If you were on WeChat on the night of March 23 or the morning of the 24th, you probably saw a deluge of posts from Chinese friends showing pictures similar to the one below, followed by several Chinese flag emojis and capped off with a jiayou for good measure.
China's online reaction was extremely exuberant after beating South Korea for only the second time in 31 years in front of a sold-out crowd at He Long Sports Center in Changsha, Hunan province. Making the victory even more sweet was the fact that the 1-nil victory preserves China's slim hopes of reaching the 2018 FIFA World Cup in Russia.
A Weibo post by CCTV5 recapping the win on the night of March 23 glowingly described the Chinese team's achievements with exclamation after exclamation. As of March 26, the post had more than 297,000 likes and around 39,000 comments.
Some foreigners were left scratching their heads at all of the social media buzz, wondering just why the victory was such a big deal outside of the anti-Korea sentiment in China at the moment.
We spoke to China hand Cameron Wilson, who has covered Chinese soccer for more than a decade and founded the website Wild East Football, to get the skinny on the context of the victory.
According to Wilson, Chinese fans have a very mercurial, "volatile" attitude towards their national team. When things are going well, they are incredibly devoted and proud, hence the outpour from netizens the night of the game.
One of the 55,000 eager fans holding court in Changsha
He went on to say that although the result was heartening to Chinese fans, their chances of advancing to the World Cup are small as they must travel to play a "very solid" Iran team Tuesday. In a stadium of 100,000 screaming Iranian fans, Wilson says "the best China can hope for is a draw."
Even a draw would be problematic as China is far down on points in the preliminary stages. To qualify, China would need a dizzying amount of unlikely upsets to occur in the qualifying rounds capped by a win over the third place team in a pool that includes Saudi Arabia, Australia and the USA.
Even though their chances of a World Cup berth in 2018 may be remote, China has enacted a series of rules designed to strengthen the domestic game in the Chinese Super League, the top professional tier of competition. Namely, the amount of foreign players a team can use per game has been reduced and each team must carry at least two under-23 national players on the roster, one of whom must be in the starting lineup.
Whether or not these changes will have a net positive effect on the game and keep the mainland's fickle fans happy until the 2022 World Cup in Qatar comes around has yet to be seen.
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