The Dark Road, by the exiled Chinese writer Ma Jian, is a dystopian road movie following family planning fugitives Meili, Kongzi and their One Child Policy-compliant daughter Nannan down the Yangtse. The plot begins with Meili pregnant for a second time just as the family planning militia descends on rural Kong village. These shock troops are here to collect fines for violations of the state’s population policy, and to force abortions and sterilizations on women whose husbands can’t pay up. They manage to escape, but the state’s pursuit of domination over Meili’s body won’t stop there.

Kongzi is a 76^th generation heir of Confucius, and his raison d’être is to produce a 77^th. Kongzi (a nickname that literally means Confucius) feels very keenly the pressure of his obligation to continue the illustrious family line, and he pursues his mission to sire a son relentlessly throughout the families’ travels and travails. A village girl with traditional values, Meili accepts her part in this quest and despite the grubbiness and general peril of their surroundings there are moments of genuine shared intimacy. Not surprisingly, Meili feels the pressure more than Kongzi; agonizing about the gender of her unborn babies (girls won’t do) and the consequences of getting caught with an out of plan child falls solely to her. Little wonder Meili feels her body isn’t her own, musing that a woman’s genitals belong to men and her womb to the state.

The Chinese title陰之道gives a sense of the book’s complexities. The character yin 陰is the yin in “yin and yang” 陰陽, the contrasting but complementary sides of nature so fundamental to Chinese conceptions of the world. Yin is the side representing darkness, hence the English title. Darkness can be sinister, but it also represents the feminine side of nature (to yang’s male), so the book could equally be titled ‘a woman’s road’. 之is a particle with no substantive meaning here, but Dao 道is another word with complex potentialities. It can mean a literal or figurative road or path. It can also indicate a doctrine. Dao is the character that forms the word Daoism or Taoism 道教, a philosophical system where the focus is on the ‘way of nature’ 道之天. Dao is also the central component of Confucianism, where it is usually translated as ‘the Way’, and focuses on the ‘way of man’人道. Much of the Analects is about extolling the virtues and prescribing how to attain the Way. Thus Ma’s Chinese title is full of potential meanings; invoking the perniciousness of Confucianism; the sinister one child doctrine; a literally dark pathway in the form of the polluted Yangtse; a figurative dark path to the margins of society symbolising the families’ exile; the trauma of a woman’s path in China confined and compelled by the twin demands of Confucianism and Communist (family) planning; the path of China’s development that has mutilated the land and people’s values. Removing the 之particle produces the noun vagina陰道the part of Meili’s body that is contested throughout.  

Determined to give birth in hope it’ll be the anticipated male heir, Meili, Kongzi and Nannan flee Kong village for a life on the road. They seek temporary refuge on the Yangtse, living on boats with other family planning fugitives. It is a squalid and precarious existence, but left alone the family manages a homely tenderness. Kongzi is a teacher turned demolition worker (Jia Zhangke’s Still Lifeprovides a perfect visualization for this part of the story). He affirms his intellectual status and noble lineage by quoting pompously from the classics, and providing a pious rationale for his libido. The family make do raising ducks, growing vegetables and repurposing bits and pieces. Their daily lives are a mix of shivering cold, duck shit and river stench, but they get by. But one day, with her baby almost at full term, Meili is captured by a family planning squad. The male foetus they named Happiness, is forcibly aborted in an indelible scene of shocking brutality juxtaposed with shocking transactional nonchalance (the physician calmly offers a knock down price for the operation). Meili and Kongzi take Happiness away in a plastic bag and give him a water burial in the Yangtse.

