A striking manifestation of the muscular Christianity underpinning American missionary work in China was the promotion of sport and physical culture. From the YMCA's arrival in 1895, Western missionaries linked athletic discipline to moral reform, embracing notions of China as the 'sick man of Asia' and casting perceived weakness as both a social ill and an opportunity for national revival. Reform-minded Chinese students and educators embraced this ethos selectively, treating athletic training as a technology of self-strengthening and modern citizenship. By the 1920s, however, they were also repurposing sport for political ends, intertwining athletic solidarity with protest and nationalism.

The RAS History Club hosts Dr. Felix Goodbody to examine this process through the fascinating story of the Yale University mission school in Changsha, Hunan. Drawing on annual reports, alumni magazines, and fundraising literature aimed at Yale graduates, it shows how Yali's sporting culture was communicated back to American donors in a familiar idiom of varsity teams, fair play, and Yale manliness. On the ground, however, Chinese students reinterpreted athletic discipline as both empowerment and resistance, transforming athletic associations into organizational surrogates when unions were banned and even staging protest on the playing field itself. The varsity sports field thus emerges as a site where Yale's traditions of muscular Christianity collided with Chinese nationalism, producing a complex politics of the bodies, minds and 'spirits'.