Reinventing Wing Chun

Wing Chun became popular after Bruce Lee’s premature death and spread like wild fire all over the world. During late 1970’s and 1980’s “kung fu craze” took over the planet.  At the beginning the only known and available style came from Yip Man. Not much was known about Wing Chun history and development in general. Yip Man’s story about the origin of the art was accepted as factual truth.

 This situation didn’t change for a quite some time but by the end of 1990’s things slowly started to change.  Wing Chun enthusiast started to travel to Hong Kong, Taiwan and China to research the art’s history and development.  Many interesting facts emerged and many different branches of the art became known and got a lot public attention.

In 2000’s number of people who traveled to the east and did research increased as well as number of people who went to Hong Kong and China and started training in different styles of Wing Chun which are usually very different from Yip Man’s style. Public interest in history and different styles development constantly increasing and development of information technology enabled an instant exchange of information. 

On the other side, non of these researchers had a degree in history or archaeology nor anyone had sufficient funds and of course no one had a resources of any historical research facility. People did their best with the knowledge and resources they had.  A lot of information surfaced and amount new information increase daily. On the other hand, inexperience, lack of knowledge and research skills, enormous cultural gap and absence of any scientific standards in gathering and processing the data resulted in great fluctuation in quality of information.

Research became new trend and created a new market. Wing Chun people, after decades of doing same thing, stared to search more exotic, older, more original style. Never ending search for the oldest and most original style started. To meet demand requirements, many teachers started to reinvent their styles, historically and technically. Old theories were proven wrong and new are emerging almost every day. Complete Wing Chun theory is reinvented always bringing some new old, never seen before, original concepts and principles. In essence, teachers or better “teachers” are making existing theory more complicated using modern science vocabulary and butchered physics theories mixed with old Chinese expressions  in order to make their teachings more exclusive, more mystical but scientific at the same time. Over time, “teachers” who are selling these exotic things found them self in a problem because Wing Chun has very limited amount of movements and certain movement, let’s say Tan Sao will always be Tan Sao, no matter how complicated explanation is. To resolve this problem they started to mix other martial arts with Wing Chun and declare it older, more original form of the style. Some of these “oldest” , “original” styles do not look like Wing Chun anymore. While evolving is natural thing and also necessary, mixing other styles and then call that mixture oldest original style is simply cheating people for money. Tai Chi”push hands” will never be Wing Chun “chi sao” no matter how hard someone tries to show it that way. There is nothing wrong to put Tai Chi “push hands” in wing chun but be honest about it, say what it is. Same goes for White Crane , grappling and other things people put in their Wing Chun and claim they were part of the style originally.

The other thing mixed with Wing Chun is Qi gong. Despite the fact that Qi gong is modern invention based on older Taoist esoteric practice and was never part of any kung fu style before 1920’s , Wing Chun became “internal” art in last few decades and “teachers” claim that Qi gong was originally part of the art, especially of the art they are teaching. Many systems of Qi gong are incorporated in the style from various sources, even some originally Wing Chun movements and parts of the forms were redefined and now are taught as Qi Gong forms.

From historical point of view, we do not know more today than we knew 30 years ago despite all the research. There are many reasons for that. There are no real historical sources about the early history of the art, no written documents, simply nothing besides so called “oral histories”. Problem with kung fu oral histories is that they are completely false because their purpose is not to record historical events but to set up moral code, a perfect example for students  personified in a character of a famous warrior ancestor ad to give style a prestige. Over time all “ancestors” proved to be nothing more than mythical characters and never really existed. In order to give a style historical significance many people are trying to connect Wing Chun with real historical figures and events and since there are no real evidence to support or discard these claims a lot of theories are circulating today presented as real histories. Another group of practitioners are trying to push the time of the art’s creation further back in the past believing that older means better or more original. They counterfeit “evidence” and cherry pick real historical fact to fabricate believable story. Also they are searching a source of the art in impossible places like Emei or Wudang mountain and styles that never existed before modern times.

In everlasting struggle for more students and money “teachers” are ready to do almost anything in order to sell their “arts”. Their deceptions are quite elaborate and person without a large amount of knowledge can easily fall into the trap of “oldest”, “original” style of Wing Chun.