Susan Brownell

Challenged America: China and America – women and sport, past, present and future

This chapter compares sport in the US and China and its relationship to nationalism and gender over the last centruy. In both the US and China sport is closely related to the construction of a national identity, but its role in that construction reflects the difference between an established world superpower and a nation seeking to establish itself as a superpower after a century of national humiliation. Chinese people hope that the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games will erase the label of the ‘the sick man of East Asia’ and mark Chinas emergence as a world power. In China the pursuit of national victories contributed to the support of womens sports and the subsuming of gender issues by issues of nationalism, while US sports have been characterized by a sexualization of female athletes that was never subsumed by US nationalism. Chinese female athletes were able to step into the role of the ‘woman warrior’ who wins glory for the nation, while the figure of the ‘woman warrior’ was largely absent in US popular culture until the 1990s, when she reappeared in part due to the influence of Chinese culture. Chinese female athletes will mount the major challenge to US medal supremacy in the 2008 Olympics, but it will be difficult for China to topple the US from the top place in the medal count. The conclusion is that while the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games may be a harbinger of some degree of ‘Eastern imperialism’ in the more distant future, the West is now dominant and still will be in 2008.

The Body and the Beautiful in Chinese Nationalism Sportswomen and Fashion Models in the Reform Era

The author is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Missouri, St. Louis, USA. The research on sports was supported by The Committee on Scholarly Communication with the PRC, funded by the US Information Agency. The research on fashion models was funded by a University of Missouri, St. Louis, Research Award, and a University of Missouri Research Board Award. Author’s note: I would like to thank Harriet Evans for suggesting the first part of the title. Much of my thinking about athletes-turned-fashion models was based on long conversations with

Representing gender in the Chinese nation: Chinese sportswomen and Beijing's bid for the 2000 olympics

In recent decades, the international victories of Chinese sportswomen have defied Western stereotypes about the oppressed Asian woman. The Western interpretation of womens sports history begins with the introduction of womens sports in the 1890s by the YMCA as a part of a strategy for liberating Chinese women and saving the nation; it continues through the Marxist egalitarianism of the Maoist era; and concludes with the wholesale imitation of the East German sports medicine machine in the 1990s. Utilizing Marshal Sahlins’ notion of the structure of the conjuncture, this paper tells another story: womens sports were shaped by distinct Chinese cultural practices, and by the use of gender symbols by elites to distinguish regional and national identities (particularly in the symbolism of opening ceremonies at major sports events). This article illustrates how, amidst the propagation of the seemingly homogenizing idea of the nation‐state, distinctly Chinese constructions of gender‐in‐the‐nation nevertheles...

Why 1984 Medalist Li Ning Lit the Flame at the Beijing 2008 Olympics: The Contribution of the Los Angeles Olympics to China's Market Reforms

After the Communist victory in 1949, the Peoples Republic of China was excluded from most world organisations. China withdrew from the International Olympic Committee in 1958 in protest over its continued recognition of Taiwan, and since it supported the US boycott of the Moscow 1980 Olympics, it did not return to the summer games until the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. While the diplomatic importance of those games is well known, their importance for Chinas economic reforms has not been discussed. The Los Angeles Games not only played an important role in the revitalisation of Chinese national identity, but also provided an eye-popping example of marketised sport and mega-events just as the economic reforms were launched. The Los Angeles Games were the first televised broadcast of the popular culture of the West to a wide Chinese audience. The deep impression they left on their Chinese viewers helped to launch China towards becoming the economic power that it became a quarter of a century later. This was symbolically represented at Chinas first Olympic Games in 2008, when the Olympic flame was lit by Li Ning, the gold medalist in Los Angeles who founded a sporting goods company that is considered as one of the hallmark cases of the reforms.

The Olympic Public Sphere: The London and Beijing Opening Ceremonies as Representative of Political Systems

Television coverage of the Beijing Olympics was estimated to reach 70% of the worlds population; London reached even more. The Olympic Games – in particular the opening ceremonies and the national medal contest – are providing global citizens with a common talking point about political systems, and the Internet is increasingly opening up a space for discussion across national borders. The London Olympic opening ceremony provided a forum for comparisons with the Beijing Olympic ceremony, with each representing a political system. East Asia as a region has been rising in the medal count, which has also sparked comparisons of Japanese, Chinese and North and South Korean political systems. The result is a more sophisticated understanding of political systems and a surprising number of shared viewpoints about the obligations of governments to their people, how they should spend their money and their future orientations. In todays increasingly connected world, the Olympics may be bringing us closer than we think to a global consensus on key political issues.