When I was a six-year-old boy in a small village in east China's Shandong province, about 500 kilometers from Beijing. I did not know what a football was like. I only ate meat several times a year. There was no electricity and I had never even heard about television, let alone seen a TV set.

Forty years on, my hometown has become one of China's most prosperous regions. It is a 20-minute drive from my father's home to the bullet train station. Two and half hours later, I can be sitting in my office in Beijing, with the capital's notorious traffic permitting.

In 1978 there were only 30,000 vehicles, tractors included, on the roads of Beijing. Now there are six million vehicles in China's capital city.

Perry has been to China over 200 times since early 1970s. In our 2017 talk Perry made one of his most startling statements. China, he suggested, had wasted 40 years trying to develop home grown football talent and clubs. But in the long run, China was the only major country in the world that can rise as a powerful football nation because it has been successful in almost every other sectors during this same period.

"China can do it because China can think strategically and research and plan a set of policies that recognize world power, and how to enter and change it. If it is embraced at the highest level then China can, and will, transform the world of football."

It is recognized that in the second decade of the 21st century China is already transforming the world of football.

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