A Modern Lei Feng

I can understand Chris Devonshire Ellis harboring much hatred for the Chinese government, especially since he embarrassed himself a few years back.  A grudge is fine, but it doesn’t make sense when you manufacture facts to fit an argument that just doesn’t exist, unless of course you’ve made up an entire educational background.

In a recent post, Devonshire Ellis uses sports as a means to attempt to show that China doesn’t “embrace its differences” because minorities are left out of sports.  I wonder if he believes that African Americans are not embraced as true Americans because their presence in the national pasttime is rapidly shrinking.  Or the fact that Indians from a number of states are equally left out of the sports scene, just like those from a number of Chinese provinces, killing the whole point of the article.  Let’s ignore those and go to some other points.

Let’s go through the post textually, from “The Exclusiveness of Being Chinese” (my comments in italics):

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However, despite reaching the World Cup soccer finals eight years ago, the then Chinese team performed so badly – not even scoring one goal – that interest was lost. The Chinese only enjoy sport if they are winning.

The Chinese national team still gets a decent crowd wherever they go and fans cheer despite the many and varied ways they find to lose.  Fans love soccer and cheer for any number of foreign teams other than the Chinese national side.  I guess Devonshire Ellis ignored the crazy attention given to the 2006 World Cup, 2008 European Championship, and fast approaching World Cup this year, Chinese have NOT lost interest in soccer or their national team.

Nowadays, the national league is corrupt, taken over by gambling syndicates, with bribery and players and referees throwing matches. Teams are being expelled, and attendances at all time lows.

Yes, there are corruption issues, though it appears that Wei Di is taking care of them and things will be straightened out, but that’s left to be seen.  Attendance is far from “all time lows”, Beijing averaged over 30,000 fans last season and the overall league average was somewhere around 18,000.  Further, its not the only international league to deal with a match fixing scandal.  Through it all, there are still many who love the league.

Other instances of Chinese sporting oddness have occurred at the last two Olympics. At Beijing’s summer Olympics, I remember well a packed Birds Nest stadium emptying en masse when it became apparent star Chinese hurdler Liu Xiang was injured and could not compete. Rather than watch other world athletes at their prime, 80 percent of the Chinese spectators left.

Umm, I guess he didn’t attend any Olympic events, not many people sat through an entire session, fans from throughout the world (Americans, Dutch, Russians, Japanese, Thai, Irish just to name a few) would come for the start, wait for their team, watch, and then leave (this was true at track and field, beach volleyball, soccer, volleyball, boxing, etc.)

Also, at the Winter Olympics, when we learned the Chinese Olympic Committee issued guidelines to their athletes on what to say when presented with medals: “Firstly, praise and thank your Motherland. Secondly, praise and thank your Mother”.

This was an idiotic proposal made by one official, not the Olympic Committee, AFTER the Olympics and has widely been panned by the media and bloggers.

Watching an entire nation enjoy and become enthralled about a national competition is an amazing experience. The feelings of elation if your team wins and of temporary despair if they lose (especially against close rivals) is something every sports fan can relate to. But within that, a national camaraderie exists, a feeling that China cannot seem to generate.

He must have missed the spirit during the 2004 Asia Cup, or the 2008 Olympics, or the unbelievable,  amazingly unique unity of EVERYBODY that went on after the Sichuan earthquake.

It is almost implausible to consider a Chinese Muslim as a religious, boundary-crossing superstar in China. Yet Yusuf Pathan is just that in India. His exploits, hitting a century from just 37 balls, made front page headlines. In secular India, Hindis, Zoroastrians, Jians, Buddhists, Christians, and Muslims alike revere him for his sporting skills and bravery.

The current Chinese men’s national soccer coach, Gao Hongbo, is from the Hui minority.  He is one of China’s soccer heroes and celebrated by fans across the country.

And here is the rub. While India – crazy, mixed up, secular, diverse, and colorful –embraces its differences, China does not. Perhaps it’s considered threatening for China to have a national league under a one-party state. Perhaps regional ‘tribalism’ would develop and grow stronger feelings for a local team than towards the bland, apparently Han-exclusive Chinese teams that the various central government-controlled sporting bodies field. It is worth noting that no ethnically regional team competes in the only true, widely supported national sport China has, which is still soccer.

This is completely wrong.  Yanbian, the Korean autonomous region, has long had a very famous side made up mostly of ethnic Korean Chinese.  Currently, they ply their trade in the China League (just below the CSL, China League One), but in the 90s, the team made it all the way to the height of the CSL and was celebrated around China.

The Chinese “Super League” is comprised of teams from exclusively Han dominated areas. No sides from Xinjiang, Tibet, Qinghai, Ningxia, Inner Mongolia or Guangxi – all autonomous regions or provinces with sizable non-Han populations – take part.

This is true, but teams require sponsorship, which costs a lot of money, and therefore its not easy.  Tibet and Inner Mongolia have long had soccer sides, at times they’ve been in China League Two, but never been able to move past that level.

The Chinese basketball association, perhaps the only other national league of any note, is also compromised of purely Han teams with one exception – the Xinjiang Flying Tigers, whose team is made up almost exclusively of Han players, not Uyghur.

I don’t know if he wants an affirmative action policy for athletes, but you pick the best athletes, not the best athletes from each minority.  It should be noted that Xinjiang’s star is Mengke Bateer, one of China’s most beloved basketball players and an ethnic Mongolian.

Consequently, the spectacle of Indian unity, the strength of the nation, such as Muslim Yusuf Pathan’s noble sporting conquests, cannot be part of the Chinese psyche. It is unimaginable for such a thing to occur in China at the expense of Han atheism and total loyalty to the Communist Party.

Umm, it is absolutely imaginable (see Hongbo, Gao) and I think Devonshire Ellis only needs to wait another 2 years to see it when Ding Hui the mixed race Chinese starts for the men’s volleyball side.  Or in a year or two when Gao Hongbo (must I repeat that he’s Hui, thus a Muslim) makes Mirahmetjan Muzepper, a Uygher currently playing for Shandong and who recently was called to a national team training session, a starter for the national team.

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Mercifully, I’ll end it there, the post goes on to totally lose the plot, has nothing to do with sports and makes little sense.

I’m not an expert on Chinese sports, just a fan.  Attempting to use sports to make a greater point about Chinese society, especially a racial divide is pure stupidity.