Vietnamese Martial Arts in 2026: Forms, the Arena, and the Missing Rulebook

Late one afternoon in the closing days of 2026, on the training ground of a martial arts club in Hai Phong, judges sat in two rows of plastic chairs, scorecards in hand. Before them, two fighters performed the same short form. The first kept the rhythm, stood firm in his stance, moved in smooth circles. The second broke the rhythm, stepped half a pace back, then turned the direction into a strike. The scores were written down, but by the closed-door meeting after the session, one thing still hung in the air: what exactly were they scoring — the beauty of the movement, or the effectiveness of the strike?

The scene was repeated everywhere, not just on one training ground. As 2026 began, with the national martial arts movement gaining room to breathe, that question became existential for an entire tradition.

Two years after Doi Moi, Vietnamese sporting life was slowly recovering. Martial arts classes opened across many provinces and cities; students ranged from schoolchildren to people past thirty. Behind the movement ran two currents, side by side and yet very different.

One current was traditional martial arts. There, forms, stances and techniques were handed down from generation to generation as a piece of cultural capital. A form was judged on difficulty, precision and spirit — what the eye can see.

The other current was sparring. There, victory was decided in minutes, by the number of clean strikes or a single knockout. What the eye sees is the result.

The two currents met increasingly on the same floor. But they were measured by two different rulers, and sometimes by two different value systems. Watching many sparring sessions, I noted one small story: master Nguyen Duc Thang ran a class in a northern province, and his student, fighter Do Thanh Tung, won a title at home, then travelled to a neighbouring province and was ruled out in the first round — because the local rules did not allow strikes to the zone Do Thanh Tung was trained to target.

The deepest bottleneck was the rules. Almost every class used its own in-house code: some allowed strikes to the face, some allowed only touches, some scored by number of strikes, others by how far an opponent retreated. When the measuring stick differs, victory and defeat no longer reflect skill — only the place where a fighter was raised. A fighter competing away from home was almost entering a different discipline.

Behind the rules lay the story of the fighters themselves. Most classes relied on word-of-mouth experience rather than a properly built physical curriculum — endurance, strength, flexibility. Weight management and weight classes were rudimentary; a fighter several kilograms heavier could still share a bracket with a lighter opponent. Injuries were common, but there were few people tracking them and no clearly defined recovery periods.

Above all stood the question of organization. Who licenses a class, who scores a bout, who ranks fighters? In many places the answer was "no one" — or "the class owner decides." No body with enough authority stood up to referee the whole movement.

The result was a long-running paradox. The movement was large in numbers but thin in comparative depth. Two strong fighters from two different provinces had almost no shared arena to prove who was better — and no way for both to improve through competition. Talent that is never placed on the scale will sooner or later dissolve into thin air.

The easiest explanation, still often heard, is that our martial arts are weak for lack of talent. I think that framing gets it backwards. What was missing was a mechanism turning good people into a measuring stick for the whole movement, not the number of good people. However gifted a fighter might be, with no rule to compare him by, his talent leaves nothing behind for those who come after.

Another way of looking must also be avoided: reducing everything to tradition or to modernity. Tradition is not bad, and sparring is not naturally better. The problem was that the two currents were placed together on one floor without a common ruler. A martial arts bout is like a book: the ordinary reader reads the ending, while the insider reads the footnotes — and in Vietnam in 2026, those footnotes were almost blank.

So the first task was not to recruit more people, but to sit down and write a minimal rulebook: on weight and weight classes, on time and scoring, and on how referees may intervene. With rules, fighters have an arena; with an arena, tradition gets a chance to measure itself and know where it stands. Thirty years on, people may ask: where did the largest gap in Vietnamese martial arts begin? And the answer, quite possibly, lies in an afternoon in 2026 — when we kept score without having defined what we were scoring.