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If you build it...: A "different story" of the re-emergence of baseball in China, the people who play it, and why

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If you build it...: A "different story" of the re-emergence of baseball in China, the people who play it, and why

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Content IF YOU BUILD IT…: A “DIFFERENT STORY” OF THE RE-EMERGENCE OF BASEBALL IN CHINA, THE PEOPLE WHO PLAY IT, AND WHY by Kaitlin M. Solimine A Thesis Presented to the FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree MASTER OF ARTS (EAST ASIAN AREA STUDIES) August 2006 Copyright 2006 Kaitlin M. Solimine UMI Number: 1438543 1438543 2007 Copyright 2006 by Solimine, Kaitlin M. UMI Microform Copyright All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest Information and Learning Company 300 North Zeeb Road P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, MI 48106-1346 All rights reserved. by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. ii Epigraph “Ray, people will come Ray. They'll come to Iowa for reasons they can't even fathom. They'll turn up your driveway not knowing for sure why they're doing it. They'll arrive at your door as innocent as children, longing for the past. ‘Of course, we won't mind if you look around,’ you'll say. ‘It's only $20 per person.’ They'll pass over the money without even thinking about it: for it is money they have and peace they lack. And they'll walk out to the bleachers; sit in shirtsleeves on a perfect afternoon. They'll find they have reserved seats somewhere along one of the baselines, where they sat when they were children and cheered their heroes. And they'll watch the game and it'll be as if they dipped themselves in magic waters. The memories will be so thick they'll have to brush them away from their faces. People will come Ray. The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game: it's a part of our past, Ray. It reminds of us of all that once was good and it could be again. Oh... people will come Ray. People will most definitely come.” - Terence Mann (played by James Earl Jones) to Ray Kinsella (played by Kevin Costner) in the film Field of Dreams “It’s good you’re writing on this topic, because although baseball is not extremely popular in China now, in the future it will be quite powerful.” - Shen Wei, Head of China’s Baseball League, Chinese Ministry of Sport in an interview with the author iii Dedication This work is dedicated to all those who made this paper possible. Many thanks to the following supporters: my main financier and confidante, Joseph Smolen, for all the love and lies (“it’s a great paper, I swear!”) I need to make it through my days; the original supporter (and cheerleader) of my research on this strange topic, Professor Eugene Cooper for his continued optimism and style; Professors Stanley Rosen and Joshua Goldstein for their support and response to my tireless emails and requests; Grace Ryu and Kin Hau of the USC East Asian Studies Center for their amazing organizational skills and humor throughout; Xiaoqiu Xu, the world’s best Chinese-English translator; my mother Kathleen, for sending me the New York Times article on baseball in China (and piquing my interest in the topic); my father Edward, for instilling in me his love of baseball and raising me a Red Sox fan; my brother A.J., for only slightly smirking at me when I took swings in the batting cage; Marc Goldstein and Edie Cox for feeding Joey in my absence; Chen Xi and Chen Guan Miao, for hosting me like family during my month of research in July 2005; Wang Xin for buying me drinks after day after day of interviews; Tan Jue, for introducing me to Yu Xuan; Yu Xuan for introducing me to countless other baseball players and coaches in China; and to all the baseball fans in China who are playing the game everyday, building their own tradition. iv Table of Contents Epigraph .......................................................................................................................ii Dedication ...................................................................................................................iii Abstract .......................................................................................................................vi Introduction: Play Ball! Baseball Lands in China........................................................1 Chapter 1: A Look at Baseball’s Recent Reemergence in China.................................4 Chapter 2: Globalization and Sport............................................................................10 Chapter 3: The History of Sport in China (In Brief)..................................................15 Chapter 4: The History of Baseball in China.............................................................23 Chapter 5: Interviews .................................................................................................30 Purpose and Methodology.....................................................................................30 Administrators .......................................................................................................31 Shen Wei ............................................................................................................31 Tom McCarthy...................................................................................................35 Coaches..................................................................................................................42 Players ...................................................................................................................46 Fans........................................................................................................................49 The “Die-Hard” Fans: Yu Xuan, Bing’er, and Mr. Dai .....................................52 The Bystander Effect..........................................................................................56 Chapter 6: Beijing’s Boys (and Girls) of Summer (An Analysis) .............................58 Chapter 7: Post-script—“If you build it, they will come?”........................................60 Bibliography...............................................................................................................62 Appendices.................................................................................................................67 Interview Transcripts.............................................................................................67 Beijing Baseball Club: Bing’er and Mr. Dai......................................................68 Chen Zhe ............................................................................................................75 Li Bing ...............................................................................................................76 Tom McCarthy...................................................................................................77 Ran He................................................................................................................87 Shen Jie ..............................................................................................................88 v Shen Wei ............................................................................................................89 Tao Lei ...............................................................................................................94 Mr. Wu ...............................................................................................................98 Xu Yang ...........................................................................................................100 Yu Xuan ...........................................................................................................102 Zeng Ran ..........................................................................................................108 Zhang Jian Xiong .............................................................................................109 Images of Baseball in Beijing: July 2005............................................................113 Useful Baseball Terms in Chinese.......................................................................118 vi Abstract In 2004 an estimated 156,000 people played baseball in China (Washburn, “In Search of Baseball’s Yao Ming”)—up from 10,000 in 2001 (Coffey, “Fine China: Nation of a Billion Takes Best Swing at Baseball”). This paper addresses this growing popularity, as framed by globalization. Using historical sources and modern-day ethnographic research, the work examines why baseball is experiencing a revival in China and whether or not baseball’s rise is the result of a more homogenized world or if baseball in China speaks to a unique set of social, political and economic mores—a “different story” than that in other nations. The narrative reinforces the hypothesis that globalization does not imply homogenization; in fact, there are significant local redefinitions that occur when an otherwise foreign sport is imported abroad. 1 Introduction: Play Ball! Baseball Lands in China Mr. Dai was just ten years old when he hit a “farewell homerun” for his elementary school baseball team in Beijing. It was 1985 and his team was losing by a run in the ninth inning. The pressure was intense—a major league player from the United States was watching the game after giving a speech to the elementary school. It was Dai’s last game for the school, hence the “farewell.” His homerun won his team the game. In retrospect Dai feels that the experience sits well within a lifetime infatuation with baseball. “I figure I must be pretty good [at baseball],” he says. “I mean, if I’ve played this long and were really bad, how could I continue playing?” Mr. Dai’s self-reflective question in many ways mirrors the state of Chinese baseball today—if the game were played that poorly or was that unpopular, then how could it continue gaining in popularity and prestige? At the same time, Dai’s experience on a Chinese baseball diamond (even as early as 1985) points to the growing globalization of a game that Americans like to romanticize as “America’s pastime.” Already successfully “Latinized” and “Japanized,” the globalization of the sport illuminates several interesting questions about the nature of the emergence of Chinese baseball, such as: why is baseball currently growing in popularity in China? Does baseball have characteristics specific to it that attract Chinese citizens? Who are the people promoting the sport and do they receive a specific tangible benefit? Is baseball’s growth in China the result of a more homogenized world or will baseball in China speak to a unique set of social, political and economic mores—a “different story” than that of the sport elsewhere? 2 Accordingly, the formation of the Chinese professional league in March 2001, which marked the Chinese Communist Party’s official endorsement of baseball, is a moment that can be viewed in the context of China’s burgeoning relationship with the global community of the sport. The establishment of the league does not, however, mark China’s entrance onto the world stage of competitive baseball. Baseball was initially introduced to Mainland China in the 1860s and since then has enjoyed significant (albeit disjointed) exposure and integration into Chinese society. Although China’s nascent professional league, the Chinese Baseball League (CBL), barely five years in existence, consists of only 6 city teams (two in Beijing, one each in Shanghai, Guangdong, Tianjin, and Chengdu), the history of baseball in China rivals that of its Japanese and Korean counterparts, though its significance in Chinese culture has had (as of yet) a much less marked presence and effect. The sport’s cyclical nature on the mainland (peaking at times of missionary and foreign presence and disappearing nearly entirely during the Cultural Revolution) is at a cursory glance easily discarded, but is integral in understanding the sport’s flexibility (or lack thereof) in Chinese society. Because of baseball’s roots in China as an elite sport from the West (as it was imported from both Chinese students returning from abroad and foreigners—including missionaries and educators—visiting the Mainland 1 ), the sport is often seen to suit the society at some historical moments and not others. Furthermore, it is to be noted that with changing governmental and political emphases (often in response to global pressures), baseball has either befitted 1 This point will be substantiated in Chapter 4. 3 the given government’s intentions or been contrary to its policies, thus directly affecting baseball’s stead in China. This paper aims to tell the story of baseball’s reemergence in mainland China, as framed by the discourse of globalization—particularly the way in which baseball reflects overall trends towards a more globally connected Chinese nation and society. I will use historical sources combined with modern-day ethnographies 2 to display these connections. The history will tell a story of which most are unaware (namely that baseball, in the early 20 th century, was actually quite established in Mainland China) as well as trace baseball’s recent reemergence after decades of disappearance. In the final analysis, the ethnographic interviews serve as a means to access the latest chapter of this story through first-person narratives of those involved in the game in China on an every day basis. This is by no means a definitive story of baseball in China; however it represents the author’s own experiences and ethnographic research on the sport combined with theoretical work on sport in China, the internationalization of baseball, and the globalization of sport in general. 2 These “ethnographies” are mostly comprised of interviews conducted during July 2005 as well as first-hand viewing of baseball practices and games during that same month. 4 Chapter 1: A Look at Baseball’s Recent Reemergence in China In 2001 it was estimated that approximately 10,000 people played baseball in China (Coffey, “Fine China: Nation of a Billion Takes Best Swing at Baseball”). By 2004 Tom McCarthy, then partner of Dynasty Sports Marketing, the main marketing firm for the CBL, estimated from his own research that “approximately 156,000 Chinese—or .012 percent of the population—play baseball” (Washburn, “In Search of Baseball’s Yao Ming”). Both figures represent a minute sliver of China’s immense population yet simultaneously point to a sport gaining in prominence. The growing popularity of China’s new professional league, the Chinese Baseball League, 3 is further evidence of the sport’s potential. In addition, the expansion of varsity baseball teams at over five-dozen mainland universities and the expanding presence of baseball in the consciousness of Chinese urbanites provide interesting points of analysis. As evidence of this burgeoning presence, in 2003, half of the new league’s 48 regular season games as well as the championship finals were aired live on China Central Television (CCTV) and several local TV stations (“Baseball Touches Home Plate in China, ChilaDaily.com). Ted Heid, the Seattle Mariners’ director of Pacific Rim scouting, is quoted as saying that “baseball is rapidly gaining more fans in China… The sport is spreading like wildfire in urban areas, especially Beijing” (Heid as quoted in Derr). At first glance, it would seem that the perpetuation of baseball is driven solely by the possibility of exploiting a market of a billion fans (think: the explosive 3 The league was formed in 2001 by the Chinese government and an American-Japanese partnered firm Dynasty Sports Marketing. 5 market potential created by the Chinese Basketball Association). Clearly, a market of school-age athletes with a population larger than that of the entire United States (“Partnership gives MLB Unique Visibility,” ESPN.com) is reason enough to develop a national baseball program. Likewise, along with the sport, come capitalists looking for profit: “for the foreign entrepreneurs who have put the fledgling league together… there is talk of history to be made, of glory to be won and, most of all, fortunes to be earned” (French, “Beijing Journal; China Warms Up and Practices for a Future in Baseball”). American baseball is also keenly aware of the market potential; on November 23, 2003, Major League Baseball and the Chinese Baseball League formally teamed up to promote baseball in every corner of China. A host of foreigners and Major League Baseball officials are looking with anticipation at a Chinese sports market valued at over $5 billion U.S. dollars a year (Zhang, “The Yin & Yang of Sports Deals in China”). Indeed, the example of China’s recent fascination with basketball is of great interest: in the 1980s, urban Chinese, obsessed with Michael Jordan, feverishly bought Nike’s Air Jordan sneakers and other Jordan paraphernalia—“he became the Mainland’s premier pop cultural hero—more lionized, in one poll, than Mao” (Coplon, “The People’s Game”). Profits naturally followed. Though while the new emphasis on baseball in China is of great excitement and interest to the MLB and other foreign entrepreneurs, the Chinese government is not oblivious to baseball’s lascivious advances on their homeland. Furthermore, the inevitability of the Chinese government’s controlling access to profits from the sport 6 by the very nature of the exchange taking place on its own turf is apparent in past business transactions and joint ventures that have taken place on Chinese soil. In the building of the American Motor Company (AMC) and Chinese joint venture to build Beijing Jeeps, Jim Mann notes in his work Beijing Jeep that AMC was often swindled by its Chinese counterparts. The government charged AMC’s foreign employees exorbitant living fees, controlled the flow of foreign exchange certificates, and generally maintained the upper hand in all transactions. One foreign businessman is quoted in Mann’s book as saying, “We are like sheep here, ready to be sheared” (Mann, p. 116). Those foreign entrepreneurs interested in baseball’s commercial market in China should therefore be more wary of those whose wallets they hope to woo. While the intent of the Chinese Communist Party has become increasingly driven by monetary pursuits, there may be even more to the new establishment of baseball than pure economics. China is a proud state and nowhere is this more apparent than in international sports competitions. In 2008, China will for the first time have a baseball team competing in the Olympic games, 4 which will take place in Beijing. The Chinese national baseball team will not sit down on the bench easily and it intends with all its might to be viewed as a legitimate competitor in the 2008 games that the nation sees as its “crown jewel” (Zhang, “The Yin & Yang of Sports Deals in China”). Moreover, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has, since its inception, 4 Due to an automatic bid as host nation. 7 been keenly aware of the political usages of sports (i.e., the way in which sport can both enhance a nation’s strength as well as bolster its image abroad): Chinese motives for participation in international athletics are readily discernible. In the 1950s they were most concerned with learning from other nations…In addition to improving athletically, the Chinese naturally saw foreign visits [from sports teams] as an opportunity to enhance their image abroad. (Kolatch, p. 204) This same ideology extends to the physical culture as a whole in China. “National defense, physical culture” is a common idiom repeated by the CCP when promoting sports to its citizens (Kolatch, p. 206). It therefore comes as no surprise that the government would choose to promote baseball at a time when the sport has been so successful in neighboring countries (perhaps those same countries with whom China hopes to compete in other endeavors as well). Similarly, the state plays a prominent role in all sports-playing promotion on the Mainland: sportsmen/women are often “used by the state as examples of the ‘civilization’ it claims to promote” (Brownell, p. 179). The point of this paper is not, however, to dissect the CCP’s agenda of sport and its application to baseball. While there is certainly a practical political aim to the Chinese government’s stamp of approval in regards to baseball (including an ever- present hostility towards Japan and an intent to beat the Japanese at the “Japanese version” 5 of the game), this is only one facet of a much more complex narrative. Furthermore, the project of baseball in China is being promoted by many outside the realm of government and in many cases, such as the corporate games organized by 5 Robert Whiting has written extensively on the unique nature of Japanese baseball in his works You Gotta Have Wa, Chrysanthemum and the Bat, and The Meaning of Ichiro. 8 Beijing’s baseball club (see Chapter 5), these private promotional efforts have been most successful. One question that remains—whether or not baseball in China truly has a chance to succeed—seems to be answered by ecstatic nods of approval by those involved in the sport in China. Of the sport’s fans, Shen Wei, general-secretary of the Chinese Baseball Association and organizer of the new league, has said: “maybe many of them do not know much about the sport, but you can see they love to watch it. Their loyalty and passion really do good for the players and the league” (“Baseball Touches Home Plate in China,” ChinaDaily.com). Is this growth (and support) of the sport in China therefore significant? Does it point to a world increasingly speaking the same cultural dialogue or does it point to something unique about Chinese culture? Will it tell a different story than baseball elsewhere around the world? Further examination of the link between globalization and sport is first necessary in understanding one potential basis for baseball’s new stead in China, as well as its significance. Later analysis of the game’s history on the Mainland as well as ethnographic material on those currently involved in its promotion will relate a parallel story of how sport takes on different meanings in not only different societies, but also different parts of that same society. Just as baseball in the U.S. is at once known for its “uniformity,” “consistency,” and “timelessness” (Mandelbaum, p. 79) as well as its “crossover appeal [in] attracting interest from groups with little else in common” (ibid., p. 81), baseball in China is “like going to war,” “like tennis,” or just 9 “a fun game” (see Chapter 5). In other words, its construction is flexible, malleable—and this may be its saving grace. 10 Chapter 2: Globalization and Sport Baseball’s increasing popularity in China is taking place within an overall global trend of an “intensification of trans-societal flows which are pushing towards a borderless global society” (Featherstone and Lash as quoted in Maguire, p. 3)—or “globalization.” Yet to say that baseball’s spread to China is just another example of an increasingly homogenized world fails to recognize the important nuances involved in the relationship between sport and society. Indeed, as much of the literature on globalization (in various facets of culture, nation, and society) asserts, there is both homogenization and “hybridization” (Pieterse as quoted in Maguire, p. 25) in place. As Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye write in Governance in a Globalizing World, “globalism does not imply universality” (p. 2). Likewise, in the case of sport, there exists a “fragmented contest between different visions of sport” (Allison, p. 163). In the example of baseball specifically, there are various notions of what the sport means, what potential it holds, even which temperaments and psychologies are best suited to play it. Accordingly, baseball’s place in the discourse of globalization is constantly changing both in form and substance. The first instance of baseball in the U.S. can be tracked to the 1840s (Van Bottenburg, p. 81), growing out of the British game of rounders and eventually superseding its rival, cricket, in popularity. There are numerous studies attempting to explain the divergence (Van Bottenburg cites the work of Guttman, Tyrell, Adelman and Kirsch, see Van Bottenburg, p. 77); among the most accepted are Adelman and Van Bottenburg’s theories that baseball’s relative infancy as a sport in the U.S. (as 11 opposed to cricket) allowed it more freedom “to express the emerging American identity” (ibid., p. 80) along with the plentiful army pick-up games that proliferated during the Civil War. Though basketball is the only sport truly American in origin (Allison, p. 103), baseball benefited from a commercialization of the sport (Guttman), as well as an effort to define its “founding myth” by one of its greatest entrepreneurs—Albert Goodwill Spaulding. With rumors that baseball was derived from British children’s games (as it was), Spalding, in 1905, set up a commission to determine who invented baseball: “the commission, relying on the memory of an octogenarian named Abner Graves, reported in 1907 that Doubleday was the man and Cooperstown the place” (ibid., p. 72). This was then announced in Spalding’s Official Baseball Guide for 1908 and in his book, America’s National Game (still in print) (ibid.). The myth still stands—and its implications worldwide ever reverberate. Michael Mandelbaum, in his study on The Meaning of Sports, gives a more cultural-psychological explanation for the sport’s popularity in the U.S., noting that baseball is “less straightforward, more complicated, more cerebral, and therefore more interesting to watch, to think about, and to discuss” (p. 46). This rationale is what Guttman calls an “effort to account for the process of global ludic diffusion on the basis of some kind of congruence between the intrinsic characteristics of a sport and the collective psychological disposition of its enthusiasts” (p. 172). Yet, to say that baseball’s “cerebral” nature appeals to Cubans, Americans and Japanese but not New Zealanders and Russians seems not only “futile” (Guttman, p. 172), but also 12 naive. Furthermore, evidence that sports wax and wane in popularity (see Van Bottenburg, p. 15) in a given country/culture 6 and that the sports themselves are constantly transforming (with new rules created or discarded every year) refutes the basis of psychological affinity. Indeed, a sport’s presence in any given society is different from the next. As Norbert Elias writes, “every variety of sport… has a relative autonomy in relation not only to the individuals who play at a given time, but also to the society where it developed” (as quoted in Maguire, p. 62). As evidence of this autonomy, one could cite the differences in baseball worldwide, such as the “classless” nature of baseball in Cuba (Van Bottenburg, p. 189), the individualism of baseball in the U.S. (Mandelbaum, p. 57), and the sacrifice of oneself for the good of the group (Whiting, You Gotta Have Wa, p. 35). Similarly, the story of baseball in a given culture is ever-changing (and likely depends on whom you ask and what they wish to tell you). For some, baseball is a means of expressing anti-imperialism (Guttman, p. 181), for others it emphasizes the “civic rituals” of the state (ibid., p. 79). In the U.S., baseball represents tradition; in Asia, it is increasingly seen as representing modernity (Reeves, p. 17). In theoretical terms, this process has been coined “glocalization” (by Aviad Raz) and is “the tension between global cultural production and local acquisition” (Morris in Link (et al.), p. 11). 