Which Part of China Produces the Toughest Fighters? | Elephant Guild

Why do Northeasterners top nearly every ranking of China's best fighters? If "fighting strength" is real, what does it depend on? And which part of China really deserves to be called a "fighting nation"?

Of all the memes that mock China's regions, the most widely shared is the ranking of which region fights best. The versions differ, but their conclusions agree to a striking degree: fighting strength falls steadily from north to south. Northeasterners sit at the top of the food chain and Shanghainese at the very bottom. Some versions, very politically correct, also add Taiwan, whose people score below zero.

This may be the one regional stereotype Chinese people agree on most easily. It even slips quietly into mainstream culture such as the Spring Festival Gala. But if China's regions really do differ in fighting strength, does this ranking hold up?

Does Liking a Fight Make You a Good Fighter?

Nearly every one of these memes judges a region by how quickly a quarrel turns into a fistfight. The faster people come to blows, the higher the score; the slower, the lower. Shanghainese score zero because their quarrels almost never get past words.

This plainly mistakes a lack of manners and upbringing for fighting strength.

By that measure, the Russians, known as a "fighting nation," would rank below the Shanghainese on China's leaderboard. They rarely get into a shouting match over some small thing the way Shanghainese do, and when something annoys them in the street, they are usually no less mild than people from Taiwan or Hong Kong.

So these memes swap one idea for another. The script the internet loves to exaggerate — "What are you staring at?" "Staring at you, so what?" "I'll flatten you..." — would, even if true, show only that Northeasterners like to fight. It says nothing about whether they fight well.

That Shanghainese avoid throwing punches does not make them weak fighters. It means only that they, more than anyone, prefer not to settle disputes with their fists. Shanghai and the Wu-speaking region around it are, as a whole, the mildest-mannered part of China, and their mild image has even been stretched to cover all southerners.

The reason may be simple. For centuries the Wu-speaking region was China's richest and best-educated. A deep tradition of Confucian propriety and a well-developed commercial culture both strongly discourage bravado and brawling, and both teach people to look for a third party to judge a dispute, even if that just means winning over the bystanders.

A street quarrel in Shanghai is a contest of who can make the more reasonable case, not who can swear harder. Shanghainese can argue for two hours without once straying onto the other side's ancestors or the women in his family — a skill at which Northeasterners used to be rather accomplished.

Places where traditional society runs deeper also tend to have a stronger culture of honor than places shaped by commerce. In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell describes how the American South holds to a stronger code of honor than the North, and how Southerners are quicker to feel insulted and to take offense. The internet's exaggerated picture of the hot-tempered Northeasterner fits the American Southerner just as well.

Shanghainese have another reason to shun physical fights. Shanghai was China's first modern city and has long been its most densely populated. Today it is also the city whose government is the most capable and efficient in China (see Elephant Guild's "Why Does Shanghai Lack Entrepreneurs?"). That alone means a better chance of a fair hearing, and a very high price for violence.

It is easy to see that the richer the big city, the more likely two strangers in a quarrel are to court the crowd's sympathy by each making their case. People in small towns and villages are more inclined to show off their talent for improvising the other side's sordid family history.

The fighting rankings that circulate online are worthless. Yet the average "fighting strength" of China's regions can in fact be compared.

Telling which of two people will win a fight is easy: a glance at their size usually settles it. Apart from sumo, combat sports — boxing, wrestling, taekwondo, judo — all divide fighters by weight. Below heavyweight, a new class begins roughly every two or three kilograms.

No reliable national data on height and weight by region exist today from which to work out a simple ranking. Still, there is no doubt that northerners are physically bigger than southerners. In the 19th century the German biologist Carl Bergmann described a rule: within a species, individuals are larger in colder regions, because a bigger body holds heat better. Volume grows with the cube of an animal's dimensions, surface area only with the square.

On size alone, it is roughly right to rank Northeasterners as China's strongest fighters. But Shanghainese would certainly rank high too. In a country of vast income gaps, where most people have only recently had enough to eat, nutrition has a large effect on height, and Shanghai has China's highest income per head. Its people are the last to go short of good food.

Still, is size, plus a greater readiness to fight, really the only reason China now believes Northeasterners are the toughest?

Clearly not. Their "fighting nation" reputation owes a great deal to the notorious exploits Northeasterners have carried out across most of the country. Luo Yonghao once said that almost every major criminal case north of the Yangtze was the work of "us Northeasterners." In violent crime in northern China, especially gang crime, Northeasterners do stand out.

The usual explanation for the Northeast's many violent gangs is that its people are "fierce by custom," and the logic seems to hang together. Northeastern society today took shape through large-scale, unorganized migration in recent centuries. Compared with orderly migration organized by the state, that kind of settlement more easily breeds a law of the jungle, in which whoever has the harder fists grabs more resources.

But a taste for fighting does not by itself explain gangs that operate in nearly every part of China. And as we will see, Northeasterners are far from exceptional in China either for aggression or for closing ranks against outsiders.

