(pt. 5-1)
Self-Defense, Wing Chun and Youth Challenge Matches, 1950-1972
Nor is this something that can be explained by looking at the association between Wing Chun and youth violence in the Hong Kong period. It is true that Wing Chun students were involved in a number of illicit “challenge matches” or street fights. However these events always paired two fighters against one another and the spectators tended not to interfere in the contests. Brawls between schools did occasionally happen but these events were considered to be rare and they often ended up involving the police.
This is not to say that this period did not have an important impact on the development of Wing Chun. It certainly did. Period accounts from the 1950s and 1960s all indicate that Ip Man was willing to make changes to the art’s teaching methods and even forms in response to his student’s experiences on the streets. He also changed the way that the art was discussed. He did away with the traditional sayings and the abstract philosophy of the Five Elements and Eight Directions, which had traditionally been part of the art, and replaced them with simple discussions that would appeal to modern western educated high school and college students.
This is actually an important process to consider as Ip Man was actually pretty conservative. He liked to dress and speak like a Confucian intellectual of a previous generation. In no way was he reforming his art simply for a love of “modernization.” Instead he wanted Wing Chun to be brutally effective, and he wanted other figures in the martial arts world to be forced to acknowledge his accomplishments.
Yet for the most part his students rarely encountered multiple attacker encounters. Instead they spilled most of their blood in a series of underground fights called “bimo.” These impromptu events would usually only be planned a few days or a week in advance. Fighters from various schools would meet secretly in basements, roof tops or allies and fight in prearranged bouts until one contestant submitted or was incapacitated. There were few if any rules limiting what fighters could do, but the events were far from chaotic. Each fight had a judge, seconds to attend the fighters between “rounds” and was arranged by a teenaged promoter. One suspects that truancy and illegal gambling were also part of the bimo youth subculture.
Individuals were occasionally badly hurt in these bouts, but interestingly I have never come across a confirmed account of an actual death. Regardless, the police viewed the entire institution as patently illegal and a violation of multiple laws. Martial artists in America today spend a lot of time ignoring and apologizing for the dark underbelly of youth culture in Hong Kong and its very real relationship with the martial arts. This revisionist tendency is one of the main factors contributing to our systematic misunderstanding of the arts that arose during this time period.
One of the dangers with bimo was that with no formal oversight and an excess of youthful enthusiasm the violence it generated could occasionally spin out of control. This might happen if a pattern of repeated injuries or humiliations led to spiral of retaliations and escalating violence that might envelop an entire school.
Ip Man clearly benefited from the reputation of his students in the bimo sub-culture, but these unregulated challenge matches also caused him headaches. I am aware of at least two incidents in the 1950s when it became necessary to hold talks with other local martial arts clans (White Crane and Choy Li Fut) to smooth over problems created by his younger, less disciplined students.
This was the dominant sort of violence that Ip Man’s students faced in the 1950s and 1960s. They were not spending a lot of time defending themselves from street crime (though that probably happened from time to time), nor were Wing Chun students involved in large scale conflicts against the Triads or the government. Instead, Ip Man’s students generally went out looking for trouble, and they found it in the semi-structured bimo youth sub-culture that dominated the era.
This is a very different situation from what one might have found in Foshan in the 1920s or 1930s. Challenge matches between students and instructors did happen during this period. Ip Man himself fought in two such matches have have been documented. One occurred 1918 and another during the Second Sino-Japanese War when he began to formally teach. But these occasional challenges were pretty different from the bimo matches of Hong Kong.
The big problem that martial artists in Foshan faced were not actually formal challenges. Instead it was the massive levels of organized crime, rampant street level violence, corrupt police and a rapidly escalating civil war that provided the drama of the period. Further complicating matters was the fact that the Triads, police, military, Nationalists and Communists all made use of local martial arts schools to advance their own agendas. Ambush, kidnapping and death were all a lot more common in this arena than they were in even the worst Hong Kong neighborhoods of the 1960s.
I suspect that if we want to understand Wing Chun’s interest in multiple attacker scenarios we need to cast our gaze further back in time and ask about Ip Man’s earlier career in the 1930s and 1940s. As a law enforcement officer he would have understood the realities of violence on a level that his teenage students a decade later would have found incomprehensible.
As I have argued in other posts, for many of Ip Man’s students in Hong Kong, the martial arts were fundamentally about social performance, reputation and networking. But by the time Ip Man started to teach in 1950 he was a veteran of the devastating civil war that ultimately claimed the Republic of China. If I had to guess he probably saw the martial arts as about survival.
But what exactly was he trying to survive? Being ambushed by multiple armed attackers who intend to kill you means almost certain death. There are very few ways that a lone individual can survive these scenarios if they are genuinely surprised and their attackers do not make some sort of horrific mistake. Assassinations in the 1930s and 1940s used favored guns, knives, grenades and very large improved explosives. If a group was determined to kill you chances were they would eventually pull it off. No martial arts system could protect you from these sorts of threats.
However, teams that were planning on assassinating you were not nearly as scary as those who wanted to capture and interrogate you. Ip Man would have known this from first-hand experience because that is the sort of work that plain clothes detectives were involved in on a daily basis. Fortunately these sorts of teams had to operate covertly and they could not just go around tossing grenades and bombs. This would have given a martial artist a chance to spot the trap in its initial stages, to confound one more team members, and to attempt to flee. When Ip Man thought about applying his martial arts to the problem of “staying alive,” he probably gave considerable thought to these scenarios.
Of course this entire topic is highly speculative. Its ultimately impossible to know what is going on inside anyone’s head. Further, Ip Man made a point of saying as little as possible about these sorts of experiences when he was alive. Therefore researchers are left to speculate as to how is life experience influenced the development of his martial art.
to be continued..
-BY BENJUDKINS
*Re Photo; Ip Man and an early group of students in the 1950s. The life experience of his students in Hong Kong was very different from what he had seen in Foshan during the late 1930s and 1940s.
