Olympic Dreams: China and Sports, 1895-2008

Olympic Dreams ★ Olympic Dreams China and Sports 1895–2008 # # # # Xu Guoqi Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England 2008 Copyright © 2008 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Xu, Guoqi. Olympic dreams : China and sports, 1895–2008 / Xu Guoqi. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-674-02840-1 (alk. paper) 1. Sports—China—History. 2. Sports—Political aspects—China. I. Title. II. Title: China and sports, 1895–2008. GV651.X78 2008 796.0951—dc22 2007 041329 To my two great teachers, Akira Iriye and Yang Shengmao Contents Foreword by William C. Kirby ix Note on Romanization xii Introduction 1 1. Strengthening the Nation with Warlike Spirit 12 2. Reimagining China through International Sports 35 3. Modern Sports and Nationalism in China 55 4. The Two-China Question 75 5. The Sport of Ping-Pong Diplomacy 117 6. The Montreal Games: Politics Challenge the Olympic Ideal 164 7. China Awakens: The Post-Mao Era 197 8. Beijing 2008 225 Conclusion 265 Notes 275 Selected Glossary 321 Selected Bibliography 325 Acknowledgments 355 Illustration Credits 361 Index 363 Foreword Why are sports important? Why does Boston collectively rise, fall, then rise again with the fate of the Red Sox? How have Yao Ming, the NBA star, and Chien-Ming Wang, the Yankees pitcher, come to be national heroes in the People’s Republic and Taiwan, respectively, even though they ply their (quite different) trades an ocean away? And how have the Olym- pic Games, created to promote the ideal of international sportsmanship, become such a lightning rod for demonstrations of nationalist pride? There are no simple answers to these questions, but with the 2008 Beijing Olympics at hand, it is an opportune moment to address the political history of sport in modern China. That is the purpose and the achieve- ment of this book. For the history of organized sport is coterminous with the history of the modern Chinese state, which has been formed and re- formed on international models over the course of the past century. China is home to a great and ancient civilization. But “China” as a political entity is much newer, founded on the ashes of the Qing empire in 1912. The great (and largely successful) quest of China’s twentieth-century rulers was to make a Chinese-led nation-state out of what had been an enormous multinational and multicultural dynastic realm. Thus China’s Foreword ★★★★ drive to participate in the international diplomatic arena as a respected nation-state coincides almost exactly with the rise of the modern Olympic movement and the growth of spectator sports as an international cultural phenomenon. There is a great myth that China “opened its doors” only in the last thirty years. This is not true. Rather, the years of isolationism (ca. 1960– 1972) are the great exception to the rule of China’s international engage- ment in the past century. The country became a republic with a series of constitutions modeled on international norms; Chinese capitalism and then Chinese socialism developed with international partnerships from Wall Street to Moscow; Chinese higher education was molded by Ameri- can, European, and Soviet models; and China survived as a nation-state not least because of its political and military partnerships with Germany, the United States, and the Soviet Union. In the creation of this new country, sports played a role that has grown in importance. The modern Olympic Games may have aspired to diminish national rivalries, but they have also helped to create and rein- force new national identities. The 1904 Games, played in conjunction with the great Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, allowed Qing lead- ers to mount an exhibit portraying the dynasty as a conservator of Chi- nese culture (although no athletes from the region participated). By con- trast, when the Nationalist Revolution brought the Guomindang to power in 1927, its early plans for its new capital city of Nanjing included an Olympic-scale stadium, and it sent China’s first athletes to the Olympic Games in 1932 and 1936. As Xu Guoqi shows, in China politics and sports have been linked from the beginning: China’s first (and, in 1932, only) Olympic athlete was sent by Nanjing in part for fear that he otherwise might have competed for Manchukuo, the Japanese puppet state. In 1936, the sixty-nine-member Chinese delegation was both a symbol of China’s growing self-confidence, and, almost surely, its close relationship with its German hosts. During the Communist period, participation in the Olympics was subject to political constraints—with the Republic of China on Taiwan initially retaining its recognition by the international Olympic movement—and sporting events x Foreword ★★★★ were secondary to political friendships. Drawing from materials only re- cently made available, Xu illuminates here a history of match-fixing and tanking, on the orders of Premier Zhou Enlai himself, that would