June 13, 2026
Anbound
By Yang Xite
Recently, the story of a group of young Chinese footballers has sent shockwaves through the Chinese football community. Dong Lu, a former journalist, took a group of teens to Europe to compete in youth tournaments. Across Italy, they went head-to-head with the youth academies of established European clubs like Everton and Fiorentina. In contrast to the usual narrative surrounding China’s national team, these boys were not defeated. Instead, they won match after match, charging through the brackets to ultimately capture the tournament “championship” of amateur competitions. Even more fascinatingly, the team’s young talent, Li Haoyan, caught the eye of European scouts and officially signed with Barcelona’s La Masia U15 academy, making him the first Chinese teen in history to formally enter its ranks. La Masia is the cradle of global football icons like Lionel Messi, Xavi Hernández, and Andrés Iniesta. For a Chinese child to gain admission is proof in itself that, by the metrics of the European youth training system, he has what it takes, and that Dong Lu’s success is sound.
The reason this story is so captivating is not only because it is a rare piece of heartening news for Chinese football. Instead, it also exposes the deepest, most systemic flaws of the sport in China. For a long time, Chinese football has spent immense capital, built countless training bases, drafted endless blueprints, and convened innumerable meetings to produce concepts and ideas. Yet, the project that has finally offered a glimmer of genuine hope is one completely outside the official institutions, spearheaded by an outsider journalist.
As a former journalist, Dong Lu is far from being a conventional professional coach. In fact, establishment insiders have repeatedly targeted him, fixating on his lack of a formal coaching license. The irony, however, is that he led these teens into European grassroots youth tournaments, where the organizers do not really look at official certificates. Instead, they focus on how the youths actually play, whether the tournament is well-run, and whether everyone respects the rules. Under those exact conditions, this group of Chinese kids played hard and brought home trophies. Critics who obsess over bureaucratic licensing have attempted to disrupt live broadcasts through reporting to the authorities, yet this only creates the impression that procedural technicalities are being weaponized to target grassroots vitality. Such behavior is unseemly and does not encourage the pluralistic experimentations that the Chinese football world so desperately needs.
This reflects a broader pattern in China where those who do not really perform are from the orthodox establishment, while those who actually get things done find themselves micro-managed as targets of regulatory scrutiny. The former more often than not turn regulations, laws, and compliance into exclusionary tools, transforming credentials and certifications into barriers to entry for their exclusive circles. Under this kind of order, collective decay is deemed compliant, while individual achievement must be penalized. Such a system does not foster national progress. Rather, it entrenches vested interests through grassroots fragmentation, protecting the privileges of the few by dismantling the potential of the whole.
The true significance of Dong Lu’s case lies not in whether it is flawless, but in how it bypassed the highly inefficient traditional pathways of Chinese football. By leveraging grassroots organization, market-driven communication, and overseas competition, it has forged a uniquely Chinese path of innovation. It shares a similar logic with the Jiangsu Football City League, which enjoyed explosive popularity before leveling off. Neither was a carefully engineered project born in an institutional boardroom, as both sprouted organically from grassroots demand and public sentiment. The only difference is that while the Jiangsu Football City League’s momentum remained largely at the level of viral internet sensation, Dong Lu’s team could carry far greater weight if they can successfully crystallize a sustainable mechanism for player development.
This is true for football and for sports in general, but it is also the case for the economic sphere. More often than not, the most vibrant forces in China do not emerge from meticulously structured top-down planning, but rather from the fringes of the system, the cracks in the market, and grassroots experimentation. This is the defining characteristic of “Chinese-style innovation”. By contrast, “American-style innovation” relies on technological integration. It thrives on a peerless reservoir of technology and talent. Elon Musk can achieve monumental feats simply by drawing upon these ready resources. Meanwhile, China’s elite institutions like Tsinghua and Peking University rely on importing professors back from the U.S., possessing little foundational technology of their own. These professors struggle to write original papers, occasionally resorting to academic fraud just to get by. Therefore, completely unlike its American counterpart, Chinese-style innovation has always depended on breaking through from the periphery, overtaking on corners, and deeply mining latent potential. This means there is an entirely different path dependency, where success is driven not by scale or rigid order, but by the agility and boldness of “Chinese Elon Musks”.
The Chinese system undoubtedly has its strengths. It excels at mobilizing immense resources for major national undertakings, demonstrating powerful organizational and mobilization capabilities across infrastructure, industrial supply chains, social coordination, and national strategy. When the strategy is sound and the direction is right, it can project formidable strategic influence on the global stage and elevate China’s standing. However, the approach of mobilizing the whole nation for major projects cannot be universally applied, nor should it be used to lock down specific domains under official pretexts. The central government has never suggested that anyone can deploy state-level mobilization at a whim, let alone invoke national efforts without delivering meaningful results. Too often, the process of mobilization merely fragments into bureaucratic powers over approvals, resource allocation, certification, and interpretation. When it comes to major projects, at time there will be challenges and shifting external conditions. Over time, genuine Chinese-style innovation diminishes in the face of these institutional walls. While there are breakthroughs in American-style innovation, the Chinese counterpart frequently reverts to national mobilization, yet whether the next major breakthrough will actually materialize remains entirely uncertain.
