Competition and Teaching
In 1929, the central Chinese government sponsored the All China Fighting Championship, a general competition in Chinese boxing. Each province was to send two participants – one for the armed division, one for the unarmed division -- to Nanjing, the then capitol of China, to compete. Zhang, whose occupation as a fur merchant had required that he move to Shanxi in 1925, entered and won the regional competition for that province. He went on to win the national championship in the unarmed division later that year.
After Zhang moved to Shanxi, he began search for a student to whom he could pass on the Yang family teachings. In all, Zhang is known to have taught ten students, although only a subset of those was taught anything beyond the publicly known Yang style. Wang Yen-nien, who moved to Taipei, Taiwan in 1949 where he lived until his death in May 2008, was the second and last student of Zhang’s to receive the entirety of the Yangjia Michuan Taiji Quan system.
Read more about this topic: Zhang Qinlin
Famous quotes containing the words competition and, competition and/or teaching:
“Playing games with agreed upon rules helps children learn to live by rules, establish the delicate balance between competition and cooperation, between fair play and justice and exploitation and abuse of these for personal gain. It helps them learn to manage the warmth of winning and the hurt of losing; it helps them to believe that there will be another chance to win the next time.”
—James P. Comer (20th century)
“Like many businessmen of genius he learned that free competition was wasteful, monopoly efficient. And so he simply set about achieving that efficient monopoly.”
—Mario Puzo (b. 1920)
“This teaching is not practical in the sense in which the New Testament is. It is not always sound sense in practice. The Brahman never proposes courageously to assault evil, but patiently to starve it out. His active faculties are paralyzed by the idea of caste, of impassable limits of destiny and the tyranny of time.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)