Purge exposes rotten underbelly of Chinese sport
- Source: Global Times
- [22:14 January 27 2010]
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Illustration: Liu Rui
By David Yang
When Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger visited Beijing last summer, there was one question in his mind. At a press conference, he asked the moderator, Huang Jianxiang, a well-known local football commentator, why China, with so many people, lacked a first-rate football team. The question was laughed o by the commentator, who replied that it was because "We never had a coach like you."
But coaching isn't the core problem in Chinese football. The recent crackdown on match-fixing and underground gambling tells one that the beautiful game has rotten to the core in China.
In the past three months, more than 100 players, club owners and officials have been entangled in the investigation and last week both Nan Yong, president of the Chinese Football Association (FA) and Yang Yimin, a senior official in both the FA and the Asian Football Confederation, along with Zhang Jianqiang, FA's head of referees, were detained by the police for interrogation.
Without waiting for formal charges, the three, who had each served in the FA for over 18 years, were soon ousted by the General Administration of Sport (GAS), the top governing body of sports in the country.®
The news came as little surprise to many Chinese sports journalists. Instead of assuming their role as watchdogs by exposing wrongdoing in the sporting industry, they are now reveling in their knowledge of match-fixing scandals.
They're making appearances in talk shows or shilling new books, enlightening the public about the severity of the scandals and how there're still "big fishes" out there to be caught. But rarely did these stories that they supposedly knew all along make the headlines of their papers or TV programs.
At the end of 2007, CCTV-5, China's sports channel, did a program evaluating the work done by Xie Yalong, then FA president.
After the program gave Xie low marks, the FA began snubbing interview requests from journalists representing the channel. The message from officials couldn't have been clearer, and the media, eager to keep their access, understood it well.
Besides media indifference, the absence of law enforcement and tacit condoning of corruption by related government department are all causes of the ignominious practices in football. Evidence suggests that bribery and match-fixing prevail in the Chinese sporting world.®
The current investigation in football was made possible only after top government officials decided that they wanted to "raise the level of Chinese football."
What is happening in football industry could well mirror other aspects of Chinese sport.
Last year, after Ma Yanping, an acclaimed diving coach, exposed that the finals of diving competition of last year's 11th National Games had been rigged by Zhou Jihong, head of China's national diving team and deputy director of the National Aquatics Sport Administration Center, officials from GAS soon came into Zhou's defense. The police were nowhere to be seen.