6 Van Bottenburg’s use of the chart “Shifts In Popularity Rankings of Organized Sports in the Netherlands, 1910- 1998” (from Miermans) is a pertinent example of shifting popularity of various sports. Van Bottenburg further complicates this analysis by introducing differing “instrument[s] of measurement” (p. 16) to judge a sport’s popularity such as ranks by number of players, spectators and viewers. 13 The story of baseball in China like even that in the U.S. is similarly convoluted and “glocalized.” In the narrative, there are those entrepreneurs who wish to tell the story of baseball’s potential commercial successes, players who hope to become sporting heroes, and government officials aiming for a national team on par with Japan. In the history of baseball in China, there are times when it is viewed as good preparation for military action, judged as inaccessibly elite, or utilized for diplomatic means (such as “brother teams” set up with the Japanese league and little league games against Taiwan). Therefore, pinning down the precise meaning and significance of baseball in China is an elusive task—just as other “global” objects upon importation are morphed into something else, baseball takes on different meanings at different times. It is much like the way in which Andrew Morris describes basketball in China: “[it] reflects the language of globalization” (Morris, “Basketball Culture in Postsocialist China” in Link (et al.), p. 10) in that it is both a “presence that disrupts and corrupts previous norms and assumptions” as well as “subject to redefinition and reconstitution at the hands of its Chinese recipients and practitioners” (ibid., p. 11). As the proceeding chapters will exemplify, baseball’s history in China displays China’s tug-of-war with Western influence, its eventual opening to capitalism and even its acceptance of the “American pastime.” The interviews cited epitomize baseball’s many faces in Chinese society—the ideals, hopes and frustrations that everyone from fans to bureaucrats share and the differences that keep baseball progressing, as well as formulating a Chinese model of the sport 14 unique to the world yet slave to global forces. What better example of this than the Qinghua University baseball team player using equipment purchased in Japan yet made in China, receiving instructions from a Taiwanese coach, singing the Chinese national anthem before the start of the game yet failing to remove his hat in honor of the flag waving before him. How China has come to this particular point in time requires first a cursory examination of modern sport in China, then a look at baseball’s Chinese history. 15 Chapter 3: The History of Sport in China (In Brief) Recent academic work on the advent of China’s modern sport culture (of which baseball is included) referentially points to the year 1840. Bi Shiming, the author of China’s Ancient Sporting History (Zhongguo Gudai Tiyu Shi), writes that after that year, “foreign governments, armies, economies, cultures, and even sports, entered the mainland and changed Chinese culture, including its sporting culture” (p. 2-3). He and Hu in China’s Modern Sport History (Zhongguo Jindai Tiyu Shi) repeat this assertion in their reference to the Opium War as the particular event that altered the state of sport in China (p. 8). As Andrew Morris writes in Marrow of the Nation: A History of Sport and Physical Culture in Republican China, “national narratives from the PRC era typically portray the 1840s as the dawn of modern Chinese history, and PRC histories of tiyu tend to conform to official periodization by placing the beginnings of modern Chinese physical culture in that decade as well” (p. 9). Still, China’s Modern Sport History maintains that “although ancient China did not have a word ‘tiyu’ (sport) per se, there has always existed an abundant content of sport in China.” (p. 3). Indeed, China did have a quite active ancient physical culture, albeit one that was not in the tradition of modern Western sport. China’s own history of sport could perhaps more appropriately be defined as “physical endeavor” (Morris, p. 3) and it is one that ranged “from the Confucian arts of archery and chariot riding, to the kickball games used in military training, to aristocratic polo and golf games, to the wrestling and ‘ice frolic’ processions so popular with the royal spectators in the Qing 16 dynasty court, to the storied and diverse history of Chinese popular martial arts” (ibid.). Susan Brownell, in Training the Body for China: Sports in the Moral Order of the People’s Republic, mentions several sports that were prevalent in Chinese ancient history. Polo was one such sport: “a popular game at court, reaching its zenith in the Tang (618-906 A.C.E.)” (p. 35). These ancient traditions of sport were replaced, as the Chinese texts suggest, with foreign notions of physical culture (including National athletic meets, international competition, and the role of the strong individual trained in military- style drills) in the mid 19 th century. Further complicating this progression was the re- constitution of the world into sovereign nation-states and China’s own place in this evolving history. While China (and its imperial rulers) had somewhat continuously conceived of itself as a civilization, its formalization as a nation-state did not come until fairly recently. This is particularly relevant in light of the new emergence of modern (and foreign) sport during this same period; both physical culture and nation were redefined. Suisheng Zhao in his work, A Nation-State by Construction: Dynamics of Modern Chinese Nationalism, frames China’s transition from empire to nation-state quite well: Imperial China…was not a modern nation-state with sovereignty and territorial integrity and clearly defined borders in accordance with what Ernest Gellner called “the national principle” of seeking to make “the cultural and the political unit congruent.” Viewing Chinese culture as a set of universal principles, the Chinese empire transcended the specific cultural traditions of the people residing in the empire. Its territorial domain was also loosely defined by cultural principles, which were in fact not always universally accepted and often had to be enforced through the imperial political system. Writing in 1914, Max Weber argued that nations and nationalism had a specific beginning. This argument, significantly enough, 17 was based on observations of China: “Only fifteen years ago, men knowing the Far East, still denied that the Chinese qualified as a ‘nation’; … yet today, not only the Chinese political leaders but also the very same observers would judge differently. Thus it seems that a group of people under certain conditions may attain the quality of a nation through specific behavior, or that they may claim this quality as an ‘attainment.’” Modern Chinese history started with the transformation from a universal but loosely connected empire into a particularistic but centrally governed nation-state. Chinese nationalism was developed to provide people with the means to identify their own position in the world in relation to others. (p. 37) In keeping with global trends at the time, sovereignty, statehood and sport culture were to be transformed within China. 7 As such, sport was redefined within this changing context. It was no longer that which served purely militaristic purposes or confined to imperial courts. Instead, it could be used as a popular device to bracket the nation-building cause and further propel nationalism into an individual’s psyche. Nations needed sports and sports needed nations. As Morris writes: The prevalence of a fairly uniform standard of physical activities and competitions around the world is closely tied to the fairly uniform standard of the modern nation-state that transcends any official ruling ideology of the twentieth century. Indeed, it seems almost impossible to imagine modern athletics without its national foundation and functions. China was no exception to this model. Chinese tiyu was built along with, and in, the new Republic of China founded in 1912, and it refracted external influences in similar ways. It was in the name of the Chinese nation that physical culture developed in the ways it did. Likewise, the competitions, struggles, and lessons of China’s athletic grounds in the 1910s influenced how many Chinese people saw their future as a nation. The world systems of athletics and of the nation-state worked in parallel, positing the athletic arena as a representation of the nation. By May Fourth, urban elites from all over China, presented with the foreign details of both systems, had already worked to build the nation around them. (p. 18) 7 In his work Imagined Communities Benedict Anderson argues that this was due to several key factors—namely, a new ability (because of print capitalism and the rise of the novel; the destruction of past shared narratives, e.g., religious or monarchical; and the move towards a monoglot world) to conceive of a shared community—that this shift occurred worldwide. It is likely the same reasoning that led to this shift in China. 18 With the assistance of the new Guomindang leadership (GMD), China’s sporting culture became even more integrated into the global trends of sport. Republican era officials saw sport as a useful transition from tradition (that associated with the imperial Qing) to modernity—a modernity influenced both by the New Culture movement and a growing acceptance of social Darwinism. 8 The GMD program therefore took elements of Western sport (and physical culture) and introduced them to Chinese society with the intention of strengthening China against imperial and Western powers. The GMD also instituted the military drill, significant in that such drills later evolved into the nation’s physical education (P.E.) program. In 1875 the Nanking (Nanjing) Military Academy began the nation’s first physical education program and others quickly followed (Brownell, p. 39). This was bred from the “German- Swedish-Japanese drill programs that sought to inculcate physical discipline and mental awareness in their participating subjects under the command of a single leader—characteristics seen as necessary for the population of a nation facing imperialist aggression” (Morris, p. 240). The drills were put in place during the late Qing and retained under the GMD until the 1920s when sports themselves became the primary physical activity in schools (Brownell, p. 39). The educational system (and its emphasis on indoctrinating youth in this new culture) was crucial to promulgating a culture of sport in Republican China. 8 Chen Duxiu (1880-1942) was one of China’s first advocates of social Darwinism. In 1915 he wrote “an influential article entitled ‘The Aim of Today’s Education’” in which he proposed that “modern education… should teach the young general of both sexes how to survive, physically and mentally” (Fan and Tan in Mangan, p. 198). 19 Stressing this new role, in 1922 the Ministry of Education issued “The Decree of the Reformation of the School System” that: emphasized that education must suit the needs of social evolution and pay attention to developing individualism in pupils. In 1923 the new curriculum was issued and published in the Jiaoyu zazhi (Education Journal). According to the new curriculum, military gymnastics in schools were abolished and the previous course title of ‘gymnastics’ became ‘physical education and sport’. This course now included ball games, athletics, gymnastics, physiology and hygiene. The new system also made it clear that male and female had the same right to participate in education, physical education and sport. This decree was another important milestone in Chinese sports history. (Fan and Tan in Mangan, p. 199) This course was also paralleled by a development of schools focusing specifically on physical education. Although in the late Qing dynasty such schools were established only in the Jiangnan area near Shanghai, by the 1920s they were “established in different areas of China as well” (Morris, p. 66). The CCP continued with this emphasis on education for promoting sport— one that is useful in understanding contemporary baseball’s relationship to the educational system in China. Indeed, “there exists an institutional continuity in the area of sports between the Republican period (1912-1949), and the Communist period” (Kolatch, p. xii), one that includes the physical educational curriculum, National Athletic Meets (which were held from 1910-1948 under the GMD), and an emphasis on military sports (Kolatch, p. xii-xiii). Under the Communists, mass calisthenics, like that in the National Games, now “enact[ed] the socialist principles of discipline and collective spirits” (Brownell, p. 60) rather than the GMD’s moral and modernizing agenda. As H. Yuan Tien notes in his study of China’s physical culture, “the structure and organization of P.E. classes in China have apparently been 20 worked out with due consideration to both instructional goals and group discipline” (p. 400). In the Communist period, a new sports ideology was formed. This ideology was in the first instance anti-imperialist and pro-nation building. It began with the early Socialist movement in the 1920s when an “impulse to nationalize tiyu” (Morris, p. 84) included not only leftists, but also the Chinese Educational Reform Society P.E. and Hygiene Division and primarily schools, through which this new national agenda was disseminated (ibid.). To the CCP, the children who received this new agenda would one day become adults and therefore “[were] the fresh forces that will build [China] into a great powerful modern socialist nation” (from Xin Tiyu, in Tien, p. 398). Utilizing mass communication, the CCP dispersed several publications on sport (handled by The People’s Sports Publishing House or Renmin Tiyu Chubanshe) including “numerous guidebooks, pamphlets, instructional posters, novels and illustrated books for children pertaining to physical culture” (Riordan, p. 113). By the 1950s, Mao, perhaps due to a fear that competition would revive an individual separate from the state, instituted a new doctrine of fair competition. In sporting propaganda, the “fraternal ethos” of “friendship first, competition second” (Allison, p. 25) was promoted to illustrate the true socialist ideology of the CCP (and Chinese citizens). Real struggle was restricted to only that between classes; between comrades in sport there was to be no such hostility. This climate served to strengthen a sense of nationalism in that it enhanced camaraderie and community. Yet, like much of the Communist ideology gone 21 haywire during the 1960s and 70s, it would not survive. Though it was used in the initial diplomatic attempts of the early 1970s (the “ping pong diplomacy” period— see Fan and Xiong in Mangan, p. 335), both the radicals of the Cultural Revolution and the utilitarian capitalists of the Deng era felt the amicability a farce. Furthermore, the chaos and upheaval of the Cultural Revolution saw the closure of several sporting schools, the disbanding of national sports teams, and even the imprisonment of the Sports Minister, He Long (he died in prison in 1975) (ibid., p. 333). 9 These upheavals also directly affected baseball’s success in China at the time, as will be seen in the chapter that follows. Although the diplomatic utility of sport towards the end of the Cultural Revolution, as explained by the Sports Ministry in 1972, claimed to “use competition to project our socialist country’s new image, and to make and win friends in the world” (ibid., p. 336), as China turned to capitalism and a market economy in the Deng era “the primacy of ideology [was] gradually replaced by an interest in sport in the Western sense of the term” (Hoberman, p. 227). Therefore, by the late 1970s, the CCP leadership incorporated Western sports into a culture they felt ready for the infusion. As such, the Communists were working off a structure that opposed imperialism in general (both domestically and abroad) and they were therefore less burdened with the need to use Western sports in order to “break with the traditions of [China’s] imperial past” (Brownell, p. 62). 9 Interestingly enough, however, some “ersatz ‘sport’” (Hoberman, p. 226) remained during the Cultural Revolution: speed contests of quotations of Chairman Mao were held that also incorporated body movements were routinely held (ibid.). 22 Instead, they could face Western sports head on. As Fan and Xiong address in Sport in Asian Society, “sport has enabled the Chinese Communists both to oppose Western imperialists and to make approaches to the same Western imperialists through a medium that benefited from its apolitical image” (p. 338)—though the latter was more thoroughly instituted later (in the 1970s to the present). Baseball also benefited from this new emphasis, when the “post-Cultural Revolution Chinese leadership wanted… to use baseball much the same way they used other sports to promote friendship and gain credence and acceptance from other countries” (Reeves, p. 46). It is in this precise context that baseball, a sport that under the CCP’s tight reign in the 1950s and 60s was all but banned, is experiencing something of a revival. How is this so? It could be proposed that in post-Deng China, a renewed interest in baseball is not all that strange. A globalized citizenry (see Link (et al.), p. 3) and a more open market economy has allowed for the liberalization of not only goods, but also ideas—and even sport. Equally important is the CCP’s support for the professional league and China’s own national team, signs perhaps that the sport is here to stay? 23 Chapter 4: The History of Baseball in China Contrary to popular belief, baseball first arrived in Asia in Mainland China. As on the rest of the continent, it is likely that missionaries brought baseball to the Mainland; it is in the records of medical missionary Henry William Boone that the presence of baseball in Shanghai in the 1860s first appeared (Reaves, p.29). In 1863, the Shanghai Baseball Club was formed and marked the way for baseball’s first residence in Chinese culture, albeit a brief one (ibid., p. xv). Baseball’s presence was further strengthened by China’s then “growing willingness to accept Western ideas as part of a new ‘self-strengthening movement,’ which came in the wake of another humiliating defeat for the Chinese in the Arrow War (1856-60)” (Reaves, p. 28). 10 The Chinese Educational Mission of 1872-81, which sent 120 handpicked students to the U.S. in groups of thirty per year for four years with the intent of studying Western science, engineering and military (and thus strengthening these areas at home), further exposed Chinese nationals to Western values and this then new American sport (Reaves, p. 20). Each group dispatched enjoyed a large amount of cultural assimilation, many of which took to wearing “American-style” clothing as well as playing baseball. The Chicago Daily Tribune also reported in 1876 that some members of the group had started their own team, the “Oriental Base-Ball Club” 10 This self-strengthening philosophy was branded by Feng Guifen, a scholar-official in frequent contact with Shanghai’s many foreigners. As Reeves writes, “[Feng Guifen] urged others in his country to adopt the ‘barbarians’ superior techniques to control the barbarians’—a philosophy that indirectly led to the Chinese Educational Mission of 1872-81, the influx of missionaries to China, the spread of Western-style schools, and the arrival of baseball” (p. 28). 24 (Reaves, p. 23). As news of these activities filtered back to China, the ruling Qing government grew increasingly fearful of this consummate acceptance of Western culture (and its potential ramifications for Qing rule). In the spring of 1881 the government cancelled the program (Reaves, p.22). Though there was mixed reception to Western ideals and sport in China during the late 1880s, baseball thrived in a few urban locales (especially Shanghai and in Western-oriented schools such as St. John’s University of Shanghai) and enjoyed a brief tenure with several teams competing regionally. In June 1905, the St. John’s University team in Shanghai defeated the Shanghai YMCA in what is considered the first baseball game between two Chinese teams on the mainland (Reaves, p. 37); during roughly that same time, one soon-to-be-influential student, Sun Yat-sen, was considering the political usage of the sport. Sun first learned of baseball when studying in Hawaii in the 1880s. Years later, his “revolutionary party, the Tongmenghui (United League)… on the eve of the 1911 Republican Revolution in China…formed a baseball club in Changsha” (Reeves, p. 38). The team was basically a “cover for [his] anti-imperialist revolutionary activities” (ibid.); the club claimed that the sport was used for military training, specifically because of the similarities between pitching a ball and throwing a hand grenade. 11 Viewing baseball for the same purposes, “the National Education Conference held in Tianjin in 1915 called for instituting military citizenship 11 Reeves notes that such claims appear frequently in Chinese history books, but expresses that it is difficult to say with accuracy whether the notion is fact or folklore. Yet, regardless of Sun’s intent, the fact that the team was formed and promoted within military circles is, in my opinion, important enough to mention. 25 education in China’s schools but conceded that the martial spirit could also be developed not only by fencing, judo, and boxing but also by baseball and swimming” (Morris, p 38). In the early 1900s, with Sun’s new “military” assimilation of baseball, along with the presence of missionaries, educational reforms, a growing Japanese influence and a strengthened emphasis on physical sport, baseball in China enjoyed its heyday. Baseball leagues operated in six Chinese provinces and in 1914 baseball competition was added to the National Sports Games in Beijing (Reaves, p. 42). Some clubs were even influential in fighting against the Qing during the Republican revolution at the turn of the century; Changsha’s Baseball Association is reported as participating in a local uprising against the Qing (Renmin tiyu chubanshe 1985: 73-74, as quoted in Brownell, p. 71). Shanghai, with its successful Shanghai Pandas team, was still a hotbed for the sport, and the city once again became the focus of baseball enthusiasts in 1934 when Babe Ruth and a team of U.S. All-Stars stopped in Shanghai after their final prewar tour of Japan (Reaves, p. 42). There are several interesting historical references to the sport from this time of baseball popularity. Morris, in his work on sport in Republican China, cites a 1920s baseball game in Beijing in which some twenty Chinese and foreign teachers at Yenching University (later Peking University) impersonated the opposite sex while playing ball (Morris, p. 60). In Morris’ analysis, the example of this “amazing transvestite baseball game” underscores the fact that Chinese tiyu (“sport”) in the 1920s was 26 more than a domain of acquiescence to hegemonic Western formulas of modernity. I understand it as a zone where all were finally free to engage with, and even become, their Others as a way to escape confining imperialist and nationalist narratives. (ibid.) Maurice Allen, an American viewing a baseball game (of American crews from passing naval ships) in Shanghai, China in 1911 had similar observations about China’s new use of foreign sport: With all her reverence for past tradition and her apathy toward the genius of modern invention, however, the Chinese nation has shown a tremendous capacity for imitating the customs of her newer sisters in the West and incorporating their systems among her own… Baseball is the national game of Japan and some day it may be of China also, who knows? (Allen, in Baseball Magazine 1911: p. 57) Yet despite these instances, the true viability of this particular Western sport was stymied, especially with the Communist project of sport culture that further buried the sport into decades of disappearance. Although it has been recorded that Communist revolutionaries played baseball throughout the 1930s and 40s 12 and even in 1959, ball teams from 30 cities and provinces competed for a national championship (French, “Beijing Journal; China Warms Up and Practices for a Future in Baseball”), baseball all but disappeared during the 1960s. The reasons for this disappearance are numerous. For one, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution granted some of the biggest blows to the sport’s position in Chinese society. In one example of the struggle between baseball and the CCP-mandated revolution, Du Kehe, a former player for the Fighting Sports Brigade, a militarily-organized baseball team started 12 Reaves notes that several photographs have been preserved in which People’s Liberation Army members are playing the game. 27 by Marshal He, is quoted as saying he witnessed several of his coaches “struggled” to death by Red Guards (Reaves, p.45). Marshal He himself died in a country camp during the purge (ibid.)