Dispense with the Tai Chi Fantasy in the National Magazines

An Editorial -- We Need to Dispense with the Tai Chi Fantasy in the National Magazines

martial arts magazines martial arts media tai chi chuan Mar 25, 2011

There has always been a strange willingness in the national Tai Chi and Kung-Fu magazines to print fantasy as if it is fact. They have shown frauds and con artists posing as "chi masters" knocking people down without touching them. Anyone with an ounce of intelligence or reasoning skills understands that this can't happen. Yet the magazines allow almost anyone to claim the most miraculous of powers.

In the two recent issues of Tai Chi magazine, there have been photos that are absolutely impossible to achieve in real life unless you have a partner who is willing to bend the truth and play along on your behalf.

Anyone who has ever been in a real fight knows that another man who is motivated does not generally go down easily, and when adrenalin is flowing, sometimes he doesn't even feel pain as he normally would.

So the magazine prints articles written by students with photos showing their teachers demonstrating impossible feats of "chi." The student/writer plays along in the photographs. Of course he does. If he shows that his teacher has miraculous powers, doesn't it follow that the student himself is developing the same powers?

The two photos we shot for this article are similar to a couple of photographs in two recent issues. The student presses on his teacher. The teacher hardly moves and the student is flying away, tossed into the air.

I'm not sure who is more dishonest -- the teacher who claims to be able to do this type of thing, or the student who plays along and pretends it's true.

Everyone wants to be a wizard. I'm sorry, but Harry Potter doesn't exist, and that could be why MMA is kicking our asses right now in popularity. We've let the nut jobs run free in magazines. The editors should take responsibility for this. The very job of editor is to edit out garbage. For every legitimate article with sound advice from a legitimate Tai Chi master such as Chen Xiaowang or Chen Xiaoxing, Chen Zhenglei or similar outstanding masters, the magazines will also put articles that spout fantasy and shouldn't be used to line a bird cage. The editors fail when they let this happen. Tai Chi, a powerful martial art, suffers as the result, because intelligent people understand the difference between -- as Bruce Springsteen might put it -- what's flesh and what's fantasy.

The internal arts are based on solid body mechanics and many years of hard practice. It takes a lot of physical pain and strength to develop skill. In a good tai chi practice, you'll sweat and you'll nearly fall over from leg fatigue.

You can't move an adult without using force. You can't cause an adult to fly up in the air without a tremendous amount of force and movement. In the internal arts, force is applied through relaxed strength and many principles that are sometimes written about in an abstract way. Because it has to be shown, and can't be understood through writing, the average person misunderstands. And because the majority of tai chi training is so poor -- focusing on "chi cultivation" and ridiculous, bogus scientific principles instead of internal body mechanics -- the mythology continues.

It's time for editors of national publications to get real or go out of business. They do no one any good when they print fantasy as if it were fact. Just ask the Chi Master who fought the MMA guy. The video is on YouTube and also in another post on this blog. That's reality, and it's what happens when honesty meets the Big Fraud.

--by Ken Gullette

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An Editorial -- We Need to Dispense with the Tai Chi Fantasy in the National Magazines

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