Chinese martial arts ‘backward’ compared to MMA, says fighter who knocked out tai chi master
- Xu Xiaodong famously knocked out a tai chi master who claimed mystical powers
- He says that Chinese martial arts skills are 40 years behind Western MMA techniques, but that his efforts to modernise them have been thwarted
In May 2018, after his mixed martial arts team performed poorly in an amateur championship in Ukraine, the usually boastful Chinese MMA fighter Xu Xiaodong ate humble pie. Chinese fighters’ skills lag far behind those of their international rivals, he declared.
The 13 young Chinese men he took to fight in the International Sport Kickboxing Association (ISKA) event were amateur fighters from different walks of life, including a food delivery worker and a train engineer. They racked up nine losses and only four wins, and Xu broadcast the results in photos on WeChat.
During the contest he had seen familiar faces from many countries who had fought in professional competitions in China. He concluded that many overseas amateur fighters were a match for Chinese professional fighters. “The skills of international masters are much higher than ours,” Xu says.
“No Chinese had ever competed in that championship. I was the first to bring a team there … the trip let us see the world and stop resting on our laurels.”
In an interview with the South China Morning Post at his MMA training school in Beijing, which he opened in 2012, Xu talked about the primitive state of Chinese MMA and why the “rather backward” Chinese traditional martial arts need to reform, and accused the Chinese Wushu Association and the media of launching a collective smear campaign against him.