A Song Dynasty painting by Su Hanchen, depicting Chinese children playing cuju.
ONE AREA IN which China is not an emerging power but wishes it was, is football. As our man among the muddied oafs has noted before, China quietly harbours ambitions of staging a FIFA World Cup.
However, for now, the national team, still recovering from the corruption and match-fixing scandals that beset the professional game in the not so distant past, does not match up to that expectation. Despite its unexpected success in reaching the quarter-finals of the recent Asian Championships, it currently still ranks joint 83rd in the FIFA World rankings (though the women’s national team ranks 16th).
President Xi Jinxing is a fan of the sport, which China claims to have invented (see picture above). Xi also understands the statements about national soft power that sporting success can make. So there is a state plan.
The State Council has issued a 50-point development plan. One of the central points is to switch responsibility for developing the sport to the China Football Association from the General Administration of Sport. That may restore some of the authority the association lost after the corruption scandals.
Another is to boost the game in schools. One immediate impact of this is the creation of a school football leading group. It comprises the education ministry and five other government departments, including the National Development and Reform Commission, which suggests it will have some clout.
The education ministry says it is increasing the number of primary and secondary schools designated as football academies to 20,000 by 2017 from 5,000 now. This will mean they get new facilities including pitches, which across China have been swallowed up for property development in recent years. Thirty counties will trial promoting the development of young players and raising the popularity of the game among schoolchildren.
Last November, education minister Yuan Guiren said that football would become a compulsory part of physical education classes in all schools and that 6,000 school coaches would be trained this year. Seven volumes of instructional text books are in preparation, according to the People’s Daily. The goal is for there to be 50,000 schools specialising in football by 2025. In 2016, football will become an option in the national university entrance examinations in an attempt to overcome parental reluctance to let their children swap studying time for chasing a ball around a pitch.
With Qatar cementing its hold on the 2022 World Cup, the next likely opportunity for China to host the tournament for the first time is 2034. Would China have a team suitably good enough by then? Never discount the power of Party discipline, but as the U.S. has shown, two decades is the bare minimum for raising a generation of footballers good enough to compete with the world’s best.
China Bystander 