China can't get enough of our Premiership, writes Hunter Davies, a hit there himself

I was big in China last week. If you happened to be there last Sunday evening, and tuned in to national radio, you might well have been one of the 58 million who caught me chuntering on.

I didn't know I was going to be so honoured. A producer called Alex Feeney came to see me and I'm sure he said he was from Sky Radio. I wasn't aware there was such a thing as Sky Radio, but one always likes to help, as long as it's no skin off my porridge.

It was about writing football blogs, and, of course, he was interested mainly in Rooney. After I'd finished talking for about half an hour, I asked when I could hear the programme. And that's when he said I wouldn't. It was being produced solely for the Chinese.

UK Soccer Review has been running in China since August, after negotiations that took two years. It's made by a little company called GBN and produced at Sky's studios over here. They have a deal whereby they can use some of Sky's football interviews, but mostly they produce their own original material, reporting every week on what's happening in British football.

Every Thursday afternoon, after Alex has knocked his half-hour programme into shape, in English, two Chinese gentlemen travel out from central London to Sky's studios at Isleworth in Middlesex. One is a translator, who turns it all into Mandarin; the other then reads it. I asked why one person couldn't do both jobs. Alex explained that the translator, who works full-time as a translator, didn't have as nice a voice as the reader, who happens to be a student doing a PhD in London.

On Saturday, after the producers have received the results of the afternoon's games, the programme is sent down the web to China. One reason why it has such a big audience is that it goes out after the national lottery programme. This is the only legal gambling allowed in China, and every week about 50 billion tickets are sold. The prizes are piddling - just a few hundred pounds as opposed to millions in the UK - but there are a lot of them.

The other reason for the big audience is that the Chinese have fallen in love with the English Premiership. All the big clubs that have made appearances there, such as Man United, Liverpool and Man City, have sold loads of merchandise. "The audience is very knowledgeable," says Alex. "During the Ashley Cole saga - would he go to Chelsea or not? - I got rung up all the time and told to make sure I included the latest."

The week before me, he had done a big interview with Sun Jihai of Man City, one of two Chinese footballers currently playing in the Premiership. The other, Li Tie, plays for Sheffield United. Having two players over here naturally increases interest among the Chinese fans back home - just as I always made a point of watching Real Madrid games in case Becks got to take his trackie bottoms off.

Sun Jihai is China's biggest soccer star by far. According to Alex, he lives a very quiet life in Manchester, shunning the big cars, the big house and the celebrity clubs. He sends a lot of his earnings back home. He is a third child, which in China is very rare, as each family is allowed two children at most. His older brother was born handicapped, so his mother was given a special dispensation to try for a third baby. "So, but for that dreadful bad luck, China would never have produced their greatest ever football player."

Football is a world game today. If you learn about it, you find out what's happening in the world.

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