Ping Pong in the Republic of China: Making Sport from the Grassroots
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Abstract:
In the 1930s, a group of Chinese athletes were convinced that ping pong was the sport of choice for China. They organized clubs, funded tournaments, and penned endless argumentative essays claiming that ping pong was the solution to China’s physical woes, a sport that could achieve the key goals of a burgeoning tiyu movement: raising international prestige, developing sport among the masses, and cultivating modern, hygienic citizenship. But while these essays were numerous, they were not altogether convincing — the Nationalist government of the Republic of China (ROC) paid them no heed, unwilling even to hold ping pong exhibition matches at the National Games. In 1953, however, the wildest dreams of China’s ping pong advocates came true. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) joined the International Table Tennis Federation (ITTF) and began actively promoting the sport as a tool of international diplomacy, forcing the ROC in Taiwan to follow suit soon after. Ping pong had finally achieved the state support that its advocates had long dreamt of, but what had actually changed? In this talk, I want to argue that far less changed than we might expect. In post-49 Taiwan, outside of the creation of a National Team, the day to day work of promoting, funding, and organizing ping pong still fell largely to passionate advocates, private businesses, and local clubs, just as it had in the Republican period. Despite the ROC government moving from complete neglect to full-fledged support over the course of the 1950s, ping pong continued to be largely driven by grassroots, voluntarist organizing. The consistent centrality of voluntarism to sports development in the ROC, I argue, forces us to rethink the traditional historiographical understanding of sports as disciplinary tools of the state. Indeed, for both state and non-state actors, a central appeal of sports was their ability to serve as imaginative spaces for new visions of local, national, and international politics.
In the 1930s, a group of Chinese athletes were convinced that ping pong was the sport of choice for China. They organized clubs, funded tournaments, and penned endless argumentative essays claiming that ping pong was the solution to China’s physical woes, a sport that could achieve the key goals of a burgeoning tiyu movement: raising international prestige, developing sport among the masses, and cultivating modern, hygienic citizenship. But while these essays were numerous, they were not altogether convincing — the Nationalist government of the Republic of China (ROC) paid them no heed, unwilling even to hold ping pong exhibition matches at the National Games. In 1953, however, the wildest dreams of China’s ping pong advocates came true. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) joined the International Table Tennis Federation (ITTF) and began actively promoting the sport as a tool of international diplomacy, forcing the ROC in Taiwan to follow suit soon after. Ping pong had finally achieved the state support that its advocates had long dreamt of, but what had actually changed? In this talk, I want to argue that far less changed than we might expect. In post-49 Taiwan, outside of the creation of a National Team, the day to day work of promoting, funding, and organizing ping pong still fell largely to passionate advocates, private businesses, and local clubs, just as it had in the Republican period. Despite the ROC government moving from complete neglect to full-fledged support over the course of the 1950s, ping pong continued to be largely driven by grassroots, voluntarist organizing. The consistent centrality of voluntarism to sports development in the ROC, I argue, forces us to rethink the traditional historiographical understanding of sports as disciplinary tools of the state. Indeed, for both state and non-state actors, a central appeal of sports was their ability to serve as imaginative spaces for new visions of local, national, and international politics.