‘Cricket is perfectly suited to the Chinese people’: the contemporary development of Chinese cricket

This article illustrates the contemporary development of Chinese cricket since the sport was incorporated into the Chinese sport system from the early 2000s. Drawing on existing literature and interview data, this article problematizes the established essentialist perspectives to explicate the contemporary development of Chinese cricket and (re)constructs the process according to five periods. By providing more subtle distinctions between different parts of this most recent period, this study offers the most detailed and up-to-date analysis and reveals that the development of Chinese cricket is both enabled and constrained by its interdependencies with sport mega events, international cricketing bodies, and China’s educational sector. These three processes are fundamental to the future development of cricket in mainland China and have important implications for the cross-national development of cricket in the contemporary era.