Training the Body for China is an interesting examination of the way cultures influence how bodies, athletics, and physicality in general are viewed, and how these bodies can in turn exert influence on a culture. One interesting element of Brownell’s study is how athletics in China were consistently connected to national interests. To some extent, athletes were concerned with “winning glory” for their college or province, but as a whole athletics were seen strictly as a way to bring glory to China, either through something concrete like medal counts, or through more subjective means of strong bodies representing a strong nation-state.

This is something, I think, that contrasts with American sports. National concerns are certainly secondary in professional team sports, but I get the sense that the same is true for the individual track and field sports that Brownell focused on. Sure, we love talking about representing your country when the Olympics roll around, but I think the day-in-day-out dialogue is much more focused on the individual. (I realize this kind of reeks of essentialism: “Americans are individualistic! Chinese are focused on the collective!” Still, there might be some truth to it.) Given that this book is twenty years old, though, I wonder if things have changed at all in China, especially as professional team sports are on the rise. If I’m not mistaken, basketball, among others, is fairly popular in China these days.

One chapter of Training the Body I found particularly interesting was “Bodybuilding and Old People’s Disco.” Brownell describes how bodybuilding was able to challenge state authority in an area––the wearing of bikinis––by existing in a space where most people didn’t perceive it as political. According to Brownell, it developed “in the cracks between state and society because it was not clearly identified…as a form of political resistance” (p. 272). Even when they exert influence on a culture, we don’t usually look at games as being subversive. Perhaps the closest analogy in American sports history is the breaking of the color barriers in the major professional sports, especially baseball’s with Jackie Robinson in 1947. This was before the civil rights movement really took off, and it no doubt influenced some people. Still, the racial politics had been debated in America for quite some time, and many people were clamoring for the removal of racial barriers to professional sports long before it actually happened. As Brownell describes it, bodybuilding in China was leading the way with the bikini and conceptions of the visibility of bodies in general.