The transition game: Toward a cultural economy of football in post-socialist China

Abstract

Following decades of significant economic and political reform, a once-closed China has emerged as the world’s fastest growing and arguably most interconnected political economic system. In the context of what has been termed a “post-socialist” transition, China’s sport system has similarly undergone rapid marketization (bringing in market actors and action). In this article, we examine the changing state and function of football (soccer) within this period of post-socialist transition. We provide a critical analysis of recent (c. 2010–2017) private and state-based initiatives to develop the commercial viability, international interconnectivity, and cultural significance of football (soccer). Drawing upon theories of cultural economy as developed by the globalization theorist Arjun Appadurai, we provide an historical and conceptual investigation of the strategic efforts to nationally imagine football culture as, and within, transitioning China. To do this, we examine how state actors and private intermediaries have leveraged increases in high-profile player transfers, domestic franchise valuations, investment in foreign teams, development of player academies, overall youth and adult participation, and expanded media rights agreements to simultaneously economize Chinese football culture and culturalize the logics of commercial sport and free market capitalism more generally. In so doing, we map the various “scapes” through which people, capital, images, technologies, and ideologies have been set aflow and thereby frame new imaginings of mass privatization, mediation, and consumerism for a national football consuming public.

Keywords

Chinese Super League cultural economy football kaifang post-socialist China

As General Charles de Gaulle pointed out, China is indeed a very large country, and one that contains many Chinese. It doesn’t want the world. But it does want the World Cup. There is vast investment here, a supernumerary population and wildly nationalistic good husbandry. Who knows, they might just get a little closer than you think. (The Guardian columnist Barney Ronay, 2017: 1)

As is often the case in China, the speed and scale of national football (soccer, or zúqiú as favorably rendered in Mandarin) development in recent years has been staggering. Often domestically derided for the national team’s lack of success on the world stage, and frequently reduced to numbers and pictographs in Europe-based market analyses (e.g. a primary import nation for La Liga, Champions League, Premier League images and products), footballing China is undergoing a rapid transformation. According to one report, 31% of China’s nearly one billion urban population now follow the sport—a football fan inventory equivalent to the population of the USA (Lovett and Townsend, 2016). The revenues for the Chinese Super League (CSL) grew from US$17.53 million in 2012 to US$223 million in 2016—with net profits increasing from US$9.5 million to US$80 million over the same period (National Development and Reform Commission [NDRC], 2016–for a list of all the referenced policy documents, please see Table 1); Xinhua News Agency, 2016). Once insolvent CSL franchises are now valued at as much as US$282 million, with perennial table- and market-leader Guangzhou Evergrande Taobao annually bringing in over US$50 million in total revenues. Attendance at CSL matches increased by 50% from 2010 to 2016, and the league is now one of the top five most-attended leagues in the world (Xinhua News Agency, 2016). To incite consumption, many teams annually spend in excess of US$25 million to lure to international players away from top European clubs (usually three or four international players feature on each team), with Shanghai SIPG spending in excess of US$10 million per international player in 2017.

Table 1.

Selected football policies.

Date	Government agency	Policy title (English)
8 March 2015	Chinese State Council	Chinese Football Reform and Development Program
27 July 2015	Ministry of Education, National Development and Reform Commission, Ministry of Finance, State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television, General Administration of Sport, Central Committee of the Communist Youth League	Opinions on Accelerating the Development of Youth Football
6 April 2016	National Development and Reform Commission, Chinese Football Association, State General Administration of Sports, and Chinese Ministry of Education	Chinese Football Mid-Long Term Development Plan (2016-2050)
10 May 2016	National Development and Reform Commission, Chinese Football Association, State General Administration of Sports, and Chinese Ministry of Education	National Football Fields and Facilities Construction Plan (2016-2020)
11 January 2017	Chinese Football Association	Chinese Football Association Super League Championship Regulations and Procedures
23 January 2017	Chinese Football Association	Chinese Football Association 2020 Action Plan
23 January 2017	Chinese Football Association	Work Plan for Conducting Chinese Football Reform and Development Pilot Program
14 February 2017	Chinese Football Association	Annex to Regulations and Procedures of 2017 Chinese Super League and China League One Championships
17 February 2017	Chinese Ministry of Education	Guiding Opinions of Ministry of Education on Further Developing National Youth Campus Football Reform Experimental Zones and Pilot Counties (Districts)
23 February 2017	Chinese Football Association	Notice of Regulating the Operation of Professional Clubs
2 March 2017	Chinese Football Association	Chinese Football Association Code of Conduct
23 March 2017	Chinese Ministry of Education	The Second Meeting Memo of National Youth Campus Football Work Leading Group
28 March 2017	Chinese Ministry of Education & State Administration of Foreign Experts Affairs	Organizing and Declaring the Supporting Projects on Employing and Inviting Foreign Football Teachers for Campuses and Schools
24 May 2017	Chinese Football Association	Notice of Rule Change of Fielding U23 Players in Chinese Super League and China League One Championships
24 May 2017	Chinese Football Association	Notice of Limiting High Club Spending on Foreign Players
20 June 2017	Chinese Football Association	Implementation Opinions on Adjustment Fees of Importing Foreign Players during the 2017 Summer Transfer Window

This expansionist trend is not limited to the professional level. At the start of 2017, China had 13,381 “special football schools”—training academies that are typically attached to public primary and middle schools and exist with the expressed purpose of increasing the nation’s footballing talent pool (according to government documents, that number will rise to 20,000 by the end of 2017—an acceleration from plans announced two years ago to hit the 20,000 mark by 2020, and 50,000 by 2025 (see Associated Press, 2017). To wit, it is expected that by 2020 China will have over 30 million elementary and middle school students enrolled in organized and academy-based football training programs (NDRC, 2016). The government has also promised that by 2020 the nation will maintain over 100,000 publically accessible football playing pitches (or roughly one per every 10,000 citizens). These targets also include a goal that “the number of people participating in football frequently in the whole society would exceed 50,000,000 by 2020” (NDRC, 2016).

