Written by Daniel Yu-Kuei Sun, Jou Fei Huang, Thung-Hong Lin.
Image credit: Fans waving TAIWAN’s National Flag for WBC baseball game TAIWAN vs. JAPAN held in Tokyo Dome (2013) by Tranpan23 / Wikimedia, license: CC BY 2.0.
In the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, the Chinese Taipei baseball team captured its first-ever Olympic team silver medal, as baseball made its debut as an official medal event. In the same year, surveys conducted by National Chengchi University showed that only 17.6 per cent of respondents identified themselves as Taiwanese. At the time, the name “Chinese Taipei” was rarely contested in public discourse, and few questioned the designation under which the team competed. Over the following three decades, however, Taiwan’s identity landscape underwent a profound transformation. A sole Taiwanese identity steadily increased, while dual Taiwanese-Chinese and exclusive Chinese identities continued to decline. By 2024, the proportion of respondents identifying as Taiwanese had risen to 61.7 per cent.
This transformation was vividly reflected during the 2024 WBSC Premier12 tournament—one of the flagship international competitions in baseball—specifically during the championship game at the Tokyo Dome featuring the host nation, Japan, and Taiwan, competing under the name “Chinese Taipei.” After hitting a decisive home run, Chinese Taipei captain Chen Chieh-hsien celebrated by using his hands to frame the empty space on his chest while rounding the bases. Widely interpreted as calling out the fact that the team is barred from competing under its preferred name— “Team Taiwan”—this spontaneous framing of a blank space where the nation’s name should be resonated deeply with many Taiwanese people. It captured both the persistence of international political constraints and the remarkable evolution of Taiwanese identity since the early 1990s.
Baseball and National Identity in Taiwan
While the consolidation of a distinct Taiwanese identity appears to be on a steady upward trend, national identifications in Taiwan remain fluid and frequently disrupted by short-term fluctuations driven by the external environment. Since Xi Jinping took power in 2013, his hardline stance and heightened pressure from Beijing have further complicated Taiwan’s identity landscape. This raises a crucial research question: What short-term factors cause Taiwanese people to shift their national orientation, and under what specific circumstances do these stances change? In a recently published journal article, “Batting for the Nation(s): Baseball and the Conditional Rise of Competing Identities in Taiwan,” we attempt to answer this question through baseball—Taiwan’s de facto national sport—and the very tournament mentioned above.
Back in the 1970s, youth baseball was utilised by the authoritarian Kuomintang (KMT) government to maintain its political legitimacy as the regime faced growing international isolation. This resulted in absolute dominance in Little League Baseball; the national team from Taiwan captured the Little League World Series title year after year, securing 17 championships over 25 years from 1969 to the early 1990s. At the time, the ideological message was clear: success in youth baseball demonstrated Chinese national pride, reflecting the hardline stance of the authoritarian KMT government during the Cold War.
However, as Taiwan democratised in the late 1980s, the cultural meaning of the sport began to shift. By the early 2000s, when Chen Shui-bian of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) took office, baseball moved decisively away from its role as a vehicle for Chinese nationalism. Instead, it was increasingly embraced as a cultural symbol of a distinct Taiwanese identity.
The 2024 Premier12 Tournament: A Case of Ecstatic Nationalism
In long-established democracies, national identity is often stable and implicit, naturally blending into daily life—a concept Michael Billig refers to as “banal nationalism.” However, as sociologist Michael Skey argues, for this everyday nationalism to persist, it requires ecstatic moments to stimulate and reinforce it. The ecstatic moments are usually pre-arranged, heavily covered by the media, and capable of pausing people’s monotonous daily routines. As such, major sporting events are one of those examples. By participating in ritualistic activities such as watching games, cheering, and chanting, the public has the opportunity to reconsolidate its affective cohesion with the nation.
