Visualizing Modern China: Image, History, and Memory, 1750–Present
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Indeed, the power of modern “science” allowed authorities like physical education expert Wu Yunrui, impressed by what he learned on a fact-finding tour through Great Britain, France and Germany, to sidestep any truly liberating implications of women’s physical culture:
Women’s sports are very important in terms of managing the household and the family. The woman’s responsibilities in the household are cooking and cleaning. The former requires preparing three meals a day; if this presents too heavy of a burden, then there is no way that one can triumph in this work. In addition to the three meals, there is also the latter, cleaning and sweeping and tidying up, which can easily exhaust the spirit and fatigue the body. Again, if the body is weak, then there is no way to succeed in these tasks.16
Men like Wu were agile in avoiding any consideration of socioeconomic class—a variable that obviously was of much import in the Chinese world of modern sports. Words like his also helped to situate powerfully the notion that the use of fit women’s bodies was not to guarantee equality for women, but instead to enable the men of China to make history in the public realm.
The Ideology of “Healthy Beauty” and Its Discontents
Not all women were expected to stay in the home, however; some women were projected as the physically fit models for the rest of China’s 200 million females to follow. Soon national and local media began establishing successful or attractive women athletes as both role models and symbols of the new strong and loyal Chinese woman. Every large meet turned up new female sports figures for the masses to idolize and to whom modern urban women were supposed to compare themselves in the mirror. Indeed, then, for all the rhetoric about women’s bodies and housework like that above, this moment of women’s physical and sensual visibility still greatly complicates the historian’s common notions of Chiang Kai-shek’s anticommunist New Life Movement, and the conservatism that we have assumed to be so prevalent throughout 1930s urban China.
The photogenic “Four Harbin Sisters,” led by Sun Guiyun and also known as the “Four Healthy Women Generals” (nü jian jiang) (Figure 6.9, website), won much attention with their sprinting performances at the 1930 Fourth National Games and the Fifteenth North China Games in 1931. Jiangsu sprinter Qian Xingsu, praised for her own “model quality,” achieved fame with her valiant performance against the “blue-eyed blondes” at Shanghai’s 1931 International Meet.17 At the 1933 Fifth National Games, articles about Ma Yi, the Liaoning athlete known as the “Iron Ox,” sounded much like the melodramatic “human interest” pieces that have become a staple of contemporary American Olympic coverage. In Nanjing, Ma’s inspirational gold medal performances in the discus and shot put allowed Chinese sports fans, as one writer put it, to “perceive the pain of the destruction of her native home [now occupied by the Japanese].”18 Qingdao’s amazing He sisters, Wenya, Wenjing and Wenjin (Figure 1.5, see Introduction), captured national attention with their clean sweep at the eighteenth North China Swim Meet in 1934.19
But the brightest of all female sport stars was “The Beautiful Mermaid” or “Miss China,” Hong Kong swimmer Yang Xiuqiong (Figure 6.10, below; Figures 6.11–6.14, website). At age 15, Yang attained superstar status with her record-setting sweep of all four women’s swim events at the 1933 National Games.
As always, however, this stardom was not without its price and qualifications. Fame for these women athletes was awarded in ready-made packages, each with its own formulated mixture of morality, poise, elegance, spirit, and commitment. Rey Chow has defined Chinese modernity in part as a process of “crushing . . . figures of femininity” at the same time that new kinds of voyeuristic interest are being constructed for the sake of the nation.20 This is a particularly apt way of describing what happens to these successful female athletes who were typecast—in a perfect example of the asymmetrical heterosexual “male gaze”—by the Chinese media in their narrative of athletics and the nation.
