of China, but in actuality it did not control large areas of China. At least
within its area of control, and as the basis for a future of unified control, the
government felt it necessary to establish a system of training for martial
arts teachers. This made pedagogical and administrative sense since there
needed to be some way to ensure that teachers hired for the schools were
competent, but it raised the fundamental question of what those teachers
should practice. The need for an established martial arts curriculum coin-
cided with efforts to unify the martial arts into something clearly and
eternally Chinese. A further strand of modernization was the inclusion of
women in the martial arts curriculum on a somewhat equal basis. In this,
again, the government was following the remarkable sexual equality pro-
moted by the Pure Martial School.
In 1928 , the Nanjing government established the National Art Research
Academy (Guoshu Yanjiuguan).^10 It initially established two schools of
the martial arts within it, Shaolin and Wudang. Here we see the influence
of late imperial concepts of the martial arts based mostly upon literature
and theatrical performance. Shaolin represented the Buddhist strand of
Chinese martial arts, and Wudang the Daoist strand (including Taiji).
Thus the Academy reified the external/internal, Buddhist/Daoist divisions
in the late imperial construction of the martial arts as a step toward
unifying the whole. This was not done as a self-conscious acknowledgment
of the tendentious construction of the split but rather as acceptance of the
split that all“experts”and even laypeople accepted as fact. In any event,
the teachers hired also believed in the fundamental nature of the split,
expressing their“centuries-old differences,”as Andrew Morris puts it, by
fighting with each other. Like so many other manufactured rivalries, this
one was also taken very seriously. Having failed to establish unity on the
first try, the Academy was reorganized later in 1928 as the Central
National Art Academy with a new structure that did not instantiate the
internal/external division in its institutional framework.
The restructured and renamed Central National Art Academy tried to
take intellectual control of the martial arts by listing 161 Chinese martial
arts and then placing them all under the rubric of National Art. This was a
much more ambitious authoritarian gambit than earlier attempts to list the
different martial arts, since by listing the arts, they could all be subject to
government authority. Ironically, as the Nanjing government did not
control large areas of China’s Central Plains, including such iconic places
as Shaolin, the list could only include well-known styles from those areas
and styles present in the area under its control. The list essentially defined
what the Nanjing government did and did not control. The Shaolin Temple
224 Post-Imperial China