ABSTRACT
As many important sports events canceled or postponed due to the Covid-19 pandemic in the beginning of 2020, Taiwanese professional baseball (CPBL) started on 12 April and became the first and the “only” professional baseball season in the world at that time. Taiwanese professional baseball was regarded as a national glory during the pandemic era. This chapter critically examined the nationalist discourses in the outbreak and finds that Taiwanese CoroNationalism: (1) forms the CPBL games as “an imagined community against viral threat”; (2) reflects the conflict of national identities in Taiwan, as well as different attitudes toward oppressions from China; (3) duplicates the global hierarchy of baseball “world system,” which is constructed by the worldview of US professional baseball (MLB). While racism and xenophobia dominated many societies during COVID-19, the nationalist discourses about the CPBL games represent the anxiety of Taiwanese society for sovereignty and recognition. The nationalist responses to the pandemic in Taiwan interweave with the global, regional, and local contexts of politics, economy, and culture.
