Economic State of Shaolin Temple today

[Matthew]

This is an overview of several stories we've been following here; The platform is interesting.

His getup, awards he wins, chariots he is carried atop, publicity, cooperation with officials, selling of Shaolin name as a brand, shipping of monks overseas to do performances (including non- Wu performances), among other publicly visible associations do lend heavy credence to that articles 'commercialization of shaolin' and selling out of it's tradition in place of popular tourism and government relations theme

It heavily contrasts with the conditions of most other temples I've seen in China- possibly with the exception of the jingan shanghai temple which is said to be making profit greater than many of the business in Shanghai (which is China's economic center).. although it is just a rumor.




Matt

[bawang]

i think shaolin's martial spirit was lost after the burning.

in 1920s shaolin temple had monk soldiers who trained rifles and dressed in western military uniform. the ideal of chanwu was very real. the spirit of shaolin was to fight and kill in harmony with buddhism.

shaolin monks always adapted to the times and used conventional weapons and tactics of the time, and were a real fighting force. thats why it is dead, both physically and spiritually.

[monkey mind]

shaolin monks always adapted to the times and used conventional weapons and tactics of the time, and were a real fighting force. thats why it is dead, both physically and spiritually.

Aren't globalization & commercialization among the most powerful weapons & tactics of our time? By that standard Shaolin seems to be successfully maintaining the old approach. If you can fight & kill in harmony with Buddhism (a big if), then why can't you market & sell in harmony with Buddhism?

[GeneChing]

Workers overhaul a pagoda at Pagoda Forest of Shaolin Temple in Dengfeng, central China's Henan Province, June 9, 2012. The Pagoda Forest, a part of the world heritage "the Chinese Historic Monuments of Dengfeng," refers to 239 stone or brick pagodas built from 791 AD during the Tang Dynasty through the dynasties of the Song, Yuan, Ming and Qing and two ones built in recent years. (Xinhua/Zhu Xiang)

I wouldn't even have posted this if it wasn't for the June 9, 2012 date.

[bawang]

Aren't globalization & commercialization among the most powerful weapons & tactics of our time? By that standard Shaolin seems to be successfully maintaining the old approach. If you can fight & kill in harmony with Buddhism (a big if), then why can't you market & sell in harmony with Buddhism?

fighting is used to protect the country and people, commercialization is used for personal gain and exploitation.

fighting is done out of love for the country and people, marketing and selling is done out of love for yourself.

[David Jamieson]

There has been global economic warfare going on since the fall of the wall in Berlin and ultimately the collapse of Communism in the USSR. First the EEC hacked at it, then the Dollar of the west and it fell. Now it is Dollars vs Euros and the euros are not fairing well.

Eventually, the EEC will fall to total division again and regular kinetic warfare will begin at some point when one country presses on another too hard and the people fall into hardship and a tyrant rises with an iron fist.

Not certain how many times it will happen or when, but there is definitely a pattern that emerged long ago.

Be happy you are where strength resides in abundance.
For this lifetime anyway.

[GeneChing]

Mr. Buddhism Inc.: Shaolin Temple’s Shi Yongxin
Jul 30, 2012 1:00 AM EDT
Shi Yongxin has turned Shaolin into a thriving brand.

The Shaolin monastery—the birthplace of kung fu, immortalized by scores of martial-arts movies and the adulation of the Wu-Tang Clan—is run by the Abbot Shi Yongxin, a portly apparatchik with a flair for the spectacular. Since his appointment to the post in 1999, the abbot has built Shaolin into a multibillion-dollar brand, sending disciples to perform in Las Vegas and attracting more than 2 million visitors in 2010. Henry Kissinger and Vladimir Putin have visited (in 2005 and 2006, respectively). Shaquille O’Neal dropped by in 2009 and wrote in his blog that the trip made him feel “Buddha Blessed.”

