Global Sports and Contemporary China: Sport Policy, International Relations and New Class Identities in The People's Republic Oliver Rick

Global Sports and Contemporary
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GLOBAL CULTURE AND SPORT SERIES
Global Sports and

Contemporary China
Sport Policy, International Relations and
New Class Identities in the People’s Republic
Oliver Rick · Longxi Li
Global Culture and Sport Series
Series Editor
David Andrews
Kinesiology
University of Maryland
Baltimore, MD, USA
Series Editor: David Andrews, University of Maryland, USA.
The Global Culture and Sport series aims to contribute to and advance
the debate about sport and globalization by engaging with various aspects
of sport culture as a vehicle for critically excavating the tensions between
the global and the local, transformation and tradition and sameness and
difference. With studies ranging from snowboarding bodies, the global-
ization of rugby and the Olympics, to sport and migration, issues of rac-
ism and gender, and sport in the Arab world, this series showcases the
range of exciting, pioneering research being developed in the field of
sport sociology.
Oliver James Collard Rick • Longxi Li
Global Sports and

Contemporary China
Sport Policy, International Relations
and New Class Identities
in the People’s Republic
Oliver James Collard Rick Longxi Li
Department of Sport Management and Center for Leadership in Athletics
Recreation University of Washington
Springfield College Seattle, WA, USA
Springfield, MA, USA
ISSN 2662-3404 ISSN 2662-3412 (electronic)

Global Culture and Sport Series
ISBN 978-3-031-18594-6 ISBN 978-3-031-18595-3 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18595-3
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature
Switzerland AG 2023
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether
the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse
of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and
transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar
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The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication
does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant
protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book
are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or
the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any
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Cover illustration: Matteo Colombo
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Acknowledgments
This book has been the culmination of a period of work that started in
2018 when we had the opportunity to travel to China. It has survived the
impact of a pandemic, and we have kept the project alive through those
tough times. We are extremely excited to bring everything to fruition in
this book and hope it can be a meaningful contribution to an important
field of study.
We would not have been able to do this work without support from
several key individuals and institutions. First, we would like to thank
Springfield College and San Yet-Sen University for their support that
allowed us to complete our initial research trip. Both institutions sup-
ported us through joint funding of the Fok Award and provided a range
of other resources that allowed for our data collection to begin.
We would also like to thank all the people that were willing to talk
with us and share insight into sport in China. This includes everyone we
spoke with while collecting data in person in 2018, but also the many
others that have shared their time and insight since. We have endeavored
to best represent their thoughts on this important subject and thank
them very much for giving to us so generously.
We want to thank our publisher and the team at Palgrave Macmillan.
They understood the importance and value in this work. They also pro-
vided us with all the support necessary to bring the manuscript to print.
v
vi Acknowledgments
This team also included the series editor, Dr. David Andrews. Their feed-
back and support in writing this book were invaluable. We are deeply
indebted to them, and this book has been made immeasurably better by
their editing. They have been deeply generous with their time and been
willing to share their intellectual expertise for improving this project mas-
sively. Part of this process also involved anonymous reviewers, and to
them we are thankful for their time and feedback as well.
Lastly, we want to thank our family and friends. The writing of a book
is a difficult task, and when the work is shouldered by the support of
those around you, it goes a long way to making it possible. Our wives
Katelyn and Anni have been patient and supportive of us both. Maggie
and Henry have been a source of joy and relief that has kept us going
through the tougher moments. We want to thank our parents for their
various roles that aided in completing this project, especially Dr.
Christopher Rick who read a final draft and provided important editing
to the manuscript.
This book was the product of a unique partnership, a professional and
personal relationship, that has made both of us better in all regards. We
are extremely thankful for the chance to work on this together and fur-
ther build on a friendship that will last a lifetime.
Oliver James Collard Rick

Longxi Li
Contents
1 Introduction: Global Sport in Contemporary China 1
2 Chinese Sport Policy from Reform to the Millennium 27
3 An Olympic China: Preparing for Beijing 2008 47
4 Global
Sports and Shifting Focus: Sport Policy,
Investment, and the Inter-Olympic Period 75
5 Sport and Accessing a Global Community 95
6 When the Global Game Comes to the People’s Republic121
7 New
Forms of Domestic Distinction: Sport and
Contemporary Chinese Class Structure143
8 Tennis Culture and the Booming Urban Middle Class179
9 China’s
Sporting Self-Determination: Achieving
Independent Global Sporting Dominance205
I ndex221
vii
About the Authors
Oliver James Collard Rick is currently an assistant professor in the

Department of Sport Management and Recreation at Springfield College.
He graduated with a PhD and a Master’s degree in Kinesiology special-
izing in Physical Cultural Studies. Since graduating from the University
of Maryland with his doctoral degree, he has developed a research agenda
that has three main strands: critical analyses of sports media and com-
munication, globalization processes in sport, and urban physical activity
cultures.
Longxi Li, also known as Jack in the USA, is currently a postdoctoral
associate and the measurement, evaluation, and research coordinator in
the Center for Leadership in Athletics at University of Washington. He
graduated with a PhD in Physical Education concentrating in Teaching
and Administration from Springfield College. Longxi conducts research
on the dynamics of Western/Chinese cultural differences as they are
expressed through sports and recreation participation. His education in
sport management and physical education at both US and Chinese insti-
tutions has informed his work in this area. Prior to obtaining a Master’s
and PhD at Springfield College, Longxi graduated with Master’s degrees
in Exercise Science and Sports Management. In addition to his academic
ix
x About the Authors
work, Longxi is a national-level tennis official in China since 2014.Through

years of professional tennis experience and his research interests in cross-
cultural physical activity experiences, the work in this book represents a
key intersection of his experiences.
Abbreviations
ATP Association of Tennis Professionals

BRI Belt and Road Initiative
CBA Chinese Basketball Association
CCP Chinese Communist Party
CSL Chinese Super League
CWSL Chinese Women’s Super League
FDI Foreign Direct Investment
GAS General Administration for Sport
ITF International Tennis Federation
OCC Open Coastal City
OFDI Outward Foreign Direct Investment
PRC People’s Republic of China
SEZ Special Economic Zone
SME Sports Mega Event
WTA Women’s Tennis Association
xi
1
Introduction: Global Sport
in Contemporary China
In the beginning of the fall in 2018, we landed in Hong Kong. We had

followed a hurricane into the city and had come to the country somewhat
behind schedule. At this point in our journey, Hong Kong would be a
brief stop as we transferred to a bus to make our way into mainland
China, through Shenzhen and onto Sun Yat-Sen University campus in
Guangzhou. Our trip to China was primarily to complete a research proj-
ect focused on the development of tennis in the country. With support
from both our home institution and our partner institution, we had
embarked on a study of the structures of tennis in the country and the
dynamics of the culture that had built up around the sport, with a focus
on the time since the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games and the 2010 Asian
Games located in Guangzhou. We were interested in the expansion of
tennis that we had identified through certain key phenomena including
a growing presence of figures such as Li Na on the international profes-
sional circuit; the increased number of ITF, ATP, and WTA events being
hosted in the country; and the broader popular uptake in participation.
What we would come to learn was that tennis was indicative of a broader
trend, a change in the sporting landscape of China in the twenty-first
century. From the center of the Chinese Communist Party outwards, a
change was underway in how sport functioned in the country. Following
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 1

O. J. C. Rick, L. Li, Global Sports and Contemporary China, Global Culture and Sport
Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18595-3_1
2 O. J. C. Rick and L. Li
on from the successes of an ‘Olympics first’ strategy in the previous

decade, a new approach came to be prominent. Both domestically and
internationally, sport would be utilized to serve new ends for the nation.
This did not mean a complete eradication of elite sport and the system
that had been harnessed to bring unprecedented achievement for China
in its first ‘home’ Olympics. Yet, at the same time, this system matured
into a new decade, being shaped to fit alongside a focus on several sports
that we will term ‘global sports.’ Domestically these appealed to the
evolving class structure, catering to a newly minted and massive middle
class. In service of the state’s international interests, these sports would
aid in bringing China to the center of the global system. The decade
demarcated a move from expansion to establishing China as a global
superpower. In normalizing China and facilitating its economic, political
and military power, sport was a key tool.
We spent more than 2 weeks traveling around Guangdong Province.
We attended tennis events in Guangzhou and Shenzhen, we met with
leaders of a sports school in Zhuhai, we interviewed a group of tennis
officials, and we spent time at tennis clubs. We also traveled around the
city of Guangzhou spending time between the skyscrapers and the water-
front of the Pearl River. In a city many in the west have never heard of, a
generation of young Chinese enjoyed the experiences that people in
global cities like London, Los Angeles, or Melbourne can have. The desire
for a western life was not the drive for this group. Instead, this new
twenty-first-century generation reveled in a middle-class life with Chinese
characteristics. Sport, including tennis, was one of these elements of a
contemporary urban, middle, and upper-middle class, globally compe-
tent lifestyle. Participation and spectatorship of sports was a hallmark,
not the traditional sports and physical cultures of previous eras, but a
cadre of western sports. In Guangzhou in 2018, we would walk past
young people wearing soccer jerseys from among Europe’s super clubs;
we would jump on the metro system to a station underneath the city’s
CBA team’s arena and pass a running group as we walked over to Tianhe
tennis club. What had started off as an attempt to get a snapshot of the
tennis culture in China today quickly seemed to be just the beginning of
a bigger moment in sport in the country. Indeed, this book is a discussion
of this moment, the ‘inter-Olympic’ period of Chinese sport. Building
on the shoulders of already existing work on several aspects of the sport-

ing landscape in China, during this period, we look to bring these ele-
ments together to provide a larger scale analysis. Combining with our
research work on the ground in 2018, we have sought to provide a fuller
picture of China’s global sports policy and culture in this time.
Sport and the Chinese Communist Party

Since the establishment of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) under
the governance of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1949, sport
has played a significant role in the creation of a new nation-state. Sport
has been a tool used variously to service the intents of the state, initially
pursuing the implementation of Mao’s ideology as a form of governance.
It has also been a way to record the performance of the PRC and, as Tan
and Houlihan (2012) suggest, is a barometer of domestic and interna-
tional achievement.1 While existing as a proxy for the development of the
Chinese economy, politics, and culture, sport has still been extremely
important to the CCP and the national government. The sporting suc-
cess of China has an ability to both condense and expand the image of
the nation. Athletes and their performances can encapsulate an embodied
expression of China, while inclusion on the international sporting land-
scape can export a popular imaginary of China around the world. Iconic
sports individuals, sporting achievements, and the spectacular presenta-
tion of sporting events have all aided in translating the performance of
the state to its people and to the rest of the world. China has embraced
the potential in sport. As the country moved into the second decade of
the twenty-first century, finding its footing on a global stage, it is impor-
tant to explore how sports has evolved in the Chinese context. As the
country embraces a position of global superpower and seeks to navigate
contemporary issues, this book is a consideration of what the latest itera-
tion of sports is within the Chinese communist project and the function
of government of the People’s Republic.
China is a country that has demonstrated ability to quickly adapt to its
transition from an almost entirely closed society under the oversight of
Mao’s government into a contemporary state that exists at the heart of a
global political, economic, and cultural system. At the same time, through
this change “China is actually a rather well-run country with a level of
social order that is truly remarkable for such a populous nation” (Brownell,
2008, p. 4). Amidst the turmoil of change and while governing over a
billion people, the organizational capacity of the Chinese government
has allowed them to embark on several projects that look beyond the
economic and political concerns of the state, to include several social
programming endeavors. These range in nature, but the national govern-
ment has very much seen sport at the core of this concern. Certainly, this
has gone through various distinct periods in which the state has taken up
different approaches to governing sport: from the ‘ping-pong diplomacy’
of the early reform period, through to the Olympic zeal of the new mil-
lennium, to engagement with a contemporary global sport system today.
Yet, what is clear across these different approaches to governing sport is
that the Chinese state understands the power of sport and how it can be
used as a tool for national advancement.
porting Periodization and the Development

