuals in society. Individually, they clarify the meaning of their particular martial art and highlight some of the problems they have encountered throughout their career and in researching the area. However, this is a very positive book that is not just of an academic nature but a text that provides ideas and innovations that can be used by future researchers and aspirants and practitioners in the field.

The authors throughout the book largely agree in concluding that there are aspects of the relationship between the martial arts and general society which have largely gone unnoticed, and they tackle the difficult perspectives of injury, stress, coaching, lack of understanding, pain, and training within their particular martial art. Of importance are their comments relating to the mind–body dichotomy and the power of meditation and practice in their sport. In doing so, they provide examples of good practice and strong programmes and make suggestions as to where the status quo needs to be addressed in order for the field to go forward.

This volume will be of great interest and value to academics working in all fields of martial arts, as well as to undergraduate and graduate students researching different disciplines. More importantly, it will also be a crucial aid to researchers who are interested in developing their sport in universities and colleges across the world.”

Lastly, readers my recall my announcement for the 2014 SUNY Press Volume Warrior Women: Gender, Race, and the Transnational Chinese Action Star by Lisa Funnel.  Paul Bowman has recently published a review of this book for the Journal of Chinese Overseas.  Check it out.  And don’t forget to take a look at his new volume, Martial Arts Studies: Disrupting Disciplinary Boundaries (Rowman & Littlefield, 2015) which is now shipping in paperback and is available for Kindle.

Also the 2015 Martial Arts Studied conference, to be held at Cardiff University from June 10-12, is fast approaching but there is still time to register.  Be sure to check out the the conference schedule to see what kind of papers will be presented.  I will be giving my keynote, “Imagining Ip Man: Globalization and Growth of Wing Chun Kung Fu,” on the 11th and look forward to meeting everyone who can make it.

Chinese tea set. Source: Wikimedia.

Kung Fu Tea on Facebook

As always there is a lot going on at the Kung Fu Tea Facebook group and this last month has been no exception.  We reviewed a Hung Gar book, discussed “5 Moments that transformed Kung Fu” and shared a moment with “Mrs. Judo,” among other things.   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!

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.

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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

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.

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

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Knife vs. Magazine fight from the Bourne Supremacy (2004).

“[…] In contemporary martial arts discourse, the most important distinction to be negotiated is not between the screen and street, but rather between the dojo and the street.

Increasingly, in martial arts discourse, it is not the screen that is held to be unreal or suspect or accused of being fantasy. It is the dojo—the training practices in training halls, that stand accused of being dream factories.”

Paul Bowman. “Mediatized Movements: Martial Artistry & Media Culture.” A Keynote presented at the Martial Arts & Media Culture Conference in Cologne (Germany), 17th of July 2015.   As always, you should read the article under discussion before moving on to today’s post.  Seriously, it will be worth it!

Introduction: Beware the DVD Special Feature!

If Peter Jackson made one strategic mistake with his release of the “Fellowship of the Rings” DVD (2002), it was to include so many special features. I enjoyed his adaptations of Tolkien’s novels, and I greatly appreciated the attention that he generated for them. But I never actually watched any of his movies more than a few times. Maybe once in the theater, and another time or two on DVD or TV. It was not that I failed to find his vision of Middle Earth enthralling. Rather it was just the opposite.

While I spent dozens of hours with each of the DVDs, almost all of my attention was dedicated to the “special features” included with each film. It was clear that producing these mini-documentaries, which covered various aspects of the making of these films, must have consumed considerable resources. I loved hearing Tom Shippy (one of my favorite Tolkien scholars) discussing the good professor’s life and literary works. But as a martial artist I spent even more time pouring over the “behind the scenes” glimpses into the workshops where the prop weapons were made and the training halls in which Orc and Elvin fighting methods were imagined by teams of very talented (and very human) martial arts choreographers.

All of this begins to raise questions. When a group of professional martial artists dedicate thousands of hours to developing a detailed combat system for creatures that do not exist, employing weapons that while realistic are not identical to historic arms, what exactly have they created? A fantasy martial art system? Certainly. Yet how different is that from the historic martial arts systems of our era, endlessly reinvented and reconstructed from personal transmission, faded 8 mm video tapes, poorly illustrated Ming era manuals and a driving dedication to make it work? Whether anyone cares to admit it or not, the transmission of “tradition” depends on both a good measure of hard work and creativity.

While watching these professionals I began to suspect that they were so successful in creating a martial art for Orcs because they were doing basically the same thing that martial artists had always done. Understand the strategic environment, ask basic questions, look at the tools that you have to work with, and apply every bit of your knowledge to solving the problem at hand.

Recently I had another, slightly uncomfortable, moment. This time I was confronted with a dystopian, but equally martial, vision of the future. Once again, it all started with delving a little too deeply into the “special features.” As I reported in this news update, the AMC series Into the Badlands is creeping ever closer to a TV set near you.  There has been a huge amount of buzz about this series, but until recently there was very little information about how this creative reimagining of a classic Chinese tale would actually look.

The shows creative vision came into focus recently when AMC released both an extended trailer and a “behind the scenes” special feature looking at the martial arts training and choreography that was going into this series. It is not surprising that these two products were released at the same time. AMC has been carefully crafting the message that they are going to bring “serious martial arts action” back to the small screen, and the videos were meant to be a down-payment on their promise.

I have to admit that the stunt team and fight choreography (provided by Daniel Wu and Stephen Fung) appeared to be excellent. Not only that, the basic martial arts instruction that they were putting the talent through looked tight. I found myself wishing that I could sit in on some of their sessions. And then I caught myself. After all, I am (or should be) a “real” martial artist. Right? I should not care about choreography or film angles.

In truth I do not remember much from the actual trailer (which I only watched once) except for a sense of emotional confusion brought on the perverse beauty of seemingly unending hills of opium poppies. I can take or leave dystopian futures; they are getting to be a little over done. Yet like any martial arts aficionado the invitation to visit another school really stuck with me. Still, this was tinged with emotional confusion. The output of this dream factory was only an image of the martial arts. It was undeniably an illusion, a masterpiece of visual fantasy. Yet the basic training that went into the production of this simulation looked all too familiar and real. In fact, it looked good.

The climatic final scene from the Karate Kid (1984).

Reality: A Two Sided Mirror

The typical response to all of this seems to be to double down and reassert the fundamental boundaries between the worlds of “performance” and those of “reality.” Of course this formulation of the problem will automatically begin to raise red flags for lots of academics. After all, many of the most basic categories that structure our lives, things like gender, nationality, race and economic class, all involve a healthy dose of performance and social construction.

Are the martial arts, structured as they are by the constraints of violence, immune to this? Put another way (one that might be most familiar to other political scientists) should we insist on the “realist,” as opposed to socially or institutionally constructed, nature of the martial realm.

This is the default position for many. The idea that what we do is brutally real while what we see on the screen is a “fiction” is widespread. And no matter how realistic one’s fight choreography attempts to be, I don’t think that anyone would assume that these visual images are actually attempting to pose as reality. After all, fights in the movies can be many things. They might be dramatic, heroic or even funny. In short, they are always (striving to be) entertaining. Violence in real life tends to lack this essential quality of good TV.

And yet we all tend to be drawn to those images on the small screen. More fundamentally, they can even structure the world of “real” martial artist to a surprising degree. In the West the Chinese martial arts, and Wing Chun in particular, were obscure topics in the West prior to the rise of Bruce Lee.  And the Karate Kid probably sold more square feet of strip-mall real estate than any other Hollywood film before or since. If we are honest, many of us will admit that it was these flickering images, or more importantly the ideas behind them, that first brought us into the realm of the “real martial arts.”

So would it then be correct to say that the movies made Wing Chun? Absolutely, but maybe not in the way that one might expect. After all, Bruce Lee did very little actual Wing Chun in his films. He probably filled more Tae Kwon Do schools with kids trying to learn his trademark flying sidekick than anything else. And when Wing Chun really did make it big, it was not alone. Rather it was accompanied by a number of other arts, all of which were reputed to emphasize midrange fighting.

In the minds of a number of practitioners the rise of systems like Krav Maga, Kali, Escrima and Wing Chun might appear to be a simple reflection of “reality.” These systems have gained in popularity because they all address a certain set of strategic problems in a realistic (and highly efficient) way. So maybe Bruce Lee and media trends are more peripheral to all of this than you might expect. Perhaps he was simply a messenger of something more fundamental rather than the message itself?

Luckily we have a new resource to aid us in sorting this out. One of my very few regrets about the June 2015 Martial Arts studies conference in Cardiff was that its gracious organizer, Paul Bowman, was too busy organizing and facilitating the event to present his own thoughts on these questions.  Luckily for us he was recently invited to present a keynote address at a conference on “Martial Arts & Media Culture” in Germany.

In his paper Bowman argues that it is no coincidence that close range combat systems rose to popularity on both the big screen and the training hall at roughly the same time. Yet to understand exactly how these two events are linked we must begin by rethinking the supposed dichotomy between martial arts “fantasy” in film or TV and “reality” on the street or in the dojo.

He begins by informing his readers in the first few paragraphs of his paper that he intends to discover the “connections between film choreography and martial arts practice – even a kind of two way street of suggestions, inspiration, copying and cross-fertilizations…” but to do so we must first accept that we are not “dealing with a situation of truth on the one hand and falsity on the other, but rather a general test of force and signification.” Or to put things in the simplest possible terms, martial artists (whether they work for a movie studio or a police department) are always looking for inspiration to creatively solve their problems, and those may come from a screen just as easily as a session in a training hall.

All of this is premised on a more basic debate about how individuals interact with the media that they consume. Are they essentially passive recipients of ideas and images, who are simply entertained (or possibly indoctrinated) by their consumption of media? Or, following the Use and Gratification Theory (Blumler & Katz, 1974), should we assume that individuals consciously seek out certain types of images, and then creatively reconfigure them for their own purposes?

A quick tour through the many playlists of Youtube would seem to leave very little question as to how engaged individuals are with their media choices. Not only is the platform (and its advertising strategy) literally built around the assumption that consumers will select certain images rather than others, it seems that most of the videos that one runs across are edited, modified, curated or commented upon by users in quite creative ways. Nowhere is this more clear than within the genera of martial arts “how to” videos.

