Guys -
this is by far the best thing you will read about the whole affair - tremendous article by Ben Judkins of Kung Fu Tea. If you want the links you need to go to the original, but here's the first bit of the text:
https://chinesemartialstudies.com/2017/ ... tial-arts/By Popular Demand: “Tradition” vs. “Modernity” in the Chinese Martial Arts
An Old Story
It is a pattern that we know well. After a debate about the utility of the traditional martial arts (and what that suggests about the state of the Chinese body politic), things got ugly. The conversation descended into public taunts amplified by the media. Students of Taijiquan, the most popular traditional style practiced in China, felt that they had to defend the honor of their system from a group of upstart fighters who seemed to have no regard for the nation’s culture. Champions were chosen and a fight was arranged in front of a national audience. But it was over all too quickly. The master of Taijiquan was left bloodied and battered in front of a stunned audience.
The media immediately went to work. What did this embarrassing defeat suggest about the decline of Taijiquan and the traditional Chinese martial arts more generally? Are its supposed masters frauds? Do the “internal arts” have any future in an increasingly modern world of global competition and fast paced information flows.
The year, of course, was 1928.
As the baseline level of knowledge that informs public debates on Chinese martial arts history had increased, discussions of the first and second National Martial Arts Examinations, staged by the KMT and the Central Guoshu Association, have become more common in the West. These two events have long enjoyed legendary status in China. They have been eulogized in popular publications, films and scholarly papers. They are remembered as the proving grounds from which a generation of martial arts masters emerged.
Lost within the fog of hagiography are some of the serious challenges that plagued these gatherings, including low levels of turnout by China’s diverse martial arts community. Like the Jingwu Association before it, the Central Guoshu Association (even with official government backing) had troubling expanding its influence into the countryside. Nor were period audiences all that impressed with the performances mounted by some of China’s traditional martial artists. Taijiquan faced a public scandal in 1928 when it became clear that its advertised promises failed to deliver results in actual fights. The noted author and martial arts advocate Xiang Kairan devoted much of his 1929 publication “My Experience of Practicing Taiji Boxing” to discussing the various problems that had been exposed through the system’s poor showing in the previous National Martial Arts Examination.
Yet I suspect that few readers clicked on this post hoping to find a discussion of Xiang Kairan’s observations on the Republic period martial arts. Another challenge match has been making waves that are being noticed well beyond the boundaries of the Chinese martial arts community. The South China Morning Post (and many other news outlets) has recently run multiple articles on the recent fight between Chinese MMA fighter Xu Xiaodong and Taiji master Wei Lei. If you have not yet seen video of the fight just follow the link. Trust me, it will not take long.
These sorts of asymmetric match-ups between traditional Chinese martial artists and athletes from the modern combat sports are not particularly rare. A quick search on Youtube will pull up several examples. The same may be true for traditional combat arts of other nations as well. I am not sure as I have never invested the time to do a comprehensive comparative search. But these sorts of fights seem to be a well-established part of the modern dialogue surrounding the Chinese martial arts.
In fact, when this film first came out I debated as to whether I should post it to the Facebook group. Was this real news? It is not just that we have heard this story before, it’s the latest incarnation of an all-time classic.
While watching this fight I found it hard not to think about the efforts of pioneering Chinese martial artists in the United State like Leo Fong who spent much of the 1960s-1970s looking for innovative ways to cross train in Boxing, Judo and Jeet Kune Do. As long as we are in the Bay Area, we should also recall James Yimm Lee’s call for scientific physical training and realistic combat drills in his long simmering feud with the traditionalist T. Y. Wong. And all of that was just a prelude to Bruce Lee’s outspoken attacks on the entire traditional martial arts scene. One could probably put together a similar list of innovators (and rivalries) in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia and Indonesia as well.
There are differences as well as similarities in all three of these time periods. In 1928 the “pure fighters” challenging Taiji’s dominance were students of more combatively inclined external Kung Fu schools. In the 1960s Bruce Lee and others were cross training in systems like boxing, judo, fencing or the Filipino martial arts. In the current era Muay Thai, BJJ and American style MMA camps have moved to the fore. And the explosion of social media has certainly changed the texture and feel of this conversation.
Still, one cannot shake the feeling that we have been here before. An advocate for “realistic” and “modern” approaches to training issues a challenge, “traditionalists” of all stripes line up, and it’s the 1964 Long Beach International Karate Championships all over again. This is a drama that, in one form or another, has been playing out for the better part of a century. And that is ok, because it turns out that it’s a story we love. I have had more readers contact me to ask if I was planning on talking about the recent Xu Xiaodong/Wei Lei fight than any other news story that I can remember.
I am not sure that there is much that is new or noteworthy to say about the fight itself. Clearly Wei was terribly unprepared for the fight. It didn’t look like he had ever done any serious sparring. And to be totally honest, he went down fast enough that I couldn’t even get a decent read on how talented Xu is in absolute, rather than relative, terms.
Yet the more I thought about the event, the more I decided that the most interesting aspect of this fight was not actually the two combatants, but rather the audience that they sought to appeal to. After all, we only heard about this event because many people around the globe decided to talk about it first, which then inspired some major media outlets to start writing stories. And I use the term “story” intentionally, as I expect that many people were fascinated by this event because it seemed to speak to issues that were bigger than the details of Wei’s training regime.
Read the rest of the article here:
https://chinesemartialstudies.com/2017/ ... tial-arts/