First of all, what constitutes street fighting? Are we talking about someone who fights with western boxing punches and tackles you. Gouges your eyes and will bite too? Or just someone who goes adreneline crazy and starts swinging wildly?
How do we define Gong fu (Kung fu, Gung fu)? As stated earlier, gong fu is the time aquired skill at something. If your fighting skill is excellent, then they say your gong fu is good.
In relation to Chinese martial arts, we’re literally talking about thousands of styles. External styles, internal styles, northern, southern. Not to mention Shuai Jiao.
So how a Chinese schooled martial artist deals with an attack depends on the style he has studied. Whether he is successful against an attack depends on whether his gong fu is good.
Now, people debate whether Chinese martial arts are practical, because at times they seem “flowery” and out of step with reality. Like when someone sees a Tai Chi form and wonders how in the hell you’re gonna beat someone with that.
Well, it’s my opinion that “real” Chinese martial arts are pretty hard to find anywhere in the world, including China and Taiwan. But the real deal is out there. Often you see people training in the States who have no idea about the application of what they practice. Often they confuse the training method for application. This is common with forms. They are not just a cataloged sequence of seamingly useless techniques. Form training is necessary for developing movement, coordination, rootedness, fluidity. They are a basic building block. Can you get this stuff without forms? Sure, but form training is a classically proven method for developing these skills.
Chinese gong fu is mostly poorly understood, poorly taught, and poorly practiced around the world. It is not theoretical, unproven stuff, but rather, with most styles, a complex art that is not mastered in a short time. It wasn’t designed to be mastered in a short time. In the old days, people trained from childhood many, many hours. Martial arts was in most cases a livelyhood. Practicioners were in the military, private security, and teachers to the emperor’s family. It was serious stuff then. Most people don’t even practice a fraction of what was done in the old days.
So when you have guys who don’t really understand the art, who are not masters of the art, trying to teach it as a quick self defense and fighting art, you’re screwed. No wonder people have low opinion of Chinese martial arts. And anyone can pass themselves off as a master these days too. Who really challenges that?
The mixed martial arts of today are more easily understood in concept than a lot of the Chinese stuff. It’s easier to perfect, because it is easier to understand. Now I’m not saying that it’s easy trainng, but rather it’s easier to work hard and apply effort to something that is pretty straight forward. If you teach someone the basic western boxing punches, it’s not that difficult to understand the mechanics involved. So you can more readily apply time and sweat to making those punches harder and faster. Whereas with some Chinese skills, it isn’t within ones natural understanding how things work. So before you can train it, you gotta understand it. Some people just never make it past understanding hurdle, so they practice incorrectly. This is most common in the internal martial arts styles.
MMA is more practical stuff if you want to have someone ready to fight in a relatively short amount of time. It’s that simple.
Given the same amount of training time a MMA artist will probably cream most CMA artists. But that doesn’t mean that CMA is inferior, it just means that correct training and a longer training (and learning curve) are involved.
And wasn’t it Sun Tzu who whote “The Art of War”? If he gets to call it an art, so do I!:mad: 
