The Local and the Global in Modern Chinese Sport History

Modern Chinese sport history is an underexplored field, lacking even a minimally credible, source-based general narrative. Approaching it through specific localities is a natural opening move. However, probably because modern sports were foreign imports, local sport histories often cannot be adequately understood without situating them in a global context. Take miniature football (xiao zuqiu) as an example—a game invented by Shanghai locals in the 1920s, modeled after soccer, and popular there for over a decade. The story of its rise would be evidently incomplete without referring to, alongside local conditions, the global spread of soccer as a British sport through imperialism. The story itself is also part of a larger story, where Shanghai’s miniature football, along with American football and Australian rules football, embodied a global trend of local adaptations of European sports. This lesson concerning the local and the global applies not only to the sport history of the pre-1949 era when China was more open to the West. For instance, to study any professional (zhuanye) team from the 1950s in depth, whether the Beijing Football Team or the Anhui Gymnastics Team, one can hardly avoid examining the delicate compromise between local conditions and the Soviet model. Such a local story is, once again, part of a larger, global story—the diffusion and localization of the Soviet sport administrative system in the Eastern Bloc. In summary, we can expect modern Chinese sport history to become a promising field where local and global histories are intricately intertwined.