Speaker: Professor Yang Cheng

Title: The Football World Cup and the Political Economy of Contemporary Russian Sports

Moderator: Professor Ma Fengshu

Host: School of Political Science and Public Administration, Shandong University

Date and place: June 27th 19:00, Zhensheng Courtyard E208

Bio of Speaker:

Yang Cheng is the professor at the School of International Relations and Public Affairs of Shanghai International Studies University and coordinator of the postgraduate program of Eurasian Civilization Studies at Shanghai International Studies University. He is good at Russian diplomacy and Eurasia regional countries. He has served in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Chinese Embassy in Russia for seven years. He has served as a guest or visiting a professor at international universities such as Cambridge University, Exeter University, French Sérés-Pontoise University, Hokkaido University, and has been employed in the International editorial boards of three foreign journals. He has published more than 60 papers in Chinese, English, French, German and Japanese, and his academic achievements have won provincial and ministerial awards six times. In the Sino-Russian relations, especially the Sino-Russian regional cooperation, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and the situation in Central Asia, he has repeatedly provided decision-making consultations to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and other practical departments. The current research focuses on the risk assessment of the “Belt and Road” and the game among big countries in the Eurasian region and the logic of small countries’ behaviour.

Content:

Contemporary Russian sports, especially competitive sports, have not only become an important goal of the power game in the international political arena, but also a specific agenda for Russia's domestic political and economic development. To a certain extent, Russia has frequently hosted the Winter Olympic Games, the World University Games, the Swimming World Championships and the football World Cup, which is being held in full swing in recent years. There is a set of international-domestic political and economic logic behind it. For Moscow, hosting large-scale international events is an important part of national construction, and it is also a realistic demand to promote the generation and stability of patriotism among the people. It can also adjust the imbalanced regional development with infrastructure construction, etc. In an alternative way, it partially dispels the shortcomings of rent-seeking in a specific political-business relationship structure and provides new elites with different distribution mechanisms to strengthen the stability of the Putin system. For the West, using various methods to combat the international reputation of Russian sports, controlling Russia's World Cup income is becoming an important political means of shaping Russia.