Such is the major difference between the American and the Chinese-style innovation. Historically, Chinese-style innovation manifests primarily as institutional innovation, which is a practical outcome driven by a culture and spirit of breaking through barriers.
China is full of highly capable minds. Though individuals may not match the singular profile of an Elon Musk, their collective efforts create a massive force where quantity breeds scale, and scale builds systemic momentum capable of achieving extraordinary things. The bottleneck in the current economic climate is not a lack of innovative ideas among Chinese people, but rather that many ideas are deterred by institutional boundaries before they can ever be validated. It is not that Chinese entrepreneurs lack ingenuity, but that they must expend immense energy navigating policy, securing approvals, managing relationships, and ensuring they do not step out of line. Consequently, whenever Chinese-style innovation manages to break free from these institutional constraints, the market invariably finds a way, proving that the grassroots possess no shortage of talent and businesses possess no shortage of creativity.
ANBOUND’s founder, Kung Chan, suggests that the core of Chinese-style innovation often lies not in playing by the book but in allowing a certain number of people to think outside the box. The very essence of reform is to break away from established scripts. If everyone follows the standard playbook, strategic direction becomes meaningless, as routine compliance would suffice to avoid major errors.
Of course, breaking away from conventional scripts does not mean abandoning rules entirely. The real question is whether rules are designed to unleash productivity or to constrain it, which gets to the heart of the tension between deregulation and control. For the Chinese young footballers competing in Europe, matters involving safety, minor protection, contractual rights, and financial transparency naturally fall under the necessity of being controlled. However, if their achievements and the broader exploration of grassroots youth training are dismissed simply because Dong Lu lacks a conventional coaching certificate, that points to a failure of deregulation, indeed a deeply narrow-minded approach.
The same applies to the economic domain. The pressures currently facing the Chinese economy cannot be resolved simply by having more meetings or issuing more official documents. Local government budgets are strained, the real estate market is undergoing adjustments, platform debt pressures are mounting, consumer recovery remains sluggish, and corporate profit margins are being squeezed, all while the external trade environment is fraught with uncertainty. Under these circumstances, the force capable of truly revitalizing the Chinese economy remains the corporate sector, particularly private enterprises. China’s ability to maintain resilient export strength despite a high exchange rate, intense external competition, and geopolitical pressures is not the result of administrative directives. It is driven by countless private enterprises fighting tooth and nail for every single order in the global marketplace. They slash costs, optimize manufacturing processes, chase down clients, pivot to alternative markets, pioneer cross-border e-commerce, and restructure supply chains. While these efforts may not seem grand or high-tech on paper, they constitute the genuine lifeblood of economic vitality.
If this vitality is forced into a rigid institutional mold that demands everyone to operate under the same template, the same bureaucratic processes, and the same official rhetoric, then the economy will gradually lose its resilience due to excessive control and a lack of freedom. This balance between control and deregulation is precisely what Mr. Kung Chan addressed in his previous conceptualization of “Structural Socialism”. It is not a simplistic debate over whether more government involvement or more market participation is inherently better. Rather, it focuses on the developmental structure of the entire economic entity. It addresses which areas require concentrated state power and which require open competition. This is about which sectors demand a state-backed safety net and which should be left to market trial-and-error, and which stages require unified rules versus those that allow local governments and enterprises to explore on their own. When this type of structure is properly established, productivity can be unleashed on a massive scale. Conversely, if this structure is flawed, even the most abundant resources will simply be wasted within the bureaucracy.
All in all, the defining element of Chinese-style innovation is its willingness to deviate from conventions. Naturally, those who rely entirely on usual rules to maintain their positions will find this unsettling. When an outsider wins by ignoring the script, it exposes the fact that the established playbook is far from inviolable. When those outside the circle succeed, the monopoly of those within it begins to fracture. This holds true for football, for sports, and for the broader trajectory of economic development.
Final analysis conclusion:
The key to innovation in China is not only technical breakthroughs, but also whether the developmental structure can truly open up. By building an adaptive socio-economic architecture, China can resolve the tension between control and deregulation, clarify its institutional boundaries, and allow its true productive forces to fully flourish.
Yang Xite is a Research Fellow at ANBOUND, an independent think tank.
About Anbound
Anbound Consulting (Anbound) is an independent Think Tank with the headquarter based in Beijing. Established in 1993, Anbound specializes in public policy research, and enjoys a professional reputation in the areas of strategic forecasting, policy solutions and risk analysis. Anbound's research findings are widely recognized and create a deep interest within public media, academics and experts who are also providing consulting service to the State Council of China.
View all posts by Anbound →
About Anbound
Anbound Consulting (Anbound) is an independent Think Tank with the headquarter based in Beijing. Established in 1993, Anbound specializes in public policy research, and enjoys a professional reputation in the areas of strategic forecasting, policy solutions and risk analysis. Anbound's research findings are widely recognized and create a deep interest within public media, academics and experts who are also providing consulting service to the State Council of China.
View all posts by Anbound →
