The Politics of Olympic Karate

Over at Kung Fu Tea was an article about the politics behind Karate becoming an Olympic sport. Below is an excerpt. The full post  may be read here.

Introduction

We are very pleased to host the following essay on Karate’s appearance in the Tokyo Olympics by Prof. Stephen Chan. This is an important topic, particularly to readers who follow the debates surrounding the inclusion and exclusion of certain sports from the games. Yet his discussion transcends the more common narrative of nationally bounded scorekeeping and instead asks what other sorts of work Karate’s Olympic moment accomplished.

Prof. Chan is a founding figure within the Martial Arts Studies community who delivered the first keynote address kicking-off what has since became our annual series of Martial Arts Studies conferences. He is an accomplished practitioner of karate, martial arts instructor and a distinguished political scientist whose writing I have always enjoyed. It is truly a pleasure to welcome him back to Kung Fu Tea.

The Politics of an Olympic Medal

by Stephen Chan

Among karate practitioners internationally the advent of their sport in the Tokyo Olympics, after years of campaigning, was eagerly awaited – but curiously not so much in Japan itself; and the reason for this was its image of violence, not necessarily in the sport itself with its elaborate (though not always successful) safety rules, but in its perceived sociological niche as a working class pursuit. Ju jutsu was, in the same stereotyping, a pursuit of Yakuza and other gangsters. Ju jutsu’s refinement as judo, alongside sumo, kendo, aikido, kyudo (archery) and above all iaido were the sports of gentlemen, or had been accepted at court, and were, moreover, (with the exception of judo) more authentically and historically Japanese. However, judo had been refined enough to pass muster, but karate was without noble pedigree and never quite lost its tag of origin in Okinawa, the most ‘backward’ of the Japanese islands.

These are generalisations to be sure but, despite all the increasing overlays of sophistication and efforts to render karate a martial art equal to the others, it probably took the modern phenomenon of manga with its heroes and villains deploying karate techniques to bring it towards public acceptance.

In Olympic terms, the success of South Korea’s tae kwon do with its development of clearly derivative techniques (despite the Korean claim to its own historical authenticity) was a goad to having, finally, its karate ancestor placed alongside it as an Olympic sport. The leverage of the previous Japanese prime minister, Yoshihide Suga, long a powerful politician and himself a karate third degree black belt – a person who rose from exactly a poor farming and working class background – helped greatly with the campaign for karate’s inclusion. Suga’s well-advertised physical fitness routine which includes 200 situps every day meant it was difficult for more sedentary politicians to gainsay him.

But karate’s inclusion in the Tokyo Olympics meant that Japan had two martial arts represented – karate and judo. South Korea had one, tae kwon do. China has none of its martial arts in the Olympics. Karate’s entry was always going to be tenuous in the terms of the numbers game as to who gets how many of which sports.

If Japan was in this sense in a weak position to insist on karate’s inclusion in the forthcoming Paris Olympics – it already had judo – then other countries were not going to act as karate’s champion. Karate is strong in France, but the international governing body, the World Karate Federation (WKF), does not command total support from the karate community in the USA; and its affiliate in the UK, the English Karate Federation (EKF) has no throw-weight in UK sporting or Olympic politics.  Without the two Anglophonic giants of world sports insisting on karate continuing in the Olympics its dropping from the Paris agenda was accomplished with barely a murmur of protest from sporting establishments with quite enough already on their agendas. 

Moreover, it has to be said that the Tokyo Olympics featured bouts of sometimes dubious quality and certainly enigmatic judging. As a spectator-friendly event, karate appealed to afficionados but not very many others. There was no wave afterwards of members of the public seeking to learn karate.

As for the WKF itself, it is a strange survivor of internecine struggles that have bedevilled karate since its inception as a sport with international participants. Particularly in the USA there were ‘world championships’ that featured in the 1960s and into the 70s almost entirely American entrants – some of whom went on to become movie stars, such as Chuck Norris, and who certainly featured on the covers of the karate magazines of that era – so that the glamour, and also lack of any international regulatory environment, made karate seem almost splendidly anarchic as the Bruce Lee era dawned. With the dawning precisely of that era, regulatory regularity at least became desirable if only to avoid injuries and their almost random causation.

 

Ding Number Seven and the Origins of White Crane Boxing

Below is an excerpt from a fascinating article from Kung Fu Tea, which has to do with women in martial arts and the origin of Southern White Crane Boxing. The full post may be read here.

The historical records produced during the Ming and Qing dynasties contain a number of references to female martial artists.  These sources clearly indicate that they were massively outnumbered by their male brethren, but as a category they were never entirely absent either.  Of course “martial arts” as a conceptual category is a comparatively recent invention.  Most of these individuals were identified and discussed using different professional markers.  They were remembered as entertainers, vagabonds, criminals, healers, mystics, saints and in one memorable case even a rebel general.  The fighting arts (and their related body of traditional physical culture) might play a role in each of these professions.

There are far fewer cases in which a woman was explicitly identified as a full time martial arts instructor with a large number of students.  And I am aware of only a single a instance in which a historical woman was acknowledged by later male writers as the founder of area’s martial tradition.  

But before we can explore further we need to know something about the sorts of resources that are available to students of Chinese martial history.

“Gazetteers” are a fascinating historical resource for anyone interested in life in late imperial China.  

These records were by their nature both geographically bounded and technical.  They might focus on a region, a province, a county, a city, a temple or even an important waterway.  The ostensible point of a gazetteer was to gather the information that a busy outside government official or visitor might need to get up to speed on a new posting or assignment.  As such these books are a valuable historical resource which provide maps, community histories, economic discussions, biographies of notable citizens and local color.  

Members of the gentry were usually tasked with writing and editing the gazetteers.  This was considered a prestigious assignment as the editor of such a volume had the ability to shape the local social and historical record.  A review of these books shows that the families of the editors were inevitably remembered as “illustrious scholars” and “paragons of virtue.”  It is important to take the social history that one finds in these books with a grain of salt, but they remain a vital resource for understanding local history in China.

The editors of these volumes usually went to some effort to put their best foot forward and appear as orthodox and socially respectable as possible.  As a result gazettes often omit the sort of information that might be most useful to the historian of the martial arts.

Douglas Wile discovered a classic case of this while researching his landmark volume on the early Taiji literature (1996).  The Wu brothers, who had important careers as high ranking public servants, were also gifted literary scholars.  They put these skills to good use by editing the local county gazetteer after retiring from public office, as well as discovering, editing and preserving the oldest still existing manuscript tradition of what we now call the “Taiji Classics.”