S
of the PRC Since Reform
Since its rise to power in 1949, the CCP embraced various programs
focused on physical development and valued the presentation of physical
activity practices in line with Maoist ideologies. Brownell (1995) suggests
that this signaled a change in body culture from the Republican period
that preceded the establishment of the communist government and
shifted the focus “with the working class and military body culture as its
prototypes” (p. 21).2 With the relatively closed nature of the Chinese
state through the period of Mao’s leadership, the focus on the body in
service of internal revolutionary projects would be the most prominent.3
It would not be until reform following Mao’s death that there was a shift
in focus again. With the slow opening of the country to a global system,
China started to engage in the global sporting arena as well. This was not
immediate, but by the 1980s and most significantly into the 1990s, the
Chinese state and the Chinese people would start to integrate into inter-
national sports systems. This included more regular attendance at
international sporting events, most importantly the Olympics, as well as

the initial formation of professional sports (Morris, 2008). This profes-
sionalization continued into the twenty-first century, but a new focus
came to dominate the beginning of the new millennium. With the award-
ing of the 2008 Summer Olympic Games to Beijing in 2001, success at
this event would heavily shape sport policy in China. This all culminates
with the start of our period of focus in this book, the inter-Olympic
period. However, to know what sport has been for this most recent
period, it is important to know where it has come from, the key points of
contrast.
The Reform Period (1979–2000)
Following the death of Mao, the rise of Deng Xiaoping to the leadership
of the CCP and president of the country, resulted in a process of opening
the country that is generally referred to as reform. The wide-reaching
changes that took place incorporated a range of areas in society but was
largely driven by a process of economic reform that would see an embrace
of marketization and engaging with the global economy while maintain-
ing ‘Chinese characteristics.’ This was a process structured around con-
trolled forms of engagement, utilizing certain industries and geographical
regions as economic ‘air-locks.’ The creation of Special Economic Zones
(SEZs) and Open Coastal Cities (OCC) in key coastal locations helped
mediate and mitigate the impacts of international investment and influ-
ences of cultural liberalization that may come with it.
One area of the society that was included in this reform process was
sport. There was significant potential for sporting development and ulti-
mately success, to both aid in crafting a sense of Chinese achievements
and to be a space for projecting these triumphs. Indeed, sport has been
integral to a form of Chinese nationalism that was formed in the wake of
the Mao regime. In a time when the shadows of a such a defining period
of political governance and ideological oversight would stretch long
across this new day in Chinese history, establishing a strong national
identity and direction was key. Sport was fundamental to this proj-
ect, where:
Existing accounts show that the development of competitive sports in the

country since the 1980s has largely been triggered by a new Chinese
nationalism focusing on national revival and inordinate expectations for
modernization (Gong, 2020, p. 445)
While this approach to the expansion of sport in China would take

many forms over the next 40 years, it has always included the increasing
inclusion of PRC teams and athletes in international competitions
abroad, the hosting of sporting events on the Chinese mainland, and the
establishment of professional sports leagues.
The initial reform process would be a matter of the state finding its way
as it established its strategic path forward, but with goals set in place, the
changes became rapid. By the end of the millennium, the Chinese gov-
ernment had fostered a process of sporting reform in the country that
re-oriented the role of sport. The period laid the groundwork for the
development of Chinese national sporting successes that would be real-
ized in the twenty-first century and explored a model for developing pro-
fessional sports with Chinese characteristics, an approach that blazed an
alternative path to the western model.
The Olympic Decade (2000–2008)
Following a 20-year period of reform, the establishment of a Chinese

model for sport had been achieved, and the new millennium would pres-
ent an opportunity to expand its impact on the global system. Alongside
significant economic growth in the 2000s, the country saw an expansion
in professional sports, including courting investment interest from inter-
national leagues in the USA and Europe. Pre-season tours from Europe’s
five biggest soccer leagues became a regular feature, and investment from
the NBA would lead the way for US leagues looking to create an expanded
supporter base in the country.
Despite the importance of these changes in professional sports invest-
ment linked to economic expansion being important, what came to
define this period in Chinese sport was the awarding of the 2008 Summer
Olympics to Beijing. Following the International Olympic Committee’s
protocols, the process of selection started in the late 1990s, but it would
be the awarding of the games to Beijing in 2001 that signaled the start of
an almost singular focus on Olympic success that came to define the first
decade of the twenty-first century.
The Chinese government looked to plan for hosting the most spec-
tacular and simultaneously expensive games in Olympic history.
Hallmarked by the building of iconic stadia, the choreographing of one
of the most elaborate opening ceremonies in history, and dominating the
medals’ table, the state utilized the games as a platform to exclaim a mes-
sage for the people of China and the rest of the world. The message was
announcing a new era, one in which China should be taken seriously as
a global superpower. The state and the party were not announcing
Chinese ability to compete with the west on their terms, but a complete
restructuring of international political and economic power.
The Inter-Olympic Period (2008–2022)
In the wake of the push to Olympic success in 2008, the country saw a
hangover from this almost all-encompassing focus of state resources and
investment. Yet, by the start of the 2010s, the government started to take
action to restructure the sport system in the absence of the pressure to
perform in the 2008 Beijing Olympics. This coincided with a shift in the
economy that saw a stabilizing from the rapid growth seen in the 2000s.
Now as a more mature global economy and further established member
of the global political system, the Chinese government looked to modify
its sporting system in this vein.
What became the focus of this period would be paying an increased
amount of attention to the development of a set of ‘global sports’.4 This
approach saw an overlap with investment in Olympic success, but sports
outside of that system were also included in this new approach. We will
highlight the specific approach to two sports in this book, with chapters
dedicated to both soccer and tennis. However, several other sports can be
included in this grouping and have been areas of focus for the state.
By the latter part of this inter-Olympic period, the national govern-
ment once again mounted a bid to host the Olympics, this time the
winter games in 2022. Indeed, when awarded the games in 2015, Beijing
again became historically significant, being the first city to host both
summer and winter games. As was seen with the focus drawn by the 2008
games, the awarding of the games in 2022 to Beijing has driven invest-
ment in winter Olympic sports development from the state. However,
unlike with 2008 the relative position of China within a global political
and economic order has shifted, alongside changes internally now under
the presidency of Xi Jinping. Not driven by the same need to project
international significance or domestic successes, the games do not look to
hold the same dominating importance with Chinese sports policy. Now
balanced alongside investment in global sports, Olympic investment is
just one part of a bigger approach to promoting Chinese sporting success
at home and abroad.
Internal vs. External Dynamics

of Chinese Sport
Since the end of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games and entering the
inter-Olympic period, the role of sports in China has shifted. This is both
as part of the domestic class structure of the nation and in terms of how
the country has navigated international relationships. This shift has been
reflected in policy orientations emanating from the central committee
outwards, as well being identifiable in the shape of the broader popular
engagement with sport. Indeed, Ma and Kurscheidt (2017) suggest “It is
no exaggeration to characterise this fundamental shift in the elite sport
policy of the PRC as a revolution in Chinese sport governance” (p. 5).
The approach taken to structuring sport in China now services different
goals, reflective of a new internal dynamic and the position of China in a
contemporary global order.
For a contemporary China, the rapid growth of the previous decade
created a new and growing middle class. Largely established in Chinese
cities, with a focus on coastal regions, centers of manufacturing growth
and international investment, but also slowly seeping into the country’s
less developed central and western provinces, this group is continuing to
expand. The middle class in China is driving development and represents

a maturing of the Chinese economy. Largely leaving behind low-wage
and low-skill work, these individuals are entering growing sectors in
high-skill manufacturing, services, finance, and other types of white-
collar jobs. This group is also showing signs of consumption patterns that
mimic the middle-class experiences of the west and a generally more
globally oriented sensibility.
The growing urban middle classes of China have also developed an
appetite for sports spectatorship and event experiences that align with
these broader developments. A demand for access to international sports
media and the interest in an ability to attend sports events as spectators
or participants have grown. Somewhat driven by a grassroots expansion
in interest connected to a liberalization of international travel and the
ingress of foreign culture to the country, the national government has
also realized the social and economic potential in growing a sports indus-
try around this middle-class expansion. As Gong (2020) suggests for
China, “…the economic open-up has also enabled Chinese spectators to
be exposed to various Western sports, as part of China’s general efforts for
internationalization to the world community” (p. 446). Therefore, in this
book we will look to examine how the shift in policy towards global
sports in the inter-Olympic period is an attempt to respond to and gain
from the presence of a new internationally engaged Chinese social class
grouping. We will engage with the question of how much this period
broadly, and the engagement with global sports specifically, reflects a
shifting internal class dynamic and the maturing of the economic system
that has taken place in the country while also connecting to a broader
internationalization process that is driven by both the actions of the state
and the desires of the population.
Where the economic advancements of China domestically and the cre-
ation of a vast urban middle class have driven an internal shift connected
to sport policy, the country has also seen massive shifts in its international
profile. No longer an expanding international newcomer, struggling to
grow in measure to the west, China has become a self-assured superpower
that shapes international relations around the world. While not mimick-
ing a western model for global dominance, a particular brand of Chinese
international engagement has facilitated their leading economic and
political position. Not necessarily interested in exporting the Chinese

model around the world, the government under the leadership of Xi
Jinping has nonetheless looked to exert its power globally. Built on the
back of strategic economic investments, especially in regions often
ignored by the western powers, and a process of military-backed political
advancements in the Asia-Pacific region, China has expanded its interna-
tional reach.
Underneath this process of elevating the nation to the position of
global superpower, the national government has looked to sport as a ‘soft
power’ tool to mediate these processes. The successes of China in interna-
tional sports have helped continue a projection of Chinese global domi-
nance around the world that was started in earnest through the 2008
Beijing Olympics. Additionally, the country’s development of domestic
sports leagues and hosting role for global tour sports have drawn the cen-
ter of many sports further east and onto Chinese shores.
Chapter Outlines
This book is built around a core analysis of two major sports that repre-
sent the shift towards ‘global sports’ that has been indicative of the inter-
Olympic period and speak to this internal/external dynamic in Chinese
sport policy. Two chapters, one on tennis and one on soccer, provide the
basis for understanding the development of Chinese sport domestically
and in an international context. However, to place this analysis within a
broader understanding of Chinese sport, an overview of sports develop-
ment in the country from reform until the present moment is also pro-
vided. Additionally, to start a conversation about what Chinese sport will
look like as the world enters a post-pandemic period and Chinese state
sport policy looks beyond the hosting of a second Beijing Olympics, we
will conclude the book with some consideration of what the future
will hold.
The book can be broken down into three main sections: (1) Chaps.
2–4 will provide a chronological overview of sports development in
China since reform. These chapters will be constructed around the peri-
odizations introduced previously. (2) The central four chapters of the
book (Chaps. 5–8) will be the basis of our primary analysis. These chap-
ters will provide discussion of the current internal and external dynamics
of a contemporary China, exploring these processes through the develop-
ment of soccer and tennis as global sports in the inter-Olympic period.
(3) Finally, the last chapter (Chap. 9) will provide insights into what
potential developments can be expected with sport in China in the 2022
Olympic year and beyond.
Major challenges have arisen since 2008, including an aggressive
restructuring of economic relations with the USA, a global pandemic
that all evidence suggests arose in the country, and complications in sev-
eral political actions taken by the Xi administration including authoritar-
ian maneuvers in handling the governance of Hong Kong and the Uighur
Muslim population. The core of this book looks to this ‘inter-Olympic’
period between the 2008 summer Olympic Games in Beijing and the
2022 winter Olympic Games also held in Beijing, as a pivotal and dis-
tinct moment in Chinese sporting history. We will highlight the ways in
which change has been made in sport policy and investment since the
2008 Beijing games, but also how this informs a new direction for the
country that informs the 2022 Beijing Olympic hosting and beyond. In
doing so we look to further contribute to filling a gap of research and
understanding. Research and publications were plentiful surrounding the
2008 Olympic Games, but “while China has gradually become a major
power in international elite sport, especially so following its success in
2008, relevant research is incommensurate with this major change”
(Zheng et al., 2019, p. 541). This book contributes to the quality work
being done to address this misalignment and bring greater focus to this
key period.
Chapter 2: Chinese Sport Policy from Reform

to the Millennium
This chapter is the first in the establishment of a chronological summary

of sport policy from the reform period until the millennium. This period
is a time of great change for sport in China, taking the country from the
extended leadership of Mao Zedong, through to the first decade of the
twenty-first century. Under the rule of Mao, China had largely been cut
off from international sporting systems, including suspension of its inclu-
sion in the Olympic movement. The move by Mao to disconnect China
from these global sporting organizations and structures was not immedi-
ate. However, through his intensifying grip on the political systems in the
country, dominating the function of the ruling Chinese Communist
Party, he increasingly detached from the rest of the world. Through this
time, some connection with other socialist countries supported settings
for elite sport participation, but a greater focus was placed on mass sport,
exercise, and fitness. With the death of Mao and the rise to power of
Deng Xiaoping, many policies would change in the country. Rising
through the ranks of the party from a background in Shanghai politics,
Deng embraced a more open and globally engaged path forward for
China. Slowly and in a controlled manner, the country opened to foreign
trade and investment over the subsequent period through the 1980s and
1990s. Focused on several key Special Economic Zones (SEZs) and Open
Coastal Cities (OCCs), international investment was courted in China,
and this boosted the economy. Starting from a level of relative underde-
velopment after the Mao years, China saw a rapid expansion and altera-
tion of its economy. Initially a site for low-cost wage-labor production,
the country took advantage of strategic relationships with Hong Kong,
Macau, and other local trading partners to jump-start the economy. By
the end of the 1990s, the focus changed as China retooled its economy
for more high-end manufacturing and white-collar work that would sat-
isfy the growing middle classes.
As part of these important changes, this chapter outlines how sport fit
within an increasing internationalization and embrace of a broader mar-
ketization in the country. The inclusion back into the global sporting
system would start with a return to the summer Olympic Games held in
Los Angeles in 1984. There was also an initial establishment of events and
sports leagues that would come to grow more significantly into the new
millennium with forerunners to the Chinese Super League (CSL) and the
Chinese Basketball Association (CBA) starting in the 1990s. Importantly
what the review of this time shows is the start of a period of international
engagement in earnest. While the rest of the book demonstrates that this
engagement has not been consistent in its form over subsequent periods,
this chapter establishes that some degrees of engagement with the world
have come to classify the state of Chinese politics, economics, and social/
cultural status ever since.
Chapter 3: An Olympic China: Sport

and the Preparation for Beijing 2008
Chapter 3 continues the chronological assessment of Chinese sport and