As is also often the case in China, this growth represents the actualization of substantial central planning and sizeable resources allocation. Despite the nation’s notorious lack of success at the international (FIFA) level, General Secretary Xi Jinping has in recent years explicitly stated the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) intention to (1) develop the domestic professional football league, (2) grow the sport’s popularity among the masses, (3) increase youth participation, (4) develop the national team to be the best in Asia, and (5) aggressively bid for and eventually host a men’s FIFA World Cup.¹ As the government outlined in the 50-point Chinese Football Reform and Development Program document (2015):

Since Comrade Xi Jinping become General Secretary in the 18th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, he has placed the development of football on the agenda in order to build China as a great sports nation…. In addition, Premier Li Keqiang has attached great emphasis to those who work in football and other sports industries. The Chinese State Council has conducted several studies in this area and have concluded that the reform and development of football is an unprecedented opportunity. Football will have a significant social impact and is adored by the masses. (Chinese State Council (CSC), 2015: 1, authors’ translation; for a list of all the referenced policy documents, please see Table 1).²

In the document, the CCP outlined the guiding ideologies, fundamental principles, and reform strategies that would be used to “transform” footballing China into a world superpower. If these initiatives are indeed enacted and brought into existence, by 2025 China’s football infrastructure will dwarf those of established footballing nations such as Brazil, Italy, Argentina, France, Germany, and the UK.

In this article, we explore the policy discourses and state action that frame and give trajectory to China’s recent football ascent. That is, we examine how the confluence of various football development initiatives—the bringing together of different producer and consumer markets, the mobilization of a mass national populace, new alignments of governance systems, and the social production of geopolitical subjectivities—are intended to produce a contextually specific frame through which Chinese sport, sporting and consumer identities, sport–labor politics, and the nation more generally are articulated. Hence, we extend—or perhaps provide analytical prologue to—a major line of research in the sociology of sport that looks to explicate how the cultural–political framing of sport sets the stage for (inter)national politics (Allison and Monnington, 2002; Arnaud and Riordan, 2013; Houlihan, 2014; Jarvie, 2003; Riordan, 2002), (inter)national economies (Coates, 2007; Crompton, 2004; Gratton and Henry, 2002; Levermore, 2008), and national identities (e.g. Bairner, 2001, 2009, 2015; Bairner and Dong-Jhy, 2011; Brentin, 2016; Houlihan, 1997; Maguire, 1994; Quiroga, 2013; Smith and Porter, 2004; Tomlinson and Young, 2006; Whigham, 2014). Rather than present a political economy of football in China, or a study of the formation of football-based Chinese national identities, we instead seek to add to the literature by examining the constitutive (geopolitical–cultural–economic) framing and framework through which sport is rendered discursively, politico-ideologically, and praxically meaningful.³ Put simply, we examine how the state positions football in China (and the development thereof) as a culturally and historically significant event.

To do this, we draw upon the work of globalization theorist Arjun Appadurai (1990/2006, 1996, 2001) to construct a cultural economy of the interrelated people (e.g. players, managers, consumers, event tourists), technologies (utilizing expert training regimes as established in developed football nations), capital (foreign investment in Chinese clubs, Chinese private and state investment in foreign clubs, capital associated with football-related real estate), images (the mass mediation of celebrity athletes, marketing of the league), and ideologies that constitute the rise of contemporary Chinese football. To get started, we first provide a brief contextualization of sport within the contemporary political economic context of what some have referred to as “post-socialist” China (see below). We then explore how the expansion of football in China is bounded to the broader dialectics of open markets, consumer capitalism, and global sport interconnectivities (and the globalization of football culture and culture football globalization). This is followed by an analysis that relies heavily on the work of Appadurai to explain how the in- and out-flows of football-related people (what Appadurai terms “ethnoscapes”), technologies (“technoscapes”), capital (“finanscapes”), images (“mediascapes”), and cultural and political ideologies (“ideoscapes”) respectively and disjunctively emerge as tautologically articulative of post-socialist Chinese sport. We conclude the article with a discussion on how, within the context of “post-socialist China,” the cultural economy of these football-scapes promotes (and produces) new systems of meaning, power, capital, and consumer identities from which the state, and sport therein, are articulated.

Football in ‘post-socialist’ China

While the phrase is frequently evoked within the social sciences, there is no singular or even agreed-upon working definition of “post-socialism” in China. Unlike the more commonly used phrase “socialism with Chinese characteristics”—which is often favorably evoked by the CCP to refer to the uniquely hybridized form of Marxist socialism that evolved most significantly following the founding of the CCP in 1921 and then gained traction after the Second Chinese Civil War (c. 1945–1949) and through the Cultural Revolution of Chairman Mao (c. 1966–1976)—“post-socialism” is often used by historians and social critics seeking to demarcate a period where Marxist principles were widely abandoned in favor of increased marketization/privatization, decentralization, globalization, and pro-capitalist reforms. Such a framing is supported by the fact that China has increasingly forsaken its pre-Revolution and Communist era insularism that, as Appadurai (1990/2006: 584) explains, had restricted the nation’s global interconnectivity:

Cultural transactions between social groups in the past have generally been restricted, sometimes by the facts of geography and ecology, and at other times by active resistance to interactions with the Other (as in China for much of its history).

Culling together the tenets put to work by various political scientists, sociologists, political economists, and globalization scholars, we might surmise that the defining characteristics of this post-socialist China include at least the following:

Starting in 1978, the CCP initiated a two-stage, large-scale reform program intended to “open up” (kaifang) the closed Communist system. In the first phase (c. 1978–1985), the CCP decollectivized the agricultural sector, opened up China to foreign investment, and for the first time allowed individual entrepreneurs to start businesses. In the second phase (c. 1985–2000), the CCP transitioned many state assets and industrial production to private firms, lifted pricing control, deregulated many major industries, and abolished numerous protectionist policies (Kroeber, 2016; Lardy, 2014; Naughton, 2007).

The growth in the Chinese economy has largely been defined by free marketization in and of major urban centers, first in the southern special economic zones (SEZs) in Shenzhen, Xiamen, Shantou, and Zhuhai and later in Shanghai, Tianjin, Ningbo, Fuzhou, and various other coastal cities (Pak, 1997; Zeng, 2010).

These reforms, in practice, brought about the development of what some have referred to as a “state capitalist” system—whereby the CCP now takes an active role in promoting the comparative advantages private and state firms hold (labor conditions, wages, economies of scale, corporate welfare programs, currency manipulation, etc.) over the international counterparts toward a state systematized private growth regime (Arrighi, 2007; Huang, 2008; Li et al., 2000).

Ideologically, this also represents a shift from the axiological and theoretical precepts of Marxist and Maoist communism(s) toward a re-centralization of the CCP. This shift is perhaps best exemplified in the “Three Represents” doxa ratified by the 16th CCP Congress in 2002, which gave primacy to economic development through globalization and free market reform and a call for political consensus in support of the Party.