Shi straddles many of China’s dichotomies: the sacred and the profane, the modern and the ancient, the party and the people. He is a portrait of success in modern China, standing at the intersection of the Communist Party’s control of both business and religion. Some see him as a brilliant visionary keeping the martial-arts tradition alive; others claim he’s a party huckster who has accepted millions in “gifts” and makes money by charging up to $14,000 for the right to burn incense in the sacred grounds of the temple. Shi has denied these allegations, but he continues to inspire both vitriol and adulation. In 2009 Shaolin’s website was hacked to display the message “Shaolin evildoer Shi Yongxin, go to hell.” Last March, as a delegate to China’s rubber-stamp Parliament, Shi made news by showing up in yellow robes, holding an iPad.

In an interview with Newsweek last year, Shi revealed little of the worldly touches that his detractors say dominate his thinking. Instead, he described himself as a simple monk carrying out his duty to enlighten the world about the compassion and harmony of Shaolin. “Us monks in temple, it’s like being in a family,” he said in his office, which was inordinately chilly despite the warm May day outside. “It’s all provided. Food, clothes, places to live. Every month we just get 200 to 400 renminbi [$30–$60] of pocket money. All of the bigger things, like cars, belong to the group. We basically don’t have personal possessions.”

The Shaolin temple was first built in A.D. 495 in central China and soon developed into a major pilgrimage site. Legend has it that the monk Bodhidharma founded the Zen school of Buddhism in the mountains near Shaolin, crossing a river on a reed and spending nine years facing a wall in silent contemplation. Shaolin now sits at the center of an ecosystem of tens of thousands of martial-arts students and monks. “There’s nothing here I don’t like,” says Shi Yanti, a monk in his late 20s who has been at the temple for 10 years. “The city with the cars is very chaotic.”

The temple also houses Americans; Niki Sligar, from Las Vegas, spent more than seven years training there. “The foreigners who come here, they want to believe the fantasy and legend, but there’s a guy on every corner trying to sell you beads. It’s very commercial and getting more so by the day,” she said.
Shaolin

Others echo the sentiment that the temple may be skewing toward the profane. “Shaolin is a source of pride [for China], but it’s not a source of religious epiphany,” says Gareth Fisher, an expert on Chinese Buddhism at Syracuse University.

In 2009 the temple contemplated an IPO, a bold move for a natural treasure, yet the abbot says he does not see himself as a businessman. “Shaolin is just a temple; I’ve never thought about how to link it up with branding,” he said. On a trip to the U.S. for the 2011 Shaolin Summit of North America, he visited New York, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C. “I fly economy. I’m used to it,” he said peacefully. Despite widespread reporting in the Chinese media that Shi has an M.B.A., including a 2010 interview with the Guangzhou Daily where he was quoted saying, “I studied for an M.B.A. in order to assimilate some good modern enterprise management techniques into the management of the temple,” Shi said that the reports were false. “That’s what they say online,” he said.

In a country where grassroots opinion plays a surprisingly large role in unseating public figures, Shi has had to deal with rumors about his alleged worldliness. One of the most pernicious claims is that Shi was caught visiting prostitutes in May 2011, and that a temple spokesman had claimed Shi met the women in order to enlighten them. About the scandal, Shi said, “it’s impossible for someone who’s been a monk for decades to have this thing happen.” Wang Yumin, a former travel agent who runs the temple’s foreign-affairs office, said the prostitution rumors were “delusional,” adding, “According to Buddhism, people who speak delusions will get their reckoning.”

Shi grew up in a little farming village in the poor province of Anhui, his martial-arts talents apparent from a young age. He joined the temple in his teens and quickly rose through the ranks, directing the temple’s management committee by age 22 and leading the monks on a martial-arts tour throughout China two years later. In the early 1990s, he became a local government representative; he stresses that he is not a party member because “party members can’t have religion,” but that on a whole, his people are “very approving of government policies.”

His temple, like all legal religious organizations in China, is overseen by the State Administration for Religious Affairs (SARA). “Every year we have meetings with the provincial government and representatives from different religious groups, and everyone is very satisfied with the government’s policy towards religion,” Shi said. After the prostitute rumors, SARA released a statement: “We seriously condemn the rumor since it was not only defamation of Shi himself, but also harmed the image of the famous shrine and even the reputation of Chinese Buddhism.”