sport policy from reform up to the current moment. The new millen-
nium in many ways represented a continuation of previous areas of devel-
opment. The 2000s were a period of concerted growth for China that
firmly established it as a global superpower by the end of the decade. The
country’s economic, political, and military reach increased to unprece-
dented levels and made China a core part of the global system. Within
this growth those governing sport continued to expand upon and embrace
more lessons from the west. However, over the top of this growth came
one thing that would dominate the sporting system in China for much of
the 2000s: the run up to the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games.
After winning the rights to host the 2008 Olympic Games, the city of
Beijing would become the epicenter for a national push for success. Not
only was the Chinese government interested in achieving at a high level
on the field of competition, but it was also focused on utilizing the games
as a platform for a projection of China as a twenty-first-century super-
power. Questions have been posed as to the soft-power capability of the
Olympic Games (Manzenreiter, 2010), but this does not stop nations
from investing the games with meaning and intent. For the Chinese gov-
ernment, the hosting of the games was a useful propaganda tool domesti-
cally and internationally, pushing the idea of the CCP’s success in
leadership of the country. Additionally, it was an opportunity to develop
policy and practice that would become useful for the nation in several
different areas.
The government utilized the games as a setting for expanding on the
already established surveillance apparatus that had been in place in the
country for some time. Upgrading and extending online surveillance in
particular, the Olympics was a useful tool for the government to further
hone techniques for Internet monitoring, face recognition systems, and

purchase tracking. They also engaged preparation for the games to
advance broad concerns about terrorism, putting in place military defense
systems in Beijing for the games and creating an elite anti-terrorism
police force. In hindsight, the mobilization of concerns about terrorism
and the advancement of technologies to address this perceived threat
have been important for the current handling of ethnic minority groups,
with a focus on Uighur Muslim populations.
At the same time, the building and restructuring of Beijing materially
for the hosting of the Olympics in 2008 would be good practice for an
extensive program of ‘stadium diplomacy’ that the Chinese government
came to use all over the world (Will, 2012). The exchange of building
projects for resource access has been important to Chinese interests in
Africa and Latin America. Through the hosting of a materially and visu-
ally spectacular games, there was now belief globally in China to deliver
state-of-the-art stadia to countries and governments that sought them as
propaganda tools in pursuit of their own interests.
Ultimately this chapter highlights just how much the hosting of its
first Olympic Games would come to shape Chinese sport and the nation
at large for the period running up to 2008. It also is a recognition of the
legacy the Olympics had for China, impacting the next period of invest-
ment in sport for the country, and how its approach changed in hosting
its second Olympics in the winter of 2022.
Chapter 4: Global Sports and Shifting Focus: Sport

Policy, Investment, and Culture Since Beijing 2008
Chapter 4 is the last of the chronological summary chapters in this book.

It establishes that following on from the Olympic Games in 2008, the
country would see yet another change in its approach to sport policy.
While not eschewing the lessons learned and the advancements made in
elite sport through the push for home Olympic glory in the previous
period, there was a resetting. Without the driving force that was the
Olympics in 2008, the country could retool its focus. We contend that
this primarily came through a new focus on what we have termed ‘global
sports’ in this text. As part of this category, we have included sports not
identified for their place in an Olympic program, but rather sports that
serve as an entry point to the global economic system and aim at servic-
ing the interests of an ever-expanding urban middle and upper-middle
class in China. As the country headed into a period of increasing eco-
nomic maturity, not pursuing massive year-on-year growth numbers, but
more focused on cultivating long-term stability, its modes of engagement
with the global system shifted. This coincided with the increasingly con-
sumptive and lifestyle-focused interests of the growing middle and upper-
middle classes domestically. As such the more concerted establishment of
home professional sports leagues, the hosting of international sporting
events, and the courting of professional tour sport event expansion, all
received considerable investment. Collectively these all functioned to
make China a more independently defined part of the global sporting
terrain. Events, athletes, sponsors, and media all turned to China. It also
brought desired experiences and exposures for those living in the coun-
try’s bustling metropoles. For those working white-collar office jobs in
Shanghai or Guangzhou, they could now spend their weekends compet-
ing in a marathon or triathlon while taking time on a summer’s evening
to watch an ATP or WTA tennis tournaments in person.
Indeed, this chapter maps out a period that is the core of our analysis
in the book. While the text provides a brief overview of previous periods,
they largely are included to provide context to a period that has been
understudied in the country’s sporting development, the inter-Olympic
period. This covers the 14-year stretch that comes between the end of the
2008 Beijing Olympics and the start of the 2022 Beijing Olympics. As
the first country to ever host both summer and winter Olympic Games
in the same city, China holds a unique position. These mega events no
doubt had a significant impact on sport in the country at both ends, but
in between these two Olympics, the nation expanded in other key areas
that we review here.
Under the governance of a new leader, the country made a transition
to a period of innovative economic expansion and of increasingly conser-
vative social policy. The premiership of Xi Jinping created the context for
a blend of Deng style engagement with the world through trade and
courting international investment initially. Yet as time went on, he has
also introduced several restrictive and punitive social policies that have
changed the country’s dynamic with the world. From the speeding up of
Hong Kong’s reintegration into the mainland to a more aggressive stance
on Taiwan and the One China policy and the persecution of ethnic
minority groups, these policy changes have had bigger impacts. Towards
the end of the inter-Olympic period, China increasingly started to step
away from the rest of the world, a process that was sped up by the
COVID-19 pandemic effects. It is this tension that we introduce in this
chapter and delve into with significant depth in the next half of the book.
How does China stand astride a period of economic maturity and global
integration while simultaneously moving towards a more conservative,
independent, and inward-looking social context?
Chapter 5: Sport and Accessing a Global Community
As the Chinese government looked to advance its relationship with other

nations and global economic, political, military, and cultural systems, the
inter-Olympic period was key. Embracing its role as a global superpower,
an equal to western powers, the country was attempting to define a new
path forward. The Chinese project was an attempt to take advantage of the
benefits of global integration while maintaining an independence of
Chinese characteristics. This was not of interest in projecting a Chinese
disposition on the rest of the world, but the preservation of a sense of a
uniquely Chinese way of life in the face of potentially homogenizing global
forces. Xi Jinping is a student of the challenges that Mao faced in his lead-
ership of the nation, a product of the Beijing political context, and took
those lessons into this period. There were important histories to reflect on
that would guide the way forward for the government in this period.
The awareness of what had contributed to the downfall of the world’s
other biggest socialist state, the USSR was front and center for the CCP
in its various stages of governance. The Soviet Union had provided guid-
ance and been a key ally to Mao in his early period of leading the party
and the nation. However, the Chinese political establishment and Mao
himself ultimately became wary of the Soviet model. The imperialist ten-
dencies and interests of the Russian core to the USSR were not something
the Chinese have been keen on replicating beyond limited reaches. The
idea of mounting a cold war era style global clash of ideologies with the
west has never been of significant interest in Beijing. This was particularly
stark as China looked to its west and saw the depletive war that the Soviet
Union became bogged down in against a western-backed militia in
Afghanistan. Additionally, subsequent politicians in the post-reform era
had watched the impact of Perestroika, the opening of the Soviet system
to the west, and how without sufficient checks on that process it could
result in a wave of outside influence that could stoke popular pushback
against the incumbent party system. This resulted in the events of the
Tiananmen Square crackdown on popular resistance to the party, a set of
events that had very real material costs for those involved.
For Xi Jinping the evolution of China as a globally significant power
was heavily shaped by this history. The model for engaging with the rest
of the world has been focused on limited political and military engage-
ment and heavily controlled embracing of western economic and cultural
elements. For Xi the focus in establishing a vast military presence has
been about securing a One China policy. Ensuring Chinese interests in
territories believed to be part of a historical Chinese sphere of influence
has been of foremost interest. This has included securing the reintegra-
tion of Macau and Hong Kong, as well as limited forays into the South
China Sea. In addition, aggressive moves into areas that pose a threat to
CCP dominance have been important policy directives. The expansion
into Tibet, the securing of Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia, and the aggres-
sive stance towards Taiwan are all steps taken to ward off ideological
threats to the Chinese Communist model or literal opposition in the case
of the exiled Republic of China government in Taiwan. Within this
secured One China, the embrace of global influence and investment then
can be heavily monitored and controlled. The continued use of SEZs,
OCCs, and other models for regulating outside infiltration into China
are still heavily in use. Xi has realized the importance of striking a bal-
ance, one which services the interests of a growing urban, globally ori-
ented, and experienced, middle, and upper-middle class, but that does
not dilute the ideological influence of the Party. This started in the Inter-
Olympic period by courting western investment and influence in con-
trolled manners, but in the run up to the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympic
Games and accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic looked to address

these interests internally. This evolution has been reflected in sport policy,
and in the next chapter, we looked to map this out in the demonstrative
example of the evolution of soccer in China.
Chapter 6: When the Global Game Comes

to the People’s Republic
Soccer has not had the long history in China that other sports have
enjoyed. Domestic sport and physical activity practices have long been
present, with an intensified push towards these in the later parts of Mao’s
period of leadership. Additionally, sports like basketball came from the
west and became widespread even before the rise to power of the
CCP. Introduced through the YMCA system early in the twentieth cen-
tury, the game has had a long history in China. Soccer in contrast did not
find widespread relevance in China until after reform. This is not to say
China had no engagement with the sport prior and is often held up as
having evidence of one of the oldest ball sports recorded in history, but
the western-driven version of the game did not become widespread until
after reform.
One of the first instances of the Chinese state looking to embrace soc-
cer domestically actually came through the women’s side of the game.
China would play host to the first official women’s FIFA World Cup held
in the Guangdong Province in 1991. From this initial foray into event
hosting, the government would lean heavily into developing its own pro-
fessional league system. Initially this was limited in nature in the 1990s
and into the 2000s. The primary interest was in expanding engagement
with the game and serving the development of national teams. The men’s
team specifically had been somewhat of a national embarrassment that
demanded attention. By the 2010s there was a realization that soccer
could fit into the wider international policy approach of the government
and would become a part of Xi Jinping’s policy agenda. With a personal
interest in the game, Xi embraced the development of the Chinese Super
League, investing significant capital into the league that would allow it to
draw talent from soccer hotbeds in Europe and South America. The
administration also gave a green light to outward foreign direct invest-

ment (OFDI) in soccer that paved the way for Chinese investment inter-
ests in organizations such as the City Football Group that owns
Manchester City FC and New York City FC, as well as an ownership
share in Football Club Internazionale Milano. On top of this Xi would
declare interest in China hosting the FIFA Men’s World Cup and would
invest in exploring this possibility.
While these examples demonstrate how much soccer policy in China
fed into and reflected broader international policy developments that
embraced an internationalization, changes would come by the end of the
period. Well underway before the pandemic, but heavily accelerated by
its effects, Xi had started a change of direction with the country’s interna-
tional relations. By the end of the 2010s and into the early 2020s, the
Chinese Super League had lost much of its funding and resources. The
ability of the league to pay massive signing fees and salaries to European
stars had been removed, signaling instead an interest in fostering domes-
tic players. The state had also changed position on foreign investment as
Chinese companies and individuals were pressured to disengage with
investments abroad. In line with a scaling back of China’s premier OFDI
project, the Belt and Road Initiative, stakes would be sold in organiza-
tions like in Football Club Internazionale Milano. Lastly, the focus on
pushing for a Chinese Men’s FIFA World Cup has seemingly been put to
one side. Following on from the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympic Games,
the state has been postponing or canceling international sporting mega
events and have appeared to sideline bidding for new events.5 Certainly,
the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic is being cited for these changes,
but at this point, it is not clear that the Chinese government will reverse
its position when the pandemic situation is resolved.
hapter 7: New Forms of Domestic Distinction: Sport

C
and Contemporary Chinese Class Structure
Chapter 7 makes a turn inwards and is focused on developing a model of

how class is constructed in a Chinese context. Sport plays an important
role in the formation of a contemporary China. Within the inter-Olympic
period, this position of sport highlighted an issue at the core of a broader

shift in the nation. As a country that claimed classless socialist ideals
under Mao’s rule for so many years, discussions of class are complicated.
In some dimension of nostalgic grasping to the romanticism of that socio-
political past, ideas of class identity and distinction are often heavily lay-
ered with veiling language. As Wang (2005) suggests, “The social value of
affluence in a socialist country is never stable” (p. 537), and therefore the
need to indirectly display/discuss class-based status is essential. Within
this politically inflected system of identity performance, proxy tools for
class distinction become essential. While class exists in a Chinese social
system, and forms of class distinction are on display, the need to veil this
performance is important. The ability to sidestep critiques of ‘bourgeois
materialism,’ an idea that runs contrary to the country’s collective socialist
ideological history, forces the need to use language that can be defended.
Within this process of veiled forms of class distinction, sport has taken
up an uneasy position. As part of the pre-millennial state program, sport
was included as part of the collective growth and emergence of China on
a global scale, widely supported as a tool for expressing Chinese expanded
global importance. As part of the Beijing Olympic focus in the 2000s,
sport became the platform for the resolution to China’s expression of its
growing global importance. Yet, since the Beijing games in 2008, the role
of sport has complicated even further. With a more nuanced project
behind sporting investment and development, the role of sport within a
class system is further conflicted. Sport has become a means for the
expression of China’s central role in a global system, connecting urban
residents to a system of events, venues, and organizations that display a
classed position in their very presence. Golf courses, ATP and WTA ten-
nis tournaments, and the Chinese Super League are all examples of
Chinese economic success. However, their very presence displays a level
of economic materialism that runs counter to the country’s claimed
socialist ideals. As Yu et al. (2018) discuss relative to the specificities of
Shanghai, the complex intersections of global/urban/sport heavily inform
and reflect the uneasy nature of contemporary Chinese class identities.
Sport, therefore, has become a proxy tool for Chinese social class iden-
tity formation. Urban Chinese elites can display their class distinction by
using these facilities, attending these events, and supporting their teams.
Yet, as these are sanctioned by the state through its investments, they can
defend this class-based display as part of the larger state development
project. As such, sport, specifically these global sporting experiences,
becomes a way for contemporary Chinese middle and upper classes to
straddle the contradictions of this social class system today.
Chapter 8: Tennis Culture and the Booming

