Obviously, these are banner days for China's sports scene. And whether or not it achieves its goal of highest gold medal count at the Beijing Games, China's Olympic team will certainly deliver many tearful, triumphant moments on top of the winners' podium. Here's the rub: there's not a patriotic Chinese alive who wouldn't trade it all, every medal, for one World Cup trophy.

No matter how many droopy-shorted youths pad around shopping malls in day-glo basketball sneakers, soccer is the People's game, for now and for the foreseeable future. No other sport is so closely identified with national pride, hence no other issue so deeply rankles the patriotic Chinese heart as keenly as the chronic incompetence of its national team.

Here's a brief timetable of international Chinese soccer history, intended not to rub salt in the wounds of football fans, but to apprise a China expat of why (s)he should treat the subject as delicately as other sensitive political matters.

Han Dynasty [206 BC - 220 AD]

The Chinese invent cuju, a game played on the emperor's birthday with a hair-stuffed leather ball and goals thirty by twenty feet. Other ancient civilizations have similar games, but since this one doesn't involve severed heads or tossing the losers into volcanoes, FIFA deems it best to hail cuju as "the birth of football".

Song Dynasty [960 - 1279]

Zhou Wenjiu's Court Life depicts concubines playing jiujiu, another Chinese variant of the beautiful game. It is popular enough that one exceptional player parlays his fame to become prime minister, cementing soccer's reputation as a game played best by those of questionable virtue.

August 1923

Nanhua football club ventures to Australia to play powerhouse New South Wales. Undaunted, eighteen-year-old Li Huitang scores a hat trick, to end the game in a tie and win the title "China's King of Football". The King is appointed coach of the Chinese National Team in 1948, but gets royally dumped by the Mainland after departing to Taipei.

1925 - 1934

Chinese football's golden years - the national team wins the Far Eastern Games four times in these ten years. To this day, die hard fans recommend a country thrown into chaos and ruled by warlords as the ideal conditions in which to nurture a championship team.

December 1981

China's women's volleyball team defeats Japan for the world championship. The event is celebrated as an athletic revival. The case is made to Deng Xiaoping to honor the day of victory as "The Day of China's National Game". "National game?" sniffs Deng. "China's national game is football." A crucial branding error in retrospect, considering how puffed with pride China could now justifiably be, had Deng sanctioned women's volleyball as the national pastime.

May 1985

Eighty thousand fans pour into Beijng's Worker's Stadium, to watch heavily-favored China face off against Hong Kong for a berth in the 1986 World Cup. After ninety minutes, the People's Republic has been bested by a British colony. In imitation of British football enthusiasts, outraged fans lob bottles, smash seats, and burn cars.

1991 - 1999 The Age of Steel Roses

- 1991: The China Women's team makes it to the World Championship quarterfinals.

- 1995: China's women reach fourth place

- 1996: The women win silver in Atlanta

- 1999: At the Women's World Cup final match, China loses a heartbreaker in penalty shots to America. Nonetheless, it is the most highly-attended woman's sports event in history, and China's team enjoys global acclaim.

Meanwhile, Chinese men everywhere enjoy the dubious pride of a guy whose wife clears the deck for him in a bar brawl.

January 2004

According to a CCTV survey, China soccer fans question the credibility of more than half of the first division matches from the 2003 season. Games across China are boycotted in protest of greedy managers and corrupt referees, leaving stadiums quiet enough to hear the flop of a lightly-grazed forward.

August 2004

Chinese fans again pack the Worker's Stadium, this time to watch their team play Japan for the Asia Cup Championship. Nearly two decades after the Hong Kong debacle, fans flaunt their country's progress, singing anti-Japanese war songs and chanting "Kill! Kill! Kill!" When China loses 3-1, the stadium erupts into a nightmare of flag-burning and hooliganism as gruesome as anything a Man-U fan refers to as "a night out with the lads". Yoshinoya windows across the city get smashed, teaching Chinese franchisees a valuable lesson in what kind of food to pin their dreams on.

June 2008

China loses to Iraq, disqualifying it from the 2010 World Cup, and dashing a billion hopes for a soccer team that even remotely rivals its country's economic prowess. One newspaper reacts with the headline "The National Soccer Team Lost Again. We Have Nothing to Say." No text follows, marking the first time a journalist ever followed the rule of brevity.