The Politics of Socialist Athletics in the People's Republic of China, 1949-1966

This dissertation traces the political significance of sport to the Chinese socialist state between 1949 and 1966 by examining state-sponsored tiyu (loosely translated into English as sports and physical culture ) and the connection between its two intertwined goals: tiyu for every citizen, and the development of elite sports programs. In these years Chinese leaders began to use international sport to carve out for China a different position in the world, while at the same time developing general tiyu and competitive training programs for ordinary citizens. China's athletic and political performance at international events was intended to showcase the emergence of a successful socialist state peopled by healthy, fit citizens and capable of international leadership. A diverse group of tiyu experts helped usher in a new organizational and institutional structure for tiyu in the early 1950s. Inspired by the Soviet model, this included introducing the Soviet Ready for Labor and Defense system in China (known in Chinese as the laoweizhi) as the centerpiece of the government's efforts to use mass tiyu in order to cultivate the ideal socialist citizen. Chinese leaders also signaled their deference to Soviet leadership in the international socialist movement by participating in socialist bloc delegation visits. By the late 1950s, work unit sports associations, spare-time sports schools, and the laoweizhi effectively blurred the lines of mass and elite sport because they included ordinary citizens while also providing ways to identify those with more athletic potential. As the Sino-Soviet relationship deteriorated in the latter half of the 1950s, Chinese officials turned away from relying on Soviet models, but continued to promote basic socialist ideals, such as collectivism, serving the motherland, and internationalism, as part of larger domestic efforts to build a superior Chinese brand of socialism. This included a massive increase in competitive sports programs during the Great Leap Forward and the mainstream emergence of socialist tiyu popular culture, which included sports films and reached an apex with the First National Games. Beginning in 1961, however, recovery from the post-Great Leap Forward economic disaster required tightening the belt in tiyu. Mass tiyu and elite sport became separate, increasingly distinct entities, and most state funding went to the latter. By the mid-1960s, mass tiyu consisted primarily of paramilitary activities, workplace calisthenics, and inexpensive sports like ping-pong, basketball, and swimming. Elite sport meanwhile prospered and nearly all state-level funding went to training an elite cadre of internationally competitive athletes. In the years between the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, elite sport helped open up new transnational networks and establish foreign relations that reconfigured China's place in the world following the Sino-Soviet split. Sport served as a way to showcase and promote Chinese socialism and China as the exemplary socialist model for others to follow, particularly those in recently decolonized Third World nations. The height of these efforts came with the first Games of the New Emerging Forces (GANEFO), a sports mega-event that took place in Jakarta in 1963, which China and Indonesia promoted as an alternative to the Olympics. The turn in high politics during the early Cultural Revolution isolated China in most of its foreign relationships, and subsequently, put a temporary halt to all sport.