With kung fu kicks and dragon masks, pro wrestlers find new fans at fight night in China

NBC News

14 hours ago

Asia
American-style professional wrestling is gaining momentum in China, where Chinese history and music are woven into standard pro wrestling fare.

June 6, 2025, 5:16 AM EDT
By Janis Mackey Frayer
BEIJING — The music blared and the crowd whooped as Alexis Lee strutted across the stage toward the ring. At just 5 feet tall, the wispy professional wrestler was dwarfed by heftier contenders, so to make her point, she pushed a spectator over in his chair and growled through her skeleton face paint.
The crowd loved it.
'It's like the circus but with athletics,' Lee, a 30-year-old Singaporean, told NBC News. 'So it's entertaining, and live drama too. It's just fun.'
While martial arts have a deep history in China, professional wrestling — with its raucous theatrics, shiny tights and body slams — is still fighting for recognition here. But on a recent Saturday night at a live events venue in Beijing, a special six-match bout billed as the 'Battle of the Decade' showed how far pro wrestling has come and its potential in the massive Chinese entertainment market.
'People are really starting to take pro wrestling — Chinese pro wrestling — seriously,' said Adrian Gomez, the American founder of Middle Kingdom Wrestling, one of the few pro wrestling organizations in China, and the man of the night.
'I feel this is the pinnacle of 10 years of really hard work,' said Gomez, 37, whose first-ever wrestling event in 2015 failed to draw a single paying spectator.
For this event, there were all the alter egos and over-the-top moves of American-style pro wrestling that have made WWE a global brand. For the harder-to-win Chinese market, wrestlers have woven Chinese history and music into standard pro wrestling fare.
Alberto Curry, from Atlanta, is better known on the Asia pro wrestling circuit as Zombie Dragon for the leathery dragon mask with wing tips that he wears. Curry admits it took some experimentation to determine what a Chinese audience wants to see.
'Nobody reacted to being a bad guy, which is weird,' a masked Curry, 36, said in an interview. 'Then I switched it, and people immediately took to it.'
One of the obstacles to acceptance in China is that officials have appeared unsure whether to classify pro wrestling as actual fighting or entertainment, according to Ho Ho Lun, who was squaring off against Chinese wrestling legend The Slam in the evening's main event.
'For many years, there were no Chinese talents,' said Lun, 36, a former WWE wrestling star from the Chinese territory of Hong Kong. 'People used to only watch on TV until they found out, 'Oh, there's actually a place I can go and watch it for real.''
WWE tried breaking into the Chinese market back in 2016, and more recently signed a livestreaming deal with a mainland platform. The reach is limited, according to market intelligence firm S&P Global, as less than 10% of Chinese households with internet access have ever tuned in.
'The thing about wrestling is that it can be anything you want it to be,' said Gomez, who moved on a whim from Arizona to the northern Chinese city of Harbin 15 years ago to work as an English teacher.
'There weren't really any local leagues for pro wrestling,' he said. 'I think we've found a way to please and make Chinese people feel proud of the wrestling that's building up here.'
For wrestlers, it's a fully hands-on experience, from getting ready to adjusting each other's costumes to selling their own branded merchandise before and after the show. They even helped build the ring for the event.
Few felt what was at stake more than Wang Tao, who grew up in rural China and is considered a rising star among pro wrestlers. Wang rehearsed moves with his Dubai-based wrestling partner Shaheen Alshehhi and, wearing no shirt and silver streaks in his hair, quietly paced a hallway close to the ringside.
'I'm a little nervous,' he said. 'For me, this is really important.'
Throughout the night, the sold-out crowd of nearly 400 people cheered, booed, swore and laughed as wrestlers delivered kung fu kicks and body blows and even spilled out of the ring onto the floor.
Ho Ho Lun defeated The Slam to claim the championship belt, notching a victory for the pro wrestling scene here in the process.
'People are looking for new ways to entertain themselves,' wrestling fan Beck Jiang, 32, said of the Chinese market. 'This is a pretty awesome way.'
Janis Mackey Frayer
Janis Mackey Frayer is a Beijing-based correspondent for NBC News.