(pt. 5)
Conclusion: Wing Chun as the Perfect Storm
The preceding essay has looked at a number of variables that help to account for the rapid rise in popularity of Wing Chun in the 1970s and 1980s. While Bruce Lee is usually seen as the sole cause behind this trend I would suggest that the situation was actually more complex. Bruce Lee actually had a positive impact on all sorts of martial arts. Nor was there anything inevitable about the Wing Chun community’s ability to turn this initial burst of enthusiasm into long term organic growth.
Instead there are a number of factors that each contributed to this outcome. Understanding the specific roles that each has played helps to reveal something about why some Chinese martial arts have succeeded while others have faded in the global market place.
The first variable that needs to be considered is simple geographic proximity to a major cultural or economic hub. Many of the Chinese martial arts that are in the greatest danger of disappearing are those that are in remote or isolated areas. While modern technology allows outside information to be pumped into the periphery, the indigenous traditions of these areas have a hard time getting their message out and finding an audience or network willing to support them. In retrospect it seems clear that if Ip Man had not physically brought his art to Hong Kong in 1949, we would all be talking about something else right now.
The second variable that needs to be considered is the question of cultural compatibility. Some combat systems, philosophies or even schools of art have an intriguing ability to appeal to large numbers of individuals across cultural lines. Others do not. When Wing Chun entered Hong Kong Ip Man changed a number of things about the way the style was discussed and practiced to make it more interesting and relevant to his younger, more urban students.
Ironically Ip Man never taught any western students, yet the sorts of reforms he undertook made his art particularly amenable to North Americans and Europeans with little to no prior Chinese cultural background. Suddenly that was much less of an issue than it would have been in the past. Nor is this process automatic.
Other arts, such as Choy Li Fut, Xingyi Quan and White Crane have all chosen to maintain a greater degree of cultural specificity. Either strategy can work, but it will affect the size and nature of your student base. Perhaps we can think of this variable as a martial arts degree of “enculturation.”
The flow of people is also part of globalization and that turned out to be an important part of our story. Wing Chun was greatly benefited by the fact that it had a relatively large number of ambitious students who were able to go overseas to pursue both college educations and employment opportunities. Not every art, or even every region, enjoys this to the same degree. One of the reasons why we just do not see much about the martial arts of the Emei tradition is that there was very little immigration from Szechuan to the West during the key periods of about 1940-1980.
Ip Man was fortunate to have a number of talented students forming loose networks in North America and Europe during the 1970s and early 1980s. As a result, when Enter the Dragon hit the big screen in 1973 there was a way to actually transform some of that enthusiasm into lasting growth.
Lastly you have Bruce Lee himself. Some traditions are fortunate to have iconic practitioners of their art. The character Wong Fei Hung has become the public face of Hung Gar and has probably done more to “build their brand” than any other single factor. This is all the more ironic as the real life Hung Gar master of the same name was actually a recluse for much of his life.
Wing Chun has been doubly blessed by Bruce Lee’s ongoing fame and the recent interest that the Ip Man movies have generated. Yet popular name recognition by itself is not enough to sustain an art. Wing Chun succeeded in spreading itself only because of a number of other factors had already been put in place for totally unrelated reasons. The absence of any one of these variables will likely impact the ability of an art to migrate and thrive.
This is an important, and sobering, observation for anyone interested in the relationship between martial arts and globalization. While global forces allow some arts to achieve levels of fame that would have previously seemed implausible, it may not be possible to replicate this outcome in a number of important cases. Much seems to depend on historical path dependency. It is also critical to think about how these variables interact and work together as a set. Single factor explanations of the rise or fall of any martial art are likely to miss much of what is most interesting about the current era of global expansion and change.
-BY BENJUDKINS
