Is grassroots spontaneity the final cure for China's football (and all soft powers)?

China Translated - Briefing #52

This has been a busy week, occupied by many fruitful meetings in Hong Kong, while I also finished the long essay "I am against CCP, not against Chinese people" - How meaningful is this idea?” in the meantime. So initially, I didn’t plan to write another piece. But something fascinating has compelled me to write one more time before this week finishes.

No, I am not talking about the first call between Xi and Trump after Trump 2.0 started, which has not only stabilized the almost-collapsing US-China trade talks but has shown that once again, China is in a strong position in this War of TACO. Nor am I talking about the spectacular break-up of the bromance between Trump and Musk a few hours after that call. To be frank, this relationship between these two egomaniacs has lasted much longer than I expected.

These events, while entertaining, have been widely covered by many commentators, and I don’t think I have anything useful to add. But there is a less-discussed interesting development happening in China that may have long-term implications, and it concerns football. (American subscribers only make up fewer than 30% of my readership, so I will avoid the word “soccer.” Sorry, folks!)

In Jiangsu Province, bordering Shanghai and one of China’s most populous and wealthiest provinces, an extremely popular football tournament involving different cities in Jiangsu is currently gaining national attention, although it has yet to capture international media.

Commonly known as “苏超 Jiangsu City League”, it is an amateur match not backed by the official China Football Association (CFA), nor by the General Administration of Sport of China, but has drawn much bigger crowds than many of China’s so-called professional football matches.

This amateur football league features 13 teams representing the province's 13 prefecture-level cities, with players coming from diverse professions such as students, teachers, couriers, and programmers, aged 16 to 40. The vibe is a bit like Guizhou’s “Village Super League” that Baiguan featured in 2023, but at a much bigger and more urban scale. And despite its amateur status, the league has rivaled professional Chinese football in popularity, regularly filling stadiums with tens of thousands of fans and generating massive social media buzz.

Sixth Tone has a good story on this:

The amateur, all-male football tournament, which began on May 10, drew bigger crowds than many of China’s top professional league games, with over 180,000 fans flocking to six host cities during the three-day holiday, according to local government data. All six third-round matches sold out, each drawing more than 10,000 spectators on average.

The game has also ignited intense but friendly rivalries and meme battles that tap into local pride, history, and culture, with cities using matches to showcase unique traditions, cuisine, and tourism, boosting local economies.

I believe two important factors contribute to Jiangsu City League’s peculiar popularity.

First, it’s not an official game. It’s amateur, spontaneous, bottom-up, and undictated. And that’s the basic requirement for fun. Despite a culture that generally centers on conformity, Chinese people know what fun is. In that, they are just like every human being on earth.

Second, one also has to consider the peculiar nature of Jiangsu.

Many Chinese people know that the province of Jiangsu is really strange. If someone comes from Shandong, very likely they will call themselves a “山东人Shandonger.” Sichuan, the Sichuanese. Hunan, the Hunanese. The most extreme example is Dongbei, a huge region made of 3 provinces and formerly known as Manchuria. Dongbei people usually just introduce themselves as Dongbei’er, regardless of the province from which they came.

But Jiangsu is strange, in that it’s maybe the only province in China that when its residents introduce themselves to outsiders, they almost never say they are “Jiangsu’er”, but usually just say the city, and sometimes even the county they came from, like Nanjing'er, Suzhou’er, or Taicang’er. (To understand China’s administrative layers, I highly recommend this primer by the always wonderful, Mr.

David Fishman

.)

This allegiance to the city, not to the province, stems from the fact that different cities in Jiangsu belong to different subcultures. The provincial capital of Jiangsu is Nanjing (where your author was born and raised), but Nanjing people speak a similar dialect to cities in the neighboring Anhui Province. Just to the southeast of Nanjing, there are cities like Suzhou and Wuxi, which have similar speaking and dining habits to those of Shanghai and large parts of Zhejiang Province. In the middle of Jiangsu, cities like Huai'an and Yangzhou also have their own distinct cultures. To the east, cities like Yancheng and Lianyungang are coastal cities with coastal cultures, but to the north of Jiangsu, the city of Xuzhou is a historic city with great importance in the Central Plains region that’s more closely associated with Shandong and Henan provinces.

