“Relaxation is the key to the mastery of Wing Chun.”
Chu Shong Tin

Front Row: Chu Shong Tin, Ip Man, Leung Sheung – looks like Wong Shun Leung in the back row, 2nd from left.

Despite my having trained in Wing Chun since 1999, I have only recently heard of Chu Shong Tin.  I actually heard about him from my current teacher, Sifu Bernard Langan, who specializes in teaching “internal” power development with Chinese Martial Arts.  He is a teacher of such systems  as I Liq Chuan and Chen Pan Ling Tai Chi (among many others).

I am not one of those people who thinks thing “happen for a reason” or according to some sort of plan.  I know enough about history to be very suspect of such thinking (what was the plan for the people who died in various atrocities over the whole of human history?).  But sometimes, you find yourself discovering certain things only when you are ready for them.  In the case of Chu Shong Tin and his take on Wing Chun, I was much more knowledgeable about how Chinese Internal Power is developed (not that I’ve developed much of it!) than I might have been even a year ago, so I was open to seeing what he was teaching and how this fit in with the whole arc of the dispersal of Chinese martial knowledge over the last hundred years.

Sifu Chu Shong Tin (1933-2014) was born in Guangdong province of China and began his martial arts training at the age of ten.  He moved to Hong Kong in the 1950s and became one of Ip Man’s early students, along with Leung Shung and Lok Yiu.

Here is where my theory comes in!

I’ve always heard that Leung Shung was a more “internal” practitioner of Wing Chun.  This was linked to the story of Sifu Kenneth Chung’s development, which I heard was “hard” initially and then, under the tutelage of his Sifu, “softened” and became more “internal.”

I’m curious if anyone knows more about this, but my theory, based on reading The Creation of Wing Chun and other books on the history of Chinese martial arts, combined with my comparisons of the system’s practices and techniques with those of systems like Southern Praying Mantis and Tai Chi, I speculate that the system Ip Man was taught by Chan Wah-Shun and Leung Bik (which they learned from Leung Jan) had much more “internal” content.  I think that when Ip Man was forced to leave Foshan due to the rise of the Chinese Communist party (Sifu Ip had been a Nationalist police officer under Chiang Kai-shek and so, was an enemy of the new state), he arrived with few resources in an impoverished post-war Hong Kong and found himself needing to make a living teaching martial arts.  However, the post-Boxer Rebellion period involved a widespread adoption of more Western, “scientific” approaches to things and the kids in Hong Kong needed to get results fast in order to survive on the mean streets of Hong Kong.

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“The ultimate goal of martial arts is not to become invincible, but to have the courage to face any opponent, both inside and outside of the ring.”
Francis Fong

Sifu Francis Fong was born in Hong Kong in 1953 and began training in martial arts at the age of 10.   He started his martial arts training in Northern Shaolin Kung Fu and later transitioned to Wing Chun after seeing a GM Yip Man demonstration.

Sifu Fong moved to the United States in 1977 and continued his martial arts training under the tutelage of Sifu Wong Shun Leung via trips back to HK.   After Wong’s passing in 1997, Fong continued his Wing Chun training under Sifu Yip Ching.

Below is a high quality Chi Sao and Dan Chi demo and below that they get into some Chin Na and even grappling (I’ve done some of those holds but the on-the-ground stuff looks like BJJ).  PS he is even more impressive when you realize he is 70!

There is a great four part interview with Hawkins Cheung by Robert Chu, first published in Inside Kung-Fu magazine starting in November of 1991.

I was pointed to it by an article on Kung Fu Tea, where it was hosted on the USADojo site.  It appears that Inside Kung Fu went out of business in 2011.  It doesn’t seem as if anyone is offering its backlog of articles and it made me think I better backup the USADojo site’s hosting of this really important article.  If Robert Chu or any representative of Inside Kung Fu would like me to take this down, I will do so – my principal aim is preservation.

In this article, an interview with Sisuk Gung Hawkins, many interesting points are made about Wing Chun.  Hawkins asks many questions that cut to the heart of the system and bring to light certain questions with the system with which we all contend, and the approaches to answering these questions that were tried by both Hawkins and Bruce Lee (i.e., Jeet Kune Do).  One question being how to bridge against opponents who do not “stay” but zip in and out with either/both their body or their strikes.  Boxers come immediately to mind, with their jabs and quick footwork.

A system like Wing Chun, which seeks a bridge and uses relatively slow footwork (to preserve the potential for structure), will naturally have to contend with this feature of such fighting styles and every WC practitioner needs to work on their response to attacks such as the jab used by the “outside fighter.”  I’ve heard many discussions over the years about how one should handle this issue.  The fundamental Wing Chun approach is that we Jeet once we get close enough.  But its a high level skill to work against a skilled opponent.  Some people take the “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” approach and incorporate jabs into their fighting repertoire.  While, as Wong Shun Leung said, Wing Chun is what works, I think people sometimes try to incorporate elements from other systems before becoming competent at the Wing Chun approach, and that sometimes the non-Wing Chun element is brought in to try and plug a hole in the person’s understanding of Wing Chun.  This patchworking of systems is a feature of the post-MMA world, but I think with Wing Chun we have a pretty integrated system and we need to truly understand it before starting to cobble together a Frankenstein’s monster of our own devising.  We are standing on the shoulders of Giants and they thought a lot of this stuff through.  But, once you have become truly competent, then there are some valid discussions to be had about ground game and closing the distance and other aspects of dealing with the strengths of other systems and customizing the system to your own physical idiosyncrasies, such as we find in these interviews.

Beginning in November 1991, Inside Kung-Fu published the following four-part interview with Hawkins Cheung, reprinted below.

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