—in itself the death was a blow to the sport as He was one of the most active promoters of the sport in China (ibid., p. 39). Xie Chaoquan, deputy secretary of the Chinese Baseball and Softball Federation in the late 1970s and early 1980s, has further blamed the disappearance on “the economic problems caused by the disastrous Great Leap Forward” (Reeves, p. 45). Surely, baseball was not on the mind of those suffering from the deadly famine that Mao’s policies caused at the time. Communist propaganda also stifled any hope for the sport’s continuance; a People’s Daily article from 1957 on the monopolization of baseball in the U.S. notes that although baseball was originally a drill-based sport that promoted bravery and teamwork, in the U.S. it has turned purely capitalistic. The article even purports that “in the eyes of the managers of American professional baseball teams, the players are merely ‘milk cows’ (yaoqianshu) for profit” (Le Shan, “The Capitalist Monopolization of Professional Baseball” (Longduan Ziben Kongzhi Xiade ‘Bangqiuye’)). It was not until the mid-1970s when the nation had been somewhat revived after the devastating effects of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution and was entering the post-Mao era, that baseball could be reborn. As baseball’s history in China shows, baseball was widely judged as a foreign sport—played by students returning from abroad such as those of the Chinese Educational Mission of 28 1872-81 and even Sun Yat-sen himself. Yet as “anti-Western feelings dampened” (Reeves, p. 45), baseball was reinstated, though it had “skipped a generation” as the ethnographic research of Chapter 5 further illuminates. Though not mentioned in academic work on the history of the sport, it is likely that without governmental support (which viewed it as an imperialist/Western invention) during the Mao era, baseball, could not survive. Without this support, a poor economic environment (thereby affecting the affordability of baseball’s expensive equipment) and relative difficulty in finding well-designed space necessary to play dampened baseball’s ability to withstand the effects of the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution in China. This may also be why other Western sports in China—especially those that require less in space and equipment such as basketball and soccer—survived this period. Furthermore, baseball had not served the purposes of the Chinese leadership in the 1960s and early 1970s, but as new leadership of the late 1970s and early 1980s increasingly looked to gain acceptance on an international level, the sport, like that of ping-pong, took on an increasingly diplomatic role: “in 1988, after years of slowly cultivating baseball, the People’s Republic of China hosted its first official international baseball tournament, the Beijing International, for boys eleven and twelve years old” (Reaves, p. 46). The new baseball would be imbued with a Communist twist, however: A particularly propagandized book put out by the official government printing house in 1978 waxed eloquently about the political correctness of baseball. Baseball, the book declared, could help “build the [Communist] 29 party” by promoting the “diligent study of Marxism, Leninism, and Mao Zedong Thought.” (Bangqiu, as quoted in Reeves, p. 46) Such propaganda is not present in current publications on the sport in China, 13 but that is not to say that the diplomatic utility of the sport is not lost on CCP leadership. By the late 1990s, baseball exchanges became frequent including the “‘first-ever’ tour by Japanese professional players to China in the fall of 1996” (ibid., p. 47). Moreover, the establishment of China’s professional baseball league (the CBL) along with the government’s establishment of a department to oversee baseball’s promotion in Chinese education and society (led by Shen Wei, see Chapter 5) point to an ever-present role of the CCP in baseball in China. The following ethnographic interview material will substantiate the history told in the previous pages. It will also emphasize the potential for baseball’s development in China as well as some problems it will likely face along the way. 13 Based on my recent ethnographic research. 30 Chapter 5: Interviews Purpose and Methodology The ethnographic interviews that follow were conducted over a month-long period in the summer of 2005 in Beijing, China. The interviews in the “administrative” section are with individuals that I deemed to be influential administrative leaders in baseball in China; I received their contact information from Howard French, a staff writer for the New York Times who has written several articles on the sport’s recent emergence. The players, coaches and fans were sought out during my research time spent in China. With several of these individuals, I had the chance to meet them several times in various locales including at baseball practices and professional team games. 14 The ethnographic case studies that follow were written with the intent of allowing the individuals involved in baseball in China the chance to tell the story of the sport in their own words. Where appropriate I have included analysis. I understand that much of the material will seem redundant or repetitive to the reader, however, I have maintained any repetitions in content to reinforce the importance of several issues here including: the problems baseball’s promotion faces in China (including a lack of fields and equipment and a “lost generation”); the reasons why it 14 Follow-ups were conducted via email. All interviews and interviewee names have been approved for use by interviewees and complete transcripts (translated into English by the author) can be found in this paper’s Appendix. 31 is being promoted and played (such as national prestige and to beat Japan); and the hope each individual has for the sport. Administrators Shen Wei Shen Wei is the sort of woman who, upon entering a crowded room, demands attention and respect. Her short, cropped hair rims a stern middle-aged face that shows little sign of aging. We meet in her office at the Ministry of Sport, where she spends her days as secretary general for baseball in China, overseeing everything from the Chinese Baseball League (CBL) to the 2008 Olympics baseball stadium construction to answering calls from 8-year-old boys about where they can find a summer baseball team in Beijing. She has never had much personal interest in baseball; in college she majored in Japanese and played softball with friends, but never seriously. Rather, it was a bureaucratic appointment that placed her in this position—in 1997, her superiors in the Ministry of Sport named her the secretary general of the sport with which she had “no prior experience.” She has been there ever since. From the outset of the interview, it is obvious that Shen takes her job and the future of baseball in China very seriously. She quickly notes the accomplishments she has been instrumental in instituting: In these 8 years…our baseball team in Asia has beaten Korea and received a bronze medal. So in these few years, the progress made in baseball has been very obvious. Also, I believe that in the 2008 Olympics in men’s ball-based team sports, baseball will receive the top place. 32 She is also explicit in regards to how baseball will continue progressing— eventually achieving the sporting success of neighboring “Japan, Korea and China- Taiwan.” Integral to this progress are several key efforts. First and foremost is the “popularizing expansionism” (puji tuiguang) of the sport–it is essential that more of China’s massive population is exposed to the sport itself and taught the rules of the game. Second, China’s national team must be recognized as a top leader in the sport in international competition. Finally, youth programs are useful for reaching children at an early age and turning them to baseball rather than other typically chosen sports in China, like basketball and soccer. To achieve these goals, her department has implemented several partnerships and programs. For popularizing expansionism, China’s national and local television stations now broadcast many of the CBL games throughout the league’s season, though this is not always the best method as it alienates the working class and other citizens who may not own a television. As she notes, There’s one thing very different between Chinese and U.S. baseball—white- collar people watch and understand baseball, but lower classes don’t know anything about it. Because our television stations have the ability to track ratings that read the audience, we noticed that it was mostly white-collar people watching. Also, this may be because baseball is a very complicated game. The rules are very complicated. You need a television to watch it. We need to broadcast it on television more often so that people start to understand the rules. Most people see it and don’t understand it, so they think it’s really boring. Also the games are really long and played fairly slowly. But more and more people are accepting it — once they understand the rules, they like to watch/play. There are a lot of fans and they’re totally crazy about the game. 33 With more constant baseball broadcasts, as well as an internet site for the league that explains the sport’s rules and allows for discussions and essay postings, Shen Wei hopes that more and more of China’s citizens will become baseball fans. The media also requires education on the sport as they are the first to provide the public with information; as a result, the Ministry has worked to attract reporters to covering games by sponsoring a media club baseball team (here Shen notes that this was primarily conducted with help from Tom McCarthy and his marketing firm). Ms. Shen is also working to expand baseball’s presence throughout China: in 2005, a 6 th team was added to the league in Sichuan, a city without the long history of baseball of that of it’s competitors Beijing and Shanghai 15 —an obviously premeditated step to expand the sport away from China’s more globalized Eastern seaboard. To improve the quality of the national team and China’s top players, in 2002 the Ministry of Sport and the CBL signed a co-operation agreement with Major League Baseball in the U.S. wherein the U.S. league “not only provides technical guidance but also provides part of the funding.” This is, as Shen Wei reinforces, an important step in providing baseball in China a useful link to the world’s best baseball league. The Los Angeles Dodgers in particular have provided much support, especially from ex-Dodgers owner Peter O’Malley (who owned the team from 1970- 1998). 15 A CBL team booklet notes that Sichuan’s baseball history is 33 years in existence with the first team established there in 1972. 34 In regards to the importance of educating youth (and particularly their parents) on the potential benefits of playing the game, Shen Wei and her department, along with assistance from Dynasty Sports Marketing (the league’s marketing outfit led by Tom McCarthy and Jack Sakazaki), have sent professional league players to local elementary schools to teach children about baseball. The end goal is that “the kids will be interested in baseball and bring it back home and then when they attend middle school, high school and college, they will want to play and bring it to their schools, increasing the interest of their parents in the sport.” Keen of the marketing capability of China’s “little emperors and empresses,” Ms. Shen notes that if children like it, their parents will follow (likely purchasing the equipment for them and searching out leagues and school teams). Furthermore, Shen Wei believes that for children playing baseball can only have positive effects—there are no bad ramifications. Because a lot of kids who have played baseball (because baseball is a game of knowledge) have seen that their grades improve after playing. You also have to be brave to play and you have to know how to “zuo ren” (lit. “make a person”)– how to include moral standards in your play and become a good person (like EQ, or emotional quotient). It’s a really good sport as far as moral education is concerned. Yet even with governmental support and a partnership with the MLB, baseball in China lacks several key proponents. Shen illuminates several of these problems with the expansion of the sport, including: a lack of suitable land for a field the size required to play baseball; the expensiveness (and inaccessibility) of the equipment; parents who would rather see their children study hard than play an unknown game; 35 and a professional league much below the level of its internationally competitive neighbors (read: Japan). Still, despite all this, Shen, like every other interviewee in this study, remains hopeful about baseball’s potential in the Middle Kingdom: No matter what kind of thing you are doing, it is important that you dare to think about the success of it. If you don’t, you will never make anything happen. We have accomplished many things that people thought we could never do. I myself have always been a person who dared to think and dared to do—and as a result our baseball league has succeeded in some championships and the population of baseball players all over China has increased. Tom McCarthy Tom McCarthy is a towering man—his history as a college basketball player and coach is not surprising to anyone who meets him. His relationship with baseball, and particularly baseball in China, is a bit more circuitous, however. After working for a running shoes company as vice-president of international sourcing (and spending a lot of time traveling between Boston and Asia), he moved to Hong Kong, where he has lived since 1991. There, with a great interest in sports (he notes: “I’m a sportsman that does business… not a businessman that does sports”), he founded Positive Image Limited, which in 1995 began a partnership with World Sport Group. The companies then owned the rights to Asian football (“soccer” to American fans). After seven years, with a growing interest in the market in Mainland China, McCarthy suggested to World Sport Group’s chairman that they work on developing baseball. He agreed. Yet after McCarthy pursued contacts with China’s then fledgling Chinese Baseball Association (CBA), he received a call from the Hong 36 Kong board telling him they were no longer interested. McCarthy had already “invested a lot of face” in the project (something he notes is particularly important in China). As he notes, …I said to myself, it’s time to ‘piss or get off the pot.’ I told them [the World Sports Group board], ‘well then I resign’ and I’ll do this on my own. Of course, I’m not financially that well off. So the first year we did a really small league in 2002. We signed the deal in March 2002. All negotiations in October 2001. In 2002, we launched the first one month league. We had made the commitment to the CBA that if the one month went well I had already talked to a bunch of people I had done business with, one in particular in Japan – he had been involved with the MLB for 20 years before they set up their league office there. So he said, I’m willing to support this if you can get this off the ground. He’s strong in the sponsorship area. Big TV deals. He’s like the grandfather of sports marketing. First guy to do it. Jack Sakazaki. So we got it off the ground and it was fairly successful. McCarthy and Sakazaki then formed Dynasty Sports Marketing (DSM), the group that, upon my meeting McCarthy, was responsible for the marketing of the Chinese Baseball League (ultimately run by the Chinese Baseball Association (CBA) and Shen Wei’s department in the Chinese Ministry of Sport). DSM signed a six- year contract in September 2002 “to acquire the exclusive commercial rights for the National team and the CBL and the National Jr. Championships.” Like Shen Wei’s mission in the Ministry of Sport, Tom McCarthy and his partners had specific goals in mind in expanding baseball’s presence in China. For one, they modeled the CBL season after that of other successful leagues (like the MLB in the U.S. and even China’s Basketball Association (CBA)) with a regular season, an all-star game at the midway point, and play-off finals. McCarthy also knows that the success of baseball in China is contingent upon the celebrity of CBL players—he points to Michael Jordan and Yao Ming and their aggrandizing ability in 37 respect to basketball’s popularity. The players could then become part of the whole marketing scheme: “ultimately,” says McCarthy, “we need to develop a strong team in the local market that people will support, strong personalities from a national standpoint that people will go and relate to that person and say ‘well that’s baseball’ and further ultimately, if the market dictates and the sport grows, then the commercial aspect comes in and corporations are looking for that particular player to be a face on their product.” In order to realize this potential, Dynasty Sports Marketing has initiated several programs. The first, “Swing for the Wall,” sends local CBL players to area elementary schools to teach them the fundamentals of baseball. The players also know the importance of marketing the sport, as McCarthy elaborates: [The players] are very, very accessible and many of the guys are in the 24 to 27 age range. For a long time, they were an ignored sports group by the general public unless they were relatives. No place for them to play. Of major Olympic international sports with professional leagues around the world, baseball did not have a home in China. They had teams that practiced 360 days of the year, played once every two months against somebody and in national competitions once every 4 years. CBA ran some loose championships. Other than that, nowhere to play. So the players and coaches and administrators from which teams come from at the local level, are very, very appreciative that they have their own home now and proud of that. So they’ve gone overboard to make themselves accessible when they’re asked to come out. We’re the only league in China with a Youth Development Program specifically associated and attached to the league. The league must be a good member of the community. You’ve got to be a good citizen and you can’t expect support from the fans if you don’t give the fans something back. And giving back to the kids is one of the best ways. Along with the “Swing for the Wall” campaign, DSM, together with the Chinese Baseball Association, sponsors a national baseball poster and essay contest open to schools in cities that have CBL teams. The winning posters and essays are 38 posted on the website—McCarthy notes that the posters were so good that “our ad agency [for the CBL] thought these young kids designs were better than his own people’s. It forced him to do an art poster as opposed to a photo for our poster this year.” The MLB also plays a part in baseball’s expansion in China. In early 2004, the CBL signed a contract with their U.S. counterpart that stipulated that the U.S. would provide coaches for the Chinese national baseball team and also provide training facilities for them in the U.S. As a result, Jim LeFebvre (an ex-Dodger) and Bruce Hurst were signed as coaches and training would be organized along with the Seattle Mariners for one month in Arizona. The training seemed to be having a positive effect, says McCarthy: After that first year of training, we played in Sapporo Japan in 2003, and although we finished fourth, we separated ourselves from the second level. China is strange in the Asian baseball community (you know, Taiwan, Japan, Korea at the top, Philippines and Indonesia, etc. at the bottom). China floats in middle. We were 0 for 3 in the first level, but against Chinese Taipei we lost 3-1 (and Taipei went to the Olympics). That opened our eyes that training was working. The CBL we had a positive effect that these guys were playing now for three months. Good things were on the horizon. So that training part was very important. Also important were other partnerships in the works. The DSM and CBL then established a “partner team program” between Chinese and corresponding Japanese teams, wherein the two “exchange coaches, teaching techniques and management and have discussed possibly players in the future.” McCarthy likens the exchanges to the “ping-pong diplomacy” between the U.S. and China in 1971. 39 Yet, baseball, McCarthy notes, still has a long way to go. The sport’s history in China is its first stumbling block: though in Asia baseball was first played in China, the Cultural Revolution and China’s blockade of foreign sport from 1949 until the late 1970s was particularly damaging to a sport that, in McCarthy’s eyes “is passed down through generations.” In China, baseball “lost a generation” so now McCarthy says that it is the parent’s generation that doesn’t understand. Grandparents and kids understand, but without parental support, it is quite difficult to pass the tradition down. So, we need to seek demand from the children. In China it is quite well-known in marketing that ‘if you want the parents, you’ve got to get the kids.’ Furthermore, the expansion of the league itself is integral in attracting the hearts and minds of new baseball players. “There are areas in Guangzhou and Xiamen where there are facilities, kids playing baseball, but at this point, not enough good players to dictate a team,” says McCarthy. It is now in these areas that the nascent league is focusing new efforts (with hopes in expanding the league there). At the same time, there are many others with a stake in baseball’s success in China, including sponsors like Mizuno, Canon, Santory, and Northwest Airlines. The games are also broadcast on local and national television—but without the regular schedule or live broadcasts typically required to secure a substantial audience. McCarthy is pleased at some successes, upset at parallel failures: Now we have more television than any growing league in the world. Out of 90 games, 30 of our games are shown on TV. Regular season. All star games on TV. And finals. So potentially 35 games. A heck of a percentage for a fledgling league in a developing country. So you know, when we were in Tianjin over the weekend, the director of the station was at the game. He said “your ratings are equal to the NBA in Tianjin.” You’ve got 10 million a shot! 40 Now if I’m Hitachi, and I can touch 10 million people—well that’s worth what they’re putting the money in. But that doesn’t happen everyday. Shanghai is a bigger market, more TV stations, we’d be happy if 1 million watched a game. It also has to do with the time of the game. We’re in a very, very competitive sports TV market. In the U.S., you know, you can turn on NBC or Fox, and the MLB is on at 2pm on Saturday and Sunday. ESPN at 8pm on Sunday night. National baseball game. A local guy can watch his local team on UPN or Channel 38, will be on at 7pm at night. Our game 5 finals on Tuesday, if there is a game, is live at 9am in the morning. Who the hell is watching at 9am on a Tuesday? I will never say that to the sponsors. But… As usual, the market demands are crucial. McCarthy notes that basketball’s spread in Asia was easier: “all you need is a pair of underwear and a ball, that’s it,” he says. For baseball, the requirements are much greater. You “need two people” (at least a catcher and pitcher), “a much bigger piece of real estate” (in Asia, a hot commodity), and equipment. Mizuno intends to address the last need, McCarthy says, with a business plan to establish 1400 stores in China before the 2008 Olympics. The league (and with it baseball’s potential popularity) is also relying upon the 2008 Olympics and Beijing’s bid to compete (as host) as its rallying cry. “This is the story we continue to try to tell along the way,” says McCarthy. Yet, on the day of our meeting, the International Olympic Committee is voting on whether or not to keep baseball in the 2012 Olympics to be held in London. On this, McCarthy waxes somewhat philosophical: Well for baseball, a big thing will occur this afternoon in Singapore. They’ll vote whether to keep baseball in 2012. For me, in the short term, we’re protected because by 2012 I intend to be emotionally involved, but I don’t intend to be running around chasing baseballs in the outfield. It will be turned over to somebody else. But we want it to continue. The true test of any league or anything that you get involved with in your life, is can it be run when you 41 get pulled out of it? You can be the driving force (and I mean our partners), but if we move away for whatever reason, we’ll be judged if that league continues to go and grow, but not today. Today is a short-term judgment. I mean it sounds good and feels nice when somebody comes up and says you’re doing a great job, but the fact is, we’re doing a great job when we go away and you can sit back and watch it. So that’s really where we are with that. So if they vote it out—again I get back to Olympic sports vs. non- Olympic sports, if you’re a developing sport and you’re in the Olympics, well you’ve always got a story to tell. If you’re a developing sport and you’re not in the Olympics, you may have a story to tell, but there are no ears to listen. So this vote this afternoon, we’re all looking at it more for the next generation. We’re hoping that the MLB and CBA have done their part. It may be that the only time China plays in the Olympics is under our watch. But will it matter? Although after our interview the IOC announces that baseball will not be included in the 2012 games, McCarthy’s optimism may mean there is hope still for baseball in China. As he points out: Baseball is a proven sport in terms of Asians being able to compete internationally. Look no further than Ichiro, Matsui, Chen Ho Park and now this kid Wang with the New York Yankees. It’s only a question of time before there’ll be a Sun Ming Feng or a Wang Wei or one of those players in the Major Leagues. Now a question of time is all relative. Will it be next year? No. Will it be 5 years? Possibly. Will it be 10 years? Absolutely. I have no doubt within ten years. That’s a long way away for me to be sitting here talking about it. I’m sure I’ll be able to see it and I’ll be at the game. But it’s a long way when you’re trying to make a dollar. For McCarthy himself, however, there is more at stake than just the success of the league. His work in expanding the league, setting up baseball outreach programs and even assisting on the design of the Beijing Olympic baseball stadium (which will, as he notes, include a “Great Wall” akin to Fenway Park’s “Green Monster,” terracotta soldier pillars at the gates, and VIP rooms like teahouses) are about setting the wheels of a great project into motion—and yet again, the tradition of passing down through generations is part of the plan: 42 In China, I want to leave a legacy. A lot of what we’ve done here, we’ve done for free... We created a “business for sports” lecture. I also write for the China Daily and China Sports Daily. I wouldn’t take away any of these experiences. I want to show my son that sits in on some of these meetings (he’s 22 and at college in Vermont) what this is all about. Because he was not with me during most of this, there is a hole that we can’t replace. But hopefully I can turn over a lot of this stuff to him. It was surely a steep trade off. I’ve had so many rich experiences, but I fear I may have lost more than I’ve gained. I’m hoping for a comeback. In the cases of both administrators, one Chinese, the other American, both were optimistic that baseball could succeed in China. They saw similar pitfalls (such as a lack of fields and poorly broadcast games), but felt that these could be overcome, particularly if youth were targeted and marketed to. This is an optimism that will be reflected in the interviews with the players, coaches and fans of baseball in China as well. Coaches The baseball coaches in China are the true educators and promoters of the sport. As the interview material attests, these are individuals who have already spent a good part of their lives playing the game who now hope to instill their love and knowledge in a growing base of fans and players. One of the most well-known coaches in China is Li Bing, coach of the CBL’s most successful team, the Beijing Tigers. He is a busy man; he can only find time to meet me on the site (right near the pitcher’s mound) of the Tigers win of China’s national championship on a field in southern Beijing. They have just swept the Tianjin team in a 4-0 series. The success is due in no small part to his attentive coaching. Li has been playing baseball since 1986, when he was the “tallest of the 43 kids” (he still towers above many of the professional players). He played at Beijing’s Tiantan University, mostly as a pitcher. Like the other coaches interviewed, he was quick to note baseball’s uniqueness among other sports—a possibility for its success in China. It is the sort of sport, he says, that “cultivates someone’s true potential” (pei yang ren de hao li) and also involves an “all-around capability” (hen zong he) despite the position played. Tao Lei, coach for the Beijing Normal University (Beishida) baseball team, seems to agree with these assessments. There is a sense of union, he says, when on the field with a baseball team. Despite