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There’s no Ch-I-na in Team

A recent Asia Times article had a rather interesting take on the Olympic Games. Besides ranking countries by gold medals per capita (with China and the United States ranking 33rd and 47th respectively, and Jamaica a stunning 1st), it points out that while China is now the new Olympic powerhouse, China has an extremely inactive population. I’d like to expand on that.

Chinese education typically does not involve sports education. There are no high school or collegiate sports like in the United States, and organized sports take a distant second to extra math or English classes. The closest approximation is the 军训 (junxun), or military training, that many students undergo several times in their career—the lucky ones only once when they enter university, the unlucky ones when they enter middle and high school as well. Junxun is a two-week to one-month long phenomenon in China that occurs at the beginning of the school year, where students put on camo, practice wheeling in formation, and climb up and down mountains. They are sometimes even given the opportunity to fire a gun. Other than that, there is no real organized sports program for them to participate in.

The Asia Times article, however, misses a few details. It would be incorrect to think that the Chinese are fat and inactive. A simple walk through the park will assure you that outdoor activities are popular with the old and young alike. I find myself consistently amazed by how active the older generation are—one of the favorite activities among the middle-aged is to kick around a feathered shuttlecock in a game that greatly resembles hacky-sack. Many of them look like pros, juggling the shuttlecock with their feet, knees, and elbows. I’ve seen badminton being played in the most unlikely of places, not just parks and street corners, but even inside a museum. Weekends will see places like the Fragrant Hills, a popular mountain outside Beijing, crowded with people out for leisurely hikes.

What the public sector fails to provide, the private sector is making up for. A decade ago, the idea of paying money to go lift heavy things and run was preposterous to most Chinese. Nowadays, private gyms are opening everywhere. Memberships go for as little as $100 for a year’s membership; others, like Bally’s Total Fitness, can cost ten times that. Come 7PM, these places are packed with people frantically exercising, to the point where not a single aerobic machine is available and there’s not a single spot to lay out a yoga mat.

China has its fair share of people who do slight amounts of exercise on a semi-regular basis. And, as we can see from the Olympics, it has world-class athletes. What it lacks, however, is that core of people in-between: semi-professionals and dedicated amateurs. The Chinese athletic system focuses on selecting children when they are young and training them up—the Western ideal is more of self-selection, the people who have the talent and the drive rise naturally to the top. The Western ideal tends to produce more of a bell curve—a number of fairly decent athletes, with a few high-scoring athletes and a few pudgy couch potatoes. The Chinese system produces a large number of high-scoring athletes, but very few casual enthusiasts. It could be argued that for overall balance of fitness in a population, the Western model has its advantages.

I see few obese people in China. Standards for body-norms here are much stricter than in the West—girls who would be considered slim in the West are thought of as “average” or “a little fat.” I do, however, see an increasingly number of obese children.

The lack of sports facilities and organized sports has a deeper impact on society, a much more invidious impact: Chinese do not learn how to be team players. Chinese people do not play a lot of team sports that involve cooperation. Even basketball tends to be ad hoc pickup games where teamwork is more of a byproduct than anything else. Sports are a unique way of learning more about one’s own strengths and weaknesses and, more importantly, how those strengths and weaknesses fit into an overall team structure, where one person’s strength can balance out another’s weakness. Chinese education has no real room for this kind of learning, both in their education system (which is highly competitive rather than cooperative) and in their sports activities (mostly solitary or one-on-one).

Now, it may be difficult to draw a broader thesis of Chinese society as lacking social teamwork norms; and even more difficult to link that back to lack of organized sports. I would like, however, for all of us to take a step back and think on our childhood and the games we played. The word “team” for us has special meanings and connotations that come from sports. English is a language filled with sports metaphors. While we may not explicitly remember life lessons we’ve learned from sports, they most certainly exist. Sports are about a group of people working together to accomplish a larger goal, without being explicitly ordered to do so. Even watching a local community sports team in action is a marvelous example of a heterogeneous group mind in action—we see group decision making, fluid reactions to change, and spontaneous pockets of cooperation emerging out of what should rightfully be chaos. It’s beautiful to see because all of this happens during the game without anyone stopping to discuss it.

Anyone who has worked in a Chinese company will have noticed that the Chinese business model is anything but what we’ve just described. Everything is centrally directed and centrally run, with each person assigned their own piece of the puzzle. Rarely do they have a good understanding of how their part of the puzzle fits into the overall scheme, what Marx called alienation. Managers give explicit instructions to employees, who carry them out as ordered. While this may sound like American bureaucracy, most American companies allow a certain amount flexibility. This hive mind that works towards a common goal is a feature of the most successful and innovative companies that we see out there—Gore-tex, Google, etc. It is not typically a feature of a Chinese company.

A greater investment into sports in China would have payoffs beyond simply the health of its citizens. It would foster a greater atmosphere of community and cooperation, friendliness instead of competition, and a greater camaraderie between strangers. In the wake of these once-in-a-lifetime Olympic Games, it is difficult to predict how things will change. But it is certain that China’s athletics program will have to be altered in order to fit better into this post-Olympian world that China now inhabits.

© 2008 The Hypermodern.