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China's football-loving President Xi Jinping says he wants his country to qualify for, to host and to win the football World Cup by 2050. Chinese entrepreneurs have spent vast sums investing in local and foreign clubs, partly to help create a passion for playing football in the Chinese and to bring the latest training techniques back home. Celia Hatton visits a special primary school in Gansu, in China's far west, which is setting out to turn those World Cup dreams into reality. Made up of children whose parents have migrated to the cities for work, the school drills the young pupils in football skills each day, to give them direction and purpose, but also in the hope that some of them will use football as route out of poverty and to garner Chinese success on the pitch.

First broadcast on Crossing Continents, 10 May 2018.