On Tuesday, March 2, 2021 at 1:47:21 PM UTC-7, Bob wrote:   
   > On Monday, March 1, 2021 at 5:04:27 PM UTC-5, rrh...@gmail.com wrote:    
   > > On Monday, February 22, 2021 at 12:14:13 PM UTC-5, Bob wrote:    
   > > > And by "big", I mean comparably to Japan or India. Did it start to and   
   get derailed?    
   > > Major modern professional team sports all, to a surprisingly good   
   approximation, originated in Britain or North America. The question to answer   
   is why anyone else took them up. The answer is imperialism, whether explicit   
   or economic. (Think of, e.g.    
   Argentina c. 1900. It was an independent country, but its technical   
   infrastructure was operated and largely owned by the British. If the   
   Argentines got feisty the Royal Navy could sail into Buenos Aires harbor and   
   set things straight.) British sporting    
   culture often was adopted by the local elites, and worked down the social   
   ladder from there. Hence Indian cricket and Argentine football (soccer).   
   Japanese baseball was introduced as a delayed part of the Mejii Restoration.   
   Japan was frantically working    
   to catch up to the West. Most of this was technology and industry, but all   
   sorts of cultural flotsam was carried with those. Then after WWII there was an   
   even stronger imperative to take up American culture. Baseball was already   
   known, making it an easy    
   sell. China? They never took to the practices of foreign devils. While the   
   Western powers could boss the government around for favorable trade deals,   
   Western culture had little direct impact on the population. I am morally   
   certain cricket was played in    
   Hong Kong, but I don't know if it spread to the locals, and it certainly   
   didn't go far on the mainland.    
   > >    
   > > Richard Hershberger   
   > While this is true, it's not enough to explain the discrepancy between these   
   sports and soccer in China. Did China adopt soccer fairly late, as part of the   
   second wave of soccer's expansion to the rest of the world? Or do I simply   
   over-estimate how big    
   soccer is in China?   
   Also, China took up basketball, but not baseball.   
      
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