do the 1919 Black Sox proud, even if the only gambling was in the arena of diplomacy. Today, the sports are cleaner but the politics remain. The contro- versy over Taiwan, which has persisted in international forums like the United Nations, has repeatedly flared in the Olympic context because of the unique history of Taiwan’s involvement in the international Olympic movement—and is one of the more pressing concerns of the 2008 Beijing Games. As just one measure of the anxiety this “two-China” issue has caused, the Olympic torch will not pass through Taiwan (which was forced to reenter the Olympics through the back door as “Chinese Taipei”) because no one can agree on just what, exactly, the political relationship is between Beijing and Taipei. Historians, journalists, and others interested in the rise of organized sports in modern China will learn much from this book. The next genera- tion will learn from it as well. This book is, as Xu argues, above all a history of modern Chinese elite attitudes toward sport. Yet we have entered an era of mass participation and mass consumption, in China as elsewhere, of sporting competitions. Now—as a “new Beijing,” built on and beyond the old Qing capital, welcomes a “new Olympics”—is the perfect time to look back on the history of China’s intense, and only recent, involvement with Western organized sports. William C. Kirby Geisinger Professor of History and Director, Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies Harvard University xi Note on Romanization This book employs the pinyin system for the transliteration of Chinese names, with the exception of names such as Confucius, Mencius, Sun Yat- sen, and Chiang Kai-shek, whose established spellings are familiar in the West. In citing Western-language sources that use older spelling systems, references to persons and places have been left unchanged. Olympic Dreams Introduction # ### # # The country is being drained of strength. Public interest in martial arts is flagging. The people’s health is declining with each passing day. Our country will become even weaker if things are allowed to go unchanged for long. Mao Zedong, 1917 What is China? Who are the Chinese? What is China’s role among nations of the world? For centuries, people both in China and abroad have asked these questions and tried to address them from many different per- spectives. But in recent decades, as China has sought to participate actively in the international community, these concerns about Chinese national identity, nationalism, and internationalization have become more urgent. Sports, perhaps more than other modern cultural activities, provide a useful perspective on—and may even help shape—how national identity is developed and internationalization is achieved. As Eric Hobsbawm has pointed out, sports have proved “uniquely effective” in defining national identity and the sense of belonging.1 Adrian Smith and Dilwyn Porter also argue, “Sport supplies a mirror that a people holds up to itself.”2 Jacques Barzun even famously maintained, “Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball.”3 These scholars make the same point from different backgrounds—namely, that sport defines a country’s national identity and internationalization because it inspires solidarity and self-reflection. For outsiders wishing to understand modern Olympic Dreams ★★★★ Chinese society, then, the history of sports in China can offer valuable insights. By internationalization, I mean the ways that the Chinese people actively engage in and are engaged by international ideas, forces, and trends— a process that has compelled China to associate with the outside world and the international system. As I have argued elsewhere, internationalization has been driven by shifts in the flow of social, intellectual, economic, ideo- logical, and cultural resources between China and the wider world, as well as by a new Chinese interest in foreign affairs and their position among nations.4 Now that globalization has further integrated China into the world system economically, and China is eager to play a more active role in international affairs, the country’s long process of internationalization has become clearer and more important in its search for a new national identity. Over the course of the twentieth century, five words figured promi- nently in Chinese public discourse: nationalism, internationalization, socialism, revolution, and imperialism. Internationalization, though rarely mentioned directly in the first half of the century, nevertheless functioned as a driving force behind China’s foreign policy and social change. Since the 1980s this term has become one of the most popular words in the Chi- nese public vocabulary. Individuals, enterprises, and government agencies, newly obsessed with the idea of internationalization, have asked them- selves or have been asked whether they are in step with international trends or norms.

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