Chinese Women Striving for Status

The book Chinese Women Striving for Status: Sport as Empowerment is original in focus and in evidence. It analyses for the first time, in informed and substantial detail, the extraordinary, successful and impressive efforts of Chinese sportswomen in their collective striving for, and achieving of, national and international recognition, status and supremacy. The performances and achievements of these women have thrust them to the very center of the global spotlight. Among the most dramatic, recent developments in Chinese society has been the international ascendancy of these Chinese sportswomen: an intentional and impressive demonstration of soft power politics.

In the late twentieth century, Deng Xiaoping urged the Chinese policymakers to construct a model of "comprehensive national power" – Chinese sportswomen are in the vanguard of this construction! More than this, in the process, they have achieved elevated social status, and in some cases considerable wealth! This book is unique in recording their astounding achievements.

"Chinese Women Striving for Status: I marvel at the complexities of the summaries. The book is certain to be important."

– Professor Sheldon Rothblatt, Formerly of the Department of History and Director of the Center for Studies in Higher Education, University of California (Berkeley)

Dong Jinxia, Ph.D. from University of Strathclyde, is a Professor at Peking University. As the author of the award-winning monograph Holding Up More than Half the Sky: Women, Sport and Society in Modern China (2002), she was awarded the prestigious "International Max and Reet Howell Award" from the North American Society of Sports History in 2007 and was a Visiting Scholar at Yale University in 2009. She has authored many articles and books in both Chinese and English on gender, culture and sport, including studies on children and physical activity. She has lectured at universities and presented at national and international conferences worldwide and has organized both national and international conferences.

J.A. Mangan, FRHS, FRAS, FRSA with Fellowships (or their equivalents) at Berkeley, Cambridge, Oxford and elsewhere, and author of the globally applauded Athleticism in the Victorian and Edwardian Public School: The Emergence and Consolidation of an Educational Ideology and The Games Ethic and Imperialism: Aspects of the Diffusion of an Ideal. He has published 73 works and founded and edited several journals including the internationally acclaimed International Journal of the History of Sport, and lectured world-wide. He is the initiating editor of the launch volume softpower, Soccer, Supremacy: The Chinese Dream co-edited with Peter Horton and Christian Tagsold. J.A. Mangan with the distinguished Berkeley academic Roberta Park edited the acclaimed ground-breaking work From Fair Sex to Feminism: Sport and the Socialization of Women in the Industrial and Post-Industrial Eras (1987) and with the Chinese academic Fan Hong edited the globally applauded Freeing the Female Body: Inspirational Icons (2001) and Soccer, Women, Sexual Liberation: Kicking Off a New Era (2004).