Folk arts of Hebei Province, such as local operas, folk vocal art forms, folk songs and dance, country traditional music, folk fine arts, characteristic crafts, Cangzhou Martial arts and Wuqiao Acrobatics, enjoy a great fame at home and abroad. All of these arts show the Chinese cultural tradition from different aspects.

They all originate from the folk lives. Some are carried from the history; Some are transplanted from outside; And some bring forth new ideas in a new form. At last, these folk arts which are well received by the people have formed a marked local feature. They not only make a strong impact in the history, but also have a continuous artistic vitality till now.

In the historical development of folk arts of Hebei Province, they not only are effective for the people to mould their sentiment, entertain their bodies and minds, express their feelings and communicate their thoughts, but also make a historic contribution to social development of Hebei.

After 1949, folk arts of Hebei Province were systematized comprehensively and entered the period of all-round rejuvenation. And these arts which are added the feature of new times have been vigorous since 1978.

At present, with the development of society, science and culture, folk arts of Hebei Province and its special artistic charm are to condense the people, build a healthy spiritual surroundings, promote the communication between Chinese and foreign culture and give service to the economic development. All in all, they play a social role in developing the politic, economy and culture in the great aim of building socialism with Chinese characteristics.

A dog suckles the quintuplets of liger cubs, inside the zoo of Wuqiao Acrobatics Panorama Scenic Zone, in Cangzhou, north China’s Hebei Province, June 16, 2010. A female lion Didi gave parturition after 3-months gestation to 3 male and 2 female ligers, with the heaviest at 1,400grams, the lightest at 1,100 grams and the longest at 40 centimeters, all in healthy conditions, in the wee hours on June 15. (Xinhua)

A zookeeper holds one of the quintuplets of liger cubs on palm, inside the zoo of Wuqiao Acrobatics Panorama Scenic Zone, in Cangzhou, north China’s Hebei Province, June 16, 2010. A female lion Didi gave parturition after 3-months gestation to 3 male and 2 female ligers, with the heaviest at 1,400grams, the lightest at 1,100 grams and the longest at 40 centimeters, all in healthy conditions, in the wee hours on June 15. (Xinhua)

Tiger kissing’ animal trainer, who has also helped deliver the cubs, shares her simple formula of safety with Guo Shuhan

Chao Gaimin has been earning her stripes as China’s most famous woman tiger trainer with her “tiger kissing” stunt in 2007.

In this trick, the 29-year-old woman feeds a more than 200-kg Manchurian tiger a chunk of meat on a skewer which she clenches in her teeth. The big cat’s tongue nearly licks its trainer’s lips as it chomps the glob of flesh, flashing its 4 inch-long fangs in Chao’s face.

The crowd goes wild.

“I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t nervous,” she says, smiling. “I have to close my eyes and drum up my courage. I meditate before every show and hope it all goes smoothly.”

The woman rewards the tigress with a playful pat or loving hug. The way the creature relishes her affection makes it seem more like an outsize tabby cat than an enormous predator.

Chao was born as the third child of a poor family in Henan province’s Chaoxiaozhai village and was forced to leave school to help the family at age 14. She worked as a migrant laborer for the following two years, until a friend introduced her to the world of animal trainers in a local circus.

Since Chao viewed the animals she worked with – snakes, bears, monkeys and elephants – as family members, she proved able to train them quickly, she says.

This enabled her to land a job at the Wuqiao Qunyi Circus, China’s largest big top, in 1998. Qunyi was founded in Hebei province’s Wuqiao, the birthplace of China’s acrobatics and circuses, 19 generations ago and has remained a family business. The boss Yu Jinsheng claims it is the only circus licensed by local and central forestry bureaus to domesticate and breed performing animals.

Less than a month after starting the job, Chao began working with Manchurian tigers.

“Some of my colleagues envy my natural kinship with animals,” Chao says. “The secret is having the right attitude. I never physically punish them. And rather than look down on them, I speak to them as if I was chatting with pals.”

 Of Qunyi’s 10 tigers, Chao is closest to 7-year-old Hu Niu and her mate, 8-year-old Hu Zai, who has been trained by her since he was 1.

Chao became the first Chinese to deliver tiger cubs when she helped Hu Niu through a difficult 10-hour labor. She took no extra precautions, even though she knew tigresses are particularly prone to aggressiveness when giving birth.

She and her husband, who is also an animal trainer, took over the care of two of the six cubs. The trainers slept with the cubs so they could feed them through the night.

Over the years, Chao has learned how to read the big cats’ moods by their facial expressions and sounds.

“If they’re happy, they’ll let their tongues hang out and narrow their eyes,” she explains. “And if they feel lonely, they murmur at night and gaze into the distance with a look of longing. When they growl, I know they’re rejecting my commands, so I let them rest rather than perform.”

