The NBA as a model

Guan is responsible for martial arts marketing with the Foshan Sports Bureau. These days, he's busy drawing up an ambitious plan for free-boxing matches in the city.

Inspired by the National Basketball Association in the United States, Nanhai Sports Federation has set up World Kungfu Club League, an association for professional free-boxing players, and is joining with other companies to roll out free-boxing contests. It aims to hold one to two international matches every year, and local ones every week or month.

In the 2009 Sino-Thai Boxing Competitions, matches between China and Thailand held in Foshan, 80 to 90 percent of some 9,000 tickets were sold and 150 million people watched the contest through different media, Guan said.

That's a worthwhile try in commercialized sports and kungfu, he said. "We will let companies invest in the matches, and try commercial operations through ticket sales, advertising and television broadcasting."

Guan said the first thing to do is to grow the market, by advertising heavily and by offering kungfu training courses to develop interest. "It may take five to 10 years to make kungfu into an industry," he said.

Foshan also plans to open its first martial arts school, invested by Sin Kwok-lam, producer of one of the Yip Man movies, among others. It hopes to enroll about 300 students in September, said Yang Zhenfu, director of the Foshan Sports Bureau. Foshan hopes to learn from the city of Dengfeng, where Shaolin Temple is located. Numerous martial arts schools there teach Shaolin kungfu.

"Capital wants to go to martial arts, but it's still not known what the best way is," Yang said. He said that a lack of talent with commercial operations is one of the biggest obstacles to Foshan's developing its martial arts culture into an industry.

"But after a successful example is set," he said, "I think capital will follow."