A basketball game between Georgetown University and Chinaâ??s Bayi Rockets ended in a bench-clearing brawl last week. The altercation began with a cheap-shot foul by a Chinese player and ended with his teammates trying to bash Hoyas over the head with chairs. Itâ??s a fitting metaphor for the looming showdown between China and America: Beijing wants to beat us on the world stage and is willing to break every rule in the book to win.
Sporting events frequently serve as fields of battle to hash out wider, more serious conflicts. Joe Louis pummeling Max Schmeling in the ring in 1938 was seen as a knockout punch against Nazi racialist theories, just as the U.S. hockey teamâ??s 1980 victory over the Soviet Union foreshadowed our eventual drubbing of communism. Itâ??s in that light that the Georgetown-Bayi fight should be viewed. There is an escalating strategic faceoff between the United States and the People's Republic of China (PRC) in which every small match-up between the two nations is indicative of the larger competition. Who wins the Olympics or a new trade deal is seen to have implications regarding which culture or system is superior. The Cold War wasnâ??t merely an arms race between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. but addressed more existential issues of what is better: capitalism or socialism, democracy or totalitarianism, freedom or tyranny. These same principles are being tested today.
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