The Goal China Can't Reach

Think this couldn't happen again? Flash forward to 2004 and the Asia Cup championship match between Japan and China, also in Workers' Stadium. Chinese fans sang an old anti-Japanese song and yelled: "Kill! Kill! Kill!" When the Japanese team -- predictably -- won, Chinese fans exploded. They torched Japanese flags and spat at Japanese fans. The chaos left both countries rattled and spurred a debate about sports and nationalism.

Part of the reason for China's tragic passion for soccer is that we believe we invented it, along with many other great gifts to humanity. One man in the Song Dynasty (960-1279) is said to have played soccer so well that he was eventually appointed prime minister. In the 1920s and '30s, China routinely fielded one of Asia's best teams. Japan may have been able to bully China militarily in the 1930s, but China was busily routing it in soccer. One brilliant Chinese shooter, Li Huitang, was even called "the soccer king of Asia."

That seems an awfully long time ago, though. The main bright spot today for Chinese soccer is the national women's team, our "Iron Roses," who have done extremely well, even winning a world championship in the 1990s. But this only makes matters worse for the country's pouting men. If the Chinese could win and prove their manhood in the 1930s, why can't we do it now? And why are China's men less impressive on the field than its women?

Some pundits have pontificated that we're going through an era of yin, or femininity, and have wondered what's gone wrong with our yang. Others maintain the problem is that only a small percentage of China's massive population actually plays sports. (Even more than you Americans, we are a nation of Monday-morning quarterbacks.) Others have tried to use our national soccer crisis as a rallying point for change. To make soccer better, we're told, we need the rule of law, more transparency, radical changes and widespread reforms. The underlying problem, they say, is that Chinese soccer is still ultimately controlled by the hidebound Communist Party. Others point to corruption: It's not just that many of our referees are bent, they argue, but that some of our players make the notorious 1919 "Black Sox" look like wide-eyed schoolboys. Then there are the supposed experts who insist that Chinese culture itself is to blame. On the surface, they argue, we look like great team players -- consider our dams, our irrigation systems, our Great Wall -- but in practice, today's fast-growing China has turned its back on communal values. These days, everybody wants to be the boss, and nobody wants to be the goalie.

I'm not persuaded by any of these explanations, but I'm intrigued by all of them. Our raw, unruly and wild feelings about our prowess at soccer, I think, have become something of a metaphor for the way we view our place at the world's table. Are we respected? Are we truly welcome? And above all: Are we a great power or just a middling one? As one Chinese Netizen posted, somewhat ungrammatically: "Now, you touched the Chinese's softest and most sensitive part."

gxu@kzoo.edu

Xu Guoqi is the author of "Olympic Dreams: China and Sports, 1895-2008." He teaches history at Kalamazoo College.