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Sports Day in Northern China
Reviewing from the stands with Major Generals from the Red Army
By Gene Ayers

I would have planned the day rather differently–not worn faded jeans and a crew shirt, for example—had I known I would be having a formal lunch and downing gambes at a brand new upscale hotel with the party bosses, one of the provincial secretaries, half the university directorate, and at least one general of the Red Army. But that’s how things tended to go, those heady first few weeks in northern China, where I’d recently arrived to teach English at one of the ten or so universities of Harbin, capital city of Heilongjiang Province, a population of 9.5 million people in the northeastern corner of The People’s Republic of China, strategically situated midway between Mongolia, Siberia, and North Korea, in what was once known as Manchuria, cradles of the Jin and Qing dynasties.

Setting the Scene
Yesterday the air had cleared out, leaving the smell of brewer’s yeast from an excellent local brewery (Harbin Beer, which brewery has now been bought by Anheuser Busch) in its wake. A new season had rolled in overnight, as abruptly as a set change at an opera. All I knew about today was that I might or might or not have class, this being Sports Day at my university, the Harbin University of Commerce. It was also the day after a major Chinese national holiday known as Mid-Harvest Festival, during which people celebrate what rural Americans call the Harvest Moon—the first full moon of autumn—by giving each other boxfuls of a quaint pastry called, appropriately enough, Moon Cakes. Each Moon Cake contained something representative of the harvest, and typically, the filling of each cake in a box would be different. I recognized apples, and pears, dates, nuts, seeds, and other semi-sweet things I knew not of, again typical of the day-to-day Manchurian fare to which I was rapidly becoming accustomed (although such Western “food” items as bacon and eggs and Kentucky Fried Chicken are lamentably readily available on demand here). Sugar, blessedly, is given minimal use in China. Instead, people eat lots of fruit—raw, cooked, processed, whatever— which in part helps explain the marked lack of obesity in this huge nation. With famines long a thing of the past, these people are still slim, trim, and fit. Which leads me to the matter of Sports Day, about to begin.

The North Campus covered about two square miles, and the northern-most half, where my classes were held, had not existed as recently as nine months earlier. Now there was a brand new oval stadium for events such as today’s, a huge glass-and-steel indoor sports complex with two swimming pools, tennis courts, and other courts du jour, and the aforementioned hotel for visiting dignitaries, all of whom were apparently present today, and one of whom, so it seemed, was supposed to be me.

Upon arrival at the main classroom building I was swiftly and unexpectedly commandeered to join a group of faculty and administrators, including HUC’s dynamic and charismatic 44-year old president, Qu Zhen Tao, the man who had dared to hire an American to run his new Foreign Language College. I was hurriedly escorted into in the still-unfinished stadium to sit at the reviewing stand along with a passel of Communist Party leaders, other university leaders, and a bunch of Major Generals of the Red Army (!). Here, prior to the commencement of the sporting events themselves, we were to review the freshman class, which had just completed six weeks of compulsory military training ten hours a day, their equivalent of the National Guard and ROTC combined. The notion of anyone ditching this operation a la Bush is laughable. These kids, male and female in equal numbers, were in formation, in uniform (fatigues), and going through drills that would scare the shit out of any neo-con. And they were just regular students, not real military at all (I’d hate to meet those guys). The deal here is they do this training for potential service, then get a free university education: not a bad deal, I suppose, although not on my preferred list of options. I mean, who would these people be afraid of, exactly? I was looking at an entire soccer field packed with a solid brigade of soldiers, and this was just the freshman class of one of 500 Chinese universities, not even the real Red Army at all (though you could’ve fooled me). They did about two hours of marching, speeches, high stepping, and saluting, all in perfect formation, while I sat with all these brass—having been introduced to the crowd of 30,000 or so students and faculty as an “important American visitor and guest”—wondering, among a thousand other things, what my Quaker friends and ancestors would have made of this. At least, I thought, these kids didn’t carry guns.

Weapons, actually, were in little evidence anywhere in the China I had seen since my arrival. This was in sharp contrast to the U.S., where even my own small regional airport in Asheville, N.C. was bristling with military personnel and automatic weapons the day I flew out. The police presence in China reminds me of Spain post Franco. Basically they are low profile, very much less evident than the cops in the U.S. (similar vehicles, except smaller, and painted blue and white with blue and white lights on top). There are not many around, and they carry small side arms as in the States. There is no NRA in China, of course, so the citizens are not armed either, nor are arms permitted.