In October 2011 a second claim emerged, apparently from a former Shaolin disciple, that the abbot had a mistress and a child living in Germany, as well as a whopping $3 billion stashed away in a foreign bank. The temple called the allegations “pie-in-the-sky, fabricated, maliciously invented slander,” and online discussion of the mistress was censored in the Chinese media. In October, Shaolin offered a reward of almost $8,000 to help find the rumor’s source.

The abbot is probably the only nondissident Chinese who receives better press in English than in Mandarin. “What would the world look like politically and morally if nearly everyone adopted the Shaolin Kung Fu lifestyle?” asked martial artist Stacey Nemour in a particularly glowing Huffington Post interview with the abbot in June 2011. “The world would be more beautiful,” responds Shi. “The world would be more peaceful, more perfect.”

In China, netizens are inundated with tales of officials earning salaries of $1,000 a month (a relatively hefty sum in the country), sending their kids to expensive boarding schools abroad, and buying luxury apartments for their mistresses. So Chinese journalists tend to either marvel at or view skeptically the idea that Shi is someone who has access to so much power but says he is immune to its lures. Coupled with Shi’s emergence as a public figure, but not one high enough in the government to be fully protected, it’s led to ongoing fascination and rumormongering about the abbot among China’s newspapers and netizens. “We don’t like receiving media interviews,” the abbot said. “I find them annoying. They raise a lot of boring questions.” When interviewed, Shi would rather talk about Buddhism. “The goal of kung fu is to build peace,” he said. “After you learn Shaolin kung fu, [you know] it’s about defense. First defend and then attack.”

Isaac Stone Fish, a former member of Newsweek’s Beijing bureau, is an associate editor at Foreign Policy magazine in Washington, D.C.

Amusing piece. I wonder if the author really talked to Niki, Stacey and the Abbot, or if the quotes were just plucked from blogs and such.

[r.(shaolin)]

Interesting point by Fish on the Shaolin brand.
Shi Yongxin and Shaolin are useful to the Chinese government in that they present a portrait of success in modern China - a poster child standing at the intersection of Communist Party business interests, politics and religion.

[GeneChing]

But it is relevant.

New generation emerges at Shaolin Temple
Updated: 2012-08-16 06:52
(Xinhua)

ZHENGZHOU - Tourists visiting the Shaolin Temple in Central China's Henan province were amazed to see Master Yanpei fix a crashed computer in just under two minutes.

Master Yanpei, 29, a 2005 computer science graduate from Chongqing University, became an acolyte in 2006 at the 1,500-year-old Buddhist temple after becoming disillusioned with his previous place of employment.

With support from Abbot Shi Yongxin, he went to the Buddhist Academy of China to further his study of Buddhism theory in 2007. Now he is a personal assistant to the abbot and a potential candidate to take up his mantle.

"I learned knowledge from college and gained an understanding of life from the Buddhist academy," he said. "The combination creates wisdom."

Master Yanti, a 28-year-old monk studying at the temple, has fused his own studies of Buddhism and martial arts with more disparate fields, such as psychology and English.

The man started his martial arts studies at the age of 16, leaving his school for the Shaolin Temple, the birthplace of Chinese kungfu, just two years later. Yanti became a formal "fighting monk" in 2004, demonstrating his skills in countries around the world before returning to his studies.

Yanti studied at Nanjing University and Buddhist College Singapore in 2008 and 2009, respectively, supplanting his study of Buddhist theory with classes on calligraphy and sociology.

"Overseas study allows me to teach the essence of Chinese Buddhism to our western trainees, "he said.

He now teaches martial arts to 20 Italians who came to the temple after applying at the Shaolin Culture Center in Italy.

The Shaolin Temple has more than 40 overseas culture centers, mainly in Europe and the United States. The centers, as well as the practice of sending its monks to study foreign languages and religious theories, is just another way in which the temple has attempted to expand its reach globally.

