much more of a general sporting association. Pure Martial branches even
spread abroad to Southeast Asia. This also reflected the notion held by
some practitioners to transform the martial arts into a modern sport,
something that had been done in the West and more recently in Japan.
The inclusion of other physical activities at a martial arts association was
not necessarily a cynical move to draw in urban youth. The practitioners
themselves were also likely interested in doing more than just martial arts all
the time. A new world of physical culture had just opened up and they were
engaged infinding their own place as well as that of their martial art in it. If
the traditional combat martial arts were no longer battlefield skills, then
how could they be transformed for the modern world? The problem was
retaining something authentically Chinese while updating traditional arts, a
problem also being played out in the broader debates about culture.
A second tactic used by martial artists was to simplify martial arts
practices into little more than calisthenics. This emphasized the positive
physical uses of the practices for promoting health and made it possible for
less active people to perform martial arts. One martial arts teacher, Chu
Minyi, went so far as to create a new system of Taiji Calisthenics (Taijicao)
that anyone could perform. Chu had received a medical education in
France in addition to his martial arts training in Taiji, and he sought to
create a“modern”art explicitly for white-collar intellectuals whose work
did not require physical activity.^7 Taiji Calisthenics were even performed
as part of the Chinese martial arts demonstration at the Berlin Olympiad.^8
Chu felt that anyone could become proficient in his new art, unlike Taiji,
which was extremely difficult to master.
Chu Minyi’s new art was also part of the National Art (guoshu) move-
ment that began in this period.^9 This was an effort to unify all of China’s
disparate martial arts into afixed set of nationally recognized forms. Much
of the force behind this effort, if not necessarily the initial idea, came from
the Nationalist government. The government decided to wrest control over
the martial arts as a whole from the private associations that had been
promoting it in order to subsume them within the body politic. This
advanced the agenda of many martial artists who wished to incorporate
martial arts training into the new public school system and established a
place for the martial arts in the modernization efforts for the“New
China.”Many well-known martial arts teachers joined the new govern-
ment efforts and established training regimes in their local areas.
Subsuming martial arts training under government control was not, in
and of itself, enough to establish it as a National Art. The Chinese govern-
ment based at Nanjing was recognized internationally as the government
The Chinese Nation and Republican China 223