the individual talents and abilities of players, the team is often elevated above this—a player can often “be infected by the excitement of the whole team on the field.” Zhang Jian Xiong, coach for the Qinghua University baseball team (arguably one of the best in the city and with a relatively substantial history) is perhaps the most pragmatic of the bunch—he dares not become emotional about a sport that he sees not as “tender” but as that which “really requires strength.” His childhood in Taiwan fostered his love for the game and likely exposed him to the potential baseball has in Asian society (he also spent a year and a half playing for the Taiwanese professional league after college). In 2001 he was invited by China’s Minister of Sport to coach the Qinghua team. He takes his job seriously, but is also a sportsman—when I meet him in a coffee shop for the interview, he is wearing the Qinghua (or Tsinghua) team baseball cap, adorned with a big “T” in the center. His practicality is obvious at the outset; he outlines a specific set of requirements in order 44 for baseball to succeed in Mainland China. Much like the administrators overseeing the expansion of the sport, Zhang notes that The first thing is the senior government and the extent to which they focus on and emphasize the sport. Second is the extent of the popularity of the sport. We need more people to play. Third, we need to improve the levels of the players, which will in turn improve the selective capability of the teams. Finally, we need to improve the level of the coaches. This will not be an easy task—like all the others involved in baseball in the mainland, Zhang laments that to truly enjoy the sport is to endure “bitterness” (“xingku”). The coaches point to a number of problems they encounter, including a lack of good playing fields, expensive and inaccessible equipment, players that don’t understand the cultural aspects of the game, explaining to new players the complicated rules of the game, and a lack of funding. On the first point, Coach Tao Lei and his players are a prime example of a team without a home. We meet during one of his team’s more informal practices—it takes place on the Beijing Normal University track. His catcher squats in the corner of the track near a chain-link fence; his pitcher is some unmarked distance in front of him, standing on flat ground just before the track meets a soccer field. The team is using equipment brought to them by Japanese friends and teammates (several of the team’s players are Japanese students). Tao Lei laughs at the roundabout route the equipment has made: It’s a very strange phenomenon; the equipment makes a huge circle. It starts off being produced in China, then goes abroad, then comes back here. I suppose you could go to the factory to get the equipment, but you’d have to know how to do that. 45 The Chinese players are also less educated on the particular culture of sport—Coach Zhang of Qinghua notes his frustration at some players who, despite being well-coached and receptive on the field, fail to remove their hats when the Chinese national anthem is played at the start of every game. To Zhang, such an act is “disrespectful;” to the Chinese players it is simply not in one’s code of ethics. Yet overall the players are primed to learn and also have powerful physiques. Zhang notes that those players from Inner Mongolia and Northeastern China have the strength to become great players, going as far to say “the strength of the players in China is better than in Japan and Taiwan.” Mostly, it is again a lack of funding that prevents real progress. The Qinghua University students often have to use their own money (upwards of 2000 yuan per tournament) for some of the travel and incidental costs incurred when attending competitions. As will later be made evident in the interviews with fans and players, those interested in expanding the sport from a grassroots level often find themselves battling with school administrators and local officials with no knowledge of the game and therefore no interest in helping. Still, the coaches are optimistic that with improvement within their own lot as well as expansion efforts by all levels, the sport has a chance to succeed. Tao says that he has brought many friends to watch the sport. Although originally they have little interest, once “you teach them how to play, they usually really like the sport.” CBL coach Li agrees: “we need more people to understand the sport first” he says simply. And true to form, Zhang has a plan: 46 I think the kids from the sports schools in China need to study more baseball. They learn the sport really quickly. In ten years, I think Chinese baseball will pass Japan and Taiwan. It helps that the population here is so big. But they need better coaching. The level of play here is pretty slow. Once baseball is more established in elementary schools, it will really improve the level of baseball in the entire nation. Coach Shen Jie, a former player turned coach (he now coaches the Li Gong Elementary School baseball team) is a perfect example of someone working at the forefront of this connection to youth. He has worked as coach of the team for over four years and in many ways echoes the reasons most young players join the sport. Li Gong is one of the oldest elementary schools to offer a consistent baseball program in China; it started its team in 1980. Shen himself played there, starting for no real reason—as he notes “I didn’t have any thoughts about it” (“wo mei you xiang fa”). He had a teacher that taught him the basics of the game and he recalls liking that it used your mind. He is less enthusiastic though, about baseball’s future in China, predicting it will take at least 50 years to reach the levels of the U.S. and Japan. His reasons have to do much with his experience as a coach at Li Gong and will be expanded upon in the following section. Players The players interviewed in this study range from elementary school-aged children to college-aged to professional. What is noticeable throughout is the difference in emphasis: for the younger players, baseball is simply a “fun game;” for 47 college-aged players, they have a reason why they enjoy baseball over other sports; for professionals, it is a career, a livelihood. It is a hot, summer day in Beijing when I meet the children on the Li Gong Elementary School baseball team at their morning practice. 16 They start with fielding practice, if it can be called that—their field is a narrow strip of dirt in the school playground with a fence at one end, wall to the side, and soccer goal at the end. Their equipment is rudimentary—all have gloves (some owned, some loaned) but their shoes are either sneakers or soccer cleats, none have formal baseball cleats. When I ask them why they play baseball, they look at me quizzically—first and foremost, because I am a foreigner standing on the sidelines watching their practice and second because the answer is so obvious: “It’s fun!” they answer, with varying degrees of enthusiasm. They are eight to eleven years old and most did not start playing baseball until they were at least seven. For the majority of them (like their coach Shen Jie), it was just another sport offered by their school and it looked “fun.” Yet, they are at the forefront of baseball’s expansion in China, first recipients of some of baseball’s progress and its growing popularity. As a result, their participation and enjoyment of the game is crucial—as is the work they themselves do to promote the game. Some of them have converted their parents to the game; one Li Gong player tells me that now his parents really like baseball and have taken him to watch CBL games. 16 In the summers, the Li Gong team practices Monday through Friday from 8am to 11:30am. 48 As these young players grow older, however, they learn to appreciate more of what they find to be the uniqueness of the sport. College and professional players interviewed noted similar affinities toward baseball. Xu Yang, the shortest player on Qinghua University’s baseball team (and a heavy smoker) employs an interesting analogy: I think that in essence baseball is a very perfect (wan mei) sport. It’s also a very fair (gong ping) sport. In every competition, every team only has the abilities of its own players. I think baseball and going to war is the same. It’s really interesting. Every base is like a fortress. You attack each fortress and secure the fortress, so that is like a base. The illustrious Chen Zhe, captain of the CBL Beijing Tigers, had this to say about the sport in a state of post-win bliss: “the art of hitting is like a doctor conducting surgery. Swinging is like slicing something with a knife.” Pan Jianping, a shortstop for the Qinghua University team from Guizhou, enjoys the game’s “lack of a sense of time.” He also notes that although baseball players are often judged by their individual accomplishments, often when a player gets a hit, he requires the batter behind him to hit to advance him. This creates a “happy feeling for all” he says. While the players’ analogies and observances may seem overly dramatic (even romantic), they are useful in understanding the reasons behind a particular player’s interest in the game; at the same time, they point to the potential growth the sport holds in China. Older players also share the optimism of others involved in promoting the game in China. Beijing Tigers captain Chen notes that at the final game versus Tianjin, “even today the crowd here is quite large.” He feels that 49 baseball is “maturing” in China and hopes it can be “as good as the [United States] in 10 years or so.” Likewise, Xu Yang, despite problems in regards to finding equipment and a lack of playing space, remains hopeful that a blossoming of leisure time in China, coupled with expansion of corporate softball leagues will lead to baseball’s “greater influence on society”—particularly in the next ten years. Qinghua player Pan emphatically states “I definitely want to play baseball with my child.” 17 At the end of their practice, the Li Gong “boys of summer” drag their gloves, bats and balls to a shady area to rest before parents and grandparents retrieve them in time for lunch. They are not waxing philosophical about the smack of a bat before a soaring homerun or the tingle of their fingertips before sending a ball in from the outfield. Instead, they are wiping blisters of sweat from tanned foreheads and comparing scratched knees. If they are fortunate, they will grow up and enjoy every day as they did this July morning. Chen Zhe, the Beijing Tigers captain, is one such person having attained that goal: “I’m really lucky to have found something I like so much in my life,” he tells me before heading towards a ramshackle dugout and a handful of fans asking him to autograph their tickets from the day’s game. Fans In the stands and on folding chairs around the field where the national championship game between the Beijing Tigers and the Tianjin Lions is being played in Beijing, sit several hundred “fans.” The term “fan” is used loosely here as 17 It is interesting to note here that due to China’s current One Child Policy (established in 1979), Pan only speaks of having a “child” (not “children”). 50 nearly half of those in the grandstands (“grand” is also an overstatement for the roughly 5 rows of seats) are waving flags sporting the Canon company logo. It is “Canon VIP day” at the park—the day when the Beijing Tigers complete their sweep of the Tianjin Lions thereby winning the CBL championship for the fourth year in a row. Nearly half of the fans present were invited by Canon; many of them are Japanese and have an understanding of baseball, but few of them care about the outcome of the game. Nevertheless, they join in the cheers with the smattering of true Beijing Tigers fans around them, shouting “jia you” (“let’s go!”) and humming along to the Chinese national anthem played before the start of the game. Alongside the first base line sits another set of fans—the ex-college players and their friends and family (in a sense, anyone they could drag along). Several of them, including one fan named Zeng Ran, played baseball at Li Gong Elementary School—making him one of what is surely one of the largest and most enthusiastic baseball communities in China. Seated with Zeng are his father and friend; the three smoke cigarettes as they watch the game, flicking the ashes with their long pinky nails. 18 Behind this group sits Mr. Wu, the owner of a Japanese cultural exchange company in China. He has been invited by Japanese friends to attend the game. Because of some time spent in Japan, he understands baseball’s rules relatively well (“bi jiao liao jie”), but he worries that with such small crowds at the CBL’s most important game, the inadequate marketing of the sport will be its downfall in China. 18 In China, this is typically a sign that an individual does not work manual labor. 51 Still, he feels that if baseball does expand in China, it will rapidly become successful due to the nation’s immense population. Directly across from this set of Canon invitees and ex-college players along the third base line, sit more Beijing fans—most are friends and family members of the Beijing and Tianjin players. Though they are raucous throughout the game; yet still, in many ways the championship feels more like a little league or high school final game in the U.S.—the field is dusty and uncared for, the fans number only in the several hundreds, and the scoreboard is old and manually maintained. The audience at the game is in many ways representative of the current fan base of baseball in China and fall into two divided camps: the die-hards and the bystanders. The die-hards attend most, if not every, CBL game of their favorite team, work to promote the sport in some way (in clubs or as purveyors of pick-up games on local soccer fields), and/or spend most nights scouring the internet looking for baseball chat rooms in Chinese. The bystanders, on the other hand, know nothing of the sport yet happen to pass by a practice or a game slowing down to watch or are brought to a game by friends or family. These fans hold the potential for the sport in China and represent a prime market for the MLB and China’s CBL. Based on my observations made during the summer of 2005, there are little fans that fall in between. The sport does not currently have a following or history to support the occasional fan. Given the difficulties alone in playing the sport in China, it is little wonder that those that love it devote much time to following its every development. 52 The “Die-Hard” Fans: Yu Xuan, Bing’er, and Mr. Dai Yu Xuan is a young “die-hard” but also perhaps one least likely to fall into the “must convert to baseball” category over which MLB executives salivate. She is geeky with round silver-rimmed glasses, has a gawky frame, and never played sports before joining her college baseball team. Yet she is one of Chinese baseball’s most avid followers and when I started my research she was one of the first people introduced to me by a mutual friend. The student at Beijing Normal University (Beishida) only began playing baseball because she joined an old friend at a “sports education” class and first learned of the sport. After that, she inquired around school for any teams but only found players that played in a few city leagues and competitions. Using the internet, Yu Xuan also pooled interest at the school and soon found a coach (“by accident” she says—he happened to see Yu and some friends throwing a ball around on campus) that had played in Shanghai. She is now the team manager and a devoted fan of Beijing’s professional teams; she is even on a first name basis with most of the players on the Beijing Tigers. In the beginning, her university team was a hodgepodge of students from around the city. Now, with growing interest and more attentive athletes, they’ve become a more selective group: We also have some students who are studying sports come and play with us. They will surely be good because they have a lot of natural abilities at sport – they’re fast too. We used to let anyone come and attend – all that was important that you liked it. But I think if these sports students end up really liking the sport, then we will be able to improve our team very quickly. Although the team she oversees receives most of their equipment from friends studying or returning from abroad (namely Japan), recently they were allotted a 53 small amount of financial support from their school—the first step in broadening their program. As a fan, Yu Xuan has been both frustrated and excited by improvements in the game. At the outset of the CBL game broadcasts on television, she notes that many were of poor quality: To begin with, they are not adapted to this sport. They really don’t know how to tape it. There was one time I was watching a broadcast and the runner was running and the ball was hit to the outfield, but the cameraman just taped the runner and not the catch! It was so strange and we had no idea what was going on. I mean, where’d the ball go?! We wanted to see the play! Sometimes they used to just tape a butterfly or a small child watching the game. But there are very few broadcasts of baseball in China. Still, the upcoming Olympic games and China’s automatic bid to compete in baseball has livened many baseball fan’s spirits. Yu says that even if the Olympic field is torn down post-competition, many fans “think that having the Olympics coming to Beijing in 2008 has really helped to facilitate the development of baseball in China.” These fans are also a close-knit community of mostly “the families of professional players,” “college players,” and “alumni who played ball in college.” Both Bing’er and Mr. Dai fall into the category of “alumni of the game” and comprise another set of fans working to expand baseball’s presence in China. Bing and Dai are staff members at Beijing’s Baseball Club, located in the old Asian Games Village in Northern Beijing and established by private individuals in 1999. The club primarily introduces baseball into companies; Dai, one of the managers of the club, believes that “each company, especially the foreign companies, focus on corporate culture and they need sports to strengthen this and baseball meets this 54 need.” In many ways, this is modeled after the successful Japanese version of corporate baseball teams. The club also sells some equipment and compiles various baseball publications. Ms. Bing, a youthful college graduate and relatively new staff member to the Club, insists that the club’s ultimate goal is to “expand baseball in China.” Herself only a one-time college player with little experience with the sport, Bing started working at the organization simply because she “liked [baseball]!” She is one of the more emotional proponents of the sport, like some of the other players mentioned in this study, citing that: To play the game you need to fight with your intellect and courage. You’ve got a united team, you belong to the team. Baseball originally is a very beautiful (piao liang) sport. After researching more about baseball on the internet (through various web postings and essays), she found the job at the club and has been there since 2002. She feels comfortable in the working environment comprised of three-fifths vegetarians and Buddhists; and though she majored in trade and economics at Beijing’s Economic and Trade University, she enjoys her work as a promoter of sport. Her boss, Mr. Dai, has a more illustrious and historical relationship with baseball. He was one of the first students on Li Gong Elementary’s baseball team in the early 1980s. At that time, Beijing Li Gong University had a professor named Li Fenglin. He played baseball a long time ago. He really liked the game from when he was really small. When they established the team at the elementary school, he always went to attend the practice. So that was really because of him that we started. 55 He’s now 82 years old. This was all his dream because in his generation, a lot of people had played baseball. So he liked the game, but in the ten years before that, it was very “luan” (“messy”) and they couldn’t play anywhere. So he started it with these kids because it was his dream. But we were still good. We were the first team to start up after “jian guo” (“building the nation” or 1949). Dai immediately fell in love with the game—despite his parents’ best wishes. His parents, professors at Beijing’s Polytechnic University wanted him to focus on his studies, but he would “always fall asleep” when studying. He notes that when it was time to practice, I would grab my glove and run outside. This sport is not like soccer or basketball because of the characteristics of the game. It uses your brain a lot more than those sports, uses knowledge. We [players] didn’t like studying, but we liked baseball. With a solid understanding of both the fundamentals of the game and baseball’s potential in China (particularly for youth), Dai and his baseball club established a t-ball league in Beijing in September 2005. Noting that t-ball is easy to play and understand, it is Dai’s hope that “if these kids start to like the game, then the market for the sport [will grow].” Though the t-ball league is free of charge for students, the corporate leagues are where the Club derives most of its profits. At the time of the interview, the Club was organizing baseball teams and tournaments for over 30 companies including Siemens, Lufthansa, Mercedes, BMW, IBM, Bank of China, and Huamei Media. Most of the employees that join are native Chinese. The Beijing baseball club and its employees are archetypal examples of die- hard fans that are working hard to improve the status of a game they love—and are also, perhaps, exemplary of a different type of individual emerging in China, one that 56 does what one loves, rather than what one thinks one “should” do. Dai reinforces this point: A lot of young people in China these days don’t have their own opinions or “zhui qiu” (“requirements”). But we are all here because we want to be here. We’ve been here for six years. We haven’t had anyone leave that started working here. We really like what we’re doing. It’s a lot of fun. None of the people here are good students, but we love having a career involved in baseball, and we find that we are recognized for what we do here. The Bystander Effect A second type of “fan” is the one who happens to come across a baseball game or practice on campus or on a field and stops to watch. Though most pass the game by, there are, in every instance, a handful of bystanders that are interested in this strange game that their fellow countrymen and women are playing. In my research, I came across several such fans—people who stopped for as long as an hour to inquire about the sport and mimic its motions. At the Beijing Normal University practice, a man and his son (who is just barely old enough to ride a tricycle) stop at the field gates to watch a player hit. The man tells his son, “see they’re playing baseball!” and then begins to take mock swings observing that the motion is “a lot like tennis.” After a while, crowds gather to watch the handful of players hitting the ball in the corner of the track field—in comparison, no one stops to watch a heated soccer match occurring on a neighboring field. A similar scene was played out during the CBL national championship game. Though most of the fans sitting in the limited grandstands had some understanding or 57 experience with the sport, a cluster of migrant workers on break from a construction project stopped by to watch a few innings of the game. From Hebei province, the workers had never before seen baseball nor knew from where the sport came. Mostly they noted that they did not understand the game (“kan bu dong”)—still they hovered (either out of interest or sheer boredom) around the game for well over an hour, smoking cigarettes, chatting and trying to figure out the rules of the game. Yet still, these instances represent only a handful of people 19 in a country of over 1.3 billion. Tom McCarthy’s plea to journalists during a media conference after the CBL final game is perhaps more telling about where baseball in China hopes to find its fans: “my voice only touches 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 of you,” he counts the media representatives sitting before him, “ but your voice touches millions.” The same can be said for the voices of the relatively few staff members at the Beijing baseball club—as many of those individuals who happen upon a baseball game, read about it in a Japanese comic, 20 or see a game on television, will contact the club for more information on the sport. Just the day before my interview at the club, the organization received a request from Xinjiang University asking them to send them books on baseball. Mr. Dai excitedly showed me the books before sending them via express mail. 19 Likely representative of a demographic without commensurate leisure time or expendable income to truly be converted to fans of the game. 20 The Japanese manga/comic, “Touch” by Mitsuru Adachi, was written from 1981-86 and is mostly about baseball (http://touch.ranmajen.net/). It seems to be quite popular in China—several interviewees cited the comic as one of their first introductions to the sport. 58 Chapter 6: Beijing’s Boys (and Girls) of Summer (An Analysis) I have included these interviews in this paper (as well as any redundancies therein) to further emphasize that the globalization of sport is not a one-way process. In fact, when sport reaches its “foreign” locale, it does not immediately create a homogenized world, or even game. It is true that most of those interviewed in this study understood that baseball was a “Western sport” with its origins in the U.S. 21 All interviewed also knew of Japan’s prowess at the “American game.” However, none of those interviewed felt that it was a force of U.S. imperialism or even globalization that was leading to their new involvement in baseball in China. Rather, as Maguire notes in his work on global sport, there is a “multiplicity of two-way processes of cultural interaction” (p. 45). That is, although baseball’s origins were in the U.S., once it landed in China it was subject to a new set of cultural expectations, including the fact that China could one day be successful at it. The current set of expectations include the understanding that baseball will first start, as Mr. Dai noted, like that of golf in China—with “high end people” and then spread to the rest of society. Like most sports, the elite (those with the time and money) are the first players; the rest of society quickly follows. As Guttman writes (citing Alan Klein): “that soccer, like other modern sports, was ‘first the province of the elite and then taken over by other sectors for society only underscores the fact that culture is competed for’” (p. 70). 