Football (as) Guanxi: a relational analysis of actor reciprocity, state capitalism, and the Chinese football industry

Abstract

Recently, private and State actors within the Chinese economy have increasingly taken ownership of (or established other financial relationships with) major football clubs across Asia and Europe. In this study, we provide an abductive interpretation of a) the extent to which capital investitures in the sport are linked to State mandates to grow influence in the game in China and abroad and b) how, by investing in these clubs, business actors are able to strategically ensconce themselves in political capital-yielding social networks. We use the concept of guanxi—or relationship building through gifting and reciprocity—to theorize the machinations through which these networks are formed. We then utilize social network analysis to map how, amidst shifting State mandates, private actors have mobilized football-based capital as a form of gifting to (re)assemble football-based networks that strategically position their firms in configurations that might maximize political capital.

Keywords:

• Guanxi
• political capital
• actor networks
• football
• China

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 The financial entanglements between footballing Europe and capitalist China extend beyond the club boardrooms. From 2016 to 2019, major Chinese firms such as Alibaba (e-commerce), Hisense (appliance and electronics), Wanda (retail and entertainment), and Vivo (electronics) provided over $2 billion in revenues to Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) as part of various sponsorship agreements.

2 Not uncoincidentally, many of the firms in “state-controlled markets”—namely those industries which have only undergone partial privatization and/or where State agencies are most actively involved in market activity (as firm, in a regulatory capacity, etc.)—were rapidly and materially drawn into other strata of the national football development project (a point we will return to later in the analysis).

3 In this section, we revise and update content from H. Xue (2015) Foreignness and Transnational Sport Organizations in China. Unpublished PhD Dissertation. Edmonton: University of Alberta.

4 In that essay, Latour takes the view that the relationship of actors is often transformed in response to statements made by another. Put differently, a statement (for Latour, the statement of a hotel manager to being back keys to the front desk, for our purposes the reform document produced by the CCP in 2015) as text produces conditions of reproduction (the action taken in response to the imperatives of the statement) and that behavioral repetition leads to both transformation (in the uptake of practice as in the confirmation of the statement) and to the production of context (for us, the economy of football guanxi). As the statement is modified (for Latour by new signage, investment in different types of key; for us in policy reform, new regulations, etc.), and as the general attitudes of key actors are contoured thereby, new arrangements are formed, new actors pulled into or out of association. In the hotel example, this might mean more or less hotel staff, new keys, added signs in rooms, more or less frequent visits to the concierge station, and so on. For Chinese football, this might mean signing a new Belgian midfielder or Italian manager, publishing new State regulations limiting investment in Spanish football clubs or requiring national youth team players to play in Chinese Super League matches, reduced oversight in retail development projects in Chongqing, and so on. Thus, while it might be easy to say that Chinese football—as a network of capital, human actors, regulators and regulation, etc.—is merely evolving, shifting with the tides of the global football economy and the rise and contraction of State capitalism and State centralization, it may well be the case that these football-associated social and financial relationships present a new structure through which regimes of accumulation and political influence can be articulated (both elocuted in a Latourian sense and connected in a Hallian sense).

5 See Wäsche (2015) for more details about the mathematical calculations and intricacies of social network metrics.

6 As further illustration, famed China entrepreneur Jack Ma, CEO of e-commerce giant Alibaba, recently committed nearly $150 million to develop domestic women’s football in China (Pham, 2019).

7 Youku sports here refers to Youku, a subsidiary acquired by Alibaba in 2015.