I have played a lot of basketball in China and I’ve written before about some of the quirks of the game here in the PRC. Obviously, the sudden emergence of Jeremy Lin for the New York Knicks over the past few weeks has generated more than its share of media attention, much of it focusing on how Lin, a Harvard-educated Taiwanese-American, seems an unlikely NBA superstar. As a high-profile athlete of Asian descent his race has become an issue in the US and abroad, and in the PRC Lin has become more fodder for an ongoing debate over what it means to be “Chinese”.
Richard at The Peking Duck has a post, following up on an excellent essay by Adam Minter at Bloomberg, which poses the question of whether China could have produced a Jeremy Lin. The Chinese government and media can seem obsessed with sports as an indicator of a national development and even national strength. As a result, the relative lack of success by China’s men in international team sports, like basketball and soccer/football, is not only troubling for the sports fan but also raises disquieting issues of nationality, gender, physicality, and, of course, race.
In the past few years, China has done much better in the individual events. The usual argument is that you can badger a kid into being the best chess player, weight lifter, gymnast, or sprinter because in the end, despite all the coaching and support, once in competition it’s you, your skills, your training, and your thoughts against everybody else.
Whether you can really manufacture champions at individual sports or not, preparing for success in team sports is not as simple as churning out perfect athletes on an assembly line. Yes, you need to develop individual skills but the best teams (and the best players on those teams) are not always those with the greatest collection of individual skills. Most great players developed their game by playing thousands of hours on dozens of teams throughout their life, from local rec leagues where the moms bring the orange slices and every kid gets a trophy, up through the ranks — traveling teams, high school varsity, camps, invites, college, pro, national. The system is flawed as hell, but it does produce some incredible athletes.
Like a lot of things in China, though, this is changing. At the courts where I play basketball on weekends, I’ve seen increasing numbers of ordinary kids, both boys and girls, practicing and playing for ‘local’ teams, with their parents showing up carrying water bottles and oranges and a harried old coach taking time out of his weekend to teach 15 rambunctious eight-year-old girls how to dribble the length of a court. Some of the kids come with limited skills but lots of enthusiasm; others show a bit of early promise. Will any of them ever play for China’s national team? Probably not. But if any of them do, those early years spent playing with their peers will make them much stronger competitors at the higher levels. And those that don’t become sports stars will learn about teamwork, camaraderie, and good sportsmanship, all the while getting a little physical exercise, the lack of which is becoming a serious problem among urban Chinese kids. Of course, rec sports leagues require money and volunteers. Even in the US many communities are finding it harder to provide recreational sports opportunities for kids. Not all Chinese communities and parents have the affluence or motivation to establish a rec sports league.
The US also has a deeply ingrained and well-established system of university scholarships for athletes. Yes, the NCAA is so corrupt it makes Chinese local government look like a model of transparency and self-sacrifice, but it does provide a ticket to university for a lot of men and women student-athletes. (How many actually graduate is a whole other story….) There’s nothing like that in China. If you want to go to a top school in China, you study and everything else comes second. Sure there are parents who see value in children participating in sports as part of their development, and that number is growing, but it will be a long time, before China has a youth sports culture on the same level as the United States.
In the history of the league, six Chinese players have suited up for an NBA game.[1] That’s a respectable number. Not all of those players have had Yao Ming’s career, but it’s not like China hasn’t contributed to global basketball culture. Jeremy Lin, a Taiwanese-American Christian from California is an unlikely standard-bearer for “Chinese basketball.” But he’s fun as hell to watch, and if it gets kids interested in playing ball here then I’m for it. While academics like me can talk about discourses of race and the body and Chinese government officials fret about the implications of “Chinese-ness” in a global world where nationality seems to matter less than group affinity, Chinese basketball fans can simply sit back with fellow hoops fans around the world and enjoy the next miraculous episode of the Linpossible Dream.[2]
[1] I was going to say “born in China” but then we’d have to include Tom Meschery, who was born Tomislav Nikolayevich Meshcheryakov in Harbin in 1938 to White Russian refugee parents. He grew up in a Japanese internment camp before the family emigrated to the US where Tom went on to average 12.7 points and 8.6 rebounds for the Seattle Supersonics and the Philadelphia/Oakland Warriors in the 1960s.
[2] There was no chance of me not dropping at least one “Lin” pun into this post. Just be happy I removed the other 48.