21 A book given to me by the Beijing Baseball Club on the sport (in Mandarin, by Liang Youde) starts with the statement “baseball—the American national game.” 59 It is this competition for the creation of culture that is essential to baseball’s success in China as is individual agency. Each individual cited in Chapter 5 felt a sense of agency in the promotion of baseball in China, such as that cited by Shen Wei (in her “dare to do” quote) and the optimism of the staff at the Beijing baseball club. Mr. Dai of the baseball club even went so far as to say that club staff are not interested in organizing games for the American Embassy or other foreigners: “we’re here to expand the presence of baseball in China” he emphasized. That is precisely the heart of the matter—that baseball’s presence is indeed expanding in China and that its trajectory will follow a different course than those previously set in the U.S., Latin America, or even in other parts of Asia. As Yu Xuan, one of the biggest fans of the sport in China, attested: “baseball in China is a different story perhaps.” It is my hope that this paper has reinforced that statement and begun to explore the narrative that the “different story” of baseball in China presents. As one Dominican journalist said of baseball in the Dominican Republic: You must understand that baseball is not thought of as the sport of the Yankee imperialists. That is a stupid way of thinking. Baseball is the national sport of the United States, and it is the greatest thing that the United States has given us and the other countries of the Caribbean. [The Americans] have not given us anything else that, in my opinion, is of any value. (Pedro Julio Santana in an interview with Rob Ruck, as quoted in Guttman, p. 91) The Chinese players, coaches, fans and administrators involved in baseball in China certainly understand that the sport is an American import, but they love—and promote their own version of it—all the same. 60 Chapter 7: Post-script—“If you build it, they will come?” 22 Since I conducted the ethnographic research for this paper, there have been a number of important changes and events in baseball in China necessary to mention here. These include a new forum for international play for the Chinese national team (in the World Baseball Classic), a change in the marketing rights for the CBL, and a lost chance for baseball in the 2012 Olympics. For one, China played in the World Baseball Classic in March of 2006. The team, coached by ex-Dodger Jim LeFebvre, had what most would consider an uninspiring showing. They opened with an 18-2 loss to Japan, followed with a 10-1 loss to Korea and a 12-3 loss to rival Chinese Taipei (Street, “Defensive Lapses do in China in Finale”). Jim Street, in an article on the losses, wrote that “one way of looking at China's participation in the World Baseball Classic would be to call it a good idea gone horribly bad” (ibid.). However, LeFebvre and his team remained optimistic—like all of those cited in the ethnographic research in this paper. Coach LeFebvre was quoted in the same article as saying that the team would go back to China and prepare for the 2008 Olympics and that China is a “young team and a young program”—“if our kids learn from this, and they are learning, we’re going to get better,” he said (ibid.). Second, upon follow-up communication with Tom McCarthy, he informed me that he and Jack Sakazaki sold their marketing rights of the Chinese Baseball 22 From the film Field of Dreams (based on the book Shoeless Joe by W.P. Kinsella). 61 League to a Japanese company called Softbank Corporation. 23 Mr. McCarthy was disheartened that he would no longer have a stake in the success of the CBL but said that his company, Dynasty Sports Marketing, now represents China’s national tennis teams. Finally, as aforementioned, the London 2012 Olympics will not include baseball. This was a vote that weighed heavily on the minds of those involved in Chinese professional and national level baseball as it was the next logical step to showcase the team’s growing talent. However, the omission will likely only affect the national level of play in China—not the youth programs, new elementary school teams, or t-ball leagues (such as that sponsored by the Beijing baseball club). On this last point, Mr. Dai of the Beijing baseball club was quick to mention that the 2012 decision will have no bearing on the overall state and progress of baseball in China: “not having baseball in the 2012 Olympics won’t have much of an impact on our club….If the government puts emphasis on this sport, then grassroots baseball would not develop that well. If the government doesn’t focus on it, then grassroots will develop.” In other words, no matter who builds it, they will come. 23 Softbank Corp. was founded in 1981 as a distributor of personal computer software in Japan. It has since expanded into everything from publishing to baseball—it has been allied with Yahoo! Japan and Sony Corporation to provide broadband network services and owns the Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks Professional baseball team in Japan (http://www.ketupa.net/softbank2.htm). 62 Bibliography Allen, Maurice. “Baseball in China,” in Baseball Magazine, September, 1911, Vol. VII, No. 5, p. 57-59. 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Lind, Jennifer. “Dangerous Games,” The Atlantic Monthly (March 2006), online edition, 2 April 2006, <http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/prem/200603/olympics> Louie, Kam. Theorising Chinese Masculinity: Society and Gender in China. New York: Cambridge UP, 2002. Rampell, Catherine. “Baseball Tries to Hit Home Run in China.” MSNBC.com. 4 August 2004. 5 November 2004 <http://msnbc.msn.com/id/5600835> Riordan, James (ed.). Sport Under Communism: The U.S.S.R., Czechoslovakia, the G..R., China, Cuba. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 1981. Simendinger, Ted. Searching for Tendulkar. Denver: Airplane Reader Publishing Co., 2004. “Shuren Baseball Center.” Shuren.com. Beijing Shuren Private School. 5 November 2004 <http://www.shuren.org/engvision/yemian/baseball.htm> Wu Shaozu. China’s Communist-Era Sporting History (Zhong Huarenmin Gongheguo Tiyu Shi). Beijing: China Book Publishing, 1999. Zito, Angela and Barlow, Tani (eds.). Body, Subject and Power in China. Chicago: The Univ. of Chicago Press, 1994. 67 Appendices Interview Transcripts What follows are the interview transcripts from all interviews conducted by the author as part of the ethnographic research for this paper (as translated by the author with additional assistance from Chen Xi, an undergraduate at Qinghua University). All interviewees have granted permission to include their names, information and interviews in full. Where requested, first names of interviewees are omitted. Initials are used in second references (KS are the initials for Kaitlin Solimine, author and interviewer). 68 Beijing Baseball Club: Bing’er and Mr. Dai Date of interview: 15 July 2005 Dai (D): I started baseball in 79, played since then. Three of the five people working at the club today are vegetarian and Buddhist. Bing’er (BE): I am from Beijing. I just graduated from college (the Beijing Economic and Trade University). I am 23 years old. My major is maoyi jing ji (trade and economics). KS: So tell me about this club. BE: We sell equipment and organize various games for companies (slow pitch). Our main purpose is to expand baseball in China. KS: Does China have other organizations like this? (KS meets Dai) KS: (to BE) have you played baseball or softball before? BE: I played baseball. In my school, it was a baseball team at Capital Economic and Trade University. I started in 2002. KS: Do any of your family members play? BE: No, no one in my family has any experience with baseball. KS: So why did you come here to work BE: Because I liked it! After I played in college, I really liked the sport. KS: Why? BE: Lots of reasons! I think baseball as a sport is really interesting. To play the game you need to fight with your intellect and courage. You’ve got a united team, you belong to the team. Baseball originally is a very beautiful (piao liang) sport. The equipment and movements are all very good looking. KS: What do you think is the future for baseball in China? BE: I think it definitely will do well and we will receive good successes. If you look at the recent history of the sport, baseball is already loads better than it used to be. It developed really quickly. 69 KS: Do you often go to CBL games? BE: I’ve been to every one. Right now, the CBL games are fairly well-known. I’ve been to every single Beijing Tigers home game. I’ve also gone to Tianjin to see games. I’ve also gone to see other competitions (baseball). International competitions, etc. KS: Have you seen any foreign games? BE: Very few. I’ve seen a few Japanese games on the internet. And some American, only seen a few on tapes here at the club. KS: Do your friends like baseball? BE: Some understand the game, but very few. Over these past two years, more and more people understand the game – because there’s a very popular Japanese comic book and it talks about baseball. KS: (to Dai) How did you start studying baseball? D: I started in 1979 when I was in elementary school at Ligong elementary school. We’ve got a few that are Ligong Da xue (Ligong University) here at the club. I was on the earliest baseball team they had there. There were five or six level teams (e.g. 81, 82). There were over 100 kids on the team. At that time, there were 3 elementary schools with baseball. Jingong Fu Elementary and Ming Guang #4 Elementary were the other ones. And Yucai Elementary School started about as long as Ligong’s team. KS: Why did you start playing baseball? D: Oh, it’s really simple. The school had a teacher and he was looking for 20 or so boys to go to a sports coach meeting. He said, “We want to start a baseball team. Do you want to join?” At the time, we all had no idea what baseball was. But we all agreed to join. Because we really didn’t know what it was, we were very interested in it. If he had said, play soccer, we would have gone and played soccer, or basketball, we would have gone. But we had never heard of baseball, so we thought “this will be really fun!” KS: Why did this teacher want to start a team? D: Beijing Li Gong University had a professor named Li Fenglin. He played baseball a long time ago. He really liked the game from when he was really small. When they established the team at the elementary school, he always went to attend the practice. So that was really because of him that we started. He’s now 82 years old. This was 70 all his dream because in his generation, a lot of people had played baseball. So he liked the game, but in the ten years before that, it was very “luan” (“messy”) and they couldn’t play anywhere. So he started it with these kids because it was his dream. But we were still good. We were the first team to start up after “jian guo” (“building the nation” or 1949). KS: Did you attend Ligong University? D: Shoudu ti yu xue yuan (Capital Sports University). So I started in elementary school and played all the way through college. In college I was a part time coach, part time player. The left fielder on the Beijing team (CBL) right now was one of my first players. I coached him. KS: (to BE) Before you started playing baseball, did you have any understanding of it or had seen it anywhere? BE: No. I had heard of it, but had never played it or seen it. Perhaps the most early time I had ever known of it was playing video games. I saw it but didn’t understand it. When I got to college I started to slowly understand the game. At that time, I just learned that China had a national team and a professional league, before that I had no idea about it. KS: How did you come to work here? BE: Because I liked baseball so much, after I saw some games I went online and wrote some news, essays, etc. These people here saw my essays and got in touch with me via the internet. So I came here to visit the company and really liked the people and decided to work here. KS: Can I speak with Prof. Li? D: I know him but his health hasn’t been that well lately. He also moved recently. He used to live at Ligong University, so we saw him a lot. But then he moved to Beijing University (his wife is a professor there). Since then we haven’t been able to find him. But if you want to interview someone, you should interview Mr. Liang. But he recently went into the hospital for a surgery, he’s 84. I think he is one of the first people who really started baseball. His father, Liang Fuqu, really started baseball in China. The photos are all there. He brought baseball from Japan. He played there and then came back here and he went around China expanding the sport here. The whole family is involved in expanding the sport. Liang Youde, Liang Youwen, Liang Youyi. KS: Do you have any books on the history of baseball in China? 71 D: There is one but it’s almost impossible to find in China. There are very few people who understand baseball in China, and it’s not very popular, so it’s hard to find. We may have one here. Mr. Liang also wrote a few books, he went to the U.S. for a month and came back and wrote a book about it. KS: So why did you continue playing? D: Because I liked playing! KS: Why? D: When I first started playing, I didn’t really think that much about it. We also weren’t very good students. We started playing baseball because we knew we wouldn’t be able to attend college. Not like BE, she got into college and then started playing! D: My parents are teachers in Beijing Polytechnic University and they wanted me to study, but I would fall asleep when we studied books. But when it was time to practice, I would grab my glove and run outside. This sport is not like soccer or basketball because of the characteristics of the game. It uses your brain a lot more than those sports, uses knowledge. We didn’t like studying, but we liked baseball. I was catcher and pitcher. KS: Did you play well? D: I think I was okay. When we were in elementary school, a famous baseball player came to China. Los Angeles. He came to give us a speech. 1985. The ninth inning, at the losing position, I hit a homerun, so I had only hit 2 homeruns before that, both were in this context. This was my farewell game, like a farewell homerun. But I figure I must be pretty good. I mean, if I’ve played this long and were really bad, how could I continue playing? So all these people at the club must have played pretty well, otherwise they wouldn’t be here. KS: What do you hope for baseball in China? D: I have a lot of hopes. First, I want a lot of people to understand baseball. More people to be counted. We’ve also started up a t-ball league. T-ball is really simple. Because right now most people can’t afford all the equipment. Especially gloves. But t-ball is really cheap. The ball is also really soft. In Chongwen district, they’re having some training for teachers. This fall, when school starts, by September 1, the t-ball will be introduced into classes of primary school. A lot of kids will then understand it. It’s really simple and everyone can play. Its only several tens on yuan. China produces very few equipment, There are some gloves and shoes, but not anything else. Everything else is from the U.S. and Japan. If these kids start to like 72 the game, then the market for the sport grows. The professional level will also improve. KS: What about the Olympics in 2012 not including baseball? D: It will definitely have an impact. But the biggest impact will be on the professional teams. It won’t affect us. Because we are working on the t-ball stuff, and this won’t have any impact on their attending these classes. The other is that we are expanding slow-pitch softball in companies (company teams). We have some 30 companies that come here and we teach them about the sport. We make it really simple for them. If it’s too complicated, they won’t have the time to learn it. So not having baseball in 2012 Olympics won’t have much of an impact on our club. Another saying is, if the government puts emphasis on this sport, then grassroots baseball would not develop that well. If the government doesn’t focus on it, then grassroots will develop. KS: Who pays for this club? D: It’s all made here. The companies pay for us. We started in 1999 (for 6 years). They have been losing money during this time because most of the things they have been doing are teaching and training for free. So they took money from their own pocket for these sorts of things. We don’t have much commercial income. The companies pay money. This is how we make most of our money. We don’t want to charge the kids. So its mostly from the companies coming. They play here on a field (next to clubhouse), there’s also one at Huairou. They can live there, eat there, have meetings, etc. Some of the companies that have come: Siemens, Lufthansa, Mercedes, BMW, IBM. Bank of China. Huamei Media. Mostly Chinese employees. Our connections with German companies are very good. We’ve also had the American Embassy come and play. We don’t want foreigners to come, we’re here to expand the presence of baseball in China. D: I don’t have kids. I’m 36. My wife has always supported me. All the people here really support what we’re doing. Because you see, a lot of young people in China these days don’t have their own opinions or “zhui qiu” (requirements). But we are all here because we want to be here. We’ve been here for six years. We haven’t had anyone leave that started working here. We really like what we’re doing. It’s a lot of fun. None of the people here are good students, but we love having a career involved in baseball, and we find that we are recognized for what we do here. Everyone had their own job in company, but found respect in amateur job as coach. They feel that others respect them when they call them “coach.” BE: I just started working here this year. D: Cranes is the name of our baseball club (Brothers). It’s very beautiful at Huairou. 73 BE: I really hope baseball becomes popular in China. I think that baseball needs to start with the kids, then more and more people will play. KS: Does the recent expansion have anything to do with 2008 Olympics? BE: I think a lot of people hope that our team will do well in 2008, but I think it will still develop after the Olympics. After seeing the professional league games this Spring and Summer, I think the level of play has definitely improved. The team has matured. We’ve had a lot of help from foreign countries too as far as training goes (the professional team has). KS: Who is your favorite player? BE: Wang Nan. He’s Beijing’s pitcher. He was the last pitcher at yesterday’s game. BE: Yesterday we had a phone call from Xinjiang University. They wanted some books on baseball, so we sent some to them. They have a team. Qinghai University also has a team. They have two teams I think. A lot of minorities in Xinjiang and Qinghai want to play. D: It’s interesting. I’ve noticed during a lot of baseball games in the states (that I’ve seen on TV), a lot of parents bring their kids to games but they all fall asleep. Beijing team’s body quality and moral standards (“su zhe”) is good. If we started a bar that showed baseball games, then you’d only have us going to the bar! D: There are a lot of opportunities for baseball in China. Right now our club already has 10 people working here. Baseball is not popular in China, is a disadvantage, but this could also been seen as an advantage. Because many people consider baseball to be similar to golf, because of similar gestures and complex rules. So the track of its develop is similar to golf; spreads from the high-end people to rest of society. Our organization focuses on introducing this baseball into companies, especially foreign companies. Currently there are 10,000 companies in Beijing and the growth rate of the # is 10% annually. I think each company, especially the foreign companies, focus on corporate culture and they need sports to strengthen this and baseball meets this need. Because softpitch baseball can be played by both men and women. If you can build the sport along with a corporate culture, it will be best. In 2003, during SARS, everyone was inside and didn’t want to come out of their houses. But our games still continued. Because it’s an outside sport, and so people came out to play and be outside. We had a lot of people that started coming then. I heard there are a lot of softpitch softball leagues in America. There are over 10,000 I heard. But of course I’ve never been to the states to investigate. This can definitely develop in China. But 74 baseball is harder. It’s much harder. You have the equipment, fields, etc. There are only a dozen or so good and professional baseball fields in all of China. SO they’re really hard to find. D: So you’ve got the problem of fields, coaching and the rules and also equipment. To get equipment in China you have to pay Y1000-2000 for one person. Most bats are made in Japan and the U.S. It’s funny, the people who work in the factories here making gloves and other equipment don’t know anything about the sport. There’s a place in Fujian that produces bats and balls. But most of the gloves produced in China is synthetic leather (or “pleather”). Not leather. And this synthetic leather glove, you can’t use in northern regions. They’re cheap though. Only Y30-40 for a glove. For leather, you need to pay several hundred kuai. D: So a lot of parents think, “why should I buy all this for my kid?” Some parents don’t mind as much because they want their kids to be able to attend Ligong elementary so they can attend the high school there and then get into a good college (because the high school is good and well-respected). But a lot of the elementary schools cannot afford to start baseball teams. It takes too much investment/capital. 75 Chen Zhe Hometown: Beijing Sex: Male Age: 30 Captain of Beijing Tigers professional team (CBL) Date of interview: 13 July 2005 Chen Zhe (CZ): I played since elementary school KS: Why? CZ: Because it was fun and it was fun to be on a team. I found it interesting, and in the end I made a profession out of it. The best feeling in baseball is hitting a homerun. CZ: When I was younger, I saw kids playing in school, but not very many. I thought it was interesting and looked fun. KS: Will your kid play? CZ: I haven’t had a kid yet, but if he is interested in the sport, he can play if he agrees. I started playing more professionally in 1990. I was studying part-time and playing baseball the other half. KS: How is baseball different from other sports? CZ: Jingque du (“the degree of precision”). The ball is smaller, but it’s still a fast game. The art of hitting is like a doctor conducting surgery. Swinging is like slicing something with a knife. KS: What do your friends and family think about baseball? CZ: My friends and relatives really support what I’m doing KS: What is your hope for baseball in China? CZ: My hope for baseball in China? I think China will develop the sport slowly. But, I mean, even today the crowd here is quite large. It is certainly maturing. I hope it can be as good as the states in 10 years or so. KS: Is it fun? CZ: Yes, I’m really lucky to have found something I like so much in my life. 76 Li Bing Chinese name: 李兵 Sex: Male Hometown: Beijing Coach of Beijing Tigers Date of interview: 15 July 2005 Li Bing (LB): I have been playing baseball since 1986 (my picture is on the wall at the Beijing baseball club, from when I was very young and the tallest of all kids). I played in Beijing at Tiantan University. Then, I liked baseball a lot. KS: What did you play? LB: I started as a pitcher and then played all positions KS: What do you like about baseball? LB: It really “pei yang ren de hao li” (“cultivate someone’s potential”). It is also “hen zong he” (“very comprehensive/involves all-around capability”). LB: Right now my son is on the #2 professional league team. He’s only in high school. KS: What do you see for the future of baseball in China? LB: You need a lot of people to like it in order for it to succeed. In China, baseball is not currently at the level of the U.S. We need more people to understand the sport first. 77 Tom McCarthy Sex: Male Hometown: Boston, Massachusetts, U.S. Date of interview: 6 July 2005 KS: So tell me a little about your history. Tom McCarthy (TM): I am originally from Boston (spent the first 41 years of my life there). I went to Boston Latin, Boston College and got a master’s from UMass. I taught and coached in Boston for quite a few years, mostly basketball, then 5 years at Boston College. I actually coached in the first Big East game ever. So I’m a little disappointed that BC is moving to the ACC this year. It’s a better game, but lost a bit of history. Then I went to work for a company called Plutonic running shoes. And they had a contact with Kareem Abu Jabaar. They needed someone to run their worldwide marketing, but after a year that didn’t work out because they only spent one million whereas Nike was spending 20. So no way to compete in that business. So then I became the vice president of sourcing and that was the real beginning of my international travel. I used to commute between Boston and Korea, and Taiwan, opened up companies in the Philippines, Indonesia, and China. That got expensive and tiring for me. So that’s when I really came over. I began coming here in 1987 and I began to live in Hong Kong around 1991. That was the start of it. KS: How did you make the jump here to baseball? TM: I have a group that I own called Positive Image Ltd., and a group called World Sport Group, which they owned at the time, all the rights to Asian football (confederation). They just started the Asian PGA and Basketball league. I began working for them in 95 and after 7 years with them, I was assigned to run marketing programs and TV and development in 44 countries (Lebanon to Japan and any place in between). What I found was that at that time for a developing sport (basketball was not as much on the map as it is today), that China really was the place where the goods would be. Part of my job was running all the world championships and Olympic qualifying events in basketball. We would have events in China because they were the most dominant player in basketball in Asia. Both men and women. It was kind of strange that our group’s headquarters was in Hong Kong, but as we were then calling ourselves the Asian Sports group (now World), we had no presence in China. So I went to the chairman and I said I think it’s time and I’d be more in president of China. Let’s go build a sports business there as opposed to just basketball. He was British, very interested in that. We both believed baseball was possible. But, basketball was something we had our heritage in. And now golf, etc. are growing rapidly. Unfortunately at the same time, we were going public on the London stock exchange and he passed off his chairmanship to another person, and it was a small board. 