The Circulation of Qi - in Media and Culture

The Circulation of Qi – in Media and Culture

 

Paul Bowman

 

Written for the 1st UK-China Media and Cultural Studies

Association Conference, Cardiff University,

6^th February 2015

 

 

I am not an authority on either UK or Chinese media or cultural studies. However, I do have an interest in aspects of both; particularly in their relations and in the circulation of things between, amongst and beyond them. My main interest in this respect, however, is less in media and more in the mediation and mediatization of aspects of culture and discourse. So it is with one aspect of this that I will engage here today, at the first meeting of this UK-China Media and Cultural Studies Association.

 

I want to take an example that we might tend to think is about as far away from the media and from mediatization as one could possibly get: namely, qi. Qi is, of course, famously, the life-force or energy that is integral to Taoist and other aspects of Chinese cosmology and mysticism. It is cultivated, circulated and directed in certain practices of traditional Chinese martial arts and traditional Chinese medicine. Indeed, it is often regarded as the very essence of life. Practitioners of taiji, qigong, nei-gong, and so on, cultivate qi within the body through meditative breathing practices, that are inward looking and entirely embodied. Qi cultivation involves the interlinked training of mind and body.

 

Needless to say, such extremely intimate, embodied internality would seem to be very, very far away from the concerns of most, if not all media studies, and from a great deal of cultural studies too. But this apparent distance is precisely why I have chosen it as an object of consideration in this context. This is because I specifically want to draw attention to the ways that such a sacrosanct quasi-religious mystical and embodied notion – one that arguably goes to the heart of so many discourses of 'Chineseness' – is circulated not just in the bodies of adept practitioners of internal alchemy and martial arts, but also – indeed perhaps primarily – in a range of media discourses. This is why my title involves a play on the familiar martial art and qigong expression 'the circulation of qi'. Here we are concerned with the circulation of qi in media and cultural discourses.

 

Qi is circulated in the body via meridians. Qi circulates around the globe not only via embodied transmissions, from teacher to student, but also via mediatized myths. Indeed, mediatized myths circulate far further afield than actual living practitioners. Ideas about qi circulate far and wide, East and West, carried by all means of transmitter – from travellers' tales to translations and publications, as well as in film, television programmes, comic books and computer games. As well as travelling far and wide, the mythology of Chinese qi-magic has an apparently long history. As Gary Krug observes:

 

The origins of these Western associations of magic with 'the Orient' are ancient and obscure. No doubt the mythical construction of the 'mysterious East' was fostered considerably through the translations of esoteric texts of Tibetan Buddhism and other sources in the 19th century. The history of the Western mapping of the world vacillates between the doubtful search for Prester John's Kingdom and the macabre certainty of finding beasts, cannibals, and other horrors. (Krug 2001: 401)

 

What I want to emphasise in relation to this passage is not the eternally-returning accusation of 'orientalism' in Western discourse (Said 1995); but rather the often overlooked significance of the role of translation. Specifically, Krug notes the role that nineteenth century translations of Tibetan and Chinese texts played in the fostering of a discourse of ancient Eastern magic and mysticism. In other words, the point is that this media dissemination (for, remember, books must be counted as media too) of a discourse of ancient Chinese magic possibly only emerged in a big way in Europe during the nineteenth century. But does this just mean that Europe was late to the party – that Europe only became aware of the considerably more ancient wisdom traditions of China during the nineteenth century? Aren't the wisdom traditions and Taoist alchemical practices involving qi themselves ancient to the extent of being effectively timeless?

 

A first rejoinder here would be to say that it is not just 'the East' that is exoticised as ancient and mystical in many discourses. Rather, the discourse of 'the ancient' is itself regularly exoticised, in all manner of discourse. Anything 'ancient' – no matter how local – is distant, out of reach, and enigmatic. A study of the ways in which the idea of 'the ancient' is romanticised, however relevant it would be here, is somewhat beyond the bounds of what I am able to carry out. Rather, I propose a quick whistle-stop tour of some interesting landmarks in the history of qi, and related matters. This may prove enlightening – although it may not perhaps be quite the enlightenment some may have expected or wanted.

