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| How Chinese Martial Arts Lost Their Original Social Function |
How Chinese Martial Arts Lost Their Original Social Function
Chinese martial arts are often presented as an unbroken tradition extending thousands of years into China's past.
There is some truth behind this image. China possesses an extraordinarily long history of warfare, wrestling, archery, fencing, military training and other combat practices.
But the martial arts practiced today are not simply unchanged survivals from the ancient battlefield.
They are the products of repeated historical transformation.
Weapons changed. Armies changed. Chinese society changed. The people practicing martial arts changed, as did their reasons for training.
Perhaps the most important transformation occurred when traditional martial skills gradually ceased to occupy the practical position they once held in warfare and everyday violence.
Kung fu did not simply "decline."
The world in which its original functions made sense changed.
Chinese Martial Arts Were Never One Thing
It is tempting to imagine an ancient system called "kung fu" gradually developing over thousands of years.
Historical reality was much less orderly.
China possessed many different forms of martial practice serving different purposes.
Soldiers trained for warfare. Officers learned weapons and military skills appropriate to their positions. Local militias trained for community defense. Bodyguards and armed escorts developed occupational skills. Bandits and rebels practiced martial arts for very different reasons. Wrestlers competed. Religious communities sometimes incorporated martial practices. Civilians learned fighting for protection, prestige, health, entertainment or other purposes.
There was no single ancient kung fu system moving steadily toward perfection.
There was a changing martial culture.
Weapons Came First
For most of human history, serious combat meant weapons.
A spear, bow, sword or other weapon offered an enormous advantage over an empty hand.
Chinese military history was therefore primarily a history of armed combat rather than fist fighting.
This does not mean that empty-hand methods were absent or useless. Wrestling and unarmed fighting have deep histories in China.
But on a battlefield, empty hands were secondary to weapons.
This distinction is important because modern martial arts frequently reverse the emphasis.
Today many traditional schools spend most of their training time practicing empty-hand forms and techniques, while weapons are introduced only after years of study.
Historically, the practical priorities of warfare were often very different.
Martial Styles Before the Modern Era
Another mistake is to imagine that every modern martial style existed in its present form hundreds or thousands of years ago.
Named fighting methods certainly existed before the Qing dynasty.
The Ming general Qi Jiguang (戚繼光, 1528–1588) discussed and compared different boxing methods in his military writings. By the sixteenth century, Chinese martial culture already contained recognizable schools, teachers, specialties and technical traditions.
But these should not automatically be equated with the highly structured style identities familiar today.
Modern martial arts frequently possess standardized forms, official genealogies, named founders, uniforms, organizations, rank structures, philosophical explanations and carefully defined boundaries separating one style from another.
Many of these identities developed gradually.
The history of a fighting method and the history of the modern "style" carrying its name are not necessarily the same thing.
The Ming Was Important—but Not a Perfect Golden Age
The Ming dynasty (1368–1644) is enormously important to the history of Chinese martial arts.
Military texts from this period provide unusually valuable information about weapons, training and fighting methods. Figures such as Qi Jiguang and Yu Dayou recorded martial practices with a degree of detail that allows us to examine them historically.
Shaolin's documented martial reputation also became particularly important during the Ming.
It is therefore understandable that the Ming sometimes appears to martial artists as a golden age.
But we should be careful.
There is no reason to believe that Chinese martial arts reached some objective state of perfection during the Ming and simply deteriorated afterward.
The Ming gives us a particularly valuable window into martial practice.
That is not the same thing as proving that everything afterward was inferior.
The Qing Did Not Destroy Traditional Warfare Overnight
My earlier version of this article argued that the Qing conquest destroyed much of China's martial knowledge because Ming military officers were killed and their systems disappeared.
That explanation was too simple.
The Qing dynasty itself was created through warfare.
Manchu, Mongol and Chinese forces used bows, swords, spears, firearms and artillery. Firearms were not introduced to the Qing military only during the nineteenth century. Guns had already played an important role in warfare before and during the Ming-Qing transition.
Military change was gradual.
Traditional weapons did not suddenly disappear when guns appeared.
For a long period, firearms, bows, spears, swords and other weapons existed alongside one another.
What eventually mattered was the increasing effectiveness and organization of modern firearms, artillery and military institutions.
A highly skilled swordsman might still be formidable.
But individual swordsmanship was becoming progressively less important to the outcome of modern warfare.
When Martial Skill Left the Battlefield
This technological transformation created a fundamental problem for traditional martial arts.
What happens to a fighting skill when the environment that made it necessary disappears?
Swordsmanship did not become physically impossible when rifles improved.
