itself was actually burned down in 1928 , further diminishing what was
already a much shrunken martial arts center. While the Central National
Art Academy drew up plans for martial arts training from the county level
up to the national level, along with administrative guidelines and funding
for these efforts, other National Art organizations emerged in the areas
outside of Nanjing’s control.
Despite these limitations, the Central Academy’s efforts were a modest
success, at least insofar as they promoted martial arts practice under the
rubric of government control over a wide area. The students at the
Academy itself were trained in many different martial arts, including
weapons, archery, and, for the men, bayonet (but not shootingfirearms).
Women practiced a slightly different curriculum until 1934 , when women
were no longer admitted. The reason for this was that the female students
were being sexually harassed by some of the male instructors. The direc-
tor’s response was not to punish the instructors but to remove the
women.^11 Government backing brought many great martial artists into
local, regional, and national schools to teach, exposing many more stu-
dents to their instruction than would have otherwise been the case.
The government and the Academy failed to create a true national
physical culture based around the martial arts, despite creating national
martial arts exams and competitions. Arguably, in the 1930 s there was no
“nation”to receive this new culture, only a collection of urban centers and
an increasingly marginalized rural hinterland. Political and military power
were so fragmented in China even before 1937 , when the Japanese army
invaded China’s eastern seaboard beginning World War II in Asia, that it
was simply impossible to use the martial arts as a nation-building practice.
In these tumultuous times, most people were far too concerned with
survival and the questions of war with modern weapons to have much
interest in the martial arts. Because the“martial arts”no longer included
battlefield skills, they were of marginal importance to China’s twentieth-
century wars. Perhaps because they simply ran out of time, China’s martial
arts did not fully develop into sports for schools and urban workers as they
did in Japan. World War II was followed by the Chinese Civil War, and it
was only in 1949 , with the communist conquest of China, that some
semblance of peace returned in China.
1949The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) conquest of China in 1949 did not
bring in a government sympathetic to traditional martial arts. Chinese