More and More People Are Promoting Combat Sports — Humanity's Oldest Sport — in China. What Will That Bring?

Combat sports, boxing and wrestling among them, mix strength, wounds, national pride and an old code of courage and honor. What happens when China's professional sporting system and the West's meet?

At a press conference on June 16, Wang Bin, a 22-year-old from Anhui, bent down, slipped through the ropes and walked to the center of the ring. He is 1.95 meters tall and weighs 105 kilograms. Triple H, a world wrestling champion, was already standing there.

Wang started out on the Anhui provincial rowing team. Four years ago he met Antonio Inoki, the former Japanese wrestler, who brought him into IGF, a Japanese professional wrestling promotion, where Wang trained and began to compete. Four years later, IGF became his route into World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), making him the first athlete from China to sign with the company. Announcing that deal was one purpose of the press conference.

Michelle Wilson, WWE's global chief marketing officer, compared him to Yao Ming: from here on he will appear in WWE's wrestling shows and get more Chinese people to know the sport — ideally, to love it. Once the contract was signed, Wang would fly to WWE's headquarters in Orlando to train.

WWE was founded in 1952. It now stages more than 300 wrestling shows a year and draws a television audience of more than 36 million. A wrestling show is a form of professional wrestling: every match is scripted and the winner decided in advance, though the moves performed in the ring are real.

WWE came to China early. Guangdong Sports Channel began carrying it in 2007, two shows a week, and many other local stations followed. That is how its first generation of Chinese fans accumulated. In 2010, WWE brought one of its live shows to Shanghai.

This time it means to work the Chinese market seriously. At the June 16 press conference, besides announcing Wang's signing, WWE struck a deal with PPTV Sports: for the next three years PPTV will carry WWE's shows and its other programming.

China does not yet rank among WWE's top 10 markets worldwide, but Michelle Wilson told QDaily that within five years it will be WWE's second-largest market after North America.

Ten combat-sports companies and organizations, WWE among them, are hoping to make money in China.

• April 2010: the World Boxing Council (WBC) set up an interactive event base in Chongqing.
• September 2015: the International Boxing Federation (IBF) entered China and formed a strategic partnership with LeSports.
• September 2015: Shengli Shijia and the World Boxing Organization (WBO) built a boxing series called the Fist Power Alliance.
• May 2016: China Media Capital and Wanda were reported to be among the bidders for the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC).
• June 2016: the China division of the World Boxing Association (WBA), organized by Ti'ao Dongli, was formally established.
• June 2016: WWE announced its entry into China and its partnership with PPTV Sports.
• July 2016: UFC announced a deal with PPTV Sports.

These companies and organizations are very different from one another, and so are their hopes for China. WWE and UFC are each a league in itself, with its own fighters and its own events. What they want is for Chinese audiences to watch more of their programming, online or in person.

WBA, WBC, WBO and IBF are the four big world boxing organizations. They work more like an industry body such as FIFA, certifying the rank of a fight. But in China they want a hand in everything that has traditionally belonged to agents and promoters: signing fighters, staging events, marketing and promotion.

As fan bases go, combat sports are nowhere near soccer or basketball. By one count, about 6 million Americans box each year, and sales of boxing gear come to only $100 million. Adidas sold $2.455 billion worth of gear last year on soccer alone.

Yet professional combat sports generate real money.

Last May, Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao fought the "fight of the century" in Las Vegas. HBO and Showtime, which carried it in North America, said 4.4 million people watched. It cost $100 to watch, and North American television alone brought in more than $400 million.

By The New York Times's estimate, the fight took in another $133 million from ticket sales, international and local bar broadcast rights, sponsorship and merchandise. That puts its total output above $550 million.

Wrestling, led by WWE, and mixed martial arts, led by UFC, have done well too as newer combat sports. 2015 was the best financial year in WWE's history, and UFC's best year as well. WWE's revenue reached $658 million, with operating profit above $38 million; UFC's passed $600 million, and 7.8 million people paid to watch its fights, also a record.

Combat sports grew out of war and self-defense, and may be the oldest sport humans have. Archaeologists have found boxing relics in Mesopotamia from the 40th century BC. Wrestling and boxing were already contested at the ancient Greek Olympics.

Modern boxing began in a private club in London late in the 19th century and, once its rules had been tidied up, crossed to the United States. In 1921, boxing associations from 17 American states together formed the National Boxing Association (NBA), which governed both boxing and wrestling.

In 1930, the wrestling arm the NBA controlled broke away and became the National Wrestling Association (NWA). Some wrestling agents opposed it and banded together to form the National Wrestling Alliance — also abbreviated NWA — which supplanted the association in the 1960s. WWE's predecessor was one of the companies that helped found the alliance.

The boxing NBA, meanwhile, renamed itself the World Boxing Association in 1962 — today's WBA. As it expanded around the world, the faction representing the United States and the factions representing other countries fell out, and the WBC and the IBF broke off in 1968 and 1983. In 1988 the WBA's leadership quarreled with boxing promoters again; the promoters who walked out founded the WBO, completing today's set of four.

Because they come from the same root, WWE and the four boxing organizations run on much the same business model. Their main revenue is paid live television — Pay Per View in the United States, meaning you pay for each event you watch. Of the $550 million the Mayweather-Pacquiao fight took in, pay-per-view accounted for $400 million, more than 70% of the total.

It is WWE's most important revenue too. WWE Network is sold by subscription, and with the licensing money from pay-TV stations in other countries and regions, this line brought WWE more than $420 million in 2015 — 65% of total revenue.

Finding new growth means getting more people to watch the matches or the shows, and China — populous, with a sports industry now treated as a national strategy — became the target.

