Few British people have as deep an understanding of, and passion for, China as Rowan Simons, who moved to Beijing in the late 1980s and has lived there ever since, pretty much.
He has enough in his media businesses to keep him busy – the group consists of three companies, and does everything from media production to strategic consulting, from event organising to communications – but one thing has given him a sense of mission.
"Football has always been my passion," says Simons. "I started playing as soon as I came to China, but I realised very quickly that football in China was very different from football in the UK, and elsewhere.
"In the mid-90s I was lucky enough to be a co-commentator on English Premier League and FA Cup matches on Beijing TV, so I became very well known to football fans as the English guy who talked about football."
Simons has a vision for Chinese football, and has devoted a lot of effort to promoting a grassroots vision of the game that contrasts sharply with the top-down, centrally-planned model he thinks is the major problem in Chinese football.
'Frustrated'
"Through the 90s, I became very frustrated with the despair, and the disaster that is Chinese football, with more and more fans complaining about it, but no-one actually doing anything about it," sighs Simons.
"Through the 90s, I became very frustrated with the despair, and the disaster that is Chinese football, with more and more fans complaining about it, but no-one actually doing anything about it," sighs Simons.
"So towards the end of the 90s, I realised that it needed perhaps a foreigner to help China on the route to understanding football, so I set up a company called China Club Football FC, which was the first foreign-invested football club in the country.
"And very much we focus on grassroots activities. Amateur football for kids and adults, and everything that goes around that.
"Over the years we've struggled against every challenge that you can imagine, but each year we've got bigger, and we're now the largest football club in Beijing with something like a hundred thousand registered members and over 2,000 kids playing every week in over twenty locations around the city, and over a hundred teams participating in our adult leagues."
"I do think football is a very good reflection of Chinese society, and a very easy way for us in the west to see the differences in China and Chinese society, and some of the challenges that it faces.
'Globalised world view'
"I think there is a change within society, it's coming at a generational speed rather than quicker than that, but a new generation of people have a much more globalised world view, and a much better understanding about choices they can make in their lives.
"I think there is a change within society, it's coming at a generational speed rather than quicker than that, but a new generation of people have a much more globalised world view, and a much better understanding about choices they can make in their lives.
"In our work with ClubFootball for example, when we started our junior coaching programmes in 2004, it was an entirely expat experience. Now more than 30% of our kids are Chinese.
"Similar things are happening at the adult level: when we started our five-a-side league programmes they were all foreign teams, now nearly we're approaching a situation where half of our teams are Chinese.
"More and more Chinese people are taking the responsibility themselves, to decide how they want to live their lives and the choices they want to make."
"More and more Chinese people are taking the responsibility themselves, to decide how they want to live their lives and the choices they want to make."
The most striking way this outward-looking mindset manifests itself is in the motivations of parents and children at Club Football.
When they first started offering coaching for Chinese children, Simons' team found it difficult to persuade Chinese parents to subject their kids to an activity that was marketed as fun, rather than self-improvement.
Language skills
English language skills are highly prized among Beijingers, and so what could have been a problem – foreign coaches delivering courses through native interpreters – is now a unique selling point for the club.
English language skills are highly prized among Beijingers, and so what could have been a problem – foreign coaches delivering courses through native interpreters – is now a unique selling point for the club.
"We just very simply added to the phrase "play football", "speak English". And "play football, speak English" immediately attracted Chinese parents, every single one of whom agrees that English is a very important skill to have.
In China, playing football alone is not enough to encourage people to turn up - the English component of that was actually the key factor.
"It seems bizarre, but we're almost tricking them into playing football by offering them an English language environment. And of course once they come and they play, they will start to make friends as well."
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