Il sogno cinese del pallone : da 购买力 a 国力 nel caso Inter-Suning

From Mao Zedong to the “fourth generation”, sport has been used by the Chinese leaders as a means to aggregate consensus and display national power both internally and externally, and the mass media has been fundamental to this project. When Chinese electronic appliance retailer Suning bought the Italian football club Internazionale in June 2016, the media discourse on the event echoed the institutional discourse on football, showing how the Chinese so-called fifth generation of leaders also use sport for political purposes. The Suning-Internazionale deal has been reported by the Chinese media as a form of redemption and a triumph over Europe, a narrative that is at the core of Xi Jinping’s “Chinese dream” (中国梦) of the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” (中华民族伟大的复兴) after the so-called “hundred years of humiliation” (百年国耻)”. This is the result that emerges from of a case study based on an analysis of a corpus of news commentaries (新闻评论) published in a selection of Chinese media outlets after the announcement of the deal. Through the presentation of this case study and a language-based analysis, this article discusses how a sport-related story has been used by the Chinese press as an opportunity to promote a discourse of national supremacy over Western nations, in a country that is openly challenging the world’s sporting order.