The 2024 WBSC Premier12 championship was exactly such an ecstatic moment for Taiwan. Despite incredibly low expectations due to past underperformances and a roster depleted by injuries to top stars, Taiwan’s national team defied the sceptics. They stormed through the preliminary round with victories over South Korea, the Dominican Republic, Australia, and Cuba. After defeating the United States in the Super Round, they achieved the ultimate goal by clinching a historic 4–0 shutout against tournament favourite Japan in the final to capture their first-ever Premier12 title.
This unexpected victory deeply captured public attention, with final game viewership ratings surpassing 10% across both TV and online streaming platforms. The championship saturated everyday life through intense media coverage, lively social media engagement, and soaring sports lottery participation. Months later, the ecstatic atmosphere persists—championship exhibitions still draw massive crowds and “Team Taiwan” merchandise continues to sell out. In order to capture these collective sentiments and explore exactly how this national ecstasy impacted national identifications, we analysed daily polling data collected throughout the tournament.
Crucial Victories and Spikes in Taiwanese Identity
We utilised data from two national telephone surveys conducted during the event: the 2024 Carbon Reduction Survey (October 28 to November 13, N = 1,220) and the 2024 China Effect Survey (November 12 to December 3, N = 1222). Both targeted Taiwanese adults aged 20 and older with landline telephones. To ensure sample representativeness, the data were weighted by county/city, gender, age, and education level, yielding a total of 2,442 completed surveys.
By aggregating these daily polling results, we can see that national identification did indeed fluctuate alongside the action on the field. The most obvious shifts occurred the day after three major victories: the 6–3 win against South Korea on November 13, the 11–3 win against Australia on November 17, and the 8–2 win against the USA on November 21. Following these three specific games, the proportion of dual identity decreased, while the proportion of sole “Taiwanese” identity increased.
Interestingly, although their overall percentage remained low, the proportion of people identifying as solely “Chinese” also slightly increased after the victories over South Korea and Australia. This indicates that the national identity stimulated by baseball is not uniform; crucial victories encouraged more single identification (either Taiwanese or Chinese) while discouraging the middle-ground dual identity. Among these, the effect of defeating South Korea on November 13 was the most significant. To explain why this happened, the context of the games is key—specifically, the combination of underdog status and reaching key milestones.
Before facing South Korea and the USA, Taiwan was a clear underdog with implied win probabilities below 50%. Pulling off upset victories against the odds acts as a strong catalyst for national pride, which drove down dual identity. Meanwhile, though betting odds heavily favoured Taiwan against Australia, winning that specific game was the critical battle needed to advance to the Super Round. Following that win—and aided by Japan winning a concurrent game in another venue—Taiwan officially advanced to the final four. Securing at least a fourth-place finish far exceeded pre-tournament expectations, leading to an observable spike in exclusive Taiwanese identity.
The Final Paradox: Why Beating Japan Failed to Shift National Identification
Quite surprisingly, winning the championship game—the ultimate achievement of the tournament—did not follow this pattern. Taiwan faced the host country, Japan, which was riding a 27-game winning streak at the Tokyo Dome in the final. Pre-game implied win probability for Taiwan was a mere 29.94%, yet they pulled off a miraculous 4–0 upset to claim the title. Despite being the climax of the tournament and a moment of ultimate national glory, it did not trigger significant fluctuations in national identity. Furthermore, the massive airport receptions and street parades in the following days had no notable impact on identity proportions either.
We believe this anomaly stems from two reasons. The first is a lack of hostility toward Japan. Over the past two decades of international baseball, while Japan and South Korea have both been Taiwan’s main rivals, the sense of antagonism and an “us vs them” mentality against Japan is far weaker than against Korea. Japan is more often viewed as a role model or a mentor to learn from rather than an enemy to crush. The second reason is rooted in historical baseball ties. Because baseball was introduced to Taiwan during the Japanese colonial period, exchanges between the two baseball communities have been frequent, shaping how Taiwanese fans view Japanese baseball. In recent years, the sport has also become a space for rethinking Taiwan-Japan relations and colonial memories. For example, the 2014 narrative film Kano, which recounts a Taiwanese high school team’s near-victory in the 1931 Kōshien tournament, sparked widespread discussion about colonial history and prompted a renewed reflection on identity and modernity.