Spears did not stop working.
Archery did not cease to require skill.
Their social and military relevance changed.
By the nineteenth century, Chinese military forces confronted opponents whose weapons, organization, logistics and industrial capacity increasingly demonstrated that older methods of warfare could no longer determine the outcome of major conflicts.
Traditional martial skills therefore began moving into different social spaces.
And this is where the history becomes particularly interesting.
Civilian Martial Arts Did Not Simply Decline
Traditional fighting did not disappear when its battlefield importance declined.
Instead, martial culture flourished in other environments.
The nineteenth century was a period of enormous social disruption in China. Rebellion, banditry, militia organization, secret societies, migration, economic insecurity and local conflict all created reasons for civilians to acquire fighting skills.
This was particularly important in southern China.
In Guangdong and other regions, martial artists could be associated with village defense, armed escort work, urban occupations, rebellion, opera communities, local associations and private instruction.
The environment was different from the battlefield.
Naturally, martial practice changed with it.
A method intended for an infantry formation does not necessarily solve the same problems as a method intended for an escort guard, urban fighter or village militia member.
Rather than seeing every change as deterioration, we should ask:
What problem was this particular martial practice intended to solve?
The Rise of the Empty Hand
One of the most striking characteristics of modern Chinese martial arts is the importance given to empty-hand boxing.
This development cannot be explained simply by saying that weapons were prohibited and people therefore invented fist fighting.
The history is more complicated.
Unarmed methods had existed long before the nineteenth century.
But as traditional weapons became less relevant to military warfare, empty-hand practice could acquire new importance because it remained useful in civilian violence, physical training, competition, performance and personal cultivation.
It also required less equipment and could be practiced in environments where carrying military weapons was impractical or legally problematic.
At the same time, sophisticated systems of bare-handed boxing became increasingly visible during the late imperial period.
This was not merely the remains of battlefield martial arts.
It was also the creation of something new.
The Boxer Rebellion and the Crisis of Martial Belief
The Boxer Uprising around 1900 exposed one of the most dramatic contradictions facing traditional Chinese martial culture.
Members of the movement practiced martial techniques alongside religious rituals and beliefs that could include spirit possession and claims of supernatural protection.
Against modern firearms, such beliefs could have catastrophic consequences.
But the lesson should not be simplified into:
kung fu fought guns and kung fu lost.
The Boxer movement was a complicated political, social and religious phenomenon involving far more than martial arts.
Nevertheless, it symbolized a larger crisis.
China was entering a world in which traditional martial ability could no longer serve as a substitute for modern military technology.
The question became unavoidable:
What were Chinese martial arts for now?
The Republican Transformation
After the Qing dynasty fell in 1911, Chinese martial arts did not simply continue their decline.
In many places they flourished.
The Republican period witnessed major efforts to transform traditional martial arts into tools for strengthening both individuals and the nation.
Organizations such as the Jingwu Athletic Association (精武體育會) promoted martial training in a modern institutional environment.
The Central Guoshu Institute (中央國術館) attempted to organize, standardize and promote Chinese martial arts nationally.
Public competitions were held.
Books and magazines were published.
Teachers who previously operated through smaller personal networks could reach much larger audiences.
Martial arts became connected with physical education, nationalism and ideas about strengthening the Chinese population.
For Guangdong in particular, the Republican period became one of the great periods of expansion for civilian martial-arts schools.
This was not the death of kung fu.
It was another transformation.
Something Was Still Being Lost
Transformation, however, always has a price.
Once martial arts cease to be practiced primarily for the environment that created them, there is no guarantee that every element will retain its original function.
A technique can survive after its application has been forgotten.
A form can survive after the training method that once accompanied it disappears.
A weapon routine can remain long after practitioners stop actually fencing with the weapon.
An explanation can be invented generations after the original reason for a movement has been lost.
This is one of the greatest problems facing traditional martial arts.
Preservation of movement is not necessarily preservation of knowledge.
A sequence can be transmitted perfectly while its original function gradually changes or disappears.
War and Revolution
The period from the 1930s through the middle of the twentieth century was catastrophic for Chinese society.
The war with Japan, the wider Second World War, renewed civil war and the establishment of the People's Republic created enormous disruption.
Martial arts were obviously not immune.
Teachers died.
Students entered military service.
Communities were displaced.
Schools closed.
Families fled.
Transmission chains were interrupted.
Some martial artists moved to Hong Kong, Taiwan and Southeast Asia, carrying their traditions with them.
Others remained on the mainland.
This dispersal profoundly shaped the geography of Chinese martial arts as we know it today.