The dark side of all this, I suppose, is that the real weapons are all in the countryside, which is where the real Red Army is, and where Mao came from, to purge the cities of intellectuals during the Cultural Revolution. The Maoists hated and feared the intelligentsia, and I can see the same thing happening in the U.S., where the military is also predominantly from the less educated provinces, with a built-in and growing bias against the urban educated “elite” (i.e., the Blue States).

Another troubling observation is that just as China is throwing its doors wide open to the West and welcoming Americans like myself to import our culture and knowledge (I am being given absolute freedom to teach whatever and however I want, as long as it is in English and is about American ideas and culture) the U.S. is slamming its doors shut to everyone else. The Bush Administration is treating China like a potential enemy instead of as a potential friend, so the Chinese are being prohibited from getting visas or entering the U.S. for any reason at present. Way to cultivate friends, neo-cons! The way they did in the Middle East back in the eighties.

On to the sports
The first sports events were in track, appropriate given that China’s Liu Xiang set an Olympic record in Athens, winning the 110-meter high hurdles, the first Asian ever to win a major sprinting event. China finished second only to the U.S. in gold medals this summer, and the prevailing attitude here is “so what,” hinting at greater glory to come. I watched several heats of sprints, and the runners were strong, athletic, and fast. I could see some of them holding their own on an American football field. Next came high jumps, which were problematic. Maybe it was the cold, but nobody seemed to want to jump that high on this day. One thing became increasingly apparent: while China has roughly 500 universities, intercollegiate sports do not exist here as such. What I was witnessing, despite all the Super Bowl pageantry, amounted to little more than inter-mural sports! Ironically, in this one-time land of mass conformity, individual performance was the order of the day. No team sports were evident at all on Sports Day, not even Olympic-style teams such as gymnastics or volleyball. On the other hand, teamwork here abounded. Amazing teamwork was taking place all around me, and had certainly been displayed by the precision troop movements I’d just seen, but only by the military and the freshmen. Chairman Mao once said that every man, woman, and child in China was a soldier. Maybe so. But in sharp contrast to the U.S., every kid in China is not yet a player.

I was just getting into the swing of things down on the track when I was commandeered to attend luncheon with all the officials and administrators. Red Army regulars and the officers’ corps, along with some faculty, party bosses, and other city, province, and university dignitaries, occupied the private dining room. Food was set out on a large lazy susan on each table, together with several large bottles of the aforementioned Harbin Beer, which many beer connoisseurs consider the best beer in the world, and some deadly local rice wine (about 70 proof). And so the “gambays” began: led, not surprisingly, by the military contingent. I found myself being introduced to, toasting, and toasted by half the Red Army and Communist Party of Northern China, or so it seemed. I suppose this could be considered a sporting event itself, along the lines of “last man standing.”

China may still be second to the U.S. in the sports department. But not for long. A talent pool of 1.2 billion no-longer starving people is nothing to ignore. Just ask Yao Ming. Or all those Olympic stars. Better yet, come to Beijing four years from now and see for yourselves. America’s profoundly corrupt and hypocritical Congress passed a resolution last March condemning China’s bid for the 2008 Olympics based on human rights violations. Yes, they do exist here, although on a far smaller scale than in, say, the U.S., which has 25% of the entire world’s prison population, many of whom are being held for minor drug offenses while corporate criminals rule the halls of Congress with impunity. This resolution has generated a certain degree of incredulity as well as indignation here in China. After all, I am asked, why does America, which has backed and upheld more dictators than anyone in history, presume such moral superiority over anyone?
Maybe we should just concentrate on our track and field and jump shots. We’re going to need them.

E.C. Ayres is an award-winning novelist, columnist, editor, and film and television producer. He has worked as a sceenwriter for PBS, ABC, Time-Life television and Universal Pictures. E.C. has authored four mystery novels and won the Private Eye Writers Association’s Best First Novel competition for Hour of the Manatee. He is presently teaching English at the Foreign Language College in Harbin, Heilongjiang Province, China, and is working on a book about the extraordinary changes taking place in that country, The New Chinese: Cheeseburgers, Cell Phones, and MP3s. Photos, Gene Ayres.