Book Review: Sporting Superpower: An Insider's View on China's Quest to Be the Best by Mark Dreyer

Abstract

and three metropoles, as well as on only young gay men, similarly adds to the clarity and coherence of the book. It also makes one curious about how tongzhi cultures are shaped in the countryside, or among different ‘minorities’. Finally, the book clearly focuses on cisgender gay men, the slowly expanding acronym LGBTQAI+ that prompts a likeminded study of, for example, lesbian and transcultures. After reading Kong’s book, this reviewer feels that he got to know the research participants intimately and to understand their life struggles and aspirations. The book unpacks and probes deep into the curious and often quite hidden entanglement between politics, family, community, locality, gender, and sexuality – all the more urgent, given the increasingly tense geopolitics of the three locales. This is a remarkable achievement for an academic book. Kong successfully steers away from using the three localities as an empirical case to apply Western theory, just as he is critical about assumed indigenous categories or claims to knowledge. As such, the book helps to decolonize not only sexuality and queer studies, but also to decolonize (and to queer) China studies. For anyone working on sexual cultures in East Asia and beyond, this book is essential reading. Its readability and clarity, and profoundly personal style of writing, without compromising on theoretical depth, also make it highly recommended for teaching purposes.