Shan Hui, a young Chinese guy with Beijing roots that go back generations, had a couple of extra tickets to a Chinese Super League football match between Guo'an, Beijing's team, and a nearby rival, ShaanXi, and invited me along. I was looking forward to sitting, drinking beer and watching sports.

But Shan Hui told me that there was no beer. "People might throw the bottles on the field. Even if the stadium had plastic bottles, there would be fights. Things would get out of control," he said. I didn’t believe him.

At the Feng Tai stadium, in southwest Beijing, a steady crowd streamed in through the outer gates. A reasonable number but not enough to make the cement walls feel alive. The grey of the stadium in the dying end of the day light made the spectators look like desert insects moving around the stands.

Guo'An used to play in the Workers Stadium, right in the center of the booming embassy section of Beijing, but that stadium's being renovated for the Olympics. Now they temporarily host other teams in this bare bones venue on the outskirts.

Large swathes of the stadium sat empty. Everybody had been crowded into three areas. We sat with a hodgepodge of fans: middle-aged men sitting crossed-legged on newspaper because they were afraid the seats were not clean enough; college students with their girlfriends; an entire elementary school football team. The two young guys in front of me told about their punk band's concert later that month.

To our right was the much smaller Shaanxi section, wearing blue and white and cheering as their team came out.

Shan Hui is the kind of person who stays up until 3am to watch European matches. This game is important, he explained. If we win today, then we will be on top of the standings.

"Is Shaanxi good?" I asked.

"Not very."

The teams had no rhythm, they never put together coherent attacks. The game was just a long succession of watching the ball get kicked to the opposing team. Shaanxi scored on a corner kick in the 9th minute and you could almost hear the Beijing fans deflate.

Then things began to shift. Guo'an started to display more controlled drives, making deep, but ultimately disappointing, pushes towards the Shaanxi goal.

And then our section started their chant.

"Shaanxi!" one person yelled.

"Stupid cunts!" Came the chorus. (These two refrains have the same number of syllables in Chinese and rhyme somewhat.)

Again and again it built louder:

"Shaanxi!"

"Stupid cunts!"

Everyone in our section joined in (except for hopefully the youth league team). The chant got louder and louder. A Guo'an striker streaked toward the opposing goal, crumpling as he was tackled from behind by a Shaanxi defender: the ref's whistle blew. Our well organised cursing broke into individual shouts of rage.

Nobody could tell what was going on. The referee moved the ball first to one position, then moved the ball to the centre of the field. Our section screeched with joy.

"It's going to be a penalty kick!" Shan Hui shouted excitedly.

But a ShaanXi defender sauntered up to the ball and kicked it away in disgust. The ref chased the ball down himself and put it back in position.

Chan He, the ShaanXi coach, came running onto the field, gesturing wildly. Half our section seemed confused, the others rained down curses. With the ref’s back turned, the ShaanXi goalie came out and kicked the ball out of bounds.

It took seven minutes to get the ShaanXi players in place and their coach off the field. In the end, Guo'An kicked weakly right into the waiting goalie - an ankle-high kick that the goalkeeper didn’t even have to dive for.

"We suck," said one of the punks in front of me.

Guo'An built up steam in the second half, forcing two corner kicks in the 51st and 54th minutes. People started to move forward, jumping a little then sighing when another shot went wide.

In the 65th minute, Guo'An turned a steal in their own territory into an attack, moving the ball down the field in two long passes.

Yan Chuang, Guo'An's striker centered the ball to a streaking Martinez, their Brazilian forward, who tried to slap it in with his heel.

The shot went high, bouncing off the inside of the crossbar and coming down right in front of the goal, but Martinez' defender, backpedaling furiously to try to keep in front of Martinez, tipped the ball with his heel sending it dribbling into an own goal.

At that, the ShaanXi coach came running out. He puffed over to the middle of the field, grabbed the ball and booted it in the direction of the stands. The ref pulled out his red card, but the coach came back for more. His assistants couldn't drag him off.

ShaanXi players were gathered all around the ref yelling at him. Guo’an fans yelled curses like they were part of the argument. The ShaanXi fans kept quiet.

Then, from the tunnel the players had used to enter the field, around twenty security and uniformed police officers poured out. The police broke up the argument, grabbing the coach by the arm and trying to lead him away. But the Shaanxi coach pushed the officers, knocking off one of their hats, and ran back at the referee, chased by the hat-less cop.

Eventually, the coach was dragged towards the tunnel. The ShaanXi goalie picked up the ball and punted it towards our section. It bounced off the wall. Plastic bottles and cups splattered the cement in front of our section as people threw whatever they could reach back.

After nine minutes the game started again but any semblance of control was lost. Our section started back up its "ShaanXi: stupid cunts!" chant. Players on the field started pulling each other's clothing.

Two players got into a shoving match that ending with what looked like the ref tackling one of them! Nobody was sure what was going on: "Did he just...?"

"I don't know!" People threw up their hands, one third outraged and two thirds giddy.

The game ended tied.

People slowly began to file out, but the corridors inside the stadium were packed. People jostled amongst each other and waited, sweaty and frustrated, for the mass to move. Then our popular game-time chant started to change.

"Referee!" somebody yelled out.

"Stupid cunt!" came the return. ("Referee" and "stupid cunt" do not rhyme at all in Chinese, but at least have the same number of syllables.)

And we chanted. Like a vigilante mob out for blood we moved out of the stadium and round to the exit the players and the ref were to leave from.

Riot police in full gear were waiting, standing straight and silent, their shields up. The mob gathered around them, inching ever closer.

The chant kept going, sometimes dying down a little, but then being brought back to life by a single person shouting: "Referee!"

"Stupid cunt!"

The flood lights glinted off the riot police's black helmets. They stared forward, trying not to look at anybody in particular.

After 20 minutes, when the chanting had died down again and it was clear that the referee was not coming out, I turned to Shan Hui: "Let's go," I said, and we started to leave.

"Don't go! Stay!" a pudgy young Chinese guy yelled. He was wearing shorts and a brightly colored t-shirt.

"Stay and do what?" I said.

"Curse at people!" he yelled, shaking his fists and belly and smiling.

"Curse at who? There's no one coming out," I pointed out.

He inhaled deep, bent over and yelled through cupped hands: "Referee!"

People all around us joined in: "Stupid cunt!" pumping their fists in the air. And the chant was going again.

And this was what it was all about. I'm not sure anyone there really cared if Guo'An won or lost. Probably almost no one could have told you Guo'An's place in the standings. The game, the experience, is about expressing emotion, about having an excuse to hate somebody, or at least act like you do; yelling curses out of smiling faces.

Shan Hui was right, you don't need to add beer to this mix.

After the last round of screaming and cursing faded off, we walked away. As we came toward the main gate we passed an opening out onto the field. The sprinklers were on and the grass shimmered under the floodlights. Across the field we could see the ShaanXi section, still filled with the opposing team's fans. None of them looked like they were leaving yet, though some seemed to be changing out of their blue and white clothes.