Table tennis is China's "national sport". From Rong Guotuan winning China's first table tennis world championship in the 50s of the 20th century (and also the first sports world champion in New China), to the diplomatic story of "small ball turning big ball" in the 70s of the 20th century, and then to the "hegemon" status of the arena that has never changed hands since the new century, China's table tennis has not only made proud achievements, but also carried many profound meanings in the history of New China, and has become an important business card for the international community to understand China.
Far away in France, on the other side of the Eurasian continent, table tennis is also a window for many people to know China. Aurelien BOUCHER, a young sinologist, is a die-hard table tennis fan from France, who has formed an indissoluble bond with China because of his love for table tennis, which has started an academic journey of studying Chinese sports culture.
欧海洋(Aurélien BOUCHER)摄影:张静
He learned table tennis at the age of 14 and came to China to play at the age of 19
In Guangzhou Fuguang Bookstore, the reporter met Ou Haiyang for the first time. He was tall and slender, quite athletic, and when he talked to reporters about sociological topics, he also talked about the language, showing the characteristic demeanor of a French intellectual. In fact, in addition to being a doctor of sociology, Ou Haiyang is also a professionally trained table tennis player.
Generally speaking, people have an intuition that "athletes are not interested in sociology, and intellectuals are not very fond of sports", but Ou Haiyang has combined his hobby of sports with academic research, and turned his love into his own happy career.
Ou Haiyang started learning table tennis at the age of 14, and the enlightenment coach was a retired table tennis player from the Beijing team. This coach is like a "father" to him, and he often shares stories about China, table tennis stories with him after training, and tells him about other people's table tennis practices in China. As a result, Ou Haiyang began to be full of curiosity about China when he was a teenager.
"Since then, I have had a dream, I want to come to China to play table tennis. Many French table tennis enthusiasts have this dream. So, in 2004, when he was 19 years old, he came to China for the first time and Xi at the China Table Tennis Center in Changping, Beijing.
During this period, he not only made many Chinese friends, but also allowed him to try his hand at studying table tennis and Chinese sports culture from a socio-historical perspective. He discovered the interest in the wider world and more fascinating research of "Chinese sports", and since then he has started his own academic research topic.
"I want to understand the changes in Chinese society through the history of table tennis. Ou Haiyang said that he has been a curious child since he was a child, and table tennis seems to open a window for him to know a distant and unfamiliar country. "In addition to table tennis, I also wanted to experience this fast-moving society in depth, which is attractive and important for a young person. I feel like I have to walk a lot to understand myself and the world. ”
Ou Haiyang and Chinese table tennis player Yu Ziyang
The academic ideal is to "merge things together"
During his university years, he studied sociology at the University of Nantes in France, and worked at the Nantes Sociology Research Center during his doctoral studies. The Centre for Sociological Studies at the University of Nantes was founded in 1998 by Jean-Claude Passeron, a close associate of Pierre Bourdieu, France's most famous sociologist.
Therefore, Ou Haiyang's research is deeply influenced by French sociologists such as Bourdieu, who has devoted himself to the sociological study of body practices in the Chinese world through a combination of ethnographic observations, interviews, and quantitative survey analysis, and completed his doctoral dissertation La Naissance du Sport en Chine (The Birth of Sports in China) in 2008 and published a monograph. In the book, Ou's research provides a new cultural perspective on how China's physical culture and physical practices affect contemporary society.
"The Birth of Sports in China", by Ou Haiyang
After coming to China, Ou Haiyang worked as an assistant director at the Center for Sino-French Studies at Tsinghua University, where he was responsible for organizing academic seminars on "History and Memory" and "Enlightenment Philosophy". Since 2016, he has been working at Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and has served as an expert in academic journals such as Canadian Sociological Review, Ageing and Society, Asian Journal of Sports History and Culture, American Journal of Sociology, China Quarterly, and International Review of Sociology of Sport in the past five years. He also serves on the editorial board of the Asian Journal of Sports History and Culture, and continues to publish in the areas of social science epistemology, social stratification, and sports studies.
"Combining tradition and modernity, integrating China and the West" is the philosophy of Hong Kong Chinese University (Shenzhen), which is very consistent with Ouyang's own academic pursuit and values. Currently, he is a lecturer in the Department of General Education at the same university, where his courses are focused on philosophy and sociology, with a focus on movement, educational strategies, and modernization.
"The general education course will open up students' thinking styles from a wide range of different disciplines, so that students can experience the research ideas of different majors," said Ou Haiyang. He teaches a wide range of courses, including "History of Chinese Sport", "Introduction to Data Science", "People-to-People Dialogue" and "Social Development and Inequality", which are well received by students.
Now, he has moved his family to live in the Greater Bay Area. He likes the southern climate very much, and he also likes to drink morning tea, and from time to time he takes his son to surf at the beach in Xichong, Shenzhen. Shenzhen is very close to Hong Kong and Macao, it is an international and inclusive city, and the phrase "you are from Shenzhen" that spreads all over the country makes him feel close - "Here, you are a foreigner, a local, and a Shenzhener, everyone has multiple identities, which is what I like about Shenzhen." Ou Haiyang said.
