Basketball in China: A Short History

From Hoopedia

In all the world, China embraced basketball early on, during the Qing Dynasty, not long after Dr. Naismith wrote the Original Rules in 1891. Naismith and the International YMCA Training School were in the business of producing Christian missionaries and that time many missions were located in China. Some of Naismith's original players ended up in China. Hence, China began its love affair with basketball long before most European countries had heard of the sport.

The Nankai Five Tigers? ca. 1896?

Basketball in China started in the YMCAs. Dr. Willard Lyon founded the first YMCA in China (in Tientsin, now called Tianjin). On December 5, 1895, Lyon presided over the first game of basketball played in China, at the Tianjin YMCA. The Nankai Five Tigers (名扬天下) team trained there, too.

In 1910 the YMCA organized the first national athletic competition in China, in Nanking. Basketball was one of the sports. While the games were organized by Americans, the athletes were all Chinese.

These YMCA activists were also responsible for organizing the first Far Eastern Championship Games, first held in Manila, Philippines in 1913. Shanghai hosted the 1915 games. Chinese President Sun Yixian (Sun Yat-Sen) remarked on the ability of these games to unite athletes from Canton, Shanghai and Peking -- regions known to feud -- to compete for one China.

The YMCA movement in China reached a peak in 1918 when it established a university to train Chinese physical education instructors. The school failed for financial reasons. Changes in personnel, combined with a rising tide of anti-Americanism, caused the YMCA to pull back in China. By 1927 they were no longer a force on the Chinese athletic scene.

In 1921 China upset the Philippines in the championship game of the Far Eastern Games, capturing their first gold medal in basketball. Sun Liren, star of the Qinghua University team and future Nationalist Army commander, led the team to this historic triumph.

Shanghai's St. John's University, coached by Phillip B. Sullivan, won the 1923 national championship and represented China at the 1923 Far Eastern Games, where they finished with the silver medal. They became the team to beat in China and Japan, until the civil war disrupted athletics in 1927.

China's 1936 Olympic Team

In 1936 China did send a team to compete in the Berlin Olympics, finishing with a record of 1-3.

While both the Nationalists and the Communists rejected many Western influences, basketball was not one of them. Both sides actively embraced basketball and the Communists continued to do so after their triumph in 1949.

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Bibliography

For more information, see Allen Guttman's Games and Empires: Modern Sports and Cultural Imperialism (Columbia University Press, 1994), from which this summary is taken.

Also worth reading is Judy Polumbaum's article, "From Evangelism to Entertainment: The YMCA, the NBA, and the Evolution of Chinese Basketball" (Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, vol. 14, no. 1, pp.178-230).

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