Reviewed by: Sporting Gender: Women Athletes and Celebrity-Making During China’s National Crisis, 1931–1945 by Gao Yunxiang Lisa Tran Gao Yunxiang. Sporting Gender: Women Athletes and Celebrity-Making During China’s National Crisis, 1931–1945. Toronto: University of British Columbia Press, 2014. xiv, 328 pp. $32.95 (paper). In the past two decades, there have been several studies using sports as a lens through which to view twentieth-century China. Gao Yunxiang’s book contributes to this growing field by exploring the gendered nature of the relationship between sports and nation, and by spotlighting the lives and contributions of the female athletes at the center of this relationship. Gao begins with the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing to highlight the link between competitive sports and nationalist pride, a connection that she traces to the association of sports with national salvation during the 1930s, a period of political instability and foreign invasion. The concept of tiyu—variously translated as sports, athletics, physical fitness, physical education, “body culture,”1 and “physical culture”2—gained prominence during this period of national crisis. Gao’s book provides an explicitly gendered analysis of the centrality of tiyu in discourses on nation and modernity by examining the role of women as administrators and athletes in the development of tiyu in early twentieth-century China. In addition, she also traces the effects of tiyu on images of women, fashion, film, public policy, and sexual mores. Sporting Gender is divided into six chapters, with three chapters focused on specific women, two chapters on groups of female athletes, and one chapter on the concept of jianmei (“robust healthy beauty”). Chapter 1 uses the career of Zhang Huilan, the pioneer of women’s physical education in China, to map the trajectory by which educated and talented women navigated the administrative infrastructure of the male-dominated tiyu establishment. Zhang’s academic credentials and nationalist goals identified her as a “New Woman,” a female ideal type that was the opposite of the pleasure-seeking and politically apathetic “Modern Girl.” However, as Gao shows throughout the book, the New Woman and the Modern Girl often overlapped, an argument she develops more fully in Chapter 5’s discussion of the Olympic swimmer Yang Xiuqiong and Chapter 6’s story of the actress Li Lili, who Gao argues represented a “radical new type of film character: the sportswoman” (p. 213). Gao analyzes the tension between the New Woman and the Modern Girl and shows how Yang and Li negotiated between their public personae and their private lives. Chapter 2 explores the various meanings that came to be associated with the term jianmei, which Gao translates as “robust healthy beauty,” in popular and state discourses. Women’s magazines used the term to describe the female athletic form. Gao shows how the standards of jianmei were based on the physiques of Western women and reflected Chinese visions of modernity. During the New Life Movement, jianmei came to be targeted as a moral threat by the state. In reaction, urban intellectuals invoked jianmei to celebrate the body in its natural form. Chapters 3 and 4 follow the careers, respectively, of the basketball team of the Liangjiang Women’s Tiyu Normal School and female track stars. Gao uses the basketball team as a springboard for an analysis of the ways in which the rules of the game were gendered and racialized. She also shows how the masculine warrior image emerged to counter views of female basketball players as “Modern Girls.” In contrast, female track stars responded to criticism of their “excessive masculinity” (p. 143) by cultivating “traditional feminine virtues” such as filial piety and self-sacrifice (p. 147). Gao shows how these female athletes also combatted portrayals of them as Modern Girls by throwing themselves into training, limiting their social activities, and joining nationalist causes. Most of the sources Gao uses are drawn from articles published in the Republican press; she supplements these with memoirs, biographies, and published interviews of the women who are at the heart of her study. Woven throughout the book are images and illustrations that bring the material to life. Although she mentions the use of archival materials, the bibliography lists...
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Apr 1, 2018
Darragh O’Donoghue 
Open Access