Young swimmer Yang was the unanimous good girl of sport in the 1930s, the picture of sun-drenched bourgeois “healthy beauty” (jianmei). A writer for Roll of Famous Chinese Women Athletes wrote that “because of Miss Yang’s healthy and beautiful figure and lovely face, she is known everywhere as the Mermaid. She is tender and quiet, proper and dignified, and has only nice things to say.” A picture of Yang in a sun dress, ironing laundry was accompanied by the caption, “[b]esides sport, Yang Xiuqiong also especially enjoys doing work around the home.”21 And she proved her chastity and innocence by refusing a famous Shanghai film director’s offer of CN¥2000 (US$600) to star in a motion picture.22 Yang also soon became an unofficial government spokeswoman of sorts, putting on swimming demonstrations at New Life Movement-related events in Nanchang, Xiamen and Nanjing, as the Guomindang attempted to break down the boundaries between elite competitive sport and mass physical fitness programs.23
But her fame—young Yang was by far the best-known athlete in 1930s China—could seem stifling as well. When Chu Minyi, Secretary of the Executive Yuan, personally served the 15-year-old Yang as carriage driver on a scenic tour around the capital at the 1933 National Games, embarrassing rumors abounded about their relationship.24 The youthful charm and beauty that put her on the covers of dozens of magazines also made her the subject of endless marriage rumors. Just days after her triumph at the Nanjing Games, the Hong Kong press was reporting that Yang would soon become the eighth wife of Chen Baiyuan, Chief Consultant of the Guangxi Bank.25 It seems clear that the value her healthy and attractive physique had for popular Chinese fantasies and imaginations also took a personal toll on the teenage star.26
Figure 6.10 Hong Kong swimmer Yang Xiuqiong, “The Beautiful Mermaid.” With the setting all but blurred out, the photo is designed to focus the viewer’s attention on Yang’s physical appearance. From: Zhonghua yuebao (The Central China Monthly) 3.10 (October 1935), back cover.
Other accomplished young women were typecast as they achieved fame. Qingdao martial arts expert Luan Xiuyun (Figure 6.15, website) was judged to be “the perfect female athletic figure” for her work teaching martial arts in two Qingdao elementary schools, as well as at her own First Women’s Martial Arts Training Center.27 Xu Zhongzuan, a Shanghai racewalker, was the wild girl of the sports set, dabbling in film acting as well as her hobby of riding motorbikes.28 The nerd role was filled by Deng Yinjiao (Figure 6.16, website), an ethnic Chinese from Malaya who was near-sighted and often wore eyeglasses; one attentive author did have to admit, however, that “[a]lthough her face is not beautiful nor her skin silvery, her healthy [figure] still makes her attractive.”29
The fall from fame of the “Four Harbin Sisters” was a tragic story that echoed for many Chinese the pain of the Japanese capture of that Northeastern city. Sun Guiyun’s (Figure 6.1, website) decision to leave the track world she once dominated for basketball was seen as a great betrayal and negative example (as a “quitter”) for sporting girls all over China. In 1933, she and four other women athletes were called out, and their integrity questioned, in the pages of Diligent Struggle Sport Monthly: “Is it that after winning one championship, they don’t want to exercise anymore? Or is it that their performance has regressed and they are not willing to compete in a day of races? . . . Anyway, this allows us to see the vanity of women.”30 In 1935, the authors of China’s Girls Athletic Champions wrote:
The Sun Guiyun of five years after [her 1930 National Games triumph] absolutely cannot match the Sun Guiyun of five years ago, and this is something one can tell right off. . . her magnificent and luxurious wardrobe, her makeup, looking for all the world like a debutante, without the slightest bit of the flavor of one out on the track. . . Her timidity, shyness and naivete of old are gone forever. I am not willing to go into great detail and describe here her private love life; this would bring such great sorrow to a Chinese sports world that is still in its developing stages. If every female athlete of the nation were like this, and just gave up like Miss Sun, our future would be filled with danger. What would we do? What would we
do?31
Sun’s teammate Wang Yuan was attacked in the media when she became the concubine of Bao Guancheng, the Chinese archtraitor who served as the puppet Manzhouguo government’s “ambassador” to Japan. Wang later left this relationship, but then had to go into hiding to avoid the vicious slander that destroyed her reputation.32 Teammates Wu Meixian and Liu Jingzhen were cast as tragic figures as well; Wu transferred to Fudan University in Shanghai and lost her athletic spirit, and Liu married and gave up sports for a home life.33 In the cases of three of these Harbin Sisters (all except for Wu), we can see how choices they made about their own sexuality seemed to violate some imagined covenant, some moral condition to which the male-dominated media wanted to hold these women.
