Every four years around this time, when the world’s focus turns intently to the thrill of victory at the Summer Games, an old debate returns to the fore in China over the roles of the market and the government in sports.
And last weekend, when 21-year-old Zheng Qinwen served up China’s first-ever gold in singles tennis at the Paris Olympics, the din reached a new zenith.
The first Asian tennis player to win such an honour, Zheng’s path to success deviated from that of nearly every other Chinese athlete competing in the Games. It was more about the support she had received from family, rather than state-led cultivation, and it was widely seen as the best evidence that China can foster world-class athletes through market-oriented means.
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“[It shows that] without the support and shackles of the national system, one can also live an epic life relying on the full release of their personal capabilities, talent and potentials,” said one user on the popular Weibo microblog service.
China has a highly centralised national sport system in which governments at all levels have extensive control over almost every link in the chain - from talent recruitment and training regimens to commercial promotion.
The system is a legacy of China’s central planning and has remained largely untouched despite decades of China’s reform and opening up. In that span, it has cultivated conditions to rapidly secure an advantageous position for winning Olympic medals. It also helped discover world-class athletes from humble backgrounds, including 17-year-old diving phenom Quan Hongchan, who was born as the third of five children in a rural village of Guangdong province to an orange-farming father and a factory-working mother who was left in poor health after being hit by a car seven years ago.
But the rigidness of such a state-controlled system conflicts with certain sports that have more complete commercial networks worldwide, including tennis.
After the Beijing Olympics in 2008, the tennis division of China’s General Administration of Sport launched a reform that, for the first time, set free several players - including the legendary Li Na, the first Grand Slam singles champion from Asia - who could, from then on, independently decide which international games to compete in and which coaches to hire, with funding coming from their prize income rather than the state money.
And Zheng’s gold has reignited the fervent calls for market-oriented reform in China’s other sports sectors, especially football - which has been widely criticised as a “complete shame” while being marred by high-level corruption charges in the past two years.
In March, Chen Xuyuan, the former head of the Chinese Football Association was sentenced to life in prison for taking 81 million yuan (US$11.2 million) in bribes, making him one of the most senior officials punished in China’s sweeping crackdown on corruption in the sport.
Such cases show that incomplete marketisation in certain sports can throw the door open to corruption, said Li Wei, a professor of economics at the Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business in Beijing.
The national sports system means the government determines a specific sports goal and then concentrates limited resources on the field to strive for competitive advantage, Li wrote in a column published on July 30 by the Caixin media platform.
And it is easier to achieve those targets in less-competitive events such as weightlifting, compared with those that are more popular and more fiercely competitive, such as football and basketball, he added.
“In fact, both the national system and commercial sports have their own strengths,” Li said. “What we need to do now is act according to the laws of sports, separate the national system from commercial sports ... carrying out different operations respectively.”
Football is a typical commercial sport, and if it can be fully marketised, it would be of huge commercial value in China, he said.
“Only by deregulating commercial sports, allowing the market to appear where it should appear, to allocate resources, can China move from a big sports country to a real sports powerhouse,” Li said.
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