Actually, kinda, yes . . .
Third chapter is a terrific ethnography of the Ma Liang group in Shanghai and very interesting phenomenology of pushing-hands,
Here's a couple quips from the introductory chapter:
Underlying the creation legends and multivocal histories above, as well as the practice and performance of taijiquan that one encounters at monthly meetings in urban parks, is a persistent vision of taijiquan as essentially Daoist. While these links between Daoism and taijiquan may go back only as far as the mid-nineteenth century (Wile 1996), the popular assumption is that taijiquan is ancient because it is Daoist, that it was originally a kind of Daoist esoteric practice. But the Daoism with which taijiquan is associated is not so much the popular, temple-based religious practice (taojiao) that has seen a resurgence in China in recent years as a kind of modernist philosophical Daoism (taojia) that grew out of a Euro-American scholarly tradition of Daoist studies. (p 64)
My best estimate is that approximately one hundred million Chinese practice something they call taijiquan in one form or another. Of these, perhaps ten million practice regularly. Among those, maybe a hundred thousand have dabbled in the martial aspects of the art, perhaps ten thousand have acquired an intermediate level of martial skill, and possibly a thousand living practitioners have reached the highest levels of skill in the art. The anti-superstition campaign of the 1990s that led to the outlawing of Falun Gong and several other popular, but heterodox qigong forms (Chen 2003) has only increased the popularity of taijiquan as an orthodox means of performing tradition and enacting a brand of Chineseness that supposedly erases ethnic, religious, class, and gender difference. (p 65)