Middle Class
As a part of a new era in Chinese state policy under President Xi and the
investments in sport that his administration has overseen, tennis is a sport
that reflects the shifts in social class dynamics that have been explicitly
targeted by the government (Goodman, 2014). Explicit goals of middle-
class expansion have driven policy development in the last decade, and
the growth in global sports, including tennis, reflects that. We will use
this chapter to outline the ways in which tennis, as with other global
sports, has become a critical part of the dynamics of social class that exist
in China into the twenty-first century.
In terms of how the central government has approached sport in its
development post Beijing 2008, as well as how the sport has been posi-
tioned culturally in China, tennis is a ‘global sport.’ Interest has increased
and business investment has proliferated feeding “off not only the most
established sports of football, basketball, volleyball, swimming and table
tennis, but also the emergence of more ‘Westernized’ sports, for example,
motor racing, tennis and golf ” (Xiong, 2007, p. 456). This has been high-
lighted most visibly by the expansion in professional tennis events, includ-
ing ATP, WTA, and ITF tournaments. The flagship to this expansion has
been the China Open event, which is now a major stop on the world
tennis calendar, attracting top-level talent from around the world. These
events and participation in tennis culture more broadly not only draw in
attention from outside China, highlighting its new-found global sporting
significance, but also in connecting with the desires of an economically
upwardly mobile and urban middle class, the sport speaks to the internal
function of sporting development in China. As Xiong (2007) suggests,
“Along with the development of the market for sport in cities, Chinese
residents have become aware of sports consumption, and they are passion-
ate about sport. Sporting consumption has grown rapidly as the younger,
affluent and professional groups demand more recognized brands and
more sports entertainment” (p. 456). Tennis and other global sports have
become desired parts of a new burgeoning middle-class identity in China,
where participation as a player or spectator is part of displaying a class
status in a contemporary, self-assured, and globalizing Chinese context.
Working from data collected during a research project completed in
2018 and located largely in the Guangdong Province, around the city of
Guangzhou, this chapter examines some of the ways in which those liv-
ing within the tennis community in China express and navigate concepts
of social class. During time spent in Guangdong, a range of qualitative
data were collected including extensive interview data and observation
data from several site visits. Utilizing native language skills, we were able
to conduct interviews with several individuals involved in tennis in
China. This included tennis officials, players, parents of players, coaches,
university athletic administrators, those involved with the governance of
the sport, and academics studying tennis in the country. This has created
a large base of data oriented towards analyzing the administration of ten-
nis in China and exploring the culture that exists around the sport. When
combined with analysis of policies introduced by the Chinese Communist
Party (CCP) that influence that structure of the sport across China, this
forms a rich basis for discussion in this chapter.
Chapter 9: China’s Sporting Self-Determination:

Achieving Independent Global Sporting Dominance
In this final chapter, we look forward. As we look to understand the impact

of another Beijing Olympics in 2022, this time a winter games, alongside
the radical reshaping of sporting events in China in the wake of COVID-19,
we consider how a newly self-determined global China will shape the global
sporting system beyond 2022. As Zhouxiang and Hong (2019) state, “Sport
has been of great importance for the construction of Chinese nationalism
and national consciousness during the past century” (p. 748). In this last
chapter, we consider what the start of a new decade can demonstrate about
how this role of sport will continue to develop for China.
The role of sport in the inter-Olympic period for the Chinese state has
been oriented around a project of normalization. Concerned with further
entrenching the idea of China as a global superpower, the CCP has uti-
lized sport as a soft-power tool. Within a global sport industry, China is
now often a taken-for-granted leader. The country has become a regular
host for professional tour events, established itself as a site for interna-
tional tournaments, has built regionally dominant sports leagues, and
developed home-grown talent in several sports. This has certainly allowed
China as a nation access to the economic potential of sport today, but it
has also aided in normalizing the country culturally and politically. It is
important to try to grasp how sport has become part of this program of
action for the CCP, but also how they will look to continue this invest-
ment in sport going forward. The Xi regime has signaled an embrace of
the global system while also bringing the country back to a level of strict
government oversight and control not experienced since the beginning of
the reform period (Economy, 2018). Beyond 2022 Beijing Olympics,
there needs to be consideration of whether this seemingly odd combina-
tion of stances from the party and the government will continue or will a
new direction be needed. Can a combination of ideas that has projected
Chinese influence on the world while protecting any internal drift
towards reform capitalism be something that can be maintained? Or does
recent events in the form of a global pandemic and a full-on international
relations assault from the USA demand change?
This conversation would have been complex prior to the last year, but
this has only intensified with developments around the COVID-19 pan-
demic, Chinese state oppression of Uyghur Muslim minorities, and the
intensified establishment of a surveillance apparatus that has most visibly
been mobilized around the handling of Hong Kong as a semi-autonomous
territory. While we have not been able to unpick all these dynamics
within this chapter and provide a set of predictions, it is an important
discussion as to where sport fits within this political and economic con-
text. While we cannot see the future of Chinese sport, we have used our
analysis of the previous periods to help identify policy developments that
may provide some indication of the direction the Chinese state will look
to take with its investments in sport.
Notes
1. While mostly focused on discussing Olympic Sport, Tan and Houlihan
(2012) suggest “Sporting success has been both a means and a barometer
of domestic modernisation and changing international status” (Tan &
Houlihan, 2012, p. 134).
2. The rise of the Chinese Communist ideology of the body resulted in a
more “egalitarian and homogenous” body culture in the country
(Brownell, 1995, p. 21). However, this shift did not eliminate well-
established ideas of the body, and remnants of previous frameworks of
understanding did carry over.
3. The Chinese state engaged in international sporting competition through-
out the Mao era; however, the focus was largely internal where “The ruling
CCP cultivated an extensive rhetoric of ‘red sports’—that is to say,
uniquely communist forms and ideologies of sporting participation and
propagation—which still are given credence today” (Morris, 2008, p. 31).
4. Throughout the book we will use the term ‘global sports’ to refer to several
sports that have received increased attention within Chinese state policy.
This included investments in the development of professional leagues in
these sports, the development of event hosting, and a modified approach
to athlete development across these global sports. We will specifically
focus on the increased investment into soccer and tennis with dedicated
chapters, but this grouping also includes sports such as golf, running,
cycling, and even cricket.
5. Currently “The Asian Games, World University Games and two Diamond
League track and field meets, all in China, will not occur as scheduled this
summer amid the coronavirus pandemic” (OlympicTalk, 2022).
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2
Chinese Sport Policy from Reform
to the Millennium
The change in the nation that led into the establishment of the CCP as
the ruling party on the Chinese mainland, as well as the shifts brought
about by the further intensification of Mao’s governing policies, was radi-
cal. Indeed, the lasting effects of the period from the civil war to the end
of Mao’s rule are incredibly significant for the shape of the country today.
In a similar fashion, the restructuring of China that came after the death
of Mao and the transition to Deng Xiaoping’s rule, a process of reform,
would encompass wide-reaching change again.
In speaking to these reforms, many are drawn to highlight the massive
economic shifts that took place, retooling many aspects of the economy
domestically to embrace broad marketization, but also facilitating inter-
national integration through trade and opening investment pathways.
Indeed, these changes are significant, yet the changes seen in the period
were not limited to economic shifts. The country also went through a
process of cultural and political transformation. The economic transition
being implemented aided in creating ways for western culture to infiltrate
into China in a manner that had not been possible under the strict rule
of Mao. The government additionally sought to pursue a differentiated
approach with its international relations, taking steps to lessen its heavy
leanings towards other socialist nations. Yet it is also important to
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 27

O. J. C. Rick, L. Li, Global Sports and Contemporary China, Global Culture and Sport
Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18595-3_2
highlight that while the changes that took place through reform had a
large impact on many aspects of China, these changes do not wholly
characterize the nation today. As much as we have seen aspects of cultural
liberalization, a marketization in the domestic economy, an embrace of
international investment inwardly and outwardly, and an engagement
with the global political system, many aspects of previous eras remain,
and new elements have emerged. The CCP continues to sit at the center
of many aspects of day-to-day life, and the preservation of a concept of
Confucian ideals is often referred to across the mainstream culture and
expressed in policy. We have also seen the rise of new restrictive measures
that reflect the current conjunction and reach beyond Mao era governing
mechanisms, specifically tools like the restrictions in place on the Internet
and web-based technologies. A reflection on earlier periods of reform
should be understood as heavily inflecting the current situation in China,
but the process of reform has had many periods and formulations.
Within the tumultuous early period of reform, sport underwent some
important transitions, both connected into the broader trends in the
nation and elements particular to a sporting context. Again, we have seen
modifications that come through successive periods of development, but
the legacy of this moment is important to understanding a sporting
China today. As the state embraced a more market-based economic sys-
tem, sport was increasingly embroiled with this logic, and as interna-
tional engagement took hold, sport would be a part of this process as
well. In addition, sport would be an important part of the ways in which
concepts of community and the sovereign individual were being re-
thought in the country. In relation to aspects of class identity and gender
in particular, sport played a specific and special role in considering the
position of groups and individuals.
This chapter will map these various changes through the period.
Starting with a slow embrace initially, the new approach ushered in by
Deng Xiaoping’s leadership positioned sport as a key part of early mar-
ketization efforts and means for engaging the international community
through event hosting. By the end of this period, sport would continue
to play a crucial role as the market system matured and China sought
tools to further engage an international community of nations. The
Chinese government explored an interest in hosting the Olympic Games,
an idea that took hold by the late 1990s and that fed into a period of
intense Olympic focus for the country’s sports policy approach once they
secured the rights to host the summer games in Beijing in 2008. It would
also prime the nation for the further establishment of professional sports
leagues in the 1990s that were direct forerunners of entities like the CSL
that expand significantly into the inter-Olympic period.
The opening of China to the rest of the world was a series of policy
adjustments that made a marked direction change to the direction in
place under Mao. Purposefully this process was slowed to protect that
nation and the CCP from a rapid form of popular-led change. Over
around a quarter of a century, China would change in a way unrecogniz-
able from what the nation had become under Mao, but what is of interest
is how this was managed through a series of control mechanisms, and for
this book, the position sport held within this reform.
Controlled Embrace: Special Zones

A
and Coastal Cities
Throughout the rise of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to power
following the civil war in the late 1940s and in its initial phase of govern-
ing the country, the Chinese government’s engagement with global sports
organizations had largely been rolled back compared to what had been in
place under the republican system. Where engagement had remained, it
was congruent with “China’s then foreign policy of ‘Leaning to One Side’
(i.e., Leaning to socialism)” (Zheng et al., 2019, p. 543). However, the
intense and self-destructive period of the Cultural Revolution would
bring an end to almost all remaining international sporting engagement
(Preuss & Alfs, 2011).
After a period of disconnection and distance from the international
system, sport provided a route back in for China, where receiving an
invitation to the 31st World Table Tennis Championships in 1971 paved
the way for “Henry Kissinger [and] Premier Zhou Enlai in July 1971 to
pen the Shanghai communique, which President Richard Nixon and
Mao Zedong jointly issued on 21 February 1972” (Horton, 2012,
p. 517). Yet it wouldn’t really be until the death of Mao Zedong and the
fall of his strict ideological oversight that the potential for China to open
more fully to the global system was renewed. An appetite existed to
embrace the potential of western capitalism and with it the cultural liber-
alism it entailed. However, the intent to pursue this process while also
maintaining the power and oversight of the CCP was paramount.
In leaning towards other socialist countries throughout the Mao era,
China had looked to them to model its own policy development and
approach to governance. This was particularly the case with the USSR
where “The reach of Soviet influence extended into a wide range of
Chinese policy domains” (Zheng et al., 2019, p. 543). However, the
Chinese process of reform and opening would not mimic the opening of
the USSR entirely. The policy of Perestroika initiated by Brezhnev and
continued by Gorbachev that ultimately contributed to the demise of the
Soviet Union by the end of the next decade would not be adopted fully.
Often Maoist and Soviet communism can be seen as the same, but in this
case and with many others, important differences existed. The CCP and
Chinese state leadership looked to proceed cautiously, protective of a
uniquely Chinese way of life and society. The reform of the country was
not a removal of the systems and structures built up under the oversight
of Mao, but a truly careful reform process that instead modified the
Chinese system, carefully selecting and admitting elements of a western
system that could offer certain advantages.
One of the most significant mechanisms for the moderation of an
engagement with global economic, political, and even cultural systems
would be the creation of Special Economic Zones (SEZs) followed by the
establishment of Open Coastal Cities (OCCs). These were geographical
areas selected to engage certain reform policies while not necessarily
allowing them free and open access to the country. Foreign investment
could only be made in the SEZs and OCCs, trade and manufacturing for
foreign markets took place in these zones, and international finance
would be held in these areas. Additionally, within these zones, while a
greater engagement with the global system was allowed, the state reserved
the ability to engage in intense forms of oversight. The SEZs and OCCs
were and still are located largely around three major urban centers:
Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou (the first established, in the city of
Shenzhen, celebrated its 40th anniversary in 2022, marked by a visit
from Xi Jinping).
The OCC that encompassed parts of Shanghai took advantage of his-