In fact, all three brothers were deeply involved with and committed to, the practice of Taiji.  It is thus odd that the historical volume that they edited contains no references to Taiji, or to the brothers other very substantial military exploits.  Wile debates how we should interpret this silence.  Was it some hint of sedition?  Possibly.  But a simpler explanation would be that a public airing of such an eccentric interest in a “dignified” source would bring embarrassment to the Wu family.

Marnix Wells has fared better with the use of gazetteers in his research.  The county records that he dealt with in his investigation of Chang Naizhou not only preserved his memory, but it went into detail on the biographies of a number of other martial artists in the region.  This is really about the best scenario that you can hope for.  Yet in many cases these records simply pass over the martial arts in silence, not because they were actually absent, but rather because they were viewed as undignified or unorthodox by the volume’s editor.

The other difficult thing about gazetteers is finding and translating them.  Localities were supposed to update these records regularly.  Some did, while others were pretty lax.  Nor is there a central clearing house for this information today.  A few of these volumes (generally the ones for the more important areas) have been republished, but most of this information is still sitting in library stacks and private book collections in China.  Actually getting ahold of all of the information that you would like to see, and successfully translating it, can be a major feat of scholarship in itself.

Luckily for us the editors of the late 17^th century gazetteer for Yongchun County, Fujian Province, had no moral objections to the martial arts.  We are also fortunate in that what he had to say was deemed important enough to warrant subsequent republishing and discussion, first by scholars in China, then by Stanley Henning in the United States.

Very often information about important martial artists (if any is included) will be found in the section on local biographies of noteworthy private citizens that most county gazetteers seem to have included.  The brief account quoted by Henning and others states that during the Kangxi era (1662-1735) a woman named Ding Number Seven moved to Yongchun with her husband.  Together they taught a number of individuals including 24 disciples.  The most important of these was an individual named Zheng Li.

Zheng warranted his own entry in the volume.  It focused on his immense strength and boxing skills.

The discussions of his feats included a stereotyped defeat of a water buffalo (which he pulled the horns off of) and a shaolin monk (who later became a friend and teacher).  Zheng was taught by Woman Ding, and he in turn provided instruction to most of the lineages that were still operating in the area at the time that the account was written.

So when does this account date to?  We do not have an exact date, but we do have some clues.  The list of southern gazetteers provided by James Tong indicates that Yongchun County did not update their records frequently (Disorder Under Heaven, 1992).  As such it looks like this account might date to the 1684 edition of the local gazetteer.   If these dates are correct than Ding Number Seven would have been active sometime between 1660 and 1680.  Given that the account indicates as least two generations of instruction have passed, this would indicate that she was probably teaching in the 1660s.

Of course this account is also interesting for what is left out.  We hear very little of her husband and his accomplishments.  One wonders if perhaps she was included because she was both a martial artist and a “virtuous widow,” a group that always enjoyed recognition in these lists (see the discussion in Victoria Cass, 1999).

Nor do we know the name of the style that she taught.  Today she is revered as the ancestor of Yongchun White Crane Boxing.  Yet neither avian nor geographic nomenclature are mentioned in the account of her teaching, just the size of her school.  Readers are also never told where she learned her art.  Was it from her husband?  Or possibly her father? 

While the biographical account of Zheng Li is full of exaggeration and folklore (the defeat of a bull-type creature is one of the classic markers of a martial arts legend, as is a confrontation with a Shaolin monk) his teacher’s life lacks any fantastic elements.  The account is all business, possibly too much so.

Subsequent versions of her story were more expansive and attempted to fill in these blanks.  Perhaps the best-preserved account from this era is found in the Bubishi.  This enigmatic work represents a Fujianese martial arts manuscript tradition dating from the last half of the 19th century.  The manuscripts in question were preserved in Okinawa (hence the Japanese title), and went on to influence the development of that island’s indigenous fighting traditions. 

The manuscripts included in the Bubishi are written in Chinese and include discussions of martial arts history, ethics, White Crane and Monk Fist styles, vital point strikes and traditional Chinese herbal medicines.  The manuscripts are sometimes heavily illustrated and often appear without any specific order.  An almost identical work entitled the Secret Shaolin Bronze Man Book was preserved by the Liu family in Fuzhou leading to the conclusion that the work was originally composed in China rather than Okinawa.

The volume begins its discussion of White Crane Kung Fu with the following story:

“In spite of his fighting skills in Monk Fist Boxing, Fang Zhonggong was no match for the scoundrels from a neighboring village who deceived and then viciously beat him while vying for control of his village.  The injuries Fang sustained during the altercation were so severe that he was unable to fully recuperate and fell gravely ill.  Attending to by his loving daughter and personal disciple, Fang Qiniang, his condition gradually deteriorated.  No longer even able to eat, he finally died.

Deeply troubled by the loathsome circumstances of her beloved father’s death, Fang Qiniang vowed to take revenge.  Although just a country girl from the rural village of Yongchun, Fang Qiniang was nevertheless a promising and spirited young woman.  She longed to vindicate her family name, but she had not yet mastered the fighting skills her father was teaching her.  She deeply pondered upon how she might find the power and strength to overcome such adversaries.

One day, not long after the tragedy, Fang was sobbing over the memory of her loss when suddenly she heard some strange noises coming from the bamboo grove just outside her home.  Looking out the window to see what was making such a racket, she saw two beautiful cranes fighting.  She noticed how the magnificent creatures strategically maneuvered themselves away from each others fierce attacks with remarkable precision.  In the midst of piercing screams, the vigorous and lethal pecking was well concealed.

Deciding to frighten off the creatures, Fang went outside and grabbed the long bamboo pole she used for hanging clothes to dry.  As she approached the cranes, Fang swung the pole but was unable to get close.  Each time she attempted to swing or poke with the pole, they sensed her proximity, and, before the pole could reach its intended target, the birds instinctively evaded her every effort and finally just flew off.

Reflecting deeply upon this incident, Fang concluded that it was a revelation and soon set about evaluating the white cranes’ instinctive combat methods.  If someone could fight the way the white cranes had, that person would be unbeatable.  After considerable time and study, Fang finally came to understand the central principles of hard and soft and yielding to power.  Fusing the central elements of Monk Fist gongfu with her own interpretation of the birds innate defensive movements she created a new style.

