ABSTRACT
The relationship between sport, nationalism and politics is evident in the history of the Qing dynasty, an era in which great changes occurred in Chinese society, in Chinese people's ways of thinking and their views of their identity. Sport was of great importance, not only for the construction of Chinese nationalism and national consciousness, but also for the eventual transformation of China from a ‘Celestial Empire’ into a modern nation state. From the outbreak of the First Opium War in 1839 to the collapse of the Qing Dynasty in 1911, sport was consistently interwoven with Chinese nationalism. After the Opium War, and influenced by an embryonic nationalism that was concerned with defending China against foreign powers and restoring the ‘Great Qing’, the Qing government introduced and promoted Western military gymnastics as part of the Self-Strengthening Movement (1861–1894) in an attempt to enhance the military power of the country. In the late 19th century, modern sport, especially Western gymnastics, was advocated by reformers and scholars who were eager to achieve national salvation by transforming China into a modern nation state. Thanks to their ef orts, sport was promoted as a means of cultivating new citizens for a new China, and was widely accepted as a basic approach to ‘preserving the nation’ and ‘preserving the race’. With the accumulation of anti-foreign sentiment that came about as a result of foreign aggressions in the late 1890s, the most famed traditional Chinese sport, Wushu, came to be practiced by lower-class Chinese civilians for the purposes of self-defense and eliminating the foreign powers. In this period, Wushu clubs united Chinese people against the foreign forces and gave birth to the Boxer Rebellion (1899–1901), which occasioned an eruption of anti-foreign nationalism. After the failure of the Boxer Rebellion, sport was used by Han Chinese nationalists in their plans to overthrow the Manchu regime. Sports schools and societies became places where nationalists and revolutionaries built up their forces. They facilitated communication and the assembly and training of revolutionary forces and contributed to the success of the 1911 Revolution.