The family continues on its way again downriver, slowly making towards a town called Heaven, where rumour has it you can have as many kids as you like. Despite the horrors inflicted on his wife, Kongzi doesn’t take long to resume his mission, and soon enough Meili is pregnant again. It is a period where Meili finds some minor economic success selling vegetables in a small market, and she starts to dream of a materially better future and vows that this will be her last child. But when the baby is born, it’s a girl. The tenderness that Meili lavishes on her second daughter, who is appears to suffer from a mental disability, is to no avail, and one day she returns to the family’s boat to find that Kongzi has gone off to sell her to a mutilated child begging racket. So much for Kongzi’s moral piety. Setting off in anger into the nearby town, Meili is detained and sent to an ad hoc labour camp for not having the proper documents. At the labour camp she shares a dormitory with an urban sex worker, who provides another view of the woman’s body, as an economic instrument. Meili rejects such a possibility, only to be let out of the camp into forced labour in a brothel. A nasty rape scene with the brothel owner ensues, but Meili escapes by burning the place down (an improbable twist, but at this point the reader is so desperate for a respite that it doesn’t matter), and is soon reunited with Kongzi.  

The family finally reaches Heaven, which turns out to be a Guangdong cancer village recycling electronic waste. The melancholy cycle repeats again: the indefatigable Kongzi continues his mission and sure enough Meili becomes pregnant again. Traumatized by her experiences she is determined to protect her baby inside her womb. Meili refuses to relinquish the baby until many months beyond the usual gestation period. Finally she gives birth to a green alien-like thing mutated by the poisonous e-waste—Heaven’s kicker is that you can have as many kids as you like but none will be healthy. Finally released from her duty Meili lets herself sink into the river to reunite with the spirits of her babies. Her passage down the ‘dark road’ is over.

Set amid the uncomfortable realism that characterises Ma’s narrative, this surreal last twist is disconcerting, until you realise that the entire reality that Ma has constructed is an inversion or perversion of the ‘natural order’, that it is all “unreal”; Happiness is a murdered baby; Heaven is a cancer village; pregnant women are criminals; aborted foetuses are sold to restaurants; babies are produced for mutilation and the begging trade. This is a very grim book, an unrelentingly negative portrait of contemporary China. If you only read this book you would imagine that the fate of Chinese women is unimaginably horrific. This is an exaggeration—there are positives about China’s development and there is a more balanced tale to tell about the opportunities and challenges for Chinese women. But if it makes people think more carefully about why China has such a gender imbalance, or the prevalence of female suicide, or can label them “leftover” if they don’t marry in their 20s, then it is worth the discomfort. It is therefore all the more regrettable that Ma’s books are banned in China.

What happens when a subculture crosses over into politically circumscribed mainstream culture? How do artists strive for authenticity and make a meaningful cultural contribution when their music is decried as being at odds with local norms and tastes? These questions are prompted by the recent popularization of rap music in China via the hit reality TV talent show The Rap of China (Zhongguo you xiha中国有嘻哈). Funded and produced by the Chinese video platform iQiyi (爱奇艺), this repackaging of the South Korean tastemaker and talent incubator Show Me The Money represented significant exposure for a genre that had existed for many years as an urban subculture with little mainstream impact. In commercial terms the show was a success, and it is now into its third season. However, it is the inaugural season that represents the more revealing case study on creative strategies in the Chinese context because at the time there was little guidance on what was permissible. Since the state’s censorship regime encourages circumspection by sketching deliberately vague guidelines enforced post-hoc, everything about the show’s inaugural season was a “calculated risk”. After the first season the state responded with clear guidance on acceptable content, and numerous changes in produc- tion were made: the word “rap” was removed from the Chinese show title; performers were forced to cover up their tattoos and to adopt lyrics more actively supportive of the state. In short, much of the experimentation and boundary testing that was possible during the first season has been replaced with familiar modes of circumscription that prevail across the Chinese entertainment industry. Full paper here

