This original book brings Chinese women to the centre of the Chinese cultural stage by examining the role which exercise and, subsequently, sport played in their liberation. Physical emancipation, particularly in the custom of footbinding, which continued to be practised to some extent in China until 1949, was the prerequisite for wider emancipation. Through the medium of women's bodies, Fan Hong explores the significance of religious beliefs, cultural codes and political dogmas for gender relations, gender concepts and the human body in an Asian setting. Until now no academic work has discussed women, emancipation and exercise within the social, cultural and political setting of China from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth centuries. Inquiry into the evolving relationship between women's emancipation and exercise over this period is necessary and overdue if there is to be a full understanding of China in an era of gender role reconstruction.
Moreover the dramatic and brutal patriarchal tradition of physical repression of the female body in Chinese history, particularly the inhuman institution of footbinding, makes the physical emancipation of Chinese women an issue of special significance in the history of liberation of the modern female body.