The Chinese Navy’s First Sports Meet
After the founding of the People’s Republic of China on October 1, 1949, personnel were immediately drawn from the People’s Liberation Army to begin establishing the different branches of the People’s Navy, in order to meet the need to defend the country’s coast.
In the summer of 1953, the Chinese Navy held its first sports meet in Qingdao, promoting physical activity and strengthening the fitness of officers and men.
I was fortunate enough to take part. At the time, my unit was the Navy’s Third Aviation Division. It had only just been organized and was still little more than an administrative “empty shell.” We had no flight instructors, pilots, or aircraft-maintenance personnel yet because they were still studying at aviation schools. The airfield had not been completed either, and we were scattered among farm families in the surrounding countryside.
The Navy’s first sports meet carried great significance, so of course we could not be absent. We had to scrape together whoever we had from headquarters—staff, political, logistics, and medical personnel—and barely managed to assemble three teams: basketball, volleyball, and soccer, more than forty people in all. We did not enter any individual events.
The Third Naval Aviation Division had originally been the 131st Division of the Fourth Field Army. In 1950, off the mouth of the Pearl River and in cooperation with friendly forces, it had used wooden-hulled boats and small gunboats against Kuomintang steel warships of more than a thousand tons, fighting night battles, close battles, fierce battles, and bitter battles. After seventy-one days of fighting at sea, the weaker defeated the stronger and the few defeated the many. Forty-eight islands large and small around the Wanshan group were liberated, protecting the country’s southern gateway and the coastal transportation routes near Hong Kong and Macao.
Because circumstances demanded it, and under Mao Zedong’s instruction to “build a powerful People’s Navy,” the divisional headquarters of the 131st Division was ordered north to Jiaozhou Bay in Shandong at the end of 1952 and reorganized as the Third Naval Aviation Division.
Fortunately, our division’s basketball team had some reputation. It was called the “Battle Cry” team. After the liberation of Guangzhou, it had been formed from the Chen brothers, a brother-in-law, a cousin, and others from a strong Nanhai County basketball team. Later, young students newly enlisted in the various regiments joined them.
Its members included Chen Shoukang, Chen Renkang, Chen Yikang, Mai Gan, Li Xing, Yao Weiwen, Lu Zhenguo, Ye Chong, Liang Gongyi, and others.
In 1951 the team went to Guangzhou and won twelve games in a row, creating a sensation in the city’s sports and newspaper circles.
Later, the tall Chen Renkang was transferred to the Central-South Military Region basketball team and then to the army-wide “Bayi” team, which won the national championship. He was later selected for China’s national men’s basketball team. He was the only Guangdong player on the national squad.
The Navy’s first sports meet included representative teams from all branches: naval schools, preparatory schools, naval aviation schools, motor transport schools, coastal artillery, fast-boat units, the First, Second, and Third Aviation Divisions, and even shipyards whose personnel were not military.
Because the various branches had all been reorganized from army units at different times after the Communist government was established, their athletic results were not especially strong. The better performances came from the young cadets in the schools.
Still, the first sports meet really did help push physical training forward and achieved its purpose of “strengthening the body and defending national defense.” Afterward, units at regimental level and above all established a physical-training director responsible for developing sports activities.
I was on the volleyball team. The players were tall and short, fat and thin, with no consistency at all. One look and you knew we were “headquarters troops.” Because the soccer team did not have enough players, I was also stuffed into that team as a makeweight.
Our “Battle Cry” basketball team, however, was fairly well known. It was good at set-piece play and grinding out difficult possessions, and wherever it went it had been hard to stop. Before the tournament, many teams thought it had a real chance to win the championship.
But by the early 1950s, Soviet-style fast-break basketball had begun to influence China. Battle Cry’s slower set offense could no longer match the rapid attacks of the young naval-school cadets, and so it had to settle for second place.
Our athletic jerseys were printed with the characters “Air Three.” In the end, they became “Three Empty”—we came home empty-handed.
After the meet, Naval Headquarters organized the better teams to tour different places and give exhibition performances, taking sports further down into the grassroots units. From then on, athletic activity in the Navy flourished.
Baseball had not yet been promoted in China. At the Qingdao gymnasium, we saw for the first time a baseball team from the Navy’s physical-training unit practicing. The coach was a broad-built, gray-haired older man. He could not speak Mandarin and may have been an old overseas Chinese from America, but his skill astonished us.
He swung the bat with tremendous force. Sometimes the ball shot upward like a rocket; sometimes he drove it clear out of the grounds. If he said he would hit it to a certain position, that was exactly where it went. It seemed almost magical. He shouted, “Seung! Seung!”—it sounded like Taishan Cantonese—telling the players to move quickly to field the ball.
Unfortunately, baseball never became popular in China. Only decades later, after reform and opening, did baseball teams begin to appear again in the 1980s.
As for boxing, China experimented with boxing competition in 1959, then stopped it, and only gradually restored the sport in the 1980s.
Now, as we prepare to welcome the Beijing Olympics, remembering these old events fills me with endless emotion.
Chinese people—jia you! Jia you! Jia you!
*(Originally published in World Journal, June 2008; the date in the source is printed as June 21–15.)*