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Xinyi Wu

To get a sense of how widely Chinese martial arts is being practised and promoted today, one only needs to look at a recent gathering in Hong Kong to honour the late Wong Shun-leung, a wing chun sifu, or master, who studied the Southern Chinese-style of kung fu under grandmaster Ip Man and is credited with being one of Bruce Lee’s teachers.
Among those paying their respects to Wong – who died in 1997 at age 61 – was Jamie Hibdon, a 39-year-old baker who has been practising wing chun for nine years.
“The ethos of the art really speaks to me. There’s nothing unnecessary; you train only what is essential,” he says.
Hibdon is now an instructor himself in Kansas City, in the US state of Missouri, after moving there from Chicago.


While Chinese martial arts are not as popular in the US outside the big cities and he only has one student for now, Hibdon hopes to eventually teach regularly and spread the craft to more people. After all, the sense of community is one of the main reasons he appreciates wing chun.
“The mougun [martial arts school] comes through family. Your training brothers truly become your brothers, and it’s a new family,” Hibdon says.
“I think that that’s one of the things that really kept me at the school [when I was in Chicago], that maybe we have so many differences in our viewpoints and in our lives, but we overlap with wing chun, and it becomes such a tight bond that nothing else really matters.”
Also at the November event, which was attended by more than 100 Chinese martial arts practitioners from around the world, was Juan Manuel Sanz from Spain.
“When I was young, because of the Bruce Lee movies, everybody wanted to learn kung fu. You could find a martial arts school on every corner,” says Sanz, who grew up in the Spanish coastal city of Almería.

After reading in a magazine that Bruce Lee had learned wing chun, young Sanz decided that he would take up the martial art too. However, it was not until decades later that his training made a breakthrough, when he met Jerry Yeung at an exchange programme in Hong Kong in 2015.
“[Yeung] changed my perspective. I learnt more from him in two hours than I did in 30 years,” Sanz says.
Yeung, who began training under Sifu Wong in 1989 at the age of 14, runs Pure Ving Tsun (PVT) Group in Tsim Sha Tsui. The 49-year-old started with just a handful of students when he opened his studio in 2010, but that has since grown to more than 100.
While most of his students are locals, around 10 per cent of them are foreigners, Yeung says.
“Many Westerners really like the Chinese cultural elements in wing chun,” he says. “In Chinese culture, there is a saying yi shao sheng duo, which means using the few to defeat the many.”

For example, it is more difficult to win a physical fight against someone of a bigger size, or for a woman to fight against a man, but it is not impossible. Kung fu is a method for that, Yeung says, where training can allow one to win from a position of weakness.
While wing chun has gathered interest around the world, its development has not always been ideal, Yeung says, as teachings sometimes get passed on incorrectly as the craft spreads.
Yeung hopes to correct this, while keeping his teaching simple and direct to make wing chun accessible to students of different backgrounds.
“Concepts used in kung fu, like the five elements, are very deep and not easy to understand,” Yeung says. “But from the perspective of sports studies, you can explain the same thing without using complicated vocabulary.”
Wing chun teaches you to be as simple, as efficient and as direct as possible. That’s our three main principles
Hong Kong-American movie star Philip Ng
This approach has helped his wing chun teachings be more easily understood across cultures. Dozens of Yeung’s students, including Sanz, are now certified to teach wing chun under PVT’s brand in many countries, including the US, Spain, and Italy.
“When I was young, everybody was crazy about martial arts. Now, the mentality has changed,” says Sanz, noting that kung fu is no longer as popular in Spain and people are less willing to dedicate much time to training.
“But wing chun has given me a lot. It’s not just a way of punching and kicking.”
He says the practice helped him through the death of his mother two years ago.
“I need to share wing chun with other people and not just keep it to myself. And of course, I want to do what’s right, as my sifu has taught me, and to run my school well, especially in my own country.”

Hong Kong-American movie star Philip Ng is another former student of Wong’s. Training with Wong expanded and transformed his view on martial arts as a whole, he says, and he began to see them not just as physical practices but as a way to approach challenges, both in and out of the ring.
“Wing chun teaches you to be as simple, as efficient and as direct as possible. That’s our three main principles,” Ng says.
“As human beings, we tend to complicate things. I think fighting is the same,” adds the actor, who has appeared in Once Upon a Time in Shanghai (2014), Birth of the Dragon (2016) and Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In (2024).
For example, one may instinctively raise their arms or try to protect their head in response to an oncoming attack, even though these movements may not effectively guard against the strike.
Through training, however, we learn to condition ourselves to respond with the most simple, direct and efficient solutions, Ng says.

He turns to this philosophy whenever he runs into problems, be they in kung fu, filming or even cooking – and it drives his mission to spread wing chun’s influence far beyond his personal practice.
Together with his father, he opened the Ng Family Chinese Martial Arts Association in Chicago to promote wing chun and choy lee fut, another Chinese martial art, in the US.
While Ng no longer actively teaches as he is focused on spreading kung fu through his filmmaking career, he still drops by the studio whenever he is in Chicago.
“We charge a very low tuition, so more people can enjoy it. We never lost money, but me and my father never really made a profit from it, even though we’ve been teaching for over 30 years,” Ng says.
“We use the space to help spread kung fu. That’s our main thing.”


The photograph of the event at Hong Kong Shue Yan University was wrongly credited to the writer of the story and has been updated.


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Participants in the “WSLSA Homecoming Gathering 2024 – Hong Kong” event, which honoured wing chun master Wong Shun-leung, watch a video of Wong (left in the video) at the event, at Hong Kong Shue Yan University in North Point, on November 22, 2024. Photo: Chinese Martial Arts and Sports Culture Communication

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Yeung trains at his school in Tsim Sha Tsui. Photo: Jonathan Wong

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More than 100 martial artists from around the world gathered in Hong Kong at an event dedicated to Wong Shun-leung, student of Ip Man


More than 100 martial artists from around the world gathered in Hong Kong at an event dedicated to Wong Shun-leung, student of Ip Man.


Martial arts

Wing Chun

Hong Kong

Bruce Lee

Wing chun masters honouring Bruce Lee teacher share their love of the Chinese martial art

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}More than 100 martial artists from around the world gathered in Hong Kong at an event dedicated to Wong Shun-leung, student of Ip Man

More than 100 martial artists from around the world gathered in Hong Kong at an event dedicated to Wong Shun-leung, student of Ip Man