Sports officials fix games: magazine

Report of systemic corruption suggests pending anti-graft campaign

Chinese senior sports officials routinely fix sports games, according to a report published by China’s top prosecuting organ that suggested a new resolve developing in government to combat corruption, experts said Monday.

Officials have “controlled the destiny of athletes, even some games,” according to a report on Friday in Fangyuan Magazine, an official magazine under the Supreme People’s Procuratorate, china.com reported on Sunday.

There are “unspoken rules” in professional sports, Tian Siyuan, a member of the China Association for Sports Law, was quoted by the magazine as saying. Illicit behavior is corrupting officials and hindering China’s sports development, Tian said.

The selection and appointment of athletes and judges at the General Administration of Sport of China (GASC) was not remotely transparent, he noted. At some programs, lucrative medals corrupted the process while at others the athletes bribed officials to enroll.

Each sports program had its own enrollment regulations and none are published, Tian said. Some athletes are accepted by the chief coach, others by administrative leaders.

Scoring in diving, synchronized swimming and gymnastics events suffers from a lack of standards and depends too much on subjective judgment, a sports insider told the magazine.

“China’s football always offers a classic example of corruption, of which the Chinese Super League is the one most affected by corruption,” the report said.

“It is customary for some football clubs to corrupt officials, bribe referees and even fix matches.”

Such a report was “rare” and demonstrated the government’s firm efforts to curb corruption in sports, Zhuang Deshui, deputy director of Peking University’s Government Integrity-Building Research Center, told the Global Times on Monday.

A new corruption drive must be coming to sports, he believed.

Such a campaign should strengthen supervision of the sports approval system, Fu Siming, a professor at the Party School of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, told the Global Times.

The move on sports echoes the report of the 19th National Congress of the Party. The anticorruption campaign will eventually make officials have no desire to commit acts of corruption, according to Fu.

Sports administrative departments overcharge, the report said, citing Qiao Xinsheng, a professor of law at Zhongnan University of Economics and Law.

“The GASC and local sports departments have formed a huge profit chain over games management,” Qiao said.