All-embracing school of combat

A unified national wushu system aims to create a clear path into the future for the varied traditional Chinese martial arts, Sun Xiaochen reports.

The attraction of wushu's extensive and profound cultural roots in various martial arts schools has long fascinated the world, while presenting challenges to promoting it internationally due to the lack of unified standards and teaching methods.

To simplify wushu training, the State Wushu Administrative Center recently issued a 10-year plan (2014-23) to promote the Chinese Wushu Duanwei System, a hierarchical system created in 2011 that evaluates practitioners' qualifications, combat skills, theoretical knowledge and martial ethics with standardized assessment criteria and teaching materials.