清末 Late Qing China
The Traditional Chinese Martial Arts as we know it today comes from a context of a violent Confucian culture plunged into societal collapse. The late Qing dynasty was a turbulent time, with famines and floods, opium epidemic and foreign encroachment, mass banditry and open revolts. Therefore many civilians learned 武術 Wǔshù (martial arts or military methods), which includes weapons skills and empty handed combat. Pugilism or boxing is called 拳術 Quánshù or “Boxing Method(s)” and is often referred to as 功夫 Gōngfū / Kung Fu today… While Kung Fu means skill attained through hard work, and doesn’t necessarily have to be fight training, it certainly applies to the martial arts. Understanding the context of the martial arts helps us to understand how it was designed and how it evolved. In today’s world where Chinese boxing is declining, we ought to look at its history and culture in order to begin to understand how it is structured.
The Hard Lives of the Peasantry
Although much of East Asia aligns with Confucian values, the reality for most Chinese was more brutish and violent. Life was tough and violent to a degree already. In the Qing dynasty, most Han Chinese were farmers or engaged in hard labor. In an agricultural lifestyle, killing animals for food already puts people one step closer to being able to commit violence. Additionally the ever present concern of not enough rain, or too much rain causing flooding, weighed on the minds of Chinese people. Competition over resources in bad times could get violent. Aside from fending off wild animals like wolves and tigers, there were bandits. Bandits often roamed the countryside in areas hard for the Empire to police. This means that travel could be dangerous, having anything of value could make you a target, and this kind of anxiety weighed on the Chinese peasantry.
People under such stress and danger needed heroes. The mindset of the ordinary people was further made martial by a whole pantheon of very martially skilled gods and powerful figures as well as a whole storytelling genre of 武俠 wuxia, involving 俠客 xiake or knight-errant - a martial artist and adventurer, living by his own moral code and his fighting skills. In parts of China there were traveling dueling swordsmen who could be called upon to exact vigilante justice or recruited to fight in local conflicts. In fact the wuxia genre, along with traditional opera, helped to give rise to our modern “kung fu movies”. But where there’s heroes, there’s also villains…
Perhaps scarier than bandits, were ghosts or demons. The 鬼 Gui hunger for human flesh. Humans must use talismans, exorcism, and execution to destroy these supernatural predatory enemies. As demons could shape shift into human form, it meant that your neighbor could actually be an evil entity. People accused of being demons could be tortured and executed as well. This kind of belief may have helped people take action against sociopaths and psycopaths amongst them - perhaps in its most ideal form it is like the community’s immune system against internal threats. But I wonder…
How often was it that a psychopath or criminal was rightly executed, and how often was it scapegoating, torture and execution to assuage local fears, anxieties, and hatreds? We will never know.
Martial Artists
In this violent context, many settlements had to have militias, and caravans often hired escorts to guard them. The village level martial arts are the grassroots foundation of many of today’s extant Chinese boxing styles. There was a thriving industry of martial artists training people in fighting skills and proving their worth in duels on leitai or raised platforms for all to see. Many also performed in marketplaces, doing stunts and going through taolu or forms/sequences for the audience. Martial arts groups were often associated with temple complexes. Martial artists also trained for, or trained others for, the Imperial Military Exams. The trials included horse-archery, foot archery, stone lifting, heavy bow pulling, and whirling the giant da-dao. Passing the exams could ensure career advancements for those looking to be officers in the Qing local armies. Of course sometimes the martial artists would themselves become bandits or rebels if economic opportunities became scarce… violence is their specialty after all.
Population Boom and More Problems
Although the Qing empire was brought about by the bloody conquest of the decaying Ming empire, after the conquest and the quelling of early rebellions, things got very good for Chinese people. The Qing empire was initially a very successful state in having militarily supreme Bannermen garrisoned across the empire and a state apparatus that incentivized Chinese and non-Chinese administrators to work closely with the Aisin Gioro dynasty and its men. The Qing empire was the 4th largest empire in human history and for a time one of the richest. The population boomed, the economy was good, and more people were able to move around and flourish than before. That said, some of these factors became problems and the rulers of the Qing gradually became more decadent and corrupt themselves.
