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

That impulse runs deep, back to the founding of the People’s Republic. In the 1950s, Mao created the country’s Soviet-style sports system with one purpose: to help China shake off its reputation — gained after a century of foreign domination — as the “weak man of Asia.”

When China earned its first world championship, in table tennis in 1959, ecstatic crowds flooded Tiananmen Square; Mao, exultant, compared the victory to a “nuclear bomb.” Years later, when China rejoined the Olympic movement, Deng Xiaoping’s “gold-medal strategy” — pouring resources into medal-rich sports — turned the quadrennial medal count into a barometer of national progress. Sure enough, China’s tally has leaped from five medals in 1988 to 51 in 2008, when it topped the United States for the first time.

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None of those medals, however, has come from basketball. Even if hoops may be China’s most popular sport, Chinese teams have fallen short at international competitions. Until 7-foot-6 Yao Ming went to the Houston Rockets in 2002, few Chinese thought they could compete in the NBA — largely because of a perceived sense of physical inferiority. This is is one reason Chinese fans took such pride in Yao: He showed that a Chinese man could stand up to (and loom over) some of the world’s biggest, toughest athletes.

Even before Yao retired this summer, the 30-year-old criticized Chinese coaches for treating basketball as a non-contact sport. The only way to succeed internationally, he said, is to play a more physical game. Could the ultra-aggressive play the Hoyas faced last week be a sign of how Chinese basketball is trying to become more American?

The brawling is a more disturbing matter. Chinese players have initiated other fights recently, including one that wounded several Brazilian players last fall. After that, Chinese players had to take sportsmanship classes and, as one sports official put it, to “deeply reflect” on their actions. A few players and coaches were suspended.

It will be intriguing to see what punishment, if any, the Rockets receive. This is not a random club, but the People’s Liberation Army team, for decades the centerpiece of the Chinese sports system. The PLA teams — called Bayi, or 8-1, for the date of the army’s founding — plucked the best young athletes from around the nation. Known for their brutal training regimens, PLA teams were so dominant in China from the 1950s through the 1980s that they were de facto national teams, and symbols of the country’s strength.

Mao’s sports system remains largely intact. But with the influx of foreign stars and commercialization in the Chinese professional league, the Bayi Rockets (the only team not allowed to field foreigners) are now just a middling squad with a reputation for pugnacious play. Even so, the players still view themselves as soldiers, the defenders of China.

One game should not derail U.S.-China ties, nor dissuade other schools from visiting China. Universities, like the NBA, have long-term interests in China’s market: They want to trumpet their brand and, perhaps, recruit the next Yao Ming.

But the days of ping-pong diplomacy are long gone, and China’s old slogan has been flipped around. It’s now competition first, friendship second.

Brook Larmer is the author of “Operation Yao Ming: The Chinese Sports Empire, American Big Business, and the Making of an NBA Superstar.”

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