One Label, Three Logics: Vietnamese Martial Arts Analysis Is Using the Wrong Measuring Stick

In May 2026, at the Cau Giay gymnasium in Hanoi, I sat in the fourth row of the press section at the 31st SEA Games. On the floor, Duong Thuy Vi settled into the opening stance of the women's jianshu routine. About twelve seconds later, a foreign reporter next to me leaned over and asked: "Has she hit anyone yet?"

It took me a few seconds to understand that he was serious. The question was not illogical. It was simply framed inside a different scoring system. Duong Thuy Vi was not hitting anyone. Her arena had no opponent. What she was fighting was the degree-of-difficulty table, the amplitude of a rotational axis, the tension in an ankle on landing after a full spin. There was no one to strike, and no one to be struck by.

A month later, in the same press area, I read a colleague's draft analysing a sanda final. He applied exactly the criteria he normally used for boxing: significant strikes landed, knockout percentage, time spent in passive defence. The draft contained no wrong numbers. It used the wrong system.

The two incidents were thirty days apart, and both were filed without anyone in the newsroom asking the most basic question of all: which measuring stick are we using?

The umbrella called "martial arts"

In Vietnamese, "vo thuat" is a very wide umbrella. Beneath it, at competition level, at least three fundamentally different systems operate. They do not share a definition of victory, a method of scoring, a medal pathway, or a risk structure for the athlete.

At the performance-scoring tier we find wushu taolu, karate kata, taekwondo poomsae and the forms division of Vovinam. At the point-accumulation combat tier we find sanda, karate kumite, taekwondo kyorugi, boxing and, in its own way, judo. At the traditional-combat tier we find Vovinam sparring, pencak silat and several indigenous divisions.

These tiers have separate federations, separate judging panels, separate rulebooks and separate ranking systems. In print, they collapse into a single word. When an article states that Vietnamese sport won five martial arts medals, the reader has no way to verify it. Those five medals may come from three different athlete-production chains, three cost structures, three injury-risk profiles and three post-retirement commercial outlooks.

The deeper problem is not vocabulary. It is that the umbrella conceals the fact that the analytical framework must be selected before the analysis begins.

With these rules in mind, I want to lay out the three logics in detail, then show where the confusion produces conclusions that look rigorous and are structurally false.