It is not all that difficult to locate videos offering to teach techniques seen in a recent MMA fight, a movie scene or to bequeath the secrets of improving upon them. Of course the UFC isn’t the only area where Youtube viewers turn for reality. One can also find CCTV footage of various sorts of fights, muggings, stabbings and attacks. Unsurprisingly these are a popular topic of conversation among martial artists. I have even used a few of these with more students as jumping off points for various training discussions.

Bowman notes that some groups take this trend further than others. Practitioners of KFM, or the Keysi Fighting Method, have a complex relationship with the concept of “reality.” Their style has always focused on simple brutal efficiency, but it was selected for use in Batman Begins (and it subsequently enjoyed a period of popularity) precisely because it appeared to be “dramatic” and “violent” when filmed. Something like Jujitsu, while just as “real” and quite effective in practical terms, is not highly visual and can be difficult for audience to follow. So it was the fantasy images of Hollywood that popularized the KFM system as a point when it was attempting to be the most “real” of martial arts.

Bowman notes that this same tension between image and practice can be found in other registers as well. The “Winchester Virginia KFM” studio released a promotional video onto Youtube in which they spliced together ‘real fight’ clips taken from CCTV film with school demonstrations. All of this was constructed to promote the following argument: “reality is like this; our training equips us to master this reality.”

And yet “reality” proves to be a hard nut to crack. There are hard limits to how “real” any training session can be made. Others have already explored these boundaries in excruciating detail so I will not belabor the point. At the same time, is what we see in the CCTV footage “reality?”

In some ways, yes. These are images of events that actually happened. Of course it is not always clear what was said in these incidents, or how they escalated. Thus the vital element verbal confrontation is often left out. Nor can we expect that any two muggings, stabbings or random attacks to play out in exactly the same ways as the one that we have just studies. Of course the instructors who ran the KFM schools were well aware of this.

Nor should such limitations be taken as an argument that these sorts of images are useless. Rather, they need to be understood with caveats. Yet once the caveats have been introduced, it quickly becomes obvious that what we are interested in is not the limited, grainy, out of focus CCTV footage itself, but the concepts, images and ideas that we see illustrated within them. Yes they are limited, but they are useful.

According to the group who spliced them together as part of an advertisement, they are more useful than much of what has been passed on under the guise of traditional martial arts instruction. As Bowman so aptly observed in our introductory quote, the real debate in the martial arts world today is not between the screen and the street, but between the dojo and the street. Increasingly it is the training hall that is under attack as a fiction while “reality” can be found in the octagon or on Youtube.

Bruce Lee executes a spectacular flying kick while filming “Game of Death.”

The Logic of the Dream Factory

Something interesting happens once we take these reproduced images of real attacks to be a legitimate way of thinking about violence. As noted above, these images are always in some way partial, and everyone understands that for them to be useful as training tools we must focus on what they suggest (conceptually or strategically) about the nature of violence rather than seeing them as a definitive catalog of everything that could possibly happen. If we take these exact same caveats and apply them to wide range of other images, what we quickly discover is that they too are making symbolic arguments about the nature of violence, some of which may be more or less meaningful to our own training.

This insight brings us back to Bowman’s central argument, that there has been a critical reciprocal relationship between the development of martial arts on the soundstage and in the training hall. To understand how these spheres might relate Bowman asks us to consider the rise of “close range” fighting in action films following the release of the Bourne Identity.

Imagine the challenges facing a fight choreographer at this point in time. Action audiences identify with fight scenes, but following the rise of the UFC they have become aware of the critique that flashy kicks and long-range fights as “unrealistic.” Indeed, even at the height of the popularity of these techniques, many of films seem to have contained their own internal critique of such high profile kicks. Daniel in the Karate Kid wins his fight with a spectacular “crane style” kick, but only after another his kicks was caught and exploited leading to his leg injury.

Likewise, everyone remembers Bruce Lee’s visually powerful flying sidekick from Fists of Fury (1971). What is often forgotten is that the same kicks are shown to be ineffective in the hands of the Japanese karate students during the Dojo fight sequence. Only Lee can perform the technique in a way that is meaningful to the audience. And even then, was it technically effective in the face of machine guns? Like so much else about the martial arts, the spectacular kicks of the 1970s and 1980s seem to have been embedded within a self-dismantling discourse which foresaw their own obsolesce.

By the 1990s audiences were demanding something fresh and “realistic.” Jujitsu would be the obvious choice given its dominance in the octagon. Yet as Bowman notes, the highly nuanced nature of ground fighting makes it difficult for non-specialists to follow. It is more of a tactile than a visual art.

Close range fighting seemed to present choreographers with a much needed answer. The physical proximity of the two characters allowed for a greater degree of inter-personal drama in the shot, but the conflict would remain open enough that audience members could see (and hear) distinct blows, grabs, elbows or throws.

Better yet, the very nature of short range fight choreography, with its linear strikes and frequent use of fast takes, meant that it was possible for a fight choreographer to train actors who were neither athletes nor professional martial artists in the rudiments of fighting as quickly as possible. Scenes could be spliced together with footage from multiple mediocre takes into an action sequence that was both fast paced and convincingly realistic.

The logic that Bowman articulates here is important. As a Wing Chun instructor I too deal with students who are neither athletes nor experienced martial artists. And it is also my job to teach them some solid self-defense skills knowing full well that most of them will never go on to become dedicated fighters. In a sense we all face the perennial problem posed by General Qi Jiguang back in the 16th century when he first contemplated the role of unarmed boxing in military training. How can we take the weak and make them strong? More importantly, how do we do it facing restricted budgets and tight timelines?

Wing Chun (and a variety of other arts that also focus on “close range fighting”) has found that strength and skill can be augmented with a focus on structure. I don’t know that it’s the only, or even the best, solution to General Qi’s question. But it is interesting to me precisely because it is such a parsimonious one. Note how similar the logic of the problems facing fight choreographers and the martial arts instructors actually is.

Bowman argues that once this new approach to “realism” in the martial arts was put on film, it quickly gained prominence in the training hall. Yes Wing Chun grew in popularity (and it is interesting to note how many films it has appeared in since about 2000), but so did an entire host of other short range systems. He argues that trends within these two environments tend to be linked because they are both part of a single larger cultural discourse in which martial artists are talking with one another, and exchanging ideas, in an attempt to work out solutions to their problems and attract new groups of students.

Where then are the dream factories? In this view we might think of both the dojo and the sound stage as likely candidates. One cannot effectively solve a problem before imagining a solution and coming up with a way of communicating it. This is a fundamentally creative act. What happens in these two spaces is undeniably different, and no good is likely to come from naively or haphazardly mixing the two. Yet it is undeniable that the broader social discourse on the martial arts does evolve over time, and it is unlikely that we can fully grasp how this happens without examining the complex and reciprocal relationship between these two dream factories.

A great example of a close range fight scene from the film 2009 Sherlock Holmes. This scene has always fascinated me as it attempts to educate the viewer about technical aspects of the fight while simultaneously exploring Holmes’ inner dialogue.

Conclusion: The Problem of Change

Bowman’s argument is both straightforward and powerful. I suspect that much of its impact comes from the seemingly counterfactual nature of his conclusions. Indeed, this is the aspect of his argument that does the most work, opening a window onto the evolution of fight choreography as well as the rise of a certain group of hand combat systems within the marketplace for martial arts instruction.

Yet conference talks are a limited medium. And as Bowman states in his introduction he is offering these remarks “in the hopes that you will join in the conversation and we can take them further together.” In that spirit I would like to use this conclusion to consider a possible omission in this framework.

The evolution of a discourse, like anything else, is predicated on a process of change. Certain sorts of meanings, arguments and images that were once powerful must fade away for a new set of identities and symbols to take the stage. Indeed, Bowman discusses this very process in some detail as he leads us on a tour of the historical evolution of fight choreography.

At one point in time the flashy flying kick was a powerful symbol that resonated with audiences. Bruce Lee, a student of a close-range fighting system, focused on these techniques in his fight choreography, essentially forsaking his more down to earth mother-art. But by the late 1990s audiences were demanding something new. What they wanted was “gritty” and “realistic.”

Bowman notes this change in taste and moves on. In essence he treats it as an exogenous variable. It remains external to the essential logic of his argument.

Still, he is clearly aware that this is a tricky and potentially important issue. He notes at one point that a “cinematic style or gimmick can remain striking for only so long.” But given that the change in audience tastes is part of the larger martial arts discourse, and that this is what he ultimately wants to understand, I suspect that we may need some way of bringing this aspect of the process into the discussion. Potentially significant events cannot be left as mere “fads,” meaning that their existence is assumed at the outset of the discussion rather than being explored.

After all, some types of symbols are remarkably resilient. There seems to be something about the image of a lone hero with a sword that just won’t die. One can draw a pretty straight line connecting the swashbuckling tales of the 1950s, Star Wars in the 1980s and more recent fare including Pirates of the Caribbean. The image of a fledgling knight errant and his trusty blade setting out on the “hero’s quest” may not be as universal as Joseph Campbell imagined, but it does seem to be remarkably stable. Yet as Bowman observed, flying sidekicks come and go. Why?

As I read his paper I took an hour or so to assemble a timeline of important fight sequences from films released in the early 1970s to the present. Bruce Lee’s 1971 Fists of Fury was interesting to me as the flying sidekick was so important to the plot of the movie. But what role did this technique really play in the film?

Given that the final scene is meant to suggest his death, I don’t think that audience was supposed to be convinced of the absolute military superiority of the technique in the face of superior fire power. Rather than being seen as “realistic” I suspect that this highly acrobat kick was introduced to tell us something about the character Chen Zhen and his use of the martial arts to create a new persona, one that was capable of both fighting and dying for the nation. His seemingly superhuman kick was critical as it marked the reality of his inner transformation in the personal and spiritual realms, something that is less easily observed.

Indeed, as I worked my way through my timeline of fights it seemed to me that during the 1970s and 1980s highly athletic, long distance, fights were used in stories of questing heroes, where the protagonist fought for a certain type of glory or honor. They often appeared in situations that might best be characterized as “duals” rather than instances of true “self-defense.”

