Marrow of the Nation: A History of Sport and Physical Culture in Republican China (Asia: Local Studies / Global Themes, 10)

"By 1907, the staff at the Tianjin YMCA were rallying their charges with a series of questions: When will China be able to send a winning athlete to the Olympic contests? When will China be able to invite all the world to Peking for an international Olympic contest? Nearly a century later, on the eve of the first Olympic games ever to be held in China, this innovative book establishes the crucial role played by sporting culture and ideology in the making of the modern nation-state in Republican China." "A landmark work on the history of sport in China, Marrow of the Nation tells the dramatic story of how Olympic-style competitions and ball games as well as militarized forms of training associated with the West and Japan were borrowed and adapted to become an integral part of the modern Chinese experience in the first half of the twentieth century. Andrew Morris draws from popular and scholarly sources that have never been seen by Western scholars, and his interviews with Chinese athletes who took part in such events at the 1936 Berlin Olympics add an important and fascinating dimension to his study. Morris also investigates the role of the martial arts tradition as an essentially "Chinese" element in the development of China's physical culture. Relating the history of sport and physical culture to questions of nationalism, race, capitalism, consumerism, imperialism, the body, discipline, and gender, Morris reveals the critical role of tiyu, or "body cultivation," in any understanding of modern Chinese social and cultural history."--Jacket.