When too much ball control is a bad thing
Beijing takes sporting success seriously. It's the reason why the government admits to spending about 800 million yuan (HK$909 million) each year on sports programmes.
For the Communist Party that is money well spent, because the achievements of the top athletes are hugely popular with the public. That helps foster the intense nationalism that has taken hold on the mainland in recent years, with the avid encouragement of Beijing.
So it was no surprise to see tennis players Zheng Jie and Li Na hailed as national heroines for reaching the semi-finals of the Australian Open last week. Media outlets linked their accomplishment to the mainland's rise to world power status, as has become standard when they cover sports stars' success overseas. It's as if each one of the backhand winners Zheng and Li hit was another blow in Beijing's campaign to earn respect around the world.
Yet Zheng and Li's achievement raises awkward questions for those in charge of the mainland sports system, as well as highlighting how Beijing's insistence on micromanaging society is not always the answer to its many problems. In December 2008, Zheng and Li became the first athletes to opt out of the state-run sports structure. The power officials wield over those in the system is absolute, whether it relates to the way they train or who they date, so many criticised the decision to allow Zheng and Li to break free.
Their results since then have made a mockery of that opposition; they are both playing better than ever. Now, the pair's success makes for an instructive contrast with the farce that is men's soccer on the mainland. Despite being the most populous nation on earth, China's national team is ranked 97th in the world. So dire is the state of soccer that, in October, President Hu Jintao and his supposed successor, Xi Jinping, both commented publicly on the need for it to improve.
The result of their intervention has been predictable. Senior officials from the Chinese Football Association have been rounded up for questioning, along with coaches and players. Above all, supervision of the sport has been radically increased. Last week, sports minister Liu Peng said that no less than six government departments would be involved in overseeing the domestic league.
But the real reason for the mainland's inability to field a decent team stems from the fact that football is barely visible on the streets of China's cities. Like most sports it exists in a parallel universe to ordinary life, played mainly by those deemed good enough for one of the government's sports schools. Until soccer becomes a popular pastime it is hard to see how the involvement of six ministries will improve its standard.
On the mainland, though, the automatic answer to any failure is to increase government regulation and add to the multiple layers of bureaucracy that already blanket the country. Only last week, Premier Wen Jiabao got himself another post - head of the National Energy Commission, which has been created just a year after the National Energy Administration was founded to oversee energy policy.
That urge to micromanage is currently being taken to extremes. Text messages are now checked for their content, as part of the anti-pornography drive that human rights groups claim is just an excuse for Beijing to increase its scrutiny of the population. Having already extended its control over the internet last year, it must seem natural to the party that mobile phones need to be monitored too.
In doing so Beijing is merely revealing its paucity of ideas. Just as Zheng and Li's efforts in Australia demonstrate that enhanced supervision does not guarantee sporting success, so blocking lewd text messages is unlikely to improve the quality of people's lives. All it shows is that the mainland has gone beyond being a nanny state to one that is positively Orwellian.
David Eimer is a Beijing-based journalist
