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I would like to thank Professor Chang-tai Hung and the two anonymous readers of Modern Asian Studies for their insightful comments and suggestions. The work described in this article was supported by a grant from the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong (Project No. LU341111).
Sports, body, and politics: Mao's 1966 historic swim
Mao Zedong's (1893–1976) historic swim in the Yangtze River on 16 July 1966, which heralded a new phase of the Cultural Revolution, was a carefully staged political performance and a notable example of body politics in Communist China. Beginning in the late 1950s, Mao began to broadcast the idea that he was a keen swimmer and to convince the masses to take up swimming. The swim was the climax of those efforts and an integral part of the Mao cult. Swimming in Mao's China offers a useful lens for understanding the close relationship between sports, the body, and politics. Swimming was a means for Mao to mobilize mass support for his political authority and a venue for the masses to practise and perform Maoism. Swimming became a political metaphor for expressing and performing Mao's ideology publicly and in a bodily dimension.
This article provides a new understanding of Maoism in practice through the lens of body politics. It examines the constructive process and meanings of Mao's swimming body, and the extent to which the bodies of the populace were regulated through the mass-swimming craze. In the theory of body politics, the living body is a construction, a symbol, and a contested site of power relations where regulation and resistance are constantly played out. As Bryan Turner argues, the body is ‘crucial to both the micro and macro orders of society’ and ‘the vehicle for self-performances’.1 The case of Mao's swimming body exemplifies the ways in which ideologies were disseminated and reproduced through performances, using the body as a vehicle for self-expression under his regime. This study distinguishes itself from the existing literature concerning images and representations of Mao in propaganda materials by demonstrating that Mao's swimming body was his preferred expression of his living body. He used his body to construct propagandist representations of himself. The influence of Mao's swimming body on the mass-swimming craze explains the complex story of...