a limited portion of the public finally grasped the correct concepts of a small branch of Chinese martial arts. This again brought to Western society a new paradigm for pursuing Chinese martial arts. Taijiquan gradually became popular. However, the American style of Chinese kung fu still occupied the major market of the Chinese martial arts society in America.
When President Nixon levered open the tightly closed gate to mainland China in the early 1970s, the Western public finally had a better chance to understand Chinese culture. From the more frequent communications, acupuncture techniques for medical purposes, used in China for more than four thousand years, were exported to the West. In addition, Chinese martial arts also slowly migrated westward. The period from the 1970s to the early 1980s can be regarded as an educational time for this cultural exchange. While the Americans’ highly developed material sciences entered China, Chinese traditional medical and spiritual sciences, qigong, started to influence American society.
During this period, many Western doctors went to China to study traditional Chinese medicine, while many Chinese students and professors came to America to study material sciences. In addition to this, many American Chinese martial artists started to awaken and reevaluate the art they had learned during the 1960s. Many of the younger generation went to China to explore and learn directly from Chinese martial arts masters. It was a new and exciting period in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Because of the large market and new demand, many Chinese martial artists poured into America from China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Indo-China. However, this generated a great force that opposed the American styles of Chinese kung fu created during the 1960s. The Chinese martial arts society was then divided more or less against each other. Moreover, martial artists who came from different areas of Asia also grouped themselves into camps against each other. Coordination and mutual support in Chinese martial arts for tournaments or demonstration was almost nonexistent.
In the late 1980s, many American Chinese martial artists trained in China became aware of some important facts. They discovered that what they had learned emphasized only the beauty of the arts, and that martial purposes, the essence and root of the arts, were missing. They started to realize that what they had learned were arts that had been modified by the Chinese communist party in the 1950s. All of the actual combative Chinese martial arts were still hidden from lay society and were passed down conservatively in traditional ways. Many of these artists were disappointed and started to modify what they had learned, transforming their techniques into more martial forms, while many others started to learn from martial artists from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Indo-China.
When mainland China finally realized this in the late 1980s, they decided to bring the martial purpose once again into the martial arts. Unfortunately, the roots of the beautiful martial arts that had been developed for nearly forty years were already firm and very hard to change. As mentioned earlier, the situation was especially unacceptable when it was realized that many of the older generation of martial artists had been either killed by the Red Guard during the “Cultural Revolution” or had died of old age. Those who controlled the martial and political power and could change the wrong path into the correct one had already built successful lives in the “beauty arts.” The government therefore established the Martial Arts Investigating Team to find those surviving members of the old generation in order to preserve the arts through videotapes or books while still possible. They also started to bring sparring into national tournaments in hopes that through this effort, the real essence of the martial arts could be rediscovered. Sparring (san shou or san da) was brought back to the tournament circuit in the early 1990s. In san shou training, certain effective fighting techniques were chosen for their special training, and each successfully delivered technique was allocated a point value. It was much like many other sports. However, the strange fact is that many wushu athletes in China today do not know how to fight, and many san shou fighters do not train wushu at all. In my opinion, wushu is san shou and san shou is wushu. They cannot and should not be separated.
In Europe, Bruce Lee’s movies also started a fashion of learning kung fu. People there were only one step behind America. Unfortunately, from 1960 to 1980, there were very few traditional Chinese martial artists immigrating to Europe. The few traditional masters there dominated the entire market. Later, in the early 1980s, many European martial artists went to mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong to train for short periods of time to learn kung fu. Unfortunately, after years of training, they realized that it was very difficult to comprehend the deep essence of an art simply by studying a few months here and there. The situation was especially difficult for martial artists who went to mainland China at that time. At the beginning of the 1990s, China significantly changed its training from gymnastic wushu to more traditional styles. The worst outcome was that after many years of effort to bring wushu into the Olympic games, China failed in its bid to host the summer games. China has since paid less attention to the development of wushu. Even the young generation in China now treats wushu as an old fashioned pursuit and pays more attention to Western material satisfaction and political reform. The spirit of training has been reduced significantly.
In America, since 1985, Mr. Jeffery A. Bolt and many other Chinese martial arts practitioners, such as Nick Gracenin, Pat Rice, Sam Masich, and more have tried to unify the Chinese martial arts community, hoping to bring together the great martial artists from China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Indo-China through tournaments and friendship demonstrations. Their ultimate goal is that these masters would become friends and finally promote Chinese martial arts to a higher quality. After ten years of effort, the organization, the United States of America Wushu-Kung Fu Federation (USAWKF) was established. Although there are still many opposing forces and obstacles to this unification, I believe that the future is bright, and I can foresee the continued success of this enterprise in the future.
Northern Styles and Southern Styles
Chinese martial arts can be categorized into northern styles and southern styles. The geographic line making this distinction is the Yangtze River (Chang Jiang, which means Long River (Figure 1-3). The Yangtze River runs across southern China from the west to the east.
Figure 1-3. The Yangtze and Yellow Rivers in China
Generally speaking, the northern region of the Yangtze River is bordered by large fields, highlands, and desert. For this reason, horse riding was common, like Texas in the United States. People in the north are more open-minded compared to those of the south. The common foods are wheat, soybeans, barley, and sorghum that can be grown in the dry highlands.
In the southern region, there are more plains, mountains, and rivers. Rain is common in the south. Population density is much higher than that in the north. The common food is rice. Other than horses, the most common means of transportation is by boat. There is a common saying: “southern boats and northern horses”. This implies that the southern people use boats for travel and communication, while the northern people use horses.
Because of a long history of development shaped by these distinctions, the northern Chinese are generally taller than southern Chinese. It is believed that this is from the difference in diet. Moreover, northern Chinese are used to living in a wide-open environment. After thousands of years of martial arts development, northern people perfected long-range fighting, and therefore they preferred to use their legs more. This is not the case in southern China, which is more crowded and where the people, generally speaking, are shorter than those of the north. Moreover, because boats are so common, many martial techniques were actually developed to fight on boats. Since a fighter must be steady on a boat, the techniques developed emphasized hands with a firm root. High kicks were limited.
From these factors, we can conclude:
1 Northern Chinese are generally taller, and therefore prefer long- or middle-range fighting, while southern Chinese are shorter, so middle- and short-range fighting are emphasized.
2 Northern
