Here is today’s China Sports column for SupChina, which you can read in full here. Below is a summary of what went on this week.
Circumventing the rules
A newly-arrived foreigner in China could be forgiven for thinking there are a lot of rules. But the trick to being successful, he or she might soon learn, isn’t learning to follow the rules, but mastering the act of working around them
There are countless examples: couples in Shanghai divorcing in order to take advantage of a property policy that benefits singletons, parents demanding that students be allowed to bring transmitting devices to school in order to cheat on exams, local officials inflating economic data to win promotions, and so on.
But nowhere is rule-bending more prevalent in Chinese society than in soccer.