Based on Master Cheng Tin Hung’s Practical Self-Defense Secret Manual, surviving a sudden conflict requires strict adherence to specific psychological principles and tactical rules:
Maintaining Your Mental State
- Establish Righteous Confidence: The manual advises that when a conflict arises, you must first ask yourself if reason and justice are on your side. Quoting the ancient proverb, “With justice on your side, one is bold” (理直氣壯), the text explains that knowing you are in the right provides the unyielding spirit and psychological anchor needed to sustain you through a fight.
- Absolute Calmness (鎮定): You must force yourself to remain calm. Panic is your greatest enemy; only through absolute calmness can you maintain the clear, alert, and resourceful mind necessary to process the chaotic environment of a street fight.
Securing a Tactical Advantage
- Control the Engagement Distance: Never allow an aggressor to get too close during the initial confrontation. You must maintain a safe, calculated distance to ensure you are not caught off guard by a sudden, unexpected strike.
- Draw a 10-Inch Psychological Defense Line: To avoid being distracted or intimidated by an attacker’s wild feints (fake moves), you should draw an imaginary “defense line” about 10 inches in front of your body. As long as the enemy’s hands or feet stay outside this boundary, let them waste their energy on flashy feints. However, the exact moment their strike breaches this 10-inch line, you must decisively intercept and counter.
- Advance Bravely, Never Retreat Blindly: Once the physical altercation begins, you must move forward courageously. The manual strictly warns against showing fear or making meaningless, panicky retreating steps. Backing away mindlessly only encourages the attacker’s aggression and severely increases the physical pressure on you.
- Accurate, Ruthless, and Heavy Strikes: When you counter-attack, your strikes must meet three criteria to ensure your safety and victory:
- Accurate (看得準): Ensures you hit the target and do not exhaust your energy on missed punches.
- Ruthless (打得狠): Overwhelms the opponent so they have absolutely no chance to launch a counter-attack.
- Heavy (出拳重): Breaks through their physical resistance.
- Conserve Energy through Yielding: Do not let the shock of the encounter cause you to exhaust all your stamina in one breathless burst. Instead, actively use Tai Chi’s “borrowing force” methods to yield to the enemy’s brute strength. By not resisting their power head-on, you preserve your own energy for the decisive finishing strikes.
Based on the provided records, Master Cheng Tin Hung engaged in numerous historical challenge matches and private bouts to prove the practical combat effectiveness of his Tai Chi system against various other martial arts styles.
Here are some of his most notable historical challenge matches and encounters:
The 1957 Taiwan Championship Match This is perhaps his most famous documented bout. At age 27, Cheng represented Hong Kong in the Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau Martial Arts Tournament. He was matched against Yu Wen-tong, a 25-year-old, three-time middleweight champion from Taiwan who had a significant weight advantage.
- Yu attacked aggressively with Shaolin boxing, but Cheng stayed calm, using Tai Chi techniques like “Step Back and Repulse Monkey” to evade and counter with “Face-Covering Punches,” bloodying Yu’s nose.
- When Yu tried to grapple, Cheng used Tai Chi throws to repeatedly take him down.
- In the second round, an enraged Yu resorted to severe fouls, choking Cheng and poking him in the eyes. Despite bleeding from his eyes and facing a much larger opponent, Cheng maintained his Tai Chi principles (“if the opponent doesn’t move, I don’t move; if the opponent moves, I move first”) and ultimately knocked Yu to the ground, winning a massive, bloody victory that earned him the nickname “The Red-Clothed General”.
Challenges at the South China Athletic Association (SCAA)
- Defeating Lu Hui-lin: A large man who claimed to have learned from famous Tai Chi masters Yang Chengfu and Wu Jianquan came to the SCAA to challenge the instructors. After Lu tied with another instructor, Cheng stepped up. Using the moving-step push hands technique “Gathering Waves” (採浪), Cheng effortlessly uprooted the much larger man and violently pushed him into a wall and onto a pile of straw mats, forcing Lu to retreat.
- Defeating Master Wang: A Zi Men Quan (字門拳) instructor came to the SCAA and defeated Cheng’s uncle (Cheng Wing Kwong) in push hands. Seeing his uncle lose, Cheng challenged Wang. Cheng quickly pushed Wang into a wall. When an angered Wang tried to strangle Cheng’s neck, Cheng fluidly trapped his waist and threw him to the floor using “White Crane Spreads its Wings”.
- The Bloody Match with Zhu Jin-rong: A hard-style martial arts instructor named Zhu challenged Cheng to a public fight at the SCAA. Before the match, Zhu intimidated the crowd by demonstrating his hard Qi Gong—breaking thick bundles of chopsticks and a thick pine branch with his bare hands. When the fight began, Zhu attacked fiercely, but Cheng used evasive footwork to get to Zhu’s blind side (the “empty” angle) and unleashed a rapid barrage of punches to his head. Zhu was left heavily bleeding from his face and chest, and the match was stopped in Cheng’s favor.
Defending Tai Chi Practitioners
- The Botanical Gardens Encounter: An aggressive young martial artist was practicing hard-style forms in the park and intentionally throwing flying kicks near an elderly Tai Chi practitioner’s face to harass him. The next day, Cheng went to the park, intentionally provoked the young man, and defeated him in just two or three moves, warning him never to harass the elderly man again.
- The Match at Braemar Hill: After the famous 1951 charity fight between Tai Chi master Wu Gong-yi and White Crane master Chen Ke-fu ended in a lackluster draw, Cheng privately commented that he could have fought much better. Word spread, and a man named Li Yao-wu challenged Cheng. They met at a reservoir on Braemar Hill. Cheng simply sent his student (Liu Zhen-qiu) to fight Li first. Liu severely beat Li, bloodying his nose and knocking out two of his teeth, which prompted Li’s entire group to forfeit the rest of the challenges.
- The Foreign Journalists: When the boxing world champion Joe Louis visited Hong Kong, a rival martial arts master claimed a punch from Louis would kill Cheng’s uncle. Shortly after, a group of foreign journalists (including writers from the Herald Tribune and Voice of America) visited and asked to test the system’s Tai Chi internal power. Cheng Tin Hung stood completely relaxed while the foreigners took turns violently punching him in the stomach. Not only was Cheng completely unhurt, but his internal power naturally rebounded their strikes, leaving the journalists deeply amazed.
- The Western Boxing and Judo Champion: In 1957, a Hong Kong champion in both Western boxing and Judo (Mr. Wei) wanted to test Tai Chi’s effectiveness. They met in a private gym. After just three brief physical exchanges, Wei was completely convinced of Cheng’s superior martial skill and treated him to a respectful dinner.
Master Cheng’s willingness to accept full-contact challenges proved that his Tai Chi was an highly dominant art against any fighter.
