Fifteenth International Conference on Sport & Society

Abstract

Worker sports were significant sporting landscapes in socialist countries over the large part of the twentieth century. Despite demonstrating athletic achievement and proletarian superiority, as some studies on Soviet Union and Eastern Europe have indicated, worker sports simultaneously produced centrifugal and unofficial identity politics in internal development. However, less known is that the tension of worker sports was particularly fierce and complicated in the distinctive socialist state-building of the early People’s Republic of China (PRC), and that is what this study unravels by focusing on football - one of workers’ favourite events-in Yangshupu area, the industrial heartland of Shanghai and even of the whole country. Specifically, by tracing the life history of some workplace football teams and players based on abundant untapped written and oral materials, the study draws forth the worker identity politics during the early PRC years (1949-1976). On the one hand, the socialist state aimed to define and remake a united and solidary working class through football. On the other hand, as a spontaneous and competitive team sport that divided both players and spectators into opposing teams representing their own communities, workers also expressed their own sense of political and cultural identities through daily football activities. The officially assigned worker identity was unmade by the divisions of genders, generations, competing units and collectivity within workers, which were brought out and further complicated by their football culture embedded in the changing urban industrial communities and landscapes.