of Wushu from the Olympics even after China won the hosting of the 2008
summer Olympics was therefore a galling setback. Japanese and Korean
martial arts have been and remain Olympic sports. but China was only
allowed to show its growing economic strength and international standing
through its competition in Western events. At least in physical culture,
Chinese modernization was coterminus with Westernization, but China’s
physical culture was not accepted as modern, despite the government’s best
efforts.
Martial Arts in Academia
In his seminal 1999 article,“Academia Encounters the Chinese Martial
Arts,” Stanley Henning wrote:“In academia, the Chinese martial arts
have been conspicuous by their relative absence from scholarly discussion,
but when they have made an appearance it has usually beenfleeting and in a
muddle not much beyond what one sees in the bulk of martial-arts literature
on the popular market.”^1 Henning detailed the misconceptions espoused
by an older generation of sinologists that also occasionally slip into more
recent scholarship. Generally speaking, however, martial arts has been
ignored by scholars studying China. Despite (or perhaps because of?) the
fact that martial arts is one of the most distinctive aspects of Chinese culture
for many people, very little research on it has been done. The reason is
unclear, but the study of the martial arts touches on a number of academic
disciplines.
Military history is an obvious place to start a discussion of martial arts.
Thefield of military history broadened considerably in the late twentieth
century, moving onto the battlefield to focus on how men fought other men.
This attention to the actual methods of hand-to-handfighting–in other
words, martial arts–became a way to examine critical questions of culture,
motivation, and group dynamics among common soldiers. By looking at the
armament a given group used, we could see how that group believed combat
should take place. When this information was linked to written records, the
historian was able to create a fuller picture of the meaning of war, warfare,
and combat. Where there is war, there are martial arts, even if they are
rudimentary. The particular forms, meanings, and tools of martial arts tell
us a lot about a culture. Even the separation between the martial arts of the
battlefield and the martial arts of individual self-defense and hunting reveals
aculture’s construction of the place of violence in society.
Even in times of peace, however, martial arts persisted in all cultures.
Violence is often a tool of government, or, in the Weberian sense, a distinctive
240 Conclusion