• Striking Thoughts has a good review of Jingwu: The School That Transformed Kung Fu. Jing Wu, or Chin Woo as I know them, were my training neighbours in Duxton Plain Park, and I got to know a number of them. Lots of very nice people there. This looks to be an interesting book; I’d like to pick up a copy some time.
• Mike Garofalo over at Cloud Hands discusses something very interesting: what were Yang Lu Chan’s Training Methods while he worked for the Imperial Guards? That’s something I would definitely like to know more about. I tried searching Chinese-language websites using Google auto-translate, but didn’t get very far. Maybe some of my Chinese-speaking readers could give some pointers?
• Rick at Cook Ding’s Kitchen links to a really interesting National Geographic article on the ancient tea trade route between China and Tibet, with Tibetan horses being sold in exchange for Chinese tea. The tea was carried over breathtaking mountain passes on the back of coolies…
• Dojo Rat discusses a Robert W. Smith quote about The Chatter In The Modern Urban Mind. Makes me think once more how much I miss my Welsh mountaintops…
• I’m not sure why Scott Phillips has been ‘vacationing at home‘ recently, but his comment about ‘Whatever it is that holds “me” together is unraveling’ certainly strikes a chord.
• And given the last two, and some of my more recent posts, I read John Michael Greer’s latest dispatch from The Archdruid Report, “Merlin’s Time“, with a lot of interest. There’s a lot to think about there.
• Let me also add there, an article on the Energy Bulleting: Creating a post-peak future you will want to live into, and A quiet crisis whispers of impending poverty on The Automatic Earth, which actually ends on a an uplifting note (way down below the quoted news articles, just above the comments).

If you thought I was being unnecessarily bearish about the immediate future, well….

I need to pinch myself; what I’m hearing beggars belief. Here’s the latest: officials from the US states bordering the Gulf of Mexico are briefing their disaster-response peers in other stats on plans for mass evacuation of the population of the Gulf states. Holy refugee disaster, Batman!

Why would they need to do this? Well, apart from the almost certainty that huge numbers of the population may be stricken down with Gulf War Syndrome, there’s the non-trivial possibility of hurricanes drenching cities in flammable hydrocarbons, which would lead to Dresden-style firestorms…..

As they say, if you put this in a novel, no-one would believe it…. But then, I never believed that a disaster in a major American city would basically be ignored…. until I watched the reports from New Orleans post-Katrina….

All that, plus a double-dip global recession looking almost certain…. Better be thinking about how to prepare…

I had planned to work late in the office last night, but by the time I’d finished teaching I was feeling a bit jaded and in need of exercise and fresh air. So, I got on my bike and cycled to Zhongshan Park, stopping at home to quickly change and pick up my shashkas.

I got there a little after 7pm; the gates close at 8, so I got in just under an hour of practice. I’m working out various different patterns of swinging the shashka, and I’m getting to understand how to hold it now – which is quite diffferent to the Chinese swords I’ve used in the past. Still, I need to think about this a bit more to be sure I’m doing it properly; I’ve never studied this, but I’m aware that there are many different ways of gripping sword handles. Apparently the ‘handshake’ is the best for the shashka.

There weren’t that many people in the park at that time, which was nice. On my previous visit, last Tuesday, it was a public holiday, and the place was packed; not necessarily a problem, but I had to keep stopping when people tried to photograph or film me (which I don’t want!). Last night, though, it was just me, a few elderly couples, and some security guards. The guards never give me any bother; that’s one of the nice things about China, actually, with its martial arts traditions – you can swing swords around in a public park and it’s regarded as entirely natural

Anyway, I’ve made enough progress with the shashkas that I’m now able to work with one in each hand; when I first tried this, my co-ordination wasn’t good enough. It’s interesting to note some of the sensations here. Long-time readers know that my left shoulder used to be really tensed up. Yiquan really made big improvements there, as I’ve previously noted. When I started using the shashka in my left hand, though, I could still feel that there was stiffness there; that’s going away as I use the swords more.