Put another way, the use of these techniques might not be confined simply to certain trends within fight choreography. Rather they may have also reflected the sorts of heroes that audiences responded to at a specific moment in history.

The Bourne Identity is interesting not only as it introduces a different sort of hand combat, but because its protagonist seems to be a different sort of hero (or possibly anti-hero). Jason Bourne is not walking into the middle of Japanese Dojos in occupied Shanghai to issue a public challenge. For the most part he goes to great lengths to keep a low profile and project an “every man” image. His unarmed fight sequences usually begin when an antagonist approaches or ambushes him (the assassin crashing through the apartment window being the quintessential example of that). In this case a close range action sequence is not only visually gripping, but it makes a good deal of tactical sense as well. The fact that this is Bourne’s “preferred mode” of combat seems to suggest something about nature as a character and the values that he embodies.

Audience reaction to Bourne suggests that at such a moment in history, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, this figure was deeply appealing to a large segment of the public. It might be possible to give other examples of the same general trend but this post has already run long. I originally wanted to discuss the evolution of Neo’s fighting style in the first Matrix movie, between his initial dual (long range) with Morpheus in the training simulation and his later desperate fight (short range) with the sinister Agent Smith within the matrix itself. It might be the case that this transition smoothed the way for what we saw in a number of subsequent films and discussions of the martial arts. But those thoughts will have to wait for another day.  While my own limited additions move this discussion another level back rather than definitively resolving the question, I hope that it suggests an area for further consideration.

In conclusion, Bowman makes a number of important observations in this paper linking trends in both the training hall and soundstage to create a more cohesive understanding of the way in which society’s martial arts discourse has evolved. I greatly look forward to reading future versions of this paper. Yet rather than taking the initial moment of change as exogenous to the model, we might want to bring this variable more clearly into the discussion. This could be accomplished by asking why the social demand for one sort of martial arts product, rather than another, evolves at a specific moment in time, and how this is reciprocally linked to (and find expression in) the protagonists created by dream factories of the silver screen.  As Seraph reminded Neo, “You do not truly know someone until you fight them.”  And it is through these evolving fight sequences that audiences come to identify with the values of their new heroes.

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If you enjoyed this post you might also want to read:  Telling Stories about Wong Fei Hung and Ip Man: The Evolution of a Heroic Type

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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.

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

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Youth engaged in militia training outside of Guangzhou in the 1850s. Note the long thin blade being held behind the rattan shield by the kneeling individual. source http://www.swordsantiqueweapons.com.

***For our Friday post we will be taking a second look at something from the archives.  That was not my original plan.  I actually had a great idea for a post all outlined, but my week turned out to be busier than expected and it has culminated in a pleasant, if not totally expected, road trip.  So we will have to wait until next week to explore some of that idea.  But this is not much of a setback as today’s post lays down much of the conceptual foundation for where we are going next.  Consider the following questions.  To what extent should students of martial arts studies think of the traditional hand combat traditions as social institutions?  And if we do conceptualize them in this way, what changes does this lead to in their expected behavior?  What could it help us to explain?  Hopefully we will be returning to these issues soon.***

Introduction

No assertion is more fervently advanced on behalf of the traditional Asian martial arts than assurances of their great antiquity.  The relative ages of these systems seems to have become a matter of increased discussion and competition in the early 20^th century.  Since that time their various creation myths have given way to a veritable antiquarian arms-race.

Some schools of Japanese swordsmanship and unarmed fighting can trace their histories back for hundreds of years through surprisingly well preserved written records.  Of course much of their nature and purpose has changed during the course of this history.

I recently read a discussion of modern competitive kickboxing in Cambodia that began by confidently asserting that the sport was based on an older fighting system which was at least 1,000 years old.  The author pointed to certain abstract reliefs carved on a temple and a few quotes by local informants as such strong proof of his assertion that no other discussion was necessary.

Writers on the Chinese martial arts routinely expound on Wushu’s long and illustrious history.  Even very respectable, historically sophisticated, authors like Prof. Kang Gewu seem to have no problem placing the genesis of the modern Chinese fighting systems in the distant past.  In fact, the first entry in his extensive time-line on the development of Wushu, titled the Spring and Autumn of Chinese Martial Arts – 5000  Years, dates to 1.7 million years ago!  This is more than one million years prior to the first emergence of modern humans on the planet.

He, as well as other Chinese authors, spends a surprising amount of time examining ancient lithic artifacts as a necessary part of the discussion of modern Wushu’s evolution.  After that exercise he moves into an even more detailed examination of “Chinese” warfare in the late Paleolithic and early Bronze Age.  In short, the title of his study is not simply an indulgence in rhetorical license.  He really does make an argument that Wushu has a history of over 5,000 years.

Nor should the Koreans be left out of this discussion.  In his extensively researched study of the origins and creation of Tae Kwon Do, Alex Gillis notes that many of this style’s schools emblazon their walls with the assertions that their art is “thousands of years old.”  In reality Tae Kwon Do is very clearly a post-WWII derivative of Japanese karate.  Worse yet, the “thousands of years” slogan was consciously created and promoted by exactly the same individuals who were busy transforming the local Karate establishment into a Korea’s new “national art.”

How should students of martial studies approach the persistent claims of ancient origins when dealing with modern hand combat traditions?  The following post argues that this ubiquitous phenomenon suggests some interesting truths about the nature and social purpose of these fighting systems.  Yet to really get at these questions we must first think more carefully about how we define the “martial arts” in an academic research program.

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

Understanding the “Martial Arts” as a Technical Transmission

One of the most exciting aspects of martial studies as a research area is its relative openness.  Not only are scholars from a wide range of disciplines engaging in a discussion of these questions, but an unprecedented number of martial artists are becoming interested in the history and social meaning of their practices as well.  This convergence creates opportunities for discussions between practical and academic students of the martial arts that can be very fruitful.

I think that it is probably easy to overlook how rare this conjunction of interests really is.  Macroeconomist and workers at a fast food restaurant may both be very interested in whether the minimum wage will be raised in the next year.  Yet rarely do the later attempt to read, let alone seriously engage with, the academic writings of the former.

The academic literature on the martial arts is much more likely to inspire interest among its subjects of study. Researchers might even benefit from the historical data and social connections that lay readers can provide.  Still, all of this common ground can mask some important differences in how scholars and practitioners understand the “martial arts.”

The fact that many (perhaps most) academic students of martial studies are also practitioners of these disciplines, while useful in many ways, can also muddy the conceptual waters.  One of the places where these differences are the most pressing is in the conceptual vocabulary that the two groups use to express their understanding of these fighting systems.

Readers might not suspect that there is any tension at all as both practitioners and academic students tend to employ the same vocabulary when describing these arts in technical terms.  Yet problems arise when we push beyond the most immediate levels and ask what the two groups actually mean by the words that they use in common.

Take for instance the term “martial art.”  Rarely do we stop to define or discuss this most basic concept.  Students from various styles might have slightly different understandings of what constitutes of a “martial art” in the abstract.  But almost all of them will understand this term to refer to a body of techniques, concepts and philosophical ideas about fighting.  The martial arts, in short, tend to be imagined as physical and cultural technologies.

This sort of technology can be passed on in a variety of ways.  Teacher/student transmission within some sort of school seems to be the “gold standard.”  But given the mind-boggling number of instructional books, DVDs, seminars and apps that are produced every year, it is clear that consumers have faith in a wide variety of educational methods.

Of course it is precisely these sorts of teachers, books, apps and DVDs that are also likely to advance the claim that the martial arts are “ancient” practices.  If one actually stops to consider what is being implied, this is a truly remarkable assertion.  It is almost intoxicating.  What other meaningful objects or technologies do most individuals interact with that can also claim such antiquity?

Most of us are employed in occupations that didn’t exist a century ago.  We work for corporations that probably did not exist even a decade ago.  The most popular forms of entertainment (film, TV, computer games, even the mass marketed novel) are all relatively recent inventions.  Even the “nation state system,” which structures almost every economic and political aspect of our modern lives is only a few hundred years old.  Other than a handful of religious texts, what in our current world really has a genealogy as ancient as that claimed by the martial arts?

I suspect that this appeal to antiquity succeeds in large part precisely because of its audacious nature.  It wows the student with the promise of something truly transcendent, and therefore legitimate.  And given that most of us have trouble understanding how different (and in many ways fundamentally inaccessible) even the recent past really is, we have no actual frame of reference with which to judge the credibility of these claims.

Then there is the problem of “evidence.”  Of course we must first begin by specifying evidence of what.  Notice that this is a step that generally does not happen in most popular historical discussions.

Given that most dialogues on the martial arts implicitly understand them as technical exercises, when they assert that their practices are “thousands of years old,” what they are really claiming is that their current technology of violence is identical to, and directly transmitted from, the physical culture possessed by warriors or sages of the ancient past.  Occasionally a specific philosophy (the Taiji Classics) or social agenda (“Oppose the Qing, Restore the Ming”) is also said to have been passed along.  But what most practitioners really seem to care about are the similarity of their physical skills to those practiced by their forbearers.

If one approaches the martial arts as a primarily technical exercise, it may be surprisingly easy to find evidence of “continuity” over time.  To begin with, most of these arts come with an “oral tradition” that asserts or simply takes the antiquity of the system for granted.   This provides a framework that students use to organize historical observations, and their understanding of earlier fighting traditions.  Such a framework also facilitates the almost universal temptation of “confirmation bias.”  It is the psychological process by which researchers over-emphasize facts that seem to bolster their beliefs about the nature of the world while disregarding contradicting evidence.

Of course these sorts of tendencies are by no means confined to popular discussions.  They often bedevil academic writing as well.  Scholars attempt to minimize these biases through well-defined methodologies, being transparent about sources and relying on external institutions like “peer review.”  Even then it must be admitted that total objectivity is probably impossible, and may not actually be all that desirable.

The problem with these sorts of “quality control” mechanisms is that they tend to be either expensive or time consuming.  As a result they are rarely employed in more popular modes of writing.  However, certain sorts of authors, notably journalists, have developed their own methods for dealing with at least some of these problems.

