Cold War China militarises soccer team

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Via the ABC because we have so much in common:

Chinese football’s governing body has turned to military drills in its latest attempt to fulfil President Xi Jinping’s goal to make the country a great football power by the turn of the century.

Over the weekend, more than 50 of the country’s top under-25 players were taken to a military base in the coastal province of Shandong where they swapped sportswear for camouflage and buzzcuts.

State television channel CCTV showed the players – many who regularly star in China’s top tier Super League – receiving instructions from military trainers and having their heads shaved.

They were also shown sitting in a classroom wearing fatigues while they watched a broadcast of China’s national team play out a scoreless draw with India.

According to the CCTV report, the squad will commence new solider training, ideological education and special forces drills.

In a shock move, the Chinese Football Association (CFA) announced the intensive camp at the beginning of October, declaring the players would be pulled out of their regular club commitments until December 28.

The decision means top tier clubs will be missing some of their best players at the business end of both the Chinese Super League season and for the CFA Cup final.

In announcing the move, the CFA said the two-and-a-half-month camp would “better improve training for outstanding young players and strengthen the reserve talent pool” for the national team.

But some fans decried the move online.

Some said it reflected the death of Chinese football, while many others questioned how military drills and training camps would be better for the players’ development than competitive matches.

“You can’t take 55 players away from the league and expect it not to affect the sport’s integrity,” said Shanghai-based football writer Cameron Wilson on The Chinese Football Podcast.

The CFA’s policy towards young players has changed several times in recent years with many fans blaming the heavy hand of state sports administrators for the unpredictable rule changes.

The regulations have forced top tier clubs to field minimum numbers of under-23 players at the expense of foreign recruits.

Speculation is swirling that the purpose of the camp is to create one or two national development teams that would play week to week in either China’s domestic league or even in an eastern European club competition.

China’s government is trying to rapidly improve the performance of the men’s national team, which has only made the World Cup finals once and is seen as a perennial underperformer despite an increasingly lucrative domestic league.

It’s always a cold war in China. Meanwhile, a Chinese think tank takes the soccer analogy way too, at the AFR comes Liu Qing, the head of Asia-Pacific research at the China Institute of International Studies, a think tank under China’s foreign ministry:

“Under Turnbull’s administration, the China bilateral relationship really hit bottom. Now the situation has slightly improved with the change of prime minister,” Mr Liu told The Australian Financial Review.

“The ball is in Australia’s court. It is up to Australia to decide which direction to kick the ball. If Australia takes sides with the US, this would hurt the China-Australia relationship. It will impact trade investment, tourism and personnel exchanges.”

He said reports of increased cooperation between the Five Eyes alliance – an intelligence-sharing network including Australia, Britain, Canada, New Zealand and the US – with other countries to share classified information on China was further evidence of which way Canberra’s loyalties lay.

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Alas, these days it is always left to MB to correct Australian media bias towards China. It was Chinese “sharp power” that triggered the crisis not Malcolm Turnbull. When Chinese dough was found to be perverting Australian democracy the PM delivered the minimum push-back imaginable in the circumstances. These are the facts that the AFR dare not mention.

About the author
David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal. He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.