Shanghai Training Diary

Just came back from training for a week with Wang Senlin of Shanghai, who I have mentioned in this blog before. Like most Chinese kungfu teachers, Master Wang teaches and practices in a park near his home every morning. He does his personal practice from 4 – 6am and then from about 6am to 9am is for teaching and supervising students’ practice. Mornings came to follow a predictable pattern:  I would turn up at 6.30 am (lazy Western student!), and after a few warm-ups, would practice Santi for about 45 minutes (changing legs of course), followed by about an hour of Piquan. Around me, Master Wang’s students ran through various elements, or if I was lucky, we would get to see some Za Shi Chui or animals (rarely). During the breaks in training, the more senior students would often stand around smoking and chatting about xingyi or recent gossip, stopping from time to time to offer Master Wang a fresh cigarette. Over the course of the week, I talked a lot with Master Wang about xingyi and also his life history in general. He mentioned several xingyi-related topics which I thought might be of interest to readers, such as:

• Importance of Pai Da Gong (body-beating exercises) if xingyi is to be used for fighting. In Master Wang’s line, there is a set of pai da gong in which various parts of the body (back, arms, ribs) are struck by a fellow student to increase ability to take hits.
• Concept of Dui La (opposing forces) in training
• Guo – ‘Wrapping’ – xingyi shenfa requirement similar to ‘han xiong ba bei’ (hollow the chest, round the back) in taiji
• Huo Kua – ‘opening up’ the kua. For most people, the kua (inguinal crease) has very limited flexibility, it is almost a dead joint. However, the kua is one of the keys to generating power in xingyi, and so Master Wang teaches his students a couple of exercises to open up the kua. This is the first step to achieving the ‘wringing’ (called ‘ning’) of the waist and kua that is a key part of xingyi power generation.

One of the things I found most interesting was Master Wang’s experience with Sanda. During the early 80s, Master Wang was part of and eventually coached the Shanghai Workers Union Sanda team. He said that at that time, they had no experience with modern protective equipment, and so had to copy it from pictures in martial arts magazines. For head protectors, they used ex-military caps and for the chest they used padded vests with bamboo strips in them. The vests turned out to be a very bad idea as the bamboo strips often splintered under impact. He said the only additional training he did to prepare for these competitions was long-distance running to build stamina. Later on, Master Wang refereed several Sanda competitions in other parts of China which were open to all-comers, and he said that the early Sanda competitions the fights often lasted less than a minute, with many competitors either giving up or being too injured to continue.

China Trip: Final Notes and Thoughts

For any fellow enthusiasts out there planning on undertaking a similar trip to China, I would say the following:

1) Language. Bear in mind that even if you speak decent Mandarin (putonghua), you may not be able to understand the teacher. This is because most Chinese people, especially the older generation, speak their local dialect (often radically different from putonghua) in daily life, and only speak Mandarin as a ‘second language’.  As such, the degree to which martial arts masters can speak putonghua varies wildly. The rule of thumb is: the younger and better-educated someone is, the more likely they are to speak clear putonghua.

2) The method of teaching. Most teachers of the neijia arts are still passing them on in the traditional way, where the the teacher teaches for free, and the learning takes place either in a park or at the teacher’s home. There is still a big difference between being a student (outside the door) and a disciple (inside the door), with disciples being provided with more information but also subject to much higher expectations than ordinary students. Commercial martial arts schools that teach the neijia are still few and far between. Chen village is very unusual in this respect, in that it has several schools teaching taiji on a commercial basis.

3) The clear distinction between ‘inside the door’ (men nei) and ‘outside the door’ (men wai) information makes it very difficult to ask about aspects of the art that are considered ‘men nei’. An example in xingyi would be asking about Pan Gen, or in taiji asking about ‘heart methods’ (xin fa) – neither are likely to get you anywhere if you are an outsider.

Lastly, two general observations I would make are that:

1) I made sure to ask each master I met about how sparring was practiced in their system. None gave a specific answer as to how they trained their students to bridge the gap between structured pair work to full-contact free sparring, or indeed whether they practiced sparring at all. This can be interpreted in 3 ways: either (a) I was using the wrong word (I used ‘san shou’), (b) the schools/branches I met do not practice free sparring; or (c) that information is considered ‘inside the door’.

2) Even before this trip, I had the impression that very few young Chinese people (on the mainland at least) were learning and practicing neijia arts (or any traditional chinese MA). Comments by various masters and my own experience on this trip have reinforced that view.