This was a very interesting piece and one of my favorites so far. Moskowitz introduced many different aspects of Weigi in China rather than just going over the game and its history. Weiqi is a very important teaching utinsel for children, and its a highly placed game in Chinese society.Moskowitz moves from the importance of weiqi to the relationship it had with confusionsim and other ideals, the gender roles in China and how they’ve shifted from Weiqi’s inception to present day.

It was interesting to see how gender roles in China are so engraned into parenting and even in Weiqi. Like how there are so few women playing professional Weiqi because their parents don’t push them as hard to learn the game because it is believed that women lack the rationality the game calls for that men have. On the other hand, parents encourage girls to play the game so they can learn this rationality that the game requires. The way masculinity has changed over the years in China is almost a relfection of Western critisism of the feminine and intellectual importance placed on masculinity over that of the more western ideals of masculinity. The way the gender ideas of men being more rational than women and of women being more delicate and gentile directly affect what they can and cannot do and how people interact with eachother. this is of course true almost everywhere, but it seems to be a more rigid idea in China than I experience in Montana.

So many children are pushed by their parents to play the game and become professionals, perhaps because it was an elite game and the qualitites it instills in children make them well balanced and intelligent members of society, such as the elite of old China. When children are pushed to play the game though they often end up paying for it by missing classes and school, sometimes having to completely drop out to focus their studies entirely on Weiqi. It is very different to see how a different social structure to my own places a higher importance on the learning and mastering of a game rather than more traditional education. China places a high importance on profesional games as we do in the United States. It is interesting to see how the games that both nations choose are extremely different. One is of a more intellectual importance and the other of physical show.