Sport in Taiwan
History, Culture, Policy
Summary
"This book is a comprehensive, critical, and timely piece of scholarship that makes a valuable and unique contribution to both the field and our understanding of the distinct and precarious status of Taiwan as a culture and society. Drawing on a range of academic disciplines, theories and methods, the fascinating assembly of essays cover topics spanning indigenous sport, racialised sporting bodies, sport policy, and sport and international relations. The editors, Bairner, Chen, and Chiang, have skilfully blended a collection that uses sport as a strategic lens to provide insights into the complex cultural, economic, political, and diplomatic spheres within which Taiwan carefully negotiates its sovereignty and identity amidst an international community that largely spectates from the geo-political side-lines. This is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand not only the significance of sport in Taiwan but also the significance of Taiwan in the world."
—Steve Jackson, Otago University, New Zealand
Excerpt
Table Of Contents
- Cover
- Title
- Copyright
- About the editors
- About the book
- This eBook can be cited
- Table of Contents
- List of Figures
- List of Tables
- Notes on Contributors
- Prologue
- 1. Taiwanese Sports (Yundong): The Hybridization of Physical Education, Sports, and Indigenous Tradition (Chih-Chieh Tang)
- 2. Taiwanese National Identity: Baseball—Changing Constructions (Shih-Yuan Hsieh)
- 3. Taiwanese National Identity: The International Olympic Committee-Supportive or Restrictive? (Susan Brownell)
- 4. Taiwan: From Cultural Diplomacy to Cultural Tourism—Postwar Taiwanese Folk Sports (1949–2018) (Hsien-Wei Kuo and Chin-Fang Kuo)
- 5. Taiwan: The Formosan Austronesian Indigenous Games and Identity Construction and Retention (Jérôme Soldani)
- 6. Taiwan: Radicalized Bodies: Sports and the Articulation of Contemporary Asian Physical Inferiority (Daniel Yu-Kuei Sun)
- 7. Taiwan: Healthy and Beautiful: The Taiwanese Municipal Sports Centers and Modern Privilege and Responsibility (Ying Chiang)
- 8. Taiwan: The Media-Sports Complex: Long-Term Developments—Innovations and Challenges (Chang-de Liu)
- 9. Taiwanese Fandom Unleashed: Major Agent of Sports Reform (Tzu-Hsuan Chen)
- 10. Taiwan: The Evolution of National Sports Policy—Significant Political and Economic Changes (Ren-Shiang Jiang and Jui-Sung Huang)
- 11. Taiwan: Professional Baseball Clubs: The Macro and Micro Franchise Management Culture (Po-hsiu Lin and Hao Fan-Chiang)
- 12. Taiwan: Sea-Change: Physical Education and Sport for the Disabled (Cheng-Hao Huang)
- 13. Taiwan and China: Face-Off Sports Bids: Unanswered Questions—the Geopolitics of East Asian Sport (Marcus P. Chu)
- Epilogue: Taiwan Matters—Taiwanese Challenges and Issues (Alan Bairner and Zhuyuan Wu)
- Index
- Series Index
List of Figures
Figure 5.2: Water transport race in bamboo tubes at Vogai (Photo Jérôme Soldani, November 21, 2015)
Figure 5.4: Two-ball volleyball game in Mahavun (Photo Jérôme Soldani, December 25, 2015)
Figure 10.1: The structure of sport administration and development (1973–1997)
Figure 10.2: The structure for sport administration and development (1997–2012)
Figure 10.3: The structure of sport administration and development (2013~)
←vii | viii→
List of Tables
Table 1.1: Most Frequently Performed Yundong
Table 1.2: The Order of Importance of Criteria for Yundong (%) Samples ≧ 1998
Table 1.3: Whether Taking Traditional Physical Activity Is Yundong (%) Samples ≧ 2018
Table 1.4: The Embeddedness of Yundong Associations in the Civil Society
Table 7.1: Participant Information
Table 8.1: Attendance of CPBL, 1990–2019
Table 8.2: The Proportion of Advertising Income to the Total Media Advertising (%)
Table 8.3: CPBL Broadcasting Rights (1990–2016) (Unit: NT$ 1,000)
Table 10.1: 1970s Sport Policy Campaigns in Taiwan
Table 10.2: 1980s Sport Policy Campaign in Taiwan
Table 10.3: 1990s Sport Policy Campaign in Taiwan
Table 10.4: Sport Policy Campaign in Taiwan since 2000
←ix | x→
Notes on Contributors
Alan Bairner is Professor of Sport and Social Theory at Loughborough University, UK. He was awarded the degree of MA in Politics from the University of Edinburgh and a PhD from the University of Hull for his thesis on Antonio Gramsci’s’ theory of the state. His main research interest is the relationship between sport and politics with a particular focus on sport, nationalism, and national identity.
