Surfing Diplomacy Goes to China : California Group Tries to Take Sport to People’s Republic

Matt George felt surreal. He was riding in a surfboard-laden bus through the rice paddies of Hainan Island toward the South China Sea, with yoked oxen on the left, hogs and naked children on the right. And all around him, three Americans and their seven middle-aged Chinese hosts were all clapping and singing at the top of their lungs, “I was born . . . in the U.S.A.! Born . . . in the U.S.A.!”

It was, by all accounts, the first surfin’ safari to the People’s Republic of China. And it was “really something,” said George, 27, of Santa Barbara, a writer and former professional surfer who has just returned from the three-week, four-member expedition to introduce surfing to an eager Chinese public. “It’s not often surfers get a five-star treatment from a socialist government, you know what I mean?”

Dignified Image

But, hey, after blue jeans and Frisbees--which already have reached China--how long could it be before baggies, Beach Boys and fiberglass boards made their way to the Great Wall?

Considering the simple-minded, beach-bum image that still plagues surfing at home, George said he appreciated being able to present surfing as a dignified sport to people who had never heard of it.

The Chinese are interested in learning about surfing, along with all popular foreign sports, to improve their competitive standing and to promote cultural understanding, said Liu Haiming, first secretary in the cultural office of the Embassy of the People’s Republic of China in Washington.

Surfing might also further China’s plans to modernize and develop the tropical Hainan Island as a tourist area, he said.

Perhaps the local people might also take up the sport, but that would take “a long, long time,” he said. “They don’t have the leisure as Californians to develop it as a popular pastime.”

The tour was the idea of editors at the San Juan Capistrano-based Surfer magazine as part of their “Endless Summer” tradition of searching the world for the perfect wave, editor Paul Holmes said. Surfer magazine, with a monthly international circulation of 120,000, has sent surfers to scores of exotic beaches around the world including the Seychelles, Morocco, Tasmania, Sri Lanka and even the Great Lakes of the United States.

China posed a new frontier. “There’s a lot of coastline (in China). Those who read ‘Typhoon’ know there’s a famous, wild, radical stretch of ocean during typhoon season,” Holmes said, referring to a 400-mile area between Ningbo and Wenzhou.

The surfers spent three days teaching surfing to children, ages 8 to 15, and a few adults from a farming village at Spring Bay on rural Hainan Island, in tropical waters off the coast of North Vietnam between the Gulf of Tonkin and the South China Sea.

“Their concentration never wavered,” George said. “There wasn’t one who didn’t stand up and ride a wave on the first try. They embraced it as a beautiful dance form, the same as a martial art.”

The Chinese translation for surfer is “he who dances upon the water,” George said.

However, there was no way to get across the Southern California surfer mystique of sand in the toes, salt in the hair, string bikini surfer life style. “It would be complete nonsense to them,” George said.

The tour’s other members--sponsored by surfer product companies--were professional surfers Willy Morris of Woodland Hills and Jon Damm and Rell Sunn from Hawaii. Sunn, 36, is half Chinese and has been surfing since she was 4 years old.

The Chinese kept asking her why she has spent so much of her life surfing, Sunn said. “I’d say that’s our life style; we go looking for surf and adventure around the world. They said, ‘How charming.’ ” But they wondered why anyone would even bother to think about exotic adventures, she said.

Research Conditions

In addition to promoting international friendship, their mission was to research surf conditions for the Chinese to see whether they could develop a surfing team to compete in amateur championships every two years, said Holmes, a native of Newquay, England, where the world surf championships were held this year. (The next will be in Puerto Rico in 1988.)

“They’re keen to become involved in as many Western sports as possible. Surfing is one,” Holmes said. “If they’re going to get into the sport, they want to make sure they’ll do it real good. Otherwise, they’ll leave it alone.”

Holmes started to plan the China tour two years ago, he said. His first overtures about a surfing expedition were made to the Chinese consulate in San Francisco. They were met with polite but vague responses, he said.

While he was getting nowhere, he received a call from Bob Roos, president of an international nonprofit consulting firm, Delta Institute, with offices in Los Angeles and Tiburon. Roos, 48, had been thinking of a “surfing diplomacy” trip. He had visited China and said his government hosts were interested in promoting surfing.

With Roos’ connections having paved the way, tour plans were settled in a last-minute flurry of Telexes in September, Holmes said. Tour members were told they would be allowed to surf and explore only at Hainan Island. They would be accompanied by two Chinese journalists, two translators and three officials from the Chinese Yachting Assn., the branch of the All China Sports Assn. that controls windsurfing in China, Holmes said.

“They received the red carpet treatment, no pun intended,” he said.

The surfers were “wined and dined,” proudly served Coke, snake and duck’s feet, George said. (“I thought, my God, I’m eating Donald Duck.”) And wherever they carried their surfboards, such as to the Great Wall, they were surrounded by crushes of the curious.

“We couldn’t communicate,” he said. “We explained through hand motions, but there were a lot of misconceptions. They thought surfboards were hang gliders. One kid thought it was an airplane wing.”

They found the surf disappointing at Hainan Island--about the size of four-foot waves on the eastern seaboard of the United States, George said. “It’s not a mecca of surfing, but other countries have developed great surfers without having the surf of Hawaii, South Africa or California. Sweden had a world championship team. We had a U.S. champion from New York,” he said.

Realistic Date

A more realistic date for a competitive Chinese surfing team might be 1990, he said. “I told them the potential exists,” George said. “They were very happy.”

The most interesting talks took place at the island hotel, a cinder-block dormitory atop a huge, boulder-filled hill, the size of Griffith Park, George said. In long evening conversations, surrounded by jungle and gardens, amid the buzzing of insects and bird sounds, their official guides asked the following questions and George said he gave these answers:

- What sort of fears does one experience surfing?

“Fear is an important reason we do it in the first place. It’s a lonely fear. If you get in trouble in the ocean, you’re all on your own.”

- Why? What’s the thrill, the main motivation?

“For a young man, or anyone, to paddle out into an environment where man does not belong, and not master it, but work with it in harmony is an experience that brings you extremely close to nature and something much bigger than yourself.”

- Is it expensive?

“No.”

- Why is money so important to American athletes?

“I don’t know whether I lied,” George said, “but I told them no, money is never behind an athlete. Maybe the people who handle the athlete, but not the athlete.”

- Is surfing open to anyone that can do it?

“Yes. it is open to anyone who wants to try.”

As mementoes, the surfers left rock ‘n’ roll cassettes with lyrics carefully written out, sweat shirts with the logo of the Surfer-China Exchange (a Chinese flag, an American flag with surfer in the middle) and their surfboards.

“I have a feeling I’ll see hundreds the next time I go back,” George said.

George said the group is already planning on a return visit to explore the Hong Kong-Macao coastline in a different season. Meanwhile, the Chinese will undertake a comprehensive, meteorological report on Hainan Island to see how consistently the waves break there.

And they might be learning some more appropriate songs. Just as the surfers were leaving, a China Friendship Tour, sponsored by United Airlines and the China Amusement and Leisure Co., was flying in Jan and Dean, the 1960s rock ‘n’ roll singers, for a four-city China tour to sing their old hits, “Tell Laura I Love Her,” “Little Old Lady from Pasadena” and “Surf City.”