ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Against Intensity: Ping Pong, Martial Arts, and the Ideology of Sport in Republican China

• In Event: Contested Bodies: Science and Statecraft in 20th-Century China and Taiwan

English Abstract

The history of China’s physical education movement has, unsurprisingly, been narrated as China’s pursuit of strength. From early advocates like Yan Fu to the height of broadcast calisthenics in the Mao years, sports and physical education all seem to have been overwhelmingly animated by anxieties over China’s physical weakness as the “Sick Man of Asia.” Yet some of the physical activities for which China is today most well known, including Tai Chi and ping pong, are not straightforwardly emblematic of “strength.”

Indeed, ping pong, Tai Chi, and martial arts in general share an unusual history beginning in the Republican period. To be sure, advocates of these activities hoped to strengthen China, but they also hoped to stymie China’s obsession with so-called “intense sports,” activities like track and field, basketball, and soccer. They argued these sports were unnatural, uneven, and dangerous methods of physical training that harmed the Chinese physique and needlessly exhausted Chinese bodies.

The distaste for intensity shared between a government-directed martial arts revivalist movement (Guoshu, or the “National Arts”) and a grassroots ping pong movement in Shanghai complicates our understanding of China’s physical education movement as merely a pursuit of “strength.” Of equal concern to advocates of “non-intense sport,” this paper argues, was anxiety over fatigue. Physical activity, according to these authors, should bring not only strength but also energy. In the imagination of advocates, non-intense sports enabled physical education to erase fatigue, unlocking bodies that were not only strong but also untiring and ceaselessly productive.

Author

• Nathaniel Pigott, University of California, Irvine