Asian Geographic - 08.2018

1913

The Far Eastern

Championship Games

(FECG) is formed and

gains Olympic support

1934

FECG is dissolved. The

Western Asiatic Games is

formed, but is cancelled

after just one edition

1949

The Asian Games is

formed. Both Taiwan

and China claim official

Chinese representation

1962

GANEFO is formed after

Indonesia’s expulsion

from the Olympic

movement

1966

An Asian GANEFO in

Cambodia is deliberately

held in the same year as

the Asiad

the asiad: key events

above The closing

ceremony of the 2017

Asian Winter Games

in Sapporo, Japan

to the promotion of sport – deemed an

appropriately masculine pastime for young

men. (In fact, this same campaign birthed

basketball, volleyball and futsal; today, the

YMCA instead promotes sport as a healthy

exercise.) So it came to be that in the early

1900s, three Asian YMCA offices – the

Philippines, China and Japan – agreed to a

combined sports meet to groom promising

athletes for participation in the Olympics.

The event was named the Far Eastern

Championship Games (FECG).

“The aim of the Games [...] was to spread

Western morality and masculinity among

those weaker oriental people. The Games was

a product of Western cultural imperialism,”

writes Fan Hong in the book Sport,

Nationalism and Orientalism: The Asian

Games (2007).

That sporting victories were to be

inextricably tangled with national identity

would mark the formation of the Asiad deeply.

During the First World War, Japan sought

to extend control over Manchuria and the

Chinese economy, leading to highly negative

reactions in China and a rise in nationalist

sentiment. So when China’s athletes emerged

victorious at the second FECG in 1915,

the Chinese chairman of the organising

committee, Wang Zhengting, remarked that