President Xi Jinping’s dream to turn China into an international soccer powerhouse has resulted in significant reforms to school curricula throughout the country. In order to create the superstars of tomorrow, school athletic programs at numerous primary, middle, and high schools, as well as universities, will now promote soccer as China’s premier sport.

However, this means that other popular Chinese sports have been pushed aside to promote President Xi’s dream: volleyball, ping pong, and much to Yao Ming’s regret, basketball.

As an attending member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, Yao took time to promote his proposed “Promotion of specialized physical education classes” bill. While happy to see reforms promoting physical education, Yao is concerned the soccer-centric focus will have a negative effect on basketball and other sports:

I resist this ‘Great Leap Forward’ of the sporting world in China. I worry that temporarily stopping all other sports just for the sake of promoting soccer (is a problem) in some areas of China. Even if there is the possibility that soccer will be able to accomplish its goals, the fact remains that all other sports will suffer (because of it).

Yao tempered his words by saying that China should not be afraid of reform or of making mistakes, and that all good reforms inevitably come with trial and error.

Yao also spoke out against the current approach to sports in China, in which elite athletes are segregated from the public to take part in specialized programs, something Yao personally knows about. Yao spoke candidly about long-distance runner Chen Penbin as an example of how athletes should be cultivated in China going forward:

(Chen Penbin and I) are peers, but our family background and upbringing are not the same. I am an athlete brought up from the national team; this is something I will never deny. However, (Chen) is a ‘civilian superstar’; these types of athletes are increasingly getting more recognition by Chinese society and showing their worth. I feel that this is a real breakthrough in the sports world. We need more people like him.

As China looks to the future, it has set some lofty goals for itself; such as hosting and winning a World Cup soccer championship, and to create a domestic sports industry worth RMB 5 trillion. Yao said the country shouldn’t focus entirely on the money:

If we were to build 20 more ‘Bird’s Nests’ (the Olympic stadium in Beijing), we could attain this goal very quickly. But instead, I think it is important to have spirited competition and to focus on building a strong sports community.