Chen Xiaoxing teaching

[ors]

Nice demos! Take a watch! Very nice!








Örs

[Hakkesho]

Very nice indeed! Lots of power

[Ian]

I'm sure CXX is very skilled, and his form is great, so I'm really just talking about the demo format here.

Re: lots of power

Yes, lots of big store and release movements into thin air. No mobility, not even a single application. And from the looks of it, that class experiences impact maybe once a year, if ever.

These videos are kinda like watching a marksman draw his pistol again and again yet not shoot any targets.

I'm not sure what people get out of them tbh :|

[yusuf]

sorry, can i ask if this is a famous master?

[Andy_S]

Nice. Chen XX is all about economical movement, being single weighted, and sinking the weight correctly over - and down into - the weighted leg.

Yusuf:

Yes, this is the grandson of Chen Fake, the younger bro of Chen Xiaowang, the older cousin of Chen Yu and the father of Chen Ziqiang. He runs the big Taiji school in the center of the village (though only teaches private classes; his son teaches the groups).

He is also my teacher's teacher - and my teacher when he comes here or we go there.

Ian:

He demos a few applications he likes and has thrown me hither and yon when I have asked to 'feel it': He has power and technique. But is he a fighter? No. Should you go to him if you want to learn to fight? Certainly not.

He really does not like teaching applications, he is all about the body method, which is demanding: When he puts me in the "correct" single weighted Chen stance, I can hold it for only a few seconds. But many of his students never do any contact drills or PH at all, which I think is a problem in his method. OTOH, senior masters of the village who I have trained with (Chen XW and Zhu Tiencai) are the same. IIRC, you trained in one of Wang Xian's schools: Was that any different?

Chen Xiaoxing's foster son, Chen Bing, OTOH, is much more open re apps, and his son Chen Ziqiang loves to fight (ie not simple shuia PH, though that is the basis of his method): He will just say with a smile: "Do anything you like."

In short, the younger generation in the village are much more combative.

[Ian]

IIRC, you trained in one of Wang Xian's schools: Was that any different?

With one of his disciples. Not much different, which is why I felt chen style was no longer suited to my needs.

In short, the younger generation in the village are much more combative.

Yes, I remember you saying that. The Chen bing wrestling clip is impressive.

[Chris McKinley]

Andy,

Kudos for a very fair-minded and honest post. Do us all a favor....bottle that and pass it around to everybody here on the Fist. I think if the guys themselves, or at least their representatives, presented what they are doing with this kind of transparency and honesty, the respect they would receive would skyrocket. It would take the piss right out of their critics if they would acknowledge these kinds of things pre-emptively.

In a way, it seems to me a shame that they can't operate on more of a university model. If this guy, and perhaps other senior masters, were represented more as professors specializing in body method instead of unquestionable, undefeatable uberbadasses, the criticism would almost dry up completely on its own. We in the West are accustomed to specialists who are expert in a certain area without having to be perfect at everything. There would still be a need for people who specialized in actually teaching you how this stuff is applied in real fighting, but that problem already exists now. With only a small handful of young strong senior practitioners who played the role of 'fighting' professor rather than 'mechanics' prof, the bases would be covered. In fact, at that point, I'd encourage the Chen organization to start making a concerted showing in San Da tourneys to crank up the glory for their system even more.

[Upyu]

<snip>
He demos a few applications he likes and has thrown me hither and yon when I have asked to 'feel it': He has power and technique. But is he a fighter? No. Should you go to him if you want to learn to fight? Certainly not.

Dead on.
Personally I don't understand the people that hem and haw about "but does this guy know how to fight, " and "the students look like 200 lb sacks of lard on a diet of McD."
Fighting and internal skills are two different things, and finding a teacher that can meld the two together are few and far between.
But I would never discredit those guys that focus on body methods exclusively either. Xiaoxing looked like he was explicitly showing the "hows" in a couple of those clips which is worth their weight in gold. Whether you choose to cash that in and put it to use in sparring is up to the individual.
そこでつべこべ言ってるやつは頭が悪いとしか言えねー

[Chris McKinley]

Upyu,

RE: "Fighting and internal skills are two different things...". While that is true, they are not two separate but equal things. One, the internal skills, is a subset of the other, fighting. This is because the internal skills are specifically for the purpose of fighting effectively.

Let's say you're in the world of high-performance auto racing. One particular company, Acme, who builds and races their own cars has racing skills that are roughly equivalent to the other drivers in the sport, and makes chassis that are on par with their competitors, but develops a reputation for designing and building very high-performance advanced engines for their cars, and they begin winning races consistently as a result. Everyone in racing recognizes and acknowledges that these new engines are the winning factor, and Acme racers dominate the sport taking victory after victory. They develop a reputation for being nearly unbeatable. Over the years, the company remains a family business and each successor learns how to race victoriously as well as how to build cars, especially including all the intricate secrets to building the spectacular Acme engines, which no one questions remain the best in the business.

However, after numerous generations, the company dwindles down and eventually stops building transmissions, chassis and bodies altogether, and none of the last two or three generations of owners has so much as sat behind a wheel, nevermind raced to victory. A large collection of pristine, high-performance engines, each designed to power a car and driver to certain victory, accumulates in the Acme design garage, fussed over and refined meticulously every day but never actually placed in a car and driven.