What may matter most in making all of China believe that "all Northeasterners are gangsters" is the way Northeastern society is built, which sets it clearly apart from the rest of the country.

Firm trust and an unspoken understanding are what hold a violent gang together. The bond among a gang's core members usually comes either from blood or from trust built up since childhood. Children who grow up together in a fairly closed community easily form strong attachments.

China's big factories and mines of the planned-economy era were closed, self-contained worlds. Workers' children lived in the same compound from kindergarten on. They shared their deepest memories and grew fiercely loyal to one another. This was even more true of the Third Front plants, the defense-industry enterprises moved to remote parts of the interior, which stood like islands in the countryside.

The effect is stronger still in an enterprise where everyone is roughly the same age. When the workers all belong to one generation and so do their children — unlike an ordinary community, where ages run continuously from young to old — the people who grow up there develop a stronger sense of belonging. At the age when hormones surge, these compound kids band together against the outside world more readily. If, as adults, they fail to find a place in society, violent gangs form easily.

The Northeast had more big factories and mines than any other region of China. Unluckily, those who reached working age in the 1980s often became "youths awaiting jobs," as the unemployed young were then called. Those who reached working age in the 1990s were unluckier still: they ran into the wave of layoffs that came with the restructuring of state-owned enterprises. Because the Northeast's economy rested on so narrow a base, these surplus workers had to leave the region to look for work.

The Northeast's pattern of migration may be the most unusual in China. Elsewhere it is villagers who leave; in the Northeast it is mainly town and city people. Such people were never going to be as willing as migrant farmworkers from the interior to take jobs in coastal factories or haul cement on big-city building sites.

In fact, children from Third Front plants in the interior, or from factory compounds surrounded by farmland, cling together and fight more than the young people around them, perhaps even more than in the Northeast. But unlike Northeasterners, they are not easily identified by their accent or habits, and so outsiders do not pin a regional label on them.

Taiwan may be the best point of comparison. Almost all of Taiwan's famous criminal gangs today grew up in its military dependents' villages, whose way of life closely copies that of the mainland's factory compounds. China's own army compounds have not bred gangs the way those villages did, largely because the young people raised in them had far better prospects than their Taiwanese counterparts.

Are Northeasterners fierce?

After the sweeping restructuring of state-owned enterprises, the Northeast's social structure has long stopped breeding violent gangs. Chinese people still think of Northeasterners as a fighting nation, but the region's young city dwellers are in fact a thoroughly mild generation. The Northeast has the lowest birth rate in China, and its only children are a different breed from the Northeasterners of legend.

As for rural Northeasterners, they may like to brag, and now and then, so as not to let their admirers elsewhere down, they may act like predators. In truth, they have arguably always been China's most docile, law-abiding farmers.

Search for keywords such as "mass incident" or "armed clan fight," and you will find barely a single large-scale brawl in the supposedly fierce Northeast. What fills the screen instead is South China, the region at the bottom of the fighting rankings.

Events like these would be hard to imagine in the Northeast:

In the "March 23 incident" of 2009 in Dongfang, Hainan, residents of two villages, unhappy with how a fight between students had been handled, smashed and burned the township government offices and the police station in a single day. The city government at once sent more than 120 officials, in four work teams, into the villagers' homes to carry out "ideological education of the masses." The next day the two villages fought each other in a mass armed battle involving more than a thousand people. Only when police and armed police arrived in equal numbers did the masses, one after another, declare that their emotions had stabilized.

Dongfang's officials were lucky. At least they were not facing the villagers of Liantang in Shantou, Guangdong. In July 2014, police arrested several gamblers in Liantang. To force the police station to release them, the villagers besieged and smashed the station, and two months later they overran the city's Party committee offices and beat the staff. More startling still, they once seized an officer on duty, paraded him through the streets for 13 hours, and let it be known that they would burn him to death.

The 2014 Report on the Development of the Rule of Law in China, published by the Institute of Law of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, bears out the southerners' strength. Of all mass incidents involving more than 100 people across China from 2000 to 2013, South China accounted for 36.6%. Guangdong led the country with 267 incidents, 30.7% of the total. The three Northeastern provinces combined had just 27, a tenth of Guangdong's figure.

So where in China is the real "fighting nation"?

Guangdong, Fujian and even southern Zhejiang — the bottom of every fighting ranking — are the true fighting nation, and have been for several hundred years.

Why are the people of South China so tough?

The Power of the Clan

Next to the turbulent villages of South China, the northern countryside is far calmer, because it lacks the South's great fighting tradition: the armed clan fight.

Armed clan fights date back at least to the Ming dynasty. By the Qing, the Zhangzhou and Quanzhou area of Fujian and the Chaoshan area of Guangdong had become their constant battlegrounds. The causes were mostly trivial, but the fights often dragged on for years and were far bloodier than an ordinary gang brawl. In 1907, for example, a dispute over gambling debts in Hui'an County, Fujian, drew in dozens of townships belonging to two surname groups, one large and one small. It lasted three years and killed more than 160 people. In the last years of the Guangxu emperor's reign, Yutian and Dongdu, two townships in Changle County near Fuzhou, fought over water for four years.

