China’s World Cup Dreams

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 10 May 2018

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

China’s football-loving President Xi Jinping says he wants his country to qualify for, to host and to win the football World Cup by 2050. The men’s national team has recently been defeated 6-0 by Wales, so there’s some way to go yet. But they’re spending billions trying to boost football in the country. Chinese entrepreneurs are also spending vast sums investing in local and foreign clubs, partly to help create a passion for playing football in the Chinese and to bring the latest training techniques back home.

For Assignment, Celia Hatton visits a special primary school in Gansu, in China’s far west, which is setting out to turn those World Cup dreams into reality. Made up of “left-behind children,” whose parents have migrated to the cities for work, the school drills the children in football skills each day, to give them direction and purpose, but also in the hope that some of them will use football as route out of poverty and to garner Chinese success on the pitch.

Producer: John Murphy (Image Credit: John Murphy BBC)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Thank you for downloading assignment.
0:02.4	China wants to be a world football superpower
0:05.8	and it's got quite some way to go yet.
0:08.0	But could a tiny rural school help fulfil China's World Cup dream.
0:13.2	See Lehatan went to take a look.
0:19.2	It's just after six in the morning.
0:21.8	Dawn has barely broken. In fact, it's still quite dark, but 40 children
0:26.7	have already begun football practice at the Jong-Lian-shuan Primary School high in the mountains
0:32.2	in Western China.
0:34.0	The headmaster, Ma Anuu, who doubles as the football coach,
0:40.0	is putting the children through their paces. Mr Madge is taught one boy to run faster.
0:48.0	I'll find her to run faster.
0:50.0	If you're a child chowchilah.
0:52.0	Towt wanger to, um... Tote one girl to a
0:53.8	a stronger center of gravity and encouraging her.
0:56.8	Really good, you did a really good job.
0:58.8	I'm going to tell you, I'm going to tell her.
1:01.1	This tiny school is dominated by football. The children work to keep their places on the
1:06.1	schools four girls and boys football teams waking up at 540 a.m. before practice begins on this windy mountaintop.
1:15.0	Mr. Ma, don't you think this is quite tough on the children to wake up so early and go to practice?
1:21.0	I would have a son who has been here. practice. are just passing balls and there's no confrontational trainings and all the
1:36.1	training method it's after their scientific design so he's not worried about that
	...

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