Yet our issues here go beyond writing strategies.  The very nature of the combat arts tends to promote “confirmation bias.”  The author of one of the papers I cited above noted that one can deduce a relationship between modern Cambodian kickboxing and ancient Khmer martial techniques through the carvings depicting military figures on some of the region’s ancient temples.  In examining these images some other observers have noted instances in which figures seemed to be in the act of striking their opponents with elbows.  Of course similar attacks are also employed in the region’s modern kickboxing.  This has led certain individuals to deduce that this traditional sport had enjoyed at least 1,000 years of continuous transmission.

Nor is this an isolated incident.  Archeological finds depicting ancient warriors in the kingdoms located on the Korean peninsula have been used to bolster the nationalist claims of Tae Kwon Do practitioners.  And students of Chinese martial studies have demonstrated a great interest in the Middle Kingdom’s ancient patterns of Bronze Age warfare going back at least as far as the time of the Shi noblemen.

Despite China’s great literary tradition, we must acknowledge that the ancient historical record is actually pretty thin.  When discussing the events of past millennia the student is forced to account for long silences and disjoints in the documentary resources.

Yes we may see an unarmed warrior striking an opponent with an elbow in one panel, but there are actually only so many ways in which one can attack.  All human being have two feet, two knees, two fists, two elbows, and (in extreme cases) one head.  The fact that an elbow strike was observed in the distant past only confirms that both modern and ancient warriors fight under the same set of biological constraints.  More interesting is the fact that other temple panels showed Khmer warriors fighting demonic creatures, yet that tradition does not seem to have persisted into modern kickboxing.

In any event, these biological constraints dictate that all systems of armed or unarmed combat, despite their place or origin, will seem more similar than different.  Spears, swords and bows are more or less universally employed and studied around the world.  The same goes for boxing and wrestling.

Given how fundamental a concept like “wrestling” is, more than one society might create a set of very similar physical practices.  When we see different groups of individuals, widely separated by geography or time, doing the same thing, we should probably start by assuming by parallel evolution rather than “mysterious transmission.”

This is not to say that direct transmission never happens.  Certain Japanese arts do trace their roots to China.  Likewise Shaolin managed to create and export a fairly stable pole fighting tradition during the late Imperial period.  But these relationships need to be carefully established through detailed scholarship rather than being simply assumed based on a few suggestive archeological finds.

Modern students tend to think of the martial arts as technological systems because that is how they encounter them.  They spend their time learning to recreate the movements, flow and power that their teachers demonstrate.  Immersing oneself in this bodily experience can even be an important tool in certain sorts of ethnographic research, particularly if one is interesting in the field of performance ethnography or questions of “embodiment.”

This is certainly a valid way of understanding the modern martial arts.  But it is not the only possibility.  I suspect that for many researchers, particularly the more historically and social scientifically inclined, there may be a more promising alternative.

Arnold Genthe and Will Irwin. Genthe’s Photographs of San Francisco’s Old Chinatown. New York: Mitchell Kennerley. 1913. (First published in 1908). A high resolution scan of the original photograph can be found at the Bancroft Library, UC Berkley).

The Martial Arts as a “Social Institution”

Consider instead the martial arts as an “institution” as defined within the social scientific literature.  By this I mean that specific styles are understood as socially constructed bodies of practices, norms and identities that are conveyed over time.  Technical exercises may be part of the process of transmitting this institution, but there is always more to it than that.

I would posit that while most practitioners think of the martial arts as a purely “technical exercise” (including both a physical and cultural component), they actually tend to encounter and participate in them as “social institutions.”  One does not have to dig deep to find a certain hunger for discussions of modes of martial ethics, philosophical insights and a sense of shared community within most of the modern martial arts.  Nor is it a coincidence that the single most common sort of dialog pertaining to Kung Fu that one finds on the internet is a constant rediscovery and elaboration of the various creation myths.  After all, at their most basic level each of these stories is a parable of belonging and personal transformation.

A similar conclusion holds even if we consider things from a more materialist perspective.  Most of us gain access to a body of technical knowledge about the martial arts by joining a specific type of commercial network.  The public martial arts school is actually a relatively recent development in the history of Chinese hand combat.  These things did not appear prior to the end of the 19^th century and they did not become common before about 1920.

Today the commercially funded public school is the defining social institution of the Chinese martial arts.  Older sorts of institutions (such as the “discipleship system”) to the extent that they still exist, have been modified so that they reinforce rather than challenge the economic logic of these new organizations.

Even the most basic goals of students of the Chinese martial arts are different now than they might have been 200 years ago.  While certain aspects of technical practice have remained the same, very few modern students engage in training because they expect the village militia to be called up.  Nor are many modern students amateur opera performers or part-time bandits.

Physical fitness, spiritual development, sporting competition and civilian self-defense are the major reasons that individuals seem to take up a martial art today.  Yet in the case of the Chinese hand combat schools, these sorts of motivations reflect the reform movements of the 1920s and 1930s much more than they do the high Qing dynasty ethos of the 1720s or 1730s.  While we may share certain technical practices with the past, almost everything else about the modern experience of the martial arts has changed.  By understanding these practices as relatively newly created social institutions, scholars can ask better questions about how and why they evolved.

This somewhat abstract discussion actually has important implications when we start to think about the 19^th century history of some of today’s most popular martial arts.  Take Wing Chun for example.  The orthodox version of this style’s creation myth (popularized by Ip Man in Hong Kong in the 1950s) is interesting in that it does not claim great antiquity.

Instead it places the genesis of the art with the destruction of the Southern Shaolin Temple in the 1720s.  The fighting style was then passed down through a number of generations until the various pieces of it were brought together by the “Red Boat Opera Companies.” Following a socially disastrous local tax revolt in the 1850s, two opera performers taught it to Leung Jan, a pharmacist in Foshan, to thank him for offering them shelter.

Leung Jan had no intention of teaching the art publicly or opening a school.  Occasionally this is used as “proof” of his highly conservative ways, or the secret excellence of his Kung Fu.  In fact, there were no public martial arts schools during most of his life.  That most basic social institution, which structures our fundamental experience of the martial arts today, had not yet been invented.

One of the few individuals that Leung Jan did teach was a friend and neighbor from the marketplace named Chan Wah Shun.  Being younger his outlook on the martial arts was somewhat different.  During his generation the Hung Sing Association (the first large Choy Li Fut school in Foshan) proved that the local economy had monetized to the point that it was now possible to open something very much like a commercial public school.

Chan Wah Shun’s ambitions to follow in their footsteps were somewhat dampened by bad timing.  The early and late phases of his teaching career were separated by a long break caused by the social fallout of the Boxer Uprising.  The governor of the province, seeking to prevent copy-cat attacks on foreigners and Chinese Christians, moved quickly to suppress all local martial arts activity in the Pearl River Delta region in about 1900.  Even after it became possible to teach again, the reputation of the martial arts had been badly damaged.  In fact, 1900-1910 were probably the darkest years for the traditional Chinese fighting systems.

In total, Chan Wah Shun only taught about 16 students over the course of his career.  The last of these was the son of his landlord, a child named Ip Kai Man.  Unfortunately Chan soon fell ill and later suffered from a stroke.  Most of Ip Man’s training seems to have come from Chan’s second disciple, Ng Chung So.

The actual nature of Ip Man’s introduction to Wing Chun is somewhat hard to disentangle.  As the son of a rich merchant and landlord he spent most of his days studying literature rather than Kung Fu.  Then, as a teenager, he was sent to Hong Kong to attend a western high school.  This might have put an end to his Wing Chun training except that by an accident of fate he was introduced to Leung Bik, Leung Jan’s remaining son.

The elderly Leung Bik had never sought to teach Kung Fu and had not been involved with the new commercial institutions that were quickly transforming the world of the southern Chinese martial arts.  Instead his relationship with Ip Man seems to have reflected the older 19^th century patterns.  He moved in with new student, who provided him with food, clothing and housing, in exchange for tuition.  In short, Leung Bik became a temporary member of the wealthy young student’s household.

This actually puts Ip Man in a very interesting position.  Much has been made of the fact that he received both a Confucian and Western education.  But in terms of understanding his Wing Chun, it is important to realize that he likewise received both a modern early 20^th century and a more traditional 19^th century introduction to the martial arts as well.  Few if any of Chan Wah Shun’s other students (perhaps with the exception of some of those who had previously studied in another style) could say this.

Ip Man carefully considered what he learned from both Chan Wah Shun and Leung Bik.  By his own admission he thought deeply about not just their techniques, but how they taught as well.  Except for a brief episode in the 1940s, Ip Man avoided opening his own school in Guangdong during the volatile Republic of China years.  Yet after fleeing to Hong Kong in 1949 he was left with little other choice.

His innovations in teaching techniques and humorous personality made him a popular instructor during much of the 1950s and 1960s.  A combination of factors, including the suppression of Wing Chun on the mainland, the socioeconomic character of some of his Hong Kong students, and the eventual celebrity of Bruce Lee, all conspired to make his branch of Wing Chun the most globally popular martial art to arise from southern China.

Let us pause to consider the following question.  What kind of story have I just told?  Most Wing Chun students would recognize this as an abbreviated history of their style.  Indeed a narrative very much like this one is told on a daily basis in Wing Chun schools around the world.  But is this narrative really the history of “Wing Chun” as a martial art?

Leaving aside the dubious historical credentials of the Southern Shaolin Temple and its subsequent destruction, I would argue that the real issue here is Leung Jan.  He is the first individual in Wing Chun’s genealogy whose birth and basic life story can be objectively verified.  Leung Jan represents the moment when the orthodox creation narrative transitions from the realm of folklore to history (loosely understood).

There is not really much doubt that the range of technical skills that Ip Man taught in Hong Kong (while modified through his own experience) ultimately came through Leung Jan.  They were transmitted to Ip Man through his son (Leung Bik), his student (Chan Wah Shun) and his grand-student (Ng Chung So).  Ip Man had the singular advantage of being able to see three different dimensions of the master’s transmission.

