Cold War competition between communist and capitalist countries, was
played out in China just as in the rest of the world. International sports was
about politics and proving a country’s value; domestic sports in China had
to serve those goals. Chinese martial arts had no place in that struggle.
Some threads of martial arts practice and study may have retained govern-
ment support, or benign indifference, but enthusiastic support was rare.
If we consider the larger sphere of Chinese culture, however, not just
what was occurring within the borders of the People’s Republic of China,
Chinese martial arts wasflourishing in movies produced in Hong Kong
and Southeast Asia, spreading awareness of its practices to the rest of the
world through that medium. In some cases martial artists who had hitherto
restricted instruction in their particular art to a very select group of
students began to teach more broadly in order to make a living.
Nevertheless, outside the realm offiction, and really just infilm, Chinese
martial arts were mostly confined to Chinese communities. A relatively
small number of non-Chinese in the West were able to study Chinese
martial arts, in stark contrast to Japanese and Korean martial arts.
More than anything else, the cinematic expression of the Chinese mar-
tial arts radically changed the place of the martial arts in Chinese culture.
Even in modern action movies, the Chinese martial arts gained power and
stature. Martial arts was represented in traditional and modern settings,
and keyed into the heroic literary images of premodern Chinese warriors.
The battlefield had nothing to do with these skills as they became mani-
festations of inner character on the screen. In sharp contrast, the Chinese
martial art most practiced in the West was Taiji, with its distinctive slow
movements and focus on“inner”cultivation. This was not wholly a
Western phenomenon, however, as the view of the Chinese“nation’s”
disastrous encounter with modernity was connected with the martial arts.
The Chinese imagined themselves a nonviolent, nonmartial people and
culture whose representative martial art, Taiji, was really all about internal
cultivation and health. In many ways this was the natural culmination of
the modern rethinking of the Chinese martial arts.
This pessimistic picture of martial arts practice within the borders of the
People’s Republic of China necessarily overlooks the continued practice
and teaching of the martial arts below the level of government scrutiny.
The Chinese government, like all governments, particularly of very large
countries, had a limited ability to control culture. It has been extremely
effective in doing so, but the government has never been completely
successful in destroying traditional culture. The best evidence for this is
the resurgence of martial arts practice after the opening up of China in
228 Post-Imperial China