Street Fighter: Harbin Edition

China's a vast country, but only a relatively small percentage of that is readily habitable. With 1.3 billion people crowding limited space, it's perhaps not surprising, then, that tempers sometimes flare up.

Despite (or perhaps due to) inventing martial arts, shouting matches in the street rarely turn to violence. Before I describe today's events, a quick word in this country's defense. I can't say enough how much safer I've felt in Shanghai and Harbin than I do back in London.

Before this week, I've only ever seen one fight in well over two years in China, even in the drunkest or poorest districts in both cities. That 'fight' if it can be described as such, occurred outside Pegasus Club in Shanghai, and involved some impressive Thai-boxing knees to the body and side of the head but quickly fizzled out.

Noone I've met in this country, from the most clueless ex-pat, to the smallest defenseless colleague, has ever had a problem with getting home to or from either city centre in the small hours.

It's by no means because China is some sort of Communist Utopia though. My guess is that it's due to a combination of a justice system best described as 'draconian', economic conditions which make 'the chav' a totally alien concept, and cultural and societal expectations which make Friday-night fighting on the high street (not that there are 'high streets' here) something completely unacceptable.

On the other hand, the concept of 'face' permeates every aspect of Chinese culture, including public disputes, and I've seen my fair share of slanging matches. For example, in case of a car accident, 'face' dictates that apologising constitutes an admission of guilt, so the natural reaction is to attack the other person as at fault, or if that's not possible, pretend nothing happened.

On my usual way route back home, I came across a crowd of perhaps two hundred spectators, crowding a vegetable stall in a rough circle, and comprehensively blocking traffic, going both ways on the intersection.

Intrepid wannabe photo-journalist that I am, I whipped out my camera and jostled my way to the front. A group of five or six men in their late-twenties and above were having a heated argument with a young Pony-Tailed Woman and an Older Man in Overalls perhaps in his sixties.

P-TW and OMiO looked like they were the owners of this vegetable stall - not much more than a little wooden box, wheels parked on a few bricks.

As the argument continued, I noticed with a start all the broken glass covering the ground - the stall's windows had all been smashed. I circled around for a closer look, and noticed a neighbouring stall had also been comprehensively battered. Maybe there'd been a car accident, and the argument was over compensation?

By now, both sides were yelling at their top of their voices. Annoyingly, the crowd was chatting away animatedly and I couldn't get close enough to figure out the finer points of the debate. Suddenly, a white pickup truck pulled up, parting the crowd, and the gang started grabbing polystyrene crates of vegetables from the stall and hefting them into the back. P-TW and OMiO were none too pleased and things got physical as they tried to wrestle back their merchandise.

Suddenly, with a chill, I noticed that some of the gang were brandishing poles, evidently taken from the neighbouring wrecked stall. They'd smashed the windows, not some out-of-control car!

The two factions continued to jostle and shove. The polystyrene crates weren't built for this kind of abuse and cabbages spilt out from the broken boxes and into the street as we all continued to watch impassively.

Suddenly, one of the gang felt he'd escalate things a bit. He jumped up onto a table, recently vacated of its wares, and launched a flying stomp into OMiO's face. OMiO staggered back, face a spider's web of crimson, but stayed on his feet. My mind raced: "Nice kick - definitely some 散打 training", "This is one really tough old man", "How can you do that to a sixty year-old?" and "I guess it's harder to knock people out than the movies say".

The crowd's chatter increased in pitch and tempo. I looked around for the cops, and noticed we were standing right outside the local police station.

"How about some help here?" I climbed the stairs and looked through the window. Not a soul in sight. Well, they're either out here trying to help, or they're at lunch. I scanned the massed audience. Sure enough, I spied a police cap at the back of the crowd, and headed over to see what he was up to.

It was one of the guys that had been so unhelpful in letting me register my residence. He was chomping away on some melon seeds, smiling and chatting away. Useless!

Suddenly I heard the distinctive tinkle of glass smashing, and pushed my way back through to the front of the crowd again to have a look. A man in his twenties was using a metal bar to smash at the remaining jagged remnants of window in the battered vegetable stall. Not for the humble vegetable seller Kite-marked safety glass - this stuff came down in big splinters which hit the ground and shot out in spray after spray of white shards.

The gang had cleared off while I'd been trying to locate the police, and P-TW was tending to OMiO's crushed nose. The new guy appeared to be an ally of P-TW and OMiO, and was trying to clean things up a bit. Action over, the crowd started to disperse, and I caught excited snippets of punditry as they went.

Some post-fight punditry:
1) At first, I thought that there'd been a car accident. The flying kick and the brandishing of metal poles put paid to that idea.
2) Enxi suggested that the stall-owners owed money. She related a similar story from her time back in Jilin, where her neighbours had had their flat turned over because of an unpaid debt. The police had sat back and watched on that occasion too, unwilling to get involved in a 'private' dispute.
3) I suggested that the police were themselves involved. Maybe OMiO hadn't paid his protection money, or didn't have the correct license, and the powers-that-be had called on some goons to sort them out.
4) Meisong had a different slant on the story. The goons were local mafia, and the cops didn't get involved because the gangs owned the police!

Whatever the reason, it was a sobering and surprisingly violent episode, that served as a reminder to be careful, despite how reassuringly safe this city feels normally.