torical positioning of the city as a hub for international finance, relations
that had been heavily suppressed under the rule of Mao, but that were
resurrected in reform. Establishing a role as an international city by the
end of this period, Shanghai would come to be a key point of engage-
ment with the west and a route for the financing of foreign direct invest-
ment. The role of Shanghai as a major economic and financial hub was
accelerated by the establishment of the Pudong area in the city in 1990.
As Tao and Lu (2012) outline:
The opening of Pudong was not only for its own development. It served as
a carrier for Shanghai’s establishment as a global financial trade and ship-
ping center, and aimed to become the bridge between China and the world,
giving service to Yangtze River Delta and the whole nation, as well as pro-
moting their economic development. Twenty years have passed since the
establishment of the Pudong SEZ. With the full support of the Central
Government of Shanghai Municipal Government, Pudong New District,
taking the advantage of the rising Chinese economy and intelligence and
hardworking spirit of its people, made remarkable achievements. In 2008,
the GDP of Pudong New District was 32 times that of 1990. In 2009,
there were 603 financial institutions and 135 transnational corporation
headquarters in Pudong. The Shanghai Stock Exchange ranked the world’s
third largest in terms of its amount of transaction and financing, while the
amount of transaction of Shanghai Futures Exchange topped the world.
Both the container volume throughput of Yangshan Port and Wai Gaoqiao
Port and cargo volume of Pudong International Airport ranked the world’s
third largest in 2009. (p. 377)
Through the establishment of Pudong as part of the special economic

planning, Shanghai would be able to effectively reestablish its role as a
global city and provide a gateway for broader investment along the
Yangtze River.
In contrast, Beijing took advantage of its position as the nation’s capital
with the national government and role of the party driving broader devel-
opment, alongside what would be its later role as a tourist hub for the
nation. Tying in development of the surrounding region and the estab-
lishment of Hebei Province as an open economic zone in 1985, the
nation’s capital came to anchor a wider region of economic development.

As production and trade grew around Beijing, its role as the seat of
national government and international tourist hub that it was becoming
preserved a differentiated identity for the city, less aligned with its eco-
nomic or production/trade role than was seen in Shanghai and Guangzhou.
The last of these would be particularly significant due to its location
and proximity to Hong Kong. Prior to reform, Hong Kong, under the
governance of the British, had become an economic hub in the region.
The small territory offered a friendly environment for western economic
interests looking to expand into East and Southeast Asia. As the reform
process was implemented, the closeness of Guangzhou and other cities in
Guangdong Province allowed for an initial flow of investment and trade.
Shenzhen stood out as it grew rapidly on the back of this economic link,
creating an almost continuous urban area stretching across the border
form the New Territories in Hong Kong’s northern peninsula. With a
focus on trade, this SEZ was oriented heavily toward manufacturing and
goods production, starting off by taking advantage of the comparatively
low cost of labor to become globally dominant in textile and low-cost
consumable production. Over time this production focus evolved to
more complex production and engineering in electrical products that
would allow adaptation as labor costs rose and competitors in low-cost
production developed across neighboring regions in South Asia and
Southeast Asia.
In this role all the central metropolitan centers in these SEZs would see
growth that lasts into the current moment through their tier one status as
cities. The unique position and growth of each city have anchored growth
throughout their provinces, regions, and collectively the nation. In turn
this increasing separation between Beijing, Guangzhou, and Shanghai
from other urban centers, surrounding urban peripheries, and rural
extensions has been recognized within the cultural terrain of the nation.
Especially Shanghainese identity expressing some type of a redux of its
pre-revolution metropolitanism stands out (Gamble, 2001). As Yu et al.
(2018) highlight, the references to Haipai cosmopolitanism have been in
widespread use since the beginning of the twentieth century.1 Not unique
in its existence, often used in contrast to Jingpai, a term describing a
Beijing style, these terminologies collectively point to a now
well-established distinction. In addition, within higher-tier cities in these

coastal zones, the architecture of these urban environments reflects and
materially enshrines how these regions have pioneered Chinese growth
since reform and an embracing of western influence. Referencing
Shanghai and Beijing specifically, Zhang (2010) highlights what has
become a more widespread trend:
The architectural motifs that signify modern are usually drawn from North
America and Western Europe. In Beijing and Shanghai, due to the high
concentration of financial capital and a transnational business class, new
urban mega-projects for upper-middle-class Chinese and expatriates have
sought well-known, high-priced international architects to “brand” their
design and assert their authenticity (Ren, 2008). Although these signature
projects are extremely expensive, they have become a high-status symbol
and emblem of Western modern styles. (p. 84)
Building projects on the large scale, such as the Canton tower in

Guangzhou, or the more sundry and everyday architecture of the
Xintiandi district in Shanghai collectively highlight just how much the
growth of these coastal cities and the SEZs they are central to were central
to reform and the current structure of growth the country still expresses.
Indeed, the study of Lilong housing in Shanghai is an important case
study in the evolution of Chinese development prior to and following
reform.2 The expression of older Chinese styles and characteristics, blend-
ing an international style of high-rise urban expansion, and the latter
restructuring of vernacular architecture in the production of new con-
sumption spaces speak to the dynamics of transition that reform has ush-
ered in and preserved in contemporary China.
roto-Professionalization and Early

P
Marketization
As the country undertook reform, mediating an engagement with inter-
national economic, political, and cultural systems with a series of policies
designed to maintain ‘Chinese Characteristics’, sporting development
was included in the Chinese government’s planning. The SEZs developed

economically and allowed for a highly government-managed outside
investment into Chinese territory that included sporting investment in a
multitude of forms. The focus on sport as part of a broader reform pro-
cess was not necessarily a first wave idea, but Gu, Wu, et al. (2015) note
that by the 1990s “the economic function of elite sport began to be real-
ized” (p. 1354). This included several policy changes and investment ini-
tiatives that came from the state.3 Policies included an approach where
“some sports facilities were operated according to market economy rules
in order to lessen the financial burden on the government and to absorb
the capital provided by society in order to develop elite sport with wider
resources” (Gu, Wu, et al., 2015, p. 1354). It also included the establish-
ment of initial forays into establishing sports leagues, hosting professional
sports events, and engaging elements of what would become a more
hybrid system for elite athlete support. Together these signaled the initial
engagement with a global market economy that existed for sport and
mimicked a broader attempt to slowly integrate with global economic
systems (Hu & Henry, 2017).
Following on from the governance approach of the Chinese Communist
Party under the leadership of Mao, sport was largely centralized. This
reflected other aspects of the reorganization of the nation under commu-
nist rule during this period. In terms of elite sport and athlete develop-
ment, the system came to resemble a pyramid of talent identification and
the fostering of that talent. Fully supported and integrated by central gov-
ernment oversight, the approach to sport sought out talent at a young age
and brought individuals through to a high point of elite performance.
Initially this supported national performance at international events like
the Olympics until their country’s inclusion in the international sports
system was largely suspended from the 1950s through until the 1980s.
Specifically the PRC would not attend the Olympics from 1956 in
Melbourne until the 1984 games hosted in Los Angeles. During this
period the elite sport system suffered, and while Chinese athletes were
able to compete at a high level at national games and some international
events held with ‘friendly nations,’ investment was reduced. A lack of
investment in facilities and coaching had an impact on elite sport perfor-
mance. Additionally, throughout this entire centralized system approach,
athletes were supported as government employees. As Liang (2019) points
out in reference specifically to soccer, “Before professionalization, players

were paid like any other state employees with a national average salary
standard” (p. 383). However, with reform these standards began to change,
and soccer was at the forefront of this shift. The soccer system was early to
be exposed to marketization and professionalization leading the way for
other sports to follow. As these ‘westernized’ tenets were applied within
the sports system, aspects of market dynamics were introduced even as the
state continued to have a heavy hand in processes and significant funding
came directly or indirectly from government investment. Importantly for
this early period of change, the introduction of market logics and the
concept of private investment were small scale. It took time for these
approaches to take hold, and overall, the elite sport system was an aspect
of sport that would take time to become more westernized in format.
When more concerted change came in China, the poor performance
of the national men’s soccer team was a significant contributing factor for
making these transitions to a more marketized structure. The failures of
the national team in the late 1980s and early 1990s would prompt inter-
est by the state in supporting a professional league to be established by
1994. This league became the forerunner for later establishment of the
Chinese Super League, that despite a period of uncertainty in the 2020s
was through the inter-Olympic period the most prominent sports league
in the country, with an international reach and impact. Forays into estab-
lishing Chinese professional soccer would provide a road map and inform
the creation of a professional basketball league in 1995–1996 and the
Chinese Volleyball League that held its first season in 1996. While other
professional sports leagues have been established in China subsequently,
specifically the expansion into female counterpart leagues across soccer
and basketball, the presence of these leagues has been limited. Competing
with the popularity of European leagues in soccer and the NBA for bas-
ketball, the creation of professional leagues has not been a hugely promi-
nent part of Chinese state policy on sport reform.
In comparison one area the government has been interested in sup-
porting has been the hosting of sports events, both at the international
level and in professional tour sports. China oriented itself towards being
an important sports event host with it being the home to Olympic
Games, Asian Games, Asian Cups, Southeast Asian Games, and many
others. However, it has also positioned itself as a regular stop for
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sprinkling of persons of a higher grade, who formed the small
Opposition. Though the opinions of these were of the most moderate
shade of what would now be called “liberalism,” the slightest
expression of them was attended with positive risk. Spies were
employed to watch such of them as had any social position; in several
cases there were trials for sedition, with sentences of transportation;
and only the impossibility of finding grounds for indictment
prevented more. The negative punishment of exclusion from office,
and from every favour of Government and its supporters, was the
least; and it was universally applied. Burns nearly lost his
excisemanship for too free speaking; and a letter is extant, addressed
by him to one of the commissioners of the Scottish Board of Excise,
in which, without denying his Liberalism, he protests that it is within
the bounds of devout attachment to the Constitution, and implores
the commissioner, as “a husband and a father” himself, not to be
instrumental in turning him, with his wife and his little ones, “into
the world, degraded and disgraced.” Part of the poet’s crime seems to
have been his having subscribed to an Edinburgh Liberal paper
which had been started by one Captain Johnstone. This Johnstone
was imprisoned after the publication of a few numbers; and the very
printer of the paper, though himself a Tory, was nearly ruined by his
connection with it. No subsequent attempt was made during the
Dundas reign to establish an Opposition newspaper. From 1795 to as
late as 1820, according to Lord Cockburn, not a single public meeting
on the Opposition side of politics was, or could be, held in
Edinburgh. Elections of members of Parliament, whether for burghs
or for counties, in Scotland, were a farce: they were transacted
quietly, by those whose business it was, in town-halls or in the
private rooms of hotels; and the people knew of the matter only by
the ringing of a bell, or by some other casual method of
announcement. Abject Toryism, or submission to Dundas and the
existing order of things, pervaded every department and every corner
of established or official life in Scotland,—the Church, the Bench, the
Bar, the Colleges and Schools; and so powerfully were any elements
of possible opposition that did exist kept down by the pressure of
organised self-interest, and by the fear of pains and penalties, that
the appearance at last from the Solway to Caithness was that of
imperturbable political stagnation.
Once, indeed, a crisis occurred which put the Scottish people
nearly out in their calculations. This was in March 1801, when Pitt
resigned office, and Dundas along with him, and a new ministry was
formed under Pitt’s temporary substitute, Mr. Addington, afterwards
Lord Sidmouth. Dundas out of power was a conception totally new to
the Scottish mind,—an association, or rather a dissociation, of ideas
utterly paralysing. “For a while,” says Lord Brougham, “all was
uncertainty and consternation; all were seen fluttering about like
birds in an eclipse or a thunderstorm; no man could tell whom he
might trust; nay, worse still, no man could tell of whom he might ask
anything.” Dundasism, which had hitherto meant participation in
place and patronage, now seemed in danger of losing that meaning;
and the bulk of the Scottish population feared that they might have
to choose between the name and the thing. They were faithful to
Dundas, however; and they were rewarded. The Addington ministry,
which had come into power principally to conclude peace with
France by the Treaty of Amiens, came to an end after that Treaty had
been rendered nugatory by the recommencement of the war; and in
May 1804 Pitt returned to the helm. Dundas, who had in the interim
been raised to the peerage by the title of Viscount Melville, then
resumed his place in his friend’s cabinet, to yield his Parliamentary
service thenceforward in the Upper House, and official service
mainly in the First Lordship of the Admiralty. Scotland then rolled
herself up comfortably once more for her accustomed slumber,—the
only difference being that her bedside guardian had to be thought of
no longer as her Harry Dundas, but less familiarly now as her Lord
Melville. So for another year; but then what a reawakening! It was in
April 1805 that, in consequence of the report of a Committee of the
House of Commons that had been appointed for the investigation of
alleged abuses in the naval service, the Whigs, through Mr.
Whitbread as their spokesman, opened an attack on Lord Melville on
charges of malversation of office, and misappropriation of public
moneys, during his former Treasurership of the Navy, either directly,
or by collusion with his principal financial subordinate. The attack
grew fiercer and fiercer, as well as more extensive in its scope; and,
although it was evidently inspired mainly by the political
vindictiveness of a party made furious by long exclusion from office,
it became more formidable from the fact that some of Pitt’s own
friends either abetted it fully or thought that the irregularities in
account-keeping which had been disclosed ought not to pass without
Parliamentary censure. Pitt reeled under such a blow at once to his
private feelings and his administration; and, after doing his best to
resist, he had to consent that Lord Melville should quit office, and
that Lord Melville’s name should be struck off from the list of His
Majesty’s Privy Council till the charges against him were formally
and publicly tried. The trial was to be in the shape of an
impeachment before the House of Lords. Before it could come on Pitt
was dead. He died on the 23d of January 1806; and the longexcluded
Whigs had then their turn of power for somewhat more than a year
in what is remembered as the Fox and Grenville ministry,—a name
accurate only till the 13th of September 1806, when Fox followed his
great rival to the grave, and Lord Grenville became Premier singly. It
was in April and May 1806, when this Fox and Grenville ministry
was new in office, that the great trial of Lord Melville in Westminster
Hall was begun and concluded. The charges against him had been
formulated into ten articles; and he was acquitted upon all the ten,—
unanimously on the only one which vitally impeached his personal
integrity, by overwhelming majorities on five of the others, and by
smaller but still decisive majorities on the remaining four. On the
whole, it was a triumphant acquittal; and it was received as such
throughout Scotland,—where, at one of the dinners held in honour of
the event by the jubilant Scottish Tories, there was sung a famous
song beginning with this stanza:—
“Since here we are set in array round the table,
Five hundred good fellows well met in a hall,
Come listen, brave boys, and I’ll sing as I’m able
How innocence triumphed and pride got a fall.
But push round the claret,—
Come, stewards, don’t spare it;
With rapture you’ll drink to the toast that I give:
Here, boys,
Off with it merrily:
‘Melville for ever, and long may he live!’”
Melville did live for some time longer, restored to his place in the
Privy Council, and rehabilitated in honour, but never again in office,
hardly caring to concern himself further with politics, and spending
his last years mainly in Scotland. He died on the 27th of May 1811, in
the seventieth year of his age.
That system of the government of Scotland by proconsulship of
which he had been so conspicuously the representative did not by
any means die with him. It was continued, with variations and
modifications, through those successive ministries of the later part of
the reign of George III. and the whole of the reign of George IV.
which fill up the interval between the death of Pitt and the eve of the
Reform Bill; nay, not only so continued, but continued with the
accompanying phenomenon that it was still a Dundas that exercised,
occasionally at least, what did remain of the proconsulship. Robert
Dundas, 2d Viscount Melville, who died as late as 1851, was a
member of most of the successive administrations mentioned, from
Perceval’s of 1809–12, through Liverpool’s of 1812–27, to Canning’s
and the Duke of Wellington’s of 1827–30, holding one or other of his
father’s old posts in these administrations, and so or otherwise
maintaining the hereditary Dundas influence in Scottish affairs while
Toryism kept the field. But, while this prolongation of the Dundas
influence in the second Lord Melville is not to be forgotten, it is the
father, Henry Dundas, 1st Lord Melville, that has left the name of
Dundas most strikingly impressed upon the history of Scotland, and
it is the stretch of two-and-twenty years between 1783 and 1806,
during which this greatest of the Dundases exercised the
proconsulship, that has to be remembered especially and
distinctively in Scottish annals as the time of the Dundas Despotism.
“The Dundas Despotism!” O phrase of fear, unpleasing to a

