Last June (2010), Tom Carter wrote five guest posts about Martial Arts in China, and the same month I wrote about a movie, The Karate Kid, starring Jaden Smith and Jackie Chang.
I’ve never been to Wudang Mountain (at last not yet), which is well known for its deep-rooted tradition of wushu (martial arts).
Watching Jackie Chang and Jaden Smith climb that long, narrow stairway reminded me of mountains I’ve climbed that challenged my breath and made my heart pound.
Tom Carter’s guest posts came with a few of the photos that he shot while there.
However, in the March 2011 National Geographic Magazine (NGM), we read of the Battle for the Soul of Kung Fu and discover that as the world and China changes, so does this ancient world of Martial Arts that has been steeped in tradition for millennia.
In Tom Carter’s first guest post on this subject, he wrote, “Located atop the western peak of the sacred Song Shan Mountain in northern Henan province, 800 year-old Shaolin Si has been destroyed and rebuilt time and again, weathering attacks by emperors, warlords, cultural revolutions, and now its most reoccurring invaders – the modern tour group.”
It’s the modern tour group Carter mentions that challenges China’s Kung Fu.
NGM says the city of Dengfeng (population about 600,000), China’s kung fu capital, boasts some 60 martial arts schools and attracts about 50,000 students from all over China.
Shaolin Si
A time line in the NGM piece shows the oldest Chinese reference to martial arts was in the 11th century B.C., more than three thousand years ago, and in 2010, the Shaolin Temple was named a UNESCO World Heritage site.
One element of the philosophy behind Kung Fu was explained by a master, “In each boy, he looks for respectfulness and a willingness to ‘eat bitterness’, learning to welcome hardship, using it to discipline the will and forge character.”
It seems the more things change, the more they stay the same.
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
To subscribe to “iLook China”, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.
No, this is not about looks or Botox or face-lifting creams or hairstyles, or tanning salons, or the desire to have a rounder, paler moon face—the standard of beauty to most Chinese.
What I am writing about is the meaning of “face” to the Chinese
Dr. Martha Lee wrote, “Nobody ever said what you do with those who have ‘disgraced’ the family name by getting divorced.” Dr. Lee was writing of the ‘hongbao’ dilemma.
In China, if you do something that is considered a disgrace, like getting divorced, that may be considered a “loss of face” for everyone in the family.
“The ‘face’ is psychological and not physiological. Interesting as the Chinese physiological face is, the psychological ‘face’ makes a still more fascinating study. It is not a face that can be washed or shaved, but a ‘face’ that can be ‘granted’ and ‘lost’ and ‘fought for’ and ‘presented as a gift’.”
When our daughter was a pre-teen, we went on weekend hikes in the hills behind our home. The end of the hike was a large park across the street from the La Puente Mall. On one fateful day, when she was nine or ten, she was the first to discover a dead man. She came running back with a shocked look.
It turned out the dead man was an architect from Taiwan and his company had gone broke. His “loss of face” for failing had driven him to take an extension cord from his mother’s house, find a suitable tree in an isolated portion of that park, and hang himself.
He was dead when we reached him.
Do not stereotype. The meaning of “face” may vary between Chinese. It depends on the balance between Confucianism and Daoism along with factors like Buddhism or belief in the Christian, Islamic or Jewish God.
“Face” is why most Chinese mothers ride their children hard to do well in school while telling everyone they know that their kid is stupid and/or lazy and has no chance to succeed.
Chinese mothers may often tell their children the same thing. However, if the child is accepted to a prestigious university, that Chinese mother has now earned bragging rights and “gained much face” for the job she did as a mother
To get a better idea, I recommend reading Amy Tan‘s “The Joy Luck Club” or watching the movie.
We had a house full of my wife’s Chinese friends over for dinner. After eating, the children gathered in our downstairs TV room to watch a movie. They picked “The Joy Luck Club“, and during one scene, when the Chinese mother was acting very Chinese, all the children looked at each other, nodded ‘yes’ and laughed ironically. Since my wife is Chinese, I knew why they reacted that way. They all had Chinese mothers.