Developing a pragmatic approach⁴ to production that links not only to a new scale of the economic, but a new economy of scale, in which mass production and the space of work-residence are extensively reconfigured for capital accumulation (see Ngai and Smith, 2007).

From the theories and reforms introduced by Deng Xiaoping and like-minded Party members from the late 1970s forward (for analysis, see Brandt and Rawski, 2008)—since referred to as “Dengism” or “Deng Xiaoping Theory”—China’s post-socialist governing coalition has been aggressively promoting the nation’s economic development and consolidated political instrumentation. In opening up China’s manufacturing and consumer capacities to the world—and specifically by way of designated special development zones, giving preferential policies for foreign investors, and providing various land-leasing instruments intended to stimulate growth in major urban centers—the CCP fundamentally transformed both the macro and everyday political and economic inter-workings of the nation (Wu, 2002; Yeh, 1996). While not necessarily leading to a change in interpersonal governance, these reforms transitioned China’s political economy away from the logics of socialist state-led industrialization, Fordist economies of scale, and redistributive state-based policy-making to “post-socialist” logics of marketization and entrepreneurialism, post-Fordist economies of scope, and post-Keynesian ‘workfare’ (see Wu and Ma, 2004).

This post-socialist transition has been thoroughly investigated by scholars from around the world, with critics and proponents alike noting a marked shift away from old forms of protectionism being integrated with or replaced by liberal economic reforms and market orthodoxies (Hsu, 2006), entrepreneurialism (Kshetri, 2009; Wu, 2003; Zhang, 2001), new modes of wealth distribution (Pow and Kong, 2007; So, 2013; Wang, 2008; Whyte, 2012), individualism (Hoffman, 2006; Liu and Mencken, 2010), labor politics (Clarke, 2005; Ngai and Huilin, 2010; Ngai and Smith, 2007; So, 2010; Won, 2004, 2007), urban governance (Lin, 2004; Pow, 2007; Zhang, 2011), and new consumer and cultural politics (Farquhar, 2002).

While there is much to debate regarding the specificities of post-socialism, it is quite clear that this transition—these reforms and ideological shifts—has brought about considerable changes to the national sport culture and sport economy. In terms of the transformation and development of football, Tan et al.’s (2017) study of football administration under the Xi government illustrates the extent to which private sector praxes have come to define the increasingly “corporatist” logics and practices of state-based football provision. For Tan et al. (2016: 1450–1451), football is thus organized under an ethos of corporatism whereby “the policy-maker, the government tends to mediate between interest groups with specific aims.” They continue, “Indeed, the formation of interest groups in society is frequently manipulated by government and interest groups are commissioned by, as well as subordinate to, government for the propagation of its policies.” As they conclude, entrepreneurial stakeholders have increasingly collaborated with the central government to implement Xi’s football reform—with this model of “state corporatism” servicing both the state’s interests to consolidate oversight and galvanize public support for the reforms and the private sector’s market-oriented aims toward relaxed commercial oversight and increased surplus value.

To see evidence of this unique football-based state corporatism, one that paradoxically seeks to enable private action and state ambition, one need look no further than the aforementioned 50-point Chinese Football Reform and Development Program document, where state administrators explicitly stated the guiding ideology for the new football program:

The theories of Deng Xiaoping, the principle of the ‘Three Represents’ and scientific development concepts are intended as a guideline. The ideas of the second, third and fourth plenary session of the 18th Central Committee should be fully implemented. The speeches by Xi Jinping should serve as a basis for the implementation of reforms. The development of the football reform is an important measure to build up a powerful sports nation. The problem-oriented institutional reform and innovation has to ensure the systematic development of football in order to raise the level of Chinese football. The development of a unified sports spirit and team building is very important to Chinese society. For an effective institutional mechanism, a democratic opening and a sound legal system is also necessary. (CSC, 2015: 1, authors’ translation)

This declaration aligns with both the broader political economic shifts within China and the functionality many emerging Asian states render sport (nay football) as a key cultural field for bringing global notoriety, people, and capital into the local nation-state. That is, football is here intended to serve not just an economic function but also a political one: to promote a state system that simultaneously encourages not only private sector growth but also the centrality of extended state governance in the oversight of such development.

On the one hand, this sporting Dengism is not all that unique to China—it is illustrative of a larger trend throughout Asia to utilize sport to promote economic development and national recognition. Asia’s sporting global-localisms have been particularly exemplary in considering the social and political ordering of the East with(in) the rhythm of globalization and its ancillary of urban entrepreneurialism, global Fordism, city-based place-making, and new regimes of urban governance: “Asia, and in particular the East Asia region, has played a pivotal role in the genesis and application of the term glocalization⁵ in the social sciences and wider public life” (Giulianotti and Robertson, 2012: 436). As such, numerous scholars have extensively examined the role of sport in reconstituting Asia’s national political and cultural economies (Brady, 2009; Broudehoux, 2007; Brownell, 2008; Close et al., 2006; Giulianotti, 2015; Maguire, 2011; Shin, 2014; Xing and Chalip, 2009; Xu, 2006). As Silk and Manley (2012) illustrate through their study of sport development in site-based vignettes (small studies in Kuala Lumpur, Beijing, Singapore, and Delhi), despite the “differential engagements with global economic processes” at each site, sport is a device “deployed by local and global elites as a fast-track way for global city-states to continue to grow (often faster than national population rates) and realize their regional and global functions and aspirations” (467–468). This coming into global being, then, is complicated by a glocalization process that at once projects the local while simultaneously re-expressing it:

There is an implied decline, a disappearance, and a question over the continued relevance of the local; as such, in thinking about Pacific Asian sporting spectacle, there is a need to think about the ways in which the (g)local presentation of self to the world alluded to above in Kuala Lumpur, Delhi, Beijing and Singapore has, in many respects, been created, influenced and penetrated by global forces and processes (such that it is glocal). (Silk and Manley, 2012: 469)

This is, of course, not to say that such glocality is unique to or an outward projection exclusively from China or Asia. In his extensive work on the English Premier League (EPL), Peter Millward (2011) draws upon the work of Manuel Castells and John Urry (amongst others) to illustrate how capital, polity, culture, technology, and social relations flow about a multi-directional network from local to global and vice versa. That is, the becoming of glocalized Asian sport represents not merely the entrée of local sport in the global sphere or processes of globalization thereof, but of an intensification of exchange systems already actively forming the landscape of international sport. For example, in their study of Premier League club Hull City’s attempt to expand into the East Asian market, Millward and colleagues (Hayton et al., 2017) provide an important timely intervention into how we must consider not only the flows of football capital and culture, but also the nodal points from which those are fixed to historically important practices, norms, and existing systems of (cultural and commodity) exchange. Through Castells’ theorizations, the Hull City example shows us how the footballing local—rooted in decades of localization in the UK—is both simultaneously re-localized (as Western, British, etc.) and also contoured to the multifarious cultural expectations of the international Asian consumer market: at once localized and glocalized.

