About China Acrobats Association

China Acrobats Association

The China Acrobats Association is the national association for acrobatics and magic in China, a member association of the China Federation of Literary and Art Circles (CFLAC), founded in 1981 and headquartered in Beijing. It unites China's acrobatic troupes, schools and performers — the practitioners of one of the country's oldest performing arts — and administers, jointly with CFLAC, the China Acrobatics Golden Chrysanthemum Award, the country's highest acrobatic honour, established in 1997. It publishes the journal Acrobatics and Magic (Zaji Yu Moshu), leads Chinese delegations to international circus festivals, works closely with the China Wuqiao International Circus Festival founded in 1987, and since 2005 has run revival programmes for the traditional art, including financial support for troupes, lower ticket prices and expanded domestic and foreign touring. Its secretary-general Wang Rengang has described it as a governmental organisation focusing on the promotion and development of Chinese acrobatics, founded in 1981 — a working definition that captures its role as the professional home of a uniquely Chinese stage art.

Chinese Acrobatics: The Art the Association Serves

Acrobatics in China has a history stretching back, in the association's own account, to the Tang (618–907) and Song (960–1279) dynasties and beyond, encompassing balancing, juggling, contortion, aerial work, clowning and magic, performed historically by travelling troupes and at temple fairs. After 1949 the art was reorganised: following the policy of letting a hundred flowers blossom and weeding through the old to bring forth the new, acrobatic troupes were created in each province and every major city and given their own theatres, producing a renaissance of the old acrobatic theatre. The result, by the time the association was founded, was a national system of state troupes and schools — from the China Acrobatic Troupe in Beijing to the celebrated school at Wuqiao in Hebei, the county known as the cradle of Chinese acrobatics — training performers from childhood in disciplines that take a decade to master. The association was created in 1981 to give that system a national professional body: to set standards, organise competitions, publish scholarship and represent Chinese acrobatics abroad.

Founding in 1981 and International Breakthrough

The association's founding year, 1981, was also the year Chinese acrobatics announced itself on the world festival stage. That year the People's Republic sent Dai Wengxia's Glass Pagoda act from the Guangzhou Acrobatic Troupe to the Festival Mondial du Cirque de Demain in Paris — the first time a Chinese act had competed in an international circus festival. Dai won a gold medal, and a Bowl Pagoda duet from the same troupe won silver, beginning a winning streak by Chinese acts at world festivals that continued for decades. A national association was the natural counterpart to that international opening: as troupes began travelling, competing and winning abroad in growing numbers, the China Acrobats Association became the body that organised the Chinese presence in the international circus world — selecting and leading delegations, hosting foreign troupes in China and speaking for the profession. Its leading figures in the international arena have included Bian Faji, long the public face of Chinese acrobatics internationally, who served as its vice-chairman and later president, judging at Wuqiao alongside festival presidents from Russia, Canada and Brazil.

The Golden Chrysanthemum Award

The association's flagship institution is the China Acrobatics Golden Chrysanthemum Award, established in 1997 with the approval of the Chinese government and jointly presented by CFLAC and the association. It is described by its organisers as the pinnacle of recognition in the Chinese circus community, and it encompasses three distinct categories — acrobatics, magic and comedy — each with its own national competition. The award is presented once every three years; eleven editions had been held with more than four hundred awards presented by the time of the twelfth edition, which took place in Puyang, Henan, in September alongside the sixth China Acrobatic Arts Festival. That twelfth competition brought together twenty-six leading acrobatic troupes from across China under the theme "Connecting Ancient and Modern Skills, Celebrating Art Across Five Continents," and ten productions ultimately received the Golden Chrysanthemum, including the Suining Acrobatic Troupe's "Blooming — Bowl Balancing," recommended by the Sichuan Acrobats Association. The tenth edition's acrobatic competition in Penglai, Shandong, drew more than twenty-eight Chinese troupes and over five hundred acrobats presenting thirty selected programmes; Wang Rengang, as secretary-general, introduced them as representing the highest level of China's acrobatics. For performers, the award functions as the profession's national championship and its highest career honour.

The Journal Acrobatics and Magic

The association publishes the journal Acrobatics and Magic (Zaji Yu Moshu), the professional periodical of the Chinese acrobatic world. In a field transmitted mainly through bodies and apprenticeship — a balance learned at age eight, a juggling pattern perfected over years — the journal provides the written record: technique and training discussion, troupe news, competition results, historical articles and obituaries and profiles of master performers. Together with the association's competition archives, it forms the documentary memory of an art that otherwise leaves few traces beyond the performance itself, and it connects the far-flung provincial troupes and schools into a single professional community that can follow developments — new apparatus, new choreography, new training methods — across the whole country.

