From ping-pong diplomacy to basket-brawl: What the Chinese-Georgetown fight reveals

In Beijing

Forty years ago, when China was still closed off to most of the world, Chairman Mao Zedong invited a group of American table-tennis players to participate in a week of friendly exhibition matches around the country. Insular and impoverished, the People’s Republic was just emerging from the most chaotic years of the Cultural Revolution. Although he was largely responsible for creating this predicament, Mao saw that sports could help gently pull China out of its isolation.

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Ping-pong diplomacy, as it was dubbed, paved the way for President Richard Nixon’s trip to China in 1972 — and for the thaw in relations between the two countries. In those days, the Chinese plastered sporting exhibitions with red banners bearing the slogan: “Friendship First, Competition Second.”

No such banners were hanging from the rafters at Beijing’s Olympic basketball stadium on Thursday night, when the Georgetown Hoyas tipped off against the Bayi Rockets, the Chinese army team. It was supposed to be a goodwill game, a diplomatic give-and-go. The Hoyas’ tour, timed to coincide with a visit by Vice President Biden, was meant to be a sporting diversion to the tensions between the world’s biggest economies. A State Department official had even urged the Hoyas to see themselves as cultural ambassadors, heirs to the ping-pong diplomats. Nobody would blame the college players for believing at the opening tip that the evening would end much like the prior evening’s game: with hugs and warm feelings of cross-cultural camaraderie for their Chinese counterparts.

So how did it go so wrong, with the exhibition degenerating into all-out hostility early in the fourth quarter — sparking a bench-clearing, chair-heaving, game-ending brawl? (Biden, who had watched the less eventful game the night before, missed the melee; he was at a banquet held by his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping.) Blame has been heaped on the lopsided officiating (the Rockets had 57 free-throw attempts to the Hoyas’ 15); hair-trigger violence (who was that guy in khaki shorts stomping on guard Jason Clark?); and nonexistent security (how were fans allowed to throw bottles at the departing Hoyas?).

Beyond those initial questions, however, is a more compelling one: Does this game — hyped as the “Great Brawl of China” — have any significance beyond the court? Sports and politics can be a volatile mix: Consider the stadium riots that led to the 1969 “Soccer War” between Honduras and El Salvador or the tit-for-tat Olympic boycotts between the United States and the Soviet Union. The Hoyas’ game hardly measures up. It was just an exhibition; nobody was seriously hurt; several Rockets players visited the Hoyas’ hotel on Friday in an attempt to smooth things over.

Yet, even as we should resist the temptation to consider this fight a grand metaphor for an emerging superpower seeking to supplant an established one, the incident does shed light on China and its changing place in the world.

For China, international sporting events are rarely just games; “face” is almost always at stake, even when the purpose is ostensibly diplomatic. The 2008 Beijing Olympics were portrayed not just as another Games, but as incontrovertible proof, for all to see, that China had arrived as a world power.