Soft Power
A veteran television engineer tells his story through kungfu
The first time Zhong Haiming heard of Bruce Lee was in 1982 as he sat in the dorm room of an African friend at Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications. He was a 32-year-old postgraduate student majoring in television engineering at the time.
The room was plastered with many Lee posters. The African student told Zhong that there were two Chinese people who were very famous around the world. One was Chairman Mao Zedong and the other was Lee.
Zhong was stunned to come across a name he had never heard before that could be as famous as Chairman Mao, he told Beijing Review. This ignited his curiosity, especially after he learned Lee was a kungfu movie star.
A kungfu life
It was then that Zhong’s life became connected to Lee’s, or Lee Jun-fan, who was a Chinese-american martial artist, actor and director. Zhong was the first to introduce Lee’s art to the Chinese mainland by translating the book Bruce Lee’s Fighting Method from English to Chinese.
In the book, Lee illustrates his Jeet Kune Do (JKD) skills step by step through photos and instructional text and expounds on his philosophy of Chinese kungfu. The translation led to the innovator’s growing fame in the Chinese mainland and also made a great impact on Zhong’s understanding of martial arts.
Zhong had been practicing kungfu for about 20 years by then, beginning in 1962 at the age of 12. His parents brought him to Wu Binlou, a prominent figure in China’s modern martial arts community, who became his teacher. One of Wu’s pupils, Wu Bin, taught Jet Li, another kungfu celebrity who has starred in a number of Hollywood movies .
Born in 1898, Wu Binlou excelled at Chuojiao Fanzi Quan. It is a martial arts style with more than 1,000 years of history featuring powerful and fast kicks as well as punching sequences.
Wu stressed that martial arts are not just about fighting skills, believing that a good martial artist should be able to show the artistic features of the traditional Chinese sports while demonstrating or competing. In addition, martial arts should follow a healthy practice that ensures every movement is good for overall health. He believed that since martial arts and traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) share the same origin, a good martial artist should also be knowledgeable in TCM.
Zhong practiced martial arts with Wu Binlou in a park near his home. “At that time, there were a lot of practitioners of different ages, gender and occupations,” Zhong said. “Wu had many followers in the park.”
This experience had a great influence on Zhong. Little did he know that the kungfu he learned as a teenager would save his life several times in the ensuing years. In 1968, he was sent to work in a farm in Heilongjiang Province, northeast China, where he managed to save himself several times from vehicle crashes by jumping out of the truck in the nick of time or kiln explosions by jumping out of the burning house.
Zhong also used acupuncture on himself to help with the harsh cold and heavy workload on the farm, never stopping his martial arts practice through all the hardships.
In 1977, Zhong was admitted to the Harbin Institute of Technology, majoring in television engineering. It was also the year Wu Binlou passed away.
He returned to Beijing two years later for postgraduate studies at the Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications.
Lee’s style
In a dialogue between Lee’s character and the abbot of Shaolin Temple in the film Enter the Dragon, released in 1973, Lee tells the abbot that the highest technique he hopes to achieve is “no technique at all.” When asked “What are your thoughts
when facing an opponent?” he answers that there is no opponent because “the word ‘I’ does not exist.” It was through this movie that Lee brought Asian philosophies to Western audiences.
The film also reflects Lee’s JKD philosophy. In his view, people practicing traditional martial arts were limited by socalled “styles,” which were too rigid and formalized to be practical in fighting. Lee decided to develop a system with an emphasis on practicality, flexibility, speed and efficiency.
He emphasized what he called “the style of no style,” promoting the dropping of the formalized approach. JKD later became a martial arts and fitness culture that would give birth to the modern Mixed Martial Arts.
“Many kungfu practitioners are not open enough and restrict themselves and their followers to a fixed style,” Zhong said, in his support of Lee. “This is no good for the development of martial arts.”
In 1982, during his thesis defense for his master’s degree in television engineering, Zhong met Yue Tao, an electronics professor who was also a great tai chi master.
“Yue was like a great hermit in a chaotic world,” Zhong said, explaining that Yue kept a low profile and was not known by many in the Chinese martial arts world.
In contrast to the other five traditional styles of tai chi, the one that Yue practiced is different and has its own unique features. Zhong was Yue’s student and coworker at the Ministry of Electronics Industry for over 20 years until 2007 when the master passed away.
Like Yue, Zhong spent most of his time in scientific research while working at the ministry and participated in some major scientific projects in China. After retirement from his engineering career in 2010, Zhong set up a studio in Beijing, teaching martial arts and promoting TCM. Based on his long-term research and practice, Zhong published several books on martial arts and Tcm-based healthcare therapies.
He also developed exchanges with artists and associations around the world to bring them different facets of Chinese kungfu.
In 2016, an improvised video of Zhong practicing tai chi while Peter Ritzen, a musician from Belgium, played the piano, went viral on the Internet. Ritzen later invited Zhong to Vienna, Austria for a second cooperation.
Zhong has also led delegations to Japan and the U.S. for exchanges with local musicians, calligraphers and martial artists, something that he said is nothing new for martial arts.
“In the 1950s and 1960s, Wu [Binlou] always had exchanges with people working in other art forms, including the Peking Opera and ballet, and helped to integrate martial arts into their stage performances,” Zhong said. “Yue also professionally played the jinghu (a two-stringed musical instrument).”
Today, Zhong guides his students’ training every Saturday at his suburban home. “There is a growing number of people both in China and abroad practicing martial arts,” Zhong said. “But we still need more people to practice and pass down real Chinese kungfu. What many people know about it now is mostly superficial.”