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 and publications, 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