The issue of what Chinese martial arts were like before the Jingwu is a very interesting one and one that have I long pondered both as a historian and as a Chinese martial arts practitioner. I have long wondered what a typical weeks worth of training would have involved for Sun Lu Tang, or for Hung Gar guys in the 1800s or Northern Shaolin guys in the 1700s, or how Chinese wrestlers trained back in the day.

The answer to those questions is----nobody has any idea. Training may have been very rigorous, very demanding or----it may have been utterly lackadaisical. There are, to my knowledge, no surviving documents before the early 1900s that detail to any degree what training was like. And of course training would vary from school to school or teacher to teacher. So, as much as I would wish to know what a typical training session was like with Lum Sai Wing (a famous Hung Gar teacher) or Sun Lu Tang or teachers from earlier ages—we will never know till the time machine gets invented.

Now a separate question, which maybe what is being asked, is what was the public perception of Chinese martial arts at the start of the Republican Era (roughly the early 1900s). That question is easier to answer and a large section of my book is devoted to talking about that. In a nutshell Chinese martial arts were held in very low regard, extremely low regard, by the Chinese public. My impression is that Chinese martial artists were seen as garbage. That simple. Sun Lu Tang got famous mostly because he was so odd; he was a Chinese martial artist who could actually read, write, put two sentences together and took regular baths. I don’t say that to be witty, I think it does reflect a historical reality.

I see the Jingwu (and related organizations) as being the single most important agency in the survival of traditional Chinese martial arts into the 20th and 21st century. Jingwu type organizations made martial arts respectable and brought Chinese martial arts out of the gutter. Now I don’t want to overstate the case, Chinese martial arts would not have disappeared off the face of the earth if the Jingwu had never been formed. But if the Jingwu had not existed I strongly suspect it would have been less likely that the subsequent Guo Shu and Wu Shu government sponsored programs would have come into existence.

Modern-Traditional Chinese martial arts owes its existence to the Jingwu, Wuxia novels and films, and the hard work of the Shaolin Tourism Board. Just kidding about the last part.
Take care,
Brian
p.s. in addition to my wife and I's book on the Jingwu, another outstanding book on the modern history of Chinese martial arts is Andrew Morris's Marrow of a Nation. Andrew is a good guy, a good scholar and a big supporter of Taiwanese baseball!!