Ip Man and the Roots of Wing Chun’s “Multiple Attacker” Principle
(pt. 1)
Law Enforcement and the Martial Arts in Republican China
The intersection between law enforcement and the development of the modern Chinese martial arts is a fascinating topic that deserves a lot more attention than it normally gets. In many ways the police are an ideal place to look when you are trying to capture recent trends in hand combat. The military never wants to engage in “hand to hand” combat. They would prefer to do their killing with artillery or bombs. Most civilian martial artists actively try to avoid trouble and they train their students to do the same. That makes perfect sense. Avoiding street violence whenever possible is a great self-preservation strategy. It’s what society expects of them.
Law enforcement officers are in a very different situation. Their job requires them to go out looking for trouble. And when they locate a criminal they cannot just call in an artillery strike. They are expected to apprehend the suspect so that the individual can be questioned or put on trial. There is every reason to expect that wanted criminals will violently resist arrest. As a result police departments the world over tend to be very interested in hand combat training.
This is often a little different from what civilians practice. How to safely handcuff a suspect without accidentally shooting them is a topic that does not come up very frequently in my Wing Chun classes. Still, police departments frequently hire outside combat experts and pour considerable time and money into the sorts of tactical questions that society as a whole is content to ignore. Law enforcement around the country manages to support a small but thriving industry that caters to their specific needs for combat training and resources.
The situation in Nationalist controlled China was no different. As the government struggled to assert its control over society it created police departments and reformed traditional law enforcement techniques in every major city in the country. This was a huge undertaking and it took a lot of money. Ironically, much of the funding to support these reforms came from the sale of opium and heroin by the state, but that is a topic for another post.
Chinese police departments and law enforcement academies hired civilian martial arts instructors in large numbers. These individuals acted both as instructors and were sometimes recruited as officers. A contract teaching at a local police academy was both a steady source of income and a prestigious honor for any martial arts teacher. Cheung Lai Chuen started his rise to fame in exactly this manner.
Given that law enforcement was such an important consumer of martial arts instruction, it might be interesting to ask whether it had any sort of impact on the development of the Chinese martial arts in the mid-20th century. The case of Wing Chun, especially as it developed in Hong Kong during the 1950s and 1960s, would seem to indicate that it did. To understand how, we need to know a little more about the early years of Ip Man’s career.
to be continued..
-BY BENJUDKINS
