World Cup Asian qualifiers will be held soon, the Chinese men’s soccer team recently gathered for training after a collective visit to the Memorial Hall of the Great Hall of the Chinese Communist Party to learn the history of the party. A knowledgeable person said that the athletes receive ideological education before major tournaments with the aim of preventing athletes from fleeing.
The 2022 Kada World Cup Asian qualifying round of forty, will be held in Suzhou from May 30 to June 15. The Chinese men’s soccer team is actively warming up to prepare for the tournament.
According to Beijing Youth Daily, after four days of training in Shanghai, all members of the men’s soccer team visited the site of the First Communist Party Congress in Shanghai’s Huangpu District on May 18 to receive education on party history.
According to the report, the CFA and the team’s coaching staff believe that it is necessary to strengthen the national players’ sense of mission, responsibility and honor by receiving patriotic ideological education before major matches. The members also include three naturalized players of Brazilian descent and two players of English descent.
Free Asia questioned whether learning about party history could help the Chinese team break out of Asia and into the world. Teng Biao, a Chinese legal scholar who has long followed sports events, responded by saying that it is meaningless for athletes to be educated in patriotic ideology to improve their business skills.
Teng Biao said, “Football, basketball and other sports that require imagination, innovation and freedom of spirit are team sports that cannot be solved by patriotic and party learning. This kind of ideological learning is increasingly imprisoning people’s creativity, the more the lack of innovative spirit that dares to break through tradition.”
Yang Weidong, a Chinese artist living in Germany, revealed that Chinese athletes must receive so-called “patriotic education” before major competitions, and that the authorities actually have another purpose.
Yang Weidong’s mother, Ms. Xue Yinxian, was a famous shot putter of the first generation after the founding of the Communist Party of China and a first generation sports medicine expert. Her family was persecuted by the Chinese Communist Party for resisting doping when she was the national gymnastics team’s team doctor in the 1980s.
Yang Weidong told Free Asia that it is a long-standing fact that athletes receive ideological education before major events, in order to prevent them from fleeing.
“From the 1960s onward, whenever there was an international event there was very strict ideological control. There are leaders and head coaches in (a team), and there are heads and translators abroad, and these translators are basically from the security bureau. In the eighties to go abroad to compete (athletes) have run, such as Hu Na.”
Originally a Chinese women’s tennis player, Hu Na left the team without permission during a 1982 trip to the United States to compete in the Tennis Federation Cup and failed to return, and obtained political asylum in the United States the following year.
Yang Weidong believes that the low professional level of the Chinese men’s national team is a problem from the very beginning of the athlete screening mechanism: “(athletes) ideological level is too hard to be a champion? This is not possible. Sport is a skill, and the level of sport and the level of thought are completely different things.”
In 2016, Xi Jinping announced a major reform program for Chinese soccer in the hope that the country would be among the world’s strongest teams. In recent years, the Chinese Communist Party has poured national efforts into signing foreign players with high salaries, acquiring European soccer clubs, and strengthening soccer education, but five years on, the Chinese men’s football team has still not made any progress.
The Chinese men’s national team is currently ranked 77th in the world and has only reached the Asian Cup finals twice since 1976. 2002 was the only time the Chinese team reached the World Cup finals. For years, the Chinese men’s soccer team has been subject to social criticism for its poor standards.
On the other hand, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has tightened its ideological control over sports circles out of a sense of political crisis, and on June 4, 2020, former Chinese men’s soccer star Hao Haidong publicly read out an “anti-communist manifesto” on the Internet, causing a public outcry.
Hao Haidong said, “It is necessary for justice to destroy the Chinese Communist Party. “The CCP’s totalitarian rule in China has developed into a complete atrocity against humanity: disregarding human rights, destroying humanity, trampling on democracy, violating the rule of law, tearing up contracts, bloodbathing Hong Kong, killing Tibetans, exporting corruption, and endangering the world.”
Hao’s Weibo account was immediately blocked and related searches were taken down.
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