Citizenship Swapping and Foreign-born Athletes on Chinese Olympic Teams

Hosted by SFU History in partnership with the David Lam Centre

Abstract: Despite the fact that national rivalries seem to be the centerpiece of the Olympic Games, citizenship swapping by athletes has a long history in the Olympic Games and, if you peel back the illusion of national identities, you find that the Olympics, the premier stage for the display of nations and nationalism, are actually a wonderful illustration of how blurry the lines between nations really are. Along with China’s emergence as an economic and sports power, increasing numbers of Chinese coaches and athletes began moving out into the world, but China only recently joined the international trend of recruiting foreign-born athletes in preparation for its home games, the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics, as well as for the 2022 FIFA World Cup. China’s openness to the outside world changed remarkably quickly in contrast with the xenophobia of the previous half century. In these times when political tensions make it seem that China is refusing to play by the rules of the (Western-dominated) world order, it is important to look at a trend that is moving in the other direction: sports are helping to pull a reluctant China toward ever-greater integration into the international order.

Susan Brownell is a Curators’ Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. Her first book, Training the Body for China: Sports in the Moral Order of the People's Republic (1995) drew on her experience as a national champion collegiate athlete in China. Surrounding both the 2008 summer Olympics and 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, she gave interviews to nearly 100 journalists from over 20 countries. She is the author of Beijing’s Games: What the Olympics Mean to China (2008), co-author of The Anthropology of Sport: Bodies, Borders, Biopolitics (2018), and has published multiple works and commentaries about China and sports. Her edited book, The 1904 Olympic Games and Anthropology Days: Sport, Race, and American Imperialism (2008) won the best anthology award of the North American Society for Sport History.

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