Susan Brownell is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. She is an expert on Chinese sport and Olympic Games. She is the author of Training the Body for China: Sports in the Moral Order of the People’s Republic (1995) and Beijing’s Games: What the Olympics Mean to China (2008), and co-author (with Niko Besnier and Thomas F. Carter) of The Anthropology of Sport: Bodies, Borders, Biopolitics (2017). She edited The 1904 Anthropology Days and Olympic Games: Sport, Race, and American Imperialism (2008). She has also translated official works and documents from Chinese into English, including the biography of the PRC’s first member of the International Olympic Committee, He Zhenliang and China’s Olympic Dream (2007), and the Shanghai Declaration, a document on urban sustainability that was read out at the closing summit of the Shanghai World Expo 2010.
Tzu-hsuan Chen is Professor at the Graduate Institute of Physical Education, National Taiwan Sport University. He holds a Ph.D. in journalism and mass communication from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is President ←xi | xii→of Taiwan Society of Sport Sociology. His research interests currently focus on sport and mass media, globalization, fan culture, and nationalism.
Ying Chiang is Professor of Chihlee University ofTechnology. She holds a Ph.D. in sport sociology from National Taiwan Sport University, an M.A. in journalism from Shih Hsin University, and a B.A. in Sociology from National Taipei University. From 2007 to 2009, she was a journalist with the United Evening News (Taiwan). She has written on media representation of female athletes and sports fans in Taiwan and on the nationalism and sport in Taiwan society. She is the co-author (with Alan Bairner) of “Women, sport and gender politics in Taiwan” in Women, Sport and Exercise in the Asia-Pacific Region, edited by Gyozo Molnar et al. in 2019.
Marcus P. Chu is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Lingnan University, Hong Kong. His research interests center on politics and international relations of China, politics of sport, and history of mega-events in the Chinese-speaking region. His most recent book is Politics of Mega-Events in China’s Hong Kong and Macao (Palgrave, 2019).
Hao Fan-Chiang is Research Assistant of National Taiwan University, specializing in sociology of sport. Hao Fan-Chiang completed a doctor’s degree and earned a master’s degree in sport, leisure, and hospitality management at National Taiwan Normal University. Hao Fan-Chiang received a bachelor’s degree in sport business management at Massey University. Hao Fan-Chiang’s research focuses on New Zealand baseball, Taiwanese baseball, glocalization, globalization, and sport business management. Hao Fan-Chiang was the New Zealand national baseball team coach in 2009, an interpreter for the Chinese Taipei Baseball Association, and a member of Sports Administration’s New Southbound policy.
Shih-Yuan Hsieh (Ph.D., National Taiwan Normal University) is Associate Professor of History at the National Cheng Kung University. Hsieh is the former Deputy Director of the National Museum of Taiwan History. He is interested in research concerning the history of sports in colonial empire, material culture history, and history of society and daily life. He also develops an understanding of the relationships between sport and identities in their historical contexts.
←xii | xiii→Cheng-Hao Huang received a Ph.D. in sociology of sport from the School of Sport, Exercise and Health Science at Loughborough University. His current research focuses on the history of sports for the disabled in Taiwan.
Jui-Sung Huang received his master’s degree from the Department of Physical Education at National Taiwan University of Sport in 2020. During his master’s program, he worked as an assistant for several research projects on the sociology of sport under the Ministry of Science and Technology. Jui-Sung’s research interests include policy analysis and mega-event’s legacy management.
Ren-Shiang Jiang is Associate Professor of the Department of Physical Education at National Taiwan University of Sport. He received a Ph.D. in sport policy from Loughborough University in 2013. Ren-Shiang’s work in the area of sport policy focuses on investigating governance systems,clientelistic relationships, and strategic relations within Western and non-Western sports policy systems, especially in Taiwan and the UK.
Chin-Fang Kuo is Associate Professor at the Department of Sport Management, Aletheia University, Taiwan. Her research interests are the oral history of sports, the life experience of athletes and coaches, traditional sports in gender, and sport aids.
Hsien-Wei Kuo is Associate Professor in National Tainan Institute of Nursing, Taiwan. His research interests are the history of sports in modern China, body culture, and sports anthropology.
Po-Hsiu Lin is Associate Professor at the Graduate Institute of Sport, Leisure and Hospitality Management of the National Taiwan Normal University, specializing in the sociocultural analysis of sport. Po-Hsiu received a Ph.D. from the psychical education department of National Taiwan Normal University and a master’s degree from the psychical education department of University of Tsukuba. Po-Hsiu served as Visiting Researcher at Tokyo University of Science and Visiting Professor at Kobe Gakuinn University in Japan. Po-Hsiu’s research focuses on Taiwanese baseball, glocalization, mediasport, sport and nationalism, indigenous peoples, and baseball.
←xiii | xiv→Chang-de Liu is Professor in the Department of Journalism at National Chengchi University. His research interests include (but are not limited to) media and sports, globalization of sports, sporting nationalism, and political economy of communication.
Jérôme Soldani (Ph.D., Aix-Marseille University) currently teaches ethnology/anthropology at the Department of Ethnology in Paul-Valéry University (Montpellier, France). He is a member of the Centre d’Etudes et de Recherches Comparatives en Ethnologie (CERCE, Montpellier), president of the Association Francophone d’Etudes Taïwanaises (AFET), and vice-president of the Commission Anthropology of Sport of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (IUAES). He was postdoctorate at the University of Ottawa (2012–2013) and Academia Sinica Institute of Taiwan History (2014–2015). In general, his work is about the structuring of the Taiwanese sports space through the themes of diffusion of practices, education, identity claims (national or indigenous), corruption, emotions, and entrepreneurial ethics. His recent work is more concerned with the transformations of sports among Taiwanese indigenous people, especially the Bunun.
