Among Li Youfu’s most searing memories as a child were the scenes of a drunken official—the cadre in charge of porridge rations—beating the elderly and stealing the hard-earned money mailed home from soldiers deployed at the frontier, as his village starved during the Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s.
He soon made up his mind to study martial arts.
That was in 1961, when Li was 11. The wanton acts had planted in him a firm sense of justice, and the desire to act upon it. But as his training progressed, he came to realize that traditional Chinese martial arts, called wushu in Mandarin and kung fu in the West, aren’t all about fighting, or even strictly about physical strength at all.
“It demands martial virtue,” Li said in a recent interview, referring to the moral and spiritual standards, long-neglected in the modern wushu scene, that once defined the ancient tradition.
These ideas, which have guided the bulk of Li’s career in martial arts, traditional Chinese medicine, and qigong training, will be given a major platform in New York State later this year, with a competition that Li will be presiding judge over. Li has been involved in the International Chinese Traditional Martial Arts Competition, hosted by a Chinese television network, for nearly a decade. The event in 2016 will be one of the biggest yet, and another opportunity to pass wushu’s authentic roots to the younger generation.
Classical Roots
