Lucky Number Sevens: The link Between the Hong Kong Sevens and Chinese Rugby

Much has been made of Alibaba’s USD100 million-dollar pledge to invest in domestic Chinese rugby. If the investment comes to fruition, it will be a great first step towards popularizing a sport that is much like a ball carrier after a 10-man maul collapses; at the bottom of the heap.

Professionals and pundits in China realize they are amid a large and unprecedented spending bubble for sports. If the bubble pops, the savior of the game in the nation 300 times more populous than New Zealand will come from a strange place indeed: The Hong Kong Sevens.

Look for the Hong Kong Sevens in all its boozy, bacchanalian splendor to stoke the nationalistic fervor of the Chinese sports machine in the possible future absence of capital. The Hong Kong Sevens jumpstarted the commercialization of rugby a decade before the World Cup was a thing and kickstarted the development of the sport in Asia. The event has been a runaway smash hit for decades now and will be huge for years to come. The tournament has a very real chance to propel the sport into the limelight in China in the same manner it brought South Korea, Samoa, Japan and other Pacific and Asian nations into the international rugby fold.

China, like J.R.R. Tolkien’s eye of Sauron, perpetually has its gaze cast towards its pet administrative region, Hong Kong. With Rugby Sevens an official Olympic sport, the Chinese will be watching especially closely, as if Tolkien’s legendary ring was on the very precipice of Mt. Doom. The fact is the Chinese simply love taking home hardware from that quadrennial outpour of nationalistic fervor known as ‘The Olympic Games.’ More importantly, Chinese sport responds exceedingly well and develops quickly after even the most minute amounts of international exposure. Rong Guotuan becoming the first citizen of the then newly formed People’s Republic of China to become a world champion in any sport at the 1959 World Table Tennis Championships is the finest example.

Table Tennis and Rugby are as admittedly different as a burly prop and lithe winger. But don’t doubt the prowess of the state-sponsored sporting monolith to scour the mountains of Sichuan, the dystopian apartment blocks of Beijing and the plains of Tibet for the next Wilkinson, Joost or McCaw. The impetus behind this won’t be from venture capital doled out by an angel investor, either. It will come from high-quality events occurring on China’s doorstep, such as the Hong Kong Sevens or the 2019 World Cup in Japan. After all, the Chinese sports machine runs far more efficiently on ambition, nationalism and collective pride fueled by glory on the international stage than it does on paper money. Look for those types of events to spark a ‘why-not-me’ feeling in the echelons of Chinese sport and provide that spark to a nation that hasn’t yet come in sniffing distance of qualifying for a World Cup.

Currently, rugby played by Chinese exists chiefly only in two specialized areas; Marine detachments in the People’s Liberation Army and on social teams in a handful disparate, backwater third-tier cities in China’s western and central areas. Places like Changzhou, Hubei and Fuzhou have significant numbers of Chinese on their teams. Places like Changzhou, Hubei and Fuzhou also have average population sizes that exceed the population of New Zealand or Ireland, which is precisely why the development of the sport in China is so exciting.

Events like the Hong Kong Sevens will be key in providing high quality entertainment and simultaneously igniting the sporting dreams for the next generation of athletes in China. Bringing the game from fringe cities and the army and into the mainstream public school playgrounds that boast numbers no other rugby playing nation can match is an exciting potential development in World Rugby.

China may be lightyears away from being able to not be absolutely embarrassed by a Commonwealth Nation or other rugby power. It may never even develop a XV side capable of breaking in the IRB Top 10 rankings. But it is conceivable that continued exposure and glorification of the sport through the Hong Kong Sevens could put China on the path to a World Cup berth, competing with- and vanquishing on a regular basis- fellow Asian top-30 squads like South Korea or maybe even Hong Kong[1] itself.

Connor Frankhouser

[1] Note that China has beaten Hong Kong before in 2006 and previously drawn with HK, hence the use of the word ‘regularly’