A New Chinese Sports History or More of the Same?: Reflections of a Newcomer
Steven POPE, Ph.D.

Yew Chung International School

Abstract

The proposed paper embraces the astute and incisive Huang, et al article and posits the need for a more rigorous examination of methodology, historiography, theory/conceptualization within the growing field of Chinese sports history including its relationship with broader Asian and Western sports history/sports studies. My intention is to provide a nudge for sports historians working within or outside of China-especially those interested in historiography-to engage with the constructive agenda presented in the 2020 article for the sake of evaluating the state of Chinese and broader Asian sports history/studies for publication in the new AJSHC. As the co-author of a recently published article in the first issue of the AJSHC (Boucher & Pope, ^Without a Red Leader^s Fan^) we suggested here that the transnational and connected histories surrounding the history of Chinese table tennis, as an example, provide a suitable research framework for global perspectives on the study of Asian sport history to facilitate, as Huang recommends, both the development of a genuinely Asian perspective on Asian sport and its interconnectedness with sport histories in the other civilizations of the world. Western sports historians have devoted considerable energy during the past (over) two decades in such a self examination. In 1998, I edited a special issue of the Journal of Sport History and launched my introductory essay with the following words: What is the state of sport history? To what extent can those working in the Americas, UK, Europe, Australasia, and elsewhere agree on methodology, theory, pedagogy, and professional issues? The following year the Australian Society for Sport History framed the theme of their annual conference on The Death of Sport History? Those initiatives maintained that in order to survive the 21st century, sports history needed to more actively develop links with the parent disciplines which seek to analyze the place of sport in society and the role of sport in actively constructing society and simultaneously not continue to conceive of their works in a specialized, narrowly focused fashion. In the recently published Routledge Handbook of Sport History, M. Phillips, D. Booth, C. Adams showcases the state of the field and how strikingly different it is than it was two decades ago--most notably the recognition of the need to better contextualize the intersections between the
historian/researcher/author/narrator (and their implicit ideological inclinations, political proclivities, and emotional empathies) and their subject matter . . . as more historians of sport are delving into the relationships between the empirical-analytical and narrative-linguistic dimensions of historical representations, or as Hayden White puts it, the relationship between the content and the form of history. This discourse is strikingly different from the current scholarship within Chinese and Asian sport history- however, it provides a useful thread for (possibly) bringing together Western and Asian research into a more collaborative fashion. In 2009 Fan Hong wrote the following about the new field of Chinese sports history: The new field is a challenge. It requires language skills, cultural understanding and creative imagination, and most of all, analytical academic capacity, to cultivate future success. It is time for the West and East to come together in the historical study of sport in society, to record the past, analyze the present, and influence the future. (Pope & Nauright, eds., Routledge Companion to Sports History, 416).

Keywords: Sport History, Asian sport history, Chinese sport history

Topic: Sport and culture in Asian societies