Wuqiao and the International Circus Festival

The association works closely with the China Wuqiao International Circus Festival, founded in 1987 in Hebei and ranked, with the Monte Carlo and Paris festivals, among the world's three great circus competitions. Since its birth the Wuqiao festival has staged over six hundred performances by acrobats from more than fifty countries; later counts put its cumulative gatherings at over thirty thousand acrobats from more than sixty countries and regions. Bian Faji, as the association's president, has fronted the festival's international presentation, noting at its thirtieth anniversary in 2017 that it had grown from an unknown festival into an international event, and that most competing programmes had already won international awards. The festival's home county is itself an acrobatic institution: the Hebei Wuqiao Acrobatic Art School, founded in 1985, has trained more than four hundred foreign students from countries including the United States, Mexico and Ethiopia since 2002, and Wuqiao's acrobatics industry generated about two hundred million yuan a year by 2016. The twentieth festival, held in Wuqiao County itself in September–October 2025 with twenty-eight acts from nineteen countries and regions competing for Golden, Silver and Bronze Lion awards, was streamed live to a global audience for twenty-four hours. For the association, Wuqiao is both a showcase and a laboratory: the place where Chinese acrobatics meets the world profession on home ground.

Revival Programmes Since 2005

Like many traditional art forms, Chinese acrobatics faced decline as contemporary entertainment multiplied. Since 2005, the China Acrobats Association has initiated a series of plans to revive the traditional art, including giving financial support to acrobatic troupes, lowering ticket prices so that ordinary audiences could return, and offering troupes more opportunities to perform both at home and abroad. Association leaders have argued publicly that acrobatics must also renew itself artistically: Bian Faji has insisted that the creation of acrobatics needs cross-boundary integration and constant innovation to maintain lasting vitality, and contemporary Chinese productions increasingly combine classical skills with dance, theatrical narrative, lighting and 3D projection. The Beijing Acrobatic Troupe's president Wang Xiaoying has described the same shift within the profession — from programmes that mainly demonstrated jaw-dropping physical skill toward integrated stage works designed for modern audiences. The association's role in this transition is coordinating: subsidies and touring keep troupes alive, competitions reward innovation, and festivals expose Chinese performers to the world repertoire while exposing the world to them.

Training, Troupes and the Profession

The world the association represents is a distinctive labour system. Performers typically enter acrobatic schools as children — teachers at Wuqiao describe students beginning at nine or ten, practising ten hours a day for a single eight-minute competition piece — and careers are short, intense and collective: an act belongs to a troupe, and troupes such as those of Chengdu (founded 1952), Shandong, Suining and Wuqiao itself carry regional reputations built over generations. Chengdu's troupe, to take one documented example, won prizes at successive national contests for acts such as Spinning Bowls of Water and Pagoda of Bowls on a Pipe, toured more than twenty countries from 1981, and performed at the art festival of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games, where its acrobats were praised as winning China's first gold medal of the Games. The association sits above this system as its national federation: provincial acrobats associations recommend competitors, national competitions rank them, and the association's delegations carry the best of them to Monte Carlo, Paris and Wuqiao's own international stage.

Leadership and Documentation

The association's documented leadership spans the generations that rebuilt Chinese acrobatics after 1949. Its presidents and leading figures include Xia Juhua-era pioneers of the modern troupe system and Bian Faji, who as vice-chairman judged at Wuqiao in 2001 and as president fronted the festival's international editions in the 2010s and 2020s, famously nicknaming a young Australian participant the "Wuqiao Baby" — a child who returned as a judge herself two decades later, in a story the festival tells as emblematic of its international family. Wang Rengang has served as secretary-general in recent competition cycles, acting as the association's public spokesman at Golden Chrysanthemum competitions. English-language documentation of the association is thinner than for some CFLAC bodies — it has no English official site of the scale of its sister associations — but its work is extensively covered in China Daily and chinaculture.org long-form features quoting its leadership, in People's Daily festival coverage, in its own English-language award pages, and in CFLAC's member-association materials.

Legacy and Continuing Role

Founded in 1981, the China Acrobats Association has presided over the period in which Chinese acrobatics became a byword for excellence in the world circus profession — the decades of gold medals from Paris to Monte Carlo, of Wuqiao's rise to stand beside those festivals, and of Chinese acts and teachers circulating through circuses on every continent. At home it built the profession's honours system in the Golden Chrysanthemum Award, sustained its written record in Acrobatics and Magic, and, when the traditional art faltered against modern entertainment, organised its revival through subsidy, cheaper tickets and touring from 2005 onward. Its continuing task is the one its leaders state openly: to keep an art rooted in Tang and Song dynasty fairgrounds alive as contemporary stagecraft — ancient skills, endlessly recombined — under the sign of the golden chrysanthemum.