Abstract
This chapter is the first in the establishment of a chronological summary of sport policy from the reform period until the millennium. This period is a time of great change for sport in China, taking the country from the extended leadership of Mao Zedong, through to the first decade of the twenty-first century. Under the rule of Mao, China had largely been cut off from international sporting systems, including suspension of its inclusion in the Olympic movement. With the death of Mao and the rise to power of Deng **, many policies would change in the country. Deng embraced a more open and globally engaged path forward for China that by the end of the 1990s would retool the economy placing cultural industries like sport increasingly at the center of the nation.
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Notes
- 1.
This terminology is commonplace, and “Haipai is the term used throughout China since the beginning of the 20th Century to describe local Shanghai expressions of cosmopolitanism brought about by the opening up of the city to the cultural, political, and economic influences of the West (Wu, 2004). The term was first used in the public sphere (by local residents, political commentators, foreign nationals, etc.) to describe expressions of cultural hybridity in literature and arts that were forming as local Shanghai customs began to morph in rhythm with Western influences brought ashore by European merchants, Western politicians, Anglophone scholars, and global military intermediaries. As Ackbar Abbas (2000) has argued, Shanghai haipai culture then and now represents a “cosmopolitan-ism of extraterritoriality” (p. 774), and that it was “precisely the city’s characteristic multivalence—its capacity to be all at once a space of negotiation, domination, and appropriation” (ibid. 775) that strategically positioned the city to be at once local and global” (Yu, Xue, & Newman, Sporting Shanghai: Haipai Cosmopolitanism, Glocal Cityness, and Urban Policy as Mega-Event, 2018).
- 2.
For an important discussion on the development of Lilong housing in Shanghai, it is important to review the article Towards modern urban housing: redefining Shanghai’s lilong (Arkaraprasertkul, 2009).
- 3.
Hu and Henry (2017) highlight two key policies during this period: SPCSC, 1986, ‘The SPCSC’s Decision on the Reform of Sport System (Draft),’ and SPCSC, 1993c, ‘The SPCSC’s Opinion on Deepening the Reform of Sport System’ (p. 537). Both were implemented before Bei**g was awarded the 2008 summer games in 2001. These were implemented by the State Physical Culture and Sports Commission, which later would be transformed into the General Administration of Sport (GAS).
- 4.
The collective incursions of western and Japanese powers into China from 1839 to 1949 are generally referred to as hundred years of national humiliation. The broad occupation of China by the Japanese from 1931 would ultimately lead to a collective action that would push back against the Japanese occupation until their ultimate defeat as part of World War II in 1945. At this point long existing civil conflict between the Republic government and the Communist factions would resume and result in the CCP taking control of the mainland to establish the PRC in 1949.
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Rick, O.J.C., Li, L. (2023). Chinese Sport Policy from Reform to the Millennium. In: Global Sports and Contemporary China. Global Culture and Sport Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18595-3_2
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