With the spectacle of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games now history, scholars—indeed the world—are speculating how the events will affect China's global relations. In this finely argued, prodigiously researched, and well-written book, Xu Guoqi argues that sports have always been a mediating force between Chinese nationalism and internationalism. In this first full-bore study of Chinese sports since 1895, Xu contends that, except for the thirty-year period of Maoist rule, internationalization has “functioned as the driving force behind China's foreign policy and social change” (p. 2). Xu's study, although it stands on previous research by Andrew Morris on sports in the Republican era (Marrow of the Nation: A History of Sport and Physical Culture in Republican China [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004]) and on Susan Brownell's earlier anthropological work on sport in China since the 1980s (Training the Body for China: Sports in the Moral...
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