Football, Business and State Power in Contemporary China

Football, Business and State Power in Contemporary China investigates the evolving relationship between private enterprise and Party/state authority in the Xi Jinping era, through the lens of the Chinese football industry.

In the mid-2010s football emerged as a policy priority of the central leadership, catalysing an unprecedented boom in private investment largely channelled through collaboration with local governments. Conceptualising private-state interactions as strategic social exchange shaped by asymmetric resource dependence, this book shows how firms used football investment to gain access to government-controlled resources. Drawing on interviews with 200 stakeholders, the authors trace the sector’s rise and fall, driven by top-down ambition, opaque transactions and improvised regulation. After three decades of aspiring to professionalization and privatization, the Covid-19 pandemic exposed structural vulnerabilities in Chinese football, prompting the widespread re-entry of State-Owned Enterprises as emergency backstops. The book situates these developments within China’s political economy, where private firms, despite their outsized contribution to growth, remain embedded in a system of political oversight and strategic compliance. It highlights the role of local governments as key vectors for policy implementation as they navigate fiscal constraints and central political directives through exchanges with the private sector. Using the case of professional football, the authors illuminate how macro- and micro-level political ambition and contingent exchanges shape governance and business in contemporary China, offering insights relevant to industries beyond football.

This book will be useful for researchers, students and academics interested in political economy, business studies, political science, and the sociology of sport.

Tobias Ross is an independent researcher with a PhD in Politics from the University of Nottingham, UK. His research focuses on the political and commercial dimensions of Chinese sport - particularly football and gaming - within the broader contexts of state capitalism, political economy, and corporate non-market strategy. In addition to academic research, he works in international marketing and strategic development in professional football.

Jonathan Sullivan is a China specialist and Associate Professor of Politics and IR at the University of Nottingham. He has published widely on Chinese politics, the Chinese internet, sport and pop culture. A volume on authoritarianism and global sport (with Ricardo Gudel Fernandez and Emilio Hernandez Correa) is also forthcoming with Routledge.