I am currently working on a book manuscript based off my dissertation while exploring digital presentation of my research. This includes, among other things, expanding my research on Sino-African sports exchanges, analyzing various born-digital sources, and developing an online database for some of the materials I have collected.
In late 2014, I completed my dissertation on "The Politics of Socialist Athletics in the People's Republic of China." My dissertation traces the political significance of sport to the Chinese socialist state between 1949 and 1966 by examining state-sponsored tiyu (loosely translated into English as "sports and physical culture") and the connection between its two intertwined goals: tiyu for every citizen, and the development of elite sports programs. My conclusions are based on numerous sources I personally collected from the Chinese Foreign Ministry Archives, the Beijing Municipal Archives, and the Shanghai Municipal Archives.
In my master's paper, I wrote about the first "Games of the New Emerging Forces" (GANEFO), an international sports competition held in 1963 in Djakarta, Indonesia in which more than 2,000 athletes from around the world took part, and in which the PRC played a leading role. Because the PRC withdrew from the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in August 1958, the first GANEFO offered Chinese athletes their first real opportunity to participate in a large-scale international sports competition. The GANEFO also served as a platform for the PRC leadership to express China's post-Sino-Soviet split worldview and geopolitical position as a socialist leader for decolonized African and Asian nations. I have since published two articles related to this topic.
Renmin ribao [People's Daily], November 17, 1963
banner at the top reads: "International Olympic Committee ostrich competition"
first mound (top left): "non-recognition of GANEFO"
second mound: "non-recognition of new world
records"
third mound: "we don't know anything about the Games of the New
Emerging Forces"
caption: "Who can keep their head buried the
longest?"