“I cannot say I am the best in the world — I think I just have not run into very good challengers,” said amiable Chen, who is now a bit stout.
Despite appearing “soft” (that’s part of its strength), tai chi requires great skill and discipline to move the body’s qi. A tai chi practitioner is supposed to feel his opponent’s power and counter it swiftly— as if by magic — first by “following” his opponent’s power and then by exploding with a burst of his own power to defeat him.
Chen’s tai chi features his trademark fajin, or short bursts of power.
In 1981, four Japanese tai chi practitioners visited Chen’s village where he demonstrated his fajin power to an international audience for the first time. Four practitioners, two on each side, locked arm-to-arm with Chen, but in a short burst of power that appeared to be an easy jerk, Chen was free and his adversaries fell away.
In 1987 when Chen went to Singapore on a martial arts tour, a local Shaolin school boxing master marveled at Chen’s escape from the Japanese arm locks. Chen invited him to try. The man, who weighed 103 kilograms, bent Chen’s arm behind his back as tightly as he could. Chen seemed to effortlessly twist his wrist and break free.
This was repeated three times with the same outcome. Just warming up, Chen then asked four people to hold his arms and, with a sudden, short burst of power, he broke free. Some of the men tumbled to the floor.
Chen said he used a basic, but difficult tai chi “trick,” concentrating all his body weight onto a single point, then “bursting” through.
Chen was studied at one time by a panel of experts from Chengdu Sports University in Sichuan Province and the Sichuan Sports Scientific Research Institute.
They measured his power burst, from the moment his entire body tensed to moment of the burst and then “relaxation” — only 0.015 second, Chen said. They used electromyography, a technique for evaluating and recording the electrical activity produced by skeletal muscles.
The challenges keep coming.
“In recent years, there are fewer challenges, but whenever I go to a new place, people challenge me, somtimes they suddenly ambush me,” Chen said.
He never turns down a challenge, that’s part of his legend.
Last year, a TV station in Hunan Province organized a show involving Chen and Long Wu, a 33-year-old, 120kg trained strongman. Long is a multi-time winner of some strongman competitions.
The two stood in a circle with a diameter of only 1.2 meters, pushing each other. Long would win if he could push Chen out of the circle in one minute; if not, then Chen would win.
Long failed.
“He knows how to escape from my power,” Long said after the battle.
But tai chi has its limits. “If Long were heavier, I might have lost,” Chen told Shanghai Daily. “The body has its limits, just as a person cannot catch a bullet no matter how fast he can respond.”
Though the two men strained mightily against each other, their hands, feet and bodies actually moved little. While Long put two big palms on Chen’s belly and ribs, Chen used what he called his neijin (inner energy) to “dissolve” Long’s strength.
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