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 women's sports history begins with the introduction of women's 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 1990's. Utilizing Marshal Sahlins’ notion of the structure of the conjuncture, this paper tells another story: women's 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 nevertheless appeared.

Keywords:

• China
• nationalism
• gender
• the body
• sports

Notes

This article draws on research done at the Beijing Institute of Physical Education, 1987–88, funded by a Dissertation Year Fellowship from the Committee on Scholarly Communication with the P.R.C. (National Academy of Sciences), with funds from the US Information Agency. Some of the library research was supported by a Richard Carley Hunt Grant from the Wenner‐Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research (1992).