After three years of relentless training, Fang developed into an unusually skillful fighter.  Capable of remarkable feats of strength and power, Fang Qiniang was no longer the weak and frail girl she once was.  Her skills and determination finally gained her a notable reputation.  Undefeated in those three years, Fang’s innovative style ultimately became one of the most popular civil self-defense traditions in and around Fujian Province, and became known as Yongchun White Crane Boxing.”

The Bubishi demonstrates that within two centuries the creator of Yongchun Boxing had evolved from a historical person with a number of personal students to a full blown initiatory figure with a martial arts mythology of her own.  A comparison of the early account of “Ding” to the later stories of the woman “Fang” provides an excellent illustration of how it is that myths emerge and crystallize around the barest historical details.  Note also how the questions posed by the short biographical sketch are systematically answered throughout the later extended story.

Rather than coming to the county with her paradoxically quiet husband, she is now attached to a father capable to teaching her Monk Fist Style.  This certainly explains where Feng learned her art.  

Yet she did not teach Monk Fist to her students?  Instead her father conveniently dies at the hands of bandits and she is forced to innovate to avenge the family name. 

While the theme is a common one in martial arts legends, it still serves to introduce the vision of the fighting cranes that has been central to the development of martial arts in the Yongchun region.   

Further, Feng’s encounter with fighting cranes at her moment of greatest loss and despair shows an uncanny resemblance to Ng Mui’s later epiphany in the aftermath of the destruction of the Shaolin Temple. 

Of course this new account raises its own set of questions.  Did Feng use her new found martial prowess to carry out an act of bloody revenge?  And what of the missing husband?  Did she ever go on to marry? If not, why?  Lastly, who was Feng Zhonggong?  Given the abrupt start of the story it would appear that the Bubishi is only presenting a tantalizing fragment of what was once a longer narrative.

Current folklore, still in circulation among modern martial artists, has taken up each of these questions in turn.  It takes no great leap of imagination to see Fang Zhonggong as an escapee from the ruins of Shaolin.  This conclusion may even be implied in the 19th century fragment of the story that we still poses.  He is obviously not a monk as he has married and has a daughter.  Still, many lay Buddhists studied martial arts at Shaolin in both legend and fact.  This would certainly seem to explain how he learned Monk Fist style in the first place. 

His daughter’s use of the long pole in her attempt to scare off the noisy cranes is highly suggestive of the historic Shaolin pole fighting style.  Lastly, the Bubishi claims that Feng always taught that it was only through the cultivation of inner peace and harmony that true martial mastery could be achieved.  It also states that her ideas about this were handed down from the ancient past through her father and were not native to Fuzhou.

Modern readers have accepted this implied Shaolin connection without hesitation.  Ng Ho reports that in some versions of the story Feng Qiniang refuses to marry, becomes a Buddhist nun herself, and changes her name to Yongchun (Wing Chun in Cantonese).  In the end he concludes that from a folklore perspective “It is impossible to ascertain whether Fang Yongchun, Fang Qiniang and the nun Yongchun were one and the same person or three distinct individuals.”   I agree with this basic conclusion that the myth takes a single identity and reworks it into multiple stories.  To this list of overlapping stories we can also add the Abbess Ng Mui. 

Historically speaking, the faded memory of Ding, a real martial arts instructor in Yongchun Village, has inspired the foundation myths of both Wing Chun and White Crane, as well as the individual legends of the Yim Wing Chun, Fang Yongchun, Fang Qiniang, and most recently the Nun Yongchun or Ng Mui.  All four of these individuals probably represent different aspects of the same legendary figure.

Culture and Community in Martial Arts Schools

Over at Kung Fu Tea, there was an interesting article on the common culture and community found within a martial arts school, which is reinforced by the formal precepts for training that would normally be posted and maybe recited by students every day. In Japanese martial arts, this would be the dojo "kun."

Below is an excerpt. The full post may be read here.

...

The Wing Chun Jo Fen and the Definition of Community

 

There is another way in which communities are defined and expectations are cultivated. Rather than relying only on the intuitive and unspoken norms that arise in the course of training, most martial arts communities also propagate explicit rules. These codes of conduct, usually written, are supposed to govern life in the community. The number of rules and their content can vary immensely from one tradition to the next, but the basic impulse is widely shared.

Such formal lists are quite common in the martial arts of southern China. However, in my limited experience, they are often observed in the breech. Students know that they exist, but they don’t generally get discussed all that often. This seems to be particularly true in Wing Chun. Early in his teaching career in Hong Kong Ip Man propagated a set of nine rules, collectively referred to as the “Ving Tsun Jo Fen.” In the case of Ip Man’s list, they tended to be suggestions of what proper behavior should be rather than overly detailed admonitions or prohibitions. Nor, when reading the historical accounts from the 1950s and 1960s, is it always clear how the behavior of his young and unruly students related to these rules.

Still, the fact that the Jo Fen were given, and that they are now commonly reproduced and displayed in Wing Chun schools around the world, seems to indicates that we should give some thought to how these guidelines have been read and helped to shape the Wing Chun community. After all, these statements come as close to a formal philosophy of personal behavior as anything in the Ip Man lineage. And it is interesting to note that the Jo Fen describe not just proper behavior in the school, but within society as a whole. By explaining how a student should comport themselves in relation to the broader community, they offer valuable hints as to the social milieu that gave rise to the early Wing Chun community.

Before we delve into a discussion of the Jo Fen there are a couple of puzzles that need to be addressed. The first is their ultimate date of origin. It is known that Ip Man wrote down and displayed the basic set of rules that are used today in his school in Hong Kong during the 1950s. However, it is not clear if these rules were entirely his own creation or if some of them were inherited from an earlier instructor (Chan Wah Shun and Ng Chung So would both be good candidates). For reasons that we will discuss later I suspect that these rules are really a response to trends and pressures from the 1920s-1930s. Even if Ip Man first wrote them down in the 1950s, the Jo Fen appear to be a thoughtful response to a conversations that had been happening decades earlier.

The second paradox is how one should read the Jo Fen. This is a critical issue for Western Wing Chun students looking for guidance in living their art. For instance, when we are commanded to “Keep sacred the Martial Morality” (Wu De; Cantonese: Ma Dak) are we being sworn to uphold the marginal and criminal behavioral codes of the “Rivers and Lakes”? The individuals who inhabit these marginal social zones often have quite strong opinions on proper behavior under “Wu De,” and have even created an entire subaltern set of cultural values. Boretz does a great job of illustrating this worldview in his carefully crafted ethnography, Gods, Ghosts and Gangsters: Ritual Violence, Martial Arts, and Masculinity on the Margins of Chinese Society (University of Hawaii Press, 2010).

