The Modern Invention of 'Ancient and Timeless' Chinese Martial Arts

February 10, 2014

The Modern Invention of 'Ancient and Timeless' Chinese Martial Arts

Johannes Fabian offers the term 'allochronism' to describe one tendency involved in certain manners of thinking about other cultures (Fabian 1983). Allochronism involves projecting a fantasy about the unchanging character of the other culture back and forward through time. What this means is illustrated by an example given by Jean Baudrillard: Baudrillard draws attention to the fantasies that it is still easy for Westerners to hold about Amazonian tribes. These fantasies take the form of an image of such natives as primitives. They are based on photographs taken at the moment of first contact between Westerners and tribespeople (Krug 2001). Of course, after the moment of first contact, a great deal will have changed. The photographs snapping the moment of contact are in fact capturing the moment of the demise of a former state. However, such images produce and circulate allochronic fantasies to the extent that people continue to project fantasies about primitivism onto such peoples, regardless of the fact that they have had increasing contact and interaction with the modern world for decades or even centuries since then.

In other words, allochronism is a kind of essentialism – a belief in the unchanging essence of an ethnic group. This is not divorced from what Said calls 'orientalism' (Said 1995). Both allochronism and orientalism produce nostalgia for such ideas as 'a more innocent time', or a time before the 'corruption' of a more 'pure' culture; before its 'contamination' by contact with the West. As Rey Chow demonstrates, one predictable practical consequence of this is that any natives who do not live up to this fantasy structure – any 'natives' who are 'contaminated' by Westernisation or modernisation – are all too often regarded as impure, inferior, corrupt or inauthentic – by both Westerners/others and by guardians of 'their own' ethnic/native culture (Chow 1995, 2002).

Chow focuses on the effects of ethnic allochronism in academic contexts, and its effects on academic subjects – that is, on actual people – actual ethnic academics. Her focus on the ways such subjects are prodded and poked, cajoled and coerced to behave in a 'proper' manner – that is, an expected manner, in accordance with this or that stereotype of what this sort of ethnic subject should be into and should act like – leads her to propose the existence and operation of what she calls 'coercive mimeticism'. Coercive mimeticism refers to all of the micro and macro forces that act on an ethnic or gendered subject and which give guidance or coercion about how, where and why to be, act, think and discourse (like). An awareness of the risks of falling into allochronic thinking and contributing to either orientalism or coercive mimeticism is extremely pertinent to martial arts studies. Its relevance extends beyond providing insights into the effects of such structures on individuals, and into the matter of the circulation of discourses.

A consideration of the martial art of taijiquan might prove illustrative. Douglas Wile points to Wu Wen-han's observation that 'In the past, students of the development of t'ai-chi ch'üan have ignored historical, economic, and political conditions and have focused narrowly on the art itself and a small number of masters' (Qtd by Wile 1996: 3). Taijiquan is, in a sense, all too frequently denied a history. What replaces a more sophisticated sense of the historical development of taijiquan is a simplistic mythology. Within this mythology, multiple levels of allochronism, orientalism and self-orientalism are at work. This includes Western ahistorical or allochronic conceptions of 'ancient China', conceptions complicated by the tendency within Chinese martial arts themselves to claim an often preposterously ancient lineage, in order to confer legitimacy, authenticity and superiority on a currently existing martial art.

However, Wile notes that many of the 'classic' texts of taijiquan can only be traced back to the 19^th century, and specifically to the writers Yang Lu-ch'an and the Wu and Li brothers. The 'internal' mythologizing of taijiquan as being something ancient and timeless by its own practitioners is compounded by the fact that, for Westerners:

Anything earlier than the Republican period (1911-49) tends to slip into the mist 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, telegraph, and missionary schools were already part of the Chinese landscape, and Chinese armies (and rebels) sometimes carried modern Western rifles. How often have we stopped to reflect that Yang Lu-ch'an was probably in Beijing in 1860 when British and French troops stormed the capital and the Manchu Emperor took flight. (Wile 1996: 3)

With this evocation of the historical and political context of the times and places of the figures who were key in the articulation and constitution of taijiquan as a certain kind of Chinese martial art, Wile sets the scene for a non-allochronic and more complex understanding of the cultural, ideological and political context of the emergence and development of taijiquan. Indeed, Wile's explicit proposition is:

that this watershed period in the evolution of the art and theory of t'ai-chi ch'üan did not take place in spite of larger social and historical events but somehow in response to them. Although the 'classics' and early writings, the focus of our study here, have a timeless, art-for-art's-sake tone, this should not prevent us from asking who were the Ch'ens, Yangs, Wus, and Lis, why did they involve themselves in the martial arts, and why did they create this kind of martial art? (Wile 1996: 3-4)

Wile's work is 'archaeological', in the sense that he studies the classics of taijiquan in relation to a reconstruction of what we know of their origin and composition. This contextual or conjunctural approach leads Wile to argue that the textual formalisation of the theory and philosophy of taijiquan that took place during the 19^th century was something quite context-specific and far from ideologically neutral. For, in fact, argues Wile, during the 19^th Century, Chinese intellectuals and thinkers felt increasingly besieged by foreign forces. These were not just military challenges, as in former times, but also intellectual, scientific, religious and cultural. Thus, China saw many 'anti-foreign' uprisings, culminating in the Boxer Uprising of the very early 20^th Century (Esherick 1987). The intellectual elaboration, codification and popularisation of a self-consciously and deliberately Chinese practice of taijiquan, with explicitly Taoist principles, can be regarded as another, albeit less violent, form of response to the Western invasion.

