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This chapter critically evaluates whether football can attain recognition as a national sport in China. Article No. 11, released by the Chinese government in 2015, aimed to develop a new national strategy centralised on the sport of football to foster consumption and enhance national soft power. Consequently, this also means encouraging Chinese football fans to support the national football team. Comparing the significance of local football clubs and the national football team to Chinese football fans is deemed meaningless and unable to generate useful information to comprehend Chinese people's attitudes towards local and national communities. Through literature comparisons with established Chinese national sports such as Chinese martial arts, badminton and table tennis, the discussion reveals that football currently falls short of meeting the general criteria of invention and popularity to be considered a Chinese national sport. In the specific Chinese context, it also proves that football fails to meet the criterion of politics, hindering its identification as a national sport. Consequently, the chapter rebuts the assumption and advocates for the validity of comparing how fans assess their fandom for local and national football teams.

This chapter explores how the development of football fandom for the Chinese national team and local football clubs is strongly associated with societal changes. Although the performances of Chinese football teams, especially the national team, have failed to impress the world, football remains the most popular because of millions of supporters with loyalty and passion. Most studies related to fans mainly focus on the economic and political implications of spectatorship along with the rise of China. Nevertheless, few articles are available to answer the fundamental questions, such as ‘When did these supporters come out?’ and ‘What were the factors of the development of fandom?’. By going through archival records and published documents over the last decades, this chapter offers a comprehensive and historical analysis of the development of football fandom in the People's Republic of China (PRC) and deals with these unanswered questions. As such, this chapter does not intend to be the most authoritative one but is one of the rare sources to lay down the foundation for research on Chinese football fandom. Furthermore, this chapter also proves that studies on football fandom can be a useful window for observing Chinese society.

Along with the national government's expectation transformation, administrative system reform, economic transition, social demand structure's upgrading and population change, these negative effects are turning increasingly obvious and thus become huge powers that push the reform of traditional elite sports development mode forward. Against this background, in order to make this reform better adapted to China's reality and future development, the chapter suggests that Chinese traditional elite sports development mode should shift its driving forces of development from single to multiple, change its administrative system from government-oriented to society-oriented, develop its training concepts from instrumentalism to humanism, improve its construction of development from unbalanced to balanced and alter its effectiveness of development from extensive to intensive so as to achieve sustainable development.

Online business can be an attractive career choice but bears gendered implications under China’s market economy. This study aims to examine how highly educated young women negotiate their career choice of online business, given their enhanced career ambitions and the persisting conservative views of their parents. It is to be examined how these factors interact in shaping women’s strategies and commitment to their nonconventional careers.

The study draws on 23 interviews with 18 women involved in online business. The interviews were coded by themes about how women perceive and make career choices to enter online business, the influence of various motivations (e.g., economic security, decency, autonomy and earning potential) and women’s interactions with their parents under gendered social expectations. The study analyzes and categorizes women’s varied strategies and levels of commitment in taking up online business, an attractive but suspicious career for highly educated young women.

The study finds that some women chose to conduct online business as a secondary job behind their stable and formal primary job; their compromise under parents’ preferences and social expectations as “compliant daughters,” willingly or forced, coexisted with their persisting interest in online entrepreneurship. Other women, or “self-determined daughters,” embraced online business as their primary job; some benefited from parents’ tolerant views, but others needed to handle the pressure of parental disapproval by hiding or proving their nonconventional career choices worthwhile.

This study speaks to the gendered opportunity-necessity framework of entrepreneurship by illustrating women’s multiple motivations in China’s market reforms and the rising online entrepreneurship dynamics. The findings contextualize women’s career choices in different family dynamics and suggest how social expectations and gender norms are imposed and transformed, with a focus on the shifting gendered concerns of opportunity, security and decency in an era of digital economy.