So does it stand to reason that Leung Jan must be the first known practitioner of “Wing Chun?”  Here things get more difficult.  If one is only interested in the transmission of an “embodied technology” the answer may well be, yes.  But did Leung Jan know that the name of the art that he practiced was “Wing Chun?”

I doubt that there can ever be a definitive answer to this question.  The name “Wing Chun” does not appear in surviving records as the title of a martial art in Leung Jan’s generation.  The names of some of the central characters in the Wing Chun creation myth first appear in a Wuxia novel that did not come out until about the time of Leung Jan’s death.

Further, critical figures in this story, such as Ng Moy, actually bear a much closer resemblance to the way that these characters were reimagined by subsequent authors writing in the 1930s.  I think that there is a good chance that Leung Jan’s explanation of the origins of his art differed substantially from what is passed on to students today.

Nor would this be a unique situation.  Historians interested in the origins of Taiji Quan point out that while the art practiced at Chen Village in the 18^th century resembles modern Taiji in many respects, there are also some pretty clear differences.  Nor does it appear that the residents of Chen Village knew that they were practicing “Grand Ultimate Boxing.”  That name, and everything that it implies, was coined by a more elite individual who was watching Yang Luchan perform in Beijing at some point in the 1850s.  Nor is there any evidence of (most of) the “Taiji Classics” at Chen Village.  The literary and philosophical aspects of the art would have to wait to be “discovered” by the Wu brothers during the second half of the 19^th century as well.

The end result of all of this is that the Taiji Quan practiced in Beijing in early 20^th century was a fundamentally different sort of social institution than that practiced in Chen Village in the 18^th.  Yes, important technical aspects of the art remained unchanged, but it was now distributed through public commercial schools rather than closed village lineages.  It was now taught as a form of physical culture rather than as a type of military training.  It was accompanied by an elite literature and philosophical system that were previously unknown within Chen village.  Even the name of the art was different.

While less jarring I would propose that we can understand Wing Chun as having gone through a similar transformation following the Leung Jan’s generation (at least in his lineage).  Leung Jan enjoyed the martial arts, but he had no intention of teaching them.  For him this was a system of personal practice (and defense) which probably grew out of his experiences in the turbulent 1850s.

It was only after his death that Chan Wah Shun was able to turn his master’s once private practice into what was essentially the first public commercial Wing Chun School which openly exchanged teaching for monthly payments of silver.

This transformation would have had many effects on Leung Jan’s art, some subtle, some more obvious.  The style’s name and history, while not really all that important in Leung Jan’s personal practice, would have become critical.  Such things are an essential part of advertising a school in the newly emerging competitive marketplace, as well as explaining to students what sort of community they have just joined.

Students today experience and understand Wing Chun as a relatively open institution built on the exchange of embodied practices and money.  This basic structure dates to the time of Chan Wah Shun.  The creation myth and folklore that monopolizes so much of the modern discussions of the style is probably even more recent than that.  When we as social scientists attempt to understand the popularity of Wing Chun, what it reveals about the development of civil society in southern China, or how it has been carried on the waves of globalization, the “social institution” that we are looking at is fundamentally different from anything that Leung Jan was ever part of.

Another picture of the same 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.

Conclusion: Focusing on Variables, not Constants, in Martial Studies

This should not be construed as an argument that everything in the Wing Chun system was invented whole cloth in the 1930s.  Neither social nor physical culture ever arises in a vacuum.  Everything has its antecedents.  Consider the role of pole fighting in the style.

Wing Chun’s famous “Six and Half Point Pole” form is actually shared with a number of other regional martial arts.  Given its widespread distribution, simplicity, and terrible practicality, I strongly suspect that it goes back to the days of mandatory local militia training in the 19^th century.  In fact, the actual techniques and understanding of violence behind this pole method is probably one of those elements of the southern Chinese martial arts that actually is hundreds of years old, maybe even dating back to the heyday of military pole fighting in the 16^th century.

Yet that is precisely the problem that we are faced with when attempting to define the “martial arts,” let alone date them.  Whatever modern Wing Chun is, it is clearly not a pure 16^th century military training exercise.  Certainly some of its techniques may be shared with practices from that period.  Yet a lot of history has intervened along the way.  It is this subsequent historical evolution that makes Wing Chun unique.  It is what defines it as a social institution, distinct and different from other styles that it may share a certain body of practices with.

When we, as social scientists, fall into the trap of defining the martial arts only in technical terms (rather than as historically and socially defined institutions) we are in danger of losing sight of precisely those aspects of these systems that account for their change and dynamism.  It is within moments of transformation that we may be able to open a window onto the mechanisms behind the development of Chinese (and even global) society.

Of course dealing with changing and evolving institutions is never easy.  Do they simply respond to the structural constraints of the systems that define them, or do they maneuver within their environment in strategic ways?  How great of a role does individual agency actually play in the creation or transformation of a martial art?  And how should we define the moment when one institution dies only to be replaced by something new?

These are all challenging questions, but their answers are potentially important.  Before we can tackle any of these problems we must start by accepting that the martial arts, as socially defined institutions, are different today than they were hundreds, let alone thousands, of years ago.  Persistent attempts to link this or that art to a famous Ming dynasty personality or text are bound to obscure much of what is actually interesting about these modern practices.

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If you enjoyed this post you might also want to read: Do the Chinese Martial Arts have One “Martial Culture” or Many?

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Plum Flower Maiden Dancing from Pole to Pole. Circa 1880. Source: Wikimedia (though I believe that Stanley Henning was the first person to publish this image in his essay for Green and Svinth.)

“The way in which we read the document depends on what we have read before.”

Evelyn S. Rawski, October 1, 2015, “Crossing from Nation to Region: China in Northeast Asian History.”

Introduction

Recently I had the opportunity to hear the noted Chinese historian Prof. Evelyn Rawski deliver a guest lecture at Cornell.  Among her many accomplishments Rawski is best remembered for her early social histories as well as for her groundbreaking work to establish the “New Qing History.”  To the best of my knowledge she has never actually written about the Chinese martial arts, but its the work of scholars like her that provide the basic framework of understanding that makes our field of study both decipherable and interesting.

Yet the most powerful idea in her talk occurred when she began to discuss the training of graduate students for the sorts of multilingual, multi-sited archival research necessary to truly think about problems in regional terms.  Nationally focused areas of study limit the number of perspectives that any one scholar tends to bring to complex topics.  After all, if we have spent our entire career studying political history from the Chinese national perspective, and we run across a new document detailing regional competition, will it ever be possible for us to read it as anything other than yet another national narrative?  Rawski contends that what we get from of our primary sources is very much dependent on all of the things that we have read before they ever enter our hands.

Her line of argument struck me as it seemed to speak so directly to a problem that I had been thinking about.  Globalization is a theme that emerges repeatedly in discussions of Chinese martial studies.  Indeed, vast systemic pressures helped to shape the specific forms that Chinese hand combat systems took in the late 19th and early 20th century.  They created new economic and political openings that martial arts reformers could exploit at exactly the same time that rapid social change was cutting off the institutions that had once supported these practices.  Then in the second half of the 20th century these same global forces allowed for these fighting systems to thrive in the West where they took on new meanings as they were appropriated into the local cultural and commercial landscape.

It is not surprising then that a number of scholars have decided that this expansion of the Asian fighting systems could potentially reveal much about the underlying processes of globalization and the ways that identity moves, hybridizes and is appropriated in its wake.  While the journey of practically any “traditional” art might illustrate these points, the popularity of Wing Chun, due in no small part to its fortuitousness relationship with Bruce Lee, makes it a particularly interesting case.  One of the main points that becomes evident as we look at Wing Chun’s “journey to the West” is that the discourse that has surrounded this art has never spoken with a unified voice.  It has never been just one thing.  Rather, multiple groups have contested the questions of what this art is, and what it should become, for reasons of their own.  Nor has this debate been stable over time.

In some cases this evolution has to do the progressive steps in the interpretation and cultural appropriation as outlined by Krug.  Yet if we look at this process on a more detailed level what quickly becomes apparent is that rather than a single dominant narrative what we often see is a dynamic process driven by the logic of strategic competition rather than simply cultural appropriation.  Yet it seems that we often miss the complexity of what is going on in these movements.  Why?  It could be that just as Rawski warned, we tend to read them from a single perspective.

To illustrate this possibility I would like to take a closer look at the early three volume instructional set produced by K. T. Chao and J. E. Weakland titled Secret Techniques of Wing Chun Kung Fu (Vol. 1-3) written between 1976 and 1983.  Each one of these three volumes explores the techniques, applications and concepts found in one of the style’s three unarmed fighting forms (Siu Lim Tao, Chum Kiu and Bil Jee).  I briefly addressed the first of these books as part of a short series of posts looking at the evolution of the earliest print discussions of Wing Chun in the West.  In the current essay I would like to discuss the content of the series as a whole, explore some issues in the way that its treatment of the art’s history evolved between the first and third volumes, and place it within its proper context.

On one level its easy to look at the work of Chao and Weakland and to see it as an example of the “Orientaliztion” of the discourse surrounding Wing Chun in an attempt to make the art more attractive to western consumers as interest in the system was spiking in the early 1980s.  Indeed, the difference in tone between these works and prior discussions of Wing Chun, both in Hong Kong and the West, is fascinating.  Yet I argue that rather than thinking of these moves as part of a process of cultural appropriation or coercive mimeticism, it is necessary to see them as responses to other specific actors in the environment.  The various strains of the Chinese martial arts which made their way to the West did not all share the same values or goals.  Nor can we place them all on a neat and tidy two dimensional continuum.  What arose from this process of strategic competition and innovation was different from what had gone before.  At least some of the new approaches that emerged were the product of the same sorts of forces that have always shaped the development of the martial arts.

Secret Techniques of Wing Chun Kung Fu. Hardbound 1st edition. Source: Author’s Personal Collection.