 

In his 2006 ethnographic study of taijiquan in Shanghai, Adam Frank notes that in Shanghai after the millennium, 'despite the 1999 crackdown on Falun Gong, there always seemed to be some new form of qigong popping up that no one had ever seen or heard of' (Frank 2006: 117). As both Adam Frank and David Palmer (Palmer 2007) observe, Falun Gong is a kind of religious qigong that was cracked-down-upon for complex political reasons that essentially boiled down to the threat that the growing institution of Falun Gong and its leaders posed to the political order and status quo in China. However, one upshot of the crackdown on Falun Gong, according to Adam Frank, was the sudden conspicuous absence of practitioners in the parks of Shanghai. As he writes:

 

Some of the styles that appear at Taijiquan Day have been actively encouraged by the Party as a means of filling park space with 'legitimate' practices (i.e., practices that are not Falun Gong or other 'heterodox' practices). Mulanquan, named after the famous female warrior about whom Disney made an animated film several years ago, incorporates both sword and fan dances and appeared on the scene immediately after the Falun Gong crackdown. While some practitioners claim that it is an 'ancient' art, its inventor did not begin teaching publicly until after the crackdown, and articles about mulanquan appear frequently in government publications, while television shows devoted to the practice facilitate its spread. Witnesses to the Falun Gong crackdown in 1999 claim that the Shanghai government literally bussed in taijiquan [and mulanquan] practitioners to fill up park space that had previously been occupied by Falun Gong practitioners. (Frank 2006: 143)

 

What is crucial to my topic is the sense in which, in Frank's words, both Chinese government publications and 'television shows devoted to the practice facilitate its spread'. Such television shows, publications and other forms of media dissemination construct, iterate and reiterate a discourse in which the objects or practices are represented as both 'ancient and timeless' and as unequivocally beneficial to physical and health, character, morality, and (hence) society. Indeed, Frank actually argues that the relentless mythologizing of taijiquan in particular – the relentless representation of it as quintessentially Chinese, as ancient and timeless and as unequivocally good – has resulted, in context after context, in taijiquan coming to be what he calls 'the master symbol of Chineseness'. Taiji and – at the very heart of taiji – qi have come, in all kinds of Chinese discourses, to constitute the very essence of Chineseness. Frank argues that in all manner of context – from academic publications to government statements to the marketing and advertising for major events such as the Beijing Olympics, and beyond – taiji became elevated to the master signifier of Chineseness.

 

Why might this be so? Is it simply because taiji and, at its heart, qi, really are ancient and rightly to be venerated? There may be elements of truth in this. All myths require grains of truth. But these are not what I want to emphasize here. Such grains of truth are too easily emphasized – often unjustifiably – and such emphases can have skewing ideological consequences. So, rather, I will emphasize the opposite.

 

If we step back in time on our whistle-stop tour of qi's social history, David Palmer points out that the putatively ancient and mystical qi-cultivation practice known as qigong was only actually named and designated as such in the middle of the twentieth century. In his words:

 

The choice of the term qigong by Party cadres in 1949 reflected an ideological project: 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, qigong is an invented tradition. (Palmer 2007: loc. 98)

 

The term 'invented tradition' refers to Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger's influential 1983 collection, The Invention of Tradition (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983), a collection of studies that reveal how often traditions that we believe to be ancient and venerable are in fact recent inventions designed to help nation-building projects or colonial administration and management.

 

If we rewind slightly further back than the 1949 institutional invention of qigong, the historian and translator Douglas Wile observes that many of the so-called 'classic' texts of taijiquan, too, can only actually 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 by its own practitioners (the claim that it is ancient to the extent of being virtually timeless) is – he argues – 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 of taijiquan as a very particular kind of Chinese martial art, Wile sets the scene for a more complex (non-allochronic) understanding of the cultural, ideological and political context of the emergence and development of taiji. 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'; and that even though the classic texts of taijiquan '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)

 

His answer is that, during the 19^th Century, Chinese intellectuals and thinkers felt increasingly besieged by foreign forces. These were not just the military challenges of former times, but also intellectual, scientific, religious and cultural onslaughts. Thus, China saw many 'anti-foreign' uprisings, culminating in the Boxer Uprising of the late 19^th and 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 consequently be regarded as a very particular kind of 'response' to the Western invasion.