The armed fights around Zhangzhou and Quanzhou put the Qing court under heavy pressure to keep order. In 1734 the Yongzheng emperor issued an edict banning them outright. It said: "The two prefectures of Zhangzhou and Quanzhou ... have never lacked men who served the state with distinction. Only in the fierceness of their customs are they known to all under heaven, and despised by all under heaven."

The clan was only beginning to take shape in the Song dynasty. In the Ming, the state, wanting to control society, tied clans to the lijia system of village self-policing and made them the basis of local order. Neo-Confucian classics such as Zhu Xi's Family Rituals supplied a full theory of how a clan should be built. Working together, the state and the people gradually built a strict clan system, complete with clan rules, ancestral halls, clan-owned land, clan schools and genealogies.

Northern China was ravaged by war again and again and saw several great migrations, while southern families kept their bloodlines relatively unbroken. As a result, southerners identify with their clans far more strongly than northerners do. Even today, many southern villages are made up of a single surname, while most northern villages mix several.

Besides stronger clan loyalty, the different ways the North and South farm help explain why armed clan fights broke out mainly in the South. North of the Yangtze the main crop is wheat, which needs little irrigation; outside certain seasons, a single household can mostly work its land alone. Rice farming in the South depends more on irrigation and demands more cooperation. That tightens the bonds of blood, and it also gives clans more to fight over: water and farmland. The southern coast is also far more crowded than the North, so clans compete harder to survive.

After centuries of ruthless fighting, some places became so heavily armed that even regular troops were no match for them. In 1924, a fight broke out among the Huang, Yan and Zhang clans in Anhai, Fujian. Kong Zhaotong, a Beiyang warlord stationed in Quanzhou, sent troops to put it down; the villagers fought back with arms and killed 27 soldiers.

After 1949, the Communist Party for the first time brought the countryside under tight control down to the village level, and the clan system fell apart. North of the Yangtze, where clan loyalty had never been strong, it never revived even after politics relaxed. But in the South, the powerful clan culture sprang back to life soon after 1978. Armed clan fights quickly returned to Qing levels of frequency and violence, and grew even larger in scale: the sides widened from rival clans to rival surnames, sometimes joined by "friendly surnames" called in as allies.

In many places, armed clan fights even developed settled rules of war. Fighters first swore an oath together in the ancestral hall, then took the field in matching clothes, carrying every kind of weapon, from blades to firearms. The fighting was usually confined to the farmland of the clans taking part. It ranged from charges across open fields to trench warfare from dug-in positions; in some places the trenches were up to three meters wide and two meters deep.

Wherever armed clan fights were common, there was a full system for mobilizing fighters and caring for them. Those killed were honored in the ancestral hall as martyrs before burial. Their families, and anyone disabled in the fighting, were supported by the clan. If the police later went after leading fighters, other clansmen would step forward to take the blame, even serve their prison terms.

Because people of the same surname do not marry each other, the clans on opposite sides were bound to be related by marriage. So the rules stated plainly that the clan's interest came first: relatives and friends on the other side were to be beaten like anyone else. To keep fighters from holding back, many battles were fought at night, and some more careful fighters even disguised their faces before going in.

With such a fighting culture behind them, southerners would beat northerners in any real mass brawl. On "neutral ground" in Japan, gangs from Fujian left Northeastern gangs with no say at all, and even Japan's own gangsters gave them a wide berth.

Among southerners, who are the fighting nation's own fighting nation?

Historically, the best known are probably the Hakka. Their fortress-like buildings are direct evidence of a warrior people: even today, from the shape of the buildings in different Hakka settlements you can tell which served as forward bases and which as small staging posts.

The Taiping Rebellion caused the greatest loss of life in Chinese history. Five of its six founders were Hakka, and Hakka made up its core fighting force. On the Taiping northern expedition, some 20,000 Hakka fought their way from Yangzhou all the way to Zhili, the province around Beijing, while hundreds of thousands of Qing troops could do nothing to stop them.

In the same period, the Hakka also set the bloodiest record in the history of clan warfare. In the late Qing, during the Xianfeng and Tongzhi reigns, their fighting with the Punti, Guangdong's longer-settled Cantonese-speaking inhabitants, lasted 13 years, spread across 17 counties, and by conservative estimates killed more than a million people.

Perhaps because those losses were so terrible, the Hakka have since turned cautious and seldom show aggression.

Ask the Cantonese today and they will say the fiercest of all are the Teochew people of the Chaoshan region. Yet unlike Northeasterners, who like to have reptiles tattooed on their bodies, the Teochew mostly look perfectly harmless.

As a rule, they will not ruin a Northeastern tough guy's face just because they glanced at him once too often in a crowd.

*** This article comes from the WeChat official account "Elephant Guild" (http://www.idaxiang.org/). Knowledge, insight, experience: Elephant Guild is neither traditional media nor the fashionable new media, but a product that enriches our knowledge, insight and experience with original content.**