Yet Ip Man was a highly educated individual who clearly held Confucian values. During his younger life he was in no way a marginal figure. The circles that he moved in were quite different from those that Boretz described, and so were his cultural values. He had both a classical Chinese and Western education. He owned land and businesses. His personal values tended to be somewhat conservative and influenced by his Confucian education. So what exactly does such an individual really mean when he exhorts his students to remember “martial virtue?” This is probably not the martial morality of the Triads.

Nor does it seem to be the same as the revivalist ideals promoted by Jin Yong in his novels. These novels have dominated the popular discussion of Chinese martial values from the 1950s to the present. In fact, Jin Yong is probably the most widely read Chinese language author of the entire 20^th century. While it seems likely that these books had an impact on the expectations of many of Ip Man’s younger students, the old master’s views on these matters were probably already set well before he started teaching in 1950.

In the west we tend to read these suggestions through our own cultural lens. Ron Heimberger, in my own lineage, once produced a small volume titled Ving Tsun Jo Fen: Expectations and Guidance from the Ving Tsun Tradition (Ving Tsun Ip Ching Athletic Foundation, 2006). It’s an interesting book to think about. The author makes a conscious attempt to bridge the two, at times very different, cultural traditions that are at play. Yet in the end his interpretations of the Jo Fen always seem to reflect a home-spun American ethical perspective rather than traditional Chinese culture. The author actually warns us that this will be the case in the introduction to his book. The central problem, as he saw it, was to make the Jo Fen meaningful to modern, English speaking students.

It is an interesting project, and on some level I suspect that this is the direction that we must go. Translation is always as much a cultural as a linguistic issue. But I suspect that such exercises are still missing something.

This suspicion brings us back to the central question of the post. How should we, as informed students, read the Jo Fen of Wing Chun, or any other southern martial art? How would these rules have been read by a student in either the 1930s or 1950s? What sorts of unstated frames and contexts, familiar to his own students but alien to modern western ones, was Ip Man relying on when he put these guidelines for living to paper?

To answer that question we are going to need compare this document to other (much better known) contemporaneous texts. This exercise will suggest some ways in which we might want to read the Wing Chun Jo Fen. It will also shed some light on how Ip Man understood the community he was trying to create, and the norms of behavior that he wished to codify.

A rainy day at the Ancestral Temple in Foshan. In the distance the old neighborhood behind the temple is being demolished to make way for a new urban development project. Ironically the new neighborhood is being designed to “look traditional” and capitalize on the area’s important “history.” 

Translating the Wing Chun Jo Fen

 

The original text of the Wing Chun Jo Fen still hangs at the Hong Kong Ving Tsun Athletic Association (VTAA). As such it is well attested. More difficult is settling on a suitable English translation. For our purposes I am providing two translations of the text below. I think it is useful to compare and contrast at least two different versions of the Jo Fen to get a better sense of what points the original is driving at. Neither translation attempts to be a pure mechanical rendering. Both translators made some editorial decisions in how they rendered the Jo Fen corresponding to their understanding of the meaning of the text.

The top line of text (marked SK) is a translation by Samuel Kwok, originally published in his book Mastering Wing Chun: the Keys to Ip Man’s Kung Fu published with Tony Massengill in 2007. Generally speaking this is my preferred translation. The second translation (marked RH) is taken from Ip Ching, Ron Heimberger and Eric Myers, Ving Tsun Jo Fen: Expectations and Guidance from the Ving Tsun Tradition published in 2006. This is also a clear translation with some interesting readings of the text. Together these two different approaches provide a comprehensive look at the original.

Figure 1: Ip Man’s Wing Chun Jo Fen

1. (SK) Remain disciplined – uphold yourself ethically as a martial artist
   1. (RH) Discipline yourself to the Rules: Keep Sacred the Martial Morality
2. (SK) Practice courtesy and righteousness – serve the community and honor your family
   2. (RH) Understand Propriety and Righteousness: Love your Country and Respect Your Parents
3. (SK) Love your fellow students or classmates – be united and avoid conflicts
   3. (RH) Love Your Classmates: Enjoy Working Together as a Group
4. (SK) Limit your desires and pursuit of bodily pleasures – preserve the proper spirit
   4. (RH) Control Your Desire: Stay Healthy
5. (SK) Train diligently and make it a habit – never let the skill leave your body
   5. (RH) Work Hard and Keep Practicing: Never Let the Skill Leave Your Body
6. (SK) Learn to develop spiritual tranquility – abstain from arguments and fights
   6. (RH) Learn How to Keep the Energy: Quit Inciting a Fighting Attitude.
7. (SK) Participate in society – be conservative, cultured and gentle in your manners
   7. (RH) Always Deal with World Matters with a Kind Attitude that is Calm and Gentle.
8. (SK) Help the weak and the very young – use your martial skill for the good of humanity
   8. (RH) Help the Elderly and the Children: Use the Martial Mind to Achieve “Yan”
9. (SK) Pass on the tradition – preserve the Chinese arts and its Rules of Conduct
   9. (RH) Follow the Former Eight Rules: Hold to the Ancestors’ Rules Sincerely.

 

Interview with Yang Jwing Ming

Yang Jwing Ming has had an impact on the transmission of Traditional Chinese Martial Arts in North America. Below is an excerpt from an interview with Dr Yang that appeared at Kung Fu Tea. The full interview may be read here.

Introduction

Dr. Yang Jwing-Ming generously sat down with Kung Fu Tea for a lengthy and wide ranging discussion of his martial arts experiences in both Taiwan and the United States. A major topic of conversation was the creation of YMAA Publications which remains one of the most important martial arts publishing houses. Also intriguing were Dr. Yang’s thoughts on the future direction of the Chinese martial arts and the role that they might play as modern societies continue to grapple with the disruption of labor markets by the rapid development of artificial intelligence and automation. The notes from that interview have been edited for length and clarity.

By way of introduction, Dr. Yang started his martial arts training at the age of fifteen under white crane Master Cheng Gin Gsao (曾金灶). The following year Dr. Yang began the study of Yang style taijiquan with Master Kao, Tao (高濤). He studied physics at Tamkang College in Taipei Xian and also began to practice Shaolin long fist with Master Li, Mao-Ching at the Tamkang College Guoshu Club (1964-1968). In 1971 Dr. Yang completed his M.S. degree in Physics at the National Taiwan University before serving in the Chinese Air Force from 1971 to 1972. In 1978 he completed his Doctorate in Mechanical Engineering at Perdue University in the United States. In 1984, Dr. Yang retired from his engineering career and undertook his life-long dream of teaching and researching the Chinese arts and introducing them to the West through his numerous books and publications.

