In the film Footloose, set in a backwater American town where dancing is outlawed, local residents had a weird way of resolving disputes: they challenged each other to a high-octane game of ‘chicken’, using tractors in place of cars.
Last week there were similar scenes in Hebei when two bulldozers from rival construction firms locked shovels in a clash for local supremacy. An onlooker caught the fight on his smartphone and posted it online, where it soon went viral (netizens, less cognisant of Footloose, compared it to a fight scene between alien robots from the Transformers movie franchise).
At one point in the battle one of the bulldozer operators managed to get his blade beneath his rival’s undercarriage, and slowly flipped the other bulldozer over. But that didn’t end the fight: several of the disabled vehicle’s allies rushed in from the sidelines to tackle the dominant machine. One tried to lift his fallen comrade, but the toppled vehicle only keeled over again. Media reports are that the clash resulted from two rival firms competing for business in Xingtang’s construction sector. Bizarrely, traffic continued to drive past the battleground as the fight rumbled on.
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