Michael Chang, a contributor to this volume, has previously written on a similar question relating to 1920s and 1930s movie actresses in Shanghai. Discussions about these women in popular magazines were often part of “a more general and widespread public discourse on dangerous women” whose social and sexual behavior (real or imagined) defied the vanishing patriarchal order of the day. Entry into this discursive world as a certain “type” of star, Chang suggests, often had very real and harmful costs, the “intimacy” that magazine readers imagining they were gaining with these women in the end resulting in “a deep sense of detachment and alienation.”34 As we see the media constructing similar identities for the women athletes described above at the same historical moment, we must imagine a similar set of costs that these women would have paid for their fame. In her study of the contemporaneous “Modern Girl” phenomenon in urban China, Madeleine Y. Dong (also a fellow contributor to this volume) has explained the societal anxieties about the Modern Girl look and lifestyle and its ability to lead its adherents “down a path toward disreputable actions or dangers. . . .blurred class and status lines and threatened the purity of the elite marriage market.”35 1930s urban China’s arbitrary definitions of which forms of sexuality would be made normative and acceptable, then, also reveal the asymmetrical power relations of women’s involvement in the national sporting scene.
These media agents were not the only ones acting to categorize and classify the women’s sports world and its stars, however; fans also were encouraged to do it themselves. In 1935, the Shanghai Athletic Publishing Society and the China Huamei Tobacco Company teamed to sponsor a “Chinese Sports Queen” contest, for the cause of “promoting women’s sports and healthy, beautiful figures.” Participating was fun and easy. Every ten-cent, ten-cigarette pack of Huamei’s Guanghua (Radiant China) label contained a ballot that readers could use to vote for their favorite female athlete. A Huamei advertisement drew out quite clearly the commodifying function—again remember the analog of Davis’s study of Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit issue in our own time—of such a selection process:
How should the Sports Queen be selected? She must have a healthy and beautiful figure, superior athletic achievement, and a noble and lofty sporting morality. How could one describe Guanghua Standard Tobacco? It has fine and beautiful tobacco leaves, superior quality, and is packaged with noble and lofty technology!36
Again, “sporting” was defined as male and heterosexual, the presence of these fully commodified sporting women relevant only because of their erotic youthfulness and femininity.37
The “Chinese Sports Queen” contest above and many of the images here suggest the ways in which these images—not at all unlike images of today’s pop or sports stars—objectified their subjects in the eyes of readers and consumers. Women athletes and their figures seemed here at least to be only the equivalent of that most common commodity, the cigarette. The different agents of the media constructed female athletes in every way as commodities who could be bought and sold, imbibed and enjoyed, public figures who could be lionized and then besmirched. Many of these women likely had entered the world of modern sports as a way to transcend their assigned roles and succeed as individuals. Now, however, they found themselves as publicly traded property which could be divided, categorized and defined into a tableau of Chinese femininity that fit the needs of the male-defined nation.
In 1935 and 1936, two collections of pictures and short biographies of Chinese female athletes were published in Shanghai: China’s Girls Athletic Champions (73 bios of women mostly from Shanghai) and Roll of Famous Chinese Women Athletes (114 bios of women from all around China). Two advertisements in Champions underlined the close relationship between photography and the sporting world. The Wang Kai Photo Studios claimed that “[i]n life there is only one way to be happy, and that is to be healthy. And to maintain a healthy body and attitude, there is nothing like photography.” The Enlightenment Photography King studios agreed, “[w]e all desire to maintain our healthy and beautiful body and look forever; for this there is only photography.”38
The modern technology of photography was a large part of the process by which the sports and media establishments worked to impose their national narratives and gazes on the world of female physical culture. Again, we know that women were looking at these images too, measuring and comparing carefully to them their own physical features, and this fact makes it difficult to call this a purely “male” enterprise. However, it is hard to deny that collections like these mentioned above—composed of just the right mix of photos of women wearing revealing uniforms or swimsuits, “traditional Chinese” qipao robes, fashionable yet modest Western-styled outfits and prep school jackets and ties—worked along masculine and heterosexual lines to portray Chinese women athletes as a group with just the right balance of a healthy body, proper Chinese morality, and modern scientific thinking that the nation needed.