Kung Fu Tea (KFT): I understand that as a youth in Taiwan you studied white crane, taijiquan and then Shaolin long fist while at university.  What do you think inspired your interest in the martial arts as a teenager?  Why, in your opinion, are we generally seeing less interest among young people in the traditional Chinese martial arts today?

Dr. Yang Jwing-Ming (YJM): First off, you have to understand what it was like in Taiwan in the 1960s. Military education was compulsory. When you became a teenager, they took you out and taught you how to shoot an M1 rifle and everyone was getting ready to fight the Chinese Communist army in a continuation of the civil war. And to actually fight the Chinese Communists was to die! As a result, many young people were trying to build up their inner courage, or just process their own mortality. They wanted to prove that they were brave. This led some people to fight or join gangs, and others studied martial arts.

When I first asked my parents about studying the martial arts, I was surprised that my father quickly said yes because some people used martial arts in gang activities.  When I asked my grandmother about this she explained that we were from a martial arts village.  In Yang village, before the war, everyone studied martial arts.  It was a simple family style for farmers. The number of techniques was limited but people really perfected them.

Everything is different today. We haven’t had society wide wars in a long time.  Young people are not scared or thinking about their own mortality. It was after the Vietnam War that martial arts really became popular in the United States.  There was such an explosion of interest in the early 1970s.  I remember watching Kung Fu with David Carradine and thinking that the martial arts choreography was not great, but at least people were really trying to explore a philosophy, which was good.  

All of that changed in the 1980s. There came to be so much violence in all of the media about martial arts. There was also an increasing emphasis on how things looked rather than actual technique or application.  The Chinese martial arts became like plastic flowers, a societal fashion rather than a pursuit of serious self-cultivation. “Gongfu” means time and energy, but most people have so little patience today.

 

A Brief Biography of Sun Lu Tang

Over at Kung Fu Tea was a series on Sun Lu Tang, who some give credit for inventing how we view martial arts today. Below is an excerpt. The first of the three part series may be found here.

 

I am currently working on a paper that has me thinking about Sun Lutang again.  To my mind he has always been one of the quintessential pioneers of the modern Chinese martial arts.  So here is Part One of a three part biographical sketch.  Also see Part Two and Part Three.  Enjoy!

Introduction: Why Sun Lutang?

One of the persistent problems that I see in amateur discussions of “Chinese martial studies” is a lack of understanding of how broad the traditional martial arts really were, and the variety of life experiences that they encompassed.  In fact, rather than discussing China’s martial culture in the singular, it would probably be better to think about these cultures in the plural.  The martial arts never were just one thing, and our experience with the modern “traditional” arts tends to seriously skew our perceptions of the past.

To counter this trend I have been compiling a series of short biographies on important and interesting martial artists from the 19^th and 20^th centuries.  So far we have seen the martial arts used as a revolutionary philosophy by a cross-dressing political terrorist, as a means of economic and political advancement for a poor boy from the country, and as an natural outgrowth of southern China’s intensely commercial marketplaces.  All of our previous martial artists have pursued very concrete economic, social and political goals.  With the exception of Qui Jin’s use of martial imagery in some of her revolutionary poetry, none of them have viewed the martial arts as an overly philosophical or spiritual endeavor.

I believe that this accurately represents the life experience of the vast majority of China’s 19^th century martial artists.  Most of these individuals were relatively uneducated youth from the countryside.  They sought out the martial arts either as a means to better paying employment (perhaps as a caravan guard) or as a source of entertainment and personal cultivation during slack periods of the agricultural year.

Yet this is not how most western martial artists view the Chinese styles today.  Discussions of the “traditional” martial arts (in both China and America) are prefaced with the assumption that these practices are “really” about health, weight loss, qi cultivation or mental peace.  I think that these often heard assertions would come as something of a revelation to most of China’s 19^th century boxers.  It is not that they did not value the health benefits of regular exercise.  In an age without modern medical care they certainly did, and “Qigong-esque” exercises have been around for a long time.  But that was never why they braved social condemnation to practice these arts in the first place.

Still, since the late Ming dynasty there has been a small minority of individuals who did practice and advocate the study of boxing as a form of “self-cultivation.”  Meir Shahar, in his masterful study of the evolution of the fighting arts of Shaolin, has demonstrated that in the late 1500s at least one group of monks at the temple started to abandon the study of battlefield weapons in favor of unarmed boxing mixed with Daoist longevity practices and traditional medical philosophy.

It is not a mystery that small groups of monks might find the mixture of strenuous physical training and philosophical mysticism intoxicating.  These individuals were, after all, monks.  Self-cultivation and the attainment of altered states of consciousness through strenuous esoteric activities was their day-job.  This was just a new technology to accomplish the goals that monks in many religious traditions have always sought.

What was surprising was Shahar’s finding that the growing popularity of this strange brew was not confined to the nation’s Temples, but that it was spreading quite rapidly throughout the lettered classes in the late Ming and early Qing period.  At exactly the point in time when one might have expected elites to be the most interested in serious military study, they were instead turning their attention to more mystical pursuits.

So we know that this interest in Daoist philosophy, medicine and longevity practices has been an undercurrent in certain corners of the Chinese martial arts world for some time.  Probably over 400 years.  Depending on how you interpret the story of the Maiden of Yue (a Bronze Age fencing master who showed a keen interest in philosophy) maybe a lot longer.  But we lack the literary evidence to say much about the pre-Ming period.

Still, this view remained a minority one.  It was the sort of thing that was mostly taken up by the few educated elites who had any interest in Boxing, and it did not have a huge impact on the goals and military aspirations of ordinary martial artists.

This basic social pattern started to undergo a fundamental shift in the wake of the Boxer Uprising (1899-1901).  In the modern era (dominated by firearms) the original military applications of the martial arts started to look outdated to a number of educated social elites.  Actual military and police personnel had reasons to continue to be interested in unarmed defense, but these sorts of concerns rarely bothered arm-chair reformers or “May 4th” radicals.  In fact, many of these reformers and modernizers wanted to do away with traditional hand combat.  To them boxing was an embarrassing relic of China’s feudal and superstitious past.