The People's Republic and the Cultural Revolution
The history of martial arts under the People's Republic also requires more nuance than the simple claim that "kung fu was banned."
Traditional practices encountered changing political conditions.
The state promoted organized forms of wushu (武術) and increasingly treated martial practice through the categories of physical culture, sport and performance.
Traditional teachers and practices nevertheless continued in various circumstances.
The Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) was especially destructive to many forms of traditional culture.
Teachers could be persecuted because of their social backgrounds, associations or perceived connection with the "old" culture. Organizations were disrupted, historical materials destroyed and normal transmission made difficult.
Some knowledge undoubtedly disappeared.
But Chinese martial arts were not erased.
They survived—in altered forms, in private practice, through individuals and families, and in communities outside mainland China.
Hong Kong, Taiwan and the Chinese Diaspora
Political upheaval produced an unexpected consequence.
Chinese martial traditions became increasingly international.
Hong Kong became an extraordinarily important center of martial-arts culture.
Taiwan preserved numerous systems brought from different parts of China while maintaining its own older Fujianese and Hakka martial traditions.
Chinese communities throughout Southeast Asia maintained and developed martial arts of their own.
Eventually teachers began transmitting these systems to non-Chinese students in Europe, North America and elsewhere.
Kung fu was no longer exclusively a Chinese cultural practice.
It was becoming global.
Cinema Creates Another Kung Fu
Then came another transformation.
Film.
Hong Kong martial-arts cinema introduced Chinese fighting traditions to audiences on a scale that no martial teacher could have achieved.
Bruce Lee accelerated this process enormously during the 1970s.
Millions of people who had never entered a Chinese martial-arts school suddenly possessed an image of what "kung fu" was supposed to look like.
That image was extraordinarily powerful.
But cinema is not historical documentation.
Film fighting must be visible, dramatic and emotionally understandable to an audience.
Real violence does not have the same requirements.
The danger appears when the cinematic representation begins influencing the practice it originally represented.
Practitioners may start expecting traditional martial arts to resemble the movies.
Teachers may respond to those expectations.
Legends popularized through films can return to martial communities and be repeated as history.
Performance can influence technique.
Fiction can influence tradition.
At that point the relationship becomes circular:
martial arts influence cinema, and cinema influences martial arts.
The Problem of Secrecy
Traditional secrecy presents another problem.
Secrecy once had understandable functions.
Martial skill could provide economic advantage, personal protection or professional status. A teacher had no obvious reason to give valuable knowledge indiscriminately to everyone.
Family and lineage structures also encouraged selective transmission.
But secrecy carries a serious danger.
If knowledge is transmitted to only a few people, the death of one teacher can eliminate it.
And secrecy can also conceal ignorance.
When a technique cannot be demonstrated convincingly, it is easy to claim that its "real application" is secret.
Historical secrecy therefore deserves neither automatic condemnation nor romantic admiration.
Sometimes it preserved knowledge.
Sometimes it helped destroy it.
Commercialization
Money is not a modern intrusion into some previously pure martial world.
Martial artists have taught professionally for a very long time.
Nevertheless, commercial incentives influence transmission.
A teacher may prolong curricula to retain students.
Schools may emphasize spectacular material because students enjoy it.
Difficult or unpleasant training may disappear because customers do not want it.
Conversely, commercialization can preserve traditions by giving skilled teachers an economic reason to continue teaching.
Again, the effect is not simply positive or negative.
Martial arts adapt to the society supporting them.
Tradition, Superstition and Myth
Traditional Chinese martial arts also contain religious practices, cosmology, medicine, philosophy, folklore and ritual.
These should not simply be dismissed as corruption.
They are part of the historical cultures in which Chinese martial arts developed.
But cultural importance and combat effectiveness are different questions.
A lineage legend can be culturally valuable without being historically true.
A traditional medical explanation can be historically important without being scientifically accurate.
A religious ritual can be meaningful to practitioners without demonstrating supernatural fighting ability.
Problems arise when these categories are confused.
Respecting tradition does not require us to stop asking questions.
The Modern Challenge: Testing
Today Chinese martial arts face a problem very different from the one they faced two hundred years ago.
Modern combat sports provide highly developed environments for testing particular fighting abilities.
Boxing tests striking under resistance.
Muay Thai tests striking and clinching.
Wrestling tests takedowns and control.
Brazilian jiu-jitsu tests grappling and submissions.
Mixed martial arts combines several of these areas under an evolving competitive ruleset.
None perfectly reproduces uncontrolled violence.
But they share something extremely important:
resistance.
The opponent does not cooperate.
That creates continuous feedback.
