China may be enjoying plenty of success in international sporting events like the Olympics these days, but it’s among the global leaders in a less desirable area too: sports-related corruption.
Recent scandals in soccer, snooker and even the relatively new world of eSports have demonstrated the downside of China’s huge and fast-growing sports industry. Chinese leader Xi Jinping, a self-proclaimed sports lover, has often expressed support for the sector whose overall value rose to more than 3 trillion yuan ($448 billion) in 2021, up 13.9 percent from the previous year, according to the National Bureau of Statistics.
Yet revelations of rampant match-fixing, illegal betting, and corruption involving several high-profile athletes, coaches, and officials are tarnishing China’s winning streak.
This week, The Wire highlights a few of China’s most recent sporting scandals: who is involved, how much was at stake, and what is being done to clamp down on this unsportsmanlike behavior.
RED-CARDED
Soccer may be one of the most popular sports in China, but the country’s national team has only qualified for the World Cup once, back in 2002. The sport’s record on corruption is even more dismal, with tales of match fixing and illegal gambling having regularly emerged ever since the country’s first professional league opened in 1994.
The latest scandal is one of the most high-profile yet. Last November, it emerged that the former head coach of the national team, Li Tie — who stepped down in 2021 amid China’s disastrous campaign to reach the most recent World Cup — was under inspection by China’s anti-corruption body.
Details about Li’s case have yet to be revealed, but the involvement of the anti-graft authority in Hubei Province suggests that it could be related to Li’s time as head coach of Wuhan Yangtze River FC, formerly Wuhan Zall, from 2017 to 2019.
The scope of the investigation appears to have widened this year. In February, the government announced that China’s powerful Central Commission for Discipline Inspection was probing the China Football Association’s president, Chen Xuyuan, for corruption, while the CFA’s former secretary general, Liu Yi, is also under scrutiny.
The close ties between sport and illegal gambling, along with the relatively low salaries for sports people are a key reason why scandals keep emerging, despite the broad crackdown on corruption in China under Xi Jinping, says Jon Sullivan, an associate professor at the University of Nottingham.
“Football in China is not all that remunerative, for many of the people throughout the sporting and institutional hierarchy [it] provides little more than subsistence wages, so opportunities for ‘easy money’ are going to find takers,” he says. “The amazing thing is that it can happen at this point [given] Xi’s anti-corruption [campaign] has already implicated millions of officials.”
SNOOKERED
Snooker is a popular game across China and its players have had plenty of success in the international game. That could be coming to end, though, thanks to a major match fixing scandal that has so far enveloped ten Chinese players.
Liang Wenbo, who won the prestigious English Open in 2016, was the first domino to fall. Nicknamed “The Firecracker,” the 35-year-old native of northeast China had already been suspended from the World Snooker Tour (WST) early in 2022 after being convicted of assault in the U.K.. He was suspended a second time last October and later charged by the sport’s governing body, the World Professional Billiards and Snooker Association (WPBSA), for his alleged involvement in match fixing and approaching other players to take part. By December, five other players had been suspended in connection to Liang, reaching a total of 10 by January this year.
According to the WPBSA, all of the players involved have been charged in relation to match-fixing, with some also being charged for betting and obstruction of the investigation. The Association is due to hold a hearing on the case on April 24.
The relatively low pay available to players outside the sport’s elite may have been a motivating factor. Current snooker world champion Ronnie O’Sullivan suggested that lower-ranked players may be “forced into desperation” when asked to comment on the scandal.
Some of the players allegedly involved seem to have acted out of fear, too. In a since deleted Weibo post, one of the suspended players, Chang Bingyu, claimed that Liang called him before a match in September 2022, threatening him to ‘throw’ (lose) the match. “I was afraid that he had bet so much money [that] if I didn’t agree, he would make trouble for me.”
LEAGUE OF LIARS
eSports have become a huge business in China, where tens of millions of people often tune in to watch other people play competitive video games. The top professional gamers in turn now stand to earn several million dollars from taking part in prestigious tournaments like the League of Legends World Championship.
As with more conventional sports, though, eSports have become tainted with corruption. A number of players and coaches were given lifetime bans in 2021 following revelations about match-fixing. A similar round of bans was handed out to a further 28 people last year, after fans and officials first raised concerns about a match in July between two League of Legends Development League (LDL) teams, Team Orange and Twelve.
In a now deleted post on Chinese social media platform Douyu, Liu “Jingyi” Ziyuan — one of the players who received a lifetime ban last year — said that “the mistake that I made is the bottom line that cannot be crossed in an industry, and I touched this bottom line… playing fixed matches.”
According to Liu, he was able to earn 20,000 yuan (nearly $3,000) from manipulating one game, but a second attempt failed as his team — FunPlus Phoenix — was simply too far ahead of its opponent to be able to convincingly ‘throw’ the match.
Gambling-related money is a major motivation for eSports players to get involved in corruption, says Chenyu Cui, a senior games analyst at Shanghai-based consultancy firm Omdia. But she adds that “other reasons like threats from coaches and exchange of benefits among league clubs are possible.”
“Due to the high uncertainty in esports, it is really hard to detect match-fixing,” Cui says. “The publishers and organizers are increasing monitoring and regulations to prevent such behaviors. But it is a long journey.”
Ella Apostoaie is an editorial associate at The Wire. She is a 2021 graduate of Wellesley College, where she majored in East Asian Studies, with a primary focus on Chinese history and politics. Ella grew up in Norwich, England and is now based in the Boston area.