For the martial arts to succeed in the 20^th century they would need to transition.  They had to be made appealing to increasingly educated and modern middle-class individuals living in urban areas.  It would be hard to imagine a group more different from the rural farm youths that had traditionally practiced these arts.  But this is the task that the early martial reformers of the 20^th century dedicated themselves too.

We have already briefly discussed the Jingwu Association (created in Shanghai in 1909) and their pioneering efforts to reform and save the Chinese martial arts (as well as the nation).  However, there were a number of other reformers in the same era.  And while the traditional martial arts did survive, the systems that we have today are in many ways quite different from what the Jingwu, and later Guoshu, reformers envisioned.

Sun Lutang is a seminal figure in the history of the early 20^th century Chinese martial arts.  While best known in Neijia and Taijiquan circles (where he is credited with the creation of Sun style Taiji), his vision of what the Chinese martial arts should be is still being perpetuated today.  In fact, he did more to promote the idea that the martial arts are fundamentally about health and self-cultivation than any other single figure.  Through his ground breaking publications in the 1910s and 1920s he codified a set of ideas about the nature of the Chinese martial arts that we continue to carry with us.

In some senses I am hesitant to write on Sun Lutang.  I do not practice Sun style Taiji, Xingyi Quan or Bagua.  For that matter I am not particularly sympathetic to the view that the Chinese martial arts should be about health and self-cultivation.  I am much more familiar with the local histories of southern China and Cantonese culture.  I come to this question as an outsider.

Yet the influence of Sun Lutang’s ideas and reforms have stretched far beyond his homeland in the “central plains.”  His theories continue to influence popular perceptions, in both the east and west, about what the Chinese martial arts are and what they should be.  With his triple dedication to hand combat, Daoist longevity and classical Chinese philosophy, he has become the perfect “little old Chinese man” that all other martial arts teachers are subsequently judged against.  In short, it is necessary for the field of Chinese martial studies to address the contributions of this dynamic writer and thinker on a more fundamental level than any specific contributions that he may have made to popular lineages of Taiji or Xingyi Quan.

The next three posts comprise a brief discussion of Sun Lutang and his contributions to the traditional Chinese martial arts.  The remainder of this post provides an overview and timeline of his life.  The information in this review is based on the introductory essay (by Tim Cartmell, 2003) in A Study of Taijiquan (1921) by Sun Lutang.  Cartmell drew on a variety of sources when assembling his biographical sketch, including extensive interviews with Sun Lutang’s surviving daughter Sun Jianyun.  A skilled martial arts teacher who worked with her father, Sun Jianyun was able to fill in many of the gaps and paint a more accurate picture of her father’s day to day life.

The second post in this series will focus on Sun Lutang’s association with other martial artists and hand combat institutions.  In fact, one of the most interesting elements of Sun Lutang’s life is the window that it opens onto the transformation of late Qing hand combat traditions and the development of modern martial arts culture in Northern China.  While the brief biographical sketches that we present below cannot always flesh out the social importance of events in his life, we hope to be able to expand on some of this material in the second post.

With a better understanding of the factual and social foundations of Sun Lutang’s life, the third post will turn to a discussion of his lasting impact on the traditional Chinese martial arts.  While Sun Lutang lived most of his life in Northern China, his ideas have spread around the country, and even around the globe.  What impact did his synthesis of philosophy, medicine and hand combat have on the development of the southern Chinese martial arts?  To what extent did he provide the intellectual and philosophical foundations that allowed the Chinese martial arts to become a middle class phenomenon outgrowing, in large part, their origins in rural poverty?  Do we see his hand in the emergence of the Qigong craze on the 1990s, and the subsequent “medicalization” of the Chinese martial arts?  Lastly, when I deal with students who want me to tell them that Wing Chun is really an “internal” art, to what extent are they responding to ideas and hierarchies that were first developed by Sun and promoted by his students?

Kennedy and Guo have called Sun Lutang the most important Chinese martial artists of the modern era (2005 p.182).  I don’t think that this assertion is an overstatement.  Of course saying that someone has had a huge impact on the development is not the same as saying that they were the most talented practitioner to ever live.  If nothing else his books have clearly had a transformative impact on all the literature that has come after them.  Still, it seems that relatively few modern martial artists (outside the Neijia community) really have much of an idea of who Sun actually was or what he accomplished.  He is lionized by members of his Taiji lineage and ignored by pretty much everyone else.

My review of Sun Lutang’s life will have little to say about his specific martial teachings or contributions to Taiji.  Instead I hope to promote a broader appreciation of this figure in the field of Chinese martial studies.  His life is a fascinating case study that illustrates a key era in the transition of the Chinese martial arts.  Further, the ideas that he authored or popularized continue to shape how many people approach these fighting styles to this day.  Even the practice of people who will profess to have never studied Sun is often profoundly marked by his writing.

Childhood: Overcoming Injustice with the Brush and the Sword.

The early years of Sun Lutang’s life are interesting enough to be the subject of a number of movies.  Originally named Sun Fu Quan, there is some debate as to when exactly he was born.  His daughter says that he was born in 1862 on a small farm outside of Baoding (south west of Beijing) in Hebei Province.  Sun’s father had never been very prosperous and did not marry until middle age.

Recognizing the intelligence of his son he sent him to study the Confucian classics with a local teacher when he was seven years old.  For the next two years Sun memorized and copied basic texts.  Despite his obvious intelligence his formal education came to an unceremonious end when his father’s crops failed and the family was forced to sell the farm to pay off debts or taxes.  A short while later Sun’s father fell ill and died, leaving the young boy fatherless and with no means of support.

Sun’s mother felt that she was unable to care for her child so she placed him in the home of a wealthy (but apparently sadistic) landlord as a servant.  Sun was never actually paid for his work but he was fed.  It seems that virtual slavery did not suit the young child’s personality and while he suffered through many beatings he started plotting a means of emancipation, at least to the degree that an eight year old child can imagine such things.

His first big break came in 1872.  While in a field tending sheep Sun came across an old man of about 70 leading an outdoor martial arts class.  The next day he returned and begged to be taught the martial arts.  When asked why he wanted to study boxing the naïve 11 year old bluntly told the teacher (surname Wu) about his situation and desire to take revenge on his employer and his equally abusive family.  Aghast at the tale of the young child life’s the older martial artist took him on as a student, but only after warning him that “The martial arts are not just for fighting, these principals are very deep.”