78 TM: The secretary general of CBA works under Shen Wei and a lady called Lin Shao Wu (our group’s partner). We met at the Harbor Plaza hotel near the airport in Beijing. I had brought the retired players of NBA here, the first time NBA related players had activity in China prior to NBA opening office in China. I signed the deal with retired players – Kareem Abdul Jabar and Moses Malone, and all these people to China for a 4 game tour against the Chinese National team. That was very successful and with Olympic events we started to build an identity here. And I write for the China Sports Daily and China Daily and I was an announcer for the Chinese Basketball Association. First 4 years I was their voice – for Star Sports. This young guy came and said “we’d like you to do for baseball what you’ve done for basketball.” So we talked a few times and I went back to the board and said we can get this. I was also the first advisor for the minister of sports in China (1 st international advisor). We were then developing the possibility of developing an NCAA in China. And so these two projects I brought to our board. The day I was in the Rosedale with the contracts in front of us for baseball. I got a call from Hong Kong, and the chairman said we’re no longer interested in doing this. Well, I had invested a lot of face (in China this is an important concept) and thinking long term, I said to myself, well now is the time to “piss or get off the pot.” I told them, “well then I resign” and I’ll do this on my own. Of course, I’m not financially that well off. So the first year we did a really small league in 2002. We signed the deal in March 2002. All negotiations in October 2001. In 2002, we launched the first one month league. We had made the commitment to the CBA that if the one month went well I had already talked to a bunch of people I had done business with, one in particular in Japan – he had been involved with the MLB for 20 years before they set up their league office there. So he said, I’m willing to support this if you can get this off the ground. He’s strong in the sponsorship area. Big TV deals. He’s like the grandfather of sports marketing. First guy to do it. Jack Sakataki. So we got it off the ground and it was fairly successful. TM: So we then formed a group called Dynasty Sports Marketing. Japanese corporation with three partners. My company which was the marketing company the first year (Positive Baseball Ltd.) and his company called JSM (Jack Sakataki Marketing), and he brought in an investment group, called Jack E. a Korean- Japanese conglomerate. We signed a 6 year deal in Sept. 2002, to acquire the exclusive commercial rights for the National team and the CBL and the National Jr. Championships. And with that, in the spirit of the contract, we developed projects – so that’s really how it started. 4 teams. Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, Guangzhou. The first year in 2002 we played like a circuit. 4 weekends in different cities. The second year, home and away. Two games a weekend. We played a total of 48 games (each team 24). And then we went to a 3 of 5 final and launched an all-star weekend in middle of season. So basically following the format of most professional leagues in the world in any sport. Regular season, all star format – because at the end of the day, and particularly in basketball and baseball, in order to develop presence in eyes 79 of fans, you need to do just as NBA was fortunate to do—find a Michael Jordan, Yao Ming. So ultimately we need to develop a strong team in the local market that people will support, yet strong personalities from a national standpoint that people will go and relate to that person and say “well that’s baseball” and further ultimately, if the market dictates and the sport grows, then the commercial aspect comes in and corporations are looking for that particular player to be a face on their product. And we certainly haven’t gotten there yet. We’re just at steps two and three, with Beijing on the brink of winning 3 championships in a row. They’re beginning to have a presence that everyone knows. There are 2-3 players, a kid in Shanghai that had a fantastic year. Zhang Yi Feng. So that evolved from 2002, in 2004, expanded the games to 36 each team –72 total. TM: This year we expanded the teams from 4 to 6. We added one new market – Sichuan out of Chengdu. And the second is a conglomerate of young players who may have a chance to play on the national team in 2008 or 2012. Pretty young. 6-7 Korean players from Korean league which was the first time that had happened in China. Called the Hope Stars. China Hope Stars based in Beijing. So that’s really where we are as we sit here today. Because we have to develop this sport, the only way to really develop a sport in China is besides tons of money, besides TV and other advertisements, to develop commercially and technically, you have to go after the kids. TM: So in 2003, we developed a program “Swing for the Wall” (it has a double meaning: swing is for baseball, but then the logo has the Great Wall of China in it). The concept is from an educational standpoint: you swing for the wall (reach for the stars). Catchy with the logo we had. We ran it at the stadiums in 2003. You’ll find that our players are unique to China. They are very, very accessible and many of the guys are in the 24 to 27 age range. For a long time, they were an ignored sports group by the general public unless they were relatives. No place for them to play. Of major Olympic international sports with professional leagues around the world, baseball did not have a home in China. They had teams that practiced 360 days of the year, played once every two months against somebody and in national competitions once every 4 years. CBA ran some loose championships. Other than that, nowhere to play. So the players and coaches and administrators from which teams come from at the local level, are very, very appreciative that they have their own home now and proud of that. So they’ve gone overboard to make themselves accessible when they’re asked to come out. We’re the only league in China with a Youth Development Program specifically associated and attached to the league. The league must be a good member of the community. You’ve got to be a good citizen and you can’t expect support from the fans if you don’t give the fans something back. And giving back to the kids is one of the best ways. We do things like Canon day (giving away cameras, hats, etc.), but its as much a commercial event as a give back. Swing for the Wall is designated to do something with these kids. 2003 we held it at the stadiums. In 2004, on wheels. We basically canvassed each city and came up with 6 80 schools that wanted us to come during the home week (when the team was in town). On a Wednesday our staff picks up two or three players, sometimes even the coach, and we go to the school for 1-2 hours. We bring the mascot. Mostly primary schools. We go out and teach baseball, give away posters, give away balls. Little gimmicks that we can add to hook them in to being excited about baseball. Last year, we held a national poster and essay contest open to all schools in each of the CBL cities and on the website. The website is now very, very active. I can’t believe how many people worldwide watch it, let alone in China. So these kids can scan and email in their poster. We’ll announce an award for this at the finals on Sunday. To the school, we’ll give a cash donation in the winner’s name. To the student-winner, they’ll get a few goodies – a plaque, autographed stuff, etc. Then we put that on the website. The posters are also on the web. They’re pretty good! Our ad agency thought these young kids designs were better than his own people’s. It forced him to do an art poster as opposed to a photo for our poster this year. TM: We run about 3-4000 kids through this program each year. We hope for it to become a little more sophisticated and get more time from players when the budget will handle it. We want to take it to kids in areas where we don’t have teams, because that’s the next logical step in building a national league, is to go where they’re not. There are areas in Guangzhou and Xiamen where there are facilities, kids playing baseball, but at this point, not enough good players to dictate a team. We’ll analyze the national games in November (which will have probably around 14-16 provinces playing), if a team shows some promise, then together with CBA we’ll talk about what the commercial opportunities in that place are as well. Because you can’t just go to the middle of Mongolia if sponsors who support us have no business there, or if there’s no local sponsors. Three of our six teams do not have a primary team sponsor, so there are all of these commercial opportunities, but every year that goes by that we don’t have one, is a wasted opportunity to make a few dollars. This has been a pure investment to date. If I were a bean counter I would say, “It’s a loss.” But I’m a sportsman that does business. I’m not a businessman that does sports. I try to convince my board that this is an investment, but now it’s been 4 years and it’s time for a payback. The lead up to the 2008 Olympics should certainly create additional excitement because baseball will play in the Olympics for the first time. Now we haven’t qualified, but as host, we get a spot, which is good enough. So this is the story that we continue to try to tell along the way. TM: Now while all this was going on, in 2002 I guess, when we were originally thinking of launching the first year, somebody from the New York Daily News got a hold of the idea. I was invited to go to the MLB in New York and meet with their people because they had been communicating for years with the CBA. And obviously seeing what the NBA had done, they felt it was a market they had to be in. So they invited me to come in and the Daily News guy also heard so they did a major news piece with our logos and everything. They ran the story and I met with the MLB and we started a dialogue. 81 TM: They asked if I could assist in moving this relationship along. So then I went back to the CBA and said they want to do something. Now they want to get to the point like they have in Japan, where they have a cooperative agreement with 3-4 key points. They’re not prepared to give money, but ready to help develop. And from my standpoint, as long as we maintain our commercial rights, it will probably help everybody if they can do something. Two years back and forth like a tennis ball. I think the two principals met maybe once or twice face to face over two and a half yrs. I was talking via phone, then meeting them when I’m in the US. We finally came to an understanding. Brought both parties to the table. Assisted in helping write the contract. And in 2003 (signed in beginning of 2004), we made so much history in the past few years that the dates pass me by. Every time we do something, it’s history because they’ve never done it before anyway. Whether big or small. TM: So they signed an agreement for a two year agreement that’s kind of rolled over now where they basically outlined three key parts that we’re going to work with. One, absolute support of the national league – the MLB will provide coaches. That was the first. Football then brought in a coach, but it was an in and out kind of thing. This was “we’re going to provide and develop.” It all kind of started happening one after the other (with Olympics too). So that led to Lefebvre and Bruce Hurst being brought on board, consistently 3 years involved with team. Two, the MLB would arrange for training in the U.S. The first year of the training with the Seattle Mariners, in Peori, Arizona, one month during the fall (in September). Second year, more history by becoming the first international team to be invited to play in the fall league in Arizona with all the professional teams. Surprisingly, we won 4 games out of 24. I didn’t think we’d win any. But being able to play against that caliber of player targeted to play in major leagues. Now you not only get the chance to upgrade your talent by playing up to best. We also got an opportunity to judge where we were in the international level. And then Jim and Bruce worked full time with these guys. After that first year of training, we played in Sapporo Japan in 2003, and although we finished 4 th , we separated ourselves from the second level. China is strange in the Asian baseball community (you know, Taiwan, Japan, Korea at the top, Philippines and Indonesia, etc. at the bottom). China floats in middle. We were 0 for 3 in the first level, but against Chinese Taipei we lost 3-1 (and Taipei went to the Olympics). That opened our eyes that training was working. The CBL we had a positive effect that these guys were playing now for three months. Good things were on the horizon. So that training part was very important. Also yeah, the example of the signing of that contract. Here there is some control over player exchange. There was that Mariners kid, Wang Chao, who plays for Tianjin now, still very young, only 20, 6 foot 6. But they don’t realize how much the state expects from these players. So with the MLB, there was a stumbling block in negotiations because the CBA wanted payback from Seattle. And then the MLB in Seattle didn’t want to set a precedent. So Seattle provided facilities, etc. What Seattle did wasn’t meant to injure the CBA. There’s now a clause in our contract that says that there’s a system of identifying Chinese 82 players and how the MLB needs to first talk to the CBA. Wang was part of the Beijing baseball school at the time. TM: What we did with the MLB was really a major accomplishment. It was the first cooperation between China and a U.S. sport league. We also established a “partner team program” between the Japanese professional teams and ours. Each team has a partner, for example the Tokyo Giants and the Beijing Giants. We exchange coaches, teaching techniques and management and have discussed possibly players in the future. There’s still a long way to go with this but it is a big first step. It is sort of like Nixon’s “Table Tennis Diplomacy” of the 1970s. TM: For more of the history of baseball in China, go to the website. Baseball started in China well before it started in Japan. This really infuriates Japanese who think it is their Asian game. The man who founded the railroads in China played baseball. In China’s Civil War in the 1900s, Marshall He had the whole army playing baseball. But with the Cultural Revolution, all things American, and especially baseball, took a big beating. Other sports, like ping-pong, soccer, and basketball, which were viewed as less “American” were allowed to continue developing. TM: Therefore, in this way, baseball “lost a generation” in China. You see baseball is the sort of sport that usually is passed down through generations. Parents take their kids to the ballpark “for an experience.” Grandparents do the same thing for their grandkids as they did for their kids. But in China, it is the parent’s generation that doesn’t understand. Grandparents and kids understand, but without parental support, it is quite difficult to pass the tradition down. So, we need to seek demand from the children. In China it is quite well-known in marketing that “if you want the parents, you’ve got to get the kids.” KS: What sports did you play? TM: I played basketball, baseball and football. Baseball was the first sport I played. I played semi-professional and was invited to the Yankees development camp but didn’t go. I started basketball when I was 8 and later played in the East League. I played so many sports and really didn’t have much concentration on one. But back then I hated lifting weights, so I didn’t have much hope professionally. I was 6 foot 3 and 160 lbs until I was 24. KS: Why do you like sports so much? TM: I was a sports person from a very young age. I grew up in the heart of Roxbury Massachusetts in a public housing project. There, you either joined a team or a gang. I was too afraid to join a gang. I really had some great lessons in life growing up poor. Sports became my outlet. And I think I always knew that in some way, sports would pay for my salary, house, car, etc. And that is what happened. I haven’t paid 83 for my living quarters in 17 years. I graduated from Boston Latin (the oldest high school in the U.S.) and in 9 th grade it was engrained in me that “you’re different, special.” With an entering class of 2000, only 279 graduated. I’m proud to say I graduated 267 (out of 2000 really). I was a sportsman then. My mother demanded I go to Boston Latin and then to B.C. even though I had scholarships elsewhere. Because of that, I got to play with Bob Conger and Chuck Daley. They taught me the history of the game (basketball) and I was greatly influenced by them. TM: So anyway, I knew I’d have to take a different route in life. I was the youngest high school coach in the history of Massachusetts. And volunteered to coach three years. The first year I coached at BC I slept under a desk, showered in the common area. This is what I did because this is what I wanted to do. It really has been a wonderful journey, but there hasn’t always been a lot of money. TM: I also started the Ebony-Ivory Association in Boston. We provided a sports league to poor kids and also gave them job training and college placement advice. I still have a lot of old mentors from Boston. They’re really helpful to seek guidance. I really want to do more than just start a league. In China, I want to leave a legacy. A lot of what we’ve done here, we’ve done for free. We started the first teaching clinic for basketball coaches here and invited coaches from abroad to come in. We created a “business for sports” lecture. I also write for the China Daily and China Sports Daily. I wouldn’t take away any of these experiences. I want to show my son that sits in on some of these meetings (he’s 22 and at college in Vermont) what this is all about. Because he was not with me during most of this, there is a hole that we can’t replace. But hopefully I can turn over a lot of this stuff to him. It was surely a steep trade off. I’ve had so many rich experiences, but I fear I may have lost more than I’ve gained. I’m hoping for a comeback. TM: I am really excited to be working on these Olympics projects. This is the last great thing to be involved in as far as sport is concerned. Our partners have been very fortunate to have this opportunity. We want to leave a legacy of the league and the stadium at Wukesong—the Olympic baseball stadium. 250,000 square meter sports park. Basketball, swimming, baseball, gold, old people stuff like mahjong. Underground mall after the Olympics. We’re the driving factor behind this. TM: In the end, I’d like to buy my own NBA team and name myself coach. But I’m not driven by money. My eye is on the project. We did this because nobody else could do it, and we believed we could. Sometimes we had only 100 fans in the stands, sometimes several thousand. But we built a secure platform for these kids. The professional league may be below the standard of the Olympics, but for the Chinese, there is nothing higher than the Olympics. Maybe their national games are every 4 years, but they consider those the Chinese Olympics. The coach is really evaluated on what he does every 4 years in the China games. So it’s tough for us to 84 get our head around that, because that is obviously our league. But when you’re in somebody else’s country, you do as they say. KS: What do you see as the future here in China? TM: Well for baseball, a big thing will occur this afternoon in Singapore. They’ll vote whether to keep baseball in 2012. For me, in the short term, we’re protected because by 2012 I intend to be emotionally involved, but I don’t intend to be running around chasing baseballs in the outfield. It will be turned over to somebody else. But we want it to continue. The true test of any league or anything that you get involved with in your life, is can it be run when you get pulled out of it? You can be the driving force (and I mean our partners), but if we move away for whatever reason, we’ll be judged if that league continues to go and grow, but not today. Today is a short-term judgment. I mean it sounds good and feels nice when somebody comes up and says you’re doing a great job, but the fact is, we’re doing a great job when we go away and you can sit back and watch it. So that’s really where we are with that. So if they vote it out—again I get back to Olympic sports vs. non-Olympic sports, if you’re a developing sport and you’re in the Olympics, well you’ve always got a story to tell. If you’re a developing sport and you’re not in the Olympics, you may have a story to tell, but there are no ears to listen. So this vote this afternoon, we’re all looking at it more for the next generation. We’re hoping that the MLB and CBA have done their part. It may be that the only time China plays in the Olympics is under our watch. I might be happy to say that on my deathbed, but I will not be happy – I’m happy to be the first (or we are) but we sure as heck don’t want to be the last. That’s not what we’re in it for. And nor are our sponsors. Something has to be said for, and probably more loudly than I’ve talked about here, from the beginning, about Mizuno giving us product support from 2002 when our league was unheard of. Canon and Santory also invested money. They could have put it elsewhere. They are Japanese companies that have a heritage in understanding the development of baseball. There’s no question that 20 years ago, the Japanese were sitting here like we’re sitting here today. A new league, trying to capture the hearts of a market. And they were successful. Japanese companies understand that this is a market that’s 10-15 times bigger than their market. Baseball is a proven sport in terms of Asians being able to compete internationally. Look no further than Ichiro, Matsui, Chen Ho Park and now this kid Wang with the NY Yankees. It’s only a question of time before there’ll be a Sun Ming Feng or a Wang Wei or one of those players in the Major Leagues. Now a question of time is all relative. Will it be next year? No. Will it be 5 years? Possibly. Will it be 10 years? Absolutely. I have no doubt within ten years. That’s a long way away for me to be sitting here talking about it. I’m sure I’ll be able to see it and I’ll be at the game. But it’s a long way when you’re trying to make a dollar. Unfortunately I’m not Bill Gates and I can’t come and donate 20 million. For 4 years this has been an investment. We’ve spent 30-40 percent more than we’ve brought in 85 every year. So now it’s starting to get a little serious. We need to generate more sponsor interest and primarily from the American companies. There’s no reason why this should be a Japanese sponsored league. Baseball is American. Now this is a small market, yes, but I personally believe that American companies have a responsibility to the game! Because the game will only grow if giant countries like China and India, support the game. Otherwise basketball’s gonna kick their butt from here to New York. Which is what they’re doing. David Stern is a great business man. He’s developed a global market where others have not and he’s sold the story. Now basketball is much easier. You need a pair of underwear and a ball and that’s it. One cubic foot of space and you can play basketball. Baseball is different. You need two people, number one. You need a catcher and a pitcher. You need a much bigger piece of real estate and in Asia particularly real estate is a lot more valuable to put a building on than to put a baseball field. You need to find equipment. I can tell you you can walk out 10 miles from this hotel and maybe find one glove. It’s a horror show. TM: Well Mizuno is going to open up now 1400 stores. Between now and the Olympics. They’ve made a commitment that they will sell baseball products. KS: Will those be affordable for kids in high school and elementary school? TM: This is the other question. I’m not going to get into Mizuno’s business plan but I can tell you that there is still a ways to go. KS: What if China started up their own market? TM: They do have a brand. They sell low-end gloves, balls, bats. Very low end. But they sell them in like you’ll find like 3-4 pieces in a corner. Nobody is marketing baseball. Now we are driving this extremely high. When baseball becomes a staple of the curriculum in primary and middle schools, well they’ve got to play with something. So now, the manufacturers and retail outlets will recognize that now I have a customer to sell to. Right now, they can’t find the customers. When we started this thing out there were probably 30,000 people involved in baseball in China. We’re probably at 120,000 now. So we’ve done a hell of a job. But that’s the head of a gnat on the head of a pin in comparison to the population. And this is when you go in and talk to sponsors. I may be a pretty good speaker and I may show a lot of passion, but we’re in a bottom line business here. And unless you get visionaries. I consider even though they’re mature companies, Canon, Santory, Hitachi. Team sponsors in Beijing. Northwest. Mizuno. I consider them all to be visionaries. Because frankly, how many cameras are you going to sell? Now we have more television than any growing league in the world. Out of 90 games, 30 of our games are shown on TV. Regular season. All star games on TV. And finals. So potentially 35 games. A heck of a percentage for a fledgling league in a developing country. So you know, when we were in Tianjin over the weekend, the director of the station was 86 at the game. He said “your ratings are equal to the NBA in Tianjin.” You’ve got 10 million a shot! Now if I’m Hitachi, and I can touch 10 million people—well that’s worth what they’re putting the money in. But that doesn’t happen everyday. Shanghai is a bigger market, more TV stations, we’d be happy if 1 million watched a game. It also has to do with the time of the game. We’re in a very, very competitive sports TV market. In the U.S., you know, you can turn on NBC or Fox, and the MLB is on at 2pm on Saturday and Sunday. ESPN at 8pm on Sunday night. National baseball game. A local guy can watch his local team on UPN or Channel 38, will be on at 7pm at night. Our game 5 finals on Tuesday, if there is a game, is live at 9am in the morning. Who the hell is watching at 9am on a Tuesday? I will never say that to the sponsors. But… KS: Why is it scheduled for that time? TM: They say, “we’ve got this coming on from Madrid… etc.” They dictate to us. If we want the airtime, we play when they want. Then we make the decision, live or delayed. In Tianjin, we could have gone 2pm on Friday or 9am on Sat. live. We played at 6:30pm delayed. And we had 5 times the fans we have normally. We had big screaming crowds. 9am in the morning you’re lucky to get 100 people. Unless you want to count the players. And sometimes I count the players! We’ll do whatever it takes to build the audience. TM: But those are the challenges. We didn’t’ get our TV schedule until the week before our season started. Our sponsors stay with us forever. We know how to service clients. We might be small, but we’ve been doing it. We’ve got experienced people that know who butters our bread. We’re the only league in China with international partners. Everyone else has gotten run out. No international partners elsewhere have survived. We’re still standing, albeit on one leg, but we’re still standing. Do we have a championship field though? No… TM: The Olympic stadium will be built in Wukesong. There will be two practice fields along with the main stadium. Eventually, if they tear the main one down, we’ll put stands on one of the practice fields for our league to use. But I hope they don’t tear it down – because I plan on building the greatest combination of culture and baseball. You know how Fenway has its Green Monster? Well this will have its “Great Wall.” Center field will be the temple of heaven. The pillars outside the stadium will be terracotta soldiers. We’ll have VIP rooms like teahouses. We want to give it the real flavor. Other countries build bowls without culture. Anyway, I want to make it so it’s really tough for them to tear it down, but it may still happen. 