Once again, the UFC planned to reboot their return to the middle kingdom.
Once again, those plans have fallen through.
Multiple sources informed MMA Ecosystem that the UFC planned to host a UFC Fight Night event in Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China at the end of August. The event would have taken place alongside the Road to UFC semifinals.
However, the promotion will no longer host an event in China this summer and will move the location of the UFC Fight Night event planned for the end of August to the United States. The Road to UFC semifinals are still planned for August 23rd, at a TBA location.
Hangzhou would have been a prime location for a UFC event, should it have worked out. The city of thirteen million hosted the 2022 Asian Games, and because of that, contains a newly-built sports complex. Included in that sports park is an 18,000-seat basketball arena, the Hangzhou Sports Park Gymnasium.
This isn’t the first UFC in China to fall through in the past year. Last December, an event was announced by the UFC for the Shanghai Indoor Stadium. However, issues securing all the proper clearance would see the event moved to Las Vegas with weeks to go.
The UFC is still yet to complete their in-arena comeback to China since the pandemic. The last event in China was a UFC Fight Night on August 31st, 2019, in Shenzhen, Guangdong province.