Using the swords is quite good exercise; I work up a sweat, and afterwards can definitely feel the effort in arms and shoulders, while ‘dancing’ as I move works the legs pretty well. I still need to improve the strength and coordination of my left hand, though – I found little nicks in my leg where the sword had caught them – good thing they aren’t sharp! One other interesting thing: the stainless steel replicas that I bought from taobao feel heavier than the carbon steel one that I bought in Panjiayuan Market; however, I notice that my hand and arm feel more tired after I use the latter. It may just be because of the grip: the replicas have resin handles, the other has a wooden handle and it may just be that I have to work harder with that because it doesn’t slip around in my hand as much as the replicas…

One thing that has amused me in the yiquan classes is that Master Yao and other students have mentioned several times that I’m very strong – which can’t be true as I don’t do any strength training beyond carrying my groceries, and haven’t done so for years. What they’re referring to, I think, is actually that I’ve gotten better at relaxing, so they’re pushing against body mass, not muscle strength. Still, I’ve been thinking that I need to get a bit more active; I’m doing a fair bit of aerobic work simply by dashing around Beijing on my bicycle, but some strength training would be good….

With that in mind, I bought Scott Sonnon’s Flowfit from Amazon. I was under the impression that it was based on his ROSS background, which it isn’t. It’s actually derived from his Prasara Yoga system. Yoga’s totally new to me; I’ve never really looked into it at all, though I have plenty of friends who practice it. Still, since I had it, I thought I’d give it a go, and I’m really enjoying it. It progresses through four levels of difficulty, and I’m taking it easy – just working on the beginner’s level using a stool as a support. Very nice; perhaps I should look into Yoga a bit more.

A German friend of mine went to India last year for a month-long yoga instructor’s course at Svyasa University in Bangalore. It’s apparently very intense, with participants rising at 04:15 and training until 21:30, 7 days a week for the full month! Wow. She’s been training in yoga for several years, but her Bangladeshi husband had no yoga background, and he also passed the same course…. Hmmm That’s something to think about for the summer holidays – add another string to my bow, and see a bit of India as well…. Hehehehe.

I’m still reading the economic news, and crossing my fingers as the western economies creak and groan under vast amounts of debt. I hope that it will all work out and the world of abundance will continue as it has for the last twenty or so years – but I, like most of you, am old enough to remember how it was before, when flying to the other side of the world was only for the few, and stitching and mending and “waste not” were the rules we lived by, and so I can’t see how we carry on as we have been, living beyond our means as a culture.

So, sorry, I’m in a bearish mood still. (I never believed in “power animals”, even in the days when I knew lots of neo-pagans. I’m coming to suspect that if I have one, it’s a bear…..)

So, let’s talk a bit about what I’ve been up to.

Others are thinking along the same lines. Dave Pollard wrote about an article on Sharon Astyk’s site, which I liked very much. I recommend reading the original article, but Dave’s summary covers all the key points:

[Y]ou should move if:

Your mortgage is way more than the value of your house (especially since house values are likely to go lower)
You have young children or are elderly, and the people you’re closest to live far away
You have children you want to spend time with, or parents who need your care, living far away
You live in an extreme climate and are not adaptable to living without inexpensive heat, air conditioning, water, and imported food
You live in a community with people with mostly lousy (by your standards) values
You don’t think your children have a future where you live
You are planning on moving anyway (sooner is probably better than later)
You aren’t going to be happy or viable where you are if everything based on oil (transport, bought food, plastics, clothing, heat) gets much more expensive, or if your ‘commuter job’ disappears and you have to take (cheaper) employment locally
You live in an exurban area with no viable public transit, no locally produced food, and few close neighbours
You are not truly ‘native’ to where you live — never really fit in, called it home — and someplace else has always beckoned.

Now, I love living in Beijing; I love my work here, and there are very good people who share my values and worldview. Recently, I’ve been practising a lot in Zhongshan Park, and as I cycle beneath the walls of the Forbidden City with the morning sunlight and clear air making the red paint glow, or leaving the park at dusk with the air above me full of swallows flitting about and chittering as they return to their nests under the eaves of the watchtowers, or chasing insects amongst the willows that line the moat – well, I have to pinch myself to remind myself that yes, it is real, and yes, I am living in this amazing, fantastic city.

But I know that it won’t, it can’t, last forever. So, maybe it makes sense to think about how and when it ends – and a number of the points on Sharon’s list were already making me a little uneasy. I also got set thinking by a recent article on Afghanistan in the 1950s – a place of engineering success, rock and roll, and liberal values. I wonder if the people in those pictures ever suspected that within their lifetime their world would revert to being “a broken 13th century country“. Kyrgystan used to be a pretty well-developed element of the USSR; who, then, would have foreseen the ethnic cleansing and savagery that’s in the headlines this morning?

