How to Kill Kung Fu
There was a time when Chinese 武術 Wǔshù (martial arts or military methods) was brutally effective. There was a time when the empty handed component, 拳術 Quánshù or “Boxing Method(s)”, was high effective. People would 下功夫 xià gōngfū or “put in the work” to gain these fighting skills. Gōngfū (Kung Fu) means skill attained through hard work, and while doesn’t necessarily have to be fight training it certainly applies to the martial arts. Today main people practicing Chinese martial arts fail to live up to it’s past efficacy. So how did people manage to “kill Kung Fu”?
Here are the reasons I’ve seen for peoples’ kung fu not resulting in them being good fighters…
Cultural Damage: The culture of late Qing China no longer exists.
No Combat Context: The late Qing fighting context has changed, the current one is imperfect or completely lacking
Gentrification: Neo-Confucian Attitudes and diminishing the martial qualities
Changing Economics: Chinese Boxers generally don’t get paid well to be violently effective
Delusion: Movie and Wuxia popularization, Weak people looking for Mysterious power, no fighting
Positive Feedback Loop: All of these added up being self-reinforcing.
Cultural Damage
Firstly let us consider… what is culture? In Chinese it is 文化 wén huà:
文 wén: language / culture / writing / formal / literary / gentle / (old) classifier for coins
化 huà: to make into / to change into / -ization / to ... -ize / to transform
Where in English, cul·ture /ˈkəlCHər/ noun: the customs, arts, social institutions, and achievements of a particular nation, people, or other social group.
It implies that the group of people are transformed by, creating, codifying and/or passing down this language, writing, art, various practices and so on. Put in a more general evolutionary perspective, it’s behaviors that organisms pass down to their next generation that seem to confer some advantages. So, in what ways was the culture behind “kung fu” damaged? It did not happen all at once but very quickly a variety of factors have chipped away at the culture. Martial artists once served as trainers for local militia or were militamen themselves. The eradication of local gentry and militias took away that context. The society was once more brutal and violent and enjoyed marketplace kung fu demonstrations, watching fighters duel on 擂臺 Léitái (raised platforms), and common folk were more engaged in violence such as fights between villages, brawls between guilds, and the predatory occupations of bandits and thugs. The Qing dynasty had Military Exams that encouraged people to become athletic and strong, capable of leadership and command, and skilled in martial arts - that disappeared. Modernization of society led to a massive decrease in hand to hand cold weapons warfare and in increase in modern firearms, bombs, artillery, airplanes, etc. Modernization and the globalized economy also vastly increased urbanization and as such the old countryside village life and the villages’ folk boxing began to fade. This is before we consider all the Republican/Kuomintang and Communist purges, assimilationist policies, the Great Leap forward and the resulting famine and economic destruction, and the Cultural Revolution.
No Combat Context
Along with the destruction of the culture, or at least its transformation, was the reduction of combat contexts. The state began to monopolize violence more and more. Warlords, private armies, local militias, and bandit armies were no longer common place. The military and police controlled most aspects of violence and plus security forces which needed to be armed would often have modern firearms. The need for trade caravans and their guards largely disappeared. Otherwise, leitai dueling on the folk level began to fade. Gang violence and self-defense was still real and street fights not uncommon, but that thriving martial arts economy was changing. As traditional warfare and fighting subsides, people would need to devise other means of keeping Chinese boxing relevant. 散手 Sàn shǒu, now called 散打 Sǎndǎ, often thought of as “Chinese kickboxing” was a decent but perhaps imperfect testing ground for the traditional Chinese boxing systems. The addition of Western-style boxing gloves and at times the wholesale importation of Western boxing handwork meant that a good portion of the Chinese pugilistic skillset was ignored. The Western style boxing gloves also limit the amount of grabbing and clinching, taking away a lot of the bridging, trapping, and clinching in Chinese boxing. Perhaps that was due to a desire to be like the West, or perhaps it was just limited foresight. But that imperfect fit aside, the worst thing was that the fight sport was not well promoted in China, nor Taiwan, nor abroad. It was not rewarded on the socioeconomic level so as to make men want to be professionals and then engage in coaching careers. It was not enough to sway parents to wish for their kids to become fighters. This is already a tough task considering the neo-Confucian leanings of East Asian societies.
Gentrification
What is “gentrification” really? According to the National Geographic, it is a phenomenon where we see “a demographic and economic shift that displaces established working-class communities and communities of color in favor of wealthier newcomers and real estate development companies”. In the 1900s we see that the “kung fu world” changed. As we know in the 1900s the Chinese landscapes and people were marred by wars, famines, purges, repression, and then finally economic growth and mass urbanization in more recent decades. During this time, where civilian wushu was mostly done on the folk level by the common man and local gentry to defend their property, seize other people’s assets, to kill or be killed - it gradually came to be taken up by urbanites. It was also a part of the growing sense of Han Ethno-nationalism. There was the concept of using Traditional Chinese Martial Arts to strengthen the nation. Chinese thinkers had observed how Western calisthenics and fight-sports such as Boxing and Wrestling, as well as the Euro-Japanese model of nationalism fused into fitness and martial education, could be quite powerful. The Martial Arts were taken up by many Chinese people but instead of being mostly combat focused, it became much more forms focused. The new student of the era was less interested in actually killing people on the streets and more interested in learning these fighting sequences from their culture and getting fit. Neo-Confucian attitudes towards the martial arts were also disdainful. It emphasized self-cultivation and scholarly pursuits as the right path to self-fulfillment, and that this was vital to a virtuous and harmonious society and state. Sparring and fighting were less attractive than perfecting forms and engaging in the (now deeply influenced by myths and nationalist fervor) stories and culture of the martial systems. This is not to say that people did not fight nor that violence was gone - but the customer and what they wanted was changing.