She hasn’t had many close calls and only has a scar or two on her hands from tiger claws. The nearest she has come to danger was when Hu Zai, who weighs five times more than the 50-kg woman, pinned Chao to the ground when she disturbed the pair’s mating.

Chao says she isn’t afraid of being attacked.

She has heard about many trainers who have been mauled or killed by their tigers, such as German-American Roy Horn of Siegfried and Roy. Horn was left partially paralyzed after being attacked by a 7-year-old white tiger on his 59th birthday in 2003.

“I never test my luck,” Chao says.

“I make sure my tigers are in a good mood and cooperative when it’s showtime and I firmly believe that if I respect them, they’ll respect me, too.”

Last November, the circus settled in Jiangsu province’s Suzhou for a half-year run in the Baixiangwan Scenic Spot.

But the two traveling entertainers don’t take their 5-year-old son with them to new locations. The little boy stays with Chao’s mother in her hometown.

While Chao’s mother is always concerned for her daughter’s safety, her son often boasts about his parents.

Chao earns 5,000 yuan ($732) a month and hasn’t yet planned for retirement, which usually begins in the 40s for animal trainers.

Until then, the lionhearted woman trainer will continue enjoying a career in which she has the tiger by the tail.

“China’s economy is not the same agricultural economy it used to be,” he said. “As the economy has shifted towards production there is less demand for ordinary, unskilled labor. As a result, there is an excess of unskilled workers and an enormous lack of skilled workers.”

Song Baohua (no relation to Song Yongliang) was laid off from his job as a supermarket cashier in Beijing in November. “It is still difficult for us to find a job, especially for an older person like me,” said the 55-year-old from Wuqiao, in Hebei province. “Employers want people with technical skills.”

This has still not translated into easy jobs for the college educated, however, in part because, as Song Yongliang discovered, an educated worker is not necessarily a skilled one. “Most companies want someone with experience. There are lots of jobs that college graduates want to do that they can’t and many don’t want to do certain jobs,” he said.

“Our universities encourage research and theory, and there are relatively few vocational schools,” said Pan. “Moreover, most students feel that the social status of attending a vocational school is lower, so they don’t want to go. But what society needs is people with skills.”

New workers at Huachen Brilliance Auto Factory in Shenyang, Liaoning province, for instance, need experience in welding, distribution or logistics, car maintenance, or electronics – knowledge that Song Baohua, Song Yongliang, and most college graduates and migrant workers do not have.

“As a result of an influx of new technology and management ideas, the type of workers we recruit has changed completely,” said Li Xuelian, a spokesperson for the factory. “The quality of people we recruit is much higher now.”

The structure of the Chinese educational system also plays a role, said Lian at the UIBE. Chinese universities usually decide the number of places for each major and then recruit students to fill them based on their university entrance exam scores, rather than letting students choose majors.

“We have a market economy but majors are still chosen through a planned system,” said Lian. “Maybe we don’t need that many international relations majors but we still train them anyway.”

This means many university graduates are either not qualified for or not interested in the jobs that are available to them, he said.

Another reason college graduates have struggled to find work is that there are simply too many of them – a legacy of the government’s efforts in 1999 to simultaneously improve the quality of the workforce and fight unemployment by dramatically expanding the country’s higher education system. That year, college enrollment was increased by about 47 percent to 1.6 million students. The result, however, was not quite what was intended: a huge increase in the number of graduates that the Chinese economy remains unable to absorb to this day.

In 2008, there were 5.59 million new graduates and about 1 million did not find jobs. Last year, 6.11 million students graduated, and according to the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security, 87 percent found jobs. Analysts say that number is vastly inflated because of both dishonest reporting by colleges and the fact that, like Song, many graduates were forced to accept low paying jobs they did not want.

Hundreds of thousands of them now live in what have been dubbed “ant communities”, decrepit, cheap and rapidly expanding towns outside major cities. Lian estimates there are about 1 million “ant” graduates, including about 100,000 in Beijing.

These unemployed and underemployed graduates and laid-off migrant workers could be a catalyst for instability – a fact that partially explains the government’s attention to the issue, analysts say.
“If people lose their jobs, of course it impacts social stability,” said CASS professor Zhang. “I don’t know of any country where that’s not true. It involves people’s livelihoods and jobs. This is something the government should think about before anything else.”

Susan Shirk, a professor at the University of California in San Diego and director of the Institute for Global Conflict and Cooperation, agreed and said the high expectations and organizational abilities of unemployed recent graduates make them a potentially volatile group.
 

For now, most members of the “ant tribe” are still willing to work and to hope, said Lian. “The road upward is increasingly narrow and difficult. It’s not a problem of social instability yet but it is a potential crisis.”

“If the distance between someone’s dream and reality is too great, their spirit simply won’t be able to take it. Especially in poor people’s families, where they always hear that knowledge can change their future,” said Song. “But if the jobs they dreamed of and the pressures of reality meet and their dreams die, what options do they have?”