The transformation of Chinese football under the aegis of Xi Jinping’s “Chinese Football Dream” (中国足球梦) illuminates the party-state’s domestic aspirations and modus operandi. The latest iteration in a long line of football reform plans is being used by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and government of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as a tool to serve broad economic and socio-political ends, including promoting public health, well-being, and active lifestyles; generating feelings of national unity and pride; stimulating middle-class consumption; inculcating social cohesion; encouraging patriotic citizenship; and forging a shared national identity. The utility of the sport as a vehicle explains why the Chinese leadership has invested significant financial and reputational capital in the top-down direction of football development. Yet, the competing motives of diverse organizations, institutions, and private commercial actors involved in the execution of a transformative reform program, and the agency of individual citizens, whether football fans, players, or consumers, mean the state cannot simply be a successful football industry and culture into existence. There is an articulation between the needs of the state and the public and private institutions that respond and contribute to state projects to advance their own interests. Studying this articulation, through the specific case of football reform, reveals the complexities of policymaking and politics in contemporary China. In their application of Appadurai’s (1996) work on cultural economy, Yu, Newman, Xue, and Pu (2017) examine how the coalescing of people, finance, images, and ideology create “football-scapes” imbued with “new systems of meaning, power, capital, and consumer identities from which the state, and sport therein, are articulated” (p. 4). Yu et al. (2017) is a compelling study of the role of football in China’s engagement with cultural globalization, and seeking to extend this pioneering work, we explore a more explicitly political dimension implicated in Chinese sport, namely the relationship between football and state-building, national identity, and citizenship. China’s engagement with football is complicated by its evolving status, first as a Communist country and subsequently as a reforming socialist economy, a rapidly modernizing country, and an authoritarian regime. There are similarities (and legacies) between China’s organization of sport during the Mao era and other Communist countries, notably the Soviet Union (Edelman, 1993; Riordan, 2007), and patriotism and propaganda are a feature of numerous Communist regimes’ treatment of sport, like North Korea (Lee & Bairner, 2009). However, reform-era developments in Chinese football have relatively little in common with post-Soviet states, where chaotic professionalization led to endemic corruption and the emasculation of domestic football structures (Molnar, 2007). Football in China is not an incubator of violent nationalism or ethnic conflict as it has been in other reforming socialist nations (Mills, 2009). Neither has football become a site for anti-state mobilization as it has in other developing nations like Brazil, despite sharing similar social conditions such as inequality and corruption (Goldblatt, 2014). Other authoritarian regimes have sought “soft power” gains through association with football, particularly countries in the Gulf (Thani & Heenan, 2017), and many countries have adopted policies to promote sport to tackle health issues and deliver elite sporting success (Grix & Carmichael, 2012). Other nations, notably Japan and the United States, have launched new football leagues and invested heavily in the recruitment of foreign expertise (Collins, 2006; Horne, 1999). Football in Europe and elsewhere is similarly no stranger to the involvement of political figures and a business–football–politics nexus embodied by individuals like Silvio Sullivan et al. 3 Berlusconi and Roman Abramovich (Doidge, 2015). While individual aspects of China’s football experience have corollaries elsewhere, taken as a whole, its experience is distinct from other nations. To anchor our analysis, therefore, we use the concept of symbolic power, a lens that helps us make sense of the totality of the Chinese approach to football by treating it as a “field-spanning” socio-cultural and politicoeconomic sphere. This article proceeds in three stages. We first present an overview of the role of football and sport through the history of the PRC, before analyzing current practices manifest in multiple policy documents and accompanying discourses and praxis that underpin China’s hybrid state-corporatist approach to football.

Read the full paper here.

Sax Rohmer, penname of the journeyman British writer Arthur Henry Ward, wrote music hall routines, serial fiction and popular novels to make money. From a working class background and unblessed with great talent or connections, Rohmer was forced to develop an eye for what would sell. He struck gold with a creation that tapped into a rich seam of anti-Chinese racism, and exploited the prevailing Anglo-Saxon sense of racial superiority combined with a growing feeling of vulnerability vis-à-vis “the Chinese”.