Changing Economics
Supply and Demand. In the late Qing era, people demanded fighting skills. Martial artists supplied such fighting skills - whether hands-on or by teaching. They were also linked to spiritual and cultural functions such as being attached to local temples or taking part in rituals and performances such as lion dancing. However, as violence became more monopolized and higher tech, the number of fighters and trainers needed was reduced. Caravan guards and paramility/militias not under government control were not in favor. Also as stated before, Sanda was also not promoted to the same degree that Sumo, Judo, Muay Thai, western Boxing, Freestyle wrestling and other fight sports were and so the arena meant for the traditional Chinese boxing styles was not as well rewarded as it could have been. China instead promoted ‘performance Wushu’ which takes the traditional taolu and makes acrobatic dances out of them, as well as the modern practice of 太極拳 Tàijí quán /Taichi involving the slow forms and push-hands rather than weight lifting, hard punching, and wrestling. These have gotten wildly popular. The emphasis on forms (over function) has led to massive explosion in the sheer number of forms in ‘kung fu systems’. Many had 1, 2, 3, or 4, or none at all traditionally. Nowadays many curriculums have 10 or more easily. While these forms / sequences can be very useful trainings they aren’t fight-training in and of themselves. But, so-called masters began, at some point, emphasizing the profoundness of forms, and insisting on every movement having at least 4 applications - striking, kicking, throwing, and seizing. Expanding the sheer number of forms can also allow you to string a student along for longer, allowing you to make more money.
Delusion
The Chinese martial arts have always had an element of fantasy. The genre of 武俠 Wǔxiá involves adventurous martial artists living by their own moral codes and sometimes possessing magical powers. This is in the same vein as the stories of honorable samurai and vagabond ronin, or European knight-errants off on quests. There is some basis in reality and a lot of fiction. The traditional opera and wuxia genre helped to give rise to the Kung Fu movie phenomenon. Although it helped to produce a craze for kung fu teachings, it also gave people unrealistic expectations of fighting and Chinese boxing. If they had the misfortune of being taught Chinese boxing not in the 2-3 years of effective fight training it often was traditionally but as a 10-30 year process of learning form after form and focusing on aesthetic perfection over actual combat skills… they probably never learned how to fight. This is made worse by the fact that in a Confucian learning setting the teacher is often an unquestionable figure, and in the martial context something of a fatherly authoritarian. Additionally, the mythologies of these systems often had amazing champion warriors in their lineage and so one just had to have faith that what you’re taught is the unchanged high level stuff of legends. This isn’t helped by the fact that the interest in Eastern philosophy, medicine, and physical ritual has also led to an explosion in the pursuit of mysterious 氣功 Qìgōng powers. While mystical beliefs have always existed, there came to be an entire sub-section of the market devoted to the pursuit of fictional powers. This involves both delusional students and delusional masters. Many have been so divorced from combat that they no longer truly know how to fight, and the forms are warped to become prettier, or to fit what they think fighting is in their unqualified opinions, and yet they still call themselves martial artists!
Positive Feedback Loop
Let’s do the calculations. What happens when you take folk fighting arts and you change their cultural base? Then on top of that, you begin to diminish and eventually get rid of most of their normal contexts of usage? So the folk culture is no longer behind the fighting art, and the fighting art doesn’t have its normal use-cases as much as it used to. Additionally you begin to look down upon the real folk culture and circumstances that brought it about and the art is being practiced by people who aren’t about that life and don’t want to be. How’s the folk fighting art holding up now? With the changing society and technologies comes changing economics and now people are getting into the folk fighting art system for reasons other than purely their killing power. They are looking for a long-lasting hobby, a social group, a daycare for their kids, a Chinese cultural bastion, a way to feel cultured, etc.etc. and Wushu/Kung Fu is just one of many activities they could engage in. Teachers are thrust into the market economy and need to attract more students to stay afloat. On top of the culture fading, the fighting context being less present, the gentrification of the arts, and the economic forces acting on the traditional martial arts, we also have down right delusional teachers and students! So where does that leave us? I am not saying there aren’t legitimate fighters from a Chinese boxing system. There are also bouncers, bodyguards, and military or policemen who swear by the traditional martial arts. Having used them in self-defense, street fights, and combat scenarios they see there’s serious value to the traditional fighting skills. Thugs who learn the old ways can be considered in this category as well. Yet these participants have not been able to overturn the cultural damage, gentrification, changing economics, delusion, and thus that positive feedback loop. Today sometimes you do get a microcosm of a proud and effective martial culture but often you get something that is a twisted echo of its forever self, warped to meet the new conditions set upon it.
The Remedy Against Decay
In a way the solution is quite simple. We would need an environment where certain key cultural traits and values of the late Qing are actively practiced - and this would include valuing combative skill and athletics. We need a combative context for it, likely a well-funded fight sport of some kind. This should counteract some of the gentrification as actual fighters seek to learn and in some ways it reduces the worst of neo-Confucian attitudes which diminishes the martial qualities. The rules would need to be specific enough to get people working the attributes and fighting-frames we desire but open enough for it to be a realistic simulation of combat. A fight context that really pays, like Judo, Muay Thai or Boxing do, would see Chinese Boxers rewarded for being good at combat showcasing such capabilities. The more people see this, the less the delusions made popular in the 1900s can sustain themselves as “martial arts”. This can bring about another positive feedback loop.
Most folk fighting arts, the traditional martial arts of the world, are dying or already extinct. The many systems and styles of “kung fu” are also in danger of this. However certain things happened historically and culturally that have saved many of these arts from extinction. That said, many are in a state of serious decay. We have a chance to remedy this, to be the change.
