Paper Topic:

20Century China History Preliminary Research Project

20Century China History Preliminary Research Project

Despite the civil unrest between the Guomindang and the Communists , the struggle against the Japanese invasion and the relative poverty of the peasant population , Chinese traditional sports together with 'new sports brought in by 'foreigners ' continued to survive and (later flourish . This is as much a comment on the resilience of sport as it is on Chinese society , but it serves to emphasize two important aspects of sport in China over the 1949-1979 's . First , that whatever the Communist revolution led to-such as the emancipation of

women (for example from bound feet and concubinage , the freeing of peasants from the land official rejection of Confucianism , eradication of the bourgeoisie and the mercantile class-it did not (and could not ) eradicate the influence of tradition in every area of life . Second , in adopting western sports such as track and field , China was entering the international arena of sport . This matched in some way the move towards the four modernizations of the post-Maoist era : agriculture , science and technology , industry and national defense . The rapid development of international sport in the final decades of this century has relied heavily on the input of science and technology . But it has also created a modern and fashionable image in the designer clothes market that is influential in setting trends for young people . Thus , as China has opened her doors to the West , sport has been able to present itself as being uniquely Chinese (in traditional sport ) and forward looking and modern (in Olympic sport . This combination of tradition and the modern is a constantly recurring theme in China

In what ways does the Chinese system of sport differ from that of other (former ) Communist countries , such as the Soviet Union and the German Democratic Republic ? For all the unrest and even open animosity that existed between the USSR and China in the 1960s , the essential features of the two sports systems were virtually identical , inasmuch as they were both 'centralized ' and part of a sporting hierarchy that operated from government down to county and district level . The circumstances under which they operated , however , were different . It is fair to say that by the mid-1980s , when the Gorbachov reforms in the USSR were presaging the political collapse of the Soviet system , China was beginning to realize the need for change to its own system-change that had been assiduously espoused by Deng Xiao Ping (the late , former leader of China . The collapse of the former USSR was a warning against early political reform . If Communism was unable to survive in Eastern Europe it was because , de facto , it simply was not providing the improvements to living standards that might have been expected to attract popular support . Deng was a reformer by nature , and his determination drove the government to take a reformist line-the open door policy of 1979 / early 1980s , the four modernizations program (of agriculture , industry science and technology , and defense , and the establishment of Special Economic Zones (for example Shenzhen...

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