I had already wanted to visit Dalian when Dong-ge went there before. At the time, though, I was on the verge of losing my job and had too many things to deal with.
“Dong-ge” is Xu Xiaodong. Some people know the name; many others do not. He is an MMA fighter, a martial artist, and, in the most basic sense, a man who practices fighting rather than merely talking about it.
When I first heard about him, his name was still appearing all over the internet. Now it is almost as if he had never existed online. The reason is not difficult to guess: he stepped on the interests of traditional martial arts.
If one insists on calling anything he did a “crime,” perhaps it was the offense people have been mentioning so often lately—hurting the feelings of the Chinese nation. After all, he beat traditional martial arts at its own game, and beat it badly.
It reminds me of a line attributed to Saitō Toshimitsu:
Your martial arts are truly laughable. Now allow me to show you what I can do.
After that, Xu was effectively erased from the entire internet. Yesterday, I posted a photograph of myself with him on my social-media feed. Within a few minutes, it had been blocked. Only I could still see it.
His own WeChat accounts have been shut down again and again. Douyin and Weibo have treated him no differently. Fortunately, YouTube is not under the same kind of control.
When the pandemic had just begun, I heard about Chen Qiushi. Later, I learned that Xu Xiaodong was in contact with him. As it happened, I also had a way to get in touch with Xu.
That was when I realized that he was far more than a man who knew how to fight.
Xu says that his formal education is limited. But when there is something he does not understand, he does not pretend otherwise. He investigates, asks questions, and tries to verify things. When he encounters something in society that he cannot make sense of, he asks Liang Hongda. When he has legal questions, he turns to Chen Qiushi. When history is involved, he asks Yuan Tengfei.
That is very much like me, except that I do not have teachers as capable as those people. Sometimes, the willingness to think matters more than the amount of knowledge a person has accumulated.
My own decision to train in combat—and eventually to study swordsmanship—was also influenced by Xu. This is not because I want to fight or beat anyone up. In this era, learning how to protect yourself is simply necessary.
Still, it is worth asking: Liang Hongda, Chen Qiushi, and Yuan Tengfei have all been silenced as well. Was Xu Xiaodong banned merely because he challenged traditional martial arts?
I do not think that is the whole story. Perhaps it is because he said too many things that were direct, uncomfortable, and painfully true. There are genuinely not many people like that left.
This is my territory, not Tencent’s. Here, I decide what I say.
That is Xu Xiaodong: a martial artist who refused to bow.
