Xi Jinping is cancelling Lionel Messi because Argentina won't play ball, Plus EU planning first sanctions on Chinese firms for aiding Russia -- China Boss News 2.16.24

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Screenshot captured from CGTN 2018 news clip on YouTube.

What happened

Chinese sports clubs last week "cancelled two football matches featuring Argentina’s national team" after Lionel Messi failed to take the field and shake hands with Hong Kong officials in an exhibition game, CNN reported.

Hangzhou Sports Bureau was the first to announce it was dropping a friendly match between Argentina and Nigeria “in view of the reason everyone knows.”

Later the same day, the Beijing Football Association said it, too, was calling off a game between Argentina and Ivory Coast and “has no plans to host relevant competitions in which Messi will participate.”

Messi’s time-out in Hong Kong due to a hamstring injury permitted him to play the following week in Japan - a double insult to nationalist Chinese fans.

In 2022, the two countries celebrated the 50th anniversary of the normalization of Sino-Japan ties after World War II, but relations are still strained over territorial disputes, Taiwan and wartime history.

A melee of anti-Messi backlash erupted online as fans vented their frustrations.

Some irate commenters even weirdly veered into peripheral geopolitics by “endorsing Britain's sovereignty over the Falkland Islands” on the Argentinian Embassy’s Weibo account,” according to GOAL, an online soccer website.

The controversy seems cryptically overblown as Messi’s “foul” in Hong Kong occurred while he was playing for Inter Miami, not Argentina, his home country.

Why it matters

International sport serves Xi’s aims

Football hooligans the world over ‘disturb the peace’ in poor taste, but backing another country’s territorial claims to an offending player’s homeland is a surprise kick that would seem a bit wide-of-the-mark and esoteric for the average sports fan.

But this is Xi Jinping’s China and, although previous leaders used sports diplomacy to help support China’s modernization, things are different now.

In their 2021 paper, The Evolution of China’s Sporting Diplomacy since 1949: The History, Experience and Promotion Strategies, Yalun An, Xueshuang Wang, Fujun Xiang describe the evolution of China’s sports diplomacy since the communist revolution in six stages:

• “leaning” into the Soviet experience (1949–1957) - to learn how to build sports programs,

• “breaking the international sports blockade” (1958–1965) - an “anti-imperialist and anti-revisionism” struggle to improve China’s international standing,

• “ping-pong” diplomacy (1966–1977) - using table tennis during the Cold War to improve relations with the West,

• Olympic Model Diplomacy (1978–1989) - full participation in international sporting events to improve Chinese athleticism,

• “multifaceted home games diplomacy” (1990–2011) - to attract tourism and investment,

• and “Panoramic heads of state sporting diplomacy” (2012– present) - the current era in which Xi Jinping uses international sporting events to “deepen” strategic partnerships and personal relationships with heads of states and international sporting organizations.

In other words, today’s China puts international sporting events into Xi’s service, and he uses them to strengthen Beijing’s geopolitical influence.

But how does a professional footballer not taking the field in Hong Kong escalate into a PR crisis for the national team in faraway Hunan and Beijing when he’s not even playing for it at the time?

In a heavy-handed and state interventionist dictatorship with the powers of information control, chances are slim that those cities sports fans could rampage, even digitally, unless permitted.

By all accounts, Messi not playing in the Inter-Miami game in Hong Kong was a disaster for the businesses who marketed and sponsored him.

Ultimately, Tatler Asia, the event’s organizer, was forced to apologize and promised to refund half the price of attendees’ tickets, totaling $7.2 million (USD).

In a non-Marxist Leninist state, the fiasco might have fizzled out there, but Hong Kong Chief Executive John Lee was so deeply wounded that Messi didn’t acknowledge him - yes, facetious - he surely volley-kicked the ball up to Beijing where the matter could be dealt with more skillfully.

Afterall, Lee was hand-selected to run Hong Kong’s affairs by the top brass and, to keep his job, must inform of potential “national security” issues - especially the embarrassing ”foreign influence” kind.

Messi’s cancellation was tit-for-tat

Last November, Beijing held a firm hand out to Argentinian president-elect Javier Millei after the latter ran a successful anti-communist campaign that was critical of China and promised an overhaul of foreign policy.

China's relationship with Argentina once helped expand “its overall influence in Latin America where it's chipped away at the US is dominance in recent decades,” Bloomberg staff then said.

“A Milei victory, however, would likely slash China’s influence in Argentina for at least the next four years,” they noted.

It's worse than that.

In the three months since Milei took office, he has personally spurned Xi Jinping at least three times.

The first came when Milei announced that Argentina would not be joining BRICS, a geopolitical club that Beijing runs, despite Xi’s own, hand-delivered invite.

Then, in mid-December, Milei managed to obtain a loan from the Development Bank of Latin America and the Carribbean and made Argentina's IMF debt payment without “tapping into a currency swap line Beijing was preparing to make available,” as VOA reported.

“On December 19, Argentine media reported that Beijing has frozen the currency swap that it had offered to Argentina during an October meeting in Beijing between Xi and Milei's predecessor, Alberto Fernandez. A day earlier, Beijing had summoned its ambassador to Buenos Aires back to its capital,” VOA said, citing local news outlets.

Xi had issued the credit line in expectation of “an important aviation deal.”

“China has expressed a strong wish to sell Argentina its own fighter jets, Rick Fisher, a U.S. specialist on Chinese military strategy and warfare, told VOA. He also cited the Argentine military, especially its air force's excellent ties with its U.S. counterparts, as among reasons that would make acquisition of the Chinese fighter jets under Milei's watch unlikely.”

Finally, the cock crowed thrice when China discovered Milei’s government was already hosting visits by high-level officials from Taipei, leading some to think that the new president might make good on his campaign promise to cut ties with Beijing and recognize Taiwan.

In their 2022 book, Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China, Hal Brands and Michael Beckley argue that China, under Xi Jinping, “ is undertaking an epic project to rewrite the rules of global order in Asia and far beyond,” and that China “wants to be the superpower—the geopolitical sun around which the system revolves.”

But Milei says he’s taking Argentina off the peso and putting it on the U.S. dollar, a currency China has been steadily growing BRICS in order to avoid.

David Day, head of Global Risk Mitigation Foundation, told VOA “[t]he potential for Argentina leaving the Chinese tent is very troubling to Beijing geopolitically, as it cuts against the trend of China’s takeover and growing influence in the Americas over the last several years.”

“Beijing’s worry is that Argentina and Milei could begin a reversal [of those gains]. [H]ence we are going to see both ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ approaches coming out of Beijing in an attempt to keep Argentina in line,” he warned.

Looks like red-carding the world’s best footballer and his national team could be just the start.

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