About the Author
Mingdong Xu is a Taijiquan practitioner, writer, and independent researcher whose lifelong study spans more than five decades. Born in China, he spent ten formative years—beginning at age fifteen—laboring at Fangqiang Farm during a period of national transition. With only six years of formal schooling, he taught himself philosophy and logic, mathematics, physics, history, and literature, laying the foundation for a life of disciplined inquiry.
In 1978, Xu earned the opportunity to participate in China’s highly competitive national examination and was admitted to Amoy University (now Xiamen University), one of China’s leading universities, where he completed a Bachelor of Economics in 1982. He later received a Master’s degree from Lincoln University in San Francisco in 1989.
Xu’s professional career spanned finance, statistics, and computer technology—fields that emphasize structure, modeling, verification, and feedback. This background strongly shaped his approach to Taijiquan, leading him to question vague explanations, isolate variables, and seek mechanisms that can be examined through observation and experience rather than accepted by authority alone.
In parallel, Xu spent six years teaching at the college level, where he developed a deep understanding of pedagogy: how complex ideas are learned, misunderstood, and internalized over time. This experience directly informed the staged structure of his Taijiquan framework, the use of milestones rather than years of practice, and the emphasis on experiments and observation as essential learning tools.
Throughout his professional and personal life, Xu has maintained an unbroken commitment to philosophical thinking. Drawing from Eastern metaphysics, modern systems thinking, and the scientific method, he approaches Taijiquan not merely as a martial tradition, but as a coherent, testable, and living discipline.
His purpose is to turn Taijiquan into a learnable modern discipline—one that serves traditional practitioners, modern practitioners, and scientific researchers alike. To this end, his work redefines classical concepts such as Yi, Jin, and Relaxation, while introducing modern principles including Integration, Synchronization, and Counter-Movement.
Together, these efforts aim to reveal the underlying mechanisms governing the interplay of the human mind, body, and movement, forming a unified framework grounded in observation and experiment, in which experimental outcomes are reproducible and can be verified directly by practitioners themselves rather than resting solely on written reasoning or theoretical explanation.
Taijiquan Framework 