“Face” is why the Chinese businessman will take great risks or take only a few risks and if given a chance may steal another person blind—that is if they believe they can get away with it. If they are caught and it is against the law, that is a “loss of face”—one reason for suicide.
Most Chinese men will wait until they are successful before they let others know. If they fail, it’s possible no one will hear about it beyond the family unit.
“Face” is why Chinese men often work twelve to sixteen hour days, seven days a week earning small but saving large. The Chinese will do without luxuries and save to pay for their child’s university education. Chinese women will work just as hard.
Studies in today’s China show that the average family saves/spends a third of its income for a child’s education.
Regaining “face” may be one reason why Mao reoccupied Tibet for China in 1949. Look closely, and you may discover that even Taiwan claims Tibet for the same reason.
The other reason may have been tactical—to control the high ground as Israel controls the Golan Heights.
Having control over the Tibetan plateau was one of the tactical reasons Britain convinced the Dalai Lama to declare freedom from China in 1912.
“Face” may be why China’s leaders get so angry over Taiwan. As long as Taiwan is not ruled by the mainland, it may be seen as a “loss of face”.
It’s why the Chinese want to walk on the moon and reach the other planets before anyone else. In China, “face” is universal to most of the population and different for each person.
For the Chinese, taking risks is no stranger. It’s probably the reason the Chinese invented paper, the crossbow, the compass, the stirrup, developed a cure for scurvy, the printing press, gunpowder, and built multi-stage rockets centuries before anyone in the West did.
China’s list of revolutionary inventions is longer than this. Many of these inventions eventually appeared in the West where Westerners took credit for them.
Now you know the truth.
In “What the Chinese Want even More than Oil or Gold“, the focus was on Chinese gambling and about illegal lotteries going legal and national. Since I married into a Chinese family, I understand what the author of this piece was saying, but the topic is more complex than that.
To learn more, I suggest you read the Investoralist, “Where Curious Minds Meet”. The Investorilist piece says that gambling is China’s Achilles heel.
I disagree.
I believe it is risk taking that brought China to greatness in the past. It’s when most Chinese stopped taking risks that China lost its spot as a regional superpower. It’s all about ‘face’. Take a risk and win but make a mistake and get caught, you “lose face” and maybe your life too, which may explain many of the suicides in countries such as China, Japan and Korea.
This revised and edited post first appeared as a four-part series starting February 17, 2010 at Chinese “Face” – Part 1
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
To subscribe to iLook China, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.
Global history shows that not all previous civilizations collapsed at the same time.
After the Western Roman Empire (500 AD) and the Han Dynasty (219 AD) were gone, the Byzantine Empire thrived in the Middle East for almost a thousand years (500 – 1453 AD), while the Tang Dynasty survived until 906 AD and the Yuan Dynasty (the Mongols) to 1368 AD to be replaced by the Ming then Qing Dynasties.
The British Empire survived until 1947 then vanished as an empire as the United States became a global super power after World War II.
However, many people are not aware of The Mandate of Heaven’s cycle, which leads to behavior that repeats the same mistakes that caused the fall of other civilizations.
American style democracy, capitalism, socialism, jet planes, the combustion engine, telephones, electricity, the Internet, and the iPad are not going to save civilization, as we know it today.
The reason for this is that human nature is what causes the downfall of civilizations.
History shows that during the good times at the height of a civilization such as Rome or the Han Dynasty, most people take the quality of life for granted as if it will never end. Once that happens, the end begins.
The Mandate of Heaven explained on a global scale by Warren Edward Pollock
In the video, Warren Pollack explains how the Communist Party returned China to stability after chaos and anarchy swept China after the fall of the Qing Dynasty. If the Party continues to maintain domestic stability and keep people working, China may survive as the civilization it is becoming for a few centuries before the next collapse.
Since Mao died in 1976, the internal goal of the People’s Republic of China has been domestic stability. With domestic stability, we see China returning to that period in the dynastic cycle where harmony and prosperity rules leading to a period of stability.