From Ip Man’s Modern Fighting System to the “Secret Techniques” of Wing Chun Kung Fu

I have always been a little surprised that Wing Chun’s many amateur historians have not taken more interest in the early publications that documented the spread of this art from Southern China to both North America and Europe.  While there has been a lot of emphasis on the critical role of Bruce Lee in all of this, there has been much less interest in the extensive paper-trail of books, magazines and ephemera that both helped to commercialize and (for our purposes) document practically every step of this journey.  This is all the more interesting as the modern history of Wing Chun is notoriously fractious with many divisions existing not just between lineages but also more basic historical theories and philosophical disagreements about the very purpose of the art (and possibly the TCMA in general).  How then did a relatively simple art from a small group of closely linked schools back in Hong Kong yield such a diversity of outcomes?

Take for instance a very basic question.  What is the purpose of Wing Chun?  Is it primarily a self-defense art?  An efficient and modern system of hand combat?  Or is it really best understood as a cultural project?  Something rooted not in the modern realities of street fighting but in the timeless philosophy of Chinese culture?  Is Wing Chun meant to be a “way of life” on a deeper spiritual level? 

One would think that such questions would be easy to answer in strictly empirical terms.  After all, most Western Wing Chun practitioners today trace their lineage back to Ip Man, and he only died in 1972.  He had many students and apparently he even gave a couple of interviews.  Ip Man’s children are still alive today and his followers have produced a raft of instructional manuals and historical remembrances.  A museum was even built to preserve his personal affects.  Its hard to find that many other masters of the same generation whose teaching careers have been quite as well documented as Ip Man’s.   And yet when we look to this vast body of popular writing for guidance on our basic question we see a vast range of opinions.  Chao and Weakland’s three volume set on the Secret Techniques of Wing Chun Kung Fu is interesting precisely because these books document a moment when a powerful new strand of discussion came to dominate the public imagination of the art.

Before delving into the specifics of those observations we should provide a more general introduction to their work.  The initial volume in this series (covering Siu Lim Tao) was released in 1976, three years after the explosion of the “Bruce Lee Phenomenon” making it one of a handful of early works on the Wing Chun system available to the English language readers.  The first of these books was Clausnitzer and Wong’s 1969 volume (unique because of its extensive discussion of the social setting of Ip Man’s schools).  The most widely read was James Yimm Lee’s Wing Chun Kung Fu (basically transcriptions of Bruce Lee’s early Wing Chun curriculum).  I have discussed the contents and contributions of these books at length elsewhere and I will not repeat those discussions here. Its sufficient to say that both were meant to be basic introductions to the system which sought to demonstrate the style’s opening form, provide a short discussion of some core concepts, and outline a few basic two-man exercises that if done faithfully would allow the reader to begin to feel some of the basic energies used in Wing Chun.  Yet both books functioned more as an advertisement for the system than anything else.

The task that Chao and Weakland set for themselves was much more ambitious.  While the authors start out by stating that is impossible to actually learn Kung Fu from a book, they then outline a detailed curriculum that would allow a small group of people working together to basically do just that.  Each of the three volumes began with a short introductory discussion.  This is often historical and distinctly philosophical in nature but other topics, such as the traditional Wing Chun Maxims (Vol. 1) or basic Qigong practices (Vol. 3), were also included.

In point of fact no actual “secrets” about the Wing Chun system were revealed in the three books.  What was offered was a fairly complete curriculum of self study roughly modeled on the progression  of movements, concepts, two-man exercises and forms used in the Ip Man schools back in Hong Kong.  Perhaps the greatest pedagogical innovation seen in these books is that individual techniques and applications were introduced and drilled extensively before the student was finally introduced to the completed form.  The authors state that forms practice will be more meaningful if the nature of each movement is thoroughly understood before repetitive practice is undertaken.

I have always been interested in the speed with which Wing Chun spread across North America in the late 1970s and early 1980s.  Given the rather limited number of individuals from Hong Kong with actual teaching experience one might be forgiven for thinking that this would have been a slow and arduous process.  Yet I suspect that the detailed curriculum of study outlined in this series of books, along with some seminars and a relatively brief period of formal instruction, probably jump-started the teaching careers of a good many individuals early in the decade.

The other innovation had to do with how all of this information was discussed (rather than simply its quantity and organization).  The authors state in their preface to the first volume that their purpose is to correct the errors of the popular articles and books that have already appeared on Wing Chun to that point.  In their view these are ignorant of the true principals of the art as taught by Ip Man.  Beyond that they hope to convince their readers “that there is more to the art than one might assume after viewing modern popular “Kung Fu” films.  It is more than a fighting technique.  More properly, it could be called a “way of life.”

One suspects that it is this extended body of arguments that form the actual “secrets” of Wing Chun, rather than the details of how various two man drills are to be organized.  In truth much of that same information (if in lesser quantities) was already made available in both Lee’s and Clausnitzer’s  volumes.  And the basic discussion of concepts offered by Chao and Weakland is actually pretty similar to what one might find in these previously published books.

The most glaring differences between these volumes and their predecessors seems to have been their answer to the basic question of what Wing Chun really was.  Clausnitzer drew on his interviews and experiences in Hong Kong to note that Ip Man explicitly argued that Wing Chun was best understood as a modern fighting system, and that his students were among the most progressive and open group of individuals that one was likely to encounter within the traditional martial arts scene.  He even went so far as to argue that its relatively streamlined and modernized nature made Wing Chun well suited for success in the global marketplace.

Lee’s volume, much like its author, is famously down to earth and taciturn.  After a one paragraph review of the art’s origins the book moves right into a detailed discussion of its conceptual foundation and training drills.  While James Lee was as well versed in the Shaolin mythos as any other western practitioner of the Chinese martial arts of the period, he seems to have consciously excluded any discussion that might be extraneous or distracting from his more practical concerns.  The result was a slim volume that is virtually timeless.  Having said so little (but including many clear photographs) there is pretty much nothing in the book that can go out of date.

Chao and Weakland frame their discussion of Wing Chun in an entirely different way.  Rather than advertising the art’s modern credentials or devastating combat efficiency they instead present it within a rich cultural framework.  They go to lengths to argue that Wing Chun can only be understood through, and as an extension of, Chinese philosophy.  While the art itself claims Shaolin roots, the authors seem oddly partial to philosophical Daoism.  The front matter of their first volume manages to quote both Lao Tzu and Zhuang Zhou and attentive readers will also be able to detect instances where these works have been paraphrased and inserted into the text without direct attribution.

Occasionally Daoist discussions occur in rather odd places.  For instance, the authors saw fit to add two new school rules to the traditional set laid down by Ip Man, each of which took the form a quote from one of these classic Daoist works.  And when discussing the details of kicking and counter-kicking in Vol. 2 readers are sagely reminded:

“Deal with it before it happens.” (Lao Tsu) Remember the Wing Chun maxim: Prevent a kick with a kick. “There is no greater catastrophe than underestimating the enemy” (Lao Tsu).  Watch your opponent carefully to detect any shift which would indicate an intended kick.  The best rule of course is to kick first, but if you cannot then block his kick with one of your own before he can generate power.  Crowd your opponent and never allow him to get set….” (Vol.2 p. 82)

This is all good advice.  It represents a line of instruction that many generations of Wing Chun students have received.  Yet I would venture to guess that most of us got the discussion without the explosion of maxims and aphorisms seen here.  Its not clear what these proof-texted quotes really bring to the problem at hand.  Yet it is typical of the authors to attempt to integrate them into their discussion of the actual details of the system.

I personally doubt that many of these references had their actual origin with Ip Man.  The few actual quotes from the grandmaster included in the volumes all tend towards a sharp sense of humor rather than protracted flights of philosophical fancy.  This is not a surprise as most period accounts of Ip Man’s personality specifically mention his caustic sense of humor.  A few note his traditional education and Confucian bearing.  Indeed, Ip Chun has explicitly argued that anyone seeking the “philosophical roots” of Ip Man’s thought should start with the Doctrine of the Mean.  But I have yet to see an extended discussion of his thoughts on Daoist philosophy outside of the basic metaphors (the Five Phases, etc) that are common to all of Chinese popular culture.

The discussion of Wing Chun provided in these books also differs from other popular manuals in its self-conscious feeling of erudition.  In addition to the Daoist works mentioned above the authors quote Carlos Castaneda, T. S. Elliot, Spinoza, and even the Taiji Classics.  This may be less surprising when we remember who the they were.  K. T. Chao earned a law degree from a University in Taiwan and later studied at Cambridge in the UK.  Weakland is a professional Historian who worked at Ball State University, making him one of the very first American academics to write about the Chinese martial arts.

History plays a critical role in the way in which the practice of Wing Chun is framed, contextualized and presented to the readers of these volumes.  Again, this is something of a depart from previous works.  The story of Yim Wing Chun had certainly been published before, but individuals like Bruce and James Lee were not primarily interested in these sorts of discussions.  And Clausnitzer and Wong’s treatment of Wing Chun focused on the art’s future rather than its past.  Volume one in the present series begins with a multiple page discussion of Wing Chun’s history.  This  starts with references to the actual building of the historic Shaolin Temple in Henan.  It then introduces the origins of the “animal styles” of Kung Fu and moves on to the myth of the destruction of the temple and the creation of the Wing Chun system.

The next section introduces a discussion of the Wing Chun maxims.  The overall impact of these sayings is to lend the art a slightly archaic feeling (students are first informed that “Because of the deceptive appearances monks and nuns, women and scholars are the most dangerous practitioners of Kung Fu.”)  The section is even introduced with a quote taken from the Tai Chi Classics (as well as another nod to Zhang Zhou) which help to underline the essentially “balanced” and “internal” nature of Wing Chun.

The second volume (published in 1981) omits any introductory historical material in favor of more philosophical quotes.  Yet in the third volume (1983) the historical discussion returns in an expanded form.  It seems that two new sources of information have become available to the authors.  First, a more detailed version of the Wing Chun origin story, written by Ip Man and  found among his papers after his death, had been published by the VTAA.  A few of the details of this version of the story clashed with elements of the account previously published by the authors and we can see their efforts to rectify those aspects of the myth.