In fact, the very idea of a “省province” is a Yuan Dynasty invention, and the core idea of it was to put people of different subcultures together, so you will have Teochow people in the middle of Guangdong, or Wenzhou people in the middle of Zhejiang. In this way, by grouping different people together, it creates internal divisions among people in a region, so it is easier for the ethnic minorities, like the Mongols, to rule.¹

But still, Jiangsu is extreme in the regard that almost every city in this province is culturally distinct from each other. No wonder it’s been called “散装江苏”, a Frankenstein of a creation!

If the unofficial nature of the game gives it spontaneity and vitality, then the Frankenstein nature of Jiangsu gives it dramatic tension. After all, for anything to have attention these days, you need to have some drama. So, for example, when the neighboring cities of Xuzhou and Suqian went to a match, fans created memorable memes invoking the story of the Chu-Han War 2,200 years ago.

Seasoned readers of this newsletter must have known this story already. Liu Bang, the lowly-bureaucrat-turned-Han-founding-emperor, was born in today’s Xuzhou, while Xiangyu, the highborn-turned-hegemon-king whom Liu eventually defeated, was born in today’s Suqian. So, a game is not just a game in this regard, but the continuation of a 2,200-year-old feud. Just imagine the pride, the joy, and the imagination in the heads of those fans when they were cheering for their cities!

Liu Bang vs Xiangyu in the City League game between Xuzhou and Suqian

For years, people have lamented that China’s football has no hope. The all-men’s team, who doesn’t seem to win any game against any adversary, large or small, is a perennial butt of the joke that is almost an inverse function of the rising strength of China as a nation.

To salvage China’s football, there have been numerous rounds of state-driven campaigns and anti-corruption cases aimed at revitalizing this sector, to no avail. Both the head of Sports Administration and the head of the CFA were imprisoned for corruption. But these measures don’t seem effective either.

Perhaps, although the state is efficient at building out hard infrastructure, it really can’t do too much when it comes to something as “soft” as a football. In fact, whatever the state does can only be counter-productive, because that will kill all the fun.

One of the best viral videos I saw on the internet about the City League laid out the tension between “central” and “grassroots” in plain sight, copying a scene from actor-director Jiang Wen’s popular movie “Let the Bullets Fly.” (This is a highly recommended dark comedy if you haven’t seen it yet.

The conversation goes like this:

Jiangsu (the main protagonist played by Jiang Wen himself): Between you and money, which one do you think is more important to me?

CFA (the main villian played by Chow Yun-Fat): ME.

Jiangsu (shaking head): Think harder.

CFA: Don’t tell me it’s the money?

Jiangsu: Think harder.

CFA: Me!

Jiangsu: Neither you or money is important to me.

CFA (in disbelief): So what’s important for you??

Jiangsu (staring at CFA intensely): That you don’t exist, is very important for me.

I echo Jiangsu-Jiang Wen’s sentiment. Maybe, despite China’s breakneck growth, China’s football still has to develop in the same way that European and Latin American football have evolved: from scratch, and at the grassroots level. These are just the steps that can’t be skipped.

From “Village Super League” to “Jiangsu City League”, I am glad to see this grassroots energy expanding its reach and popularity. Over time, when it has a life of its own in more parts of the country, then we can talk about the future of China’s football.

And if you look beyond, maybe all “soft” things, from cultural content, to brand, to industry standards, to trust, to belief, can only develop in much the same bottom-up way and can’t cut corners.

In the coming days, I might write about the implications of this kind of spontaneity for China’s consumer market at Baiguan, which is my company’s newsletter that’s more designed for actionable business and investment insights.

I might also write at

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, my newsletter about the professional data and information service industry in China/Asia, about stories of our own industry that are also related to this trend.

Stay tuned and have a happy weekend!

1. It’s a natural strategy for all large empires. The Soviet Union under Khruschev gave the Donbass region away to Ukraine, stemming from exactly the same intentions. That it later created continued tension till the present day is another topic for another day.