Becoming a Chinese football fan: An examination of the influence of national and local identities on the development of Chinese football fandom

Jiang, Kaixiao and Bairner, Alan (2024) Becoming a Chinese football fan: An examination of the influence of national and local identities on the development of Chinese football fandom. Soccer & Society. ISSN 1466-0970

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Abstract

The article explores how national and local identities influence Chinese football fandom. Previous research has failed to provide detailed information about how these two social identities influence the process of fans’ self-identification. This study uses fans of Henan Jianye Football Club and Shenzhen Football Club because they can typically represent native and internal immigrant fans in China as examples to fill the knowledge gap. By combining the experiences of these two fan groups, the article reveals that international games and the feeling of supporting the nation can strengthen the influence of national identity on fandom for the national football team. It also reveals that fans’ recognition of their teams’ local symbolic status stimulates local identity in developing native fans’ support for local football clubs. Although internal immigrant fans do not share their local identities, their desire to acquire local affiliation also allows local identity to affect their fandom.

Item Type: Article
Additional Information and Comments: © 2024 The Author(s). This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.
Faculty / Department: Faculty of Human and Digital Sciences > School of Health and Sport Sciences
Depositing User: Kaixiao Jiang
Date Deposited: 25 Mar 2024 10:22
Last Modified: 25 Mar 2024 10:22
URI: https://hira.hope.ac.uk/id/eprint/4171

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