The population boom caused many social issues. With more people there was less arable land to go around. Oldest sons often inherited land and property, and as such many young men were not given great economic opportunities. Landless, their odds of marrying were reduced. Additionally, although nothing like PROC’s One Child policy, Han Chinese society had long had a preference towards boys. The daughters were more expendable, since they would be married off to other clans anyhow, and as such the infanticide of daughters are not uncommon. Therefore, in certain times and places there could be a sex ratio imbalance. Those with employment often found themselves squabbling with others over shared resources. Guilds and other organizations fought over resources like water, right of way in streets, and so on. Gangs of unemployed men brawled in the cities and were drawn to the martial arts. The sex imbalance, landlessness, a surplus of disenfranchised single young men without good employment is a recipe for unrest.
This is not to say that Qing China was a lawless land - far from it. Local elders and magistrates were busy resolving civil disputes. Qing dynasty records indicate there was a serious backlog of cases in many areas and leadership was doing its best to mediate and resolve problems before they became too serious. That said, when things become too serious it got violent and that violence was met with extreme brutality. The Qing empire once had a very effective military. Qing Bannermen (Manchu, Mongol, and Han professional warriors and administrators) were stationed across the empire in garrisons. Local forces called the Green Standard armies would police the provinces and support the Bannermen in crushing serious threats. If they could, they sought to pacify the region by killing the leaders of the revolt and granting amnesty for the surrendered forces. However the other method was extermination. This involved killing the leaders, their forces, and all their families and affiliates. Yet, the longer the Manchu and their Bannermen stayed in the garrisons across the empire, the more they Sinicized and the more decadent they got. They became complacent and stopped maintaining the old ways of frugality, strength, and military excellence and at the same time many Green standard army commanders were highly corrupt siphoning off funds for armies that were under strength and for arsenals that only existed on paper. So when serious unrest occurred, their inadequacy was exposed.
Ethnic Hatred
Many Han Chinese also hated the Manchu and resented having been conquered. The Tiandihui (or triads) was an insurgency which fomented rebellion against the Qing. In 1787 they started a massive rebellion in Taiwan which was defeated but nearly bankrupted the Qing. Then in 1854 they launched the Red Turban rebellions which destabilized southern China. Full of anti-Manchu sentiment, the Taiping rebellion of 1850 was one of the bloodiest in human history. The Taiping rebellion was partly the creation of a new state, in part the unleashing of the rage of the Hakka (a marginalized and oppressed Chinese ethnicity), and partly a campaign of extermination against the Manchu.
The Qing managed to decisively defeat them but not without extreme financial strain and the use of not only the Qing military, but also 勇營 Yong Ying local armies and foreign mercenaries. 20-30 million people died in that conflict, about 5-10% of the empire’s population. While that war was raging, the Punti–Hakka Clan Wars kicked off in the Pearl River delta between the Cantonese and the Hakka, killing about 1 million and displacing many more. See, many Chinese ethnicities had rivalries and hatred against one another and non-Han ethnic groups. The decay of the Bannermen and the green standard army made them rely on local militias a lot more. This led to a decrease in the martial credibility and thus the authority of the Empire.
War, famine, societal collapse… An increasingly corrupt government not only had to deal with all that but also British and Americans smuggling in opium, the empire falling behind technologically and losing to foreign powers, trade concessions to foreigners and the opening up of China to missionaries… All of those problems combined you get a very angry and humiliated population.
The Boxer Rebellion erupted in 1899. Fueled by anti-foreign and anti-christian anger and armed with millenarianism, martial arts, and pre battle rituals, the 義和團 Yihetuan “Boxers” launched an uprising that ended up seeing about 100,000 dead. After several more massacres of Manchu and Mongols and other episodes of violence, the Qing dynasty would fall in 1912.
It was this context that the civilian wushu or “kung fu” matured in.
