Written by Jerry Chen.
Image credit: 1951 KANO Baseball Team of TAIWAN in Rizal Baseball Stadium, Manila, Philippines.
In the past two years, Taiwanese baseball has inserted itself into the global baseball conversation on two distinct occasions. First, in November 2024, its national team defeated Japan in the Premier12 tournament title game, winning Taiwan’s first-ever adult-level international tournament. Then, in August 2025, Tung-Yuan Little League from Taipei City defeated Las Vegas in the Little League World Series to take home the country’s 18th title in history.
In the world of baseball, besides having to use the controversial “Chinese Taipei” designation, Taiwan is perhaps best known for having historically dominated at the youth level. On both occasions, this moniker in international competition arguably diminished any soft power Taiwanese baseball sought to exert abroad. The naming controversy, however, is but one example of the notable discrepancy between how the Taiwanese understand their baseball identity and how the rest of the world sees Taiwanese baseball.
The nomenclature
To Taiwanese fans, Zhonghua Taipei carries a constitutional history and has little to do with present-day China. A legacy of a historical, authoritarian Kuomintang (KMT) regime that actively claimed to rule China and sought to represent “China in Taipei” in its waning days, the naming concession made to the International Olympic Committee (IOC) was framed domestically as the only way to defend constitutional legitimacy.
To anyone else in the rest of the world, Chinese Taipei may be falsely interpreted as a city of China, much like French Polynesia is an overseas collectivity of France or American Samoa is a territory of the United States. This mischaracterisation, though more ambiguous in the Chinese translation, is central in Taiwanese political and national identity discourse, reaching a national referendum ahead of the Tokyo Olympics. As Taiwan’s government democratised and carried out multiple peaceful transfers of power over the past few decades, the main motivation for maintaining the moniker now sits not with any Taiwanese party but with China.
Ultimately, the 2018 initiative to shed the use of “Chinese Taipei” in international sports competitions failed the vote, as concerns mounted that Taiwanese athletes may lose eligibility, informed by an official warning from the IOC.
While the naming controversy has gained popular attention and press coverage both domestically and internationally, the politicisation of Taiwanese baseball is not limited to the moniker of its national team. In fact, the same political project that established the controversial naming also manufactured baseball’s status in Taiwan’s national pride.
The original myths
The first origin story of Taiwanese baseball started during the Japanese colonial era. Baseball, introduced to Japan a few years before the Japanese introduced it to Taiwan, became a tool for Japan’s imperial ambitions. After a few decades of baseball development in schools, the Kagi Agricultural and Forestry School, or Kano for short, became the poster child for successful assimilation in 1931.
The Kano story involves a “tri-ethnic” high school baseball team that united Han Taiwanese, indigenous Taiwanese, and Japanese students in achieving excellence at the iconic Koshien tournament. The myth of a diverse group of pupils working together to master a meritocratic sport was used to legitimise Japanese colonisation of other cultures. Nonetheless, Taiwan’s baseball heritage began in this era and continued beyond Japanese rule.
As the end of World War II ushered in a new government and a new era, a new origin story of Taiwanese baseball emerged after a couple of decades under Chiang Kai-shek’s regime. In 1968, the Hongye youth baseball team defeated a Japanese team and manufactured a rags-to-riches story of poor rural boys overcoming adversity to achieve success and glory to captivate the country.
Chiang Kai-shek’s government was expelled from the UN in 1971 and lost US recognition in 1979. As Chiang’s international influence waned, his government repeated the formula of Hongye to win youth tournaments abroad and consolidate support at home. It poured resources into youth baseball and devised win-at-all-costs tactics as Little League Baseball became a top priority for its nationalist aspirations. In that same decade of diplomatic setbacks, Taiwan won seven Little League World Series titles. Baseball dominance, even if at an amateur level and not typically associated with international competition, became a repeatable source of national pride.
The modern myth and future directions
Both the Kano and Hongye myths have been woven into Taiwanese cultural consciousness over the past century. They both demonstrated that the Taiwanese were just as good as the Japanese or other nations. They established baseball as a unifying force but stopped short at identifying the architects of said unifying force.
Baseball development has been extractive in nature. Kano worked because it included indigenous students, and Hongye worked because it included poor kids. Each attempted to create the façade of a “race” that superseded ethnicity or socioeconomic status – first it was a “Japanese” race that could justify further colonisation, then it was a “Chinese” race that could justify returning to and ruling what some viewed as their homeland. In the latter case, the myth of political (hence baseball) superiority over China has continued even as Taiwanese identity, suppressed under Chiang’s rule, began to normalise over the past couple of decades under democratised governance.
Baseball does not have nearly the same cultural significance in China, but defeating China in baseball has become a national obsession in Taiwan. The overlaying myths of Kano and Hongye contrast Taiwan’s ethnic makeup and capitalism with China’s Han-centricity and communism. This obsession is the inheritance of a nationalistic program that started with the Japanese and continued with the KMT.
Using indigenous players and rural children as instruments is an extractive practice that has served nationalist ambitions, which have outrun their usefulness in an open society. The myths that helped develop baseball players and fans in Taiwan have created a ceiling for baseball’s further development as a participatory and accessible national sport.
These myths are only understood and internalised by the Taiwanese and not at all by the rest of the world. While a Taiwanese baseball renaissance may well be in progress, with the opening of Taipei Dome and recent international titles, a public and genuine reckoning of its historically extractive development has yet to take place.
The “Chinese Taipei” naming controversy largely sits with international organisations beyond Taiwan’s reach, but Taiwan’s development of its own national sport is under its full control. Whether or not the recent wins will lead to a more self-aware version of Taiwanese baseball, rather than another myth celebrated at home and misread abroad, is the central theme of Taiwanese baseball’s next chapter.
A fuller treatment of these origin myths appeared in “Illusions of a National Game: The Myths That Built (and Broke) Taiwanese Baseball” in NINE: A Journal of Baseball History and Culture.
Jerry Chen serves on the Asian Baseball Research Committee of the Society for American Baseball Research. His work on Taiwanese baseball history has appeared in NINE: A Journal of Baseball History and Culture (University of Nebraska Press). Originally from Taiwan, he works in investment banking in San Francisco.
This article was published as part of the special issue on ‘More Than a Game: Baseball and Taiwan’s Past, Present and Future’.