Hong Kong sports teams pressured to include ‘China’ in their names

Officials said the letter was sent to sports organizations in the city this week and targeted organizations that do not contain the word “China” in their names, including the 109-year-old Hong Kong Football Association and the Hong Kong Football Association. included. Hong Kong rugby union. Of the 83 sports organizations listed on the Commission’s website, only about a quarter.

The International Olympic Committee emphasized that the city’s Olympic Committee uses “Hong Kong, China” in its name. “The name was adopted over 20 years ago,” an IOC spokesman said in an email to the Post.

Without committee members, teams and their athletes may lose their chances of competing in the Olympics, Asian Games, or other international events.

The renaming instructions are more than Jersey’s words. In Hong Kong, the sport has become political football. Hong Kong players compete as a Hong Kong team under the Hong Kong flag, even though the former British colony was handed over to Chinese rule under the “one country, two systems” framework in 1997. Allows the city to maintain its own passport and currency.

Local fans root for Hong Kong teams and were once so adamant about booing the Chinese national anthem during football matches that Hong Kong passed a law in 2020 to ban it. Local media reported that a resident watching the game at a shopping mall was arrested for disrespecting the Chinese national anthem.

Hong Kong authorities are becoming increasingly concerned about symbolism at sporting events. When overseas organizers accidentally played the pro-democracy protest song “Glory to Hong Kong” during the flag-raising ceremony, they were criticized by Hong Kong’s leaders and police. The city government even encouraged Google to hide the song from search results.

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The latest directive could cause dozens of sports clubs to change their names. The city’s Olympic Committee said in an email that using “Hong Kong, China” in its name was “in line with the spirit of Article 149 of the Basic Law”, citing a vaguely worded section of Hong Kong’s “mini-constitution”. is referring to

The directive is “really intended to strengthen China’s sense of national identity.” Said Tobias Twozer, a lecturer at the Chinese University of Hong Kong who studies sports and culture.

Tuzer says sports have become a platform for political expression. “In the football match against the Hong Kong national team, the fans themselves will greatly welcome the opportunity to express their different identities from China,” he said.

Zuser said that rooting for a local team is “the last chance” to show local pride. At a football match, “10,000 people will chant ‘Hong Kong, Hong Kong, Hong Kong’ and it won’t happen outside the stadium,” he said. Protests have been limited since mass pro-democracy demonstrations in 2019 and the passage of the National Security Act a year later.

When Hong Kong won an unprecedented six medals at the 2021 Olympics, “the people of Hong Kong at the time really sympathized,” said Zuser. “Whatever their political stance, I think they felt there was some kind of investment in Hong Kong. was there.”