Defending local culture through the global game in Southern China: Guangzhou Football Club fan culture

Abstract

Chinese fans of domestic sports clubs have received scant scholarly attention. This study addresses this literature gap by exploring the fan culture associated with supporters of Guangzhou Football Club (Guangzhou FC). For local Guangzhou FC fans, collectively rooting for the team offers a way to defend their local culture as represented by the Cantonese language. Besides describing the features and evolution of Guangzhou FC fan culture as the team became a national icon after spending almost a decade in China’s second division, this paper discusses the following issues concerning football fandom: how fans maintain their local identity when the club strives for success at the expense of its local roots, the impact of globalisation on local identity, and the relationship between local and national identities. Moreover, this paper attempts to show that studying sports fan culture can offer insights into Chinese society such as state-society relations and the problems created by the country’s socio-economic transformations.

Keywords:

• fandom
• fan culture
• Chinese football
• local identity
• Cantonese

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 One exception is Sorek’s (2005) study on Ittihad Abna’ Sakhnin, a club based in an Arab-Palestine town in the Israeli state.

2 For a more comprehensive account of Guangdong’s football history, see Chen et al. (2008, 2016).

3 Hakka and Teochew are the two other major dialects spoken in Guangdong province.

4 Xiguan is a historic district in Guangzhou that symbolizes old Cantonese culture. The Yuexiushan Stadium is very close to Xiguan.

5 As of 2019, less than 40% of those living in Shenzhen have a Shenzhen household registration (Shenzhen Municipal Bureau of Statistics, 2020), meaning that recent migrants may constitute more than 60% of the population in Shenzhen. In contrast, the household registrations of just over 62% of Guangzhou were based in the city (Guangzhou Municipal Bureau of Statistics, 2020).

6 In 2019, the GDP per capita of Henan Province was approximately 50% of that of Guangdong Province (see Guangdong Provincial Bureau of Statistics, 2020; Henan Provincial Bureau of Statistics, 2020).

7 Although many locals might deny that the term ‘lao’ itself is discriminatory, it is usually used to describe waisheng people negatively or to highlight the undesirable impact of immigration.

8 The history and achievements of Guangzhou Evergrande make it difficult for Guangzhou R&F to genuinely compete with Evergrande in terms of attracting fans. According to 2018 season attendance figures, among all CSL clubs, Guangzhou Evergrande had the highest number of spectators on average (47,002), while R&F had the least (10,255) (Sina Sports, 2018).