While in the now more modern world of racing, Acme's reputation for building superior engines is still unquestioned, racing itself has changed. Some aspects of the sport have evolved. Transmissions, chassis, bodies and suspensions are all manufactured based on much more advanced designs and materials. Drivers themselves are better-skilled and perform more consistently across the competitive field. All are within a few seconds of each other on any given day, and the most average driver is generally on par with the best of previous generations.

Scuttlebutt within the world of racing, among both the other racing companies and the fans, begins to build, and perhaps understandably so, about whether or not Acme's current generation of owners could actually win a significant race anymore, nevermind dominate the sport like their predecessors did. They've just been out of the game so long, and a fan would have to go back to his own grandparents to remember the last time an Acme driver was truly dominant or even noteworthy in the sport.

Sure, the owners still proudly display their engine-building skills on a regular basis, even travelling far and wide to host symposia to teach others how to build their own Acme-style engine. They even occasionally show how the engine can be hooked up to a transmission properly. Yet while this is certainly generous of them, it really accomplishes little with regard to mitigating the creeping doubt about their family's driving prowess being truly competitive in the modern era of the sport.

The fickle and greedy nature of human interest being what it is, Acme eventually realizes that it is faced with a situation in which, regardless of its deserved reputation for building superior engines, it will either have to begin producing winning, or at least competitive, drivers again or face eventual relegation to a place as a once-bright but long-diminished star in the annals of the sport's history, much like Rolls Royce or Bentley.

[Wanderingdragon]

Simply stated. There must be fighting.

[Adam S]

Yes an excellent post by Andy

The very last thing I am is an expert on the history of Chenshi Taiji & the village

However some of the things I have heard (second & third hand) about what some of the guys went thru during the cultural revolution, I'm not at all surprised that some Masters dont teach applications & sparring

When it comes to the promotion of some Masters that's a bit of a 'hard question'

But in relation to Zhu Tiancai at least in no way shape or form does he represent himself as an uberbadass
You know up front he's not a 'fighter' & you aren't going to be taught that by him
Well that's my experience

[Andy_S]

Adam:

Indeed, none of the Chen village Taiji masters promote themselves as fighters; they promote themselves as Taiji masters, which is exactly what they are.

However, some of their students - and some of the literature - promote them and Chen Taiji as "the martial Taiji" and that is not necessarily the truth.

OTOH, if they said that the Chen style has an unusually strong base in gongfu training - which I believe it does - I would agree.

But actual combat? No.

[roger hao]

Guys -
Look at the students in these clips. They all look like they are suffering
from autism. You want him to prepare them for the octagon fer rice cakes?
They could not even get close to doing a poor tornado kick and they are all
standing around with their knees locked - they appear to have not internalized
even basic tai chi principals - of course he's gonna teach how to single weight.
You all watch a kindergarten class and criticise that he is not teaching quadratic equation.

[Chris McKinley]

roger,

That could be a fair assertion if it weren't for one annoying little detail: clips, articles, etc. of these Taijiquan masters are never of them working with what appear to be obviously skilled/experienced fighters. The clips or other media that show them working with people who actually appear to be able to fight effectively just aren't out there. As such, the criticism that masters such as the one shown here are forced to teach only rudimentary movement skill instead of actual fighting skill because they are limited by the abilities of their students begins to ring a little hollow.

Yes, I understand from experience that as a seminar instructor you don't have control over the relative skill/experience level of seminar participants and are often required to adjust the material you are teaching accordingly. However, if you felt that what you had to offer was being misrepresented as not indicative of the actual fighting skill you were capable of teaching, then you could always show other contexts such as when you are working with your senior students or even other experienced practitioners.

IOW, assuming 1) the system or style actually contains functional fighting skills and 2) the instructor himself actually has those skills personally, then it ought to be a fairly simple matter of selecting the more advanced practitioners or students with which to work if you wish to depict the more functional aspects of your system in clips. What appears to be a consistent trend over not only a significant amount of time but also over a fairly representative sample of Chen style teachers is that, at the very least, finding skilled/experienced students to work with on clips on more functional material seems to be a thus-far-insurmountable challenge. At worst, it might suggest that even the teachers themselves are no longer capable of teaching or demonstrating the level of functional fighting skill that some of the posters on this thread would seem to prefer.

[Andy_S]

Roger:

SNIP
Guys -
Look at the students in these clips. They all look like they are suffering
from autism. You want him to prepare them for the octagon fer rice cakes?
They could not even get close to doing a poor tornado kick and they are all
standing around with their knees locked - they appear to have not internalized
even basic tai chi principals - of course he's gonna teach how to single weight.
SNIP

A rather remarkable conclusion to draw from looking at some people standing around watching a master demonstrate in a seminar. In future, if I see a Taiji practitioner standing with straight legs, I will know he is a beginner or an imposter...funnily enough, Chen Xiaoxing, when making a verbal point, has a funny habit of sort of flinging his head back. Next time I see him do this, I will immediately berate him for breaking his alignment.

FYI, the point I was making about single weighting is that Chen Xiaoxing emphasizes this far more than other village teachers. His teaching in this area is at odds with that of his more famour older brother.

SNIP
You all watch a kindergarten class and criticise that he is not teaching quadratic equation.
SNIP

If we are talking about MA, why should fighting be considered a high level skill? I have been practicing in the village line since 1995, and have never seen or heard of any of this generation of village teachers explicitly teaching fighting. Ergo, I don't believe they do. It is that simple. There are some clips of Chen XW flinging around Chen Bing and Chen Ziqiang, but these are really demos.

As noted above, the sons and nephews are a rather different prospect when it comes to combative teaching/training.