Martial arts are often viewed and discussed as an essential aspect of traditional Chinese culture. Origin myths of different martial arts styles, handed down and embellished for centuries, are taken at face value by practitioners of these styles in Chinese cultural nationalist and Western Orientalist contexts alike.

What in earlier periods had been an infinitely diverse and only loosely delimited body of the arts of violence and self-defense has in this century been transformed into a unified, coherent (and often commercial-friendly) category of "martial arts." This panel will show how nearly every connotation that this category carries, whether as a uniquely Chinese "sport," an exotic path to self-awareness or cultural discovery, or a lucrative cottage industry, are historical legacies of the Chinese twentieth century.

Ruth Rogaski looks at the legendary Jingwu organization, later immortalized by stars like Bruce Lee, and discusses the very bourgeois notions and structures that provided for Jingwu ascendance in the 1920s. Andrew Morris’s paper focuses on the Guomindang’s 1930s efforts to create a rational, scientific, modern and unified guoshu (or "national arts") from the scattered histories of Chinese martial arts. Adam Frank focuses on taijiquan players in contemporary Shanghai, seeing in this everyday practice an "imagined tradition" that incorporates the modern urban practitioner into self-Orientalizing notions of "Chinese" tradition and culture. Drew Herman’s paper concludes our panel’s examination of the historicity of modern martial arts, as he analyzes their thorough commodification, and their alienation from the very heritage that is essentialized in their contemporary production.

Ruth Rogaski, Princeton University

Since Bruce Lee’s 1972 classic film Fist of Fury (also known as The Chinese Connection), numerous films and TV series from Hong Kong and Mainland China have chronicled the legend of Jingwumen. All set in the early years of the Republic, these media creations depict the fearless disciples of the famous martial arts school as they avenge their master’s death and fight against imperialism. Audiences throughout the Chinese diaspora. continue to thrill to the sight of Jingwumen heroes smashing the infamous "Sick Man of Asia" sign and inflicting defeat on arrogant Japanese karate champions.

This study seeks to extract the Jingwumen from late twentieth-century lore and locate its meaning within the social and political context of early twentieth-century China. Founded in Shanghai in 1909, the Jingwu Athletic Association (Jingwu tiyu hui) more closely resembled a turn-of-the-century YMCA than a heroic martial arts dojo. Late twentieth-century representations present the Jingwumen as an organization dedicated to redeeming an effete Chinese elite through an invigorating injection of a peasant masculine martiality. By contrast sources from the early twentieth century suggest that the Jingwu Athletic Association sought to redeem a peasant masculine martiality through the discipline of modern science and urban(e) organization. This transformation would thus make martial arts more acceptable to an emerging Chinese bourgeoisie in the post-Boxer era. By playing in the spaces between popular myth and historical representation, this study will highlight the ambiguous role that martial arts has played in the construction of regional, gender, and class identities at both the beginning and the end of the twentieth century.

Andrew Morris, Colgate University

Among the surprising developments of the May Fourth period in China was the emergence of a new and energetic urban-based martial arts community. By the mid-1920s, Shanghai’s Pure Martial (Jingwu) Association and other activists succeeded in establishing a new space for wushu in a modern and outward-looking Chinese republic.

This martial arts realm—a symbol of the fractured, "backward" legacy of traditional Chinese culture—was a natural for Guomindang engagement when the Nationalist state was established at Nanjing. The government’s solution was the Central Guoshu Academy (Zhongyang Guoshuguan), which defined Nanjing Decade martial arts.

The formerly diverse Chinese wushu or quanshu ("fighting arts") were now consolidated into a new "national arts" (guoshu), a perfect site for the Guomindang in which to continue its revolution of science, discipline and unification in the physical realm. In this era of national crisis, guoshu was uniquely positioned—both as a Chinese "sport" particularly suitable for Chinese bodies and minds, and as a legitimate form of self-defense—to represent the Nationalist conquest of the weighty legacies and realities of foreign imperialism.

The Guoshuguan succeeded by pulling once autonomous martial arts practitioners into its fold, as it rewarded with a new national recognition the martial artists who had served their local communities for so long. Many martial artists and guoshu educators and activists operated outside of the formal Guoshuguan apparatus in the 1930s, but this state organization left its traces on virtually all aspects of the modern martial arts during this time.

Adam Frank, University of Texas, Austin

This paper is an initial attempt at using historical anthropology to understand how martial arts practice in urban Shanghai serves as a symbolic site of history, power, and transglobal culture. It will specifically revolve around an event I observed (and participated in) in Shanghai in the summer of 1997: a monthly public demonstration of the Wu family Qian Chuan Taijiquan Association, one of the oldest martial arts groups in Shanghai.

Drawing on Frederic Jameson’s notion of literature as a socially symbolic system, I discuss the practice of taijiquan as a bodily site where history is narrated at multiple levels. I also draw on Eric Wolf’s paradigmatic argument that labeling a people or practice with "tradition" is itself an hegemonizing act of power, intentional or otherwise; on Hans-Georg Gadamer, Richard Flores, and Sherry Ortner to pose questions regarding martial arts practice and historical consciousness; on Michel Trouillot regarding "silenced voices" in present-day accounts of martial arts history; and on Hobsbawm and Ranger’s notion of "invented tradition," which I synthesize with Flores’ work on modernity and the Alamo to look at how martial arts practice in modern, urban Shanghai serves as a consciously "imagined tradition" that both preserves the past and incorporates the present.

I conclude with the assertion that this imagining of martial arts tradition is one tool that Shanghai people use to cope with the stresses of frequent and dramatic changes in China’s political, economic, and cultural landscape.

Drew Herman, University of Iowa

Historians have treated modernization and Westernization as leading themes in understanding the development of East Asia since at least the mid-19th century. During that period, the nature and practice of traditional martial arts have undergone drastic changes. From quasi-mythological beginnings and exclusive training schools, Asian martial arts have become one of the most prominent cultural exports to the West. This development has direct roots in e.g. the reform programs of Meiji Japan. Through the twentieth century, the arts have acquired a new mythos with practices crucially shaped by cross-cultural interactions, including sports competitions and movies.

The founding and evangelizing of the World Taekwondo Federation (WTF), culminating in the acceptance of TKD as an Olympic medal sport, serves as the leading successful example of the modern, synthesized paradigm. In contrast practitioners of the Chinese art of Tai Chi Chuan have largely rejected such modernizations as national governing bodies, ranking and tournaments, while the popular new aerobic system Tae Bo represents total Americanization.