Intriguing art has ‘captured the world’s imagination’

In an increasingly popular event, people gathered in parks worldwide on Saturday to imitate snakes and cranes, stand on one leg like a golden rooster or emulate a dragon diving into the sea.

These joyful animal imitators, on the same day the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation wrapped up in Beijing, were celebrating another Chinese achievement that has likewise had an unmistakable global influence: tai chi.

The event, World Tai Chi and Qigong Day, for which enthusiasts amass on the last Saturday in April each year to exhibit and promote tai chi and discuss the numerous benefits of the Chinese health and martial art, marked its 20th anniversary this year.

This recognition of a Chinese cultural treasure took root in the heartland of the United States, not far from where I grew up and was introduced to tai chi more than 30 years ago.

While the first truly global observation was held in 1999, the event that inspired it occurred the year before when “a group of 200 people gathered in Kansas City, Missouri, to hold a mass tai chi teach-in and exhibition”, Bill Douglas, the founder and organizer of World Tai Chi and Qigong Day, told China Daily. “It was picked up by CNN and called the ‘largest gathering of its kind outside of China’.

“In these 20 years, this event captured the world’s imagination and has spread to hundreds of cities in over 80 nations, spanning six continents,” he said.

As a tai chi enthusiast, I am constantly perplexed at how this intriguing art continues to be widely misunderstood, and not just outside China.

For one, its origins have sparked intense debate. Although historical records trace the art as we know it today to the 1600s in Chenjiagou, a small farming village beside the Yellow River in Henan province, others insist — despite scant historical evidence — that it was created hundreds of years earlier by a legendary Taoist figure named Zhang Sanfeng.

There’s also the question of whether

tai chi is a health or martial art — as if it must be one or the other — and, if it is a martial art, whether it is truly useful for self-defense.

Chen Xin, a 16th-generation resident of Chenjiagou, perhaps summed it up best. He wrote in The Illustrated Canon of Chen Family Taijiquan, published in 1933, that “the secret of tai chi lies in the fact that its movements exist not of themselves, but are elements in an ancient tapestry of thought and consciousness, combining philosophy, healing and fighting into a single fabric”.

Unfortunately, the martial aspects of tai chi are still overlooked or simply dismissed, partly because Yang family tai chi, for many years the predominant style due to its influence in Beijing in the early 20th century, is practiced in a manner that is uniformly slow and gives no outward sign of martial tendencies.

The Chen style, on the other hand, which is the oldest form of tai chi, retains a strong martial flavor but was not effectively introduced outside its village of origin until the mid-1980s.

The real beauty of tai chi, though, is that you can get from it whatever you desire — depending, of course, on how much work you put into it, since, contrary to what some movies suggest, there’s nothing magical about it.

I’ve discovered that the art develops an explosive, whole-body strength unlike that of other martial arts I’ve practiced (Korean tae kwon do for 45 years, Okinawan karate for 30 years).

It also enhances the holistic “body brain”, increasing our awareness far beyond our visual scope; improves circulation and respiratory control; and ensures a symmetrical development and maintenance of the muscular and skeletal systems.

Douglas, meanwhile, in words that call to mind the win-win philosophy of the China-proposed Belt and Road Initiative, said one of the purposes of World Tai Chi and Qigong Day is “to provide the world an example of how we can all come together around personal and global health and healing”.

JAKUB HALUN