Martial Arts and Nations’ Pride
Xu Xiaodong is a curiosity in martial arts. Millions of people have seen his fights; some even know his reputation. But Xu has never fought in a major MMA promotion and rarely fought outside of the People’s Republic of China.
In 2017, Xu got into a social media dispute with Tai Chi “master” Wei Lei. Wei claimed to be a master and founder of the “thunder style” of tai chi. Xu’s callout was bombastic, and included challenging Chinese boxing legend Zou Shiming. Zou is a real martial artist, with two Olympic gold medals (2008 and 2012, and a Bronze in ’04) who had just retired, which makes Xu’s remarks look a bit like trolling.
But Xu did set up a fight with Wei, and knocked Wei out in 20 seconds. After this, Xu put an open challenge to traditional martial artists in China, offering 1.2M 元 (about USD$175,000, at the time) for such a martial artist who beat him.
Xu, the Mad Dog, is a major popularizer of mixed martial arts in China. Many of his exhibition matches have been well publicized. He has no patience for claims of chi manipulation and kamehameha waves. The problem for Xu is political. The Chinese government likes to project strength through appeals to historical Chinese culture, and the very martial arts Xu attacks are considered a significant cultural achievement in China. For the Chinese Communist Party, Chinese traditional martial arts are an expression of Chinese exceptionalism and a way for the government to project a glorious national identity. Challenging this with violent displays of effectiveness, like beating up Wei Lei, is considered unpatriotic.
I won’t go into detail here, but the Chinese social credit system has caused serious problems for Xu. If people want more discussion of the politics around Xu, I recommend Vice’s documentary on him.
The relationship between traditional martial arts and nationalism is common. Many countries project national martial arts and combat sports as exhibitions of strength. This is true for martial arts we know to be combat effective. In Thailand, Muay Thai is the national sport and recognized as a major cultural pillar; in the western hemisphere, professional boxers like Julio César Chávez, Sr., define national styles and represent their nation’s strength.
Countries are proud of their achievements. Sporting success is a source of national pride, and even more so when that success can be tied to the cultural roots themselves.
Sometimes celebrations of national culture come with myths. So do martial arts.
In fact, martial arts is rich with myths, in both the “larger-than-life story” and “are-you-kidding-me?” senses of the word. (We call the latter “bullshido.”) But when the mythical and absurd is a part of national identity, things get dangerous. People want to see displays of strength; sometimes people are skeptical. That is how we get the charlatan demonstrations of magical powers.
In 1981, the self-described psychic James Hydrick appeared on That’s My Line!, hosted by Bob Barker. Hydrick performed a standard range of breath-based magic tricks; after this appearance, the legendary debunker James Randi came on stage and proposed a basic experiment to show how the breath-based trick was done. In 2013, Hydrick was arrested and convicted for child sexual abuse in California.
Imagine if Hydrick’s shtick was slightly different; instead of claiming psychic abilities, he supplemented this with appealing to American exceptionalism and patriotism. He might claim that the heritage of the American people includes the history of tapping into this energy, that it is a part of an exceptional tradition and challenging it is a direct challenge to patriotism. That’s the analogy to what has happened in many other countries, including China.
Xu is a violent, Chinese James Randi, the affable old buster of magicians. Xu takes no bullshit, and puts his money where his mouth is.
China isn’t the only stomping ground for nationalist mythmaking. In the United States, our hucksters tend to be for-profit; some make up military records (like Frank Dux), but they rarely claim that their martial arts are an American tradition, instead appealing to exotic east Asian heritage. We Americans have our hucksters, and I’ll come back to Dux and George Dillman another day, because those are fun stories and we all need a good laugh sometimes. But the nationalist varieties are instructively different.
The philosopher Harry Frankfurt provided a seminal, technical analysis of “bullshit.” Bullshit involves making a claim because it serves a purpose, regardless of whether the claim is true or false. While the purpose of lying is to deceive, to direct people away from the truth, bullshit isn’t about deception. Bullshit is indifferent to the truth; it’s just about achieving goals, and whether that’s served by truth or not is irrelevant.
Claiming to be able to shoot fireballs out of your hands or stun people with chi waves is usually bullshit. The goal isn’t deception; the goal is to influence the person to hand over their money. It happens to be false, because nobody can shoot fireballs out of their hands; but it wouldn’t really matter either way.
There’s a lot of bullshit in politics, because politics involves telling people what they want to hear. Harry Frankfurt passed away recently (July 23, 2023), but before he did, he wrote on the role of bullshit in contemporary American politics. Warwick philosopher Quassim Cassam argues that we should subsume our understandings of bullshit, in the context of politics, under our understanding of propaganda: propaganda is about rhetoric that tries to accomplish a particular set of political goals.
For those who are interested, Cassam’s chapter “Bullshit, Post-Truth, and Propaganda” is his best technical distillation, in my opinion; if you want a broader overview or don’t feel comfortable with the technical background, his book Conspiracy Theories gives a great overview.
The purpose of propaganda is to marshal political support. Appealing to national identity and tradition is effective political propaganda. Nobody loses political support upselling nationalism, tradition, or military strength; appealing to bullshit in the martial arts as a form of national tradition does all three at once. Most countries have nationalist associations with warrior figures, from Genghis Khan in Asia to William the Conqueror in Europe to Shaka Zulu in Africa. These associations often tie to views of military achievement and national exceptionalism. They work well as propaganda tools.
Whether stories of military exceptionalism are true doesn’t matter. Some of them are true; some are false; most blend both. What matters is that they’re effective, evocative storytelling that moves people.