Daniel Yu-Kuei Sun is Lecturer in Sport Management at Towson University. He holds a Ph.D. in American studies from the University of Iowa. His research interests include 20th-century American sport history, sport in Asian America, and sport in contemporary Taiwan.
Chih-Chieh Tang 湯志傑 (Ph.D., Universität Bielefeld, Germany, 2002) is Associate Research Fellow of the Institute of Sociology, Academia Sinica (Taiwan) and an editorial board member of Soziale Systeme: Zeitschrift für soziologische Theorie. His research involves different areas of sociological theory, historical sociology, sinology, and Taiwan studies, and always keeps a spirit of reciprocal comparison. Recent publications include Modernity in Reciprocal Comparison: A Taiwanese Perspective (edited, National Taiwan University Press, 2019), “A Rewriting Experiment of Modernity from the Perspective of Connected Histories: Taiwan as a Laboratory of Modernity” (Journal of Historical Sociology, 2018), “China: Ancient Régime, Revolution, and After” (The Sage Handbook of Political Sociology, 2018, co-authored with Feng-Tsan Lin and Hung-Chang Wu).
←xiv | xv→Zhuyuan Wu studied Journalism and Communication at Shih Hsin University in Taiwan where she was awarded a BA in Journalism and a BBA in Communications Management. She subsequently received an MSc in Sport Management from Loughborough University, UK, in 2021. She is currently doing a PhD with a particular research focus on the relationship between sport and politics across the Taiwan Strait.
Prologue: Taiwan: Important, Prominent—Invisible!
There is no country in the world like Taiwan. It can be so important and prominent; yet it can also be so invisible. Its information technology industry is so critical that any lapse in the country’s famed industry could jeopardize the flow of the global supply chain. On the other hand, the 23 million people living on the 36,000 square-kilometer island southeast of Mainland China across Taiwan Strait are still unrecognized by the United Nations, as well as by most prominent international organizations. Despite being only a strait away from the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic, Taiwan has been one of the most stubborn fortresses during the crisis. Yet, it is still rejected by the World Health Organization to date.
In the past century or so, Taiwan has experienced Japanese colonization (1895–1945), what was then the longest period of martial law governance in the world (1949–1987), enforced by an exile authoritarian regime, and rapid democratization and the dynamic growth of its civil society, which in combination make it hard, if not impossible, to find a parallel in the world. With traditional Chinese and Confucian heritage, Taiwan also marches forward, amidst political and military threats from China, with modern technology and progressive ideology, becoming the first Asian country to legalize same-sex marriage in 2019.
Amongst these various contexts, why does sport matter to Taiwan? This can be dissected in many different ways. Even the term “sport” itself is a problematic one vis-à-vis Western custom. In addition, different sports which sank roots on this island are taking different routes and have acquired different connotations for different groups of people. All things considered, this book is an ambitious and yet, we believe, practical project that aims to deal with the complexity.
←xvii | xviii→This is a pioneering collection of essays which brings together scholars from a variety of academic disciplines adopting different methodological approaches which provide historical depth and cultural width. In an era when Taiwan is attracting more global attention than at any time since the Martial Law era of Chiang-kai Shek and his Kuomintang regime, it is important that the international community has as much information as possible about various important aspects of Taiwanese society. Sport is one of these. None of the contributors will be portraying sport in a vacuum. Rather, sport will be examined in its historical, sociopolitical, economic, and cultural contexts within which it has been and continues to be administered, played, and consumed in Taiwan. The collection differs markedly from existing English language books about sport in Taiwan which are concerned primarily with baseball. Although baseball is deservingly present in this collection, as the “national ball game,” the impetus behind this book is C.L.R. James’ question (1963), considerably paraphrased, “What do they know of sport in Taiwan if only sport they know?” With that in mind, the book addresses physical education, gender, national identity, international diplomacy, relations with the People’s Republic of China, folk sport, disability, fandom, sport policy, the sports media, indigeneity, and the economic infrastructure of sport.
Details
- Pages
- XXIV, 266
- Year
- 2023
- ISBN (PDF)
- 9781433182891
- ISBN (ePUB)
- 9781433182907
- ISBN (MOBI)
- 9781433182914
- ISBN (Hardcover)
- 9781433182884
- DOI
- 10.3726/b17398
- Language
- English
- Publication date
- 2023 (March)
- Keywords
- Sport in Taiwan: History, Culture, Policy Alan Bairner Tzu-hsuan Chen Ying Chiang Taiwan sport politics policy People’s Republic of China Olympic Games Japanese colonialism media fandom gender indigenous peoples baseball nationalism national identity
- Published
- New York, Berlin, Bruxelles, Lausanne, Oxford, 2023. XXIV, 266 pp., 7 b/w ill., 13 tables.
