3/18/2021 0 Comments Yu Chenghui
While a martial artists he was also an accomplished poet and calligrapher.Yet even a brief glimpse at the timeline of his career suggests that these events had a notable impact on his evolution as a martial artist.
![]() Once the social and economic ecosystem that had supported and promoted these fighting systems was destroyed, the public practice of the folk martial arts vanished with surprising speed. The newly instituted state sponsored Wushu framework, including regional tournaments and both local and provincial teams, grew throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Yet these state sponsored institutions also found their legitimacy challenged during the period of disruption that followed. He has demonstrated that the folk arts disappeared with so little protest in large part because new social institutions were put in place that provided many of the same sorts of assurances that they had previously provided. ![]() Rather, once unleashed the Red Guards also turned their attention to many of the newly created social institutions and bargains that a previous generation of revolutionary leadership had put in place. As former folk martial artists and repentant gangsters saw their positions of stability eroded during the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution they began to actively reform their social structures and to restore their practices. Private patronage and teaching networks that had previously been sidelined by social reforms once again looked like a possible survival strategy. While the sudden emergence of a public park Taiji and Kung Fu would have to wait for the end of the Cultural Revolution, it would be hard to underestimate the importance of this period in sparking the era of restoration that followed. One suspects that if it had happened at all, it would have occurred much later and by very different means. It seems doubtful that the Kung Fu Fever that gripped China in the early 1980s would have emerged in the absence of the Cultural Revolution. Yet as we will see they helped to shape the historical stage upon which his martial genius could expand. ![]() Instead I am interested in exploring what the distinct stages of his career suggest about the evolution of the Chinese martial arts in the 20 th century. Most of the biographical material in this essay can be found in various published articles and obituaries that came out following his death in 2015. A port city on the Pacific coast, it was the sort of environment that might nurture dreams of knight-errantry in the young and a yearning to reconstruct the regions lost military history on the part of the more educated. The city had once been a fortified naval base and it was rightly famous for its stone towers and walls in addition to its historic courtyards and gardens. It had even been home to the illustrious wall builder and martial arts innovator General Qi Jiguang. He was famous both for his work on the expansion of the Great Wall during the Ming era and for publicly advocating the use of boxing as a training tool in the Chinese military. For these reasons, as well as the beautiful views, Penglai had actually been something of a minor tourist attraction for over 500 years before Yus birth. Yus father was forced to leave the area and fled to Taiwan while his son was still very young. I am not sure whether this happened during WWII or the Chinese civil war.
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