“What this show tells is priceless,” he told me—thinking, perhaps, of the increasingly dire financial straits his crusade against tai chi is putting him under (he is currently searching for a new apartment because he can no longer afford the rent on his current one). “If you gave me a million RMB to stop the show, I would say, ‘No.’ If you gave me 10 million RMB to stop, I would still say, ‘No.’ If you gave me 100 million RMB to stop”—here he took a beat to grin—“I would say, ‘Okay.’”
Xu Xiaodong’s gym is located in a basement facility in the middle of a parking lot in Shuangjing, an upscale residential district near Beijing’s East 3rd Ring Road. His clients are well-off hobbyists, mostly men, who come to train for fitness purposes. Every so often, an incensed tai chi master shows up at the gym’s door to challenge Xu in person, an occurrence that took Xu’s fellow trainers by surprise the first time it happened.
I visited the gym in mid-August, and despite Xu’s rapidly complicating political situation, the place bore no reflection of the turmoil that had befallen its figurehead. During a boxing class, students took two-minute turns sparring with trainers. No one seemed particularly worried about Xu. I spoke to an eight-year veteran of the gym, a plump and genial man surnamed Wang, who happened to work for CCTV, the state broadcaster. Wang said that while he did not support the violence, he was fundamentally sympathetic to Xu’s quest. “Otherwise, young people will continue to believe in these fakes,” he said.
When I entered Xu’s office he glanced at me conspiratorially and motioned me over to look at an icon on his phone. It was a VPN. I asked him why, after abstaining for so long, he had finally started using one.
He told me recent events had caused him to conclude he would never be on the right side of the law in China, no matter what he did. Not long after he signed the contract to fight Wang Zhenling, his 18th tai chi grandmaster, relevant authorities informed him that the match, or any future matches, would not be allowed to take place. This should be illegal, Xu noted angrily, but his lawyer friend had advised him that in China, the law is essentially “whatever they say it is.” And so, Xu figured, he had nothing more to lose by taking the extra step of hopping the firewall.
“What makes me angry,” he added, “is that I’ve been very careful. Everything I’ve said has been true. If I had been lying to people, sure, I can accept punishment. But I’ve said nothing wrong. I can’t understand this.”
As someone who has been living and reporting in China for five years, I was caught off guard by Xu’s belief in the power of truth and sincerity. Although he was fully cognizant of the fact that there were things he could say that would have him disappeared tomorrow—that the ruling Party had inflicted and continues to inflict grievous human rights violations on the population such as the concentration camps in Xinjiang, and that the State relentlessly censors reports of said atrocities—he never discarded the notion that the truth had some value.
Such a belief is something that’s become almost impossible to hold onto in China, where the truth has long since ceased to matter. The week I went to meet Xu at his gym, the Party had pivoted its policy toward coverage of the Hong Kong protests from the usual program of suppression to an all-out disinformation campaign. State media organs blared with reports of protester violence and a secret CIA plot. These reports left out the disproportionate brutality being inflicted by the Hong Kong police, and that a protestor had lost an eye to a bean bag round.
“What makes me angry,” he added, “is that I’ve been very careful. Everything I’ve said has been true. If I had been lying to people, sure, I can accept punishment. But I’ve said nothing wrong. I can’t understand this.”
After we discussed his plans to livestream on YouTube that night, it was time for Xu to pitch his MMA class to a crop of prospective students. In a matter of seconds I watched him transform from the laconic, somewhat sullen man I had just interviewed into the charismatic personality I recognized from Hot Takes. He talked without pause for the next 45 minutes, weaving together a pocket history of MMA with heavy doses of autobiographical narrative and thoughts on everything from Bruce Lee to yoga. More than a dozen students listened attentively and laughed along with his jokes and exaggerated pantomime.
Watching Xu give his spiel, I thought about something he had once told me about his ambition for Hot Takes to one day become China’s “No. 1 most courageous sports talk show.” In a different place or time, Xu could easily be a titan of the sports entertainment industry. It’s easy to imagine someone with this much wit, passion, and intelligence hosting a slickly produced sports show from behind a desk. But all Xu can do in his current situation is go on smuggling his low-fi episodes of Hot Takes past firewalls and dodging government authorities who would like to see him cast out onto the street.
What really stings Xu is that he doesn’t stand to benefit from the coming expansion of MMA in China, which he worked for so long to bring about. This summer, the UFC opened a state-of-the-art training facility in Shanghai in a bid to mint a Chinese MMA star who would help the promotion win over the Chinese market. This plan already seems to be succeeding: At the third UFC China in Shenzhen this August, 30-year-old female strawweight fighter Zhang Weili triumphed over Jessica Andrade to become the first ever Chinese UFC champion. Xu, a huge UFC fan, told me he was thrilled with Zhang’s victory and the entrance of UFC into China, but he has not been called on to help promote it. He said that at the two previous UFC events in China, he paid full price for front row tickets—almost $1,000 USD—because UFC did not personally invite him.
A few hours after I left him that day at the gym, Xu went home and made the live YouTube broadcast about Hong Kong that would get him taken in for questioning. His message began in a tone of half-ironic grandeur: “It is I, Xu Xiaodong. The Xu Xiaodong who overturned heaven and earth two years ago.” Next, he thanked the state censorship organs monitoring him for their troubles. Then he said his piece about Hong Kong.
By international standards, Xu’s views on Hong Kong are extremely moderate. He does not support Hong Kong independence and regards Hongkongers (and Taiwanese for that matter) as Chinese. Yet in the dissent-paranoid environment of today’s China, publicly expressing skepticism that the reality on the ground in Hong Kong may differ from how it has been depicted in state media is tantamount to betrayal. Indeed, only one other mainland public figure has dared to express the same doubts as Xu: A 33-year-old lawyer named Chen Qiushi, whose earnest “fact-finding” broadcasts from Hong Kong—now scrubbed from mainland social media, along with his personal Weibo account—have put him in the same precarious position as Xu.
Get xu xiadong a real fight
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isnt MMA the fastest growing/paying combat sport?) instead of doing these circus fights. I feel like some Japanese Dojo lord is paying these dudes to shame Kung Fu lol its really a bad look for all martial arts when you think about it. 
why does he avoid the entire "Yan" generation of Shaolin fighters, who are known for whoopin ass? maybe because they are known for whoopin ass. 
Originally Posted by Jimbo
or enter a MMA/Kickboxing league to compete in, because beating the old self proclaimed masters is pretty low and cheap, almost as much as those masters claims.