Migrant workers, too, have not yet become a source of major social instability. Despite the financial crisis – which the National Statistics Bureau said caused Chinese exports to drop 16 percent and, according to the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security, cost an estimated 20 million migrant workers their jobs – it is striking just how few labor-related protests there have been over the last year, said Shirk.

One reason, she argued, is that the 4-trillion-yuan ($586 billion) stimulus package launched by the State Council in November 2008 was largely successful. “The stimulus was very effective. It came in early, just when it was needed, so it had the right kind of Keynesian boost to demand,” she said.

Another possibility is that many of the laid-off workers were migrants from the countryside and were able to return homes to their farms. “That creates a cushion because when factories slow down these folks can still go back to the countryside,” said Shirk. “Their expectations maybe are lower. They don’t expect that they have permanent employment,” unlike the workers laid off by State-owned companies in the 1990s.

Still, social stability and employment are unlikely to recede as major issues, especially as both the demand for skilled workers and the oversupply of college graduates are likely to intensify in the next few years. But as the National People’s Congress meets over these coming days, scholars say there are a number of steps the government can take.

One is to encourage enough lending to support the economic growth necessary to preserve job growth. However, as Shirk noted, if it goes too far, Beijing risks inflation, which could also undermine social stability. “Inflation really hits the middle class, the urban middle class. I think they worry about discontent from that group as well,” she said.
Another option is to give migrant workers and college graduates more practical training. “China needs to strengthen its technical training, including for migrant workers, and make a college education more applicable,” said human resources expert Pan. Lian at the UIBE also suggested the government focus on developing second and third tier cities to expand opportunities for graduates.

In the meantime, Song Yongliang remains frustrated he is unable to utilize the language skills he learned in university. But he still makes what he considers a livable salary – 3,000 yuan a month – and recognizes that in the current climate, it could be a lot worse.

“If this company still thinks I’m someone they can use, and I can learn a little bit while I’m here, I’ll stay as long as I can,” Song said. “This company has given me a job and a place to develop myself a little bit. I’m very grateful.”

The Book of History refers to them as ‘the dances of hundred animals’. In addition, rudimentary sports appeared, such as Dance with Shield and Battle-Axe and Butting with Horns, both military exercises. The Dance with Shield and Axe, which was a martial dance depicting battle and training troops, demonstrate the early relationship between dance and fighting skill. Butting with Horns was competitive wrestling practiced by the soldiers. This sport was said to have been a training method before battle by the armies of the legendary Chiyou tribe of eastern China. The soldiers wore horns on their heads as a symbol of courage, and then butted each other during the contest.

It was tradition that every feast should have a dance performance, which by the Han time would often take the form of a sword dance. Unarmed combat contest were also popular during the Han Dynasty. The rapid development in cavalry warfare of this period led to further improvements in skill using bladed weapons.

According to the Book of Zhuang Zi, unarmed combat was a highly developed skill by the end of this period, with many methods of attack, defense, counter-attack and feints. Fencing was also fairly common at that time. It was especially popular among the people of the states of Wu, Yue and Zhao. Competitions were frequent, but because contestants wore inadequate protection, injuries were common during the bouts. In one fencing competition in the state of Zhao, more than 60 people were killed or wounded over a period of 7 days. In the state of Wu, scars on the body of face were common sight among the people. Nevertheless, the love of fencing went unabated among women as well as men. By the Qin Dynasty (221 – 207BC), competitions had developed stricter rules with referees, arenas and protective clothing. During the Han Dynasty (206BC – AD220), Kung Fu was developed further, the element of sport and dance now becoming more apparent. Many martial dances appeared, such as the Rapier Dance, the Broadsword Dance, the Twin-Halberd Dance and the Battle-Axe Dance. While these dances contained elements of attack and defense, other postures and techniques evolved which were designed clearly for callisthenic purposes. An historic record in 108 B.C. tells how people came from as far as 300 li (150km) around the capital to see a contest.

Kung Fu could be defined as any of the various Chinese martial arts. Chinese Kung Fu was studied, organized and systematized by the Shaolin monks. Shaolin Kung Fu is known for their many animal styles such as Tiger, Crane, Dragon, Monkey, Praying Mantis and Snake. The word Kung Fu was originally used by the West. It means “skill” or “ability”. It literally does not have anything to do with martial arts such as the word Tae Kwon Do, which means The Way of the Hand and Feet. In China today, Wushu is the preferred word to describe Chinese Martial Arts. The word Kung Fu was first used by a western Jesuit Missionary named Pere Amoit after witnessing exercises and training regimen in China. He called it “Cong Fou” in his personal journals. The term “Kuo-Shu” was popular in China until about 1930. This term has since been popularized by the Taiwanese Government to describe Chinese Martial Arts.