"Training the monks is a tradition of Shaolin Temple," said 47-year-old Abbot Shi Yongxin.

"Overseas training is good for the inheritance and development of Buddhism in a globalized world," Shi said.

Only by broadening their knowledge and vision can Buddhists communicate well with their followers, he said.

Shi said more than 40 Shaolin monks are currently pursuing degrees at institutes of higher education both home and abroad, adding that every monk who wishes to study can be sponsored.

More than half of the temple's 300 registered monks were born after 1980. The younger monks are more educated and more likely to embrace the modern world, Shi said.

Master Yanzheng, a 27-year-old monk who dropped out of an economics program at Anhui Normal University in 2001, might be the temple's most studious monk. After studying for five years at Buddhist College Singapore, he was able to achieve a high score on his IELTS (International English Language Testing System) exam. He plans to go to the University of Hong Kong to complete a master's degree in religion.

"The era of sitting in meditation by the light of an oil lamp has gone. We need to keep pace with the times," said Yanzheng, iPhone in hand.

Yanzheng opened a Facebook account in 2006 in Singapore and his own Chinese microblogging account last year.

"The Internet is a good tool with which to disseminate Buddhism," he said.

"If we are not well educated and do not know what's going on in the world, how can we preach to our followers?" he said.

Shaolin monks sent overseas for study
Shanghai Daily, August 15, 2012

The time-honored Shaolin Temple, home of Chinese kung fu and Zen Buddhism, is sending an increasing number of promising youngsters to study abroad as part of an education plan.

Nearly half of the total 300 monks in the historic complex in central China's Henan Province are "post 80s," meaning those born after 1980, and many of them have studied in overseas Buddhist institutions and universities, said its abbot, Shi Yongxin.

The monks with overseas experience have a good command of foreign languages and get used to a modern lifestyle involving social networking, which enables them to reach more and more foreign followers, Xinhua news agency reported yesterday.

The ancient temple spends several hundred thousand yuan on fostering monks per year, Shi said.

The 28-year-old monk identified as Yanti entered Nanjing University in 2008 to learn religion and philosophy and studied another two years in Singapore.

Another monk, Yanzheng, 27, was instructed in Singapore for six years and then chose the well-regarded Hong Kong University to pursue his study.

"My campus life is the same as many other ordinary students in additional to adhering to the Buddhist disciplines. I also learn university compulsory courses involving psychology, sociology and management," Yanzheng said.

He joined social networks in 2006 and opened his account on Weibo last year.

"The overseas experience broadens my vision and helps me to understand the Buddhism in a modern way," he added.

The old but energetic temple is teaching hundreds of foreign followers martial arts and Zen during this summer holidays and thousands last year. Yanti was among monks able to communicate with them in English.

He shouted "quickly" and "this side" in English recently when guiding the movements of the foreigners, Xinhua said.

Shi, the temple's 30th abbot, has been criticized for vigorously promoting commercial development of the ancient temple.

He initiated the opening of a Shaolin pharmacy, and monks have visited many countries for kung fu shows. His innovations, however, promoted the temple and hundreds of thousands of foreigners learned Shaolin martial arts around the world, Xinhua said.

[GeneChing]

The Price of Faith: Chinese Buddhist Sites Plan IPOs
China’s four most sacred Buddhist mountains are hatching plans to list on the Shanghai stock exchange.
By Chengcheng Jiang / Beijing | September 27, 2012 | 2

In China today, there’s little that money can’t buy — even when it comes to faith. Many of the country’s most popular Buddhist sites are chock-full of cure-all tonics and overpriced incense. For the most part, people seem happy, or at least willing, to oblige. That changed this summer, though, when it emerged that China’s four most sacred Buddhist mountains were hatching plans to list on the Shanghai stock exchange.

