ovine king

they didn't take over china. once upon a time, due to political and trade reasons, parts of china were divided and governed by different countries.

there are quite a few mantis styles and I am not the best person to talk about them having only real experience in one particular line. One thing you might want to look at. sevenstar, bagua/8 step/trigram and plum blossom are all types of footwork. Coincidence?

not quite, the floppy sword is something else entirely. There is also a trend for wushu competitions to use a floppier sword because they think it looks good but this is not the same floppy sword that i mentioned earlier. there is no difference between the sword used in tai chi and a 'normal' chinese straight sword. When you hear them refer to it as 'tai chi sword' they are refering to the sword form, not the sword itself.

not to mention that a big part of the sumo game is control of your balance. Who says sumo are slow? What has being faster got to with anything anyway? To hit him, you have to get near him. If you are near him, he can hit you.

name one art that doesn't deal with the interception of an attack.

It's not really the applicabilty of tai chi. The thing is, you really can't deny that the majority of places out there aren't teaching tai chi properly. That's also not mentioning the fact that a lot of places aren't even teaching autehntic tai chi forms, instead they teach the 'fixed' chinese wushu competition tai chi form, which if you know history of chinese wushu, is hardly the best source material for fighting arts.

i think you are missing the point.

bingo. sil lum is a romanisation of the cantonese pronunciation of the name that translates to "little forest".

my comment still stands. yes they have a gate theory based on a similar centreline but what they do with it, while there are similarities, they also have instances where they would do some things that are almost a definite no-no in wing chun.

i've never been a fan of organisations although i can see the reasoning and the intention of them. I have to ask, do you really need it to be an official organisation? Can it not be a stand alone school and then you organise tournements as you see fit? The problem I see is that the moment you make it an official organisation, you enter a whole world of politics and squabble. Even if you choose not to partakein the "discussion" you're un-involvement can and most probably still will be taken as a political stance with the other groups.

oops. Trust it to be the chinese guy to mention it... edit. not sure about taiwan but at one point japan had successfully invaded hong kong.

it was..... but with added flash. Wing chun doesn't look good on film. If you do proper wing chun, only people who know it, or some other short bridge style, will see and appreciate the movements. It doesn't really allow for a good show. It's like when I have to make up a display for someone/thing. We have to pad out a lot of things so that the audience can see something happening. It's not a lot of padding and most of it is just about having a bigger gap between the guys and them doing larger than usual movements. It's a small difference but it's that difference that makes good/bad/proper wing chun. But that's also true for every martial art you seen in a film. You'll see a single properly done type of movement sandwiched between two minutes of flashy versions of the same.

awarded??? hmm..... i know a few people who would question the use of taht word. How about the Chinese were forced to give over Hong Kong, a place of massive geographical importance, to the British as part of ad eal to stop flodding their country with opium? One thing though, it was handed back in 1997. On a very rainy night. anyway. was it after the boxer rebellion when the imperial family moved to taiwan? I have a vague memory of the soong family (with the famous sisters) moving to taiwan but wasn't that during/after the civil war between mao and the remaining imperialist people during which some guy with the surname Yuen proclaimed himself general/emperor and lasted less than a month..... damn... my chinese history is a mess.

That is movie fu and bears little to no resemblance to wing chun, not to mention misrepresents the history. A friend and I once sat down and took it apart in terms of the wing chun; there a few good moments but it's still movie fu.

it's not a wing chun/muay thai hybrid. what he teaches is wing chun. Gary Lam is/was a student of Wong Shun Leung, a man who is literally half his size but without dispute from anyone in any school/style that knew the man, is one of the greatest street fighters in HK who took part in true no holds challenge matches (ok.. there were some gentlemens' rules...) whilst there were still semi-legal (sometimes tolerated...). Wing chun has a good reputation because back in the day when people used to train and fight properly, it worked without making a fuss. Today, too many people talk, not enough people fight.

i highly doubt that anyone in the west trains a traditional style in a traditional manner.....

depends on the mantis style. from what i've experienced, they do more closing of the centre instead of going over the centre so it's not really use of THE (as if there's just the one version of it) centre line theory but more like they both use a theory based heavily on a similar centreline.

why? can they not be equally powerful?

there is no other style called jeet kune do. not even in chinese, no style is called way of intercepting fist so how is that stealinga name? stealing whose name? wing chun? I could've sworn wing chun was called.... wing chun....

wing chun and praying mantis share a lot of similarities in their use of body structure and in the way they treat footwork. Both emphasis forearm/bridge arm work and especially shirt bridge work. Both have a strong element of closing/trapping/control. Both are very direct, or at least they should be direct, in application. one way of looking at tai chi, wing chun and mantis is to put them in a line with wing chun on one end and tai chi on the other end forming a sort of scale. mantis, depending on your teacher would be close to wing chun than to tai chi but depending on your wing chun teacher, the distance between wing chun and tai chi might not be that big.

because hong kong isn't china.

yes. forms and applications, especially in the chinese styles are not the same thing. That is why you especially have to practice applications because if you fail to do so, how will you ever learn those little differences and what it feels like to do them/have them done to you?

everything that was deemed a threat to their communist ideal was removed.

the way shown on that site isn't that good in my opinion as it doesn't support the wrist enough and it seems that the wrist area often comes loose more esily when wrapped in that fashion.