Chinese Martial Ritual Groups in the Mid-Twentieth Century

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Chinese Martial Arts Ritual Groups in the Mid-Twentieth Century: an interview with Yupeng Jiao. Yupeng Jiao is a Ph.D candidate in Modern Chinese History. Hi...

Chinese Martial Arts Ritual Groups in the Mid-Twentieth Century: an interview with Yupeng Jiao.

Yupeng Jiao is a Ph.D candidate in Modern Chinese History. His forthcoming dissertation is the subject of this interview. He researches Chinese religiosity, Christianity in China, Global Christianity and Chinese Modernism. He holds a B.A. in Chinese Language and Literature from Southeast University, Nanjing, China, and a M.A. in International Politics fromUC San Diego.

We discuss the Interrogation of thousands of martial arts ritualists by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) during the 1950s. What led up to it, and what followed. It is an exciting interview, where we cover a lot of ground.

My Response to Ben Judkins’ Review of my Book

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My Response to Ben Judkins’ Review of my Book

My friend Ben Judkins recently reviewed my new book Tai Chi, Baguazhang and The Golden Elixir, Internal Martial Arts Before the Boxer Uprising. Unfortunately, I believe he misunderstood it. The crux of his misunderstanding is with a theory I developed called the YMCA Consensus. I assemble the work of dozens of scholars to show that there was a consensus to separate martial skills from theatricality and religion. This consensus began taking shape immediately after the Boxer Uprising in 1901 and grew in strength through the 1920s to become official policy of the Republic of China and then the Chinese Communist Party.

Here is a summary of the main points of my argument:

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The Good at Forgetting Village

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I saw this movie on Amazon Prime called “The Village of No Return,” in Chinese that’s 健忘村 Jiànwàng Cūn. It should have been translated more literally as “The Good at Forgetting Village.” I thought the movie was great. It is weird and crazy too. It is a dark comedy from Taiwan.

The plot is that a Daoist magician shows up in this small town with a device that can erase memories. The iconography of the device is from the epic play Canonization of the Gods (Fengshen Yanyi). The device fits on your head and there are hands sticking out where your eyes should be, there is also a puppet-like merry-go-round of seahorses on it. Okay that isn’t much of a plot but this movie isn’t directly about the plot. It is about Chinese trauma through the 20th Century. The village is a model village.

English speaking culture and language is biased towards seeing the future as better. We don’t necessarily believe that, in fact we often reject that idea, but we are biased towards it. Chinese language and culture is the opposite, they are biased towards seeing the past as superior, obviously they also do not necessarily believe it. But in the film, forgetting becomes a way to maintain the bias.
Sitting and Forgetting (Zuowang) is the name of one of the central practices of religious Daoism, it is a type of meditation. In the movie this is not made obvious but it is probably obvious to most Chinese viewers. Certainly the ambiguous power of forgetting is a major theme. Perhaps the amorality of forgetting is a better way to put it. The power to make people forget leaves them docile. People are manipulated into bliss. Utopian-dystopian bliss. This is a cross-cultural theme, and an extremely dark one. Anyway, I’m not sure I can say exactly what the movie was about, haha, but it was fun and I recommend it.

Eastover Workshop

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I am delighted to announce this exciting new workshop at Eastover in Massachusetts JUN 07, 2020 - JUN 12, 2020.

This is a fantastic place to do a workshop because it is beautiful and you have the choice to stay in luxury accommodation, to camp out on the grounds, and several options in between. The area is historic, near Jacob’s Pillow one of the birthplaces of modern dance, and Tanglewood center for music.
Please share the details of this workshop far and wide.. I will be writing more about it and producing a video soon, it represents a breakthrough in my vision.

Temple Trash

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You are in for a treat! I just spent three hours exploring temple murals from Northern China.


For the essay I wrote in the Journal of Daoist Studies (2019) on Zhang Sanfeng and his relationship to Tai Chi, the Golden Elixir and theater, I included a citation from Hannibal Taubes’ website. The citation was about the ubiquity of Zhen Wu (Perfected Warrior) City Wall Temples across Northern China. My editor at the JDS suggested I use a specific published work instead. I lost most of the fights with my editor, but that one I won because Taubes website is simply the best source in existence on the subject. Readers may recall that Zhen Wu is the god that taught the Immortal Zhang Sanfeng how to do Tai Chi in a dream.

The awesome Stephen Jones, expert on Daoist Music, who brought an incredible Daoist Processional Band to a conference in Paris eighteen months ago, has a write up of Hannibal Taubes’ latest work on his blog.

One of the things that makes this project wonderful is that it was crowd-funded outside of any institutional support. Once he was on his way, he got help from Vincent Durand-Dastès whose work also crosses mine (he studies theater/ritual/comedy and its historical relationships to authentic Daoist practice, most of his work is in French).
I could write about this project more, and perhaps I will, but you might as well get over there yourself and check it out. This is a good place to start, it organizes everything into categories.

There is some interesting stuff in his notes, like that some temples had dueling stages! Two stages that faced each other. Theater troupes would put on shows at the same time or perhaps alternating, in which they would compete for audience attention.

In my new book, I present six examples of different types of rituals which likely had some form of highly skilled martial Nezha performer as a possible source for Baguazhang. Several of those rituals are mentioned in the Temple Trash notes. Dragon King temples are one of the most common temple types he encountered and also the site of one of the rituals I describe in the book. Seems it would have been great to get some of these pictures in my book! Oh well, next time… enjoy.


Nezha and his Friends!