Brendan Gallagher: Are China ready to rush through the open door?

Will Rugby ever crack China or indeed vice versa? I ask that question again in light of the rather startling announcement in midweek of a huge new sponsorship aimed to fire up and develop rugby in the most populous nation on the planet.
Alisports – the Sports Division of the massive Alibaba group – has pledged a minimum of $100m investment in the Chinese game over the next ten years. It aims to establish national men’s and women’s leagues and to help make both Sevens programmes more competitive along with the national fifteens. They also aim to attract over a million new players of the game in the next five years and to target the nation’s thousands of Universities rather than the militia which was the traditional thinking on growing rugby in China.
Working with World Rugby there will be a drive to recruit and train up to 30,000 coaches and 15,000 match officials by 2020. Extraordinary stufff and if the project achieves just 25 per cent ofits stated aims it will be a game changer in every sense. This could be massive. Or will it all fizzle out like the first Chinese Rugby Revolution?
It’s 20 years ago now that I found myself, smuggled into China as a Level 3 coach with the Hong Kong Rugby Union, accompanying the irrepressible George Simpkin on a trail blazing first ever coaching visit to the massive PLA training base in Guangzhou. Rugby was to be introduced there both as a recreation for raw Red Army conscripts and the crack Special Operations Battalion that was based in Guangzhou.
Alas for my peace of mind at the first banquet which greeted our arrival George, who had been on the wagon for a few years, felt obliged to start sinking a few excellent Tsingtao beers in order not to lose face with the Red Army top brass who were imbibers of absolutely heroic proportions.
At the end of a long noisy evening George rose unsteadily to his feet and announced that I was actually a ‘world renowned journalist’ – no seriously, they were his precise words – who was here to write a story on China’s first ever rugby players. Soon they would be famous. One final toast please gentlemen to the Red Army pioneers and the British press. Ganbei!
Just for a minute I prayed the translator would stay silent but as he relayed George’s message a deathly silence descended on the dining table followed by much heated debate and angry gesturing among the ashen faced top brass. There were venomous stares and aggressive finger jabbing in my direction before their leader – the all-powerful camp commander and a man seemingly bent double by sheer weight of medals – addressed George via the interpreter.
“This is a most unfortunate start to such an important visit,” stated the man who held all our fates in his hands. “Most irregular, but after consideration and only after his own unprecedented personal intervention and clemency, Mr Gallagher could remain. But I was to be accompanied at all times by a special operations officer during my visit and that was to include standing guard outside my hotel room at night.
And so it passed. My smiling and courteous guard Sgt Liu scarcely left my side for the rest of my trip but it does seem that overnight, following our banquet, the worldwide Chinese military machine and information gathering service went to work and decided that I was indeed a bone fide sports journalist – of sorts – and of no possible consequence in the greater scheme of things. How right they were on that score.
A much chastened George had also been frantically trying to explain that it was his little joke, not easy via the translator who possessed all the joie de vie of an Easter Island statue.
Anyway, to my surprise I was still allowed into the vast barracks – I seem to remember they had three Olympic sized swimming pools or something daft – and with Sgt Liu occasionally distracted by George inviting him to try his hand at spin passes or some such I even managed to fire off a few shots with my reliable Canon Sure Shot Supreme, the finest idiot proof camera ever produced.
The Sure Shot was predictably confiscated at Customs as I exited the country although happily, a used film I had absentmindedly placed in the pocket of a dirty tracksuit top escaped detection by China’s finest security operatives.
All the action took place on a meticulously marked out full-sized pitch with a flaky white wall behind one set of posts that was potmarked with a splattering of bullet holes. The site of executions for those found wanting politically and socially both in the Army and among the local populous
The 100 or so guinea pigs on show demonstrated huge enthusiasm for this strange game of ours, as well you might given the close proximity of said wall. There were some great athletes on view ranging from international quality gymnasts – who would casually throw in three or four somersaults as they waited on the touchline or walk around on their hands – to short muscular martial arts types with 4 per cent body fat and bulging veins like strips of spaghetti protruding from their muscles.
There were one or two beefy forwards but not as many as I had expected. The Commander, patrolling the touchline with eagle-eyed intent one afternoon, assured me there were much bigger men in the Regiments up North, close to the Mongolian border, and there were many areas in China – Shanghai for example – that produced tall men.
That is true enough, a few years later the 7ft 6in Yao Ming was to take the NBA by storm but in truth none of these exceptional athletic types ever seemed to make their way into the Chinese Rugby teams that have spluttered ineffectively over the last 20 years.
For a while China was the story, I even recall being drafted in by the legend that is commentator Keith Quinn as some kind of spurious ‘expert’ for China’s first ever international in Singapore but the truth is Chinese Rugby  never took off as all concerned had hoped and expected. I can’t claim to know the reasons but can make an educated guess.
Timing was an issue. If rugby had enjoyed Olympic status in 1996 there is a chance that the Chinese Army and Government would have made more strident efforts to establish the game rather than just toy with it.
Second, the soldiers came from all over a vast diverse country and, after being demobbed, there was zero chance of them returning to a rugby environment. The rural areas were too poor, the urban sprawls too chaotic. If the Army lost interest, there was no rugby outlet.
And finally, to these eyes, the Chinese didn’t take to the game emotionally although they seemed to get the ‘drinking’ well enough. And perhaps they never will which is why I find the current initiative so intriguing. As a famous Chinese proverb proclaims: “Teachers may open the door but you must enter the room by yourself”.
The thing about rugby is that for all its emphasis on exceptional teamwork, common purpose, shared suffering and the inflicting, legally, of physical pain on the opposition it is also big on independent thought, initiative, leadership, cleverly avoiding contact and injury, illogical hope against the odds and occasionally cussed rebellion.
If rugby is to succeed in China it will, in my opinion, offer up strong evidence that China itself is changing radically. It will mean that an independently minded class – with time, money and resources to hand –  is emerging who are attracted by the game itself and don’t play because the man in uniform orders it. I will happily drink to that. Ganbei!