Partisan Divergence: KMT Split, TPP Pivot, and DPP Stability
Interestingly, the tournament also had divergent reinforcement effects based on political party lines. For KMT supporters, the proportion of dual identity decreased, but their subsequent trajectories split: some identified more strongly as Taiwanese, while others conversely identified more strongly as Chinese. This finding echoes prior observations that KMT faced increasing difficulty sustaining a Chinese identity position capable of bridging Taiwan’s dominant identity cleavage. Conversely, exclusive Taiwanese identity significantly increased among political independents and supporters of the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP). Meanwhile, DPP supporters did not show significant changes, which is likely related to their already high baseline level of Taiwanese identity.
Ultimately, our study demonstrates that international baseball tournaments are far more than mere sports entertainment; they function as ecstatic moments capable of rapidly driving collective emotions to a peak, thereby rearticulating and reconfiguring Taiwanese national identity, at least temporarily. During the tournament, the proportion of dual identity—which often suggests a middle-ground position—significantly declined, while contrasting national identities emerged much more distinctly. In moments of heightened emotion, individuals appear more willing to explicitly declare a firmer national identity, making definitive choices that might otherwise be blurred or strategically withheld in daily life.
These results reveal that national identity is highly susceptible to short-term shifts triggered by external events. Whether the athletes on the diamond are conscious of it or not, they are effectively playing for a nation whose competing identities are continually contested and reshaped by these ecstatic events, much like a baseball game where the entire outcome can be decisively turned by a few unexpected moments.
Daniel Yu-Kuei Sun is a research associate at the Institute of Sociology, Academia Sinica, in Taipei, Taiwan. He previously served as a lecturer in Sport Management at Towson University and has also taught sport sociology courses at National Taiwan University, Fu Jen Catholic University, and National Taiwan Sport University. He earned his Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Iowa, and his research examines the cultural politics of contemporary sport, with a particular focus on the intersections of race, gender, and nationalism in both North American and Asian contexts. His work has been published in Nations and Nationalism, Amerasia Journal, the International Journal of the History of Sport, and several edited volumes.
Jou Fei Huang is an assistant professor at the Graduate Institute of National Policy and Public Affairs, National Chung Hsing University (NCHU). Her research lies at the intersection of comparative political economy, public policy, and public goods provision. She is particularly interested in how political institutions shape the allocation of different types of public goods, as well as how unequal or strategic patterns of public goods provision may weaken public empowerment, reduce political participation and trust in government, and ultimately undermine democratic resilience under external pressure. Her work has been published in journals across multiple disciplines, including Nations and Nationalism, Policy Studies, Taiwan Democracy Quarterly, and the American Journal of Chinese Studies.
Thung-Hong Lin is a research fellow at the Institute of Sociology, Academia Sinica, and the former director of the Center for Contemporary China at Tsinghua University (Taiwan). He has received multiple prestigious awards, including the Golden Tripod Award (National Book Award in Taiwan 2012), the Wu Ta-You Memorial Award (National Young Scholar Award in Taiwan 2015), and the Fulbright Scholarship for the academic year 2023-2024. Currently, he is the Stanford-Taiwan Social Science fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford University for 2023-2024. Lin’s research interests span social stratification, political sociology, sociology of information technology with a focus on internet censorship and disinformation, as well as sociology of risks such as armed conflicts and natural disasters. His work has been published in various esteemed journals across different disciplines, including Nations and Nationalism, Social Science & Medicine, Social Indicator Research, Social Forces, the China Quarterly, Chinese Sociological Review, and many other top journals in Taiwan.
This article was published as part of the special issue on ‘More Than a Game: Baseball and Taiwan’s Past, Present and Future’.