Sporting Gender: Women Athletes and Celebrity-Making during China’s National Crisis, 1931–45 by Yunxiang Gao (review)

When talking about Chinese competitive sports, people often use the term yin sheng yang shuai (female athletes won far more medals in international events than male ones did). However, individual female athletes’ everyday lives and personal voices have often been neglected in the scholarship on sports culture in modern China. Filling this gap, Yunxiang Gao’s book Sporting Gender: Women Athletes and Celebrity-Making during China’s National Crisis, 1931–45, is the first comprehensive study of the early development of Chinese sports and physical education from a unique gender perspective. This timely and original study will interest readers, students, and scholars in the fields of sports studies, gender studies, China studies, and modern Chinese history.

This book has six main chapters in addition to an introductory chapter and a short conclusion that discusses briefly the legacies of female athleticism in contemporary China. The introductory chapter records Chinese athletes’ early Olympian experiences. China’s participation in international competitive sports was particularly significant when the country was embroiled in political turmoil and military aggressions. Hence, tiyu (physical culture with extensions into fashion, film, government, and sexuality) served as an important site of nation-building, modern citizenry, body politics, and women’s liberation at a moment of national crisis.

All the following chapters take a biographical approach, except for chapter 2. Rather than focusing on a particular historical figure, chapter 2 examines the cultural translation of the new idea of jianmei (robust/healthy beauty). A series of editorials, articles, and illustrations in Linglong, a women-oriented cosmopolitan magazine published in Shanghai in the 1930s, promoted the imported Western (particularly Hollywood) star images of jianmei, which replaced sickly, vulnerable beauty as the new standard of feminine beauty.

The other five chapters deal with a wide range of important personalities in female athleticism. Chapter 1 draws a biography of Zhang Huilan, the “mother of women’s modern physical education” in China. Chapter 3 traces the history of the basketball team of the Liangjiang Women’s Tiyu Normal School, which is dubbed the “cradle for women’s basketball in China,” under the leadership of a woman principal, Lu Lihua. The following two chapters focus on individual athletes: track queens Sun Guiyun, Qian Xingsu, and Lin Sen and an Olympic swimmer, Yang Xiuqiong. Through a thorough investigation of these sportswomen’s professional careers, mediated images, and everyday lives, Gao points out that despite their efforts to boost national pride with their international competitions, these pioneering female athletes have to carefully construct their public images more toward the progressive yet virtuous New Woman rather than the decadent bourgeois Modern Girl. Chapter 6 studies the jianmei image of Li Lili, a 1930s star who is well known for her athletic role in the popular film Queen of Sports (1934). Although the cinematic exhibition of her jianmei body served wartime nationalism, Li still had to display more of her asexual, girlish innocence and patriotic spirit on and off the silver screen to fend off scandalous gossip and accusations of immorality.

Negotiating skilfully among various social and political forces including the Nationalist New Life Movement, modern hygiene and medical sciences, social Darwinism and eugenics, and the feminist agenda, as well as Euro-American scholars promoting a “scientific PE system” based on gender and racial differences, these pioneering figures successfully expanded the public space for women’s tiyu, which not only challenged sexist and racist biases against Chinese female athletes but also showcased the allure of a modern physical culture. Moreover, Gao’s study also highlights the individual experiences, voices, and agency of female athletes and educators and their struggles with gender-specific social biases.

If one could ask more for this well-researched and well-written work, one or two chapters could have been dedicated to a full-length discussion of female athleticism in rural areas, such as in the Communist base in Yan’an. Although the Communists’ promotion of...