In July, Mount Putuo Tourism Development Co. announced it would attempt to raise 7.5 billion yuan in a 2014 initial public offering. The company operates the tourist facilities at Putuo Shan, located on an island 20 miles (32 km) off Shanghai. Chinese state media quoted representatives of Wutai Shan in Shanxi province and Jiuhua Shan in Anhui province as saying they too had plans to raise funds on the capital markets. The fourth of China’s sacred mountains, Emei Shan in Sichuan province, completed a public listing in Shenzhen in 1997, under the incredibly auspicious ticker symbol “888.”

The IPO plans have not played well. The four mountains are revered by Chinese Buddhists as the earthly homes of four bodhisattvas — holy people who have attained enlightenment but have returned to earth to help others attain nirvana. Now, though, they have become symbols of commercial excess, with critics charging that they have crossed an invisible spiritual line. “Does Buddha Love Money Too?” asked a provincial newspaper in Hunan. “Buddhist Mountain IPOs Bring Shame,” screamed a headline in the National Business Daily. “These temples are sacred places, they shouldn’t be listed, it goes against the idea of religion,” Jiang Zhaoyong, a well-known social commentator and former editor of a Hong Kong newspaper, says. “This is a spiritual thing — how can you measure that with money?”

The officials who run the sites disagree. They emphasize that hundreds of thousands of pilgrims and tourists visit the sites every year and argue that the listings are necessary to maintain the mountains and develop facilities for visitors. Indeed, in an interview with the Shanghai-based Dongfang Daily, the head of the Putuo Shan tourism office said that the funds raised through the IPO would be used to improve accommodation, transportation and restaurants on Putuo island and nearby areas.

The strategy is not entirely new. Perhaps the most infamous ecclesiastical entrepreneur in China is the abbot of Shaolin Temple, spiritual home of Zen Buddhism and site of the world-famous martial-arts school. Since Shi Yongxin, the youngest abbot in the history of the temple, took charge in 1999 he has launched several ambitious moneymaking ventures, including a Hollywood-style movie based, very loosely, on the history of the temple, a franchise operation to license the Shaolin name to other temples, and an online store selling, among other things, a book called The Secret of Shaolin Martial Arts. The book retails for $1,500.

Critics see such revenue-generating ventures as gateways to religious commercialism, even corruption. On a recent visit to Putuo Shan, Li Chengpeng, a top social commentator in China, was accosted by groups of fortune-telling monks looking for money. “I got up at 4 a.m. to visit the Puji Temple on the mountain and ran into a group of shaven-headed monks dressed in traditional cassocks who jumped on me, telling me ‘You should do some good deeds to ensure a prosperous future,’” Li recalls. He says his offer of 200 yuan was rebuffed. “They demanded 400 [yuan] instead. Later I realized they are all cheats. Real monks are all in their morning classes at that hour. How could they be walking around and asking for alms?”

And it’s not just a couple of crooks, Li contends. He sees religious IPOs as just another example of the national obsession with gaining wealth. “How can you tell when a generation is in trouble?” he asks. “It’s when its religion, its priests, its temples and its churches are all for hiding their faith in order to achieve ulterior motives.” Liu Wei, deputy director of the No. 1 Division at the State Administration for Religious Affairs, said at a press conference earlier this summer that temples should operate as nonprofit organizations, serving the religious needs of the public. “Looking at other countries in the world, there are no other examples of religious sites listing publicly,” he said. “There have to be boundaries in the development of a market economy.”

Nonetheless, business is booming. Emei Shan’s share price has risen 17% since the start of the year, and analysts are feeling optimistic. “Since a rising of ticket price is very likely, and the Chengdu–Mt. Emei Express Railway is going to be put into operation in 2013, we are confident about [Emei Shan’s] growth in 2013–2014,” Haitong Securities’ analyst Lin Zhouyong wrote in a recent report. It seems that despite the moral outrage, investors have faith.

To be fair:
"Hollywood-style movie based, very loosely, on the history of the temple" = Shaolin (2011), which he only blessed - it wasn't his project. It was the cover story for our 2011 Shaolin Special.

"a franchise operation to license the Shaolin name to other temples" = the franchises were discussed earlier in this thread, starting here.

