This article examines how Chinese national values are imparted to and through the recent phenomenon of ceremonial volunteers or etiquette volunteers (liyi zhiyuan). These volunteers are all young college women who serve at major national events by greeting guests, ushering, and holding ceremonial ribbons. They are supposed to embody Confucian ritual values and the practices of propriety that define China as a nation of civilization through their roles as ceremonial hostesses. This feminine symbol of national tradition and cultural virtues is realized through a heavy emphasis on discipline, physical training, compliance to authority, and collectivism expressed through the ways the performances are staged and mass mediated. This article argues that the ceremonial volunteer represents a new state effort to engineer a model woman citizen by combining the Confucian discourse on etiquette, the communist party-state discourse on militarization and strong womanhood, the communist sport tradition of body training, and the latest initiatives on volunteering. The result is the making of gendered national subjects, marking new values of class, femininity, and nationalism. This article contributes to the understanding of emergent values about gender, class, volunteering, and the important roles they play in the process of citizen making in today's China.

The link between global sports brands and the violation of workers' rights in Asia has been a mainstream issue for many years. A ceaseless flow of news reports on the infringement of workers' rights in Asia suggests that neocolonialist dependencies and the ruthless exploitation of sweatshop labor are endemic in the industry. However, Asian corporations standing in the shadow of global brands have recently taken the lead in coordinating global sports commodity chains. Asia's rise within the industry is having manifold impacts on development opportunities for workers, companies, and countries, first of all in the Asian region, but also beyond. Putting these transformations into the historical perspective of industrialization, this essay questions the taken-for-granted assumption about agency and compliance behind the new international division of labor.

Having put a very successful Olympics in the rearview mirror, China entered 2009 with a set of new challenges, brought on in part by the worldwide economic crisis and the resulting demands to ensure necessary employment levels and in part by the familiar issue of maintaining social stability. While the hope, presumably, was to move reasonably smoothly from the Olympics of August 2008 to the celebration of the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China in October 2009, the Chinese media has instead become proactive in alerting local officials and the general public that China is entering “a peak period for mass incidents” (quntixing shijian, 群体性事件), with further warnings that a single national-level event, handled poorly, could “resonate” (gongzhen, 共振) into a threat to overall social stability and a serious political crisis.

“Myanmar is telling Asia ‘we are coming back!’ This is the time. Watch out! We are coming back. After the SEA Games, we will host ASEAN [Association of Southeast Asian Nations]. Big things are happening in our country.” “Kyaw,” an amiable rig coordinator in his early thirties, was relaxing on the ground drinking beer with his wife, passing the time prior to Myanmar's opening men's football match of the 2013 Southeast Asian or SEA Games. Fifteen days later—after a glorious opening ceremony, a slew of gold medals, and a celebratory closing ceremony—his assessment seemed prescient. The government newspaper, The New Light of Myanmar, boasted: “With the honor of hosting the Games that returned to the country after a 44-year long wait, Myanmar successfully hosted the biggest regional sporting event.” Thailand's Nation concurred: “The country failed to overhaul Thailand as overall winners, but its symbolic triumph as host was far more important.” “Myanmar has basked in its host status and a rare moment in the international limelight after years in isolation under military rule,” declared Agence France-Presse in a widely syndicated article. “Some local and international observers thought Myanmar could not host the SEA Games. They were wrong,” boasted triumphant presidential spokesman U Ye Htut.

It is widely believed that the Allahabad Kumbh Mela is an ancient religious festival or that it is “ageless”, that its roots lie obscured in time immemorial. Editorials and articles in the press at mela time (every twelve years) lyrically emphasize the continuity of the pilgrimage throughout India's past, find inspiration in its durability and changeless character, and marvel at the anachronism of an ancient festival thriving in the modern world (“The Kumbh Mela”, Pioneer, 17 February 1918; “Editorial”, Leader, 16 January 1942; “Pilgrim's Process”, Times of India, 24 January 2001). There is no better example of this than the oft-quoted section of Jawaharlal Nehru's will and testament, in which the avowedly secular modernist explains his desire to have a portion of his ashes scattered at the triveni sangam, the confluence of the Ganga and Yamuna Rivers and the site of the Kumbh in Allahabad:

I have been attached to the Ganga and the Jumna rivers ever since my childhood and, as I have grown older, this attachment has also grown. The Ganga, especially, is the river of India, beloved of her people. … She has been a symbol of India's age-long culture and civilization, ever-changing, ever-flowing, and yet ever the same Ganga. … And though I have discarded much of past tradition and custom, and am anxious that India should rid herself of all shackles that bind and constrain her and divide her people, and suppress vast numbers of them, and prevent the free development of the body and the spirit; though I seek all this, yet I do not wish to cut myself off from that past completely. I am proud of that great inheritance that it has been, and is, ours, and I am conscious that I too, like all of us, am a link in that unbroken chain which goes back to the dawn of history in the immemorial past of India. That chain I would not break, for I treasure it and seek inspiration from it.

(2000, 612–13)

Many asian cultures have rich traditions of self-cultivation that exercise mind and body through physical and meditational training. Research and scholarship with respect to those traditions have focused fruitfully on how the body is cultivated to serve as an agent of resistance against various forms of social control. Of these many writings on this subject, I will here name only a suggestive few: Joseph Alter's study of Indian wrestling (1993), for example, tracks the wrestlers' self-conscious reappropriation of their bodies from the power of the state through a regimented discipline aimed at resisting docility. John Donohue's study of the Japanese martial art karate (1993) explores how, in the West, karate's symbolic and ritual functions create a psychological dynamic that counters the prevalent fragmentation of urban life. Douglas Wile's research on Chinese taiji quart (1996) similarly reconstructs the cultural/historical context in which this martial art was created. He shows that what motivated nineteenth-century literati to create taiji quan was its representational function rather than its practical utility. That is, Taiji quan “may be seen as a psychological defense against Western cultural imperialism” (p. 26) insofar as it produced a secure sense of the national self that helped China adapt to a new international environment (p. 29). All of these studies place the body-in-cultivation in a specific historical context; they maintain that the individual, physical body both registers and reveals the national sociopolitical landscape.