Taiwan's martial arts

[brianlkennedy]

[Chris H]

Yeah, it would seem that a lot of white crane made its way to Taiwan. Some of the best white crane I've seen was out of Taiwan.

What I've always appreciated about Taiwan is that a lot of folks focused on fighting, and the kuoshu events were basically born from the Taiwan CMA community. Hong Kong and the mainland never really caught on to this, and this is why there is such a divide in CMA right now, because nobody really made a good venue to test skills.

[prayingmantis888]

One odd thing I have noticed here is that there are far more tournaments and exhibitions than are generally known. I have gotten invited to watch several of them, but the strange thing is that they are very clannish in who they invite to attend. There will be a tournament with smaller schools all over the island, but none of the larger schools or famous teachers knew about them.
In other countries there is publicity and mass invitation. Here, groups of schools will throw an exhibition in an out of the way hall with very limited attendance. ANyone can come, but no one knows about it.
For me, it really skews my view of how many people are practicing what. Like you said in a previous post, northern and Japanese/Korean styles get tons of press, but I was surprised at the number of people doing styles Taiwanese styles and systems that aren't extant outside of the island anymore.