Colonial Project, National Game ─ A History of Baseball in Taiwan

In This Engrossing Cultural History of baseball in Taiwan, Andrew D. Morris traces the game's social, ethnic, political, and cultural significance since its arrival on the island more than a hundred years ago. Introduced by the Japanese colonial government at the turn of the twentieth century, baseball was expected to "civilize" and modernize Taiwan's Han Chinese and Austronesian Aborigine populations. After World War II, the game was tolerated as a remnant of Japanese culture and then strategically employed by the ruling Chinese Nationalist Party (Kw) and even enthroned by Taiwanese politicians, cultural producers, and citizens as the island's national game. In considering baseball's cultural and historical implications, Morris deftly addresses a number of societal themes crucial to understanding modern Taiwan, the question of Chinese "reunification," and East Asia as a whole. Colonial Project, National Game transcends the limits of sports histories in its investigation of the many intersections among discourses on colonialism, ethnicity, gender, the body, nationalism, the cold war, globalization, and post-colonialism in modern Taiwan.

Andrew D. Morris is Professor of History and Chair of the History Department at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. He is the author of Marrow of the Nation: A History of Sport and Physical Culture in Republican China (UC Press) and coeditor of The Minor Arts of Daily Life: Popular Culture in Taiwan.