A photo of Ou Haiyang's life with his son.
-Interview-
Nandu: You came to China twice in 2004 and 2008 specifically for table tennis, can you talk about these two experiences and what you learned?
Ou Haiyang: I often tell my students about my first time in China, which was in 2004. I asked them how old they were, and some of them weren't born yet, which was funny. At that time, I stayed at the Zhuolong Table Tennis Training Base in Changping, Beijing, for more than two weeks, playing table tennis every day. I was so tired that I lost a total of 4 kilograms. You see I'm skinny now, but I was thinner back then. At that time, I felt that I had to take a break, and then I spent a month in Beijing visiting a lot of historical buildings to learn about Chinese history and society.
After returning to France, I shared my experience in China with the professors of the university, and the development of table tennis and sports in China aroused great interest among the professors and scholars. At the University of Nantes, where I studied, there was a group of experts in the sociology of sport, who were not only the best and most famous sociologists of the 21st century, but also former partners of Bourdieu. They said to me, "There are not many talents who understand Chinese sports, and it is rare for you to have this resource, plus you can speak Mandarin, and you are a 'scholar', so you should do research on the history of Chinese sports in the future." "With their encouragement, I jumped at the chance and I'm here today.
The second time I came to China was in 2008, through the people I contacted, I went to Qingdao to start my fieldwork, to understand the children in the table tennis school, to understand their family background and academic Xi, in fact, to understand the reform and changes in the training mechanism of China's sports reserve talents in the 21st century. Basically, my PhD research is all about these questions.
Nandu: What are the important findings of the fieldwork done at Qingdao Table Tennis School?
Ou Haiyang: My coach joined the Beijing team in 1970, and he was selected from the school. There are coaches who will select the more talented seedlings and provide them with more professional training courses for a few hours a day, and slowly move towards the career path. At that time, my coach said to me: "You can't imagine how much this (being selected for the Beijing team) means in my life: I can eat eggs, eat meat, and drink milk every morning, whereas in the past, my family could only eat Chinese cabbage every day in winter, and basically did not eat meat." And when I got into the team, I was 10 years old and I was able to earn money to help my family. ”
My coach made me realize why the athletes of that era were so deeply grateful to the country and the Communist Party, because it changed everything in their lives. After the reform and opening up, especially after the 90s of the last century, the training and selection mechanism of sports talents is a little different. I did a questionnaire of more than 400 questionnaires in Shandong Province to investigate the family background of students in table tennis schools, why they started playing table tennis, etc. Among them, there are only two children of peasants, and there are not many workers, and the most are the children of self-employed people, because they are out-of-town population in the cities. At that time, it was 2008, in many cities in China, if you are a non-local population, you can't go to the local public school, the conditions of private schools are not particularly good, and it is more troublesome to go back to your hometown to study, so going to a table tennis school can better solve the problems of your child's studies and future. Many parents think that they can let their children give it a try, and if they succeed, they can become athletes, and if they don't succeed, they can also become physical education teachers, and it is not bad to be a table tennis coach. It's a big change, and that's why those people started playing table tennis. They have a different view of themselves, their families, and their country. From the financial and psychological aspects, parents have to support the players for a lifetime, parents and coaches have to help them find professional teams and development, and in the end, athletes will feel the honor of representing the country, but first of all, they will consider the contribution of themselves, their parents and the coach.
Nandu: What methods did you use in your research to complete this doctoral dissertation?
Ou Haiyang: I went to seven or eight different table tennis schools, and in some places I observed their daily lives, and in some places I was directly involved with them, playing table tennis with them, being an assistant coach, and helping to train those students. But overall, I spent more than two years doing fieldwork and daily observations between different schools.
I also went to some archives to consult the public information of the General Administration of Sports of China and to understand the background of the country's reform of the sports training mechanism. Especially in sports, there is also a "contracting system", and the "contracting system" is a gold medal task in sports, and coaches must complete some gold medal goals every four years and train some athletes. This is also something that was not something in my coaching era, and this has changed a lot of things, but there are policies and countermeasures, and many people will also think about how to face the pressure of gold medals.
Nandu: In addition to Chinese table tennis, your research also covers a wider range of topics, such as urban lifestyles, social differentiation, and modernization.
Ou Haiyang: Actually, my interests have always been quite diverse, and I started doing sports research because sports research is the most familiar and resourceful for me. Later my research was also expanded. Regarding lifestyle, because not many people do similar research in China. To be honest, in China, a lot of social science research is to assist in the reform of the country, but there is not much research in the area of lifestyle. Lifestyle includes sports, but also going to the library, going to the cinema, and many other things. My academic training was carried out along the path of Bourdieu scholars, so my research in this area is more traditional, so I feel that my research in this area can also contribute to the academic field.
