China in the 21st century. The case of taiji quan masters

Abstract

The practice of taiji quan in one of its martial aspects, the pushing of the hands (tuishou in Chinese), relatively uncommon in Europe, is very often the pretext for the dissemination of emphatic discourses that are part of Chinese soft power. In this article, we'll be showing how taiji quan's rural origins diverged sharply from its 19th-century recovery by Chinese scholars. Even then, theoretical discourses took precedence over practice, defining an imaginary master shaped by the context of the existential crisis that China underwent in the 19th and 20th centuries. When taiji quan spread to the West from the 1960s onwards, these fantastical discourses were taken up by the small world of sinologists. We observe with interest the different research cultures between the rather pragmatic Anglo-Saxon world and the infatuation of some French-speaking intellectuals with the theorization of the field, in particular its highly controversial association with Taoism, shamanism or internal alchemy. In the final section, we'll try to show that the general public of practitioners acts as a sounding board for these fantasized discourses, to the point of ignoring the martial origins of taiji quan to make it a discipline essentially associated with well-being and spiritual fulfillment. Whatever these terms may mean on an individual level, we are witnessing the emergence of a religious-type discourse based on a culturally hybrid representation of the body. The Chinese master has become its epitome.