The production of leisure: understanding the social function of football development in China

Chris Hesketh,Jonathan Sullivan

doi:10.1080/14747731.2020.1737408

Chris Hesketh, Jonathan Sullivan

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2020.1737408

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Abstract

ABSTRACT In this article, we utilize the social theories of Antonio Gramsci and Henri Lefebvre to explore the role that leisure activities such as football play within contemporary China in relation to issues of class. We argue that the recent promotion of football in China can be viewed as a continuation of broader top-down processes of ‘modernization from above' that serves as a microcosm of the wider class contradictions inherent in Chinese approaches to development since the 1980s. The issue of class has been strangely absent from the literature dealing with the development of football in China. We explore the major role of the middle classes as the target for the promotion of leisure activities and consumerist lifestyles patterns as part of the Party-State’s effort to integrate them into a transformed historical bloc.

Highlights

Since the mid-1950s, sport in China has been intricately tied to political questions surrounding national identity, international legitimacy and modernisation (Xu 2006: 90-92)
It has been suggested that the ‘Gramscian moment’ for analysing sport may have passed and been outpaced with new concerns, displacing class as a category of analysis (Rowe 2004: 107)
The article has argued that the development of football in China can be viewed fruitfully through the prism of Gramsci’s concepts of passive revolution and the ancillary notion of trasformismo that take as their central subject of analysis the changing class composition of societies within broader patterns of state formation

Summary

Introduction

Since the mid-1950s, sport in China has been intricately tied to political questions surrounding national identity, international legitimacy and modernisation (Xu 2006: 90-92). It is closely tied to national pride and national rejuvenation (Liu et al, 2019; Yu et al, 2017). Such an ambitious undertaking requires the combined institutional resources of the executive, legislature and judiciary: Eleven Ministries, three State Council commissions, two State Council agencies, three government agencies, the Supreme People’s Court and Procuratorate, and the Central Bank are all directly involved.

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