Chinese bar fights

Or restaurant fights, as it more often is.

Last night I went to dinner with a friend, quite late, after catching a film show. Well, quite 'late' for China. While there are plenty of restaurants that will stay open till the wee small hours of the morning (especially the grotty-but-cheap ones that I tend to prefer), a lot of restaurants try to start closing up around 9pm. My companion and I arrived nearer to 10 than 9, but there were still a few tables occupied with Chinese diners, so they were being forced to stay open a little later than they'd like. The table in the centre of the restaurant, nearest the door, held two young Chinese couples. They'd finished eating, but the two lads were now getting into a serious beer session.

This spelled TROUBLE. Well, potentially. I assessed the situation: they didn't seem to be too far gone as yet, and we would be able to sit quite a way away from them. I judged it was safe to sit down. However, if they carried on drinking like this, things were likely to get ugly. We would have to be watchful.

Sure enough, ugly they soon got. The tables in this restaurant were topped by thick plates of glass - a rather pointless piece of design, it seems to me, and one that is inviting disaster. The lads were beginning to rap their glasses or their beer bottles louder and louder on these glass table-tops as they toasted each other ('toasting' in China is actually more about goading someone to take another chug, rather than truly expressing noble sentiments and good wishes). And it was making such an unholy racket, it just didn't seem possible that the table-top hadn't broken yet. The staff assembled in a semicircle, watching anxiously but unwilling to intervene. I began to wonder if the table was made of safety glass; I became curious about it, began gingerly rapping on my own table-top to see how it resonated.

And then.... of course, inevitably, the CRASH. Now, unfortunately I had my back to the scene at this point; and my companion had also failed to notice exactly what transpired.

What we found when we turned to look was that these two buffoons had somehow managed to break the table next door to them (which, mercifully, had been deserted). The culprit had beer all over his face, and a big cut just above his left eye. The base of a large Tsingtao beer bottle was lying amid the remains of the adjacent table. Other shards of emerald-green glass from the shattered bottle were distributed all over the restaurant floor - including one piece under our table, which was a good 15ft away. The passivity of the rest of this idiot's group seemed to argue against the possibility that his friend had flung a beer bottle at him (oh, believe me, I've seen it happen). My first thought was that he must have just tossed an empty, or nearly empty bottle over his shoulder after drinking. Ah, the bleeding forehead? Well, perhaps he'd tried to chuck the bottle over his shoulder and acccidentally got in the way (oh, believe me, I've seen it happen). Ah, but then how had he managed to spill so much beer, most of it over his head? I eventually concluded that the likeliest answer was that he had (whether on a sudden wild impulse to show off or goaded into it by his friends) broken a full, and perhaps unopened, beer bottle over his temple.

Unbelievable.

But this sort of lunacy happens around here all the time.

In China, I rarely see the sort of 'ugliness' which is rife in the UK on a Friday or a Saturday night, with drunken thugs, singly or in groups, staggering around city centres looking to pick fights with people (as a tall person, I need to be particularly wary about this, since belligerent short-arses often deem me a suitable opportunity to try to disprove their inadequacies). But there are huge numbers of smaller-scale fights here, which often turn very ugly indeed - and can sometimes embroil, and injure, innocent bystanders, if only by accident (last night's flying bottle fragments being a salutary warning).

There seem to be a number of interlinked factors behind this phenomenon. First, most Chinese are lightweights at drinking; many of them lack, or are seriously impaired in, their ability to metabolise alcohol (it's a common genetic deficit in much of East Asia, I gather), so they get drunk very quickly. In fact, they get ill very quickly. But this physiological weakness does not seem to deter most of them. On the contrary, it only seems to make them drink even more stupidly. I theorise that Chinese drinking culture (which is based on rapid toasting and counter-toasting, the dreaded battlecry of gan bei being a challenge to empty your glass in one) is conditioned by the desperate imperative to get drunk before you throw up. As with almost every other culture in the world, getting drunk is seen as a sign of manly toughness; but the Chinese - mostly - find it very hard to get drunk, because alcohol makes them sick so damn quickly; and so they have no choice but to drink very, very fast.

You put this very rapid drinking (and comparative inexperience with being drunk, because no-one is able to get drunk very often, or to savour the experience for very long) together with the rather competitive/aggressive streak in the Chinese character, and with their over-developed sensitivity to social status and 'face', and you get..... fights between friends. Quite often over the bill (Chinese culture being that the person who pays the bill has the most 'face', and thus paying can be a fiercely contested-for 'honour'). Honestly, I've hardly ever seen a fight between strangers in China; it's almost always between people who were sitting down eating or drinking together as the best of buddies.

There's also a deep well of anger in many Chinese people. That's a complicated and perhaps contentious point. I wouldn't like to speculate too much on where it comes from - although various sources of high stress are easy enough to identify (low incomes, high levels of environmental pollution, traditional values which are still very restrictive, bewilderingly rapid social change, enormous pressures to 'succeed' in an increasingly materialistic culture, etc. - and perhaps, at least amongst those older than 35 or so, the lingering psychological impact of traumas suffered in their childhoods under Mao). And that's an aggression that exists within the context of a culture that generally emphasises extreme restraint, the avoidance of strong outward displays of emotion. The result seems to be that modern-day Chinese have just about no gradation of response. They are like VOLCANOES: seemingly dormant and harmless, yet apt to explode at a moment's notice. Really - they can go from mildly pissed off to bat-shit crazy in a matter of seconds.

And you really have to watch out for it, because when they start throwing bottles and chairs around..... they're not that accurate.