Why do Japan and South Korea have better national teams than China?

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Imagine if David Stern, after his retirement as commissioner of the N.B.A., was led off in leg irons for taking bribes. His predecessor goes with him on a ten-year hitch behind bars. And, for good measure, throw in a couple of members of the winningest team in international competition—let’s say, Magic and Jordan from the 1992 Olympic team—sent away for half a dozen years each, along with scores of top-level referees, team officials, and other players, all jailed for taking bribes and fixing games.

That gives you a sense of the scale of housecleaning underway in the spectacularly rotten world of Chinese soccer. In the most senior convictions yet, two former national-league chiefs were jailed last week for ten and a half years. (If you want to know whether police have been told to take this seriously, reflect on the insistence of one of them, Xie Yalong, that he only admitted to corruption because he was tortured.) The former national-team captain is going away, as are four members of the only Chinese squad ever to reach the finals of the World Cup. Even China’s most famous referee, Lu Jun (the Golden Whistle), is now behind bars for taking more than a hundred and twenty-eight thousand dollars in bribes to fix seven games. In total, fifty-six high-level soccer figures have gone to jail since the nation’s largest crackdown on soccer corruption began three years ago, and as the campaign “draws to [a] close,” the government is eager to project a sense of a new day. Even China’s incoming President, Xi Jinping, has stated his desire for the country to set its sights on a World Cup trophy.

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When, in 2008, milk powder from the Chinese company Sanlu was found to have been tainted with melamine, causing a national scandal, the joke was: “Sanlu milk, the exclusive milk of the Chinese national football team!”

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