Elsewhere, Wile has undertaken a 'genealogical' study of taijiquan, and looked for the 'ancestors' of modern taijiquan (Wile 1999). Like others who have undertaken such studies (Kennedy 2005), Wile's studies suggest that the principles central to internal martial arts like taijiquan are eminently discoverable: Anyone in any time or place could discover and activate the training principles characteristic of taijiquan – such as slowness, sensitivity, yielding, redirection, and so on. However, the reasons these caught on and developed in China were historical in a very precise causal sense.

The first scene of the emergence and growth of taijiquan was, as mentioned above, as a symptomatic ideological response to Western cultural, ideological and intellectual forces. Taijiquan was a defensive retreat – a search for something 'essentially Chinese'. Taoism was one cultural resource, being as it was a set of ideas and practices alien to the West. The intellectual elaboration of certain 'internal' martial arts practices became another. In other words, although taijiquan had existed in different forms and under different names in China for quite some time, it emerged in its modern form because of a series of significant cultural, political and economic processes. As Wile puts it:

The shapers of modern t'ai-chi ch'üan thus witnessed repeated military defeat and reduction of the empire to semicolonial status. T'ai-chi ch'üan as we know it today rose from the ashes of a collapsing empire. With roots that clearly reach back farther than the nineteenth century, t'ai-chi's association with national revival did not become explicit until the twentieth. China's anti-imperialist struggles began in the nineteenth century, yet t'ai-chi writings from this period do not yet show self-conscious patriotic sentiments. Succeeding sections of this chapter will explore t'ai-chi ch'üan as a cultural response to China's political predicament. (Wile 1996: 5)

Wile proposes that 'T'ai-chi ch'üan in the nineteenth century may be seen as a psychological defense against Western cultural imperialism, a clinging to chivalry in the face of modernity' (26). At the same time, it was not just 'modernity' that was causing cultural identity crises. It was specifically a Western or westernising modernity. Thus, Wile proposes, against this backdrop, the development of taijiquan as a practice underpinned by a strong ideology or philosophy, suggests it can be understood as an 'attempt to create a space where purely Chinese values and worldview could survive' (27).

Thus, as China's political body was losing control (sovereignty), t'ai-chi ch'üan became a way to maintain a measure of autonomy in the practitioner's body. It must have been clear to China's elites in the second half of the nineteenth century that the West could not be beaten at their own game. They were thus thrown back on their own bodies, the microcosm where traditional Taoist self-cultivation sought to discover and become attuned to the tao. This was to pursue a Chinese brand of strength. (Wile 1996: 27)

Wile proposes that the semiotic structure of Western domination imposed an immanent femininity upon any discourse of essential Chineseness (27). Thus, it was not simply or solely that, as a Saidian approach might have it, that Western orientalism constructed Chineseness as the feminine to the West's masculine. It is also that, in the face of the 'rational', 'intellectual', 'reasonable', 'powerful' imperial and economic encroachments, there was, in a sense, very little semiotic room for manoeuvre. Accordingly, rather than championing progress and technology, a defensive and nostalgic response to forces of change would champion nature. Indeed, Wile notes, 'Late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century European romanticism suggests some interesting parallels with the t'ai-chi movement in nineteenth century China' (27). For, European Romanticism 'advocates returning the body to nature', and 't'ai-chi advocates returning to nature in the body' (27-8):

Nature is the setting in which man is beautiful and powerful, the stage on which Greek mythology is acted out. The Chinese literati in the nineteenth century faced an external but similar culture shock, and the effect, of course, was even more alienating. Disaffected young European aristocrats created a romantic subculture and took refuge in the arts as a realm of personal perfectability. The shapers of t'ai-chi ch'üan also project a vision of personal perfectability, or mastery, through the martial arts. As opposed to all other pursuits in their lives, which were overtly familial or political, t'ai-chi was an individual and interior quest. The almost religious solace that men like Goethe, Byron, Swinburne, Flaubert, Valery, Poe, and Brooke found in swimming, a subset of Chinese intellectuals found in t'ai-chi ch'üan. It may be no coincidence that Cheng Man-ch'ing called t'ai-chi ch'üan 'swimming on dry land'. Both feature physical effort against a mythological backdrop: for one it was Greek mythology and for the other Taoist hagiography. (28)