By the time Rohmer’s Chinese supervillain Dr Fu Manchu emerged on the scene in London in 1912, the “Yellow Peril” idea had been around for several decades. Gina Marchetti’s classic study of romance and race in Hollywood film traces the popularization of the narrative to late 19^th Century America. A dialectic characterized the “Chinese masses” as a threat to the lives of morally superior and yet physically vulnerable (by dint of their smaller numbers) whites. Yellow Peril discourse typically advanced a “semantics of spread”, with images of expansion, takeover and appropriation. Fears of an influx of Chinese labour to West Coast America, following major migrations during the gold rush of the 1850s, led to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, a ban on Chinese immigration that was not repealed until the 1940s.

Such narratives have recurred over time and are not limited to the Chinese (consider fearful projections in some quarters about “Hispanicization”). Unsurprisingly, when it was later exported to the US, Rohmer’s work found a receptive audience, particularly in the screen version where Fu Manchu was played by Warner Oland (later reincarnated as Charlie Chan) and Boris Karloff in the 1930s. Christopher Lee reprised the role in a series of five films as late as the 1960s. In the early 20th Century Yellow Peril discourses resonated powerfully with British audiences too, although for a more nuanced reason than American fears of impending or imagined Chinese migration alone (despite British historical sensitivities about invasion). For the British, it was the alleged malevolence of the Chinese, reflected and reinforced by the Fu Manchu character, rather than sheer numbers, which triggered feelings of vulnerability heightened by a sense of decline, if not impending loss, of the Empire.

The character of Fu Manchu is spectacularly stylized, to the extent that he is the Yellow Peril incarnate. At one point in The Mask of Fu Manchu, the detective Nyland Smith comments in awe of his nemesis that “the spread of the thing is phenomenal”. As Ruth Mayer puts it in her investigation of the ideology behind the Yellow Peril, Fu Manchu’s “volatility and intangibility, his expertise at masquerade, infiltration and impersonation render him at the same time impossible to locate and ubiquitous”. Racial stereotypes were an important feature of colonialism, strategies to cultivate the self-image of the colonizers while Othering their subjects. Constructing “the heathen Chinee”, to quote Bret Harte’s poem of 1870, was to justify acts of subjugation in the name of “civilizing missions” to force open trade, expropriate land or secure converts to Christianity. Chinese men, if they were considered as individuals rather than a mass of coolie labour (from the Chinese苦力meaning hard or bitter work), were portrayed as despicable, disgusting and physically, mentally and morally inferior. They could also be devious, villainous and inscrutable, as with Fu Manchu. Asian women were sexualised, available and in need of being rescued, a fantasy embodied by Fu Manchu’s Eurasian slave-girl Karamaneh.

Sax Rohmer’s own fantasies were served by a passing familiarity (which according to Christopher Frayling he greatly exaggerated) with the goings on and the characters of Limehouse, a riverside district in London where Chinese sailors, labourers and sundry merchants and associates resided. Known as ‘the Asiatic colony’, in the popular imagination (fed by Rohmer and others) Limehouse became synonymous with opium, crime and squalor, a microcosm of the “Far East” by the Thames. Rohmer, like many of his compatriots at the time, was fascinated with the “mysterious” Chinese underworld, secret societies, and the violence, drugs and prostitution that surrounded them. Movies like Big Trouble in Little China (1986) show the longevity of such fantasies. Edward Said argued that Orientalist fantasies were the externalized fictions of Europeans, essentially a made-up view of the world. Said didn’t study China (a regret expressed to Frayling which inspired the latter’s recent book), but the China scholar Colin Mackerras has shown how western images of China are consistent with Orientalist projections and the Orientalist schema. As Frayling says of the Fu Manchu series, “the stories were about us—they were not really about China at all”.

