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The term tiyucan refer to Chinese traditional practices as well as "sports" as generally understood. While such a broad grouping of physical activities might appear surprising at first, it is not at all strange given the context in which sports were introduced in China.
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From June 23 to July 15, 2007, China celebrated "Olympic culture" for the last time before the opening of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. The 5th Olympic Culture Festival featured 110 physical activities in the form of demonstrations or exercises presented to the public through ceremonies and workshops themed "Sports for All." Chinese martial arts, rope skipping, jianzi, (1) and bamboo dances took pride of place. Paradoxically, the organisers of the Chinese sports movement decided to celebrate non-Olympic activities in order to promote the ideals of fair play, competi- tion, and fraternity that the Games champion. In China today, activities deemed "traditional" appear to have become fully assimilated with sports culture. This mixture of diverse physical activities subsumed under the label of sports seems relatively unsurprising, as a number of Asian disciplines such as judo and karate have also become associated with sports over the last century. This has led to the introduction of new rules govern- ing the practice of these disciplines, as well as the organising of competitions. The confusion between sports and "tradition- al" disciplines is emblematic of the way in which the field of physical activities has been historically structured in China.
It is pertinent at this juncture to review the historic process of introduction of sports in China in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
Contrary to the idea touted by the organisers of the Beijing Games, (2) sports and Chinese physical activities were not origi- nally structured according to the same cultural logic. Literally "imported" by a handful of people moulded by the Victorian era British educational models and North American entrepre- neurial spirit, sports met with considerable opposition when introduced to China in the early twentieth century. This con- trasted greatly with the situation around the same period in Europe, where sports and competitive activity that had been an exclusive preserve began to enjoy massive popular enthusiasm and grew rapidly. The Union of French Societies of...