Why Do Taiwanese Play Baseball? A Diachronic Study of a Successful Broadcast

Baseball was introduced in Taiwan at the turn of the twentieth century, when the island was ruled by the Japanese. The practice meets a particularly favorable echo owing much to the affinities between its formal properties and local conceptions of space, time and individual and collective action. It is also associated with representations of modernity associated with the Japanese period. After wwii, Taiwan came under the control of the withdrawn Chinese Nationalists. Baseball became the flagship of a State isolated on the international scene, but also the manufacture and the showcase of a Confucian moral order promoted by the government and closely related to the bodies of individuals and Nation.