A lot of people are talking these days about beginning to build your tribe – or, as military theorist John Robb calls it, a “resilient community”. I’m not sure that I see that happening for me anywhere but Wales…

So, what to do? There are perhaps two options.

One is to seek to retreat from the world and let it go on its way without me. That’s the route of the hermit or the monastery. I still want to write about people who’ve taken that way, in the much-postponed next post in the “What’s it all about?” sequence of entries here. That did seem a strong option for me at one point, to be honest. I’m very drawn to Plum Village, for example… Still, starting from when I began dating the Siberian, I’ve been drawn back into the world of attachment….

The other route is to get involved in building a resilient community. The question is, what can I (or you, reader) contribute?

It’s a question that is provoking a new movement in my martial arts interests – and leading me along the Tea Road…. In other words, it’s why I’ve been posting a lot about shashkas and systema recently!

I’ve been reviewing some of the DVDs of systema that were given to me, and comparing them to the “Systema Spetsnaz” DVD on “Internal Wave Energy” that I recently purchased. I also bought Scott Sonnon’s “Softwork“; I gather that this isn’t what he teaches these days, being from an earlier period in his trajectory, but it brings together what he learned from ROSS and other Russian systems.

To be honest, I really don’t see any huge differences between the practices of the different schools. I really like the philosophy that they all seem to share, and which is outlined in an article that I’ve previously linked to:

The doctrine of Russian Martial Art is based on the concepts of non-violence, cooperation, non-resistance and conformity. The Russian Martial Art master absorbs blows effortlessly, contorts the body to accommodate the threat and maintains contact until the assailant is rendered immobile.

… which fits rather nicely with something I’ve also been seeking in my martial arts studies (see my post ‘The manner of victory is important‘).

So far so good, but if I can get this with the Chinese martial arts, why move towards systema? This is where community comes into the picture…. With the Chinese martial arts, I’m getting great results in health, mental calmness, and combative ability; yiquan in particular, as I’ve mentioned here many times, has been particularly beneficial for me. The thing is, even if I reach the level of being able to teach in one or more of these, I’m not sure how they help to build a community -especially back in the UK where they’re not exactly mainstream; in a community adapting to resource constraints, I rather suspect that they would be seen at best as “nice, but by no means necessary”.

The Russian martial arts, on the other hand, have elements that may be a bit more marketable. In particular, I’m thinking of its connection with Cossack dance and choral singing (hey, I am Welsh, after all!). These are elements that can be used to build a community – dance and singing could attract people of all ages when a lot of what has become popular entertainment turns out to be unsustainable, and people start working in larger groups again…. It is suitable for both genders and all ages… and inside the song and dance are health techniques and systema fighting methods… Add to that the connections with the theatre from Stanislavsky, Chekhov and so on, and you have a system that’s highly appropriate to community-building….

As an example, I’ve been following the “Siberian Cossack Group LAD” for some time; although there are some elements that make me wary – and I know there has been a falling out with Mikhail Ryabko, though I have no idea what it’s all about – they are doing a lot of interesting work in combining the elements I’ve been talking about, and taking these into schools, youth groups, and so on – take a look at their videos on YouTube. (And, as a point of interest, in a recent Yiquan class, we had a visitor from Hong Kong who trains systema there, and who has friends who’ve attended the seminar in Kuala Lumpur I wrote about before. We had a very interesting chat!).

Don’t take this to mean that I’m giving up on the Chinese styles – quite the contrary! I’m still really enjoying the yiquan, though I think this is something for me to work on in my original path of “martial arts and meditation” as opposed to ‘finding a role in a community’. I’ve also been training again in bagua, though for various reasons I’ve kept quiet about that; I’ll be writing about it soon, though.

I’d be interested to hear what you think about all this….

I went down to Panjiayuan Market this morning. I haven’t been for ages, and I really don’t know why I’ve left it so long – it’s such an amazing place.

