Could HEMA ever be big in China? With Zeng Yang

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Today’s episode is with Zeng Yang, who is a doctoral student at the Shanghai Sport University, where he is pursuing a PhD in the history of European swordsmanship from the 14th to the 17th centuries. He is a lifelong martial artist having begun training in Wushu at the age of eight. His master’s degree is a comparison of Duan Bing and HEMA.

In our conversation, we talk about the spread of Chinese martial arts to the Western world, through things like kung fu movies and immigration, but the question is, why the same hasn’t happened in the other direction? How could HEMA become more popular in China? We hear about a new term, Bing Ji, which combines all steel weapons in an exciting new form of cross-cultural communication.

Here’s a bit of detail on some of the terms that come up in this episode:

• Wushu: The official name of Chinese martial arts
• Guoshu: The name of Wushu in the early 20th century that literally means "the art of the nation", thus elevating the status of martial arts to the level of the country. But currently people no longer use this term.
• Tau lu (routine or form): It is a pre-designed practice method and an important form of expression in Chinese martial arts. It had already emerged in the Song Dynasty (960-1279 AD) and has been widely used since the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644 AD). It is very similar to Assalto in Marozzo. It usually has a fixed start and end action. Each routine roughly contains dozens of actions.
• Bing Ji: The literal meaning is "fighting with cold weapons", which broadly refers to all fighting sports related to steel weapons, and narrowly refers to the fighting sports of historical martial arts. It is a term that emerged around 2016 to replace the concept of HEMA. Because China's HEMA not only involves European weapons, but also includes Chinese weapons, many people believe that continuing to use HEMA is inappropriate. Therefore, this new term has been created to describe historical martial arts sports. At present, Bing Ji has been widely used in China, and it is used in almost all historical martial arts competitions.