Jiangsu Suning F.C.

Jiangsu Suning Football Club (simplified Chinese: 江苏苏宁; traditional Chinese: 江蘇蘇寧; pinyin: Jiāngsū Sūníng) is a professional football club that currently participates in the Chinese Super League under licence from the Chinese Football Association (CFA). The team is based in Nanjing, Jiangsu and their home stadium is the Nanjing Olympic Sports Center that has a seating capacity of 61,443. Their current owners are the retailer Suning Commerce Group.

The team was originally founded in 1958 as Jiangsu Provincial Team while the current professional football club was established in March 1994. They were one of the founding members of the first fully professional top tier league in China, the 1994 Chinese Jia-A League season, however they faced relegation in that campaign. They have since gone on to win promotion back into the top tier at the end of the 2008 league season and achieved their best ever league finish when they ended up being runners-up in the 2012 season.

History

Jiangsu

Jiangsu ( listen ), earlier romanized as Kiangsu, is an eastern coastal province of the People's Republic of China, with its capital in Nanjing. Jiangsu is the second smallest, but the fifth most populous and the most densely populated of the 22 provinces of China. Jiangsu is the Number 2 province in GDP. Jiangsu borders Shandong in the north, Anhui to the west, and Zhejiang and Shanghai to the south. Jiangsu has a coastline of over 1,000 kilometres (620 mi) along the Yellow Sea, and the Yangtze River passes through the southern part of the province.

Its name comes from Jiang, short for the city of Jiangning (江寧, now Nanjing), and su, for the city of Suzhou. The abbreviation for this province is "苏" (sū), the second character of its name.

Since the Sui and Tang dynasties, Jiangsu has become one of the nation's economic and commercial centers, partly due to the construction of Grand Canal. Yangzhou, Nanjing, Wuxi, Suzhou and Shanghai have all been among the foremost hubs of economic activity in China. Shanghai was separated from Jiangsu to become a municipality in 1927. Since the initiation of economic reforms in 1990, Jiangsu has become a focal point for economic development. It is widely regarded as China's most developed province measured by its Human Development Index (HDI). However, its development is not evenly distributed, with the Wu-speaking southern part of the province being significantly more well-off than its Mandarin-speaking north, which sometimes causes tensions between northern and southern residents.