powerful in Huang Baijia’s telling because it proceeded from a deeper under-
standing of the martial arts than the external Shaolin martial arts. It is worth
noting, of course, that Wang Zhengnan had actually served as a military
officer under the Ming. He was a professional warrior earlier in his life.
For anti- or non-Buddhist Ming loyalists, Shaolin and Buddhism offered
a shorthand for foreigners and the Manchus. Chinese power was internal
and concealed, but superior. Internal martial arts was part of a Chinese
discourse about identity and political loyalties rather than a transparent
description of practice. The Qing Dynasty literature on the martial arts was
inflected from its very beginning by the politics of the change from Chinese
to Manchu rule. Ming loyalism directly affected the Qing understanding
of martial arts. As Chinese scholars in the early Qing wrote about the
martial arts and military affairs, they did so in response to a profound
anxiety that the Ming had fallen because the literati, who formed the elite
of society and led the government at every level, had cut themselves off
from everything martial. Ming literati had become too literary and had lost
the necessary martial interests to keep their regime strong.
Regardless of the truth of the matter, the neurotic Ming loyalist per-
spective on the martial arts and the literati struck directly at the core of
Chinese literati identity. During the Qing Dynasty, Manchus and Mongols
were clearly more martial, and thus more masculine, than the subject
Chinese population. Regardless of how scholars and thinkers tried to
cast the relative positions of martial and civil as categories, elevating the
civil over the martial, it was clear that martial men were more masculine,
steppe people were more martial than Chinese, and civil literati incapable
offighting were likely to be subjugated in any conflict. Brains or moral
cultivation might create inner strength, but it was usually beaten by brawn.
Internal versus External Martial Arts
Wang Zhengnan’s internal martial arts, or at least Huang’s description of
it, left a lasting intellectual mark on the martial arts. While Wang’s own art
disappeared quite quickly, a permanent link had been established between
the internal“school”of martial arts, Zhang Sanfeng, Daoism, and Mount
Wudang. It was entirely specious, but it gained credibility with each retell-
ing. This was not surprising given that the sort of dichotomy it established
between internal and external was completely consistent with other areas
of Chinese thought. It took an accomplished philosopher motivated by
politics tofit the martial arts into the context of Chinese thought.
Internal versus External Martial Arts 195