The aftermath of last night has been many people complaining about the poor performance of the Chinese men's football team until today, when they were kicked 7 times by Japan. You have to understand that most of them don't play football or care about it, and they don't know the gap between Chinese and Japanese football today.
I recently saw a video of a Japanese high school football match on TikTok, which was absolutely stunning. They hold a high school league every year, with more than 4,000 school teams signing up to participate. After a preliminary round, 48 teams are selected to participate in the national competition, which is professionally staffed and broadcast on TV.
These 48 teams will then play a single-elimination tournament until the national champion is decided. The final was held at the Tokyo National Stadium with more than 40,000 spectators. The atmosphere was extremely warm and it looked like a World Cup final.
My crude words can hardly describe the feeling of the scene. If you have the slightest curiosity, I suggest you go to Tik Tok or Bilibili and search for "Japanese High School Football League". I guarantee you will be amazed.
You should understand what I mean. With such a huge sports base, this is the passion of the whole nation and the participation of the whole nation. How many of our middle school students are playing football? How many regular football teams are there in our middle schools? Our children are all studying hard to participate in the fiercely competitive college entrance examination.
Football is the top sport in the world, but not in China. There are less than 10,000 registered players in the Football Association, and most of them are just joining in the fun, including me. The vast majority of Chinese families only complain about the poor performance of the national football team after they lose, because they subconsciously compare it to those sports that won gold medals in the Olympics, and think that China is obviously a sports powerhouse, so why can't you play football well?
But they forget that the main Olympic gold medal sports, such as diving, shooting, and weightlifting, have nothing to do with 99.99% of Chinese families. In terms of mass participation, these sports may not be even 1% of football. There are other reasons why these sports perform well.
We Chinese are a nation that values hard work and perseverance. We are not bad at competition, but we are very practical in seeking benefits and avoiding harm. It is right for us to let our children study hard, because studying hard is the best way for children from ordinary families to succeed, while the return rate of sports training is too low.
But since we have chosen this path, we don't need to complain about the poor quality of Chinese football. Everything has its cause and effect. Our entire society is the cause and the football team is the effect. In the final analysis, it is not shameful to play football poorly. It is shameful for the country to be weak and poor and for the people to have a bad life.
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These days, more and more people have asked me about Jiang Ping’s grades. They haven’t been announced yet. What’s the point of asking me? I’m not a gossiper.
Alibaba officially said that the results would be announced in August, but it is September 6 and there is still no news. The matter is so serious, they don’t want to let it go. Give me a word on whether it is good or bad, the public needs a result.
Many people on the Internet believed that Jiang Ping was real from the beginning to the end. They subconsciously hoped that a genius outside the traditional education system would appear to prove that the current selection method was wrong. Those who questioned Jiang Ping insisted that mathematics education is a gradual process of accumulation. The past experience of a mathematics genius must be traceable, and it is unlikely that he would suddenly appear among the students of clothing majors in a technical secondary school.
This is a collision of two completely opposite worldviews, and there is no possibility of mutual understanding at all, so there is no point in saying more, and the truth will be revealed when the results come out. So what are the possible results?
First, Jiang Ping won the award and was one of the 85 people. That would definitely be explosive news. The pro-Jiang faction won a great victory, and the anti-Jiang faction was liquidated across the Internet. But after the heat has passed, I think the anti-Jiang faction will still not be convinced. They will try to invite Jiang Ping to take another third-party public exam. She doesn't need to take the full test paper. In fact, she only needs to do 1-2 math problems of a certain degree of difficulty live to prove her success. Jiang Ping may not accept this challenge, and then this matter will continue to be controversial forever. For similar incidents, you can refer to the Han Han ghostwriting case.
Another possibility is that Alibaba announced the list of 85 winners, without Jiang Ping, and Alibaba did not announce her results separately, and then remained silent in the face of media inquiries. This ending is the most open, and neither side got the information they wanted, and then there were years of verbal battles and conspiracy theories.
The last possibility is that Jiang Ping did not make the cut, and Alibaba announced that her final results were not ideal, which would inevitably lead to another online storm. People who support Jiang Ping would argue that every test has its ups and downs, and that a failure in the final does not mean that the previous results were false.
Anyway, no matter which result it is, it will not make everyone shut up in the end, nor will it make the opposing party convinced, because from the very beginning this was a conflict of world views that could not be reconciled.
Many netizens have asked me what I think before. Let me be frank. I also suspect that there is something wrong with the preliminary results. But as long as Ali says she is fine, I will believe it and not dwell on it. I will just move on from that.
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Let me think about it. There is another topic in this week's evening news that has received a lot of comments from readers, which is asking what the real India is like? This question is difficult to answer, just like someone asking what the real China is like. As a Chinese, I also find it difficult to answer.
If we only look at the data, India has 10 million more people than us, and its per capita GDP is about $12,700 in China and about $2,200 in India, a difference of nearly 6 times. However, India has grown very fast in recent years, and if they are given another three or four years, it will surpass Germany and Japan and become the world's third largest economy.
An international organization has released a corruption prevention index. In the 2023 list, China and India ranked 39th and 42nd respectively, with close rankings.
As for the frequent rape cases in India, which is what netizens say, I checked the data and found that there are more than 30,000 cases reported a year, which is about 100 cases a day. But I checked the number of cases in China, which is also about 100 cases a day (rape + molestation). Of course, the circumstances of rape cases are special, and many victims will choose to keep quiet, so the data on both sides may not be accurate.
As for the gap between the rich and the poor, I found on the World Bank that India's Gini coefficient is 0.325 and China's is 0.37, but neither country has updated its data for several years.
One big advantage that India has over China is its stock market performance. In the past 20 years, the Bombay Index has increased 15.6 times. Even if we exclude the 54% depreciation of the Indian rupee against the RMB during the same period, this performance is still outstanding.
As for the India photographed by travel bloggers, they are actually only partial views and inevitably one-sided, so I will not bring them up for discussion.