modern ear! What a Scotland that must have been which this phrase
describes! A country without political life, without public meetings,
without newspapers, without a hustings: could any endurable
existence be led in such a set of conditions,—could any good come
out of it?
Incredible as it may seem, there is evidence that the Scottish
people did contrive, in some way or other, to lead not only an
endurable but a very substantial and jolly existence through the
Dundas Despotism, and that not only a great deal of good, but much
of what Scotland must now regard as her best and most
characteristic produce, had its genesis in that time, though the
exodus has been later. The various liberties of the human subject
may be classified and arranged according to their degrees of
importance; and a great many of them may exist where the liberty of
voting for members of parliament and of openly talking politics is
absent. So it was in Scotland through the reign of Henry Dundas and
his Toryism. The million and a half of human beings who then
composed Scotland, and were scattered over its surface, in their
various parishes, agricultural or pastoral, and in their towns and
villages, went through their daily life with a great deal of energy and
enjoyment, notwithstanding that Dundas, and the lairds and the
provosts and bailies as his agents, elected the members of parliament
and transacted all the political business of the country; nay, out of
the lairds and the bailies themselves, and all the business of
electioneering, they extracted a good deal of fun. What mattered it to
them that now and then some long-tongued fellow who had started a
newspaper was stowed away in jail, or that an Edinburgh lawyer like
Muir was transported for being incontinent in his politics? Could not
people let well alone, obey the authorities, earn their oatmeal, and
drink their whisky in peace? Few of Scott’s novels come down so far
as to this period of Scottish life, and it has not been much described
in our other literature of fiction; but till lately there were many alive
who remembered it, and delighted in recalling its savageries and its
humours. O the old Scottish times of the lairds, the “moderate”
ministers, the provosts and the bailies!—the lairds speaking broad
Scotch, farming their own lands, carousing together, seeing their
daughters married, and writing to London for appointments for their
sons; the “moderate” ministers making interest for their sons,
preaching “Blair and cauld morality” on Sundays, and jogging to
christenings or to Presbytery dinners through the week; the provosts
and bailies in their shops in the forenoon, or meeting in the morning
at their “deid-chack” after a man was hanged! Every considerable
town then had its hangman, who was frequently a well-to-do person
that sold fish or some such commodity. And then, all through society,
the flirtations, the friendships, and the long winter evenings at the
fireside, with the cracks between the “gudeman” and his neighbours,
and the alternative of a hand at cards or a well-thumbed book for the
young folks! What stalwart old fellows, both of the douce and of the
humorous type, oracular and respected in their day, and whose
physiognomies and maxims are still preserved in local memory, lived
and died in those days and made them serve their turn! Nay, of the
Scotsmen who have been eminent in the intellectual world, what a
number belong by their birth to the reign of Dundas, and were
nurtured amid its torpid influences! Burns closed his life in the midst
of it; Dugald Stewart and James Watt lived through it; Scott, Jeffrey,
Chalmers, Wilson, Hamilton, and Carlyle are all, more or less,
specimens of what it could send forth. Vixere fortes ante
Agamemnona: there was pith in Scotland before there was
Parliamentary Reform.
Naturally it was in Edinburgh that the various elements of
Scottish life at this time were seen in their closest contact and their
most intimate union or antagonism. It was here that Dundas lived
when he was in Scotland; and here were the central threads of that
official network by which, through Dundas, Scotland was connected
with the English Government. Edinburgh was then still the chief city
of Scotland, even in population; for, though now Glasgow has far
outstripped it in that particular, then the two cities were happy in
numbering little more than 80,000 each. At least, in the census of
1801 Edinburgh stands for 82,000, or almost exactly neck to neck
with Glasgow, which stands for 83,000. Dundee, which came next,
reckoned but 29,000; Aberdeen, 27,000; and Leith and Paisley each
about 20,000. Few other Scottish towns had a population of more
than 10,000.
Was there ever another such city to live in as Edinburgh?
“And I forgot the clouded Forth,
The gloom that saddens heaven and earth,
The bitter east, the misty summer,
And gray metropolis of the North.”
One regrets that this is all that our noble Laureate’s experience of
Edinburgh enabled him to say. The east winds do bite there fearfully
now and then, and blow a dust of unparalleled pungency in your eyes
as you cross the North Bridge; but, with that exception, what a city!
Gray! why, it is gray, or gray and gold, or gray and gold and blue, or
gray and gold and blue and green, or gray and gold and blue and
green and purple, according as the heaven pleases, and you choose
your ground! But, take it when it is most sombrely gray, where is
another such gray city? The irregular ridge of the Old Town, with its
main street of lofty antique houses rising gradually from Holyrood
up to the craggy Castle; the chasm between the Old Town and the
New, showing grassy slopes by day, and glittering supernaturally
with lamps at night; the New Town itself, like a second city spilt out
of the Old, fairly built of stone, and stretching downwards over new
heights and hollows, with gardens intermixed, till it reaches the flats
of the Forth! Then Calton Hill in the midst, confronted by the
precipitous curve of the Salisbury Crags; Arthur Seat looking over all
like a lion grimly keeping guard; the wooded Corstorphines lying soft
away to the west, and the larger Pentlands looming quiet in the
southern distance! Let the sky be as gray and heavy as the absence of
the sun can make it, and where have natural situation and the hand
of man combined to exhibit such a mass of the city picturesque? And
only let the sun strike out, and lo! a burst of new glories in and
around. The sky is then blue as sapphire overhead; the waters of the
Forth are clear to the broad sea; the hills and the fields of Fife are
distinctly visible from every northern street and window; still more
distant peaks are discernible on either horizon; and, as day goes
down, the gables and pinnacles of the old houses blaze and glance
with the radiance of the sunset. It is such a city that no one, however
familiar with it, can walk out in its streets for but five minutes at any
hour of the day or of the night, or in any state of the weather, without
a new pleasure through the eye alone. Add to this the historical
associations. Remember that this is the city of ancient Scottish
royalty; that there is not a close or alley in the Old Town, and hardly
a street in the New, that has not memories of the great or the quaint
attached to it; that the many generations of old Scottish life that have
passed through it have left every stone of it, as it were, rich with
legend. To an English poet all this might be indifferent; but hear the
Scottish poets:—
“Edina! Scotia’s darling seat!
All hail thy palaces and towers!”
was the salutation of Burns, when first brought from his native
Ayrshire to behold the Scottish capital. “Mine own romantic town,”
was the outburst of Scott, in that famous passage where, after
describing Edinburgh as seen from the Braids, he makes even an
English stranger beside himself with rapture at the sight:—
“Fitz-Eustace’ heart felt closely pent;
As if to give his rapture vent,
The spur he to his charger lent,
And raised his bridle hand,
And, making demi-volte in air,
Cried, ‘Where’s the coward that would not dare
To fight for such a land?’”
Here, though it is an Englishman that is supposed to speak, it is a