At the same time, I continued to study sports and became a member of the editorial board of the Asian Journal of Sport History & Culture. From 2018 to 2021, I studied the labor market for golf coaches, and I wanted to compare sports workers in different sports, because the development of golf is more distinctive in China, and because I like the sport, this research is very interesting. Specifically, through this research, I learned about the openness and instability of the labor market for golf coaches, and also compared the characteristics of the working conditions and incomes of sports workers and art workers.
Nandu: How do you understand the role and role of sports culture in contemporary Chinese society?
O: The impact of sport on our lives varies from person to person. For athletes, this is not only life, but also a livelihood, a profession, and for more ordinary people, in urban life, people need to find a balance, find a way to relieve stress, this aspect of sports is very important.
In recent years, with the introduction of the "double reduction" policy by the state, more attention has been paid to the physical fitness of minor children, and the state also hopes that children can exercise more. But we also see that this is still a challenge and many students are not in good shape.
In fact, China's sports culture is very rich, and the Chinese attach the most importance to the Olympic Games, which is an important way to shape the country's identity and identity. The movie "My Motherland and Me", released in 2019, uses several different stories to express the patriotic spirit, two of which are sports themes. One is about a Beijing taxi driver who got a ticket to the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics, and the other is about the Chinese women's volleyball team winning the gold medal at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. Sport is part of collectivist culture, and in the history of Chinese culture, sport is more than that, it is also the road to rejuvenation, a part of the history of the country.
All asked sinologists
(The questions in this column are collected from readers)
1. Why are humans keen on sports?
OH: From a philosophical point of view, Marx actually discussed this as well. We don't live to work, we want to play and create the world around us. We are transforming the material world for ourselves and others according to our ideas and work. That is to say, human beings are characterized by creativity, rationality, idealism and imagination. From this point of view, sports are the space that plays into human beings.
In fact, sports is also a way to challenge our emotion, to stir up our emotion. For example, sociologist Norbert Elias argues that sport satisfies the need for individual emotional release. In modern society, whether you are at school or at work, everyone expects you to have an exemplary attitude. You have to obey the rules, control your emotions and feelings, society, work, and school all have requirements for "attitude", and some of the various emotions that people fight each other in real life are brought to the field of sports competition. It doesn't matter what country you're from, it's all the same.
Therefore, an important function of sports is to vent emotions. Competitive sports can produce the mimicry function of emotional arousal, in which people can experience many emotions such as laughter, anxiety, elation, sympathy and disgust, and the level of emotional arousal is higher than that of regular daily activities. Modern competitive sports also incorporate national and national ideologies, simulating the effects of the battlefield on the field, and mapping individual and social-emotional performances on the field. This is one conclusion of Elias's study.
2. Should I choose sociology, and how can I tell if I am suitable for studying sociology?
Ou Haiyang: Actually, I think the most important thing is to choose a major according to your interests. If you're interested, you'll learn whatever you study. Secondly, you may be worried that you will not be able to find any job after graduating from sociology.
As long as you are open-minded, cheerful and curious, if you can understand other people without judging them, if you have a certain ability to reflect and work hard, you can learn mathematical models, methodology, theory of knowledge, cultural and historical background, etc.
3. What methods do you use to learn XiChinese?
Ou Haiyang: When I first learned XiChinese, I bought a book by myself, used a CD player, listened to it, memorized it, and it was as simple as that. There should be more apps now, with a variety of resources. Again, if you're interested, you're going to work hard, you're disciplined, you're going to find some resources. But finding resources can only be said to be the first stage, after learning the basics, you have to communicate with other people, and continue to learn the logical thinking of Xi language and local culture, this is the most interesting.
4. Can I ask my teacher to recommend a book?
Ou Haiyang: Actually, I don't have much time to read other books other than sociology and my academic research. But there is a Chinese book that impresses me very deeply, which is "Wolf Totem", which has thoughts about people and nature. I was also interested in George Orwell's books. Especially in "1984" and "Animal Farm", thinking about dystopian fiction is also an opportunity to reflect on the ideal society and one's own values.
5. If you could restart your life, what kind of career would you choose?
O: I don't think I'm going to make any other choice, I'm very happy with my current career. Whether I'm on the road, at home, whenever I have a second, I use it to read a book or touch the data, and I have this passion for my profession. Sometimes, I also attend lectures, but lectures are also an opportunity for me to learn Xi. So I don't regret anything, I just have a quiet life, spend time with my family, and simply do my job. I just want to continue to be here, to continue to think about China, to share and explain my findings with people from different cultures around the world, just to live such a simple life.
Chief planner: Rong Mingchang, Liu Jiangtao
Planner: Wang Weiguo, Li Yang
Co-ordinator: Song Shuang
This issue is written by: Nandu reporter Zhu Rongting and Xi student Zhu Xiaoyu