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Yunxiang Gao, Stefan Huebner. Pan-Asian Sports and the Emergence of Modern Asia, 1913–1974., The American Historical Review, Volume 123, Issue 1, February 2018, Pages 203–204, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/123.1.203
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Extract
In Pan-Asian Sports and the Emergence of Modern Asia, 1913–1974, Stefan Huebner has written a solidly constructed, deeply informed history of three successive series of Asian sports events: the Far Eastern Championship Games (1913–1934), the Western Asiatic Games (1934), and the early Asian Games (1951–1974). Huebner uses these athletic competitions to show “transfers of norms, values, and images between Asia and the West and within Asia” (5). His actor-centered history focuses on the elites of West and East who actively organized and spread sports, and the concomitant rise of mass education, in this case physical training. By focusing on the elite, Huebner acknowledges that individual athletic experiences are less important to his analysis than is “Orientalist” discourse. By emphasizing the attitudes and actions of the elite, which means missionaries, sports officials, and civil and major political leaders, Huebner allies himself to the approach employed by Xu Guoqui in his book Olympic Dreams: China and Sports, 1895–2008 (2008), to show sports as political nationalism. A second close relative is the recent global survey of sport and diplomacy found in the essays in Heather L. Dichter’s and Andrew L. Johns’s edited volume Diplomatic Games: Sport, Statecraft, and International Relations since 1945 (2014).
