Currently I am researching and writing my dissertation, "The Politics of Socialist Athletics in the People's Republic of China." I am working through archival documents and sources collected in Beijing and Shanghai.
For completion of the MA, I wrote about the first "Games of the New Emerging Forces" (GANEFO), an international sports competition held in 1963 in Djakarta, Indonesia in which more than 2,200 athletes from 48 nations took part and in which the PRC played an important role. The PRC withdrew from the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in August 1958 due to the "Two Chinas" issue, so the first GANEFO offered PRC athletes their first chance to participate in any large-scale international competition since 1949.
The GANEFO idea grew out of the relationship between sports and politics in particular historical moment, and explicitly challenged the dominance of the IOC. The first GANEFO paralleled the Olympic games in many respects--from the sports disciplines and ideals of sportsmanship and amateurism, down to an opening ceremony with a torch and parade of athletes and an international athletes' village. In fact, they were so successful that a permanent committee was set up to make sure the Games occurred every four years. Meanwhile, the IOC refused recognize world records broken at the Games, and banned GANEFO athletes from participation in the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. In 1966, an Asian GANEFO (mimicking the Asian Games) took place in Cambodia. Due to changes in politics in the mid-1960s, a second large-scale GANEFO never occurred and the GANEFO disappeared from the public record.
Renmin ribao, Nov 17, 1963
Banner at the
top: "International Olympic Committee ostrich competition"
"non-recognition of GANEFO"
"non-recognition of new world
records"
"we don't know anything about the Games of the New
Emerging Forces"
Caption: "Who can keep their head buried the
longest?"
In my paper, I discussed the background to the GANEFO in the context of sport and politics in China in the early 1960s, the events leading up to the GANEFO idea, the first GANEFO as media spectacle, the GANEFO documents, and the response of the IOC. I argued that the PRC used the GANEFO as a culmination in a larger project to establish its role as leader of international socialism, especially among Asian and African countries. In my dissertation, I combine research from this paper with recent research conducted at the Chinese Foreign Ministry archives to look more closely at specific issues within the GANEFO movement and the relationship PRC leaders had with other GANEFO countries.