3 - Producing Socialist Bodies

Summary

Huang Hongjiu is a ninety-year-old former PRC athlete in swimming and water polo. Born and raised in Indonesia, he attended the World Festival for Youth and Students held in Berlin in 1951 – as a member of the Indonesian delegation. The delegation was invited to Beijing, where Chinese sports leaders then recruited Huang and several teammates to “return to the motherland” and help build a new state-sponsored swimming program. Over the next few years, Huang and the others learned Chinese and competed internationally for the PRC. This chapter seeks to understand how athletes such as Huang, and the networks within which they were embedded, were crucial to the Chinese party-state’s national project of the early 1950s. Athletes like Huang helped a nascent PRC initiate new state-sponsored sports programs and, through sport, solidify the new state’s participation in the Soviet-led socialist world. Tracing the lives of these athletes and early PRC sports networks shows how China’s national sports development was a thoroughly transnational project. This chapter also uses sport in order to argue more generally that a transnational perspective is needed to understand the early PRC.