On the other hand, and unlike the EPL, football in China is inimitable. The development of the sport surfaces as one part state functionalism (for everything from health promotion and education to consensus- and capital-building) and one part market expansionism (stadial urban development, increased (inter)national media economies, etc.). What, then, are we to make of football development in China under such conditions? How does the evolving Chinese footballing local (as history,⁶ as culture, as nation-based economic sphere, as state project, as commodity) interface with and articulate to global commodity and media flows, oligarchies and market formations, and transnational corporatisms? More specifically, in what ways is the state seeking to acculturate the commercial and developmental aspects of the sport across various striations of the national imaginary?

A note on method

To answer these questions, we conducted a qualitative content analysis of sport-based policy documents and corresponding public statements from the CCP, the central administration of sport, the CSL, the Chinese State Council, and other representative agencies (see Table 1). Amongst various analytical methods in qualitative research, qualitative content analysis is a systematic procedure for examining and interpreting data to elicit meaning, gain understanding, and develop empirical knowledge by reviewing or evaluating both printed and electronic (computer-based and Internet-transmitted) material (Bowen, 2009; Corbin and Strauss, 2008). The focus of analysis was on football development policies and related public discourses produced by state intermediaries at the city, provincial, regional, and especially state levels. Thus, although this study first drew on archives, local chronological records, news articles, government reports, and literature to provide a background description of sport development and urban development in the city of Shanghai, the focus of this analysis is primarily on the major policy documents and related public statements made by policymakers and administrators. Policy documents in China are called “red-head documents” (hongtou wenjian, due to the red ink used to print across the top). In Chinese politics, these policy documents use formalized language as a form of power that deals with proscribing and prescribing specific terminology (Schoenhals, 1992). Those policy documents examined in this study were written expressly to address the status of commercial, participatory, or elite football development.⁷

Chinese football in the global cultural economy

By cultural economy, we are referring to both the regimes of (cultural) accumulation (in this case the multifariously indeterminable “Chinese culture,” football culture, sport-based consumer culture, etc.) and the state-based regimes of acculturation (see McRobbie, 1994) intended to naturalize a particular state capitalist approach to sport development. This cultural economy, however, is neither unified nor homogenous. Arjun Appadurai (1990/2006: 1) argues that, “the sheer speed, scale, and volume of flows of people, machinery, money, images, and ideas are now so great that the disjunctures have become central to the politics of global culture.” Appadurai hints at the notion that global economization is to some extent reformulating local cultures—in the form of commodified ethnicities, corporatized cultures, homogenized localisms, and heterogeneous global marketing schemes.

Hence, we see the emergence of a new cultural economy—whereby old lines of local and global, culture and economy, have been disjointed and blurred:

The new global cultural economy has to be seen as a complex, overlapping, disjunctive order that cannot any longer be understood in terms of existing center–periphery models (even those that might account for multiple centers and peripheries). Nor is it susceptible to simple models of push and pull (in terms of migration theory), or of surpluses and deficits (as in traditional models of balance of trade), or of consumers and producers (as in most neo-Marxist theories of development)…. The complexity of the current global economy has to do with certain fundamental disjunctures between economy, culture, and politics that we have only begun to theorize. (Appadurai, 1990/2006: 588)

In China, these footballing disjunctures reveal themselves in a cacophony of local–global encounters ranging from West-to-East migrant player-celebrities (the oft-heralded Brazilian Hulk or oft-derided Argentinean Carlos Tevez), emerging social practices such as large Bayern Munich supporter groups in Shanghai, local expressions of consumer cosmopolitanism (Manchester United team shops, Barcelona FC tours, Bundesliga live-streaming subscriptions, etc.), and the increased national primacy given to global mega-events (World Cups).⁸

At the epicenter of these fractures is the football commodity itself. Again following Appadurai, it is worth considering how football as a thing-to-be-marketed in China is situated by state and private actors and toward what ends. For Appadurai (1988), commodity situation refers to both the conditions in which the thing becomes a “thing of exchange” and the conditions (situatedness) in which the thing ascertains value:

I propose that the commodity situation in the social life of any “thing” be defined as the situation in which its exchangeability (past, present, or future) for some other thing is its socially relevant feature. Further, the commodity situation, defined this way, can be disaggregated into: (1) the commodity phase of the social life of any thing; (2) the commodity candidacy of any thing; and (3) the commodity context in which any thing may be placed. (Appadurai, 1988: 13, emphasis in original)

Appadurai (1988: 13) goes on to define the commodity phase as the “temporal (and spatial) organization of the thing such that it moves (or is rendered moveable) in and out of the commodity state.” The notion of commodity candidacy refers to the “standards and criteria (symbolic, classificatory, and moral) that define the exchangeability of things in any particular social and historical context” (Appadurai, 1988: 14). The commodity context for Appadurai refers to the variety of “social arenas, within or between cultural units, that help link the commodity candidacy of a thing to the commodity phase of its career” (Appadurai, 1988: 15).

For our analysis, we are interested in how the football commodity—as a disjunctural form of global and local, economy and culture—represents an assemblage of various actors, commercial forces, capital flows, knowledge and technology economies, and digital communication systems; and how various football-scapes, to channel Appadurai, are vectored within the contemporary Chinese economic and cultural spheres to manufacture consent for major reform. For Appadurai (1990/2006), the use of “scapes” as conceptual framework:

…allows us to point to the fluid, irregular shapes of these landscapes, shapes that characterize international capital as deeply as they do international clothing styles. These terms with the common suffix -scape also indicate that these are not objectively given relations that look the same from every angle of vision but, rather, that they are deeply perspectival constructs, inflected by the historical, linguistic, and political situatedness of different sorts of actors. (Appadurai, 1990/2006: 589)

In his work, Appadurai (1988: 599) used the construct of “scape” to theorize and exemplify the ways in which “these various flows (or landscapes, from the stabilizing perspectives of any given imagined world) are in fundamental disjuncture with respect to one another.” In what remains, we utilize this framework to map out the terrain through which local and global people (ethnoscape), technologies (technoscape), capital (finanscape), images (mediascape), and political ideologies (ideoscape) intersect in disjunctural yet productive ways to frame the football commodity and thereby form the ascendant Chinese football imaginary.