I hope to explore Wu’s background and his influence on the young Sun in my next post.  While a good mentor for the boy his influence on him only lasted a couple of years.  On New Year’s Day of 1875 Sun got in a confrontation with the son and nephew of his employer.  After successfully defending himself from an unprovoked attack, his boss threatened to beat him to death and Sun’s term of “employment” as a household servant came to an end.

With no means of supporting himself, and no plans for the future, Sun fell into deep depression.  His only interest now lay in the martial arts, but even that was soured by the taunts of local villagers.  They felt that Sun was sure to grow up to become a bandit and a blight on the countryside and delighted in telling him so.  Statistically speaking they may have been correct.  Most “bandits” were young men without prospects or land who suffered an economic setback that forced them out of village life.

Not wishing to be a burden on his mother the young Sun resolved to hang himself.  Fortunately his suicide attempt failed and the boy was cut down by a passing traveler who took the boy home.  After assessing the situation he gave the family some money that they used to leave the hamlet and travel to Baoding proper where Sun had an uncle who ran a shop selling calligraphy brushes.  The uncle took in the struggling family and gave the young Sun a job as a clerk.  This was an immense step up in life from what he had known in the countryside and the Uncle proved to be a kind employer.  Further, his job in town put him in touch with the literary elements of society and gave him a chance to practice his calligraphy on scraps of paper.

It was through his Uncle that Sun would meet two men who would change his life forever.  The first of these individuals was a scholar named Zhang.  Zhang immediately recognized the young boy’s talents and invited him into his home to study calligraphy and literature.  He in turn introduced Sun to a friend of his named Li Kui Yuan.  Li Kui Yuan was a talented Xing Yi Quan student and the owner of the Tai An armed escort service.  He was delighted to find a student and resumed Sun’s formal instruction in the martial arts.

When he was 18 years old, Sun and Li went to visit Zhang on his 50^th birthday.  Zhang took the opportunity to suggest that Li accept Sun as his formal disciple, and Li suggested that Sun should be engaged to Zhang’s 16 year old daughter.  Both ideas were heartily accepted and Sun place in society was now secure.  But he did not marry immediately.  Instead he and Li traveled to Beijing to study with Guo Yun Shen, Li’s original Xingyi Quan teacher.

 

Firearms and the Development of Southern Chinese Martial Afts

Below is an excerpt from an article that appeared at Kung Fu Tea that described how the arrival of widespread western firearms affected the development of martial arts in China in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The full post may be read here.

 Giving Up the Gun: Revisiting a Classic Argument.

In 1979 a Dartmouth English Professor named Neol Perrin wrote one of the more popular and more widely read books on the history of the martial arts.  It was titled Giving Up the Gun: Japan’s Reversion to the Sword, 1543-1879.  While a non-specialist, and more interested in Japanese literature than military history, the book gained quite a following.  I first encountered it in high school after I developed a fascination with the Japanese sword arts.  While so many of my classmates were delving into the dark secrets of Ninjitsu, I was more interested in understanding why there was an entire island full of warriors who carried swords rather than guns until the second half of the 19^th century.  Apparently students of martial studies are born rather than made.

Professor Perrin shared my curiosity on the subject.  Or maybe not.  To the great chagrin of historians everywhere, sometimes people with very little interest in their stated subject matter write historical books anyway.  Perrin was actually interested in something much more contemporary.  The true focus of his slim volume, published at the absolute nadir of the Cold War, was nuclear disarmament.  Could the developed states of the world dismantle their high-tech arsenals and slow the pace of proliferation?  At the time it seemed to be the only question worth asking.

The Japanese were an interesting test-case for Perrin.  The establishment of the Tokugawa Shogunate had been a long, bloody and uncertain process.  Further, it was an affair that swords played relatively little role in.  They had not really dominated the Japanese battlefield for hundreds of years.  As the size and technical sophistication of the Japanese feudal armies increased the sword and bow were replaced with the spear (yari) and the matchlock.  Firearms, both in the guise of matchlock rifles and cannons (some of them quite large) were the key to the ultimate establishment of the new government.

Much of this technology was quite sophisticated. The Japanese got so good at copying western weapons that they were able to modify the designs and even begin to export these arms to other, less technically advanced, buyers.  They developed devices to allow groups of gunners to engage in accurate mass fire at night (an important skill before the invention of the heavy machine gun), and they learned all sorts of lessons about how gunpowder changed the battlefield.

Then everything changed.  Once in power the new government closed the doors to social mobility and fossilized the class system.  The peasants were systematically disarmed, which was an important event as networks of religiously motivated peasant revolutionaries had been one of the groups to most successfully employ guns on the battlefield.  Even the samurai ceased to carry firearms in public.  For that matter the three meter spear, which had dominated the battlefield for hundreds of years, slipped into obscurity and was nearly forgotten by all but the most esoteric martial arts schools.  Instead there was renewed interest in the cult of the sword.

It was only in this late period that the sword became the “soul of the samurai.”  Prior to that top honors had gone to the bow, the spear and, very briefly, the gun.  Even contemporary sword masters realized that their weapon was obsolete on the “modern” battlefield of the 17^th century.  At best it was a weapon of personal defense if you were unhorsed or your spear was lost.  Yet it is the sword that dominates the last era of Japanese feudal history.

Nor was this seeming loss of military technology mirrored in other areas of Japanese society.  While isolated from much of the world the Japanese did attempt to keep up on medical and scientific developments through their limited contacts with the west.  I have always been under the impression that standards of living were pretty high in Japan compared to some of the more marginal areas of southern China that I have studied, though I would need to look at some actual economic data to know for sure.

For Perrin this was the crux of the issue.  The Japanese were not forced to give up the gun by foreign domination, or social and technological decay.  It is easy to understand the loss of technology through these sorts of processes.  Instead they (meaning the political and cultural elite) made a choice to take one sort of military technology and put it back on the shelf.

This was an unprecedented moment in human history and Perrin wanted to know whether it could act as a model of nuclear disarmament.  Many of the critics of his work have fundamentally misunderstood his project.  He was not an English professor pretending to be a historian, and hence writing bad history.  He was actually an English professor pretending to be a social scientist.  Perrin’s real aim was to talk about causality.  He wanted to develop a covering law that explained disarmament, and he did so through a single, highly detailed, case study.