 

The reason I am problematizing some of the most easily accepted ideas about taijiquan, qi, and so on, is not to do some kind of violence to these discourses or practices, or to try to refute anything. It is simply to suggest how entangled in a changing mediascape the discourses are. The dissemination of published manuals on aspects of martial arts has always had a profound effect on their perception and mythologisation – even after bogus manuals have been exposed as complete fakes. Fantastical early twentieth century Chinese texts on the training methods and skills of the Shaolin Monks, for instance, were at once completely fanciful and instantly denounced and debunked by Chinese martial arts historians. But to no avail. The fantasies about the superhuman abilities of Shaolin monks caught on within China and never went away.

 

All of these discourses crossed the ponds, hopped the water margins and left the rivers and lakes not simply (if ever) in the bodies and abilities of itinerant monks and wandering Taoists, but rather in their media manifestations. In martial arts literature, martial arts manuals, in national allegories and government policies, and then in films – the first film ever made in Shanghai was a now-lost martial arts film – the discourse outpaced any other reality. The qi circulating in the bodies of adepts could never keep pace with the qi that circulated in the bodies of texts.

 

Gary Krug argues that a key aspect of the Western encounter with Chinese martial arts, and qi, is that it took place against the backdrop of American military activities in Asia (Krug 2001). Consequently, before qi, Americans encountered Japanese ki – an idea that was brought back from Japan and Korea by returning US military servicemen. In Britain too, Japanese martial arts were the first Asian martial arts that were known. The Suffragettes studied jujitsu for self-defence, and Sherlock Holmes was represented as an expert in Baritsu, which is how Conan Doyle rendered the term Bartitsu, which was an early British version of jujitsu, taught by Barton-Wright, who had studied at least two styles of jujitsu whilst working in Japan in the nineteenth century.

 

Just like the differences between ki and qi, and their different places and roles in different cultural, ideological and either nationalistic or, more recently, individualistic discourses, Chinese martial arts have had a different mediatized history to Japanese and other martial arts. The most famous case in the mediatization of all Asian martial arts is Bruce Lee, of course; but Bruce Lee is neither the first nor the most appropriate example to consider when it comes to the matter of the media circulation of qi.

 

Adam Frank points to the groundwork laid by translators of Chinese texts such as Wilhelm's translation of the I Ching and the writings popular psychologists like Jung. However, he argues that 'real explosion of Daoism as popular culture in Europe and America … occurred in the 1960s, when Daoism, along with Zen Buddhism and various Maharajiisms, spread in the United States' (213). He argues that 'Daoism was one among several exotic philosophies that offered alternatives to existing paradigms, and thus it made an important contribution to counterculture ideology' (213). With this came a crucial 'institutional' response in the West, one that had a significant impact:

 

Popular presses like Shambala Books heavily weighted their catalogs toward Eastern mysticism. Editors at Shambala, Yoga Journal, Tricycle, and New Age magazine not only published on the basis of what they thought their public wanted to read, but often led the way in explicitly or implicitly linking practices like taijiquan to Daoism. (213)

 

In other words, the circulation of the discourse attending qi in the West was firstly literary/philosophical and then countercultural. Thereafter, or thereupon, it also moved into Western bodily practices, on a more mass scale; as attested perhaps by the first major sighting of taijiquan in a US film – the improvised version of what appears to be the short Zheng Manqing taiji form in the 1969 film, Easy Rider. Frank notes:

 

Easy Rider, starring Peter Fonda, Jack Nicholson, and Dennis Hopper, contained not only signs of flower children looking for America and free love, but also the earliest cinematic reference to taijiquan in an American film. Hopper and Fonda are hanging out at a desert farming commune. A theatre group (the Gorilla Theatre) has just finished performing for the community. Fleetingly, we see a man going through what appears to be a half-improvised version of Professor Zheng Manqing's taijiquan form on the stage. No mention is made of what is happening in the scene. The characters watching the scene appear to know what they are seeing, and the taijiquan all seems very normal to them. What we are left with is an indeterminate exoticization of 'the Chinese', sandwiched between images of sharing, free-spirited wandering, and nature. While the scene has no direct significance to the story line of Easy Rider, it is in retrospect the symbolic seed of an emerging New Age discourse. As a counterculture symbol, Easy Rider also raises the question of whether or not we can read American taijiquan as resistance to state control of the body. (215)

