REPRESENTING GENDER IN THE CHINESE NATION - CHINESE SPORTSWOMEN AND BEIJING BID FOR THE 2000 OLYMPICS

In recent decades, the international victories of Chinese sportswomen have defied Western stereotypes about the oppressed Asian woman. The W estern interpretation of women's sports history begins with the introd uction of women's sports in the 1890s by the YMCA as a part of a strat egy for liberating Chinese women and saving the nation; it continues t hrough the Marxist egalitarianism of the Maoist era; and concludes wit h the wholesale imitation of the East German sports medicine machine i n the 1990's. Utilizing Marshal Sahlins' notion of the structure of th e conjuncture, this paper tells another story: women's sports were sha ped by distinct Chinese cultural practices, and by the use of gender s ymbols by elites to distinguish regional and national identities (part icularly in the symbolism of opening ceremonies at major sports events ). This article illustrates how, amidst the propagation of the seeming ly homogenizing idea of the nation-state, distinctly Chinese construct ions of gender-in-the-nation nevertheless appeared.