Photography’s relation to women’s sports also included the trend mentioned earlier of male heterosexual “ogling for the nation.” Sporting and other popular magazines now were often adorned with pictures of Chinese women swimmers in their swimsuits, often wet (Figure 6.17, website). Women’s sporting uniforms in the 1930s seemed to have been designed expressly for this voyeuristic purpose. Just a decade earlier, female athletes wore large-fitting tops, bloomers and beanies (Figure 6.18, website), and were nowhere to be found on Chinese magazine covers. However, by the 1930s the standard uniform was a V-necked white T-shirt with very high-cut sleeves, and short black shorts (Figure 6.19, website), shorter even than those worn by Western women athletes pictured in these same magazines.
New photographic strategies were adopted for shooting women’s sports—one was the popular behind-the-starting-blocks angle, which could expose a treasured rear glimpse of these patriotic mothers-to-be. Team pictures almost always showed a front row of women sitting below their male teammates, their legs bared and extended toward the camera’s gaze (Figures 6.20 and 6.21, website). Even individual post-event victory photos were different for men than women—while most winning men were photographed from the waist up, almost all women were pictured in full-body poses, in order to capture and sell the most winning flesh.
Indeed, a number of these photos depict women who look very uncomfortable being explored by the camera’s male gaze. For the cover of Diligent Struggle Sport Monthly’s January 1935 issue, students at the Shanghai Patriotic Girls’ School were posed straddling a set of parallel bars. (Figure 6.21, website). The media’s scrutiny and attention seems to have been experienced as an imposition and intrusion by many of these women, most of whom likely would not have imagined all that could come with their participation in the seemingly liberating arena of sport. Figure 1.5 (see Introduction) is just one of several swimsuit shots of the three He sisters from Qingdao that regularly showed them looking annoyed and/or resentful at the eyeing they endured.39 Many of these young women, enveloped though they were in a thoroughly modern regime of sport and commodification, did not see themselves as “capital-M” Modern Girls, who in other forms of media, as Madeleine Dong shows, were able to provocatively ignore, enjoy, or even return the imposition of the male gaze.40 Even Superstar Yang Xiuqiong, the constant center of photographers’ attention, at
times betrayed a grudging discomfort with the lens trained upon her (Figure 6.22, website).
Even with all these pressures and intrusions that female athletes had to endure, the men in the sporting media could not fathom why some of these women would reject this objectification and degradation, and retire from the public athletic scene. Women athletes who stopped competing and who did not go on to serve as physical education teachers were seen as quitters, women too tainted by the feudal Chinese values of weak femininity to be able to make a real contribution to the nation. Sun Guiyun, who suddenly left the track and field world, became public sporting enemy number one. In 1933, The Sports Review reported as a “humorous story” an incident where Sun, after suffering a head injury in a bicycle accident, snapped at an insensitive bystander who took this chance to ask her why she had left her boyfriend, the famous pole vaulter Fu Baolu!41 When an unnamed female basketball player from Shanghai quit after coming under harsh criticism in the media, The Sports Review had only this ho-hum, sarcastic comment: “News reporters can’t please everybody.”42 This same Shanghai magazine reported in 1933 that Norwegian figure skater Sonja Henie was retiring at age 20 because male fans and reporters simply bothered her too much,43 but few of these sports reporters seemed self-reflexive enough to see how this mirrored their coverage of China’s women athletes.
Conclusion/Reconsideration
This chapter attempts to draw out the main features of the world of Chinese women’s physical culture, a world that was constructed in large part by the male-defined agendas of the government, the mass media, and the sporting community in prewar Republican China. It challenges narratives of one-dimensional “progress” and “liberation” with a different history of Chinese women’s physical culture, a history that acknowledges and recognizes the power wielded by male agents of modern society who hoped to dictate their own narrative of national crisis and conservative “family” morality onto this stage of women’s sports.