"an online store selling, among other things, a book called The Secret of Shaolin Martial Arts. The book retails for $1,500." This one I'm not sure about. Is it the United States Sports Academy book? That wasn't $1500, but Shaolin is 1500 years old and perhaps that got confused.

[GeneChing]

No more religious profiteering! It's banned.

State bans local govts from religious profiteering
By Sun Xiaobo and Yang Jingjie (Global Times)
08:25, October 24, 2012

The State Administration for Religious Affairs (SARA) has banned local authorities from farming out Buddhist and Taoist temples to enterprises and individuals, or listing religious sites in the stock market, in the wake of a public backlash against the commercialization of such sites.

In a joint statement published on its website Monday, the SARA and nine other government departments said that some local governments, enterprises and individuals had built new religious sites for profit, hired fake monks to hold illegal religious activities and collect endowments, and had also tricked or forced visitors into giving them money.

"These practices violated China's religious policies and regulations, disturbed the order of religious activities and damaged the image of religious circles as well as believers' feelings," it said.

A local government in Henan Province tried to push the Shaolin Temple, a famous Buddhist site, to be listed on the stock market at the end of 2009. The plan was aborted due to pressure from religious authorities, according to Xinhua.

Tickets for the Shaolin Temple are priced at 100 yuan ($16), and the site earns more than 130 million yuan ($20.8 million) a year, according to media reports.

Local governments are banned from participating in or supporting any equity investment or joint investment conducted by enterprises or individuals at religious sites, the SARA statement said Monday.

The SARA did not respond to Global Times' inquiries about the new policy.

"Although it's questionable whether such a document can stop the trend of religious sites going public, moves like this still make perfect sense," Cheng Gongrang, a professor at Nanjing University who has been following the issue, told the Global Times.

[GeneChing]

We've discussed the Guandu temples in this thread previously. Now we're reporting on them, and from one of our own forum members here. See Shaolin in Spring City Guandu Shaolin Temples in Kunming By Daniel Chase in our Shaolin Special 2013.

[mawali]

Great news! Shaolin Economics
/ Trademark Name/ Public Recognition
/ IPO / Brand / Marketplace Skills / It all positive as long as the prime skillset is there. At least, if the brand (name) doesn't sell, there is still computer repair, landscaping or something in the works. Australia is still a great place as a second home

[ShaolinDan]

WOOT!! My first professional publication. Excited to see it!

[GeneChing]

More on the hidden camera story here.

Kung Fu revenue fighting
Global Times | 2013-7-22 0:13:01
By Zhang Xiaobo


The abbot of Shaolin Temple, Shi Yongxin (right), gives a statue of Buddha to a foreign student during a graduation ceremony at the Shaolin Temple at Mount Songshan in Dengfeng, Central China's Henan Province, on July 3. Photo: IC

The abbot of Shaolin Temple, Shi Yongxin (right), gives a statue of Buddha to a foreign student during a graduation ceremony at the Shaolin Temple at Mount Songshan in Dengfeng, Central China's Henan Province, on July 3. Photo: IC

Claims a hidden camera had been placed in the room of Shi Yongxin, the abbot of China's famous Shaolin Temple, have set the online community on fire in recent days, but that has proven to be almost insignificant when compared to the drawn-out commercial dispute that has enveloped the temple, resulting in men storming the ticket offices this month to seize control of sales.

A monk, who didn't reveal his name, denied the claims of hidden cameras on Wednesday. "Hidden cameras were never found in the temple. We have never heard of such a thing," he told the Global Times.

However, he did admit that the temple is not the quiet sanctuary many imagine and that a protracted struggle between the temple, the local government and corporate partners is damaging the sacred site, which is a massive source of revenue for the local government.

"Famous temples and governments always try to achieve mutually beneficial situations, however, it is not easy to find a fair way to distribute the profits between the two," Zhang Shangzheng, a tourism professor at Anhui University, told the Global Times Sunday.