Racist stereotypes like Fu Manchu and the Yellow Peril are repugnant and utterly anachronistic. And yet they underpin racist discourses, which serve as the basis of world views that are extraordinarily resilient and hard to budge. For instance, Emma Mawdsley’s analysis of UK broadsheets’ contemporary coverage of China’s engagment in Africa invokes striking stereotypes about “the Chinese”. Ono and Pham’s book on Asian Americans and contemporary US media speaks of the “structured embeddedness of the Yellow Peril”, which they find is deeply “entrenched within the cultural fabric of the US”. Frayling notes that “some of the most indelible visual images from popular culture were of ‘Chinamen’”. Unfortunately they were mostly Yellow Peril stereotypes like Fu Manchu and Ming the Merciless, of the subservient Charlie Chan variety or played by white actors like David Carradine (who was cast ahead of Bruce Lee in the TV series Kung Fu). Another genre is the mocking “yellowface” impersonation of Asians by white actors, like Mickey Rooney’s lamentable Mr Yunioshi in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

It remains to be seen how the PRC’s recent rise to economic and political prominence, and increasing competition with the US, affects depictions of Chineseness. Racism doesn’t require or attract creative genius, as reflected by the limited repertoire of Fu Manchu’s fiendishness, and one wonders if the Yellow Peril will simply find another target without China’s economic clout (North Korea for instance, which appears to have replaced China as a source of Hollywood baddy). The Yellow Peril has changed little over time. Consider a complaint by Rd. EJ Hardy, Chaplain to the Forces in Hong Kong and published in the periodical Tit-Bits in 1896: “the peril is that China will manufacture things cheaper than Europeans can and dismiss us from trade in the Far East” (quoted by Frayling). This could easily come from the lips of any contemporary American or European politician. The target for Yellow Peril can change over time (it is hard to imagine, now that it has become a diplomatic and military bulwark against China’s rise, the fear and loathing Japan inspired in the US merely thirty years ago), but it won’t go away.

The Dark Road, by the exiled Chinese writer Ma Jian, is a dystopian road movie following family planning fugitives Meili, Kongzi and their One Child Policy-compliant daughter Nannan down the Yangtse. The plot begins with Meili pregnant for a second time just as the family planning militia descends on rural Kong village. These shock troops are here to collect fines for violations of the state’s population policy, and to force abortions and sterilizations on women whose husbands can’t pay up. They manage to escape, but the state’s pursuit of domination over Meili’s body won’t stop there.

Kongzi is a 76^th generation heir of Confucius, and his raison d’être is to produce a 77^th. Kongzi (a nickname that literally means Confucius) feels very keenly the pressure of his obligation to continue the illustrious family line, and he pursues his mission to sire a son relentlessly throughout the families’ travels and travails. A village girl with traditional values, Meili accepts her part in this quest and despite the grubbiness and general peril of their surroundings there are moments of genuine shared intimacy. Not surprisingly, Meili feels the pressure more than Kongzi; agonizing about the gender of her unborn babies (girls won’t do) and the consequences of getting caught with an out of plan child falls solely to her. Little wonder Meili feels her body isn’t her own, musing that a woman’s genitals belong to men and her womb to the state.

The Chinese title 陰之道gives a sense of the book’s complexities. The character yin 陰is the yin in “yin and yang” 陰陽, the contrasting but complementary sides of nature so fundamental to Chinese conceptions of the world. Yin is the side representing darkness, hence the English title. Darkness can be sinister, but it also represents the feminine side of nature (to yang’s male), so the book could equally be titled ‘a woman’s road’. 之is a particle with no substantive meaning here, but Dao 道is another word with complex potentialities. It can mean a literal or figurative road or path. It can also indicate a doctrine. Dao is the character that forms the word Daoism or Taoism 道教, a philosophical system where the focus is on the ‘way of nature’ 道之天. Dao is also the central component of Confucianism, where it is usually translated as ‘the Way’, and focuses on the ‘way of man’人道. Much of the Analects is about extolling the virtues and prescribing how to attain the Way. Thus Ma’s Chinese title is full of potential meanings; invoking the perniciousness of Confucianism; the sinister one child doctrine; a literally dark pathway in the form of the polluted Yangtse; a figurative dark path to the margins of society symbolising the families’ exile; the trauma of a woman’s path in China confined and compelled by the twin demands of Confucianism and Communist (family) planning; the path of China’s development that has mutilated the land and people’s values. Removing the 之particle produces the noun vagina陰道the part of Meili’s body that is contested throughout.

