Sunday, March 7, 2021

Chen Ziqiang vs Xu Xiaodong

I have heard that Tai Chi master Chen Ziqiang (as a coach) has had a standing challenge against MMA fighter (and fake master exposer) Xu Xiaodong for YEARS now. The challenge is that Chen Ziqiang has a team of fighters, any one of which is eager to fight Xu Xiaodong. Below is the evidence why I think this challenge exists and why I think the story is credible. But before I go on, I just want to say that I am a huge fan of both of these men, as they are both very important voices in the global Chinese Martial Arts community when it comes to advocating for the practice of sparring. They have both dedicated their lives to practicing martial arts in the most legitimate way they could.

If you don't know already, Xu Xiaodong is a MMA fighter who exposes delusional martial arts masters the old fashioned way, by challenging them to fights:

Because of the overlap with Chinese Yoga (chi kung,) Tai Chi has the worst reputation for producing people who think they can fight, but who can't. Xu Xiaodong has beat up some (so-called) Tai Chi masters over this.

However Tai Chi is just as legitimate of a martial art as Karate if you practice a complete form of Tai Chi that does more than line dancing and yoga and has actual sparring in it. Right now the most respected Tai Chi master in the world is the head coach at the birthplace of Tai Chi (Chen Village,) Chen Ziqiang. Chen Ziqiang is known for his clinch skills, and there are various YouTube videos of his fights and doing his Tai Chi wrestling against other Tai Chi fighters.

So with Xu Xiaodong berating Tai Chi, and Chen Ziqiang being the foremost defender of Tai Chi, it makes sense that Ziqiang made this challenge. Because this claim was printed in a magazine, I am going to have to here show some pictures from that magazine, which show why I was interested in this particular issue of the magazine, and where it describes this challenges explicitly. So this is the cover of the magazine I refer to:


When I thumbed through the magazine at Barnes and Noble, I noticed something unique about this issue, which is it had back to back articles from the Choy Li Fut/Tai Chi organization I originally learned Tai Chi from (Doc Fai Wong's organization,) next to an article from the Tai Chi celebrity I am most interested in meeting in the future, Chen Ziqiang (the article itself written by a different Choy Li Fut organization.) Here's the table of contents:

Here's the front page of the 4 Tenets of Tai Chi article by people from Doc Fai Wong's organization (totally unrelated to this challenge other than some wonder if people from this organization spar enough, this is just illustrating part why I was personally so interested in this issue):

And the article immediately after that was this Chen Ziqiang one:

Now this was the article I had the highest expectations for, and to be frank I was disappointed - Chen Ziqiang actually just showed off a few of the most generic applications of Tai Chi known, and they weren't even Chen style specific, almost like an explanation of how to apply the techniques shown in the Doc Fai Wong article before.

But that article ends with a huge bang. Chen Ziqiang mentions Xu Xiaodong, and explains that there are huge problems in the Chinese Martial Arts from people not sparring enough. He goes on to explain that Xu Xiadong is helping to illustrate this problem. But then Chen Ziqiang criticizes Xu Xiadong:

Yes, that is indeed a "Choy Lee Fut: Chile" shirt that guy is wearing. Anyhow that paragraph on the left quotes Chen Ziqiang as saying word for word:

...the situation that I am going to tell you happened while I was in Europe. I arranged four of my students of all body sizes, some of them tall heavier, short, or lighter, to pay a visit to Xu Xiaodong. I offered Xu to pick any of them and test his sparring skills under any rules. But he refused to choose and spar with any of my students. A hundred percent of the people who Xu chooses to fight are the ones he can confidently defeat. So, he uses this kind of arrangement to show off his skills and make his declarations. There were three reporters who accompanied my students on their visit to Xu and recorded the whole interaction on video. Since Xu could not turn this situation to his own advantage, he got scared and even called the police. When the police arrived, he asked the police to take away my students. The police refused to take my students away, because the were not doing anything wrong. The police even asked Xu that if he was such a good fighter why he still needed their protection...

This amounts to a standing challenge to Xu Xiadong from the Chen Village (where Chen Ziqiang is the head coach.) The Chen Villiage's main export is Tai Chi training, and they are known for these incredibly long training days, something like you would expect from a Muay Thai camp in Thailand. Some have suggested training up to 12 hours a day... starting off with a long run, then standing mediation practice, then form practice. That would only get you to about 4 hours... apparently the rest of the day varies from day to day and includes various weapons training, conditioning, and various forms of push hands and sparring. Consider what real traditional Tai Chi sparring looks like in the first place:

Though Tai Chi people are known for using San Shou as a type of competition and the San Shou two-man forms in Tai Chi actually predate the San Shou tournament rule set, what you see above is more like no-Gi Enshin with unlimited clinch time. After reading accounts of what Sumo and Mongolian Wrestling were like in the ancient empires they originated in, I suspect that this is the rule set most Asian martial arts sparring originates from: the goal is to take down the opponent while you remain standing, no strikes to the head allowed.

But Chen Ziqiang frequently travels the world helping to spread Chen Tai Chi far and wide. He himself has fought with San Shou rules. He fully understands the difference between MMA and San Shou, and if Chen Ziqiang says he has students who will fight under any rule set, this tells me that they are sparring and training several different ways in the Chen Villiage. Maybe that would explain this:

There Chen Village Taijiquan Denver states "The upcoming generation of young masters at the village, whom we are trying to bring to the US MMA scene." Why hasn't Xu Xiaodong given Chen Village a reality check if all Tai Chi fighters are as useless as Xu says they are?

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