of the eight powerful countries of Britain, France, the United States, Japan, Germany, Austria, Italy, and Russia occupied Beijing in the wake of the Boxer Rebellion, Chinese dignity was degraded to its lowest point. Many Chinese started to despise their own culture, which had been built and developed on principles of spiritual cultivation and humanistic morality. They believed that these traditional cultural foundations could not save their country. Instead, they needed to learn from the West. Chinese minds started to open and guns and cannons became more popular.
After 1911, the Qing Dynasty fell in a revolution led by Dr. Sun, Yat-sen. Due to the mind-expanding influence of their earlier occupation, the value of traditional Chinese martial arts was reevaluated, and their secrets were gradually revealed to the public. From the 1920s to the 1930s, many martial arts books were published. However, this was also the Chinese Civil War period, during which Chiang, Kai-shek tried to unify the country. Unfortunately, in 1928, there was a battle in the area of the Shaolin Temple, and the temple was burned for the last time by warlord Shi, You-san’s military. The fire lasted for more than forty days, and all the major buildings were destroyed. The most priceless books and records on martial arts were also burned and lost.
It was also during this period that, in order to preserve Chinese martial arts, President Chiang, Kai-shek ordered the establishment of the Nanking Central Guoshu Institute at Nanking in 1926. For this institute, many famous masters and practitioners were recruited. The traditional name for martial techniques (wushu) was renamed Chinese martial techniques (zhong guo wushu) or simply country techniques (guoshu). This was the first time in Chinese history that under the government’s power, all the practitioners of the different styles of Chinese martial arts sat down and shared their knowledge. Unfortunately, after only three generations (that is, the time it takes to train a group of students from novice to advanced), World War II started in 1937 and all training was discontinued.
In 1945, after the Second World War, mainland China was taken over by communists. Under communist rule, all religions were forbidden. Naturally, all Shaolin training was also prohibited. Later, under the communist party, wushu training was established by the Chinese Athletic Committee. In this organization, the communist party purposely deleted portions of the martial training and their applications in order to discourage possible unification of martial artists against the government. From Chinese history, it is well known that almost all revolutions that succeeded did so due to the unification of Chinese martial artists. Unfortunately, only the aesthetic and acrobatic parts of the arts were preserved and developed. Eventually, it became known that the athletes trained during this period did not know how to fight or defend themselves. Performance was the goal of this preservation. This situation was not changed until the late 1980s. After the communist government realized that the essence of the arts—martial training and applications—started to die out following the death of many traditional masters, the traditional training was once again encouraged. Regrettably, many masters had already been killed during the so-called “Cultural Revolution,” and many others had lost their trust of the communist party and were not willing to share their knowledge.
In order to bring Chinese wushu into Olympic competition, China expended a great deal of effort to promote it. With this motivation, the Shaolin Temple again received attention from the government. New buildings were constructed and a grand hotel was built. The Shaolin Temple became an important tourist attraction. In addition, many training activities and programs were created for interested martial artists around the world. Moreover, in order to preserve the dying martial arts, a group called the Martial Arts Investigation Team was organized by the government. The mission of this team was to search for surviving old, traditional masters and to put their knowledge in books or videos.
This situation was very different in Taiwan. When Chiang, Kai-shek retreated from mainland China to Taiwan, he brought with him many well-known masters, who passed down the Chinese martial arts there. Traditional methods of training were maintained and the arts were preserved in the traditional way. Unfortunately, due to modern lifestyles, not many youngsters were willing to dedicate the necessary time and patience for the training. Therefore, the level of the arts reached the lowest level in Chinese martial history. Many secrets of the arts, which were the accumulation of thousand years of human experience, rapidly died out. In order to preserve the arts, the remaining secrets began to be revealed to the general public and even to Western society. It is good that books and videotapes have been widely used both in mainland China and Taiwan to preserve the arts.
Many of the Chinese martial arts were also preserved in Hong Kong, Indo-China, Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia, Japan, and Korea. It is now widely recognized that in order to preserve the arts, all interested Chinese martial artists should be united and share their knowledge openly.
If we look back at the martial arts history in China, we can see that in the early 1900s, the Chinese martial arts still carried on the traditional ways of training. The level of the arts remained high. But from then until World War II, the level of arts degenerated very rapidly. From the war until now, in my opinion, the arts have not reached even one-half of their traditional levels.
All of us should understand that today’s martial arts training is no longer useful for war. The chances for using it in self-defense have also been reduced to a minimum compared to that of ancient times. This is an art whose knowledge has taken the Chinese thousands of years to accumulate. What remains for us to learn is the spirit of the arts. From learning these arts, we can discipline ourselves and promote our understanding of life to a higher spiritual level. From learning the arts, we can maintain healthy conditions in our physical and mental bodies.
A History of Chinese Martial Arts in the West. If we trace back the history of Chinese martial arts in Western society, we can see that even before the 1960s, karate and judo had already been imported into Western society and had been popular for nearly twenty years (Figure 1-2). Yet most Chinese culture was still isolated and conservatively hidden in communist China. Later, when Bruce Lee’s motion pictures were introduced to the public, they presented a general concept of Chinese kung fu (gongfu), which stimulated and excited Western oriental martial arts society to a great level. This significantly influenced the young baby-boomer generation in America. During the period of unrest in America during the war in Vietnam, these films provided both a heroic figure for young Americans to admire, as well as a positive Asian personality with whom they could easily relate. Many troubled youngsters started to abuse drugs during this time, perhaps as an attempt either to escape from the reality of a capricious world or to prove to themselves that they had courage and bravery. Under these conditions, Bruce Lee’s movies brought to the young generation both excitement and challenge. Since then, Chinese kung fu has become popular in Western society.
Figure 1-2. History of Oriental Martial Arts Developed in Western Society.
At that time the term “kung fu” was widely misinterpreted to mean “fighting,” and very few people actually knew that its meaning is “hard work,” an endeavor which normally requires a person to take a great deal of time and energy to accomplish. It was even more amazing that after the young generation saw these movies, they started to mix the concepts from what they had learned from the movies with the background they had learned from karate, judo, aikido, and their own imagination. Since then, a new generation of American styles of Chinese kung fu originated, and hundreds of new kung fu styles have been created. These practitioners did not know that the movies they had watched were a modified version of Chinese martial arts derived from Bruce Lee’s Chinese martial art, Wing Chun (Yongchun) Style. For cinematic purposes, it had been mixed with the concepts of karate, Western boxing, and some kicking techniques developed by Bruce Lee himself. At that time, there were only a very few traditional Chinese martial arts instructors residing in the West, and even fewer were teaching.
During this period Cheng, Man-ching brought the concept of one of the Chinese internal martial arts, taijiquan, to the West. Through his teaching
