Fighting for the future : martial arts education, youth culture, and urbanization in Dengfeng, China

Abstract

Dengfeng, a county-level city in Henan Province, the People's Republic of China, was home to 48 registered Shaolin martial arts schools and more than 70,000 full time students in 2012. Shaolin martial arts education is an alternative to the mainstream academic education in China. Yet little is known about how this non-mainstream form of education emerged, how the pursuit of martial arts education links to broader social contexts, and what social issues an ethnography of martial arts students' everyday life can illuminate. This thesis is an ethnographic study of students' participation in Dengfeng martial arts schools. It examines how kung fu training shapes their daily life in post-socialist China. Drawing on 12 months fieldwork from October 2012 to September 2013, it highlights the diverse subcultures, motivations and actions of the martial arts students and how they anchor their feelings and emotions in relation to both a process of accumulating bodily capital and a larger meaning system in a rapidly urbanizing place. The ethnographic findings reveal that the short-term students are often only-children from well-off families while most of the long-term students are former left-behind children from rural-to-urban migrant families. Most of the full-time students' parents are small business owners or skilled workers who have relatively high and stable income. The short-term students are sent to learn martial arts aiming at improving the bodily capital and fixing "problems" like internet addiction and obesity. Most of the full-time students are drop-outs from mainstream academic schools. Their dropping-out relates to the experiences of being left-behind, as well as the structural factors that limit their life chances. Life in martial arts schools redefines gender norms and ideals. The school's culture of masculinity affects both the boys' and the girls' understandings of violence, martial masculinity, and moral codes of jianghu (rivers and lakes), as well as redefining the ideals of man-/woman-hood. Also, martial arts students experiment with different types of masculinities and femininities in both the online and offline worlds. This liminal practice forms the passage to adulthood. The experience of learning martial arts also influences how students perceive their desired futures and social statuses. By comparing themselves to familiar others like parents, siblings and friends, martial arts students constantly reorient their hopes and aspirations. Though what the future holds is hard to predict, they all attempt to portray potential futures for themselves which are both realistic and allow them to "feel good" in the present. This thesis focuses on how different groups of people make use of Shaolin martial arts education for their own ends. This strategy enables this study to build on previous studies of Chinese martial arts practice and the majority of works on youth culture. It aims at deepening the knowledge of both the unfinished process of China's urbanization and modernization, and the everyday cultural practice of the martial arts students. Show more