Determined to give birth in hope it’ll be the anticipated male heir, Meili, Kongzi and Nannan flee Kong village for a life on the road. They seek temporary refuge on the Yangtse, living on boats with other family planning fugitives. It is a squalid and precarious existence, but left alone the family manages a homely tenderness. Kongzi is a teacher turned demolition worker (Jia Zhangke’s Still Life provides a perfect visualization for this part of the story). He affirms his intellectual status and noble lineage by quoting pompously from the classics, and providing a pious rationale for his libido. The family make do raising ducks, growing vegetables and repurposing bits and pieces. Their daily lives are a mix of shivering cold, duck shit and river stench, but they get by. But one day, with her baby almost at full term, Meili is captured by a family planning squad. The male foetus they named Happiness, is forcibly aborted in an indelible scene of shocking brutality juxtaposed with shocking transactional nonchalance (the physician calmly offers a knock down price for the operation). Meili and Kongzi take Happiness away in a plastic bag and give him a water burial in the Yangtse.

The family continues on its way again downriver, slowly making towards a town called Heaven, where rumour has it you can have as many kids as you like. Despite the horrors inflicted on his wife, Kongzi doesn’t take long to resume his mission, and soon enough Meili is pregnant again. It is a period where Meili finds some minor economic success selling vegetables in a small market, and she starts to dream of a materially better future and vows that this will be her last child. But when the baby is born, it’s a girl. The tenderness that Meili lavishes on her second daughter, who is appears to suffer from a mental disability, is to no avail, and one day she returns to the family’s boat to find that Kongzi has gone off to sell her to a mutilated child begging racket. So much for Kongzi’s moral piety. Setting off in anger into the nearby town, Meili is detained and sent to an ad hoc labour camp for not having the proper documents. At the labour camp she shares a dormitory with an urban sex worker, who provides another view of the woman’s body, as an economic instrument. Meili rejects such a possibility, only to be let out of the camp into forced labour in a brothel. A nasty rape scene with the brothel owner ensues, but Meili escapes by burning the place down (an improbable twist, but at this point the reader is so desperate for a respite that it doesn’t matter), and is soon reunited with Kongzi.

The family finally reaches Heaven, which turns out to be a Guangdong cancer village recycling electronic waste. The melancholy cycle repeats again: the indefatigable Kongzi continues his mission and sure enough Meili becomes pregnant again. Traumatized by her experiences she is determined to protect her baby inside her womb. Meili refuses to relinquish the baby until many months beyond the usual gestation period. Finally she gives birth to a green alien-like thing mutated by the poisonous e-waste—Heaven’s kicker is that you can have as many kids as you like but none will be healthy. Finally released from her duty Meili lets herself sink into the river to reunite with the spirits of her babies. Her passage down the ‘dark road’ is over.

Set amid the uncomfortable realism that characterises Ma’s narrative, this surreal last twist is disconcerting, until you realise that the entire reality that Ma has constructed is an inversion or perversion of the ‘natural order’, that it is all “unreal”; Happiness is a murdered baby; Heaven is a cancer village; pregnant women are criminals; aborted foetuses are sold to restaurants; babies are produced for mutilation and the begging trade. This is a very grim book, an unrelentingly negative portrait of contemporary China. If you only read this book you would imagine that the fate of Chinese women is unimaginably horrific. This is an exaggeration—there are positives about China’s development and there is a more balanced tale to tell about the opportunities and challenges for Chinese women. But if it makes people think more carefully about why China has such a gender imbalance, or the prevalence of female suicide, or can label them “leftover” if they don’t marry in their 20s, then it is worth the discomfort. It is therefore all the more regrettable that Ma’s books are banned in China.

