This week I watched the Chinese Super League so you don’t have to, taking in the full, slightly wild 90 minutes of the champions Guangzhou Evergrande versus last year’s runners-up Jiangsu Suning, the most recent of the CSL fixtures being shown in dribs and drabs by Sky Sports.

There was a vague point to all this beyond simple recreation. The lure of the Chinese Super League seems to lurk behind every story, every noise off, presented as a kind of gilded career-dustbin for every ageing star with a hungry agent to feed. Diego Costa and Radamel Falcao have been linked with moves this summer. Only this week Wayne Rooney has been implored not to go, reminded that he “still has so much to give”, like a man being talked down from the 27th-floor windowledge of a seven-star tower hotel.

But then China has always been an object of confused fascination from outside its borders. Most commonly this comes out as alarm at China’s sheer scale, its furious ambition, captured best in sport at the opening of the Beijing Olympics, those massed ceremonial drummers hammering out their terrifyingly synchronised rhythms like footsoldiers of an advancing robot army, here to batter your skull to pieces with the sharp end of a mass-produced, low-cost computer circuit board.

There is something of this in the way the CSL has been portrayed from afar. And yes, as a footballing “product”, even this summit meeting of Guangzhou and Jiangsu was predictably middling. But there was also something oddly captivating about the whole occasion from the moment the players came running out across a huge red soaking Styx-like running track at the Tianhe Stadium on a steaming night where every surface seemed to be dripping and oozing.

The Tianhe itself is huge, its craning stands packed out with genuinely excited-looking locals. Albeit as the teams lined up for a pre-match national anthem there was a reminder of what this really is, an expression of nationalism and political will as much as the more familiarly nihilistic European cash circus.

There was dear old Ramires lining up for Jiangsu and the gaucho Luiz Felipe Scolari swaggering about on the touchline looking as though he’s about to stride across and accuse you of having sworn in front of his horse. The CSL is a ghosts-of-Chelsea-past kind of place generally, with an AVB there, an Oscar here, tracing it a bit like having a weird dream about Chelsea 2008-2013 after 17 shots of rice wine and six caipirinhas.

Early on there were shrill cheers from the crowd at each slide tackle or overhead kick. Beyond this Chinese football is intense, a game full of collisions, lunges, bruised toes, barked shins. It is also a two-speed affair. At times the Brazilians seemed to be playing a kind of mini-game among themselves while everyone else got on with kicking each other in the spaces in between.

Ten minutes in Alan, once of Red Bull Salzburg, scored the opener with a header from a corner, to sightly empty cheers. And for a while everything did seem to go a little stodgy and slow, the cracks poking through, the sense of a Big Football League that exists for no other reason than to be a Big Football League because a Big Football League is a thing to be.

Which is all very well but China is at least trying to do something else. The league here does have a purpose beyond simply a commercial exercise. China’s president, Xi Jinping, has announced that the intention is for China to win the World Cup within the next 30 years. The new, possibly game-changing tax on buying overseas players speaks to this, designed to prevent the wealthy old-lag effect in favour of development.

For each overseas transfer an equal sum will have to be paid into a fund designed to breed local young players. This has been chuckled at in England as something weird and wonderful. In fact, it’s a brilliant idea. Why on earth, in a country where green space and basic facilities are so poorly provided, don’t we have something like that? China, land of rising economic might – and also of deeply useful ideas designed to promote local infrastructure.

Back in Tianhe Alan got the second for Guangzhou, a nice little flick and a neat finish cheered wildly by a stand full of young fans with replica shirts, floppy hair and thick glasses, a kind of indie-chic terrace look, as though the Chinese champions were being cheered on by 40,000 sensitive San Francisco singer-songwriters of the 1990s.

Towards the end all hell broke loose as the Colombian Roger Martínez, who looks like a nice friendly tubby teddy bear, was involved in yet another shin-raking flare-up and pretty much everyone present lost their mind, players shoving and yelling and bickering all over the place, the referee taking three minutes to get round to sending someone off.

“Believe in Canton”, a huge pitch-side sign urged through all this. But can we really believe in Chinese football? Sheffield United or Bolton would win this league as it is now. If you scooped up all the best Brazilians in the CLS you’d probably have one pretty decent Ukrainian Europa League team.

The lack of an ingrained “football culture” of clubs and leagues is often flagged up rather scornfully as a fatal flaw among all this ambition. But this is in part a legacy of the old politics, with its prohibition on formal gatherings and clubs. For now the machine continues to drive itself on. The fact is Rooney, Costa and John Terry are only part of the story in a country where the state is ploughing billions into a vast and terrifying nationwide football academy and schools programme.

This is in isolation arguably the greatest social-sporting experiment ever carried out and a path that could frankly lead anywhere, even from the chaotic, fun but low spec fare on show on a hot night in Guangzhou. It will, at the very least, be fascinating to watch, and something to be learned from rather than scorned.

As General Charles de Gaulle pointed out, China is indeed a very large country, and one that contains many Chinese. It doesn’t want the world. But it does want the World Cup. There is vast investment here, a supernumerary population and wildly nationalistic good husbandry. Who knows, they might just get a little closer than you think.