JIAXING (AFP) – In a half-covered amphitheatre in eastern China, 20-year-old Wang Shuangshuang locked his shoulder against the neck of a bull, grappling with its horns to force it to its knees.
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Chinese bull-wrestling, or “guanniu”, dates back over 600 years but remains a little-known sport domestically, let alone internationally.
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Students like Wang sporadically sign up for competitions, but a lack of funding and exposure means few adopt it as a full-time career, leaving it facing an existential struggle.
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“Our heritage right now is neither dead nor alive,” 72-year-old master Han Haihua told AFP in Jiaxing, a city just south of Shanghai.
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“To bring in talent, you need money… I’m not bragging – give me 30 or 50 kids, train them here for three years, and I’ll make the whole world know about guanniu.”
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Guanniu was brought to Jiaxing by Hui Muslim migrants, and evolved from a herding skill into a folk competition.
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Unlike Spanish bullfighting, Chinese wrestlers use no weapons and do not kill the animal at the end of the bout.
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Instead, they seize the bull’s horns and try to bring it to the ground, and win extra points if they can jump onto its back or crawl underneath its belly.
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According to Han, in the early 2000s guanniu got a boost from Xi Jinping, then the provincial party secretary, who pushed for traditions like bull wrestling to be officially listed as “intangible cultural heritage”.
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These days, an annual competition run by Han’s martial arts school is held at the “China Bullfighting Hall” amphitheatre, its nameplate inscribed by martial arts novelist Jin Yong.
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Nine university students entered the preliminaries this year, wrestling bulls weighing hundreds of kilograms and sporting hard, stubby horns.
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“You have to go with its flow, shift your shoulders constantly to follow its resistance, lock its neck, and then throw it down,” Wang said.
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“Strength and technique, neither can be missing.”
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‘Hot-blooded’
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Fellow competitor Xu Zhiqian, also 20, said he enjoyed testing his strength against nature.
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“I think this sport is very youthful, very hot-blooded,” he said.
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Both Wang and Xu brought their bulls to the ground in the competition final, watched by a few hundred people.
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A bull wrestler grapples with a bull at an arena in Jiaxing, China’s Zhejiang province._x000D_
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But Xu said he planned to work in his field of study, and while Wang said he was “considering” pursuing guanniu, he was far from certain.
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Thirty-year-old Li Bo is a rare example of someone who made a career of it.
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He joined Han’s martial arts school as a teenager, drawn by his love of kung fu films.
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Han now considers him China’s finest guanniu practitioner, but Li is troubled by the lack of others following in his footsteps.
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“Nobody wants to do this full-time. That makes our inheritance extremely difficult,” Li said.
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To keep afloat, the school stages performances at tourist sites and runs a halal steamed-bun shop.
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Li has also reached out to media outlets, sold souvenirs, organised regular tournaments and adapted guanniu’s history for stage shows in an effort to boost its profile.
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– ‘Committed’ –
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Master Han remembers the sport’s heyday.
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He still recalls the exact date in 1982 when he performed guanniu at a national ethnic-minority sports meet, and a senior government official called it “a true Chinese-style bullfight”.
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In the decades that followed, the sport appeared in films and on television, but that prominence has faded.
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While Spanish bullfighting has long been a target of animal rights activists, no such public controversy has emerged around guanniu in China.
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Trainers perform during the 15th China Bullfighting championship at an arena in Jiaxing, China’s Zhejiang province._x000D_
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After it was inscribed as intangible cultural heritage, the government provided free venues, allocated annual subsidies to support regular competitions, and attracted sponsorship.
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Yet Han stressed such support is still far from enough to foster a professional sport.
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“Our cattle breeding and training spaces are all temporary facilities inside the martial arts school,” Li explained.
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When AFP visited this month, the bulls were being kept in the bathrooms of a nearby residential building for the duration of the competition.
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Despite the odds, Han remained defiant.
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“I am committed to keeping this tradition alive,” he told AFP.
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“I will raise money or borrow money myself to keep it running.”