Zúqiú as ethnoscape

For Appadurai (1990/2006: 589), ethnoscape is

…the landscape of persons who constitute the shifting world in which we live: tourists, immigrants, refugees, exiles, guest workers, and other moving groups and individuals constitute an essential feature of the world and appear to affect the politics of (and between) nations to a hitherto unprecedented degree.

The contemporary Chinese football (zúqiú) ethnoscape is a unique assemblage of players, coaches, fans, and corporate and state actors whose on- and off-pitch interactions constitute a series of social and cultural interdependencies.

Here, let us consider the player composition of the CSL teams. From its inception in 1994 to today, the league has progressively placed mandatory limits on the number of foreign players allowed on each team’s roster (and on the pitch at a given time). In a recent effort to promote domestic player (and celebrity) development, no more than three international players were usually allowed to participate in each match. Under the previous rules, all 16 teams in the CSL were allowed to sign a maximum of five foreign players (one was required to be from another Asian Football Confederation country). All five could be named in the 18-man match-day roster but only four could take the field at any one time (one of those players has to be from an Asian nation). For the 2017 season, teams have still been able to sign five foreign players from anywhere in the world (as the “Asian quota” has been abolished), but only three could be included in match-day rosters (Xinhua News Agency, 2017). In addition, for the 2017 season, all teams have to feature at least two Chinese football players under the age of 23 in their match-day squads, and at least one in the starting lineup (Zhao, 2017). Moreover, from the 2018 season, the Chinese Football Association (CFA) has mandated that each CSL and second-division team will be required to have the same number of Chinese under-23 football players as foreign players in the match-day roster (CFA, 2017).

These requirements in some ways illustrate state-based forms of labor flow restriction and regulatory protectionism illustrative of a foregone Communist era. The restriction on player in-migration mainly serves two functions: (1) controlling the capital flow within the process of signing and transferring foreign players, and (2) reducing the use of foreign players while promoting local Chinese football talents (Wang, 2017).

Based in two parts on the central government’s plan to make China a global football power and private CSL team owner’s pursuits to procure top international talent, within this labor framework the league has witnessed an unprecedented rise in salaries and transfer fees offered to bring elite international players to the Chinese market to enhance team profile and performance. Starting with the high-profile signing of French star Nikolas Anelka in 2011, the import labor market has quickly expanded as a wave of foreign players flowed into China. In 2012, CSL teams spent approximately US$148 million in player salaries, but by 2016 had increased that figure to over US$460 million. The vast majority of these wages were earmarked for recruiting top international players. For example, in January 2017, Shanghai SIPG reportedly paid Chelsea US$65 million to bring Brazilian midfielder Oscar to the club (Xinhua News Agency, 2017).

The state, however, has raised an alert over the extravagant expenditure on international players and has started to release a series of regulations and policies⁹ to shift away from high-profile player in-migration to the development of a domestic football labor force (to grow interest in the game, promote public health, and to advance the Chinese national team). As a Chinese football official explained¹⁰:

Clubs have been investing irrationally in foreign stars, with staggering transfer fees and salaries, while neglecting the cultivation of homegrown players. The new regulation will provide more opportunities for local players as well as helping to regulate clubs’ financial operations. (Wang, 2017: 3)

The regulation of labor flows and eventual control of wages aligns with the state’s shifting focus on developing Chinese talent and produce a national team capable of winning the World Cup by 2050. From the perspective of the CCP, the CSL should serve the Chinese national team by producing and developing local talent to improve the national team’s performance, which is ever more important than promoting the league and club’s performance and profile by relying on foreign players (Chen and Zheng, 2016). As Li Yuyi, the Vice President of CFA, said,

Though the league seems to be popular (in China), that popularity is not resulting in improvement in the performance of the Chinese national team…In terms of football reform and development, we have to focus on building our national team and contribute to the society through achieving good performance of the national team. As a big sports nation, we cannot complete reform if we don’t put the Chinese national team’s performance in a very important position. (Chen and Zheng, 2016: 18, author’s translation)

Hence, we see a disjuncture of local state and market actors, where on the one hand club owners are looking to invest in and import foreign labor to enhance the on-the-pitch product and team brand and bring heightened exposure to the CSL.¹¹ On the other hand, state actors have enhanced regulatory mechanisms and oversight of league operations and finances with the expressed goal of using the league to develop a team that best promotes the nation and the CCP through international competition. The arrangement of football labor, qua ethnoscapes, within the Chinese context thus illustrates a tension between Dengist approaches to promoting economic development through investment and deregulation and more traditional socialist approaches aimed at developing and harnessing the productive capacities of the national labor form to enhance the national output.

Zúqiú as technoscape

According to Appadurai (1990/2006: 589), the notion of technoscape refers to “the global configuration of technology and the fact that technology, both high and low, both mechanical and informational, now moves at high speeds across various kinds of previously impervious boundaries.” If we are to consider football technologies to be everything from coaching and training to performance and business science, then the configurations of football-related mechanical and informational technologies flowing in and out of China is evident. In the Chinese Football Reform and Development Program document, state administrators explained the function of knowledge transfer in developing a technically advanced national football system:

In order to realize the full social value and function of football, it is necessary to start from the actual situation in China and to learn from the experiences of developed football countries to achieve a new way of reform and development of football with Chinese characteristics. (CSC, 2015, author’s translation)

To wit, the state has invested considerable resources in importing foreign experts and high-profile coaches to improve performance at various levels of the national football system. At the national team level, following the success of the 2002 national team—who under the direction of Serbian Bora Milutinovic qualified for that year’s World Cup—the CFA has frequently employed top international coaches to steward the national team (Arie Haan 2002–2004, Vladimir Petrovic 2007–2008, Jose Antonio Camacho 2011–2013, Alain Perrin 2014–2016, Marcello Lippi 2016–present). The current manager, Marcello Lippi—who led Italy to the World Cup championship in 2006—was enlisted at a salary of approximately US$25 million per year. In the CSL, sponsors and team owners subsidize high salaries for foreign managers—totaling over US$80 million for the 16 teams in 2016. Indeed, many of the world’s highest paid and most distinguished managers—former England manager Sven Goran Eriksson, World Cup winning-manager Luiz Felipe Scolari, legendary Italian defender Fabio Cannavaro, former Chelsea boss Andre Villas-Boas, and former Real Madrid manager Manuel Pellegrini—have managed Super League teams in recent years.