87 Ran He Sex: Male Hometown: Hebei Province, China Age: 20 Construction worker, building a bike-racing stadium at school where CBL game is being held. Date of interview: 13 July 2005 KS: Have you ever seen baseball before? Ran He (RH): No and I don’t know the rules. KS: Do you like what you see of the game? RH: It’s okay, but I really don’t understand it. KS: Where is baseball from? RH: I have no idea. 88 Shen Jie Sex: Male Coach for Li Gong Elementary School: 理工附小 Date of interview: 18 July 2005 KS: Why did you start playing baseball? Shen Jie (SJ): I didn’t play soccer that well, so once I started baseball, I just kept playing. I played at Ligong Elementary and middle school for 10 years. I have been coach here for 4 years. SJ: When I was small, I didn’t have any real reason for playing (“mei you xiang fa”). Ligong started the sport in 1980; it was the first elementary school in China to offer baseball. KS: What sort of coaching techniques do you use? SJ: We try to mimic the method of coaching and practice in the U.S. and Japan. KS: Why did you like baseball? SJ: To begin with, I just did it because the teacher taught us. But I think I liked that it uses your mind. KS: What is your future career? SJ: I will keep working as a coach. KS: What is the future of baseball in China? SJ: It will need many years. It will take at least 50 years to become as popular as abroad. We don’t have enough fields, and we really need fields. There are not more than 20 baseball teams in elementary schools (I think 16 or 17). Beijing has the most elementary school teams. But the kids that come out and play don’t play that well KS: What about the 2012 Olympic decision not to include baseball? SJ: No baseball in the 2012 Olympics is “tai ke xi” (“really too bad”). 89 Shen Wei Sex: Female Hometown: Liaoning Province, China Secretary General for Baseball in China (under sports ministry) Date of interview: 5 July 2005 KS: Why did you establish the baseball league? SW: Why establish the league? When looking at baseball as a sport, there are two important goals. The first is for “puji tui guang” (common expansion) of baseball, to develop the sport and allow for the most possible amount of people to understand it. The other goal is so that the national team can get a good “chengji” (grade) in the world stage, and to be able to attend the Olympics is an important opportunity (2008). In fact, baseball in China already has 100 + years of history. A lot of exchange students who went to the U.S. brought the sport back to China. The most recent developments were after the reforms (“gai ge”), around 1980. The U.S. and Japan gave China a lot of support. They helped build fields and Peter O’Malley from the Dodgers also came to visit. Then in 1990 Asian games, SW: baseball in American is like the national game, but it’s not that popular. Why did we still in this very difficult situation still develop this sport. The most important is because this sport is based on knowledge. It’s not always about sports ability (“ti li”). I think if you look at basketball, it is more based on sports ability (for example, look at Yao Ming and how tall he is). But baseball looks at knowledge and team work, it requires you to be very agile (both in body and your mind). SW: Look at Japan, Korea, and China-Taiwan, these three places have also won Olympic medals or world competition medals. I think China will definitely be able to achieve such things. Three years ago we started our league, and we’re expanding the presence of baseball, teaching more and more people about the rules and improving the level of our play and coaching. KS: How did you come to work here? SW: I had no prior experience with baseball. When I was in College I studied foreign language (Japanese). I played a little bit of softball. And in this ministry, it’s not as if each person picks where they will work. Our leaders delegate responsibility within the organization. Eight years ago I became the general secretary. In these 8 years, excepting the league, our baseball team in Asia has beaten Korea, and received a bronze medal, so in these few years, the progress made in baseball has been very obvious. Also, I believe that in the 2008 Olympics in men’s ball-based team sports, baseball will receive the top place. 90 KS: Have you been to the states to watch baseball? SW: I’ve been there three times. When I was there I watched some professional games. In Phoenix Arizona. Our national team has also been to the states three times in conjunction with the MLB (they gave us some coaches). So our coaching has also made some huge progress in recent years. For example, we have signed a cooperation with the MLB, MLB not only provides technical guidance but also provides part of the funding. So compared to other sports, baseball in China has a better external environment. They have given us a lot of support. Starting in 2002. We’ve received a lot of support from the Dodgers. E.g. Peter O’Malley. Owns the Dodgers. KS: What do you hope for the professional team? SW: I hope that they will via the teammates ability can allow the most people possible to understand the sport (for example, little kids, high school and college students) and that they will like the sport. I hope that in the future the Chinese population will love the sport as much as they do in Japan and the U.S. KS: How do you think society will accept the league? SW: Most people have no idea about the league. Tom McCarthy and the CBL has done a lot of work to expand the knowledge of the league. We’ve had some league players to go to the elementary schools to teach them about baseball. Several thousand kids participated in this activity. The goal is that the kids will be interested in baseball and bring it back home and then when they attend middle school, high school and college, they will want to play and bring it to their schools, increasing the interest of their parents in the sport. A lot of these kids will continue playing up to high school as well. SW: There’s one thing very different between Chinese and U.S. baseball – white- collar people watch and understand baseball, but lower classes don’t know anything about it. Because our television stations have the ability to track ratings that read the audience, we noticed that it was mostly white-collar people watching. Also, this may be because baseball is a very complicated game. The rules are very complicated. You need a television to watch it. We need to broadcast it on television more often so that people start to understand the rules. Most people see it and don’t understand it, so they think it’s really boring. Also the games are really long and played fairly slowly. But more and more people are accepting it — once they understand the rules, they like to watch/play. There are a lot of fans and they’re totally crazy about the game. They also post a lot of their essays and thoughts on the CBL website. But we’ve only been doing this for a very short time so naturally there aren’t many people who know about it. We want to do some important work: including to expand the presence of baseball and its popularity. We need more people to attend the activities. With more 91 fans, the game will definitely expand. The popularity of the sport depends upon the number of fans, so one of the most important parts of improving the sport in China is popularizing the sport. SW: From every city we need baseball to develop in every place. You need to really work hard for this to occur (in schools, population, industry, etc.). Baseball, the requirements for the fields are also really difficult. It’s almost like needing 3 soccer fields. In China, fields are very few, so it’s hard to get kids to the fields to play. So this is a very difficult area to work within. KS: Tell me more about the stadium in Fengtai. SW: Because of the 2008, Fengtai is going to be made into the 2008 softball field. Baseball will be in Wukesong, but I read recently in the newspaper that it might be moved to the Olympic Park. SW: We put materials and pictures on the CBL website, so that more and more people like the sport. Problems developing in China: the rules are difficult to understand, you need a large field to play on, the equipment is fairly expensive. If you really want to own everything, each child needs to spend several thousand yuan. I recently had a call from a Chinese kid who had studied in America and played baseball there. He came back for the summer and wanted to play, so I recommended a place in Beijing for him. SW: Because the kids are all only children, then we really need to start the interest from them. Because if they like the sport, then the parents will follow. But I think that children playing baseball can only have positive effects—there are no bad ramifications. Because a lot of kids who have played baseball (because baseball is a game of knowledge) have seen that their grades improve after playing. You also have to be brave to play and you have to know how to “zuo ren” – how to include moral standards in your play and become a good person (like EQ). It’s a really good sport as far as moral education is concerned. The field problems is perhaps the largest problem. We just don’t have the fields for all the schools and kids. Chinese kids are all very smart, our 12 year and below team, have won 12 world championships. SW: Besides this, there is also the discrepancy in professional levels. The U.S. has over 30 professional teams, Japan has over 12. They play so many games every year. So there is a big difference here, also in the number of games played. China only has dozens of times to really compete, compared with hundreds in the U.S. and Japan. So China can’t really compete internationally. But with the creation of the league, we give a lot more competition time to our Chinese players. KS: Do you have a child? 92 SW: My daughter is 22 years. She really likes baseball. She’s seen games on the TV. She played softball before and really liked it. It’s good your writing on this topic, because although baseball is not extremely popular in China now, in the future it will be quite powerful. SW: In May, in the Asian championships, we beat the Korean team. We will attend the World Baseball Championships in Holland in September. SW: In the 2008 Olympics, of course its great that China is hosting it and it’s really had a positive effect on the development of baseball in China. Also, during the Olympics there will be lots of TV broadcasts of the games, so a lot of other countries and our own will start seeing our baseball team. They will understand the level of our play and more and more people will like it. And Tom Mc McCarthy has done a lot of work on baseball in China. He’s tried to popularize the game here using a variety of methods. For example, we bring in some American methods of league competition to attract an audience. We hold an All-star game during the season and do lucky draws during the games. KS: Elementary school situation and how ministry will support? SW: We want all the elementary schools to have a little league. Competitions in elementary schools. Bring them together to one place. We really want them to attend the Asian and World games. We’ve brought some professionals and coaches to tutor them in the game as well. In the future, if they have the experience in the game and a good foundation, then they can join in the good professional teams. However, it’s been hard to popularize China among small kids because often their parents want them to study hard, not play a sport. SW: Chaoyang Park has a baseball park, but its not a regular one. And Beijing’s North Industrial College. Most parks do not really follow the rules well. KS: What did you think of baseball when you started studying it? SW: When I started, I worked on other sports. As I worked on it and learned about it, I liked it more and more. I want the teams to be able to receive medals in big games. Baseball is a game, how is a woman working on this? In the first place, I am a representative of China and in charge of the sport. So I’m proud of being able to have this chance to lead this. Although difficult to manage this sport because of lack of resources and its kind of arduous, but because China has focus on difficult kind of sports competition, the sport with the most chances to win Olympic medals, the government is more likely to support with great effort (including money and resources). 93 SW: Because reporters don’t know a lot about baseball, so we’ve led a lot of activities to teach them about the game so that they can write about it. Only when reporters like and understand baseball can they write about it. We’ve started a media club baseball team. They attend games and learn about it (this was done through Tom McCarthy’s DSM companies). I lot more media companies are agreeing to broadcast the game. For ex, this year in Sichuan, the TV station showed 5 games. The quality of broadcast was very low, but the enthusiasm for the game (“re qing”) was very high. Beijing and Tianjing, these two team levels are pretty high. A lot of reporters like to report on it, some only report on baseball. This is one result of our work. We’ve been teaching them how to write reports on the game. They can write a really good sounding report. Our CBL website also has some reports as examples. For example, at Qinghua College there are a lot of kids that join the team. Their level of play is really low but their enthusiasm for the game is extremely high. Furthermore, if the 2008 baseball games are played at Wukesong, that place is very close to the schools so surely lots of their students will attend. Our website has received a huge amount of hits in recent years and it increases daily, so people are more and more interested in the sport. SW: No matter what kind of thing you are doing, it is important that you dare to think about the success of it. If you don’t, you will never make anything happen. We have accomplished many things that people thought we could never do. I myself have always been a person who dared to think and dared to do—and as a result our baseball league has succeeded in some championships and the population of baseball players all over China has increased. 94 Tao Lei Sex: Male Hometown: Beijing, China Age: 27 College: Shanghai Jiaotong College Currently working as a software engineer in Beijing and coaching the Beijing Normal University team Date of interview: 2 July 2005 KS: Why did you start playing baseball? Tao Lei (TL): When I was small I saw a TV program produced in China about baseball. It was produced a very long time ago. It was about a small child playing baseball. This was around 1988 or 89. Then I really liked baseball but I didn’t have any opportunity to play. When I really started playing was during my first year at Shanghai Jiaotong University. That was around 1998. We had a team at school. KS: What did your classmates think about the sport? TL: At that time there were very few people who played baseball. To begin with, we just played for fun. We didn’t practice at all. It was just a game. KS: So why did you like it so much? TL: The first reason is that from when I was really small I had a dream to play baseball (because of the TV program I saw). Also, I thought baseball had this equipment that was all really cool – like a bat, glove, ball. It was “shuai” (“cool”). KS: Had you seen baseball anywhere else between the time you saw the TV program and the time you started playing? TL: No, I had no other exposure. At that time it was near impossible to get on the internet and so I didn’t have any ability to investigate the sport. So when I got to college the first thing I did was look to see if there was a baseball team. KS: What sports did you play in high school? TL: I did track and field. Sprints. KS: So you must have been good at baseball? TL: I guess I could run quite fast. 95 KS: What are your thoughts about baseball? TL: Baseball, on the field, is a type of game where everyone can be very united. But sometimes you have to consider the individual talents and abilities of each teammate. Besides, on the field, when you’re united you can really get infected by this. Sometimes you can be infected by the excitement of the whole team on the field. KS: Have you ever seen Japanese or American games on TV? TL: Yes. After I graduated from college I saw some. I thought they were really exciting. You can see how natural all these actions are to them. And they can throw and run and do everything so quickly. It’s really beautiful to watch. KS: Have you seen any professional games in Beijing? TL: Yes. Right now China has 6 professional teams. For the past few years I’ve been to games. They are already the best players in China. But compared with Japan, Taiwan and the U.S. they are perhaps only as good as some of the college teams there. KS: What do you think about the future of baseball in China? TL: Yes, there’s been a lot of progress in baseball programs in China. Because most of the students that play on the college teams only started in college, so they’re improvements are drastic. KS: What did you think about baseball the first time you actually played? TL: At that time, I was at Shanghai and we were just playing a softball game. The first year was a softball team, the second year was a soft baseball game, then the third year was baseball (hard ball). So that time, the first time we played it was most of the players first time to play so we didn’t have a lot of experience. We all really didn’t know what we were doing and it was quite messy. We were all really excited though. As soon as we finished classes we’d go to the field to practice. At the time I was playing first base and right field. TL: Now we get most of our information about baseball from the internet. We can also follow the professional teams there. My favorite Chinese team is the Chinese Tigers. I also like the Tokyo Giants. I like the San Francisco Giants because their field is really beautiful. TL: I had some friends that had studied abroad and they brought back some Boston hats. The one with the “B” on it. 96 KS: So I want to know more about the popularity of baseball in China. TL: Well right now there are quite a few players on the mainland. Most of them came to know about baseball through a Japanese comic strip called “Bang Qiu Ying Hao”（棒球英豪）The comic is called “Touch.” We’re just playing around here, so you should feel free to bat whenever. Also, I’m not much older than most of them so they don’t take me that seriously… Lots of people saw this comic strip and began liking baseball. Then Beijing also had a BBS, lots of people who liked baseball could go online and submit their notes to a bulletin and you could make a time and date (and location) to get together to play. KS: So do you think most people saw this comic and then got interested? TL: Yes, definitely. They saw this comic and then had an interest in the game so they wanted to go try it out just once. Most of this is all on the internet that we connected and met. We also had our own ideas about the game. KS: So how could you study the game? TL: Well at that time there were many postings that people put on the BBS and online that were essays about the game. These people knew a lot about the game and people thought that these writers must have experience playing the game and so they studied their ideas. So when we had opportunities to play, we’d look for people with experience and ask their ideas about the game. We all met on the internet. Her, him, him. We have nicknames on the BBS so we now call each other by those names. TL: We use a soft baseball because it’s safer to use here. KS: So will you study baseball after this? TL: I think I will continue to help coach this team. We all really like it and want people to be excited about the game. KS: What do your friends who don’t play baseball think about it? TL: I’ve brought a lot of friends to watch practice and games. Most of them have never played before. Most of these people when they first watch the game think that the ball and the way it’s thrown is too dangerous. But when you teach them how to play, they usually really like the sport. We use this soft ball because it’s safer. When we practice we don’t usually wear helmets, so it’s better we use this type of ball. When we compete using a soft baseball we don’t wear helmets either, only when we use a hardball. 97 KS: So among the schools in China, which schools have the best programs? TL: Qinghua is really good. Then Bei Fang Gong Ye University, in the Western part of Beijing. TL: In Shanghai, Shanghai Wai Guo University (Foreign Language University) is fairly good. Then schools in Guangdong and Tianjin are also quite good. The baseball teams are mostly in these four cities. TL: Qinghua is quite fortunate as they have a professional field and a Taiwanese coach. Most players start playing in college so there are very few with long experience and a real feel for the game. KS: Are there left and right handed pitchers and batters? TL: Yes, but there are very, very few left handed batters and pitchers. KS: How do you get your equipment for the team? TL: See those Japanese students practicing with us right now? They bring them back from Japan. It’s a very strange phenomenon; the equipment makes a huge circle. It starts off being produced in China, then goes abroad, then comes back here. I suppose you could go to the factory to get the equipment, but you’d have to know how to do that. KS: Look around this field – there’s so much soccer and just these few baseball players. Why do you think that is? TL: Oh there are lots of reasons for that. First off, soccer rules are not nearly as complicated as baseball. So it’s a lot easier to develop teams and start them young. Second, it is so much cheaper to play and thus requires much less investment. Look: you just need one ball to play. With baseball you need all sorts of equipment and specific fields. Finally, you need a lot of people to really play baseball properly. With soccer you can play with just a few people and you still can practice well. TL: You see, none of this was anything any leader or something told us or taught us to do. We just came together and created this environment (of baseball) because we were all genuinely interested in the sport. But if you look around, it’s kind of interesting. People watch us and some people think the game looks really unsafe. Others are really interested and want to join us. 98 Mr. Wu Age: 36 Hometown: Beijing, China Date of interview: 13 July 2005 KS: Why are you here? Mr. Wu (W): I have lots of Japanese friends, so they invited to come watch (they were invited by Canon) KS: Where is baseball from? W: The U.S.! KS: Do you understand the rules? W: Yes, relatively well. TV often broadcasts games form China, some from Japan and the U.S., so I’ve seen games on TV. The first time I ever saw baseball was in middle school. In the 70s more and more people played baseball KS: What do you think is the future of baseball in China? W: Because there is no baseball in the 2012 Olympics, it may become less popular. Our country invests too little money in the sport. Look around here – so few people here are watching and so it is less advertised Need more U.S. and Japanese teams to come to China to expand the presence of the sport here. Most Chinese don’t understand the game. It needs a real expansionist movement. KS: What do you do? W: I work at the International Youth Exchange Center for Chinese-Japanese Exchanges. So many Japanese students are at my company. So I’ve learned from them. But I think that when most people don’t know the rules of the game, they fear the game. Overall, however I think that if anything has an expansionist movement in China it will do well because the population is so big! KS: What problems are there for baseball in China? W: We need money and need fields. This is different from soccer and basketball. Need someone like Yao Ming – he’s made basketball really popular. 99 KS: Have you ever seen a game abroad? W: I’ve been to Japan and watched a professional game there. But at that time, I didn’t understand the game, so I’ve since sought out people to teach me more. Besides me, no one in my family understands. Everything I’ve learned pretty much has been through my Japanese friends in my company KS: When you have children will they play baseball? W: I think kids should play what they want to play. 100 Xu Yang Chinese name: 徐洋 Sex: Male Hometown: Beijing, China Age: 25 College: Qinghua University, Major: Chemical Engineering (hua gong) Currently working as a salesman for digital TV broadcasting equipment Date of interview: 2 July 2005 KS: Why did you start playing baseball? Xu Yang (XY): At Qinghua University every year we have a baseball intramural competition. At that time, my department didn’t have enough players so I joined. I really liked playing the sport and so I kept playing and have been playing continuously ever since. KS: What did you like so much about it? XY: I think that in essence baseball is a very perfect (wan mei) sport. It’s also a very fair (gong ping) sport. In every competition/game, every team only has the abilities of its own players. I think baseball and going to war is the same. It’s really interesting. Every base is like a fortress. You attack each fortress and secure the fortress, so that is like a base. KS: When you play what do you think/feel? XY: I think it’s great because each time I play I can improve my level of play. This includes, if you’re on a team, you have a very connected and harmonious feeling. That’s why this sport is so charming/attractive. If you play together very often, you’ll form a harmonious link between each other. It’s really hard to use language to describe this kind of feeling. But when you play a long time together, you form that kind of harmony. And it’s really a happy feeling when you get this with a team. KS: What position were you? XY: When I first started, I played left field. KS: “Left field is left out.” It’s an idiom. (XY laughs.) “Or I play left bench.” XY: When I was on the Qinghua team I played left field. We actually have three levels. Beijing Normal University only has one. (XY laughs.) When I was on the 101 department team, I played catcher. There are currently about 12-13 department teams at Qinghua. KS: What do you think will be the future for baseball in China? XY: I think Chinese baseball in the next six years or so will have a lot of improvement. There are a few reasons for this: 1) Originally in China the game wasn’t very popular. If you want to play baseball, the investment for one person is quite large. You need a field and equipment. 2) but now Chinese people’s leisure time is more and more and their economic standing is higher so this may have an effect. 3) A lot of baseball clubs have started at companies. They now organize softball teams for their departments/companies and they often play at night. This I think will help to adapt everyone to the rules of baseball. 