In February Beijing will host the Olympic Games again, this time amid a surging pandemic, a new wave of lockdowns, at least 10 diplomatic boycotts, and international alarm at the disappearance of one of the country’s top athletes. “Together for a...
Houston Rockets General Manager Daryl Morey tweeted—and then quickly deleted—a post supporting the protests in Hong Kong. The tweet generated an immediate outcry. The Chinese Basketball Association announced it was suspending cooperation with the...
The General Administration of Sports has issued a notice regarding foreign NGOs conducting sports activities in China.The notice reiterates that sporting events held by international non-profits fall under the ambit of the Foreign NGO Law....
The number of Chinese racers has risen dramatically—a phenomenon that Chinese media call a “marathon fever.” Obed Tiony, a Kenyan studying at Shanghai University, works as an agent for some 300 runners from Kenya and its neighbor Ethiopia. Tiony’...
“We were at an altitude of 15,000 feet on Mount Haizi. It started to hail. The temperature dropped to 40 degrees. We were only wearing t-shirts. They didn’t stop biking.” It was photographer Wang He’s second time on the Tibetan Plateau. The first...
Wu Dajing won China’s first Olympic gold medal in the men’s 500 meters on Thursday, setting a world record time of 39.584 seconds to beat South Korea’s Hwang Dae-heon.
The Chinese National Bureau of Statistics announced official data on the growth of China’s sport’s industry for 2016 on Saturday, showing a total output of 1.9 trillion yuan ($295 billion), and an 11.1% growth that outpaced the recovering...
China is not sending a team to the 2018 Russia World Cup, to the dismay of fans. But the country’s businesses are not going to miss the world’s most popular sports event.
When the Chinese businessman Li Yonghong bought A.C. Milan, the world-famous Italian soccer club, virtually nobody in Italy had heard of him.
The three UCLA players who were detained in China for shoplifting returned to the U.S. on Tuesday night, following intervention from, among others, President Trump. As immensely relieved as LiAngelo Ball, Jalen Hill and Cody Riley must be to have...
China’s president remains a massive football fan, but it seems clear that youth development and commitment to training, rather than sky-high transfer fees and foreign takeovers, is the way to his heart.
By 2004, many of China's hundreds of golf courses were found to be built on valuable farmland through corrupt land deals.
The country's President Xi Jinping is hoping the Asian superpower will host - and one day win - the global football tournament.
Each March, Beijing hosts the “Two Sessions,” massive meetings of the National People’s Congress and the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference. Members of the two bodies of the nation’s legislature meet for a week in...
The soccer match whipped up Chinese nationalist sentiment at a time of high political tension over the rollout of a U.S.-made missile defense system in Asia.
If the world’s big sportswear brands could invent a country with just the right mix of ingredients to fuel their businesses for years to come, it would look a lot like present-day China.
Fans worry beautiful game could lose luster if Guangzhou Evergrande makes good on pledge
After impressing in Taiwan and the Philippines, Matt Ward moved to Shanghai Shenxin, where he gained ‘all the experience you need to deal with anything’
China’s top sports administrator has vowed to cap spending by football clubs, accusing them of burning money and paying excessive wages to foreign players.
The 48 soccer fields of the vast Evergrande Football School in south China seem barely enough for its 2,800 students. Against a backdrop of school spires that seem modeled on Hogwarts, the young athletes swarm onto the fields nearly every day,...
In June 2015, a couple dozen China-based photographers—some Chinese, some not—founded the Instagram account Eyes on China. Their goal, as member photographer Gilles...
Chinese teams set to continue soccer spending spree in window; Spending comes amid warning from Communist Party newspaper
Wang will be joined by seven other Chinese athletes hand-picked by WWE Inc, in the hope that one of them will become the first Chinese WWE "superstar"
Michael Jordan has pulled out a victory in an arena long known as unfriendly to visitors: the Chinese legal system
In this month’s Depth of Field, Chinese photojournalists explore foreign terrain, both beyond China’s borders and within them. Independent photographer Yuyang Liu traveled the open seas to document the lives of Chinese and African...