Internet companies are their favorite partners. LeSports, PPTV Sports, Ti'ao Dongli and China Media Capital all own channels of their own — video sites, internet TV — which makes it easier to land combat-sports programming in China.

Staging events is the other thing they can do, and through it they hope to raise a new set of viewers and fans in China.

Can they really make the money they expect in China?

"We did some market research and found there are 165 million WWE fans in China," WWE's global chief marketing officer, Michelle Wilson, told QDaily. "That surprised us too."

Those 165 million are probably not die-hards but people who have watched a WWE match and know something about the sport — the first group of Chinese fans, built up for WWE by local sports channels.

Boxing is the same. By Yutang Sports' count, in the last week of January this year the two most-watched events on CCTV5 were a WBO super featherweight international title fight and a super lightweight four-round bout, both ahead of a Spurs-Cavaliers NBA regular-season game.

Besides these professional shows and events, some local stations have started making their own combat-sports programs. In 2014, a show called Kunlun Fight began on Qinghai TV, with Chinese and foreign fighters competing under rules drawn from Muay Thai kickboxing, sanda and mixed martial arts. A year later it moved from Qinghai TV to Jiangsu TV, at 4 p.m. on Sundays.

WWE and its peers also arrived just as paying membership at video sites shot up. Last June, iQiyi said it had 5 million paying subscribers; a year later, 20 million. LeTV's went from 700,000 in 2012 to 12.2 million now. LeSports announced 1.5 million paying members three months after launching its membership plan.

But the mess has started to show.

In April this year, a new combat-sports series called Glory of Heroes premiered on Henan TV, and one fight on it — between the Chinese fighting monk Yi Long and kickboxing world champion Enriko Kehl — caused an uproar. Kehl was ahead throughout; the judges gave the decision to Yi Long. Afterward, users on Facebook were furious: "This was flat-out robbery, Kehl won every round. Yi Long has no technique to speak of, yet somehow he is worshipped in China."

Even a professional body like the WBO is being questioned. In April 2015, after a bout, the winning Chinese boxer Qu Peng was given the WBO China national championship belt. A report in China Sports Daily pointed out that national title fights usually go 8 to 10 rounds; this one went 6, which made the belt look plainly watered down.

Not long ago, Jia Chuntian, executive editor of Boxing and Fighting, published an article titled "Where Is Chinese Professional Boxing Going?" attacking the disorder in China's boxing market: boxing organizations whose job is to certify fights start running fights themselves once they reach China; a WBO intercontinental heavyweight title fight copied another event's lighting and staging; and Chinese boxers raise their world rankings by fighting weak opponents.

Combat sports do not mean quite the same thing to Westerners as they do to Chinese. On Reddit, one reply with 92 upvotes put it this way: "Boxing comes out of fighting, and it is about a human instinct, fight or flight… Some men are knocked down in the ring, but they would rather face what may come than run from it. Some men choose the comfortable life over fighting in the ring. There is no correct choice here, but from how they behave in that ring we learn what kind of men they are."

In China, combat sports are not seen that way. Zhao Daoxin, a martial artist born in 1908, once said: "What the public means by 'fighting ability' — the odds of winning a fight — is not only a style's power to injure. It is a psychological need to be satisfied: to conquer others with vigorous, refined skill. That is the middle way between the elegant and the brutal in fighting."

"[Traditional Chinese boxing] has mixed a great many symbolic movements and school rituals into its attack and defense. These movements have nothing to do with fighting. As training, they remain primitive and inefficient — less a way of building fighting strength than a form of prayer, austerity and patience."

There is another side to this. In China, not only combat sports but all of sport has been loaded with national feeling and national honor, meanings beyond sport itself. Combat sports are more sensitive still. Films like Ip Man and Fearless quietly teach one idea: against martial arts from the West, Chinese kung fu may win but may never lose. In Ip Man, Ip Man beats a Japanese fighter with Wing Chun; by Ip Man 3, he is up against the boxing champion Mike Tyson.

Someone once asked Zhao Daoxin: "What if our fighters lose? What do we tell the public?" His answer: "We have to dare to lose. As long as our fighters gave everything, there is nothing better than coming home beaten."

For Chinese audiences that feeling can be magnified. It brings attention, and it brings controversy. "If Chinese people don't know our programming, we need to give them a reason to watch. Wang Bin is that reason," Michelle Wilson said.

But one Wang Bin is not enough for WWE. From the end of 2015, WWE worked with a Chinese company to recruit new talent online; after resumes and one round of interviews, 35 people were picked for the WWE China Star tryout. For a week they would train under WWE's coaches, and the company would choose whoever satisfied it. WWE set no number — Michelle Wilson said anyone good enough would get in.

Will Wang Bin become the next Yao Ming, the way WWE imagines? For now it is hard to say.

First, his own technique and ring craft have to be good enough. Even in a scripted show like WWE's, wrestling that isn't good enough clearly will not convince an audience. That takes enough professional training from WWE, and it takes unusual talent from Wang himself.

WWE will probably also have to balance the national pride Wang carries with him against its own brand image.

That is the lesson Yao Ming taught the NBA. Yao was a born model student, and his image sat awkwardly against the rebellion and cool the NBA emphasizes. He did bring the NBA more viewers for a while, but after injuries forced him to retire, NBA China — already thinned of its American character — became a brand with a blurry image, built on nothing but the sport of basketball itself.

Now, driven by commercial interest, WWE has come, WBA has come, UFC has come too. They have ignored the difference between what combat sports mean in Eastern and Western contexts, and brought a flood of shows and events to China. Under that flood, the gap in how combat sports are understood does look as if it is slowly closing.

Still, for this sport to really grow in China there is a long way to go — and it all starts with building a mature system, and with sending one young man to America.