Home Team Away
Watching European Football in Urban China
European football fandom as a cultural process in urban middle-class China
Description
Home Team Away calls for a rethinking of sport fandom that is divorced from an attachment to location. As the first comprehensive account of the European football fandom in China, this book explores how the Chinese middle class subjectivity is formed through the cross-cultural, digital consumption of the Big Five leagues. Yuan Gong captures the embodied experiences of fans and fan clubs, fan discourses and activities unfolding on digital platforms on Weibo, Weixin, and Hupu, combining fieldwork in Shanghai and virtual ethnography. Gong argues that Chinese fans’ decisions to follow and engage with European football result from their material conditions, ideological contestation, and technology appropriation as a new demographic bloc arising during China’s transition to authoritarian digital capitalism. By engaging with their home teams away, the Chinese middle class fans perform as citizens with a global vision despite the resurgence of the nationalist and anti-Western sentiments.
Yuan Gong is Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at Massey University.
Reviews
“In the way that it places fandom and the fans’ use of social media within their social context, Home Team Away is one of the best works I have read on fandom and media.”
- Susan Brownell, University of Missouri-St. Louis
“The middle classes in post-socialist China have been analyzed through the lens of such dynamics as work, marriage, and housing. Here Yuan Gong provides a completely novel approach that demonstrates how transnational sport fandom creates new configurations of class distinction.”
- Niko Besnier, co-author of The Anthropology of Sport: Bodies, Borders, Biopolitics
“Surprisingly little is known about European football’s ‘Big Five’ leagues’ enormous fan base in China. In Home Team Away, Yuan Gong draws on her extensive field and media research on Chinese football cultures in producing an original class-cultural analysis that studiously avoids one-dimensional applications of neoliberal, globalization, and de-Westernization theories.”
- David Rowe, Western Sydney University