China’s ‘G-7 Revolution’ in Soccer

Abstract

In October of 2004, seven football clubs launched the ‘G-7 Revolution’, which represented a hallmark in the history of Chinese football. However, the revolt lasted for less than one month before it was thwarted. Recently, complexity theory (CT) has emerged as a vital theoretical perspective to twenty-first-century humanities and social sciences research. CT promises to offer considerable insight into the process of the ‘G-7 Revolution’. Because of the imminence of organizational decline, changes in leadership of the Chinese Football Association (CFA) and the ongoing conflicts between organizations, the sensitive, ‘far-from-equilibrium’ state of the league constituted the contextual basis for the revolution. Also, a referee’s poor decision was a small incident, like the ‘flapping wings of butterfly’, that helped incite the revolution of the seven football clubs’, as a result of which a self-organized union emerged. Lastly, the union’s actions amplified the deviation, but the major inertia deriving from the central system represented by the CFA counteracted this, leading eventually to the failure of the revolution.