It is a very significant, and staggeringly rapid, achievement for Xi to have his Thought elevated to the Party charter. The comparisons with Mao are becoming harder to resist, simply because he has accumulated such incredible power in such a short space of time. We should resist the temptation though, because there is no indication that Xi has any Mao-like proclivities or intentions. And, the one caveat to Xi Thought is that it is an add-on to Deng’s, rather than a unique stand alone – which suggests that behind the scenes there is resistance to giving Xi an even stronger mandate.

What he does have though, is the basis for shaping China in his image almost without obstacle in the near term, and the foundation for continuing to influence the country for a long time, far exceeding the next 5 years. With Xi Thought ensconced as guiding ideology, it is unlikely that China will diverge from Xi’s vision in the short-medium term and, potentially, for decades to come.

In one way this is good news for the rest of the world: at least we know what we are dealing with. In another, it represents a very real challenge, because Xi’s vision includes, for the first time in contemporary Chinese history, staking out a global leadership role. This will inevitably bring China’s interests up against those of other powers, and a strategy for managing relations and expectations of a more “robust” Chinese global engagement policy is crucial.

America’s foreign policy disarray and leadership vacuum represents a “strategic opportunity” for China as Xi noted in his work report and I expect taking advantage of this opportunity to be a major feature of Xi’s second term.

Meanwhile, the issue of succession has been rendered much less significant by the elevation of Xi Thought, which will tie the hands of anyone who follows. Xi is looking more and more like a “paramount leader” a la Deng and Mao, albeit one who still has a lot to prove.

From U.S. President Donald Trump’s initial conversation with Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen to his recent reaffirmation of the “one China’”policy with China President Xi Jinping, assess the impact of Trump’s volte face on Taiwan.

“One China” is a useful conceit, a nebulous concept that all sides interpret according to their own needs and giving each side space to operate. Trump’s initial indication that the U.S. might challenge or reject “one China” policy was a major shock, not just to Beijing, but to Taipei as well. At the present time, the “one China” framework is the mechanism that allows Taiwan to maintain its functional autonomy and peaceful productive relations with the PRC. Taiwan does not gain anything from disrupting the status quo. The call was an effective way for Taiwan to put itself back on the agenda in Washington (having lost salience under Obama), and a way for Trump to signal that he is going to do things differently vis-à-vis China. But the most sensible thing that the Trump administration has done to date is to reaffirm its commitment to “one China.” Doing so is welcome in Taipei.

Full interview with me at The Diplomat here.

A series of audacious player signings and investments in European clubs has put China’s soccer ambitions on the map. As soccer fans around the world are now aware, China has decided to become a soccer power and, as it usually does, is putting its money where its mouth is.

At home, the Chinese Super League has been reanimated and a huge amount of money earmarked for infrastructure, training facilities and expertise that China hopes will eventually improve the fortunes of the national team. At the same time, Chinese investors have been on a shopping spree across Europe, buying controlling stakes in clubs, notably in the English Premier League and Spanish La Liga.

The approach to becoming a soccer power has some similarities with other ambitious state-sanctioned projects, notably massive, rapid investment in infrastructure. The “build it and they will come” strategy has had mixed results. It served the manufacturing boom well, but it has also led to huge overcapacity in housing, steel and other sectors.

As with other somewhat nebulous ambitions (the Belt and Road, the Chinese Dream), the leadership has sketched out a vision to become a “major soccer power”, while the planning and implementation is largely left to government bureaus, provincial governments, state-owned enterprises and private businesses. With such an ambitious project, a lack of a concrete plan and a multiplicity of actors (often with their own motivations), things can go wrong.

Full article at SCMP here.