To let go or to control? Depoliticisation and (re)politicisation in Chinese football

ABSTRACT

The concept of depoliticisation has become increasingly popular in Western governance studies. However, empirical analysis of depoliticisation processes in non-democratic political regimes is less prevalent. This article addresses this gap through an examination of China’s recent efforts to depoliticise the sport sector, using football as a trial. Documentary analysis and semi-structured interviews were adopted for data collection. Specifically, we delineated the principles adopted, activities occurred, and tools used for football depoliticisation at three political levels (macro, meso and micro), highlighting the inconsistencies between the desired outcomes and strategies for depoliticisation. We reveal that the depoliticisation of Chinese football is a convoluted and incremental process and various depoliticisation strategies were used in an attempt to reform the football governance system. A nexus between depoliticisation and (re)politicisation constantly emerged due to factors such as historic path dependency and the lack of determination of the government to fully relinquish control.

KEYWORDS:

• Depoliticisation
• policy change
• governance
• China
• football

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Depoliticisation is translated to Chinese (pinyin) Qu Xingzhenghua in this study, which is a common word being discussed frequently in government policies and media articles. It is a familiar term to all interviewees; therefore, during the interviews, no detailed explanation was asked by the participants. We appreciate that readers may have different interpretation of this concept due to the fact that there is no equivalent word in Chinese. However, we believe for this study Qu Xingzhenghua is the best and most contextualised interpretation.

2. Article 19 of the Federation Internationale de Football Association Statutes provides that ‘Each member shall manage its affairs independently and without undue influence from third parties’ (FIFA 2018).

3. Jia A and Jia B, the precedent form of the current Chinese Super League and League One.

4. CCTV: Chinese Central Television, the mainstream state TV broadcaster in China.