Morris, Andrew David, “Cultivating the national body: A history of physical culture in Republican China” (1998)

Title : “Cultivating the national body: A history of physical culture in Republican China”

Author(s) : Morris, Andrew David

Year : 1998

Type : Dissertation

Subject : History

Keywords : culture

University : University of California, San Diego

Language:Name : English

Support : Print

Abstract : This dissertation is a study of the role played by ideas and practices of physical culture (physical education, sports, recreation, physical fitness) in China over the first half of this century. My focus is on the connections between Chinese physical culture (in Chinese 'tiyu,' or literally 'body-cultivation') and notions of the nation, modernity and a modern citizenry--namely, how the realm of tiyu served as a conduit for teaching Chinese citizens about modernity and the nation. The work is primarily based on Republican-era physical culture journals and bureaucratic reports, collected in libraries and archives in Hangzhou, Beijing, Nanjing and Shanghai, and interviews with elderly ex-sports stars living in Taiwan and China. During the last decades of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), two forms of modern physical culture--the German-Swedish program of military calisthenics and gymnastics, and the Anglo-American 'sports' of track and field and ball games--were imported into China. These basic forms, and the ideologies which shaped them, became the foundations for the development of a modern Chinese tiyu, or physical culture. Even China's indigenous martial arts, which represented to many the worst of China's 'feudal' and 'backward' traditions, came to be understood in terms of these new forms of rational competition, scientifically-approved modes of fitness, and the connections they posed between the individual body and national strength and worth. Physical culture in the Republic of China (1912-1949), whatever the form, always shared two tenets. First, the Chinese nation would be based in a modern and active citizenry who would learn the arts of self-discipline and attention to the larger consequences of all one's actions and movements. Secondly, these national duties could only be taught through educational, cultural, social and political programs that emphasized a physical education, a tiyu 'body-cultivation.' This work aims to show how new ideas of physical fitness, physical education, physical exercise, and physical competition shaped the Chinese nation by influencing the ways in which Chinese understood and presented their bodies to fellow citizens and to the outside world.