Olympic Dreams: China And Sports, 1895-2008
The Age
Saturday July 26, 2008
Olympic Dreams: China and Sports, 1895-2008
Xu Guoqi Harvard University Press, $54.95WHAT DISTINGUISHES this scholarly, academic text from so many of the recent flood of books on China, is its emphasis on the political and national role of sport in the Chinese ascendancy. Xu Guoqi gives a kind of diplomatic history of China over the past hundred years, looking at, for example, seemingly incompatible themes such as nationalism and internationalism, and contending that (far from being contradictory) on the sporting field the two inform each other. The author takes his sport as seriously as the observer who noted "Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball". So when Xu Guoqi examines, at length, the emergence of so-called "ping-pong diplomacy", he's not just talking table tennis. The Olympics are emblematic of the "new" China but, interestingly, he speculates on whether the long-held dream of the Communist party to host the Olympics may well spell the beginning of its end.
© 2008 The Age