Perhaps for many Chinese, the proudest moment during Qatar World Cup 2022 was not when Ma Ning made his World Cup debut as a FIFA listed referee, but was when Japan came from behind in stunning win against Germany – a seismic shock to tell the world that an Asian team could actually defeat a powerful European one.
Dubbed as the “Light of Asia”, Japan’s victory gave Chinese soccer fans vicarious thrills. If anything, it is reminiscent of China’s painstaking resistance to imperialism and colonialism in its modern history – a period of fighting to rid itself of the Western-imposed insult “Sick Man of Asia”. On top of a flurry of praise for Japan, reflections are sparked on why Japan and other Asian football teams are making strides while Chinese team is mired in a tailspin. All of a sudden, so many political fanatics in China – those who feed on nationalism and the so-called “Chinese Dream” – have made an about-face and started to join the witch-hunt of Chinese football quagmire.
“When the gap between ideal and reality is too large, people can’t help but ask why the difference is so big.” The comment posted by one Chinese netizen captures the crux of the issue represented by Chinese football. For decades, China has been dreaming about becoming a football superpower, which is often bantered as an easy task of “picking 11 players out of its 1.4 population”. That dream, however, is crushed over and over again by China’s repeated World Cup elimination since 2002 to an extent which even President Xi Jinping’s passion about football has failed to galvanize the sluggish Chinese football. Flaring nationalism may help cook up a fairy tale of a forthcoming powerful football team, but it cannot belie the fact that China is nowhere near there.
Unmasked by Japan’s performance during Qatar World Cup, the reality that many Chinese can no longer shy away from is that China’s football dream is ill-founded, as is its superpower dream. They realize that when football fans from all over the world assemble in Qatar to celebrate the once-every-four-year carnival, their quarantine life is entering the fourth year. They find out that while workers in western countries can strike for a higher pay without the fear of being arrested, they can only choose to be passive aggressive through quiet quitting. The rise of China gave them the rise of work time but not the rise of pay, and the nationalism fed them with illusion instead of promotion. It does not take a genius to figure out that something went wrong with the once-exalted China model.
Blatant humiliations of western countries that were once dominating Chinese social media was taken down a notch this year, not by the government, but by Chinese people themselves. The rhetoric used by the Chinese government to pump up nationalism – “East is rising and West declining” – is being supplanted by the burgeoning “run philosophy”, a jargon for disillusioned Chinese longing to emigrate. As the Chinese government has strengthened internet censorship to a level which is almost on par with the Cultural Revolution standard, discussions on news deemed as having negative impacts on the stability of the society are largely forbidden. Ironically, that has provoked more Chinese people to rethink the freedom of speech, especially after many of them had the first-hand experiences of various forms of inhumane treatments inflicted on by the zero-Covid policy.
“Now it looks like BBC was not exaggerating. Instead, it was actually being reserved.” Sarcastic comments as such appear more frequently under videos implicitly unveiling the dark underbelly of China, ranging from the chained woman to bank customers beaten up by an unidentified mob to the bus crash killing 27 people who were forced to be transported to a Covid quarantine facility. The incessant government-led tragedies and repressions have made more people realize that western media such as BBC, once intentionally demonized by the Chinese government, is an outlet they are now in desperate need of.
Caught between the endless nationalist frenzy and the grimmer reality, more Chinese people are recalibrating their lives in accordance with the international standard. They begin to realize that they are exposed to issues of human rights more closely than they ever thought. Due to their quarantine experiences, they can relate to Uyghurs incarcerated in “education camps”. Because of their desperation for food, they can feel the hopelessness felt by those migrant workers who were brutally evicted in that bitter winter. “Even prisoners of war are treated better under Geneva Convention!” Exclamations as such highlight the ongoing transition from hollow nationalism to humanistic internationalism in the Chinese society.
The Chinese government seems to forget the old Chinese wisdom that “things will develop in the opposite direction when they become extreme.” The higher nationalism rises, the harder it eventually falls. It was true for Germany, Italy, and Japan during the WWII and all the other governments attempting to exploit nationalism in history. China’s veneer of the “Great Wall of Steel” buttressed by the top-down nationalism is faltering and the bottom-up internationalism is spreading. The Chinese government may never know why their grand strategy of nationalism would ultimately fail, just as they never know that Japan has spent decades preparing for their victory over Germany.