In the most recent policy documents,¹² the CCP has also expressed the intention to invest public resources in widespread government and non-governmental organization (NGO)-led community-level and grassroots football development programs. As part of that effort, at the provincial and municipal levels, youth campus football “reform experimental zones” and “pilot counties (districts)” have been set up to explore a grassroots football development system with Chinese characteristics. The “reform experimental zones” and “pilot counties (districts)”¹³ will focus on building an education system characterized by football where at least 60% of the schools at all levels have to add football to curriculum and entrance exams for developing campus football teams and potential league games (CSC, 2015; CME, 2017). Local schools and colleges are also encouraged to bring in foreign football teachers and coaches to learn “advanced football knowledge and training methods” (Wang et al., 2017). One policy has specifically noted that around 120 foreign football experts (about 115 were hired in 2016) are expected to be employed to teach and coach in local Chinese schools and colleges each year. Meanwhile, Chinese coaches and junior players would routinely go abroad (i.e. European countries such as Germany, France, and Spain) for short-term professional training and study (CME, 2017).

Moreover, local Chinese cities have proactively been involved in hosting football-related international conferences to advance the business. For example, the city of Changsha hosted the World Football Forum in May 2017 and invited FIFA officials and famous foreign football clubs and stars to discuss Chinese football development. As a Changsha government official denoted:

By hosting WFF, on one hand, we accept new ideas about professional football and learn advanced management experience and operational mode. On the other hand, we make Changsha connected to International agencies and football giants and become part of the big football family. (Zhao, 2017: 4)

Hence, we see an emphasis in investing in human capital over labor capital, whereby the state prioritizes the in-flow of technology and expertise as the primary means through which the football labor force’s capacities are enhanced and made valuable in the broader field of global exchange.

Zúqiú as finanscape

Appadurai (1990/2006: 590), describes a global finanscape where “the disposition of global capital is now a more mysterious, rapid, and difficult landscape to follow than ever before as currency markets, national stock exchanges, and commodity speculations move megamonies through national turnstiles at blinding speed”. Such a football finanscape is thusly envisioned in policy documents as:

A combination of a national system and market mechanism. Using the superiority of the socialist system. Joining forces to integrate resources. Fully make use of the market mechanism. Inspire vitality. The creation of a fair and honest environment in order to promote the protection of equal competition. (CSC, 2015, author’s translation)

Football capital, in the form of rents, ownership of the means of production, revenues, salaries (discussed above), and sponsorship agreements have all come to flow freely through the professional and community level iterations of the sport. In the CSL, commercial sponsorship revenues grew from US$186 million in 2012 to US$235 million in 2016 and ticket income grew from US$13 million to US$76 million over the same period. Clubs’ total income swelled from US$175 million in 2012 to US$1.06 billion in 2016, while during the same period expenditures went from US$188 million to US$1.22 billion. In short, the business of professional football in China exploded.

Football in China, as is the case with other sports and in other nations, has long been closely connected with industrial sectors. In recent years, private corporations have quickly sealed the major ownership in the CSL with 10 out of the 16 teams in 2016–2017 season being privately owned. Real estate developers, both privately held and state-owned, also played a major role in funding the teams in the league (e.g. Guanzhou Evergrande Taobao, Hangzhou Greentown, and Shanghai Greenland Shenghua, see Lovett and Townsend, 2016). To many corporations, investing in football has been perceived as a viable way to build a “strategic partnership” with the government in a way of supporting the government-led initiatives (see Chadwick, 2017). As such, the investment in football not only helps increase the companies’ brand equity and public image, but also serves as a “stepping stone” to gain an array of supports (e.g. tax reduction, land-use rights, and preferential policy) from the local government officials, who are aspiring to use football as a “city branding” leverage to gain an edge in regional competition, attract external investment, and collect political credits to get promoted.¹⁴ Against the recent backdrop that football is heavily invested in and promoted by the government, it further creates an opportunity for speculative investment from these cooperating entities, especially those real estate developers who have already been “skillful” in land speculation while greatly relying on the state’s redistribution of scarce public property—land.

The “financializing” of football by Chinese capital not only takes place domestically, but it also ruffles the global football market. According to a report by Bloomberg, Chinese investors spent over US$2 billion on investing in European Football from 2015 to the end of 2016 (Pham, 2016). Some of the high-profile investments including the acquisition of a majority stake in Italian club Inter Milan by Suning Holdings Group (who also owns the CSL team Jiangsu Suning FC and EPL broadcasting right holder (2019–2012)—PPTV) for US$307 million; the US$821million acquisition deal of another Italian football club AC Milan by Sino-Europe Sports; and the purchase of minority stake of the EPL team Manchester City for a deal worth US$400 million. It is worthwhile noting that the spending spree of Chinese investors in European soccer was later characterized as “overheating” by government officials in early 2017, as the head of the State Administration of Foreign Exchange (SAFE), Pan Gongsheng, stated:

Last year (2016), Chinese firms bought lots of football clubs overseas. If these purchases help improve the standard of Chinese football, then I think that’s a good thing. But is that what’s really happening? A lot of Chinese companies already have high levels of debt and then borrow another large sum to make overseas purchases. Others pretend to be investing but are actually just moving their assets out of country. (Quoted in Acton, 2017: 9–10)

The director of the People’s Bank of China, Zhou Xiaochuan, similarly asserted,

Some of the foreign investments are overheated, which do not fit our national condition and system. The investment on sport, entertainment and clubs have not do much good to China and have caused some complaints outside. We think it is necessary to give a certain degree of policy guidelines.¹⁵

Nonetheless, the accelerated in-flow and out-flow of capital is both significant and illustrative of the new order of investiture in the sport that has come to define contemporary Chinese football and semi-related industries.

Zúqiú as mediascape

Appadurai’s (1990/2006: 590) mediascape of the global cultural economy refers:

Both to the distribution of the electronic capabilities to produce and disseminate information (newspapers, magazines, television stations, and film-production studios), which are now available to a growing number of private and public interests throughout the world, and to the images of the world created by these media.