Scotsman that supplies the words; but there can be no such objection
in the case of the following lines from a sonnet, entitled “Written in
Edinburgh,” by Tennyson’s friend, Arthur Hallam:—
“Even thus, methinks, a city reared should be,
Yea, an imperial city, that might hold
Five times a hundred noble towns in fee ...
Thus should her towers be raised; with vicinage
Of clear bold hills, that curve her very streets,
As if to indicate, ’mid choicest seats
Of Art, abiding Nature’s majesty,—
And the broad sea beyond, in calm or rage
Chainless alike, and teaching liberty.”
At the time with which we are concerned this city had the
advantage of containing, as has been said, only about eighty
thousand people. For comfortable social purposes, that is about the
extreme size to which a city should go. The size of London is
overwhelming and paralysing. There can be no intimacy, no unity of
interest, in such a vast concourse. Ezekiel might be preaching in
Smithfield, Camberwell might be swallowed up by an earthquake,
and the people of St. John’s Wood would know nothing of either fact
till they saw it announced in the newspapers next morning. Hardly
since the days of the Gordon Riots has London ever been all agitated
simultaneously. In Ancient Athens, on the other hand, we have an
illustration of what a town of moderate size could be and produce.
That such a cluster of men as Pericles, Socrates, Æschylus,
Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Plato, Phidias, Alcibiades,
Xenophon, and others,—men of an order that we only expect to see
now far distributed through space and time, nantes rari in gurgite
vasto,—should have been swimming contemporaneously or nearly so
in such a small pond as Athens was, and that this affluence in
greatness should have been kept up by so small a population for
several ages, seems miraculous. The peculiar fineness of the Hellenic
nerve may have had something to do with the miracle; but the
compactness of the place,—the aggregation of so many finely and
variously endowed human beings precisely in such numbers as to
keep up among them a daily sense of mutual companionship,—must
also have had its effect. In “Modern Athens” the conditions of its
ancient namesake are not all reproduced. To say nothing of any
difference that there may be in respect of original brain-and-nerve
equipment between the modern and the ancient Athenian, “Modern
Athens” is, unfortunately, not a separate body-politic, with separate
interests and a separate power of legislation. There are no walls now
round the Edinburgh territory; nor have the Edinburgh people the
privilege of making wars and concluding treaties with even the
nearest portions of the rest of Great Britain. They cannot meet
periodically on the Castle Esplanade to pass laws for themselves in
popular assembly, and hear consummate speeches beginning “O men
of Edinburgh.” But, with many such differences, there are some
similarities. Everybody in Edinburgh knows, or may know,
everybody else, at least by sight; everybody meets everybody else in
the street at least once every day or two; the whole town is within
such convenient compass that, even to go from one extremity of it to
the other extremity, there is no need to take a cab unless it rains. It is
a city capable of being simultaneously and similarly affected in all its
parts. An idea administered to one knot of the citizens is as good as
administered to the whole community; a joke made on the Mound at
noon will ripple gradually to the suburbs, and into the surrounding
country, before the evening. If such is the case even now, when the
population is over 260,000, must it not have been still better when
the population was only 80,000, and that population was more shut
in within itself by the absence as yet of telegraphs and railroads?
Moreover, the eighty thousand people who were in Edinburgh
when Henry Dundas ruled Scotland were people of a rather peculiar,
and yet rather superior, mixture of sorts. There never has been any
very large amount of trade or of manufacture in Edinburgh, nor
much of the wealth or bustle that arises from trade and manufacture.
For the roar of mills and factories, and for a society ranging
correspondingly from the great millionaire uppermost to crowds of
operatives below, all toiling in the pursuit of wealth, one must go to
Glasgow. In Edinburgh the standard of the highest income is much
lower, and the standard of the lowest is perhaps higher, than in
Glasgow; nor is wealth of so much relative importance in the social
estimate. Roughly classified, the society of Edinburgh in the days to
which we are now looking back consisted, as the society of
Edinburgh still consists, of an upper stratum of lawyers and resident
gentry, college officials, and clergy, reposing on, but by no means
separated from, a community of shopkeepers and artisans sufficient
for the wants of the place. Let us glance at these components of the
society of Old Edinburgh in succession:—
First, The Lawyers and Resident Gentry.—These two classes
may be taken together, as to a certain extent identical. From the time
of the Union, such of the old nobility of Scotland as had till then
remained in their native country, occupying for a part of the year the
homely but picturesque residences of their ancestors in the Old Town
of Edinburgh, had gradually migrated southwards, leaving but a few
families of their order to keep up their memory in the ancient capital
of Holyrood and St. Giles. In the room of this ancient nobility, and,
indeed, absorbing such families of the old nobility as had remained,
there had sprung up,—as might have been expected from the fact
that Edinburgh, though it had parted with its Court and Legislature,
was still the seat of the supreme Scottish law-courts,—a new
aristocracy of lawyers. The lawyers,—consisting, first, of the judges
as the topmost persons, with their incomes of several thousands a
year, and then of the barristers, older and younger, in practice or out
of practice, but including also the numerous body of the “Writers to
the Signet” and other law-agents,—are now, and for the last century
or two have been, the dominant class in the Edinburgh population.
From the expense attending education for the legal profession, the
members of it, till within a time comparatively recent, were generally
scions of Scottish families of some rank and substance; and, indeed,
it was not unusual for Scottish lairds or their sons to become
nominally members of the Scottish bar, even when they did not
intend to practise. The fact of the substitution of the legal profession
for the old Scottish aristocracy in the dominant place in Edinburgh
society is typified by the circumstance that the so-called “Parliament
House,”—retaining that name because it enshrines the hall where the
Estates of the Scottish Kingdom held their meetings during the last
eighty years of the time when Scotland had no Parliaments but her
own,—is now the seat of the supreme Scottish law-courts, and the
daily resort of the interpreters of the laws in these courts. Any day
yet, while the courts are in session, the Parliament House, with its
long oaken ante-room, where scores of barristers in their wigs and
gowns, accompanied by writers in plainer costume, are incessantly
pacing up and down, and its smaller inner chambers, where the
judges on the bench, in their crimson robes, are trying cases, is the
most characteristic sight in Edinburgh. Even now the general hour of
breakfast in Edinburgh is determined by the time when the courts
open in the morning; and, dispersed through their homes, or at
dinner-parties, in the evening, it is the members of the legal
profession that lead the social talk. In the old Dundas days it was the
same, with the addition that then the lawyers were perhaps more
numerous in proportion to the rest of the community than they are
now, and were more closely inter-connected by birth and marriage
with the Scottish nobility and lairds.
Of hardly less importance socially was the Academical Element.
As Edinburgh possesses a University, as its University has long been
in high repute, and as, by reason of the comparative cheapness of
board and education in Edinburgh, many families, after a residence
in England or the Colonies, have been attracted thither for the sake
of the education of their sons, or, without going thither themselves,
have sent their sons thither, the business of education has always
been prominent, if not paramount, among the industries of the city.
The teachers of the public and of other schools have always formed a
considerable class numerically, as well as in rank; while to the
University professors, partly from the higher nature of their
teaching-duties, partly from the traditional dignity conferred on
them by the great reputation of some of their body in past times, and
partly from some superiority in their emoluments, there has alway
been accorded a degree of social consideration not attached to the
same function anywhere out of Scotland. The reputation of the
Medical School of Edinburgh, in particular, has always invested the
professors in the Medical Faculty of the University with special
distinction; and, as these professors have been generally also at the
head of the medical practice of the city, the Medical element, and
with it the Scientific element, in Edinburgh society have from times
long past been, to a considerable extent, in union with the
professorial.
In all Scottish cities The Clergy have, from time immemorial,
exercised an amount of social influence not willingly allowed to any
other class of persons. This arises partly from the same causes which
give the clergy influence in other parts of Britain, but partly from the
peculiar affection of the Scottish people for the national theology
with which they have been saturated through so many centuries of
clerical teaching. In Edinburgh, in consequence of the perpetuation
there of relics of that old Scottish aristocracy which never was
completely brought into subjection to Presbytery, and in
consequence of the presence in society of a distinct intellectual
element in the lawyers, the clergy have not perhaps had, relatively,
the same weight as in other towns. Still they were powerful even in
the old Edinburgh of the Dundas rule. At the very least, a negative
respect was paid to them by the preservation throughout the place of
an external Presbyterian decorum and strictness; and in all houses
“the minister” was treated with distinction. Add to this that there
generally were among the Edinburgh clergy men possessing claims
to respect in addition to those belonging to their profession. Some,
even in that age of “Moderatism,” were remarkable for their
eloquence and zeal as preachers and as pastors; others had literary
pretensions; and others were professors in the University as well as
parish clergymen. More, indeed, than now, the professorial and the
clerical elements were then intermixed in Edinburgh. Perhaps,
however, that which gave the greatest dignity to the clerical or
ecclesiastical element in Edinburgh was the annual meeting in that
city, every May, of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland.
In the history of Scottish society since the Union there is, perhaps, no
one fact of greater importance than the regular and uninterrupted
succession of those annual “General Assemblies” in Edinburgh for
the discussion of the affairs of the National Church. Let an
Englishman fancy that during the last two centuries there had been
no Parliament in England, no meetings of the House of Lords or of
the House of Commons, but that regularly during that period there
had been annual convocations of representatives of the whole body
of the English Clergy, together with such leading members of the
laity as churchwardens or the like from all the English parishes, and
that these convocations had sat ten days in every year, discussing all
public matters in any way bearing on the Church, and making laws
affecting the entire ecclesiastical organisation of England, and he will
have an idea of the extent to which the national history of Scotland
since her union with England is bound up in the records of her
“General Assemblies.” The General Assembly, in fact, from the year
1707 to the Disruption of the Scottish Church in 1843, was, to some
extent, a veritable Parliament, in which, though the secular
Parliament had been abolished, the united people of Scotland still
saw their nationality preserved and represented. All through the year
the clergy individually, in the thousand parishes or so into which
Scotland was divided, managed their own parochial affairs with the
assistance of select laymen called elders; these clergymen, again,
with some of their elders, held frequent district meetings, called
“presbyteries,” in order to regulate by deliberation and voting the
church affairs of their districts; there were still larger meetings,
periodically held, called “provincial synods”; but the grand
rendezvous of all, the supreme court of appeal and ecclesiastical
legislation, was the annual General Assembly in Edinburgh. The time
of its meeting was one of bustle and excitement. Black coats
swarmed in the streets; the Assembly was opened with military
pomp and circumstance by a Lord High Commissioner representing
the Crown; this Commissioner sat on a throne during the meetings,
and held levees and dinner-parties in Holyrood Palace all through
the ten days; the clergy, with lay representatives, some of whom were
usually noblemen or baronets, deliberated and debated during those
ten days, under a president of their own choosing called the
“Moderator”; the proceedings were in parliamentary form, and the
decisions by a majority of votes; and in many cases,—as in trials of
clergymen for moral or ecclesiastical misdemeanour,—barristers
were called in to plead professionally, as they did in the secular law-
courts. As was natural in a deliberative assembly almost all the
members of which were of the speaking class, the speaking was of a
very high order,—far higher, indeed, than has ever been heard in
these later days in the British Parliament; while at the same time
there was ample opportunity for the exercise of business talent and
of all the tact and skill of party-leadership. Much of the general
politics of Scotland took necessarily the form of church politics; and,
indeed, the connections between church politics and state politics
were pretty close. The vast majority of the clergy were adherents of
Dundas in general politics, and bent on swaying church polity in the
same direction; while the small minority of “Evangelicals” or “High-
Fliers,” as they were called, corresponded to the proscribed
“Liberals” in secular politics. The leading clergymen of both parties
were to be found in or near Edinburgh.
Respecting the Mercantile and Artisan classes it need only be
repeated that they were by no means separated by any social
demarcation from the fore-mentioned classes, but were intertwined
with these by family-relationships, and often also by the sympathies
belonging to superior natural intelligence and superior education.
Booksellers and printers were more numerous in Edinburgh
proportionally than in any other British town.
In a population of such dimensions, composed as has been
described, there was necessarily a good deal of leisure; and leisure
leads to sociability. Edinburgh in those days was one of the most
sociable towns in the world. By that time “society,” in the
conventional sense, had, with a few lingering exceptions, shifted
itself out of the Old Town into the New, or into the suburbs; and,
with this change, there had been a considerable change of manners.
Much of the formality, and at the same time much of the coarseness,
of an older stage of Scottish life had been civilised away,—the absurd
etiquette of the old dancing assemblies, for example, and the more
monstrous excesses of hard drinking. But the convivial spirit, and
many of the old convivial forms, remained. Dinner parties were
frequent; and the old custom of “toasts” and “sentiments” by the
hosts and the guests over their wine was still in fashion. Lord
Cockburn’s description of those dinner parties of his youth is one of
the best passages in his book. But it is on the supper parties that he
dwells with most evident affection. There were various kinds of
supper parties: the oyster supper at taverns, the bachelor supper in
lodgings, and the real domestic supper, to which both sexes were
invited; which last Lord Cockburn vaunts as a delightful institution
of Edinburgh, which the advancing lateness of the dinner-hour had
unhappily superseded. In short, in every form and way, from the set
dinner party, with its immense consumption of claret, in the houses
of the more wealthy, to the homely tea parties of gentlewomen of
moderate means, living in the suburbs of the Old Town, or in flats in
the New Town, and the roystering suppers of young men, where
culinary deficiencies were compensated by good humour and the
whisky punch, people were in the habit of incessantly meeting to
spend the evenings together. Lord Cockburn mentions, as illustrative
of the continuance of those sociable habits of the Edinburgh folks to
a somewhat later period than that with which we are immediately
concerned, the fact that for a great many years after his marriage,
which was in 1811, he had not spent above one evening in every
month, on the average, in solitude, i.e. without either being out as a
guest, or having friends with him at home. Even Sydney Smith,
though not native and to the manner born, and, with his English
tastes, more fastidious in his ideas of conviviality, retained to the last
a pleasant recollection of those Edinburgh hospitalities, as
experienced by him during his stay in Edinburgh from 1797 to 1802.
“When shall I see Scotland again?” he says in one of his letters:
“never shall I forget the happy days passed there, amidst odious
smells, barbarous sounds, bad suppers, excellent hearts, and the
most enlightened and cultivated understandings.”
Sydney Smith’s allusion to “the enlightened and cultivated
understandings” he encountered amid such roughish surroundings,
suggests the mention of what was, all in all, the most characteristic
feature of Edinburgh society at the close of the eighteenth century
and the beginning of the nineteenth—its intellectualism. In a
community composed in so large a measure of practitioners of the
learned professions, it was inevitable that there should be more of
interest in matters intellectual than is common, more of a habit of
reasoning and discussion, more play and variety in the choice of
topics for conversation. What mattered it that many of the most
intellectual men and women gave expression to their ideas in broad
Scotch? Ideas may be expressed in broad Scotch, and yet be the ideas
of cultivated minds; at all events, it was so then in Edinburgh, where
many excellent lawyers, University professors, and medical men kept
up the broad Scotch in their ordinary conversation, though the
majority had gone over to the English in all save accent, and some
were sedulous in trying to Anglicise themselves even in that. But,
whether the dialect was English or Scotch, there was a great deal of
very pleasant and very substantial talk. True, in Sydney Smith’s
recollection of the conversation of the Edinburgh people at the time
he moved among them, two great faults are specified. It ran too
much, he records, to that species of jocosity, perfectly torturing to an
Englishman, which the Scotch themselves called wut; and it also ran
too much, he records, into disputation and dialectics. “Their only
idea of wit,” he says, speaking of the Scotch generally, but of the
Edinburgh people in particular, “or rather of that inferior variety of
the electric talent which prevails occasionally in the North, and
which, under the name of wut, is so infinitely distressing to people of
good taste, is laughing immoderately at stated intervals.” And again
—“They are so imbued with metaphysics that they even make love
metaphysically: I overheard a young lady of my acquaintance, at a
dance in Edinburgh, exclaim, in a sudden pause of the music, ‘What
you say, my lord, is very true of love in the abstract, but——,’ here
the fiddlers began fiddling furiously, and the rest was lost.” This is
somewhat unfair. Wut, in its place, is as good as wit, and may be a
great deal heartier. As practised in the north, it corresponds more
with what is properly humour. It consists in a general openness to
the ludicrous view of things, a general disposition to call each other
Tam and Sandy, a general readiness to tell and to hear Scottish
stories the fun of which lies in the whole series of conceptions (often
too local) that they call up, rather than in any sudden flash or quip at
the close. At all events, the Scotch like their wut, and find it
satisfying. As for the dialectics, there is, perhaps, too much of that.
The excess in this direction is due, doubtless, in part to the
omnipresence of the lawyers. But wut and dialectics make a very
good mixture; and, dashed as this mixture is and always has been in
Edinburgh with finer and higher ingredients, there has been no town
in Britain for the last century and a half of greater deipnosophistic
capabilities, all things considered.
One element which Englishmen who do not know Edinburgh
always imagine as necessarily wanting in it never has been wanting.
Whether from the influence of the lawyers, and of the relics of the old
Scottish baronage and baronetage, acting conjointly as a
counterpoise to the influence of the clergy, or from other less obvious
causes, there has always been in Edinburgh a freer undercurrent of
speculative opinion, a tougher traditional scepticism, a greater
latitude of jest at things clerical and Presbyterian, than in other
Scottish towns. From the early part of the eighteenth century, when
Allan Ramsay, Dr. Archibald Pitcairn, and others, did battle with the
clergy in behalf of theatrical entertainments and other forms of the
festive, there has never been wanting a strong anti-clerical and even
free-thinking clique in Edinburgh society; and towards the end of the
century, when David Hume and Hugo Arnot were alive or
remembered, no city in Britain sheltered such a quantity of cosy
infidelity. Of hundreds of stories illustrative of this, take one of the
mildest:—Pitcairn, going about the streets one Sunday, was obliged
by a sudden pelt of rain to take refuge in a place he was not often in,
—a church. The audience was scanty; and he sat down in a pew
where there was only another sitter besides,—a quiet, grave-looking
countryman, listening to the sermon with a face of the utmost
composure. The preacher was very pathetic; so much so that at one
passage he began to shed tears copiously, and to use his pocket-
handkerchief. Interested in this as a physiological phenomenon for
which the cause was not apparent, Pitcairn turned to the
countryman, and asked in a whisper, “What the deevil gars the man
greet?” “Faith,” said the man, slowly turning round, “ye wad maybe
greet yoursel’ if ye was up there and had as little to say.” Pitcairn was
the type of the avowed Edinburgh infidel; of which class there were
not a few whose esoteric talk when they met together was of an out-
and-out kind; but the countryman was the type of a still more
numerous class, who kept up exterior conformity, but tested all
shrewdly enough by a pretty tough interior instinct. Indeed, long
after Pitcairn’s time, a kind of sturdy scepticism, quite distinct from
what would be called “infidelity,” was common among the educated
classes in Edinburgh. Old gentlemen who went duly to church, who
kept their families in great awe, and who preserved much etiquette in
their habits towards each other, were by no means strait-laced in
their beliefs; and it was not till a considerably later period, when a
more fervid religious spirit had taken possession of the Scottish
clergy themselves, and flamed forth in more zealous expositions of
peculiar Calvinistic doctrine from the pulpit than had been
customary in the days of Robertson and Blair, that evangelical
orthodoxy obtained in Edinburgh its visible and intimate alliance
with social respectability. Moreover, even those who were then
indubitably orthodox and devout by the older standard were devout
after a freer fashion, and with a far greater liberty both of conduct
and of rhetoric, than would now be allowable in consistency with the
same reputation. There is no point on which Lord Cockburn lays
more stress than on this. “There is no contrast,” he says, “between
those old days and the present that strikes me so strongly as that
suggested by the differences in religious observances, not so much by
the world in general, as by deeply religious people. I knew the habits
of the religious very well, partly through the piety of my mother and
her friends, the strict religious education of her children, and our
connection with some of the most distinguished of our devout
clergymen. I could mention many practices of our old pious which
would horrify modern zealots. The principles and feelings of the
persons commonly called evangelical were the same then that they
are now; the external acts by which these principles and feelings
were formerly expressed were materially different.”
Among the differences, Lord Cockburn notes in particular the
much laxer style, as it would now be called, in which Sunday was
observed by pious people and even by the most pious among the
clergy. There seems also to have been more freedom of speech, in the
direction of what would now be called profane allusion, among the
admittedly pious. One of the gems of Lord Cockburn’s book is his
portrait of one venerable old lady, a clergyman’s widow, sitting
neatly dressed in her high-backed leather chair, with her
grandchildren round her, the very model of silver-haired serenity, till
one of her granddaughters, in reading the newspaper to her,
stumbled on a paragraph which told how the reputation of a certain
fair one at the court of the Prince Regent had suffered from some
indiscreet talk of his about his own relations with her, but then
starting up, and exclaiming, with an indignant shake of her
shrivelled fist,—“The dawmed villain! does he kiss and tell?” There
were not a few old ladies of this stamp in Edinburgh in Lord
Cockburn’s boyhood and youth; some of whom survived far into the
present century, too old to part with their peculiarities, even to
please the clergy. “Ye speak, sir, as if the Bible had just come oot,”
said one such old lady, who lingered long in Edinburgh, to a young
clergyman who was instructing her on some point of Christian
practice on which she was disposed to differ from him. The
continuation in the society of Edinburgh of a considerable sprinkling
of such free-speaking gentlewomen of the old Scottish school,
intermingled with as many of the other sex using a still rougher
rhetoric, imparted, we are told, a flavour of originality to the
convivial conversation of the place for which there is now no exact
equivalent.
Presided over by such seniors, the young educated men of the
time did not stint themselves in the choice or the range of their
convivial topics. They discussed everything under the sun and down
to the centre. Who has not heard of the Speculative Society of
Edinburgh, founded in 1764 in connection with the University, and
kept up from that time to this by successive generations of students;
of which Lord Cockburn says that it “has trained more young men to
public spirit, talent, and liberal thought, than all the other private
institutions in Scotland”? Between 1780 and 1800 this society was in
all its glory, discussing, week after week, as its minutes inform us,
such topics as these:—“Ought any permanent support to be provided
for the poor?” “Ought there to be an established religion?” “Was the
execution of Charles I. justifiable?” “Should the slave trade be
abolished?” “Has the belief in a future state been of advantage to
mankind, or is it ever likely to be so?” “Is it for the interest of Britain
to maintain what is called the balance of Europe?” Here surely was
scepticism enough to keep thought alive; and that such questions,
discussed not only in the Speculative Society, but also in minor
associations of the same kind, and carried doubtless also, with other
more scientific topics, into private assemblages, should have been
ventilated in Edinburgh at that day, shows that, even under the
Dundas Despotism, there was no lack of intellectual freedom.
It is but a continuation of what we have been saying to add that
the old Edinburgh of those defunct decades had already an
established reputation as a literary metropolis. The rise of the
literary reputation of Edinburgh may date, for all purposes except
such as shallow present scholarship would call merely antiquarian,
from the time when Allan Ramsay set up his circulating library in the
High Street, and supplied the lieges furtively with novels, plays, and
song-books, including his own poems. This was about the year 1725,
when his countryman, Thomson, was publishing in London the first
portion of his Seasons. Thomson himself, and his contemporaries or
immediate successors, Mallet, Smollett, Armstrong, Meikle,
Macpherson, and Falconer, all rank in the list of literary Scots; but
they were Scoti extra Scotiam agentes, and had, most of them, but
an incidental connection with Edinburgh. The poets Robert Blair and
James Beattie, the philosopher Reid, and the theologian and critic
Dr. George Campbell, were not only literary Scots, but literary Scots
whose lives were spent on their own side of the Tweed; but, with the
exception of Blair, none of them were natives of Edinburgh, and even
Blair did not live there. After Ramsay, in short, the early literary
fame of Edinburgh is associated with the names of a cluster of men
who, born in different parts of Scotland, had, from various chances,
taken up their abode in Edinburgh, and who resided there, more or
less permanently, during the latter half of the eighteenth century.
The most prominent men of this cluster were these:—David Hume
(1711–1776), known as a philosophical writer since the year 1738, and
who, though he spent a good many years of his literary life in
England and in France, was for the last twenty years of it, and these
the most busy, a resident in Edinburgh; Hume’s senior and survivor,
Henry Home, Lord Kames (1696–1782), one of the judges of the
Court of Session, still remembered for the contrast between the
coarse Scottish facetiousness of his manners and the studied fineness
of his writings; the learned and eccentric Burnet, Lord Monboddo
(1714–1799), also a judge of Session, at whose Attic suppers in the
Old Town all the talent and beauty of Edinburgh were for many years
regularly assembled; the pompous but sensible Dr. Hugh Blair
(1718–1799), Professor of Belles Lettres in the University, and one of
the clergymen of the city; his more celebrated colleague, Dr.
Robertson the historian (1722–1793), Principal of the University, and
likewise one of the city clergymen; the minor historical writers and
antiquarians, Tytler of Woodhouselee (1711–1792), Dr. Henry (1718–
1790), Lord Hailes (1726–1792), Dr. Adam Ferguson (1724–1816),
and Dr. Gilbert Stuart (1742–1786); the poet John Home, author of
the tragedy of Douglas (1722–1808), once the Rev. Mr. Home, but
long bereft of that title, and known since 1779 as a retired man of
letters in Edinburgh; the illustrious Adam Smith (1723–1790),
settled in Edinburgh during the last twenty years of his life in the
post of commissioner of customs; the hardly less illustrious Dugald
Stewart (1753–1828), elected Professor of Mathematics in the
University as early as 1774, but thence transferred in 1785 to the
chair of Moral Philosophy, where he completed his fame; and, lastly,
not to overburden the list, the novelist and essayist Henry Mackenzie
(1745–1831), an acknowledged literary celebrity ever since 1771,
when he had published his Man of Feeling. In a class by himself,
unless we choose to associate him with the Creeches, Smellies, and
other “wuts” of a lower grade, whose acquaintance Burns made in his
leisure hours during his first visit to Edinburgh in 1786, we may
mention Burns’s immediate predecessor in the poetry of the Scottish

