Master aims to build franchise tai chi chain
Print Edition
Master Chen Xiaowang is not only a legendary martial arts superhero who has motivated thousands of foreigners to study tai chi, but also a successful entrepreneur who wants to “build tai chi clubs just like franchises.”
“To have that business mode brings reputation,” 68-year-old Chen said in a recent interview during the Shanghai Tai Chi Cultural Carnival at the Oriental Pearl Tower. Tai chi masters from China and overseas competed and staged demonstrations.
Chen is the “19th generation standard bearer of Chen-style tai chi” and says 300,000 people around the world have joined his tai chi association, including 30,000 whom he has trained.
Starting in the 1990s, Chen lived in Sydney, Australia, for 10 years, teaching tai chi, spreading its culture and starting his business.
“I realized it is not possible to have so many foreigners study tai chi in China, and we need to teach in foreign countries,” he said.
He’s now back in his hometown, the Chen Family Village in central China’s Henan Province, teaching and spreading the tai chi message.
Many people go there to train with the master.
Chen embodies the spirit of tai chi, the martial art that looks slow and soft, but has surprising explosive power when practiced by a master. It is, after all, a martial art. It is widely practiced by many elderly people for its health benefits that derive from the circulation of qi or life energy.
After Bruce Lee showed the world how cool spinning a nunchuck could be, Chen demonstrated “slow” tai chi’s combat power in real fights with martial artists from various disciplines.
He organized the worldwide Xiaowang Tai Chi Association, which has 60 centers in many countries, including Australia, France, Germany, Japan, Malaysia, the US and the UK. And, of course, in China. He selects his best students and trains them as coaches whom he employs in his association.
Legends swirl around his exploits. Chen takes on all comers. He has been challenged many times by martial artists, some asking to spar and some who ambushed him.
He has never lost. Stronger men have tried to push him to the ground. They failed.
“I cannot say I am the best in the world — I think I just have not run into very good challengers,” said amiable Chen, who is now a bit stout.
Despite appearing “soft” (that’s part of its strength), tai chi requires great skill and discipline to move the body’s qi. A tai chi practitioner is supposed to feel his opponent’s power and counter it swiftly— as if by magic — first by “following” his opponent’s power and then by exploding with a burst of his own power to defeat him.
Chen’s tai chi features his trademark fajin, or short bursts of power.
In 1981, four Japanese tai chi practitioners visited Chen’s village where he demonstrated his fajin power to an international audience for the first time. Four practitioners, two on each side, locked arm-to-arm with Chen, but in a short burst of power that appeared to be an easy jerk, Chen was free and his adversaries fell away.
In 1987 when Chen went to Singapore on a martial arts tour, a local Shaolin school boxing master marveled at Chen’s escape from the Japanese arm locks. Chen invited him to try. The man, who weighed 103 kilograms, bent Chen’s arm behind his back as tightly as he could. Chen seemed to effortlessly twist his wrist and break free.
This was repeated three times with the same outcome. Just warming up, Chen then asked four people to hold his arms and, with a sudden, short burst of power, he broke free. Some of the men tumbled to the floor.
Chen said he used a basic, but difficult tai chi “trick,” concentrating all his body weight onto a single point, then “bursting” through.
Chen was studied at one time by a panel of experts from Chengdu Sports University in Sichuan Province and the Sichuan Sports Scientific Research Institute.
They measured his power burst, from the moment his entire body tensed to moment of the burst and then “relaxation” — only 0.015 second, Chen said. They used electromyography, a technique for evaluating and recording the electrical activity produced by skeletal muscles.
The challenges keep coming.
“In recent years, there are fewer challenges, but whenever I go to a new place, people challenge me, somtimes they suddenly ambush me,” Chen said.
He never turns down a challenge, that’s part of his legend.
Last year, a TV station in Hunan Province organized a show involving Chen and Long Wu, a 33-year-old, 120kg trained strongman. Long is a multi-time winner of some strongman competitions.
The two stood in a circle with a diameter of only 1.2 meters, pushing each other. Long would win if he could push Chen out of the circle in one minute; if not, then Chen would win.
Long failed.
“He knows how to escape from my power,” Long said after the battle.
But tai chi has its limits. “If Long were heavier, I might have lost,” Chen told Shanghai Daily. “The body has its limits, just as a person cannot catch a bullet no matter how fast he can respond.”
Though the two men strained mightily against each other, their hands, feet and bodies actually moved little. While Long put two big palms on Chen’s belly and ribs, Chen used what he called his neijin (inner energy) to “dissolve” Long’s strength.
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