 

Needless to say, this kind of cross-cultural movement of qi as both a signifier and an ingredient of bodily practices – and bodily practices that can never be disconnected from larger ideological discourses – raises many questions. Adam Frank engages with many of them in his own text, and I follow his lead in my forthcoming book Martial Arts Studies (Bowman 2015). But to conclude here, I will briefly refer to only one. This is the question of what happens when 'qi' is translated from Chinese to English, or from China to America, or from China to the UK, whether via American media or not? Frank proposes the following:

 

When a speaker 'borrows' a word, that act may involve specific strategies to communicate social messages beyond the meaning of the word. In the case of qi, the attempt to define the word actually provides one of the chief contexts for using it. In addition, even while the definition of qi remains unclear to the members of this community in which it appears, it is the very act of using the word that produces social solidarity, enhances the speaker's status, and evokes a shared image of an exoticized Chinese Other that supports a larger transnational discourse about qi. (220)

 

Thus, English language discourse about qi is always also going to be 'about establishing status and solidarity within a community of like-minded specialists' (220). This is because, 'As nonnative speakers, as borrowers, we … rely on higher-status members of our peculiar speech community (the community of taijiquan and qigong practitioners) to elaborate the parameters of how and when the word can be used'. He continues: 'We also rely on these high-status members to serve as our conduits to a transglobal cultural phenomenon – the spreading of qi-related practices beyond China' (223). The 'translation' or even just the employment of the term is never neutral. It involves all sorts of hierarchizing and affiliating operations:

 

As instances of transglobal cultural exchange, borrowed words can take on larger roles as measures of interests and values that cross geographic and political boundaries. Qi is one such instance. The increasing use of qi in English, especially in the last twenty years, provides us with a small window into how values, tastes, and beliefs in American culture – at least predominantly white, middle-class American culture – have paralleled, to some degree, those in Chinese culture. Qi, therefore, serves as an example of a living, moving Chinese identity, an instance of borrowing that goes well beyond language. (224)

 

This element of something that 'goes well beyond language' in cross-cultural encounters, movements, translations, appropriations, expropriations, borrowings and thefts is what interests me here. And in multiple directions. For, it illustrates the complexity of the transnational circulation of ideas like qi – east and west, north and south, west and east, south and north. This complexity is not simply geographic. It is also, as  we have seen temporal: ideas of the ancient can be invented in the present, for all sorts of reason and with all sorts of consequences. Moreover, this cultural discourse is also at once multimedia and also, in a sense, alien to media – more than media, other than media, yet relying on what deconstruction might term a 'media supplement'. The practices of qi-cultivation are essentially embodied, internal, intimate. But they are also implanted through external discourses – media discourses. This places all manner of discourse, media and signifying practice at the very heart of even the most intimate matters of subjectivity and identity; and reveals the central importance of the way things are constructed and performed for how things can be constructed and performed. And it is important to draw attention to this matter, I think, at the first meeting of a UK-China Media and Cultural Studies Association.

 

References

Bowman, P. (2015), Martial Arts Studies: Disrupting Disciplinary Boundaries, London: Rowman and Littlefield International.

Esherick, J. W. (1987), The Origins of the Boxer Uprising, Berkeley, Ca. and London: University of California Press.

Frank, A. (2006), Taijiquan and the Search for the Little Old Chinese Man: Understanding Identity through Martial Arts, New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Hobsbawm, E. J., and T. O. Ranger (1983), The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Krug, G. J. (2001), 'At the Feet of the Master: Three Stages in the Appropriation of Okinawan Karate into Anglo-American Culture', Cultural Studies: Critical Methodologies no. 1 (4):395-410.

Palmer, D. A. (2007), Qigong Fever: Body, Science and Utopia in China, [Kindle Edition] London: Hurst & Co. in association with the Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches Internationales, Paris.

Said, E. W. (1995), Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient, London: Penguin.

Wile, D. (1996), Lost T'ai Chi Classics of the Late Ch'ing Dynasty, New York: State University of New York.