Chinese soldiers were capable of taking pride in what they did which was not really related to their meager pay and poor living conditions. Opera performers were just the same. Yet when the martial reformers of the 1930s, or even the 1890s, attempted to reconstitute these fighting styles and promote them to the public, they fundamentally failed to capture the essence of this earlier social reality.
How could they? The Chinese economy and society had evolved and fundamentally changed. The industrial revolution had started to spread, cities were growing rapidly and more of the economy was invested in fully monetized markets. Martial reformers like Sun Lu-Tang were attempting to sell hand combat instruction to a middle class urban market in places like Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou which did not even exist one generation before.
This was an era characterized by the sudden emergence of choice. One could choose to study boxing, or one could choose to study western ballroom dance. In point of fact dance was actually the much more popular discipline. Likewise in Beijing one could choose to study Taiji, Bagua or Xingyi Quan.
Suddenly everything about these arts, from the spaces where they were practiced, the fame of their teachers, what was said about them in the press or their creation narratives, became a means for consumers to evaluate what they wanted to buy. It might be tempting to assume that things like the creation narratives “changed” when they became advertising tools in the current era. Yet this is what they really had been all along. It is their essential function.
Yes, the traditional fighting arts of China are in some very important respects commercial “brands.” All of the institutions that surround these pedagogical methods exist basically to channel consumer behavior. Often they do this so well that we don’t even realize what is going on. What we see is “traditional Chinese culture.” We are unaware that much of this is actually a comparatively recent invention. For example, it might be a unique vision of “Chinese culture” designed to comfort a displaced country youth who suddenly found himself in Shanghai during the 1920s or Hong Kong in the 1950s.
Excellent article by Ben Judkins on martial brands, special lost lineages that contain the "real" martial essence, and the realities of commerce.
https://chinesemartialstudies.com/2021/ ... al-arts-3/