He explains that mediascapes, whether produced by private or state interests, tend to be

…image centered, narrative-based accounts of strips of reality, and what they offer to those who experience and transform them is a series of elements (such as characters, plots, and textual forms) out of which scripts can be formed of imagined lives, their own as well as those of others living in other places. (Appadurai, 1990/2006: 590)

Appadurai’s approach delineates media as process and as product, whereby the former is the mode of mediation through which local images are globalized and global images come localized and the latter is the commodity form (the media[ted] image) that facilitates ancillaries such as advertising, streaming services, satellite subscriptions, and celebrity discourse.

As we know, the sport of football has a long and complicated—some might say symbiotic—relationship with the mass media. The sport is made meaningful as process and product are blurred in a global sport–media complex (Jhally, 1989) that organizes fan identities, consumer subjectivities, commodity flows, and celebrity discourses in rhythm with the broader dictums of global capitalism (see Boyle and Haynes, 2004). This interrelationship becomes all the more complex in China, where the state plays an active role in controlling the messaging and imaging of all mass media content. In terms of the mediascape process, the bandwidth for football content flowing into, throughout, and out of China has in recent decades expanded exponentially. Once a restricted media market for many of the world’s top leagues, the Chinese television market now represents a significant viewership market for the likes of the Bundesliga and the EPL. For example, China’s Super Sport Media Group currently pays around US$20 million per year to broadcast EPL matches to over 50 million Chinese viewers. Starting in 2019, the online video streaming service PPTV will begin a three-year deal reportedly worth US$700 million for the rights to broadcast EPL matches in China (Associated Press, 2016). Spain’s La Liga, the German Bundesliga, and Italy’s Serie A have created similar partnerships, although the financial terms have never been disclosed to the public. The in-flow of images and out-flow of capital measured by these arrangements is belied by equally stultifying metrics in terms of exposure. More than 80 million Chinese viewers tuned in to watch the 2014 FIFA Men’s World Cup final match (far more than any other nation—see Xinhua News Agency, 2014). According to a FIFA report, the “audience reach” for the event was highest in China, where 252.3 million viewers were reached across the duration of the event (Kantar Media, 2014).

China’s football media flows are not, however, unidirectional. In 2016, Ti’ao Dongli (a Beijing-based sports broadcasting and market research firm) acquired the broadcasting rights of the CSL in a five-year (2016–2020) deal worth 8 billion yuan (approximately US$1.2 billion)—a staggering increase from the US$12 million per year in 2015. LeSports, China’s leading Internet-based sports company, later purchased exclusive online multimedia rights of CSL matches for 2.7 billion (approximately US$390 million) yuan (Ye, 2016). Moreover, the CSL has burst into the global media landscape of football with the 2017–2018 season being broadcasted to 96 countries and regions, including the recent partnership with Sky Sports to air the league in the UK (Ti’ao Dongli, 2017).

The increasing domestic and global appeal of the league is also attributed to the celebritization of the mediascape product—the rapidly growing media market also keeps pace with the influx of foreign players, especially the star players from all over the world. The CSL clubs spent over US$421 million on the transfer market in the winter of 2017, outstripping the top leagues in Europe, including the EPL, and luring away some of the most talented players, such as Oscar, Carlos Tevez, and Axel Witsel from prestigious European teams (Astley, 2017). These world-famous athletes brought much sought-after media exposure to the CSL to increase its international profile and expand its global fan base. The mediated interplays of local and global imaginations of Chinese football thus constitute a mediascape that articulates the inbound and outbound flows of information, images, and bodies.

Zúqiú as ideoscape

Finally, as Appadurai (1990/2006: 591) would have it, ideoscapes are, like mediascapes, “concatenations of images,” but they often “directly political and frequently have to do with the ideologies of states and the counterideologies of movements explicitly oriented to capturing state power or a piece of it.” In the contemporary globalization context, these ideoscapes are typically composed of “elements of the Enlightenment worldview, which consists of a chain of ideas, terms, and images, including freedom, welfare, rights, sovereignty, representation, and the master term democracy” (Appadurai, 1990/2006: 591). On the surface, the widespread development of football simultaneously represents an ideological shift away from traditional Chinese state political economic ideology (Maoism, protectionism, trepidation toward commercial sport) and a shift toward free market (read: Western, liberal, democratic) ideologies. Significant investment in the professional league, enablement of corporate actors, and the increased wages of top producing athletes would all seem to be indicative of a neo-Dengist approach to the further marketization of Chinese football.

However, if we read recent policy documents more carefully, the case can be made that while the ideological bases for football development seem to diverge from the anti-capitalist edicts of the CCP, they do not stray far from the centralizing mandates of the Communist Party itself. In the Development document, the Party outlines plainly the ideological foundations that link football reform and CCP governance:

strengthening the leadership of the Party;

strengthening the football association as an organization mechanism of the Party;

proceed in accordance with the principles of the party cadres and the personnel policy of the party;

strengthening the association ideology, the political work, and the daily management of cadres.

The CFA is built as a party committee and the Party organization is led by the General Administration of Sport leadership.

They outline how the Party system is well-suited to develop “a football management model with Chinese characteristics” (CSC, 2015; NDRC, 2016). The state reiterated the strategic importance of football in developing and restructuring social, economic, political, and cultural aspects of China in their Chinese Football Mid-Long Term Development Plan (2016-2050) document (NDRC, 2016), stating:

Football can help promote sports participation and further increase the level of national fitness and health development;

Football can stimulate consumption and promote new economic growth;

Football can help build a strong sports nation and realize the national rejuvenation;

Developing ‘a football culture with Chinese characteristics’ can help promote core socialist values.

This integration of state and market, of domestic and foreign assets, of the nuances of the socialist system with the globality (appeal, market, cultural significance) of football, and an ambitious and comprehensive structure develops the football industry, mass/public/school football, and professional football in conjunction with broader state directives and ideologies.

Conclusion: Football in (post-)post-socialist China?

What, then, are we to make of this new cultural economy of Chinese football? Based on state discourse and action, it is clear that a number of uncertainties and disjunctures both constitute and are constituted by the intercession of state and market interests onto football. Local identities, local politics, local laboring practices, and local interests are reconstituted in relation to the global flows of football-related images, international celebrities, and transnational technology and knowledge flows. As coaches, players, and capital flow into and out of the Chinese football market, the sport itself is remade in the image of other more established “global” leagues such that we might then say that Chinese football has experienced “deterritorialization.” Again following Appadurai (1990/2006: 593), we might also surmise that football is thus a fertile ground of deterritorialization, in which “money, commodities, and persons are involved in ceaselessly chasing each other around the world, that the mediascapes and ideoscapes of the modern world find their fractured and fragmented counterpart.”

