xie xing app

angryclown

Jingang
I spend a lot of time wondering what I would do if a journalism major from the local community college casually walks up to me and applies an arm bar using all the arm strength developed from hours in front of a keyboard and sipping lattes at a nearby coffee shop. Now I know.

 

Marin

Lao Tou
Staff member
There are so many odd things about this video. Firstly the "shifu" and the "student" just have the appearance of two college roommates who decided to make a class video project, "you be the shifu, ok?"
Second each one of these "applications looks basically nothing like the "xiexing" form sequence presented and could, I think with just basic logic, be understood as not a result of training it. Thirdly, well none of these applications are martially realistic, which is to say they would ever occur effectively in an actual conflict. Of course I am not surprised. it is the way things are now and people make a lot of money off of all this, but it is still weird to me.
 

angryclown

Jingang
I like this one because it's especially weird, and it's made by someone from Chen Village. Or someone named Chen who at least visited the village to film videos. I kind of wondered if there was some mastermind at work, pulling the strings and deciding who was going to get promoted, and which of the current generation was going to be the "fighter" vs. who was going to be the qigong person, etc. Kind of like a record company building a boy band. But now I kind of think it's just like this high pressure competitive environment where everyone is trying to figure out how to build their own brand and get famous so they can do seminars to get rich and give money back to the village and buy some status.

It's gotta be tough for the younger generation right now. The 4 old tigers are still able to do seminars and cover the mystical master angle, and Ziqiang and Bing have still probably got at least another decade of their versions of application practice for the more "martial" crowd. The new guys are going to have to do it with MMA or movies or social media, or something, and those are all super-competitive environments. Desperate times. I imagine some of those poor guys are going to end up just having to practice taiji because they like it, and actually get jobs to earn a living or something. Sounds terrible...
 

Assad

Jingang
The "student" has a Wang Xian T-shirt, I can tell from the little red logo on the sleeve (left arm).
I don't know for the other tigers, but this one is taught in Wang Xian lineage exactly like this.
 

Marin

Lao Tou
Staff member
Like any 'get rich quick' scheme it is finite. There is a start, then a rush, and then a peak. Then comes saturation, glut and die off. Taijiquan has been exploited as a money scheme for the past 30 years and it may have reached saturation at this point. So then, yes people might actually start to abandon that mechanism. That may be good for the art, maybe not.
 
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