Fan Violence Rears Its Angry Head at Chinese Soccer Match

For some Europeans, it’s a way of life. But the phenomenon is new in China: professional sports teams and fans affluent enough to follow them from city to city.

Last weekend, the Chinese encountered another phenomenon familiar to Europeans: fan violence.

In a five-hour rampage Saturday, 10,000 furious soccer fans rioted in the streets of the former imperial capital, Xian, according to official media. The fans smashed police cars and stoned vehicles from the opposing team’s home province of Sichuan.

The fans were about to attack local government offices when riot police routed them with tear gas and water cannons. At least 10 fans were injured in the melee, and police detained eight rioters, according to media reports and witness accounts.

The fracas appears to be the most serious such event since the “May 19 Soccer Incident” of 1985, when Chinese fans burned cars and injured police after the national team’s loss to Hong Kong in the early games of the 1986 World Cup.

Still, soccer matches remain among the few occasions in Chinese public life during which open displays of rowdiness and spontaneity--within limits--are tolerated. Chinese officials are generally nervous about mass gatherings, and even when they pick the participants and orchestrate the events, security is tight.

In general, sports in China are laden with political and nationalist overtones. The state’s sports machine grooms many of the country’s top athletes to reap medals and glory for China in international competition.

Not surprisingly, many fans share an intense frustration that China, a major nation in other respects, is incapable of fielding a first-rate soccer team capable of getting into, at the very least, the World Cup quarterfinals. Some fans rank this humiliation on a par with, say, their navy’s lack of an aircraft carrier.

Chinese soccer matches are also a stage for regional rivalries. To the dismay of officials, fans can often be heard on television broadcasts hollering obscenities in their local dialect at the opposing team.

To China’s leaders, irate soccer fans are just another disgruntled interest group contributing to the sporadic outbursts of unrest across the country.

In recent days, according to human rights groups, thousands of farmers in drought-stricken Shandong province have rioted over access to water. Workers fearing layoffs in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province, have surrounded their army-run factory, and in Jilin province in the northeast, riot police recently beat laid-off schoolteachers as they were about to travel to Beijing to protest.

Saturday’s violence in Xian began when fans dissatisfied with several of the referees’ calls in the 1-1 draw between the Shaanxi National Power team and the Chengdu Five Oxen team began pelting police and officials with water bottles and other debris.

“This incident’s nature is serious and its influence is pernicious,” the China Soccer Assn.’s Discipline Committee declared in its official verdict on the riot. The association fined the Shaanxi National Power soccer club more than $12,000--a huge amount by Chinese standards--and banned it from hosting further matches in Xian, Shaanxi province’s capital, for the remainder of this year’s season.

As a result, the team will have to either hold its games outside Xian or withdraw from the soccer association’s second division. The China Soccer newspaper said the club stands to lose more than $120,000 per game in ticket and advertising sales because of the ban.

Some of the Shaanxi team’s supporters expressed dissatisfaction at the verdict.

“I think it’s unfair that our club should have to bear all the responsibility for things that happened outside the stadium and were due to mishandling by the police,” a Shaanxi club employee in charge of relations with fans said in a telephone interview.

“Our fans showed the utmost restraint. Not one window was broken in the stadium. All that was smashed was police cars. I think that’s very indicative of where the problem lay,” said the employee, who asked that only his surname, Li, be used, because “many police are involved in this case.”