Football, it seems, is made significant within the national popular and local praxis in accordance to a cultural economy of difference. Foreign footballing experts, brands, practitioners, media consumers, and events serve as both the means and ends through which Xi Jinping’s CCP can articulate present footballing ascension to the future state (of sport). Taking a critical approach, we might suggest that disjuncture and difference is thusly framed as exemplary of modernization, development, and globalization, and that such frames are, to follow Appadurai (1990/2006: 594):

…exploited by nation-states to pacify separatists or even the potential fissiparousness of all ideas of difference. Typically, contemporary nation-states do this by exercising taxonomic control over difference, by creating various kinds of international spectacle to domesticate difference, and by seducing small groups with the fantasy of self-display on some sort of global or cosmopolitan stage.

Using Appadurai, we might understand the transformation of Chinese football as one-part fractal hybridization (blending of local consumer and fan identities, local capital, state governance with global football stars, international technical expertise, and a vast global brand and mediascape) and one-part state hegemony (central control of the messaging and administration of professional and community-level football development).

However, as is always the case in China, the development of football is not so simple. The new cultural economy of Chinese football is materially constituted not just by flows and scapes—by contradictions of state and enterprise and global–local disjunctures—but also by the destabilization of production, consumption, and the football commodity itself. This cultural economy is inextricably bounded to a more substantive reconstitution of value (a double entendre is intended here to refer to both value in the material/economic sense and in the cultural/ideological sense of the importance the sport holds to the nation and its citizenry).

Let us revisit the culturalization of football production. The business of football—and success thereof—is framed within the national imaginary as productive to the nation, the state, and the people therein. This “production fetishism” (Appadurai, 1990/2006) is exemplified in narratives and praxes formed around (1) economic development through football, (2) football’s function in promoting the overall health and productivity of the nation, (3) seizing the productive capacities of the national population to grow the status of the modern nation and pacify social unease,¹⁶ and (4) using football to make capital more “fluid” within and outside of the domestic marketplace. Firstly, the economic development of the nation: businesses can use the game to promote their brands and to forge strategic partnerships with the government toward more favorable business conditions. Secondly, it is clear that state administrators envisage football as an important technology from which to systematically develop a healthy national labor force. As was explicitly stated in the state document, “A combination of football development and the improvement of the physical health of the entire nation. The promotion of football will improve the athleticism of the masses” (CSC, 2015). Thirdly, and as has been a common theme in the emergence of the Chinese economy more generally, state administrators look to the productive capacities of the general population as a strategic investment and comparative advantage over other developed nations within and outside of Asia. The saturation of the domestic football labor pool is further evidence of a supply-side strategy intended to grow the sport and the values produced therefrom (for the purposes of developing the quality of play for both the national team and the domestic league).

However, it is also the case that the state is looking to culturalize football as a uniquely local consumer commodity. Football is offered by the state as an eminently consumable aspect of everyday (physical) cultural life. For Appadurai, this “fetishization of the consumer” provides a new subject position through which the good national citizen “has been transformed through commodity flows (and the mediascapes, especially of advertising, that accompany them) into a sign, both in Baudrillard’s sense of a simulacrum that only asymptotically approaches the form of a real social agent, and in the sense of a mask for the real seat of agency, which is not the consumer but the producer and the many forces that constitute production.” (Appadurai, 1996: 42). For this new footballing China to thrive, the citizen consumer is once again (as interpellated in recent years by Western fast food chains, luxury watch and handbag brands, Hollywood designers and filmmakers, etc.) called into action by the state to perform on behalf of national modernization.

Here we might suggest then that the CCP seeks to utilize football to promote more than simple varieties of “political nationalism”—that is, those nation-based identities that reify and promulgate the body politic and its symbolic and political machinations. Football as it is currently being devised is also being utilized to promote what Hutchinson (1987/2012: 3) refers to as “cultural nationalism”—thereby using sport to “transform ideals into concrete political, economic, and social programmes.” In the conception of modern, post-socialist China in and through football, the nation is not only told a story about itself, but is actively engaged in the dominions of participatory and consumer-based citizenship, where to play, watch, or even support the national team or the programs initiated around football is to engage with discourses and cultural logics of the aspirant Chinese state.

Paradoxically, what becomes most clear is that the Xi Jinping government is simultaneously giving and taking control of Chinese football. As is evidenced in the public discourses and policy documents analyzed above, the Dengist approaches of sport development—the deregulation, opening up (or kaifang), of the Chinese producer and consumer markets to the West—are receding in favor of a new socialist/centralist approach to state disjuncturalism. This post-post-socialist approach, if you will, is presented as a uniquely Chinese assemblage whereby “complex, overlapping, fractal shapes constitute a simple, stable (even if large-scale) system” (Appadurai, 1990/2006: 599). Deterritorialization and destabilization lead to new regimes of value (Appadurai, 1988), whereby Lippi, Hulk, Oscar, SIPG, Argentinean tacticians, thousands of football academies and millions of adolescent footballers, the CFA, Nike, FIFA, and the World Cup constitute a cultural economy of football in/and/as contemporary China. What emerges from the disjunctures is “something critical and new in global cultural processes: the imagination as a social practice” (Appadurai, 1990/2006: 587). Culture is put to work in the name of political economy just as cultures of difference (and cultural difference) are incorporated into the global regimes of accumulation.

We might then say that the state has sought to redevelop football within the national Chinese imaginary. As Appadurai (1990/2006: 587) explains, “The imagination is now central to all forms of agency, is itself a social fact, and is the key component of the new global order.” Football, the state, and China more generally get broken up and put back together by disjunctively flowing into the global, and letting the global flow in—through various football-scapes—the “images of flow and uncertainty, hence chaos,” that have come to redefine the state of things as antithetical to, more modern, and more developed than “older images of order, stability, and systematicness” (Appadurai, 1990/2006: 599). What becomes clear in these documents and concurrent initiatives is that football itself has emerged as an important commodity form and “scape” through which the (post-)post-socialist state can be assembled, articulated, imagined, and put into praxis. As Xi Jinping looks to mobilize the footballing masses to grow both the nation and the state, what has become increasingly clear is that football represents a significant field of cultural economy through which the state can be both re-imagined and repositioned as shifting back toward new regimes of insularism, regulation, nationalism, and centralization whilst keeping aflow the people, money, imagery, and expertise that have made for state ascendency in the age of globalization.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

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