The power of Chinese culture in contrast with its military weakness was
explained in several interconnected ways. Some Chinese, like Lei Haizong,
blamed Chinese culture itself as too civil and demilitarized. Lei traced this
back to the Han Dynasty demilitarization of the farming population at the
beginning of the Later Han recovery. It did not matter that this was non-
sense; his explanation tapped into a discourse of non-military Chinese
culture that has persisted to this day. Chinese culture, in this conception,
despite millennia of wars, is distinctively civil, more concerned with poetry
and self-cultivation thanfighting. Under this rubric, all Chinese activities
regardless of how martial they might appear–such as the invention of guns
and martial arts practice–only seemed so on the surface. In reality these
things were somehow not martial, and that is why the West or steppe
people had better armies than the Chinese.
Another line of thought made a clear distinction between Manchus and
Chinese, blaming the former for China’s humiliation at the hands of the
West. The Manchus were corrupt and, because they were conquerors and
non-Chinese, could not harness the military potential of the Chinese
nation. There was some truth to the idea that Manchu distrust of the
Chinese prevented them from fully harnessing the potential military
power of the vast Chinese population. But there was no Chinese nation
as such during the Qing Dynasty, and it took decades of struggle to form
one in the twentieth century. Still, the idea of leaving the failure to mod-
ernize and the Qing defeats on the doorstep of the Manchus was very
attractive. The new Chinese government could start afresh.
Yet that still left the question of what to do with Western culture. There
was no question that Western military practice had to be emulated. To
make it truly work, as some argued, required the wholesale adoption of
Western culture in every area from politics, to education, to physical
culture. The only way for China to become strong was to become
Western. The other pole of this debate accepted the need for Western
military practice, science and technology, and many other aspects of the
West while still maintaining that some core Chinese values and practices
were valuable. China, in this argument, could modernize without necessa-
rily Westernizing. Moreover, not only was Chinese culture valuable in and
of itself but it also had something to offer the rest of the world.
Chinese martial arts reflected, and continue to reflect, all of these con-
cerns. Advocates for the martial arts fought hard to establish the martial
arts as uniquely valuable, and uniquely Chinese. With the influx of
Western physical culture in the form of modern sports, there was a per-
ceived need for a distinctly Chinese physical culture. Where did the martial
Post-Imperial China 213