Wile goes on to argue that whilst 'rejecting Westernization and withdrawing into nativist roots might appear to be merely a reactionary reflex', in a sense it can be argued that such types of 'nativism' may be regarded, in retrospect, as 'the healing that prepares the way for modern nation building in the twentieth century' (29). This is because, as a process which articulates a strong sense of Chineseness – both in the present (in the body, in the mind, in the physical and mental dispositions acquired through training) and in terms of a notion of an elongated mythological history – the discourse of taijiquan is part of larger nationalist and nationalising processes, such as the 'invention of tradition' (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983) and the invention of the sense of a nation (Anderson 1991). As Wile observes: 'Selective celebration of tradition thus helps to consolidate Chinese identity, and in this sense it is "complicit" with the task of modern nation building rather than antagonistic to it' (Wile 1996: 29).

Of course, it is wrong to conclude from this that the emergence and elaboration of taijiquan in any context is simply nationalist, or, similarly, orientalist. As Wile proposes:

Only a secure sense of national self could permit China to change and adapt to a new international environment. By consolidating and retaining firm control over the spiritual sphere, it becomes easier to compromise with modernity. If t'ai-chi ch'üan in the West today represents a reaching out from within modernity to embrace a foreign and traditional practice, in nineteenth-century China it may have been a recoiling from modernity and withdrawing into native roots, but in both cases an attempt to make modernity tolerable. (29)

This idea of taijiquan as a cultural and physical activity emerging and functioning so as to 'make modernity tolerable', for both Easterners and Westerners chimes with Slavoj Žižek's argument that 'Western Buddhism' and 'Western Taoism' are actually the exemplary forms of ideology in contemporary global capitalism (Žižek 2001; Bowman 2007). On Žižek's account, all such practices are therefore implicitly negative, because they do not 'combat' or militate against modern and postmodern capitalism – they do not politicise or antagonise; rather they depoliticise and actually enable the spread of the ideology and of the political system that they would seem to be opposed to.

However, Wile's focus on the nation and its attendant ideologies is probably more pertinent than Žižek's focus on 'global ideology', at least initially. This is because taijiquan certainly functioned throughout the latter half of the 20^th century as part of the project of achieving China through the development of Chineseness. Later on, Žižek's perspective will become relevant. But taijiquan, as most people think of it now – with reference to images of large groups of Chinese people performing forms in Chinese city parks – came into its present form in Mainland China under Maoism.

Maoism championed taijiquan because it was collective, communal, synchronised, coordinated, non-Western, physical, non-sporting and non individualistic. It became a part of the material ideology of state communism. It could be regarded as forward-looking and nation building much more easily than certain meditative practices, such as qigong, which had unclear connections with religion any mysticism. Nevertheless, even qigong – a heterogeneous realm of meditative practices – has at various times been recruited for ideological purposes.

Qigong, like taijiquan, is another Chinese tradition that is often regarded as being timeless and unchanging – an enduring tradition, stretching back in an unbroken lineage through the mists of time to the most ancient prehistories of China. However, as David Palmer's study of the history of qigong makes plain, although many physical practices that we may today class as qigong may well have existed here and there throughout history, it was actually in 1949 that Chinese officials settled on the name for the practices and set about 'nationalising' them (Palmer 2007). Palmer writes:

Many of the gymnastic, breathing and meditation techniques defined as gigong were widely practised in Chinese society before 1949, but were not known under that name, nor grouped under a single category. They were practised in a diversity of contexts, and embedded in a variety of systems of representations and social organisations: monastic institutions, sectarian groups, martial arts networks, literati circles and medical lineages. It was only in 1949 that qigong became a global category which aimed to include all Chinese breathing, meditation and gymnastic techniques. (Palmer 2007: loc 136)

According to Palmer: 'The choice of the term qigong by Party cadres in 1949 reflected an ideological project'. This was 'to extract Chinese body cultivation techniques from their "feudal" and religious setting, to standardise them, and to put them to the service of the construction of a secular, modern state. As such', he states baldly, 'qigong is an invented tradition' (Palmer 2007: loc 98).

Inevitably, part of the invention of tradition is the simultaneous obfuscation of the act of invention and the attempt to cover ones tracks. Thus, both taijiquan and qigong, along with Shaolin kung fu, have overwhelmingly been constructed and represented as ancient, unchanging, and timeless, despite the fact that their histories and genealogies were largely invented during the 19^th and 20^th century. Historical studies, such as those of Wile (Wile 1996, 1999), Lorge (Lorge 2012), Kennedy and Guo (Kennedy and Guo 2005), Shahir (Shahar 2008), Palmer (Palmer 2007), Henning (Henning 1995), and the ongoing work of Judkins (Judkins 2012-), have done much to counteract allochronism in the academic discourse of Chinese martial arts – in China. However, the status of such arts and practices is somewhat different when the focus changes from a historical study of Chinese martial arts and related practices in China to a consideration of their status in the wake of their global dissemination.