It’s called an “antiques” market, and the quote marks are there for a reason; some stalls, a very few, sell genuine antiques and rarities, but the overwhelming majority are essentially wholesale outlets for the vast output of Chinese cultural epherema, the likes of which can be found in Chinatown stores around the world…. The thing about Panjiayuan, though, is that it’s just so big, and there’s so much to be found here at rock-bottom prices…. The other reason to go is to people-watch – all kinds of tourists, vendors from all over China (notably Tibetans), and a vibrant, incessant, buzz of haggling, debate – the heartbeat of a great bazaar…

I was there for a purpose; I’d tracked down someone who was selling shashkas online. Unlike the two I bought from Taobao, these are real swords, not replicas. They are, purportedly, genuine Soviet-issue, and that’s why I’m writing this – I think there’s an interesting story here…

So: the shashkas are Soviet cavalry issue, which means that they have the bayonet of a Mosin-Nagant 1891/30 carbine mounted in hoops on the outside of the scabbard. Soviet practice in the 1930s was for infantry to keep their bayonets permanently fixed; for cavalry using carbines, this was obviously impractical, so the bayonet was carried with the shashka.

The seller was offering two different types of shashka. One, a trooper’s version, is obviously the model for the Windlass shasqua – the curve of the handle essentially follows the angle of the blade. The other, the officer’s version, has a rounded tip rather than the classic pointy shashka tip, with the handle being strongly angled counter to the curve of the blade, thus giving more leverage.

I’d done some research online, and found that there is a strong belief that these swords are fake – recently manufactured, and artificially aged. One writer points out that cossack swords were made to be used, and photographs of these swords show no sign of use in anger.

Now, let’s face it: this is absolutely plausible. Contemporary China is awash with fakes of anything that can be faked, not to mention determined efforts to fake things that shouldn’t be fakeable! So, it shouldn’t be in any way a surprise if these came out of a factory recently, or even are leftover props from a Chinese movie.

On the other hand, the seller insists on their authenticity. When I asked him how these Soviet swords came to be in China, his reply was that the Soviets and the Chinese were allies against the Japanese; after the end of WW2, a number of soldiers in the allied armies swapped weapons as souvenirs. He comes from a town in north-east China, and by some means has come into possession of a hundred or so of these Soviet-issue swords.

This is actually plausible – which is what I find interesting, because it involves an aspect of WW2 that is completely unknown to most Westerners.

The Empire of Japan occupied and colonized Manchuria, in north-east China, during the 1930s. They spread into Inner Mongolia, and attempted to take Mongolia proper as well. The status of Mongolia was unclear at that time; the Chinese Empire had claimed it as part of their territory, but since the declaration of the Republic of China in 1911 Mongolia had essentially been an independent, and Communist, state. As the Japanese threat grew, the Mongolians appealed to the Soviet Union for help, which was forthcoming. In a series of clashes, the Soviets decisively defeated the Japanese, and Mongolian independence was preserved.

This might not have been the end of the story, but then WW2 broke out. The Japanese needed their armies in South-East Asia, while the Soviets needed theirs in Europe. Neither side wanted to be tied up in northern Asia, so a neutrality pact was signed.

During WW2, Mongolia provided material and financial support for the Soviet war effort, but its armed forces, which were mostly cavalry, did not participate in the conflict.

With the allied victory in Europe, the Soviets – following an agreement with the US and UK – declared war on Japan, and invaded Manchuria.

Part of their invasion force was the Soviet Mongolian Cavalry Mechanized Group – which, as the name suggests, was mostly composed of Mongolian cavalry units – who hadn’t participated in the fighting against Germany, but were equipped entirely with Soviet weapons…. These cavalry units actually didn’t fight much against the Japanese either, capturing a lot of territory largely without resistance after outflanking Japanese units…

So, is it conceivable that Mongolian Communist cavalry, equipped with Soviet weapons including shashkas that had never been used in combat, were received as triumphant victors and allies by Chinese troops (either Guomindang or Communist)?

Absolutely it is….. And with the subsequent falling out between the USSR and Maoist China, it’s quite likely that these swords would have been kept hidden away….

Is this the real story of these swords? Or are they simply fakes? I don’t know, and there’s no way for me to find out at the moment. It doesn’t really matter, either – because there’s nothing wrong with the quality of the swords as far as I can tell. So, I’ve acquired today a pretty good sword at a price far, far below what it would cost in the West.

As to why all of my recent posts seem to have been about Russian martial arts, I’m coming to that.

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