Further Thinking On The Relationship Between Chinese Traditional Culture And The Development Of Chinese Men's Basketball Team

Both sport and physical education is not only an activity concerning on the human body, but also a social and historical phenomena, which embodies a complex cultural characteristic.Sport, as a culture, in large sense, is to enrich human lives, to satisfy the living requirements and to process, organize and regulate the activities which fulfill the people's needs via the sport itself, and finally form the socially recognized, independent and valuable culture. It includes spiritual culture (attitude, awareness, thoughts and sayings towards the sport), material culture (establishment, appliance and costumes) behavior culture (action, technology, rules and criterion). In a small sense, sport is just a part of living culture, which makes sure the sport spawning from the social lives to be of a valuable activity, in the meantime, endowing it with certain meaning to make the natural activity to become the cultural activity. It contains all physical activities and physical productions related to the arts, religions, literature, entertainment and media. For instance, gymnastic dances, eurhythmics, martial arts together with photography, sculpture, architecture, music, literature, research leisure and mass spreading.Sport, as one of the culture, has the common feature of all human cultures_ the nationality. This conception means a certain nation has its unique physical culture which is different from other nations, due to the different regions, environments, ways of living and producing, culture sediments and spread in history. The nationality is intensive, for any national sport in the world has its own character, with strong cultural atmosphere and national awareness inward. From the aspect of culture phylogeny, any physical culture belongs to a nation. As a result, we see the unavoidable differences among these physical cultures, which embodies in the formations in organization, physical modes, attitudes and value standards.The national attitude toward value will determine the development direction ofthe national sport; the interests of aesthetic will influence the choice of sport contents, and the national ethos will limit the rules of sport activities. In another word, the mental habits of a nation affect the tendency of the choice of sport culture. In addition, the choice of sport decides the basic pattern of sport existence.The Chinese social culture background has strong stability and outstanding characteristic. It takes on tremendous inertia and social accommodation, on condition that the traditional culture is of long development history and broad socially existing bases. The dominant culture greatly influences the choices of sport content, while the invisible culture (trend of value and tendency deposited in the deep psychological structure in humans, etc) has wide permeability and forceful ability of inside refrain. They both influence almost the whole human's choices and behavior regulations, so they fully constrain the purpose, stage, content and ways of Chinese sport. The Chinese sport under such social background brings on the apparent prints of agricultural society. The primitive austerity, harmonious thoughts, compromising spirits and practical attitudes determine the level of competitiveness in Chinese sport, which is quite different from the fierce and intensive sport in occidental world. This makes Chinese sport culture of the natural, peaceful-mind feature seeking self-satisfactory and motionlessness. The "pro-motionlessness and con-motion" cultural feature, immensely limits the development of competitive sport because of the traditional psychology, and this made the contents of Chinese competitive sport sedative and compromising which are totally different from the competitive, adventuring and creative sport attitudes advocated by westerners.Under the influence of Chinese traditional mental habits (the cultural character) of a nation, the records are not pleasing on some competitive events, especially the men's games. Take the basketball game for example, in the conventional concept, we often consider the unpleasant performance is owing to the gaps in the physical qualities between the Chinese men's basketball team and the occidental forces. From the height structural adjustment in 1996 Atlanta Olympics to the 27th Sydney Olympics in 2000 and US Indiana world championship for basketball men in 2002, the Chinese men's basketball team has acquired a world strong formation.In 2004, the Chinese men's basketball team participated the Athens Olympics with 2.02m average heights, 95.25kg average weight and 24.5 average age, which indicates a first level physical quality. Accordingly, the physical quality should not take the blame for the halt of performance any more.Ostensibly, the development of Chinese men's basketball team is limited by training level, lack of advanced skill and strategy theories, but in fact, the deeper ailment behind the phenomena is the negative effect of Chinese national traditional cultures on the development of Chinese sport. Some factors in the tradition result in the dilemma of Chinese men's basketball team that being top in Asia, but lower-ranked in world. Therefore, with deeper study and discussions the relationship between the Chinese traditional cultural characteristics and essence and connotation of basketball game, the competing abilities will be enhanced and men's basketball enterprise will be on the launching pat.