Singapore: NUS Press, 2016. xiv, 397 pp. (Illustrations.) SGD$46.00, paper. ISBN 978-981-4722-03-2.
The Times of India (5 March) covered the Opening Ceremony of the first Asian Games, staged in 1951. The event, in New Delhi, was “Declared Open in Colourful Setting,” the newspaper reported. Jawarhalal Nehru, independent India’s first prime minister, was a strong supporter of the Games, and had suggested a motto for the 1951 event: “Play the Game in the Spirit of the Game.” During the event itself, “Ever Onward” emerged as a permanent motto, and in a climate of anti-Britishness among delegates, it was decided that the expression would be translated into the language of respective future hosts. If this was a tricky and sensitive decision, the choice of music and songs for the ceremonies was extraordinary, in a pan-Asian event in a radically post-colonial context. At the opening ceremony, participants and spectators were treated to Marching through Georgia and Way Down upon the Swanee River; at the closing ceremony the end of the Games was signalled by the Last Post.
This is just one of the countless arresting vignettes that bring alive the contradictions and tensions that characterize the history of pan-Asian sporting events in Stefan Huebner’s detailed and deeply researched study. Underpinned by around 107 pages of references, notes, and bibliographic detail, his introduction, conclusion, and eight intervening chapters examine the significance of pan-Asian sports events in the six decades from the eve of World War I to the mid-1970s. Huebner operates with a consistent conceptual framework in two ways. First, he regularly focuses, as he puts it (6), on three ideals that elites operated with in their aspirations to use sport as an influence upon the shaping of a “new Asian man,” and later a “new Asian woman” (6). These are internationalism, egalitarianism, and economic progress. The author shows how the political, religious, and economic aspects of these “ideals” were rebalanced as different Asian countries and their elites operated in this emerging transnational sporting calendar. Second, Huebner, noting that theoretical approaches to the study of sports remain “very much in their infancy” (11), anchors his analyses in three concepts: authoritarian high modernism, via James Scott; Anthony D. Smith’s ethno-symbolism; and nation-branding. This allows him to cover the historical sweep of the book and the geo-political range of the selected events with an appropriate and effective interpretive toolbox to hand.
The study is a chronologically based evaluation of three sports events, taking us from the series of the ten Far Eastern Championship Games (FECG, 1913–1934) to the one-off Western Asiatic Games (WAG) in India in 1934, and on to the Asian Games (AG), inaugurated in India in 1951, the seventh edition held in Tehran (1974). Huebner looks in particular at the elites who shaped the initiatives, but also, chapter by chapter, provides what we could call a semiotically inclined analysis of the ceremonies and symbols surrounding the events—the elements, one might say, of the sporting spectacle or mega-event. The overarching narrative in the study takes the reader in and out of China-Japan hostilities, sporting nationalism in an independent India, the politics of the Philippines and Indonesia, a persisting royalist presence in Thailand, and the economic consequences of oil wealth in Iran. It is a mind-boggling tour (Huebner himself calls it a “tumultuous ride,” 261) of the complexities and commonalities of Asian political, cultural, and sporting interests in the period. It is a comparative historical project of vast scale and proportion and Huebner is to be congratulated on accomplishing a study of such depth and quality that will be of interest to scholars of cultural history, political history, and sport studies, as well as international relations and diplomacy studies.
What Huebner shows in his overarching narrative is that the US Protestant missionaries from the US YMCA—many from Springfield College, the birthplace of basketball—who effectively established Western sports in the Philippines, were huge influences in the early “sportization” of that country, and ensuing relations between the Philippines and its early partners, Japan and China, in staging the early editions of the FECGs. All ten of the FECGs were staged by one of these three nations, but power passed from religious to more secular interests, and gradually involved, at the expense of civil society influences, more formal professionalized, political elites. The do-gooders in the Muscular Christianity tradition were in the long run displaced by political figures for whom the mega-sport event offered the potential to showcase national strengths and modernizing qualities on the global stage. There are nuances in these dynamics, case by case, and Huebner shows how Western sporting values and ideals were undermined by wider forces such as the World War I conflict between Western rivals; and how the Cold War made pan-Asian ideals increasingly difficult to sustain. Yet the study shows that the model of the supra-national sporting mega-event could be adapted to these localized or sub-regionalized circumstances, and still sustain a self-referencing and accumulative historical significance. But it was certainly not an idealized universalizing model that motivated the shah-inspired Asian Games of 1974, the final case study in the book, where nation-branding presented Iran as a modernizing, economic powerhouse on the cusp of global superpowerdom. The Tehran case is a sobering tale of the fragility of over-ambition, and of the ideological baggage (not Huebner’s choice of language here) that has been brought to the fore in the hyperbole and rhetoric so commonly employed in the winning and staging of, and justification for, the sporting spectacle.
Pan-Asian Sports is a book that will repay many return visits, to know more about a general point, or to inform a particular scholarly specialism. Each chapter depicts the elites and the strategies that put and kept this show on the road. It would be over-claiming to say that modern sports forms have shaped modern Asia. But Huebner’s outstanding and forensic scholarship confirms that sport events are invaluable sources for demonstrating the power dynamics of emergent elites, and their motives, in critical historical phases of the emergence of a modern Asia.
Alan Tomlinson
University of Brighton, Brighton, United Kingdom