When Beijing was named the host city for the 2022 Winter Olympics, China immediately became hockey’s brave new frontier
As if the land of 1.4 billion people wasn’t already exerting influence on enough global markets, China is now a big part of golf’s future
Disgruntled fans demand that president of football association is sacked as hopes for a football revolution suffer a blow
Drowning is now the #1 killer of Chinese children under the age of 14, topping traffic accidents and infectious disease
Former quarterback says ‘no-brainer’ for NFL to play in China
Chinese companies are buying soccer teams across Europe, echoing the Beijing government’s ambitious plan to turn the nation into a soccer powerhouse.
The powerhouse plan, which has backing from President Xi Jinping, has led...
In this week’s episode of Sinica, we are proud to announce that we’re joining forces with SupChina. We’re also delighted that our first episode with our new partner is a...
Documentary filmmaker Sue Williams is finishing up her latest documentary about our beloved electronic gadgets, Death By Design. I was involved in the project...
Chinese consortium thinks involvement will benefit nation’s football.
Around the world, there are legendary, dynastic rivalries in football.
The Hong Kong Football Association (HKFA) has been fined $40,000 Hong Kong dollars ($5,160; £3,400) by Fifa.
Upon hearing that Beijing would be hosting the 2022 Winter Olympics, we wondered what the Chinese government was thinking. The decision seemed counterintuitive, to say the least: For one thing, it barely snows in Beijing, or even...
Beijing will stage the winter games in the desert.
Winter sports are catching on as Beijing bids to host the 2022 Winter Olympics.
Where better for a Winter Olympic Games than famously arid north China?
Drought and a fast growing economy have created water shortages so severe that China’s government has spent more than a decade, and up to U.S.$80 billion, constructing...
Chinese sports authorities have vowed to stamp out corruption and match-fixing.
Despite China's legal moratorium on the development of the golf industry, a policy driven by concerns over illegal farmland seizures and the potential misallocation of agricultural land and water resources, the golf industry has experienced an...
This week on Sinica, Jeremy Goldkorn and David Moser are pleased to be joined by Sascha Matuszak, a Chengdu-based expert on Chinese martial arts and the producer of a new documentary on Chinese MMA (mixed martial arts), a competitive tournament...
China has a fixation on training elite champions in select sports and an education system that considers sports a luxury and not a priority.
In an interview, Dan Washburn discussed how a nongolfer came to write about the sport, the future prospects of golf in China and how something that is technically banned has been able to expand so quickly.
In China, just because something is banned, doesn't mean it can't boom. Statistically, zero percent of the Chinese population plays golf, still known as the "rich man’s game" and considered taboo. Yet China is in the midst of a golf boom—hundreds of new courses have opened in the past decade, despite it being illegal for anyone to build them. Award-winning journalist Dan Washburn charts a vivid path through this contradictory country by following the lives of three men intimately involved in China's bizarre golf scene.
As the World Cup draws to a close, we present a photo essay by Chinese photographer Zhang Xinmin exploring the game of soccer along the Silk Road in Xinjiang, where it has a special place in Uighur education and culture. China’s forays into...
With a population of 1.3 billion, you'd think that there would be 11 people in China who are good enough to put up a fight on the football pitch. But apparently not. Since 2002, the last—and only—time it made it to the World Cup finals, Team...
Dan Washburn, managing editor of the Asia Society and author of the new book “The Forbidden Game,” tells Jessica Marksbury that golf in China is both banned and booming.
Not known for its soccer prowess, China is now beginning to get serious about the sport.
This week we’re delighted to be joined by Christopher Beam, author of the passage quoted above, which we unceremoniously filched from his fantastic New Republic essay about his year with the Chongqing Dockers, one of the many new amateur football...
For Richard Nixon’s foreign policy, 1971 was the best of years and the worst of years. He revealed his opening to China, but he connived at genocide in East Pakistan. Fortunately for him, the world marveled at the one, but was largely ignorant of...
When China hosted the 2008 Summer Olympics—and amazed international observers with both its pageantry and gold-medal count—it made a very public statement about the country’s surge to global power. Yet, China has a much longer history of using sport to communicate a political message.
Ready or not, Putingrad (aka Sochi) is now on prime time. The opening ceremony of the Winter...
