China’s Football Dream: Sport, Citizenship, Symbolic Power, and Civic Spaces

Jonathan Sullivan,Simon Chadwick,Michael Gow

doi:10.1177/0193723519867588

Abstract

This article examines the mobilization of football in relation to Chinese state-building projects. Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of “symbolic power” is applied to frame policy analysis of China’s 2016-2050 National Football Plan and narrative analysis of developments within China’s rapidly expanding football sector. The extensive mobilization of national, provincial, and local government institutions forms spaces for civic participation in state-building projects through direct participation in football. These civic spaces allow for active citizenship engagement with state projects and for expressions of consensus and participation with the Chinese Dream while also limiting potential for competing cultural movements to emerge. This article argues that such developments are driven primarily for socio-political objectives with the aim of fostering shared notions of citizenship through the medium of sport.

Highlights

The transformation of Chinese football under the aegis of Xi Jinping’s “Chinese Football Dream” (中国足球梦) illuminates the party-state’s domestic aspirations and modus operandi
French colonialists essentially stratified the Algerian context, producing and reproducing inequalities which served to define and delimit social groups and include or exclude them from society. It is this process of the state exercising a monopoly over “symbolic power” to determine the characteristics of acceptable and legitimate citizenship, which we aim to explore in relation to China
The state’s intention is that the objectives outlined in the National Football Plan will be achieved as a result of competition between diverse public and private sector actors

Summary

Introduction

The transformation of Chinese football under the aegis of Xi Jinping’s “Chinese Football Dream” (中国足球梦) illuminates the party-state’s domestic aspirations and modus operandi. Against the backdrop of the Wenchuan earthquake, the flawless Olympics conferred legitimacy on the state through the symbolic realization of national objectives, while simultaneously rewarding participating individuals, institutions and organizations with symbolic capital Flushed with this success, soon after the Olympics the state’s attention turned to back to football, long conceived as a symbolic power resource that had gone untapped. Xi Jinping himself first revealed his ambitions to strengthen Chinese football on a visit to Germany in 2009 Soon before his rise to General Secretary of the Communist Party, Xi’s targets had become more concrete, expressed to Korean politicians as qualification and hosting of the World Cup. Soon before his rise to General Secretary of the Communist Party, Xi’s targets had become more concrete, expressed to Korean politicians as qualification and hosting of the World Cup Operationalizing these objectives would require more systematic investment in grassroots facilities and youth training, further institutional reform of the organization of domestic and national football structures and financial burden-sharing with the private sector. The Xi administration was focused on devising a systematic plan for the development of football from grassroots to the national team

A New Era of Football Reform?

Discussion and Conclusion

Objectives