Techniques that repeatedly fail must eventually be modified or abandoned.
Traditional martial arts can lose this feedback mechanism when applications are practiced only cooperatively.
The problem is not tradition itself.
The problem is untested tradition.
Forms Are Not the Enemy
This does not mean forms are useless.
Forms can preserve movement principles, coordination, structure, combinations, body mechanics and historical technical material.
They can function as repositories of a system.
But a repository is not the same thing as fighting ability.
Reading a military manual does not make someone a soldier.
Practicing a sword form does not automatically make someone a swordsman.
Knowing an application does not mean one can execute it against an unwilling opponent.
If combat ability is one of the objectives of training, some form of progressive resistance is necessary.
Forms preserve possibilities.
Practice determines whether those possibilities work.
Has Kung Fu Declined?
The answer depends entirely on what we mean by "kung fu."
If we mean its importance on the battlefield, then yes—the traditional martial arts lost that role because warfare changed.
If we mean preservation of particular historical fighting methods, then some knowledge has unquestionably disappeared.
If we mean participation, cultural influence or geographical reach, the story is completely different.
Chinese martial arts eventually spread around the planet.
Millions of people encountered them.
Tai Chi became one of the world's most widely practiced forms of Chinese physical culture.
Shaolin became an international symbol.
Wing Chun spread from a relatively small southern Chinese tradition into a global martial art.
Chinese martial arts did not simply die.
They became something different.
What Should Be Preserved?
This brings us to the question that matters today.
Preservation cannot mean freezing martial arts in an imaginary past.
Nor should modernization mean throwing away everything that cannot immediately win an MMA competition.
Chinese martial arts contain several kinds of value simultaneously:
historical knowledge,
combat methods,
body-training systems,
weapons traditions,
community history,
ritual and cultural practices,
and accumulated experience transmitted through generations.
The first task is to determine which is which.
A historical tradition should be researched historically.
A combat claim should be tested physically.
A medical claim should be examined scientifically.
A lineage tradition should be recorded as lineage tradition.
A religious belief should be understood within its religious and cultural context.
Confusion begins when evidence from one category is used to prove another.
Kung Fu Did Not Fall
The history of Chinese martial arts is therefore not a simple story of decline.
There was no perfect ancient kung fu from which everything subsequently deteriorated.
There were instead repeated transformations.
Weapons changed.
Armies changed.
Political systems collapsed.
Communities migrated.
Teachers adapted.
Sports developed.
Governments intervened.
Movies created new expectations.
Old knowledge disappeared while new traditions emerged.
Something was certainly lost.
Something was also created.
The challenge today is not to return Chinese martial arts to an imaginary golden age.
It is to understand what survived.
To preserve what deserves preservation.
To test what claims to work.
To document what is disappearing.
And to distinguish history from the stories we tell about history.
Kung fu did not fall.
The world around it changed—and kung fu changed with it.
References and Further Reading
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Peter A. Lorge. Chinese Martial Arts: From Antiquity to the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge University Press, 2012.
This should be the main general reference. It covers military martial culture, weapons, firearms, the Ming-Qing transition, changing social functions of martial arts, and the modern period. -
Meir Shahar. The Shaolin Monastery: History, Religion, and the Chinese Martial Arts. University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008.
Particularly useful for Ming martial culture, Shaolin's documented martial history, development of bare-handed practices, and the relationship between religion and martial arts. -
Benjamin N. Judkins and Jon Nielson. The Creation of Wing Chun: A Social History of the Southern Chinese Martial Arts. SUNY Press, 2015.
Very useful for the article's discussion of nineteenth- and twentieth-century civilian martial culture, Guangdong, urbanization, social change, martial schools and the Republican period. -
Stanley E. Henning. “The Chinese Martial Arts in Historical Perspective.” Military Affairs 45, no. 4 (1981): 173–179.
A useful concise historical corrective to many popular assumptions about the antiquity and development of Chinese martial arts. -
Qi Jiguang 戚繼光. Jixiao Xinshu 紀效新書 (New Treatise on Military Efficiency), 16th century.
This is worth including as the primary source behind our discussion of Ming martial arts and the existence of identifiable boxing methods before the Qing. -
David A. Graff and Robin Higham, eds. A Military History of China. University Press of Kentucky, 2002.
Useful broader military context, especially so we don't treat Chinese martial-arts history independently from changes in warfare and military technology. -
Andrew D. Morris. Marrow of the Nation: A History of Sport and Physical Culture in Republican China. University of California Press, 2004.
Excellent for our Republican-period section: nationalism, physical culture, modernization, Guoshu and attempts to redefine traditional martial practices for modern China.