With the spectacle of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games now history, scholars—indeed the world—are speculating how the events will affect China's global relations. In this finely argued, prodigiously researched, and well-written book, Xu Guoqi argues that sports have always been a mediating force between Chinese nationalism and internationalism. In this first full-bore study of Chinese sports since 1895, Xu contends that, except for the thirty-year period of Maoist rule, internationalization has “functioned as the driving force behind China's foreign policy and social change” (p. 2). Xu's study, although it stands on previous research by Andrew Morris on sports in the Republican era (Marrow of the Nation: A History of Sport and Physical Culture in Republican China [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004]) and on Susan Brownell's earlier anthropological work on sport in China since the 1980s (Training the Body for China: Sports in the Moral Order of the People's Republic [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995]), focuses on the Olympics as key to understanding Chinese social change and aspirations for international recognition.
In the early chapters, Xu argues that China borrowed Western sports to enhance modernization, nation building, and self-perceptions of strength and accomplishment. He consciously neglects the history of martial arts and physical exercise, which are traditional activities in Chinese society, and mass sports, though he acknowledges their importance in nation building and global reputation. Xu eschews general discussion of women in Chinese sports, even as he notes that Chinese women often hold up more than “half the sky” (p. 7). Morris's work remains the best account of martial arts, while the story of Chinese women's sports and concomitant gender analysis awaits a historian.
Concentration on sport at the national level is required, Xu contends, because from 1895 to the present, elites have controlled Chinese society and managed sport for political purposes. He devotes a fascinating chapter to the methods that the Chinese leadership employed before World War II to empower the nation through representation of fit bodies and dreams of success in the Olympics. Using previously inaccessible archives in China, Xu offers a nuanced account of the battles between the People's Republic of China and Nationalist Taiwan over representation in the Olympics between 1952 and 1980. Xu distributes blame for this convoluted history among the two Chinas and the International Olympic Committee (IOC). Xu places this struggle effectively in the People's Republic of China's determination to overcome past humiliating defeats by Japanese imperialism and American intervention in the Chinese Civil War. Such wounds meant that the Beijing government would rather forgo the Olympics than allow Taiwan to be independent. Since the publication of the book, the IOC's conduct of the Olympics in Beijing has clearly shown that the question of who represents China is no longer a hot-button issue.
Cold War diplomacy was at the heart of Sino-American tensions around the Olympic Games and kept the world's largest nation out of the quadrennial festival for thirty years. As is famously known, Chairman Mao Zedong and President Richard M. Nixon defrosted relations between the People's Republic of China and the United States through ping-ping diplomacy. Using personal and state archives from three nations, Xu manages to shed new light and draws important insights on this breakthrough moment. (The book also includes rare photos of the American players in China.) His thorough research in archives in China and at the IOC documents the high-stakes diplomacy around the 1976 Games in Montreal, which nearly led to their cancellation. After the Chinese government under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping endorsed the nation's return to internationalization in the late 1980s, Xu demonstrates how the winning of gold medals and national honor became inextricably intertwined. Writing before the 2008 Games, Xu adds a hopeful coda that the Beijing Olympics can provide the country with a resurgence of self-confidence, shaking off the “sick man” image and facilitating a shift to democratic government, at the expense of the party.
Just shortly after the Olympics, there is little question that China hosted a successful competition for the world, while winning the greatest number of gold medals (besting the United States) and expressing a potent national confidence. Whether the Communist Party has lost legitimacy and power is doubtful, especially when calls for democracy during the Olympics were either marginalized or repressed while the IOC and other nations looked the other way.
Overall, this is a history of power, but there are moments when the human elements are brought to the forefront. Xu provides, for example, new insights into the chance meeting during the ping-pong diplomacy between Zhuang Zedong, the Chinese table tennis star, and Glenn Cowan, a young, longhaired American player, when the latter jumped on the Chinese players' bus and encountered Zhuang. Later, Cowan asked Premier Zhou Enlai what he thought of American hippie culture; Zhou responded thoughtfully. Still, I wish Xu had probed Zhuang's controversial life a bit more, thereby going beyond the sentimental charm of the encounter between the Chinese revolutionary and the young American hippie and telling us more about the athletes themselves.
Xu's argument and evidence are convincing, and his book is a model for interpretations of other aspects of Chinese culture, particularly fashion and media. His research includes extensive use of archives in Taiwan, the IOC archives in Switzerland, the National Archives of the United States, the Public Archives of Canada, and the People's Republic of China Foreign Ministry Archives in Beijing. With ramifications far beyond sport or Olympic history, Xu's book will interest all who care about the historical destiny of China and its relations with the world.
