Third International Conference on Tourism & Leisure Studies

Abstract

In Republican China, swimming pools emerged in various cities as a new urban leisure space that symbolized both freedom and moral control. Swimming pools were a material product of Chinese people’s growing interest in swimming, which was a Western sport and pastime that gained popularity and legitimacy in the historical circumstances in which the physical fitness of individuals was regarded as conducive to national strength. The political authorities came to see swimming as a form of “proper recreation” and building swimming pools as an integral part of modern urban planning. Nevertheless, to some of the young people who began to enjoy the newly-gained freedom of love and marriage, swimming pool was a romantic place for dating and a place to see and to be seen. Male and female bathers swimming together in revealing swimsuits eventually aroused conservatives’ anxiety about cultural and moral decadence and stirred up debates over proper behavior and dress codes in swimming places. This paper argues that the swimming pool in Republican China was not only a material space for the government to showcase, and for ordinary people to experience, modernity, it was also a liminal space (i.e. a space in-between) where transgressive behavior and state regulation were constantly negotiated and mediated.