Triangle of fury

The management committee of the Songshan Shaolin Temple Scenic Area and the Shaolin Temple made an agreement to divide the revenue from ticket sales, which states that 30 percent of the ticket revenue belongs to the temple, while the rest goes to the government.

However, the profits aren't always carved up this way. Abbot Shi Yongxin pointed out that the money received by the Shaolin Temple is less than the agreement stipulates, because the government controls all sales.

"We are not in charge of selling entrance tickets. So we are unlikely to know how many tickets are sold or what kind of tourists can enter for free. It all depends on the government," Shi Yongxin said in earlier media reports, adding that 70 percent of the income is set aside for temple construction, including the attached temples, 20 percent is to cover the costs of the monks' living expenses, and 10 percent is for charity.

"All that we can do to verify the amount of tickets sold is to count how many tourists enter the temple yard. That is the only way for us to know whether they are lying to us or not," the anonymous monk said.

The commercial situation faced by the temple was muddied by a 2009 agreement between a local government-owned tour company and the China Travel Service Hong Kong Ltd (CTS) to form a joint venture.

CTS is a powerful State-owned travel agency and owns a 51 percent share of the joint venture, which controls ticket sales for the scenic area.

According to the agreement, the ticket sales for the scenic area are regulated by the company. In return, CTS guaranteed at a press conference that it would invest up to 1 billion yuan into the construction of infrastructure at the scenic area over a three-year period.

Relationship goes sour

In October 2011, experts from the National Quality Ranking Committee of Tourist Attractions inspected the Songshan scenic area. They were dissatisfied with the conditions there and warned they would consider downgrading the rating of the area if it was not improved.

This was regarded as humiliating by the Dengfeng government, and it threatened the relationship between the CTS joint venture and the government, according to a Thursday report by the Dahe Daily.

The scenic area management committee also accused CTS of not actually planning to invest in the area as they had promised, and said the financial situation was getting worse.

"These situations involving debt often happen after the government relinquishes control over ticket sales," the monk told the Global Times.

"Some of the joint venture companies don't want to invest any more if they find the input-output ratio is too low, so they change their mind and choose to stop further investment. And that disappoints the government and ultimately the situation doesn't improve," Zhang told the Global Times.

The conflict finally exploded on July 1, when the scenic area management committee sent workers to forcibly seize control of the ticket office. The move succeeded on the first day, but was stopped by the upper administrative department on the second, according to the Dahe Daily.

"Usually, governments don't have enough resources to develop scenic areas, so they try to cooperate with some mature tour companies to obtain benefits and lower the risks. It seems like a wise choice, but they forget the potential danger when they choose a tour company at random," Zhang said.

Fighting for cash

The Shaolin Temple, which was established in 495 during the period of Northern Dynasties (386-581), is well known for the Shaolin style of kung fu. Its fame then shot to stratospheric levels after the 1982 kung fu classic Shaolin Temple.

"The Shaolin Temple saw its first batch of tourists in the early 1980s and the number rises every year," the monk told the Global Times. He said the temple now attracts over 1 million tourists per year, bringing in more than 100 million yuan ($16 million) annually in ticket sales.

Neither the temple nor the local government is willing to give up their slice of the profits.

"In some circumstances, it is hard for the temple to obtain the revenue even if they follow the government's calculations. The government of the Songshan scenic area owes the temple a large sum of ticket sales revenue. That is not surprising. It has been an open secret for years," a journalist from the Dahe Daily, who declined to be named, told the Global Times Thursday.

The large debt eventually resulted in wages being paid late for workers at the temple, which finally led to a protest.

"Many monks went to the Dengfeng government, which supervises the Songshan scenic area, to petition them in 2011. And it worked. They returned some of the money to us. But still, they have owed us over 30 million yuan since 2009," the monk told the Global Times, adding that the debt might have been caused by too much construction, evidenced by the many unfinished buildings around the site.

Liu Shaowei, a press official from the management committee, refused to comment on the matter to the Global Times.

"Temples rarely sue in these kinds of cases as most of them don't want to destroy the relationship with the local government," Zhang said.