China

This chapter covers the development of sport psychology in mainland China since the establishment of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949. Chinese sport psychology, research and application, focuses on performance enhancement among top elite athletes (Yao & Xu, 2004), and in China, this is highly related to the socio-political background. The PRC government has stated that sport, in general, should serve the nation and its political condition. In this context elite sport should act as a showroom to display the political, economic, cultural, and technological power of one’s nation and ethnicity (Tian, 2002). Policy makers have established specific goals and tasks for both the ‘Olympic Glory Plan’ (General Administration of Sport in China, 2002, 2011) and the ‘National Games Gold Medal Strategy’ (e.g., General Administration of Sport in China, 2006). The former, in particular, outlined the proposed development of China elite sport for each ten-year period in order to achieve the national target at each of the Olympic Games. Elite sport has become a key area for Chinese sport science research, including sport psychology (Huang & Zou, 2001). Based on Zhang and Mao’s (2003) categorization, we shall illustrate the history of Chinese sport psychology in three stages: (1) learning, (2) development, and (3) research and application. Copyright © 2016 Routledge.