Global Sports and Contemporary China: Sport Policy, International Relations and New Class Identities in The People's Republic Oliver Rick

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Global Sports and Contemporary

China: Sport Policy, International

The Rise of the Middle Class in Contemporary China

International Relations in the Anthropocene: New

The United States and Contemporary China-Russia

Class on Screen: The Global Working Class in

Poverty, Inequality, and Innovation in the Global South

Americans in China: Encounters with the People's

China and Global Governance: A New Leader? 1st Edition

China in Malaysia: State-Business Relations and the New

Global Sports and

Global Sports and

ISSN 2662-3404 ISSN 2662-3412 (electronic)

Cover illustration: Matteo Colombo

Oliver James Collard Rick

1 Introduction: Global Sport in Contemporary China 1

2 Chinese Sport Policy from Reform to the Millennium 27

3 An Olympic China: Preparing for Beijing 2008 47

5 Sport and Accessing a Global Community 95

6 When the Global Game Comes to the People’s Republic121

8 Tennis Culture and the Booming Urban Middle Class179

Oliver James Collard Rick is currently an assistant professor in the

work, Longxi is a national-level tennis official in China since 2014.Through

ATP Association of Tennis Professionals

In the beginning of the fall in 2018, we landed in Hong Kong. We had

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 1

on from the successes of an ‘Olympics first’ strategy in the previous

on the shoulders of already existing work on several aspects of the sport-

Sport and the Chinese Communist Party

 porting Periodization and the Development

international sporting events, most importantly the Olympics, as well as

The Reform Period (1979–2000)

Existing accounts show that the development of competitive sports in the

While this approach to the expansion of sport in China would take

The Olympic Decade (2000–2008)

Following a 20-year period of reform, the establishment of a Chinese

The Inter-Olympic Period (2008–2022)

Internal vs. External Dynamics

expand. The middle class in China is driving development and represents

political position. Not necessarily interested in exporting the Chinese

Chapter 2: Chinese Sport Policy from Reform

This chapter is the first in the establishment of a chronological summary

Chapter 3: An Olympic China: Sport

Chapter 3 continues the chronological assessment of Chinese sport and

hone techniques for Internet monitoring, face recognition systems, and

Chapter 4: Global Sports and Shifting Focus: Sport

Chapter 4 is the last of the chronological summary chapters in this book.

Chapter 5: Sport and Accessing a Global Community

As the Chinese government looked to advance its relationship with other

Games and accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic looked to address

Chapter 6: When the Global Game Comes

administration also gave a green light to outward foreign direct invest-

 hapter 7: New Forms of Domestic Distinction: Sport

Chapter 7 makes a turn inwards and is focused on developing a model of

period, this position of sport highlighted an issue at the core of a broader

Chapter 8: Tennis Culture and the Booming

Chapter 9: China’s Sporting Self-Determination:

In this final chapter, we look forward. As we look to understand the impact

1 Introduction: Global Sport in Contemporary China 1

2 Chinese Sport Policy from Reform to the Millennium 27

3 An Olympic China: Preparing for Beijing 2008 47

5 Sport and Accessing a Global Community 95

6 When the Global Game Comes to the People’s Republic121

8 Tennis Culture and the Booming Urban Middle Class179

Sport and the Chinese Communist Party

porting Periodization and the Development

The Reform Period (1979–2000)

The Olympic Decade (2000–2008)

The Inter-Olympic Period (2008–2022)

Internal vs. External Dynamics

Chapter 2: Chinese Sport Policy from Reform

Chapter 3: An Olympic China: Sport

Chapter 4: Global Sports and Shifting Focus: Sport

Chapter 5: Sport and Accessing a Global Community

Chapter 6: When the Global Game Comes

hapter 7: New Forms of Domestic Distinction: Sport

Chapter 8: Tennis Culture and the Booming

Chapter 9: China’s Sporting Self-Determination:

Controlled Embrace: Special Zones

well-established distinction. In addition, within higher-tier cities in these

roto-Professionalization and Early