Edward Pollock says, “If China stood as the world’s top country, it would not act like the United States, which has been irresponsible, lazy and greedy and engaged in robbery and cheating. They (US) have brought economic recession to the whole world.”
If we look to the dynastic cycle as a guide, it would seem that the United States has entered the cycle’s stage of decay moving toward a collapse.
However, with the weapons of mass destruction that America has in its arsenal (more than any other nation even the USSR), could the US, like a drowning man, pull the rest of global civilization down with it?
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
To subscribe to iLook China, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.
On April 15, 2010 (more than a year ago), I posted The Mandate of Heaven, which has become the most popular post on this Blog. To date, there have been about 2,000 views and they keep coming daily. Only the Home Page has more. Third place has less than half.
Edward Gibbons in The Decline of the Roman Empire; Arnold J. Toynbee‘s A study of History, and Jeffrey A. McNeely. All three pointed out elements that were signs of the pending collapse of a civilization.
However, these Western historians and authors are novices compared to ancient Chinese scholars and historians.
The Dynastic Cycle or the Mandate of Heaven as explained by a sixth grade American teacher.
After more than a dozen dynastic collapses, the Chinese learned that underlying the rise and fall of a civilization [The Mandate of Heaven (天命)], is the belief that when ruling families or political parties do nothing for the people but everything for themselves that civilization is doomed to fail.
The Chinese learned that there are duties governments are required to carry out to protect the people from widespread catastrophe, chaos and anarchy. When a government fails to do this, we may predict that the end of a civilization such as America or Europe is at hand, which will not happen overnight but may take decades or a century.
What I did not realize until this morning was that the Chinese discovered the life cycle of civilizations millennia ago and called it The Mandate of Heaven, The Mandate of God or the Dynastic Cycle.
It doesn’t matter which form of government a civilization has. They all follow this same pattern. Republics and democracies have existed before the United States, and they all perished along with civilizations ruled by kings, emperors and dictators.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
To subscribe to iLook China, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.
Y Chan’s comment continued with, “In the English language, the word “Christianity” usually refers to the hundreds of religions (some estimate the total number of Christian sects to be about 38,000 worldwide) that are based on Jesus as their Savior… However, to the Chinese people, the words “Catholicism” and “Christianity” seem to refer to two different religions, which is wrong. The translation got lost somewhere.”
“In fact,” Chan wrote, “different Christian sects came to China at different times with different techniques. The Catholics first came to China under Father Matteo Ricci around 1582 “WITHOUT” weapons or gunboats.
“All Ricci brought was the Bible and scientific knowledge and thus gained the respect of the Chinese people [even today the Chinese respect him].
“Actually, the religious exchange went both ways. Whilst the Jesuits brought Christianity to China, they also introduced Taoism, Buddhism and Confucianism to Europe, because Father Ricci studied and translated many Chinese texts and sent them back to the Vatican.
“On the other hand, the Protestants arrived in China [in the 19th century] with the assistance of Western gunboats and opium. The first Protestant missionary was Robert Morrisonof the Scottish Presbyterian Church. He pioneered the translation of the Bible into Chinese. He actually was hired by the notorious British East India Company that sold opium in China.
“Therefore, Chinese historians usually give a much higher respect to Father Matteo Ricci than to Rev. Robert Morrison. Today, Morrison has largely been forgotten by most Chinese.
“Father Matteo Ricci was an Italian, came to China 400 years ago, arrived in Macao and learned to speak fluent Cantonese rather than Mandarin.
“He studied Buddhism, dressed as a Buddhist monk and talked as if he were one when he tried to introduce Christianity to the Chinese people. However, Ricci discovered to gain the trust of the Chinese Emperor, he had to understand Confucianism.
“Through the study of Confucianism, he was accepted into the Imperial Court and was the first Westerner to hold a high position in the Chinese Government.
“Father Ricci treated Chinese culture and religions “EQUALLY” as he introduced Christianity to China, whilst the British missionaries [Robert Morrison and the Protestants] looked down on China as a land of barbarians [heathens] to be “saved” as they came ashore supported by gunboats and opium.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse 
