Cultural History Commons^™

This article explores the growth of Chinese baseball since the early 1970s. The sport was very popular in the 1940s and 1950s as the semi-official pastime of the People’s Liberation Army, but it disappeared from the country in the 1960s due to economic woes stemming from the Great Leap Forward and the anti-western fervour of the

Cultural Revolution. Richard Nixon’s historic meeting with Chairman Mao in 1972 ushered in a thaw in Sino–American relations that enabled veterans of 1950s competitions to take up baseball once again and teach the game to a new generation. Over the 1970s, baseball began to …