In the news and on the record, reactions to the Georgetown University men's basketball team's brawl in China has been disgust and disappointment.
It was an ugly scene. Even if the Bayi Rockets, a Chinese professional team Georgetown was playing as part of a "goodwill" tour, baited the Hoyas into a fight, the images captured on video exhibit distasteful conduct.
In casual conversation and in the gym locker room, the reaction is a little different. It's surprise. It's bemusement. It goes, in short, like this: "The Chinese can punch?"
That's right. Who'd have thunk that when two people go toe-to-toe, they fight, even if one happens to be Chinese?
The sentiment is summed up perfectly in a column by Chad Pergram of Fox News. Pergram recounts a scene from Enter the Dragon — because we all know the Chinese watch Bruce Lee movies for fighting tips — and connects the fight to an incident the day before, when U.S. reporters were harrassed by Chinese security while covering Vice President Joe Biden's visit to the country.
Pergram adds this: "These two episodes, only hours apart, are demonstrative of an evolving, more muscular China. A China that's no longer deferential to the west. One that's more aggressive. One that could be more willing to enter into geopolitical fisticuffs rather than 'fighting without fighting.'"
For a minute, overlook the fact that we're arguing about what a fight between basketball players says about geopolitics and sociology. Pergram and those who are surprised a Chinese man would throw a punch are working off the stereotype that the Chinese are docile, hard-working and deferential. China has become a world power not through armed conflict, Pergram points out, but through its economy. Fighting is not in China's nature, is it?
Pergram is an award-winning Capitol Hill reporter, so let's assume he knows but merely forgot that in the middle of the 20th century, China did a whole lot of fighting. China even fought the U.S. to a stalemate (at worst) in a little thing called the Korean War. If anything, the Georgetown-Rockets brawl reinforces everything China has ever stood for in conflict with the West: China might not be able to compete on a neutral field, but when you're on China's turf, China wins.
The Beijing brouhaha didn't happen because China feels it has more clout in the world. Reports indicate it happened because the Rockets taunted Georgetown coach John Thompson III and the Hoyas, bullying them until the Georgetown side felt no choice but to fight back.
The fight doesn't signal that the Chinese attitude is evolving, because that attitude is a mirage based on prejudices. It signals that when someone is pushed, he'll push back. That's the way things go on basketball courts everywhere, from Dorchester to New York to L.A., and apparently in Beijing, too.
Do you think the Georgetown-Bayi Rockets brawl had political undertones?
