Bangqiu: MLB's Role in Baseball's Comeback in the People's Republic of China

• Published in: International journal of the history of sport Vol. 32; no. 2; pp. 332 - 350
• Main Authors: McLaughlin, Sean J., Gao, Jie
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Routledge 22-01-2015
• Subjects: Athletes; Baseball; China; Chinese Baseball League (CBL); Cultural Revolution; Game theory; Leagues; Major League Baseball (MLB); Modern China; Sino-American relations; Sports
• ISSN: 0952-3367; 1743-9035
• DOI: 10.1080/09523367.2014.924508

This article explores the growth of Chinese baseball since the early 1970s. The sport was very popular in the 1940s and 1950s as the semi-official pastime of the People's Liberation Army, but it disappeared from the country in the 1960s due to economic woes stemming from the Great Leap Forward and the anti-western fervour of the Cultural Revolution. Richard Nixon's historic meeting with Chairman Mao in 1972 ushered in a thaw in Sino-American relations that enabled veterans of 1950s competitions to take up baseball once again and teach the game to a new generation. Over the 1970s, baseball began to slowly grow in China with some modest Japanese encouragement and China began competing internationally the following decade. Over the past decade, Major League Baseball has made such a large investment in China that baseball has become the fastest growing sport in the country. At present, the country's only professional league is currently in the early stages of its development, but American talent evaluators believe that the skill of Chinese players is steadily improving and that it is not impossible to foresee a day when China produces baseball's Yao Ming from a massive pool of millions of internationally competitive athletes.