I definitely enjoyed the portion of “Training the Body for China” that we read this week. The reading included many interesting facts about China that I was unaware of. The fact that the Qing dynasty banned martial arts was pretty mind blowing. I have always been under the impression that martial arts have always been to China like hockey is to Canada.

Brownell explores how the Qing dynasty, after bowing down to foreign interests, realized that martial arts were widely appreciated and utilized by anti-Qing nationalists, and in a bid to subvert them the Qing banned the sport. Brownell then goes on to describe how the martial arts still carry nationalistic themes in China.

The description of the Communists’ struggle with sports was also very interesting. Brownell describes how Chinese communists took great issue with the tendency of sports to prescribe superiority to individuals instead of everyone. I have never even thought about this struggle within the communist agenda, would people on a true Marxist utopia not be able to play soccer or board games because the games inevitably construct hierarchies.

I also found the discussion of tai chi in the Marrow of the Nation reading to be very interesting. I have always been under the impression that tai chi is a very old practice, and would have guessed that it was thousands of years old (perhaps because I feel like most things we study concerning Asian theory are thousands of years old). So I was obviously shocked to learn that the sport made its debut in 1933.

Both Brownell and Morris’s texts offered what I considered to be genius Chinese antidotes that concern sports and games. Brownell’s text, while discussing her time at university in China Brownell tells that she and her teammates would joke “practice makes permanent.” (13) For some reason this notion really clicked with me. Morris’s text, while discussing the creator of tai chi, includes the quote “if a machine is not moved it will rust, if people do not move they will also deteriorate.”

To be honest, all of the ancient paintings of Asian people playing polo seemed pretty bizarre to me. I always assumed that polo was a European game, I suppose because the only times I have ever encountered the game in media it has been being played by English aristocrats.