There is a saying about how soccer is perceived in three big nations: Americans are not interested in watching soccer games but are good at playing it; Chinese like watching it but are poor players; Indians are neither fond of it nor able to play it. It is a kind of black humor but it also tells the truth.
A foreigner who is visiting Beijing or Shanghai, or any other major city in China, will be amazed to see how obsessed the Chinese are about the World Cup despite their national team not playing in the tournament. Newspapers, TVs and social media sites are awash with World Cup-related commentary, photos, video footage, animations and commercials.
Even the official Central TV station, which is usually dominated by political and economical news and reports about government officials' activities, devote large chunks of time to live broadcasts of the games. Provincial stations also bombard TV viewers with interviews, guessing games and lotteries. Celebrities and sports stars join students and housewives in radio and TV studios to express their joy and disappointment from watching the World Cup. Men relish talking about the performance on the pitch. Women take delight in gossiping about handsome players. Billboards and huge screens flash images of soccer stars everywhere – at office buildings, hotels, restaurants, bars, railway stations and airports. Companies reschedule work hours to ingratiate employees who burn midnight oil watching the games. Cellphone users even receive messages offering forged medical notes for exhausted fans to ask for sick leave from their employers. Walking down the streets and alleys in the Chinese cities in the early morning twilight and hearing shouts of "shoot, shoot" or "a goal" drift out of the windows, one would feel in Rio de Janeiro or Sao Paulo rather than in Beijing or Shanghai.
Why are Chinese so crazy about the World Cup? Reasons abound and vary, but the most important is the traditional love of the sport passed down from older generations. There were many soccer lovers among the founding leaders of the People's Republic of China. Mr. Deng Xiaoping, father of China's reform, was a genuine aficionado. When the Chinese national women's volleyball team won the world championship five times in succession in the 1980s, there was a suggestion that the day the team won the fifth title would become China's national sports festival. But Deng Xiaoping opposed the idea, saying that the festival should be set only when China's soccer team won a world title.
Though the corrupt and scandals-ridden national soccer team has disappointed and exasperated the nation with decades of fiascos, soccer's position as number one of all ball games in China has never wavered. Chinese President Xi Jinping reportedly expressed, on a private occasion, three wishes. First, the national soccer team would qualify for the World Cup playoffs; second, China would host the World Cup; and third, China would win. Whether these wishes come true or not may need time, but at least they attest to the fact that every Chinese, from the State president to the street resident, has never lost their hope for victories on the soccer field. Without doubt, national pride is a major factor accounting for Chinese people's craving of a performance in the quadrennial global carnival.
A more in-depth reason, I think, is a new way of life that Chinese people have found in the sport. Watching what happens inside and outside the World Cup arenas, the Chinese people see a social atmosphere and a state of spirit that they have long admired, a relationship of equality, a rational order and a way of showing talent, demonstrating wisdom and expressing emotion. The highly competitive but reasonably regulated games, the equal rivalries between players of different complexions and races, the sincere friendship that permeates the seemingly ruthless qualification games, and the perfect infusion of wild aggression and civil manners deeply moved the Chinese. After decades of a developing market economy, the Chinese society has witnessed a loss of sincerity, a deterioration in moral standards and the rampant violation of rules and regulations. Vexed by these social evils for many years, the Chinese people are pleased to find and retrieve, during the World Cup, something they have lost – the friendly communication between people, rational approach to differences and free expression of emotions. Sport preserves and carries on the primitive nature of the human race, as is demonstrated in the World Cup.
