Native Songs and Dances: Southeast Asia in a Greater Chinese Sporting Community, 1920–48

China boasts a rich history of physical culture--from the archery of Confucian scholarly culture, to the kickball games used in military training, to aristocratic polo and golf games, to ice skating pageants performed for imperial audiences, to the storied and diverse Chinese martial arts. However, the modern physical culture introduced to China in the late nineteenth century through Japanese and Anglo-American channels represented a clean break from these previous modes of physical endeavour. Where older Chinese genres were laced with values of martial manhood or aristocratic privilege, the modern physical culture known as tiyu [CHINESE LANGUAGES NOT REPRODUCTIVE IN ASCII] (literally, "body-cultivation") was a systematic ideology invested with definite ideals of the relationship between the individual and national bodies, and thus must be treated as a new and separate question. Sports and physical culture -- physical education, callisthenics with a military flavour, recreation, physical fitness, all included in the broad term tiyu -- were closely connected to notions of the nation, modernity and a modern citizenry. Beginning in the last years of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) and continuing through the period of the Republic of China (1912-49), the realm of physical culture served as an important conduit for teaching and learning about modernity, the nation, and the duties of the modern citizen. By the 1920s both modern sports and martial arts (wushu [CHINESE LANGUAGES NOT REPRODUCTIVE IN ASCII]) were commonly viewed as important modes of strengthening and modernizing a Chinese nation and race for the twentieth century. Tiyu-minded Chinese citizens also extended these considerations of physical culture, modernity and national strength to the so-called "Huaqiao ([CHINES LANGUAGES NOT REPRODUCTIVE IN ASCII])", or "Overseas Chinese" population in Southeast Asia. To many, these Nanyang (South Seas) Chinese [1] represented a tantalizing link to a potential "Greater China" that could transcend the borders of the troubled Republic, battle-scarred by the seemingly endless warlord fighting that plagued the new nation over the first fifteen years of its existence. Experts and planners in the world of Chinese physical culture hoped to use that realm to create a sporting version of this Greater Chinese community, where the scientific, educational, vigorous and virile motions of modern sport and physical culture could provide a valuable link between Chinese in China and their long-lost sojourner brothers and sisters. This article will discuss these Republican-era imaginings of a Greater Chinese sporting community -- imaginings which can tell us much about Chinese notions of physical culture and of this elusive Overseas Chinese population during the 1920s through the 1940s. It is not a study of Nanyang Chinese physical culture in and of itself -- an interesting topic but one that is well beyond the scope of this research. Rather, the point of the study is to understand the significance attached by Republican Chinese to "Huaqiao" participation in the Chinese tiyu world. The period under consideration begins in 1920, when a private Shanghai-based organization called the Pure Martial Athletic Association (Jingwu Tiyuhui) began spreading its famed martial arts among the Nanyang Chinese population. It ends in 1948, when several Southeast Asian Chinese communities sent athletes to join in China's Seventh National Games, a competition modeled upon (and held in preparation for) the Olympics. The article thus explores two Chinese physical culture forms that were distinct yet equally valid modes of shaping and sharpening Chinese bodies and minds. Different forms of this modern tiyu presented differing ideals of how a strong and modern nation would be made. Modern martial arts, brought to Southeast Asia purely and explicitly in the context of "Chinese culture", were understood to bring out in their practitioners a "national essence" of ancient and timeless Chinese virtues. …