To move the body

Sports and meaning

My first two sports experiences last year in Xiamen consisted of a tennis session with two Serbian expats in a tennis complex bounded by construction zones and a game of pick-up basketball with 13 ex-military office workers.

The Serbians drove luxury vehicles, paid for by their tracksuit import/export business. We ate Pizza Hut afterwards. The office workers spoke in dialect and wore Nike sneakers. They took me to have barbecue and beer in the evenings, and would ask about my experiences of Taiwan.

In Beijing I play tennis tournaments in converted conventions centers. I am paid to take a train 2 hours to the coast to participate in a bi-weekly series of matches broadcast on local television. I’ve stopped playing soccer with a group of English and German foreigners.

Physical exercise has been vaunted for millennia as not only a respite from the repetition of the work day or the humiliation of servitude but as a transcendent act with implications for the structure of social organization. The most conspicuous classical sources are the Greeks, the Persians, and the Mayans, but the importance of sporting as a non-instrumental component of culture that is nonetheless held in high esteem also has strong roots in the Qin and Han dynasties of China. The Han dynasty saw Confucianism inducted as the official state ideology. Of the Six Arts of the Confucian Gentleman, two are archery and chariot driving. This period is also home to the earliest recorded predecessor to modern-day soccer, initially conceptualized as fitness training for wealthy military units and then adopted by court royalty.

Millennia later, late Qing dynasty reformers saw recreational sports culture as a kind of antidote to what they thought of as the anti-modern sloth and backwardness of their country up until that point. This was a reaction to the physicality of the conflicts of the 19^th century and their confrontation with scientific and medical modernity. This process continued into the early Republican period, coalescing into a nationalistic and eugenicist movement to build up the strength, morality, and fortitude of the body-politic through physical training. Calls to end foot binding were a highly visible element of these reforms, but they extended beyond. A National Athletic Meet was organized in 1910 in conjunction with the National Industrial Exposition in Nanjing, a result of the efforts of the Chinese YMCA. This event was heavily inspired by the popularity of translations of Charles Darwin, and less auspiciously, Herbert Spencer.

Throughout the 20^th century, China’s concerted focus on sports culture was directly tied to her nation-building project, in its revolutionary, socialist, and then reformist modes. China has eagerly embraced the symbolic nationalism of the Olympic Games, and Xi Jinping has sought to establish at least a small part of his legacy as the man who finally develops the Chinese national soccer team.

Chinese soccer has suffered a series of embarrassing setbacks, but there has been success in other areans. In 2023, Hangzhou native Wu Yibing beat four of the North American tennis superstars in a string of progressively dramatic upsets in order to become, at the age of 23, the first Chinese man ever in the Open Era to win a title. He did it in Dallas. His groundstrokes explode through the court in arcs and curves, guided by thousands of years of poetry and calligraphy of the West Lake.

Zheng Qinwen, from the central province of Hubei, made it to the Finals of the Women’s Australian Open early this year, stopped only by Belarus’ Aryna Sabalenka in an impressive display of physical strength. A shot of her chasing down a ball was plastered over the 4-storey Nike store in an outdoor mall in Beijing for the days preceding the final. For a few evenings, she leaped over the heads of the wealthy passersby with their Gentle Monster bags. She is 21 this year.

And the Chinese Olympic Weightlifting Team continue to destroy records across weight classes and in both genders. One of my favorite shouts “Fuck!” when he takes to the platform. His coach responds in kind. When he starts his lift, its “Fuck me!” instead. Hr is loud, and his shout comes from the gut.

Sport remains a crucial component of centralized Chinese political planning, and has increasingly found a foothold in yuppie life through digital health start-ups and group training classes. Soccer education is being mandated and standardized. Private table tennis and badminton academies are springing up to compete with the success of the national ones. Chinese funding is flooding foreign sports markets, as advertising and e-Commerce companies grab up sponsorships. Many of my friends in Beijing take a tennis lesson every 6 months, and own racquets and cute skirts. Basketball is huge among boys and men. My students will literally explode at every basket scored by their House teams.

Christopher Lasch wrote about agonistic potential of sporting to serve as resistance against the dehumanizing effects of late capitalism. His was a conservative argument about the ability of sport to produce human bonds outside the market through an appreciation of traditions executed at the highest level.

I am confident about the strength of the non-instrumentalized bonds formed through sweat; almost all of my close friends in this country have come through sport. I don’t totally buy the “ritual action” thesis, but there is something about competition and sweat which makes for good drinking sessions and kind words. I appreciate that these kids and young adults had the same kinds of experiences I did; it is both a physical and social exchange of cross-cultural meaning, and it does lie outside the sphere of wage labor.

But I am skeptical about this direction. Can we rely on apps and Hot Yoga Cardio to brings us the non-market meaning and fulfillment we crave? Does the jock-world subsume all other realms of camaraderie? Is the future of capitalism work, and sports, and nothing else?