Japanese historians quickly pointed out that the Samurai never actually gave up the gun in any definitive sense.  They continued to maintain some coastal batteries and individual Lords maintained stockpiles of these weapons.  There were even periodic reminders by the Shogunate that all Lords were required by law to maintain large number of muskets and insure that their troops were drilled in using them, should the need should ever arise.  Pretty much the only group in Japanese society that lost its connection with firearms was the peasantry, but this relationship was not so much “given up” as “forcibly severed” as part of the maintenance of an absolutely brutal class based feudal system.

Many historians have been quick to dismiss Perrin.  He wants to talk about variables like “culture” and “choice,” where as they turn to “realist” political analysis.  The Japanese turned away from the gun because after the establishment of the new government the state entered a period of peace that lasted for 200 years.  Weapons development is expensive and socially disruptive.  No one does it just because it is fun.  Countries do it because they are forced to over the course of certain types of conflicts.

The development of firearms exploded in Europe between 1650 and 1850 not because the west was more rational, more scientific or more technologically advanced.  The real reasons were purely political.  This was a period of almost continual warfare and violent conflict.

According to this realpolitik view, weapons development happens only when it is rational to do so.  War accelerates this process.  During times of peace there are other spending priorities that will better insure your hold on power, such as public works or infrastructure spending, so this is where rulers will spend their gold. (For any international relations scholars out there that are keeping score, what I have just described is a “classical realist” theory rather than a stricter “neo-realist” account).

China: The Dragon and the Gun.

It is interesting to consider what happens when we bring China into this discussion.  China has a somewhat schizophrenic reputation on this point.  On the one hand it is credited with the invention of gun powder and the rocket, two of the more important destructive technologies of all time.  On the other hand it is burdened with images of peasant soldiers, armed only with spears, running into the face of machine gun-fire as late as the Korean War.

Rather than these being treated as isolated incidents that were the result of process failures in society’s military/industrial complex, these instances are often taken as being indicative of something about Chinese culture and its values.  It is often said that the Chinese do not value “human life.”  I have even had some of my own Chinese graduate students tell me this when trying to explain some of the more puzzling points of state policy.  Yet I cannot help but notice that all of the Chinese individuals who I associate with do value human life.  It is always some other mysterious person, who no one can quite identify, that lacks any humanity.  This should be a warning flag to those seeking to advance historical arguments based on cultural difference.  I am not saying that culture is never important, but this is a variable that needs to be employed with great caution.  Desperation makes people do “desperate” things, but that is not really the same as proving that they have fundamentally different values.

The 19^th century European view was, if anything, more reductionist.  They explained their world in terms of racial categories.  In their view the Chinese lacked the mental or moral capacity to master the modern arts of warfare.  And yet these arguments always rang hollow, even to the individuals who advanced them.  The fact that it was the Chinese who initially created this entire class of weapons could not be forgotten.  Nor could the Europeans afford to overlook the furious pace of Chinese military advance.

In the 1850s Guangzhou found itself badly outgunned against the British.  By 1911 everything was different.  China was awash in modern European weapons and highly trained military specialists.  The state was militarily just as advanced as most European states.  Its defeats in the early 20^th century had more to do with political divisions and a lack of unity than any actual military factors.  This means that in only 50 years China was able to radically transform not just their military arms, but the entire social and military structure that produced and supported them.  It had taken all of Europe nearly 200 years to complete this same transformation.  Clearly the Chinese reformers were quite talented.  One of the problems with the “victimization” narrative promoted by the Chinese state today is that causes individuals, in both the east and west, to systematically overlook these accomplishments.

I suspect that the success of the traditional Chinese martial arts may actually account for much of the historical misunderstanding that goes on.  For better or worse, Kung Fu has become a critical part of China’s public diplomacy.  These unarmed fighting systems seem philosophically rich and purely defensive.  I suspect that this perception has helped to ease tensions about China’s growing influence in the world.  But on the other hand, the same whiff of ancient mysticism makes these arts appear to be fundamentally incompatible with the modern world.

The supremacy of the gun over the more physical disciplines of combat is too firmly entrenched in the western mind to be easily dismissed.  It is a message that our media has reinforced repeatedly throughout the 20^th century.  From cowboys exterminating Indians, to Indian Jones carelessly blowing away a Middle Eastern swordsman, we are confident in our ability to negotiate a hostile world.  The superiority of the gun seems to reinforce our broader faith in technology.

Nor is the American media alone in this assessment.  If anything Chinese story tellers have been even more enthusiastic in linking the gun to the “modern” world.  In western science fiction we can at least find a place for hand combat, whether it is Luke’s transformation into a disciplined Jedi knight, or Captain Kirk forgoing the niceties of the phaser for the simple pleasures of beating down a malicious alien with his own bare hands.

I have never run across anything quite like a Jedi knight in the Kung Fu genera.  Instead the vast majority of Kung Fu stories tend to be backwards looking.  They look back to a simpler time before the coming of the gun, when more “civilized” methods of defense still held sway.  They paint a picture of a reassuring world where ultimate power went to the individual who worked the hardest, who developed the best Kung Fu, rather than to gangster who could buy the most guns.  In the popular imagination Kung Fu is as much about justice as it is anything else.

I literally cannot count the number of martial arts films that I have seen which revolve around the introduction of firearms and how they destroy the “old order” of things.  Inevitably the hero beats the bad guy with the gun one last time, but the writing is on the wall.  The age of hand combat is drawing to a close.  In the “age of the gun” there is simply no way to defend yourself with your hands.  In fact, there is no way for the individual to defend himself against the industrialized aspect of society.

I despise this narrative.  It is not just that it gets the actual history of Chinese martial arts wrong, but it creates a vision of an unreal past.  Once you have internalized this vision it becomes impossible to understand the true history of Kung Fu even if someone stops to explain it to you.

It is a powerful narrative because it speaks to a lost “golden age” that has just slipped out of our grasp.  It captures the sorts of struggles that individuals feel in their own lives.  This is the story of a world that is passing you by.  Unfortunately it is now the only version of 19^th century history that most individuals in China are familiar with.  If you ask them about the martial arts they will all tell, first we used traditional hand combat, then guns came and we modernized.

Historically speaking, this is totally backwards.  First the guns came, and then the modern martial arts developed.  What we see in China is quite similar to the puzzle that made life difficult for Perrin when he discussed Japan.

Firearms have been a fact of life in China since the 1300s.  At first they were difficult and expensive to manufacture, but the government employed large numbers of hand cannons, field artillery pieces and even massive rocket launchers from an early period.  If you are curious about what early military gunnery looked like you should check out the Fire Dragon Manual.  At the start of the Ming dynasty Chinese firearms were probably the most advanced in the world.  So what happened?