It also appears that one of the authors had an opportunity to work with some of the documents that are held by the Wade Collection at Cambridge University.  The end result was a much more detailed historical discussion in which additional information about the historical creation and rebuilding of the Shaolin Temple were appended to the sorts of myths that had long been popular with martial artists.  To this was added references to much older material, such as the myth of the temple’s salvation by a pole wielding giant at the start of the Ming dynasty, and even detailed references to Cheng Zhongyou’s pole fighting manual written by the important 16th century martial scholar.    In an attempt to explore and rectify the various accounts of Shaolin’s destruction the authors introduce a longer variant of the story taken directly from accounts of Triad initiation dramas.

The progression of the historical discussion from the first to the third volumes is significant.  The authors are clearly uncomfortable endorsing the historical validity of the style’s creation myth, yet they do not attempt to offer any alternative to it. Nor do they simply throw it out when they encounter more reliable information about the history or the development of the Chinese martial arts elsewhere.  Instead they try to integrate this new information into a larger, and more detailed, narrative.  The end result is story that sounds more accurate and reasonable, yet is still built on mythic foundations.

Its also interesting to note what never comes up in any of these discussions.  The work of Tang Hao, or any of the other early historians of the Chinese martial arts, is never referenced even though it was available in Taiwan. So while the authors were attempting to do historical research they were essentially forced to start from scratch.  Still, by the standards of popular publications of the early 1980s a lot of fascinating information had been presented.  Elements of what they uncovered anticipated the later discussions found in Meir Shahar’s work on the Shaolin Temple and Ter Haar’s discussion of the shared Shaolin mythos of both martial artists and gangsters.

Figure 1: Early Wing Chun Publications by Year and in Social Context

Wing Chun Articles and Books by year. Source: chinesemartialstudies.com, 2015.

The Evolution of a Secret: Debates Within and Without

While many readers have valued Chao and Weakland for the training tips, these were not the most unique aspects of their book.  Instead their emphasis on Wing Chun as a culturally bounded mode of self-actualization, detailed historical discussion and emphasis on arcane knowledge (whether maxims, Daoist thought or discussions of Qigong exercises) all set their work apart from other early treatments of the art.  Those tended to focus instead on its simplicity or combat prowess.  How were these differences likely read at the time?

Given the disapproving comments in the text about Kung Fu movies and “previous books and articles,” one suspects that on a certain level this project was taken as a rejoinder to Bruce Lee and the vision of the Chinese martial arts that he had sought to promote.  While clearly dependent on the groundswell of interest in the Asian fighting systems that Lee had helped to create for its economic success, its interesting to note that he receives no direct mention in these books.  This is another point of departure from the works of both James Lee (heavily advertised using Bruce’s image within the pages of Black Belt) or the earlier volume of Clausnitzer and Wong (1969).  We can even see in this training program a direct embrace of the traditionalism that Lee worked so hard to reject and very little of the scientific method of experimentation that he sought to promote.  It might then follow that these works are best read as an attempt to “Orientalize” Wing Chun to better promote it to a new generation of Western students in the wake of the Bruce Lee Phenomenon.

Yet if we read these works only in the shadow of Lee and the small Wing Chun literature that came before, do we fall into the sort of trap that Prof. Evelyn Rawski warned us about?  Lee’s approach to the Chinese martial arts was never the only one to circulate in the West during the 1970s.  Nor did the debates that he is best remembered for capture the totality of the discussion that swirled around the Chinese fighting systems.  Other individuals with their own concerns had also arrived in the West and were actively promoting their theories by the time that Chao and Weakland began to write their book.  In fact, it might be the case that the innovations in this work are better understood as a response to these other discussions than as a direct attack on Lee or the more modernist camp within the Chinese martial arts community.

Consider for instance the renown painter and Taijiquan teacher Zheng Manqing (Cheng Man-ch’ing) who arrived in New York City and established his own martial arts schools in 1964.  Of course Sophia Delza had already been teaching Wu style Taijiquan in New York since 1959, and the artistic, philosophical, political and medical concerns of these practitioners were fundamentally different from the issues of efficacy and pedagogy that Lee was best known for.  Nor would many people have been introduced to these perspectives without the pioneering work of Draeger and Smith.  Smith was also a student of Zheng and helped to facilitate his relocation to New York.  He co-authored an early manual with his teacher (1967) and promoted him in his articles, letters and the 1974 book Chinese Boxing: Masters and Methods.

Its hard to overstate the impact of this last volume on a generation of Chinese hand combat students in the West.  Smith’s account of his martial arts exploration in Taiwan was widely held up as the best thing available on the Chinese martial arts and the gold standard by which all other martial artists and writers could be judged.  This position of prominence was further cemented by the encyclopedia titled Asian Fighting Arts (later the Comprehensive Asian Fighting Arts) coauthored with Draeger.  These are probably the sorts of books that individuals like Chao and Weakland were concerned with as they most closely matched their own concerns and temperament.

Anyone with a passing familiarity with Smith’s work will already know of his dislike for the commercial appropriation of the martial arts in America.  He appears to have detested Bruce Lee and pretty much everything ever published in magazines like Black Belt.  Smith very much promoted himself as the arbiter of good taste and “real” talent in the Chinese martial arts.  He had little good to say about the indigenous fighting styles of Guangdong or Hong Kong.  Nor was a he ultimately much of a fan of the “external” Shaolin styles.  Instead Smith promoted the martial excellence that he perceived in his own teacher and the internal martial arts more generally.

Recall that Chao and Weakland’s first volume was released in 1976.  Smith’s Chinese Boxing made a big splash of its own in 1974 and 1975.  All of this happened in years when precious few books about the Chinese martial arts of any kind were available to the reading public.

Thus when we see Chao and Weakland going out of their way to map Daoist discussions onto Wing Chun, to argue that it is an “internal art” (a category of discussion that was not particularly relevant at the time and place of its creation) and even quoting the Taiji Classics at the start of their book, one senses that they may have been much more interested in establishing their legitimacy with sorts of readers that followed Smith rather than those who are more interested in Lee.  Their contention that Wing Chun is best understood as a deep cultural project and “way of life” is then not so much a rebuke to Lee or any other Wing Chun authors as it is an attempt to gain legitimacy in the eyes of an entirely different discourse being promoted by a different group of martial artists.

Ultimately this is important as the conversation that Chao and Weakland helped to promote has never ceased.  In this way the discussion within the American Wing Chun community began to move beyond simple questions of how best to achieve results, to deeper disagreements on the nature of the system itself.  Ironically the critical figuring in making this happen may have been an author and expert on the TCMA who never really discussed Wing Chun at all.

Nor do these questions show any sign of nearing a resolution.  Their ongoing presence serves as a warning against the assumption that a single discourse will always dominate the discussion of the martial arts in the global system.  Instead a variety of reformers and teachers have exercised their agency to apply the martial arts to a wide variety of problems dealing with topics as diverse as practical self-defense, self-actualization, national identity formation and even public health.  Each one of these strains has an ability to find its own way along the pathways of global exchange.  Together they remind us of the necessity of looking at the broad picture when approaching any given text.  The sorts of lessons that we can draw from a source are closely tied to what else we might have read (or seen, or practiced) before.

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

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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.

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

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

Introduction

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

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

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

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

Books: Feed your Head

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

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

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

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

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

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

Weapons: The Cutting Edge

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

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

http://www.everythingwingchun.com/

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

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

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

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

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

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

Training Gear

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

Photo of Wallbag. Source: Everything Wing Chun.

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

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

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

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

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

Artistic and Cultural Objects

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

Woodblock print of Chinese warrior holding a sword.

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

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

Mini buick yip dummy. Source: Everything Wing Chun

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

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

Conclusion: The Best Things in Life are Free

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

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

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

Introduction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LaRochelle and the Four Types of Origin Stories

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion: Martial Arts Studies as an Interdisciplinary Project

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

oOo

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

oOo

Introduction

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

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

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

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

Chinese Martial Arts in the News

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RIP Yang Jian Bing. Source: SCMP.com

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

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

Bruce Lee inforgraphic. Source: SCMP.

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

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

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

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

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

Chinese Martial Arts in the Entertainment Industry

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

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

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

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

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

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

News From All Over

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

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

Martial Arts Studies by Paul Bowman (2015)

Martial Arts Studies

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

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

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

The abstract is as follows:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kung Fu Tea on Facebook

As always there is a lot going on at the Kung Fu Tea Facebook group.  We discussed spirit possession in the traditional Chinese martial arts, Star Wars, female friendly training spaces and why academics need to take blogging more seriously.   Joining the Facebook group is also a great way of keeping up with everything that is happening here at Kung Fu Tea.

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

A Pallet of Wooden Dummies for sale at a Costco store in Japan. Source: goodall factory on Instagram.

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!

Ming era armor currently on display in Shanghai. Source: Shanghai Daily Post.

News from all Over

This week’s report starts with three items from the Shanghai Daily.  The first article details the opening of a new exhibit of ancient and traditional Chinese weapons at the Han Tianheng Art Museum in Shanghai.  Much of the article focuses on an interview with the individual who collected these artifacts and loaned them to the exhibit.  It certainly sounds as though there will be some important early pieces there and if anyone is in the area it would be great to see a report.  The exhibit is currently expected to run through February.

That article was followed up by another titled “The Finest Swords Becomes Legends.”  It focuses on the mythology surrounding some of the amazing bronze swords produced in ancient China.  Dedicated students of the history of China’s weapons will already be familiar with these accounts, but its always fascinating to see them working their way into the more general press.

Jiang Hanlong, Wing Chun Instructor. Shanghai Daily.

Next we turn to something a little more current.  As part of its Hangzhou Special series the Shanghai Daily also ran a profile of Jiang Hanlong, a cartoonist who, after being introduced to Wing Chun, went on to become an professional martial arts instructor and to open his own school.  A student of Lun Jia (who in turn studied with Ip Man), Jiang went on to open a school with a friend and Taijiquan practitioner hoping to help students find peace within the routines of a hectic modern life.  In addition to Wing Chun and Taijiquan they also offer courses in Chinese archery, meditation and traditional music.

A Pallet of Wing Chun dummies at a Costco store in Japan. Source: Apple Daily.

This next story is by far my favorite in the current news roundup.