4) The professional team is expanding. I mean, to start off with there were only 4 teams and now there all already 6. Of course there will be more and more in the future. And this will lead to greater influence on society. XY: So I really think that within the next 10 years baseball in China will have huge developments. So really it comes down to these three aspects: 1) Time 2) Economics 3) Professional. XY: Right now a lot of elementary schools in Beijing have a baseball team. There’s an elementary school outside of Beijing Normal University that has a baseball team. KS: Why do some have and others not? Is this an issue of investment/money available? XY: I don’t think it’s a money problem. KS: Where’d you get this ball that you’re all playing with? XY: That Japanese student brought it back for us. There are very few places to buy baseball equipment in Mainland China. KS: Have you seen any Japanese/American games? XY: I’ve seen a few. But CCTV doesn’t broadcast these foreign games. Right now on CCTV, the only sports are local sports team broadcasts. For ex, CCTV 6 is Beijing sports, so they’ll show Beijing’s baseball team occasionally. But we’ve seen a lot of Japanese and American games on the internet. We also have old tapes of foreign games. We have a lot of Chinese students abroad that tape the games for us. But most of them are already a few years old when we see them. Anyone who has pay TV in China can watch foreign games, but there are very few people that have pay TV. 102 Yu Xuan Sex: Female Hometown: Beijing, China College: Beijing Normal University (year: senior) Age: 21 Date of interview: 10 July 2005 Yu Xuan (YX): I had never before seen baseball before college. When I was a first year student in college I went to a classmate of mine from high school’s “Sports Education” class (as part of this friend’s college courses, she could pick several voluntary classes). This was at Beijing’s Economics and Trade University. Her boyfriend played baseball, she played softball. So she found it very interesting and inviting me to go to the class with her. KS: So what do you think about baseball? YX: Baseball is a very “bu quan” (uncommon) sport. You have to use your brain/mind to play well. Therefore, many students who haven’t excelled at other sports in China are often interested in baseball Because they can use their knowledge (this specific baseball knowledge). KS: So would you say that there is a big difference then between baseball and soccer? YX: Yes, definitely. The rules in baseball are very complicated and require you to think about many different aspects. You also need for your mind to be extremely clear. Baseball in China is a different story perhaps. You see, there are very few teams in elementary, middle and high school, so often by the time students reach college-age they are already not excelling at other more common sports, but they find baseball interesting because of the way it uses one’s mind. So they tend to really think that this sport is interesting and like the way that knowledge of the game is really important when playing the sport. YX: So when I went to that class, I was very interested in what I learned about baseball. So when I got back to my school, I asked around to find out if anyone at Beijing Normal University played baseball or had interest in it. This was when I was still a first year student. But there were a few students who played on a city baseball team (not the school’s) and they attended an inter-city competition between a bunch of local teams. KS: Where do you think baseball is most popular in China? 103 YX: Beijing, Shanghai. It’s even more popular in Shanghai. But Beijing’s baseball development in the past two years is extremely fast. Now there are about 12 teams (baseball) in Beijing colleges. There are also quite a few high school teams now. More than college. Qinghua had a person there named Nan Yue Han, he was very instrumental in helping their team. Qinghua’s team started around 1992. YX: So I started playing softball and competing on the team. I was the pitcher but I was an awful pitcher! YX: Our baseball and softball teams practice together and also compete in the same competitions. I had only been playing on the softball team for a few months and I became the pitcher. I threw really slow… and also I threw all three games. I was exhausted. We had only at that time been together for a month but we were still pretty good. We got to know a lot of other college’s baseball and softball players at the competition. We started to communicate and contact with them. YX: We started to search for lots of people in Beijing’s modern society who had a love for baseball and knew about it to come to our practices and help us. Our coach went to college in Shanghai and played baseball there. He saw us playing baseball and offered to coach us. KS: I am looking to learn more about how baseball came about and how you specifically came to learn about it. YX: Yes, most of China’s population know very little about baseball. I think Chinese people have learned more about baseball recently because they’ve been interested in Japanese culture. This is one aspect. Another is that because of the Olympics, Chinese people are gaining awareness of sports and one of which is baseball. KS: So where do you think baseball came from? YX: Where? America of course! But I know that many people think that it came from Japan. The Japanese have become so proficient at baseball, and Chinese people know a lot about Japan or go there to study, so they may think that it originated in Japan. Also, they are the most advanced at baseball in all of Asia. KS: Do you ever play against Japanese teams? YX: No way! Their level is way above ours. But I think that in a short time we’ll be able to be competitive with them. Our development in Mainland China has been very quick. There have been a few competitions with Japan, but they didn’t do that well. YX: There are only 20-30 elementary schools with baseball teams. 104 KS: When you’re playing softball or managing a team, what are your feelings? YX: Baseball really uses your knowledge way more than other sports. But this is just the way I think. Of course there are others that think this way. I actually am not that good at softball, but I really enjoy watching baseball and managing the teams. YX: But right now the NBA is the most popular game to watch in China. We also watch some CBA (Chinese Basketball Association) games. I’ve been to quite a few CBL games (Chinese baseball league). They used to be at Fengtai stadium, but it’s now been knocked down to build a new stadium for the Olympics. Now they play at a sports complex down in the south of the city (called Lu Cheng Ti Xiao) but this isn’t a professional field and isn’t specifically for the league. YX: Last year I went all the way to Tianjin to watch the games. I stayed there for three days and watched every professional play off game. YX: For the Olympics they will be building a new stadium in the West of the city where the old Fengtai stadium. But then after the Olympics they will probably knock that one down as well. Beijing right now doesn’t have any professional fields. It’s really pathetic. I thought I was going to go this past weekend to see the games in Tianjin, but no one wanted to go with me, so I didn’t go. YX: We pretty much know everyone who plays baseball in the city (at the colleges and on the professional teams). The people who play are so few that it’s a pretty close-knit community. KS: What do your friends think about baseball? YX: Now the main task for college students is to study, so our group is an association. So the participants are all come to the activity because of their interest and there’s no discipline. There’s no rules to discipline regarding joining the group. It’s mainly their interest that attracts them here. There are lots of problems concerning the baseball team. YX: But it’s really hard to play baseball in China. There aren’t any fields for it and we just set up temporary playing areas on the soccer fields. You need a lot of room for the field, but to get this sort of support from the school is really difficult. A lot of schools think this sort of sport is too dangerous and they want you to play in other areas. So we have been discussing this problem with our school officials. YX: We play and practice on our school’s playground (fields/track and field place), not on a baseball diamond. We don’t have a mound, we just put down some temporary bases (moveable ones). The umpires are just other students who volunteer to help out and judge the game. 105 YX: We have seen a few tapes (old) of Japanese and American games. Whenever some students we know study abroad, we have them tape games and send them back to us. KS: Who is the most popular professional player for Chinese players? YX: We know a lot of players… like Ichiro and Hideki Matsui. But it’s hard to say who is the favorite player. And the Taiwanese pitcher. I don’t know very much about the professional players abroad. I’ve only seen very few games. I usually play more than I watch games on TV or tape. YX: We know a lot of players on the Chinese professional teams. Most of the players on the Beijing team we know personally. YX: We also have very few books regarding baseball written in Chinese. Most are from Japan or Taiwan translated in Mandarin. Taiwan’s books on baseball are quite prevalent. KS: Do you think baseball will become more and more popular? YX: Definitely. It will definitely be like this. You know, right now baseball equipment is extremely expensive. We just have some people from the states or Japan that study abroad and bring back the equipment. There are some places to buy gloves in Beijing, but the quality isn’t that good. Actual baseball stores are very small, and the quality isn’t that good. Most of the gloves aren’t real leather. So most have come from Japan or the U.S. We have some student friends in Japan right now that send us to. It’s really not easy to get this stuff. We all really like it and think it’s a lot of fun but it is hard to really play. YX: There have been some exchange programs where players teach young kids and stuff so this should help to popularize the sport. There are some people who are really trying just to do this. For example, it’s free to attend any professional games. This is to help to spread the popularity of the game. KS: (talks to YX about Boston and the Boston Red Sox) YX: I know Fenway. I have a postcard of the stadium on my wall. It’s really beautiful! YX: The players here make very little money. Only about 2-3000 RMB a month for professional players. Their equipment is all sponsored by Mizuno (bats, gloves, etc.) 106 YX: In a lot of the games I’ve played in, there weren’t enough players. We’ve had a lot of players from Beijing or elsewhere come and help our team out (people who used to play in college). They help us practice and help us buy some equipment. But I think we take too many people from outside of the school and we don’t use enough students from our school. So recently I decided to become manager and not play anymore. We really need to improve the competitiveness of our team, so we need to rely less on people from outside. YX: It’s good that recently we received some support (financial) from our school. We also have some students who are studying sports come and play with us. They will surely be good because they have a lot of natural abilities at sport – they’re fast too. We used to let anyone come and attend – all that was important that you liked it. But I think if these sports students end up really liking the sport, then we will be able to improve our team very quickly. KS: Why did these sports students want to join your team? YX: To begin with we asked them to come and help us compete in competitions. Then when we communicated and practiced with them, I think they kind of got infected by our spirit and love for the game. Then they slowly started joining us more often and getting some other students to join. I think in order to improve our team we also need more of these sorts of students that really like playing baseball. I hope that we’ll have less people that we request to join and instead have more players that are joining because of their love for the game. YX: The Qinghua team is really good. They’ve existed for a while and they have a lot of alumni who played and come back to support them. Their coach is from Taiwan. But he doesn’t have a salary now (the school won’t give any money). We found our coach at Beijing Normal University by accident. He just happened to come by and see us and then wanted to help us practice. He played baseball in college at Shanghai. YX: Of the fans at the professional games, they fall into the following categories: 1) the families of professional players 2) college players 3) alumni who played ball in college. For most people, if they don’t know anything about baseball, then they have no interest in attending games. There are actually quite a few women that like to watch baseball games. KS: So tell me about the fields in Beijing. YX: A lot of us think that having the Olympics coming to Beijing in 2008 has really helped to facilitate the development of baseball in China. We players and fans are also excited because they will have to build a new field for the Olympics. They’re 107 building it in the old Fengtai site. But that field after 2008 they will still knock it down. KS: So what will happen after that? YX: I don’t know… I think some of the professional teams and their managers might know about this. It’s really strange because it must cost so much to put that field up and then they’ll knock it down. We all don’t understand it. Maybe you can ask the CBL and let us know… Sometimes some of the games are on CCTV. Like the Beijing-Tianjin finals are supposed to be on tomorrow night on CCTV 5. But their broadcasts are really bad. To begin with, they are not adapted to this sport. They really don’t know how to tape it. There was one time I was watching a broadcast and the runner was running and the ball was hit to the outfield, but the cameraman just taped the runner and not the catch! It was so strange and we had no idea what was going on. I mean, where’d the ball go?? We wanted to see the play! Sometimes they used to just tape a butterfly or a small child watching the game. But there are very few broadcasts of baseball in China. We once saw an essay on the internet about the hindrances to baseball in China. The first said that the rules are too complicated. The second said that it’s not easy to broadcast on TV. Finally, the field is much too expensive to build. It needs to be so big and we don’t have that much space in our cities. Also all the equipment is relatively expensive compared to other states. For the bat it costs at least 1000 RMB. It’s really strange though because most equipment is produced in China, exported to Japan and the US for sale, then we ask people to bring it back here for us. We usually ask them to buy discounted equipment. 108 Zeng Ran Sex: Male Played baseball in elementary school, middle school and college (at Ligong University) Age: 22 Date of interview: 13 July 2005 KS: Why did you play baseball? Zeng Ran (ZR): My elementary school had a team, I really liked it. KS: Who is with you here today? ZR: My father and friend are at game. They don’t really know the rules. I am a Beijing fan. KS: What did you play in college? ZR: I was pitcher. I was a left handed pitcher, batter, but I am a right handed writer. KS: What about the future of baseball in China? ZR: I think it will improve, because those who don’t play but see the game want to play. It’s good exercise. It also is a sport that most uses your mind. The united feeling (“he zuo”) is also important. You can meet a lot of people and friends by playing. KS: Have you ever seen MLB games? ZR: I’ve seen some MLB games on TV. There are very few broadcast, but I make sure to watch them whenever they are on. 109 Zhang Jian Xiong Sex: Male Hometown: Taidong, Taiwan (the hometown of baseball in Taiwan) Coach for Qinghua University Age: 38 Date of interview: 19 July 2005 Zhang Jian Xiong (ZJX): Practicing baseball is really difficult, “xing ku” (“bitter”). Even in Taiwan. Of course it’s different because the level in baseball on the mainland is different. Most kids don’t learn to play until college. KS: What about in the future? ZJX: My kid is 11 years old right now and he doesn’t play baseball. Its “tai xing ku” (“too bitter”). KS: So what is your job right now? ZJX: My only job is to coach the Qinghua team. They’re “hai hao” (pretty good). But these kids are not like the ones at Taiwan. All of them never played before they got to Qinghua. KS: How did you come to know baseball in Taiwan? ZJX: In Taiwan, baseball is (and especially in elementary schools) a very, very important part of the school. In the schools they consider playing baseball extremely focused on the basic practice. It’s a basic education. KS: Why did you like baseball? ZJX: In the beginning it was in school and I had a wish/dream to play. When we played we had a lot of friends and classmates watching us. In Taiwan if you can wear your school’s uniforms, you’re really cool. It’s really important. KS: Now back then did you pay your own money or does the school pay? ZJX: (ZJX thinks KS means Qinghua) Basically Qinghua doesn’t give very much financial support. Because you know a school is a market, so we need to look elsewhere for funding. KS: What do you think about the future of baseball in China? 110 ZJX: The first thing is the senior government and the extent to which they focus on and emphasize the sport. Second is the extent of the popularity of the sport. We need more people to play. Third, we need to improve the levels of the players, which will in turn improve the selective capability of the teams. Finally, we need to improve the level of the coaches. ZJX: I started in 2001 coming to the mainland and was invited by the minister of sport. But because there are very few fields here. Qinghua has a field, but it is not very professional. But the mainland has very few good fields. ZJX: Quality of sport ability and your body quality. It’s hard for them to accept things from the outside. But the kids are pretty good. They are good at receiving coaching and training. But they don’t have the same habits that we have. For example, in Taiwan, people remove their hats during the anthem or in front of their coaches. Here they don’t do that. It’s really disrespectful. In Taiwan, if you want to study baseball you also have to study politeness. ZJX: The teams here are basically comparable to America’s high school teams. I think it will take about 10 years or so until they can play at a competitive level. We need more kids playing and then in 10 years they’ll be the future of baseball. ZJX: We have 2-3 teams at Qinghua. There are 14 departmental teams. We pick players from the departmental teams for our school team. Every year there is a Beijing baseball college competition. But its really faked and the umps are often bribed (and show preference). We have one season every year. On the first team there are 20 + players. ON the second team we have 20 +. There are 28 girls on the softball team. I also coach that team. I’m the only Qinghua coach. KS: Why has China been so late to develop baseball in the modern era? ZJX: The first reason is the economic situation. The economic hasn’t fully developed yet. So it’s been late to develop. But for the kids here, if they can play baseball, it’s a really “jiao’ao” (prideful) situation. My ex-wife liked baseball. Her little brother played in the leagues. We divorced 10 years ago. KS: Have you ever been abroad to watch games? ZJX: Yes, I went to Japan. I saw some of their elem. School competitions. They’re really good. I’ve seen American games on TV and on tape. ZJX: I think once the economy improves in China, baseball will be much more able to develop. But we first need to develop the ability to play. A lot of people like the game, but they need to know how to play. They see it and like it, but they need the experience playing. So many people who watch don’t understand it. In order to 111 improve the expeditiousness of the development, it needs to first start with the development of the young players, then the college players. KS: How did the Qinghua players come to play baseball? ZJX: Most of the kids learned about Qinghua in a baseball class during their first year. You can choose to study it. Both for men and women. I teach the class. The other thing is from comic strips from Japan. The third is that sometimes for practice I have our team wear their uniforms and go for a jog together around campus. I think a lot of people see the team and they remember and say to themselves “hey what is this team?” It’s like that… ZJX: The uniforms are the same style as international uniforms (like the American ones). Our pitchers are not that good. Our pitcher is only a second year college student. He only started studying pitching a year earlier. KS: Any foreign coaches ever come to Qinghua? ZJX: No. Not in the four years I’ve been there. But there have been a few foreigners that have come to the games. They really understand the game and play well. ZJX: Everyone started studying in College on our team. None of them started in high school or younger. But that makes sense – it’s hard to get into Qinghua. KS: How long will you stay here? ZJX: I’ll be here forever. I’ve become accustomed to it. ZJX: There aren’t any good fields here. You just don’t get the feeling on a field that you get when on one in Taiwan. You need leaders in this sport here. ZXJ: See I think people need to learn about the game to know that the game isn’t as dangerous as it looks. We need to do an expansionist movement and bring the game outside of the city. This would lead to some really useful results. You really need to build a base there. Introduce this to these places. It really will have a good result. KS: More thoughts on the future of Chinese baseball? ZXJ: If the coaches’ level improves, then China will be good in the future. The strength of the players in China is better than in Japan and Taiwan. The players’ power is really good. Especially players from the Northeast and Inner Mongolia. Baseball has come to become a sport that really requires strength. It’s not tender. So this is important. Baseball school in Fengtai is not very good because their training is not very systematic. 112 ZXJ: Shanghai has good teams. I really hope for baseball to expand into areas other than the big cities. ZXJ: Beijing’s ministry of education in Haidian district has already listed baseball as one of the sports for primary school students to take in the school. Building fields is really important on the mainland. The teammates on my team often have to use their own money to play. If they attend away competitions, Qinghua only gives Y2000, so they often need to pay some more on top of this, or I use my own money to subsidize. ZXJ: I think the kids from the sports schools in China need to study more baseball. They learn the sport really quickly. In ten years, I think Chinese baseball will pass Japan and Taiwan. It helps that the population here is so big. But they need better coaching. The level of play here is pretty slow. Once baseball is more established in elementary schools, it will really improve the level of baseball in the entire nation. 113 Images of Baseball in Beijing: July 2005 The following are photographs taken during the ethnographic research conducted for this paper during the summer of 2005. July 18, 2005 Players on the Ligong Elementary School baseball team, one of the oldest in China, listen to their coach Shen Jie give instructions. July 18, 2005 A player waits to catch a fly ball at the Ligong Elementary School baseball team practice. The team practices on a school playground that is a long strip of land with a soccer goal in the far end. The mural on the surrounding wall was painted by the school’s students. 114 July 18, 2005 Ligong Elementary School baseball team players round up after practice. July 18, 2005 Ligong Elementary School baseball team players listen to Coach Shen Jie’s comments on their practice. July 18, 2005 Players on the Ligong Elementary School baseball team compare scratched knees post-practice while waiting for family members to pick them up in time for lunch. 115 July 2, 2005 The Beijing Normal University (Beishida) team practice. Note that the practice takes place on the corner of a school track. July 13, 2005 “Canon Day” at the Beijing vs. Tianjin Chinese Baseball League final match. Canon company VIPs were seated in the grandstand; general admission was on a small patch of land along the first baseline (attendees were required to bring their own seating). July 13, 2005 The Beijing vs. Tianjin CBL final game played on a college field in Southern Beijing. The game was aired on CCTV. 116 July 13, 2005 Fans watch the CBL final game. Front row from right: Tao Lei (Beijing Normal University coach), Shen Jie (Ligong Elementary School coach), and friend. Back row: Baseball fan Yu Xuan. July 13, 2005 Construction workers from Hebei on a break watch the CBL final game. Interviewee Ran He is in the center of the photo wearing a white vest. Photo courtesy of Beijing Baseball Club Caption reads (translation by K. Solimine and X. Qiu): “Chinese Baseball” team of overseas Chinese youth in Japan was honorably awarded the Championship of Yokohama Employees Baseball Match in 1922. 117 Photo courtesy of Beijing Baseball Club Caption reads (translation by K. Solimine and X. Qiu): A Chinese study group of young baseball coaches were invited by Tommy Lasorda to study baseball in the U.S. in Feb 1986. Photo courtesy of Beijing Baseball Club Caption reads (translation by K. Solimine and X. Qiu): Photo taken of Beijing children during training when participating in a match among friendship cities Tokyo, Beijing and New York in 1984 in Tokyo. Photo courtesy of Beijing Baseball Club Caption reads (translation by K. Solimine and X. Qiu): American vice president Bush (fifth from left, back row) met Chinese vice president Huang Zhong (fourth from left, back row) and Chinese youth baseball team members in the White House. Chinese team coach Wang Changyuan is first from right in the front row. 118 Useful Baseball Terms in Chinese Umpire 裁判员 Base 垒 Batter 打者 Pitcher 投手 Catcher 捕手 Shortstop 游击 Outfielder (left, middle, right) 外场（左，中，右） Strike out 三振出属 (One) strike （一）击 (One) ball （一）球 Base on balls (walk) 四坏保送 Steal home 偷家垒 Hit 安打 Foul 界外球 (One) out （一）出属 Points/runs 分 Sponsor 赞助者 League 联盟 119 Fan 球迷 Training/practice 训练 Coach 教练 Captain 队长 Team 队

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Creator Solimine, Kaitlin M. (author)

Core Title If you build it...: A "different story" of the re-emergence of baseball in China, the people who play it, and why

School Graduate School

Degree Master of Arts

Degree Program East Asian Area Studies

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag anthropology, cultural,history, Asia, Australia and Oceania,OAI-PMH Harvest,Recreation

Language English

Contributor Digitized by ProQuest (provenance)

Advisor Cooper, Eugene (committee member), Goldstein, Joshua (committee member), Rosen, Stanley (committee member)

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c16-56310

Unique identifier UC11338278

Identifier 1438543.pdf (filename),usctheses-c16-56310 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier 1438543.pdf

Dmrecord 56310

Document Type Thesis

Rights Solimine, Kaitlin M.

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the au...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus, Los Angeles, California 90089, USA