acts in that effort was the rebuilding of temples to Guangong (Guandi, the
god of war). This was followed by a return to martial arts training. As
Thaxton described it:
The training had a specific political purpose: villagers took it up to empower
themselves in confrontations with Da Fo party leaders so that the latter could no
longer place them in threatening situations without paying a price. Between 1985
and 1990 , scores of Da Fo families sent two and three sons to train under local
martial arts teachers, and they did so for the unstated but understood purpose of
hitting back at Bao Zhilong [the communist village leader] and his power network.
By 1986 several Da Fo martial artists whose families bore grudges from the Great
Leap period were making it difficult for Bao Zhilong to rule the village. They
challenged Bao more frequently and occasionally threatened to beat the daylights
out of his family members if he attempted to interfere with their affairs.^15
Bao Zhilong responded to these threats by sending his son to study at the
Shaolin Temple Academy for a year. The sixteen-year-old did not learn
how tofight effectively, however, and the villagers believed that the teach-
ers had been“imposters.”It is difficult to prove the teachers’status one
way or the other as the teenager trained with them for only one year.
Obviously the Baos seemed to feel that a year of training with a“real”
Shaolin martial arts teacher would have been enough to defend against the
attacks of embittered villagers seeking revenge for past injustices. Bao
Zhilong’s authority continued to crumble, and the county police offered
little support. He eventually suffered a stroke in 1992 , and his chosen
successor was also unable to lead in the face of villager resistance.
Thaxton’s research has continued, and he has explored the way the
martial artists began to form a parallel power structure independent of
either the Communist Party or the Chinese state. Ties of teacher-student
relationship bind this network together and penetrate into the police force.
Thefictional touchstone for these martial artists isThe Water Margin, the
Ming Dynasty novel set in the twelfth century. This band of righteous
martial arts outlaws now offers a form of real justice in contradistinction to
the government.^16 The specific circumstances of Da Fo village, its history
of martial arts, its contentious struggle between the Bao family and the
Maoist hardliners on the one side and the villagers on the other during the
Great Leap Forward, and the villagers’use of martial arts to regain power
neatlyfit the martial arts into thefictional construction of the twelfth-
century bandits. The martial artists in Da Fo appear to be righteous men
resisting corrupt government officials, thus connecting the martial arts
with righteousness and justice. A weak government response allows this
state of affairs to exist, and it is unclear whether better government, at least
232 Post-Imperial China