Naturalization, as a crucial strategy for developing countries to narrow the competitive gap, has social impacts extending beyond the competitive level. This research targets two developing football powerhouses, Indonesia and China, and seeks to unpack the disparities in social identity shaped by their respective football naturalization policies. Rooted in a postcolonial theoretical perspective, the paper mobilizes a set of conceptual tools: Orientalism, strategic essentialism, reverse Orientalism, and demonstrative governance. With these theoretical lenses, it carries out a systematic examination of the historical discourses, identity-building processes, and social acceptance logics behind football naturalization in the two nations. The study finds that Indonesian football, by embedding its naturalization practices within postcolonial historical heritage and kinship-based diaspora networks, legitimizes the mixed-type subject through a “Rojak-style” narrative of hybrid identity, constructing naturalized players as “repairers of historical ruptures”, thus gradually forming a social consensus. In contrast, Chinese football’s naturalization has long relied on technical rationality and performance logic, lacking historical dimensions and cultural narratives. The legitimacy of naturalized players’ identities is highly dependent on short-term competitive performance, quickly escalating into an identity crisis when results fall short of expectations. The study concludes that the social consequences of football naturalization do not depend on the hybridity itself, but rather on how this hybridity is narrated, displayed, and institutionalized. The root cause of the predicament of naturalization in Chinese football lies not in policy choices or individual players, but in the lack of conscious reflection on the post-colonial situation of modern sports. The study suggests that Chinese football needs to transcend the instrumental logic of naturalization and reconstruct a narrative framework with historical continuity and subjective awareness in order to transform naturalization from a form of competitive compensation into a positive resource for national identity construction.
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Share and Cite
Qiao, Y. (2026) Football Naturalization and Subjectivity Construction in a Postcolonial Context: A Reflection on Chinese Football Based on the Indonesian Experience. Journal of Social Development and History, 2(2), 43-51.