As part of a recent business trip I was able to visit a taiji teacher that I have been interested in for a while now named Ren Zhongxin, who lives in Tangshan, a large industrial city a couple of hours away from Beijing. As I learned my mandarin in Tangshan and actually lived there for a year or two back in the early 2000s, it was a good excuse to pay M Ren a visit.
Unusually for a master who is fairly low profile in the Chinese CMA community, several videos of M Ren pushing hands have made it onto Youtube, which is how I first learned about him:
I was impressed by his obvious root and relaxation, and the ease with which he could absorb and control his students’ power without resorting to grabbing / qinna, and so decided to visit in person to learn more.
M Ren actually works as a surgeon and has no formal CMA school, instead teaching his students on a nondescript empty lot behind a hotel in central Tangshan – not the most imposing of locations to study taiji! Also it didn’t help that at the time I visited the temperature was hovering around freezing. However I have learned over the years that there is almost no relationship between the quality of the teaching and the impressiveness of the training area or the amount of money you spend – in fact sometimes in the CMA it seems as if the opposite is true, i.e. sometimes you will find that low key masters in parks can have much equal or better skill than world famous ‘name’ teachers.
As is usual for visiting schools in CMA, I had made contact through one of M Ren’s students named Wang, who very kindly brought me to their training area and introduced me to M Ren. M Ren and his students are a very no-nonsense, straightforward bunch, and it was not long before I was invited to ‘taste the flavour’, i.e. get some hands on pushing with their students. I should first state that my only practice of tuishou was many years ago, and make no claim to have even middling tuishou skills. The only help was that my perhaps my xingyi zhan zhuang had made me slightly more difficult to uproot than a complete rookie.
However, nevertheless I found myself easily handled by M Ren’s students, and was launched with ease several times by M Ren himself, who was able to control and dominate my structure with ease. Note from the photos that M Ren does not need to ‘grab’ to achieve this control – he emphasized that relying on grabbing is a sign that someone is using qinna rather than true taiji jing to win.
After the very educational pushing session was over, I got talking to one of M Ren’ senior students, who filled me in on M Ren’s martial arts backround. M Ren originally studied Sun style xingyi under a famous Tangshan teacher called Zhang Yushu, who in turn was a student of Sun Zhenchuan, one of Sun Lutang’s senior students. Zhang apparently also received pointers from Sun’s son Sun Cunzhou and the famous xingyi master Xue Dian. Ren’s taiji comes mostly from a colleague called Sun Xincheng, who in turn was a disciple of Li Jingwu, the famous Chen / Wu style master – and indeed later on Ren had the opportunity to study directly with Li before he passed away. Ren and his students frankly stated that the majority of Ren’s pushing hands skill came from Li Jingwu, and were extremely complimentary about the skill of Li and his students.
In Ren’s day-to-day teaching he manages to organically combine xingyi power (particularly Pi and Beng) with the body skills of taiji such as rooting and listening, making for an unstoppable combination – pushing against Ren, regardless of whether you try to play it soft (yielding) or try to use power, both end up in the same result – being launched out or dropping to the floor, which is especially remarkable given that M Ren is nearing 70 years old!
M Ren’s Pi power is also unusual – with just an apparently light Pi palm to the chest, he is able to launch the opponent way so that they actually bounce upwards, which he willingly demonstrated on me several times (once at the same time as I was using Beng on him). He explained that there is nothing mysterious about this skill, it is just using the upward counter-reaction within the opponent’s body to a downward force.
There are two other points about M Ren that are especially unusual:
- He does not believe in Qi or directing the Qi. As a doctor of western medicine, M Ren has no truck with conventional explanations of Qi flowing to a certain place, or even for it being necessary to achieve a good level of skill in CMA. He quickly pointed out that this does not mean he does not follow the traditional requirements of relaxation, softness, rooting, whole body power etc – in fact if anything in his teaching these are empasised even more, he just does not use the word Qi.
- His does not emphasize standing post (Zhan Zhuang) practice at all. Much like certain Cheng Man Ching stylists, M Ren insists that everything that you train in Zhan Zhuang can be found in the form, and that if you are having a problem with, say, connection or rooting in your push hands then the answer should be sought in the form.
As a final postscript, M Ren’s students mentioned that he is often visited by taijiquan enthusiasts from other parts of China (including on one occasion by a coach from Chen Village) – almost invariably these visitors find that their previous experience is not much use against M Ren’s skill, and several have in fact become M Ren’s students after having been convinced.
In summary, I would definitely recommend M Ren to anyone looking to get a better handle on how taijiquan’s Song (relaxation), Chen (sinking) and Zheng (whole body connection) are actually used in both push hands and free san shou.