Kung fu in Chinese means any hard-won skill, not only kicks
English speakers say kung fu or wushu for Chinese martial arts; Mandarin and Cantonese loanwords carry different home meanings. Kung fu (gōngfu) is any skill earned by work; wushu literally means martial art. Quánfǎ, “fist method,” is another native label for boxing systems.
The many fighting styles developed in China are grouped into families by shared traits, such as the Five Animals exercises of Shaolinquan or training inspired by old philosophies and legends. Internal styles centre on cultivating qi, external ones on muscle and cardiovascular fitness, and a common geographic split separates northern from southern boxing. The Chinese phrase for the whole field is Zhongguo wushu. The characters for quánfǎ are the same ones used for the Japanese art kempō.
Wushu is also the name of a modern sport developed in the People's Republic since 1949, with bare-handed and weapon routines judged on aesthetic criteria for points, and the state has run martial arts as exhibition and full-contact sport since the 1950s. Much of what is known about older schools comes from the Nanjing decade, 1928 to 1937, when the Kuomintang's Central Guoshu Institute tried to survey them encyclopedically.
Practical origins lay in self-defence, hunting and soldiering, since ancient troops trained in both empty-hand and weapon combat. Legend pushes the story back past the semi-mythical Xia dynasty, crediting the Yellow Emperor, said to have taken power in 2698 BC, with the first fighting systems and treatises; his rival Chi You is named as the originator of jiao di, forerunner of Chinese wrestling.
The Spring and Autumn Annals of the fifth century BC mention a combat theory mixing hard and soft techniques, and the Classic of Rites describes jiǎolì, a wrestling system with strikes, throws, joint locks and pressure-point attacks. Jiao di became a sport under the Qin, and by the Former Han records separated shǒubó, no-holds-barred unarmed fighting with its own manuals, from sporting wrestling; Sima Qian's Records of the Grand Historian also describes wrestling.
Source: Chinese martial arts
