Sporting Superpower: An Insider’s View on China’s Quest to Be the Best

With Beijing becoming the first city in history to host both a Summer and a Winter Olympics, the Chinese capital has truly arrived as an international sporting destination. But the glamor of those two Games in 2008 and 2022 hid a strategic powerplay by China to leverage the Olympics as a way to further its global ambitions.Despite international calls for a boycott of the 2022 Olympics due to human rights violations, Beijing was determined to show that it could conquer COVID-19 and host another spectacular Olympics. But behind all the politics and the soft power, China’s sports industry has changed dramatically since those first Games in 2008:A drive to promote football with the ultimate goal of winning the World Cup has already gone through both boom and bust.International leagues such as the NBA, the WTA and the English Premier League now have to tread through a minefield of nationalistic fervor to engage in China.Sportswear companies like Li-Ning and Anta have ridden a wave of domestic support in an ongoing bid to topple Nike and Adidas in the world’s largest consumer market.Ski resorts and ice rinks have sprung up across the country as a surging winter sports market takes shape.The naturalization of athletes, such as Eileen Gu, unearths difficult questions about what it truly means to be Chinese.Weaving together the parallel threads of sports, business and politics, Mark Dreyer—the China Sports Insider—who first moved to Beijing to cover the 2008 Olympics, takes us along the rollercoaster ride of China’s burgeoning sports industry with a series of tales from those inside the industry that collectively paint not just a picture of China’s quest for dominance in yet another sector, but also shed light on the global implications of a modernizing China. Read more