Many of these stories involve myths. Jet Li’s epic film Fearless shows a public bout between Chinese martial arts master Huo Yuanjia and an Irish boxer Hercules O’Brien; Li’s film was controversial for a range of reasons, especially depictions of Huo as excessively violent. The fight with O’Brien is part of the myth, that Huo knocked down a much larger westerner; there’s dispute about whether the fight ever happened. But it’s part of Huo’s legend. Many parts of his legend are well-documented enough that they are beyond dispute (like his chronic health issues and many challenge fights).
For fighters from the era before film, much less the internet, claims about them are steeped in mystery. This is especially true in the period where newspaper reports could be spun to build mystique. Huo was a real person. He was born in 1868 and died in 1910; he fought challenges matches and founded an organization. Whether the O’Brien fight ever occurred is unclear; like many other martial arts myths, it lives in the grey letters of history.
During the 1970s and ’80s, we saw a precipitous increase in documented cases of bullshit in the martial arts; Hydrick was one case, but there were many, many more.
American interest in Asian martial arts was fueled in large part by popular culture. Bruce Lee became a legend through martial arts displays on film, and combined them with real fighting credibility. The blur between film and reality tangled together to enhance myths about successful martial arts.
Unfortunately, for every Bruce Lee there were easily a half-dozen James Hydricks. They would talk about psychic powers or chi manipulation, and sell these things to their students. They aren’t martial arts; they’re bullshit artists.
If people are interested in more discussions of the history, psychology, and epistemology of “bullshido,” please let me know in the comments.
Some of these bullshit artists marketed themselves as sources of national pride: these include Chinese traditional martial artists who claim chi powers and Soviet-era systema masters who claim to be able to manipulate radio waves. For those figures, tying nationalism and militarism together gave them the opportunity to sell these fantastical stories with the backing of the state.
Earlier this year, Colonel Mikhail Ryabko died. Ryabko was a founder of one of the civilian martial arts organizations associated with systema. Systema is a loose group of martial arts systems developed shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
If you want to see an English-language rehearsal of the mythic history of systema, you can look at a 2018 piece by Slate. The piece focuses on Colonel Aleksandr Maksimtov, who claims the art was inherited from the Cossacks in Siberia and was practiced and honed by various Soviet military organizations. The stories about the history of systema are questionable; my own view is the stylistic discrepencies between systema and the Russian martial art of sambo (which has a well-documented history, including crossover competition in judo) count strongly against the mythic histories told by Ryabko and Maksimtov.
Mikhail Ryabko’s biography includes very little English-language information on Ryabko, but from the available video of Ryabko’s martial arts practice, I feel comfortable calling him a 5-Dillman-level bullshit artist.
What is notable about Ryabko is that he advocated for the expansion of systema into other countries, and exported Russian nationalism and exceptionalism along with it. The Hungarian investigative outlet Atlatszo found that civilian systema organizations (and Ryabko’s in particular) were often closely affiliated with Russian paramilitary organizations. These include organizations who engage in quasi-military actions on behalf of Russian state interests, while not being officially Russian military.
The Night Wolves are often referred to as a Russian “motorcycle gang,” but are probably better understood as a Putin-loyal paramilitary outfit. The Night Wolves have been involved in organizing Russian nationalist demonstrations in Europe since the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. If you followed the Russian-backed actors starting conflicts with the Ukrainian government in the Donbas, under the pretext of “independence” starting in 2014… a lot of that involved the Night Wolves.
The politics of these organizations are complicated and vary depending on country and tradition. Many martial arts associated with national identity have proven capable of integrating a global community without noxious nationalism. Muay thai includes elements of Thai culture and tradition (including the wai khru and music during matches), but need not involve any commitment to thai nationalism; the same for Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, judo, taekwondo, and different forms of wrestling. The practices of these martial arts can involve the study of and respect for the cultures and histories that produced them without buying into bullshit or propaganda.
The association with political nationalism is hardly unique to martial arts communities; any area of culture can develop entanglements with political ideology. Broad social problems occur in martial arts communities, in the way they occur everywhere else. James Hydrick and Mikhail Ryabko might have turned to selling snake oil to cancer patients, instead of pretending to have magical powers in the martial arts; the martial arts is just one (often lucrative) area for this kind of bullshit.
James Randi is a personal hero for many people invested in debunking bullshit artists. He appeared on television as an effective spokesperson for decades. In the martial arts, we have similar resources, including the Bullshido Forums and the McDojoLife YouTube channel. But all of these things are in an American context, where the ability to speak publicly on these things is well protected.
This brings us back to Xu Xiaodong. Xu went into the same business that James Randi was in, albeit with a more violent model. He set out to improve his culture by calling out bullshit. Because that bullshit was embedded in a nationalist political framework, this project turned Xu into a de facto Chinese dissident, with all of the persecution that entails.
During the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, the Chinese writer Fang Fang started The Wuhan Diaries to discuss the life in China during the lockdown. The website was not designed to be opposed to the Chinese government, but by publishing anonymous interviews and candidly discussing the impacts of the lockdowns on people’s lives, it inevitably entailed things the Chinese Communist Party found unflattering. Many in the nationalist tai chi community, including Wei Lei, called for assaulting Fang Fang.
The Wuhan Diary was recently translated by UCLA professor Michael Berry and published by Harper Collins.
When Wei was making threats against Fang Fang, Xu stepped forward again, condemning him, “Have you no shame?” Extremist movements thrive on the idea that any criticism of the nation or tradition, no matter how mild or accurate, must be snuffed out. This is true with nationalist political movements that silence any criticism of the country as “unpatriotic;” this is true of martial arts cults which demand obsequious adherence to belief in the impossible or absurd. A basic commitment to grounding ourselves in reality is a first step in an honest martial artist’s journey.