How do  you know that Wing Chun is officially “big in Japan”?  There are reports (such as this one at inverse.com) that some Costco locations have begun to sell wooden dummies (mook yan jongs).  Photos on Instagram appear to back this up.  I have attempted to contact Costco’s corporate media people in Japan to find out more about this product but have yet to receive a reply.  All of the photos seem to show stand-alone (rather than wall mounted) units and feature the “Jeet Kune Do” style head.  One assumes  that the release of these dummies just prior to Ip Man 3 may not have been a coincidence.  Still, the packaging doesn’t make any direct reference to either Ip Man or Bruce Lee.  I don’t really need a new dummy at the moment, but I would still love to see these show up at my local Costco!  You can read the original Apple Daily story here.

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

One of the surprises to arise out of the last news cycle was this detailed article published by Bloomberg Business reviewing the current controversies and financial history of the Shaolin Temple.  Titled the “Rise and Fall of Shaolin’s CEO Monk” this is probably the best discussion of the current state of the Shaolin Temple that I have seen produced by anyone in the mainstream press.  Over the last few years Shaolin has appeared in more and more articles, but very few of them take the time to review the modern history of Shaolin in quite as much detail as you will find here.  Definitely a recommended read.

Yang Style Taiji Students In Shanghai, 2005.

The Chinese Martial Arts also made a recent appearance in the New York Times “Wellness” blog.  The topic of the conversation was Taijiquan and whether it had therapeutic value with regards to heart disease.  Spoiler alert….the answer is yes, for a couple of reasons.  You can read the full discussion here.  (No word on how practicing Taiji against Shanghai’s smoggy skyline might impact your health).

The character Jack Wong (based on Wong Jack Man) and co-star (along with Bruce Lee) of “A Challenge,” a webcomic by Jeremy Arambulo.  Source: NPR

As always Bruce Lee’s legacy continued to be discussed.  Anyone interested in either Lee’s fight with Wong Jack Man, or the portrayal of the martial arts in comic books more generally, will want to check out this interview on NPR (national public radio).  In it Jeremy Arambulo talks about growing up as an Asian-American, Bruce Lee and his current webcomic, “A Challenge.”  This work is loosely based on Lee’s well known confrontation with Wong Jack man and also provides some extended meditations on subjects that may be of interest to readers of Kung Fu Tea.  Or click here to go directly to the comic.

If you are in the Northwest you might instead want to check out a new walking tour of Bruce Lee’s Seattle which ties into the current exhibit on his life at the Wing Luke Museum.  It appears that they are trying to get some good social history into their program.

A few other pioneers of Kung Fu in North America have been in the news. I particularly liked this discussion of Grandmaster Pui Chan as it had some good biographical material about his life in southern China and his early teaching career in the USA.  The discussion is well worth checking out if you are interested in the more modern history of the Chinese martial arts.

Also fascinating is the recent feature titled “The Legend of the 52 Blocks” published by the Vice Sports blog.  Written by Benjamin Nadler this article provides a fairly comprehensive introduction to the history, legend and mystery of this predominantly African-American vernacular martial arts style.  Students of Martial Arts Studies may have been introduced to this unique style through the writings of the anthropologist Thomas Green.  I have it on good authority that Prof. Green is getting ready to publish more of his ethnographic research on the topic.  As such Nadler’s blog post may be a good way to get yourself up to speed for prior to its release.

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

Chinese Martial Arts Films

Ip Man 3 has now officially made its way into theaters and the reviews are starting to roll in.  I have yet to see  it, but the initial signals seem to be encouraging.  First off, the Hollywood Reporter has a quick list of five things to expect if you are planning on seeing the film.  The San Francisco Chronicle gave the film an overall decent review and thought that it was a fitting end to Ip Man’s martial arts saga.  And while a number of reviewers lampooned Mike Tyson’s appearance in the film, the Vancouver Weekly had some surprisingly positive things to say about his performance, starting with the fact that he basically stole every scene that he was in.  And what could we do to make the Ip Man franchise even bigger?  How about a little cross-promotion with Star Wars?  That was another trend that has been evident in a lot of the discussions of Donnie Yen’s recent work.

Kung Fu Panda 3. Grab destiny by the dumplings.

Possibly the only thing bigger than Donnie Yen right now is a Panda named Po.  All of the early discussion of this film has been great.  But what has really been turning heads among Hollywood insiders is the business mechanics behind this project.  As a joint production between an American studio and a set of our Chinese companies, this film is able to skirt a number of the regulations that are normally imposed on foreign films in China (limiting the amount of time that they can run and the total numbers of screens that they can show on, as well as the distribution of ticket sales).  Given the popularity of the franchise in China, its clear that this film is going to be very profitable.  Forbes dives into the number here, and The Street offers its own commentary on the Panda’s success.

Lastly, a Star Wars story has emerged for fans of the Chinese martial arts.  As I have discussed elsewhere, the internet has been clamoring for an Asian Jedi for some time now.  This is not an unreasonable request given the importance of Kung Fu mythology and Samurai films to the genesis of Star Wars.  Simply put, no katanaa, no lighsabers.  Well, it appears that Disney heard these prayers and responded by giving the fans a Storm Trooper.  And not just any white bucket wearing thug.  Nope, Kung Fu brought you the internet’s favorite Storm Trooper.  You can read more about him here.

Students at a Japanese Archery Club. Source: http://faculty.washington.edu/kendo/budo.html

Martial Arts Studies

There are a number of forthcoming books on martial arts studies that readers should be aware of.  Yet before we launch into these, Paul Bowman recently posted an article on Academia.edu asking the prior question of how we go about making martial arts history matter.  It is an interesting paper on an important subject.  Be sure to check it out.  And while you do, get your registrations in for the 2016 Martial Arts Studies conference to be held in July at the University of Cardiff.  Last years event was a great success, and the list of speakers and guests for this year’s event is even stronger.  Click here to find out who is coming and how to register.

In Search of Legitimacy by Lauren Miller Griffith (Berghahn Books, January 2016)

Lauren Miller Griffith’s volume In Search of Legitimacy: How Outsiders Become Part of the Afro-brazilian Capoeira Tradition (Berghahn Books (January 31, 2016) is about to be released.  I have been looking forward to reading this book for a while and am currently in the process of ordering a review copy for the journal Martial Arts Studies.  It certainly tackles a topic of central importance to students of many martial art traditions.  The publisher’s synopsis is as follows:

Every year, countless young adults from affluent, Western nations travel to Brazil to train in capoeira, the dance/martial art form that is one of the most visible strands of the Afro-Brazilian cultural tradition. In Search of Legitimacy explores why “first world” men and women leave behind their jobs, families, and friends to pursue a strenuous training regimen in a historically disparaged and marginalized practice. Using the concept of apprenticeship pilgrimage-studying with a local master at a historical point of origin-the author examines how non-Brazilian capoeiristas learn their art and claim legitimacy while navigating the complexities of wealth disparity, racial discrimination, and cultural appropriation.

Lauren Miller Griffith is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Hanover College who studies performance, tourism, and education in Latin America.

Later in the spring readers can expect another volume focusing on Capoeria.  Sara Delamont (Cardiff University), Neil Stephens (Cardiff University), Claudio Campos will be releasing Dreaming Brazil, Embodying Brazil: An Ethnography of Diaspora Capoeira through Routledge (May 15, 2016).

Capoeira, the Brazilian dance-fight-game, has spread across the world since the 1970s. It has become a popular leisure activity for many people, and a career for many Brazilians in countries as diverse as China and Spain, and as geographically distant from Brazil as New Zealand and Finland. This ethnographic research conducted on capoeira in the UK is not only an in-depth investigation of one martial art, but also provides rich data on masculinity, performativity, embodiment, globalization, rites of passage and tournaments of value, as well as an enhanced discussion of methods and methodology.

This April Lionel Loh Loong will be releasing The Body and Senses in Martial Culture by Lionel Loh Han Loong through Palgrave.  While still a few months out, this work will focus on the booming martial arts tourism industry in Thailand.

This ethnographic study of a mixed martial arts gym in Thailand describes the everyday practices and lived experiences of martial art practitioners. Through the lived realities and everyday experiences of these fighters, this book seeks to examine why foreigners invest their time and money to train in martial arts in Thailand; the linkages between the embodiment of martial arts and masculinity; how foreign bodies consume martial arts and what they get out of it; the sensory reconfiguration required of a fighter; and the impact of transnational flows on bodily dispositions and knowledge. The author argues that being a successful fighter entails not only sensitized awareness and knowledge of one’s body, but also a reconfiguration of the senses.

Lastly, students of cultural and film studies may want to take a look at Manga and Anime Go to Hollywood by Northrop Davis (A professor of Media Arts at the University of South Carolina).  Various types of comics have had an important impact on film in recent years, and they are also important vectors by which media discourses on the martial arts are spread throughout society (consider the impact of a single title like Scott Pilgrim in promoting a specific image of the martial arts).  The publisher’s blurb is as follows:

The media industries in the United States and Japan are similar in much the same way different animal species are: while a horse and a kangaroo share maybe 95% of their DNA, they’re nonetheless very different animals-and so it is with manga and anime in Japanese and Hollywood animation, movies, and television. Though they share some key common elements, they developed mostly separately while still influencing each other significantly along the way. That confluence is now accelerating into new forms of hybridization that will drive much of future storytelling entertainment. Packed with original interviews with top creators in these fields and illuminating case studies, Manga and Anime Go to Hollywood helps to parse out these these shared and diverging genetic codes, revealing the cross-influences and independent traits of Japanese and American animation.

Readers looking for study material of a more “practical” nature may want to check out Scott Rodell’s latest project.  Dandaofa Xuan – Chinese Long Saber Techniques Anthology is a translation of a 400 year old manual describing techniques for a the long two handed saber called the dandao.  Apparently this was also the first Chinese martial arts manual to be published with accompanying illustrations.  As such it is an interesting bit of martial arts history.

An assortment of Chinese teas. Source: Wikimedia.

Kung Fu Tea on Facebook

As always there is a lot going on at the Kung Fu Tea Facebook group.  We discussed the logic of Taijiquan’s forms, African-American martial arts history and hand combat as intangible cultural heritage.   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.

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.

The Creation of Wing Chun by Judkins and Nielson.

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

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

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

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

Ip Man and his best known student, Bruce Lee.