Suspect Rebels 195
the famous temple. Therefore they need not make pretence. The abbot
laughed and assented.”^40
Epilogue
Contemporary visitors would be hard-pressed to imagine Shaolin’s dismal
nineteenth-century conditions. Today’s Shaolin Temple is as flourishing as it
has ever been. Paved with marble and decorated with gold, each year it attracts
more than a million tourists from around the globe. The monastery is sur-
rounded by dozens of martial arts schools, where tens of thousands of aspiring
athletes vie to become China’s martial arts champions. The tourists and the
students have transformed the Dengfeng County economy, establishing the
temple as its most important financial asset.
The monastery’s economic power is matched by its political clout. Con-
temporary Shaolin monks nestle as comfortably in the regime’s embrace as
did their Ming ancestors five centuries earlier. The monastery’s abbot,
Yongxin, is concurrently a member of China’s People’s Congress and the vice
president of the Chinese Buddhist Association. His political influence may
be gauged by his ability to forcibly remove (in 2000) some twenty thousand
people from their residential shacks around the temple, thereby restoring
Shaolin to what he—and fellow officials—regarded as its pristine beauty.
The temple’s links to the regime are also evinced by its place on dignitaries’
tours. The likes of the Russian president Vladimir Putin and the former U.S.
secretary of state Henry Kissinger are marched through the Shaolin Temple,
where they are entertained with martial demonstrations and are ceremoni-
ously offered antique swords.
How did the Shaolin Temple emerge from the ashes of civil war, Japanese
occupation, and the Cultural Revolution to become an international sports
center? The answer to this question goes beyond the scope of this book, which
does not cover the temple’s twentieth-century history. Nevertheless, a few pre-
liminary observations may be made, if nothing else as suggestions for future
research.
The National Arts (guoshu): Shaolin’s revival has been related to a funda-
mental change in the state’s attitude to the martial arts. Unlike the Qing dy-
nasty, which suspected martial artists of collusion with rebels, twentieth-century
governments—whether nationalist or communist—considered their art a na-
tional treasure. Beginning in the Republican period (1912–1948), the native
fighting techniques were heralded as the means for rebuilding the bodies and
the spirits of the Chinese citizens who were faced with the onslaught of West-
ern athletics. Their very name—“National Arts” (guoshu)—attests to the incor-
poration of the martial arts into the realm of nationally sanctioned culture, as
do the repeated attempts to include them in international sporting events.^41
The martial arts have evidently become a source of national pride. At the time