Kai Asakura, Xiong Jing Nan and the UFC's import problem

A week before UFC Shanghai I wrote here about the promotion's champion import problem: the habit of signing a fighter who holds a belt somewhere else, selling them as a champion, and then discovering that a title in ONE or RIZIN does not convert into a UFC ranking at anything like the exchange rate the marketing implies.

Two of those imports fought on Friday. One of them knocked a man out in 34 seconds. The other was knocked out in the first round and is now 0-2. That is a useful night, because it is the whole argument compressed into a single card.

Kai Asakura, two years and four fights in

Photo: ホタテマン0010 / CC BY 4.0

Kai Asakura arrived from RIZIN as a bantamweight champion and one of the biggest names in Japanese MMA, and the UFC gave him a flyweight title shot against Alexandre Pantoja in his debut in December 2024. He was submitted in the second round. Eight months later Tim Elliott submitted him in the second round as well. At that point the import looked like exactly the thing my earlier piece was complaining about: a promotion buying a name, monetizing it immediately at the top of a division, and then having nothing left to sell once the name lost twice.

Then he knocked out Cameron Smotherman in the first round in May, and on Friday he knocked out Aoriqileng at 34 seconds of round two. He was a -463 favorite for that one, which is the market finally treating him as a fighter rather than a curiosity. Two knockouts in a row does not undo two submission losses, but it does establish something the first two fights obscured: the striking that made him a draw in Japan works fine in this cage. The grappling is the leak, and both of his losses came from a man getting hold of him.

The counterfactual is what stings. If the UFC had brought Asakura in against a Smotherman-level opponent and built him for a year, he would be 4-0 right now with two knockouts and a genuinely marketable Japanese contender at 32. Instead he is 2-2 with a title-shot loss on his record and has to rebuild toward a position he was handed on day one.

Xiong Jing Nan, 0-2 and 38 years old

Xiong Jing Nan is the harder case. She held the ONE strawweight title from 2018 and put together a long run of wins there, including a five-round unanimous decision over Angela Lee in October 2022, a third-round stoppage of Nat Jaroonsak in 2023 and a decision over Meng Bo in March 2025. That is not a paper belt. It is one of the most established championship runs in women's MMA outside the UFC.

She has now lost both of her UFC fights. Angela Hill took a unanimous decision from her in May, which is a respectable result against a long-serving UFC strawweight. On Friday she was knocked out by Julia Polastri at 3:06 of the first round, as a +183 underdog, on the prelims, at 38 years old.

The betting line is the part I keep coming back to. A reigning world champion from another promotion was priced as a nearly two-to-one underdog against an unranked fighter with eight UFC appearances, and the market was right. That is not an insult to Xiong. It is a measurement, and it says the market had already worked out what the promotion's own matchmaking was still testing.

The pattern is not that imports are bad

It would be easy to write this as "outside champions cannot hack it," and that would be wrong. Denise Gomes, who knocked out the fourth-ranked strawweight in the same building on the same night, came up through the UFC. So did Song Yadong, who has been on the roster since 2017 and has now beaten Deiveson Figueiredo and Umar Nurmagomedov back to back at 28.

The pattern is about the runway. The UFC keeps signing established champions and then spending their novelty immediately, because a debut against a contender sells better than a debut against a gatekeeper. Asakura got a title shot in his first fight. Xiong got Angela Hill, a ranked-adjacent veteran of the division, in hers. Neither of them was given the thing every fighter the UFC develops in-house gets as a matter of course, which is a couple of winnable fights to adjust to the cage, the officiating, the weight cut schedule and the drug testing program.

Asakura survived that treatment and is now clawing back. Xiong is 0-2 at 38, and there is no obvious version of the next two years where she recovers the standing she had when she signed.

What to watch next

Both of these careers are now genuinely open questions rather than marketing exercises, which is more interesting than where they started. Asakura is 2-2 with back-to-back knockouts and no ranking; the useful test is whether the UFC gives him a ranked bantamweight or another Smotherman. Xiong is 0-2 and the useful question is whether she gets a third fight at all.

The full Shanghai card and every result sits on the event page, and both fighters' complete multi-promotion timelines, RIZIN and ONE fights included, are on their Asakura and Xiong pages.

The UFC signed both of these fighters to prove its expansion into Asia had championship weight behind it. It got one knockout artist it nearly wasted and one champion it may have signed three years too late.